The Love of a Good Woman

enlarged and many farms getting prosperous, that it looked as if her responsibilities might dwindle away to the care of those who had bizarre and hopeless afflictions, or were so irredeemably cranky that hospitals had thrown them out.
    T HIS summer there was a great downpour of rain every few days, and then the sun came out very hot, glittering off the drenched leaves and grass. Early mornings were full of mist—they were so close, here, to the river—and even when the mistcleared off you could not see
very
far in any direction, because of the overflow and density of summer. The heavy trees, the bushes all bound up with wild grapevines and Virginia creeper, the crops of corn and barley and wheat and hay. Everything was ahead of itself, as people said. The hay was ready to cut in June, and Rupert had to rush to get it into the barn before a rain spoiled it.
    He came into the house later and later in the evenings, having worked as long as the light lasted. One night when he came the house was in darkness, except for a candle burning on the kitchen table.
    Enid hurried to unhook the screen door.
    “Power out?” said Rupert.
    Enid said, “Shhh.” She whispered to him that she was letting the children sleep downstairs, because the upstairs rooms were so hot. She had pushed the chairs together and made beds on them with quilts and pillows. And of course she had had to turn the lights out so that they could get to sleep. She had found a candle in one of the drawers, and that was all she needed, to see to write by, in her notebook.
    “They’ll always remember sleeping here,” she said. “You always remember the times when you were a child and you slept somewhere different.”
    He set down a box that contained a ceiling fan for the sickroom. He had been into Walley to buy it. He had also bought a newspaper, which he handed to Enid.
    “Thought you might like to know what’s going on in the world,” he said.
    She spread the paper out beside her notebook, on the table. There was a picture of a couple of dogs playing in a fountain.
    “It says there’s a heat wave,” she said. “Isn’t it nice to find out about it?”
    Rupert was carefully lifting the fan out of its box.
    “That’ll be wonderful,” she said. “It’s cooled off in there now, but it’ll be such a comfort to her tomorrow.”
    “I’ll be over early to put it up,” he said. Then he asked how his wife had been that day.
    Enid said that the pains in her legs had been easing off, and the new pills the doctor had her on seemed to be letting her get some rest.
    “The only thing is, she goes to sleep so soon,” she said. “It makes it hard for you to get a visit.”
    “Better she gets the rest,” Rupert said.
    This whispered conversation reminded Enid of conversations in high school, when they were both in their senior year and that earlier teasing, or cruel flirtation, or whatever it was, had long been abandoned. All that last year Rupert had sat in the seat behind hers, and they had often spoken to each other briefly, always to some immediate purpose. Have you got an ink eraser? How do you spell “incriminate”? Where is the Tyrrhenian Sea? Usually it was Enid, half turning in her seat and able only to sense, not see, how close Rupert was, who started these conversations. She did want to borrow an eraser, she was in need of information, but also she wanted to be sociable. And she wanted to make amends—she felt ashamed of the way she and her friends had treated him. It would do no good to apologize—that would just embarrass him all over again. He was only at ease when he sat behind her, and knew that she could not look him in the face. If they met on the street he would look away until the last minute, then mutter the faintest greeting while she sang out “Hello, Rupert,” and heard an echo of the old tormenting tones she wanted to banish.
    But when he actually laid a finger on her shoulder, tapping for attention, when he bent forward, almost touching or maybe reallytouching—she could not tell for sure—her thick hair that was wild even in a bob, then she felt forgiven. In a way, she felt honored. Restored to seriousness and to respect.
    Where, where exactly, is the Tyrrhenian Sea?
    She wondered if he remembered anything at all of that now.
    She separated the back and front parts of the paper. Margaret Truman was visiting England, and had curtsied to the royal family. The King’s doctors were trying to cure his Buerger’s disease