Through the window, Harriet Struthoff’s flowered hat goes by. This is a hat for the young woman Harriet Struthoff ceased to be some years ago. There are so many ways for a spinster to look ridiculous. Rosalie admires Miss Struthoff for not caring. She wishes that she, too, could wear a big and lovely hat now that Edwin is here to buy one for her. Instead he surprised her a few days ago with a writing box, mahogany and brass, linen paper inside for her letters. All very elegant and Rosalie does love it, that very thoughtful, that impeccably appropriate spinster’s gift.
After all, Rosalie has no one for whom to wear such a hat. A few weeks back Mother had said, apropos of nothing, “You know that I don’t think much of marriage. I didn’t like it myself.” This was for Rosalie’s ears only. Asia must be allowed to believe that Mother’s heart had been broken forever by Father’s death. For where thou art, there is the world itself . . . And where thou art not, desolation. Whereas Rosalie had always understood Mother’s collapse to have been largely a matter of economic anxiety. Now that Edwin is paying the bills and as long as she has her darling John, Mother is content.
Just as Rosalie is thinking this, Mother enters the parlor. Her gray-streaked hair is in a knot at her neck, the center part straight as a nail. There are just a few flecks of dandruff, a light sprinkling of snow on the shoulders of her black dress. She inhales sharply. “Come down from there before you hurt yourself,” she tells Rosalie. “What gets into you?” As if she often comes into a room to find Rosalie standing on the furniture.
She holds out a hand to help Rosalie down. There is stumbling and swaying, tottering and thumping. Mother is right, of course. Rosalie should stay on the ground where she belongs. “Poor Rose, the invalid daughter” is not the identity she would have chosen when she was sixteen, eighteen, twenty-three. By thirty-three, she’s accepted it. She can play to its advantages as needed. It’s better than no identity at all.
ii
Mother, Asia, and Rosalie are all at the table, watching Edwin not eat. Rosalie pours him a cup of coffee, which she knows from experience can set things right. She pours herself one, too. The smell of coffee is stronger than the smell of gin.
He’s returned from a two-week tour in Washington, DC, and Richmond, tired, but exhilarated, staggering in after dark, flush and flushed, breath you could light with a match. He rises late the next morning, the jolliness gone, his eyes like black holes. “My head,” he says grimly at breakfast, brushing his hair back with one listless hand and staring unenthusiastically down at a plate of corn dodgers and doughnuts. Everyone else ate hours ago and John has already left the house. He’s started making himself scarce when Edwin is around.
They can’t coax out anything but monosyllables, but Rosalie is left with the impression that Edwin’s performances were good. Better than expected. He made money, most of which he gives to Mother.
After three or four days of low skies, the morning is a dazzle of sunshine. “Edwin has brought the sun back,” Rosalie says to the table, pretending there weren’t several equally sunny days during his absence. Winter keeps losing her grip—coming and going and coming again.
Twenty minutes later, while Rosalie is still washing up, Edwin returns to the kitchen. He’s more presentable this time, face washed, curls combed, wider awake. “Rose,” he says. “Would you show me Father’s grave?”
“Of course,” she tells him, all tender and flattered.
Asia, uninvited, insists on coming along.
Only then she doesn’t. While Edwin is fetching the carriage, hitching the horse （Roman, a chestnut Morgan）， and bringing it all with much clatter to the front of the house, Asia’s friend Jean Anderson arrives unexpectedly. Clearly there is gossip of some sort, confidences to be shared. The whispering begins before Jean has even removed her gloves. So Asia begs off and suddenly the tête-à-tête Rosalie wants is being offered without any contrivance on her part.
In spite of the sun, the wind is cold enough to sting Rosalie’s cheeks. Her bonnet is too small to provide much protection. She remembers a time when women went out blinkered like horses. Edwin helps her onto the running board and into the buggy, puts a rough blanket over her lap, and takes up the reins. They drive in silence for a few blocks, down a street framed with sycamores, branches trembling, leaves rattling. And then Edwin asks her, “Do you remember my pet lamb? She used to follow me around, just like in the rhyme?”
“Yes,” Rosalie says. “I can’t remember what happened to her.”
“She went back to the farm. One day I was trying to read and she wanted to play. She kept pushing the book out of the way. So I hit her, a good solid crack on the nose with the book. I’ll never forget how she looked at me. After that, she never came near me again.”
“What made you think of her?” Rosalie asks.
“I don’t know. Regrets.” Perhaps his head is still hurting. He shakes it vigorously, smacks his own temple with his hand as if trying to dislodge a stone from his brain. The carriage bumps over something in the road, something small, an apple maybe or a potato someone dropped. Rosalie can’t lean out far enough to see. Edwin doesn’t seem to have noticed. He’s in the middle of telling her what it’s like to play Father’s old roles, how Father ghosts his every move so that with each gesture he can see his father’s hand moving through the air and must force his own in a different direction. “Like a rebellious puppet,” he says.
Rosalie thinks of suggesting that he not take the roles Father was so famous for. After all, his youth and beauty are more suited to romantic leads and less to glowering villains. But she can see that he’s deliberately announcing himself as his father’s son.
When, at supper two days ago, John had declared, and not for the first time, his determination not to trade on Father’s reputation, but to act under the name of Wilkes, Rosalie had understood this to be a criticism of Edwin. She’d thought, unkindly, that John was more likely to suffer than Edwin by any comparison to Father, but, of course, she didn’t say this.
Had it been Edwin criticizing John, her instinctive protectiveness would have been the same. She loves them both. She wants them to love each other.
They arrive at the gate to the cemetery, an elaborate arrangement of twisted iron, black leaves and vines, with real leaves and vines twining between. Edwin helps Rosalie down and ties up the horse. He gives her his arm. The paths are spongy with wet leaves and mud, flanked by tall, thin Normandy poplars. We should have brought flowers, Rosalie thinks and then thinks not, remembering how Father wouldn’t suffer a flower to be cut. “This way,” she says. She sees that it’s hard for Edwin to match her gait. They keep falling out of step.
Edwin hunches against the wind. He looks very young suddenly, as if he’s sloughed off five years since breakfast. His hands are bare. He asks her to tell him about the funeral.
“It was cold like this,” she says. “Cold and gray. The whole day dressed in mourning.”
“This isn’t cold,” Edwin tells her. “I once had to walk for hours and hours through a blizzard with snow up to my neck.” Rosalie waits to see if he wants to say more. He doesn’t.