A Death in the Family - James Agee [53]
Chapter 9
SHE WAS WATCHING for him anxiously as he came back into the living room; he bent to her ear and said, “Nothing.”
“No word yet?”
“No.” He sat down. He leaned towards her. “Probably too soon to expect to hear,” he said.
“Perhaps.” She did not resume her mending.
Joel tried again to read The New Republic.
“Does she seem well?”
Good God, Joel said to himself. He leaned towards her, “Well’s can be expected.”
She nodded.
He went back to The New Republic.
“Shouldn’t we go up?”
That’s about all it would need, Joel thought, to have to bellow at us. He leaned towards her and put his hand on her arm. “Better not,” he said, “till we know what’s what. Too much to-do.”
“To much what?”
“To-do. Fuss. Too many people.”
“Oh. Perhaps. It does seem our place to, Joel.”
Rot! he said to himself. “Our place,” he said rather more loudly, “is to stay where she prefers us to be.” He began to realize that she had not meant our place in mere propriety. Goddamn it all, he thought, why can’t she be there! He touched her shoulder. “Try not to mind it, Catherine,” he said. “I asked Poll, and she said, better not. She said, there’s no use our getting all wrought up until we know.”
“Very sensible,” she said, dubiously.
“Damned sensible,” he said, with conviction. “She’s just trying her best to hold herself together,” he explained.
Catherine turned her head in courteous inquiry.
“Trying—to hold—herself—together!”
She winced. “Don’t—shout at me, Joel. Just speak distinctly and I can hear you.”
“I’m sorry,” he said; he knew she had not heard. He leaned close to her ear. “I’m sorry,” he said again, carefully and not too loudly. “Jumpy, that’s all.”
“No matter,” she said in that level of her voice which was already old.
He watched her a moment, and sighed with sorrow for her, and said, “We’ll know before long.”
“Yes,” she said. “I presume.” She relaxed her hands in her sewing and gazed out across the shadowy room.
It became mere useless torment to watch her; he went back to The New Republic.
“I wonder how it happened,” she said, after a while.
He leaned towards her: “So do I.”
“There must have been others injured, as well.”
Again he leaned towards her. “Maybe. We don’t know.”
“Even killed, perhaps.”
“We don’t—know, Catherine.”
“No.”
Jay drives like hell broken loose, Joel thought to himself; he decided not to say it. Whatever’s happened, he thought, one thing he doesn’t need is that kind of talk about him. Or even thinking.
He began to realize, with a kind of sardonic amusement, that he was being superstitious as well as merely courteous. Why I don’t want to go up till we hear, too, he said to himself. Hands off. Lap of the gods. Don’t rock the boat.
Particularly not a wrecked boat.
“Of course, it does seem to me, Jay drives rather recklessly,” Catherine said, carefully.
“Everybody does,” he told her. Rather, indeed!
“I remember I was most uneasy when they decided to purchase it.”
Well, you’re vindicated.
“Progress,” he told her.
“Beg pardon?”
“Progress. We mustn’t—stand—in the way—of Progress.”
“No,” she said uneasily, “I suppose not.”
Good—God, woman!
“That’s a joke, Catherine, a very—poor—joke.”
Oh.
“I don’t think it’s a time for levity, Joel.”
“Nor do I.”
She tilted her head courteously. Taking care not to yell, he said, “You’re right. Neither—do—I.”
She nodded.
Working his way through another editorial as through barbed wire, Joel thought: I had no business calling her. Why couldn’t I trust her to let me know, quick’s she heard. Hannah, anyhow.
He pushed ahead with his reading.
A heaviness had begun in him from the moment he had heard of the accident; he had said to himself, uh-huh, and without expecting to, had nodded sharply. It had been as if he had known that this or something