Corny Penrose?”
Worthy said it was an old village custom; when a boy was interested in a girl he sent her a corn ear, and if she accepted his attentions she husked the ear and returned it; if she wasn’t interested she sent it back unshucked. Sometimes a girl, if she was bold enough, would send an ear to a boy. But whatever ears might be sent, the results had to wait until the crops were in.
“Has anybody sent you a cob?” Kate asked.
“Not yet.”
She looked relieved and began relating what she had learned from the Widow’s quilt concerning the Corn Play. Worthy’s face darkened. “That’s silly stuff.”
By diligent questioning, Kate found out a little more about the choosing of the Harvest Lord and the Corn Maiden. Since the original Agnes Fair, the Harvest Lord had always been picked on that day. He would be crowned with honors the following year at Spring Festival, when the villagers would bring him presents. Then, during the next seven years, he would be given all sorts of privileges, including free communal labor to work his fields and farm. And at some point during that time, he would select a Corn Maiden to reign with him.
“Is it always a husband, who chooses his wife?” Beth asked.
No. The village had been surprised when Justin had married Sophie, then picked her for his Corn Maiden. Usually it was a single girl. When the Corn Play was given, in the Grange hall, the new Corn Maiden would be crowned.
Beth and Kate cleared the table and brought in dessert and coffee. When they were seated again, Kate asked, “Worthy, you’re going to be the new Harvest Lord in the play, aren’t you? Who’ll you pick for Corn Maiden?”
I exchanged a look with Beth: bold as brass, our daughter. Worthy frowned and didn’t answer; he wasn’t interested in all that.
“Do they have square-dancing at the husking bee?”
“Sure.”
“Can you square-dance?”
“Sure.” But he didn’t like doing it. Square-dancing was old-fashioned, for old fogeys who lived in the past. He didn’t want to live in the past; he wanted to live in the here and now. His brows were drawn down in a gloomy line as he toyed with his napkin. “Mr. Deming carrying on like that at the fair. All I was doing was having some fun, but you’re not supposed to bring a tractor on the Common. You’re not supposed to play on the shinny pole. Old geezers like him don’t think anything’s funny. The minute you do different or act different, people talk. It makes you stand out, and people around here don’t want to stand out.”
“Do you?”
“Well, I don’t want to be like everyone else. There’s no point in doing things just because other people do them, is there? I think it’s crazy doing them their way just because it’s their way. Look at Gracie Everdeen.”
“What about Gracie Everdeen?” I put down my fork and prepared to listen.
“I don’t know, really. It all happened when I was small. But there’s been lots of talk.”
“What kind of talk?”
“They say she went crazy.”
Gracie Everdeen, a product of the overly mixed bloodlines of the village? “Was she a Penrose?”
“I don’t know, sir. She may have been. Almost everybody is, one way or another. She was supposed to marry a Penrose.”
“She was?”
“They were engaged, then she ran off.”
“But she came back, didn’t she? She’s buried in the cemetery-or out of it, rather. Why is that?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Who was she engaged to?”
“Roger Penrose.”
Ah, Roger Penrose the bone-carver. “Did he marry someone else?”
“He died.”
“How?”
“He got killed jumping his horse. A broken neck, I think. Like I say, it all happened a long time ago. Before-”
“Yes?”
He shrugged. “Before I was old enough to remember.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “Gee-it’s getting late-”
“Don’t you want dessert?” Beth said.
“Maybe we’d better get started,” he suggested quickly and I had an idea he was trying to extricate himself from a conversation he was sorry he’d begun in the first place.
When we had seen them off for Danforth, with instructions to be back before nine, Beth and I put the dinner dishes in the dishwasher, then walked down the lane and through the meadow to the river, where we found the boat Amys had mentioned. We had brought along a blanket and a transistor radio, and Beth tuned in some music, sitting in the stern, while I turned the boat and began rowing upriver.
It was one of those days a happy man records for his mental posterity. Sunday afternoon, New England, summer’s end. A dreaming landscape; faultless sky; dazzling clouds; bursting sunlight; river calm, placid, seductive in its peaceful turnings; the splash of water, creak of oarlocks. Birds singing along the shore; the play of light and shadow among the trees; a little music; your wife, whom you love. What might be called the ingredients for a perfect day.
I could tell Beth was in one of her reflective moods and I did not try to make conversation, but only gave myself up to the beauty of the afternoon. Along the shore, the oncoming autumn was showing itself, not outright, but secretly, in the smallest corners. There was a tang of smoke in the air, making a kind of uneven haze that seemed to lay a golden sheen over everything-water, trees, foliage-with the soft luminosity of a Turner painting. It was a special kind of ease and contentment that enveloped me as we followed the meandering course of the river for perhaps a mile, until we came within sight of Soakes’s Lonesome. When we had got around several more bends, I saw on the opposite bank the Soakeses’ jetty. Half a dozen ducks floated idly in the water, while on the landing the old man and the boys were hunched over some kind of activity. They looked up, eying us briefly as we passed. I got a feeling of menace from this furtive appraisal, and as I glanced back the old man opened his knife and stropped the blade on his boot. Putting more force into my strokes until we were well past them, I looked back again to see one of them getting into the skiff.
I could hear the dull reverberation of the motor as we rounded the next bend, and I wondered if we were to be followed or in some way interfered with, but when the skiff appeared again it was heading for the Cornwall shore. Shortly we had the river to ourselves once more. I wiped my arm across my forehead, rested on my oars, and let the boat drift close to the bank, enjoying our solitary state.
The sun felt warm on my back and shoulders, and I stripped off my shirt, which Beth took and held in her lap. She still continued rapt in some kind of reverie, and I made no effort to disturb it. Once she looked at me with a trace of a smile; then she looked down again, watching her hand in the water. She was wearing a gold snake I had bought for her in Venice, and I saw a fish dart close to it, attracted by the bright gleam of the metal. Then Amys Penrose’s flat-bottomed tub became a gondola and the river was the Grand Canal, the sky not American but Italian, and we were back in Venice, that summer seventeen years before, in 1955.
It had begun the previous winter, a bone-chilling one in Paris, where I was studying at the Sorbonne on the G.I. Bill. I picked Beth up on the grand staircase of the Louvre, under the “Winged Victory.” She’d come over from London with a college chum she’d been sharing a flat with in Chelsea. I heard her reading from her catalogue: “The ‘Winged Victory of Smothrace.’”
The other girl, Mary Abbott, went back to London alone and Beth stayed with me in my loft in the Rue du Bac.
