we won’t!’ said the girls. ‘Will we?’ they asked one another.
‘Wait and see!’ said Mrs Bentley.
And to herself she thought, Oh, God, children are children, old women are old women, and nothing in between. They can’t imagine a change they can’t see.
‘Your mother,’ she said to Jane. ‘Haven’t you noticed, over the years, the change?’
‘No,’ said Jane. ‘She’s always the same.’
And that was true. You lived with people every day and they never altered a degree. It was only when people had been off on a long trip, for years, that they shocked you. And she felt like a woman who has been on a roaring black train for seventy-two years, landing at last upon the rail platform and everyone crying: ‘Helen Bentley, is that you?’
‘I guess we better go home,’ said Jane. ‘Thanks for the ring. It just fits me.’
‘Thanks for the comb. It’s fine.’
‘Thanks for the picture of the little girl.’
‘Come back – you can’t have those!’ Mrs Bentley shouted as they raced down the steps. ‘They’re mine!’
‘Don’t!’ said Tom, following the girls. ‘Give them back!’
‘No, she stole them! They belonged to some other little girl. She stole them. Thanks!’ cried Alice.
So no matter how she called after them, the girls were gone, like moths through darkness.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Tom, on the lawn, looking up at Mrs Bentley. He went away.
They took my ring and my comb and my picture, thought Mrs Bentley, trembling there on the steps. Oh, I’m empty, empty; it’s part of my life.
She lay awake for many hours into the night, among her trunks and trinkets. She glanced over at the neat stacks of materials and toys and opera plumes and said, aloud, ‘Does it really belong to me?’
Or was it the elaborate trick of an old lady convincing herself that she had a past? After all, once a time was over, it was done. You were always in the present. She may have been a girl once, but was not now. Her childhood was gone and nothing could fetch it back.
A night wind blew in the room. The white curtain fluttered against a dark cane, which had leaned against the wall near the other bric-a-brac for many years. The cane trembled and fell out into a patch of moonlight, with a soft thud. Its gold ferrule glittered. It was her husband’s opera cane. It seemed as if he were pointing it at her, as he often had, using his soft, sad, reasonable voice when they, upon rare occasions, disagreed.
‘Those children are right,’ he would have said. ‘They stole nothing from you, my dear. These things don’t belong to you here, you now. They belonged to her, that other you, so long ago.’
Oh, thought Mrs Bentley. And then, as though an ancient phonograph record had been set hissing under a steel needle, she remembered a conversation she had once had with Mr Bentley – Mr Bentley, so prim, a pink carnation in his whisk-broomed lapel, saying, ‘My dear, you never will understand time, will you? You’re always trying to be the things you were, instead of the person you are tonight. Why do you save those ticket stubs and theater programs? They’ll only hurt you later. Throw them away, my dear.’
But Mrs Bentley had stubbornly kept them.
‘It won’t work,’ Mr Bentley continued, sipping his tea. ‘No matter how hard you try to be what you once were you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you’re nine, you think you’ve always been nine years old and will always be. When you’re thirty, it seems you’ve always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You’re in the present, you’re trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.’
It had been one of the few, but gentle, disputes of their quiet marriage. He had never approved of her bric-a-brackery. ‘Be what you are, bury what you are not,’ he had said. ‘Ticket stubs are trickery. Saving things is a magic trick, with mirrors.’
If he were alive tonight, what would he say?
‘You’re saving cocoons.’ That’s what he’d say. ‘Corsets, in a way, you can never fit again. So why save them? You can’t really prove you were ever young. Pictures? No, they lie. You’re not the picture.’
‘Affidavits?’
‘No, my dear, you’re not the dates, or the ink, or the paper. You’re not these trunks of junk and dust. You’re only you, here, now – the present you.’
Mrs Bentley nodded at the memory, breathing easier.
‘Yes, I see. I see.’
The gold-ferruled cane lay silently on the moonlit rug.
‘In the morning,’ she said to it, ‘I will do something final about this, and settle down to being only me, and nobody else from any other year. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.’
She slept.…
The morning was bright and green, and there at her door, bumping softly on the screen, were the two girls. ‘Got any more to give us, Mrs Bentley? More of the little girl’s things?’
She led them down the hall to the library.
‘Take this.’ She gave Jane the dress in which she had played the mandarin’s daughter at fifteen. ‘And this, and this.’ A kaleidoscope, a magnifying glass. ‘Pick anything you want,’ said Mrs Bentley. ‘Books, skates, dolls, everything – they’re yours.’
‘Ours?’
‘Only yours. And will you help me with a little work in the next hour? I’m building a big fire in my back yard. I’m emptying the trunks, throwing out this trash for the trashman. It doesn’t belong to me. Nothing ever belongs to anybody.’
‘We’ll help,’ they said.
Mrs Bentley led the procession to the back yard, arms full, a box of matches in her hand.
So the rest of the summer you could see the two little girls and Tom like wrens on a wire, on Mrs Bentley’s front porch, waiting. And when the silvery chimes of the icicle man were heard, the front door opened, Mrs Bentley floated out with her hand deep down the gullet of her silver-mouthed purse, and for half an hour you could see them there on the porch, the children and the old lady putting coldness into warmness, eating chocolate icicles, laughing. At last they were good friends.
‘How old are you, Mrs Bentley?’
‘Seventy-two.’
‘How old were you fifty years ago?’
‘Seventy-two.’
‘You weren’t ever young, were you, and never wore ribbons or dresses like these?’
‘No.?’
‘Have you got a first name?’
‘My name is Mrs Bentley.’
‘And you’ve always lived in this one house?’
‘Always.’
‘And never were pretty?’
‘Never.’
‘Never in a million trillion years?’ The two girls would bend toward the old lady, and wait in the pressed silence of four o’clock on a summer afternoon.
‘Never,’ said Mrs Bentley, ‘in a million trillion years.’
The