Siesta by Berry Fleming

Author:Berry Fleming
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504009881
Publisher: The Permanent Press

7. Wilderness Song

Monday, July 20

They drove along the pink road through the brilliant heat.

“The funny thing,” said Nora, “is that I really rather like it all.”

Mr. Applewhite looked out of the car at a ragged wall of scrub oaks twisting up through the white sand. “You didn’t seem to feel quite that way last spring.”

“I know. I remember. But it isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

“You don’t think it may be just that you’re getting used to it?”

“No. I exaggerated it,—exaggerated it so much I could hardly bear the idea of coming back. I thought I just couldn’t do it.”

“What was it you exaggerated so much?”

“Oh, I don’t remember exactly. It was the same sort of feeling I have always had coming back. Only it was stronger, because you see that was my last year. I felt coming back this year was definite.”

“And you didn’t like the idea of its being definite? I mean, after all, you were coming home.”

“I know. But there was somehow a feeling of turning my back on things. I remember that. It was always that way. I remember at Smith everybody talking about what they were going to do that summer, swimming, riding, sailing, getting together again up on the North Shore, on the Cape. I don’t know; things were just beginning for them; the weather was just getting to be fun. I used to think it was sort of like walking out in the middle of the show.”

“That’s about what it was.”

“I used to think of all kinds of similes.” She laughed. “I used to think, getting on the train, it must feel a little like that to be marrying somebody you didn’t love.”

“Was it the country? I mean all this sort of thing?” He waved through the window at a green cotton field with a group of earth-colored shacks in the middle.

“Partly, I suppose. It took me awhile to see the beauty of all that.”

“Now look here!—That hasn’t any beauty.”

“It has for me. It really has.”

“I’m afraid you’re beyond me. I can’t understand that.”

“I think there’s a beauty about these scrub oaks, these sandhills—”

“This red clay?”

“Yes.”

“But, Nora—”

“This country has character.”

“But, Nora, if this is beauty, what word do you use in thinking of Devon and Chartres Cathedral and the Hudson River and southern Pennsylvania and—”

“It’s a different kind of beauty.”

“No, Nora.” He laughed.

“But there can be different criterions of beauty.”

“There may be different criterions, I’m not sure. People who are very different, like Americans and Orientals, may have what look like different criterions, but you and I belong to the same race and our backgrounds have been, after all, much the same. You may object seriously to an old man’s saying he has had the same background as you, but it’s only some thirty-five years different and Pennsylvania and Devon and Chartres haven’t changed much in thirty-five years. I mean in a general broad way, you and I should have the same criterions of beauty. And I think we have.

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