The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford by Jean Stafford

Author:Jean Stafford
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: CS, Fiction, Short Stories, ST
ISBN: 9780525481010
Publisher: Dutton
Published: 1969-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

The Mountain Day

( 233

I t had always bored Camilla and me terribly to go to the Science

Lodge. The place was a dismal aggregate of log cabins, some of

which were laboratories and lecture rooms and others Spartan

living quarters for the faculty and for the dozen or so students

-solemn, silent, myopic youths, who, we decided, must be even

more solemn in the winter, at college, since coming to the Lodge

to study high-altitude vegetation and the mineralogy of moraines

was their notion of a holiday; the boys we knew bicycled through

France or fooled around on boats o!I Martha's Vineyard. Everyone, staff and students and guests, sat at one long table in the mess hall and ate fried beefsteak, dehydrated potatoes, canned

peas, and canned Kadota figs, and drank sallow coffee with canned

milk. Daddy and Dr. Menzies would fervently discuss some such

thing as the wisdoms and the follies of foundations. Mother, who

was a beauty and had no intellectual class consciousness, would

try to talk about flower arrangement with the ecologists and the

systematic botanists, who blushed and addressed their eyes to their

food. And Camilla and I would flounder through the maneuvers

of "Do you know So-and-So at Dartmouth?" or "Have you been

up to Troublesome Falls yet?," and, for our pains, got monosyllabic replies, usually in the negative. Not one time, until this summer, had she and I found any of these young men worthy of

comment; they were, indeed, so much of a kind and so stunningly

dull that in our private language we had a generic term, "a Science Lodge type," to designate nonentities we got stuck with at parties.

And then, this year, sitting directly across the table from me

was Rod Stephansson, so sudden, somehow, so surprising, that I

averted my eyes, as if his radiance would blind me. He was as

serious as the other boys, but he was not solemn, and he. and

Mother, in a conversation about Boston, which she knew from

visits to our aunts and cousins there and he knew because he went

to Harvard, so charmed each other that long before we had

reached the Nabiscos and the viscous figs, she had invited him to

our house for Sunday supper. He was sophisticated and funny and

acute, but he was gentle, too, and mannerly. His smile, in which

the responsive eyes played the leading role, made me giddy, but

I wanted, nevertheless, to remain within its sphere.

As soon as lunch was over, the scientists and their apprentices

bolted for their microscopes and samples of pyrites-all except Dr.

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