Season of Disbelief
How it began with the children, old Mrs Bentley never knew. She often saw them, like moths and monkeys, at the grocer’s, among the cabbages and hung bananas, and she smiled at them and they smiled back. Mrs Bentley watched them making footprints in winter snow, filling their lungs with autumn smoke, shaking down blizzards of spring apple-blossoms, but felt no fear of them. As for herself, her house was in extreme good order, everything set to its station, the floors briskly swept, the foods neatly tinned, the hatpins thrust through cushions, and the drawers of her bedroom bureaus crisply filled with the paraphernalia of years.
Mrs Bentley was a saver. She saved tickets, old theater programs, bits of lace, scarves, rail transfers; all the tags and tokens of existence.
‘I’ve a stack of records,’ she often said. ‘Here’s Caruso. That was in 1916, in New York; I was sixty and John was still alive. Here’s June Moon, 1924, I think, right after John died.’
That was the huge regret of her life, in a way. The one thing she had most enjoyed touching and listening to and looking at she hadn’t saved. John was far out in the meadow country, dated and boxed and hidden under grasses, and nothing remained of him but his high silk hat and his cane and his good suit in the closet. So much of the rest of him had been devoured by moths.
But what she could keep she had kept. Her pink-flowered dresses crushed among moth balls in vast black trunks, and cut-glass dishes from her childhood – she had brought them all when she moved to this town five years ago. Her husband had owned rental property in a number of towns, and, like a yellow ivory chess piece, she had moved and sold one after another, until now she was here in a strange town, left with only the trunks and furniture, dark and ugly, crouched about her like the creatures of a primordial zoo.
The thing about the children happened in the middle of summer. Mrs Bentley, coming out to water the ivy upon her front porch, saw two cool-colored sprawling girls and a small boy lying on her lawn, enjoying the immense prickling of the grass.
At the very moment Mrs Bentley was smiling down upon them with her yellow mask face, around a corner like an elfin band came an ice-cream wagon. It jingled out icy melodies, as crisp and rimmed as crystal wineglasses tapped by an expert, summoning all. The children sat up, turning their heads, like sunflowers after the sun.
Mrs Bentley called, ‘Would you like some? Here!’ The ice-cream wagon stopped and she exchanged money for pieces of the original Ice Age. The children thanked her with snow in their mouths, their eyes darting from her buttoned-up shoes to her white hair.
‘Don’t you want a bite?’ said the boy.
‘No, child. I’m old enough and cold enough; the hottest day won’t thaw me,’ laughed Mrs Bentley.
They carried the miniature glaciers up and sat, three in a row, on the shady porch glider.
‘I’m Alice, she’s Jane, and that’s Tom Spaulding.’
‘How nice. And I’m Mrs Bentley. They called me Helen.’
They stared at her.
‘Don’t you believe they called me Helen?’ said the old lady.
‘I didn’t know old ladies had first names,’ said Tom, blinking.
Mrs Bentley laughed dryly.
‘You never hear them used, he means,’ said Jane.
‘My dear, when you are as old as I, they won’t call you Jane, either. Old age is dreadfully formal. It’s always “Mrs” young people don’t like to call you “Helen.” It seems much too flip.’
‘How old are you?’ asked Alice.
‘I remember the pterodactyl.’ Mrs Bentley smiled.
‘No, but how old?’
‘Seventy-two.’
They gave their cold sweets an extra long suck, deliberating.
‘That’s old,’ said Tom.
‘I don’t feel any different now than when I was your age,’ said the old lady.
‘Our age?’
‘Yes. Once I was a pretty little girl just like you, Jane, and you, Alice.’
They did not speak.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing.’ Jane got up.
‘Oh, you don’t have to go so soon, I hope. You haven’t finished eating.… Is something the matter?’
‘My mother says it isn’t nice to fib,’ said Jane.
‘Of course it isn’t. It’s very bad,’ agreed Mrs Bentley.
‘And not to listen to fibs.’
‘Who was fibbing to you, Jane?’
Jane looked at her and then glanced nervously away. ‘You were.’
‘I?’ Mrs Bentley laughed and put her withered claw to her small bosom. ‘About what?’
‘About your age. About being a little girl.’
Mrs Bentley stiffened. ‘But I was, many years ago, a little girl just like you.’
‘Come on, Alice, Tom.’
‘Just a moment,’ said Mrs Bentley. ‘Don’t you believe me?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Jane. ‘No.’
‘But how ridiculous! It’s perfectly obvious. Everyone was young once!’
‘Not you,’ whispered Jane, eyes down, almost to herself. Her empty ice stick had fallen in a vanilla puddle on the porch floor.
‘But of course I was eight, nine, ten years old, like all of you.’
The two girls gave a short, quickly-sealed-up laugh.
Mrs Bentley’s eyes glittered. ‘Well, I can’t waste a morning arguing with ten-year-olds. Needless to say, I was ten myself once and just as silly.’
The two girls laughed. Tom looked uneasy.
‘You’re joking with us,’ giggled Jane. ‘You weren’t really ten ever, were you, Mrs Bentley?’
‘You run on home!’ the woman cried suddenly, for she could not stand their eyes. ‘I won’t have you laughing.’
‘And your name’s not really Helen?’
‘Of course it’s Helen!’
‘Good-bye,’ said the two girls, giggling away across the lawn under the seas of shade, Tom followed them slowly. ‘Thanks for the
