the winter carnival

Ardith Dutton had been writing to her English correspondent for seventy years. The two met through a pen-pal exchange devised by their schools, about the time that the Allies were reaching wary hands of partnership across the waters. When the bombs dropped on London, Ardith could not be pried from her post beside the Zenith Stratosphere.

"Dear Fredericka," her letter entreated, "are you all right? I am beside myself worrying about you, and I will not sleep a wink until I get a letter back in your own hand. I have been with my ear to the radio all this evening, lisetning about the boms in your city. My dad he wanted to make me come to dinner, and he bellered so loud I could not hear the radio hardly, then he tried to pick me up and carry me in to dinner but boy I fought him, I do not hardly know what posesssed me, and do you know he let me loose and stay there. And now he is calling me Spitfire. So it is like I am a plane and I wish I was a plane, Fredericka so I could fly over London and rescue you.

Ardith's mother was a woman well-disposed to the drama of their relationship; she added to the family income by the writing of lurid dime-store novels. This vocation afforded Ardith two advantages in her correspondence. Not only was she able to type her letters on an Underwood Three, but also she was encouraged by her mother to preserve the carbons of the letters she sent across the sea. Consequently, Ardith again read the foregoing to herself in the kitchen of her home on the edge of Gopher Road, only a few days before her eightieth birthday. During the occasion made of it by her nieces, nephews and cousins, and all their children, she felt fairly old. But when she was alone, moving in her rounds of daily life, she did not feel any older than she did at twenty-eight. At twenty-eight, she had not felt particularly young, nor old, either. She was simply herself, five feet and five inches tall, gnarled, like a tree in a windbreak, with hard knots of muscle along her limbs. She perseveringly fed her chickens and horses, drove her truck, walked in her fields, pulled up weeds in her garden, shoveled the snow off her walkway, and hung her laundry to dry in the wind. Her mother had passed when she was forty-two, her father when she was fifty.

By a strange coincidence unknown to either of them, the letter that Ardith read, as she baked her own birthday cake in the quietness of her kitchen, was also was the letter that Fredericka Wolsey read some few days after her own eightieth birthday, on the morning of the day that she died of renal failure.

Ardith set aside Wednesday afternoons as her time to write to Fredericka. She did a tidy amount of work during the morning but did no shopping or errands or visiting. She spent the noontime pondering different turns of phrase as she ate her lunch. At two-thirty, she would settle herself wherever it felt most apt for writing that day--sometimes the swing on the back porch, sometimes at the kitchen table, sometimes at the little secretary facing west in her bedroom, sometimes tucked into her bed. She had done that once and felt quite naughty for it; she meant to do it again one day, and chuckled to herself at the thought of it. She usually began to write in earnest at three, and seldom finished before five. She would mull on the letter all evening and night, and the next day she would copy it over on the typewriter, on proper stationery, inserting the improvements she came up with in the twelve hours preceding. The letter would be posted by noon on Thursday, which meant that Fredericka would receive it, if all went as it ought to, on the Monday that followed the second week from the date it was posted.

Avery Simms collected the mail on Gopher Road until his stroke, after which his nephew Jamison took over the route for him. Ardith was ill pleased by this change. It was Jamison who told her that the Gopher Road route was likely to be closed soon, and she would have to pick up her mail in town.

"Why on earth?" Ardith asked him, in clipped tones. "Don't I pay my taxes, state and local?"

"All the houses that useter be on thisyer road are selling out, getting pulled down," said Jamison Simms, gesturing languidly eastward. "Farms are getting bigger and folks don't wanter live so far out ther way."

"Whose houses have been pulled down?" Ardith knew the answer, even before she asked it, but she demanded a explanation of him.

"Phippses, O'Tooles, Gertlers, Paleys. All 'em building nice new places close to town, with air conditioning and whatnot." Jamison shrugged. "Ts'more convenient."

Ardith took her mail and shut the door in his face. She never used to wonder whether her letter would reach Fredericka on time, with Avery Simms carrying it. She did not always like the persistent friendly questions he made of her--"London, England, Miz Dutton? Waterloo Road? Miz Dutton, how d'you come to know somebody in London, England? D'you ever go there, Miz Dutton? Miz Dutton, I'd venture to suspect it was an admirer you have there!" But Jamison asked no such questions, never gave a second glance to the letters she gave into his care. Not surprising, she thought, if he doesn't think this route is worth his time, he's hardly likely to think an individual letter is worth his notice.

She wrote to Fredericka about the impending change. "I've never felt the pressure to sell out my house," she wrote. "It will be a cold day in hell before they buy up this land to build tract housing on it. The only possible inducement for anyone to leave this place would be of their own devising. The insolent young surrogate postman says that my neighbors have been building houses closer to town, for convenience's sake. It certainly doesn't make me eager to follow suit. But it does give me a strange feeling that I do not relish--that of being left behind, of being forgotten. I'm sure you must have felt something similar upon being sent to Canada. I'm sure your family must have felt the same, watching you leave them for how long no one could guess."

Fredericka's response after the onset of the Blitz was highly unsatisfactory to Ardith, as it came from somewhere on the sea, far to the north.

"Sweet darling Ardith," it said, "Mummy sent me your letter and that I must write to you straightaway. You are a dear and a sweet angel, thank you, I am quite well and now I am living in the town of Saint John, which is in the province of New Brunswick in Canada. It is a very pretty place now but they say it will become terribly cold in the winter and if they make me go to school here I do not know if I shall survive."

Ardith stewed in her own choler for weeks, wondering how the authorities who determined Fredericka's asylum could have been so dimwitted as not to send her where she would be best looked after. In Waring, Nebraska, the climate was temperate and the town so deeply couched in middle America that Nazis were likely to never know of its existence. She repeated the idiocy of the assignment to her mother and father every night, hinting strongly that they might exercise their adult rights to rectify the situation. "All they would have to do to find her is look across the ocean, and there she is! She's right by the sea!" Even a look at the world atlas, which showed that Saint John was well sheltered by the neighboring province of Nova Scotia, did not avail to assuage her feelings. "She would feel so much more at home here," Ardith insisted. "She doesn't know anybody in Canada." As she said this, however, she was assailed by a deep, insinuating dread that Fredericka might possibly know someone in that faraway country--that she might even have a pen pal of the same age as Ardith, even one who lived in Saint John, New Brunswick. "I'm her best friend in North America," Ardith declared, more staunchly than she felt, as the possibility occurred to her that given a choice of asylum, Fredericka had elected to stay with the Canadian correspondent. She went to bed stormily that night, and considered that she might never write to Fredericka again; "I don't want anyone else to see the letters I write for her," she told her mother each day that week. However, habit and curiosity were too strong for pride to break; on Wednesday she wrote again, perhaps more reservedly, in case interloping eyes were casting judgment on the missive. And the response was overwhelmingly rewarding. Fredericka reported that she was staying with a couple who were older than her parents, who ran a dairy farm, who had two grown-up sons, one who lived apart with his wife and the other who lived on the farm to help his aging father, and had a nose like Jimmy Durante's.

Ardith had little to say to Jamison Simms after his proclamation on the fate of Gopher Road. Her resentment grew in the weeks that followed it, and she wondered how long she might have to put up with his presence on the mail route. One rainy Thursday in April, as she was making the exchange of outgoing and receiving mail, she snipped at him, "How is your uncle coming along?"

Jamison blinked at her; it had been some time since she had done any more than sniff or grunt at him. "Coming along?" he said.

"Is is his health improving?"

Jamison shrugged. "Can't talk too good," he said. "Gets around all right, so long as he don't strain hisself trying to do too much."

Ardith had a sudden, stark picture of Avery Simms sidling feebly through his family's house, attempting to lift a pail or open a window, struggling with it until someone condescendingly guided him away from the effort and deposited him in a rocking chair.

"It's a terrible thing for the old to admit defeat," she murmured reproachfully. She shut the door softly and stood with her back against it, her chest rising and falling with unaccountable severity. Her fingers played against each other frenetically, her glance swung from one corner of the hall to another. The screech of cicadas outside pressed nervously against her, and the noise of a flight of crows swelled like a blood vessel swifting its expanding urgency toward the unsuspecting brain. She dropped her received mail on the sideboard and tripped up the stairs to her writing desk.

"Dearest Ardith, it is unimaginably cold here. I do not know how the weather is in Nebraska, but I cannot imagine that it is colder than here. I am not attending school anymore because I came down with a cough in October and it did not go away for several weeks because the building suffers terrible draughts. Instead I do my lessons beside the hearth, wrapped in a blanket. Mrs. Johns makes them herself. She is very kind. I am feeling much better now that I can stay warm always. Mr. Johns says I must get used to the cold soon, because they want to take me to the Winter Carnival, which is in Montreal, in the province of Quebec. I have asked them what it is, but they will not tell me! They say I must get strong and used to the cold, so that I can see this wonderful thing."

Ardith scribbled feverishly across the pages of her loose-leaf, her thoughts brief passages across the intransigent vision of Avery Simms' face, red and strained with effort, or pale yellow like a faded leaf against a window fastly closed.

Avery Simms, who was so friendly all their long acquaintance, had wanted to marry her once; after she gleefully refused him, he remained staunchly friendly. He married another woman he met in France, while he was in the service. She had not liked Waring at all, and they never had any children, and then she caught pneumonia one winter and died.

The following Monday was stormy and sullen, by turns. Unable to go about her usual errands and chores due to the weather, Ardith stayed in bed, with the covers pulled over her head, and dozed heavily through the morning. She awoke with a start when a window shutter banged against the window frame, and with an astonished look at the clock, though she remembered choosing to stay in bed and sleep late, she pulled on her clothes and made her way down the stairs.

Thinking of the reactionary, extraneous letter she had written, she smiled wryly to find the letter from Henley-on-Thames, where Fredericka had retired to with her husband since 1972. She perused it cursorily, as she always did, using the first pass to get a general sense of what it held before she delved into its particulars. She turned on the stove flame under the kettle, and set the letter beside the coffee mill so she could look at it as she turned the handle.

Ardith reckoned that she would not send the extra letter she had written. In light of Fredericka's cordial, dispassionate prose, it seemed to overstep the crafted parameters of their correspondence. They were always frank about their opinions, but impartial about their validity; they wrote no emotional propaganda, betrayed no effusions of vitriol or despair or enthusiasm. Ardith did not fear that Fredericka would think ill of her for reacting as she had, but she wanted to spare her the chore of deciding how to respond. Growing old was a fact, like snow was a fact, like weeds and horse shit. You could shove it out of your way, or you could wax eloquent about how it made you feel.

She set her coffee cup before her and began to read in earnest.

"Dear Ardith, Happy eightieth birthday! Everyone will tell you--no doubt has already told you--what a milestone you have reached. No doubt you are sick of hearing congratulations. Do they suppose we have learned everything at our age, and are sitting smugly on the wisdom we have amassed? I, for one, have quite the same lingering doubts about life and what is to be done with it, as I had when first we began to write, and the older I grow, the more they seem to insinuate themselves into my thoughts..."

She understands, Ardith thought, pleased and a little amazed. Perhaps--she read through the rest of the letter, and found this idea growing stronger--perhaps we are old enough to change. The following Thursday, she sent the letter she had written the previous week, with some addenda pertaining to week since.

Once the ground froze over and there was nothing to inspect in her fields, Ardith took long walks down Gopher Road. She went eastward, toward town, if she wanted to buy anything or see anyone. But usually she went west, with her shoulders back, her head toward the ground, and her boots uncompromising on the muddy ice. It did not signify that she paced over the same steps each day; the road in winter bore no vestige of its character during the rest of the year. The old live oak that had been split by lightning before she was born looked no different from as the maples that were planted as a windbreak only the previous spring, and like them were the slender silver birches that lined the road just off the drive from the Paleys' former place. The sky reduced everything that stood on the earth under it--growing, reaching things made feeble as a cry in the wind. Whatever in other seasons might mark the distance she went, was shrouded by a blinding sameness of light; Ardith often found herself startled by sudden darkness, as the sun dropped after unnoticed hours she spent plodding forward, her teeth and her fists clenched in defiance of the cold.

"Fredericka, today I walked for what must have been three hours or more, over the frozen road. I might have gone farther, I'm sure I have before, except that I happened upon a pearl necklace lying by the side of the road. I do not understand how I came to see it, for as I said the ground is all frozen and the reflection off the snow and ice practically blinds me, anywhere I look. But there it was, lying in the snow. I stood there and stared at it for some time. I suppose it must have been dropped by someone going past in a car, or perhaps it was being carried by a bird sometime in the year previous. How long might it have been lying there?

It made Ardith sick to think what she had written afterward, halting attempts at understanding some bedridden emotion that could not assert itself fully, only lurch about in her belly. She brushed away tears of angry shame, thinking how she had suddenly snatched up the necklace, hurried home with it in her fist, mincing hastily over the slippery road, and upon arrival had taken the necklace upstairs and shut it out of sight, into a drawer. She wondered at herself for scribbling such overwrought drama, and resolved that if Fredericka forgave it and condescended to write back, she must never again subject either of them to it.

She opened the door on a drippy Monday, but not to Jamison Simms. It was a woman of about thirty years old, with a square haircut and soft, sensible clothes, her shoes covered in mud, and a face like a sheep.

"Hello," said the woman to Ardith.

"I'm not buying anything today," Ardith said, more curt than even her wont, for she had a bad cold.

"No! I'm not selling anything." The woman's speech had deep, open o's and soft, upturned a's.

Ardith blinked at her, and they both stood in silence for a moment.

"Who are you?" Ardith said. Before the woman could answer, she hurriedly said,

"Is Fredericka all right?"

The woman's eyebrows shot up past her eyeglasses. "Yes!" she quickly answered. "That is...that is to say..."

They sat in the kitchen, facing each other. The light was muted and undemanding around them, having much to do with spring's hard effort outside.

Ardith faced the woman imposingly, unwilling to speak.

"I am Nigella Allan," she said, proffering her hand with some trepidation.

Ardith took it momentarily and gave it up.

"Are you here to tell me Fredericka is dead?" she asked.

The woman took a halted breath. "I...yes."

Ardith stayed upright, but her eyes dropped to the surface of the table. "When?" she gruffly demanded.

"Er..."

Ardith's eyes snapped back up, arresting the woman in her prevarication. "When!"

"Last April!" the woman blurted, terrified.

Again they sat in silence. Then Ardith's hands flew together and clenched, until the knuckles showed bone through her skin.

"April!" she croaked. "April!" A tingling sensation rushed up her arms, over her face, over her scalp; it seemed as if she could feel her hair turning its final white all at once. "A year ago!"

"April. Yes." The woman's face was flushing as pink as a young crabapple. "Ardith...Miss Dutton...please, forgive me. I've been...it's been me, writing to you. I'm Fredericka's granddaughter. She showed me your letters when I was a little girl, and we always read them together; when she died, I couldn't bear to have them stop coming. They've meant the world to me in the last few years...Ardith." She looked for permission to go on using the familiar name.

Ardith said nothing; she stared at the wall over Nigella Allan's head. The news hung in the air and dropped softly, like snowflakes falling with a mild, dissolving burn upon her skin.

"I suppose," she said, one word plodding relentlessly toward the next, "it helped you feel close to her, after her death."

"Oh! It was...more than that," said Nigella, miserably pink. "That was part of it, of course, but really it was you, Ardith. The things you wrote about were so...they helped me to understand life. Especially in the last year. I couldn't bear to lose all of that." She looked about her in despair. "I only came because...in your last few letters, you seemed to wish you had done things...gone places... And I thought, perhaps, if you couldn't go to them, being old..." She stopped, her face shrimp-colored and contorted with shame.

Ardith looked up, startled, with a thunderous frown.

"Did I say that?" she demanded.

"No," Nigella squeaked meekly. "But...I thought, perhaps it might cheer you up." Her gaze dropped to the ground; she seemed to be looking for a crack to crawl into.

The rain went about its business outside with a noise that did much to forgive the painful awkwardness created by their congress. There was a sudden, sharp noise that made them both jump; it was caused by an involuntary motion Ardith made in her chair. She had felt a creeping sensation deep within her bones, something alien and much too proprietary.

Ardith looked at Nigella determinedly.

"Where do you come from, exactly?" she asked. "Henley-on-Thames?"

"No," said Nigella, yet more shame-faced, "I posted that as the return address, but... I live in London."

London... Ardith had only a mental picture of a radio, and fish-shaped bombs falling--they fell incessantly toward indistinct spires silhouetted on a red sky.

She thought of all the foolish things she had said, in her letters, and wondered whether Fredericka had read them also to her husband, to her other friends, as well as this grandchild. She thought of foreign eyes looking at the things she felt, talking about the things she hardly understood.

A milder climate, she considered, must make people different from us. We are raised to expect the cold, and endure it. But, she thought, it seems we live a longer time.