Going Ashore (25 page)

“Sweet!” said Mr. Kennedy, outraged.

Sweet? thought his wife. Why, they were treating Mr. Kennedy as if he were funny and old-fashioned, somebody to be humored. If they could have heard some of the things he had said to the bishop that time, they might have more respect! She had given the young man a terrible look, and he had begun to speak valiantly of books, but it was too late. Mr. Kennedy was offended, and he interrupted sulkily to snap, “Well, no one had to revive Kipling for
me,”
and the visit broke up right after that.

Really, no one would do for Mr. Kennedy, thought his wife – but she thought it without a jot of censure, for she greatly admired her husband and was ready to show it in a number of practical ways; not only did she ungrudgingly provide the income that permitted his medical excursions
but she sat by his bedside nearly every day of the year discussing his digestion and reading aloud the novels of Upton Sinclair, of which he was exceedingly fond.

Sighing, now, she brought her gaze back from the window and the unsuitable hotel guests. “You might as well go to lessons,” she said to the girls. “But remember, no movies.”

They got down from their chairs. Each of them implanted on Mrs. Kennedy’s cheek a kiss that smelled damply of milk. How grubby they looked, their mother thought, even though the day had scarcely begun. Who would believe, seeing them now, that they had been dressed not an hour before in frocks still warm from the iron? Ernestine had caught her dress on something, so that the hem drooped to one side. Their hair … But Mrs. Kennedy, exhausted, decided not to think about their hair.

“You look so odd sometimes,” she said. “You look all untidy and forlorn, like children without mothers to care for them, like little refugees. Although,” she added, conscientious, “there is nothing the matter with being a refugee.”

“Like Frau Stengel,” said Jane, straining to be away.

“Frau Stengel? What on earth has she been telling you about refugees?”

“That you should never trust a Czech,” said Jane.

Mrs. Kennedy could not follow this and did not try. “Haven’t you a message for your father?” she said, holding Jane by the wrist. “It would be nice if you showed just a little concern.” They stood, fidgeting. “Shall I tell him you hope he feels much better?”

“Yes.”

“And that you hope to see him soon?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“He will be pleased,” their mother said, but, released, they were already across the room.

Frau Stengel was, on the whole, an unsatisfactory substitute for a mother’s watchful care, and it was only because Mrs. Kennedy had been unable to make a better arrangement that Frau Stengel had become the governess of Jane and Ernestine. A mournful
Volksdeutsch
refugee from Prague, she looked well over her age, which was thirty-nine. She lived – with her husband – in the same hotel as the Kennedy family, and she had
once been a schoolteacher, both distinct advantages. The girls were too young for boarding school, and the German day school nearby, while picturesque, had a crucifix over the door, which meant, Mrs. Kennedy was certain, that someone would try to convert her daughters. Of course, a good firm note to the principal might help: “The children’s father would be most distressed …” But no, the risk was too great, and in any case it had been agreed that the children’s religious instruction would be put off until Mr. Kennedy had made up his mind about God. Frau Stengel, if fat, and rather commonplace, and given to tearful lapses that showed a want of inner discipline, was not likely to interfere with Mr. Kennedy’s convictions. She admired the children just as they were, applauding with each murmur of praise their mother’s painstaking efforts to see that they kept their bloom. “So sweet,” she would say. “So
herzig
, the little sweaters.”

The children were much too pretty to be taxed with lessons; Frau Stengel gave them film magazines to look at and supervised them contentedly, rocking and filing her nails. She lived a cozy, molelike existence in her room on the attic floor of the hotel, surrounded by crocheted mats, stony satin cushions, and pictures of kittens cut from magazines. Her radio, which was never still, filled the room with soupy operetta melodies, many of which reminded Frau Stengel of happier days and made her cry.

Everyone had been so cruel, so unkind, she would tell the children, drying her eyes. Frau Stengel and her husband had lived in Prague, where Herr Stengel, who now worked at some inferior job in a nearby town, had been splendidly situated until the end of the war, and then the Czechs sent them packing. They had left everything behind – all the tablecloths, the little coffee spoons!

Although the children were bored by the rain and not being allowed to go out, they enjoyed their days with Frau Stengel. Every day was just like the one before, which was a comfort; the mist and the rain hung on the windows, Frau Stengel’s favorite music curled around the room like a warm bit of the fog itself, they ate chocolate biscuits purchased from the glass case in the dining room, and Frau Stengel, always good-tempered, always the same, told them stories. She told about Hitler, and the war, and about little children she knew who had been killed in bombardments or separated forever from their parents. The two little girls would listen,
stolidly going on with their coloring or cutting out. They liked her stories, mostly because, like the room and the atmosphere, the stories never varied; they could have repeated many of them by heart, and they knew exactly at what point in each Frau Stengel would begin to cry. The girls had never seen anyone weep so much and so often.

“We like you, Frau Stengel,” Jane had said once, meaning that they would rather be shut up here in Frau Stengel’s pleasantly overheated room than be downstairs alone in their bedroom or in the bleak, empty dining room. Frau Stengel had looked at them and after a warm, delicious moment had wiped her eyes. After that, Jane had tried it again, and with the same incredulity with which she and Ernestine had learned that if you pushed the button the elevator would arrive, every time, they had discovered that either one of them could bring on the great, sad tears that were, almost, the most entertaining part of their lessons. “We like you,” and off Frau Stengel would go while the two children watched, enchanted. Later, they learned that any mention of their father had nearly the same effect. They had no clear idea of the nature of their father’s illness, or why it was sad; once they had been told that, because of his liver, he sometimes turned yellow, but this interesting evolution they had never witnessed.

“He’s yellow today,” Jane would sometimes venture.

“Ah, so!” Frau Stengel would reply, her eyes getting bigger and bigger. Sometimes, after thinking it over, she wept, but not always.

For the past few days, however, Frau Stengel had been less diverting; she had melted less easily. Also, she had spoken of the joyous future when she and Herr Stengel would emigrate to Australia and open a little shop.

“To sell what?” said Ernestine, threatened with change.

“Tea and coffee,” said their governess dreamily.

In Australia, Frau Stengel had been told, half the people were black and savage, but one was far from trouble. She could not see the vision of the shop clearly, and spoke of coffee jars painted with hearts, a tufted chair where tired clients could rest. It was important, these days, that she fix her mind on rosy vistas, for her doctor had declared, and her horoscope had confirmed, that she was pregnant; she hinted of something to the Kennedy children, some revolution in her life, some reason their mother would
have to find another governess before spring. But winter, the children knew, went on forever.

This morning, when Jane and Ernestine knocked on her door, Frau Stengel was sitting by her window in a glow of sunshine reflected from the snow on the mountains. “Come in,” she said, and smiled at them. What pathetic little orphans they were, so sad, and so fond of her. If it had not been for their affection for her, frequently and flatteringly expressed, Frau Stengel would have given them up days ago; they reminded her, vaguely, of unhappy things. She had told them so many stories about the past that just looking at the two little girls made her think of it all over again – dolorous thoughts, certain to affect the character and appearance of the unborn.

“Mother doesn’t want us to go to the movies with you,” began Jane. She looked, expectant, but Frau Stengel said placidly, “Well, never do anything your mother wouldn’t like.” This was to be another of her new cheerful days; disappointed, the children settled down to lessons. Ernestine colored the pictures in a movie magazine with crayons, and Jane made a bracelet of some coral rosebuds from an old necklace her mother had given her.

“It’s nice here today,” said Jane. “We like it here.”

“The sun is shining. You should go out,” said Frau Stengel, yawning, quite as if she had not heard. “Don’t forget the little rubbers.”

“Will you come?”

“Oh, no,” Frau Stengel said in a tantalizing, mysterious way. “It is important for me to rest.”

“For us, too,” said Ernestine jealously. “We have to rest. Everybody rests. Our father rests all the time. He has to, too.”

“Because he’s so sick,” said Jane.

“He’s dead,” said Ernestine. She gave Gregory Peck round blue eyes.

Frau Stengel looked up sharply. “Who is dead?” she said. “You must not use such a word in here, now.”

The children stared, surprised. Death had been spoken of so frequently in this room, on the same level as chocolate biscuits and coral rosebud bracelets.

“He’s
dead,” said Ernestine. “He died this morning.”

Frau Stengel stopped rocking. “Your father is
dead?”

“Yes, he is,” said Ernestine. “He died, and we’re supposed to stay here with you, and that’s all.”

Their governess looked, bewildered, from one to the other; they sat, the image of innocence, side by side at her table, their hair caught up with blue ribbons.

“Why don’t we go out now?” said Jane. The room was warm. She put her head down on the table and chewed the ends of her hair. “Come on,” she said, bored, and gave Ernestine a prod with her foot.

“In a minute,” her sister said indistinctly. She bent over the portrait she was coloring, pressing on the end of the crayon until it was flat. Waxy colored streaks were glued to the palm of her hand. She wiped her hand on the skirt of her starched blue frock. “All right, now,” she said, and got down from her chair.

“Where are you going, please?” said Frau Stengel, breathing at them through tense, widened nostrils. “Didn’t your mother send a message for me? When did it happen?”

“What?” said Jane. “Can’t we go out? You said we could, before.”

“It isn’t true, about your father,” said Frau Stengel. “You made it up. Your father is not dead.”

“Oh, no,” said Jane, anxious to make the morning ordinary again. “She only said it, like, for a joke.”

“A joke? You come here and frighten me in my condition for a
joke?”
Frau Stengel could not deliver sitting down the rest of the terrible things she had to say. She pulled herself out of the rocking chair and looked down at the perplexed little girls. She seemed to them enormously fat and tall, like the statues in Italian parks. Fascinated, they stared back. “What you have done is very wicked,” said Frau Stengel. “Very wicked. I won’t tell your mother, but I shall never forget it. In any case, God heard you, and God will punish you. If your father should die now, it would certainly be your fault.”

This was not the first time the children had heard of God. Mrs. Kennedy might plan to defer her explanations to a later date, in line with Mr. Kennedy’s eventual decision, but the simple women she employed to keep an eye on Jane and Ernestine (Frau Stengel was the sixth to be elevated to the title of governess) had no such moral obstacles. For them,
God was the catch-all answer to most of life’s perplexities. “Who makes this rain?” Jane had once asked Frau Stengel.

“God,” she had replied cozily.

“So that we can’t play outside?”

“He makes the sun,” Frau Stengel said, anxious to give credit.

“Well, then –” Jane began, but Frau Stengel, sensing a paradox, went on to something else.

Until now, however, God had not been suggested as a threat. The children stayed where they were, at the table, and looked wide-eyed at their governess.

Frau Stengel began to feel foolish; it is one thing to begin a scene, she was discovering, and another to sustain it. “Go to your room downstairs,” she said. “You had better stay there, and not come out. I can’t teach girls who tell lies.”

This, clearly, was a dismissal, not only from her room but from her company, possibly forever. Never before had they been abandoned in the middle of the day. Was this the end of winter?

“Is he dead?” cried Ernestine, in terror at what had become of the day.

“Goodbye, Frau Stengel,” said Jane, with a ritual curtsy; this was how she had been trained to take her leave, and although she often forgot it, the formula now returned to sustain her. She gathered up the coral beads – after all, they belonged to her – but Ernestine rushed out, pushing in her hurry to be away. “Busy little feet,” said an old gentleman a moment later, laboriously pulling himself up with the aid of the banisters, as first Ernestine and then Jane clattered by.

They burst into their room, and Jane closed the door. “Anyway, it was you that said it,” she said at once.

Ernestine did not reply. She climbed up on her high bed and sat with her fat legs dangling over the edge. She stared at the opposite wall, her mouth slightly open. She could think of no way to avert the punishment about to descend on their heads, nor could she grasp the idea of a punishment more serious than being deprived of dessert.

“It was you, anyway,” Jane repeated. “If anything happens, I’ll tell. I think I could tell anyway.”

“I’ll tell, too,” said Ernestine.

“You haven’t anything to tell.”

“I’ll tell everything,” said Ernestine in a sudden fury. “I’ll tell you chewed gum. I’ll tell you wet the bed and we had to put the sheets out the window. I’ll tell everything.”