Home from the Hill (19 page)

She stopped abruptly. She sensed that he was not listening, and she feared she had been egotistic and boring. She asked his plans. He had been listening to her voice, not her words. It was low in timbre, and her accent, though undoubtedly southern, was more easterly sounding than the nasal local twang with its singsong rhythm and its exaggerated inflection. Her question was a surprise not only because of his inattention. He never made plans. His plans were just to go on.

“Go on what?” she said.

He studied a minute. “Living,” he said.

A soft, rich laugh rose from deep in her throat. “Do go on doing that,” she said.

She gave her attention to the room. She looked at both the boars' heads. “One is your father's and one is yours, isn't it? Which is yours?”

He pointed and said, “The small one.”

“Looks just as big as the other one to me,” she said.

“It isn't, though,” he said.

“It's big enough. Weren't you awfully scared?”

He had been asked that question by a good many girls the day before. He had given them the answer they wanted—no answer at all, but an immodestly modest expression. He did not care for their admiration, but it would have been unchivalrous to let that be seen. He did care for Libby's admiration, but for an admiration different from the conventional ooh's and ah's of other girls. “I was so scared,” he said, “I didn't know what I was doing.” And that, he thought, was quite literally true.

She saw that she had been treated to a special intimacy, and she responded with a look of mixed gratitude and triumph.

She looked back at his trophy, studied it, and then he thought he saw a light shudder pass over her. He did not dare interpret it, yet he did so; clearly her shudder had been for the risk he had run. He felt his heart miss a beat. She turned suddenly to him, as if with a sudden consciousness of having lost herself in contemplation, of having perhaps revealed too much of her feelings—so suddenly that it caused one of the little seed pearl earrings that trembled like a last raindrop from her ears to shake loose and fall to the floor. Theron picked it up. She never could keep earrings on, she said, laughing, lifting back her hair to show that she had ears of the sort that have no pendant lobes. The thought of women's ears with hanging lobes was suddenly distasteful, almost monstrous to him. It was her right ear, yet to bare it she had drawn back her hair with her left hand, reaching clear over her head. As she did this the light stole down the underside of her chin and down the sinuous line of her throat bent on the strain. Perhaps she saw in his eyes that it was a moment worth prolonging. It was, in fact, the moment and the attitude which his memory was even then selecting for its permanent impression of her image. He had a consciousness of drops still sparkling in her brown hair. Her eyes, now some shade of lavender, startling in their paleness beneath their dark and rather heavy brows and lashes, looked at him from out the extreme corners of their high and rounded lids and over two triangles of light resting softly on her cheekbones.

He raised the earring to her ear, as she seemed to invite him to do. He tightened the little screw carefully. “Oh, that will never stay on!” she said, and bringing her right hand up, she screwed it up to so cruel a pinch that he could feel it in his own ear, and a tear of sympathetic pain sprang to his eyes.

“What was that?” she whispered, turning suddenly, her eyes wide with alarm.

“I didn't hear anything.”

“There!” she said. “What was that? Oh dear, I mustn't—”

“I don't hear anything,” he said. But now he did, and he knew what it was. It was the sound of people talking and scraping their feet; it was his mother returning with the Negro woman she had in on Saturday to help Melba with the cleaning, and with the extra one hired to help with the party mess.

Outside the rain pelted down. He led Libby out into the hall. He could think of no safe place; the cleaning women would go everywhere.

Everywhere except the attic.

He held his finger to his lips and motioned her to follow. They went down the hall. At the bottom of the stairs he took her hand and set his foot upon the first step. He felt her holding back and turned. She was plainly in the throes of an indecision, a conflict. He realized what it was just as she resolved it. Whether her hesitation had been merely conventional or a more particular loyalty to her father, he did not know. Before he had time to register any offense, a faint blush of shame for her suspicions colored her face and she squeezed his hand and followed him up the steps.

26

The rain beat upon the roof, the only sound they heard, and they became aware of their aloneness and grew embarrassed and constrained. And so they began by wordless agreement to play a game. They must at all costs avoid the heavy suggestions of being adults alone together; they played the game of children in the attic on a rainy day.

It was a big attic, and Mrs. Hannah was one of those women who never threw anything out. Sentiment prompted the saving of some things, but even when that was not the motive, once a thing got up to the attic years were liable to go by before she saw it again, by which time throwing it out was often more trouble than it was worth. Sometimes things had to be held on to out of shame of having them found even on one's trash heap. Beaded and lamé gowns, georgette dresses or pongee with scalloped hems, cloche hats—women had thrown such things out only later to see the whole neighborhood being entertained by a parade of painted little urchins tripping down the public street in them.

The attic was a tidy place, for Mrs. Hannah was neat in everything. There were clear lanes between stacks of cartons like rows of library shelves, with the contents of each listed in her plain, careful hand on canning labels pasted to their sides. The clothes hung on racks as in a department store, and the shoulders of each garment were covered with a cape of dusty, yellowed newspaper. It was an attic so plentifully stocked and with things so easy to get at that Libby entered genuinely into the spirit of their game. “Oh, look!” she cried, and, “Oh, just look at this!” But though she cried, it was in a whisper, and this made an intimacy that was thrilling.

He found it impossible not to gloat over his triumph. What would her father say if he could see them now! And he was amazed afresh at Mr. Halstead's suspicions of him. How far it was from his desire to take advantage in that way of this situation, so much more advantageous than any Mr. Halstead could have imagined in his fears. He turned to gaze at her. She stood beside the fan window, half lost in memories of her own which the sight of some old something had aroused, a stray skein of hair raveling across her still-damp cheek, and his confidence in his immunity received a shock. What he felt was a sudden strong desire to kiss her.

She returned her attention to the clothes rack. She drew out and held up for his amusement a once-white, now yellow-brown linen suit with short pants. Behind a row of knickers he found one to show her.

“Maybe you remember this one?” he said.

It was linen also. It was his first long pants suit, and he had worn it first when they graduated together from grammar school. She did not remember the suit, but she remembered him on Elocution Day, when he must have worn it, reciting
How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix
.

In that tone-deaf, dog-trot, make-it-scan style approved for prize day, he reeled off:

All I remember is—friends flocking round

As I sat with his head 'twixt my knees on the ground;

And no voice but was praising this Roland of mine
,

As I poured down his throat our last measure of wine
,

Which (the burgesses voted by common consent
)

Was no more than his due who brought good news from Ghent
.

“Poor Roland!” she said.

“A finer piece of horse-flesh,” he said, “or a drunker, was not to be found between Aix and Ghent.”

She realized quite suddenly what a very good time she was having, and she wondered what on earth had made her suppose he was dull? Simultaneously he wondered at himself. He had not suspected he had in him this kind of small-talk and ease with girls, or that it would please him to find that he had.

Her eye was caught by a dress hanging among the clothes, whose glitter, though dulled, made it stand out from all the others. It was a gold-sequined dress, shorter than any that women had worn for years, and it was waistless like the dresses she had worn as a little girl. It rasped as she drew it out. It was tarnished now, coppery green, and one detached sequin dangled forlornly at the end of its pulled thread. She began to laugh at it. Seeing the look on Theron's face, she stopped.

That was a dress that suddenly stood out brightly in his memory from the rest of his mother's dresses. He remembered when all those sequins lay as smoothly shingled as the scales of a fish, when they had glistened as though fresh-wet, and to him his mother had appeared a sleek, new-risen mermaid in that dress.

He remembered the first time he saw it.

“Would you like to tell me?” she asked.

He was eight, and supposed to be fast asleep; but the excitement and bustle downstairs of last-minute preparations for a party and his own sense of exclusion and neglect had kept him awake, kept him standing in his booteed pajamas holding the door open a crack, hoping for a sight of Mama when she came into the corridor. It had been like a vision. She shone, she glittered, she dazzled; the lights seemed to reflect her rather than she them. She had been Joan of Arc, resplendent in a heavenly suit of mail, and he had cried, “Oh! Mama!” She had scolded him in that tone which he knew for love rather than anger, and, blushing pleasurably, had spun herself about for his admiration, swishing metallically and scattering a shower of sparks of light about her, after she had tucked him into bed.

Thereafter this had become his favorite of her dresses, and he pestered her to wear it all the time—though as a matter of fact she never wore it again, or if she did, he never saw her. Most distinctly he remembered an occasion two years later, when he was ten. She was to take him to a birthday party that afternoon. (“You were probably there too,” he said.) When he was ready he had come into her room to be approved. He had asked was
that
the dress she was wearing to the party and she had said yes, why, didn't he like it, and he had said yes, he liked it, but not as well as he liked
his
dress; why didn't she wear it? Oh, nobody wore that sort of thing anymore, she said. It was out of fashion. It never had suited her. She had not bought it. His father had bought it, and he had not liked it on her. Why, it was no longer in her wardrobe, even, but had been put away in the attic. He strove to appear grown-up and reasonable, but the thought of his beautiful dress consigned to the attic had saddened him and he moaned. He felt that together he and his dress had been betrayed. He felt jealous that she had worn “his” dress for grown-up affairs, evenings when he was tucked out of sight, and never for anything of his. She was just then straightening the part of his hair. When she lifted his chin and looked into his eyes, she grew serious. He turned aside, feeling sorry for himself, conscious that he was being childish, and feeling even more sorry for himself because he knew it. She sent him downstairs to wait for her. When she appeared, she was wearing his dress. He had been very proud of her, and had not failed to notice the astonishment and what he took for envy on the faces of the other mothers at the party that afternoon. He had forgotten all about it; but he had recalled it before and had realized how much embarrassment it must have cost his mother to appear among the townswomen at an afternoon children's party in an old gold-sequined evening gown.

A silence which seemed to portend an uncomfortable seriousness, the very thing they had set out to avoid, followed his reminiscence. She returned the dress to the rack, handling it with a new respect, even tenderness.

“Did you make that?” she asked. She pointed to a model airplane hanging by a cord from the rafters. It was faded and tattered, showing its broken ribs through the holes in its body, and the propeller hung brokenly from its nose, for the rubber motor had rotted and parted.

He nodded.

There were other such things of his: a roller-skate scooter, a kite with a ball of twine, a cabinet full of lead soldiers—things which like all girls she had felt somewhat denied and was now at last being allowed to share.

“Now what is this?” she said, holding up two round icecream cartons strung together.

“What? Didn't you girls ever make those? That's a telephone.”

“Oh, yes! I remember!” she cried.

“Ssh!”

She handed one of the phones to him and put the other to her ear. He stepped backwards away from her. “The string has to be stretched tight,” he said.

“Yes, I remember.”

“It's the vibration that does it,” he explained.

She nodded, the phone to her ear, and in his, Theron heard a faint
pop
. She lowered the phone, frowning prettily, turned it up over her palm, and, smiling, held up for him to see, her earring. They now shared a private little joke about her.

Returning the phone to her ear, “Say something,” she said.

He put the cylinder to his mouth, pulling it to him to tighten the string, and he felt her light, answering tug, felt the vibrant pulsation connecting them.

“What?” she said. “What did you say?”

He cleared his throat. “(Excuse me),” he said. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing yet.”

“Well? Say something.”

He said, “Hello.”

It came through a trifle static-y and underwater-ish, but she heard, and it tickled her. “Hello,” she said. There still clung faintly to the carton the sweet, summery smell of vanilla. “Who's calling, please?”

He had a thought—a serious, a disquieting thought. He said, “I suppose you get an awful lot of phone calls, don't you?”