My Sister's Hand in Mine (48 page)

“I'm no sneak or hypocrite and neither are you, Hoffer, you're no hypocrite. You're just sore at the world, but you don't pretend you love the world, do you?”

Sadie was lightheaded with embarrassment. She had blanched at Evy's allusion to her going, which she mistook naturally for a reference to her intention of leaving for Camp Cataract.

“Only for a few days…” she mumbled in confusion, “and then I'll be right back here at the table.”

Evelyn looked at her in consternation. “What do you mean by announcing calmly how many days it's going to be?” she shouted at her sister. “That's really sacrilegious! Did you ever hear of such a crusty sacrilegious remark in your life before?” She turned to Bert Hoffer, with a horror-stricken expression on her face. “How can I go to the office and look neat and clean and happy when this is what I hear at home … when my sister sits here and says she'll only go crazy for a few days? How
can
I go to the office after that? How can I look right?”

“I'm not going to be crazy,” Sadie assured her again in a sorrowful tone, because although she felt relieved that Evelyn had not, after all, guessed the truth, hers was not a nature to indulge itself in trivial glee at having put someone off her track.

“You just said you were going to be crazy,” Evelyn exclaimed heatedly. “Didn't she, Bert?”

“Yes,” he answered, “she did say something like that.…”

The tendons of Evelyn's neck were stretched tight as she darted her eyes from her sister's face to her husband's. “Now, tell me this much,” she demanded, “do I go to the office every day looking neat and clean or do I go looking like a bum?”

“You look O.K.,” Bert said.

“Then why do my sisters spit in my eye? Why do they hide everything from me if I'm so decent? I'm wide open, I'm frank, there's nothing on my mind besides what I say. Why can't they be like other sisters all over the world? One of them is so crazy that she must live in a cabin for her nerves at
my
expense, and the other one is planning to go crazy deliberately and behind my back.” She commenced to struggle out of her chair, which as usual proved to be a slow and laborious task. Exasperated, she shoved the table vehemently away from her toward the opposite wall. “Why don't we leave the space all on one side when there's no company?” she screamed at both of them, for she was now annoyed with Bert Hoffer as well as with Sadie. Fortunately they were seated at either end of the table and so did not suffer as a result of her violent gesture, but the table jammed into four chairs ranged on the opposite side, pinning three of them backward against the wall and knocking the fourth onto the floor.

“Leave it there,” Evelyn shouted dramatically above the racket. “Leave it there till doomsday,” and she rushed headlong out of the room.

They listened to her gallop down the hall.

“What about the dessert?” Bert Hoffer asked Sadie with a frown. He was displeased because Evelyn had spoken to him sharply.

“Leftover bread pudding without raisins.” She had just gotten up to fetch the pudding when Evelyn summoned them from the parlor.

“Come in here, both of you,” she hollered. “I have something to say.”

They found Evelyn seated on the couch, her head tilted way back on a cushion, staring fixedly at the ceiling. They settled into easy chairs opposite her.

“I could be normal and light in any other family,” she said, “I'm normally a gay light girl … not a morose one. I like all the material things.”

“What do you want to do tonight?” Bert Hoffer interrupted, speaking with authority. “Do you want to be excited or do you want to go to the movies?” He was always bored by these self-appraising monologues which succeeded her explosions.

Evy looked as though she had not heard him, but after a moment or two of sitting with her eyes shut she got up and walked briskly out of the room; her husband followed her.

Neither of them had said good-bye to Sadie, who went over to the window as soon as they'd gone and looked down on the huge unsightly square below her. It was crisscrossed by trolley tracks going in every possible direction. Five pharmacies and seven cigar stores were visible from where she stood. She knew that modern industrial cities were considered ugly, but she liked them. “I'm glad Evy and Bert have gone to a picture show,” Sadie remarked to herself after a while. “Evy gets high-strung from being at the office all day.”

A little later she turned her back on the window and went to the dining room.

“Looks like the train went through here,” she murmured, gazing quietly at the chairs tilted back against the wall and the table's unsightly angle; but the tumult in her breast had not subsided, even though she knew she was leaving for Camp Cataract. Beyond the first rush of joy she had experienced when her plan had revealed itself to her earlier, in the parlor, the feeling of suspense remained identical, a curious admixture of anxiety and anticipation, difficult to bear. Concerning the mechanics of the trip itself she was neither nervous nor foolishly excited. “I'll call up tomorrow,” she said to herself, “and find out when the buses go, or maybe I'll take the train. In the morning I'll buy three different meats for the loaf, if I don't forget. It won't go rotten for a few days, and even if it does they can eat at Martie's or else Evy will make bologna and eggs … she knows how, and so does Bert.” She was not really concentrating on these latter projects any more than she usually did on domestic details.

The lamp over the table was suspended on a heavy iron chain. She reached for the beaded string to extinguish the light. When she released it the massive lamp swung from side to side in the darkness.

“Would you like it so much by the waterfall if you didn't know the apartment was here?” she whispered into the dark, and she was thrilled again by the beauty of her own words. “How much more I'll be able to say when I'm sitting right next to her,” she murmured almost with reverence. “… And then we'll come back here,” she added simply, not in the least startled to discover that the idea of returning with Harriet had been at the root of her plan all along.

Without bothering to clear the plates from the table, she went into the kitchen and extinguished the light there. She was suddenly overcome with fatigue.

*   *   *

When Sadie arrived at Camp Cataract it was raining hard.

“This shingled building is the main lodge,” the hack driver said to her. “The ceiling in there is three times higher than average, if you like that style. Go up on the porch and just walk in. You'll get a kick out of it.”

Sadie reached into her pocketbook for some money.

“My wife and I come here to drink beer when we're in the mood,” he continued, getting out his change. “If there's nobody much inside, don't get panicky; the whole camp goes to the movies on Thursday nights. The wagon takes them and brings them back. They'll be along soon.”

After thanking him she got out of the cab and climbed the wooden steps on to the porch. Without hesitating she opened the door. The driver had not exaggerated; the room was indeed so enormous that it suggested a gymnasium. Wicker chairs and settees were scattered from one end of the floor to the other and numberless sawed-off tree stumps had been set down to serve as little tables.

Sadie glanced around her and then headed automatically for a giant fireplace, difficult to reach because of the accumulation of chairs and settees that surrounded it. She threaded her way between these and stepped across the hearth into the cold vault of the chimney, high enough to shelter a person of average stature. The andirons, which reached to her waist, had been wrought in the shape of witches. She fingered their pointed iron hats. “Novelties,” she murmured to herself without enthusiasm. “They must have been especially made.” Then, peering out of the fireplace, she noticed for the first time that she was not alone. Some fifty feet away a fat woman sat reading by the light of an electric bulb.

“She doesn't even know I'm in the fireplace,” she said to herself. “Because the rain's so loud, she probably didn't hear me come in.” She waited patiently for a while and then, suspecting that the woman might remain oblivious to her presence indefinitely, she called over to her. “Do you have anything to do with managing Camp Cataract?” she asked, speaking loudly so that she could be heard above the rain.

The woman ceased reading and switched her big light off at once, since the strong glare prevented her seeing beyond the radius of the bulb.

“No, I don't,” she answered in a booming voice. “Why?”

Sadie, finding no answer to this question, remained silent.

“Do you think I look like a manager?” the woman pursued, and since Sadie had obviously no intention of answering, she continued the conversation by herself.

“I suppose you might think I was manager here, because I'm stout, and stout people have that look; also I'm about the right age for it. But I'm not the manager … I don't manage anything, anywhere. I have a domineering cranium all right, but I'm more the French type. I'd rather enjoy myself than give orders.”

“French…” Sadie repeated hesitantly.

“Not French,” the woman corrected her. “French
type,
with a little of the actual blood.” Her voice was cold and severe.

For a while neither of them spoke, and Sadie hoped the conversation had drawn to a definite close.

“Individuality is my god,” the woman announced abruptly, much to Sadie's disappointment. “That's partly why I didn't go to the picture show tonight. I don't like doing what the groups do, and I've seen the film.” She dragged her chair forward so as to be heard more clearly. “The steadies here—we call the ones who stay more than a fortnight steadies—are all crazy to get into birds-of-a-feather-flock-together arrangements. If you look around, you can see for yourself how clubby the furniture is fixed. Well, they can go in for it, if they want, but I won't. I keep my chair out in the open here, and when I feel like it I take myself over to one circle or another … there's about ten or twelve circles. Don't you object to the confinement of a group?”

“We haven't got a group back home,” Sadie answered briefly.

“I don't go in for group worship either,” the woman continued, “any more than I do for the heavy social mixing. I don't even go in for individual worship, for that matter. Most likely I was born to such a vigorous happy nature I don't feel the need to worry about what's up there over my head. I get the full flavor out of all my days whether anyone's up there or not. The groups don't allow for that kind of zip … never. You know what rotten apples in a barrel can do to the healthy ones.”

Sadie, who had never before met an agnostic, was profoundly shocked by the woman's blasphemous attitude. “I'll bet she slept with a lot of men she wasn't married to when she was younger,” she said to herself.

“Most of the humanity you bump into is unhealthy and nervous,” the woman concluded, looking at Sadie with a cold eye, and then without further remarks she struggled out of her chair and began to walk toward a side door at the other end of the room. Just as she approached it the door was flung open from the other side by Beryl, whom the woman immediately warned of the new arrival. Beryl, without ceasing to spoon some beans out of a can she was holding, walked over to Sadie and offered to be of some assistance. “I can show you rooms,” she suggested. “Unless you'd rather wait till the manager comes back from the movies.”

When she realized, however, after a short conversation with Sadie, that she was speaking to Harriet's sister, a malevolent scowl darkened her countenance, and she spooned her beans more slowly.

“Harriet didn't tell me you were coming,” she said at length; her tone was unmistakably disagreeable.

Sadie's heart commenced to beat very fast as she in turn realized that this woman in plus-fours was the waitress, Beryl, of whom Harriet had often spoken in her letters and at home.

“It's a surprise,” Sadie told her. “I meant to come here before. I've been promising Harriet I'd visit her in camp for a long time now, but I couldn't come until I got a neighbor in to cook for Evy and Bert. They're a husband and wife … my sister Evy and her husband Bert.”

“I know about those two,” Beryl remarked sullenly. “Harriet's told me all about them.”

“Will you please take me to my sister's cabin?” Sadie asked, picking up her valise and stepping forward.

Beryl continued to stir her beans around without moving.

“I thought you folks had some kind of arrangement,” she said. She had recorded in her mind entire passages of Harriet's monologues out of love for her friend, although she felt no curiosity concerning the material she had gathered. “I thought you folks were supposed to stay in the apartment while she was away at camp.”

“Bert Hoffer and Evy have never visited Camp Cataract,” Sadie answered in a tone that was innocent of any subterfuge.

“You bet they haven't,” Beryl pronounced triumphantly. “That's part of the arrangement. They're supposed to stay in the apartment while she's here at camp; the doctor said so.”

“They're not coming up,” Sadie repeated, and she still wore, not the foxy look that Beryl expected would betray itself at any moment, but the look of a person who is attentive though being addressed in a foreign language. The waitress sensed that all her attempts at starting a scrap had been successfully blocked for the present and she whistled carefully, dragging some chairs into line with a rough hand. “I'll tell you what,” she said, ceasing her activities as suddenly as she had begun them. “Instead of taking you down there to the Pine Cones—that's the name of the grove where her cabin is—I'll go myself and tell her to come up here to the lodge. She's got some nifty rain equipment so she won't get wet coming through the groves like you would … lots of pine trees out there.”