My Sister's Hand in Mine (55 page)

“I hoped we'd get a visitor or two while we were here,” she said to her. “That's why I arranged this little sitting place. All the rest of the rooms are being painted, or else they're still too smelly for visiting. Last time we were here we didn't see anyone for the whole two weeks. But he was a baby then. I thought maybe this time he'd contact when he went out. He goes out a lot of the day.” She glanced at her son. “You've got some dirt on that chair,” she remarked in a tone which did not express the slightest disapproval. She turned back to Mary. “I'd rather have a girl than a boy,” she said. “There's nothing much I can discuss with a boy. A grown woman isn't interested in the same things a boy is interested in.” She scratched a place below her shoulder blades. “My preference is discussing furnishings. Always has been. I like that better than I like discussing styles. I'll discuss styles if the company wants to, but I don't enjoy it nearly so well. The only thing about furnishings that leaves me cold is curtains. I never was interested in curtains, even when I was young. I like lamps about the best. Do you?”

Mary was huddling as far back into her chair as she could, but even so, without drawing her legs up and sitting on her feet, it was impossible to avoid physical contact with the woman, whose knees lightly touched hers every time she shifted a little in her chair. Inwardly, too, Mary shrank from her. She had never before been addressed so intimately by a grown person. She closed her eyes, seeking the dark gulf that always had separated her from the adult world. And she clutched the seat cushion hard, as if she were afraid of being wrenched from the chair.

“We came here six years ago,” the woman continued, “when the Speeds had their house painted, and now they're having it painted again, so we're here again. They can't be in the house until it's good and dry because they've both got nose trouble—both the old man and the old lady—but we're not related. Only by marriage. I'm a kind of relative to them, but not enough to be really classed as a relative. Just enough so that they'd rather have me come and look after the house than a stranger. They gave me a present of money last time, but this time it'll be clothes for the boy. There's nothing to boys' clothes really. They don't mean anything.”

She sighed and looked around her.

“Well,” she said, “we would like them to ask us over here more often than they do. Our town is way smaller than this, way smaller, but you can get all the same stuff there that you can here, if you've got the money to pay. I mean groceries and clothing and appliances. We've got all that. As soon as the walls are dry we go back. Franklin doesn't want to. He don't like his home because he lives in an apartment; it's in the business section. He sits in a lot and don't go out and contact at all.”

The light shone through Mary's tightly closed lids. In the chair next to her there was no sound of a body stirring. She opened her eyes and looked down. His ankles were crossed and his feet were absolutely still.

“Franklin,” the woman said, “get some candy for me and the girl.”

When he had gone she turned to Mary. “He's not a rough boy like the others,” she said. “I don't know what I'd do if he was one of the real ones with all the trimmings. He's got some girl in him, thank the Lord. I couldn't handle one of the real ones.”

He came out of the freshly painted room carrying a box.

“We keep our candy in tea boxes. We have for years,” the woman said. “They're good conservers.” She shrugged her shoulders. “What more can you expect? Such is life.” She turned to her son. “Open it and pass it to the girl first. Then me.”

The orange box was decorated with seated women and temples. Mary recognized it; her mother used the same tea at home. He slipped off the two rubber bands that held the cover on, and offered her the open box. With stiff fingers she took a stick of green candy from the top; she did not raise her eyes.

A few minutes later she was running alone down the stone steps. It was almost night, but the sky was faintly green near the horizon. She crossed the highway and stood on the hill only a few feet away from the pit. Far below her, lights were twinkling in the Polish section. Down there the shacks were stacked one against the other in a narrow strip of land between the lower road and the river.

After gazing down at the sparkling lights for a while, she began to breathe more easily. She had never experienced the need to look at things from a distance before, nor had she felt the relief that it can bring. All at once, the air stirring around her head seemed delightful; she drank in great draughts of it, her eyes fixed on the lights below.

“This isn't the regular air from up here that I'm breathing,” she said to herself. “It's the air from down there. It's a trick I can do.”

She felt her blood tingle as it always did whenever she scored a victory, and she needed to score several of them in the course of each day. This time she was defeating the older woman.

The following afternoon, even though it was raining hard, her mother could not stop her from going out, but she had promised to keep her hood buttoned and not to sit on the ground.

The stone steps were running with water. She sat down and looked into the enveloping mist, a fierce light in her eyes. Her fingers twitched nervously, deep in the recess of her rubber pockets. It was unbelievable that they should not at any moment encounter something wonderful and new, unbelievable, too, that he should be ignorant of her love for him. Surely he knew that all the while his mother was talking, she in secret had been claiming him for her own. He would come out soon to join her on the steps, and they would go away together.

Hours later, stiff with cold, she stood up. Even had he remained all day at the window he could never have sighted her through the heavy mist. She knew this, but she could never climb the steps to fetch him; that was impossible. She ran headlong down the stone steps and across the highway. When she reached the pit she stopped dead and stood with her feet in the soft clay mud, panting for breath.

“Men,” she said after a minute, “men, I told you we were going to specialize.” She stopped abruptly, but it was too late. She had, for the first time in her life, spoken to her men before summoning them to order with a bugle call. She was shocked, and her heart beat hard against her ribs, but she went on. “We're going to be the only outfit in the world that can do real mountain-goat fighting.” She closed her eyes, seeking the dark gulf again; this time she needed to hear the men's hearts beating, more clearly than her own. A car was sounding its horn on the highway. She looked up.

“We can't climb those stone steps up there.” She was shouting and pointing at the house. “No outfit can, no outfit ever will.…” She was desperate. “It's not for outfits. It's a flight of steps that's not for outfits … because it's … because.…” The reason was not going to come to her. She had begun to cheat now, and she knew it would never come.

She turned her cold face away from the pit, and without dismissing her men, crept down the hill.

Other Stories

 

The fictional pieces collected here are fragments of longer, unfinished works, taken from the author's notebooks. They date from the 1940s and 1950s.

Andrew

Andrew's mother looked at her son's face. “He wants to get away from us,” she thought, “and he will.” She felt overcome by a mortal fatigue. “He simply wants to spring out of his box into the world.” With a flippant and worldly gesture she described a flight through the air. Then abruptly she burst into tears and buried her face in her hands.

Andrew watched her thin shoulders shaking inside her woollen dress. When his mother cried he felt as though his face were made of marble. He could not accept the weeping as a part of her personality. It did not appear to be the natural climax of a mood. Instead it seemed to descend upon her from somewhere far away, as if she were giving voice to the crying of a child in some distant place. For it was the crying of a creature many years younger than she, a disgrace for which he felt responsible, since it was usually because of him that she cried.

There was nothing he could say to console her because she was right. He wanted to go away, and there was nothing else he wanted at all. “It's natural when you're young to want to go away,” he would say to himself, but it did not help; he always felt that his own desire to escape was different from that of others. When he was in a good humor he would go about feeling that he and many others too were
all
going away. On such days his face was smooth and he enjoyed his life, although even then he was not communicative. More than anything he wanted all days to be like those rare free ones when he went about whistling and enjoying every simple thing he did. But he had to work hard to get such days, because of his inner conviction that his own going away was like no other going away in the world, a certainty he found it impossible to dislodge. He was right, of course, but from a very early age his life had been devoted to his struggle to rid himself of his feeling of uniqueness. With the years he was becoming more expert at travesty, so that now his mother's crying was more destructive. Watching her cry now, he was more convinced than ever that he was not like other boys who wanted to go away. The truth bit into him harder, for seeing her he could not believe even faintly that he shared his sin with other young men. He and his mother were isolated, sharing the same disgrace, and because of this sharing, separated from one another. His life was truly miserable compared to the lives of other boys, and he knew it.

When his mother's sobs had quieted down somewhat, his father called the waitress and asked for the check. “That's good tomato soup,” he told her. “And ham with Hawaiian pineapple is one of my favorites, as you know.” The waitress did not answer, and the engaging expression on his face slowly faded.

They pushed their chairs back and headed for the cloakroom. When they were outside Andrew's father suggested that they walk to the summit of the sloping lawn where some cannonballs were piled in the shape of a pyramid. “We'll go over to the cannonballs,” he said. “Then we'll come back.”

They struggled up the hill in the teeth of a bitterly cold wind, holding on to their hats. “This is the north, folks!” his father shouted into the gale. “It's hard going at times, but in a hot climate no one develops.”

Andrew put his foot against one of the cannonballs. He could feel the cold iron through the sole of his shoe.

*   *   *

He had applied for a job in a garage, but he was inducted into the Army before he knew whether or not they had accepted his application. He loved being in the Army, and even took pleasure in the nickname which his hutmates had given him the second day after his arrival. He was called Buttonlip; because of this name he talked even less than usual. In general he hated to talk and could not imagine talking as being a natural expression of a man's thoughts. This was not shyness, but secretiveness.

One day in the Fall he set out on a walk through the pine grove surrounding the camp. Soon he sniffed smoke and stopped walking. “Someone's making a fire,” he said to himself. Then he continued on his way. It was dusk in the grove, but beyond, outside, the daylight was still bright. Very shortly he reached a clearing. A young soldier sat there, crouched over a fire which he was feeding with long twigs. Andrew thought he recognized him—he too was undoubtedly a recent arrival—and so his face was not altogether unfamiliar.

The boy greeted Andrew with a smile and pointed to a tree trunk that lay on the ground nearby. “Sit down,” he said. “I'm going to cook dinner. The mess sergeant gives me my stuff uncooked when I want it that way so I can come out here and make a campfire.”

Andrew had an urge to bolt from the clearing, but he seated himself stiffly on the end of the tree trunk. The boy was beautiful, with an Irish-American face and thick curly brown hair. His cheeks were blood red from the heat of the flames. Andrew looked at his face and fell in love with him. Then he could not look away.

A mess kit and a brown paper package lay on the ground. “My food is there in that brown bag,” the boy said. “I'll give you a little piece of meat so you can see how good it tastes when it's cooked here, out in the air. Did you go in for bonfires when you were a kid?”

“No,” said Andrew. “Too much wind,” he added, some vague memory stirring in his mind.

“There's lots of wind,” he agreed, and Andrew was unreasonably delighted that the boy considered his remark a sensible one. “Lots of wind, but that never need stop you.” He looked up at Andrew with a bright smile. “Not if you like a fire and the outdoors. Where I worked they used to call me Outdoor Tommy. Nobody got sore.”

Andrew was so disarmed by his charm that he did not find the boy's last statement odd until he had heard the sentence repeated several times inside his head.

“Sore?”

“Yes, sore.” He untied the string that bound his food package and set the meat on a little wire grate. “They never got sore at me,” he repeated, measuring his words. “They were a right nice bunch. Sometimes guys don't take to it if you like something real well. They get sore. These guys didn't get sore. Never. They saw me going off to the woods with my supper every evening, and sometimes even, one or two of them would come along. And sometimes twenty-five of us would go out with steaks. But mostly I just went by myself and they stayed back playing games in the cottages or going into town. If it had been winter I'd have stayed in the cottages more. I was never there in winter. If I had been, I might have gone out anyway. I like to make a fire in the snow.”

“Where were you?” asked Andrew.

“In a factory by a stream.” The meat was cooked, and he cut off a tiny piece for Andrew. “This is all you're going to get. Otherwise I won't have enough in me.”