I didn’t dare to call mother or to tell her of my dream, though this would have relieved me greatly. If she found out about my harassed nights, it would be the end of any movies, comic books or radio programs that departed from the sugary fables of the Singing Lady, and such a sacrifice I was not prepared to make.
The trouble was, in this dream, my sure sense of eventual justice deserted me: the dream incident had lost its original happy ending—the troops of the good side breaking into the camp, victorious, to the cheers of the movie audience and the near-dead prisoners. If a familiar color—the blue of Winthrop Bay, and the sky over it, or the green of grass, trees—suddenly vanished from the world and left a pitch-black gap in its place. I could not have been more bewildered or appalled. The old, soothing remedy ‘It’s not true, it’s only a dream’ didn’t seem to work any more, either. The hostile, brooding aura of the nightmare seeped out, somehow, to become a part of my waking landscape.
*
The peaceful rhythm of classes and play periods at the Hunnewell School was broken often now by the raucous, arbitrary ringing of the air raid alarm. With none of the jostling and whispering we indulged in during fire drills, we would take up our coats and pencils and file down the creaking stairs into the school basement where we crouched in special corners according to our color tags and put our pencils between our teeth or, the teachers explained, the bombs would make us bite our tongues. Some of the children in the lower grades always started to cry; it was dark in the cellar, the cold stone bleakly lit by one bare bulb in the ceiling. At home, my parents sat a great deal by the radio, listening, with serious faces, to the staccato briefs of the newscasters. And there were the sudden, unexplained silences when I came within hearing, the habit of gloom, relieved only by a false cheer worse than the gloom itself.
Prepared as I was for the phenomenon of evil in the world, I was not ready to have it expand in this treacherous fashion, like some uncontrollable fungus, beyond the confines of half-hour radio programs, comic book covers, and Saturday afternoon double features, to drag out past all confident predictions of a smashing-quick finish. I had an ingrained sense of the powers of good protecting me: my parents, the police, the F.B.I., the President, the American Armed Forces, even those symbolic champions of Good from a cloudier hinterland—the Shadow, Superman, and the rest. Not to mention God himself. Surely, with these ranked round me, circle after concentric circle, reaching to infinity, I had nothing to fear. Yet I was afraid. Clearly, in spite of my assiduous study of the world, there was something I had not been told; some piece to the puzzle I did not have in hand.
*
My speculations about this mystery came into focus that Friday when Maureen Kelly hurried to catch up with me on the way to school. ‘My mother says it’s not your fault for biting Leroy,’ she called out in clear, saccharine tones. ‘My mother says it’s because your father’s German.’
I was astounded. ‘My father is not German!’ I retorted when I had my breath back. ‘He’s … he’s from the Polish Corridor.’
The geographical distinction was lost on Maureen. ‘He’s German. My mother says so,’ she insisted stubbornly. ‘Besides, he doesn’t go to church.’
‘How could it be my father’s fault?’ I tried another tack. ‘My father didn’t bite Leroy. I did.’ This wanton involving of my father in a quarrel Maureen had started in the first place made me furious, and a little scared. At recess I saw Maureen in a huddle with some of the other girls.
‘Your father’s German,’ Betty Sullivan whispered to me in art period. I was designing a civil defense badge, a white lightning bolt bisecting a red-and-blue striped field on the diagonal, and I didn’t look up. ‘How do you know he’s not a spy?’
I went home straight after school, determined to have it out with mother. My father taught German at the city college, right enough, but that didn’t make him any less American than Mr Kelly or Mr Sullivan or Mr Greenbloom. He didn’t go to church, I had to admit. Still, I could not see how this or his teaching German had the slightest relation to my row with the Kellys. I only saw, confusedly, that by biting Leroy, I had, in some obscure, roundabout way, betrayed my father to the neighbors.
I walked slowly in through the front door and out to the kitchen. There was nothing in the cookie jar except two stale gingersnaps left over from the last week’s batch. ‘Ma!’ I called, heading for the stairs. ‘Ma!’
‘Here, Sadie.’ Her voice sounded muffled and echoey, as if she were calling to me from the far end of a long tunnel. Although the winter afternoon light died early on these shortest days, no lamps were lit in the house. I took the steps two at a time.
Mother was sitting in the big bedroom by the greying window. She looked small, almost shrunken, in the great wing chair. Even in that wan light I could tell her eyes were raw-rimmed, moisty at the corners.
Mother didn’t act the least bit surprised when I told her what Maureen had said. Nor did she try to sweeten things with her usual line about how Maureen didn’t know any better, being so little, and how I ought to be the generous one, forgive and forget.
‘Daddy isn’t German, the way Maureen said,’ I asked, to make sure, ‘is he?’
‘In one way’, my mother took me by surprise, ‘he is. He is a German citizen. But, in another way, you are right—he isn’t German the way Maureen said.’
‘He wouldn’t hurt anybody!’ I burst out. ‘He’d fight for us, if he had to!’
‘Of course he would. You and I know that.’ Mother did not smile. ‘And the neighbors know it. In wartime, though, people often become frightened and forget what they know. I even think your father may have to go away from us for a while because of this.’
‘To be drafted? like Mrs Abrams’ boy?’
‘No, not like that,’ mother said slowly. ‘There are places out West for German citizens to live in during the war so people will feel safer about them. Your father has been asked to go to one of those.’
‘But that’s not fair!’ How mother could sit there and coolly tell me my father was going to be treated like some German spy made my flesh creep. ‘It’s a mistake!’ I thought of Maureen Kelly, Betty Sullivan and the kids at school: what would they say to this? I thought, in rapid succession, of the police, the F.B.I., the President, the United States Armed Forces. I thought of God. ‘God won’t let it happen!’ I cried, inspired.
Mother gave me a measuring look. Then she took me by the shoulders and began to talk very fast, as if there were something vital she had to get settled with me before my father came home. ‘Your father’s going away is a mistake, it is unfair. You must never forget that, no matter what Maureen or anybody says. At the same time, there is nothing we can do about it. It’s government orders, and there is nothing we can do about them….’
‘But you said God….’ I protested, feebly.
Mother overrode me. ‘God will let it happen.’
I understood, then, that she was trying to give me the piece to the puzzle I had not possessed. The shadow in my mind lengthened with the night blotting out our half of the world, and beyond it; the whole globe seemed sunk in a darkness. For the first time the facts were not slanted mother’s way, and she was letting me see it.
‘I don’t think there is any God, then,’ I said dully, with no feeling of blasphemy. ‘Not if such things can happen.’
‘Some people think that,’ my mother said quietly.
Sweetie Pie and the Gutter Men
Waiting on the front doorstep of the unfamiliar house for someone to answer the bell and listening to the shrill, musical intonation of children’s voices from the open window upstairs, Myra Wardle remembered how little she had cared for Cicely Franklin (then Cicely Naylor) at college. In those days she had tolerated Cicely—few of the other girls did—as a well-meaning, if prudish and provincial classmate. Clearly, that same bare tolerance on Myra’s part must have mellowed, in Cicely’s mind, over the subsequent eight years, to a facsimile of friendship. How else to explain Cicely’s
note, their one communication in all that time, turning up in the Wardles’ mailbox? ‘Come and see our new house, our two little girls and cocker puppy,’ Cicely had written in her large, schoolmarmish hand on the back of an engraved card announcing the opening of Hiram Franklin’s obstetrical practice.
The card itself, until she’d discovered Cicely’s note on the reverse side, gave Myra an unpleasant moment. Why should a new obstetrician in town (Myra hadn’t recognized Cicely’s husband’s name) be sending her an engraved announcement unless to suggest, with the utmost subtlety, that the Wardles were not fulfilling their duty to the community, to the human race? Myra Wardle, after five years of marriage, had no children. It was not, she explained, in answer to the delicate queries of relatives and friends, because she couldn’t have them, or because she didn’t want them. It was simply because her husband Timothy, a sculptor, insisted that children tied one down too much. And the Wardles’ relatives and friends, saddled with children, with the steady jobs, the mortgaged houses, the intalment-plan station wagons and washing machines that form such an inevitable part of parenthood in the suburbs, couldn’t have been in more gratifying agreement.
Myra pressed the doorbell again, faintly annoyed that Cicely should keep her waiting so long on the unshaded step in the humid August afternoon. The children’s voices continued, a clear, sweetly discordant babble from the second-floor window. A woman’s voice sounded among them now, a low counterpoint to the slenderly-spun treble. Myra tried the handle of the screen door to get at the front door knocker, but the screen door seemed hooked from within. Unwilling to raise her voice, to shout upstairs as if Cicely were a back-fence neighbor, she rapped loudly with her knuckles on the doorjamb. A bit of paint flaked off into the dry, sepia-colored shrubbery. The whole place looked in bad shape. White paint peeling away in blistered swatches, shutters down, stacked haphazardly at the end of the yard, the house had a curiously lashless albino expression—rather, Myra thought, resembling Cicely’s own. For a moment she wondered if Cicely meant her to go away under the illusion that the bell didn’t work. Then she heard the voices receding from the window. Footsteps clattered on a staircase in the depths of the house. The front door swung inward.
‘Well, Myra.’ It was Cicely’s voice, the same prosy Midwestern accent, the trace of a lisp lending a touch of primness. Shading her eyes against the glare of the white shingles, Myra peered through the screen, unable to make out much of anything in the dark well of the hall. Cicely opened the screen door then, and came out onto the step, carrying a chubby blond child in her arms. A thin, lively girl of about four followed her, looking at Myra with frank interest. Flat-chested, her complexion pallid even in summer, Cicely still wore her wan blond hair crimped tight, like a doll’s wig.
‘You weren’t sleeping, were you?’ Myra said. ‘Is this a bad time?’
‘Oh no. Alison had just woken Millicent up anyway.’ Behind the tortoise-shell rimmed glasses, Cicely’s pale eyes shifted slightly to a point somewhere beyond Myra’s right shoulder. ‘Let’s go out and sit under the beech tree in the back. It’s always coolest there.’
Striped canvas chairs and child-size wicker chairs stood in a circle in the dense, russet-blue shade of the great tree whose comprehensive boughs arched over half or the small yard. A rubber wading pool, a swing, a metal slide, a wooden seesaw and a yellow sandbox crowded the children’s play area. Cicely set Millicent on her feet beside the wading pool. The child paused, teetering slightly, her plump belly rounding out over her pink seersucker pants like a smooth-skinned fruit. Alison jumped immediately into the pool and sat down hard; the water splashed up in a fine sheet of spray, dousing her close-cropped hair.
Cicely and Myra pulled up two canvas chairs and sat some little distance from the children. ‘Now Alison,’ Cicely said, rehearsing what was evidently an old lesson, ‘you can wet yourself and the toys, and the grass, but you mustn’t wet Millicent. Let Millicent wet herself.’
Alison did not seem to hear. ‘The water’s cold,’ she told Myra, widening her grey-blue eyes in emphasis.
‘Cud,’ Millicent echoed. Squatting beside the pool, she made gentle churning motions in the water with her hand.
‘I often wonder if linguistic ability is hereditary,’ Cicely said, lowering her voice out of range of the children’s hearing. ‘Alison spoke complete sentences at eleven months. She’s amazingly word-conscious. Millicent mispronounces everything.’
‘Why, how do you mean?’ Myra had a private pact with herself to ‘bring people out’. She began by imagining herself a transparent vase, clearer than crystal—almost, in fact, invisible. (She had read somewhere that a certain school of actors pretended they were empty glasses when studying a new role.) In this way—purged of any bias, any individual color tint—Myra became the perfect receptacle for confidences. ‘How do you mean, “word-conscious”?’
‘Oh, Alison makes an effort to learn words. She works on changing her vocabulary. Once, for instance, I overheard her talking to herself in the playroom. “Daddy will fix it,” she said. Then she corrected herself: “No, Daddy will repair it.” But Millicent’s hopeless …’
‘Perhaps Alison subdues her?’ Myra suggested. ‘Often when one child talks a lot, the other turns inward, develops a sort of secret personality all her own. Millicent may, don’t you think, one day simply come out with a complete sentence?’
Cicely shook her head. ‘I’m afraid there’s little chance of that. When we were in Akron, visiting mother, Millicent learned to say “Nana” and “Daddy” quite clearly. Ever since we moved up here, though, she’s confused the two. She comes out with “Nada”, some weird combination like that. And she says “goggy” for “doggy” and so on.’
‘Ah, but that’s quite natural, isn’t it? Quite common?’ Myra’s fingers twiddled at the leaves of a low branch of the beech tree near the arm of her chair. Already she had shredded several of the glossy, reddish-back leaves with her nails. ‘Don’t most children substitute some letters for others that way?’
‘I suppose,’ Cicely said, her attention diverted momentarily by the children chattering and dabbling in the wading pool, ‘it’s common enough.’
‘Why, I remember when I was a child,’ Myra said, ‘I couldn’t pronounce “l” for some reason. I used to say “Night! Night!” when I wanted the hall light left on. This confused the women who used to baby-sit for me no end.’
Cicely smiled, and Myra, heartened, was inspired to ad-lib. ‘I believe I also alienated a certain Aunt Lily from the family. She wouldn’t accept mother’s explanation of my foible with “L’s”. She insisted I’d overheard her called Aunt Ninny by my parents.’
Cicely shook with dry, silent laughter. In her starched middy-blouse, her beige Bermuda shorts and her flat, brown walking shoes with the scalloped flaps over the ties, Cicely was undeniably plain, even dowdy. She possessed none of the fruity buxsomness of the harassed working-class mothers Myra ran into in Woolworth’s or the A & P. Then, a bit guilty about her brief lapse from impersonal glassiness, Myra steered the conversation toward Hiram and his obstetrical practice. With some relief, she became transparent, crystalline, again. But as Cicely talked on about the difficulties of starting an obstetrical practice in a strange town, Myra fell into a reverie of her own. Cicely’s words faded away like the words of a television announcer after the sound track is shut off. Suddenly Myra felt a warm silkiness graze her ankle. She glanced down. The black cocker puppy lay stretched out under her chair, eyes shut, his tongue a scrap of pink felt lolling at the corner of his mouth.
‘… the Chamber of Commerce letters were mostly silly,’ Cicely was saying. ‘All about population, industry, things like that. Some of the towns had too many obstetricians. Some had none …’
‘Why wouldn’t a town without any be a good place to start?’
Obligingly, Cicely launched into a detailed account of the animosity kindled in the hearts of general practitioners when an obstetrician invaded their town and stole away their
clients by his speciality. ‘Then Dr Richter wrote from here. He said there was a good opening, and a man was already thinking about moving in, so Hiram had better hurry if he wanted to come …’
At that moment, Cicely was interrupted. Millicent lay on her stomach in the wading pool, howling and spitting water, her round face twisted into an image of outrage.
‘She must have fallen,’ Myra found herself saying, although she was reasonably sure Alison had pushed her sister into the water.
Cicely jerked up from her chair and went to pick Millicent out of the pool.
‘Can you open this?’ Coolly ignoring Millicent’s cries, Alison handed Myra a black-enameled can with holes punched in the screw-top. ‘It’s stuck.’
‘I can try.’ The can felt oddly heavy. Myra wondered for a moment if she was reading her own suppressed pleasure into Alison’s eyes—pleasure at the sight of plump, white-skinned Millicent whining on the grass, rubbing at her wet sunsuit pants, stained a deeper crimson from the water. ‘What’s in here?’
‘Cake mix.’
Myra tried to loosen the screw-top, but the can, glistening with wet, slithered around in her grasp. The lid would not budge. With a sense of mild chagrin, she handed the can back to Alison. She felt a little as if she had failed to pass a test of some sort. ‘I can’t do a thing with it.’
‘Daddy will open the can when he comes home from the office.’ Cicely paused by Myra’s chair, Millicent bundled under her arm. ‘I’m going in to make us some lemonade and change Millicent. Want to see the house?’