Autumn Street

Yes, I thought. Noah was a dreadful child. But I was filled with dread myself.

  ***

  "What happens," I asked nonchalantly at dinner, as Tatie was removing the soup bowls before she served the roast veal, "if you do something very bad and don't ever get caught?" Nervously I reached down with one hand, pulled a scab painfully from my knee, and dropped it to the rug.

  No one answered me.

  "You'll have to be more explicit, Elizabeth," said Grandfather finally. "We don't know what you mean."

  "Well, sometimes there are bad things that people do, but they're not against the law, so they don't have to go to jail. Sometimes nobody even knows that they have done it." By now I was sorry that I had brought the subject up.

  "In that case," said my mother, "I think the best thing to do is to go and tell the person they've done it to that they're sorry."

  "What if the person isn't around?" I rubbed my thumb in the bloody spot on my knee. "I mean, maybe the person might even be dead, or something."

  That put the whole question into Grandmother's realm. Grandmother was High Church.

  "Then the person should go to Confession. Making one's Holy Confession to the Lord, and asking forgiveness, is the only thing to do under those circumstances." Grandmother nodded to Tatie, who stood in the doorway with the platter of veal, and Tatie began to move around the table, serving each of us from the left.

  "And if you don't do that, then you go to Hell and burn forever," said Jessica with satisfaction, lifting a piece of veal with her fork and grinning across the table at me as the steam rose from it.

  "I don't believe that," I muttered.

  "Shhh," said Mama, warning me. She changed the subject.

  That night I went upstairs before Jess and knelt beside my bed, my grass-stained knees firmly on the thick hooked rug. I folded my hands. By now my father's face was a blur in my memory, but his forgiving hugs were still more comforting to me than those I had never experienced from Father Thorpe's Episcopalian Gawd. So I began, "Our Father," stopped, re-began, "My Father," and made my confession to a deity whom I pictured wearing a major's cap, and who, I remembered vaguely, had once put a dab of shaving cream on the tip of my nose.

  "Please forgive me," I whispered, "because I didn't mean to, but it was partly me that killed Noah Hoffman."

  "What on earth are you doing, Liz?" asked Jess, opening the bedroom door suddenly.

  "Looking for a worm. I had it in my pocket and it fell out onto the rug." Hastily I whispered, under my breath, "Amen," and went to bed puzzled, frightened, and absolved.

  ***

  Mama and my grandparents went to Noah's funeral. While they were gone, Charles and I wandered out to the backyard and held a funeral of our own, behind the lilacs. We buried the knife. Neither of us said very much.

  Then we went back to the kitchen, into the pantry, and washed our hands.

  "You two sick?" asked Tatie suspiciously.

  My stomach lurched. In my mind, in my memory, I could hear Nathaniel's little voice call, "Noah's sick!"

  "No," said Charles, "we jest wanna eat ice. It's hot out."

  Tatie chipped some ice and gave us each a chunk. "Don't you drip on the floor now, you hear?" she said.

  "Come on, Charles, let's take it outside."

  We sat beside each other on the back steps and sucked ice. The day was muggy and oppressive and still.

  "Charles," I said, finally, "you told me that children don't die."

  He stood up and threw his ice angrily into the hollyhocks. "So?" he said defiantly. "It was a lie. Maybe I tole you lots of lies, Elizabeth!"

  He turned his back on me, ran across the yard, and disappeared behind the garage. I sat alone for a while on the steps, holding the ice against my teeth until they ached. Finally I followed him and found him sitting in the dirt, disconsolately arranging pebbles in patterns.

  "I can show you how to make letters if you want," I said.

  "Okay."

  I made an A from the pebbles.

  "That's an A. It's the first letter of the alphabet."

  "Yeah, I know the alphabet all the way through."

  I rearranged the pebbles. "That's a B."

  "Yeah."

  "Charles, did you?"

  "Did I what?"

  "Tell me lots of lies."

  Charles picked up the pebbles of the B and threw them against the side of the garage. Small puffs of dust rose as they fell to the dirt. "No," he said, not looking at me. "Only jest that one, and it wasn't really a lie. It was because I didn't know."

  9

  "OH, JESS," I groaned, "I wish I could be a boy."

  Jessica looked over at me quizzically. We were sitting on the shaded side porch, the green slatted blinds pulled partway down against the sun. We each had an embroidery hoop, linen stretched tightly across the circular center. Grandmother had been teaching us both to embroider. It seemed the most boring thing I had ever done.

  "What's the matter now?" asked Jess, working her needle neatly through her piece of linen.

  "Look," I said glumly, and showed her mine.

  Jessica giggled. "Why do you do it crooked?" she asked.

  "I can't help it! The needle just goes crooked when I try to do it. And look: those are bloodstains. I keep jabbing myself.

  "I wish I could be Charles," I muttered gloomily.

  Jess wrinkled her nose. "Charles! Why on earth would you want to be Charles?"

  I put my embroidery down, put a cushion from the wicker chair over it so that I wouldn't have to look at it, and watched a tiny spider move slowly up and down a nearly invisible thread from the ceiling of the porch.

  "Probably he never ever has to take a bath."

  "Don't be silly. Tatie must make him take baths. Tatie's very clean."

  "Well, dirt doesn't show on him the way it does on me."

  "I wouldn't want to be Charles. Probably he lives in a very little house. Probably he is very poor."

  "That doesn't matter. He has more fun than I do. He says that when he's at home he can do almost anything he wants."

  "Like what?"

  "There's a dump near where he lives. Sometimes he goes to the dump and finds stuff. Once he found an old broken typewriter."

  Jess made a face. "Who'd want an old broken typewriter?"

  "Me."

  "I wouldn't go to a dump anyway. I'd be scared."

  "But not if you were a boy, Jess! Boys aren't scared. Charles isn't scared of anything. Charles wants to go up to the woods at the end of Autumn Street sometime, and I'm even scared to do that."

  "You're not allowed to go that far anyway."

  I sighed. "Even if I could, I'd be scared."

  "Me too. But maybe when Daddy comes home from the war, he'll take us to the woods."

  "We'll be old by then."

  Jess sighed, too, when I said that. The war seemed to be going on forever. Summer seemed to be going on forever. Maybe I would be six years old forever.

  "Liz," asked Jess suddenly, "have you ever heard of someone named Ferdie Gossett?"

  Ferdie Gossett. I had heard of him. Charles had said "Let's scare Ferdie Gossett" when we still had the knife.

  "Yes," I told her. "Charles said he's a crazy man who walks around town and talks to himself. Did you see him, Jess?"

  Jessica nodded. "I went to the grocery store with Anne, and..."

  "Oh, I wish I could cross streets, Jess!"

  "When you start first grade you'll have to cross streets. That won't be very long. Anyway, Anne and I went down to the grocery store to get some eggs for her mother, because her mother wanted to make a cake. It was Anne's brother's birthday..."

  "Jess. Tell about Ferdie Gossett!"

  "I am. Right there at the grocery store—not inside the store, but outside, Liz, looking through the trash out in back—was this man with hair that I bet he has never combed in his whole entire life, and clothes so dirty that you can't imagine..."

  "Was he talking to himself?"

  Jess
thought. "Yes, I think he was. But there was a cat, there, by the trash cans. Maybe he was talking to the cat."

  "What was he saying?"

  "I couldn't understand what he was saying. But he looked right at Anne and me when we came out of the store. He looked right at us. We ran. We almost dropped the eggs."

  "Did he look at you as if he was friendly, or mean?"

  "Neither one. As if he didn't even see us. As if he looked through us. It was really scary."

  "How did you know his name?"

  "Anne told me. She said he comes around the school a lot and stands by the playground, watching the kids. Everybody knows his name."

  She started her embroidery again. I thought for a long time, about Ferdie Gossett.

  "You know what, Jess? Probably he had a little child who died."

  "Died?"

  "Yes, because children die sometimes. Like Noah. And probably Ferdie Gossett's child died, and he feels so sad that he never combs his hair, and he likes to go and look at children playing."

  "Well, maybe." Jess seemed dubious.

  "I wouldn't be scared of him if I saw him. I think I would probably smile at him so he would feel better." I practiced a small, sad, piteous smile.

  "I wouldn't." Jess shuddered.

  "But it would be nice to have Charles with me, when I see Ferdie Gossett," I said. "Because Charles wouldn't be scared of him at all."

  10

  "GOOD MORNING, ELIZABETH," Great-aunt Caroline said. "You've brought a friend, I see." She said it without raising her eyebrows, so I took Charles by the hand and led him into the aunts' cool green kitchen where translucent curtains suffused the sunlight and there were always grapes as pale as ghosts' eyes in a bowl.

  "Charles, this is my Great-aunt Caroline. Great-aunt Caroline, this is Charles.

  Charles stood gravely in the center of the kitchen, his brown legs below his shorts dusty with dirt that turned them beige, the opposite of the way that dirt affected my own scabbed knees.

  "How do you do," he said, and held out his hand to Great-aunt Caroline, who took it firmly for a moment in her own.

  "I'll call my sisters," Great-aunt Caroline said, "and we can all have some iced tea in the parlor. Isn't it hot? August always seems to be the hottest month, I think.

  "Florence? Philippa? We have company!" she called up the stairs into the dim hallway above. I could hear their feet, soft as moths against a windowpane, as they came from their rooms.

  "Today is Charles' birthday," I explained, when we were all seated in the parlor, Charles and I together on the crushed-velvet settee, our legs dangling. "And he came to visit Tatie because she made him a special cake with seven candles.

  "Tatie is Charles' grandmother," I added, on the chance that the great-aunts might not know that.

  Charles was not saying very much. But he was sipping his tall glass of iced tea politely.

  "Well, my goodness, a birthday boy!" said Great-aunt Philippa. I had trouble, sometimes, telling the aunts apart. But Philippa was the one who wore a large diamond ring. She had been engaged, long ago, Tatie had told me, but the man had married someone else. The other aunts had never been engaged at all. I wondered if they were ever jealous of Philippa and her diamond ring that still, after so many years, sparkled the way wet spiderwebs did in sunshine. "And you're Tatie's grandson. Tell me, Charles, do you call her Grandmother, or do you call her Tatie the way we all do?"

  "I calls her Tatie. She like that better."

  "Sweet Potatie," I announced. "That's what Charles and I call her sometimes, just teasing."

  "Her real name Titania," Charles said suddenly, to the great-aunts. I looked at him in astonishment. I had never known that before.

  Great-aunt Florence sat up straight in her rocker with interest. "Titania! Why, that's Shakespeare! Did you know that, Charles?"

  "No ma'am."

  "Well, my goodness, that's from A Midsummer Night's Dream! Titania was Queen of the Fairies."

  Charles sipped his tea. "I likes stories about fairies."

  Great-aunt Florence leaned forward and looked at him more carefully. "Do you go to school, Charles?"

  "No ma'am. I just be seven today. When Fall come, then I go to first grade."

  "So you don't read yet, Charles?"

  "No ma'am."

  "I can read," I said.

  "Philippa. Caroline. I've had a wonderful idea. Why couldn't we divide the parts, the three of us, and we could read A Midsummer Night's Dream to Charles. He says he likes stories about fairies. Now we can't do it today, Charles, because ray sisters and I will need some time for preparation..."

  "I taught myself to read when I was four," I said loudly, but no one seemed to be listening.

  "I can come back," said Charles. He set his empty glass on the silver tray, took a pink linen napkin, and wiped his mouth carefully. I had already wiped my own mouth with the back of my hand.

  "Yes, he can come back. We shall do that some day very soon, Charles." Great-aunt Florence leaned back, her eyes excited and planning.

  "Don't we have some cupcakes left from Wednesday, Caroline?" asked Philippa. "It is Charles' birthday, after all."

  They brought cupcakes, frosted with chocolate, baked in little pleated paper cups, on a flowered plate.

  "Tatie, she make good cupcakes," said Charles, taking one. "But these cupcakes, they look as good as Tatie's."

  Liar, I thought.

  "My birthday is in March," I said. "So I will be the youngest person in the first grade, probably."

  "When I go to school I going to learn to read right away," said Charles to my great-aunts. "Then I going to get me a library card so I can read me lots of books."

  The three great-aunts smiled, sighed, and rocked, looking at each other meaningfully, looking at Charles.

  "There is a whole world of books waiting for you, Charles," said Great-aunt Caroline in her lilac voice. "What an exciting time you will have when you learn to read."

  "Yes ma'am. I going to read me adventure stories."

  They beamed.

  "Florence. Philippa. Why don't we show Charles the inclinator? Why don't we give Charles a ride?"

  I stood up, and cupcake crumbs fell from my lap to the rug. "That's not fair. You don't let Jess and me ride on the inclinator."

  "Don't be rude, Elizabeth. Charles is a guest, and it is his birthday."

  They left me standing there, and took Charles by the hand, to the stairway, where the mechanical seat, operated by a small switch, moved slowly up and down the stairs in its track against the wall. I stood in the doorway to the parlor, against the thick velvet curtains, and watched, pouting, while they helped Charles onto the seat and showed him how to turn the switch. They giggled when his eyes widened as it moved.

  "Hold on tight, now, Charles!" called Great-aunt Florence as he began to move slowly up the stairs.

  He rose to the top of the long staircase, sitting straight, grinning, his sneakered feet neatly together, until I could see only his legs, then only his feet, then nothing at all from my place in the doorway. I could hear the soft whir of the inclinator and, along with it, my great-aunts' delighted soft laughter.

  "I be way at the top of the world!" called Charles from the dim beige place at the top of the stairs.

  "'Way at the top of the world'" repeated one of the great-aunts to the two others. They fluttered together like sparrows, looking upward, their papery faces pink with excitement.

  "Here he comes, now!" called Great-aunt Caroline. And Charles whirred back down, his shoulders straight, his smile proud, his hand lightly on the switch, making the inclinator move.

  When he dismounted, he bowed theatrically to my great-aunts, and they giggled in breathy spasms.

  "We have to go now," I said, glumly.

  We said our good-byes at the back door: or they did. I was silent. Charles shook hands gravely with each of the three sisters, who bobbed and tittered.

  "Thank you very much," said Charles. "Your iced tea be very g
ood, but sometimes it make it better if you put some mint leaf in it."

  "My goodness," exclaimed Great-aunt Caroline. "I did forget the mint! Aren't you a nice boy, Charles, to remind me of that. When you come back, we shall surely have mint in our tea!"

  We walked back to Grandfather's house silently through the dusty alley, kicking stones.

  At the gate to Grandfather's yard, I turned to Charles and looked him straight in the eye.

  "Happy birthday," I said, "nigger."

  Charles grinned.

  11

  THOUGH AUGUST, as Great-aunt Caroline had said, seemed to be the hottest month of the summer, the nights began to be cool. The summer slipcovers were still on the parlor furniture the rainy August night that Grandfather said, after the evening news, "I believe it's a good night for a fire."

  I shivered. I remembered Grandfather's fires from winter, and there was a magic to them. There was the placement of the birch logs. The careful rolling of newspaper. The lighting, with a special long match. I was not allowed to do any of that, only to watch Grandfather. Later, when the fire was dying, I would be permitted to throw in one of the pine cones that were kept in a special basket. But that would be after Grandfather's magic.

  "May I hold Gordon?" I asked Mama. "I want to show him the fire." She placed the baby in my arms as I sat on the rug in front of the fireplace.

  Gordon had become less boring. He cried less now, smelled of spitup less often, and held his head high, looking around with blue, unfocused eyes. Sometimes he smiled at me. The grownups said that he looked like Daddy, and I wondered how they knew that, how they could remember, when I couldn't, my father's face.

  Of Gordon's few baby skills there was only one that I admired. Sometimes, when Mama bathed him, I watched as he lay squirming and naked in her arms, and sometimes he peed into the air, high and arched like a rainbow, the thin stream bright against the sunny window behind him.

  "I wish I could do that," I confided in Mama. She smiled.

  "Well, you're a girl. Girls can't do that." I already knew that they couldn't. I had tried, myself, privately, in the bathtub, and met with humiliating failure.

  "Can Daddy do that?"

  "Goodness. I suppose he could."