For awhile I contented myself with looking out the window and browsing through a magazine I’d brought with me.
Then I looked over at the two women.
The one on the aisle had dry, flat colored blonde hair. It looked like the wig from a doll that had fallen on the floor and gotten dusty. Her skin was tallow white and her face looked as if it had been formed of this tallow with two fingers, a pinch for the chin, one for the lips, one for the nose, one each for the ears, and finally two savage pokes for her beady eyes.
She was talking with her hands.
I had never seen that before. I’d read about it and I’d seen pictures of the various hand positions that deaf-mutes use for communication, but I’d never actually seen them used.
Her short, colorless fingers moved energetically in the air as though her mind were teeming with interesting things she must say and was afraid to lose. The hands contracted and expanded; they assumed a dozen different shapes in the space of a few moments. She drew the taut hand figures one over the other, pulling and squeezing out her deathly still monologue.
I looked at the other woman.
Her face was thin and weary. She was leaning back on the head rest with her eyes fixed dispassionately on her gesticulating companion. I had never seen such eyes before. They never moved; they were without a glimmer of life. She stared dully at the mute woman and kept nodding her head in an endless jerky motion as if it were on rockers.
Once in a while she’d try to turn away and look out the window or close her eyes. But the moment she did, the other woman would reach out her pudgy right hand and pluck at her dress, tugging at it until her companion was forced to look once more at the endless patterns of shapes created by the white hands.
To me it was phenomenal that it could be understood at all. The hands moved so quickly that I could hardly see them. They were a blur of agitating flesh. But the other woman kept nodding and nodding.
In her soundless way, the deaf-mute woman was a chatterbox.
She wouldn’t stop moving her hands. She acted as though she had to keep it up at top speed or perish. It got to a point where I almost could hear what she was talking about, almost could imagine in my mind the splatter of insensate trivia and gossip.
Every once in a while, she seemed to come up with something very amusing to herself, so overpoweringly amusing that she would push her hands away quickly, palms out, as though physically repulsing this outstandingly funny bit of business, lest, in retaining it, she should destroy herself with hilarity.
I must have stared at them a long time, because suddenly they were conscious of it and the two of them were looking at me.
I don’t know which of their looks was the more repelling.
The small deaf-mute woman looked at me with her eyes like hard black beads, her buttonlike nose twitching and her mouth arced into a dimpling bowlike smirk, and in her lap her white fingers plucked like leprous bird beaks at the skirt of her flowered dress. It was the look of a hideous life-sized doll somehow come to life.
The other woman’s look was one of strange hunger.
Her dark-rimmed eyes ran over my face, then abruptly down over my body, and I saw the shallow rise of her breasts swell suddenly under her dark dress before I turned to the window.
I pretended to look out at the fields, but I could still feel the two of them looking at me steadily.
Then, from the corner of an eye I saw the deaf-mute woman throw up her hands again and begin weaving her silent tapestries of communication. After a few minutes I glanced over at them.
The gaunt woman was watching the hands again in stolid silence. Yes, she nodded wearily, yes, yes, yes.
I fell into a half-sleep, seeing the flashing hands, the rocking head. Yes, yes, yes . . . I woke up suddenly, feeling a furtive pluck of fingers on my jacket.
I looked up and saw the deaf-mute woman weaving in the aisle over me. She was tugging at my jacket, trying to pull me up. I stared up at her in sleepy bewilderment.
“What are you doing?” I whispered, forgetting that she couldn’t hear.
She kept tugging resolutely and every time the bus passed a street lamp, I could see her pale white face and her dark eyes glittering like jewels set in the waxy flesh.
I had to get up. She kept pulling, and I was so sleepy I couldn’t get my mind awake enough to combat her insistent efforts.
As I stood up in the aisle, she plumped down where I had been and drew up her feet so that she covered both seats. I stared down at her uncomprehendingly. Then, as she pretended to be suddenly asleep, I turned and looked at her companion.
She was sitting quietly, looking out the window.
With a lethargic movement I dropped down beside her. Seeing that she was not going to say anything I asked, “Why did your friend do that?”
She turned and looked at me. She was even more gaunt than I had thought. I saw her scrawny throat contract.
“It was her own idea,” she said. “I didn’t tell her to.”
“What idea?” I asked.
She looked more closely at me, and again I saw that look of hunger. It was intense. It burned out from her like an arc of drawing flame. I felt my heart jolt.
“Are you sisters?” I asked for no other reason than to break the silence.
She didn’t answer for a moment. Then her face grew tight.
“I’m her companion,” she said. “I’m her paid companion.”
“Oh,” I said, “I guess it—” I forgot what I was going to say.
“You don’t have to talk to me,” she said. “It was her idea. I didn’t tell her to.”
We sat in awkward, painful silence, me looking at her groggily, her watching the dark streets pass by. Then she turned and her eyes glittered once from the light of a street lamp.
“She keeps talking all the time,” she said.
“What?”
“She keeps talking all the time.”
“That’s funny,” I said awkwardly, “to call it talking, I mean. I mean—”
“I don’t see her mouth anymore,” she said. “Her hands are her mouth. I can hear her talking with her hands. Her voice is like a squeaky machine.” She drew in hurried breath. “God, how she talks,” she said.
I sat without speaking, watching her face.
“I never talk,” she said. “I’m with her all the time and we never talk because she can’t. It’s always quiet. I get surprised when I hear people really talking. I get surprised when I hear myself really talking. I forget how it is to talk. I feel like I’m going to forget everything I know about talking.”
Her voice was jerky and rapid, of indefinite pitch. It plunged from a guttural croak to a thin falsetto, more so since she was trying to speak under her breath. There was mounting unrest in it, too, which I began to feel in myself, as though at any moment something in her was going to explode.
“She never lets me have any time to myself,” she said. “She’s always with me. I keep telling her I’m leaving. I can talk a little with my hands, too. I tell her I’m going to leave. And she cries and moans around and says she’s going to kill herself if I go away. God, it’s awful to watch her begging. It makes me sick.
“Then I feel sorry for her and I don’t leave. And she’s happy as a lark and her father gives me a raise and sends us on another trip to see some of her relatives. Her father hates her. He likes to get rid of her. I hate her, too. But it’s like she has some power over us all. We can’t argue with her. You can’t yell with your hands. And it isn’t enough for you to close your eyes and turn away so you can’t see her hands anymore.”
Her voice grew heavier and I noticed how she kept pressing her palms into her lap as she spoke. The more she pressed down against herself, the harder it was to keep my eyes off her hands. After a while I couldn’t stop. Even when I knew she saw me looking I couldn’t stop. It was li
ke the complete abandon one feels in a dream, when any desire is allowable.
She kept on talking, her voice trembling a little as she spoke.
“She knows I want to get married,” she said. “Any girl wants that. But she won’t let me leave her. Her father pays me good and I don’t know anything else. Besides, even when I hate her most, I feel sorry for her when she cries and begs. It’s not like real crying and real begging. It’s so quiet, and all you see are tears running down her cheeks. She keeps begging me until I stay.”
Now I felt my own hands trembling in my lap. Somehow her words seemed to mean something more than they said on the surface. It seemed that what was coming grew more and more apparent. But I was hypnotized. With the lights flashing over us in the pitch blackness as the bus sped on through the night, it was like being inextricably bound in some insane nightmare.
“Once she said she’d get me a boyfriend,” she said, and I shuddered. “I told her to stop making fun of me, but she said she’d get me a boyfriend. So when we went on a trip to Indianapolis, she went across the aisle in the bus and brought a sailor to talk to me. He was just a boy. He told me he was twenty, but I bet he was eighteen. He was nice though. He sat with me and we talked. At first I was embarrassed and I didn’t know what to say. But he was nice, and it was nice talking to him except for her sitting across the way.”
Instinctively I turned, but the deaf-mute woman seemed to be asleep. Yet I had the feeling that the moment I turned my back, her beady eyes popped open again and refocused on us. “Never mind her,” said the woman beside me.
I turned back.
“Do you think it’s wrong?” she said suddenly, and I shuddered again as her hot, damp hand closed over mine.
“I—I don’t know.”
“The sailor was so nice,” she said in a heavy voice. “He was so nice. I don’t care if she’s watching. It doesn’t matter, does it? It’s dark and she can’t really see. She can’t hear anything.”
I must have drawn back, because her fingers tightened on mine.
“I’m clean,” she whined pathetically. “It’s not all the time. I only did it with the sailor, I swear I only did. I’m not lying.”
As she spoke more and more excitedly, her hand slipped off mine and dropped, quivering, on my leg. It made my stomach lurch. I couldn’t move. I guess I didn’t want to move. I was paralyzed by the sound of her thickening voice and the flaring sensation of her hand beginning to move over my leg, sensuously caressing.
“Please,” she said, almost gasping the word.
I tried to say something but nothing came.
“I’m always alone,” she said, starting in again. “She won’t let me get married because she gets afraid and she doesn’t want to let me leave her. It’s all right, no one can see us.”
Now she was clutching at my leg, digging her hand in fiercely. She put her other hand in my lap and as a blaze of light splashed over us, I saw her mouth as a dark gaping wound, her starved eyes shining.
“You have to,” she said, moving closer.
Suddenly, she threw herself against me. Her mouth was burning hot, shaking under mine. Her breath was hot in my throat and her hands were wild and throbbing on my suddenly exposed flesh. Her frail, hot limbs seemed to wrap themselves around me again and again like writhing tentacles. The heat of her body blasted me into submission. I’ll never know how the other passengers slept through it. But they didn’t all sleep through it. One of them was watching.
Suddenly, the night had chilled; it was over, and she drew back quickly and her dress rustled angrily as she pulled it down like an outraged old lady who has inadvertently exposed her legs. She turned and looked out the window as if I wasn’t there any longer. Stupidly, I watched her back rise and fall, feeling drained of strength, feeling as if my muscles had become fluid.
Then, shakily, I adjusted my clothing and struggled up into the aisle. Instantly, the deaf-mute woman jumped up and pushed past me roughly, wide awake. I caught a glimpse of her excited face as she moved.
As I slumped down on the other seat, I looked across the aisle again and saw her stubby white fingers grasping and fluttering, milking greedy questions from the air. And the gaunt woman was nodding and nodding and the deaf woman wouldn’t let her turn away.
MUTE
The man in the dark raincoat arrived in German Corners at two-thirty that Friday afternoon. He walked across the bus station to a counter behind which a plump, gray-haired woman was polishing glasses.
“Please,” he said, “where might I find authority?”
The woman peered through rimless glasses at him. She saw a man in his late thirties, a tall, good-looking man.
“Authority?” she asked.
“Yes—how do you say it? The constable? The—?”
“Sheriff?”
“Ah.” The man smiled. “Of course. The sheriff. Where might I find him?”
After being directed, he walked out of the building into the overcast day. The threat of rain had been constant since he’d woken up that morning as the bus was pulling over the mountains into Casca Valley. The man drew up his collar, then slid both hands into the pockets of his raincoat and started briskly down Main Street.
Really, he felt tremendously guilty for not having come sooner; but there was so much to do, so many problems to overcome with his own two children. Even knowing that something was wrong with Holger and Fanny, he’d been unable to get away from Germany until now—almost a year since they’d last heard from the Nielsens. It was a shame that Holger had chosen such an out of the way place for his corner of the four-sided experiment.
Professor Werner walked more quickly, anxious to find out what had happened to the Nielsens and their son. Their progress with the boy had been phenomenal—really an inspiration to them all. Although, Werner felt, deep within himself, that something terrible had happened he hoped they were all alive and well. Yet, if they were, how to account for the long silence?
Werner shook his head worriedly. Could it have been the town? Elkenberg had been compelled to move several times in order to avoid the endless prying—sometimes innocent, more often malicious—into his work. Something similar might have happened to Nielsen. The workings of the small town composite mind could, sometimes, be a terrible thing.
The sheriff’s office was in the middle of the next block. Werner strode more quickly along the narrow sidewalk, then pushed open the door and entered the large, warmly heated room.
“Yes?” the sheriff asked, looking up from his desk.
“I have come to inquire about a family,” Werner said, “the name of Nielsen.”
Sheriff Harry Wheeler looked blankly at the tall man.
—
Cora was pressing Paul’s trousers when the call came. Setting the iron on its stand, she walked across the kitchen and lifted the receiver from the wall telephone.
“Yes?” she said.
“Cora, it’s me.”
Her face tightened. “Is something wrong, Harry?”
He was silent.
“Harry?”
“The one from Germany is here.”
Cora stood motionless, staring at the calendar on the wall, the numbers blurred before her eyes.
“Cora, did you hear me?”
She swallowed dryly. “Yes.”
“I—I have to bring him out to the house,” he said.
She closed her eyes.
“I know,” she murmured and hung up.
Turning, she walked slowly to the window. It’s going to rain, she thought. Nature was setting the scene well.
Abruptly, her eyes shut, her fingers drew in tautly, the nails digging at her palms.
“No.” It was almost a gasp. “No.”
After a few moments she opened her tear-glistening eyes and looked out fixedly at the road. She stood there numbly, thinking of the da
y the boy had come to her.
—
If the house hadn’t burned in the middle of the night there might have been a chance. It was twenty-one miles from German Corners but the state highway ran fifteen of them and the last six—the six miles of dirt road that led north into the wood-sloped hills—might have been navigated had there been more time.
As it happened, the house was a night-lashing sheet of flame before Bernhard Klaus saw it.
Klaus and his family lived some five miles away on Skytouch Hill. He had gotten out of bed around one-thirty to get a drink of water. The window of the bathroom faced north and that was why, entering, Klaus saw the tiny flaring blaze out in the darkness.
“Gott’n’immel!” he slung startled words together and was out of the room before he’d finished. He thumped heavily down the carpeted steps, then, feeling at the wall for guidance, hurried for the living room.
“Fire at Nielsen house!” he gasped after agitated cranking had roused the night operator from her nap.
The hour, the remoteness, and one more thing doomed the house. German Corners had no official fire brigade. The security of its brick and timbered dwellings depended on voluntary effort. In the town itself this posed no serious problem. It was different with those houses in the outlying areas.
By the time Sheriff Wheeler had gathered five men and driven them to the fire in the ancient truck, the house was lost. While four of the six men pumped futile streams of water into the leaping, crackling inferno, Sheriff Wheeler and his deputy, Max Ederman, circuited the house.
There was no way in. They stood in back, raised arms warding off the singeing buffet of heat, grimacing at the blaze.
“They’re done for!” Ederman yelled above the windswept roar.
Sheriff Wheeler looked sick. “The boy,” he said but Ederman didn’t hear.
Only a waterfall could have doused the burning of the old house. All the six men could do was prevent ignition of the woods that fringed the clearing. Their silent figures prowled the edges of the glowing aura, stamping out sparks, hosing out the occasional flare of bushes and tree foliage.