1941 (Published 1954)
Portrait of a Girl in Glass
We lived in a third floor apartment on Maple Street in Saint Louis, on a block which also contained the Ever-ready Garage, a Chinese laundry, and a bookie shop disguised as a cigar store.
Mine was an anomalous character, one that appeared to be slated for radical change or disaster, for I was a poet who had a job in a warehouse. As for my sister Laura, she could be classified even less readily than L She made no positive motion toward the world but stood at the edge of the water, so to speak, with feet that anticipated too much cold to move. She’d never have budged an inch, I’m pretty sure, if my mother who was a relatively aggressive sort of woman had not shoved her roughly forward, when Laura was twenty years old, by enrolling her as a student in a nearby business college. Out of her “magazine money” (she sold subscriptions to women’s magazines), Mother had paid my sister’s tuition for a term of six months. It did not work out. Laura tried to memorize the typewriter keyboard, she had a chart at home, she used to sit silently in front of it for hours, staring at it while she cleaned and polished her infinite number of little glass ornaments. She did this every evening after dinner. Mother would caution me to be very quiet. “Sister is looking at her typewriter chart!” I felt somehow that it would do her no good, and I was right. She would seem to know the positions of the keys until the weekly speed drill got underway, and then they would fly from her mind like a bunch of startled birds.
At last she couldn’t bring herself to enter the school any more. She kept this failure a secret for a while. She left the house each morning as before and spent six hours walking around the park. This was in February, and all the walking outdoors regardless of weather brought on influenza. She was in bed for a couple of weeks with a curiously happy little smile on her face. Of course Mother phoned the business college to let them know she was ill. Whoever was talking on the other end of the line had some trouble, it seems, in remembering who Laura was, which annoyed my mother and she spoke up pretty sharply. “Laura has been attending that school of yours for two months, you certainly ought to recognize her name!” Then came the stunning disclosure. The person sharply retorted, after a moment or two, that now she did remember the Wingfield girl, and that she had not been at the business college once in about a month. Mother’s voice became strident. Another person was brought to the phone to verify the statement of the first. Mother hung up and went to Laura’s bedroom where she lay with a tense and frightened look in place of the faint little smile. Yes, admitted my sister, what they said was true. “I couldn’t go any longer, it scared me too much, it made me sick at the stomach!”
After this fiasco, my sister stayed at home and kept in her bedroom mostly. This was a narrow room that had two windows on a dusky areaway between two wings of the building. We called this areaway Death Valley for a reason that seems worth telling. There were a great many alley cats in the neighborhood and one particularly vicious dirty white Chow who stalked them continually. In the open or on the fire escapes they could usually elude him but now and again he cleverly contrived to run some youngster among them into the cul-de-sac of this narrow areaway at the far end of which, directly beneath my sister’s bedroom windows, they made the blinding discovery that what had appeared to be an avenue of escape was really a locked arena, a gloomy vault of concrete and brick with walls too high for any cat to spring, in which they must suddenly turn to spit at their death until it was hurled upon them. Hardly a week went by without a repetition of this violent drama. The areaway had grown to be hateful to Laura because she could not look out on it without recalling the screams and the snarls of killing. She kept the shades drawn down, and as Mother would not permit the use of electric current except when needed, her days were spent almost in perpetual twilight. There were three pieces of dingy ivory furniture in the room, a bed, a bureau, a chair. Over the bed was a remarkably bad religious painting, a very effeminate head of Christ with teardrops visible just below the eyes. The charm of the room was produced by my sister’s collection of glass. She loved colored glass and had covered the walls with shelves of little glass articles, all of them light and delicate in color. These she washed and polished with endless care. When you entered the room there was always this soft, transparent radiance in it which came from the glass absorbing whatever faint light came through the shades on Death Valley. I have no idea how many articles there were of this delicate glass. There must have been hundreds of them. But Laura could tell you exactly. She loved each one.
She lived in a world of glass and also a world of music. The music came from a 1920 victrola and a bunch of records that dated from about the same period, pieces such as “Whispering” or “The Love Nest” or “Dardanella.” These records were souvenirs of our father, a man whom we barely remembered, whose name was spoken rarely. Before his sudden and unexplained disappearance from our lives, he had made this gift to the household, the phonograph and the records, whose music remained as a sort of apology for him. Once in a while, on payday at the warehouse, I would bring home a new record. But Laura seldom cared for these new records, maybe because they reminded her too much of the noisy tragedies in Death Valley or the speed drills at the business college. The tunes she loved were the ones she had always heard. Often she sang to herself at night in her bedroom. Her voice was thin, it usually wandered off-key. Yet it had a curious childlike sweetness. At eight o’clock in the evening I sat down to write in my own mousetrap of a room. Through the closed doors, through the walls, I would hear my sister singing to herself, a piece like “Whispering” or “I Love You” or “Sleepy Time Gal,” losing the tune now and then but always preserving the minor atmosphere of the music. I think that was why I always wrote such strange and sorrowful poems in those days. Because I had in my ears the wispy sound of my sister serenading her pieces of colored glass, washing them while she sang or merely looking down at them with her vague blue eyes until the points of gem-like radiance in them gently drew the arching particles of reality from her mind and finally produced a state of hypnotic calm in which she even stopped singing or washing the glass and merely sat without motion until my mother knocked at the door and warned her against the waste of electric current.
I don’t believe that my sister was actually foolish. I think the petals of her mind had simply closed through fear, and it’s no telling how much they had closed upon in the way of secret wisdom. She never talked very much, not even to me, but once in a while she did pop out with something that took you by surprise.
After work at the warehouse or after I’d finished my writing in the evening. I’d drop in her room for a little visit because she had a restful and soothing effect on nerves that were worn rather thin from trying to ride two horses simultaneously in two opposite directions.
I usually found her seated in the straight-back ivory chair with a piece of glass cupped tenderly in her palm.
“What are you doing? Talking to it?” I asked.
“No,” she answered gravely, “I was just looking at it.”
On the bureau were two pieces of fiction which she had received as Christmas or birthday presents. One was a novel called the Rose-Garden Husband by someone whose name escapes me. The other was Freckles by Gene Stratton Porter. I never saw her reading the Rose-Garden Husband, but the other book was one that she actually lived with. It had probably never occurred to Laura that a book was something you read straight through and then laid aside as finished. The character Freckles, a one-armed orphan youth who worked in a lumber camp, was someone that she invited into her bedroom now and then for a friendly visit just as she did me. When I came in and found this novel open upon her lap, she would gravely remark that Freckles was having some trouble with the foreman of the lumber camp or that he had just received in injury to his spine when a tree fell on him. She frowned with genuine sorrow when she reported these misadventures of her story-book hero, possibly not recalling how successfully he came through them all, that the injury to the spi
ne fortuitously resulted in the discovery of rich parents and that the bad-tempered foreman had a heart of gold at the end of the book. Freckles became involved in romance with a girl he called The Angel, but my sister usually stopped reading when this girl became too prominent in the story. She closed the book or turned back to the lonelier periods in the orphan’s story. I only remember her making one reference to this heroine of the novel. “The Angel is nice,” she said, “but seems to be kind of conceited about her looks.”
Then one time at Christmas, while she was trimming the artificial tree, she picked up the Star of Bethlehem that went on the topmost branch and held it gravely toward the chandelier.
“Do stars have five points really?” she enquired.
This was the sort of thing that you didn’t believe and that made you stare at Laura with sorrow and confusion.
“No,” I told her, seeing she really meant it, “they’re round like the earth and most of them much bigger.”
She was gently surprised by this new information. She went to the window to look up at the sky which was, as usual during Saint Louis winters, completely shrouded by smoke.
“It’s hard to tell,” she said, and returned to the tree.
So time passed on till my sister was twenty-three. Old enough to be married, but the fact of the matter was she had never even had a date with a boy. I don’t believe this seemed as awful to her as it did to Mother.
At breakfast one morning Mother said to me, “Why don’t you cultivate some nice young friends? How about down at the warehouse? Aren’t there some young men down there you could ask to dinner?”
This suggestion surprised me because there was seldom quite enough food on her table to satisfy three people. My mother was a terribly stringent housekeeper, God knows we were poor enough in actuality, but my mother had an almost obsessive dread of becoming even poorer. A not unreasonable fear since the man of the house was a poet who worked in a warehouse, but one which I thought played too important a part in all her calculations.
Almost immediately Mother explained herself.
“I think it might be nice,” she said, “for your sister.”
I brought Jim home to dinner a few nights later. Jim was a big redhaired Irishman who had the scrubbed and polished look of well-kept chinaware. His big square hands seemed to have a direct and very innocent hunger for touching his friends. He was always clapping them on your arms or shoulders and they burned through the cloth of your shirt like plates taken out of an oven. He was the best-liked man in the warehouse and oddly enough he was the only one that I was on good terms with. He found me agreeably ridiculous I think. He knew of my secret practice of retiring to a cabinet in the lavatory and working on rhyme schemes when work was slack in the warehouse, and of sneaking up on the roof now and then to smoke my cigarette with a view across the river at the undulant open country of Illinois. No doubt I was classified as screwy in Jim’s mind as much as in the others’, but while their attitude was suspicious and hostile when they first knew me, Jim’s was warmly tolerant from the beginning. He called me Slim, and gradually his cordial acceptance drew the others around, and while he remained the only one who actually had anything to do with me, the others had now begun to smile when they saw me as people smile at an oddly fashioned dog who crosses their path at some distance.
Nevertheless it took some courage for me to invite Jim to dinner. I thought about it all week and delayed the action till Friday noon, the last possible moment, as the dinner was set for that evening.
“What are you doing tonight?” I finally asked him.
“Not a God damn thing,” said Jim. “I had a date but her Aunt took sick and she’s hauled her freight to Centralia!”
“Well,” I said, “why don’t you come over for dinner?”
“Sure!” said Jim. He grinned with astonishing brightness.
I went outside to phone the news to Mother.
Her voice that was never tired responded with an energy that made the wires crackle.
“I suppose he’s Catholic?” she said.
“Yes,” I told her, remembering the tiny silver cross on his freckled chest.
“Good!” she said. “Ill bake a salmon loaf!”
And so we rode home together in his jalopy.
I had a curious feeling of guilt and apprehension as I led the lamb-like Irishman up three flights of cracked marble steps to the door of Apartment F, which was not thick enough to hold inside it the odor of baking salmon.
Never having a key, I pressed the bell.
“Laura!” came Mother’s voice. “That’s Tom and Mr. Delaney! Let them in!”
There was a long, long pause.
“Laura?” she called again. “I’m busy in the kitchen, you answer the door!”
Then at last I heard my sister’s footsteps. They went right past the door at which we were standing and into the parlor. I heard the creaking noise of the phonograph crank. Music commenced. One of the oldest records, a march of Sousa’s, put on to give her the courage to let in a stranger.
The door came timidly open and there she stood in a dress from Mother’s wardrobe, a black chiffon ankle-length and high-heeled slippers on which she balanced uncertainly like a tipsy crane of melancholy plumage. Here eyes stared back at us with a glass brightness and her delicate wing-like shoulders were hunched wnth nervousness.
“Hello!” said Jim, before I could introduce him.
He stretched out his hand. My sister touched it only for a second.
“Excuse me!” she whispered, and turned with a breathless rustle back to her bedroom door, the sanctuary beyond it briefly revealing itself with the tinkling, muted radiance of glass before the door closed rapidly but gently on her wraithlike figure.
Jim seemed to be incapable of surprise.
“Your sister?” he asked.
“Yes, that was her,” I admitted. “She’s terribly shy with strangers.”
“She looks like you,” said Jim, “except she’s pretty.”
Laura did not reappear till called to dinner. Her place was next to Jim at the drop-leaf table and all through the meal her figure was slightly tilted away from his. Her face was feverishly bright and one eyelid, the one on the side toward Jim, had developed a nervous wink. Three times in the course of the dinner she dropped her fork on her plate with a terrible clatter and she was continually raising the water glass to her lips for hasty little gulps. She went on doing this even after the water was gone from the glass. And her handling of the silver became more awkward and hurried all the time.
I thought of nothing to say.
To Mother belonged the conversational honors, such as they were. She asked the caller about his home and family. She was delighted to learn that his father had a business of his own, a retail shoe store somewhere in Wyoming. The news that he went to night school to study accounting was still more edifying. What was his heart set on beside the warehouse? Radio-engineering? My, my, my! It was easy to see that here was a very up-and-coming young man who was certainly going to make his place in the world!
Then she started to talk about her children. Laura, she said, was not cut out for business. She was domestic, however, and making a home was really a girl’s best bet.
Jim agreed with all this and seemed not to sense the ghost of an implication. I suffered through it dumbly, trying not to see Laura trembling more and more beneath the incredible unawareness of Mother.
And bad as it was, excruciating in fact, I thought with dread of the moment when dinner was going to be over, for then the diversion of food would be taken away, we would have to go into the little steamheated parlor. I fancied the four of us having run out of talk, even Mother’s seemingly endless store of questions about Jim’s home and his job all used up finally—the four of us, then, just sitting there in the parlor, listening to the hiss of the radiator and nervously clearing our throats in the kind of self-consciousness that gets to be suffocating.
But when the blancmange was finished, a miracle
happened.
Mother got up to clear the dishes away. Jim gave me a clap on the shoulders and said, “Hey, Slim, let’s go have a look at those old records in there!”
He sauntered carelessly into the front room and flopped down on the floor beside the victrola. He began sorting through the collection of worn-out records and reading their titles aloud in a voice so hearty that it shot like beams of sunlight through the vapors of self-consciousness engulfing my sister and me.
He was sitting directly under the floor-lamp and all at once my sister jumped up and said to him, “Oh—you have freckles!”
Jim grinned. “Sure that’s what my folks call me—Freckles!”
“Freckles?” Laura repeated. She looked toward me as if for the confirmation of some too wonderful hope. I looked away quickly, not knowing whether to feel relieved or alarmed at the turn that things were taking.
Jim had wound the victrola and put on Dardanella.
He grinned at Laura.
“How about you an’ me cutting the rug a little?”
“What?” said Laura breathlessly, smiling and smiling.
“Dance!” he said, drawing her into his arms.
As far as I knew she had never danced in her life. But to my everlasting wonder she slipped quite naturally into those huge arms of Jim’s, and they danced round and around the small steam-heated parlor, bumping against the sofa and chairs and laughing loudly and happily together. Something opened up in my sister’s face. To say it was love is not too hasty a judgment, for after all he had freckles and that was what his folks called him. Yes, he had undoubtedly assumed the identity—for all practical purposes—of the one-armed orphan youth who lived in the Limberlost, that tall and misty region to which she retreated whenever the walls of Apartment F became too close to endure.