Collected Stories Page 5

  "Come on now. Here's your milk."

  Out of her sleepy haze a question came that she had not intended to ask, that she had not even been consciously thinking about: "Where's Mother?"

  Miss Whelan held the glistening bottle in her plump hands. As she poured the milk it frothed white in the sunlight and crystal frost wreathed the glass.

  "Where—?" Constance repeated, letting the word slide out with her shallow release of breath.

  "Out somewhere with the other kids. Mick was raising a fuss about bathing suits this morning. I guess they went to town to buy those."

  Such a loud voice. Loud enough to shatter the fragile sprays of the spirea so that the thousands of tiny blossoms would float down, down, down in a magic kaleidoscopic of whiteness. Silent whiteness. Leaving only the stark, prickly twigs for her to see.

  "I bet your mother will be surprised when she finds where you are this morning."

  "No," whispered Constance, without knowing the reason for the denial.

  "I should think she would be. Your first day out and all. I know I didn't think the doctor would let you talk him into coming out. Especially after the time you had last night."

  She stared at the nurse's face, at her white clad bulging body, at her hands serenely folded over her stomach. And then at her face again—so pink and fat that why—why wasn't the weight and the bright color uncomfortable—why didn't it sometimes droop down tiredly toward her chest—?

  Hatred made her lips tremble and her breath come more shallowly, quickly.

  In a moment she said: "If I can go three hundred miles away next week—all the way to Mountain Heights—I guess it won't hurt to sit in my own side yard for a little while."

  Miss Whelan moved a pudgy hand to brush back the girl's hair from her face. "Now, now," she said placidly. "The air up there'll do the trick. Don't be impatient. After pleurisy—you just have to take it easy and be careful."

  Constance's teeth clamped rigidly. Don't let me cry, she thought. Don't, please, let her look at me ever again when I cry. Don't ever let her look at me or touch me again. Don't, please—Ever again.

  When the nurse had moved off fatly across the lawn and gone back into the house, she forgot about crying. She watched a high breeze make the leaves of the oaks across the street flutter with a silver sheen in the sun. She let the glass of milk rest on her chest, bending her head slightly to sip now and then.

  Out again. Under the blue sky. After breathing the yellow walls of her room for so many weeks in stingy hot breaths. After watching the heavy footboard of her bed, feeling it crush down on her chest. Blue sky. Cool blueness that could be sucked in until she was drenched in its color. She stared upward until a hot wetness welled in her eyes.

  As soon as the car sounded from far off down the street she recognized the chugging of the engine and turned her head toward the strip of road visible from where she lay. The automobile seemed to tilt precariously as it swung into the driveway and jerked to a noisy stop. The glass of one of the rear windows had been cracked and plastered with dingy adhesive tape. Above this hung the head of a police dog, tongue palpitating, head cocked.

  Mick jumped out first with the dog. "Looka there, Mother," she called in a lusty child's voice that rose up almost to a shriek. "She's out."

  Mrs. Lane stepped to the grass and looked at her daughter with a hollow, strained face. She drew deeply at her cigarette that she held in her nervous fingers, blew out airy grey ribbons of smoke that twisted in the sunshine.

  "Well—" Constance prompted flatly.

  "Hello, stranger," Mrs. Lane said with a brittle gaiety. "Who let you out?"

  Mick clung to the straining dog. "See, Mother! King's trying to get to her. He hasn't forgotten Constance. See. He knows her good as anybody—don't you, boyoboyoboy—"

  "Not so loud, Mick. Go lock that dog in the garage."

  Lagging behind her mother and Mick was Howard—a sheepish expression on his pimply, fourteen year old face. "Hello, Sister," he mumbled after a gangling moment. "How do you feel?"

  To look at the three of them, standing there in the shade from the oaks, somehow made her more tired than she had felt since she came out. Especially Mick—trying to straddle King with her muscular little legs, clinging to his flexed body that looked ready any moment to spring out at her.

  "See, Mother! King—"

  Mrs. Lane jerked one shoulder nervously. "Mick—Howard take that animal away this instant—now mind me—and lock him up somewhere." Her slender hands gestured without purpose. "This instant."

  The children looked at Constance with sidelong gazes and moved off across the lawn toward the front porch.

  "Well—" said Mrs. Lane when they were gone. "Did you just pick up and walk out?"

  "The doctor said I could—finally—and he and Miss Whelan got that old rolling chair out from under the house and—helped me."

  The words, so many of them at once, tired her. And when she gave a gentle gasp to catch her breath, the coughing started again. She leaned over the side of the chair, Kleenex in hand, and coughed until the stunted blade of grass on which she had fastened her stare had, like the cracks in the floor beside her bed, sunk ineffaceably into her memory. When she had finished she stuffed the Kleenex into a cardboard box beside the chair and looked at her mother—standing by the spirea bush, back turned, vacantly singeing the blossoms with the tip of her cigarette.

  Constance stared from her mother to the blue sky. She felt that she must say something. "I wish I had a cigarette," she pronounced slowly, timing the syllables to her shallow breath.

  Mrs. Lane turned. Her mouth, twitching slightly at the corners, stretched out in a too bright smile. "Now that would be pretty!" She dropped the cigarette to the grass and ground it out with the toe of her shoe. "I think maybe I'll cut them out for a while myself. My mouth feels all sore and furry—like a mangy little cat."

  Constance laughed weakly. Each laugh was a huge burden that helped to sober her.

  "Mother—"

  "Yes."

  "The doctor wanted to see you this morning. He wants you to call him."

  Mrs. Lane broke off a sprig of the spirea blossoms and crushed it in her fingers. "I'll go in now and talk to him. Where's that Miss Whelan? Does she just set you out on the lawn by yourself when I'm gone—at the mercy of dogs and—"

  "Hush, Mother. She's in the house. It's her afternoon off, you know, today."

  "Is it? Well, it isn't afternoon."

  The whisper slid out easily with her breath. "Mother—"

  "Yes, Constance."

  "Are—are you coming back out?" She looked away as she said it—looked at the sky that was a burning, fevered blue.

  "If you want me to—I'll be out."

  She watched her mother cross the lawn and turn into the gravel path that led to the front door. Her steps were as jerky as those of a little glass puppet. Each bony ankle stiffly pushing past the other, the thin bony arms rigidly swinging, the delicate neck held to one side.

  She looked from the milk to the sky and back again. "Mother," her lips said, but the sound came out only in a tired exhalation.

  The milk was hardly started. Two creamy stains drooped from the rim side by side. Four times, then, she had drunk. Twice on the bright cleanliness, twice with a shiver and eyes shut. Constance turned the glass half an inch and let her lips sink down on an unstained part. The milk crept cool and drowsy down her throat.

  When Mrs. Lane returned she wore her white string garden gloves and carried rusty, clinking shears.

  "Did you phone Doctor Reece?"

  The woman's mouth moved infinitesimally at the corners as though she had just swallowed. "Yes."

  "Well—"

  "He thinks it best—not to put off going too long. This waiting around—The sooner you get settled the better it'll be."

  "When, then?" She felt her pulse quiver at her finger tips like a bee on a flower—vibrate against the cool glass.

  "How does the day after tomorrow st
rike you?"

  She felt her breath shorten to hot, smothered gasps. She nodded.

  From the house came the sound of Mick's and Howard's voices. They seemed to be arguing about the belts of their bathing suits. Mick's words merged into a scream. And then the sounds hushed.

  That was why she was almost crying. She thought about water, looking down into great jade swirls of it, feeling the coolness of it on her hot limbs, splashing through it with long, effortless strokes. Cool water—the color of the sky.

  "Oh, I do feel so dirty—"

  Mrs. Lane held the shears poised. Her eyebrows quivered upward over the white sprays of blossoms she held. "Dirty?"

  "Yes—yes. I haven't been in a bathtub for—for three months. I'm sick of being just sponged—stingily—"

  Her mother crouched over to pick up a scrap of a candy wrapper from the grass, looked at it stupidly for a moment, and let it drop to the grass again.

  "I want to go swimming—feel all the cool water. It isn't fair—isn't fair that I can't."

  "Hush," said Mrs. Lane with testy sibilance. "Hush, Constance. You don't have to worry over nonsense."

  "And my hair—" She lifted her hand to the oily knot that bumped out from the nape of her neck. "Not washed with water in—months—nasty awful hair that's going to run me wild. I can stand all the pleurisy and drains and t.b. but—"

  Mrs. Lane was holding the flowers so tightly that they curled limply into each other as though ashamed. "Hush," she repeated hollowly. "This isn't necessary."

  The sky burned brightly—blue jet flames. Choking and murderous to air.

  "Maybe if it were just cut off short—"

  The garden shears snipped shut slowly. "Here—if you want me to—I guess I could clip it. Do you really want it short?"

  She turned her head to one side and feebly lifted one hand to tug at the bronze hairpins. "Yes—real short. Cut it all off."

  Dank brown, the heavy hair hung several inches below the pillow. Hesitantly Mrs. Lane bent over and grasped a handful of it. The blades, blinding bright in the sun, began to shear through it slowly.

  Mick appeared suddenly from behind the spirea bushes. Naked, except for her swimming trunks, her plump little chest gleamed silky white in the sun. Just above her round child's stomach were scolloped two soft lines of plumpness. "Mother! Are you giving her a haircut?"

  Mrs. Lane held the dissevered hair gingerly, staring at it for a moment with her strained face. "Nice job," she said brightly. "No little fuzzes around your neck, 1 hope."

  "No," said Constance, looking at her little sister.

  The child held out an open hand. "Give it to me, Mother. I can stuff it into the cutest little pillow for King. I can—"

  "Don't dare let her touch the filthy stuff," said Constance between he: teeth. Her hand fingered the stiff, loose fringes around her neck, then sank tiredly to pluck at the grass.

  Mrs. Lane crouched over and, moving the white flowers from the newspaper where she had laid them, wrapped up the hair and left the bundle lying on the ground behind the invalid's chair.

  "I'll take it when I go in—"

  The bees droned on in the hot stillness. The shade had grown blacker, and the little shadows that had fluttered by the side of the oak trees were still. Constance pushed the blanket down to her knees. "Have you told Papa about my going so soon?"

  "Yes, I telephoned him."

  "To Mountain Heights?" asked Mick, balancing herself on one bare leg and then the other.

  "Yes, Mick."

  "Mother, isn't that where you went to see Unca Charlie?"

  "Yes."

  "Is that where he sent us the cactus candy from—a long time ago?"

  Lines, fine and grey as the web of a spider, cut through the pale skin around Mrs. Lane's mouth and between her eyes. "No, Mick. Mountain Heights is just the other side of Atlanta. That was Arizona."

  "It was funny tasting," said Mick.

  Mrs. Lane began cutting the flowers again with hurried snips. "I—I think I hear that dog of yours howling somewhere. Go tend to him—go—run along, Mick."

  "You don't hear King, Mother. Howard's teaching him to shake hands out on the back porch. Please don't make me go." She laid her hands on her soft mound of stomach. "Look! You haven't said anything about my bathing suit. Aren't I nice in it, Constance?"

  The sick girl looked at the flexed, eager muscles of the child before her, and then gazed back at the sky. Two words shaped themselves soundlessly on her lips.

  "Gee! I wanna hurry up and get in. Did you know they're making people walk through a kind of ditch thing so you won't get sore toes this year—And they've got a new chute-ty-chute."

  "Mind me this instant, Mick, and go on in the house."

  The child looked at her mother and started off across the lawn. As she reached the path that led to the door she paused and, shading her eyes, looked back at them. "Can we go soon?" she asked, subdued.

  "Yes, get your towels and be ready."

  For several minutes the mother and daughter said nothing. Mrs. Lane moved jerkily from the spirea bushes to the fever-bright flowers that bordered the driveway, snipping hastily at the blooms, the dark shadow at her feet dogging her with noonday squatness. Constance watched her with eyes half closed against the glare, with her bony hands against the bubbling, thumping dynamo that was her chest. Finally she shaped the words on her lips and let them emerge. "Am I going up there by myself?"

  "Of course, my dear. We'll just put you on a bicycle and give you a shove—"

  She mashed a string of phlegm with her tongue so that she would not have to spit, and thought about repeating the question.

  There were no more blooms ready for cutting. The woman looked sidewise at her daughter from over the flowers in her arm, her blue veined hand shifting its grasp on the stems. "Listen, Constance—The garden club's having some sort of a to-do today. They're all having lunch at the club—and then going to somebody's rock garden. As long as I'm taking the children over I thought I—you don't mind if I go, do you?"

  "No," said Constance after a moment.

  "Miss Whelan promised to stay on. Tomorrow maybe—"

  She was still thinking about the question that she must repeat, but the words clung to her throat like gummy pellets of mucus and she felt that if she tried to expel them she would cry. She said instead, with no special reason: "Lovely—"

  "Aren't they? Especially the spirea—so graceful and white."

  "I didn't even know they'd started blooming until I got out."

  "Didn't you? I brought you some in a vase last week."

  "In a vase—" Constance murmured.

  "At night, though. That's the time to look at them. Last night I stood by the window—and the moonlight was on them. You know how white flowers are in the moonlight—"

  Suddenly she raised her bright eyes to those of her mother. "I heard you," she said half accusingly. "In the hall—tipping up and down. Late. In the living room. And I thought I heard the front door open and close. And when I was coughing once I looked at the window and I thought I saw a white dress up and down the grass like a ghost—like a—"

  "Hush!" said her mother in a voice as jagged as splintered glass. "Hush. Talking is exhausting."

  It was time for the question—as though her throat were swollen with its matured syllables. "Am I going by myself to Mountain Heights, or with Miss Whelan, or—"

  "I'm going with you. I'll take you up on the train. And stay a few days until you're settled."

  Her mother stood against the sun, stopping some of the glare so that she could look into her eyes. They were the color of the sky in the cool morning. They were looking at her now with a strange stillness—a hollow restfulness. Blue as the sky before the sun had burned it to its gaseous brilliance. She stared with trembling, open lips, listening to the sound her breath made. "Mother—"

  The end of the word was smothered by the first cough. She leaned over the side of the chair, feeling them beat at her chest like great
blows risen from some unknown part inside her. They came, one after another with equal force. And when the last toneless one had wrenched itself clear she was so tired that she hung with unresisting limpness on the chair arm, wondering if the strength to raise her dizzy head would ever again be hers.

  In the gasping minute that followed, the eyes that were still before her stretched to the vastness of the sky. She looked, and breathed, and struggled up to look again.

  Mrs. Lane had turned away. But in a moment her voice rang out bitterly bright. "Goodbye, pet—I'll run along now. Miss Whelan'll be out in a minute and you'd better go right in. So long—"

  As she crossed the lawn Constance thought she saw a delicate shudder shake her shoulders—a movement as perceptible as that of a crystal glass that had been thumped too soundly.

  Miss Whelan stood placidly in her line of vision as they left. She only had a glimpse of Howard's and Mick's half naked bodies and the towels they flapped lustily at each other's rears. Of King thrusting his panting head above the broken window glass with its dingy tape. But she heard the overfed roar of the engine, the frantic stripping of the gears as the car backed from the driveway. And even after the last sound of the motor had trailed into silence, it was as though she could still see her mother's strained white face bent over the wheel—

  "What's the matter?" asked Miss Whelan calmly. "Your side's not hurting you again, I hope."

  She turned her head twice on the pillow.

  "There now. Once you're in again you'll be all right."

  Her hands, limp and colorless as tallow, sank over the hot wetness that streamed down her cheeks. And she swam without breath in a wide, ungiving blueness like the sky's.

  The Orphanage

  How the Home came to be associated with the sinister bottle belongs to the fluid logic of childhood, for at the beginning of this episode I must have been not more than seven. But the Home, as a dwelling for the orphans in our town, might have in its mysterious ugliness been partly to blame. It was a large, gabled house, painted in a blackish green, and set back in a rake-printed front yard that was absolutely bare except for two magnolia trees. The yard was surrounded by a wrought iron fence, and the orphans were seldom to be seen there when you stopped on the sidewalk to gaze inside. The back yard, on the other hand, was for a long time a secret place to me; the Home was on a corner, and a high board fence concealed what went on inside, but when you passed there would be the sound of unseen voices and sometimes a noise like that of clanging metal. This secrecy and the mysterious noises made me very much afraid. I would often pass the Home with my Grandmother, on the way home from the main street of town, and now, in memory, it seems that we always walked by in twilight wintertime. The sounds behind the board fence seemed tinged with menace in the fading light, and the iron picket gate in front was to the touch of a finger bitter cold. The gloom of the grassless yard and even the gleams of yellow light from the narrow windows seemed somehow in keeping with the dreadful knowledge that came to me about this time.