The Mortgaged Heart Page 13

  Then came the part that afterward was the hardest to understand. As soon as the glider left the swing it crashed and he fell so hard that for a long time his stomach moved round and round in dizzy turns and he felt like someone was standing on his chest so that he could not breathe. But for some reason that did not matter at all. He got up from the ground and it was as though he would not let himself believe what had happened. He had not fallen on the glider and it was not hurt except for a little tear in the wing. He undid his belt buckle and tried to take a deep breath. He and Sara did not talk but kept themselves busy getting ready for the next take-off. And the queer thing was that they both knew that this second trial would be just like the first and that their glider would not fly. In a part of them they knew this but there was something that would not let them think about it—the wanting and the excitement that would not let them be quiet or stop to reason.

  Vitalis was different and her voice went up high and sing-song. "Here Andrew done almost bust hisself wide open and still you all ghy keep on with this thing. Time you all is near bout twenty-five and old as I is you'll learn some sense."

  Even Mick began to talk. She was always a quiet kid and hadn't said more than ten words all the time she had been hanging around. That was the way she always was. She just looked with her little mouth half open and seemed to wonder about and take in everything you did or said without trying to answer. "When I'm twelve years old and a big girl I'm going to fly and I'm not going to fall. You just wait and see."

  "Quit your talking like that," Vitalis said. She did not want to watch them so she went into the house. Now and then they could see her dark face peering out at them from the kitchen window. He had to launch Sara by himself.

  When she got into the glider it was almost dark. She crashed even worse than he did but she did not act like she was hurt and at first he did not notice the bump over her eye and the long bloody smear on her knee where the skin had scraped off. The glider was not even damaged much this time and it was like they were really wild as Vitalis made them out to be. "Just one more time I'm going to try," Sara said. "It keeps sticking to the seat and when I fix that it's just got to go up." She ran into the house, stepping light on the leg she had hurt, and came back with a hunk of butter on a piece of waxed bread wrapper to grease the swing. Vitalis's high singing voice called out to them from the kitchen but no one answered.

  After the third time it was all over. He let Sara go because he was too heavy for her to launch. Their glider was smashed so you wouldn't know what it was and he had to help Sara get up from the ground this time. Her eye was swollen and she looked sick. She stood with her weight on one foot and when she pulled up her skirt to show him a big bruise on her thigh, her leg was trembling so that she almost lost her balance. Everything was over and he felt dead and empty inside.

  It was almost dark and they stood there for a while just looking at each other. Mick still sat on the steps, watching them with a scared look and not saying anything. Their faces were white in the half-darkness and the smells of supper from the kitchen were strong in the hot still air. It was very quiet and again it seemed that lonely feeling came to him like they were the only people in the world.

  Finally, Sara said: "I don't care. I'm glad anyway even if it didn't work. I'd rather for it to be like it is now than not to have tried to build it. I don't care."

  He broke off a piece of the pine bark and looked at Vitalis moving around in the soft yellow light of the kitchen.

  "It ought to have worked though. It ought to have flown. I just can't see why it didn't."

  In the dark sky there was a white star shining. Very slowly they walked across the yard toward their back steps and they were glad that their faces were half secret in the darkness. Quietly they went into the house and after that Vitalis was the only one who ever spoke of what had happened on that day.

  The young man finished his beer on the table and motioned to the sleepy waiter to bring him another. All at once he decided not to take the next bus, but to stay in this strange town until morning. He half closed his eyes to shut out the crude light, the few weary travellers waiting at the tables, the dirty checked cloth before him.

  It seemed to him that no one had ever felt just as he did. The past, the seventeen years of his life when he was at home, was before him like a dark and complex arabesque. But it was not a pattern to be comprehended at a glance, being more like a musical work that unfolds contrapuntally voice by voice and cannot be understood until after the time that it takes to reproduce it. It took shape in a vague design, less composed of events than of emotions. The last three years in New York did not enter into this pattern at all and were no more than a dark background to reflect for the moment the clarity of what had passed before. And through all this, in counterpart to the interwoven feelings, there was music in his mind.

  Music had always meant a lot to him and Sara. Long ago, before Mick was even born and when their mother was still living, they would blow together on combs wrapped in toilet paper. Later there were harps from the ten cent store and the sad wordless songs that colored people sang. Then Sara began to take music lessons and although she didn't like either her teacher or the pieces she was given, she stuck to her practicing pretty well. She liked to pick out the jazz songs she heard or just to sit at the piano, playing aimless notes that weren't music at all.

  He was about twelve when the family got a radio and after that things began to change. They began to dial to symphony orchestras and programmes that were very different from the ones they had listened to before. In a way this music was strange to them and again it was like something they had been waiting for all of their lives. Then their Dad gave them a portable Victrola one Christmas and some Italian opera records. Over and over they would wind up their Victrola and finally they wore the records out—there began to be scratching noises in the music and the singers sounded like they were holding their noses. The next year they got some Wagner and Beethoven.

  All of that was before the time when Sara tried to run away from home. Because they lived in the same house and were together so much he was slow to notice the way she was changing. Of course she was growing very fast and couldn't wear a dress two months before her wrists would be showing and the skirt would be shorter than her bony knees—but that wasn't what it was. She reminded him of someone who had been sleepily stumbling through a dark room when a light was turned on. Often there was a lost, dazed look about her face that was hard to understand.

  She would throw herself into first one thing and then another. For a while there were movies. She went to the show every Saturday with him and Chandler West and the rest of the kids, but when it was over and they had seen everything through she wouldn't come out with them but would stay on in the movie until almost dark. She always started looking at the picture as soon as she passed the ticket man and would stumble down the aisle without ever looking at the seats until she has almost reached the screen—then she would sit on about the third row with her neck bent back and her mouth not quite closed. Even after she had seen everything through twice she would keep turning back to look as she walked out of the show so that she would bump into people and was almost like somebody drunk. On week days she would save all but a dime of her lunch money and buy movie magazines. She had the pictures of Clive Brook and four or five other stars tacked up on the wall of her room and when she would go to the drug store to buy the magazines she would get a chocolate milk and look through all they had, then buy the ones with the most in them about the stars she liked. Movies were all she cared about for about three months. Then all of a sudden that was over and she didn't even go to the show anymore on Saturdays.

  Then there was the Girl Scout Camp she and the girls she knew were going on, out at a lake about twenty miles from town. That was all she talked about the month beforehand. She would priss around in front of the mirror in the khaki shorts and boy's shirts they were supposed to have, her hair slicked back close to her head, thinking it was grand t
o try to act like a boy. But after she had been on the camp just four days he came in one afternoon and found her playing the Victrola. She had made one of the counsellors bring her home and she looked all done in. She said all they did was swim and run races and shoot bows and arrows. And there weren't any mattresses on the cots and at night there were mosquitoes and she had growing pains in her legs and couldn't sleep. "I just ran and ran and then lay awake in the dark all night," she kept saying. "That's all there was to it." He laughed at her, but when she started crying—not in the way kids like Mick bawled but slowly and unsobbing—it was almost like he was part of her and crying, too. For a long time they sat on the floor together, playing their records. They were always a lot closer than most brothers and sisters.

  Music to them was something like the glider should have been. But it wasn't sudden like that and it didn't let them down. Maybe it was like whiskey was to their Dad. They knew it was something that would stay with them always.

  Sara played the piano more and more after she got to high school. She didn't like it there any more than he did and sometimes she would even worry him into writing excuses for her and signing their Dad's name. The first term she got seven bad cards. Their Dad never knew what to do about Sara and whenever she did something wrong he would just clear his throat and look at her in an embarrassed way like he didn't know how to say what was in his mind. Sara looked like pictures of their mother and he loved her a lot—but it was in a funny sort of timid way. He didn't fuss at all about the bad cards. She was just twelve and that was young to be in high school anyway.

  There is a time when everybody wants to run away—no matter how well they get along with their family. They feel they have to leave because of something they have done, or something they want to do, or maybe they don't know why it is they run away. Maybe it is a kind of slow hunger that makes them feel like they have to get out and go in search of something. He ran away from home once when he was eleven. A girl on the next block took her money out of the school savings bank and got a bus to Hollywood because the actress she had a crush on answered one of her letters and said that if she was ever in California to drop in and see her and swim in her swimming pool. Her folks couldn't get in touch with her for ten days and then her mother went out to Hollywood to bring her back. She had swum in the actress's pool and was trying to get a job in the movies. She was not sorry to come back home. Even Chandler West who was always slow and dumb tried to run away. Although Chandler had lived across the street from them all their lives there was something about him no one could ever understand. Even as little kids he and Sara felt that. It happened after Chandler had failed all his subjects at school, most of them for the second time. He said afterward that he wanted to build a hut up in the Canadian woods and live there by himself as a trapper. He was too dumb to hitch hike and he just kept walking toward the north until finally he was arrested for sleeping in a ditch and sent home. His mother had almost gone crazy and while he was gone her eyes were wild and like an animal's. You would think that Chandler was the only person that she had ever loved. And maybe it was from her that he was running away, too.

  So there was nothing very peculiar about what Sara did—that is unless you were a grown person like their Dad who just didn't understand things like that. There wasn't any real reason for her wanting to leave. It was just the way she had begun to feel in the last year. Maybe music had something to do with it. Or it might have been because she had grown so much and just didn't know what to do with herself.

  It happened on her thirteenth birthday and it was Monday morning. Vitalis had the breakfast table fixed nice with flowers and a new table cloth. Sara didn't seem any different that morning from any other time. But suddenly as she was eating her grits she saw a kinky hair on her plate and she burst out crying. Vitalis's feelings were hurt because she had tried to have breakfast so nice that morning. Sara grabbed her school books and went out the door. She said she wasn't mad with anybody about anything but that she was leaving home for good. He knew she was just talking and would just stay away until school was out. If it hadn't been for Vitalis their Dad would never have known about it. Sara went up the street running and when she came to the vacant lot at the corner she threw all her school books in the high grass there. When he went to pick them up there were papers scattered everywhere in the wind—homework and funny things she had drawn in her tablet.

  Vitalis phoned their Dad who had already gone to work and he came home in the automobile. He was very worried and serious. He kept pulling his lower lip tight against his teeth and clearing his throat. All three of them got in the automobile to go find her. The rest would have been funny if you hadn't been mixed up in it. They found her after about half an hour—walking down the road between high school and downtown. But when their Dad blew the horn she wouldn't get in the car, or even look around at them. She just kept going with her head in the air and her pleated skirt switching above her skinny knees. Their Dad had never been so nervous and mad. He couldn't get out and chase a girl down the street and so he had to just creep the car along behind her and blow the horn. They passed kids going to school who stared and giggled and it was awful. He was madder with Sara than their Dad. If they had had a closed car he would have leaned back and hid his face. But it was a Model T Ford and there wasn't anything to do but shuffle his feet and try to look like he didn't care.

  After a while she gave up and got in the car. Their Dad didn't know what to say and all of them were stiff and quiet. Sara was shamed and sad. She tried to cover it up by humming to herself in a don't-care way. They got out quietly at the high school. But that wasn't the end.

  The next month Uncle Jim, who was kin to them on their mother's side, came down from Detroit on the way to spend his vacation in Florida. Aunt Esther, his wife, was with him. She was a Jew and played the violin. Both of them had always liked Sara a lot—and in their Christmas boxes her present was always better than his or Mick's. They didn't have any children and there was something about them that was different from most married people. The first night they sat up very late with their Dad and maybe he told them all about Sara. Anyway, before they left, their Dad asked Sara how she would like to go to school a year in Detroit and live with them. Right away she said that she would like it—she had never been farther away from home than Atlanta and she wanted to sleep on a train and live in a strange place and see snow in the winter time.

  It happened so quickly that he could not get it into his head. He had not thought about the time when any of them would ever be away for long. He knew their Dad felt Sara was growing to the age where maybe she needed somebody who was at home more than he was. And the climate might do her good in Detroit and they didn't have many kinfolks. Before they were even born Uncle Jim had lived at their house a year—when he was still young and before he left for the north. But still he could not understand their Dad's letting her go. She left in a week—because the school term had only been going a month and they didn't want to waste mote time. It was so sudden that it didn't give him time to think. She was to be gone ten months and that seemed almost as long as forever. He did not know that it would be almost twice that time before he would again see her. He felt dazed and it was like a dream when they said goodbye.

  That winter the house was a lonesome place. Mick was too little to think about anything but eating and sleeping and drawing on colored paper at kindergarten. When he would come in from school all the rooms seemed quiet and more than empty. Only in the kitchen was it any different and there Vitalis was always cooking and singing to herself and it was warm and full of good smells and life. If he did not go out he would usually hang around there and watch her and they would talk while she fixed him something to eat. She knew about the lonesome feeling and was good to him.

  Most afternoons he was out with Chandler West and the rest of the gang of boys who were sophomores at high school. They had a club and a scrub football team. The vacant lot on the corner of the block was sold and the buyer began to bu
ild a house. When the carpenters and bricklayers left in the late afternoon the gang would climb up on the roof or run through the naked incompleted rooms. It was strange the way he felt about this house. Every afternoon he would take off his shoes and socks so he wouldn't slip and climb to the sharp pointed top of the roof. Then he would stand there, holding his hands out for balance and look around at all that lay below him or at the pale twilight sky. From underneath the boys would be scuffling together and calling out to each other—their voices were changing and the empty rooms made long drawn echoes, so that the sounds seemed not human and unrelated to words.

  Standing there alone on the roof he always felt he had to shout out—but he did not know what it was he wanted to say. It seemed like if he could put this thing into words he would no longer be a boy with big rough bare feet and hands that hung down clumsy from the outgrown sleeves of his lumberjack. He would be a great man, a kind of God, and what he called out would make things that bothered him and all other people plain and simple. His voice would be great and like music and men and women would come out of their houses and listen to him and because they knew that what he said was true they would all be like one person and would understand everything in the world. But no matter how big this feeling was he could never put any of it into words. He would balance there choked and ready to burst and if his voice had not been squeaky and changing he would have tried to yell out the music of one of their Wagner records. He could do nothing. And when the rest of the gang would come out from the house and look up at him he felt a sudden panic, as though his corduroy pants had dropped from him. To cover up his nakedness he would yell something silly like Friends Romans Countrymen or Shake-Spear Kick Him In The Rear and then he would climb down feeling empty and shamed and more lonesome than anybody else in the world.