The Mortgaged Heart Page 7

  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, I 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 her 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 so—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.

  [Redbook, October 1971]

  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.

  My initiator was a little girl named Hattie, who must have been about nine or ten. I don't remember her last name, but there are some other facts about this Hattie that are unforgettable. For one thing, she told me that George Washington was her uncle. Another time she explained to me what made colored people colored. If a girl, said Hattie, kissed a boy she turned into a colored person, and when she was married her children were colored, too. Only brothers were excepted from this law. Hattie was a small child for her age, with snaggled front teeth, and greasy blond hair held back by a jeweled barrette. I was forbidden to play with her, perhaps because my Grandmother or parents sensed an unwholesome element in the relation; if this supposition is true they were quite right. I had once kissed Tit, who was my best friend but only a second cousin, so that day by day I was slowly turning into a colored person. It was summer, and day by day I was turning darker. Perhaps I had some notion that Hattie, having once revealed this fearful transformation, might somehow have the power to stop it. In the dual bondage of guilt and fear, I followed her around the neighborhood, and often she demanded nickels and dimes.

  The memories of childhood have a strange shuttling quality, and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light. The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from the surrounding darkness. I don't remember where Hattie lived, but one passageway, one room, have an uncanny clarity. Nor do I know how I happened to go to this room, but anyway I was there with Hattie and my cousin, Tit. It was late afternoon, the room was not quite dark. Hattie was wearing an Indian dress, with a headband of bright red feathers, and she had asked if we knew where babies come from. The Indian feathers in her band looked, for some reason, scary to me.

  "They grow in the insides of ladies," Tit said.

  "If you swear you will never tell a living soul then I will show you something."

  We must have sworn, though I remember a reluctance, and a dread of further revelations. Hattie climbed up on a chair and brought down something from a closet shelf. It was a bottle, with something queer and red inside.

  "Do you know what this is?" she asked.

  The thing inside the bottle resembled nothing I had ever seen before. It was Tit who asked: "What is it?"

  Hattie waited and her face beneath the band of feathers wore a crafty expression. After some moments of suspense, she said:

  "It's a dead pickled baby."

  The room was very quiet. Tit and I exchanged a sidelong look of horror. I could not look again at the bottle, but Tit was gazing at it with fascinated dread.

  "Whose?" he asked finally in a low voice.

  "See the little old red head with the mouth. And the little teensy red legs squelched up under it. My brother brought it home when he was learning to be a drug store man."

  Tit reached out a finger and touched the bottle, then put his hands behind his back. He asked again, this time in a whisper: "Whose? Whose baby?"

  "It is an orphan," Hattie said.

  I remember the light whispering sound of our footsteps as we tiptoed from the room, and that the passageway was dark and at the end there was a curtain. That, thank goodness, is my final recollection of this Hattie. But the pickled orphan haunted me for some time; I dreamed once that the Thing had got out of the jar and was skuttling around the Orphans' Home and I was locked in there and It was skuttling after me—Did I believe that in that gloomy, gabled house there were shelves with rows of these eerie bottles? Probably yes—and no. For the child knows two layers of reality—that of the world, which is accepted like an immense collusion of all adults—and the unacknowledged, hidden secret, the profound. In any case, I kept close to my Grandmother when in the late afternoon we passed by the Home on our way from town. At that time I knew none of the orphans, as they went to the Third Street School.

  It was a few years later that two occurrences came about that brought me in a direct relation with the Home. Meanwhile, I looked on myself as a big girl, and had passed the place a thousand times, walking alone, or on skates, or bicycle. The terror had diminished to a sort of special fascination. I always stared at the Home in passing, and sometimes I would see the orphans, walking with Sunday slowness on their way to Sunday school and church, grouped in marching formation with the two biggest orphans leading and the two smallest orphans at the end. I was about eleven when changes occurred that drew me in closer as a spectator, and opened an unexpected area of romance. First, my Grandmother was made a member of the Board of the Orphans' Home. That was in the autumn. Then at the beginning of the spring term the orphans were transferred to the Seventeenth Street School, where I was going, and three of the orphans were in the room with me in the sixth grade. The transfer was made because of a change in the boundary line of the school districts. My Grandmother was elected to the Board because she enjoyed Boards, Committees, and the meetings of associations, and a former member of the Board had died at about that time.

  My Grandmother visited the Home about once a month, and on her second visit I went with her. It was the best time of the week, a Friday afternoon, spacious with the sense of coming holiday. The afternoon was cold, and the late sunlight made fiery reflections on the windowpanes. Inside, the Home was quite different from the way I had imagined it. The wide hall was bare, and the rooms were uncurtained, rugless, and scantily furnished. Heat came from stoves in the dining room and in the general room that was next to the front parlor, Mrs. Wesley, the matron of the Home, was a large woman, rather hard of hearing, and she kept her mouth slightly ajar when anyone of importance spoke. She always seemed to be short of breath, and she spoke through her nose in a placid voice. My Grandmother had brought some clothes (Mrs. Wesley called them garments) donated by the various churches and they shut themselves in the cold parlor to talk. I was entrusted to a girl of my own age, named Susie, and we went out immediately to the board fenced back yard.

  That first visit was awkward. Girls of all ages were playing different games. There was in the yard a joggling board, and an acting bar, and a hopscotch game was marked on the ground. Confusion made me see the yard full of children as an unassorted whole. One little girl came up to me and asked me what was my father. And, as I was slow in answering she said: "My father was a walker on the railroad." Then she ran to the acting bar and swung by her knees—her hair hung straight down from her red face and she wore brown cotton bloomers.

  INSTANT OF THE HOUR AFTER

  LIGHT AS SHADOWS her hands fondled his head and then came placidly to rest; the tips of her fingers hovered on his temples, throbbed to the warm slow beat inside his body, and her palms cupped his hard skull.

  "Reverberating va-cuity," he mumbled so that the syllables lolloped ponderously into each other.

  She looked down at his lax, sound body that stretched the length of the couch. One foot—the sock wrinkled around the ankle—hung limp over the edge. And as she watched his sensitive hand left his side and crept up drunkenly to his mouth—to touch his lips that had remained pursed out and loose after his words. "Immense hol
lowness—" he mouthed behind his feeling fingers.

  "Enough out of you tonight—my darling," she said. "The show's over and the monkey's dead."

  They had turned off the heat an hour before and the apartment was beginning to chill. She looked at the clock, the hands of which pointed to one. Not much heat anyway at that hour, she thought. No draughts, though; opalescent ribbons of smoke lay motionless close to the ceiling. Speculatively her glance shifted to the whiskey bottle and the confused chessmen on the card table. To a book that lay face downward on the floor—and a lettuce leaf lying forlornly in the corner since Marshall had lost it while waving his sandwich. To the dead little butts of cigarettes and the charred matches scattered.

  "Here cover up," she said absently, unfolding a blanket at the foot of the couch. "You're so susceptible to draughts."

  His eyes opened and stared stolidly up at her—blue-green, the color of the sweater he wore. One of them was shot through at the corner with fragile fibers of pink, giving him somehow the guileless expression of an Easter bunny. So much younger than twenty, he always looked—With his head thrown back on her knees so that his neck was arched above his rolled collar and tender seeming with the soft outline of the cords and cartilages. With his dark hair springing from the pallor of his face.

  "Vacant majesty—"

  As he spoke his eyelids drooped until the eyes beneath had been narrowed to a slit that seemed to sneer at her. And she knew with a sudden start that he was not as drunk as he pretended to be.

  "You needn't hold forth any longer," she said. "Phillip's gone home and there's just me."

  "It's in the na-a-ature of things—that such a viewpoint—view—"

  "He's gone home," she repeated. "You talked him out." She had a fleet picture of Phillip bending to pick up the cigarette butts—his agile, blond little body and his calm eyes—"He washed up the dishes we messed and even wanted to sweep the floor, but I made him leave it."