by Belva Plain
Hennie would like to be a volunteer nurse like Lillian Wald. Her parents, though, will not allow her to take training. Nor will they let her do any other labor for pay. To receive pay would make it seem that her father was unable to support her! A young lady does not work for money, even, Hennie thinks, when her family could certainly use it. But she does not say so. It is one of the many things she thinks but does not say.
“You sighed, Aunt Hennie,” Paul said now.
“Did I? I’m tired, I guess. Are you tired? Are you hungry? We’ve had a long walk, but there’ll be time for cocoa at my house before your mama comes for you.”
They were passing through Washington Square. Sparrows filled the brisk air with anxious twittering. Two little girls clattered their hoops against the railings, making a rat-a-tat like drums. A lady stepped out of her carriage, holding a little white dog, and smiled at Paul.
“It’s pretty here,” Paul said.
He looked up at the dome of trees, now only sparsely leaved; his little face was earnest; the sky, seen through the leaves, must be a wonderment to him, Hennie thought. Perhaps he is trying to see God up there, as I used to do.
He was thinking not of God, but of Hennie. He was thinking, although he did not have the words, that he liked the hush among these houses, and the colors, and being here with her. He loved it whenever he was allowed to visit for a day or a night. She was so nice! She was different; he could think of the rest of his family as “they” apart from “her,” and could love them all, for no one was ever unkind to him, yet she was different.
She never said: “Don’t bother me right now” or “Later, Paul, I’m busy.”
When she took him to the park, which wasn’t that often, usually on Fräulein’s Thursday out, it was so much better to see her sit there watching him play, than to see Fräulein scowling over her knitting. She was always knitting some ugly gray thing for her nieces and nephews.
“Komm jetzt! Schnell zurück!” she would call, sounding angry; she wasn’t really angry, but her voice made it sound that way, like a bark. He laughed, thinking of Fräulein barking like a dog. So Aunt Hennie was much, much better. Better than his mother, too, although he suspected he wasn’t supposed to think that. Mama didn’t scold, but she wasn’t all that much fun. You could hardly ever get on her lap because of wrinkles: Be careful, darling; you’ll wrinkle my skirt. Of course, he was almost five, and really didn’t want to sit on anybody’s lap very much; only sometimes, when he was tired, it was a good thing to do.
He could always sit on Aunt Hennie’s lap, though. She would read to him about Little Orphant Annie, and then there was the one about the “funny little fellow of the very purest type, for he had a heart as mellow as an apple overripe.” That’s called “poetry” when it rhymes like fellow and mellow.
Aunt Hennie would hug him. “Guess who the funny little fellow is,” she would say, and he would tell her he couldn’t guess, although he did know.
“Why, it’s you!” she would say, opening her eyes wide with the surprise, and she would hug him again.
“Did you like that man?” he asked her now.
For a moment she could not think whom he meant. “The man who climbed up on the roof, do you mean?”
“Yes. Did you like him? I did.”
“Yes, he was wonderful.”
“I could do that,” Paul said again.
She touched his head. “I don’t know that you could ever do that. Hardly anybody could.” She believed in being honest with a child. “But I do believe you will do many wonderful things.”
“What will I do?”
“You will learn a lot because you look carefully and you listen. You will understand beautiful things. And you will be very kind. Now let’s hurry. They must be wondering where we are.”
* * *
The tea service was out on its heavy tray; Hennie’s mother and sister were waiting. It is a picture, she thought; they know they are making a picture. Florence must have brought the roses. She always brought them, never too many, only enough to create a perfection of pink and cream in a small silver bowl.
“Paul must have his cocoa,” said Angelique, the grandmother. “And then you may take him home, Florence.”
They had been comfortably chatting. The arrival of Hennie and Paul having interrupted the flow of the chat, there was a short silence while thoughts were once again collected.
“This is such a lovely room,” Florence said. “All your beautiful things, Mama.”
Angelique shook her head. “They belong in a proper setting. Not here.”
It was true. These portraits, the lace curtains fine as a bride’s veil, these Dresden dukes and duchesses bowing to each other on the whatnot, were too grand for such ordinary rooms. They recalled high ceilings, columns, and verandas. They were from another place and another life, the life that had stopped at Appomattox, eight years before Hennie was born.
How, then, could she still hear its cries and clamor in her head? It was because Angelique made them vivid. Papa, who had gone through four years of war, almost never spoke of it, nor did Great Uncle David, who had gone through even worse, though, as Angelique always said, on the wrong side. But how she clung to that old war! She wore sorrow and anger like a worn-out coat and would not throw it away. Perhaps she could not. Perhaps in some peculiar way it protected her.
“Yes, it was a sorry day when we came to New York,” Angelique said now. She stood up and went to the window, to which she was drawn a dozen times a day. “They say it will be an early winter. All those heaps of dirty melting snow to look forward to.”
The bleakness of the imagined wintry street was reflected in her handsome, aging face, on which the cheeks had just begun to sag. “Oh, when I think of the places where I grew up! Our lovely sheltered garden in New Orleans, with the fountain trickling!” Her voice lamented that lost, privileged charm. “Lawns and lawns all the way to the river at Beau Jardin before the war! Parties and servants …”
Slaves, but she would never use the word. And her swift hand dismissed the little parlor that Florence, however charitably, had praised, and the kitchen in which the latest Irish maid was humming and chopping, the hall with Papa’s bookcases—dismissed them with a gesture.
“It’s dark in here,” Hennie said, finding it all unbearable.
She lit the gas; the blue flame hissed and jetted. The marble clock, suspended between gilt Corinthian columns, chimed the hour.
Florence stood up. “Come, Paul. Time to go home.”
“We had a good time, Paul and I,” Hennie told her.
“We saw a fire,” Paul cried, “and gulls. They dive for fish in the river.”
“We always have a good time,” Hennie said.
“That I know.” It was never clear whether Florence minded or not.
From the window Angelique watched her daughter and grandson ride away in their polished black carriage, behind the coachman in brass buttons and the fine pair of matching grays. She sighed again.
“Your father is coming down the street. Open the door so he won’t have to fumble with his keys.… You’re home early, Henry!”
“There wasn’t much doing downtown.”
Too often there was not. Papa had been waiting to prosper ever since he and Wendell Hughes had come north and opened their office in the cotton district near Hanover Square.
Papa was gray: gray cloth suit, skin, and faded hair. The sight of him pained Hennie.
“Not enough capital,” he would say, “that’s the trouble. Not enough to expand as we ought. Oh, we’re managing, but it’s not what I had in mind, God knows. I sometimes feel I am failing you, Angelique.”
Hennie watched him all through the dinner. He ate silently. She wondered whether he heard half of her mother’s and her brother’s animated talk. Alfie could always amuse his mother.
“—so Mr. Hemmings turned around to see where the spitball came from, it hit the back of his neck, all squooshy, a real wet one—”
The
mother wanted to seem shocked, but laughter prevented.
“Alfie, you are the limit! Now tell me, have you really done tomorrow’s homework?”
Of course he hadn’t. He would need to be reminded and prodded.
But he is his mother’s last darling baby and will always be the darling, although his hair is no longer as yellow as canary feathers, a light mustache has begun to smudge his upper lip, and his nose will be bulbous. The twinkle of his eyes overcomes all.
When they went to the parlor, Papa laid his head on the back of his chair. He did that because he was too tired to talk. Hennie knew. They were two together, she and her father. It had been intended that she would be Henry, but she had turned out to be Henrietta instead. Still, she was tall like him, and she had his strong, separated teeth. That was supposed to be good luck, people said. Papa laughed at that and said he was still waiting.
Angelique looked up from her knitting. “Florence and Walter will be moving into the house on Seventy-fourth Street before they go to Florida. Such a beautiful house, and right near the park, which is perfect for children.”
“You startled him. He was just falling asleep,” Hennie said silently and angrily. She closed her book.
“Yes, wonderful,” Papa said. “Wonderful to think that all their good fortune has come to them from the Werners’ side, and none from me.”
It was a shame for a man to feel such bitter humiliation. Hennie could not look at him.
“We didn’t even have her wedding at our house,” Papa said. It was the hundredth time he had said it.
“You know very well, Henry, we couldn’t have had all those people in this place,” Mama answered. “I don’t know why you keep harping on it.”
“The South was ruined, yet I married you in your own home, Angelique.”
On the wall behind Papa hung his portrait, done by an expensive artist, in Confederate gray. Proud he stood, with epaulets and braid, some sort of thing like a dagger or small sword in his hand, and a jaunty tilt to his head. Whenever he spoke of the South or of ruin, his eyes would go to the portrait. To him it was precious, but to Hennie it gave only a sense of doom, as if it were a reminder, a warning and promise that what he had lived through would have to be lived through by others, maybe by herself. Over and over again, to the end of time.
Uncle David had a picture of himself too. His was only a photograph, and his uniform was blue, but he, too, kept it where he could see it. A reminder. To the end of time.
“As to the Werners,” Mama said now, “it’s an even exchange and never forget that, Henry!” She broke off to cast stitches and count, her nervous hands flying. She resumed, “The Werners got rich out of the war that made us poor. They may be in banking now, but the grandfather stood behind a dry goods counter, like all the Germans, not too long ago. Don’t think they aren’t very much impressed by the De Rivera name, my dear!”
She was more impressed by it than Papa, who owned the name. How she talked and talked about the distinguished lawyers, the doctors and scholars, the aristocrats in Charleston before there even was a United States! What she meant to say is that although among Jews it is infinitely better to be German than one of those poor Poles and Russians downtown, it is better yet to be Portuguese or Spanish.
This makes me shrivel in my skin. So mean. And stupid, too, because her own mother’s family had been German, as Uncle David liked to remind her.
Now Hennie reminded her. “Uncle David was born in Germany.”
“Oh, Uncle David! Why do you always refer everything to Uncle David!”
“I don’t always.”
“Well, you are so much like him,” Angelique said, more mildly. And she smiled to make up for the first rebuke, but the second remark was not entirely a compliment either, Hennie knew.
They thought it was ridiculous, and even Papa agreed, that Uncle David should practice medicine among the tenements and pushcarts, when he could just as easily be uptown. Angelique complained that he was an embarrassment to the family, although she was fond of him in a way. She made a mystery of his past, but it was no mystery to Hennie because Uncle David had told her about it himself. He had been a secret abolitionist in the South before the war, had shot a man, killing him accidentally, and had had to flee North for his life. He was old, nearly seventy, but you would never guess it. There was joy in his meager rooms, and nobody knew how often Hennie went to him there for his welcome.
She got up. “I think I shall go to bed. Papa, Mama, good night.”
“So early?” Papa said. “Don’t you feel well?”
“I feel well, only sleepy.”
But mourning had lain thick in the room, like dust. The dust lay on the furniture, the walls, the ceiling, and everything between the walls; the man with the newspaper dropped by his chair, the woman frowning and knitting; it was as if they—we—were all waiting for something. More money, so that they might be what they had been. But what they had been was nothing Hennie wanted.
In her own room she could shut the sadness away. The things in it were friends. They spoke to her. The doll with the china head had a winsome face, reminding her of the sunny birthday when Uncle David had brought it, a dozen years ago. Books filled the shelves. Robinson Crusoe, Alice in Wonderland, The Old Curiosity Shop—all were friends. Their covers were neat, although they had been read and reread. She liked things to be neat, but spare, without excess. In her jewelry box lay a gold bangle bracelet and a seed pearl necklace; they were her treasures and she craved no more.
She lay down in the dark. It was growing cold, with chilly air seeping around the edges of the bed; the quilt made a warm pocket in which she curled, loving her little room. The wind that had been so fierce in the afternoon had died away, so that the night was still. The street was quiet except for the occasional clip-clop of a horse and a voice calling good night.
Suddenly it was too quiet. It was still early; there ought to be more life. And she thought of the streets where her settlement house people struggled in dirt and disorder, such as no human being should endure. Yet there was more real life there. Was that nonsense?
She knew she was thought to be too emotional. She could not bear the mew of a starving cat in the areaway, to see horses struggling to pull a bus uphill on ice, while the driver lashed them. Poor things! Poor things! she used to cry, when still a child.
Too emotional, they said. Well, she was never her mother’s favorite and she had always known that, too, for no gift or smile or kiss can hide a truth like that from a child.
Oh, her mother could be so gay with Alfie! He had “personality,” or rather, many personalities to suit the moment. Mrs. Hughes, the wife of Papa’s partner—a hearty fool, in Hennie’s opinion—called Alfie a “young gentleman,” which was, of course, her highest praise. She wouldn’t think he was one if she could see him mock her with his sputtering laugh while he tucked two pillows under his coat behind and before.
And her mother could be so confidential with Florence! But Florence had always known how to tie a blue sash on an old white summer dress and turn herself into a beauty, which she was not. When she had been eighteen, like Hennie now, the invitations in their lovely thick envelopes had piled up on the table in the hall. People remembered Florence, people from Sunday school at temple, or people met during a week at the shore. Walter Werner proposed to her two months after they were introduced and married her on her nineteenth birthday.
So Hennie was caught between the sister and the brother. So easily could she vanish under their waves, a little skiff capsized in their wake, if she were to let it happen! But none of that was any fault of theirs. It was simply that they were determined people and she was not.
“You only think you are not,” her friend Olga corrected her. “You have never tried to find out.”
Their friendship was unexpected—or perhaps not unexpected, for Hennie needed to be wanted and Olga was honored that her teacher sought her out. They had met on the street one summer evening after class; it had been ear
ly, still light, and on sudden impulse Hennie had proposed having a cup of coffee together. Olga had piqued her curiosity. Married to a worker like herself, confined to a drab and bitter life, she had not lost her eager imagination. As fast as Hennie lent books to her, she came back for more.
From discussion of Tolstoy and Dickens they came to the personal. Olga told of the shame and horror of Russian persecution, and of the long, hard months of the escape and voyage and the struggle in New York. Hennie told something about her family, and in some fashion, from what Hennie did not say rather than from what she did say, Olga came to understand her position in that family. The imagination that took her to Dickens’s England took her into Hennie’s home.
She had never physically entered that home. Clearly felt by both girls, although never put into words, was the unsuitability of such a visit. Their friendship was better left on neutral ground, removed from the tenements to whose resentful occupants Hennie would seem to be a mere sightseer, and removed as well from the polite and curious scrutiny of Angelique.
Hennie was wide-awake. She felt suddenly a restless energy. These random thoughts of her friend led now, possibly through a natural association of Olga’s mean street with the one on which that afternoon’s miracle had taken place, back to her own emotion. As never before in her life, she had been dazzled. She wanted to feel like that again.…
In the gray shadows of the room, his image floated, vague as an unfinished sketch. Yet it was certain that she would recognize him: vivid eyes, a careless dark wave of hair. Absurd fantasy! What had he to do with her life? She was a foolish romantic, an embarrassment even to her most secret self.
And yet … there was so much happening in the world. Meetings, partings, lovers … life. Why not to her?
Because … absurd fantasy … that is why not.
Then one day she saw him coming out of Uncle David’s office. He was running down the steps, tossing off his forehead that long, loose wave of hair that would not stay in place. He wore the same green corduroy trousers; it seemed to her very touching, very masculine, not to know better than to wear such an ugly color. She watched him stride away through the crowded street.
