by Belva Plain
“It must be tiring to do so much traveling.” Angelique sighed. “Still, I wish your father could—”
“What do you wish I could?” Henry inquired, coming in.
“Travel, my dear, you haven’t had a real vacation in years.”
“I keep inviting you,” Florence declared. “Why not come to Florida with us this winter? And you come with them, too, Hennie.” She swung round in her chair and faced Hennie. “Now, listen, I want your promise, your solemn promise, that you’ll come with us this winter.”
Hennie’s palms were wet. Sickening, dizzying speckles of light flashed in the air.
“I’ll try,” she answered weakly.
She felt ill. Her stomach heaved. She had been feeling like that quite often this last week or two.
“What do you mean, you’ll try? What else have you got to do?” And when Hennie did not reply, “Or will you have something else to do?”
The question opened new possibilities in the room.
“Let us not beat about the bush any longer.” Angelique clipped the words. “You have been seeing this Roth, and no one else, for too long.”
Hennie bowed her head. In the line of her vision were shoes: Florence’s slim pointed toes, Papa’s feet—in scuffed boots, he needs new ones—planted on the rug, and her mother’s foot tapping.
“What have you to say about it? Anything, Hennie?”
What have I to say? Only that I love him, I would die for him, and he does not want me anymore.
“Hennie! Why are you looking like that, as if the end of the world had come?”
Funny, that’s what he said, the end of the world hasn’t come. She raised her head and put out her hand.
“I would like some tea, you haven’t given me my tea.” Maybe it would settle her queasy stomach.
They had planned this conversation. This was no spontaneous thing. They had been waiting for her. It was for this that Florence had come on a Sunday. Now they made a semicircle around her, as in that engraving of the stag, cornered finally by the hounds. There was no way out, and hating them for what they were doing, she knew they were right.
“What do you want of me? What do you want me to say?” she cried, shouting into the decorous room.
“We only want to know what’s going on,” Angelique said. “Have we no right to know, no interest in you?”
Don’t be sick on the carpet.
“All Mama means,” Florence said quietly, “is whether you have any—any understanding.”
This day had been too much, everything was too much, unbearable. Hennie’s look appealed to her father, begging him to stop this, to release her. But his head was down, reaming his pipe. He was not going to help, and for the first time she had no pity for him.
“We know,” continued her mother, “that you have been seeing him more often than you admit. You may think you have been fooling us with your denials. Yes, for a while you did, we believed you, but all that has come to a finish, Hennie. It’s time for you to speak frankly, for all of us to speak frankly.”
Oh, the little room where we took our joy, and how we loved each other!
“There is nothing to speak frankly about,” Hennie said. “Nothing at all.”
“Perhaps your father should speak to him and find out what all this ‘nothing’ amounts to.”
This was not even decent, the hounds were ripping at her.
“No, no,” Hennie cried, adding then very faintly, “he needs more money. He can’t afford—”
Angelique set her cup down. “What? Then he is looking for a rich wife?”
“Mama, how can you say such a thing? Of all people! Dan cares nothing for money. He has no interest in wealth—” The words choked her.
“But you just said he needs more, so he has to care. Don’t be a child,” Angelique said, and touching Hennie’s arm, spoke with surprising gentleness. “Listen, Hennie dear, it takes money to run a home, you’re seeing that it does. Even a once-a-week cleaning woman costs a dollar and a half. How is he to get it, does he say?”
“He’s a teacher. The salary is small.”
“People do live on teacher’s salaries, though,” said Angelique, reversing herself.
Hennie did not answer. Someone walked in the apartment overhead and the crystal drops on the chandelier tinkled lightly. There was no other sound in the room. They were waiting for Hennie to say something.
“I can’t talk now,” she said. “I don’t feel well. Can’t you see that I’m miserable?”
“Yes, and that’s just why we’re talking now, because we do see and have been seeing,” answered Angelique.
“I’m miserable because I’m coming down with a cold, and I only want to be let alone!” Hennie shouted, causing them all to draw back.
It crossed her mind that they had never heard her shout at them. Her voice had suddenly become a weapon. They all stood up. Florence went to the mirror to adjust her hat, on which a small bird, brightly blue, perched above a wreath of veiling.
She spoke into the mirror, in which she could see Hennie. “We only mean your good, dear. But I see that this is not the best time to discuss anything. Another day, then.”
Hennie stood at the window watching the bird and veil, the sable muff and velvet sleeves, disappear inside the carriage. She felt her father’s hand on her shoulder.
“May I talk to you, Hennie? Only for a minute, then go lie down.”
Angelique had taken the tea tray into the kitchen, this being Eileen’s free afternoon.
“Not now, Papa.”
He could have come to her rescue! Perhaps he had been too tired. He was always tired.
Her father spoke quickly. “I don’t want anyone to hurt you, Hennie, that’s all. I know your mother and your sister care about things that don’t interest you, but they do care about you. You may not like the way they show it, but they love you. You know that, don’t you?”
She nodded. The quiet tone and the warm touch of his hand brought the sting of tears. This time they brimmed over. She caught her father’s hand and laid it against her cheek.
“This is all wrong, Hennie.”
“What is, Papa?”
“I don’t know the man.”
“You don’t like him?”
“I don’t know him, I tell you. And I’ve let you be too free. I shouldn’t have allowed it all this time. I don’t know why I did.”
But I know why. Because you knew I needed to be loved and you didn’t want to spoil it. Yes, I know.
“Don’t worry about me, Papa, I’ll be all right.”
Later in her room, in the early evening after the spasm of sickness had passed, she sat down at her desk and began to write. The words came of themselves.
“Dear Dan, I know you have grown tired of me. I won’t plead or ask for any explanation. A person is perfectly free to love and to stop loving. Only be honest with me and say so.”
She dipped the pen. The ink slid across the paper, making smooth curves and loops; how odd it was that a pattern of arabesques so light and easy could spell out such a breaking! And how was it possible for another human being to be so much a part of you as to break you in half by leaving you?
“I will make no scenes,” she wrote.
He would tear this open when the mail came, or perhaps the letter would be waiting under the mail slot when he got home. Then he would sit down by the window at the table on which the crumbs from his breakfast roll would still be scattered, and would tear it open and read, feeling—feeling what? Relief? Guilt? Sorrow, or all of these? And would do what? Come running to her in remorse? No, it would not be that. He would say, “Yes, yes, it’s true, and I am so terribly sorry, but it’s over; this is how it happened. I’m in love with Lucy Marston—or somebody.”
Her heart pounded, her head pounded, yet the pen moved on, offering her sacrifice, giving everything away.
“There will be no blame. What I did I did to myself. There’s no use pretending something you don’t feel, and if you don�
��t feel anything for me anymore, you can’t help it. But you mustn’t lie to me. It is not fair to lie to me.”
After signing the letter, she sat for a while, sat up very straight and stiffened her back; she was filled with a deep, mournful pride in her ability to bear so much pain. Then she lay down, exhausted, and slept.
In the morning she tore the letter up.
There was a chill in the household. Angelique spoke of ordinary things, as though nothing had happened. Yet all her words came out like a rebuke: We are observing the natural decencies, as you see, but do not think we have forgotten. We are only waiting.
Hennie was starved for food. Five times during one afternoon she went to the kitchen, raiding the icebox, then the breadbox, tearing off the bread in a hunk, so that even Eileen looked astonished. She ate a chicken leg from the previous night’s dinner, drank a glass of milk, and ate an apple. When her stomach was empty, she felt sick.
One morning she vomited. The fine machinery of her body was definitely out of order. She wished she had more knowledge … On the other hand, she wished she had never gone peeking into Uncle David’s textbooks.…
Oh, my God, it can’t be! It’s something else. Dan said it wouldn’t be. So it isn’t.
She had not heard from him. She thought of walking downtown, playing a game, a dangerous game with herself: How far will I go toward his house before I turn back? This was the hour when he sat near the window correcting papers. He could look down into the street; she could not risk the humiliation of having him see her searching for him.…
One morning she was sent to the grocery store. A strange thing happened: She forgot what she had been sent for. Among the barrels of oatmeal and coffee she stood trying to recollect, feeling faintly dizzy. It was still early and the store was empty. Mr. Potter was being patient. Nevertheless, she felt painfully embarrassed.
“Well, now, what could it have been?” he asked. His red hands, resting on the counter, looked like raw beef; a sickening thought.
He looks like a gnome. I wish I could tell him everything. I must be crazy.
“What could it be?” he repeated. “Let’s think. Sugar? Bread?”
Sugar, yes, sugar! It all came back to her: a bag of walnuts for Sunday’s cake, and butter.
The butter had begun to melt. Along the sides of the crock it swam in fat yellow globules. Slick, greasy butter. Her mouth filled with water. She had to shut her eyes from the sight. Hurry, hurry! She was going to be sick.
Out on the street again, her reflection jumped out of Mr. Potter’s plate glass window. She looked like a pouter pigeon. Of course! Of course, she was laced too tight, that’s why she had been feeling so ill. That’s why she was sweating as though it were still August.
She stood at the curb, trying to decide whether to go home with the bag of groceries, or to find out once and for all …
She went downtown. On Uncle David’s street the pushcarts in double rows stood piled with suspenders, caps, aprons, and potatoes. A horseless carriage, an unusual sight on such a poor street, came rattling to a halt when the bicycle chain came loose from the rear axle. The peddlers cursed, and a frightened horse tore away, pulling his wagon, while a pair of boys who should have been in school jeered at the luckless owner of the new contraption: “Get a horse! Get a horse!”
The confusion, lasting no more than a minute, printed itself on Hennie’s mind. I shall remember this, she thought queerly, although none of it has anything to do with me: the frightened horse and the dazzle of light on the dangling chain.
Uncle David’s door was open, but the office was empty. She sat down to wait, picked up last week’s copy of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, and was unable to read. Without moving, almost frozen, she waited for, and also dreaded, the sound of Uncle David’s footsteps on the stairs.
“In a doctor’s eyes,” Uncle David said, “the body is only a machine. Like the horseless carriage to the mechanic. That’s all there is to it.”
She could not look at him. With the fingers of one hand she smoothed the nails of the other. Pink nails, neatly rounded and glossy as shells.
“From what you tell me,” Uncle David said gently, “it’s pretty clear what’s the matter. But I shall need to look, all the same.”
Burning, burning shame. Wherever does one find the courage to do this?
“Just lie down and put the sheet over yourself. I shall step out. When you’re ready, call me.”
She lay quite still. The corset, the corset cover, the chemise and the petticoats lay on a chair. They looked ashamed, limp and exposed like that in a strange place. She closed her eyes so as not to see them, or the ceiling or anything. She called out.
When the sheet was lifted, cool air swept over her and she felt cold metal. Her hands were clenched.
I am not here. I am somebody else.
The sheet was drawn up again.
“Get dressed,” Uncle David said. “We’ll talk afterward.”
His voice was dry, without emotion, and she knew he was suppressing a terrible anger. So it was true.
Now panic shook her. A panic as awful as if she had been tottering on a cliff in a roaring wind, or as if she had been lying alone in an enormous house at night, with footsteps coming up the stairs. She made herself stand and fasten her clothes and tie her shoes. Tears poured; she wept without making a sound.
When Uncle David returned to the room, he said softly, “Don’t cry, Hennie.” All the anger had gone out of his voice. But the tears still slid down her cheeks.
The old man looked away. Drab, sorry sparrows, hunched in their feathers, Dan’s poor people, cheeped on the windowsill. The old man watched them while he tapped with a pencil on the desk, making a little marching rhythm. After a minute he spoke.
“Will you tell me about it, Hennie?”
When she opened her mouth, no sound came until, straining, she was able to whisper, “I can’t.”
“All right. I suppose there’s nothing to tell … it happened, that’s all. At least you love each other, and that’s what matters.”
Yes, in his practical way, he was thinking as he always did, All right, it happened; now we must think of what to do about it. And this, along with the absence of reproach and the swallowing of what must surely be his outrage, could have been such comfort, such strength on which to lean and take hope, except for those few words: At least you love each other.
Her tears stopped. In desperation she looked around the room, at the books and the medicines on the shelves. She made a vague gesture.
“Isn’t there some medicine—something?”
“Pe-Ru-Na?” David’s smile was a rueful twist of the lips. “It will cure almost everything. But not this.” His eyes rested on Hennie, touching her softly, softly. “You will have to be married,” he said. “Right away. Really, right away.”
Hennie bowed her head.
“Right away,” Uncle David emphasized. He asked then, “Does he know anything of this?”
Hennie shook her head.
“You must tell him today, Hennie.”
Why so proud? Put your head on this old man’s shoulder and cry it out: Oh, Uncle, you told me there are men who don’t stay with one woman, you told me.
“I will say the baby came early. No one will question it when I say so. I will take care of it, Hennie. Now you’re in this, you must brave it out.”
“I don’t know how I can do that, Uncle David.”
“You will.”
“You’re more sure than I am, then.”
“You will do it because you have to.”
His warm, firm hand, as he helped her with her coat, paused to press her shoulder. Opening the door, he reminded her, “Dear Hennie, the main thing is, at least you love each other. Just keep thinking of that.”
She waited for Dan on the stairs. While, in the half darkness, he searched for the keyhole, she blurted what she had to tell.
“Dan, I am having a baby.”
What plans she had labored ove
r during these last hours! Whether to berate him for his neglect of her, or to beguile him with lace at her throat and a charming hat, or to seize his hands and be tender, or to weep, or somehow to make him jealous (how, you fool, how?)—repeatedly she had considered all of these and discarded them. Now, after all, she had crudely and simply flung the words I am having a baby.
The door slammed back against the wall. He threw his coat—she had mended a burn-hole he had made in it at the lab—over the back of the chair and slid his armful of books into a pile on the table. She saw him catch his lip under his teeth.
“How do you know?”
“I went to Uncle David this morning.”
“Good God, not to him!”
“Why not to him?”
He struck a match to light a cigarette. The flame went out in his shaking fingers.
“Was he sure? Is it definite?”
“It’s definite.”
How many times had she come running up the stairs to this room, running to find the door wide open and Dan with his arms outstretched and a glowing face, mischievous, bright with expectation! They stood now with the width of the room between them. He struck another match and held it to the gas bracket; a weak light seeped out into the dusky afternoon.
“What did he say? Was he in a rage?”
That we must be married right away. That the important thing is, we love each other.
“He didn’t say very much.”
“He must have said something.” Dan looked down at the floor. “I should think he’d want to kill me.”
“There wouldn’t be much point in that, would there?”
“I’ve ruined his good opinion of me—of us both.”
“I don’t know. Mostly, I think, he’s just sorry.”
Sorry. Sad, yet more than that. “A sorry sight,” one says, by which one means something sad indeed but also pitiable because it need not have been.…
It came to her, in her misery, that she was thinking like an English teacher; she felt the absurdity of a smile on her lips.
