My Sister's Hand in Mine

by Jane Bowles

  Sometimes an ecstatic and voracious look would come into her eyes, as if she would devour her very existence because she loved it so much. Such passionate moments of appreciation were perhaps her only reward for living a life which she knew in her heart was one of perpetual narrow escape. Although Sadie was neither sly nor tricky, but on the contrary profoundly sincere and ingenuous, she schemed unconsciously to keep the Hoffers in the apartment with them, because she did not want to reveal the true singleness of her interest either to Harriet or to herself. She sensed as well that Harriet would find it more difficult to break away from all three of them (because as a group they suggested a little society, which impressed her sister) than she would to escape from her alone. In spite of her mortal dread that Harriet might strike out on her own, she had never brooded on the possibility of her sister’s marrying. Here, too, her instinct was correct: she knew that she was safe and referred often to the “normal channels of marriage,” conscious all the while that such an intimate relationship with a man would be as uninteresting to Harriet as it would to herself.

  From a financial point of view this communal living worked out more than satisfactorily. Each sister had inherited some real estate which yielded her a small monthly stipend; these stipends, combined with the extra money that the Hoffers contributed out of their salaries, covered their common living expenses. In return for the extra sum the Hoffers gave toward the household expenses, Sadie contributed her work, thus saving them the money they would have spent hiring a servant, had they lived alone. A fourth sister, whose marriage had proved financially more successful than Evy’s, contributed generously toward Harriet’s support at Camp Cataract, since Harriet’s stipend certainly did not yield enough to cover her share of their living expenses at the apartment and pay for a long vacation as well.

  Neither Sadie nor Bert Hoffer had looked up when Evy’s fork clattered onto her plate. Sadie was truly absorbed in her own thoughts, whereas Bert Hoffer was merely pretending to be, while secretly he rejoiced at the unmistakable signal that his wife was about to blow up.

  “When I find out why Sadie looks like that if she isn’t going to be crazy, then I’ll eat,” Evelyn announced flatly, and she folded her arms across her chest.

  “I’m not crazy,” Sadie said indistinctly, glancing toward Bert Hoffer, not in order to enlist his sympathies, but to avoid her younger sister’s sharp scrutiny.

  “There’s a big danger of your going crazy because of Grandma and Harriet,” said Evelyn crossly. “That’s why I get so nervous the minute you look a little out of the way, like you do tonight. It’s not that you get Harriet’s expression … but then you might be getting a different kind of craziness … maybe worse. She’s all right if she can go away and there’s not too much excitement … it’s only in spells anyway. But you—you might get a worse kind. Maybe it would be steadier.”

  “I’m not going to be crazy,” Sadie murmured apologetically.

  Evelyn glowered in silence and picked up her fork, but then immediately she let it fall again and turned on her sister with renewed exasperation. “Why don’t you ask me why I’m not going to be crazy?” she demanded. “Harriet’s my sister and Grandma’s my grandma just as much as she is yours, isn’t she?”

  Sadie’s eyes had a faraway look.

  “If you were normal,” Evelyn pursued, “you’d give me an intelligent argument instead of not paying any attention. Do you agree, Hoffer?”

  “Yes, I do,” he answered soberly.

  Evelyn stiffened her back. “I’m too much like everybody else to be crazy,” she announced with pride. “At a picture show, I feel like the norm.”

  The technical difficulty of disappearing without announcing her plan to Evelyn suddenly occurred to Sadie, who glanced up quite by accident at her sister. She knew, of course, that Harriet was supposed to avoid contact with her family during these vacation months at the doctor’s request and even at Harriet’s own; but like some herd animal, who though threatened with the stick continues grazing, Sadie pursued her thoughts imperturbably. She did not really believe in Harriet’s craziness nor in the necessity of her visits to Camp Cataract, but she was never in conscious opposition to the opinions of her sisters. Her attitude was rather like that of a child who is bored by the tedium of grown-up problems and listens to them with a vacant ear. As usual she was passionately concerned only with successfully dissimulating what she really felt, and had she been forced to admit openly that there existed such a remarkable split between her own opinions and those of her sisters, she would have suffered unbelievable torment. She was able to live among them, listening to their conferences with her dead outside ear (the more affluent sister was also present at these sessions, and her husband as well), and even to contribute a pittance toward Harriet’s support at the camp, without questioning the validity either of their decisions or of her own totally divergent attitude. By a self-imposed taboo, awareness of this split was denied her, and she had never reflected upon it.

  Harriet had gone to Camp Cataract for the first time a year ago, after a bad attack of nerves combined with a return of her pleurisy. It had been suggested by the doctor himself that she go with his own wife and child instead of traveling with one of her sisters. Harriet had been delighted with the suggestion and Sadie had accepted it without a murmur. It was never her habit to argue, and in fact she had thought nothing of Harriet’s leaving at the time. It was only gradually that she had begun writing the letters to Harriet about Camp Cataract, the nomads and the wanderlust—for she had written others similar to her latest one, but never so eloquent or full of conviction. Previous letters had contained a hint or two here and there, but had been for the main part factual reports about her summer life in the apartment. Since writing this last letter she had not been able to forget her own wonderful and solemn words (for she was rarely eloquent), and even now at the dinner table they rose continually in her throat so that she was thrilled over and over again and could not bother her head about announcing her departure to Evelyn. “It will be easier to write a note,” she said to herself. “I’ll pack my valise and walk out tomorrow afternoon, while they’re at business. They can get their own dinners for a few days. Maybe I’ll leave a great big meat loaf.” Her eyes were shining like stars.

  “Take my plate and put it in the warmer, Hoffer,” Evelyn was saying. “I won’t eat another mouthful until Sadie tells us what we can expect. If she feels she’s going off, she can at least warn us about it. I deserve to know how she feels … I tell every single thing I feel to her and Harriet … I don’t sneak around the house like a thief. In the first place I don’t have any time for sneaking, I’m at the office all day! Is this the latest vogue, this sneaking around and hiding everything you can from your sister? Is it?” She stared at Bert Hoffer, widening her eyes in fake astonishment. He shrugged his shoulders.

  “I’m no sneak or hypocrite and neither are you, Hoffer, you’re no hypocrite. You’re just sore at the world, but you don’t pretend you love the world, do you?”

  Sadie was lightheaded with embarrassment. She had blanched at Evy’s allusion to her going, which she mistook naturally for a reference to her intention of leaving for Camp Cataract.

  “Only for a few days…” she mumbled in confusion, “and then I’ll be right back here at the table.”

  Evelyn looked at her in consternation. “What do you mean by announcing calmly how many days it’s going to be?” she shouted at her sister. “That’s really sacrilegious! Did you ever hear of such a crusty sacrilegious remark in your life before?” She turned to Bert Hoffer, with a horror-stricken expression on her face. “How can I go to the office and look neat and clean and happy when this is what I hear at home … when my sister sits here and says she’ll only go crazy for a few days? How can I go to the office after that? How can I look right?”

  “I’m not going to be crazy,” Sadie assured her again in a sorrowful tone, because although she felt relieved that Evelyn had not, after all, guessed the truth, her
s was not a nature to indulge itself in trivial glee at having put someone off her track.

  “You just said you were going to be crazy,” Evelyn exclaimed heatedly. “Didn’t she, Bert?”

  “Yes,” he answered, “she did say something like that.…”

  The tendons of Evelyn’s neck were stretched tight as she darted her eyes from her sister’s face to her husband’s. “Now, tell me this much,” she demanded, “do I go to the office every day looking neat and clean or do I go looking like a bum?”

  “You look O.K.,” Bert said.

  “Then why do my sisters spit in my eye? Why do they hide everything from me if I’m so decent? I’m wide open, I’m frank, there’s nothing on my mind besides what I say. Why can’t they be like other sisters all over the world? One of them is so crazy that she must live in a cabin for her nerves at my expense, and the other one is planning to go crazy deliberately and behind my back.” She commenced to struggle out of her chair, which as usual proved to be a slow and laborious task. Exasperated, she shoved the table vehemently away from her toward the opposite wall. “Why don’t we leave the space all on one side when there’s no company?” she screamed at both of them, for she was now annoyed with Bert Hoffer as well as with Sadie. Fortunately they were seated at either end of the table and so did not suffer as a result of her violent gesture, but the table jammed into four chairs ranged on the opposite side, pinning three of them backward against the wall and knocking the fourth onto the floor.

  “Leave it there,” Evelyn shouted dramatically above the racket. “Leave it there till doomsday,” and she rushed headlong out of the room.

  They listened to her gallop down the hall.

  “What about the dessert?” Bert Hoffer asked Sadie with a frown. He was displeased because Evelyn had spoken to him sharply.

  “Leftover bread pudding without raisins.” She had just gotten up to fetch the pudding when Evelyn summoned them from the parlor.

  “Come in here, both of you,” she hollered. “I have something to say.”

  They found Evelyn seated on the couch, her head tilted way back on a cushion, staring fixedly at the ceiling. They settled into easy chairs opposite her.

  “I could be normal and light in any other family,” she said, “I’m normally a gay light girl … not a morose one. I like all the material things.”

  “What do you want to do tonight?” Bert Hoffer interrupted, speaking with authority. “Do you want to be excited or do you want to go to the movies?” He was always bored by these self-appraising monologues which succeeded her explosions.

  Evy looked as though she had not heard him, but after a moment or two of sitting with her eyes shut she got up and walked briskly out of the room; her husband followed her.

  Neither of them had said good-bye to Sadie, who went over to the window as soon as they’d gone and looked down on the huge unsightly square below her. It was crisscrossed by trolley tracks going in every possible direction. Five pharmacies and seven cigar stores were visible from where she stood. She knew that modern industrial cities were considered ugly, but she liked them. “I’m glad Evy and Bert have gone to a picture show,” Sadie remarked to herself after a while. “Evy gets high-strung from being at the office all day.”

  A little later she turned her back on the window and went to the dining room.

  “Looks like the train went through here,” she murmured, gazing quietly at the chairs tilted back against the wall and the table’s unsightly angle; but the tumult in her breast had not subsided, even though she knew she was leaving for Camp Cataract. Beyond the first rush of joy she had experienced when her plan had revealed itself to her earlier, in the parlor, the feeling of suspense remained identical, a curious admixture of anxiety and anticipation, difficult to bear. Concerning the mechanics of the trip itself she was neither nervous nor foolishly excited. “I’ll call up tomorrow,” she said to herself, “and find out when the buses go, or maybe I’ll take the train. In the morning I’ll buy three different meats for the loaf, if I don’t forget. It won’t go rotten for a few days, and even if it does they can eat at Martie’s or else Evy will make bologna and eggs … she knows how, and so does Bert.” She was not really concentrating on these latter projects any more than she usually did on domestic details.

  The lamp over the table was suspended on a heavy iron chain. She reached for the beaded string to extinguish the light. When she released it the massive lamp swung from side to side in the darkness.

  “Would you like it so much by the waterfall if you didn’t know the apartment was here?” she whispered into the dark, and she was thrilled again by the beauty of her own words. “How much more I’ll be able to say when I’m sitting right next to her,” she murmured almost with reverence. “… And then we’ll come back here,” she added simply, not in the least startled to discover that the idea of returning with Harriet had been at the root of her plan all along.

  Without bothering to clear the plates from the table, she went into the kitchen and extinguished the light there. She was suddenly overcome with fatigue.

  * * *

  When Sadie arrived at Camp Cataract it was raining hard.

  “This shingled building is the main lodge,” the hack driver said to her. “The ceiling in there is three times higher than average, if you like that style. Go up on the porch and just walk in. You’ll get a kick out of it.”

  Sadie reached into her pocketbook for some money.

  “My wife and I come here to drink beer when we’re in the mood,” he continued, getting out his change. “If there’s nobody much inside, don’t get panicky; the whole camp goes to the movies on Thursday nights. The wagon takes them and brings them back. They’ll be along soon.”

  After thanking him she got out of the cab and climbed the wooden steps on to the porch. Without hesitating she opened the door. The driver had not exaggerated; the room was indeed so enormous that it suggested a gymnasium. Wicker chairs and settees were scattered from one end of the floor to the other and numberless sawed-off tree stumps had been set down to serve as little tables.

  Sadie glanced around her and then headed automatically for a giant fireplace, difficult to reach because of the accumulation of chairs and settees that surrounded it. She threaded her way between these and stepped across the hearth into the cold vault of the chimney, high enough to shelter a person of average stature. The andirons, which reached to her waist, had been wrought in the shape of witches. She fingered their pointed iron hats. “Novelties,” she murmured to herself without enthusiasm. “They must have been especially made.” Then, peering out of the fireplace, she noticed for the first time that she was not alone. Some fifty feet away a fat woman sat reading by the light of an electric bulb.

  “She doesn’t even know I’m in the fireplace,” she said to herself. “Because the rain’s so loud, she probably didn’t hear me come in.” She waited patiently for a while and then, suspecting that the woman might remain oblivious to her presence indefinitely, she called over to her. “Do you have anything to do with managing Camp Cataract?” she asked, speaking loudly so that she could be heard above the rain.

  The woman ceased reading and switched her big light off at once, since the strong glare prevented her seeing beyond the radius of the bulb.

  “No, I don’t,” she answered in a booming voice. “Why?”

  Sadie, finding no answer to this question, remained silent.

  “Do you think I look like a manager?” the woman pursued, and since Sadie had obviously no intention of answering, she continued the conversation by herself.

  “I suppose you might think I was manager here, because I’m stout, and stout people have that look; also I’m about the right age for it. But I’m not the manager … I don’t manage anything, anywhere. I have a domineering cranium all right, but I’m more the French type. I’d rather enjoy myself than give orders.”

  “French…” Sadie repeated hesitantly.

  “Not French,” the woman corrected her. “Fr
ench type, with a little of the actual blood.” Her voice was cold and severe.

  For a while neither of them spoke, and Sadie hoped the conversation had drawn to a definite close.

  “Individuality is my god,” the woman announced abruptly, much to Sadie’s disappointment. “That’s partly why I didn’t go to the picture show tonight. I don’t like doing what the groups do, and I’ve seen the film.” She dragged her chair forward so as to be heard more clearly. “The steadies here—we call the ones who stay more than a fortnight steadies—are all crazy to get into birds-of-a-feather-flock-together arrangements. If you look around, you can see for yourself how clubby the furniture is fixed. Well, they can go in for it, if they want, but I won’t. I keep my chair out in the open here, and when I feel like it I take myself over to one circle or another … there’s about ten or twelve circles. Don’t you object to the confinement of a group?”

  “We haven’t got a group back home,” Sadie answered briefly.

  “I don’t go in for group worship either,” the woman continued, “any more than I do for the heavy social mixing. I don’t even go in for individual worship, for that matter. Most likely I was born to such a vigorous happy nature I don’t feel the need to worry about what’s up there over my head. I get the full flavor out of all my days whether anyone’s up there or not. The groups don’t allow for that kind of zip … never. You know what rotten apples in a barrel can do to the healthy ones.”

  Sadie, who had never before met an agnostic, was profoundly shocked by the woman’s blasphemous attitude. “I’ll bet she slept with a lot of men she wasn’t married to when she was younger,” she said to herself.