Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  “I don’t know . . .” I began, but he cupped his hands round his plump lips and whispered loudly, “Your mother is going to have a baby, muchacha.”

  2

  When I came home from school that afternoon, my mother was not in her accustomed place beside the stove, a most surprising fact, for she was a creature of tenacious habit, and had, since I could remember, taken up her place there an hour before sundown to idle over a glass of strong and bitter tea. She would rise, as I entered, and embrace me as if I were an intimate friend for whose visit she had been impatiently waiting, and then, drawing me to a chair beside hers, she would rub my cold hands between hers and say, “Oh, Sonie, how cold you are! Oh, the darling little hands all red!”

  Often at this hour, I found neighbor women seated round about her, going over in exhaustive detail the difficulties of maintaining a household when there was no money to pay the high prices of food. I wondered if these women were as gloomy in their own houses as they were in ours, or if my mother’s winter melancholy was contagious to them as it was to my father and myself. Strangely enough, when the heaviness of the bad weather skies had invaded our kitchen, she cast off the dark colors she had worn all summer and stepped forward, as lively as a bird, in a costume like a ballerina’s. But her full skirt, the length of a peasant’s dress, which was made of black challis and printed with bright pink flowers and fantastic pea-green leaves, her scarlet flannel blouse with tarnished German silver buttons, and her high blue leather boots, laced with tan hide, were not an antidote to her perverse mopes but seemed rather to be the excuse for them. Mrs. Henderson would come in and say, “How gay you look, Mrs. Marburg! Why, I can warm my hands at you.” But my mother, in a voice bleaker than any winter wind along the beach, would answer, “It is the red that fools you. But look at the boots. Now they’re the color my hands used to be all day long in Moscow, even in the house, and they were so stiff I couldn’t hold so much as a wine glass by its little tiny stem.” Sometimes, out of spite, she would then slip her arms into the sleeves of a blue Beacon-cloth bathrobe whose skirt hung to the floor; a high, pointed hood was attached to the back of the neck. It belonged to my father, and the sleeves were so long that the unfilled portions of them flapped like seals’ flippers as she gestured with her invisible hands. Had it not been for her face, she would have looked like a monk of some outlandish order.

  Softly I opened the door to the bedroom. She was lying there, either asleep or else so deep in thought that she did not hear me on the threshold. The dark green blinds were down, but the light of the sunset, coming through the holes and falling on her immobile face, gave it an even incandescence like that which comes through the hand when it is held up to a bright light. Her body was covered with an army blanket and though the room was cold, one bare white foot dangled over the side of the bed. I could see my breath. The windows did not anywhere quite fit their frames and we had failed to stop up many of the cracks in the walls, either through laziness or through the conviction that it would do no good.

  There was only one other article of furniture in the room besides the bed, a tall combination wardrobe and bureau with a sliver of flawed mirror at the top, in a frame carved with the same ornate roses that decorated the feet. My father, I suppose because it was solid and perhaps reminded him of something at home, admired the schrank as he called it, and each spring he spent one entire day polishing it with salt and olive oil. Today, to my surprise, I saw that the two pots of geraniums stood on the top, blocking out the mirror. Their transfer from the sunny kitchen window was stranger to me even than the sight of my mother lying in bed before we had had our supper. Was she, I wondered, going to have the baby now?

  Presently I tiptoed out and went to my father’s shop. He was not working. He was sitting on the bench before the monkey stove, his head in his hands.

  “Papa?”

  He did not look up, but he thrust forth his long arm in welcome. “Hello, Sonie girl. Didn’t you eat anything yet today?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Why didn’t you come home at noon?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I guess I wasn’t hungry, Papa. I guess I had an apple. What’s the matter with Mamma?”

  “She’s tired maybe.” Now he turned his face toward me and I saw that his blue eyes were troubled, but they showed no signs of their storm of last night. He smiled and with two hard fingers that smelled of tallow, he tweaked my nose. “I know what you want, Gretchen von Hexensee, you want to look at the tintypes.”

  They were not really tintypes, but the word amused him. I fetched the fat album from the high shelf above the window. It lay with his fat little Messbuch and a few fine leather-bound volumes of Schiller, Leibnitz, Cicero, Goethe, Mommsen, and Balzac. The books were not worn. Probably my father had never read them. They were mostly gifts from his schoolmates on the day of his commencement from the gymnasium and were inscribed in a bewildering handwriting, the same that I saw on the occasional letter which came to him from Würzburg.

  Together we looked at the photographs in which my relatives genially smiled forth, all with my father’s eyes. My grandparents sat side by side on a plush settle with a high, carved back. Their fat arms were intertwined and they stared directly into the camera. Their round faces were frank and innocent and benign; and their sober, old-fashioned clothes—my grandfather wore a long collar with a full ascot, a black coat with wide satin lapels and upon his knees he balanced a gleaming top hat, while my grandmother, with a black lace jabot at her stout old neck, was dressed in a striped jacket with leg-o’-mutton sleeves and a deep pointed bodice which met a black skirt—advertised them as people of respectability. Both of them were dead. One of the letters that had come to my father had been from his brother, Christian, announcing that they had died within half a year of one another.

  My favorite picture was one of my cousin Peter taken when he was about five years old. His wide eyes stared at the photographer’s incorporeal birdie and his lips were opened in perplexity. He was a bewitching little boy with fair hair, matted in curls tight to his skull, his solid body was encased in leather breeches, a jacket decorated with hearts, and tasseled socks. In his hands he ferociously clutched a hat with an improbably long feather.

  “Some day, when we are rich,” my father said, “we will go to see that boy. Shall we take our Packard car with us and honk outside of Fransiskanerstrasse zwei und zwanzig? Or should we not take it and walk from the station as calm as you please?”

  I debated for a moment. “Let’s take the Packard car,” I said.

  “I don’t know when it would be that we would go.”

  “If Miss Pride keeps on buying shoes, we’ll get rich.”

  “She only feels sorry for me, and I don’t like that. No, in America they don’t know a good boot from a bad.”

  “Then why don’t we go to Germany, Pa?”

  When he answered, he looked away from me. He moved to the window and stood looking out at the last glow of the sun on Boston. “I would be ashamed,” he said. “How am I going to explain to my brothers and friends that I never had my child baptized?”

  Whereas it embarrassed me to have Gonzales talk about his sins of omission, it frightened me to hear my father speak of them. Once, at Christmas time, he had made a crèche for me, carving out a youthful Mary and the doe-eyed animals and three Teutonic wise-men and the faceless Christ-child with a boyish rapture. I was delighted with it until, once it had been brought from the shop into the house, I saw that my mother had no interest in it and that my father had lost his. It was as if some ungovernable force in her was determined to extinguish every joy her husband might have. In his frustration and furious disappointment, he abruptly seized the platform and dashed it to the floor so that all the figures were broken and the frame was splintered. He stared down at the fragments, his hands hanging loosely at his sides. He said nothing, but in a moment he took his hat from the shelf and went out. Hours
later, when he came back, totally drunk, he sat in the kitchen for a long time, laughing his inhuman laugh. In the morning I found him sleeping with his head on the table. For a week thereafter, whenever we were alone together, he invited me to look on him as the most obstinate of all sinners, and while I was not certain what he meant, I would rack my brains for a pretext to escape him, for I was mortally afraid.

  He had pressed his cheek against the windowpane and when he spoke, a cloud formed on the glass. “Or how confess it to a priest?” he inquired. “Or anything else?”

  There was no sound in the room but the spanking of a live coal against the purple sides of the monkey stove. And my father was motionless, with his eyes and his lips closed. Perhaps he had cried last night out of fear of his sins and the punishment God would deal to him. And what were his sins? He did not tell lies and he did not steal and he was not a murderer. It was true that he spent a good deal of time carousing with the Coast Guards, but so did the fishermen. What, then, had he done that tormented him so, even now when there were no outward signs of it beyond the pallid weariness of his face and the tension of his pose? I would have asked and my lips parted, but something hindered me from intruding upon his mysterious meditations and I said, my voice cracking, “I guess I better go help Mamma.”

  “Ja, you better,” He sighed so that his whole lengthy frame shivered, and he turned to me with a willful smile which did not fool me, for the corners of his mouth twitched and would have turned down but for the effort he expended on their upward curve. “Don’t you expect me for supper. I have some business.” With this, he took down his sheep-lined mackinaw and his hunter’s cap, put a pipe and tin of tobacco in his pocket and drew on a pair of mittens.

  “Are you going to the Coast Guard?” I asked him.

  “Curiosity killed the cat,” he said waggishly but, like his smile, his jollity was forced and did not take me in.

  “Where are you going, Pa?”

  Suddenly irritated, he pushed me towards the door. “Shut up now,” he snapped. “Go along to the house and mind your own business.”

  I watched from the kitchen windows until he had disappeared round the bend of the road, and then I stole out and followed. Over the crusted ruts for a mile I ran, ducking behind cottages and sheds when I feared he might turn around. At this hour the village was usually deserted save for the men going in and out of the pool hall in the splattered window of which a sign futilely proclaimed, “Ladies Invited.” I had expected my father to turn in there, but he went on, passed the large, shadowy general store about which, even in winter and when the door was closed, there hung an odor of fish and fishermen and a rich, sweet smell which came either from raisins or chewing tobacco. I glanced across the street at the Bijou where the obfuscated films which wavered before our eyes like dispirited ectoplasm bore no more relationship to entertainment than the lusterless exterior bore to any jewel known to man. It was closed now and the torn sign advertising “Ben Hur” was streaked from melted snow. These, with a few churches, a little library, and a post-office made up our business district. On one side, overlooking the sea, was the Coast Guard house, on the other, overlooking the bay, was a small white hospital, enveloped for a quarter of a mile on all sides by a pall of mortal silence. Midway between the village and the hospital was the school, so newly built that its yellow-brick walls had not yet been relieved by shrubs and ivy. As I lingered in the doorway of the store until my father should be a safe distance ahead of me (he had paused to knock out his pipe), I was visited by a longing to see Marblehead, Salem, and Boston, and I was as weakened by the feeling as though I had seen them and something in the winter evening had made me nostalgic. And then I conceived the stubborn notion that the crisis which my father was passing through would end in a change of residence. Perhaps even now he was headed for the Marblehead bus stop and when he came home, he would have news of a house and a shop to which we would immediately move.

  It was with a flush of anger that I saw, in a few minutes, what his destination was: the Catholic church, a small white building with a high green spire. It was called “The Chapel of the Little Flower.” I followed him.

  My schoolmates had told me, in frightened whispers, that Catholics prayed the dead out of Purgatory, whatever that might be, and I fancied my father kneeling before a High Necromancer, chanting in an unknown language. I had heard that priests were ghosts and since they had no substance, could never marry. Someone said they could change from one thing to another: “They can look like anything they want, like a billy goat if they want.” There was something impressive to me in the sight of my father starting out to Mass on Sunday, wearing his suit and his polished boots, and carrying the Messbuch with its bright ribbons. Impressive and a little scandalous, even though I knew he never got as far as the church porch, but instead took another road which led to the Coast Guard house where he would spend an hour playing checkers.

  A few parishioners were kneeling in the front pews of the darkened chapel, and now and again the door to the confessional swung open; I could hear the wicket slide and presently another penitent entered the box. There was a murmur, caught by a silence, and broken at last by the faint, sibilant Latin of the absolution. Those who had been cleansed slipped into the kneeling benches to say their penance, and as their lips mouthed the words of the prayers, their eyes were fixed upon a shining golden object on the altar: it looked like a child’s drawing of the sun, for from the round white center, a thousand rays of gold shot out, glittering in the red light cast by the vigil lamp which swung very gently at the end of a long iron chain. My eyes grew accustomed to the shadows and I saw my father at the altar rail, far to one side, his head buried in his arms. Each time someone emerged from the confessional, I expected him to go in, but he did not stir. It was cold in the church and I shivered, leaned up against the side of the pew, and hugged my knees. It seemed to me a long time that I waited for the terrifying moment when my father would become a part of the esoteric game. At least five people went into the closet with their sins and came out purged of them. The last light of the day perished from the stained glass windows. Now only two people besides my father and myself remained.

  Presently, the Irish priest came out, a tall, red-haired young man, round-shouldered and near-sighted, with a face ravaged by boredom and eczema, but not an unpleasant face and in no way similar to my picture which had represented him as lithe and swart, wearing a mustache and pointed beard over which darted bright evil eyes. He passed close by my father as he went into the vestry, but my father, deep in his prayer, did not look up, and only after the door had closed behind the priest did he rise and hasten out, looking straight ahead so that he did not see me. But when the swinging doors had shut upon him, I heard a voice in the vestibule intercept him. “Thank God, man! You’ve come back by the grace of God! The new one will have a better chance than Sonie.” It was Gonzales. There was the sound of a match being struck, and my father replied, “You fool busybody.” The outer door opened and banged to, forcing a blast of cold air into the church. Gonzales went down the central aisle, genuflected at the altar, and went to the right where he knelt before a statue of a woman saint in a brown robe who held roses in her hands. He crossed himself and began to pray audibly. I ran from the church appalled, for there was a presence there, not of God nor of angels, but of something human, yet shockingly bodiless, and I felt as I had done the time I had dreamed that I was dead and the only thing left of me was the knowledge, suspended in a ball of solitude, that I was dead.

  The house was as it had been when I came in from school. My father was not there and the shop was dark, and my mother, still lying in bed, had not changed her position. I spread a piece of bread with margarine and sprinkled it with sugar and I ate, sitting on the floor by the stove, as in the light from the fire through the isinglass I read a book lent to me by a schoolmate called Frances and the Irrepressibles at Buena Vista Farm. The thick pages were glossy and each one bore an act
ual photograph of a character or a whole group of them together, posing in the costumes they had worn at a mock wedding or at the minstrel show they had ingeniously produced. A child cannot sustain his moods for long, and I, after a few minutes of inattention, became completely absorbed in the adventures of these wealthy, carefree, and urbane children. They were all upright and considerate with the one exception of a rotten little boy named Dickey Doolittle who one had no doubt would come all right in the end under the influence of his companions. They all lived in Wisconsin on a farm where fresh diversions presented themselves every day and where in the neighborhood, chicken thieves, Indian caves, buried treasure, and watermelon patches were to be had for the asking.

  The door opened and my father, in an ugly temper, scolded me: “Now you’ll go blind. What is the meaning of this, young lady?” When he found that the mantle of the Coleman lamp was burned out, he cursed savagely and ordered me to fetch a new one from the top shelf. As I did so, a pipe clattered to the floor and broke in two. It was one he never used, but he kept it as a curio, for its bowl was porcelain and baked into it was a picture of the cathedral at Worms.

  “Now damn you!” he screamed. “Now give me the mantle from your damned butter fingers!”

  He slapped me on the side of the head with his open hand and there was a sudden ache in my opposite ear. Then he turned away and as he adjusted the mantle, he growled, “What is the use? They make me come into a dark house and then they break my things. They should go to jail.” When the white light flared up, I saw him move the red felt cozy and look at a heap of bits of white china, all that was left of his coffee pot.

  “I didn’t do it!” I cried. “I never did!”

  “I know it,” he said. “Your mother did it. She picked it up and threw it at the stove.” Our eyes turned together and saw, beneath the oven door, two or three white glittering splinters amongst the ashes. I could not imagine so violent a gesture in my lazy mother. Her only weapon was her tireless voice. There must have been a quarrel of unprecedented savagery while I was at school, and I was glad that I had not come home at lunch time but instead had eaten an apple and a fig-Newton given to me by the Hendersons.