Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  “Come along, child, open the door!” It was Mrs. Henderson’s sister from Marblehead who was visiting in Chichester that day. I unbolted the door and met her greedy face which nosed into mine, seeking my feelings. “Is it a girl?” I asked.

  “It’s not anything yet, sweetie, but it will be one or the other in a minute and your mother wants you there.”

  “I’ll wait till it happens and then I’ll come in,” I said.

  “No, you come along with me now. She’s carrying on bad and wants you near.”

  Indeed, I could hear her carrying on, and while my feet were wooden, I knew at the same time that something must be done to hush her, and so I followed slowly, deliberately shutting off from my mind what was taking place in the house and instead calculating the number of steps from the shop to the back door. There were thirty-seven. I had never failed to count them when I went to the shop or when I returned and I never failed to forget how many there were.

  Mrs. Henderson’s sister ran her fingers through my hair as I opened the screen door for her. “How old are you?” she asked me. I told her that I was twelve. “Such pretty hair!” she said, but her face said, “To go through this and only twelve years old!”

  The air in the kitchen was solid with heat and even the March cold we brought in with us was immediately absorbed. The stove raged and the ebullient pots danced on the iron lids; roasted and sealed into the atmosphere was the smell of carbolic acid and, I thought, of yeast. Seeking the sources of the odors, I saw in the wide window-ledge, beside the geraniums, a shallow bowl over the sides of which swelled an unbaked loaf of bread, and I wondered vaguely which of the two ladies had left my mother’s side to make it.

  The house was suddenly quiet. The door to the bedroom was closed, and beyond it I could hear nothing save the rustle of cloth and a splash of water. Mrs. Henderson’s sister, her finger upon her lips, motioned me to the door, but I told her, “I’ll go if she calls.” The woman, who was not at all like her sister but was small and pretty and wore a velvety brown mole on her cheek like a beauty mark, hesitated and asked me if I were hungry. When I said I was not, she suggested that we play “Twenty Questions.” I replied that I would rather just sit and wait. She felt then that she had done her duty and, relieved, hurried into the bedroom and its fascinating business.

  My mother did not call for me, but now and then in the long hour when the obese and sweating dough held my gaze and my thoughts never came to life but labored futilely, I heard her groan and heard Mrs. Henderson speak kindly to her as she persuaded the child from its hull. Both the ladies had said to me when they arrived separately in the morning that they loved nothing so much as a tiny baby. I thought of Mrs. Brunson who still kept to her bed. Her pudgy fingers were always quarreling in a box of chocolate creams, trying to find one “fit to eat. My Gawd!” Now Betty, who had set her hopes on a baby, must content herself with her father’s Packard sedan, with presents he had brought her from New York: a fire-opal ring, an angora cape, a rock garden in a glass sphere. For the least of these, I would have traded my mother’s baby.

  At last I heard the cry of a child, and I sprang to my feet. Mrs. Henderson was intently slapping the skinny backside of the wailing baby boy who looked like a brick-red fish and nothing human. His black hair did not grow from his skull but lay close like a mat pasted on, and his poor head which seemed all out of shape, curiously dented and noded, lolled over the midwife’s wrist as though his neck had been wrung. When he was bathed and oiled and swaddled in a blanket, Mrs. Henderson carried him to the bedside and with a scoop of the blanket, framed the pitiful face from whose crimson mouth issued a ceaseless protest. My mother turned away with a groan. “Oh, take it away! Oh, leave me be!”

  The neighbor woman, her kindly mouth half open with anxiety and surprise, whispered to her sister, “Poor dear, she’s all worn out. Look, would you, he has his mother’s hair and eyes,” and she turned her bundle to me. I could see no eyes among the furrows of the ancient, vociferous face. But I pitied the improbable thing and against my will felt drawn toward it and asked if I might see its hands and feet, for I wondered if they, like the useless bud of a nose, had been executed as amateurishly. Indeed, no! Several authors had collaborated on the composition of this creature. The novice band that had created the nose which possessed only one property common to noses, that is, two large nostrils, had not been the same one which, with so grim and un-Christian a humor, had made the long, prehensile feet with all five toes the same length, flexing and straightening as though a jungle vine to swing on were just outside their reach.

  “Somebody’s pleased with her little brother, that’s not hard to see,” said Mrs. Henderson’s sister with a giggle as she held out a finger for the gruesome foot to grip. Brother! I felt with this prodigy only the most general fraternity: we breathed and were flesh. And yet, immediately the words were out, a leaven commenced to resolve my wonder into the emotion the woman had assumed in me and my pity became protective. Almost as soon as my instinct to mother him matured, there came to me the more complicated feeling of love, so that I longed to hold him myself and to kiss his bawling, cockled face, and to bestow upon him all the tender services that were the right of anything so supremely helpless.

  He was, said Mrs. Henderson to her sister, a “puny one,” and the sister, feeling his feet and skinny legs, agreed, although she said she had seen punier. My mother, who lay with her eyes closed, scarcely moved her lips when she said, “If it’s true he’s puny like you say, maybe he won’t live forever.”

  The midwife cried, “Oh, perhaps he’s a little small, but he’s healthy as you please. Just look at these fine hands and feet. Why, he has lovely bones, Mrs. Marburg!” But my mother had no wish to feel her son’s well-shaped feet. Her hands curled as though protecting themselves from contact with the baby and only when he was taken from the room did her long, scarred fingers lie straight upon the coverlet.

  Thinking she would fall asleep, I started to follow the women into the kitchen, but she called me back, piteously begging me not to leave her, and when I had gone to the bedside, she grasped my hand and would not let it go. From under the lids of her still closed eyes, a few tears seeped out. I was shocked at the sight of them and felt my throat grow thick.

  “Come closer,” she said softly. “I want to tell you something and I don’t want the ladies to hear.” I knelt at the side of the bed and she put her lips to my ear. “You’re only a little girl,” she whispered, “but you’re not too little to learn something. Your papa won’t come back now because somebody has taken his place. Listen to me: he prayed for a boy!”

  “Oh, Mamma!” I cried. “It’s just a little baby!”

  The poor red parcel wailed in the kitchen and Mrs. Henderson cooed, “There, there. Isn’t it a squirmer though!”

  “Everybody’s a baby once, darling,” continued my mother. “That don’t mean they don’t get cruel by and by. I’m afraid of it, Sonia!”

  But there was fear neither in her face nor in her voice as she lay back upon her pillows. I stood up. “Can’t I open a window, Mamma?” I asked. “It’s hot in here.” It was not hot but it was close with a strange odor.

  “Yes,” she said with a sigh. “Open the window and let me get some air. Even though the sea air is bad for a person. I should live in the mountains.”

  I drew up the green blind, opened the window, and stood there breathing in the moist cold. The sun was bright as gold on the sand. My mother talked on. “There is nothing here but sand! In the mountains I would have a garden with melons and radishes and cucumbers. My God, I would have flowers! I love flowers, Sonia girl. Maybe you might buy me some? Fifty cents out of the golden egg wouldn’t hurt, would it, to get your mother some tsvetiki?”

  “I’ll get you some,” I said. “Maybe when Mr. Henderson goes to Marblehead he can bring them back. Is it violets you want, Mamma?”

  “No, it’s roses I want. Little
yellow ones, Sonie.” She stretched out her hands to me but withdrew them as I went to her. “Do you remember what was the name he said for a boy that night he left?”

  I did remember. “Ivan.”

  “Yes, that was it. We’ll call him that. Ivan.” She pronounced it like a curse in order that without delay the child might shoulder the double burden of her hatred for him and her hatred for his father who had used the name to taunt her.

  2

  Until the Hotel Barstow opened and Miss Pride had come back and the Brunsons had gone to Provincetown, I was completely absorbed in my brother, and my daydreams of Boston came to me only at intervals. And still, though my love for him was so despotic that I could not imagine loving anyone else so much, I realized, the first time I saw Miss Pride at her regular place in the dining-room, that he had not, after all, won my whole heart. One of the waitresses had cut her finger, and I was sent in with the dessert, a bowl of canned peaches and a thin slice of chocolate cake. Miss Pride had been reading a letter but when I served her, she looked up.

  “How d’you do, Sonia? Are you taking your mother’s place today?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’ll be here in her place all summer.”

  “Oh, indeed? Does she have other work?”

  “No, ma’am. Mamma isn’t very well this summer.” Her eyes demanded the nature of my mother’s illness, and I faltered, “She had a baby on the twenty-first of March.”

  “Mm.” Then, as though she had given me as much time as she could spare, she turned again to her letter. I thought I had heard a note of disapproval in her voice and I regretted that I had not said my mother had broken her arm.

  A few days later, she came into her room as I was dusting the bureau and, handing me a parcel wrapped in blue tissue paper, said, “I didn’t know whether the baby was a boy or a girl, so I brought a little thing that would do for either.” She left the room at once, before I had even time to thank her. My hands trembled as I untied the white satin ribbon around the little box. I was sure she had given Ivan a silver spoon. Instead, from a nest of white paper, I lifted out a bright yellow celluloid rattle made in the shape of a gourd. Still pasted to the neck was a sticker giving the name of a Marblehead novelty shop and the price, “15¢.” My disappointment lay heavily on my heart until it was lightened by a remark my mother made when she looked at it. “Now that’s what I call ladylike,” she said, shaking the rattle for her own amusement. “It shows she don’t think we’re poor or anyway she don’t want us to know that she knows we’re poor. If she had given us something useful, I would be mad.” Mrs. Brunson, she went on to say, was not ladylike, because she frequently reminded me of my poverty by giving me Betty’s outgrown dresses and sweaters. Until now I had not perceived the insult at the core of her generosity and had been only grateful. Mrs. Henderson, who was calling on my mother, eyed the rattle and said nothing. “Isn’t that right, Mrs. Henderson?”

  “I don’t know but what it is, Mrs. Marburg,” replied our neighbor in a voice of restraint. “As the saying is, it’s not the gift but the spirit in which it is given.”

  During this summer of my thirteenth year, I was in the dining-room regularly, and because I often served Miss Pride’s table and carefully attended whatever she said, I learned a great deal about her. I had been in the habit of thinking that she had come to the Hotel Barstow all her life, but I learned that a long time before she had spent every summer in Europe. Travel had left no mark upon her. When she spoke of France or Italy or Germany or England, it was to condemn the train service and the touts who “sprang out of the ground, especially in the Latin countries, selling everything regurgitated by the ocean and everything exported by the Japanese.” She would say, “They hang too many pictures on one wall in the galleries. The Uffizi is a tiresome junk-shop.” And I could see her marching through Europe without surprise, taken in by nothing.

  Occasionally Miss Pride’s lawyer, a Mr. Breckenridge, came to luncheon and I heard them talking of taxes and dividends. Once she said, “When you get back to town, I’d be obliged if you’d give Barton a ring and tell him I want to sell my Sears Roebuck. I’m going in for public utilities.” I was deeply impressed by her State Street argot, a few phrases of which I had heard Dr. Brunson use to his friends. But Dr. Brunson could never have said, with such casual yet unfeigned interest, “By the way, what did the pound do in the Bourse yesterday?”

  Even more than by her familiarity with high finance, I was stirred by her intellectual life. For years without fail, she had set aside two hours of each day, from eleven until one, when she sat erectly in a corner of the lobby reading The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, and the novels of Trollope, Henry James, Thackeray, and William Dean Howells. When I was enchanted by a book and did not put it down for several hours together or when, in the winter time at school, I found myself in arithmetic lesson dreaming of being free to read, I was ashamed of my intemperance, remembering Miss Pride. I wondered if she would not be flattered if I dropped an intelligent remark now and again which would reveal that I had read what she had. Consequently I borrowed The Awkward Age, by Henry James, from the public library. The title appealed to me for I had heard Mrs. Henderson say of her daughter, Sarah, that she was at “the awkward age.” After a tormenting evening of poring over the completely unintelligible sentences of the novel, I returned it early in the morning of the next day and I did not try again to read Miss Pride’s favorite authors, but contented myself with attracting her attention in more modest ways. I made her a pen-wiper out of the top of a black cotton stocking and delivered it with a bunch of black-eyed Susans. She thanked me graciously. “You are very thoughtful,” she said. “I will think of you every time I wipe my pen.” Emboldened, I invited her to come see my little brother of whose appearance I was very proud, but she declined. “Some other day, my dear,” she said. I never had the courage to ask her again, for I felt that she was not really interested in Ivan. I told her once that he had prickly heat. She shuddered, “Oh, mercy! How dreadful!” It had not seemed dreadful to me, but only uncomfortable for my little brother. Later on I realized that by “dreadful” she had meant “unattractive.”

  I was pained that summer by an episode in which she figured. Gonzales’ little boy, Emmanuel, had clever hands and often painted water colors of flowers and waves and bright blue birds, and this year he had begun to carve things out of soap. One day he came proudly into the kitchen with a little madonna he had made. Everyone marveled at the folds of her gown, the delicacy of her halo, and the perfection of her tiny, snubbed nose. Audrey, the headwaitress, said that the figure must be exhibited in the dining-room to the guests at luncheon. Emmanuel’s protests were taken as modesty, and so that day, the little Virgin was passed around from table to table and was universally admired. At last it was placed before Miss Pride who examined it carefully and did not smile; with a frown of annoyance, she lifted it to her nose and sniffed. “This is my soap,” she said sharply. A silence fell upon the dining room and Audrey blushed as Miss Pride handed the figure back and waved her away. Some days later, I heard Mrs. McKenzie tell Mrs. Prather that Gonzales had paid Miss Pride ten cents for the cake of soap his son had stolen from the box under her bed.

  The old ladies, with whom Miss Pride never associated, gossiped about her incessantly when she was out of the Hotel, and it was through them that I heard tales of Hopestill Mather, so discrediting that they afforded me the greatest joy. Mrs. McKenzie had heard from the mother of one of Hopestill’s schoolmates that she had so hot a temper not one of the mistresses could discipline her, that she deliberately chewed gum in chapel, had spoken of God as “the old boy,” and of the Apostles as “the whole gang.” Miss Pride, it was said, obviously had no affection for her and only tolerated her in the house during the brief vacations at Christmas and Easter. In the summer, she was sent to camp in Maine.

  “I pity the little thing,” said Mrs. McKenzie in a low voice. “It can’t be a natural li
fe, you know. I’ve heard that her father wasn’t all he should have been. Bad blood shows up, try as you may to conceal it. But fancy the high-spirited child spending her holidays in that gloomy old house on Pinckney Street! As I understand it, she hasn’t any other close relatives. The line is dying out, and I do believe our friend is the last of the Prides.”

  If I were Hopestill Mather, I would never permit my dear aunt to send me away to boarding school. I would prevail upon her to let me go to a day-school in the neighborhood so that I might sit across from her each day at tea and on certain nights have dinner with her. On Sunday I would go, dressed soberly like her, to church. After the service (and I supposed we would sit in her own hired pew) we would walk around the basin of the Charles, no matter what the weather was, and then would lunch together at a long table, being sparing of our helpings.

  Occasionally I heard Miss Pride speak of her niece to friends who came to the Hotel. I recollect one conversation I heard when Mrs. Brooks, who had brought Hopestill to the Hotel some years before, had come to spend the night. Miss Pride said, “I sometimes wish I had never seen the child, Josie. Yesterday I had a most unfavorable letter from one of the counselors. She’s a born trouble-maker, you know. What will she be at twenty? It’s not only bravado—one can’t begrudge a child a measure of that. It’s a deep rebelliousness against everything fitting and proper.”