I did not answer but ran out of the house. The snow, which had let up for a little while around dinner time, was falling more thickly than ever and the loud wind drowned my voice as I stumbled down the road toward the village, calling to Ivan. Twice I thought I had found him and when I discovered that what I had seen in the distance was only a rock, I sank down with weariness and grief and would have stayed there but for the image of my brother as he might be suffering that drew me to my feet again. The versatile wind enclosed me in a live, round cloud and the next moment flattened me against a moving wall and then withdrew, leaving me in a noiseless little space where the snow fell gently and straight down. From time to time, I felt warmth slowly returning, but it never reached my feet or fingers because the wind halted it again and exploded charges of snow into my face or beleaguered me with unremitting blasts. Sometimes I plunged up to my knees in drifts as soft as pudding. I was trying to go in the direction of the Brunsons’, thinking he might have found his way there, but I could distinguish no landmark to set me right. In a brief lull of the wind, I heard the angry ocean and the next moment slipped and fell into a deep pit which I recognized as being a few hundred yards from the Coast Guard house. I rested a moment and closed my eyes to the wet snowflakes and then struggled up the steep bank. A sharp stone cut into the palm of my hand and I could feel blood seeping through my rent wool mitten. I called, “Halloo! Halloo!” hoping that one of the Coast Guards would hear me. I went on, bent nearly double against the blast. Now I had lost all sense of direction: when the wind paused, I listened for the ocean but the sound came now from one place, now from another. I did not know whether I was hearing the bay or the sea. I rose up straight to call again and saw through the snow, near by, a lighted doorway, and I ran on shouting. As I drew closer I saw that the figure framed in the yellow block of light was Mrs. Henderson, shaking out a tablecloth.
“Ivan is lost!” I cried.
“Lord have mercy! Sarah, Ross, Jack, Josephine, get on your overshoes! The little Marburg boy is lost in the snow!”
The three children and the father were ready at once, as if they had been awaiting the alarm, and with no more account of the catastrophe than they had heard through the open door to the dining-room where they had been sitting round the table playing Lotto, they hurtled out the back door and into the storm while Mrs. Henderson filled a glass with rum and told me to drink it before I went out again.
“You’re soaking wet,” she scolded me. “You should have come here first.” She tied a scarf about her head and went out after the others.
I started after her but halfway to the door shivered with mortal cold and turned back to drink the rum. It had an immediate effect on me. A bone-deep drowsiness made me nod and shake myself. I stared into the dining room from my place at the kitchen table and saw the scattered Lotto cards, the chairs pushed back, the upturned ash-tray on the floor. The alarm clock in the window sill above the sink, ticking off the minutes of my brother’s absence in the furious snow, attracted my eyes and I watched the minute hand creeping so slowly it seemed not to move at all. I closed my eyes, but the measured tick-tock stayed with me. It must have been for the briefest moment that I half fell asleep while I still heard the tinny seconds clicking into the past, and when I opened my eyes again I knew that I had dreamed of being in Miss Pride’s drawing-room where I had seen a box of ferns like that in the seventh-grade room at school. I had been alone. I felt I had just come in off the street, for cold enveloped me like a loose cloak. It was the selfishness of my dream that made me leap to my feet and run out the door, but just as I reached the bottom step, I heard voices near and Mr. Henderson came into sight, carrying Ivan’s insensible body.
“The poor little duffer,” said the man. “He was lying in the pastor’s garden.”
We kept him there that night, though Sarah and her father protested, sure he would have a fit immediately on regaining consciousness. I said I thought we should have a doctor, but Mrs. Henderson assured me that a doctor could do nothing that she could not do for the time being and that we would call one tomorrow if it were necessary. She made a bed for him on the sofa in the parlor and we sat up all night, for he was feverish and tossed so violently that he would have hurled himself to the floor if we had not been there to hold him back. Mrs. Henderson took up her knitting and worked nimbly at the heel of a sock. The room was unbearably hot and smelled of the camphor-oil on Ivan’s chest.
“Why don’t you sleep a little, Sonie?” said Mrs. Henderson.
But I refused. I felt I must be vigilant now since I had abandoned him this afternoon. “I love Ivan,” I said.
“I know you do,” replied the woman. “I’m sure of it.”
“I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to him! Do you believe me, Mrs. Henderson?”
“Indeed I do, Sonie. You mustn’t feel bad about staying away this afternoon. He’ll be all right, you’ll see. Sonie, over there you’ll find some magazines. Don’t you want to look at them? I think we oughtn’t talk too much for fear of waking the little boy.”
Toward morning he was more peaceful and his forehead was cool. At sun-up we carried him home. My mother had been waiting up all night for me, and she was melancholy. She said nothing, only stared as we lowered Ivan to his cot.
He improved during the day although he developed a cough that troubled us and when in the afternoon he seemed to be choking with it, Mrs. Henderson sent me to the hospital for Dr. Galbraith. “Be clear with him, Sonie,” she said. “It’s sometimes hard for the doctor to follow what a person’s saying, you know.”
It was not because he was stupid but because he was an alcoholic that Dr. Galbraith could not follow. His quick speech, hampered by a hasty stammer, was deceptive. He spoke so rapidly he concealed the degeneration of his mind and appeared to be a man whose energy outdistanced his tongue, whose attention at any moment was subdivided many times, giving to each focus a degree of concentration varying with its importance. Breathless with the long run through the cold, I stood beside the desk in his sterile cell, while the doctor nervously twisted a fountain pen round and round between his plump fingers and interrupted me.
“Just a minute, you must try, you must try to control yourself.”
I sensed in his voice an agitation that surpassed my own. And while he kept me there with his trivial questions which he brought out with a great struggle (he even asked my age) he only made me wilder and himself more confused, so that, in the end, when he did come, he was not in the least prepared for what he found. I had identified Ivan as the child he had seen at the Hendersons’ and he thought he was being summoned to another epileptic fit. For a moment I was not sure that he would come at all. He sat staring at me, moving his lips. He had a repulsive face, flabby, blotched, and dissolute. The crescents of dark flesh under his eyes were distended and the eyes themselves were bloodshot, filmy, and of a color akin to auburn. His lips, tumid and wet, worked slowly over what his eyes saw as if, once the object were removed, he would still be able to recall it by running his tongue over his lips which had mouthed it and shaped its secret formula. He had had, I had heard, several attacks of jaundice and his skin was permanently stained to so dark a color that it resembled sunburn.
At last he rose with a convulsive jerk. “Will I need my stethoscope?”
Thinking he spoke to me, I said, “Why, I should think so, sir!”
He laughed self-consciously. “I talk to myself. It is the privilege of an old man.” And abruptly he pinched my chin between his thumb and forefinger.
Ivan’s illness was diagnosed as bronchitis. The doctor prescribed mustard poultices and a benzoin kettle. “Keep him well covered up and put on the mustard as hot as he can stand it. It’s not a bad attack and the fever isn’t high. Call me if he seems to fail, but he won’t, he’ll be all right, quite all right.”
He left some sleeping powders with us and these we gave Ivan every eight hours so that for seve
ral days we kept him asleep save when we woke him to pour a little water or broth down his parched throat. We made a tent of an old sheet and kept a pot of benzoin bubbling on a kerosene stove beside his bed. He was never himself but muttered and groaned and stared at us without recognition. His bright cheeks blazed under my fingers as I tried to stroke away the illness that racked him, hooped his body with a cough and cast it down, gasping.
My mother remained in the kitchen, sleeping on the floor occasionally, but for the most part making feather-stitched pot-holders. As she worked, she sang Fräulein Lili’s song in a soft but penetrating voice, over and over again until I begged her, bursting into tears, to cease. And when she did not, Mrs. Henderson laid her hand on mine and shook her head.
When I came home at noon and later after school and then in the evening, I could hear her before I had left the road to turn into the lane:
Well they know without my telling
Where she lives, for whom I long.
Round their hoofs the snow is swirling.
Loud the coachman sings his song.
Round their flying hoofs the snow is swirling.
Loud the coachman sings his song.
Or, in the night, half asleep but alert to every noise, I could hear her sorrowing, for she had changed the gay tune into a dirge:
Hurry, horses, faster, faster!
Quick, my flying hawks, away!
Days and hours like these are golden—
We must seize them while we may.
Golden days are these and golden minutes—
We must seize them while we may.
She never spoke to me. She might look me full in the face as if she were about to say something. Then, if I spoke, she drowned out my words with another verse of her song or, instead, repeated one line again and again with a passionate monotony:
Hurry, horses, faster, faster!
Hurry, horses, faster, faster!
Hurry, horses, faster, faster!
But my little brother heard nothing. His fever was coy; each time it went down, Mrs. Henderson and I were comforted, but only for an hour or so. On the fourth day, there was no diminishing of it at all. On the contrary, it went steadily higher until it had reached 106 degrees. Mrs. Henderson said he should be taken to the hospital at once and she called out the window to Sarah to run to the village and telephone the doctor. It was late in the afternoon and I had been home from school for an hour or so. Terrified as I was by the anxious tone of the woman’s voice, I was so weary that when she advised me to go into the kitchen to rest for a few minutes until the doctor came, I agreed.
My mother, her head bent over her work, was singing through smiling lips. The sun was going down. The red light glowed on her face and hair with a softness and subtlety that made it seem a property of her own being, an interior light which, passing through the many filters of her body, the tissues, bones, and muscles, was revealed, at its mellowest, upon her skin so that her face did not reflect the sunset but resembled it. Through the window I could see the sky, striped with stratus clouds of pink and deeper shades of pink, separating here and there to disclose a streak or patch of green like pale shoots and leaves amongst flowers.
Each day, I wished to prolong this hour so that I might have time to do in it all the things that were suggested to me. I wished to walk down the road to the Hotel Barstow to see the rows and rows of windows shining like solid blocks of wine-red ice, giving to the old-fashioned, quasi-baroque façade an interest which was lacking at any other time. The whole aspect of the building would be improved, for this was a benevolent kind of light which enriched the shadows with the same ruddy color it infused into the surfaces, but in such a way that there were no abrupt contrasts, only a deepening and reinforcement. It was quite unlike the light earlier in the afternoon which, cold and white, accented the dirtiness of the old paint and brutally discovered all the vulgarity of the building, the whimsical fenestration following the roof line, the tedious repetition of egg-and-dart, the ogees of the veranda, the festoons of roses looped and ribboned over the doors and windows. I should have liked, too, to look at the State House dome from Miss Pride’s belvedere and to accompany with my eyes the snail-paced approach of coal-boats to Boston harbor; or to watch, from the topmost of the rocks at the Point, the fearful, reddened water which now in the winter supported few fishing and no sailboats, as if it had devoured them all but still in hunger thrashed many tails and snarled for something more to swallow.
I could not even choose between the sky and my mother’s face, and my eyes roamed heavily from one to the other. Her chant, toneless, and yet indescribably sweet, went on:
Till with age my hair starts graying,
Till my locks have ceased to curl,
Let me live in joy and gladness,
Let me love a pretty girl!
Let me live my life in joy and gladness,
Let me love a pretty girl!
I felt that I had all the time in the world. In various versions, I posed myself the question: Is she mad? Can she sing really as carelessly as this when her son is dying? Or is it that the song hides her feelings? Her needle’s movement followed the pattern of the rhythm of her voice; at the end of a line or at a rest, she would gracefully and deliberately draw out her green silk thread and let it hang in the air a moment like a sunbeam. I could not tell, afterwards, if it was one or several minutes before I realized that she was silent and had looked up from her fancy-work. She rose and crossed directly to the bedroom door. I followed her.
She went to the cot and said in a whisper, not to me nor to Mrs. Henderson but to herself, “I think he’s going to die.” She touched the little boy’s forehead lightly with her fingertips. A shudder coursed through Ivan’s thin body under the bedclothes, and my mother drew back in alarm. His stifled breathing seemed to stop and then began again, a rattling, wheezing inspiration. Forgetful of my duty towards him and even of my love, I could only look on him with horror, but I was impelled to his side where I knelt down, taking his tiny wrist between my fingers. The pulse raced under by untutored touch. His sharp little face was distorted and blue; the red lips hung and the cheeks drew in. I heard someone come to the door and, thinking it was the doctor, turned in relief, but it was only Sarah. “He advised another poultice and he’s coming in half an hour.”
“Oh, Lord!” cried her mother. “I don’t know what to do. His poor little chest is raw where they’ve been.” But, although she was certain that the doctor was wrong, she was obedient to his professional orders, and went to the stove to heat the mat. I followed and opened a new shaker of mustard. The sharp smell stung my nostrils; in this one whiff seemed to be embodied all the others that I had taken in in these four long days. I lunged heavily against the stove in my sudden fatigue and burned my wrist. Instinctively, I put the hurt place to my tongue and as I did so, my mother called from the bedroom, “Sonia! Hurry! I think he’s dead.”
As I dropped his hand, thin as a bird’s foot, and turned to my mother I thought I saw, passing like a light across her face, a look of pity and regret; but perhaps I only imagined it for immediately she smiled and said, “See how peaceful he is.”
Mrs. Henderson covered his face with the sheet and, turning, hid my face from him in an embrace. I could feel her bosom rising and falling tranquilly as she murmured, “There, there, the little fellow’s better off now God has taken him. Just you rest a little, pet, and then you go over to my house and stay until I come.” But in the other room, while she was comforting me, my mother was admitting Dr. Galbraith and I heard his voice, curiously cleared of its stammer: “What charming work you’re holding there, ma’am. I had no idea my little patient’s mother was an artist.”
“My son is dead.”
“Oh, I didn’t kn
ow! It must have been only a few minutes ago.”
“In there,” she said. “I was just making a poultice—you see I had everything ready, when suddenly he cried out and I went to him. He died in my arms.”
“God bless you.”
My mother began to cry softly. “I tried!”
I did not ponder then what she meant. I leaned against Mrs. Henderson and breathed in, with the sweet, herbal odor of the benzoin, still bubbling futilely, the smell of her freshly ironed cotton dress.
“You run along, Sonie. Get Sarah to make you some lemon verbena. It’ll rest you.”
I did not want to leave her, for I was protected by her kindly, corseted body in its pale blue dress printed with little white flowers. The moment I released myself, I would see Ivan and know that he was dead. I was broken suddenly and I sobbed against the cotton, “Oh, Mrs. Henderson, my wrist hurts where I burned it!”
Chapter Five
* * *
OVER THE place where Ivan’s cot had been and where now there was nothing but a rag rug with four square indentations, the smell of benzoin still hovered faintly. The snow from the storm had melted and a dense fog enveloped Chichester. All day, from early morning, we had heard the solemn foghorns. My mother and I sat silent before the stove in the afternoon. Her face was overcast and I believed that when she had wailed to Dr. Galbraith, “I tried!” she had meant, “I tried to love him.” For in the night, sleepless for both of us, she had murmured, “My tears are all gone, Sonie,” as though all the springs of her being, save her love for me, had been drained, perhaps long before his birth.
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