The Orphan

by Robert Stallman

  It came as a shock, then, when Mrs. Stumway said casually one evening, “Christmas is coming, Charles, and we’re to have some company.”

  “Oh?” Charles said, preoccupied with the history of the Civil War and hardly hearing what had been said.

  “My daughter Claire will be staying a few days.”

  Charles stopped reading and looked up, the words sinking in. “Your daughter?” he said stupidly, looking at the old lady.

  “Oh, I have family, young man,” she said, putting down a piece of sewing she had been working on. “I don’t often see them anymore. No, not even when there’s trouble,” she said in a thoughtful voice. “But they write, and I think about them. C1aire’s my youngest, though she’s not so young anymore either, and she’s had her share of trouble.”

  Charles sat attentive and dutiful, listening to the old lady’s voice that he seldom heard unless it was giving him directions or assigning tasks about the house. There was something in the back of his mind about the name of Mrs. Stumway’s daughter that bothered him. He could not possibly know her, but he thought of a picture of a young girl in a long black bathing suit. He listened.

  “I know you’ll be on your best behavior, Charles, for you are a thoughtful boy. She’s a widow like I am. Poor Bernard, her husband, taken in the prime of his life by that terrible World War and no reason nor rhyme to it.”

  She paused and removed her little elliptical glasses and wiped her eyes. “Oh the men in our family, what happens to them? And I said, Claire, you must marry again, for you can still have children - she was only twenty-seven and a lovely girl, but she wouldn’t have any of those men came courting her. Said they were all after Bernard’s estate money or they were mean, or they drank too much, or were restless. None of them good enough, and I guess she knows. She’s been over most of the world on ships and airplanes now. She’s done well with the money and the land he left, hardly lost a cent in the crash. Well, and here she is going on forty-four, no, forty-five next February, middle aged, though she don’t look it.”

  Charles sat and wondered why the old woman was saying all these things until he realized she was in a reverie and hardly remembered he was there. Her voice trailed off into a mumbling and then silence, so that the boy was startled by the sudden reemergence of it.

  “Oh, but she’s a good girl, a fine person. And Catherine, oh my Catherine, whatever will become of you now? All of us left alone, lonely old women. It’s so hard, so hard to be alone, and my poor dear Catherine with her tragedy so fresh and her wild letters full of nonsense.” Mrs. Stumway stopped rocking and bent double to lever herself up out of the chair, pausing on her way to the kitchen to look at Charles as if he had suddenly materialized at the dining room table.

  “And you, an orphan, alone like all of us. Do you know what she sent me?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Here now, Charles, I shouldn’t be talking to you about my family, giving out all our private matters, but you’re not one of us, and sometimes I talk on like you can’t understand; like you was a dog or something for an old lady to talk to. There now, Charles, I’m sorry, and I do feel you need to be in a family, for you’re a lone one too, after all.” She leaned over and patted his head, making Charles feel even more like a dumb animal.

  Mrs. Stumway moved over to the old secretary with its tall bookshelf encased in curved glass and pulled down the desk part. She rummaged in the papers, looked in the little drawers and found something heavy that she brought back and plunked down on the table. It was a carved piece of stone about four or five inches high that might have been the figure of a bear with a hole bored through the neck for a thong or light chain. It was smooth as if it had been handled by many generations. Charles looked at it for a moment without interest, but something about the shape of the figure was compelling. He reached to pick it up, and as his fingers touched it he felt a tingling as if a static discharge were tickling his skin. He drew back and looked at it again. It had some lightly incised figures or letters all down both sides.

  “It’s all right, you can handle it,” the old lady said, pushing it toward him so that it toppled face down with a clunk. “Piece of junk some medicine show fake sold my poor Catherine. Poor woman.” The old lady hobbled out to the kitchen for a drink of water, muttering that the talk about relatives had made her arthritis worse.

  Charles reached out to the stone figure again. There was the tingling again, not painful, but as if the stone were in rapid and invisible vibration so that it shook his flesh and bones like waves of sound. He picked it up, holding it tightly. It was cool, a stone, gray and smooth with white lines, and it looked like a standing bear with its muzzle lifted as if howling. The paws seemed held to the sides by a band or belt pulled tight around the whole figure. In all, it looked like any primitive carving, blurred with age and handling, but Charles held it near the lamp and saw a line of very fine markings on the band around the paws, and he felt increasingly uncomfortable. He was aware that Mrs. Stumway did not feel the tingling that he felt, and that there was more to the stone than she imagined. The markings along the sides of the figure resembled crude drawings of clouds, lightning, birds, and stick men, but the intricately curled and flowing figures on the band were of a different sort, like the graceful letters of some unknown language.

  He put the stone down on the table. The tingling stopped. He picked it up and held it to his ear, but could hear no sound. On his cheek it was cool, and it made the skin tingle with a buzzing like the dry ice they had played with that night at the PTA party. He put it down, puzzled and a bit afraid. It made him unable to think clearly. What was he doing holding it to his cheek? Why was he picking it up and laying it down so many times? The old woman would think it strange. He picked it up again, unable not to. It tingled.

  Mrs. Stumway was standing in the kitchen door looking at him. “You like it?” she said, sipping at the jelly glass of water. “I’d say that you could have it, but just suppose poor Catherine comes for a visit and wants to know where her, what did she call it? her ‘Mawky Stone,’ is. Something like that. Some such trash. Suppose she does, I have to have it here to show her.” She reached down and picked it up.

  Charles watched her face to see if she noticed anything. He felt stunned, as if he had been struck on the head with something hard, and for a moment while Mrs. Stumway put the stone figure back in the desk, he could not think. He felt after a moment that for the past few minutes he had been alone for the first time in his life, and it was not for some time that he was able to grasp the implication of that feeling.

  ***

  In the final week before Christmas, Charles outdid himself and passed some exams Miss Wrigley had prepared for the fifth grade in the next semester, so that she kept Charles after school on the last day and looked at him with a barely perceptible smile. He was standing before her desk at the front of the room which was getting cold now that the fire had been allowed to die down in the stoves, and he was wondering what had happened with the exam. He had tried as hard as he possibly could, pushing himself every night to study so that the other kids in the school hardly talked to him, or he to them, in those last weeks.

  Miss Wrigley looked up at him with her hands folded in front of her as she did when she had something good to tell the kids. She smiled with such affection that it made Charles’s stomach suddenly drop away.

  “Charles, I have a Christmas present for you,” she said.

  “But you already …”

  “No, I don’t mean the presents I give all the children, I mean something less tangible, but more important.”

  “The exam?”

  “You did nearly perfectly, Charles. I’m going to register you in grade six for the beginning of school in January.”

  “My gosh,” was all that Charles could think to say. The same grade as Paul Holton and Runt Borsold, a grade of Doug Bent. He felt as if he had been left stranded on a height.

  “Gosh,” he said again as Miss Wrigley got up and came a
round the desk and took both his hands in hers.

  “You are a truly remarkable young man, Charles,” she said, looking up now into his flushed face. “Oh, Charles, you are going to be a great scholar someday, a brilliant person.” And she threw her arms around him, hugging him hard.

  Charles put his arms around Miss Wrigley very delicately, lightly touching her wool jacket. He smelled her hair and felt intensely happy as she pulled back and held him by the shoulders. “I’m so proud of you, Charles,” she said, her eyes looking as if she would cry. “Do you know that teaching in a school like this …” she began, but then she stopped and turned back to the desk, catching her breath.

  When she turned back to Charles, she had become his teacher again, and he realized with amazement that there was not really all that much difference in their feelings, even though he was immeasurably beneath Miss Wrigley in learning and experience. He felt that in that moment he had grown toward adult understanding almost enough to match his rapid physical growth in the past few months.

  Then she told him goodbye. She was leaving for the Christmas vacation to be with her family in Joliet and would not be back until the fourth of January when school began again. Charles walked out of the schoolhouse and down the steps in the twilight, feeling the cold hit his teeth, and realized he was still grinning widely. He began a long legged dash through the drifts along the side of the highway, headed for Douglas Bent’s house to tell him the news.

  The exciting winter vacation days before Christmas were a round of snowy games, sledding, chases, rabbit hunting with the older men, the cutting of Christmas trees on the Peaussier farm for just about everyone in the farm community, riding the Bents’ horses when they could get permission, jumping from the highway bridge into the snow drifts on the creek bottom. Bashful Kenny Grattan took a dare and grabbed the back bumper of a milk truck and went zipping along on his sled until he hit a patch of bare cinders near the highway turn and came off the sled on his face. Rudy Bent fell through the river ice and had to be rescued with a ladder and was in danger of pneumonia for a few days they said, but he got over it. And Charles got two Christmas presents stuffed in the old widow’s mailbox: a jackknife from a secret admirer (Douglas said it was Brenda Gustafson) and a handkerchief from Flossie Portola with his initials embroidered on it. And he was hard at work making presents too: a carved wooden pistol that was an exact replica of an Army .45 automatic for Douglas, a butterfly carved out of a piece of walnut and a wooden pin to go through the carved hole so it would hold a girl’s hair, and that was for Betty Bailey who would not get it until after Christmas since she was away with her parents visiting relatives in Chicago. And a hand-drawn calendar for 1936 with all the holidays marked with red designs and pictures for Mrs. Stumway was almost finished, since she had said she was always forgetting what week it was. He had already given Miss Wrigley her present, a handsome gilt brooch with a setting of petrified wood which was the only store bought present he had money for and which she had received with much delight.

  And then the day before Christmas, Claire Stumway Lanphier arrived, pulling off the highway into the short drive that Charles had shoveled the snow out of and roaring the engine of her new cream-colored Auburn convertible before turning it off. Douglas Bent spotted the car as he and Charles were coming back from the sledding hill across from the schoolhouse. He let out a cry and dropped his sled rope to go hopping in his ungainly, stiff-legged run until he stood panting beside the car. It was different, Charles saw, from the cars he had seen. It had a pointed rear and large shining tubes coming out of the sides of the hood and disappearing under the fenders. In front was a single V-shaped front bumper and a stylized naked woman hood ornament with her head thrown back and her chromium breasts thrust forward to cut the wind.

  “Wow, it’s an Auburn Speedster,” Douglas said, touching the cream-colored metal as if it were living skin. “I’ve never seen a real one. I bet it’s the only one in this part of the country.”

  Charles watched the smaller boy move minutely around the car, touching it gingerly here and there. He laid a hand on one of the shiny pipes, found it warm and decided the visitor had arrived only a few minutes before.

  “I guess it belongs to Mrs. Stumway’s daughter,” Charles said, not overly interested. He could not understand Douglas’s infatuation with machinery and found his patience tried on many occasions when Douglas would have to stop and examine some entirely uninteresting piece of industrial craftsmanship.

  “Guaranteed to go one hundred miles an hour,” Douglas was saying. “She must be really rich.”

  “I guess she is,” Charles said. “Mrs. Stumway said -” but he stopped rather than talk about what the old lady had rambled on about the other evening. “She’s going to visit for a couple days.” He watched Douglas kneeling in the snow to look under the car, peeking into the interior, and finally became irritated. His feet were freezing. “I got to go in and meet her, Doug.” And then he recalled he had not given Doug his present, and he made that his pretext. He ran into the house, dashed up the stairs to his bedroom without taking off his boots, and rushed back out with the present wrapped in brown paper with Douglas’s name on the homemade tag. He sailed off the top step into the snow, finding Doug still admiring the car.

  “Here, Doug. I made it myself, and it’s really authentic.” He laid the package in Doug’s outstretched hands. “What’s the matter?” Charles said, noticing the other hoy’s face turning sad or angry.

  “I ain’t got anything for you.” Douglas stood straight with his braced leg at an angle. “Pa said we didn’t need to get things for people outside the family, ’cause …” He stopped, looking down at the package.

  “Geeze, Doug, you’ve already given me so much I can’t ever pay it all back,” Charles said, putting his arm over the other boy’s shoulders. “Merry Christmas, Doug,” he said, patting the boy’s shoulder.

  “Merry Christmas, Charles,” Douglas said. He looked up with a smile. “I got something for you after all, and you’re really going to like it. Okay if I bring it down tomorrow?”

  “Sure, but you don’t have to if your Pa said not to.”

  “Oh, this is okay. It’s already mine, I mean mine to give.”

  With that, Douglas hobbled off to the highway, gathered up the sled rope and headed for home with a backward wave. Charles felt sorry for Douglas for a minute, and then he thought, who was he to feel sorry for a guy with all that family and probably a really great Christmas coming up tomorrow. Charles was not overly concerned about presents for himself, as he expected very little, but he did want to give things to people he liked, and he felt that he had pretty well covered the field. Not until this moment did it occur to him that he would have a very slender holiday himself. He thought of it for the time it took to pull his boots off in the porch and then shrugged it away. It just didn’t seem important.

  Standing next to the stove in the kitchen, Charles became aware of the new presence in the house by several subtle aromas that he began to perceive as a difference in the environment. There was perfume, of course. Every woman just about had some sort of stuff she put on to smell good, and this perfume was beautifully delicate, not the usual lavender or lilac or rose oil stuff, but something warm, like putting a clean fur up to your nose, a scent that might have been a very exotic flower, perhaps a night flower; and there was an overlay of acrid scent like burned wood. Charles wondered what that could be, since it was new to the house, not like the smell of wood or coal burning in the stove.

  “Charles, boy, will you come in the living room?” Mrs. Stumway’s voice came, high and strained, from the newly opened living room.

  Charles ran his hand through his hair, but it was sticking up in all directions from wearing his stocking cap. He shrugged again and walked somewhat selfconsciously through the dining room and stood in the wide doorway of the living room.

  “Charles, this is my youngest daughter, Claire Lanphier,” the old lady said.

  A woman in da
rk green with some sort of fur around her neck rose from the sofa and offered Charles her hand. As he shook it, he noticed she was holding a glass of light brown liquid in the other hand, and knew it was from her drink that the odor of burned wood came. He looked into Mrs. Lanphier’s eyes, seeing her for the first time as she smiled at him and settled herself back on the sofa. Standing, she had been a bit taller than Charles, her hair pulled back from her face and done in some soft kind of roll behind her neck, around which was a white silk scarf knotted like an ascot, and tucked into the front of the dark green dress which Charles thought must be expensive by the heavy, smooth look of the material. Mrs. Lanphier had a familiar look, he thought, sitting down in the other living room chair and smiling. Her mouth was wide with a full underlip and it turned up at the comers, making a rather pretty and complex curve, even though there were fine wrinkles in her throat and around her eyes. Her nose was long and straight and a shade too large for prettiness, but her eyes made up for that by being wide and blue and very expressive. He noticed that as she talked they acted an accompaniment to her words. Actress’s eyes, Charles thought, taken with the woman’s face as he tried to recall who she looked like.

  “So you are the local hero and prodigy, Charles,” Mrs. Lanphier said, and her eyes twinkled to assure the boy she was lightly teasing.

  “Now Charles, don’t let her embarrass you ” Mrs. Stumway said. “She’s just a terrible tease.”

  Charles could see the old lady was pleased with her daughter, that there was nothing the daughter could do or perhaps had ever done that would not please the mother. He smiled again.