The Sight of the Stars

by Belva Plain

  Pa, your Father

  He laid down the letter, ate his light supper, and went to the desk where, after the usual period of careful thought, he began to write.

  Dear Pa,

  Please don’t call yourself “stupid.” I know you say that because you are accepting money from your son. That is so wrong of you! You have always supported us; we have never gone in want of anything that we really needed. Even now, you surely do not need my money to get along with. It is just that we are both doing what we can and should do for Jonathan.

  I know he has some strange feelings about it, too. Many times he has written to me that he will “take good care of all of us” when he is “grown up.” I agree with you that he grew up years ago, even though he is only sixteen. Please tell him again that I am not “going without,” as he once wrote, to help him. I am doing just fine.

  I’m sorry to hear that Leo is so cranky. Of course that’s nothing new and it’s rather sad, but lately when I read about him in your letters, I get pretty impatient. If he can’t find any job that he likes, he should be grateful for his job in the store.

  I wish I could go home to see all of you, but it is a very long trip, and I don’t think Mrs. R. would like me to take the time right now. She has just given me a raise, and I don’t want to ask her for a favor so soon. But I will do it before long, I promise. Love to you all,

  Adam

  At the window again, he watched the first stars. Below their light more lights shone from houses that only a year ago had not yet been built. The town was expanding. In a few more years, he thought, cars will no doubt outnumber the horses; right now the college is turning gradually into a university. Someday the town will be a suburb of the capital.

  All this means a new class of shoppers. We must keep them in mind and grow with the town. Already we could use twice the space that we have.

  These thoughts pursued Adam when he pulled the shade and lay down for the night. They wandered between waking and sleep, then woke him again at the edge of sleep.

  Those ads in the glossy fashion magazines. If I could go to New York and talk to some of the companies that import things. Should talk again to Theo Brown. Too soon, he says. Mrs. R. would never spend the money. But she is pleased with me, he says.

  Young nobody walks in off the street. Imagine that!

  You should study to be an accountant, Theo says. You’ve the mind for it. He reminds me of Mr. Shipper. We like each other. Funny, that first time we met at Francine’s rich place. How could he have expected to find me there? Me? But I was there with Jeff Horace, the reporter. His boss owns the paper. All big names go there, respectable men, business, politics, lawyers, big names. Interesting talk you hear about what’s going on in the great world. Francine’s handsome parlors, her beautiful walled gardens. Otherwise, no different from Gracie’s back home.

  Reilly used to kid me about it because it’s out of my league. So he thinks. He’d be surprised to know I’ve been there. More than once. I’m a little surprised, too. All those men like Theo Brown. Or Mr. Lawrence, Mrs. R.’s lawyer. All married. Why? Maybe I’m naive. Naive, like Pa.

  Mrs. R. is pleased with me, Theo says. She’d never let me know. Wouldn’t give me the satisfaction. Like ice down your back.

  My God, how did a husband live all those years with a creature like her? Came into the store one day last winter in her mink coat. Looked for a minute like a grizzly bear walking toward me. No wonder the poor man had a stroke. While she was yelling at him one day, he must have taken a good look at her and decided to die.

  Adam’s chuckle awoke him. Be careful about marrying, says Archer, who has a cranky wife. But start looking.

  I do look. There’s Fannie, only a short ride in on the Interurban, and never tired of having fun. Sees all the motion pictures, goes to all the dances, plays cards, has lively friends and a good nature. There’s Geraldine. You go someplace with her and watch the men pretending not to be staring at her. There’s Mabel, sweet and serious. Teaches kindergarten out near the boulevard. She would make a good wife. No question about that.

  But I’m not ready to settle down for a lifetime. Will I ever be? Will I always be a bachelor, roaming around town and never marrying?

  But I would like to feel love, and I never do. Something haunts me. Something is missing. I need to feel that I can’t go on without the person, or I don’t want her. What I mean is a kind of yearning, the kind that comes sometimes with music or grand poetry. Is that too much to ask?

  Perhaps it was.

  When he awoke in the morning it was already light. He remembered having had vaguely troubled thoughts before falling asleep. Then, alert, he remembered that a delivery of imported fabrics was expected today. He was hastily fastening his necktie, when there was a knock at the door. Mr. Buckley had come up with a telegram in hand.

  “Western Union for you, Adam. I hope it’s not any bad news.”

  As always, Pa was frugal. There were only six words: “Rachel died this evening. Heart attack.”

  Chapter 6

  The train rumbled, was halted at watering stops, crossed the Mississippi, and neared the end of the journey. All through daylight and darkness there floated the kind face of Rachel, who surely had not expected to die so suddenly and so soon, the blue, distended veins at Pa’s temples, Jonathan’s eyes that missed nothing, and Leo’s face in shadow . . .

  Now and then Adam dozed in his seat, then he would wake, read a page in his book, and put it down to look out of the window.

  “Mr. Arnring! What are you doing so far from Chattahoochee?”

  Startled by the abrupt appearance of Emma Rothirsch, who must surely have come from a Pullman car, he stood and, in one brief sentence, gave the reason for this journey.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I wish I knew something better than that to say to you, but I can never quite find the right words for death.”

  The train swayed, and they both caught awkwardly at the seat back. Expecting her to continue on her way, he waited for her next words.

  “Mr. Arnring, I was on my way to the dining car. Would you like to join me?”

  “Why, that would be very nice, Miss Rothirsch.”

  Very nice, and very uncomfortable, too. Some people, no matter whether one of them may live in Brazil and the other in Australia, no matter whether they have just met five minutes ago, can still strike up a conversation with ease. But Adam did not fit so well with the niece of Sabine Rothirsch, and she ought to know it. Yet he could not very well refuse the suggestion, and so he followed her into the dining car, where each table was covered with white linen and held a bowl of flowers. He recalled the fear that had beset him the first time he sat in such a place, fear of the unknown, and fear, too, that he was using up his sparse dollars.

  They sat down, and for once in his life, he had nothing to say. Other than rare, formal greetings on those few occasions when this young lady had come to the shop with her aunt, the only words that had ever passed between them were the remarks made some five years ago about The Oregon Trail.

  The sun, a bright red ball in the sky, was glaring directly into her face. Seeing her reach for the window shade, Adam leaned forward over the table to do it for her, but she did not need him.

  “I have long fingers,” she said.

  He thought of a response. “From playing the piano?”

  She laughed. “They say it’s usually the other way around. They find a child with long fingers like mine, and they say, ‘Oh ho, let’s buy her a piano.’ ”

  “So they bought a piano for you?”

  “Oh, yes, a marvelous one. It’s a concert grand, and it takes up half of a room.”

  When Adam agreed that that was marvelous, he was contradicted.

  “I appreciate it, but all the same, it’s ridiculous.”

  He was becoming interested, and perhaps a little amused. “Why is it ridiculous?”

  “Because. My aunt sees me going around the world giving recitals, having my name in the
newspapers and being famous. I’ll feel so sorry for her when she finally realizes that it will never happen.”

  “How can you be so sure it never will? ‘Never’ is a long time.”

  “If you ever heard me play, Mr. Arnring, you’d understand what I mean. That is, if you know very much about music.”

  “I love music, but I don’t know anything about it, so I’m no judge.”

  Her glance flickered over him and then went to the menu. “I’m starved. They have fish soup, I see. I’d never expect to find it on a train. Do you like fish soup?”

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever had it.”

  “Try it. You won’t be sorry. Or maybe you will be, and if you are, just say so.”

  He was beginning to feel more at ease with her. She was different, he thought. He couldn’t have said just now what the difference was, but he knew it was there. Every so often while he ate, he glanced at her hands, at the narrow gold bracelet that lay below a sleeve of cream-colored silk. This simplicity was certainly not her aunt’s taste. The green eyes within the pale oval of her face bore no resemblance, not the faintest, to the aunt, or to the uncle whose portrait hung above the mantel in the room where he had sat that one time and never once since. He had a picture in his head of that house with the fussy clutter and the mauve gloom of the stained-glass window; it seemed as if this young woman opposite did not fit at all into the picture. It seemed impossible that they could be related. On the other hand, people might say the same of Leo.

  “I hope you like the soup,” she said, “since I suggested it.”

  “I do. Very much.”

  “It needs wine. I make mine with plenty of good wine.”

  “Then you’re a cook, too?”

  “At college I live in an apartment with three other girls. And since the cafeteria food is horrible, we do a little cooking.”

  “The college is in New England, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, outside of Boston. I change trains in New York. My goodness, didn’t you know where I go to college? Sometimes it seems to me that nobody in our whole town even knows I exist.”

  “It’s not quite like that,” Adam said gently, “but the fact is you’re away almost all the time. You told me once that you never even went to grammar school in Chattahoochee, so how can people know anything about you?”

  “You remember that conversation?”

  “I certainly do. You were reading The Oregon Trail.”

  “Yes, I was a bookworm when I was home. When I wasn’t practicing at the piano, I was reading. That came of having no local friends.”

  The girl’s locked away, Reilly had said, like the gold in Fort Knox.

  He would have liked to know more, but did not ask. It was no business of his. Yet he could not resist one question.

  “Do you like being away all the time?”

  “Yes,” she answered directly. “I do. I can take a cooking course if I want to, I can buy clothes according to my own tastes, I can march in a suffragette parade—”

  “You did that?” he exclaimed.

  “I did. Why? Are you shocked?”

  “Not at all. Tell me about it.”

  “Well, I was in New York at a music school, when the suffragettes had a parade. Three thousand of them, I read the next day, marching down Fifth Avenue carrying banners and wearing sashes around their shoulders. I just walked up and joined, even without a sash, but a nice old lady gave me a little flag to carry. She smiled and winked at me, I remember. I thought the whole thing was great. And there were a lot of policemen riding horses. I wish I had a horse, but there’s never enough time to ride, so it’s just as well.”

  “So you think women should have the vote.”

  “Why not? The brain is an organ, like the heart or the kidneys, the same in a woman as in a man. It has nothing to do with the”—after a second’s hesitation she finished—“the reproductive system.”

  Adam was fascinated. The young women he knew did not talk about “the reproductive system.” At least to him, they didn’t.

  “Yes, it was an experience. They’ll probably have pictures of it in the history books in a few years. There were photographers all over the place. Yes, it was great,” she repeated. “I don’t want to miss the next one if I can help it.”

  But if Mrs. R. hears about it, you’ll miss it, Adam thought. It must be a challenge to rear a girl like her. When she’s finished with college, it’ll be time to find a husband. Who will be smart enough for her? Or smart enough to accept her independence? Who will be important enough to satisfy Mrs. R.?

  He asked her whether she was still studying the piano.

  “Yes, and I love it. Even though I’ll never be a star. One has to know oneself, you see, and I do. I’m a realist,” she said gravely.

  When she had spoken about the suffragette parade, she had seemed very young, gleeful, and almost mischievous. Now he was hearing a much older voice. He calculated: She’s at least nineteen. Did I know myself when I was nineteen? When I rode on this train in the opposite direction with no idea where I was going?

  “What do you see outside that’s so interesting?” she asked.

  “Mostly trees. I was also thinking of my first trip, going the other way, and landing in Chattahoochee, a place I had never heard of.”

  She laughed. “Most people haven’t. The day we met in the store was your first day there, I heard.”

  “First day, first hour—or nearly.”

  “It was horrible, wasn’t it?”

  Be careful, Adam warned himself. It was no business of yours then, and it still isn’t now. So, carefully, he replied.

  “I was just—sorry. That’s all.”

  “Sorry? For whom?”

  “Just sorry about the—the disagreement. And for you.”

  “For me? You should have been more sorry for Aunt Sabine.”

  He must not become involved. He must not say anything that could be held against him. He had not come this far and gained so much to throw it away.

  “I don’t know about that,” he said. “All I know is that everyone has treated me very well. I hear only good things about your family, your uncle, what a fine, kind man he was—”

  “Fine? Kind? That shows you what people don’t know. He was a monster! It’s a wonder she has any sanity left. He despised her. He destroyed her. Sometimes, not often, he even struck her. It’s probably an awful thing to say, but she’s been gradually getting better ever since the day he died.”

  Imprisoned for the duration of dinner at his seat, Adam felt as though the chair were burning his back.

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t be telling me these things,” he said gently. “They’re very personal, and you will probably be sorry tomorrow that you confided in me.”

  “I’m doing it because I’m so angry that I’m ready to burst. And I know you won’t talk. I don’t know you, but still I’m sure that you won’t. I’m angry because of what people say about her. They say they can’t stand her, and they laugh at her. And it’s so cruel. I think of her alone in that awful old house, alone except for the times she visits me wherever I am, in college, or last summer at the music school in Paris. She only has one or two friends, lonely old women like herself who get dressed up and have tea together.”

  The train was passing through a tunnel of evergreens. Placid and cool they stood, while the flow of hot words continued.

  “I don’t know what you can be thinking, Mr. Arnring. I’m not being very ‘ladylike,’ am I? Not even very sensible! But I’ll tell you. It’s because of the things I overheard at the hairdresser’s just yesterday. They were lies, so unjust that I had to get these things out of my system and tell them to somebody. And when you said that about my uncle—forgive me.”

  He looked at her and saw that there were tears in her eyes.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Say what you will.”

  “He never had a kind word for her,” she resumed. “He wanted children, you see, and she couldn’t have any. They had
been fleeing the hate-filled years in Europe and she was pregnant. It was the worst time to be pregnant; they had no place to care for a baby, not even a place to give birth. So she went to a midwife and had an abortion. After that, she had no more children and he never forgave her.

  “She got fat and homely. She didn’t care. After he died, she had enough money to keep the store running properly, but she didn’t care about that, either. I’m all she cares about, Mr. Arnring, although I must say she is very pleased with the things you’ve done in the store. And with the money that’s coming in. She puts it all aside for me, although I don’t need or want so much, I really don’t. I plan to take care of myself. But that’s another story. This story is about her. In her mind, you see, I’m taking the place of the woman she wanted to be. She wants me to have everything she read about, and heard about, and missed.”

  When she stopped, Adam was silent. Yet he did not disguise his frank examination of her face.

  “Are you thinking that there is something wrong with me, Mr. Arnring? I can understand very well that you might think so.”