by Packer, Vin
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Since our decision to go to America, we have had to make certain decisions. Important ones! Now we are really joined together. O! We’re as splendidly mad as March hares!
— from the diary of Mary Drew Edlin
APRIL, 1956
“Yes, please come in,” Evelyn Rush said, seeing the girl hesitate in the doorway, “Please, I’m sincere!”
In a way, Rush believed that about herself — incredibly enough, believed, at times, that it was her most sterling quality. And perhaps it was, for hadn’t she actually wept over Beth Dragmore’s death — actually wept — even while she realized it was a relief. It seemed, when it had happened, that it was impossible to know which emotion was causing her most to weep — bereavement or deliverance — and, fascinated by the bountiful elasticity of her ego, she decided that perhaps her reaction was truly the only sincere one of anyone’s who mourned for Beth.
Now Martha Kent stood in her doorway, and Rush felt a slow sense of delicate amazement fill her. She should have known that eventually this beautiful black-haired child goddess would succumb, but she could sincerely say that until she saw her there, some years-long seconds ago, she would not have predicted it.
“Are you busy, Rush?”
Was it the first time Martha had ever said her name at the end of a sentence? Rush was too shaken to remember.
She said, “Heavens, no! I was making out the contraband list.” “Oh, that.” “Yes, that.”
It was a weekly task assigned to Rush. She would have to inspect the fresh laundry sent from home to see if any parent had slipped in candy somewhere; then list the receiver’s name and the penalty. It was a belief at Chillam that in order to stop contraband from entering the premises, the person to whom it was sent should receive a stiff punishment, unless of course the contraband was cigarettes or unsavory literature — then expulsion was the rule, or as Chillamites put it, the receiver was “sent to Coventry.”
This week, like most, there were only minor incidents: taffy in Betty Swampscoot’s pillow cases, and jellybeans in Dorothy Brewer’s gym bloomers — nothing more startling than that.
Martha sat on Rush’s bed, gently putting aside the black velvet knee britches and the white silk skirt spread out there.
“Are these for the Dickens Ball Friday?”
“Yes,” Rush said. “I’m going as Nicholas Nickleby. Blakie, down the hall, is going as Smike. We’ll go together.”
Martha was wearing an angora sweater, sky-shaded blue, with tiny pearls around her neck, and the navy Uniform skirt. Rush wore her school skirt too, but over it, the top to her white silk pajamas. She liked wearing the top. It was rather like a short dressing gown, and with it, looped in the back, she wore a scarlet-colored ascot to match the monogram on the pajama pocket — a gold crown of some sort, set against a red coat of arms. She loved the pajama top, felt terribly regal and impressive in it; felt now rather like an English gentleman receiving a wonderfully beautiful lady in his apartment.
“Are the balls fun?” Martha asked.
“Oh, the Dickens Ball is always terribly fun. Everyone dresses up, of course, and we do awfully old-fashioned dances — minuets, you know. The faculty is divine. Last year Miss Davy came as Mr. Mell, flute and all. I was devastated!” She straddled the desk chair and fixed her eyes on the girl, thinking how like April to begin this way. She said, “Are you going, Martha?”
“To the ball? No.” She seemed so suddenly shy and vulnerable.
Rush felt a sweet chill stir her. “You day girls miss so much.” She smiled, not too boldly (a sincere smile, she imagined). “And we miss you, you know.”
“You’ll look handsome in your costume, won’t you, Rush?”
“I’d dance with you if you came, you know, Martha.” How often they said each other’s names; as though it were impossible now to stop.
“I can’t dance a minuet, not at all.” “Oh, but I’d teach you.” “I won’t be able to come, Rush.” “I am sorry, Martha.”
“So am I,” Martha said, “about treating you so poorly these last few months.”
Rush blushed and looked away from the girl. It was too divinely painful for her — this happening so unexpectedly, at such a preposterous moment, just as she was noting, “Milk chocolate, 6 bars, in Liz Blake’s jumper. Penalty: Tea House privileges suspended for 3 weeks.”
“I suppose you were right about Mary Drew,” said Martha.
“It was a ghastly stigma, I know,” Rush said, “significant relationships always are.”
“Were you ever reported for having a significant relationship?”
“No. I never … well,” Rush hesitated, then said, “confined myself exclusively to one person. I guess there’s your answer, Martha. It simply isn’t wholesome behaving that way. I’ve found that behind all of Chillam’s rules and philosophy, there’s good sound reasoning.”
“Then I’ve said my little say, haven’t I?” Martha said.
“Thank you,” Rush answered. “I’m sincere when I say it means more to me than anything almost that’s happened here at Chillam.”
“I expect I ought to go. I’m past due home. May I borrow your comb, though? It’s so rude, I hate to ask.”
Rush jumped to her feet. “Of course it isn’t. It’s nothing. I’ll feel divine having a comb with even one strand of your hair caught up in it. I mean that, Martha.” She stood looking at the girl with very serious eyes. Rush felt too solemn for anything but utmost reserve toward the girl. It was a beginning, and at the beginning, Rush always lost her cockiness, felt too touched by the momentous realization of what was happening. It was so fragile, so terribly tender-shy, and Rush was awed — a little at the fact it had begun and unspeakably at her limitless drawing power. She knew that later, when the girl left, she would cry, or pray, or watch herself sadly in the mirror; certainly take a scalding bath and dress in everything clean from head to toe, and write a poem. Then a walk in the twilight around the square at Chillam, with her coat collar turned up in a melancholy fashion.
Martha walked to the dresser and fiddled there until she found the comb. “Do you have any water? My hair requires so much to stay in place.”
Rush fairly leapt from the room, across the hall, and back, carrying the black plastic cup with near-trembling hands, lips quivering, eyes searching Martha’s.
And, “Here” was all she could croak through her dry lips.
She watched while the girl ran the comb through her long coal-shaded hair, and then she cleared her throat to ask a frightfully premature question, which she was unable to restrain herself from asking.
“Martha, would you hold the crook for me at commencement?”
With each class that was graduated, the favored undergraduates stood in a long line of rose crooks, beneath which the graduates passed, while all sang the Alphabet Song, traditional at Chillam.
Rush could almost see it — herself in white, carrying the prayer book, marching a drag step, while Martha, tears streaming from her eyes, stood in the crook line; and the song booming around them:
“A is for al-ways and ever you’ll see,
B is for bravest endeavor, 01 we — ”
“I may,” Martha answered. “I may.”
She turned and looked at Rush. “I must go now.”
Rush nodded. “Yes,” she whispered.
She watched while the girl slipped out the door; then Rush stood there in the center of her room, fumbling with her ascot, speechless, her heart pounding wildly.
• • •
Philip Craig had made up his mind never to take another drink. What he wanted to do was to belong to the real world again, and the very best way that this could begin to be realized, he believed, was to call up some people and invite them around to dinner. Goodness knows, Mrs. Brady wouldn’t consent to return to cook for him — he didn’t expect her to, not full time; but she could easily be persuaded to serve up a dinner on her day off from her new employer, if he were to offer satisfac
tory reimbursement. Of course he couldn’t be expected to serve a non-alcoholic dinner party; there would be cocktails, and wine with the meal, but all the better — because his refusal to participate in that phase of the evening, would demonstrate his good faith…. No, he wouldn’t sip even one sherry; he had made that mistake before. This time, he wouldn’t touch a drop.
His decision made him feel thoroughly light-headed and buoyant, and he was running about the house whistling while he searched for the slip of paper with Mrs. Brady’s new address recorded on it. He’d ask his neighbors Tim and Eleanor French, of course; they’d always stuck by him, even that wretched evening at Guessgate when he had thrown ice cubes up the Sheridan’s elegant staircase in a futile attempt to have them all land on the thirteenth step. And the Bristers would come — he was sure they would, even if they didn’t relish the idea; and Maude Joseph was always awfully kind. Craig was whipping in and out of the large rooms of the white house on Trumpet Head when the sound of the doorbell startled him.
That was funny — he wasn’t expecting anyone.
He was quite pleased that he was so sober and feeling so cheerful as well, and he answered the door with a rather grand gesture, flinging it open with a slight unintentional bow and a broad, steady smile.
There was a short silence while he tried to remember.
The girl had said simply, “Hello, Mr. Craig. How are you this afternoon?”
For a moment he thought it was Tim French’s girl, but he remembered her as being older somehow, and away at school in any case. Yet this girl’s face was familiar.
He answered her pleasantly enough, and she asked if she might come in and talk to him. And as he stepped back to allow this, he suddenly remembered who she was — by her coat.
The evening in January came back to him like a fresh slap in the face. It was preposterous that a man of Craig’s proclivities worried himself gray-faced about dignity, but it is just such an irony that creates complexity in the human animal. For surely the time he had passed out cold in town last December, he had probably been less dignified than he had ever been since he began drinking so heavily. But oddly enough, it was not that scandalous day that had changed Philip Craig and made him attempt to gather himself up before his dignity was not only lost but gone forever. It had been that night in January.
He could not remember how those girls got in his house — whether they were housebreakers or whether they were invited guests (though that seemed so unlikely); but however it may have been, falling across them there on the floor in his study late that night could not have terrified him more had they been strangled corpses. They had bolted as rapidly as they could under their circumstances, and he had remained gaping at their coats, left behind, and thought how utterly obscene his life had suddenly become. Returning their coats in the manner he did, via the caretaker he shared with the Frenches was, to his mind, even more obscene, as well as the lie about finding them on his grounds. He made himself face up to that fact as well — that he was too weak and spineless to admit he was so drunk he had no recollection of how those girls became involved in his life, and that he had been drinking so much lately he even suspected his own integrity.
But that was three long months ago, with several good ones in between. He meant it this time, about not drinking any more; and here was this girl … why?
“What do you want!”
“Money.”
“Preposterous!”
“Not very. Why did you lie about that night?”
“I must ask you to leave, or I will call up your father.”
She laughed. “Go ahead, and I’ll have some things to tell him too. Things I think hell believe.”
“What is it you want? Blackmail?”
“How silly! Just a loan, really. Not much of a loan either, considering — ”
“You’re a nasty little child, on the verge of becoming a nasty little criminal.”
“What would the police say if I told them I was too terrified, at the time, to say what really happened here. But I’d thought it over, and I’d decided to tell how you molested me, even if it ruined my reputation.”
“They’d most likely say you were a psychotic liar.”
“Would they, Mr. Craig?”
“Do you want to wait here while I call your father? You may say anything you like.”
“If you want it that way, Mr. Craig. I’d rather only borrow fifteen pounds. That’s not a lot.”
“I’ll call your father,” Craig said.
He walked to his left, off the living room toward the study. He was thinking that no one would believe this child! Would they?
He was a man well past fifty; yes, a drunk, but no one would believe that Philip Craig would molest a child, two children. As he sank onto his red leather couch, he recalled two things then. First, old Krich from the club — respectable, retired. A widower who began to drink after his wife died, then began to go slowly crazy, chasing after schoolgirls and frightening them in the streets. The druggist’s daughter had told stories about Krich, and no one at the club believed it until witnesses testified in open court. Craig remembered the silence in the lobby at the club, the evening Krich came for his luggage. Only one person spoke — the new young lawyer; he was sitting beside Craig, and he spoke in a whisper.
“What got into him, do you suppose?” he wondered. “Too much in his cups, eh?”
Craig remembered that, and then he also remembered Tim French’s voice when he called him up the morning after that night in January.
“But why return the coats, Philip? Make the girls come and get them. It’s not your worry, if they were only on your grounds.”
“I wish you’d simply do as I ask, Tim, if you don’t mind,” Craig had said, and Tim had complied, sent the caretaker over for them without any more mention of the matter.
How would it sound to Tim, this child’s ugly accusations?
“Lost your nerve, Mr. Craig?” from the hall. Yes, Philip felt like saying. Fifteen pounds wasn’t a lot, after all.
But with a certain snap to his movement, he lifted the receiver.
He said, “The number?” realizing that his voice was edged with panic.
“Why, 3636,” came laughed back at him.
He hesitated, then he called the number.
“Dr. Edlin’s office. Good morning.”
He said, “One moment please.” He sat back, muffling the receiver with his large square hand. “All right,” he said. “All right.”
There was no answer from the hallway.
He repeated himself, then left the phone on the leather seat and went through to the hallway. The door was open, and down at the end of the front walk was the girl, going away.
Craig went back and put the phone’s arm in its cradle. And so it was over; he had called her bluff…. He needed a stiff drink.
• • •
The swimming pool produced a hollow echo. It said … “about your note to Rush.” Miss Nicky stood in her worn blue knit swimsuit with the baggy green man’s sweater over it, holding the pole with the hooked end that she used when she was teaching here. Class had just ended. Beyond her, in the room off the pool, showers hissed, and there was the familiar hilarity of girls dressing, and the slight steamy fog with the raw smell of chlorine.
Before her, the girl with the long black hair waited for her to say something, a slight tilt to her lips, her eyes fastened on Miss Nicky’s face.
The girl spoke again. “You, and all of you here, have sat back and let Miss Pierce-Morgan accuse me of a signicant relationship. What about you, Miss Nicky?”
“Rush gave you this?” the woman asked very softly, looking down at the blue water in the pool and not at the girl.
“I borrowed it a while ago from Rush, when I visited her. Rush must be very sentimental. Had a special place for your love letters, a special little old leather box on top her bureau.”
Miss Nicky said, “All right, Martha. What are your plans then?”
“I’d
like a loan.”
“You’d what?”
“I’d like to borrow twenty pounds. You have it. You go abroad almost every other summer.”
“Do you know this can mean your expulsion, Martha? If I report this, do you know what it can mean?”
“To me, or to you? As for me, I detest Chillam!”
“i know,” Miss Nicky said. “I know you do.”
“You needn’t worry about my wanting more than twenty, about my coming back again and again, the way blackmailers do in the movies. I won’t tap any source too heavily. I know not to force my luck.”
Miss Nicky looked at the girl. She could think of nothing to say, or of too many things, really — pointless explanations, excuses, pleas; none of those would even dent this girl.
Martha said: “My mother and father are getting a divorce. They’re taking me to America. I won’t be back at Chillam next year anyway. I wonder if you will be.”
Not to return to Chillam? To go back and live with her mother? It would mean that…. And how often had Miss Nicky paused in the yard between Old House and Gate Dorm at night, and watched the school lights dot out one by one, in students’ rooms, and felt safe here at Chillam. She loved the looks of Weerdale, with the bluffs circling it as though to buttress it and close it in from the outside world. She loved the narrow ancient roads and back streets known as the Lanes, and the open, thyme-scented fields that bordered on the beach and the changing sea.
And the school itself — the large group of yellow buildings, brightened by white colonnades and fresh-colored green ivy, resting on the terraced hillside with the woods behind it — this was a haven as well.
Oddly, as she stood there before the girl, she remembered how conscious she always became of her body when she was away from Chillam, how outlandishly overgrown and clumsy she felt at times, as though she were a huge, bungling misfit, conspicuous and obnoxious. She always felt like sitting on her long, big hands, as though she were sort of a freak child who had mistakenly grown too rapidly into a woman’s size.
She had fought herself so strenuously since college.
There was the day of her graduation from the small women’s teachers’ college, where she had majored in physical education; where she had been known as “sweat socks.” At the graduation exercises, when the class history was read, someone had written an entry in the ”Will We Ever Forget” section:
