The Puzzleheaded Girl

by Christina Stead

  At last she said, “Mommy, he was a nice man; very kind. Aunt Di was right. And he admired Aunt Di; he said she was full of fun.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Mommy, we laugh too much, don’t we?”

  “We have to laugh, kiddo. I cried for years after they died. At first I stayed up all night playing patience; I couldn’t sleep at all. Then I would sleep and dream I was talking to your father, that our family life went on. I would wake up and find he had gone, they had all gone but you. And you were very sad, you were such a doleful thing, a wet blanket.” She suddenly laughed. “So, kiddo, I had to start; and I knew nothing.”

  “Mommy! I am going to find a man I can give all my money to, like Aunt Di did. We thought she was a stick; a ridiculous old scarecrow, didn’t we?” They both began to laugh. “I am a stick, Mommy, oh, I am such a stick.”

  Her mother gave musical evenings; they invited their friends and young men. They prepared a variety of rich dishes, both being good cooks. The guests could look at the pieces of rare furniture and a cabinet of old china and jewellery which they had kept from Hester’s marriage. The year passed. They heard that Tamara had committed suicide and that her lover and his wife had made it up. “The money had given out,” said Lydia. Spring came. Lydia was very tired. Her mother could not get away from her work; so Lydia went alone to Saint Augustine, Florida, a place that Peggy had raved about, when they were in Paris. She was very disappointed: the hotel was empty. There were no noisy visitors, lively crowds. She tapped along in her New York clothes, and she knew that at sunset it looked like a town in the Arabian Nights, but she did not care for sights; and when she walked along one of the roads, she heard noises. “What’s that?” she asked a passing man. “Rattlesnakes.” She hurried back to the hotel.

  There was a long strip of fine beach, no one on it but an eagle with feathered boots looking at a sand-dollar. She walked from it back to the hotel.

  After a few days, she decided that Miami was the place she really wanted. She walked out on her last evening towards the St. John’s River, where the bridge crosses to a small sandy island. Walking about lonely was a stately young man of athletic build, fair haired and well dressed. After a few paces, she called to him and they walked along together; but she did not chatter in her usual way. She was quite serious and somewhat plaintive. She stayed on and they passed several days together. He found out her age and said, startled: “But why aren’t you married? I can’t understand it, a beautiful girl like you.” He walked along for a time without saying anything more; and at last, “How do you explain it?” He already knew her family history, that she had some money, a good job, that she was well educated.

  “I have never been able to trust a man. It is very foolish of me,” she said. “I want a man I can trust always. I want to rest with him and never to be anxious again. Oh, I have had such a wretched life; perhaps I don’t understand men.”

  “Have you ever been ill, nervously ill?”

  She laughed. “You mean am I crazy? Oh, no, Arthur; oh, how ridiculous!”

  “I can’t understand it then.”

  She was at her ease with him, looked forward to seeing him and was not in a fever. They took the same train back to New York. But she did not hear from him. She told her mother about him, adding, “He probably thinks I’m crazy or there’s something wrong with me. Otherwise I should have been snapped up long ago.” She began to laugh hysterically.

  Two months later, he telephoned her in the evening. “Will you have dinner with me?” She had meant to turn him down, if ever he telephoned, but instead she said, “Yes.” She went straight to the restaurant and they spent a quiet evening. He did not ask about her mother. In the weekend, he took her out to his home, a house on Long Island. He was a bachelor, aged thirty-eight, who collected art treasures and studied the ’cello. He played for her: he was an artist. “Sometimes I have a few friends here; we make up a quartet.” “Do you go to concerts?” “No; sometimes I get an orchestra to come here.” She saw that he was very rich; and the quiet house with the servants, his own independent, eccentric absorption pleased her. He was quite amusing when alone with her. He took her home but would not go in to see her mother. “I think I know your mother now,” he said. She did not expect to hear from him again; and even this, though she felt disappointment, left her with a feeling of calm. For the first time, she was resigned to her life. “What a funny man not to want to see your Mommy! Did you quarrel?” “No.” “What’s he like, kiddo? Come, tell me, and we’ll have a good laugh.” “I don’t want to talk about him, Mommy. Supposing he never telephones again? More water under the bridge! I wish I could go swimming. I couldn’t go at Saint Augustine: it was too cold and I couldn’t go swimming on that lonely beach. It is so quiet out there at his place; and it’s by the Sound. I could swim there.” “Well, some day in summer he’ll ask you out.”

  The following week he telephoned again. They met in the same restaurant; and as soon as they sat down, he asked her to marry him. “I’ve thought about it for two months and I couldn’t believe it; but I feel sure. I couldn’t understand why you weren’t married. I thought there must be something wrong with you. I was looking for a woman when I met you; but I never imagined I’d meet you.”

  She said yes, at once.

  “I’ve thought about you and your life and I’ve made up my mind what I am going to do.”

  She listened and did not laugh. It seemed to her that he had found the solution; what he said was quite right. She was going to be happy. Her mother was invited to the engagement party which he gave; but he did not speak to her. “I don’t understand it: why couldn’t he say he was glad to know me, that he was grateful to me for bringing him his wife? He needn’t have meant it; but it would have been a few words I would have been glad to hear.” And little by little, patiently but with determination, he met her old friends, was good to them and discarded them. Presently it was as if her old life had never been; and she had grown up in his house; and it was many years before she thought about their union or found anything in it extraordinary.

  The Rightangled Creek

  A SORT OF GHOST STORY

  CHAPTER 3

  The road rises steeply from Lambertville on the Delaware, into hill country, bared for planting and grazing, with small old white villages in trees and unpainted farmhouses high on the ridges. The road follows the uplands. Several miles along, entering Newbold Township, a track turns right and down by Will Newbold’s red barn, a landmark. The track drops between Newbold’s home patch and the pasture for their famous red and white herd; and, on the other side, some acres of corn and alfalfa. It drops into trees between stony ridges on which live poor Austrian and German farmers, down to a narrow creek. This tiny creek first appears as a meander in a wet place, and then as a wallow, where a broad soft meadow declines into swamp, where Sobieski’s black and white cattle lounge all day in a hemicycle of trees, till they are called in the evening, Cow, cow, cow, by Sobieski’s little boys. Above, it becomes a creek, falling from a series of rocky saucers from which the transparent water drips between banks of poison ivy, elder and tiger lilies. In the saucers are elvers and other small fish; and where the track and the creek together make a rightangled turn and go east, a trickle from the Strassers’ rocky infertile ridge has made a deep cut, passing under a strong wooden bridge in which there is a loose plank. This plank is kept loose at one end to tell who is passing: a footstep, lunk! a car, lonk-lonk! It is heard in the daytime in the fields; at night, much louder, it wakes from sleep: “Who is that, so late?” But it is above this thin trickle from the hill and going higher and eastward that the creek broadens to several feet, deepens to eighteen inches and more, and threaded with current, planted with waterweed is lively with eels, fish and watersnake. Now, with a wooded ridge on the right hand, on the left it has turned around a small patch of cleared bottomland, on which stands a double cottage, Pennsylvania style, and a big barn. A solid wooden bridge crosses from the road in
to this clearing, under a magnificent pin-oak and a few other trees, beside the barn; and this clearing of not more than two acres of bottomland, fenced off from Sobieski’s rising rounded meadows, with the right angling creek, coming along a panhandle from Sobieski’s cattle-wallow and running east suddenly along another panhandle, turning all around Sobieski’s hill, getting deeper and wider under heavier and more tangled bushes, is Dilley’s place. For some strange reason, the whole creek in this corner belongs to a piece of land too small to farm; and on this tiny piece of land stands a new barn large enough for a tractor and farm machinery and the well-built house, part stone, with stone cellar and attic, part wood with double porches and upper storey.

  “That’s it,” said the taxi-driver to his one passenger, a stubby dark man with bright blue eyes. They passed the cattle-wallow, the car hobbling over ruts and stones, they entered a passage of tall trees, not disturbing two immense affable ravens on the first half-dead, sky-searching bough. Low set in the green, below the pouring ivy and lightblow of tiger lilies, ahead through thick leaves, was the cottage, with a set of shining windows. All the other farmhouses bare on the hilltop were blistered and weathered bone-white or raw; this one was fresh in buff and red. Ringed with high fields, waters, trees and overgrown ridges, with its lines flowing towards the brook, low set and like a pumpkin flower, the cottage was spellbinding. The April afternoon was rather quiet. A flock of gold canaries flew through tall weeds. Between the weeds and the creek a lanky soft-moulded woman in turban and trousers, with a heavy fork was trying to turn the sods, in an irregular vegetable patch: a fine day, a west wind, a paper-chase of torn cloud blowing over, and coolness with the shadows. The house had two porches, two pitched roofs and, at the back two tall stone chimneys. The spring sun with the birds bathing in it lay on the track. They passed the warning plank, and a large mail box on a post with the name: Laban Davies.

  Said the passenger: “Put me down here. I’ll give them a surprise. I came straight here from Paris. They don’t know I’m in America. I knew Mr. and Mrs. Davies in Paris. We’re old friends. They’ll be glad to see me. My name’s Sam Parsons. If I stay here, you’ll see me around, my friend.”

  “I see Mr. Davies often in Lambertville when he goes to mail his packages,” said the taxi-driver. “My name’s Newbold.”

  Parsons crossed the bridge, which was the only entrance into the place, crossed the tussocks and stones, dropped his little valise by the open kitchen door, went around the house, creekside; but the woman in the vegetable patch, her tired face turned away, did not hear him above the wind and water. Parsons approached smiling, waited, came closer, walked up to the edge of the fresh sods. The woman went on pushing the fork with her sandalled foot, she stooped to pick out a vineroot, threw it on the burning pile.

  “Hello, Ruth, hello!”

  With her foot on the fork, she looked up, looked into his face with dull anxiety. He was a dark mass against the sun. She took off her spectacles.

  “Sam! Oh, my stars! How did you get here?” She began to laugh, showing her strong white teeth.

  “I thought you were in Europe! Oh, wait till Laban sees you! Oh, Sam, oh, my brother.”

  Sam laughed and waved his hands, his wide mouth opened, showing his buck teeth, creamy and broad, and his wide throat: his blue eyes opened and shut.

  She was pumping his hand and beginning to weep. He kissed her.

  “Here I am, yes, here I am! Not there, here! Ruth, my sister. Ha-ha-ha. What’s the matter, old girl?”

  “Oh, Sam, you helped us, you helped us. We’ve never forgotten.”

  “It was nothing. I was broke that time and couldn’t help you much.”

  “Oh, Frankie has never forgotten. He wanted to stay in Paris, with the man with the money, you remember, the man with the money?”

  “The man with all the money—ha-ha!”

  “Excuse me calling you my brother, Sam; I feel like that.”

  “Ha-ha-ha—I feel as if you’re my sister. Ha-ha.”

  “How did you find us? No one knows we’re here.”

  “Don’t you remember you sent us a Christmas card last Christmas?”

  “Did I? It was a hard winter, Sam,” said she. “Where’s Clare, but where’s Clare?” she continued suddenly looking everywhere, to the porch, the tall weeds. “Oh, she’s hiding! Oh, what a surprise,” and she began to laugh.

  “Clare’s in New York: she’ll be down. I don’t leave my wife behind when I travel.”

  “Some do, but you wouldn’t,” said Ruth.

  They entered the framehouse by the downstream porch.

  “This is a typical way of building round here,” said the woman. “A farmer builds himself a framehouse and when the son grows up, he builds on a stone one for the young couple. You see it more across the river in Pennsylvania than here.”

  In the wooden house there was only one room downstairs, the big farm kitchen with its two doors, two porches, a long range of windows warm with the sun and warm with the big wood-and-coal stove with its double oven, standing in the centre. There was a table, a few chairs, some tubs, a sink and a pump beside it. “We save money here, I do everything,” she said in her warm round voice in which there was a strident note. On the stove was a white enamel coffee pot; on the table a thick white cup half full of cold black coffee. There was also a closet; but this turned out to contain a staircase leading to the second-storey rooms in the wooden house. Ruth called and explained pleasantly.

  “Laban, it’s Sam!”

  Footsteps irregularly came down the stairs somewhere in the house, though there was no one there. “There’s another staircase; it’s in the stone house.” They went up a step into the stone house.

  The sitting-room there had only two small windows and was dark. Laban stood there, a couple of yards from the doorway, looking at them; and then rushed forward with his big hands outstretched, crying, “Sam!” and kissed Sam on both cheeks.

  “I couldn’t think who Sam was! I’m working and not to be disturbed. Company’s not good for me. I mean some company; the sort we’re likely to get.”

  He was a tall thin countryman, in slippers, bare elbows, spectacles, a home-knit waistcoat. His fair hair was thin and turning grey, the large hollow eyes were a transparent blue; he had a knife-edged nose and hollow cheeks. A horrible scar ran from below the ear on the left side of his face up into the scalp, which was bare at that place. The flesh had knitted roughly in the old wound.

  They sat down at the table and drank black coffee from the white enamel pot. It was on the stove all day for Laban, who drank three or four pots a day—bad for his heart, but it kept him at work. He was working well now. They had taken the farm for two years at twelve dollars a month, a very low rent. They had been lodging over in the artists’ colony on the Delaware, New Hope on the Pennsylvania shore, and had seen this place, Dilley’s place, advertised in a store. They had rented it from old Mr. Dilley who was retired, they believed, and lived in Jersey City. They lived on country produce, home-grown potatoes, little meat. If Laban’s book, a history of European culture, sold, they might buy this place from old Mr. Dilley to have a home in the country for their boy, Frankie, who was now twelve years old, and who was to go to one of the big colleges.

  Sam Parsons was a very lively man and had a lot to say about Paris, though Laban himself was in closer touch with literary people over there. He said in a dignified way, “You probably noticed my big mail box.”

  Sam had no fixed plans. He wanted to look around for a place for himself and his wife in New York City. The Davies said he must stay with them. They had plenty of room, three bedrooms upstairs, and even a small boxroom with windows that would do, when they got a couch. They bought their provisions in big quantities at the beginning of each month. Sam, who was a writer, and his wife, an illustrator, could work there. “You won’t be disturbed.” No one had this address but Laban’s agent. “Lambertville is too near to New Hope. We never go to Lambertville, where Laban would be recogni
zed. According to Jeroboam’s wishes, Jeroboam being our twenty-dollar Ford, we shop each month in Flemington, Hopewell or even Princeton,” Ruth explained.

  It was to Princeton that they hoped to send Frankie, if they could buy the place and if Laban could sell enough. The only true drawback here was that Frankie had to go to the local school, eleven pupils taught by a young city girl, in a small shed. “We take him there in Jeroboam. The pupils are country boys and girls of all ages, mostly rough and backward, destined to be village gossips and wiseacres,” said Laban. Frankie had easy victories: he deserved better teaching. But Laban’s work came first this year. He had already completed one volume and had sent it off to Paris, asking a celebrated French scholar to write an introduction.

  “With typical French negligence and improbity, a rascally, shallow nation, Lebeau, who wrote me such flattering letters in Paris, does not now even answer my letters. Naturally, if I could pay him, I would hear soon enough. But I can’t pay; and I think scholars should help each other, without dirty money coming into it. He wrote me a letter recognizing me as one of the leading American cultural experts,” said Laban. “Probably he flattered me, expecting me to put him over in this country.”

  But Laban began to smile. His spectacles shone, he became excited and went out to the barn, got out Jeroboam, took Parsons to get Frankie, all the time talking about his work, his contacts, literary life abroad. Laban was a self-taught man, a ditch-digger’s son become a city desk man, turned to literature. Working with irritability, energy, spite, prejudice and vanity, and a nose for the trends, he had set up a remarkably wide circle of useful acquaintances in many countries. He brought out anthologies of writing in languages he could not read, re-translated famous works, wrote introductions to others; had built himself a solid reputation in America. These works were all potboilers; yet Laban had taste, judgment and cunning, and was a literary figure.