Crying Child

by Barbara Michaels

  “The woman! I told you this morning. The woman in the—”

  And then, almost too late, I remembered Mary. I turned. From the depths of the big chair where she sat she watched me with affectionate concern. The mildness of that concern was a bad sign; ordinarily she’d have been fussing over me, demanding to know what had frightened me. I swallowed all the words that were boiling up in my throat, though the effort almost choked me. I hated to imagine the effect a macabre description like the one I was about to make would have on her.

  “Just my imagination,” I said slowly. “Twilight is such a spooky time of night.”

  I don’t suppose anyone believed me. Ran didn’t; I could tell by his face that he realized what I was talking about. He looked terrified. And in his fright and concern for Mary he spoke with brutal directness.

  “It’s not the twilight. It’s this damned house. We’re getting out of here. Mary, Jo—we’ll leave Monday, go back to town. Maybe later on we can go abroad for a few months. It’s the wrong time of year for Switzerland, but in June—”

  I tried to stop him, but it was too late. Mary came up out of her chair as if propelled by a spring.

  “Go away from here?”

  She looked as if she were going to faint. Ran went to her, his arms outstretched, but she put him off with a convulsive movement of her hands.

  “I won’t go, Ran. I won’t leave. I like it here. I feel better here. If I go I’ll be ill. Really ill.”

  It was a threat, and Ran knew it. His arms dropped heavily. He stared at Mary with naked fear in his eyes.

  Her face softened a little at the sight of his distress. She knew she had won; she could afford some compassion.

  “You don’t understand, Ran,” she said pleadingly; it was as if the two of them were alone in the room. “You must bear, or lose; there is no other way. Just give me a little more time.”

  “Mary,” I said hoarsely.

  Mary looked at me.

  “No, Jo,” she said. “I can’t talk now. I have too much to do. Now why don’t you sit down and relax? I must—I must speak to Mrs. Willard about something.”

  She left the room. After a moment Ran followed.

  “What was that all about?” Will demanded.

  “Blackmail,” Anne said coolly. She put out her cigarette. “She’s threatening to break down completely if he forces her to leave.”

  “Oh, that, sure. But what did she mean when she said—”

  Ran reentered the room. Will glanced inquiringly at him and he nodded wearily.

  “She’s with Mrs. Willard. I just wanted to be sure. You ought to hear her, chatting about hors d’oeuvres.” He looked at me. “Jed was right, wasn’t he? He warned you she wouldn’t leave.”

  “I believe I also mentioned that possibility,” Anne said waspishly. She wasn’t so pretty or so charming when her professional pride was challenged. “If you hadn’t been so abrupt, Mr. Fraser—”

  Ran looked like a whipped dog, and I said angrily, “It wouldn’t have made any difference. We knew it probably wouldn’t work, but we had to try it. Sure Jed was right; he always is.”

  “Jed? Who is this Jed you all keep quoting?”

  “Somebody call me?”

  There he was in the doorway. He must have been there for some time waiting for a chance to interrupt. As Will had said, he had a funny sense of humor. I suspected he was enjoying the look on Anne’s face as she compared his lanky overalled form with the expert she had visualized from our respectful comments. She probably expected another psychiatrist.

  Ran, who was so totally without snobbery that he never sensed it in other people, introduced the two of them to one another. Jed nodded politely.

  “Did you hear what happened?” Ran asked.

  “I gather Mary refused to leave the house.”

  “She said something odd,” Will said. “What was all that about ”You must bear or lose‘?“

  By that time I shouldn’t have been surprised at the breadth of Jed’s acquaintance with the classics; but I really didn’t expect anyone else to recognize that obscure quotation. He did; I could tell by his face. His eyes moved inquiringly from one bewildered face to another, and stopped when they came to me.

  “You know it too,” he said. “You and Mary must have read the same books.”

  “There were books all over the house,” I said. “In every room, even in the hall. Memory is a funny thing. I couldn’t remember my mother’s face without the pictures; but I can close my eyes, and see that set of Kipling. It was in a bookcase in the dining room. Brown cloth bindings stamped in gold. ”The Just-So Stories’ and “The Jungle Books’ were the first, and then ‘Puck of Pook’s Hill.” From the time I was three or four, somebody read to me every night. They took turns—Mother and Dad and Mary. After I learned to read I was insatiable. I tried everything, from Dad’s old Hardy Boy books to Shakespeare. A lot of it I didn’t understand. But nobody controlled my reading; they explained when I asked questions, and suggested books I might enjoy, but they never…“

  I stopped, realizing that they were all staring at me. Memory is a funny thing. It can rise up, alive and hurting, after years of indifference.

  “So,” I said. “That’s why I know the story. It isn’t one of his best-known tales. And nobody reads Kipling these days, do they. He’s too sentimental for modern tastes. This is a particularly sentimental story.”

  “Wait a minute,” Will said. “I knew it was familiar. Sure, it’s the story about the blind woman who keeps her house open, furnished with fires and toys—for the ghost children. She can hear them; but the only ones who can see them are the bereaved parents.”

  “ ”You must bear or lose,“ ” I quoted. “The narrator of the story was a father. I always wondered if it wasn’t semi-autobiographical. Didn’t Kipling lose a little girl?”

  Anne lit another cigarette.

  “Naturally I am aware of the form Mary’s delusion has taken,” she said. “She believes that the spirit of the child she never had is lost in the dark and is calling to her. Your description of the story fits in very well. But I don’t believe it adds anything to what we already know.”

  She looked so smug. I was rather upset anyway. “You know, we know, everybody knows,” I said. “But you don’t know, not really, not with your blood and bones and guts. Damn it, Doctor, you can’t help Mary if you won’t face the fact that people are sentimental and primitive and uncritical. Our sophistication is a veneer; when trouble strikes, we revert to the emotional patterns of the Middle Ages, or before. I don’t know what you think about the soul, or survival after death, or anything like that; the important thing is what Mary believes. I know how she feels because I have the same weaknesses. The idea of death as a journey—it’s only a figure of speech, to describe a transition that is otherwise incomprehensible. But it isn’t just an academic description; it has a more complex meaning to some of us. And then when we think about the children. It must be terrible to see them start out on such a long, long journey, when we never let them out of the front yard alone. In the dark nights, with rain or snow falling, the thought is unbearable. And no matter how fine a place Heaven may be, we can’t believe that they won’t feel strange and lonesome there.”

  “Neither the harps nor the crowns amused, nor the cherubs dove-winged races,

  Holding hands forlornly, the Children wandered beneath the dome,

  Plucking the radiant robes of the passers-by, and with pitiful faces

  Begging what Princes and Powers refused:— “Ah, please will you let us go home?” “

  There was a long silence after Jed had finished. He broke it himself, with an incredibly cynical chuckle.

  “The old boy sure knew how to wring out the pathos, didn’t he?”

  I wasn’t going to let him get away with it so easily. “Don’t forget the ending,” I said. “ ”Shall I that have suffered the children to come to Me hold them against their will?“ ”

  “This,” Anne said, with fasti
dious distaste, “is not really a good idea.”

  To my surprise, Jed nodded vigorously. “You never said a truer word, Doctor. But that’s the point Jo is trying to make. This whole subject is emotionally overloaded. A person can’t hardly think about it at all without these images coming to mind, and such thoughts can break you to pieces if you let them. It’s like that story, that has such a grip on Mary. To somebody who doesn’t have that particular weakness it’s just a piece of sentimental foolishness. But what’s folly to you may be life and death to somebody else. That’s what Jo is saying—isn’t it, Jo? You don’t dare sympathize too much, or you end up wallowing in grief. But you can’t ignore these things either, or pretend they don’t exist. It’s awfully hard to avoid falling into one extreme or the other.”

  I beamed at Jed. He almost had me convinced that that was what I was trying to say. I hadn’t realized how smart I was.

  The hands of the clock moved on toward midnight, and past. My room was in shadow except for the circle of light cast by my reading lamp. The silence and the cool breeze that stirred the white curtains should have made me sleepy, particularly after my activities the night before.

  I wasn’t sleepy, although the book I was reading was decidedly soporific. It was a history which Ran had pressed upon me, reminding me that I had once, in a moment of mania, expressed an interest in the China trade. The subject had come up at dinner. I think we were all groping rather desperately for something safe and detached to talk about. Although I was becoming convinced that the trouble in the house was bound up with Hezekiah and his family, I didn’t see that there was any danger in talking about him so long as Mary didn’t suspect any connection.

  We actually worked up a certain amount of merriment on the subject of old Hezekiah; I kept teasing Ran about his reluctance to discuss his ancestor’s weaknesses, and he finally told us some of the riper stories. I could see why the family hadn’t taken any pride in the old boy’s exploits. Even in Victorian times there was a certain admiration for a virile, tom-cat type of man; but Hezekiah had an unpleasant weakness for very young girls, and seduction was too kind a word for his sexual techniques.

  “Still,” Ran said—giving the devil his due—“he was a damn fine seaman. He must have been pretty good to command his own ship at nineteen.”

  “It wasn’t unusual in those days.” Will grinned. “The case that impressed me was that of the captain’s wife who took over when her husband came down with brain fever. The first mate was in irons for insubordination and the second mate didn’t know any navigation. So Mrs. Patten, who had taught herself navigation on an earlier voyage, took command of the ship. She not only nursed her husband through brain fever, but she navigated that clipper ship with its rough, tough crew from Cape Horn to San Francisco. She was nineteen at the time.”

  “Oh, well, sure,” I said feebly. “I’m sure I could have done a little thing like that when I was nineteen… You know any more stories to make me feel inferior, or do you want to talk about Hezekiah?”

  “I don’t think I do,” Ran admitted. “Let’s stick to his good qualities, shall we?”

  “Did he have any?”

  “If you consider ambition and ability good qualities. He came up the hard way, through the hawseholes, as they used to say; that means he rose to command from being a foremast hand. By the time he was nineteen he had his own command; by twenty-six he was building his own ships at Bath and had bought this house. That doesn’t necessarily mean he was unscrupulous; if you were good enough you could get rich quick. Salaries weren’t all that high, but an officer had the privilege of several tons of cargo space on the return trip for his private investment, and also a primage, or commission on the proceeds, after the cargo was sold. Hezekiah bought into a shipbuilding firm when the trade was expanding enormously and he went on sailing his own ships… Anne, you look bored. I’m sorry this is so dull.”

  She had hidden her yawn behind a well-manicured hand. Now she leaned forward, her eyes sparkling with amusement.

  “Tales of virtuous accomplishment are always dull, aren’t they? Let’s get back to his vices. He must have been a handsome dog to cut such a wide swath.”

  “Oddly enough, they say he was an ugly devil.”

  “They say? Isn’t there a portrait of the family hero anywhere about?”

  “You’d think there would be. I seem to remember one, but I don’t know what’s become of it. But he wasn’t handsome; he was short and stocky, bowlegged and hairy. He must have had sex appeal, or something; they used to lock their daughters up when Hezekiah’s fore-topgallant sails rose up over the horizon. He calmed down a bit after he got married; his wife was the daughter of a Boston shipping family, and he needed her money and connections. Of course he wasn’t home much. He had plenty of time and opportunity to indulge in his favorite habits while he was on his travels.”

  “The old male boast,” Anne said. “Enough tall sons of the same age to provide his pallbearers.”

  “I think that’s repulsive,” I said.

  “It depends on the point of view,” said Will.

  “Be that as it may,” Ran said hastily, “Hezekiah could have done it. They usually stopped at Hawaii on the way out; the ladies of the Sandwich Islands had quite a reputation for beauty and accessibility. Then the big shipping families maintained permanent quarters in Hong Kong, and some had fancy summer homes at Macao. I can see Hezekiah living it up out there in more than oriental splendor. On the homeward voyage they went to Java and Madagascar and the Cape. Not to mention the red lights of New York and Boston.”

  “Whooping it up around the world,”“ I muttered. ”While the wives sat home scrubbing and baking and nursing sick kids.“

  Anne laughed.

  “Possibly Mrs. Hezekiah was happy to get him out of the house. Really, though, Ran, I don’t understand why the family has made such a big thing of his sins. They sound pretty normal.”

  “It depends on the point of view,” I said, glancing at Will. “As to what’s normal, I mean.”

  “The stories that have survived are the expurgated versions,” Ran said. “But what really bothered his descendants was the cargo Hezekiah specialized in. He started with tea and silks and the usual things; but there wasn’t much demand for European imports in China, so my admirable progenitor turned to opium.”

  “Oh, great,” I said. “A pusher in the family.”

  “He carried opium to China, not back to New England from China,” Ran said. “Maybe I’m being a little hard on him; if we’re going to make moral judgments we have to consider the mores of the period. The British had been pushing Indian opium into China for decades. When the Chinese objected, the highly respectable merchants of London and Bristol went to war to make sure they wouldn’t lose their profits.”

  “You mean that’s what the Opium Wars were all about?” I asked incredulously. “I’ve heard about them, but I never realized. I had the vague idea that the British got mad because the Chinese were trying to monopolize the trade.”

  “Quite the contrary,” Will said. “The people who want to legalize various forms of cheap euphoria these days don’t seem to realize that other countries have tried it and found out that it doesn’t work. Even before 1800 the Chinese made the importation of opium illegal. But the good Christian merchants of Europe found the trade too profitable, and by bribing dishonest Chinese officials they kept the stuff coming in. Finally the Chinese government cracked down, and the Europeans rammed drug addiction down the throat of an entire nation by bloody force. Oh, I guess historians will give you a long list of other causes; but that that motive could enter in at all… Most New England merchants refused to deal in opium. Maybe their motives weren’t all that noble; they were wary of a trade that, being illegal, carried some risks. The fact remains that Hezekiah was the biggest American dealer in opium, and some of his methods for running the stuff in sickened his contemporaries. And they weren’t noted for weak stomachs.”

  That conversation had intere
sted me enough to make me want to find out more about the subject—hence the book I was now reading. It was a terrible story. Reading history has one therapeutic effect; you realize that we aren’t any worse than our ancestors—maybe we’ve even improved a little. But the book was dully written and after a while even the tragedy of the Opium Wars couldn’t keep me interested.

  I got up and went to the window. I’ll be honest; it took some courage for me to look out. But there was nothing on the lawn except moonlight and the shadows of trees and shrubs. I thought how beautiful it could be here if the terror that haunted Mary could be exorcised—and if I could ever get a good night’s sleep. I hadn’t done very well with sleeping in this house.

  After a while I began to get drowsy, but still I sat there, arms folded on the sill, looking out into the still beauty of the night. I wished the window weren’t screened. I would have liked to thrust my head and shoulders out into the chill air and the moonlight, which looked like crystallized water.