Hilda and Pearl

by Alice Mattison

  Her father and Uncle Mike were standing near the bed and looking at her, and they were both smiling just a little. She had never noticed how alike their smiles were. Both their mouths stretched sideways when they smiled, but did not turn up. “Did you find Simon?” she said.

  “No,” said her father, and he looked sad again. Uncle Mike shook his head. Yet she felt that they had found something. They had found her, and that seemed to please them, but only a little—their smiles were tiny smiles. It was not that they had stopped caring about Simon. They reminded her of her mother and Aunt Pearl, and so she knew that they had not been fighting. She imagined them walking the streets, over and over again, searching, growing tired, falling against each other and leaning on each other’s shoulders.

  They were standing close together, that was it. And now her father put his hand on his brother’s shoulder. Then the phone rang. Frances got off the bed. The dark pink bedspread, quilted satin, was rumpled, and she tried to straighten it. Her father and uncle had gone to the phone, and she heard her father’s voice say, “Hello?” and then, “He is? He’s there? Mike, he’s there. Thank God, thank God. Is he all right? You’re sure? Here, Pearl, talk to Michael,” and when she hurried into the living room, her father was sobbing and he took both her hands in his. “He’s all right, baby,” he said.

  “A friend?” Uncle Mike was saying. “Sammy? He never mentioned a Sammy. Who knew there was a Sammy? This Sammy, did he talk him into this? No, no, don’t worry.” He was shaking his head, denying what Pearl was saying. “I’m not going to do a thing, Pearlie, of course I wouldn’t hurt him. I just got him back. You think I’m going to do something to him? I’ll be right there. I’ll be home right away.”

  He hung up the phone and turned to Frances and her father, who were standing together. Nathan had his arm around Frances’s shoulders. “I can’t believe this,” Mike said. Frances thought he was going to give her father a hug and a kiss, because he stepped forward and raised his arms. But he just touched the sides of their heads, both at the same time, her father’s and hers. He hadn’t taken his coat off. It hung open as he touched their hair, just above their ears, and Frances felt his fingers shake. Buttoning his coat awkwardly—Frances thought he might have buttoned it wrong—Mike turned and let himself out of the apartment.

  3

  PEARL SUTTER TOOK A SUMMER JOB AT A DILAPIDATED HOTEL in the Adirondacks where a cousin used to work. Her cousin said she’d have to answer the phone and take reservations. Pearl was also supposed to keep track of the band that played on weekends and communicate with the cab service that brought guests from the bus station. Pearl knew nothing of the hotel business. Twice she forgot to arrange for guests to be picked up, but it didn’t matter. It was 1935 and there were few guests at all. She knew she was incompetent, and she didn’t complain when the manager, red-faced, told her that business was so poor he’d have to cut her pay.

  Pearl didn’t mind the hotel, which was simple and quiet, on the edge of a lake in pine woods. Her cousin and the cousin’s new husband had driven her there in June and she didn’t know where she was. She liked being on her own. Up to now she’d lived at home and worked in her father’s candy store, part-time when she was a girl, full-time after she dropped out of Hunter College in her sophomore year. Now her younger brother was working in the store, and he’d taken to it as Pearl never had, rearranging the candy counter and ordering more magazines. Her father didn’t need her, and Pearl, who tried not to think about the end of the summer, preferred being incompetent in the hotel to being incompetent in the store. Other than not knowing what she’d do in September, her main problem was hairpins. She’d forgotten to bring any.

  Pearl was a blonde, and she hadn’t bobbed her hair but wore it in a thick braid which she twisted into a crown at the back of her head. It had given her a certain distinction in college, where everyone else was determined to be modern. Pearl liked feeling queenly, though she knew it put people off. Here at the hotel, she didn’t make friends with the girls who cleaned the rooms and waited on tables, though they were about her age and her sort. She didn’t think she was better than they were, but she knew she looked as if she thought that.

  It took twenty gold-colored hairpins to secure the braid properly, and Pearl had learned to do it swiftly—her left hand supporting the braid while her right hand poked pins around it at even intervals—generally working by feel because she couldn’t see the back of her head unless she had two mirrors. Of course, occasionally a hairpin fell out and got lost. At home she had a good supply, but when she’d come to the hotel, she’d forgotten her little tin box, and had only the twenty hairpins she wore the day of the trip. One must have been lost in her cousin’s car: even the next morning, there were only nineteen. She’d written to her mother, but no hairpins had arrived.

  Now, after three and a half weeks, having taken meticulous care, Pearl had fifteen hairpins. She didn’t see how she could get through the summer this way. She had Thursday afternoons off, and she could have bought more, but she had no way to get to town. Sometimes the chambermaids got rides with friends, but she didn’t know any of them well and hated to ask. One afternoon she walked to a store at a crossroads, but couldn’t find hairpins in the small stock, mostly bread and milk.

  Now she was at the hotel desk on a hot Wednesday afternoon when nobody was likely to come through and need anything. She was reading aloud from a newspaper that was several days old to Mike Lewis, the saxophonist in the band. She was reading an account of a baseball game and Mike was taking down what she said in shorthand, writing rapidly in a notebook. He said he needed all the practice he could get because he was hoping to qualify for a job as a shorthand reporter for the Manhattan district attorney’s office. At present he worked in a music store when he wasn’t here and wasn’t taking college courses at night.

  “What made you take up shorthand?” Pearl asked.

  “I can’t make a living playing the saxophone, can I?” said Mike. The band was now playing for room and board. They were students at City College, glad to be out of the city for the summer. Mike’s father was dead and he lived with his mother, and Pearl thought maybe he didn’t get along with her.

  “You’re good at shorthand,” she said, looking at his notes, which were unintelligible to her but looked impressive.

  “No, I’m not good yet.”

  The small lobby with its knotty pine walls was hot, and Pearl went out from behind the desk to open the door. She propped it open with a rock that was kept just outside for this purpose. She could smell the pine trees when the door was open.

  “You dropped something,” said Mike.

  Pearl felt herself blush and looked where he pointed. Of course it was a hairpin. She bent down for it, wiped it on a scrap of paper, and stuck it back into her hair. The trouble was that fifteen hairpins weren’t enough to hold the weight of the braid, and as it pulled away from her head, it loosened them.

  “They must not pay you much,” said Mike, “if you have to scrape those things off the floor.”

  “They don’t pay me much,” said Pearl. She thought that was rude of him, although she didn’t mind. But of course she could afford hairpins. “There’s no place to buy them,” she said.

  “I thought girls were born with a lifetime supply.”

  “At home I have an oak chest with forty thousand,” said Pearl, “but I forgot it. I could buy some, but I never get to town.”

  “I go to town,” said Mike. “Come with me. When’s your day off?”

  “Tomorrow,” said Pearl. She thought she’d like to go to town with Mike. He was good-looking—young, slouchy, always with a cigarette in his fingers or something else: his pencil for taking down shorthand, a leaf, a twig. His hair fell into his eyes and he had a habit of blowing hard upward, as if he thought that would be the same as combing it. She’d been aware of him. He looked like the least friendly of the band members, but he was the only one who talked to her. He was abrupt, that was all. The other two sto
od if she entered a room—Mike didn’t—but they had nothing to say. “I didn’t know you had a car,” she said.

  “I don’t. We’ll hitchhike.” She was a little alarmed but tried to act nonchalant, and then one of the guests came in wanting the canoe paddles, which were kept behind the desk. Mike stood to the side while she handed them over, and she found herself glancing to see if he noticed when she ran her hand over her hair, checking, after she bent down. He was looking at her, not smiling, and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

  The next afternoon Mike said it would be easier to get a ride if the drivers didn’t know he was there. “A girl alone,” he said. He waited behind a bush, and with some embarrassment she stuck her thumb out. The first car slowed for her, and Mike jumped out from behind the bush and got into the back seat. “Well, I didn’t see you, young man,” said the driver, an older man, but Pearl thought he’d probably have stopped no matter who was waiting. He talked all the way into town. He was the owner of a dry goods store in Glens Falls. “Now, that’s a nice piece of goods, that skirt you’re wearing,” he said to Pearl. “I can see quality.” It was a narrow gored skirt in dark green and Pearl wondered whether Mike had noticed it.

  The man dropped them off at a drugstore in town (“My girl has to pick up some hairpins,” said Mike), but it carried hairpins only in black. “They’d look like ants in my hair, going around my braid,” Pearl said. Mike laughed at her but accompanied her down Main Street until they found a second drugstore, and there hairpins came in gold as well as black. “Fourteen carat,” said Mike. “No doubt about it.”

  She liked being teased. “I’ll buy you an ice cream cone,” he said then, and they walked back to the first drugstore, which had a fountain. He paid for the cones and then, without talking about whether they were going to do it, they walked all the way back to the hotel, scuffing their feet in the brown pine needles at the edge of the road, or walking on the road itself when the brush came right down to it. A few cars passed them, but they didn’t try to flag them down. After his cone was gone, Mike smoked, or he broke off a twig and peeled it as he walked.

  That night Pearl had a blister and her feet ached. She soaked them in Epsom salts, which she found in the bathroom she shared with the manager and his wife and the chambermaids. She sat on her bed with her feet in an enamel basin, looking out the window and watching the light sift away from the trees and from the lake, which she could just glimpse from her room. She took down her hair, putting her hairpins one by one into an ashtray on her dresser—still careful, though now she had plenty, as though the hairpins were small souvenirs of the day.

  Mike liked to take walks, and he began to show up when Pearl was just ready to leave the desk at night. They’d walk partway to town, slapping at mosquitoes. As the summer progressed it began to be dark by the time they’d gone a little way, but they walked a bit anyway, facing traffic, turning their faces away from the headlights when, every once in a while, a car came along. Or they went down to the lake. He stood with his arm around her, not saying much. Then he walked her to the main building of the hotel, where she lived. The band lived in a cottage on the grounds. He walked her home three times before he ever kissed her, but once he began, he kissed her every night.

  On weekends she’d sit alone at a table in the lounge, listening to the band. She’d never paid attention to jazz before and at first she didn’t like it. It seemed disreputable: it made her sad in a way that scared her. Mike said he didn’t know what she meant, jazz was beautiful, and after a while she began to pick out songs she liked, at first those that seemed most like what she called “just plain songs.” Gradually she began to like others, the songs with low, wailing notes. It surprised her when Mike played these songs. It was like hearing him speak in a foreign language, and sometimes she imagined that if she could read his shorthand notes, they would also sound like great cries and strange muted calls.

  At the end of the summer Mike said they should get married. “What else will you do?” he asked bluntly, when she claimed to be astonished, although she’d had the same idea herself.

  “I could go home and look for a job,” she said. “We can’t afford to get married.”

  “You don’t want to go home.”

  “No.” Her father would make her work in the candy store, and make her brother, who belonged there, look for a job. Pearl thrust her feet out in front of her and noticed how the sun made patterns on her open-toed shoes. She and Mike were sitting on the wooden steps of the cottage where he’d been living all summer with the other musicians. They’d been talking in low voices because the other two men were asleep.

  “You’ll be fine in September, whatever we do,” said Pearl. The owner of the music store had said he might give Mike a full-time job in September. And maybe he’d get the stenography job. As she spoke she heard one of the other musicians walking around, and then the pianist came out, carrying a towel. He was on his way to the showers, which were in a small wooden building closer to the main house.

  “Somebody else is going to grab you,” Mike said gruffly. It was the nearest he’d come to a declaration of love. “Some guy will come along.” As she watched the pianist, whose name was Moe, walk up the hill to the showers, Pearl wondered if Mike had expected her to have other admirers, and she wondered whether Moe, who was stiffly polite with her, liked her at all. Once she’d been identified as Mike’s girl, other people at the hotel had pulled back even more noticeably. The chambermaids were a tiny bit friendlier, and Pearl thought maybe they were afraid of Mike and admired her for being comfortable with him.

  “Where would we live?” she said.

  “We’d live with my brother and his wife until we found an apartment. You could look for a job, but meanwhile we’d have what I make.”

  “Your brother wouldn’t mind?”

  “He won’t mind. We’ll give him some money. You’ll like his wife. You’ll get along with her.”

  Pearl thought of the candy store. It had just one light bulb. The windows were crowded with signs sent by companies that sold syrup and malted mix. When Pearl stood at the marble counter of the soda fountain, near the cash register, she couldn’t see out into the street; a large cutout blocked her way. From behind, it was just gray cardboard; in front it was the fading picture of a smiling girl and boy drinking with two straws out of the same soda. She remembered how much it irritated her that she couldn’t see out the window.

  “All right,” she said.

  On the Thursday before Labor Day, they borrowed a car and drove to New York for a marriage license. They drove all day, and then, going back, all night, because Mike had to play on Friday. The car broke down. Mike played without sleep Friday night. Labor Day weekend was the busiest time at the hotel all summer, and Pearl took it in confusedly, through tiredness and excitement. They told no one but the band members that they were going to be married. The day after Labor Day, they took the bus to New York, and then Pearl told her family. She’d mentioned Mike in her letters, but she hadn’t said much. Her mother cried and tried to talk her out of it.

  Pearl stayed with her family that night and the next, and they were married on Thursday, in a rabbi’s study, with her parents and brother and Mike’s brother and sister-in-law in attendance. Mike said it would be better to tell his mother about it after it was a done thing. Pearl’s mother, though she had cried, bought food from a delicatessen and invited everyone to their apartment over the candy store after the wedding. Mike’s brother, Nathan, and his wife came along, and Pearl kept her eyes on Hilda, who seemed to be looking everything over, gazing with composure at Pearl’s mother and father, her brother, and the small living room with its heavy mahogany furniture.

  Pearl thought it would be a privilege to live with Hilda, even for just a few weeks. Hilda was wearing a gray dress and hat, quite plain. Her hair was short, and it was arranged in dark curls around her face. She moved her head slowly, calmly, when she talked to one member of the family or another. She and Nathan were still
there when Pearl and Mike left—in the rain—on their honeymoon.

  They took the subway to New York and spent two nights in a hotel. Pearl was a virgin, and she was surprised by sex. She’d imagined something more headlong: a moist, yielding sort of dissolution. This ritual felt a little violent and a little silly, both drier and, somehow, wetter than she had expected. But she liked sleeping in bed with her new husband. She woke in the night and kissed his shoulder and arm gently, careful not to waken him. She kissed him over and over again. Asleep, curled away from her, he looked like a boy.

  The next day Mike took Pearl to the Central Park Zoo, even though it was still raining. There was a hurricane in Florida, and everyone was talking about how much it had rained. Later they went to the movies, to see Anna Karenina with Greta Garbo, and to a jazz club.

  “Did you change your name?” Pearl asked Mike, on the way to Hilda and Nathan’s Saturday morning. It fascinated her that her last name was now Lewis, but she’d noticed that Hilda and Nathan’s name was Levenson.

  “I’m not hiding the fact that I’m Jewish,” Mike said. “I’ll tell anybody I’m Jewish. But I don’t see why I have to advertise it.” So her name might have been Levenson. She wasn’t sure which she liked better.

  Hilda and Nathan lived in a one-bedroom apartment on Bedford Avenue in Flatbush. They had a couch in the living room that was really a single bed, and Hilda had said that if Mike and Pearl could get hold of another single bed, they could push the two together and have a double bed to sleep on. Pearl’s parents said they could take the bed from Pearl’s room.

  As soon as Pearl and Mike arrived at the Levensons’ after their two-night honeymoon, Mike and Nathan took the trolley to the Sutters’ apartment and got the bed, which they brought back on the roof of a taxi. Meanwhile Hilda made Pearl a cup of coffee and Pearl sat in the kitchen drinking it, while Hilda cleared away the breakfast things. Pearl offered to help, but Hilda shook her head. Still wearing her jacket and hat, Pearl watched her new sister-in-law. Her suitcase was in the hall, and there was a box of clothes at her parents’ apartment that she had to bring sooner or later. Hilda and Nathan’s apartment was small.