Hilda and Pearl

by Alice Mattison

  There were children on the train, high school students. The boys almost made her cry. Even when they seemed outwardly tough or cold or stupid, she could suddenly see that their lips and eyes were innocent, a little fearful, full of hope and uncertainty. She caressed them with her eyes and wanted to bless them. She wanted to bless all the people on the subway, to put her fingers on their foreheads in a half-remembered, half-invented holy gesture. Standing and walking among them, getting off at her stop and joining the throng on the platform, where some people were already mounting the stairs and others shuffled behind her, Pearl discovered that she believed in God.

  She was sure they’d be happy, she and Nathan. She didn’t know how. At work, she let herself think about him only now and then, as a reward for typing a stack of letters, or for approaching Mr. Carmichael with a difficult question. It would be all right, she said to herself over and over.

  In the late afternoon, as it was growing dark, she was suddenly afraid. A sheet of fear passed over her body the way it might have if she’d looked up to see a masked gunman in the doorway. She pressed her hands into the papers on her desk. “Are you all right?” asked the bookkeeper, Ruby—Hilda’s replacement—walking past her.

  “I shivered,” she said, but Ruby kept walking.

  She told herself again that everything would be all right, that Nathan would know what had to happen, that if she just waited patiently it would all become clear. She needed to think, anyway. She didn’t want to see Nathan just yet, or even speak to him. She wanted to think of him, to run her fingers over his body in her imagination.

  All she cared to do in the next days was sing and listen to the radio. She sang love songs. She’d known them for years but had never paid attention to the words. She’d never known that the people singing loved someone.

  She still had a good time with Mike. He was funny and he was her husband. She neglected the cooking and cleaning for the next week because she was always staring out the window and doing nothing, but that was not right. When her mother dropped in one afternoon and asked what Pearl was making for supper, Pearl didn’t know. The next day she bought a cookbook so she could make better meals for Mike. There was nothing wrong with Mike. When she and Nathan spoke at last, he must not be allowed to say anything bad about his younger brother Mike. He might say she should divorce Mike and he’d divorce Hilda, and they’d get married, but she wouldn’t agree, at least not right away. They owed a lot to Hilda and Mike and besides there was the baby. She’d tell Nathan they had to keep silent and wait, and see how they felt about each other over the years. Maybe they’d have to wait until Racket was grown up. That seemed hard but worthwhile. She could picture herself, ennobled by love of Nathan, waiting until they could act on their love without hurting Racket.

  Pearl went to see Racket and Hilda one afternoon on the way home from work, as she had at first. Of course she felt strange but she told herself that the world was a strange place, people all over were feeling and doing things that they had never expected. Ruby’s boyfriend hadn’t expected to become a soldier in Spain—he was a student at City College—but he was talking about going. Pearl hadn’t expected to marry Mike and that had happened. Things happened.

  “I took her for a walk in the carriage,” Hilda said. “I’m glad I got back before you came over.” She was peeling potatoes with the playpen set up next to her, though the kitchen was so small the playpen filled it. Racket was lying in it on her stomach, flailing her arms like a little swimmer.

  Pearl picked her up and Racket batted at Pearl’s nose. She was a dark-eyed baby, solemn for a moment, but then she laughed. “She laughed with a sound,” Pearl said.

  “I know. She did that yesterday, too. It’s cute, isn’t it?” said Hilda.

  The baby reminded Pearl of Nathan. She was the first person besides familiar Mike whom Pearl had touched since she’d touched Nathan. Racket seemed sinewy and busy for a baby, twisting in her arms. Pearl lowered her into the playpen again. She was half relieved, half disappointed that Nathan wasn’t there, and she hurried home before he could come in.

  As the days passed Pearl noticed that Nathan’s touch had changed her. Her breasts felt different. She touched them and shaped them with her hands as she was getting dressed in the morning. She thought they were more beautiful than they had been. She’d never thought of herself as having beautiful breasts, as being beautiful at all, except for her hair, but now she stretched to see herself in the mirror over her dresser and liked the long line of her body. She had good feet—she’d never thought of that either. They were narrow and her insteps were high. She would have liked those feet if she’d seen them in a shoe ad in a magazine.

  But she was tired. Just thinking about Nathan tired her. She yawned when she was standing in Mr. Carmichael’s office while he explained something he wanted her to do. She had to think about climbing the stairs. When it was finally night, she’d lie in bed next to Mike, thinking of Nathan. Sometimes Mike wanted to make love to her, and she complied, but she was so tired she felt almost nothing. “Come on, sweetie,” Mike would say, “don’t you like this? How about this? Do you like this?”

  And he’d fondle her. He too sculpted her breasts with his hands. “Baby, I think you’re growing,” he said to her one night, a few weeks after her night with Nathan.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said, smiling.

  “Your breasties are really something. I never noticed.”

  “You never looked.”

  “I looked, I looked, believe me.”

  Pearl was frightened, as if Mike were about to discover Nathan’s fingerprints on her breasts. She stroked him to hurry him. She felt dry inside. She didn’t really want to do this, and it wasn’t because he was Mike instead of Nathan. Maybe she was getting her period, she thought, although she didn’t recall that being about to get her period usually made her feel this way. She began to try to remember when she had last had her period.

  She always meant to write it down, but she never did. She’d been caught by surprise at work more than once, and had had to get permission to run out to the drugstore for sanitary pads. She was pretty sure she hadn’t had her period when they’d gone on the picnic, and she knew she didn’t have it the day of the rally, October eighth. She counted up. The rally—the day she’d slept with Nathan—was more than three weeks ago. She hadn’t had her period between the picnic and the rally, because then she’d have been thinking about it when they made love, thinking about whether it was really over and whether he’d mind if there was blood. She hadn’t thought about it at all.

  But this didn’t make sense. Pearl was regular—twenty-eight days. She counted back twenty-eight days—she could hear Mike breathing deeply in his sleep now—but that was October 6, the week between the picnic and the rally. Then she remembered her last period. She’d left work early that day to go to the dentist. She’d said something to Ruby about how it wasn’t fair, the dentist and the curse in one day.

  She couldn’t figure out what that date had been, but it felt like a long time ago. And now she knew what she was thinking about. Pearl was going to have a baby. In the morning she checked her calendar. Her dentist appointment had been September twenty-third. Now it was November fourth. She had to be pregnant. That was it. She was pregnant.

  She was sure it was Nathan’s child. That explained everything—why she had been so happy, why she had not realized for so long. She had kept it a secret from herself.

  Then, “Hey, are you pregnant?” said Mike at breakfast.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I don’t know. I was thinking about your breasties, I guess.”

  “Would that be bad?” said Pearl, blushing. He didn’t use that word except in bed. “If I was pregnant?”

  “Of course not,” said Mike. “It would be great.”

  “I’ll go to the doctor and find out,” said Pearl.

  “But do you think you are?” said Mike.

  “Well, maybe,” said Pearl. “It’s
too early to tell.” But it wasn’t too early to tell. She was pregnant with Nathan’s baby. Sometimes she and Mike didn’t make love for days, especially if he was working at night. Of course it was Nathan’s baby.

  This changed everything. She and Nathan might have to act now. They had to stop hiding from each other, at least. She had not seen him since the night they had made love, which was unusual for them. Ordinarily they all visited back and forth. Just before their night together, she had promised Hilda she would pick a day and invite them to dinner. Hilda had said she could bring Racket in the carriage, and take it upstairs in the elevator. Maybe the baby would sleep, and they could talk. Pearl had not thought about inviting them from that day until this.

  Now she had to talk to Nathan. She made an appointment with the doctor and she thought about how to talk to Nathan. After a few days she wrote him a note. “Dear Nathan, I have to talk to you about something important.” She thought for a long time about how to sign the note. “Love” wasn’t enough. She might have written “love” when he was just her brother-in-law. “All my love,” she wrote, at last, then crossed it out, threw the note away, started again, and wrote her name without any complimentary close at all. She mailed it to Nathan at Erasmus Hall High School, where he taught.

  Two days later she was working alone in her part of the office, retyping a letter on which she had made some mistakes, when she looked up. Later she thought that she must have heard footsteps, but at the time she wasn’t aware of them. She knew Nathan was going to be standing there, and so she looked up—but when she saw him, she stared as if she didn’t know who he was. He looked exactly the way he had looked the day of the rally, and for a moment she wished it were that day and that the only thing happening was that she and Nathan were going to a rally. Nathan was wearing his dark overcoat, which made him look more old-fashioned than usual. He was not smiling or speaking.

  “You came here,” she said.

  “You said you had to talk to me.”

  “Here?”

  “Can you leave for a while?”

  “I’ll ask.” It was late in the day—after four. She bypassed Mr. Glynnis’s office because she knew that Mr. Carmichael, who liked her, would say yes. She told him that her brother-in-law had a problem he needed to discuss with her, and Mr. Carmichael said, “Oh, yes, the fellow with coffee on his trousers.” Pearl got her coat and she and Nathan went into the street. They walked until they came to a little luncheonette and went inside. Nathan ordered coffee, but Pearl said she wanted a malted. She needed strength.

  “A malted, of course,” said Nathan. He crossed his arms on the table and stared at her so hard that Pearl, who had taken off her coat and put it around her shoulders, looked down at her sweater to make sure it was properly buttoned. Or maybe he too had noticed her breasts. “I should have talked to you before,” said Nathan.

  “It didn’t matter,” said Pearl. He thought she just wanted to talk about what had happened that night.

  “It mattered a lot,” said Nathan. “Pearl, I want you to know I have nothing but respect for you. And I always will. I could never explain it except by saying that I think you are a very—a very lovely girl. I’ve been thinking about it, day after day. I know you are not that sort of person.”

  “What sort of person?”

  “The sort of person who is accustomed to—”

  She couldn’t understand him. “Accustomed?”

  “Pearl, you never did that before. Did you?”

  “You mean—make love?” She was so confused she felt shy about saying they’d made love, as if maybe she’d imagined it, and he would be shocked.

  “Well, yes.”

  “With Mike,” she said quietly, like a child answering a question in school.

  “Yes, of course, with Mike—but not with anybody else. I mean, it’s none of my business—”

  She thought he wanted to know whether she’d been a virgin when she married. “No, not with anybody else.” She thought he wanted to make sure of her.

  He accepted his coffee from the waitress and put cream and sugar in and stirred it. “That’s what I mean,” he said, a little impatiently. “You’re not like that. And I hope I don’t—”

  “I love you,” said Pearl simply, in answer. Her malted had come. There was a tall glass and a metal container with more malted in it. She always liked that thought, that there would be more when she finished the first glass. It usually made her feel rich, like someone who didn’t have to be careful.

  Nathan reddened, glancing out the window, where a man in a shabby coat was walking by with a thin dog on a leash. Nathan stirred his coffee some more. Then he looked at her. His eyes were pleading. “Pearl,” he said.

  “Nathan, I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t loved you,” she said. “Now, I don’t know what we should do exactly. And I have something to tell you—the reason I wrote to you. But please—”

  “I understand,” he said.

  “What I wanted to talk about?”

  “No—I mean, I don’t know.”

  “Nathan,” she said. She wanted him to be a little different, to speak more definitely. She’d imagined this conversation only two ways. One way, he’d say they should run away together. The other way, he’d want to wait. But now that there was this baby, she didn’t see how they could wait. She was a little impatient with him. She didn’t know why he kept saying he respected her. She didn’t care about that. She drank some of her malted while she thought about what to say. It was comforting—it tasted as if she were a child. But she wasn’t a child. “I’m having a baby,” she said.

  “Oh, Pearl, that’s good,” he said. “Congratulations. I didn’t know.”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “Mike doesn’t know?”

  “Mike asked me if I was. I told him it was too early to tell. But it’s not too early. I’m sure I’m having a baby.”

  “Did you go to the doctor?”

  “Not yet.”

  “But you’re sure—that’s good, Pearl. I’m glad.”

  “Nathan,” she said. It was painful, having to explain so much, so many times. “I’m not sure it’s so good. It’s your baby.”

  “What?”

  “It’s your baby.”

  “But how do you know?” he said. He looked alarmed. “Haven’t you and Mike—”

  “Oh, sure,” she said. She didn’t want him to think she and Mike weren’t normal. “But I can tell. A woman can tell.”

  “You mean you just imagine it’s my baby?”

  “No, not that, more than that. I mean, I had to get pregnant sometime, right? Well, I remember—”

  “You couldn’t be sure,” he said. “How do you know what day it was? You could have gotten pregnant on lots of days. Don’t you know that?”

  “No, I don’t think that’s right,” said Pearl, but she wasn’t sure, now that he was acting this way, exactly when a woman could become pregnant.

  She had had it all worked out. Now she couldn’t remember, couldn’t explain about having her period the day she’d gone to the dentist but not the week of the rally. He wouldn’t believe her.

  She drank some more of her malted. It was sweet and rich. “I’m sure,” she said again.

  “Well, I don’t see how you can be,” he said, and he sounded like a teacher, as if she’d just explained to a teacher that he’d misunderstood her answer on a test, that she had had the right answer all along.

  “But—” she said.

  “Look, Pearl,” he said. “It happened and I’m not going to deny it. But let’s be reasonable here. If you insist you’re pregnant with my child, look what’s in store for us—for the child, for Hilda, for Rachel, for Mike, for everyone. Mike doesn’t know what happened that night, does he?”

  “No, of course not,” she said.

  “Good,” he said, nodding briskly. “He doesn’t ever have to know. It would only hurt him. I’m sorry it happened, I can’t explain it, but I can’t change it now. Only if you insist t
hat—”

  “It’s not that I’m insisting,” she said. “It’s just the way it is. And I love you. Isn’t that important?”

  He dropped his balding head into his hands. He had drunk his coffee and pushed away the cup, and his arms were on the table. He looked up at her and said, “Yes, Pearl, it’s important. I’m—I’m touched that you say you love me.” And he lowered his face to his crossed arms.

  “But you don’t love me?” said Pearl. She had not drunk much of the malted. The second portion, in the container, was still there. She was angry that he wouldn’t look at her. She thought he was only pretending to be overcome with emotion. He looked like a child hiding his eyes while he counted in a game, to give everyone a chance to hide. She stood up.

  “Good-bye, Nathan,” she said. Her coat slipped down when she stood up and she had to reach to the floor for it; then she tripped on it. She stuffed it under her arm and ran outside. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the waitress, her face alarmed, take a step toward her as she opened the door and the cold air rushed in. She began to walk rapidly, not noticing where she was going. She knew she was hurrying across streets without making sure it was safe, but she did it anyway. It was dark now. People who had come from offices were rushing toward subway stations and disappearing down the stairs into the lighted wells. Pearl ran past them. She was crying, and she bumped into a man when she bent her head and wiped her eyes with her hand. She expected him to be angry, but he put his hands on her shoulders for a second, like someone straightening a wobbly ornament on a mantel, and in a kind way said, “Mind your step, Missy,” before he hurried away. He was a white-haired man and Pearl wished she could bring him back and tell him what had gone wrong, why she was crying in the street without a hat or coat. She stopped and put her coat on. She had to figure out where she was and go back to the office. She had not put the cover on her typewriter and straightened things for the end of the day, and she had left her hat there. And there was another reason she had to go back, though she didn’t know—didn’t quite know—what it was.