Hilda and Pearl

by Alice Mattison

  Pearl thought Ruby might not be too shocked if she didn’t say she’d done anything about her love. They could talk. It might help. But Ruby pulled her short body downward as if her stomach hurt.

  “I think about him all the time,” Pearl said.

  “But that’s how I feel about Billy,” said Ruby. Billy was her boyfriend.

  “No, it’s different,” said Pearl.

  “Because you’re married?” Ruby looked frightened.

  Pearl ignored her. She was sorry she’d mentioned it. It was impossible to say how much she loved Nathan—far more than Ruby could possibly love Billy—how the dusty cartons and the dust in the air itself seemed different once you knew Nathan was in the world. And he didn’t love her. It would be unbearable even if she weren’t having a baby—yet it was also wonderful. Ruby couldn’t understand it.

  “I’m sorry, Nathan,” Pearl whispered, running down the stairs at five, when it was finally time to go home. She stepped into the damp winter darkness. People were nearby but she could whisper. “I’m sorry, darling,” she said. “I’m sorry I told her.”

  Sometimes Pearl hoped. Maybe, after all, Nathan would come to her late some night when Mike was not home and urge her to run away with him. “You don’t really want to,” she’d say, avenging herself. For she was furious with him and hated him, even while she loved him.

  It wouldn’t have been possible for their night together to have taken place if he hadn’t loved her. Leaning back in the subway one day, her eyes closed, letting herself be shaken by the sloppy but rhythmic thrusting of the train, Pearl imagined a grain of something shiny in the middle of a dark waste. The shiny spot was the chance that Nathan loved her after all. She couldn’t remember now exactly what he had said the day of the malted. She had left so quickly, maybe she hadn’t understood.

  She would never again speak to Nathan about what had happened, and he might never speak to her, but if she could believe in the shiny spot, she could live.

  She had no morning sickness, which made the doctor look sober. “Are you sure?” he repeated.

  “Yes. Isn’t that good, not to be sick?”

  “Sometimes it’s better to be a little sick,” he said.

  That made Pearl think something was wrong with the baby. Surely he couldn’t tell what she had done. She remembered that she had offered Hilda the baby. That was shameful. It was her baby. It was all she had. Of course the doctor did not rise from his listening posture to accuse her of bearing a child whose heartbeat revealed the wrong father. Nor could he tell, apparently, that Pearl was in trouble with her husband. He called her Mother, and advised her to eat baked potatoes and not too much salt.

  He worried less as she began to grow bigger. “Well, you’re a lucky girl,” he said finally. “Some mothers never do feel sick.”

  “I feel fine,” said Pearl. Ruby said it was because Pearl was tall and so the baby had room and didn’t squeeze her stomach. Ruby was excited that Pearl was having a baby. Pearl had told her about it before she told anyone else in the office, and that secret went over better. It was two weeks after she’d told the first secret, which had not been mentioned again. This time Ruby sat up straighter and grinned. She gave a great sigh, as if she’d been worrying all that time about Pearl’s love for Nathan, and now she could cross off that problem.

  Pearl thought about Nathan all the time. She could feel his sad stare behind her as if he followed her through her life, drawing his conclusions about what she did. He was always there. One bright day in midwinter, Mr. Glynnis sent Pearl to another office a few blocks away with some papers. Pearl walked slowly, watching as people hurried along the wind-polished pavement, and she thought that they held their hats to their heads like folk dancers, though their clothes were not colorful, like dancing costumes. Suddenly she thought of Nathan, with a rush of pain, and realized that for those moments, watching the people clutch their hats, she had forgotten him. She’d had a moment without him for the first time in weeks and weeks.

  She liked that, and shook herself, reaching under her coat to follow the curve of her tummy. So far she could hide it with a sweater at the office, but not much longer. Some day, she thought, picturing herself with a baby in her arms, she would go an entire day without thinking of Nathan. Now he was her first thought each morning, and the shame and sorrow of it fell on her when she opened her eyes.

  She felt better as the day went on. Sometimes, though she thought about Nathan, it was perfunctory: she’d drop a stack of papers on the floor and think, Nathan!—as if he might have caught it. It didn’t count but it did.

  Ruby was having a hard time. Her boyfriend, Billy, was talking about going overseas to fight in the civil war in Spain. Pearl had met him. He was like a boy, a little like Mike but without Mike’s cynical shrug. Mike would never voluntarily go to fight in a foreign country for people he didn’t know, but Billy seemed to glory in that thought. If someone had told him that people in Spain were even more different from him than he believed, that they carried their young on their backs for three years and set their dead afloat in baskets on rivers, Billy’s luminous eyes would have grown even brighter and closer together and he would have been even more determined. It was hard on Ruby, a small woman with freckles who looked about fourteen. Pearl could tell by her wide-open, puffy eyes and fixed look when something had pushed Billy closer to a decision. Once it was a conversation with a friend who was going, another time the departure of the first American volunteers at the end of December.

  “My husband thinks the volunteers are crazy,” Pearl said one day, as they ate their sandwiches in the little room filled with cartons. She swallowed hard. “But my brother-in-law thinks it’s wonderful. He’d go if he didn’t have a baby. I went to a rally with him.”

  It was the closest she’d come to touching on that subject again, but Ruby ignored that part of it. “It’s not that I don’t think it’s important to support the Loyalists,” she said seriously.

  “Of course,” said Pearl.

  “But what good will he do anybody if he dies? If he stayed here, if we had children—”

  Pearl stood and walked to the window. Her body was beginning to slope outward. She would look better pregnant than poor Hilda had. She knew Ruby was studying her with admiration, as if it were noble just to be pregnant. Pearl looked out the window. “Maybe Billy should talk to Mike,” she said. Listen to Mike, she amended it in her mind. Mike had stopped being so angry with her. He had not been able to sustain it for weeks and months, though she knew that he was still unhappy, and they still had not seen Nathan and Hilda, not since the day Hilda had made them come over.

  “Oh, that would be so helpful,” Ruby was saying. “Maybe I could bring him over some night?”

  “Sure,” said Pearl. “Whenever you want.” Mike would shout about foolishness. Of course Billy wouldn’t listen—people like that didn’t, and Mike was so loud and argumentative he nourished everyone’s spirit of opposition. He was turning Pearl into an arguer despite herself. “College kids,” he’d said the other day, talking about the volunteers. “What do they know about war? They’ll just be in the way.”

  “What does anyone know about war?” she had answered. “Soldiers are always kids.” She had a stab of fear, then, that her baby would be a boy, and someday he’d go to war.

  But for once Mike didn’t want to argue. “Where do you get your ideas?” he snarled, leaving the room. Maybe what she had said sounded too much like Nathan.

  “My husband isn’t always very nice,” she said to Ruby.

  “I’m sure he’s nice underneath,” Ruby said.

  Pearl snorted inwardly, to think of what Ruby didn’t know about her family life. Mostly she was so busy thinking about Nathan and her sorrow that she lived in dazed inattention, but sometimes, when she and Mike were together in the apartment and she was alert, she didn’t know how she could keep on as his wife. She could feel his anger, although when he played the saxophone in the other room, she thought it sounded more
fearful than angry. She heard the fear of a younger brother whose older brother can take away his treasure because he is bigger. Then she wished heartily that it had never happened—until she remembered the night with Nathan, and the days following it. She would not have been Pearl if it had not happened. She had been an ignorant woman.

  Hilda’s birthday was coming. When Pearl first remembered it, she almost cried, to her surprise; she wanted to be with Hilda on her birthday. And Mrs. Levenson, her mother-in-law, would assume that the family would gather on this occasion. For days Pearl thought about it. They had to make up for Mrs. Levenson’s sake. They had to celebrate Hilda’s birthday.

  Finally, one night after supper, when she was washing the dishes and Mike was loitering behind her, she said, “I want to invite Hilda and your brother and your mother next Friday.”

  “How come?”

  “It’s Hilda’s birthday.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes. We did the same thing last year.”

  “If you say so.” Pearl didn’t know whether he was agreeing about last year’s dinner or this year’s, but while Mike was playing the saxophone in the other room, she phoned Hilda.

  “This is Pearl,” she began.

  “Hello,” said Hilda.

  “How’s Racket?”

  “She’s fine. She’s getting big.”

  “Is she fatter?” said Pearl. It was March—more than four months since they’d seen the baby.

  “Longer. Not fatter. She can crawl.”

  This seemed friendly, so Pearl risked her invitation. Hilda accepted. Pearl found she couldn’t say Nathan’s name.

  “We’ll bring Mom,” said Hilda.

  “That’s fine.” Pearl would have to see Nathan—she was afraid but also excited. She was grateful to Hilda for being friendly. “Don’t forget Racket,” she said foolishly.

  “Now is that likely?” said Hilda.

  “Of course not, of course not,” Pearl murmured, overcome. Off the phone, she tried to think about cooking, but it was a difficult week.

  Fifteen minutes after her guests arrived the following Friday, Pearl realized that Mrs. Levenson and Racket made anything possible. She and Nathan were unimportant. Mrs. Levenson wanted to hold Racket, who was still bundled up for the cold outside, and who objected to being held and wriggled out of the old woman’s arms. Hilda put her on the floor to show off her crawling, but Racket thrashed her arms and legs and tore at her hat. Hilda undressed her and smoothed out her dress, but now Racket wanted to crawl, and she was vaulting out of her mother’s arms before Hilda was done with her. Hilda set her on the floor again. “At first,” said Nathan—they were the first words he had spoken, “she could only crawl backwards. Her little face would get farther and farther away.”

  Now Racket crawled expertly to a chair and began to suck on the chair leg. Pearl laughed, but Mrs. Levenson said, “Look, look what she’s doing!” and seized the baby.

  Again Racket tried to get away from her. “What’s the matter, you don’t like your bubbi?” said the old woman. She lifted Racket into the air with her short arms, leaning her head back and laughing. She was ugly, and it made her uglier when she threw back her head and held her legs wide apart to steady herself, but Pearl, watching from the doorway, rather liked Mrs. Levenson for the first time. The uglier she was, the less ugly, Pearl thought, and didn’t know what that could mean. She ought to go into the kitchen and check on the dinner, but she remained at the edge of the group in the living room and watched Mrs. Levenson try to win over Racket, who cried, but then stopped and reached for her grandmother’s teeth. Mrs. Levenson had big false teeth that showed now, as she laughed at the baby. At last Racket settled into the old woman’s arms, and then her grandmother—who was something like the baby, Pearl noticed—tired of the game.

  “You take her, Michael,” she said, thrusting Racket away. “You should learn, a baby coming.”

  “I know how to hold a baby,” said Mike, who had been scowling and watching. He took Racket and she snuggled her head into his neck. Pearl saw the look in Mike’s eyes, and she saw Nathan watching. He glanced at her. Nathan would come to hate her, she thought, and rushed into the kitchen, where she took the roast chicken out of the oven and carefully lifted it onto a platter, her eyes filling. She didn’t know why the sight of her husband cradling Nathan’s baby made her feel that Nathan would hate her, but she was as sure as if hatred had come from his body in a long, cold, unpleasant stream. He couldn’t help it, she excused him to herself. She had separated him from his brother. “But it wasn’t my idea,” she said out loud, in a low voice. When she looked up, Hilda was coming in to help and Pearl wondered if she had heard. The table was set. Pearl had done everything before the others had arrived.

  “Well?” said Hilda.

  “What?”

  “Are you cooking in here, or crying, or what?”

  “I’m cooking.” Pearl smiled with tears on her cheeks.

  “What do you want me to do with these potatoes?”

  Pearl handed her a bowl. “She’s not so bad,” she said, inclining her head toward the living room.

  “Mrs. Levenson?” Hilda said. “She’s practical. She comes to my house and gives Racket a bath. The baby slips out of her hands, and she shouts to her, ‘Rachela, Rachela, come back, come back!’”

  Racket sat on Nathan’s lap during dinner, and he fed her bits of food she could suck on. Pearl marveled that she had ever imagined he might leave Hilda and the baby. Racket mouthed on a piece of boiled carrot, making loud sucking noises that convulsed Mike. The dinner was a success.

  The doorbell rang as they were having coffee, and Mike went to answer it. He came back leading Ruby and Billy, whom he had never met. “Friends of yours,” he said to Pearl, and the old suspicion, never far away, was back in place—friends who had perhaps helped her connive with his brother, friends who knew. Pearl wanted to reassure him, but she couldn’t, and she had told Ruby she was in love with Nathan—only that, but still, too much. Now, as she introduced everyone, she was sure Ruby remembered that conversation. And Nathan would guess, and would hate her for yet another reason.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” Ruby was saying. “You mentioned we could drop by.”

  “It’s fine,” said Pearl.

  “This is Rachel,” said Hilda, who was holding the baby now.

  “She’s cute,” said Ruby.

  “I didn’t know there was a baby,” Billy said, and he sank to his knees to be on Racket’s level, waving his long fingers to get her attention. His eyes seemed even bigger and lighter than when he stopped at the office to call for Ruby and stood there looking as if he’d come in on a shaft of sunlight. Now his eyes seemed lit almost as if to give the baby something to stare at.

  “Billy likes babies,” said Ruby.

  The kitchen was crowded. They barely had room for Nathan and Hilda and Mrs. Levenson, not to mention the baby, and now there were two more people. Billy remained standing after he stopped playing with Racket, and Mike brought in their only other straight chair for Ruby to sit on. Pearl had to wash her own coffee cup to serve them. She owned six cups and saucers and had never contemplated having so much company at once. Luckily there was enough cake. The kitchen was hot—the heat was bubbling up—and the window was steamy. Billy was wearing a sweater and he took it off. Pearl’s chair was empty, but she’d have to dislodge several people to get to it, so she leaned back against the sink.

  “We’ve been arguing about Spain,” Ruby said, looking at Mike. “I brought Billy over because I thought maybe you’d talk to him.”

  “Spain,” said Nathan, and he put down his coffee cup and looked steadily at Billy. “You’re interested in Spain?”

  “I’m very interested in Spain,” he said. “I’m a student at City College, but I’ve been doing some organizing—rent strikes and that sort of thing. You have time to think when you’re getting locked up every few weeks.”

  “I’m sure you do,” said Nathan respectfu
lly.

  “I’ve been talking to some people about volunteering. The Abraham Lincoln Battalion—you know about that?”

  “I know about that,” said Nathan, with sad kindness. “I’ve been reading about the fighting at Jarama. A terrible thing.”

  “I think the Loyalists can win,” Billy said. “It’s an amazing chance—this is a true democracy that the military is trying to stamp out. The people of Spain—”

  “Oh, what does a kid like you know about the people of Spain?” said Mike suddenly, and he sounded angry, with all the anger of the last months, the anger against Pearl and Nathan, in his voice.

  “What do I know?” said Billy quietly. “Well, I don’t know much.” He sounded good-natured. “Do you know a lot about Spain? I’ve been reading....”

  “Me?” Mike was disarmed, but still angry. “No, I don’t know much about Spain. But I also don’t know why a man would want to go fight in Europe if he didn’t have to. I don’t understand this Abraham Lincoln Battalion—I think they’re a lot of crazy idealists.”

  “Hold it, Mike—not so crazy,” said Nathan, and it was the first time Pearl had heard the old tone between them.

  “How do you stop fascists by dying?” asked Mike, standing, his jaw tight and the muscles standing out. “Hitler’s going to be impressed by the death count? And more impressed if the death count is a bunch of American kids?”

  “Hitler?” said Mrs. Levenson. “War with Hitler?”

  “They’re talking about Spain,” said Hilda.

  “There are Jews in Spain, too,” said Mrs. Levenson. “There are Jews everywhere. Everywhere Hitler will find them.” She seized the baby and held her so tightly that Racket cried. “What a world we make for babies!”

  Pearl had read about the dreadful fighting at Jarama. She had not known that Americans were already fighting in Spain until Ruby had told her. She hadn’t known that the group of Americans was called the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. Ruby and Billy knew others who had gone—men who didn’t know anything about being soldiers. Nathan had wished he could go, and Pearl realized that many of those going were men just like Nathan, like Nathan if Racket hadn’t come along. Some of them probably had babies. If it hadn’t been for Spain and for the rally, she wondered what might have happened—or not happened—between Nathan and her. It was strange to think that Hitler had caused all this pain she’d been through—and the pleasure, too: the pleasure, even now, of loving Nathan.