Hilda and Pearl

by Alice Mattison

  Mrs. Levenson took her napkin and mopped her forehead. “It’s hot,” she said. Then she turned to Billy. “Tell me, young man,” she said, “you have a mama? You have a papa?”

  “Yes. In the Bronx,” said Billy.

  “And what do they think, in the Bronx, that you should go to Spain, maybe get killed—how does your mama like that?”

  “I’m afraid she doesn’t like it,” he said. “I tell her, if I go, and the Loyalists win, maybe Hitler and Mussolini will stop trying to take over the world, maybe a bigger war won’t have to happen. I have a little brother—maybe if I fight, he won’t have to.”

  “This makes your mama change her mind?” said Mrs. Levenson. “Excuse me I should mind your business for you.”

  Billy blushed and looked at his shoes. “No, I’m afraid it doesn’t make her change her mind,” he said.

  “And I can’t do anything with him, either, Mrs. Levenson,” Ruby said. She was sitting next to the old lady, her cake still on its plate on her lap, her fork in her hand. “I can’t talk him out of it.”

  “You married?” said Mrs. Levenson.

  “No, not married, but we’d like to get married. I’d like to have a baby,” said Ruby.

  “I wish you luck,” said the old lady formally. “I wish you should have what you want.” She sat back, fanning herself with her napkin, rocking sideways a little bit. Then she began to sing quietly in Yiddish.

  “I’ve been working with a group that’s raising money for Spain,” Nathan was saying to Billy in a soft voice. “But that’s all I can do. I’m a coward. I can’t go over there and fight.”

  “You have a daughter.”

  “I don’t know if I’d have the courage, even if I didn’t have a daughter,” Nathan said. “I do not find myself to be a particularly courageous person.”

  Pearl saw Billy staring at him and she knew Billy was falling for Nathan, too. Billy didn’t believe Nathan wasn’t courageous. “To tell the truth, he isn’t,” she said inwardly, thought it in words as if she were speaking to Billy. Nathan hadn’t even had the courage to talk to her about whether or not it was his child she was carrying—yet she too couldn’t help but forgive him. Even now, she liked handling plates and spoons he had touched.

  Ruby and Billy apologized for breaking in on a family party, but Pearl was glad they’d come. The dinner had been going well, but if Ruby and Billy hadn’t arrived just as the food was gone and the kitchen was getting hot, something bad might have happened. Mike might have turned on Nathan—though she couldn’t quite imagine that. Mike was angry all the time but he didn’t talk about Nathan or what had happened, as if he had lost the memory but kept the anger.

  Or maybe Mrs. Levenson would have been difficult. Pearl assured Ruby, when they talked about it in the office on Monday, that her arrival had been welcome. But Ruby shook her head. Billy hadn’t paid much attention to Mike, but he’d admired Nathan and said Nathan understood him. “It isn’t your brother-in-law’s fault,” Ruby said quickly. “Billy would find a talking dog who’d agree with him, if nobody else came along.”

  Ruby was troubled, and a few weeks later she told Pearl that Billy really was going to Spain. He was out buying boots and a canteen at an Army and Navy store. And Pearl was about to stop working; she was too big now to hide her pregnancy. “I’m going to feel so bad,” Ruby said. “May I come to your house sometimes? Just to talk? Will you be with me when he leaves?”

  “Sure,” said Pearl.

  A few weeks later Billy did leave, on a passenger liner with a group of other volunteers. He’d explained to Ruby—and Ruby explained to Pearl—that it was all secret. The government had outlawed what he was doing, and his passport was stamped “Not Valid in Spain.” The volunteers had to go to France, pretending to be tourists or students, and sneak across the border through the mountains. Ruby mustn’t come down to the ship and wave.

  She’d pointed out that if he were going to France to study, she’d go down and wave. “He said I wouldn’t look so miserable then,” she told Pearl, “but I’d look miserable, even then.”

  Billy insisted, but when he finally left, on a sunny spring day, Pearl and Ruby went to see the ship depart anyway. “We don’t have to stand on the dock and look conspicuous,” Ruby said. “We could just be passing by.”

  They had to walk many blocks from the subway station to the pier on the Hudson. They were shocked at the size of the liner. They could hardly see the passengers, far away, scurrying on the deck. They held back, the wind blowing their hair and blowing cinders into their eyes until Pearl didn’t know whether Ruby was crying or whether she just had something in her eye. It was hard to understand that Billy was on the big ship. At last its horn sounded, and after a while they realized it was moving. It slid away from the dock, and water appeared. At the last minute another woman, who had been standing behind a pillar where they hadn’t noticed her, rushed forward. “Leo!” she shouted. “Leo! Leo! Be careful!” Pearl and Ruby stepped forward, but they didn’t rush toward the ship like the woman. They stood and waved, and Pearl was sure no one could have told them from friends of a departing tourist. The woman who’d called to Leo stumbled as she left the dock. She was older than she had seemed at first, and Pearl wondered whether the woman was Leo’s mother.

  Spring was easier for Pearl. She didn’t have to go to the office anymore. They had less money, but she was careful. She didn’t mind being pregnant—she thought she looked fine. She liked wearing maternity clothes. She was still unhappy about Nathan, but away from the office, and with Mike out of the house working, she was free to think about him. She avoided her mother, who wanted to come and visit often. Alone, Pearl could turn her mind into a little shrine to her brief happiness. She encouraged herself to do this because it was better for the baby. It couldn’t be good for a baby if its mother was unhappy all the time. Pearl took herself for walks in the park and neglected the house and the cooking. At last she realized the time was close and she began to get ready. She cleaned the apartment and bought a crib and a layette.

  Pearl had her baby on June seventh. Her labor was not too bad and the nurses joked with her, but Pearl was frightened. The baby would be born looking just like Nathan, or something would be wrong with the baby, a punishment for loving Nathan.

  Mike was sent to the waiting room. Pearl lay alone, covered with sweat. She thought of Ruby’s Billy fighting in Spain, and it was as if she were fighting in a war as well. Ruby had received a short letter from Billy. He had already made friends, and lost a friend who had died in battle. If Pearl and Nathan could have gone to Spain and given their lives for the Loyalists—perhaps she could have been a nurse—it would no longer be wicked that they had gone to bed together. The greater goodness would wipe out the lesser badness, at least if they died. She thought that maybe the same thing was true about having a baby. If she could bear the pain without complaining, she would be a good person who could be somebody’s mother.

  The doctor had told Pearl that when it was time for the baby to be born, he would anesthetize her, but when it happened, late at night, he wasn’t there, and by the time he arrived the baby was coming. Pearl grinned at the doctor when he came into the delivery room. “I’m having a baby!” she said madly.

  “Well, that was the idea, wasn’t it?” he said.

  One of the nurses laughed and the doctor frowned at her, as if only he and Pearl were allowed to laugh. Pearl didn’t mind being naked below the waist, didn’t mind that nurses were wiping blood and feces from her body. She wanted to send a message to Mike, but all she could think of to say was, It isn’t what I thought it would be like. Of course, the nurses were too busy to carry messages. In another moment there was a great rip of pain—for a second Pearl thought that a stray bullet, somehow careening over from Spain, had hit her—and then came cries, a child’s cry and the nurse’s cry. “A boy, Mrs. Lewis, you got a boy!”

  Pearl lay back exhausted. “Let me see him,” she said, but her boy, Simon, was carried off. By the
time they brought him back she was asleep, but she roused herself. “Doctor says you want to try breastfeeding,” the nurse was saying to her. Pearl remembered now. She had said that—insisted. She reached for her son. His head was smaller than her breast, or not much bigger. She didn’t know what to do. “Not many of the moms try,” the nurse was saying. “Of course, I was breastfed. My mother can’t believe women don’t do it anymore. But she says it’s bad for your figure.”

  “I don’t care about my figure,” said Pearl. She took the breast in her hand and stuck the nipple into the baby’s mouth. The mouth was damp and flaccid around her nipple, and then it slipped off and Simon’s eyes closed. Pearl poked him with her nipple some more. The third time, suddenly his mouth was muscular and busy, and Simon was sucking.

  “Of course you don’t have any milk yet,” said the nurse.

  “Well, he’s found something,” said Pearl with some excitement. She stroked Simon’s head with her free hand and traced the outline of his body with her finger. He kept his knees drawn up and his eyes closed, like a small swimmer bobbing and floating, trusting her.

  Home from the hospital, Pearl sometimes heard Mike’s voice in the bedroom, talking to Simon as if he were an adult. The first time, Pearl thought that somehow someone had come along and gone into the bedroom when she wasn’t looking. Mostly Mike’s words were inaudible, but she heard, “how the hell anybody could think that would work,” and she put down her knitting needles to listen, uneasy. Her mother had taught her to knit and she was making a sweater for Simon, but she found it tedious, and she couldn’t remember to decrease for the armholes.

  Mike had made love to her once during her pregnancy—wordlessly, almost brutally. He looked at her, red-faced, afterward, and Pearl wondered whether he had been trying to dislodge the baby from her womb with his penis. She didn’t know if that was possible. She hadn’t asked the doctor if it was all right to have sex when you were pregnant.

  Hilda and Nathan came to see Simon the day after she and Mike brought him home from the hospital. They gave him a diaper bag fitted with baby bottles. Pearl wasn’t using bottles because she was nursing, but she didn’t say so. She was pleased. They stayed only a little while. At first Pearl couldn’t look at Nathan, then she allowed herself—or forced upon herself—one long look when he wasn’t looking at her. She noticed wrinkles on his face: he was beginning to look middle-aged. He seemed balder than he had been. He looked sad.

  But she didn’t think about Nathan as much. She was busy taking care of Simon. When Mike was at work, she put Simon into his carriage and took him down in the elevator and out into the street. In the hot weather, she walked with him in Prospect Park. Sometimes she passed a small, unpaved playground where, she decided, Simon would play when he was bigger. It was rather far from where they lived, but it had deep shade and a wading pool with a sprinkler in the middle. As she walked, Pearl talked to Simon, who was awake, lying on his back and looking up at her, about the playground and what fun he’d have there.

  Twice when she looked into that playground she saw Hilda there. Once Hilda was reading on a bench, shaking Racket’s carriage with one hand. The other time, she was crouching over the wading pool, and Pearl could see the baby, her arms flung wide. Simon was different from Racket, quieter and rounder. He liked being wrapped up, and lay with his arms and legs drawn up to his body even when he was unwrapped. He had radiant smiles. He fed eagerly at her breast.

  One Sunday afternoon when she was nursing him, sitting up on their bed because the bedroom window caught a breeze and it was cooler in there, Mike came in and sat down on the bed. He watched silently for a long time. “I like that sound he makes,” Mike said at last. It was true. When Simon nursed, he made a grunting noise. “Do they all do that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Pearl hesitantly. He sounded friendlier than he had for a while.

  “He’s getting ready to be a musician,” said Mike. “Maybe we’ll start him on the clarinet.”

  Simon finished nursing and Pearl burped him and laid him on the bed between them. She looked at the baby and at Mike to see if they looked alike, but Simon just looked like a baby to her, not like Mike or Nathan, though he was dark like Nathan. Of course he was Nathan’s, she thought, but maybe in some way he was Mike’s as well.

  “He’s too nice,” said Mike now.

  “Too nice? What do you mean?”

  “A baby should yell,” said Mike. “This kid’s going to be a pushover. You can’t be like that. This world, you have to be tougher than that.”

  “He’ll be tough,” said Pearl, but she didn’t want her boy to be tough. She didn’t want him to fight with other children.

  “You have to warn him,” said Mike urgently, as if he were really criticizing Pearl.

  “He’s only a baby!” she said sharply.

  “Right. Only a baby,” said Mike, and now he sounded sarcastic. She was frightened, and it reminded her of the months when she’d been afraid of Mike.

  “What do you mean?” she said in a low voice.

  “I’m glad it’s so simple for you,” he said sarcastically. “I’m glad you think he’s only a baby!” He had been happy, and now he was angry, and nothing had happened. Pearl was in her nightgown, though it was afternoon, and it was twisted around her hips, sweaty, smelly with breast milk. She pulled it down as she stood up and took Simon to his crib, but Mike wasn’t watching her; he’d left the room.

  Racket was a year old in August, and Pearl went to a toy store for a birthday present. The man in the store said that for a one-year-old, who would be learning to walk, she should buy a push toy. He showed her a rolling spool with a wooden handle. “Once she can walk, you buy a pull toy,” he said. There was a yellow wooden duck on red wheels, which was pulled by a red-and-white string with a big blue bead at the end, and Pearl liked that much better. “But is she walking?” said the man. She didn’t know, but she paid for the duck and put it into Simon’s carriage.

  Sure enough, she spotted Hilda crocheting on a bench under a tree. Racket was standing at her knees. Pearl pushed the carriage into the playground.

  “How’s Simon?” said Hilda, looking up.

  “Fine,” said Pearl. “I came to wish Racket a happy birthday.”

  “Thanks. I suppose we should go back to calling her Rachel, but I still like Racket.”

  “Does she still make a racket?” said Pearl.

  Hilda nodded. Pearl took the toy from the carriage. “Look, Racket, I bought you a birthday present,” she said.

  “Nice of you,” said Hilda a little huskily.

  “I wanted to,” said Pearl. “Can she walk?”

  “She’s starting. It’s hard here because the ground is uneven. At home she can take three steps.”

  “The man in the store didn’t want me to buy a pull toy unless she could walk,” Pearl explained.

  They looked at each other and laughed together. Racket fastened her mouth on the duck’s yellow wooden beak. Hilda showed her how the toy could be pulled along, and Racket sank to her knees and pushed the duck back and forth on the ground. Then she began to crawl rapidly toward the fountain, leaving the duck.

  “Not with shoes on,” called Hilda. Racket was wearing new-looking white leather shoes—real shoes—and socks, and Hilda carried her back to the bench and took them off her. “I let her get her clothes wet,” she said. “I bring extras.”

  Pearl took Simon out of the carriage and crouched on the edge of the wading pool with him in her lap. She dangled his feet in the water. He hung limply, then kicked and smiled.

  “He likes it,” said Hilda. Racket had seated herself in the water and was slapping it hard with her palms.

  “Can she talk?” said Pearl.

  “She has a couple of words.”

  “She’s easier now?”

  “Not really,” Hilda said. But she smiled at Pearl, who had thought Hilda would never smile at her again. Pearl looked down at her easy baby.

  “I’ve been wanting to as
k you,” said Hilda. “What happened to that boy? Billy.”

  “He’s in Spain.”

  “He really did go? Oh, I hope he’s all right! Things aren’t going well for the Loyalists.”

  “I know,” said Pearl. “I don’t see Ruby so much, now that I’m not working.” Ruby had come to see Simon and had brought him a rattle. She promised to come again, but she didn’t.

  Now Racket rolled over in the water. She was drenched and she began to cry. Hilda carried her back to the bench and took off her clothes. She pinned a fresh diaper on Racket, but when she set her down a moment to reach for her sunsuit, Racket began walking toward the pool, where Pearl was still sitting with Simon. She took one step, two, three, four. “Did you see that?” Hilda called, as Racket sat down hard in the sand and patted it, then rolled over to crawl once more. “Four steps!” Pearl nodded and smiled. Yes, she had seen the four steps.

  She met Hilda in the playground twice more during the summer. Sometimes she looked for her but couldn’t find her. She was afraid to suggest that they plan to meet, and Hilda didn’t bring up the idea. Pearl didn’t know whether it was painful for Hilda to see her. Probably it was. Once when they met, Hilda was reading while Racket played, and she seemed to mind putting down her book. Another time they talked. Fall was coming, and Mike had a new job as a stenographer for the city department that heard workmen’s compensation claims. Pearl wanted to talk about Mike’s moodiness, about the hard things—and sometimes the friendly things—he said about Simon, but she didn’t.

  “You could come over and visit some day,” Pearl said softly as they were preparing to leave the playground. She was lonely. Simon was no trouble but there wasn’t much to do for him, either. Pearl had never been one for cooking and cleaning. She didn’t have any friends, and her mother irritated her. It would be nice if Hilda and Racket would come over some afternoon. Racket could walk now, and she hurtled down the path toward the playground gate. Hilda got up to chase her. “I will,” Pearl heard her say over her shoulder as she ran.