Hilda and Pearl

by Alice Mattison

I was tidying up while the meat loaf cooked. They’d eaten oranges, and I gathered the peels and threw them away. The breakfast dishes were still in the sink. I was washing them, knowing that Nathan was standing behind me. Then he came closer and put his hands on my shoulders just the way Billy had, not wrapping the whole palm over the shoulder but taking my shoulders between his thumbs and forefingers, the way one would pick up a dress. When Billy did it, it made me feel as if he thought I might break, as if the loss of my daughter had shriveled me until I was brittle. Nathan’s fingers felt different, more definite. I turned off the water and he pulled me around and looked down into my face. Then he kissed me hard on the lips.

  Nathan had kissed me many times in the years since he had gone to bed with Pearl and since Racket had died—two events I thought of together now—but if he kissed me in the kitchen it was to comfort me because I was crying. He kissed me in bed when he made love to me, but his lovemaking had been perfunctory, almost embarrassed, as if someone behind him were saying, “Now kiss her.”

  But that evening in the kitchen he kissed me like my young lover, and groped at my clothes as though he had never seen me without them. I was wearing a blouse and skirt and I laughed at him as he unbuttoned the blouse slowly, from the top down. “Now what’s got into you?” I said.

  “I don’t know. It’s a good time, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t you want to have supper?”

  “When will it be ready?”

  The meat loaf had half an hour to bake.

  “That’ll do, I guess,” said Nathan. I laughed and turned down the oven.

  We went into the bedroom, me with my blouse still hanging open. I hadn’t had time to make the bed in the morning and it was still unmade. Nathan undressed quickly and I took off my clothes, too, sitting down to unroll my stockings.

  “I love to watch you do that,” he said.

  “Do what?”

  “Roll your stockings down. You do it with the bottoms of your fingers, not the tips.”

  “I don’t want to start a run.”

  “You’re a kind person, Hilda,” he said, a little sentimentally.

  “Kind to my stockings?”

  It was pleasant to take them off and to wiggle out of my girdle. Nathan hadn’t watched me get undressed for a long time. He’d seen me, of course, night after night, but he hadn’t seemed to be watching me. Maybe he had been, all along, if he looked forward to seeing me take off my stockings. I felt free and as if my belly was a pleasant thing, for once.

  I got into bed. He was hard—he had been erect the whole time I was undressing. I wanted to give him everything, all the warm circles of excitement gathering in my body. My breasts seemed to reach toward him when he stroked them.

  I thought he was murmuring “little one” when he entered me. I wasn’t certain and didn’t want to ask. The words I thought I heard moved me. I hadn’t been anyone’s little one for a long time. “My big girl,” my father used to say, when I would cook a meal after my mother got sick. I had learned how to be big. I didn’t want to be little forever, but I wanted to be little for a while.

  “Sweet,” Nathan was saying. “Good.” He made love to me vigorously and even a little brutally, as if there was no question it was going to happen, and could be no question. I loved it. I hadn’t thought about how every gesture, before, was a question, but now I saw that that was how it had been. And he laughed. He gnawed at my shoulders and neck, and laughed as if he were a gigantic, outrageous pet let loose on me. I felt young, a girl, a beautiful girl.

  He kept saying endearments that didn’t make sense, as if he had never learned, and had to make them up. “Sweet little,” he said, “sweet little.”

  When we were finally still I said, “Aren’t you hungry?” Then I said, “That was lovely.”

  “It was lovely,” said Nathan. “I’m starving. What happened to dinner?”

  “I was going to boil potatoes to go with the meat loaf,” I said. “I didn’t even peel them.”

  “Well, we’d better peel some potatoes, then,” he said, but he put his arm around me and pulled me closer, as if I was his girlfriend and he was a sailor and we were walking on the boardwalk, and I leaned my head into the crook of his shoulder and neck, there in bed. I began to be cold, and pulled the covers around us.

  “I want you to be like that all the time,” I said.

  “All right.”

  I didn’t want to ask questions, but after a few minutes he began to talk. “Billy talked and talked about the baby,” he said.

  “You said that.”

  “And about you.”

  “About me?”

  “He talked about Spain,” Nathan said. “How sometimes what a man did led to something terrible happening. Once he and a friend were talking, and then the friend got up to take a piss. It was the middle of the night, and they were lying under some rocks, trying to get some sleep. They knew the rebels were around them. His friend was shot on the way to the ditch they used as a latrine.”

  “He got killed?” I said.

  “That’s right,” said Nathan. “Billy said he kept thinking that if he’d said one more thing, to delay the man, it might not have happened, or if he hadn’t talked at all, the man might have gotten up sooner, and it might not have happened.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “He said it must be like that for you. I don’t know if it is.”

  “Like what?”

  “Do you torture yourself—blaming yourself for—for what happened?” he said.

  I considered. I felt close to him. “No,” I said. “I did for a while.” And that was true. There was the moment when I let Pearl take the stroller while I took the carriage—how about that moment?

  Nathan was silent for a long time. Then he said, “Hilda, please don’t take this wrong. I miss Rachel every day. I feel terrible about losing her. But sometimes I think, if you hadn’t done that, I couldn’t have lived. If you hadn’t made a mistake—after. After my mistake.”

  “You’d have lived.”

  “I’d have been in awe of you all our lives.”

  I turned and sobbed into his chest, and then I wiped my eyes and we got up and put on our robes. We peeled the potatoes together.

  9

  “DID YOU WORRY WHEN FRANCES WAS FIFTEEN MONTHS old?” said Pearl. She looked over her shoulder as if she thought someone might hear us, but we were on a bench at the Central Park Zoo and behind us were plants and the lion house, no people.

  “I’ve never worried about Frances,” I said, as if I didn’t know what she meant. Frances, my daughter—the new daughter who was born five years after Racket died—was about two, and she was walking near us in pink overalls, not exactly chasing pigeons but following them, following one for a while as it clucked and tottered along the cobblestone path, then following another.

  “I held my breath the whole time Frances was fifteen months old,” Pearl said. “And that was months ago. I couldn’t even mention it until now.” She stood to get a better view of Simon, who had gone to watch the seals across the cobblestone walk in front of us, and had momentarily disappeared. Pearl never let her hair grow. She looked more regal than when she was younger, tall and now broad-shouldered, in a straw hat, frowning judiciously and tilting her head and chewing on a piece of fruit or a peanut.

  “He loves those seals,” she said.

  Now Frances sat down on the ground and put something into her mouth. I called her to me and took it away and gave her an animal cracker. I was at peace with Frances. She reminded me of myself. People say that’s the baby mothers have trouble with, but I’m on good terms with my own practical nature, and Frances was a practical baby, waking when she was hungry and eating until she was full, falling asleep when she was tired. I thought she approved of me. I didn’t worry that she would die. I don’t think the thought ever crossed my mind, which is silly, because any human being may die, but that’s the way it was. There was a trace of sadness about Frances from the first, and I so
metimes wondered about that, but I didn’t worry. I had not particularly thought about her being fifteen months old. She was quite different from Racket. She didn’t learn to walk until she was fourteen months, and so she was barely toddling around at fifteen months.

  That just isn’t the way I think. Pearl thinks differently from me. It’s often interesting to see what thought will have crossed her mind.

  I knew she wanted to say more, but I didn’t feel like encouraging her. Now Frances came over and put her hands on our knees, one hand on mine and one on Pearl’s. She had brown hair, and the curls were just coming in. She’d been bald for a long time. Pearl took her finger and followed the curve of one of Frances’s curls, against her scalp. “Funny to think she’s a woman,” she said.

  “A small woman.”

  “Someday she’ll get her period. Do you think she knows about growing up?”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “I think she does,” said Pearl.

  “How could she know? She can hardly talk.”

  “She’s always known.”

  “Has Simon always known about growing up?”

  “Not the way Frances does.”

  I looked at her. “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t yell at me,” said Pearl. “I guess I mean knowing what it’s like to be grown up. The way things hurt, but you get used to them. Now, Racket would never have learned that.”

  “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Sometimes it drives me crazy that we’ll never know Racket as an adult,” said Pearl. “If there was anyone on earth I wanted to know, it was that kid.”

  “She was just a baby.”

  “She wasn’t just any baby,” Pearl said.

  “She was difficult.”

  “No, I don’t mean that,” said Pearl.

  Now Simon came over to us. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said.

  Pearl stood up. “Now where am I going to find a men’s room?”

  “I think they’re near the cafeteria,” I said.

  “Will you go by yourself?” she said to Simon.

  Simon looked at his shoes. “Do I have to?”

  “Well, I can’t go into the men’s room,” said Pearl, “and you can’t go into the ladies, can you?”

  “I don’t want to go alone,” said Simon.

  “Well, maybe I can find some nice man to take you,” said Pearl. The two of them set off. I picked up Frances so she wouldn’t follow them. She was chubby, a solid child. Her overalls had ruffles and she had on a little short-sleeved blouse. It was summer. I smoothed her curls, mostly to touch them, and set her on her feet again, and she took off after another pigeon, but only a few steps from me.

  Her blanket was beside me on the bench, a thin flannel receiving blanket from which she could never be parted for long. She came back between pigeons and leaned over to rest her face on it for a moment, as if to draw something from it—comfort or courage; maybe she was a little afraid of the pigeons. It was a pink blanket, almost white from being washed so many times. I had to wash it at night and dry it on the radiator. She was upset if she woke up in the morning and didn’t find it in her crib, yet sometimes it had to be washed.

  After a while I looked up and saw Pearl coming back. I didn’t see Simon for a moment; he was lagging behind. I remember looking at Pearl as she came back toward me. She must have found a nice man to take Simon to the bathroom, because she was walking with him. The strange thing was that he looked like Nathan, so like him—the way he held himself and moved more than the way his face looked—that for a startled second I thought it was Nathan, coming toward us in the Central Park Zoo for some unfathomable reason in the middle of a school day when I knew he was teaching summer school. Of course it was not Nathan, but a somewhat younger man. Pearl fit well beside him, because of her height. She looked blond and happy, like a bride. The man turned in the other direction now, toward the polar bears, with a wave, but Pearl still smiled, swinging her arms as she came toward me. Simon was walking a little behind her, looking elsewhere. Following his glance, a stranger wouldn’t know which adults he belonged to.

  A little while after that the children tired of the zoo, or maybe we did, and we went out into the park. Frances walked slowly, and sometimes she wanted to be carried. Pearl and I took turns, though I think Pearl carried her more than I did. It was getting cloudy, but I knew Pearl was happy to be in the park and didn’t want to go back to the subway, and it seemed that if she was willing to carry Frances I should let her do what she liked. We went down to the lake and the children watched the ducks. Simon walked carefully around the rim of the lake, and Frances tried to imitate him. I would have carried her off someplace where there wasn’t a lake to fall into, but Pearl was willing to walk with her and hold her hand.

  The park was full of people, but not too many people. It was wartime, and everything had a certain look that I’d come to think of as “the war”—things looked brave, I guess I’d have to say. It looked brave for a child’s collar to fly up near his neck when he rode his tricycle: the wartime tricycle looked flimsy and the child seemed to be riding into uncertainty, right there on the walk with his mother ten steps away, looking brave herself, in a skirt that the wind pulled tight to her body. Everything bright looked like a scrap of a flag. Yet I’d had enough. I wanted to go home and make supper.

  Pearl led us away from the lake on one of the paths. She was looking for something she thought she remembered. There were fewer people now, and Simon and Frances began to roll on the grass. We sat down and watched them. Pearl lay down on her back. “Those are storm clouds,” she said, shading her eyes with her hand and looking straight up. She reached out and pulled me down so I could see too—pulled me by the back of my neck.

  I lay and looked at the clouds, though I’m not the sort of woman who lies on her back on the grass in the park. They were big, spiraling, dark gray clouds. “We’d better head for the subway,” I said, but we didn’t, not yet.

  I could see people walk by now and then. They probably thought we were unconventional. I knew that bits of grass and possibly ants would work their way under my stockings and into my underwear. I yanked my skirt down so no one passing could see up my legs, but there was no one passing. Frances came over and rested her face on my face and I was overwhelmed by the sweetness of her smell.

  Frances ran off again and I sat up to watch her. Pearl, still lying on her back, ran her finger along my arm, reaching it lazily just as far as it would go, then moving it up and down over my elbow.

  “What?” I said.

  “I felt a dro-op!” She sang drop.

  We called the children and by that time it was raining. Then I saw lightning and there was thunder in the distance. We began to hurry down the path, first running slowly with Frances between us. Then Pearl snatched her up and we went faster.

  The path curved. It might not be the shortest way back to the subway after all—we were quite far from the subway. A little earlier, we’d walked through a tunnel under a road, and now we came to the tunnel. It was raining hard and it kept thundering. Two young men were already taking shelter in the tunnel. We hurried inside. On the way through before, we’d stopped to call hello and hear the echo. Now Simon tentatively said, “Hello? Hello?” The thunder was strange in the tunnel.

  All at once Frances began to cry. “Bank! Bank!” she wailed. It was her word for her blanket, and with actual panic I realized that I didn’t have it. I was carrying a handbag and a diaper bag. The blanket had been in the diaper bag along with our lunch and a couple of bottles. I reached into the diaper bag but I knew the blanket wasn’t there. The bag wasn’t full enough. I’d taken the blanket out and let her hold it while we looked at the animals, but I had it when we sat on the bench. I might have left it there, or I might have left it on a bench near the lake.

  Frances was crying hard, and Simon was looking at me with terrible concern. “You didn’t lose Francie’s blanket, did you, Aunt
Hilda?” he said soberly.

  “I hope not,” I said. I looked up at Pearl.

  “I’ll get it,” she said in an instant, before it even occurred to me that there was anything we could do. Pearl handed me her pocket-book and her straw hat and took off into the rain, running back the way we’d come in her tight skirt and high-heeled open-toed shoes.

  “Where’s Mommy going?” said Simon.

  “Pearl, don’t be silly!” I called.

  “She’ll be struck by lightning,” he said. Frances had sat down on the dirty ground in the tunnel and was still crying. Rivulets of water were running in, and puddles and streams were forming, the rain was so sudden and hard. The two young men turned and looked at us, but didn’t say anything. I crouched with the two handbags and the diaper bag to pick up Frances, and stayed low, holding her on my knees, to talk to Simon.

  “She’ll be all right,” I said, though I was worried too, and I thought he could probably tell I was worried.

  “No, you don’t understand, she could get hit by lightning,” he said.

  I knew that people did get struck in Central Park, it wasn’t just a silly fear. “Not so close to the big buildings,” I said, though. “Only in the other part of the park. It won’t happen.”

  But I was worried, and Simon wasn’t convinced. “It could happen,” he said. He walked closer to the end of the tunnel from which Pearl had run, and stood with his hands in his pockets, watching the sheets of rain and waiting for her.

  Frances sobbed and I held her against me. Finally I put the bags down on the muddy ground. Every time there was a clap of thunder now, Frances screamed. Simon came over and held on to her foot. “The thunder can’t hurt us,” he said, and when she didn’t answer, began shouting it again and again, “The thunder can’t hurt us! The thunder can’t hurt us!” His voice echoed and bounced and the two young men stared. I rocked Frances, her muddy shoes kicking against me, and used one hand to stroke Simon’s back and shoulder.

  At last, suddenly, Pearl was behind us—she’d come from the other direction—soaking wet, laughing, holding out the soaked blanket. Frances stopped crying abruptly and took it, then wriggled out of my arms and sat down in the mud, holding it to her face. I felt terrible that I could not do for her what that scrap of flannel could do. Simon, who did not like to hug his mother, crouched near her and began wiping her shoes with his hands.