Hilda and Pearl

by Alice Mattison

  She said it in an ugly voice, and Harold turned and looked at her. A moment later he asked whether there was any popcorn and said he was finally going to learn how to make it. Mrs. Engel continued to smile and look around her. I stumbled out and went for some toilet paper to wipe Frances’s nose. Then I picked her up and said over her protests that she had to go to bed. Pearl came in ten minutes later.

  “What did you tell her?” I said.

  “Now or before?”

  “Both.”

  “I didn’t tell her anything. I’ve just been sitting there. I talked to Mrs. Engel.”

  “But before,” I said. “You didn’t say anything to Gussie about—about things that happened in the past?”

  “Of course not,” said Pearl. “Why would I do that?”

  “You must have.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  But of course she had.

  Frances was eight when we began going away for a month in the summer, not to Long Island but to a bungalow colony in the Adirondacks. Many people who stayed there were Jewish teachers. We went back every year. Frances learned to swim in the lake. Nathan half relaxed—there were people he could talk to. It was the start of the McCarthy years, and from the first, I think, he knew what was going to happen.

  At a hotel near where we stayed, fund-raisers for the Teachers Union were held, and everyone would load up in a couple of cars and go. Folk singers sang old European songs and the political songs we’d grown up on.

  There was some tension at the bungalow colony. People whispered about one person or another. The manager of the place was a charming bachelor whose name wasn’t Jewish. People said he’d changed it and even that he was some sort of spy for the Board of Education, which had begun investigating Communists in the schools.

  There was some suspicion of Mike, too—maybe even one or two people who remembered his taking notes at Party meetings years before. Or maybe it was just because Mike argued with everyone he met. “That’s ridiculous,” I’d hear him say from across the beach, the pitch of his voice rising. He and Pearl and Simon would come for a week every summer and crowd in with us. Pearl and I would stay up late talking as if we didn’t see each other all the time at home.

  The spring before Nathan lost his job, I thought he was trying to slow time. He’d come home later and later each afternoon, and then not change out of his suit. There was always chalk dust on him, as if he wanted to save it. I thought I ought to gather it in an envelope, the way I’d saved Frances’s baby teeth and, earlier, Racket’s small white shoes, which were still in my bottom drawer; sometimes, searching for an old sweater, my fingers would touch the paper bag I’d put them into. The paper was old and soft, and when I felt it I wouldn’t remember for a moment what it was.

  When the term ended in June of 1953, Nathan was somber, and I could sense that each thing he did—mark the grade reports, fill out the forms teachers fill out at the end of the year—had taken on a sacred quality. He’d be back in the fall, but it might be his last June as a teacher—and in fact it was. “What will you do—” I tried to say. He shook his head. He had no idea what he’d do if he lost his job. I knew he thought he should have a plan, out of prudence, but he didn’t.

  I didn’t want to worry Frances about Nathan’s job. I didn’t want her thinking Nathan was some sort of criminal. I didn’t know what a child would think. She was eleven. Most of the time she seemed busy with her friends and dolls. Sometimes she was quiet. Once I found a sheet of loose-leaf paper that had fallen from her notebook. “Ways to Help Mommy and Daddy” she had written at the top. She’d numbered ten lines but had written down only two ways: “I. Help with the dishes. 2. Don’t say things that remind them of things.”

  One night when Pearl and Mike were with us at the lake, Pearl and I sat up talking. Everyone was in bed except the two of us. We were sitting on the steps of the cabin. It was the only place we could be alone, and there we were bitten by mosquitoes, but Simon was asleep (we hoped) on the screened porch behind us; we couldn’t go there.

  “You should tell her,” said Pearl. She was eating a peach in the dark, and I could hear each bite.

  “What do you mean, tell her? What do you want me to say?”

  “Tell her the whole story. Tell her about Nathan and the Party, in the thirties, and what’s happening now.”

  “Oh, she knows all that,” I said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t want to worry her.”

  “Hilda,” said Pearl, “Frances worries. She worries all the time anyway. Can’t you see that?”

  “What does she have to worry about?” I said.

  “She thinks about everything,” Pearl said. “One day she asked me if I’m happy.”

  “She did?” I said. “What did you say?”

  “I told her I’m happy about some things, unhappy about others.”

  “Why didn’t you just say you’re happy?” I asked her. I suddenly wanted her to make a speech, to say she was happy, that she loved Mike, that she didn’t love Nathan anymore, that she had long ago stopped thinking about whether Simon was Nathan’s child. And for a second I was afraid that she had sat herself down and told Frances everything.

  “Why should I tell her I’m happy?” Pearl said.

  “Because she’s a child.”

  Pearl said, “Oh, Hilda, stop it!”

  I couldn’t say what had passed through my mind. I kept wondering if Simon was awake, listening. Finally Pearl said, “Let’s go to the rec hall.”

  Walking down there, I asked, “Do you talk to Simon about—different things?”

  “About what?”

  I didn’t want to go into it. “The things that come up,” I said. “Do you and Simon talk?” Simon was sixteen—I didn’t know what it would be like to have a sixteen-year-old son.

  “About some things,” said Pearl. We walked in silence and I could feel Pearl deciding what to say. Then she said, “When he’s twenty-one, I’m going to tell him that Nathan is his father.”

  I didn’t answer right away. “But Pearl,” I said finally, “maybe Nathan isn’t his father.”

  “Oh, Hilda, look at them. Just look at them.”

  “People look like their uncles,” I said. But as we walked down the dirt road in the quiet, I could hear my voice in my mind, and it didn’t sound sure.

  The rec hall, a big room near the beach, was empty. Pearl picked up a Ping-Pong paddle and slapped a ball with it. Neither of us knew how to play but we tried hitting the ball back and forth. We had to run for it so much we were out of breath in an instant. We sat down on folding chairs at the side of the rec hall. “I want you to be happy,” I said.

  “Well, keep playing Ping-Pong with me, then!” she said.

  “I can’t.”

  “Neither can I.” She slapped my leg. “Frances knows plenty,” she said. “Never mind.”

  “Well, that’s what I think.”

  “I look at her sometimes,” said Pearl. “She’s looking past us. She understands this stuff about Nathan’s job better than you or I do. She probably knows everything—all about Racket and everything.”

  “All about Racket?” I hadn’t been thinking about Racket. I still didn’t like talking about her. Now and then Pearl wanted to talk about her and I tried to let her. “Well, she must know some things about the baby,” I said. In fact, there was something I wanted to ask Pearl. “Do you and Simon talk about Racket?”

  “No,” said Pearl. “That’s not on purpose—I meant to. I don’t know what I was going to say. But when he finally asked me, it was at some awful moment. I think we were in the basement, and I was taking clothes out of the dryer. Maybe other people were there. And he said, just like that, ‘Did Aunt Hilda ever have another baby?’”

  “What did you say?” I said.

  “Well, I lied,” said Pearl. “I said, ‘She had a miscarriage once, a late miscarriage.’”

  “Why in the world did you say that?” I had assumed Simon knew ab
out Racket—almost as if he might remember her.

  “I guess I didn’t want to frighten him,” said Pearl. “Simon’s—you know what he’s like. This was a few years ago.”

  “But how could you do that?”

  “Well, do you want me to tell Simon everything?” she said, turning and facing me.

  “No,” I said. “No.” I was amazed at the lie she had told about my baby. But that’s what it’s always been like with Pearl. I never could predict her.

  “I mean, we could sit them both down and tell them about Racket,” she said, standing up and walking around. She was looking for something to eat, I thought, but there was nothing. She stood at the Ping-Pong table and fingered one of the balls as if she might bite into it. I watched to see if she’d crush it.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. But it made me picture myself sitting across a table from Frances—my kitchen table at home—saying, “You had a sister. She never stopped kicking, fighting me....” And maybe Frances would say, “Oh, I know all about her. Don’t you remember—you said this, you said that?”

  Pearl and I kept talking, but about other things. “Mike will wake up and not know where I am,” she said. “He’ll yell and wake up the whole house.” Yet she stayed where she was, leaning against the Ping-Pong table. I thought of Mike asleep on the daybed in the cottage living room, then waking and missing Pearl, pounding the mattress as if she might have slipped into a hole in it. He would think the same twelve thoughts over and over. There were things Mike would never think and would never say, and so he had to shout very loudly. “He’ll yell at you in the morning,” I said. “He’ll say you were up late and so you’ll sleep late, and you’ll miss a beautiful summer day, and how many summer days do you get? He’ll wake you up to say that.”

  “I know it,” she said. “He’ll say, ‘You talk to Hilda enough at home—here you should go swimming.’”

  But after a while we got tired, and we started up the hill to the cottage. Pearl laid her hand on my arm as we walked, as if to get my attention, but she left it there. I wanted to hold hands with her, to walk swinging our joined hands like a couple of girls in kindergarten. Then I saw someone coming toward us as we walked: a thin figure in a light shirt—Simon. “He heard us!” said Pearl, joking.

  “Good evening, mother and aunt,” he said, coming up to us. “Are you planning to wander the premises all night?”

  “We were just going back,” I said. “You’re still awake?” He was dressed.

  “I am a fitful sleeper,” said Simon. “If I ever join the navy, I can take a watch in the middle of the night.”

  “The navy!” I said.

  “Don’t say things like that,” said Pearl. “He said it to me once, too. That he might join the navy.”

  “Better that than Brooklyn College,” said Simon cheerfully. “Better that than Brooklyn.” He did a little dance step. He was trying to do a hornpipe.

  “I don’t think they do much dancing now,” I said.

  “The navy’s a lot better than it used to be,” said Simon. “Though I don’t know about anti-Semitism in the navy. Do you ladies know anything about that? How I’d do with a Jewish name?”

  “Lewis isn’t a Jewish name,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said lightly, and brushed his mother’s shoulder with one hand, as if what he was saying was really meant for her. “I’m thinking of taking the name Levenson. Taking it back. What do you think, Mom?”

  “Levenson,” said Pearl.

  “Well, it’s our name, after all,” said Simon. “I don’t know why Dad changed it. Cowardly to change it.”

  He stood there smiling at us, just as tall as Pearl now—smiling down at me. For a second I thought he might be walking in his sleep; the conversation felt like one in a dream. He didn’t come back with us right away. He said he wanted to walk down to the lake, and he kept going when we went back to the cottage. I lay awake until I heard him come in a little while later.

  The next day Pearl and I went shopping together at the Grand Union in town. When Pearl was visiting, she didn’t seem to mind spending some of her short vacation doing the shopping, even though I offered to go alone so she could be at the lake earlier. I guess she liked picking out food.

  I drove. I hadn’t had my license for long, and I liked driving Pearl places. I drove slowly through the grounds of the bungalow colony and out onto the highway, while she sat beside me talking. I was tempted to keep driving through town. “We could go someplace exciting,” I said.

  “Grand Union will do.”

  She went back to what she’d been saying. “Do you and Nathan fight?”

  “Yell and scream?”

  “Well, sort of.”

  “No,” I said. “Nathan won’t. And I guess I won’t.”

  “You fight with me,” she said.

  “Now and then.” When Pearl and I had an argument neither of us could leave it alone until it was settled, and we’d talk—usually on the phone—until it was over. Once we talked until three in the morning. We’d been arguing about whether people were basically good or bad, I remember. It had started with Hitler and ended with our children. At the time she was trying to defend Mike for punishing Simon. “It will teach him, I guess,” she said, but then she cried.

  “He doesn’t need to learn, he already knows,” I said. I always liked Simon and worried about him.

  In the store, now, I took a cart and started down the aisles. I needed hamburger meat. “Do you mind frozen french fries?” I said.

  “No, that’s fine,” said Pearl. “Let’s get some fruit.”

  “Of course.” In the fruit and vegetable department, she couldn’t be stopped. “Look at the cherries,” she said. “Really nice cherries. And the plums.”

  “Let’s get some plums,” I said. I was already putting cherries into a brown bag.

  Pearl leaned over the display of plums. It was July and they were those tart, dark red plums with yellow flesh. She reached out an arm for a brown bag and began selecting plums, fingering them lightly and putting them into the bag or letting them be. I stood behind her with my cart, waiting.

  She was so familiar: the curve of her back, her narrow back and big hips. That chopped-off blond hair. She weighed the plums and then went in search of a clerk to mark the bag. I’d lost Racket, I suddenly thought, I could never tell Nathan the whole story—but I’d kept Pearl. The clerk, in his white apron, seemed to point toward the front of the store—and beyond, to the mountains—and Pearl looked too, and they nodded together. It was a hot day, they were probably saying. They chatted a moment. She nodded again.

  And she came back to me, waving her bag like a prize. I’d lost something and I had something, and that was true for her, too. My eyes filled but I turned away so she wouldn’t see. Pearl took the front of the cart and pulled it down the aisle, looking at the other fruit with interest.

  “I already have bananas,” I said.

  “I know, I ate one for breakfast. There are three left.”

  “I’ll be back.”

  “We eat a lot.”

  “That’s all right. I want you to eat a lot,” I said.

  Then when we left the store I didn’t go straight home after all. I kept driving past the entrance to the bungalow colony. “I’m carrying you away,” I said.

  “I notice.”

  I didn’t know where I’d go, then I remembered a stand up the road that sold antiques and pottery, and I pulled in there. “I want to see what they have here,” I said.

  There were no other customers, and the old woman who ran the place was inclined to talk. She guessed we must be from New York. “You look Jewish,” she said. When we began looking around, she showed us a few things. “You like antiques?”

  I said I didn’t know much about them, and she showed us old washstands and ladles and devices to warm a bed in winter. There were rows of cups and saucers and spoons and glasses in all sizes and colors.

  I was thinking that I might buy Pearl a present, but I did
n’t see the purpose of a glass or a cup. It would just be something to dust. She came toward me carrying an old picture frame, carved dark wood. There was a photograph in it, an old-fashioned baby in a long white gown. She handed it to me. The baby had startling dark eyes, and I knew what she meant, but I fingered the wooden frame.

  “Do you like the frame?” I said.

  “The picture reminded me …”

  “It could be any baby,” I said. I put the photograph down and we went out to the car.

  “I like places like that,” said Pearl.

  “For a few minutes,” I said.

  We drove back to the bungalow colony. Next to me on the front seat, Pearl was silent. When we got there, we were both hungry. The cabin was quiet, and I thought all the others were at the lake. There were crumbs on the table, and in the refrigerator a bowl of tuna salad with waxed paper over the top. They had come up from the lake and had lunch and gone down again. We put away the groceries. “Tuna fish okay with you?” I said, and Pearl took out the bread. I made instant coffee. We ate, talking about Mike some more. “At least he still thinks I’m good-looking,” said Pearl.

  “Yes, I think he does,” I said. I was going to say she was good-looking, too, but I heard a sound, and Frances came into the kitchen, barefoot, her index finger holding her place in a book.

  “I thought you were down at the lake,” I said. She was in her bathing suit. She was getting chunky—she had that solid look little girls have before they grow breasts.

  “I was down there this morning,” she said.

  “Aren’t you going back?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Did you eat lunch?”

  She nodded. “Can I have a cookie?”

  I gave her a cookie and she sat down at the table, as if cookies required formality. Pearl and I were sitting there with our instant coffee, and Pearl took a cookie, too. “Where did you go?” said Frances. “I wanted to go with you.”

  “Just to Grand Union,” I said. “You were here when we left.”