Window on the Square

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  “We’d better return,” he said, and we went down the steep bank together and started toward the far end of the pond and the shelter. Our steps matched less perfectly now, and I knew my glides were often ragged. When we rejoined the children, we found that Selina was growing cold and ready to start home, though I think Jeremy could have skated till dark.

  In the carriage Brandon gave them the bag of chestnuts and they occupied themselves with shelling and munching on the long drive downtown from the park. It had begun to snow again, and once I saw Brandon glance up at the filmed sky with a look so unhappy that it stabbed me to a pity I had never expected to feel toward Brandon Reid.

  TWELVE

  The next morning I wakened to the realization that this was the day when I must meet my new responsibilities.

  I tried to put from my mind the insistent memory of that moment near the chestnut vendor when Brandon Reid had held my hands and I’d heard the first faint cracking of the ice. I tried to dismiss the look Miss Garth had given me as something I must have exaggerated. Detest me, the woman might, but there was nothing she could do to injure me and I must not let such imaginings possess me. Malevolence was far too strong a word.

  Mr. and Mrs. Reid left early that morning, with Selina sitting between them in the carriage. They would drive to the pier to take passage on one of the river boats that ran between New York and Albany. Miss Garth, having been informed that all control of Jeremy was to be relinquished to me for these few days, slept late and arose sullen. But there was nothing so alarming as malevolence in her. She was pleased, she told me tartly, to have Jeremy off her hands, and she wished me well with him in a tone which implied her true wish that everything possible would go wrong.

  Jeremy was up and restored again, and I began to devise ways in which to keep him busy. There were, of course, the lessons with Andrew in the morning, and I sat through them, not sewing, but taking part in the discussions, and often working out the wrong answers to arithmetic problems, much to Jeremy’s superior amusement. Andrew took his cue from me, and we were more frivolous than usual about lessons. I believe we all enjoyed the change and that it was good for Jeremy, even though studies did not progress as well as they might.

  Miss Garth did not appear at lunchtime—Kate said she was having a cup of tea in her room—so the meal went well. By the time Andrew left the house, Jeremy was cheerfully ready to interest himself once more in the gift he planned to make for his uncle. I had never asked him what it was, but now he told me about it voluntarily.

  When we were again in the schoolroom, which for all its bareness, I preferred to the stuffy nursery, he brought me the book I had purchased on Egypt and showed me the picture of a statue. The figure wore a wide, flat collar of the type so often seen in Egyptian paintings and sculpture.

  “I’m making a collar for the Osiris head,” he told me, his eyes ashine with pride. “I’ll need more of those steel beads you gave me, and I’d like some other beads of the same shape and size. Perhaps in green, and a few red ones too. Mr. Beach brought me the wire, and it’s just right for making the collar stiff.”

  He showed me the plan he had drawn with colored crayons on paper and the work he had painstakingly commenced. The design was attractive, and its execution revealed the boy’s creative gift. I was happy to give him my unstinting approval and promise him the beads.

  This seemed a good time to urge upon him an interest in making gifts for his mother and Selina as well, but this suggestion left him indifferent.

  “Selina likes silly things,” he said. “And my mother has everything she wants. When she wishes something new, she buys it. So there’s no use trying to give her anything.”

  I sensed that his resistance was due to more than the difficulties he named and I insisted quietly that some sort of gift for his mother must be thought of. I made various suggestions, but he shrugged them all aside.

  Later, when we were engaged in a game of chess, with Jeremy beating me badly, he made one of his unexpected capitulations.

  “All right—I’ll make a gift for my mother if I can think of something,” he offered.

  I suspected that his change of mind was due to a desire to please me and I took pains to show my approval. Any positive steps he might make were in the right direction.

  “Perhaps if I went to her room and looked around,” he suggested, “I would get an idea of what to make. Will you come with me, Miss Megan?”

  The notion did not appeal to me, but he had already slipped from his place at the table.

  “Do come along,” he said, sounding as impatient as his uncle.

  The important thing was to encourage him in any sort of generous gesture toward his mother, I told myself. There could be little harm if he looked about her room for inspiration. I would not enter, but would stand in the doorway and watch to see that he touched nothing, performed no mischief.

  We went downstairs together, and Jeremy led the way first into his mother’s small boudoir. The heavy green velvet draperies that hid the door to her bedroom were drawn across the opening, and before we could approach them, a sound reached us from the room beyond. I realized with a start that someone was moving about in Leslie’s room.

  Jeremy put a finger to his lips. “Hush,” he warned. “I know who it is. She does this sometimes when my mother is away. Come and look.”

  Before I could stop him, he went to the doorway and parted the velvet curtains to a narrow slit. Puzzled, I stood behind him and looked through upon an astonishing scene.

  Miss Garth had her back to us and she was dressed in one of Leslie Reid’s beautiful gowns. It was a green satin that went dramatically with Leslie’s red hair, and it was too tight for Miss Garth to hook all the way up. The flesh of her upper back showed pinched above the hooking, and, as she moved before us, I caught the scent of the violet spray she had used lavishly upon her person.

  For a moment I stood shocked and frozen, watching her in something like horror, unable to draw myself away from the sight. As I stared, she picked up the full pleated skirt of the underdrape, turning and dipping before the long mirror until her heavy dark hair, loosened from its puffs, trembled on the verge of dishevelment. She gave her head a quick toss that sent the tortoise-shell pins flying, and her hair came down in thick profusion about her face and shoulders.

  I did not like the glow in her eyes or the smile on her lips as she watched her own image. But when I put a hand on Jeremy’s arm to draw him away, I could feel his resistance. I did not want to betray our presence by a struggle, and, as I hesitated, the woman in the green gown swooped toward the bed table and picked something up in her hands. As she turned toward the lamp that burned on Mrs. Reid’s dressing table, I saw that she held the double miniature Leslie had shown me on my first visit to this room.

  Miss Garth’s back was still toward us, and I could not at first see her face, though I knew she was studying the twin portraits—or one of them. Slowly she turned with the framed miniatures in her hand, and now I could catch her expression. It was the warm, glowing look of a woman in love, and my sense of shock and horror increased. This time I bent warningly to Jeremy and put pressure behind my grip on his shoulder. Somehow I managed to get him quietly away, and we did not speak until we had returned upstairs.

  The thought came to me that in Jeremy’s hands, if he were indiscreet, lay a frightening power to wound and humiliate Thora Garth. For all my distress at what I had seen, an uneasy pity toward the woman moved me. She had gone too far along the road of daydreaming, and sure disaster lay in the course she followed.

  Back in the schoolroom Jeremy returned calmly to the chess game and began to study the board as though nothing untoward had occurred. A lecture on the evils of spying would have little effect, I knew, but at least I must express an attitude.

  “I don’t think it’s fair to watch anyone who doesn’t know she is being watched,” I told him gently.

  Jeremy shrugged and began a triumphant move across the board with his red queen.
“Garth is crazy,” he said. “Crazy as a witch.”

  I pushed a black bishop absently into a castle’s path, unable to concentrate.

  “She certainly isn’t crazy,” I insisted. “You must never say such a thing about anyone.”

  “Why not?” His dark eyes met mine almost insolently. “It’s what they say about me. But Garth is a lot crazier than I am.”

  I leaned toward him across the board. “Listen to me, Jeremy. Miss Garth must be a very lonely woman. Especially now when your mother and Selina are away. I expect she feels at home with your mother’s things because she took care of her when she was a young girl. Since children like to dress up in older people’s clothes, why shouldn’t older people enjoy dressing up like someone younger?”

  “You don’t know what she’s like,” Jeremy said carelessly, unconvinced by my feeble logic. His main attention was still for the game. Deliberately he moved his queen and said, “Checkmate,” ending the contest. “You’re too easy to beat, Miss Megan,” he added.

  I sensed that further argument would not reach him just now and cast around in my mind for something cheerful to do with the rest of the afternoon. It was then an inspiration came to me.

  “Let’s have a tea party in my room, Jeremy. I can heat water on the hearth in my little kettle, and I’ve some biscuits I’ve been saving for a special occasion. I’ve even a new rocking chair to show you—and my new lamp. Come and keep me company.”

  He seemed to like the idea, perhaps because I had never before invited him into my room. He helped me with the fire, and we soon had smoke and flames writhing up the chimney. In a little while there would be bright warmth. I lighted the lamp I had recently purchased. A plump china globe sprigged with pink rosebuds circled the chimney and added a touch of cheer to the small plain room. I spread a cloth of Irish linen over the table and set Jeremy to work putting out the blue Lowestoft tea set. When I opened the tin of Huntley and Palmer biscuits, Jeremy took pleasure in arranging small pink and white frosted cakes on a blue plate.

  While we made our preparations, I told him of the morning I had gone to church and of the fine things the minister had said about Dwight Reid. Everyone else avoided any mention of his father’s name to Jeremy, and I felt this to be unwise. It could only add to the burden of unspoken guilt the boy carried. He listened somewhat warily to my account and I sensed his inner bracing.

  “Miss Megan,” he said when I finished, “if there’s an opening ceremony for the Home, do you think Uncle Brandon would permit me to go?”

  “I don’t see why you shouldn’t go,” I told him recklessly, since I had no knowledge of how his uncle might react to this suggestion. “Anyway, it’s a month or more away, so we needn’t worry about it now.”

  Absently, he put the cover back on the oblong biscuit tin. “I must go,” he said, and I wondered what expiation such an act might signify to the boy.

  We did not mention the matter again that day, however. To distract him, I went to the mantel where Richard’s carrousel sat and while the water heated in a kettle hung over coals, I wound the toy and set the tiny horses and sleigh to whirling as the music box played. Jeremy’s eyes brightened as he watched and I sang the old nursery tune for him in French.

  “Frère Jacques,

  Frère Jacques,

  Dormez-vous?

  Dormez-vous?

  Sonnez les marines,

  Sonnez les matines,

  Ding! Dang! Dong!

  Ding! Dang! Dong!”

  He was clearly fascinated, but when I would have taken the toy from the mantel to let him see it more closely, he put his hands behind his back, remembering what I had forgotten.

  “I’m still being pun—that is, I’m still paying a penalty, Miss Megan,” he said. “I mustn’t touch it.”

  I set it back on the mantel and wound it again, deciding then and there that this toy would be my Christmas gift to Jeremy.

  When the kettle had bubbled and the tea was steeped, we enjoyed our little party to the full. Jeremy looked so contented that I wished his mother and uncle had been there to see him. There was nothing wrong with this child that new interests, patience, and a little loving kindness would not cure.

  When our cups were empty and a sufficient number of biscuits had been consumed, I told him something about Richard, who had owned the carrousel, and there was an easing in my own heart for the telling. Finally I drew out a book of fairy tales that had belonged to me when I was little, and from which I used to read to Richard. Jeremy seemed delighted at the prospect of being read to, and I realized with a pang that he knew nothing of the companionable experience of reading aloud. He took a cushion from a chair and sat upon it cross-legged before the fire, studying the flames as all children love to do, while I began the story.

  I had found a favorite of Richard’s, though I was not quite sure how Jeremy would receive it. He did not look at me as I read, but there was a rapt expression in his eyes and a faint smile curled his lips.

  The tale was the one of the ugly little toad whom no one could love until the kindness of a beautiful maiden freed him from enchantment and he became again a handsome, shining prince. Jeremy made not a sound until the last word was done and silence lay upon the room. Then he turned toward me and I saw a mist in his eyes.

  “Even while he was a toad,” Jeremy said, lost in wonder, “he found someone to love him. Someone who didn’t mind how ugly and warty he was.”

  It cost me an effort to speak in the matter-of-fact manner I knew I must adopt. I wanted to kneel on the hearth beside him and put my arms about him, but the gesture must not come too soon or it would be suspect and thus rejected.

  “I think that was quite natural,” I told him. “The girl in the story was kind and she could see past the toad disguise to the fine prince he really was inside.”

  Jeremy nodded. “But first there had to be something fine for her to see. What if there hadn’t been anything at all? What if he were wicked clear through?”

  The lump in my throat was unbearable, and while I sought words to reassure and comfort him, a sharp rapping sounded on the door.

  I went to open it and found Miss Garth on the threshold. She was dressed once more in her brown merino, though the breath of violets still clung to her person. Color rode high in her cheeks, and she was furiously angry.

  THIRTEEN

  The warmth and gentle happiness of the little room was gone in an instant. The moment I opened the door Miss Garth saw the boy and she pushed past me, entering without a by-your-leave.

  “What did you do with them?” she cried, pouncing on him. “Where did you hide them?”

  Jeremy went white and sullen beneath the angry pressure of her hand upon his shoulder. He stared at her with contempt rising in his eyes and said nothing at all.

  “What is it?” I asked. “What is it you think he has taken? Surely you can ask him more kindly!”

  My earlier sympathy for the woman had vanished, and I was ready to oppose her for the boy’s sake.

  “He knows very well,” Miss Garth snapped. “He has taken the gold scissors and thimble that were my mother’s. He has played with them before and now he has stolen them from the sewing basket in my room. What have you done with them, you wicked boy?”

  He shrugged her hand aside and rose to his full height before her, clearly unafraid of the anger that burned in the woman.

  “Why do you try to pretend that you’re my mother?” he asked coolly. “Why do you dress up in her clothes and make believe that you’re young and pretty when you’re really so very old and ugly?”

  Every vestige of color went out of Miss Garth’s face. While I stood helpless and alarmed, she gasped as if she could not draw her breath without pain. Then she reached out and caught Jeremy by the arm with fingers turned as vicious as claws. He lacked the strength to resist her, and she pulled him with her out of my room and to his own, next door.

  I followed them, my anxiety rising. I had no intention of abandoning Jeremy, but
the woman was in so demented a state that coping with her would be difficult.

  In his own room she flung the boy from her. “Are you going to tell me what you’ve done with my things?” she demanded. “Or must I search your room for myself?”

  He recovered his balance and would have hurled himself upon her if I had not put my arms about him, holding him back. “Wait,” I whispered. “Let her be, Jeremy. You shouldn’t have said what you did.”

  For a moment he struggled, then went limp in my arms. Together we watched as she moved about the room, pulling open drawers, looking into boxes. When she reached the bed she lifted the pillow and pointed dramatically. There beneath it lay the gold scissors and thimble. She snatched them up and held them out accusingly to Jeremy.

  “So now you are a thief as well!” she cried. “Don’t expect to escape without punishment this time. Your uncle shall hear of this when he returns. A thrashing is what you have coming to you, and a thrashing you will get!”

  “My uncle will not thrash me,” the boy said tensely. “He wouldn’t dare. Nor will you.”

  Her eyes, glazed by rage, searched the room as if to find some means of punishing him. Her eyes fell upon the collar Jeremy was making for his uncle’s Christmas gift, with loose beads and wire strewn around it. With a spiteful, slashing gesture, she dashed the collar from the table, scattering beads over the carpet.

  “Trash!” she cried. “Worthless trash!”

  Jeremy escaped my arms and flung himself to his knees where he could pick up the collar. Over the shimmering circlet he stared up at Miss Garth.

  “When I find the gun,” he said in a low, deadly voice, “I will kill you too.”

  The woman looked at him, and the crazed fury went out of her, replaced by sudden fear.

  “I’ll not stay in this house tonight!” she gasped. With the scissors and thimble clutched in one hand, she fled from the room without looking back, and I knew she was truly frightened.

  Silently I knelt beside Jeremy, helping him pick up the scattered beads. They were small, and the loose ones had scattered widely. I held to my silence until his harried breathing quieted and some of the trembling went out of him.