by Hugh Hood
“I thought I’d come and talk to you.”
“Daddy’s working, dear, you know that.” Her face fell, and then she gave him a little smile and he felt sad. “Would you like to help me?” he asked, trying unsuccessfully to conceal his impatience.
“Yes, I would.”
“I’m doing some drawings,” he said, “and you could do some, too, and then we can see which are the best ones. Would that be fun?”
“Oh, yes!” she said, very pleased. More than anything else, she loved to draw and paint. The Haggertys suspected that she might have some talent, though at three-and-a-half there isn’t enough to go on.
“Just a minute,” he said, going into the bedroom, where he extracted the cardboards from some freshly laundered shirts. He brought them back in and handed them to her. “Here’s something to draw on,” he said, “now you get your pencils and I’ll show you what to draw.”
“They’re all broken,” she said dolefully, and if he began to look for them and sharpen them he might as well knock off work for the morning.
He took a ballpoint out of his hip pocket and gave it to her; he carried it to make notes and was used to having it handy. “That’s Daddy’s special pencil,” he told her, “and it isn’t a toy, so you be careful of it, won’t you?”
“Yes.”
“O.K., now here’s what you do.” He showed her some of his crumpled-up roughs. “I’m drawing coats today, see? Now you take the cardboards and the pencil and draw some coats, three or four of them, and then we can see which is the best one. O.K.?” He had once or twice used her drawings in children’s-wear layouts, with some modifications, and they had been striking and very fresh.
“O.K.,” she said happily, and stretching out on the floor began to draw with enormous concentration. As she settled into it he watched the back of her head, her neck and shoulders, very moved as usual by the pathetic delicacy of their line. Then he went back to the draughting-board, sure that he had silenced her for the time being. He hated to think about it that way; like most young parents in similar circumstances he felt a great concern about his relationship with his child — only one so far, thank God — and he worried continually and felt obscurely guilty about putting her off, placating her, trying to find friends for her who would take her off his hands.
Peter and Helen felt especially guilty about the hard time they had given Sally by moving to Montreal; she knew no French and had been accustomed to English-speaking kids who didn’t talk as well as she did. Finding herself unable to hold her own with the other children on this strange new block, who talked to each other in what was to Sally a devilish and bewildering gabble, she had grown extremely dependent on her parents. From a sturdily independent child, eager to get out of the house and run with the gang, she had changed into a homebody, not a whiner or a crybaby, it was simply her policy to avoid trouble.
Peter and Helen hoped that this spring, after a year in the city spent mainly in watching children’s shows on the French TV, she might get along better on the street. When the cold weather stopped, she began to get out with her wagon and tricycle, and fewer and fewer were the unhappy occasions when she came in on the point of tears. To the great relief of her parents, she explained that she had found a friend.
They wondered if this friend spoke French, and eagerly quizzed Sally about him.
“His name is George,” she said.
“ZZheorzzhe?” asked Haggerty, giving it an approximately French pronunciation.
“No, George,” she said positively.
“Well, does he speak English?”
“Yup, and Hungarian.”
“Hungarian?”
“Yes, and he’s very nice. He keeps Bernard from knocking me down, and when Brigitte took my tricycle he got it back. He’s eight.” She went out on a strict schedule, having figured out precisely when George was around to look after her.
“It’s a polyglot town,” Haggerty said to his wife. “The kid must be one of the refugees. A lot of them came here.”
“Maybe she’ll learn Hungarian instead of French,” said Helen with a grin, “maybe both.”
“I’d better have a look at George,” said Haggerty, “and get the score on him.” He kept his eyes open for a couple of weeks, but so far hadn’t bumped into the lad.
“George is a Jew,” said Sally, one night at supper, “and he plays the violin. He has a black bag with his violin in it, but he won’t take it out with kids around. He says it’s very precious. It’s a Hungarian violin.”
Her parents eyed one another silently, waiting for her to go on. She seemed to be pleased by the unaccustomed attention, but said nothing more about Jews, Hungarians, or violinists, changing the subject to mud and toy shovels, and leaving them neatly on the hook. When she’d gone to bed they dug out Spock and the three other child-care manuals which the insurance companies had sent them at Sally’s birth; but they found no satisfactory entries on the emergence of the social conscience in the three-and-a-half-year-old. Apparently it didn’t emerge unless somebody made it emerge. She likely had no inkling what a Jew or a DP was or was not. Mind you, she always noticed Negro children, especially on buses, usually shouting something like: “Look, Mummy, a brown baby,” to her liberal mother’s discomfiture, and going across the aisle to cuddle and kiss the infant in question. It was the overt difference in pigmentation that she noticed; the social intricacies simply didn’t exist.
Peter and Helen wondered if they should try to tell her about them, or whether they should let her find them out for herself, and so far they had found no answer.
As he finished the topcoat sketches and stuck them in a Manila envelope, Haggerty brooded about these matters, as he sometimes did for weeks at a time. He didn’t want to inject the poisons, even as inoculation. But the world was such-and-such in structure, and she shouldn’t be isolated from it, for her own good. He turned from the draughting-board to look at her and found to his surprise that she was standing beside him with a look of apprehension on her face.
“What is it? What’s the matter, Sweetie, have you finished?”
“I broke it,” she whispered, holding out the pieces of the ballpoint. She had unscrewed the barrel and the cartridge and spring had fallen out. Involuntarily he let a spasm of annoyance flicker in his face, and she began to look really frightened, which gave him a perverse pleasure.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, “we’ll buy another one at the store.”
“God,” he said viciously, “you spoil everything, don’t you?” It put her on the verge of tears. She had apparently lost the little spring which operated the propel-repel mechanism. Suddenly he felt a wave of nauseating self-contempt; was he doing that kind of thing all the time? What the hell, should he make his daughter hate him for a lousy half-cent spring from a thirty-nine cent ballpoint? He took her in his arms.
“I’m sorry I said that, dear,” he said, as expressively as possible, “you’re right, it doesn’t matter a bit, not a tiny bit. When we go to the store this afternoon we’ll buy two of them, one for you and one for me, and you can have some ice cream too.” This was the right thing to say because for some reason she loved going to the store, any store, with him. But it didn’t unsay what he’d said, and the gratuitous and unnecessary hurt would persist, and be remembered, another failure of love for him to chalk up on the board. Why do we say these things, he wondered, what does it matter? I want her to love me, and I want to love her. And he thought flashingly: I want my children around my deathbed, I don’t want to die alone. Neurotic patterns, neurotic patterns, there was no need to take quite so long a view, he was well under thirty.
They held their arms tightly around each other for quite a while as he repeated. “It doesn’t matter a bit, not a bit, it doesn’t matter.” Then she smiled and he began to tickle her, and peace and contentment were restored.
“Did you finish any coats?”
>
“I did two,” she said, “and then I tried to fix the pencil and I lost the little spring from inside.”
“Keep the pieces for your junk box,” he told her munificently, “and this afternoon you can pick a new one for yourself in any colour you like.”
She wriggled out of his arms and climbed onto the window seat to check the passing scene. For a few moments there was silence in the room as Haggerty busied himself finding the materials for a finished execution of his topcoat sketches, with which he hoped to catch the one-thirty mail.
“There’s George,” said Sally suddenly.
“Where?” he asked curiously, looking out the window beside her.
“There, there, he’s waiting for the bus. I want to go out, please.” She trotted to the front door and he held it open behind her; it was nearly lunchtime and in a minute he would have to retrieve her. He went back into his workroom and assembled the materials for this afternoon’s work, dropping pencils and pen nibs here and there, and treading on them. Apart from his left hand, Haggerty’s body was not especially well co-ordinated.
Now and then he looked out the window to see if he could spot Sally and her friend. He could hear her excited chattering but couldn’t quite crane his neck far enough around to bring the bus stop into view. Pulling on his cardigan, he walked out onto the front steps and there he saw his daughter and a considerably larger boy giggling and punching each other harmlessly. The boy was certainly several years older than Sally, but was doubtless glad to have any friend, his own age or not, considering his circumstances. Haggerty came up to them just as the bus pulled up and the little boy moved to get on.
“George has to go downtown to see his Daddy,” said Sally. There was no time for introductions, and when the bus had gone they went inside for lunch.
“George is going to New York with his Daddy,” said Sally through her peanut-butter sandwich. As she was an uncannily accurate recorder and transmitter of neighbourhood gossip, her parents saw no reason to question the statement.
“When is he going?”
“Saturday, on the train with his father,” she said sadly.
“Why?”
“To meet some people on the boat.”
She almost always got such details exactly correct, perhaps because she simply repeated what she’d heard, perhaps because she had the historian’s conscience — it was hard to tell. When she had finished her sandwich and milk she went out with her tricycle to see if George had come back yet, leaving her parents to mull over her communique.
“Probably going to welcome some more refugees,” said Helen, “these people stick together. They rent each other houses and things like that. It isn’t as if they were all alone.” She had been feeling rather lonely herself, for most of their first year in the city.
“I’d like to know more about these people,” said Haggerty, feeling vaguely worried for some unexplainable reason, “they sound sort of interesting. I wonder if George is any good on the violin.”
“I think he may be. He told me one day that he’d been playing for four years, since they left Budapest, and he’s only eight.”
“Maybe he’s some kind of prodigy. He’s certainly nice to Sally.” In Haggerty’s eyes this forgave anything.
“I think he’s a nice little boy,” said Helen, “he’s very polite and a little odd, a little grown up for his age. He seems to act responsible for Sally, and he told me he liked to look after her.”
“That’s a very good thing,” said Haggerty with pleasure, “everything’s coming along nicely. I told you she’d make friends.” He spent a cheerful afternoon finishing up his current assignment but missed the one-thirty mail by giving his sketches an unusually high finish.
On the weekend he was kept busy amusing Sally, inside the house and out. He kept the weekends free for his family, and on this Saturday and Sunday much was demanded of him. Sally missed George quite a lot. She kept asking how far it was to New York, how long a trip there and back would take, and when George and his father, and perhaps their friends off the boat, might come back. She kept moping off up the street a hundred feet or so to stand in front of George’s apartment house, ignoring the calls of the French children who genuinely seemed anxious to include her in their play. Haggerty didn’t want to play nursemaid too overtly, and he encouraged her to mingle with Brigitte and Marisa and the others, whose talk he was beginning to understand. For one thing, they were closer to her own age than George, and might in the long run be better friends for her. But she simply walked past them to wait for the friend of whom she felt sure, and her father couldn’t really blame her. Every time he brought out her tricycle or wagon one of the other children appropriated it, in the friendliest way, with no objection from Sally.
He began to grow tired of providing playthings for everybody on the block while his own child made no use of them, a rather petty motive, he supposed, but a genuine one of which he wasn’t truly ashamed.
“Come and ride your bike, dear,” he urged, but it did no good. Claudine or Brigitte diverted themselves with the gay red and white three-wheeler, playing fireman or ambulance, and Sally went on moping. Haggerty felt aggrieved, though for no good reason. In the evening he had to go looking for the tricycle for nearly an hour before he finally located it up an alley at the end of the block. He didn’t expect any consideration from toddlers, but he began to wish that George would hurry back.
“We’ll send her to a maternelle in the fall,” he said with decision. Until now he had been opposed to nursery schools on the grounds that they were faddish and an evasion of parental responsibility. Now he was beginning to see their point.
Helen brightened up at this. “Really?” she asked. “Oh, boy!” And it wasn’t that they were anxious to be rid of Sally, they were honestly puzzled and they wanted to do what was right.
They were very glad indeed to hear that George was back from New York. Sally was full of details about the trip; but the details as she developed them were dismal, even shameful. Apparently the trip had been nightmarish, utter disaster, whose proportions their daughter was in no position to appreciate, though she was perfectly competent to describe them. One afternoon in the middle of the next week she bounded into her father’s workroom and asked, in the sprightliest way: “What’s a coronary attack?”
“A what?” said Haggerty, blanching.
“A co-ro-na-ry-a-tack.”
There wasn’t the least hint of gravity, displeasure, or sorrow in her face; she didn’t know what she was talking about. And if there was one thing he did not want at any time to discuss with her, this was it, but how should he evade it? How long and how legitimately could he go on putting her off? She and George were not experimental children in Rousseau’s Eden, they were not to be protected indefinitely. But three-and-a-half is too young for some kinds of experience. He chose to direct her attention elsewhere, and began to show her a sample line of pastels which Grumbacher had sent him on approval. She grabbed one and painted her forearms a vivid blue, chuckling happily.
“Blue,” she said intently, “what a blue, look!” She held up her wrists and he wondered if the stuff was washable. “George’s father has one.”
“One what?” said Haggerty, walking innocently back into it.
“A coronary attack. He got it in New York.” Something or other, maybe the sound of the words, had fascinated her and she repeated them several times. “Quack, wack, coronary attack.” She enjoyed rhyming play and loved the children’s poetry books from which her parents read to her, sometimes for hours. “Mack, nack, quack, lack,” she went on.
“You got that out of Make Way for Ducklings,” said her father, “those are the names of the ducklings.”
“Nack, lack, coronary attack,” she said. “George and his father didn’t meet those people. They weren’t on the boat.”
At the prospect of this abyss of implied misery yawning before him, p
oor Haggerty quailed and wanted to run. He had the sensibilities, without quite the talent, of a really good artist, and in an instant he saw the whole desperate story, stretching back over a decade, the merciless political oppression, the slowly fomented rebellion and its inhuman defeat, the flight of the refugees. It was certainly all there in the dreadful story lurking three apartment buildings away on the peaceful Montreal street. He didn’t want to guess at the rest of it — the Austrian refugee camps, separated families, lost children, hungry, even famished, three-year-olds. The arrival in totally strange Canadian towns and the sometimes silently heroic beginnings of a new, forever haunted, life. He could see it all and he did not want to look. He refused to consider his daughter and his wife, lost, wandering along unfamiliar roads wondering if he had been caught or had managed to escape and was looking for them. Not in Canada, he thought, we’ve never had that and who’s to say that we won’t? He suspected that this was the morbidity of fancy of the failed, or at best third-rate, artist.
“Why weren’t they on the boat?” he demanded unwillingly. He was certain that she would have the information and of course she did. She would have got it from George who would have got it from his father, and God knows how he got it.
“They were arrested at the border,” she said, with a finality that assured him that it was all she knew; she didn’t even know what a goddamn border was, but she could tell him all this. “It made George’s father sick, and that’s when he got his coronary attack, in the station. George sat up all night in the train with his father being sick.”
“Have another piece of chalk,” Haggerty said mechanically, offering them as he would a box of candy. She selected a pink one and began to colour her legs. “You look like Boadicea,” he said smilingly, a little desperately, “She painted herself with woad. All blue. The ancient Britons painted themselves blue.” She laughed at him. “Not that it did them any good,” he concluded absently.
