Tender Victory

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  Lorry leaned against the closed door, weak and undone. This was like some dark and formless dream to her, illuminated only by the shifting candlelight hovering over the casket like angel wings. Lorry could see Emilie’s little head on the white satin pillow, the fan of bright curls, the sleeping eyes, the ecstatic smile of knowledge and joy. Her small body was clad in the blue velvet and lace dress Mrs. Burnsdale had made for her for Christmas. She isn’t dead, thought Lorry, and her throat contracted. She is only asleep, the darling baby. But Lorry thought of the laughing and playing children on the street, and there was a darkness before her eyes. Emilie’s first Christmas had been her last. She would never play again.

  Someone was touching her arm gently, and her vision cleared and she saw the tall black figure of Father Krupszyk near her. The big priest was very pale, his mouth strained and taut, but he was trying to smile, pityingly. He spoke in a low voice, and not a whisper, “Miss Summerfield, I’m glad you came.”

  “I didn’t know—” she answered, through her white lips, “until about half an hour ago. I was expected—by Uncle Al.” She could not say anything further.

  She looked beyond the priest and then, for the first time, she saw Johnny sitting in the shadows behind the candles and behind the head of the casket. He was staring sightlessly at the floor; one of his hands rested near Emilie’s head, clutched tightly over the silked side of the thing which contained the body of the child. Lorry put her hands to her throat. “No, no, no,” she said, over and over.

  Johnny had not seen her enter; he did not hear her. He was hearing nothing now. The candlelight moved as if in a draft, and Lorry saw his face, strained, lifeless, yet grim, as if he had died himself, in one long last agony. She said, “He is dying. Where is Uncle Al? Why did he leave him?”

  “Unfortunately, people need sudden operations, even when there is death,” said the priest. “And this was an emergency, and the man is an old friend and wouldn’t have anyone else.”

  “Johnny’s taking this so hard—I mean—he is a minister.”

  “And he should rise with sure faith and confident peace to the situation?” The priest’s face darkened. “Too many people think the clergy are not men at all, and have no hearts of flesh, and no sorrows and no private anguishes. They forget that even the saints suffered, perhaps more than any average man could ever imagine.”

  “Sorry, sorry,” whispered Lorry, with piteous humility. “It’s just—he looks as if he would hate you if you offered him any comfort.”

  “You mustn’t forget the circumstances,” said the priest. “This isn’t an ordinary death. This strikes at his very soul; he remembers what the child suffered all her life. He can’t be reconciled—yet. I talk to him, and he won’t look at me or listen to me. We must give him time.”

  “But—his God,” stammered Lorry, and now she wrung her hands a little.

  “He’s closed all the doors of his spirit to God,” said the priest. “He’s barred the windows. He doesn’t hear anything just now, but what he heard when he first got the children. If this child had died quietly, as expected, it wouldn’t have been too bad. But you know how and why she died, and he can’t forget that. He can’t forgive either God or man.” The priest sighed. “I must go now. Don’t talk to him; he won’t answer.”

  They had talked near the door, but Johnny, far to the front of the long room, had not seen or heard them. He was lost in some frightful dream of his own. The priest went to him and put his hand on his shoulder, and he did not respond in the slightest. Then Father Krupszyk knelt beside the casket, and prayed for the soul of the innocent child, who, to the last, could not escape the evil of men.

  Lorry was alone in a moment or two with Johnny and the flowers and the dead child. She walked unsteadily to the casket and looked down, and then, for the first time, her eyes flooded with desperate tears. She fell to her knees and leaned her head against the bier, and cried soundlessly. Her tears ran down her cheeks unimpeded, and splashed on her hands. They seemed to rise from some bottomless well in her spirit which had never flowed before.

  Emilie slept and smiled, far removed from all grief and pain, under her blanket of white roses and lilies which Father Krupszyk had sent. There was no shadow of death on her face; her long lashes lay gently on her cheek. She had nothing to say to the stricken man at her head, or the weeping woman beside her. She had been delivered finally from anything the world of men could inflict upon her.

  Lorry, sobbing silently, heard a slight movement near her, and she lifted her tear-disfigured face. Johnny was standing very close to her, and she began to tremble, for his eyes were not the eyes she remembered, and this was not his face. He was a man of vengeance now, a man of hatred, and she could not help seeing it.

  “What are you doing here?” he said in a loud, abrupt voice.

  At first she was afraid that he had not recognized her, and then she knew that he had. She tried to speak through the flood of her tears. “Johnny, Johnny. I just heard. I—was expected.” She lifted up her hands to him in an eloquent gesture of pleading, as two thousand years ago a woman like herself had lifted her hands to God.

  But Johnny did not remember God now, nor think of Him except with cold and passionate anger. He looked down at the woman at his feet and stepped back, and his pallid mouth contracted. “I can’t talk,” he said. “I don’t want to see anybody. Will you please go?”

  She lifted herself upright on her knees, dropping her hands, her golden hair disheveled around her face. They gazed at each other, Lorry with mourning and mute appeal, and Johnny with the silent rejection of all who wished to console him and grieve with him. This, to Lorry, was more awful than anything else, and she pushed herself to her feet. He took another step backward, and his face became whiter.

  By the time she had reached the door, and had looked back, he was again in his chair, in his terrible vigil, wrapped in his terrible thoughts.

  Lorry went upstairs to the gigantic master bedroom where Mrs. Burnsdale had told her the children usually gathered. She found them there, sitting in unchildlike silence, in the light of the scattered lamps. The house was almost emptied of visitors now, and empty of that rustling of voices.

  The huge and ancient furniture almost engulfed their small bodies. Rosaries hung from Jean’s and Pietro’s hands, limply. Max sat very close to Kathy, and she was clutching his hand tightly, like a mother, for he had that blind and seeking look again, that shattered look. Oh, thought Lorry, the poor children. They understand so much more than Johnny does. They stared at Lorry in silence, for their suffering was too great for speech. The one in whom all their faith and trust and love had been poured had deserted them, no longer knew them, and they were totally abandoned.

  They noticed, with their reddened eyes that never missed anything, that Lorry had been crying, and as she stood there among them, her arms dropping to her sides, Kathy gave a dry, gulping sob and dropped her head on her breast. Max wailed feebly; Pietro called out once; but Jean did not move or speak.

  “Hello, darlings,” said Lorry, her voice shaking with tenderness. She sat down on the floor in the circle of looming furniture. At a distance stood the enormous white bed with its black ebony posts. She longed to throw herself on it and give herself up to sorrow. Instead, she smoothed her hair with the palms of her hands, and then raised her head with its old gallant gesture. Her eyes slowly studied the faces of the children. All were extremely pale, and unnaturally drawn, even Kathy’s. These were not bewildered children who grieved, but souls who had known incredible pain and despair, and had half forgotten, and then had known again.

  “Emilie,” said Lorry, trying to speak with quite surety, “is asleep. When I was a child I heard that God has said that the guardian angels of little ones like Emilie look upon the face of God Himself. And now her guardian angel has carried Emilie to the presence of God, and she’s safe there, and so happy, and she’s thinking of you and praying for you, and hoping that you’ll remember her, and not be too sad.”
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br />   Max’s blind eyes turned to her, regaining conscious sight. He said, “It is not for Emilie we are so sad. We knew Emilie would go to God soon, even before the fire, just as Papa knew. It is that we are sad for Papa. Papa remembers—nothing, not even what he taught us. It was not a lie he said, but he forgot the truth.”

  Pietro spoke in a high and wavering voice, tinged with hysteria. “If Papa forgets, then perhaps it is not the truth at all? It is a lie we hear?”

  Jean spoke sternly. “Pietro, you are being the fool again. Papa does not say things that are not true. Father Krupszyk does not lie. God does not lie.”

  Kathy lifted her fallen head and gazed at Pietro severely. “If you believe today, and not tomorrow, then you do not believe at all. Things must be happy for Pietro, or Pietro gets mad, and everything is bad.”

  Pietro began to cry, and his mouth pouted mutinously. “That is not so!” he said. “But what shall we do with Papa? Why is it Papa will not see us, touch us, or pray? Why does Papa lock himself in his room, and never answers, and such a face? He is a stranger. We would love to put our arms around him and kiss him, and we tried, but he wasn’t there, Miss—”

  Lorry stretched out her slim arm and took Pietro’s warm, wet little hand. He cried, jumped from his chair, and flung himself down beside her and buried his face in her breast. She held him to her and said, “I’m Lorry to you, dears, your Aunt Lorry, if you want to call me that.”

  Kathy slipped down to join Pietro, and then Max did, and finally Jean, pushing himself painfully from his chair and dropping near her knees. They clung to her and cried bitterly in their misery and longing. She put her arms about them and kissed their lips and their cheeks. There were so many children she had held this way over the past months, so many children who had come to her instinctively. She consoled those lost ones again, as she consoled these. Pietro, moved, ran his hands over her hair, feeling for comfort. Kathy leaned her head on Lorry’s shoulder. Max was at her knees, and Jean clasped her arm in both his hands. She stroked them, drew them to her, comforted them. Her head rose from among them like a gleam of light.

  “If you were just ordinary American children I couldn’t tell you about your father,” she said steadily. “But you aren’t. All of you have known sorrow and homelessness and fear and anger and hatred. They were things you knew for a long time. And now your father knows them, perhaps for the first time in his life. He’s been—struck down. Like you, he asked questions, but he won’t listen for the answer. He gave you time, and loved you while you were trying to find your way home. You must be good, and give him time to find his way.”

  “But Papa is a man, and he was always strong,” said Kathy fearfully. “If men don’t look at God, and they aren’t strong any longer, what is it for us?”

  “It’s experience that makes people strong and faithful,” said Lorry with aching compassion. “You’ve had your experience. Now he has his. You must treat him as he treated you, and you must wait for him to come to you, as he waited for your love.”

  “Papa is angry, real angry,” said Pietro, the intuitive one.

  “Just as you were angry,” said Lorry. “You wouldn’t trust him in the beginning, and he was your loving father, who had patience, and now he doesn’t trust God, who is his loving Father and has patience.”

  She added, “Sometime he will need you, and call for you. Be sure of that.”

  They thought of it with their old prescience, and then a spontaneous chorus rose from them, muted and trembling, “Papa, poor Papa. We’ll wait for Papa. We love him.”

  They cried again, clinging to her, weeping not for themselves but for Johnny, and Lorry thought this so touching that her eyes swam with tears again.

  “We have seen Emilie. She is so beautiful,” said Pietro. “She was never so beautiful. She played with us a little, but she always was so tired. Awful tired. She knew she was going away. But Papa held on to her, when it was God’s will that she go home to heaven. The Father told us so. Why, then, is Papa so angry?”

  “Because she had suffered so much, and he hoped to make her happy, so she would grow tall and strong like you, but God had willed it otherwise. So Papa won’t accept God’s will. Besides, she died when she didn’t have to die, just then. There were all the toys, and it was Christmas, and—”

  “And bad men killed her,” said Kathy. “That is why Papa is angry. He hates God because God let the men kill her. We heard the police.”

  “The Father said Emilie was pure, and just a baby, and we mustn’t worry about Purgatory,” said Pietro with hope. “I have a song for Emilie. It is the Ave Maria, Our Lady, who loves little children. Why doesn’t Papa know that the Blessed Mother holds Emilie in her arms? Why doesn’t he—believe?”

  Lorry sighed. “He will. One of these days. He is sick; he can’t forgive. He hates. Those things blind us to God. They shut Him out. But God is waiting, too.”

  She had learned to pray only recently, to ask, to see her prayers answered. “Suppose we all now pray, not for Emilie, but for your father?”

  They knelt together, all except Max, who stood up and prayed for the dead child’s peace, and for Johnny. He said thoughtfully, “But Emilie has peace. It is just Papa. And I can’t say Kaddish for Papa.”

  The short and pathetic prayer concluded. Pietro kissed Lorry fully on the lips and said, “Aunt Lorry will be our mother, and she will not leave us.”

  Two servants brought in trays of hot food for the children and Lorry. “Now,” said one of the maids affectionately, “this time we’ll eat, won’t we, and not be bad and make things worse?”

  “Of course we will,” said Lorry confidently. “We’ll sit right here around the big table. And—well, Kathy, you will dish out the soup, won’t you? You are the mother of the family.”

  “No,” said Pietro, looking at Lorry with liquid eyes floating in love. “It is Aunt Lorry who is our mother.”

  The maids went down to the kitchen and informed Mrs. Burnsdale, with relief, that the children were eating at last, and that they’d heard Pietro laugh, and the others had smiled.

  “We’d like to see Emilie often,” said Kathy. “But Papa won’t let us. When he found out we’d seen her he gave orders that we mustn’t go in there again. But all the people come, who never loved or saw Emilie, and never knew about Emilie.”

  “You see,” said Lorry triumphantly. “He loves you and remembers you, at all times. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t care how many times you went to see Emilie. He wants to spare you suffering.”

  “But we know all about pain, and death,” said Jean. “We could teach Papa.”

  Max added, in his low, uncertain voice, “We saw death long ago, and we know now it is nothing.”

  “We cannot go to the grave with Emilie,” said Kathy, with the sadness of maturity. “We can’t say good-by to Emilie.”

  “What does that matter?” asked Lorry. “I will not go either. And I’m sure your papa won’t be allowed to go. It would be a bad thing for him to look at her grave, with all his sorrow and hatred and forgetfulness.”

  Jean remembered something. “But it is terrible to me that the image my mother sent me, when I was dying, was lost in the fire.”

  “Ah,” said Lorry, making a mental note, “your mother will send you another image. Just you wait and see.”

  She helped put the children to bed, assisted by Mrs. Burnsdale. And beside each bed Lorry Summerfield, the once harsh and ruthless and bitter, said a simple prayer, and left the children to immediate sleep and comfort.

  27

  “My girl,” said Dr. McManus quaveringly, holding and kissing Lorry, “you don’t know how I’ve missed you.” But Lorry, with alarm, saw how old he had become, and how shrunken. Even his voice had lost its rough squeak of angry power. “I suppose you’ve been told everything?”

  They sat together in the old back room which had once been called the breakfast-conservatory room. Ancient racks, shelves, and flowerpot holders lined the walls, but nothing grew there no
w. The doctor, who was not allergic to flowers “growing right in the damned garden where they belong, and not having their torsos chopped off with a knife,” was allergic to flowers in the house, possibly, Lorry would think, because he loved them and unconsciously believed that flowers had a right to remain where they lived, and that they too were conscious of pain. They drank coffee, though it was long after midnight.

  “Yes, Uncle Al,” said Lorry, trying to keep her anxiety for him out of her voice. She wiped her damp palms with her handkerchief, and her new gauntness made her appear ill. “Is—he—still in there with Emilie?”

  “Yes. That’s the only time he is sure people won’t come in and stare at him. People, even the best, are curious. You’d be surprised, damn ’em, to see mobs strolling by at night, after work, just to rubber-neck at the house.” The doctor savagely bit through a new cigarette, discarded it with a curse. “And, I hate to tell you this, it’s because of Mac—he’s always printing little insinuations. Here’s one tonight.” He spread out the newspaper and showed it to Lorry, whose lips took on a livid color.

  “There are still a number of unanswered questions about the unfortunate death of Emilie (last name unknown) who was the ward of the Reverend Mr. John Fletcher of this city. Why hadn’t the child been removed to a hospital a long time ago, when her condition was known? Services for the child will be conducted on Saturday by the Reverend Mr. Gordon Hemsmith of the Barryfield Community Church, as it is rumored Mr. Fletcher is still in a state of collapse.”

  Lorry put down the paper in silence. The doctor said, “There was another question just this morning, under a photograph of the burning wreck of the parsonage. ‘Mystery surrounds death of child, Emilie, an alleged orphan, who died in this fire. Who is Emilie?’

  “I’ve watched the faces of the brutes passing here—not our parishioners—and I tell you they look like the lynching kind. But why? Why should they bother about that poor baby? Well, Lorry, I’ll tell you, knowing all about people. The lynching kind is a big minority in every country, and they don’t care who they kill, or why, just so they can kill. When a war blows up, they’re the hero-boys who get medals, lots of ’em, for running right at the enemy with hand grenades. Think most of ’em really think about fighting for their country? Nope. Most of ’em born killers, and this is their chance. I’ve studied lynching, just out of curiosity. And when the police catch lynchers, guess what? Lots of ’em are heroes of one war or another!”