Children Are Bored on Sunday

by Jean Stafford

  “How old was your mother when she died?” said Miss Dreadfulwater.

  “Eighteen and a half,” said Jim.

  “How do you know?” she said.

  “Grandma told me. Besides, I knew.”

  “You knew? You remember your mother?”

  “Yes,” said Jim. “She was a Bolshevik.”

  Miss Dreadfulwater put down her Eversharp and looked straight into his eyes. “Are you crazy with the heat or am I?” she said.

  He rather liked her, after all, and so he smiled until Miss Hornet said, “Hurry along, Sally, I haven’t got all day.”

  “O.K., O.K., Queenie. I just wanted to straighten out this about the Bolshevik.”

  “Oh, do it later,” said Miss Hornet. “You know he’s just making up a story. They all do when they first come.”

  Miss Dreadfulwater asked some more questions—whether his tonsils were out, who Mr. Wilkins was, whether Jim thought he was a full-blood or a half-breed or what. She finished finally and put the card back in the drawer, and then Miss Hornet said to Jim, “What would you like to do now? You’re free to do whatever you like till suppertime. It’s perfectly clear that you have no unpacking to do.”

  “Did he come just like this?” said Miss Dreadful-water, astonished. “Really?”

  Miss Hornet ignored her and said, “What would you like to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Jim said.

  “Of course you do,” she said sharply. “Do you want to play on the slide? Or the swings? None of the other children are out, but I should think a boy of eight could find plenty of ways to amuse himself.”

  “I can,” he said. “I’ll go outside.”

  “He ought to go to bed,” said Miss Dreadfulwater. “You ought to put him to bed right now if you don’t want him to come down with it.”

  “Be still, Sally,” said Miss Hornet. “You run along now, Jim.”

  Although Jim was terribly thirsty, he did not stop to look for a drinking fountain or even to glance at the ferns. The composition floor was cool to his feet, but when he went out the door the heat came at him like a slapping hand. He did not mind it, because he would soon escape. The word “escape” itself refreshed him and he said it twice under his breath as he walked across the lawn.

  In back of the building, there was a good-sized tree and a boy was sitting in the shade of it. He wore a green visor, and he was reading a book and chewing gum like sixty.

  Jim walked up to him and said, “Do you know where any water is?”

  The boy took off the visor, and Jim saw that his eyes were bright red. They were so startling that he could not help staring. The boy said, “The water’s poisonous. There’s an epidemic here.”

  Jim connected the poisonous water and the sickness in the dormitory with the boy’s red eyes, and he was motionless with fear. The boy put his gum on his lower lip and clamped it there with his upper teeth, which were striped with gray and were finely notched, like a bread knife. “One died,” he said, and laughed and rolled over on his stomach.

  At the edge of the lawn beyond all the buildings, Jim saw a line of trees, the sort that follow a riverbank, and he thought that when it got dark, that was where he would go. But he was afraid, and even though it was hot and still here and he was thirsty, he did not want the day to end soon, and he said to the ugly, laughing boy, “Isn’t there any good water at all?”

  “There is,” said the boy, sitting up again and putting his visor on, “but not for Indians. I’m going to run away.” He popped his gum twice and then he pulled it out of his mouth for a full foot and swung it gently, like a skipping rope.

  Jim said, “When?”

  “When my plans are laid,” said the boy, showing all his strange teeth in a smile that was not the least friendly. “You know whose hangout is over there past the trees?”

  “No, whose?”

  “Clyde Barrow’s,” whispered the boy. “Not long ago, they came and smoked him out with tommy guns. That’s where I’m going when I leave here.”

  For the first time, Jim noticed the boy’s clothes. He wore blue denim trousers and a blue shirt to match, and instead of a belt, he wore a bright-red sash, about the color of his eyes. It was certainly not anything Jim had ever seen any other boy wear, and he said, pointing to it, “Is that a flag or something?”

  “It’s the red sash,” replied the boy. “It’s a penalty. You aren’t supposed to be talking to me when I have it on.” He gave Jim a nasty, secret smile and took his gum out of his mouth and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. “What’s your name, anyway?” he asked.

  “Jim Littlefield.”

  “That’s not Indian. My name is Rock Forward Man-killer. My father’s name is Son-of-the-Man-Who-Looked-Like-a-Bunch-of-Rags-Thrown-Down. It’s not that long in Navajo.”

  “Navajo?” asked Jim.

  “Yes. I’m not Cherokee,” said the boy.

  “What did you do to make them put the red sash on you?” Jim asked, wishing to know, yet not wanting to hear.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” said Rock Forward and started to chew his gum again. Jim sat down in the shade beside him and looked at his burned foot. There was no blister, but it was red and the skin felt drawn. His head ached and his throat was sore, and he wanted to lie down on his stomach and go to sleep, but he dared not, lest he be sleeping when the night came. He felt again the burden of the waiting silence; once a fool blue jay started to raise the roof in Clyde Barrow’s woods and a couple of times he heard a cow moo, but the rest of the time there was only this hot stillness in which the red-eyed boy stared at him calmly.

  “What do they do if you escape and they catch you?” Jim asked, trembling and giving himself away.

  “Standing-Deer comes after you with his six gun, and then you get the red sash,” said Rock Forward, eying him closely. “You can’t get far unless you lay your plans. I know what you’re thinking about, Littlefield. All new kids do. I’m wise to it.” He giggled and stretched his arms out wide, and once again he showed his sickening teeth.

  The desire to sleep was so strong that Jim was not even angry with Rock Forward, and he swayed to and fro, half dozing, longing to lie full length on a bed and dimly to hear the sounds the awake people made through a half-open door. Little, bright-colored memories came to him pleasantly, like the smallest valentines. The reason he knew that his mother had been a Bolshevik was that she’d had a pair of crimson satin slippers, which Grandma had kept in a drawer, along with her best crocheted pot holders and an album of picture postal cards from Gettysburg. The lovely shoes were made of satin and the heels were covered with rhinestones. The shiny cloth, roughened in places, was the color of Rock Forward’s eyes and of his sash. Jim said, “No kidding, why do you have to wear the red sash?”

  “I stole Standing-Deer’s gun, if you want to know, and I said, ‘To hell with Uncle Sam.’”

  Jim heard what the boy said but he paid no mind, and he said, not to the boy or to anyone, “I’ll wait till tomorrow. I’m too sleepy now.”

  Nor did Rock Forward pay any heed to Jim. Instead, he said, turning his head away and talking in the direction of the outlaw’s hangout, “If I get sick with the epidemic and die, I’ll kill them all. Standing-Deer first and Dreadfulwater second and Hornet third. I’ll burn the whole place up and I’ll spit everywhere.”

  “Do you have a father?” said Jim, scarcely able to get the words out.

  “Of course I have a father,” said Rock Forward in a sudden rage. “Didn’t I just tell you his name? Didn’t you know he was in jail for killing a well-known attorney in Del Rio, Texas? If he knew I was here, he’d kill them all. He’d take this red sash and tear it to smithereens. I’m no orphan and I’m not a Cherokee like the rest of you either, and when I get out of here, Standing-Deer had just better watch out. He’d just better watch his p’s and q’s when I get a six gun of my own.” Passionately, he tore off his visor and bent it double, cracking it smack down the middle of the isinglass, and then, with
out another word, he went running off in the direction of the line of trees, the ends of the red sash flapping at his side.

  Jim was too sleepy to care about anything now—now that he had decided to wait until tomorrow. He did not even care that it was hot. He lay down on the sickly grass, and for a while he watched a lonesome leaf-cutter bee easing a little piece of plantain into its hole. He hoped they would not wake him up and make him walk into the dormitory; he hoped that Mr. Standing-Deer would come and carry him, and he could see himself with his head resting on that massive shoulder in the spotted coat. He saw himself growing smaller and smaller and lying in a bureau drawer, like Kayo in the funny papers. He rustled in his sleep, moving away from the sharp heels of the red shoes, and something as soft and deep and safe as fur held him in a still joy.

  The Maiden

  “I bought the pair of them in Berlin for forty marks,” Mrs. Andreas was saying to Dr. Reinmuth, who had admired the twin decanters on her dinner table. “It sickens me, the way they must let their treasures go for nothing. I can take no pride in having got a bargain when I feel like a pirate.” Evan Leckie, an American journalist who was the extra man at the party, turned away from the woman on his right to glance at his hostess to see if her face revealed the hypocrisy he had heard, ever so faintly, in her voice, but he could read nothing in her bland eyes, nor could he discover the reaction of her interlocutor, who slightly inclined his head in acknowledgment of her sympathy for his mortified compatriots but said nothing and resumed his affectionate scrutiny of the decanters as Mrs. Andreas went on to enumerate other instances of the victors’ gains through the Germans’ losses. Evan, just transferred to Heidelberg from the squalor and perdition of Nuremberg, joined in the German’s contemplation of these relics of more handsome times. One of the bottles was filled with red wine, which gleamed darkly through the lustrous, sculptured glass, chased with silver, and the other with pale, sunny Chablis. The candlelight invested the wines with a property beyond taste and fluidity, a subtile grace belonging to a world almost imaginary in its elegance, and for a moment Evan warmed toward Mrs. Andreas, who had tried to resuscitate this charming world for her guests by putting the decanters in the becoming company of heavy, florid silverware and Dresden fruit plates and a bowl of immaculate white roses, and by dressing herself, a plump and unexceptional person, in an opulent frock of gold brocade and a little queenly crown of amethysts for her curly, graying hair.

  The double doors to the garden were open to admit the moonlight and the summer breeze, and now and again, in the course of the meal, Evan had glanced out and had seen luminous nicotiana and delphiniums growing profusely beside a high stone wall. Here, in the hilly section of the city, it was as quiet as in the country; there was not a sound of jeeps or drunken G.I.s to disturb the light and general conversation of Americans breaking bread with Germans. Only by implication and indirection were the war and the Occupation spoken of, and in this abandonment of the contemporary, the vanquished, these charming Reinmuths, save by their dress and their speech, could not be distinguished from the conquerors. If chivalry, thought Evan, were ever to return to the world, peace would come with it, but evenings like this were isolated, were all but lost in the vast, arid wastes of the present hour within the present decade. And the pity that Mrs. Andreas bestowed upon her German guests would not return to them the decanters they had forfeited, nor would her hospitality obliterate from their hearts the knowledge of their immense dilemma. Paradoxically, it was only upon the highest possible level that Germans and Americans these days could communicate; only a past that was now irretrievable could bring them into harmony with one another.

  For the past month in Nuremberg, ever since Evan’s wife, Virginia, had left him—left him, as she had put it in a shout, “to stew in his own juice”—Evan had spent his evenings in the bar of his hotel, drinking by himself and listening, in a trance of boredom, to the conversations of the Americans about him. The mirrored walls and mirrored ceilings had cast back the manifold reflections of able-bodied Wacs in summer uniforms, who talked of their baseball teams (once he had seen a phalanx of them in the lobby, armed with bats and catchers’ mitts, looking no less manly than the Brooklyn Dodgers) and of posts where they had been stationed and of itineraries, past and future. “Where were you in ’45?” he had heard one of them cry. “New Caledonia! My God! So was I. Isn’t it a riot to think we were both in New Caledonia in ’45 and now are here in the Theater?” Things had come to a pretty pass, thought Evan, when this was the theater of a young girl’s dreams. They did not talk like women and they did not look like women but like a modern mutation, a revision, perhaps more efficient and sturdier, of an old model. Half hypnotized by the signs of the times, he had come almost to believe that the days of men and women were over and that the world had moved into a new era dominated by a neuter body called Personnel, whose only concerns were to make history and to snub the history that had already been made. Miss Sally Dean, who sat across from him tonight, had pleased him at first glance with her bright-blond hair and her alabaster shoulders and the fine length of her legs, but over the cocktails his delight departed when, in the accents of West Los Angeles, she had said she wished General MacArthur were in Germany, since he was, in her opinion, a “real glamour puss.” The woman on his right, Mrs. Crowell, the wife of a judge from Ohio in the judiciary of the Occupation, was obsessively loquacious; for a very long time she had been delivering to him a self-sustaining monologue on the effronteries of German servants, announcing once, with all the authority of an anthropologist, that “the Baden mind is consecrated to dishonesty.” He could not put his finger on it, but, in spite of her familiar housewife’s complaints, she did not sound at all like his mother and his aunts in Charlottesville, whose lives, spun out in loving domesticity, would lose their pungency if cooks kept civil tongues in their heads and if upstairs maids were not light-fingered. Mrs. Crowell brought to her housekeeping problems a modern and impersonal intellect. “The Baden mind,” “the Franconian mind,” “the German character” were phrases that came forth irrefutably. And the bluestocking wife of a Captain McNaughton, who sat on Evan’s left and who taught library science to the wives of other Army officers, had all evening lectured Dr. Reinmuth on the faults (remediable, in her opinion) of his generation that had forced the world into war. Dr. Reinmuth was a lawyer. She was herself a warrior; she argued hotly, although the German did not oppose her, and sometimes she threatened him with her spoon.

  It was the German woman, Frau Reinmuth, who, although her gray dress was modest and although she wore no jewels and little rouge, captivated Evan with her ineffable femininity; she, of all the women there, had been challenged by violence and she had ignored it, had firmly and with great poise set it aside. To look at her, no one would know that the slightest alteration had taken place in the dignified modus vivendi she must have known all her life. The serenity she emanated touched him so warmly and so deeply that he almost loved her, and upon the recognition of his feeling he was seized with loneliness and with a sort of homesickness that he felt sure she would understand—a longing, it was, for the places that she would remember. Suddenly it occurred to him that the only other time he had been in Heidelberg, he had been here with his wife, two years before, and they had gone one afternoon by trolley to Schwetzingen to see the palace gardens. Virginia had always hated history and that day she had looked at a cool Palladian summerhouse, designed for witty persiflage and premeditated kisses, and had said, “It’s so chichi it makes me sick.” And she had meant it. How she had prided herself on despising everything that had been made before 1920, the year of her birth! Staring at the wines aglow in their fine vessels, Evan recaptured exactly the feeling he had had that day in Schwetzingen when, very abruptly, he had realized that he was only technically bound for life to this fretful iconoclast; for a short while, there beside the playing fountains, he had made her vanish and in her place there stood a quiet woman, rich in meditations and in fancies. If he had known Frau Reinmu
th then, she might have been the one he thought of.

  Evan watched Dr. Reinmuth as he poured the gold and garnet liquids, first one and then the other, into the glasses before his plate. The little lawyer closely attended the surge of color behind the radiant crystal and he murmured, in a soft Bavarian voice, “Lovely, lovely. Look, Liselotte, how beautiful Mrs. Andreas’ Karaffen are!” Frau Reinmuth, wide-faced, twice his size, turned from her talk of the Salzburg Festival with Mr. Andreas and cherished both her husband and the decanters with her broad gray eyes, in whose depths love lay limitlessly. When she praised the design of the cut glass, and the etching of the silver, and the shape of the stoppers, like enormous diamonds, she managed somehow, through the timbre of her voice or its cadences or through the way she looked at him, to proclaim that she loved her husband and that the beauty of the bottles was rivaled and surpassed by the nature of this little man of hers, who, still fascinated, moved his handsome head this way and that, the better to see the prismatic green and violet beams that burst from the shelves and crannies of the glass. His movements were quick and delicately articulated, like a small animal’s, and his slender fingers touched and traced the glass as if he were playing a musical instrument that only his ears could hear. He must have been in his middle forties, but he looked like a nervous, gifted boy not twenty yet, he was so slight, his hair was so black and curly, his brown face was so lineless, and there was such candor and curiosity in his dark eyes. He seemed now to want to carry his visual and tactile encounter with the decanters to a further point, to a completion, to bliss. And Evan, arrested by the man’s absorption (if it was not that of a child, it was that of an artist bent on abstracting meanings from all the data presented to his senses), found it hard to imagine him arguing in a court of law, where the materials, no matter how one elevated and embellished justice, were not poetry. Equally difficult was it to see him as he had been during the war, in his role of interpreter for the German Army in Italy. Like every German one met in a polite American house, Dr. Reinmuth had been an enemy of the Third Reich; he had escaped concentration camp only because his languages were useful to the Nazis. While Evan, for the most part, was suspicious of these self-named martyrs who seemed always to have fetched up in gentlemanly jobs where their lives were not in the least imperiled, he did believe in Dr. Reinmuth, and was certain that a belligerent ideology could not enlist the tender creature so unaffectedly playing with Mrs. Andreas’ toys, so obviously well beloved by his benevolent wife. Everyone, even Mrs. Crowell, paused a second to look from the man to the woman and to esteem their concord.