Children Are Bored on Sunday

by Jean Stafford

  His mother giggled and winked at Dr. Pakheiser. “His birds! He think of nothing but his birds. Today he don’t catch one big pheasant and this evening another get out of her house and fly away.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said the doctor. “But perhaps your bird will come back. They seem so tame. They eat out of your hand, don’t they?”

  “That bird won’t come back,” said the boy. “I know what happened to him. That cat got him. You get a bird tame and if it gets out anybody can catch it.” The cold, accusing face began to contract in a childish pucker and tears hindered the next words: “That damned cat ate my bird!” He wrenched the mattress out of his mother’s hands and flung it back onto the springs and flung himself upon it, sobbing maniacally. “And if I catch that cat, I’ll kill it! I’ll kill it! I’ll kill it!”

  The doctor flushed with embarrassment at this display, unchecked by the mother who merely stood smiling beside the bed. In time, the tantrum spent itself and Freddie lay shaking, face down on the naked bed. In the quiet, Mrs. Horvath, deceptively matter-of-fact, said, “Doctor, did you read that book by the doctor of Hitler? He say Hitler don’t like women, only men? You think that true, Doctor?”

  He could not chart her course, begun so remotely. He stalled, took off his glasses and put them on again. She went on. “I hate Hitler, Doctor. But I do not believe all what they say. This book I buy in the drugstore for one dollar ninety-eight cents. I think a Jew write the book out of madness for what Hitler do to Jews.”

  If only he could turn his leaden flesh and carry it up the stairs to his own room and lock the door upon these savages! There rest, there drink his Dubonnet, there be at home! But a score of weights held him immobile, facing the barbarous woman and he listened to her: “I hate Hitler,” she repeated. “I like Jews. But if you’re mad you don’t all times tell the truth, isn’t it? So this doctor in this book I got say Hitler like men. You know? What you think of that, Doctor?” She went on and on. Unskilled as were her thrusts, they were direct. And when at last she was finished and had dismissed him (did she, he wondered, in her marvelously malicious mind think that perhaps he was the “doctor of Hitler”? Or that he did not like women, only men?) he felt trampled upon. Actually he ached and when he got to his room, he was sure he was coming down with something. Never in all these three years had his loneliness been so acute. It sprained his whole body, buried his faculties so deeply that sensation, if it came at all, was ambiguous and incomplete. Impassively, he accepted the anonymous voices of machines: radios, motor boats, factory whistles, trains, a random bomber. They came to him thickly insulated so that, shrill or loud as they might really be, they did not penetrate his mind but lay, all of them together, in a humming mass on the threshold. His thoughts faltered like sleep-burdened eyes or attached themselves with imbecilic fixity upon one trivial object. For a long time he studied a minute fissure in the plaster of the wall beside the window. Later, he meditated intently upon the small, dispirited American flag on a pole beside the Sikorsky plant, and when at last he broke from this trance, it was only to become absorbed in the spectacle of a fouled old fish-bucket raffishly perched on a stump at the water’s edge. Once, from some remote region of the house, there came the sound of a music box tinkling over a radio and at least a hundred times he stubbornly reiterated the words he knew it heralded: “PEPSI COLA HITS THE SPOT.” At last, passing his hand over his cool forehead, he closed his eyes. The sounds cohered as in delirium. He could still visualize the blackbirds and fancied them to be a deathless band of flies which refused to walk upon the glass where they could be swatted. Hearing a train screaming in the station for passengers to Boston, he tried to imagine that he stood in the Bismarckgarten waiting for the yellow tram to Mannheim, but all he could see, in his mind’s eye, were the shabby girls at the flowerstall deftly plucking daffodils from the pails of water. Next, he pretended that the train he heard was the express to Munich, and this time the recollections spun out effortlessly. He had gone to Salzburg once for a fortnight at the house of a classmate, a yellow-haired boy named Heine Waffenschmidt. He remembered that in the compartment there had been two soldiers on leave who had played chess the whole journey and had gladly drunk the wine offered to them by a tipsy letter-carrier on his way to Garmisch-Partenkirchen to see his tubercular daughter who was dying. The old man’s blue coat glistened with age and the brass buttons on it were so tarnished that when the light fell on them they did not shine. “Danke, Papa,” the soldiers had said. Once, at the end of a game, they stretched and yawned and told the old man what they were planning to do. “And Papa,” said one of them, “what do you think? We have hired a café and ordered a keg of Löwenbräu and we’ll have Scotch whisky besides.” Dr. Pakheiser remembered how whenever the train stopped at a station, the pause seemed as clearly defined as a box; his eyes burned now as if he were looking up at the bright blue ceiling light. It was hard to redeem much of the two weeks in Salzburg. He had been happy, he was quite sure, and dimly he recalled a ski tournament after which he and Heine had gone to a rathskeller for Glühwein. There had been a troop of players on their way to Danzig and one of them, an effeminate young man, had described the jumpers he had seen that afternoon. “Und er geht so und so und so!” he said, gesturing with his hands. “’Swar unglaublich wunderbar.”

  The memory was flat and he rejected it. He tried to think of his patients, but could think, instead, only of his office where something was always wrong. The electricity unaccountably went off or the water ran rusty or the windows got stuck. Today Miss Johnson had worn an artificial rose in her hair and he had already been so nervous that the sight of it had nearly sent him into a tailspin.

  He had a glass of brandy which quieted his fidgeting hands. The smoke from the flat Egyptian Prettiest gave off a fragrance like sweet wood, but tonight, it did not bring back Greta. Through the open windows came sharply the sound of Mr. Horvath’s voice warning his son who was clipping the hedge. “Watch out for snakes, Freddie.” The shears clicked steadily; the boy was a good worker. With his glass in his hand, the doctor went to the window and stood beside it looking out. The appalling grin had come back to Freddie’s face in which there were no signs of sorrow or even of anger. Once he stood up straight to rest his back from its stooping position and the big clippers dangled by their handle from his little finger.

  Dr. Pakheiser went straight through the brandy and even then had not had enough to drink, so he replaced the empty decanter with the one half full of kümmel. He thought of the supper he soon would eat and he began to wonder what the Horvath family had upon their table. For some reason, he had an idea they were fond of mussels (which made him ill) and he was positive they enjoyed the displeasing flavor of celeriac in their soup. They would have chunks of fat meat; they would especially like rutabaga, watermelon, molasses, pancakes and hot tamales. Again, he wondered if they ever bathed. He had frequently seen Mrs. Horvath’s wash hanging on the line in the back yard and had been certain that she used neither soap nor hot water in her laundry. He suspected that they did not brush their teeth which were very long and extremely black. He did not, to tell the truth, altogether understand why the United States had given Mr. Horvath citizenship.

  The sun went down and the helicopters left the sky. At a little before seven, the doctor heard a noise in his room and, conscious that he was quite drunk, he allowed his full lips to curl into a smile as he thought of the pleasure Milenka would have if this were a mouse he might catch for his first course. The sound came again, a faint rustling. He thought at first it was in the closet, but then, at its repetition, concluded that it was in the fireplace. Rather slowly, for his hands were awkward, he took away the flowered screen and looked in at the bare, clean hearth. The sound continued, close beside him. He stuck his head in the opening and listened and it came again. There was no doubt about it, something was trapped in the chimney. He returned to his chair in indecision and poured out another glass of kümmel and considered. He knew that it was Freddie’s lost b
ird, beating its wings against the walls.

  The boy had left the hedge and his shears lay atop the formal leaves. He would be at his supper now (were they not, at this very moment, spooning up the repellent sauce that surrounded their mussels?) so there was still time in which to choose between an armistice and revenge. For a few minutes the man sat still in his rocking chair, listening tensely to the desperate wings. But presently he could endure the creature’s agony no longer and he left his room, having decided to drive a bargain with the boy.

  From the top of the stairs, Dr. Pakheiser could see through the window to the left of the front door. Milenka was sitting on the wall, looking archly down at the tabby who crouched in the grass. “I-yi-yi-yi, bad puss,” he thought. His feet were slow on the steps and he clutched the bannister with an unnaturally moist hand. He was halfway down when Mr. Horvath came into his ken. The large man moved soundlessly around the corner of the house and stood at the edge of the lawn under a young elm tree, and in a moment, Freddie joined him, carrying a rifle. Dr. Pakheiser hesitated for the length of time it took Mr. Horvath to aim and fire and then, in order not to see the body fall off the wall, turned and went back to his room.

  Late, after the Chance Vought worker had gone to the graveyard shift, Dr. Pakheiser opened the damper of the fireplace and a dead oriole fell to the hearth. He gazed abstractedly at the black and golden feathers and touched the soft body with the fire tongs. A bright apple leaf was caught under one wing. He picked the bird up carefully with a piece of newspaper and put it in a box which he found on the shelf of his closet. He carried the box downstairs and into the back yard and he floated it on the water, blue with the lights from the factory windows. He pondered if it would float to the Sound and if it did, how far it would go then. A mile on the way to Europe? Halfway? “Go, Milenka,” he addressed the box which already had drifted several feet from the bank. In the cool air his head cleared a little and he felt a wonderful exhilaration as if he had been freed of a persistent pain. He ran like a young man back to the house, took the stairs two at a time and when he got to his room, he lay down without undressing and at once was fast asleep.

  Between the Porch and the Altar

  At five in the morning in February, it is darker than at midnight. The streets are empty of automobiles; the latest readers have gone to bed and the earliest risers are only just opening their eyes. The few people abroad are swift and furtive, like creatures who must quit a place before the sun shines forth. At that hour, their business seems mysterious and even shady, although they are not cutthroats or thieves but only watchmen and charwomen and night waitresses on their way home to dine at sunrise. So uncluttered are the streets, so starkly direct is the walk of the people that anyone whose custom it is to get up much later, at the normal hour, feels when he goes out that he intrudes upon a scene of bare but meaningful privacy. And a light, springing on abruptly to make a staring eye in a blackened building, may stir him with embarrassment and wonder as if this were an alarm or an esoteric signal of hostility.

  It was cold and the girl was hungry. She paused in the vestibule of the apartment building and half turned to unlock the outer door again and go back to her warm bed. But as she lingered, she observed a bright blue star high over the houses opposite and the sight inexplicably gave her resolution, even though its color was so pure and frigid that it made her all the more conscious of the cold. She drew on her gloves and went out, shocked by a biting gust of wind which passed her by like a big rapid bird. She turned the corner and hurried along Sixth Avenue on her way to the first mass.

  Although the star, which was now behind her, had had a decisive effect on her, it had not dispelled her apprehension and her distrust of the unfamiliar streets. While her feet were steady enough, her breath was erratic and her ears were fanciful, making her think she heard sinister noises behind the blank faces of the buildings. She looked straight ahead, fearful of what she might see in the dark doorways and even in the interiors of delicatessens and bakery shops whose cheerless windows were dimly silvered by the street-lights. And still, discomforting as it was, she took a certain pleasure in her uneasiness, feeling that even the most accidental castigation was excellent at the beginning of Lent.

  On the corner of Thirteenth Street, there was a large second-hand shop whose windows she had many times studied with an incredulous amusement, so dreadful and so undesirable were the objects displayed there: funeral wreaths made of human hair, armadillo baskets, back-scratchers that looked like sets of bad teeth, ceramic vessels of an unimaginable function. The antelope with eaten ears and rubbed-off hide, the alabaster boar and the complacent Chinese philosopher made of porcelain stared out, looking, even at five in the morning, for someone to adopt them and give them a good home.

  Within the doorway of the shop, a drunken beggar sprawled like a lumpy rug, his feet in ruptured tennis shoes thrust out onto the sidewalk. He was not asleep. Under a cap set raffishly at an angle on his head, he regarded the girl’s approach with an eye made visible to her by the arc light at the intersection. Paradoxically, her pace slowed down as her terror rose, and the man had risen to his feet before she was abreast of him. The smell of whisky was so strong that it was like a taste in her mouth. He stretched forth his hand and whined, “Lady, I’m hungry, lady.”

  She did not carry a purse, but in her pocket were two dimes and a quarter. She intended to put the quarter into the poor box and the dimes in the candle offering, for she wished to light a candle for the repose of her mother’s soul and another for the safe-keeping of two friends, captive in China by the Japanese. Although it was only a fraction of a minute that she debated, a succession of images with an individual emotion attending each revolved through her mind. She saw the poor box in the dim vestibule of the lower church and heard her quarter click upon the other coins. This box was stationed beside the holy water font, near by the statue of Our Lord between whose palely gleaming feet someone placed fresh flowers each day. Then she saw her mother lying in the limbo of her last hours, unsightly, unconsoled, and heard the sonorous matter-of-factness of her Protestant relatives to whom this transformation, so unbearable to her, was neither strange nor dreadful. It was not that they did not grieve their kinswoman, but it was that they had many times before known death and had learned, through its reiteration, that it was no wonder. She, still bedewed with baptism, had knelt and the blue beads of her rosary slipped through her fingers until her mother’s soul abandoned its wrecked flesh. She had been, she remembered, in the middle of the fourth decade when her aunt, vigilant at the bedside, had whispered, “She is gone now.” And she remembered how the odor of belladonna had obtruded so in her devotions that part of her mind pronounced the word over and over as if it belonged to a litany.

  Then she tried to fancy her friends as they might be in prison and could not, could only see them before their fireplace on a winter day of the year before. She had come to tea and had stayed on for sherry. She sat on a maroon sofa; a little dog slept with his chin on her arm, whimpering once in a dream. There was short-bread to go with the wine and as she ate a piece she realized that it was the texture rather than the taste that made it her favorite pastry. In an easy silence that came in the conversation, she saw her reflection in the brass bedwarmer that hung beside the fireplace, and this blurred travesty of her face had the power, as the star had done this morning, to make her suddenly purposeful, and she told her friends good-by that day, although they did not leave for another week.

  In the early desolation of this present year, she felt tenderness muffling her like smoke and smaller, general pictures showed themselves to her: a clean room, a forced sprig of bittersweet, her mother’s silver-backed hairbrush, her friends’ passport pictures.

  No time at all had passed. She saw the beggar’s lips part again. She could not find her voice, and one bold self chided her for her nervousness, for this was no extraordinary occurrence. On the contrary, the rarest day in New York was the one on which one was not asked for money by a
fellow like this or by a senile tart or by a belligerent child. She could pass by, or she could say she had no money. But mechanically she had paused—she was not yet a craftsman in the selection of experience and her days were often a chain of pauses—and the man took advantage of her hesitance saying, with his vague face close to hers, “Lady, was you ever hungry?” Her fear of him was obliterated by an abstract but brilliant anger, for his question was beside the point, unfair, a contemptible trick. She almost spoke her indignation aloud and then her anger burnt itself out; she controlled herself stiffly like a soldier: on this grave day she should not presume to judge. And into the cold hand, she put the quarter and one of the dimes. The man muttered something but she did not hear what he said and she went on hastily. In the windows of a flower shop, she saw her shadow drift through pots of tall azaleas. When she turned the corner at Sixteenth Street, she slowed down, for two nuns walked slowly ahead of her. Her hunger returned with savage force.

  * * *

  The entrance to the Jesuits’ church was dark. Its black iron gates were open only a crack. A night-like and velvety blackness stood solidly between the columns on the porch of the upper church. The stone steps leading downward seemed colder than the sidewalks, and the holy water was cold. It teemed with the ripples of fingers that had been dipped there before her own, and the touch of it on her forehead was icy. Today, between the wounded feet, were dark roses. One of the sisters touched the feet and then pressed her fingers to her lips.

  The mass had not begun. The girl said her prayers, but she could not concentrate, for her mind was occupied with what she would do with her last dime. Who was the neediest, she questioned: the poor, the dead, or the oppressed? Truly, she had to admit that she loved the poor less than her mother and her friends, and yet, for this very reason—for a willful sacrifice—should she not put the dime into the poor box? Then she thought, but I have given already to the poor. Lout, wastrel that he was, he was poor and it is not the duty, nor even the right, of the almsgiver to distinguish between degrees of poverty. But between her mother and her friends, how should she choose? Should one pray for someone’s long life here or for someone else’s shortened term in Purgatory? It occurred to her to offer her mass for her mother and light the candle for the prisoners. This seemed like a compromise and did not satisfy her, yet there was no alternative.