Children Are Bored on Sunday

by Jean Stafford

  Four nuns were in the pew ahead of her and, finishing their prayers, they sat back and simultaneously opened their missals. On the right hand of one, she saw a wedding ring. She had never before been close enough to a nun to notice this, and she wondered when it was that the badge of their eternal marriage was placed upon them and if they really did feel unity with God at that moment or felt, instead, hushed isolation. The words of the Gospel today were: Lay up to yourselves treasures in heaven: where neither the rust nor the moth doth consume, and where thieves do not break through nor steal. For where thy treasure is, there is thy heart also. The words, now that she had seen the wedding ring, seemed richer and more profoundly exciting than they had done before, and for a moment she was almost idolatrous, worshipful, almost, of the fair-skinned sisters in their tower of ivory and their house of gold. And then she re-coiled, for under the coif of one she saw black stubble.

  The church was full, principally of old people who slept so little that rising for the earliest mass on Ash Wednesday was no great hardship. Most of them were telling their beads and only a few had missals. An aged man behind her said his Aves aloud in a harsh, sibilant voice and his false teeth clicked on one another in a curious counterpoint to the measured whispers of his wooden beads. A bald young seminarian entered the sanctuary to light the candles on the altar. He genuflected gracefully and liquidly like a dancer, and the hand with which he crossed himself was as long and white and shapely as one painted by El Greco. He was incongruously beautiful in his surroundings, for the lower church was ugly and in bad taste. The statues were gaudy, even in this shadowy light, and the crucifix was sentimental. In all the accouterments of the sanctuary, there was a mixture of modern leanness and Victorian laciness. The seminarian alone seemed a product of inspiration.

  At last the bell rang and the celebrant with his altar boys entered the sanctuary. The girl prayed that nothing would mar the spirit of penance which she carried like a fragile light within her; she closed her eyes to the nun’s neck and begged forgiveness for her fault-finding. All through the mass, while she fixed her attention on her mother—imagining her face, disembodied, hovering in a crowd of other faces in Purgatory which she saw as an echoing marble hall—she wondered if she had not committed an act of betrayal, both to the beggar to whom she gave unwillingly and to the parish poor, deprived of her offering through her cowardice. Although she knew that her confusion would be understood and unraveled by the counsel of a confessor, she went, half dazed, to the communion rail and received, she felt, with an imperfect heart. Afterwards, her thanksgiving was more full of petition than of gratitude: I humbly beseech guidance and my whole heart desires wisdom and stern purpose. Reason reiterated to her that she had properly allocated her good will: money to the poor, a mass for the dead, a candle for the oppressed. Yet she was not assured in her heart and she prayed with a dry compulsion.

  When she had received the cross of ashes on her forehead, she went directly to the altar of St. Francis Xavier at the back of the church. The cups for the candles were blood-red; the flames cast a sheen on the closed tabernacle. She knelt down to pray the saint to watch over her friends. As she stood up to take the taper to light her candle, she saw an old woman coming from the vestibule. She pretended not to see, for she recognized the old crone who was always there before the sun and the Jesuits discovered her. At later masses she begged on the sidewalk. The girl had already lighted the taper and was looking for a fresh cup when the woman reached the altar.

  Blear-eyed, unctuous, crafty, she slithered to her knees. “God bless you, dearie,” she began, her face touching the skirt of the girl’s coat. The dime was in the pocket on that side, and it was as if the woman smelled it with her long nose or heard it with her ear beneath her sour gray hair or felt it on her furrowed cheek. It was impossible to ignore her, and the girl could think of no way to resolve this preposterous dilemma. Her hand still held the taper and her eyes still roved the tiers of candles seeking an unlighted one.

  It seemed some time before the old woman spoke again. Behind them, people were moving about, unconcerned with anything but the small devotional tasks they had set themselves. Some were making the stations of the cross, some prayed at the Lady altar, others gazed meditatively at the crucifix. The bald young beadle had come again into the sanctuary and was preparing the altar for the next mass. Everything happening in the church was pious and usual, save for the squalid commerce at St. Francis’ altar. The ceiling seemed oppressively low; she was reminded of a dreary train-shed.

  When the woman spoke again, her voice was more eager and hopeful. She nodded toward the candles and said, “They’re every one of them lit already and they won’t bring the new ones round till after the eight o’clock.” How well she knew the habits of this church’s servants! She had probably studied them for months, huddling in shadows behind the grating that enclosed the baptismal font or in the corner where the statue of St. Ignatius stood. The girl saw that what she said was true and she blew out the taper and replaced it. But she was determined to make the offering and she stepped down to go to another altar. The old woman took hold of her coat and peered straight into her face, shamelessly. She said, “You’re young and pretty, girlie.” The oblique entreaty weakened her, embarrassed her movement like a web, and finally she put her hand into her pocket and took out the dime. Before the clever, metropolitan fingers had enclosed the alms, the girl had gone, running down Sixteenth Street to the corner of Sixth Avenue. The streets were lighter now, and the big star had begun to pale. Shop-keepers were putting trash on the sidewalks; news vendors were cutting the ropes that bound the morning papers; a melancholy white horse ambled down the street dragging a milk truck after him.

  When the coffee was nearly ready and her rooms were full of its fragrance, the girl looked at her forehead in the bathroom mirror and saw that the Jesuit had marked her clearly. She washed away the ashes, leaving herself alone possessed of the knowledge of her penance.

  The Bleeding Heart

  Every morning and on alternate afternoons, Rose Fabrizio, a Mexican girl from the West, worked at a discreet girls’ boarding school as secretary to the headmistress, a Miss Talmadge who had a sweet voice. It was sweet even when she was dictating a warm comeuppance to the laundry about its mistreatment of the school’s counterpanes and bureau runners; and sweet when she was explaining the value of physical education to a recalcitrant pupil who declared that she loathed volleyball. Every day when she arrived shortly after Rose had unlocked the office and uncovered her typewriter, Miss Talmadge cried “Good morning” twice and then she said with a lilt, “How is our Westerner? Acclimated? Finding the charm of New England both within and without?” She then stepped briskly into her own office and made a great clatter with the files, rudely flung up the window no matter what the thermometer said and set to work like a whirlwind. At first Rose, who was twenty-one and uncommonly sensitive, bridled at this greeting which she believed to be subtly derisive, but now after two months, she knew that there was no feeling behind it at all; Miss Talmadge inquired, in the same sweet rapid way, quite indifferent to the answers, about the parlormaid’s fiancé and the French teacher’s needlepoint and the riding master’s brother’s greenhouse. But even now, this reminder of her origin (vague as it must be in Miss Talmadge’s mind, for if she imagined anything at all, she probably imagined cigar-store Indians and clumps of sage) sometimes brought on a subcutaneous prickle and distracted Rose from her shorthand so that on occasion she had fetched up with sentences that could not possibly be parsed.

  Except in the vocal presence of Miss Talmadge, she was acclimated and she did find New England charming, although she was not quite sure that she had found it so both within and without, having no idea what the headmistress meant. She rejoiced in the abundance of imposing trees, in the pure style of the houses and the churches, in the venerable graveyards and in the unobtrusive shops. One was not conscious of any of the working parts of the town, not of the railroad nor of the filling station
s nor of the water towers and the light-plants. Her own town, out West, had next to no trees and those were puny and half-bald. The main street there was a row of dirty doorways which led into the dirtier interiors of pool halls, drugstores where even the soda fountain bar had a flaccid look, and small restaurants and beer-parlors and hotels whose windows were decorated sometimes with sweet-potato vines growing out of jam cans painted red, and sometimes with a prospector’s pick-ax and some spurious gold ore, and sometimes with nothing more than the concupiscent but pessimistic legend that ladies were invited or that there were booths for them. The people here in this dignified New England town, shabby as they might be, wore hats and gloves at all hours and on all days and they appeared moral, self-controlled, well-bathed, and literate. The population of her own town was largely Mexican and was therefore, by turns, criminally quarrelsome or grossly stupefied so that when they were not beating one another up they stared into dusty space or lounged in various comatose attitudes against the stock properties of the main street: the telephone poles and fire hydrants and hitching posts. They were swarthy and they tended, on the whole, to be fat and to wear bright, juvenile colors. Repudiating all that, she greatly admired the pallor of the people here and their dun dress and their accent so that the merest soda-jerk sounded as if he had gone to Harvard.

  In this atmosphere of good breeding and adulthood, Rose was happy half the time and altogether miserable the rest of it, miserable, that is, with envy of the people who had been born here of upright gentlefolk and had been reared in mannerly calm. And Rose, although she was full-grown and had a Bachelor of Arts degree (to be sure she had not gone to Radcliffe and her education had been a shabby, uninteresting affair) longed to be adopted by a New Englander. Sometimes this longing coupled with her loneliness—it was not to its detriment that the town was unfriendly but quite the contrary—fretted her so that she could neither read nor play Canfield and she sat idle and unhappy in her bed-sitting room where the wind came down the chimney like a failing voice and now and then caused the long-handled bedwarmer to stir on its hook, chiming against the bricks.

  She had selected the very person she wished to become her foster-father, a man about sixty whom she saw on Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday afternoons in the town library, an incongruously modern building dedicated to the memory of Samuel Sewell. Here Rose read books on psychology in a western room where the sun came amply through the windows; in this room, besides herself, there always sat a thoughtful gentleman, wearing a lemon-yellow ascot and a sober dark blue suit. The ascot alone would have set him down as a person of prominence, for no one unimportant, she reasoned, could afford to be so boldly eccentric. She did not know what he read through the scholarly Oxford glasses which perfectly fitted on his stately nose and were anchored to his lapel by a black ribbon ending in a silver button. The books were big, she knew that much, and their bindings were a usual maroon. He did not take any notes (as she did voluminously, having been so recently graduated) and he read quite slowly. He did not move all afternoon save that at half past three he went outside and stood on the steps to smoke a cigarette; she could see him clearly through the window beside which she sat reading of Pavlov’s submissive dog. Either he stood still, leaning against a half-pillar of the half-Ionic façade with his eyes closed and his lips moving a little, or he took a turn around the little triangular yard, holding his hatless white head at a dignified backward angle. Occasionally he paused under a tree and there, ankle deep in fallen leaves from the wine-glass elm, he was lost impressively in speculation. She thought he might be a mathematician or a novelist. Often when he returned, bringing with him a final remnant of the autumn air, he looked over at Rose across the tables and gave her an amiable, perfunctory nod as if he were her busy employer passing through the office of his underlings. Once he said something to her but in so low a voice and with so noncommittal an expression on his face that she did not understand and only smiled.

  Despite a heritage of headlong impulse and her practice of setting forth before the signal was given, Rose made no move to further her acquaintance with the man and, indeed, she took pains never to see him out of his context. She always left the library before he did so that she would neither be tempted to find out what he was reading, since this would give a clue to his profession, nor to discover the direction he took to go home. Earlier in the fall, before she was aware that her library habits coincided with his and before she wanted to be adopted by him, she had enjoyed walking through the woods and over the hills and beside the river. On Sundays she had always gone to the largest and the oldest cemetery and there, upon a crest of rocks which overlooked the thin, ungarnished headstones, she had thoroughly read the literary supplement of the New York Times and had absently considered the hedge of barberry that flourished every which way beside a brook. She had liked to imagine the furnishings of the houses she could just see opposite and to wonder what scions of Mayflower families lived in them and were about to order tea. But now on Sunday, she stayed in her room, long as the day seemed, for it would in no way serve her purpose, she thought sensibly, to be caught spying on the library-man if he should come some time to pay his respects to someone’s bones, those of his wife, perhaps, or a beloved daughter dead in early womanhood.

  And before this, she had gone to dinner once or twice a week to an inn a mile out of the town on a byroad. This inn had the mark of Henry Ford upon it and so had the diners who disputed facts involved in the American Revolution and who exclaimed over the hasty-pudding. The landlord, a lethargic man from Bangor, sat in a chimney corner smoking an authentic pipe and the cook was said to be descended from King Philip on the maternal side. Rose did not think it probable that the man in the yellow ascot would ever come to a place like this since the atmosphere of his own dining room would be, if anything, even more bona fide. But she did not wish to run any risk, for, just as she did not want to know what books he read (he might be proved by them to be in his second childhood) and did not want to see him laying flowers upon his daughter’s grave (for it might not be a daughter at all but only some old aunt by marriage) so she did not want to see him eating lest she discover that he followed an idiosyncratic diet and therefore had a constitutional disease.

  All this abstention and the restiveness that accompanied it made her days and evenings monotonous and she became very much aware of the drawbacks of her room which until now she had found—at least by comparison with the room at home which she shared with two younger sisters both of whom walked in their sleep and one of whom gnashed her teeth—ideal. She lived on the ground floor of a double house that stood on a corner and was shaped like a wedge so that the front doors were on different streets. Her room, at Number 8 Patriot Road, was flush with what she thought must be the parlor at Number 6 Faneuil Lane and through the wood and plaster she sometimes heard throttled voices, heavy footsteps, and the indignant squawk of a mistuned radio. But she never heard a sound in Number 8. She was the only lodger on the first floor, but upstairs there were several meek and apparitional figures whom she met in the mildewed hall as she went to and from the bathroom. The landlady lived across the entry-way from Rose and was visible only on Wednesday evening when she came to collect the rent and present the clean towels. Generally this transaction was performed as a dumb show and without smiles. The telephone seldom rang and the doorbell never. Besides this rather sepulchral air, the house was chilly and the lamps in Rose’s room were poor.

  Her feeling toward the silence of Number 8 and the sounds, low and distorted as they were, of Number 6, passed through several stages between the middle of October and the Thanksgiving holiday. At first the quiet of her own house pleased her because she could read with such concentration and the noises of 6 irritated her when they were loud enough to intrude upon her page, yet not quite loud enough to be properly identified. Then, she was disturbed and next annoyed by the silence and felt that it was unnatural, while she was grateful for the indications through the wall that there was life just yonder. And, a
gain, she would be strained and unsettled, waiting for the noises and unable to make use of the interstices of silence between them. She never saw the tenants of the other house, but she had an idea what sort they might be, for frequently there was an electric car in front, looking like a large, abandoned toy. The driver of it, she was certain, would be a brisk old lady with no nonsense about her and she came to believe, groundlessly, that there were two such old ladies, sisters, perhaps, or friends since boarding school days at Lausanne. One must be either rather fat or else somewhat lame and wear special shoes, for nothing else could account for the heavy tread Rose sometimes heard. Once, on a Sunday afternoon, out of a clear blue sky she wondered if the man in the yellow ascot ever called at Number 6 and she snubbed the thought, snubbed the peculiarly awful possibility that he might be there at this very moment.

  On Thanksgiving Day, she went to the inn outside the town for midday dinner. The library-man was there and the moment she saw him, dressed as usual, she knew that she had secretly expected him, for she was not at all surprised. He was sitting at a table near the fireplace engaged in conversation with the landlord and simultaneously reading the menu. A bright fire burned in the hearth and his fresh skin shone in the light like a leaf turned golden and it appeared to have a leaf’s smooth texture. He sat very straight in his chair and while he waited for the soup, he closed his eyes and calmly smiled as he listened to the landlord who was apparently telling a long joke. He looked as if he might be sitting for his portrait and, indeed, he would have been a distinguished subject for a painter who did accurate “likenesses” of college presidents and notable physicians, for his face had admirable qualities of mellowness and deep, pacific wisdom and irony and casualness. He was in no hurry. He waited for his dinner with his eyes closed, not having to be occupied with looking round the room at the other diners and at the Currier and Ives prints on the walls and all the antique furniture which one might buy if one were able. Rose’s own young and impatient mind immediately pranced away from him and dwelt, in quick succession, upon the brindle cat who was balancing for no earthly reason on the newel post; upon the lemon tree in the bay window, fed like an animal to produce fruit of a dreadful size; two quiet brown-eyed children who sat silent at a table with two thin old women, holding their hands between courses in an attitude of prayer. Fleetly it struck her that these two might be her neighbors and at that very moment, as if she had been directed by a voice, she looked out the window at the far driveway and saw the electric car, its square top grizzled with frost. It must be that the children were with their aged great-aunts for the day and she thought it must be a doubtful pleasure to them all since the four mute mouths bore an illegible expression.