Children Are Bored on Sunday

by Jean Stafford

  Rose did not look at her foster-father save when her eyes fell on him by accident. Once she caught him looking at her over a piled fork and in his surprise, he let some of the stuffing fall off. Every inch of her skin felt roasted and her hands shook so that for a moment she dared not try to lift her water glass although her mouth was dry. And later when his salad came, she looked again and he distinctly winked at her as he tossed the cloves of tomato and the water cress. It was not a plain-spoken wink at all and it made her nervous. She hurried through her meal in order that she might leave before he did because, besides the ambiguous gambit of his eye, she was inadmissibly afraid that he, not the old ladies, might enter the electric car. She grappled hard with her suspicions about him and imperatively pointed out to herself that this stately aristocrat lived in a handsome house and that he had naturally given his housekeeper and his cook the day off and because the air was fine and sharp, had liked to walk a mile to his dinner. She could not help feeling that it was strange he had not been invited anywhere, for surely a man of his position, whatever it was, would have friends in the town. Perhaps he despised the sentimental fanfare of holidays. Next year, after his adoption of her was a legal fact, she imagined that on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter they would dine alone and afterward would play back-gammon. Yet already she was visited with a nettlesome problem: should she play badly so that he would have the pleasure of winning or cleverly so that he would praise her? She rather hoped that he did not have a violin or any whimsical hobbies like collecting Revolutionary artifacts or going for bird-walks.

  Rose did not wait for her dessert and on her way out she glanced quickly at the coats hung on the pegs in the hall. She recognized his immediately; it was black with a beaver lining and although it was quite worn, it still was very rich and serviceable. His derby was there too and a tartan muffler. Fearing the road along which, at any moment, the electric car might pass, she struck into the woods and walked home along the pale, thick river. She found a nickel and a fresh-water mussel shell and she came upon a beached canoe, withering in the dry fall. She passed behind the girls’ school and glanced at the windows of the dormitory with their starched dimity curtains. The little girls had all gone home to their fathers for the holiday. She was very lonely here beside the river and she began to walk fast, counting her footsteps to forestall her melancholy, but then she slowed down again as she realized that she would be just as lonely in her room. Until now she had been content with seeing the man in the library and had even been a little proud in a queer way that he had a life quite secret, quite independent of the alternate afternoons in the reading room and that what she did at other times was equally unimaginable to him. But now beside the woeful river, she was almost frightened to think of him just as she had almost been frightened as a child when everyone had left the church after the last mass and she had wondered what happened then, whether the plaster saints came to life and if God emerged, full-bodied, from the wafers in the ciborium.

  Rose did not know, until she was actually within her room again, shadowy with dusk and musty with the old upholstery of the buckling wicker chairs, that there had been another reason why she had not liked to come back: now she was face to face with the knowledge that she had seen the driver of the electric car who was, therefore, one of the authors of the noises in the other house. The car had got there before she did. The very moment she stepped across her threshold onto the distempered carpet with its muddy oak leaves, the sounds came, feebly ill-natured, straight to her anticipating ears. There were no new sounds, no children’s voices.

  All that afternoon, while she was thinking of the man as he sat in his own library (the Samuel Sewell was closed today) in one of the white clapboard houses in the side streets of the town, the dulled hubbub went on beyond the wall. At first she paid little heed; she was thinking of the chintz wing chair he might be sitting in with his feet on a brass fender before a fire. And at first the sounds were unobtrusive. But toward dark, they became more insistent and she grew fully conscious of them. Although she could not hear words nor could she tell what sort of movements were being made, she was entirely alert, straining to read this trifling mystery. After a little, she was able to separate some of the noises and she heard a door open and close and a telephone ring and a clock strike and outside, in the street, she heard a boy irrelevantly cry, “Richard?” and she heard something bump over an uncarpeted floor. But above—or rather beneath, for it was little more than a jerky hum—the other sounds, there was a voice complaining, directly on the other side of the wall; it was a venomous and senile whimper which went on and on. It seemed to be uttering short curses with just time for a breath in between the tenth, perhaps, and the eleventh. Presently there was another opening and closing of the door and a second voice, a man’s voice, spoke. There was, as well, a rattle of metal and now Rose constructed a picture: someone was ill and someone else was bringing a tray to the sick-bed. But the important fact was that she must revise her general notion of the household: it included a man. Yet why could it not be a doctor, summoned hastily because one of the old ladies had eaten unwisely at the inn? She regretted that she had not scrutinized her neighbors more closely to see if they bore any marks of frailty in the color of the skin or the look about the nose. She sighed and went to the window to pull down the shade for it had grown dark, and once again the electric car served her, for here it came, a silent, absurd box, round the corner and on its way toward the Mill Dam. “They have gone for the prescription,” she said happily, and she saw a peaked spinster lying in a bed, another peaked one operating the simple machinery of the car. And she assured herself that the driver must, indeed must, be one of the children’s great-aunts for no man in his right mind would be seen in such a thing in this day and age.

  When she had pulled the bottle-green blinds and turned on her two lamps, no brighter than candle flames, she was momentarily disgusted with herself for spending so much time conjecturing on unseen and unknown people. She was as bad as her mother who could search a whole evening through for the inner meanings of a neighbor’s greeting when they had not been on speaking terms for weeks or the impertinence of a salesgirl in the five and ten. So she tried to forget about the other house and to go back to the man in the yellow ascot but he was suddenly gone altogether and instead of him she could only see her real father, Joseph Fabrizio, who would be having a holiday today like everyone else and who, stupid and cynical, would be shambling about the house out West where even the hopvines at the windows were limp and unclean. Her father wore a black coat-sweater from J. C. Penney’s and a spotty gray cap and Army store pants and miner’s shoes studded with cleats that tore up the linoleum and made a brash racket. The putrefied smell of sugar beets clung to him constantly even after a bath which he took only once in a month of Sundays. She did not know one good thing about her father except that when she was very small she had been delighted to hear him sing “Juanita” and “Valencia” in a tenor voice for which he was admired by two or three people in the town; and one time when he must have been as drunk as a monkey, he brought her a box of Cheese-bits and a copy of Sweetheart Stories when she had the pinkeye. Although as far back as she could remember, she had been driven to get away, far away and never go home again, she was often resentful that he never wrote to her and that he had not been at all sorry when she had gone away. As a matter of fact, he had not even seen her off on the bus and her mother did not know where he was. Her mother said, looking vaguely up and down the street and nodding to several acquaintances, “Well, I’ll tell him good-by for you,” and handed her a lunch in a Honey Kist bread wrapper. The simple and humiliating fact was that he cared so little that he had clean forgotten.

  The memories of her father, each one of which was uglier than the one before, made her so cross and jumpy that she knew she must quiet herself and she sat down to read Self Reliance which she had always found very soothing because it was so sedately dull. But she could pay attention to it even less than usual and the patter
n of sounds next door presently was repeated: the telephone, the opening and closing of the door, the sound of china and silver on a tray. She was irritated and when she returned to Emerson, exhorting him to lull her, the voice would give her no peace but went on in its protracted peeve, hovering like a gnat over every word on the page. Finally she grew really angry and she knocked sharply on the wall. There was an immediate silence and then a most terrible and much louder sound: it was a laugh! And such a laugh as she had never heard in her life for it was as thin as a needle and unlike the speech, it did not quaver. For a moment she was afraid and she stepped away as if there were real danger, and then she was even angrier than before and her thoughts went quickly down this ladder of unreason, “If my father had not been a low person and if he had loved me, I would not have grown up in poverty and I would not have hated him so much that I had to go away from home to the first job that came along, this mean one that pays so little that I must live in a dark, depressing room where the walls are so thin that the sound of sickness comes through and for no reason at all I am laughed at by a cruel person who does not even know me.” And she envisaged her father as he had probably been that day she had boarded the orange bus; fat and foul-tongued he would have been shooting Cowboy at the pool hall where they had spittoons since most of the patrons, including (God damn him) her father, chewed tobacco.

  * * *

  It was no longer possible for Rose to stay in her room in the evenings because of the busy personalities so near, and after dinner she went back to the Samuel Sewell. The overhead light was poor and made her eyes smart and she missed not sitting in her wrapper and her slippers. She was impatient with the spinster’s prolonged illness and she saw no reason why she was not taken to the hospital. Sometimes they went on for years that way, just clinging to the ragged edge of nothing, getting more and more querulous and bothersome. Miss Talmadge noticed that Rose was distraught and when she asked and Rose said that she was dissatisfied with her room, Miss Talmadge objected with vehement sweetness, “But it is a quaint room! It is a lovely, lovely, lovely room!” and began instantly to dictate a stunning letter to the parent of a pupil who, in a tantrum over nothing at all, had deliberately broken a hockey stick belonging to the school.

  One morning just before the Christmas holiday, Miss Talmadge asked, in her pink voice, if Rose would run an errand for her in the afternoon. The girls of the fourth form wished to send a potted plant to someone who was ill, a former matron. Rose was not surprised at all when she heard that the address was Number 6 Fanueil Lane. So important was this illness with which she lived that it did not occur to her that there was another invalid in the town and Miss Talmadge, never dreaming that the retired matron was the reason she did not like her room, said, with pointless cheer, “It will be so handy for you.”

  She accepted the commission with the greatest reluctance, not only because she wanted the occupants of the other house to remain anonymous but because, as well, she had a horror of being near old people and she remembered a time when the fifth grade had gone to sing Christmas carols at the old people’s home. There had been a smell of senility in the long room with its glaring linoleum and Mission benches where the old people sat fiddling with their neckties or with pieces of holly purloined from the dining room decorations. The last song was “We Three Kings” and by this time Rose was so sick that she only moved her lips, not making any sound. When it was over and they stood for a moment, dumb and immobile, until the teacher came to herd them away, a terribly, terribly old man rose to his feet and cried, “Damned brats! Clear them damned brats out p.d.q.” He had bicycle clips on his eleemosynary plus-fours.

  She had never actually passed the other house and she was surprised to find that its façade was altogether different from that of Number 8 Patriot Road. The paint was a darker shade of red and instead of two bay windows it had only one, just to the right of the off-center door. In the windows at Number 8, the landlady kept ferns and cactuses but there was nothing at all alive in those of Number 6 and there were no curtains. There was only a solitary tuberculosis seal from the year before pasted in the lowest middle pane. Instead of a neat brass letter-slot, there was a raveling raffia basket which hung on a hammock-hook to hold the mail and there was no knocker but a bell instead, the kind you rang by turning an embossed iron handle. She turned it and heard a tinkle and instantly a voice very near her cried thinly, “Just a minute!” Rose could not tell where it came from but she waited in discomfort, feeling that she was being looked at from some vantage point no more than a foot away. Still, no one came. It was snowing and the big soft flakes dissolved in beautiful splashes on the glazed green paper that wrapped the bleeding-heart. She rang again, and again, immediately, the voice encouragingly said, “Just a minute!” It was a high and genderless voice and was, she thought, the same one that had laughed at her when she had knocked on the wall. She was despondent here in the twilight snowstorm and her fingers clutching the pot were growing numb. The voice broke its promise for the second time; several minutes passed and nothing happened. She would try once more and if still no one came, she would leave the plant on the doorstep even though it might freeze. Each moment she hated her role more, no matter what its outcome was to be. It would be worse than ever now to hear the sounds through the wall if she had the misfortune actually to see the interior of the house (how dreadful if she had to go into the sickroom itself!) and it would be almost as bad if the door was never opened and whoever it was that bade her wait a minute saw her leave and enter Number 8. Her comings and goings would thereafter be observed; or, even if they weren’t, she would think they were and now, besides the sounds, she would be rattled by hypothetical eyes spying upon her.

  She was about to ring for the last time when out of the corner of her eye, she saw the electric car coming cautiously down the gentle slope of the street. Now there was no escaping. The great-aunt driving the car and the bodiless procrastinator behind the door would catch her there with the bleeding-heart and make her explain herself. “Just a minute!” The voice, speaking this time of its own accord and not in answer to the bell, startled her and the plant slipped in her hands. The car disappeared in a driveway behind the house and in a little while a distant door opened and closed and Rose firmly rang the bell. This time the voice laughed mockingly up and down an untrue scale and she was in no doubt at all that it was the same one that had sneered at her knock.

  The mysterious house behind the black door was seized with spasms. Someone screamed, “Tea!” and a stove was madly shaken down. Heavy footsteps crossed a room and a man’s voice, roared, “What? What do you say?” “Tea! Toast!” the screamed reply rang clear and the “s” in the toast was prolonged with hatred. “Give a person a chance to turn around, Mother!” said the man and the laughing voice near Rose chuckled high in its throat and mimicked itself, “Just a minute!” and then mimicked the deep voice of the man, “Just a minute!” She would have set the present down and run for dear life, but she was too late, for a light came dimly on in the front hall and feet approached the door.

  “Well!” said the man in the yellow ascot with the same comforting smile he gave her in the library when he came in from smoking. He held the door wide open so that she saw a tall spooky staircase and a room to the right where chairs were arranged in a circle as if for a funeral or a clergyman’s tea. Rose took a step forward and held out the bleeding-heart to him, unable to say a word.

  “Well!” he said again. “What’s this? A posy for my poor sick mother?” He, for his part, was not in the least discomfited by this meeting. It was clear that he recognized her but he was not surprised; it was almost as if he had expected her all along. Now that she was up close, she saw that the ascot was made of diapered foulard but she saw, as well, that it was not clean and had the uncleanliness that accumulates over a period of weeks. She wondered if it hid something repulsive like a goiter or a birthmark or if it were some sort of fascist insignia and he was cat’s-paw to a band of crooks.

&nbs
p; “Yes,” she said, as bashful as a child. “It is a plant from the school.”

  From the left came the scream again, beside itself with rage, “Tea! Toast! Me!” The man, as if to himself, said, “Bring my tea and toast to me,” and then smiling and looking directly at Rose with active brown eyes, he explained, “My mother has lost her verbs and adjectives. In fact, she has lost all parts of speech except her nouns and pronouns, a very interesting phenomenon. Come in, please,” and he put his hand under her elbow with gallant pressure. There was nothing she could do and she stepped inside the vestibule which had a sweet smell like the taste of Neccos.