“Oh,” he said and he came back, “Mamie leaks,” and he laughed.
“Who is Mamie?” we said.
Papa said, “Come and see,” and we ran down the grass, looking for Mamie. It was a boat, there was Lucy and Polly and Mamie; Papa read out the names and said, “Which do you want?” and we said, “Polly.”
Polly is the name of a parrot. Aunt Jennie had a Polly that ate crackers, or you said, “Polly have a cracker,” and if it said, “Polly have a cracker,” back at you, we gave it some sunflower seeds. The sunflower seeds are like little nuts if you bite into them.
Papa took the two oars. The oars caught in the bulrushes, everywhere there were bulrushes; we were caught here and the sun was shining.
We waited for Papa to put back the oars in the boat, and he pulled the boat along by the bulrushes; then I saw what it was we had come to see. It spread back and it was bigger than a white rose.
“Stop, stop,” I said, though the boat was going slowly.
“What is it?” said Papa.
“Look,” I said, and Harold looked and Gilbert looked.
“The boat will run over it,” I said. I was in the front of the boat and Gilbert was in the back with the two ropes for the rudder. Harold crawled along.
“Is it a naligator?” he said.
I said, “No, you know they come from Florida. It’s gone, Papa you have run over it.”
Papa said, “What?”
He went on pulling the boat along by the bulrushes.
It was gone. I would never see it again, it would be squashed and dead, it would be torn up by the boat. I wanted the boat to go back.
Papa said, “What was it?”
I said—I said—but I could not speak because now he had pulled the boat out and given it a push with the oars, and I saw what it was that we had come to see.
There was not just one water lily there on the water, like the one we had run over. They were crowded together so that sometimes one was pushed sideways, like our pears when there are too many on a branch. They were under my hands when I reached out.
“Don’t fall in,” said Papa.
I saw the picture in our Hans Andersen about Peter the child, or was it Peter the stork?
There is a story in our Hans Andersen about a stork and children. The babies like the innocents in our Doré Bible wait there on the water lilies.
It was not that I thought of the picture; it was that something was remembered. There was a water lily, painted on blue velvet, in Mrs. Kent’s house, but she said it was not stylish any more to have painting on velvet. But it was very pretty. There were bulrushes, painted on a blue umbrella-stand. It seemed that the water lilies, painted on the velvet and the blue umbrella-stand with bulrushes painted on it, were not in my mind, any more than the picture of the water lilies lying large and flat-open on the pond or lake in the Hans Andersen story.
They were not at first there, but as the boat turned round and shoved against the bulrushes and then the bulrushes got thinner and you could see through them (like looking through the slats in a fence), you saw what was there, you knew that something was reminded of something. That something remembered something. That something came true in a perspective and a dimension (though those words, of course, had no part in my mind) that was final; nothing could happen after this, as nothing had happened before it, to change the way things were and what people said and “What will you do when you grow up” and “It must be exciting to have so many brothers” or “You’ve torn a great triangle in your new summer dress and the first time you wore it, too” (as if I did not know that) or “That branch of the pear tree is dead, be careful when you children climb that tree,” but it was not us but Teddie Kent who fell out of it, because he said, “The old thing is no deader than the rest of the old tree,” and climbed out, just because we said, “Don’t,” and fell down and broke his arm.
And Jack Kent ran away and was gone a whole night, and when he came back Mrs. Kent cried, and that seemed a funny thing to do, “Why did she cry, Mama?”
“Well, she cried with relief, because she was so happy.”
“Can one cry because one is happy, Mama?”
THE SECRET
The stars?
“Well—there’s a …” and the voice stops, and they all stop talking. This is later in the new house. They are sitting under my window. I am in bed, they are under the window. My garden is under the window was in our first entertainment at the old school; I mean, they were my words to speak. They had made a window at the back of the platform, and we stood together in a row; we were from Kate Greenaway. I was in the middle with two boys, but the boys were in my first class at school and we were all six years old and they were not my brothers.
But this is the new house. They are sitting on the grass. They pulled their chairs out from under the big maple tree. It is summer, and they come to see us; Uncle Fred and Aunt Jennie are staying with us. Mamalie is here too, but she is not a visitor. “My” someone else is there but it does not matter who it is. I think Mamalie has gone to bed, too. I wonder if she hears them say “my,” then I seem to know what they are looking at, why they have stopped talking.
They always have so much to say; Uncle Hartley and Aunt Belle come too, but Aunt Jennie and Mama laugh most. Maybe that is Cousin Ed saying “It reminds me of. …” They always say it reminds them of. Papa is at the transit house, Eric is at the observatory looking for his double stars. The double stars stay together, but they go round one another like big suns; we know this, for he tells the visitors at the observatory Thursday evenings and we tell them to sign their names in the visitor’s book. This is not Thursday. You can almost tell what day of the week it is by the feel of something in the air, but it was easier to tell in the old town because of the church bells and the factory whistles, the other side of the river. Uncle Hartley is going to get a promotion and go to another place than Bethlehem Steel. They will have a new house like our new house when we came here and Papa left his little observatory for this new transit house, which has the only instrument (except in Greenwich, England) like he has. Mr. Evans lives in the wing of the house, and Eric has his room in the wing of the house over the empty library, but they are bringing out maps and books now for the observatory library from the university library.
“The first this year—the first real one, I mean …”
Mamalie is not in bed. She is coming up the stairs. The clock is ticking. It has a loud tick. Maybe she has forgotten her knitting, maybe I will run downstairs and get her knitting for her in the dark. The house is dark because the mosquitoes come in even though we have new screens on all the windows. “Mamalie,” she is at the top of the stairs now.
“Mamalie. …”
“What—what—is that you, Helen?” She calls me “Helen” sometimes and she calls Harold “Hartley,” but we do not say, “My name is not Helen” or “My name is not Hartley,” we just answer.
“Mamalie. …”
“Yes—yes, Helen—what is it?”
“It’s me, Mamalie. …”
“Oh—it’s you.”
“Mamalie. …”
“Yes—yes—Laura, I mean Helen—Oh, Hilda, of course, what is it?”
“Did you forget your knitting?”
“Why—yes—yes, I think I left my knitting on the window seat in the sitting room.”
“Shall I run down for it?” I am out of bed now. I stand by her in the dark in the hall, at the top of the stairs. Their voices go on outside. “… when we hired the old post-coach, for fun—do you remember? We clubbed together for Uncle Sylvester’s birthday treat and drove to the Water Gap and …” They are all there, and what they said “ah” about is a shooting star, and Aunt Jennie says you can make a wish on your first shooting star.
I did ask Eric why it was called a shooting star and he said because it streaks or shoots across the sky—“But would it fall on us?” He said no, there was something about gravity that would keep it from falling, but how do they know that? I did not ask s
illy questions like the visitors Thursday evenings at the observatory who say, “Are there people on Mars?” but sometimes I wonder if they are able to tell if really a shooting star will not fall down and fall on us and fall on the house and burn us all to death. It is quiet now.
“Mamalie. …”
“Why aren’t you asleep, Laura?”
“Oh, I don’t know—they’re talking outside.”
“That’s no reason not to go to sleep, they always sit on the porch or on the lawn and talk when it’s so hot.”
“Yes—because if they light the lamp the June bugs bump in.”
“… but you’re shivering.”
“It’s only goose-flesh, Mamalie,” I say. I don’t quite know what I mean by goose-flesh, but I just say something to keep her standing in the dark.
“And why do they call it goose-flesh, Mamalie?” though I know that, too; it’s because if you’re cold you get little rough pimples like a goose has when it is in its dish waiting for the oven, but the roughness doesn’t really look much like goose-flesh; it’s like that thing they call your-hair-standing-on-end, but it doesn’t really. But I have asked her one quick question which she hasn’t answered, so if I am able, I will ask her another. I reach out and the wall is there and it is a hot night and I am cold. “Why do they call a shooting star, a shooting star, Mamalie?”
“Well … I—I suppose because—”
“It might hit a house, mightn’t it? I mean, it might shoot down and hit us?”
“Why should it?” She is brushing past me as if I were not there. She must not do that.
“Mamalie. …” I feel along the wall. “Where are you going, Mamalie?” She does not answer. She is like that. Sometimes she does not answer, she does not look up when she is knitting, she even sits without her knitting and is not asleep, but “Don’t disturb your grandmother,” Mama will say. It is not just because she is getting a little deaf in one ear, but we know which ear that is and stand on the side of her “good ear,” as she calls it. But she is hearing something all the same; you can see that she is hearing something. Maybe she is hearing something now in the dark. I have forgotten about the shooting star. Maybe she will let me stay in her room. If I stay in her room with her, I might hear something.
She is feeling for the matches in her top bureau drawer. She has her lace caps there and handkerchiefs in sachet, and there is cologne on the top of her bureau.
“They’re in the left corner, at the back,” I prompt her, “you told me to remind you if you forgot.” She hides the matches in different corners, as if she were afraid of them. But she has found the matches. She strikes a match, and there is a little flame from the candle in a saucer; she keeps a saucer and the candle standing on the top of her bureau. She will put the saucer on a chair by her bed. It is a night light, and she will even ask me sometimes to pour water in the saucer from her pitcher on the washstand, and then we have to pour some out again, because it is too much for the candle, and then we get it just right, so that the candle will go out and not set anything on fire if it starts to sputter. She even carries a candle in the train, in her handbag, in case, she says, “the lights should all go out in a tunnel.”
“But do they?”
“Do they what, Aggie?” Now she is calling me “Aggie.” I wonder if she will notice, she never calls me “Aggie,” but why shouldn’t she call me “Aggie” if she calls me “Helen” or “Laura” even? Now I am Aggie; this is the first time I have been Aggie. I stand in my nightdress and see the room, and it is a different room and I am Aggie. It is summer I know, but I do not hear their voices because Mamalie’s room is this side of the house, away from the front steps and the grass where we have the new little magnolia tree planted.
She will never unpin her cap because she has a little bald spot on the top of her head, she says, but now she unpins her cap. I see Mamalie without her cap and she looks just the same, only maybe not so old because the light is not very bright and her hair is not all-over white but partly white, and where it is not white you can see that it is black, but very black, not like Mama’s, or mousy as they call mine.
Her eyes slant up at the sides, yes, you can see now that she looks like Aunt Aggie, only Aunt Aggie is a taller lady, taller than Mama even. It seems that it is cold, though it is a hot summer night, but there is wind this side of the house because the curtains blow a little in the wind, and I can see that Mamalie is afraid they’ll brush against the candle in the saucer, even before she says, “The curtains, Aggie.”
I go over and jerk the summer curtains; they are made of flowered stuff, like the curtains they pinned up for the window they cut out of an old screen that they stood up for a house in a garden when I was My garden is under the window. It was that kind of window curtain, and this had little daisies and wild roses running along and little yellow flowers in the corner that Mama said were English primroses and grow wild in England, but we had not seen them, only the ones that grow bunched on a stem that the Williamses had in their garden, that Mrs. Williams called “primulas” and that Mamalie called “keys-of-heaven.”
It is better to get in her bed. It is not cold, but the quilt she always brings with her in her trunk is pretty; it is made of patches of everybody’s best dresses and some French stuff that was sent by one of the old-girls from New Orleans. Mamalie can tell me about the dresses; I will want to ask her again about this black one with the tiny pink rosebuds, that was one of Aunt Aggie’s to go to Philadelphia in, when she married Uncle Will. I can pull up the quilt and I can sit here and I am not afraid now to think about the shooting star because I think she is going to talk about the shooting star in a different way that isn’t gravitation.
She said, “I forgot all about it.”
I don’t know if that is the shooting star or the question I am thinking of asking her (because sometimes she seems to know what I am going to ask her and answers me beforehand) about Aunt Aggie’s black silk dress with rosebuds, but she has not forgotten about that because she was telling me about it only the other day when I helped her unpack. She will stay as long as she can, but then she must get back to Bethlehem; it will be for one of those things, like putting flowers on Papalie’s grave for his birthday or the day he died on, but she seems to like to be with us here and goes in the kitchen and makes Papa apple pies. Now she has pulled out the bone hairpins that she wears at the top, to keep up her braids. She has two braids, and they hang down now, either side of her face, and she might almost be a big girl or a little girl sitting in the low chair with the candle on the window sill.
“I would have told you before but I forgot, Agnes.”
I say, “Yes, Mimmie,” because Mama and Aunt Aggie call her “Mimmie.” I am afraid she will remember that I am only Hilda, so I crouch down under the cover so she will only half see me, so that she won’t remember that I am only Hilda.
“It wasn’t that I was afraid,” she said, “though I was afraid. It wasn’t only that they might burn us all up, but there were the papers. Christian had left the secret with me. I was afraid the secret would be lost.”
I do not know who Christian is and I am afraid to ask. Or does she mean a Christian? It is the same name as Hans Christian Andersen. I get tired of hearing them talk about the picture someone called Benjamin West painted of a lady called Mary Ann Wood (I think her name was) and the spinet that the fan-maker in London gave to someone; anyhow their grandfather had a spinet in his house, even if it wasn’t that one, and that would be Mamalie’s papa, why yes, that would be Mamalie’s own papa, and perhaps Mamalie played the spinet, though she never plays the piano.
Now it seems that I can understand why they are so interested in Mary Ann Wood and what she had, because all at once I understand about the spinet, and I even wonder about the fan-maker in London and who he was and who he made fans for and what the fans were like and why did he give the spinet away and did they bring it with them on the same boat or did they send it on another boat and what was the name of the ship they
came on, anyway?
For the first time in my life, I wonder who we all are? Why, Mamalie’s own Mama was called Mary and she was from Virginia, and her father and mother had come straight from Scotland, and I did not even know their names nor the name of the ship they came on. Mamalie’s own mama’s name was Mary, and is that why (I wonder for the first time) Mamalie always gets Uncle Fred to sing The Four Marys the last thing after Thanksgiving or Christmas parties?
I never thought about who they were very much, and anyhow I could always find out by asking them, but now for the first time I really want to know; I want to know who Christian is, because somehow Christian is not one of the ones Mama and Uncle Hartley and Cousin Ed talk about, but Christian is someone I just hear about, alone with Mamalie, as if Christian belonged alone to me and Mamalie, and didn’t she say, anyhow, there was a secret?
“Christian,” I say half to myself, because I cannot help it though I have not meant to ask her about Christian, because Aunt Aggie perhaps knew all about him, but Mamalie might come back and remember that I am Hilda and that I am not Agnes. But I did not say “Christian” very loud, perhaps she did not hear me.
Mamalie came back, she looked round the room, she said, “What was I saying, Hilda?”
I said, “I was thinking of asking you about this scrap, it’s black with pink rosebuds; Aunt Aggie said is was a silver-grey dress that she had for Philadelphia when she married Uncle Will.”
Mamalie said, “You said something, or somebody said something, who said something?”
I said, “It’s you and me, Mamalie, I was asking about Aunt Aggie, I was thinking about—about—church—I mean, I was thinking about something...” Mamalie puts her hand up to her hair, she presses her hands against the sides of her face as if to hide the two long braids that have white threads in them but look darker when they are down than when they are looped up either side of her face, under her lace cap.
‘‘What were you talking about before I went to sleep?” said Mamalie. I do not tell her that she has not been asleep.
The Gift: Novel Page 8
