“Irini,” Mr. Henry called. “Irini! We need you at the ice cream station. No one else can turn the crank.” The sun came back out, spreading over the water like syrup.
An hour after ice cream, Henry was ready to make the swim. A group of girls from the Kitchen climbed down, walked under the falls, and climbed back up to set the landing site on the far side. They were equipped with lemonade, sparklers, and towels. The faction from Upper Magrit expressed their opposition this year by standing back and whispering among themselves. They made a sound like the wind in the trees, or the snakes in the grass.
Margo, who was wearing a red scarf over her hair, sat out on a rock as a spot point. She removed the scarf and waved it. Henry waved back. On the other side of Upper Magrit, the girls could see Henry stripping down. His skin was the color of boiled chicken; his chest had a plucked look. He did some knee bends to warm up. They could see Ada speaking to him. He shook his head. Bend, straighten, bend, straighten. The second straighten was slower than the first, the third was slower than the second.
Henry waded in. His footing was awkward. He waded back out again, sat on a rock and examined the bottom of one foot. Ada said something.
“He’s picked up a stone,” said Fanny caustically. Suddenly she was loud enough for the rest of the girls to hear; the Upper Magrit faction had moved closer to see what the holdup was. “Mrs. Ada is telling him she’s very sorry, but now she has to shoot him.”
Henry stood, tested his foot. “Oh, good,” said Fanny. “He’s not lame after all. My mistake.”
Ada spoke again. Helen paraphrased. “ ‘Mr. Gandhi gets his exercise fasting. He doesn’t make a fool of himself swimming the Ganges. Why can’t you be more like Mr. Gandhi?’ ”
Henry waded back into the water. Suddenly he ducked and windmilled. He ducked again. Bent over, as if facing a strong wind, his hands covering his head, he hurried back onto the shore.
“What the heck was that?” asked Arlys.
“Bee,” Irini guessed. “Big bee.”
He and Ada argued with each other. “Henry wants to kill the bee,” said Fanny. “Ada is shielding it with her own body.”
Henry waded back into the water. Ada said something. Henry looked up at the sky. “Mrs. Ada is worrying about lightning,” Arlys guessed. The clouds were high, light, and gauzy.
“Mrs. Ada is worried about aerial bombings,” said Helen. “Mrs. Ada is afraid the Nadeau boys will come in their aerial canoe and strafe Upper Magrit with their paddles.”
“And they could, too,” said Tracy. “If they wanted.”
Henry waded in deeper. The water was up to his calves now, which meant he was near Nedd’s hole. He took a deep breath which puffed his cheeks. He bent his knees. He straightened again. He blew out the breath. No one on either bank moved. Henry’s cheeks filled with air again. Again they emptied. He stared out over the dark water. Margo waved her scarf.
“Something’s wrong,” said Irini.
On the opposite bank, Norma Baldish scrambled down to speak with Henry. He was curling up, growing smaller, aging before their eyes. He shook his head, waved Norma back. Ada spoke again. Henry looked at the water. He backed out, up to his ankles, onto the shore. He dried his feet. Put his clothes back on. Leaned on Norma’s arm to help him up the bank. Went home.
“He just lost it,” Irini’s father told her later. “Lost his nerve. It was Mrs. Ada, worrying at him all day. Look at this.” Her father had an S.O.S. Ship in his hand, a cardboard firework in the shape of a boat, with distressed passengers painted on the sides. He set it in the water, lit it. There was a desperate shriek, several bangs. The ship took on water and went down. You could see the little painted faces going under.
“He didn’t look strong,” Irini said. “Mrs. Ada was just being realistic. We should go ahead and string that rope. Just in case. He might not have made it.”
"She just loves him," Irini said later. "Would you let me swim it?"
“Aren’t there enough ghosts in that pond already?” Irini said, even later. “He’s an old man.”
Her father was setting out a Python Black Snake on a large, flat rock. “Grows before your very eyes! Three to four feet long!” the box had said. He lit it. It expanded to about four inches. Irini put out a finger. She barely touched it, but it crumbled immediately into ash. “He is now,” her father agreed.
At Collins House, Henry had gone straight to bed. Ada put her nightgown on and padded down the stairs to the kitchen, where she made herself a cup of tea. She didn’t like tea much, not since she had given up dairy and begun taking it straight, but she was somehow oddly satisfied to eat foods and drink drinks she didn’t like. It was purposeless suffering, and she didn’t know what Gandhi would say, but it was a kind of practice and might fit her better for the real thing.
What an easy life she had always had. It embarrassed her to think of it.
She sat at the table and stirred her spoon in her cup. The chair was hard. The floor was sticky. The kitchen, all kitchens, were a sort of temple to the body. They trapped you inside the world of the senses. Ada tried to imagine an alternative, a kitchen of the mind, a kitchen of the spirit.
In this kitchen there would be cooks but no one would cook for themselves. The degrading hierarchy of waiting on someone else would vanish when everyone did it. Each cook would serve another; each would be served.
The food would be simple, strictly vegetarian, and with none of those seasonings that excite the senses. Because the food wouldn’t be the point.
The point would be the gift of the food. The point would be the discipline of the labor. The point would be to eat, with gratitude, the food that someone else had prepared for you, with love, no matter what the taste, and to give your food away, freely and personally, with your own two hands.
26
Later that night, when the clouds had blown fortuitously away, under a sky of exploding flowers and screaming stars, Ruby Redd arrived in Magrit to play for the Sweethearts. Irini had completely forgotten about Ruby.
Irini was stretched out on the knobby weeds of the outfield with Walter on one side and Arlys on the other, watching Norma’s fireworks. She was covered in Cutter, but there was a bug crawling over her arm. She couldn’t see it, but she could feel its various feet, crawling together toward her armpit. Then, while she was trying to track it down, fishing through her clothes, an ominous nothing, no tickle, no further movement. She sat up and at that exact moment, there was shadow in the sky above her, as if a tree had suddenly walked in and set down roots.
“Hi, Coach,” said Ruby Redd. She was wearing the same dress as before, the same bib, even the same shoes, which was a bit of a surprise, although they were even more scuffed. When she had been at the mill for a while she would learn to polish her shoes with the inside of a banana peel, the way the rest of Magrit did. “I’m here to try out for the team,” Ruby said.
After Ruby, everything was different. “She was so good,” my mother told me. “It was like we had Satchel Paige all of a sudden. She pitched for us and she always went the distance. She could hit. We never lost again. She was so good, I can’t even tell you. We never came close to losing again except for just once.”
This was a reference to the game that Mr. May attended. The May girls hadn’t seen their father since the war. Suddenly he was there in the stands with his gas station–owning slut of a new wife and she was actually calling out their names, cheering them on as if they didn’t hate her guts. Naturally Tracy insisted on starting at pitcher and naturally neither of the May girls played their best. Mike Barr offered to beat him up for Fanny, and the new wife, too, if that was what Fanny wanted. He was filled with indignation at the thought of three fatherless girls. Fanny said no, but she thought about it, you could see.
Of course having Ruby on the team meant someone else had to sit out. Walter varied it occasionally, but usually it was Helen, at least for a few innings. The Sweethearts didn’t need her now, getting those walks to first. It was enough
for her to appear there in the uniform and wave at the men in the stands. It was enough for them to think she might go in at any moment.
Sometimes the person who sat out was Cindy and she minded a lot more. Sometimes it was Sissy. Tracy rarely actually sat out, but she minded most. Walter moved her to third, and put Cindy in right. The opposing teams hit so rarely, and never to the outfield. He could have put anyone anywhere. “We all still batted, of course,” my mother said. “It’s not as if she could play alone. But I was having trouble connecting. I was in a slump. Not that it mattered.”
Anna Peal started announcing the scores as well as the schedule. It was a shame that Henry was in no shape to enjoy it. He never attended the games now, rarely asked how they’d done. He didn’t write columns for Maggie, didn’t seem to care what the dogs ate. He was undergoing a long, dark night of the soul and he was undergoing most of it in the ham radio room. Ham radio conversations are characterized by an inevitable, effortless cheer. “How is the weather there in Dover?… Rained here, too, last week. Pretty today, though.”
Walter gave Ruby a job and she moved in with the Leggetts. She was hopeless in the Kitchen, worse than Irini. Claire began visiting the Leggetts almost nightly to tutor her. “We’re not going to exploit this young woman’s athletic ability,” Mrs. Ada said. “After a few years with the Sweethearts, she is going to know how to cook. When she leaves us, it will be as a woman with a future.”
Soon Ruby was wearing Helen’s old clothes. They were a poor fit. Ruby had a muscular build, but thin, just the opposite of plushy Helen. Mrs. Leggett contrived to take the clothes in with oddly placed darts.
“She does sit-ups and push-ups in the mornings before work,” Helen told them. The girls were taking their lunch break outside. It was a beautiful day with a high wild wind, so there was sun but only occasional heat. The leaves sawed one against another. It was amazing how much noise they could make, when all those soft sawings were added together.
Ruby had gone for a jog, her hair in a high ponytail, her legs in Helen’s old jeans. She was the only one missing from the Kitchen.
Helen stretched out on the grass, wearing cucumber slices on her eyes to reduce shadows and puffing. The road to beauty so often leads first in the other direction. Witness hair rollers. Witness face masks. Helen looked like a praying mantis with breasts. “She does men’s push-ups, from the toes. Twenty of them. And she runs in short little bursts. She says it improves her speed.”
“Who’s chasing her?” asked Fanny. Fanny was patting her throat with the back of her hand in an exercise thought to stave off wrinkles. It gave her voice a strange wobble.
“If she was as good as she thinks she is, it would be something to see. She is so stuck on herself,” Tracy said.
“She’s just fast,” she added when no one responded. “She doesn’t have finesse. She’s very predictable.” Tracy was painting her toenails Ripe Plum. She had cut her hair very short. It was cute, but not as cute as she thought it was.
You would think Irini might have benefited from the example of all these improving activities. But luck, Irini’s father always said, would beat out effort every time. Irini lay on her stomach, looking for four-leaf clovers and not even looking hard. If you were lucky, you were lucky. No need to exert yourself.
Irini picked a clover flower, pulled it apart tube by purple tube, and sucked out the honey. She rolled onto her back. Mounds of whipped clouds streamed across the sky above her. The sun flashed in and out, like Morse code. “Irini,” it said, and it was probably important, but Irini was too drowsy to work out the rest.
“She is so good,” Margo said. “She’s not the friendliest person. But you have to admit she’s good.”
“She doesn’t pitch with psychology. Pitching is a duel. Pitcher against batter. You have to know a lot about people to be a pitcher,” said Tracy. She leaned back on her elbows and waved one finished foot in the air to dry. “I don’t think it’s possible to be an unfriendly person and also a great pitcher.”
“I didn’t say she was unfriendly.”
“She’s just shy,” said Claire.
“She’s so serious about it,” Fanny said. “Like she thinks she’s a real athlete.”
“She shouldn’t wear your old clothes, Helen. That is not an attractive look for her,” said Tracy.
“She should think about a different haircut. Long hair is only fashionable if you’re eleven,” said Fanny.
Irini opened one eye. A giant buttercup bloomed next to her cheek, a buttercup the size of a dinner plate. Much smaller, in and out of her vision, the metronomelike ticking of Tracy’s foot in the air. And beyond Tracy’s foot, high above Irini, a tiny hawk floated on the wind. Zipping around it, harrying it, was a much smaller bird. A swallow, Irini thought, from the heart-shaped silhouette of its open wings.
Suddenly the sounds of dozens of little birds rose from the ground and the trees. Henry had pointed out this phenomenon to the girls before. The birds were responding to the shadow of the hawk. They were trying to confuse and distract it from its prey by calling to it. “Pure instinct,” Henry had said. “Don’t confuse it with concern.”
Irini watched a moment out of her single eye, while the little bird dove and circled in dangerous proximity. A mother, Irini guessed. This sort of suicide mission was the kind of thing mothers did, and Irini, who had no mother, felt a little sad. She was afraid to watch the ending. She closed her eye again and imagined Thomas Holcrow leaning over her. “Miss Doyle,” he was saying, his mouth very very close to her mouth. He put a hand on her breast, startling her so that she opened her eyes. She was not ready to fantasize that. What kind of a girl did he think she was?
“I like her,” Helen said. “I mean, I don’t not like her.”
“I like her,” said Claire, who liked everyone, so it didn’t count. “I think she’s swell.”
“Did we say we didn’t like her?” Fanny asked, in her wrinkle-preventing Elmer Fuddish vibrato.
They heard footsteps. “Did you have a nice run?” Fanny said. “Time to get back to work, girls.” Irini sat up.
Tracy and Ruby were smiling at each other, mouths wide, maximum teeth.
Walter asked Irini to walk Ruby over to Collins House one day before practice, when it became clear that Henry wasn’t coming in to the Kitchen anytime soon. Their arrival obviously interrupted Ada’s spinning. Her hair was flocked like an old sweater with little balls of fuzz. But her smile was gracious and she served them great slabs of marble cake and apple cider with chipped ice, in the gold-rimmed glasses that always gave Irini a guilty start. They took their drinks and dishes into the sitting room. Collins House had a drawing room, a sun room, a smoking room, a library, and a billiard room, so they never lacked for choices.
Thomas Holcrow was there as well. He had been spending more time at Collins House, going over old papers and stories with Henry, who had suddenly started to prefer looking backward to looking ahead. It was more evidence of his rapid aging. There was no further mention of any suspicions relating Holcrow to Maggie’s unfortunate outbursts. Indeed, he had become one of the family.
“Walter tells us you’re quite the player,” Henry said to Ruby. He had taken a seat in the sun. The excessive light showed every spot and crease in his skin. His throat hung loose like a purse and was as napped as corduroy. He was still wearing his dressing gown. He crossed his bare legs at the ankle and you could see up to the two lumps of his knees, but fortunately no farther. “I got Rio on the radio yesterday. Do you know anyone in Rio? I could send a message.”
“No, sir,” Ruby said. “I surely don’t.” Her hair was beginning to work free of her ponytail. It curled around her temples. She had finished her juice and her cake. Her hands were folded stiffly in her lap. Irini noticed that she bit her nails. The top thumb had a raw, painful edge.
“They’re having a nice sunny stretch down in Rio.”
“That’s nice to hear,” said Thomas Holcrow. “That sounds just swell. I hope they’
re enjoying it.” He was seated across from Irini. He smiled in her general direction.
“Nice weather is nice,” she agreed idiotically. She was always nervous with Holcrow, but today even more so with Mr. Henry. She had never seen him stooped like this, bent as macaroni. He had missed a spot shaving. There was a small patch of beard the size of a quarter back by one of his enormous ears. He had combed the top of his hair, but the back stuck out in weedy disarray. He was usually so dapper. Irini swung her legs around so that she didn’t face him. She had seen more than enough.
“I’m an old man,” he told Ruby, who was, of course, forced to deny it. “No, no. I know what I am.”
“According to Hindu tradition the normal human life span is one hundred and twenty-five years,” said Ada. “That’s how long Gandhi expects to live.”
“You have a lot of years left,” Thomas Holcrow agreed.
“That’s nice,” said Henry. There was a subtle popping sound as he stood up. “I wonder if it’s raining in Rio today?”
“Have you heard any more about an ape?” Irini asked him.
“Oh, I very much doubt that I’m up to taking on an ape,” he said. He climbed the stairs slowly, hands on the bannister, pulling himself from stair to stair. Ada followed. Thomas Holcrow saw them out.
Walter drove them back to the field. Ruby sat with him in the front. Irini took the back. Walter stretched his arm out over the seat. The wind blew a strand of Ruby’s hair loose so that it lay against his hand, spread thin like the wing of a dragonfly and the sun caught all the thousands of colors of it. Walter felt it; Irini saw him look over. But he didn’t move his hand. “Do you know how good you are?” Walter asked Ruby. “I mean, you’re really good.”
“It’s the only thing I ever wanted to do. Only thing I can do.”
The Sweetheart Season Page 23
