“And play with clothespins and rag dolls in the meantime?”
“He hasn’t played with such things for a long time,” said Randall wearily. “If you paid any real attention to him you’d see how interested he is in his new building blocks. You could make things with him—you’d be far more fun for him in such a way than I am.”
“And let him go on being afraid of a hobby-horse? He’s got to be a boy! He’s got to be active. He’s got to—” Randall had taken John’s hand and quietly led him out of the room, leaving Seymour talking to himself.
But he still tried to balance things by taking John to Seymour in the library every afternoon to play there for an hour before his supper. He had bought a box of thick colored crayons and an outline picture book to give John something to do in the library, since he was beginning to be bored there. John lay on his stomach on the floor, crudely filling in the outline pictures with crazy-quilt colors whose selection had some meaning for him, but no relation to the objects he was coloring. Since Seymour could only participate by hearing about it, he questioned John from time to time what he was coloring, and how; and at one point John said, vigorously daubing away, “It’s a lion. Blue lion.”
“Lions are not blue,” said Seymour “You must make your lion brown.”
“Don’t like brown.”
“But John, that is silly. You can’t make a lion blue when there is no such thing.”
“This one is blue.” John rubbed harder with his crayon.
“And I tell you you’ve got to make it brown.”
“I won’t.”
“John! Give me that book.”
“No.”
Randall was coming up the stairs with John’s supper of barley-broth and milk and junket on a tray. He heard the argument in the library and John’s shrill, stubborn “No! ” He heard Seymour say, “John, obey me at once. Bring me that book.”
“No! You’ll hurt my lion.”
“You come here with that book.” Randall, nearing the top of the stairs, could see into the library, see John there on the floor with his knees drawn up under him, and his square little hands planted flat to protect his book and his lion. Seymour rose from his chair and strode towards John and seized him by the shoulder. “Give me that book!” he said, in a tone which ripped from Randall’s mind the last curtain that had hidden the full face of the thing he feared. He hurried in and put the tray on a table near the door and said, “Seymour! What are you trying to do?”
John turned and flung himself against Randall’s knees, holding his arms around them. Seymour reached after him and tried to drag him away. “Go ‘way!” screamed John. “Uncle Ran, make him go ‘way.”
“That child is going to obey!” shouted Seymour. “John! Get up off that floor and stand on your feet. Do as I say.”
John took one bewildered, terrified look over his shoulder at Seymour and began to bawl. Randall bent over and lifted him gently aside, a little behind himself, and holding John in his left arm, with his sobbing face hidden against his leg, he said, “I’ve been watching it happen. I’ve been a damned fool. I’ve been watching it, seeing it right before my eyes.”
His voice turned hoarse; he swallowed. If Seymour could have looked at him he would have seen the blue eyes dilate in slow horror, the color drain from the gentle face, the mouth drop slowly open. There was a long, tense silence while John sobbed with his face hidden against Randall’s leg. Seymour spoke finally, furious, contemptuous.
“What have you been watching?” he said. “What do you see—you with your precious eyesight?”
“What a thing to say! Do you mean you don’t know? You can’t feel it yourself?”
“My blindness does not extend to my mind, which remains considerably more balanced, I venture, than yours.”
“Oh, God.” Randall bent down and tried to comfort John, but Seymour took a step towards the child and he began to scream louder. Randall looked up at Seymour’s bony face, set and ugly, the blind eyes giving the illusion of an angry glare, the bitter mouth dragged down between the wings of the moustache. Randall tried to deny the terrible truth hammering at his raw nerves. “You mean you don’t know?” he breathed, staring at Seymour.
“What?” Seymour’s voice was a snarl. “What the hell are you maundering about?”
“You’re—just—like—Her,” said Randall very slowly, breathing hard between the words. He stood aghast, watching Seymour’s face tighten into a scornful, weirdly male replica of the face at the root of all fear. Seymour made a sneering sound and took another step towards John. The child shrieked so piteously that Randall knew this to be nothing momentary; it was cumulative, a long-wrought crisis. Randall felt him shaking all over, stamping his feet in fright and temper.
“Make him go ‘way,” he screamed, clinging to Randall’s leg.
Randall picked John up and stood for a moment holding the heavy child and looking round the room. Every corner, every shadow, every object, a hell’s crew of memories, and Seymour there in the midst of it, invoked the sources of terror and threat and heartbreak his whole life long.
“You heard me,” he said, almost whispering. He scarcely recognized his own voice. “You’re just like Her, I said. Seymour—” he tightened his arms round John; his face was grey and haunted. He stared wretchedly at his brother. “You’ve turned into Her—oh!” he gasped, burying his face in John’s neck. “Oh, how horrible. God help you.”
He turned away and carried John out of the room. Behind him he heard, “And God damn you!” Seymour lunged forward, there was a crash, Randall gave a brief look over his shoulder at the smashed dishes and the mess on the floor. He held John tightly and took him upstairs.
His hesitations were past. He had only one more decision to make now, and that was about his things. He had got John to sleep, holding him in his arms, and tucked him up at last in his crib. Then he lay down on his own bed, to get some rest and make up his mind. Should he go up and get all his things now and take them down and burn them in the boiler? Everything? That would take courage, he did not know exactly why, but it would be very hard to bring himself to do it. It would mean that the future, whatever form it might take beyond the impenetrable veil of this moment, might be much harder for him; he might feel lost, he might founder without his things. He could not carry them with him, he did not want to. He wanted them to stay hidden.
He went downstairs and telephoned to a locksmith whose shop he had often seen over in Twenty-first Street. Day and Night Service, said a sign across the window. Randall found the number in the book and told the man what he wanted. In a little while a workman arrived, and under Randall’s direction he installed strong tumbler locks on the little desk, the wardrobe where it was hidden, and the doors of both old nursery rooms on the fourth floor. After a moment’s hesitation Randall had him put a Yale lock also on the door of his mother’s room. Then he paid the man, put all the new keys in his pocket, and went upstairs and packed a large valise with John’s clothes and his own. Then he roused John, who was too sleepy to ask questions, and dressed him and put on his own best suit. He had already left the valise down in the front hall beside his hat and overcoat. When John was ready, still half asleep, Randall picked him up.
“Teddy,” said John drowsily. “Teddy come along.”
Randall put the bear in John’s arm, turned out the gas, and carried John quietly downstairs. It was half past one in the morning when they left the house.
CHAPTER 18
At first when the cart wheeled round the steep serpentines, with the driver trudging ahead leading the straining mule, John clung to Randall in amazement and fear. “Don’t fall over,” he cried, his eyes big and round. “Don’t let him fall over, Uncle Ran!”
“He won’t, John. He’s used to it, he does it all the time. Don’t be afraid.” He pointed down as they rumbled along, higher and always higher. “Look. Isn’t it beautiful?”
The air was cold, but not biting. Below them lay a spectacle of splendor, a triangular
sweep of brilliant sapphire water; spring-like green slopes; villages whose yellow and grey walls and deep red roofs were picked up like jewels by the morning sunlight. Beyond rose the mountains, proud and glistening in full winter dress, folded in ranges up and away into the bluest sky Randall had ever seen. “This is a beautiful place,” he said to John. “Remember, that’s what I promised you?”
John nodded solemnly. The driver bellowed, the mule took another turn, and they came round the next bend. Each time the view widened, dropping into grander perspective as they climbed, Randall felt more keenly the sensation of soaring into pure beauty. Once as they turned he made a loud exclamation of delight and the mule-driver looked back with a smile. “It is so beautiful!” said Randall shyly in Italian, and the man nodded as enthusiastically as if he had never heard this before.
“E’ molto bello!” echoed John proudly. For in the twelve days on the steamer he had done what the Italian stewardess had said he would do: begin instinctively to imitate the sounds he heard and put them to use. In the rough winter seas Randall had been helplessly seasick and Donata the stewardess had promptly adopted the child and taught him simple words and phrases. John had a wonderful time and landed at Genoa in possession of as many Italian words as he had English ones. He interchanged them without effort and he was far more at ease among the Italians than Randall, timidly consulting his pocket self-teacher. He was timid not so much about the language itself as about the purpose for which he was going to need it. Sometimes lying in his bunk, queasy enough from seasickness, he felt sicker still from doubt about the wisdom of what he had done. My God, he thought, was I out of my mind to go off like this with nothing but a couple of names in the back of my head, and no real idea of what I meant to do? What on earth am I going to prove? Then he told himself, as he had been doing for weeks past, not to try to anticipate. You cannot guess, he thought. You want to see them, you want to learn something, you want advice. Wait and see.
He looked at John, happy and interested beside him. The boy’s cheeks were apple-red in the pure winter air. His eyes, clear and widespaced, were sparkling; his brown curls peeped from the edges of his cap. His lips were parted over little new white teeth. He was sturdy and chunky in his warm clothes. He clapped his mittened hands as the mule swung out for another turn. He had lost his fear of the curves and sat as eager as Randall, watching everything.
There was a narrower road going downhill at the right, and the driver turned into it. The road descended a little way, very rough, jouncing them in the two-wheeled cart; then it widened to a small, bare piazza and the mule stopped. Randall sat looking round at the bleak houses and the humble church. Faces appeared at windows and went away again. Randall jumped down from the cart and held up his arms to John.
“This is San Bernardo di Bellagio?” he asked the driver slowly in Italian.
“Yes, Signore. You know where you want to go here?”
He could scarcely help but know, once he saw anybody to talk to. He remembered too vividly those then funny words: Everybody in San Bernardo is my parent. He preferred to manage without the help of the driver, a cheerful, mannerly peasant whose polite curiosity made him uncomfortable. He knew that a signor inglese arriving in midwinter with a small child, asking for the tiniest village in the Comune, would hardly be considered a tourist. He told the man he might be here an hour or two, and the man said, “Va bene, Signore, I will go home for dinner and come back afterwards and wait until the Signore is ready to return to Bellagio.”
“You live near here?”
“The next village,” said the man, pointing up the mountain.
He led the mule away and Randall stood in the middle of the piazza holding John by the hand and wondering how and where to begin. He looked at the houses forming three sides of the piazza, with the church the fourth side. In one corner there was a small shop with a dark doorway, through which an occasional woman came or went, carrying a straw bag or a basket. Each looked curiously at the man and the child, and then went her way. Randall was beginning to wonder whether he had better go and knock on some door and find somebody to talk to when John said, “Where are we, Uncle Ran?”
Randall looked down at him and smiled. “In a village called San Bernardo,” he said. “We came all the way from New York to find it. Now we’ll find someone to talk to here.”
He walked towards the tallest house, not knowing why he had chosen it, leading John by the hand. He was beginning to feel very uneasy, unsure of himself, worried about his scant Italian, anxious because, though there were few people about and those few had hardly spoken in his hearing, he had not understood a word that they had said. Mostly the village appeared deserted and he wondered whether the time of day had anything to do with that. He looked at his watch. It was half past ten in the morning. Well, he thought, I suppose the men are at work and the children are at school and the women are indoors doing their housework. Just then he heard clattering footsteps inside the entry of the tall house, and a woman came out on the doorstep carrying a heavy iron pot. She was small and spare, elderly, with iron-grey hair in a knot on top of her head, dressed in black, with her feet thickly woolclad and thrust into wooden clogs. She paused on the step and looked at Randall and the boy. Her eyes were deep-set in a worn brown face. Randall stood still, hoping for luck with his Italian; then he took a step towards her and said slowly, “Excuse me, I am looking for the Famiglia Gandolfi. Can you—?”
“Here there are many families Gandolfi.” She spoke as slowly as Randall had done and he understood her well.
“This one has a Zia Paola in it, Signora.”
She drew back a little, knitting her thick eyebrows. She looked from the man to the child and again at the man, with a half-cognizant, half-suspicious expression. He saw that she was weighing what to do. He had divined already who she was. She said, as if reluctantly, “They call me Zia Paola.”
Randall smiled timidly and put out his hand. She did not move for a moment. Then she put her iron pot down on the doorstep, slowly ran her right hand down the side of her black skirt, and laid it in Randall’s. It felt rough and hard. She did not say anything, but after the handshake she stood staring at the boy. Randall put his arm round John, drawing him forward towards the woman, and said, “I think you will know whose child this is, Signora. Is it not so?”
Her mouth was shut tight, her whole face stern and controlled. But she nodded slowly. Her eyes began to soften as they rested on John’s bright face and sturdy little body. She had apparently nothing to say and was far from knowing what to do. John smiled at her and said, “Is this the lady you were looking for, Uncle Ran?”
The woman’s eyes went uneasily over John’s head, across the piazza where Randall, though he could not see behind him, knew there must be women standing by the shop, watching this scene with natural curiosity. “Let us go into the house,” said Zia Paola. She picked up her iron pot and motioned them inside. She led them up two flights of dark and very cold stone steps; Randall carried John most of the way. She opened a door into a small room with a single window on the piazza. It was furnished with a rough square table and several hard wooden chairs, a home-made set of shelves which held crockery and kitchen utensils, and a low cot in one corner covered by a grey blanket. In another corner there was a small brick stove, merely a firebox with a round hole in the top. On the whitewashed plaster walls were several religious chromos and an illustrated calendar and a crucifix with a dry sprig of olive thrust behind it. The scrubbed board floor was bare. The woman went over and put some faggots into the stove and blew on them until they flamed up. “It is probably colder here than you are accustomed,” she said.
Randall stood in his overcoat, holding his hat in his hand, looking slowly round the bare, clean room. John surprised him by leaving his side and trotting over to the woman at the stove, to watch what she was doing. She turned from the fire and looked down at the boy with an expression which could not conceal that he charmed her. But when she looked at Randall her face wa
s different; remote, closed.
“Why have you come here?” she asked. She did not make the question sound rude as it might have done. Randall knew that she was feeling her way.
“I came to see you. To talk to you.” He paused and added, “But, as you see, I speak very little Italian.”
She did not answer at once. Then suddenly she shrugged. She said, “My son Domenico speaks English. In summer he works at the Gran’ Albergo. He will be able to explain. He comes home soon for dinner.”
“That is good.” Randall felt a little better. He took courage and said, “Signora—you are, indeed, Renata Tosi’s aunt?”
He had the impression that the woman would have avoided answering had that been possible. As it was, she stayed silent for a moment and her face was cold. Then she shrugged again, assenting to the self-evident. Randall knew that she was not pleased to hear him speak Renata’s name. She was embarrassed; so was he. But she kept looking with increasing interest and warmth at John. Presently she put out her hand and took the cap off his head and ran her rough fingers over his thick brown curls.
“It is a beautiful child,” she said, almost as if against her will. Then she looked hard at Randall and her level stare demanded to know once for all why he had come here. “Why did you ask for me?” she said. “Why not for the boy’s mother?”
“Renata?” Randall was surprised. “I did not come to find her.” He had no wish to give his reasons. “I know nothing about her since she went to South America. Is she not still there?”
The aunt did not answer. She sat down and lifted John to her lap. She began to take off his warm coat and leggings. “He will be too hot,” she said. “You will stay and eat dinner with us.”
Randall did not know what to say. He had not expected this, and he felt he ought to refuse. They might not have enough food on hand for two extra mouths; they were surely very poor. But if I act as if I were thinking this, he knew, she will be offended and that is the last thing I want. He looked at her face, bent over John; it was austere and patient, the forehead curiously unlined in contrast with the toll that years and hard work had visibly taken of her. She was making friends with John who appeared to be pleased.
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