Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  On the way back my mother enumerated the varieties of filth she had brought to light. She planned her schedule for the next night’s work. With industry she believed she could finish all the chairs in less than a month. She found me quiet and suspected that I did not care. Very well, I needn’t go back. She would go alone if I preferred to stay at home idling with that little black beast of a boy.

  Knowing perfectly well how angry she would be if I did not mollify her, I still could not bring myself to speak. For after my fretting in Miss Pride’s eviscerated room and after I had become disgusted with the explorations of my hairpin, I had concluded that my predominant feeling towards my mother was boredom. I was surprised because always before I had thought it was a mixture of rebelliousness and loyalty. I was suddenly impervious to her and did not care if she burst into tears and cried for days. I even smiled smugly in my brutal silence.

  The pitch of her voice never changed, but its volume increased so that halfway between the Hotel and the Hendersons’ house, she was howling abuses, not at me, for as always her madness showed its method, but at my father whose bad treatment had made me lazy, dull-witted, completely insensitive to important things. She railed to the wind for I steadfastly held my tongue. I was closer to my father because her racket had brought back those nights when she had quarreled with him. If I had broken my silence, it would have been to imitate his laugh, provoked by the devil that had taken up permanent residence in her and, anxious for a wider acquaintance, sought admission also to me.

  From a little rise, we could see the Christmas tree alight in the village square, a bright triangular scar in the darkened town, and to me, a mockery of that other one, that charming, dressed-up fir whose needles’ fragrance lingered still in my memory and seemed even to cling to my mother’s hair as she spluttered beside me. She, too, saw the tree and stopped talking, ending a sentence with a smile. She touched my arm. “Now isn’t that pretty?” she said. “It would make a nice Kodak picture.”

  “I was thinking I would get Ivan a Christmas tree, Mamma,” I said. “Do you remember the one in the Sunday School rooms a long time ago?”

  “That must have been when Hermann Marburg was still here. He used to pinch your little toes and I would tell him what a terrible thing it was to do but he would never stop.”

  My anger flared forth. “You mean you pinch Ivan’s toes!” I cried.

  “Sonie, you stop it. I don’t know what’s come over you. Did you ever see me pinch him?”

  “Yes! No, oh, I don’t know and I don’t care!” I took her firmly by the elbow. “Look here, you’ve got to stop being mean to poor little Ivan. Do you hear?”

  She did not answer but tried to wrest herself away and looked at me with widened, terrified eyes. “Damn you!” I cried. Because I had never cursed her before and the sensation was intoxicating, I repeated it twice until she, stricken speechless, loosed from my grasp, hurried on ahead of me. On the instant I saw her disappear from view I felt released from my responsibility to her and it occurred to me that if she were walking out of my range of vision forever, I would not have the slightest remorse.

  Yet my emancipation vanished when I had reached the Henderson house. Ivan, being part and parcel of my duty towards her, required my care, and while it was too late to reform her, he was not yet damned. I must continue as before. Sarah Henderson opened the door for me. In her face, calm had been replaced by solemnity and the gesture she made of extending her hand and laying it upon mine, so gently I knew she meant me to be quiet, made me sense that disaster had befallen someone.

  We entered and I saw my brother asleep on the leather sofa. At the first sight of him, I thought I had been mistaken at the door and Sarah had only intended me not to disturb his sleep. But then I saw the signature of agony in the blotches of red on his white cheeks and the blood on his lips, the saliva that bubbled up with each deep, sighing breath. The pose of his body was not like a child’s but like an adult person’s, drugged or unconscious. Simultaneously, I heard the voice of my heart consenting to the appeal of his collapsed flesh, and heard Mrs. Henderson telling me that he had been “seized” while he was playing. He had been in a temper that I was so slow in coming and had flung himself to the floor and kicked his heels, had been so convulsed in his rage that he was doubled up and frothing at the mouth and muttering all manner of strange things. Finally Mr. Henderson had gone for Dr. Galbraith and the doctor had said the child was epileptic.

  “Will it happen again?” I asked Mrs. Henderson.

  “Yes! Yes!” cried Sarah, beside herself, unmindful of her manners and of the charity in which she had been schooled by her mother. “You must take him away and never bring him here again! It’s too awful!” And she ran from the room weeping. I was unnerved by the change in her and knew that what she had seen must truly have been “too awful” if it had disrupted her serenity.

  Mrs. Henderson and I faced each other over the sleeping child. “If he’s not excited, he won’t have the fits. It’s temper brings them on. Don’t you mind Sarah.”

  Mr. Henderson, a small, sandy man, usually as easy-going as his wife, shifted his chair beside the fireplace and said, “Well, I mind Sarah and I mind my other children, and God save you, Sonie, but you mustn’t let us see this again.”

  “Hush, Ross,” said his wife. “Pity the poor girl and boy.”

  “I do! I do! Lord knows I do, but I’ll do nothing more than that.”

  He pronounced the ultimatum without rancor, but I knew he would never retract it. He kicked the hearth and commenced to pare an apple. A curl of red skin coiled into the coal scuttle and at last the globe of fruit was naked and white. He quartered it, leaned back, and began to eat, surveying his domain but never once permitting my brother and me to enter his ken. I stared at him with envy. There was a look of satisfaction in his stark, rusty face as though he were in command of his squads once again after an undisciplined excursion. His house, with its long-waisted, uncomfortable chairs, and the sturdy tables, more hewn than built, and the useful gimcracks—the basket for firewood, the cast-iron hearth accessories, a dun-colored cushion or two, a braided rug—the house and his sleeping children were like a standing army at its post, not hostile but prepared for hostilities, on guard at all times against intrusion. At a distance he might pity the enemy but he would fight to the death if they tried to impose their outlandish ways on his world.

  He finished the apple and spat into the dying fire. “Well, tomorrow’s another day,” he said, and as though he shut a book, he closed his face for the night, locking in its changes of expression and its few words. Presently he left the room.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Mrs. Henderson. I could think of nothing else.

  She put her large arms about me. “There,” she said. “You don’t pay any attention. You pray, child.”

  4

  For five successive nights my mother went alone to the Hotel and each time stayed past midnight. She did not know until the sixth day what had happened at the Hendersons’, for Mr. Henderson and I had carried Ivan home after Mamma was asleep and in the morning, except for a clot of blood on his lip, he appeared normal. But on the sixth day, Sarah Henderson came to bring some bread to us while I was at school. Probably still under the influence of her terror and knowing too little of my mother’s aversion to Ivan, she told the whole story and heightened some of the details. She was fascinated in spite of herself and was drawn to us with a morbid curiosity. If we met on the street, she paled and would have turned into the nearest shop to avoid me had she not longed to know the answer to the question she asked me each time, “Has he had another one yet?” Her myopic eyes behind rimless spectacles registered her disappointment when I told her no.

  By evening of the day on which my mother first heard of Ivan’s affliction, she was convinced that she had seen the fit and she described it to me in such accurate detail that I was half convinced myself. She told me how his f
ace had turned purple and his eyes had started from his head and his voice had sounded strangled. There was a frightening eagerness in her face as she talked and when Ivan came in from the bedroom, she stretched out her arms to him and said, “Come, sweet baby boy, come, darling, come kiss your mother.” Ivan stuck out his tongue and Mamma laughed as if nothing had ever pleased her half so much.

  Later that evening I was studying my lessons and she was at work on a stamped bureau runner I had brought her from town in the hope that she would give up her sprees in the Hotel lobby. Ivan was quietly playing on the floor with a toy truck Mrs. Henderson had sent. Absorbed, I was not watching them, though now and again I was aware of them, for I would come to a word in Macbeth which I was obliged to look up in the glossary. The interruption caused my mind to slip back into the ordinary world and I looked up, taking in my surroundings with detachment. They constituted, with their other occupants, a prison escapable only through some such occupation as I was just now engaged in. My dog-eared book, bound in maroon cloth, bandaged with adhesive tape where it had been pulled apart by careless hands, was called Literature and Life. I had never fathomed the title.

  It may have been a sound or it may have been intuition that made me turn and see my two companions hypnotically attached, their gazes joined, their large eyes directly focused and mirrored as though the reflection could burn through to the brain and destroy it, gazes of equal strength, age meaning nothing. Hatred and desperation freighted all the black eyes. But age gained. As I watched, Ivan screamed, throwing back his head which languished on its stem while his live mouth travailed in calling my name, “Sonie! Sonie!” He was purple when I reached him and gripped by a vise I could not pry apart. His teeth were clenched and his fists were clenched and his head, which the second before had been horribly agitated, was turned to one side as though fixed there forever. But before I had really taken in this petrifaction, he was violently released from it and his head, his arms, his eyelids, his legs twitched, and over his busy lips poured blood-stained foam such as I had seen drool from the jaws of the bull-dog that had killed my kitten.

  “The beast!” shrieked my mother, and in her face and body, a sympathetic disquiet began, aping his, until she rose from her chair and went to the window where she stood sobbing with her forehead pressed against the glass.

  He was a beast, the very repository of all bestiality, composed of filth and evil, as though his interior life, in the cavern of that rocking skull, were one of utter nastiness. In a moment, he passed into the third phase of the fit, a coma so profound that I might have thought him dead if I had not seen him like this at the Hendersons’. I carried him to the bedroom and put him on the army cot I had bought for him the year before. While I bathed his face, I heard the sobbing of my mother in the other room, like the sad cries of certain birds or the collision of breakers with the sand. I sat down on the floor beside the little boy, feeling no longer any disgust now that he was relaxed. In a little while my mother came in, bringing another lamp. She had unpinned her hair which rippled to her waist and glowed in the light and upon her face there was, as I saw so often, the beauty of a saint which flowers through the perpetual renewal of mercy.

  “My God! What shall we do, Sonia?”

  “He’ll be all right in the morning,” I said.

  “Will he do it again?”

  “He won’t unless . . .” I was on the point of saying, “unless you scare him again,” but I changed the syntax to the passive voice, “unless he’s scared.”

  “But he wasn’t scared tonight. How could he have been scared?” Her direct, innocent gaze did not prevent me from hearing the guile in her voice.

  The next morning, before school, I took Ivan out to the shop on the pretext of giving him a present and I told him that if Mamma ever frightened him, he must run out of the house and either bolt himself into the shop or else walk down the beach and wait for me to come home from school. But he must not go to the Hendersons’.

  “She don’t scare me,” he said sullenly. “You scare me, you lousy old girl,” and he gave me a kick on the shin that made me wish to thrash him.

  My warnings for a long time were useless. He remembered nothing of what had happened before the fit, but only that he fell asleep and awoke, inexplicably sick at the stomach, his lips and tongue sorely bitten. Gradually he began to attach these feelings to me, for I was always the first thing he saw when he came out of his coma, and he developed such a repugnance to me that when he saw me coming home in the afternoon, he hid under the bed, and it was only my gift of candy or a new lead pencil that induced him to come out. Again and again, I begged him to leave my mother when he felt nervous, and at last, after a particularly severe attack when he had emerged from the coma only to repeat the frightful process two or three times, he told me that he remembered something Mamma had done: she had been looking at him although he had his back turned to her, and when he faced her, he was afraid, he did not know why.

  Then, instead of me, he began to avoid her, and sometimes he followed me all the way to the Brunsons’ like a little dog and sat in the pantry without moving or making a sound until I was ready to go home. Nearly every afternoon I met him on the road, his overcoat buttoned up wrong, his pilot’s helmet pulled down so far over his face that he could barely see where he was going. He refused to go to the shop, for he said Mamma came after him and looked in the windows and he could not look away when her eyes were on him.

  5

  On a Friday afternoon, early in January, a snowstorm came up. The snow fell in swift spirals, floating like gulls into the tree branches in the school-yard. The soft, circling petals smoothed away the harsh outlines of buildings and bony trees and transformed the light in the study hall. By the time school was out, the snow was several inches deep and was still falling. Mrs. Brunson was having a dinner party and had asked that I come to work immediately instead of going home as I usually did to prepare supper for my mother and Ivan. I enjoyed the evenings when the Brunsons entertained: the overheated house, immaculately clean, was redolent with the perfume of cut flowers delivered that morning from Boston, with the smell of roasting beef or turkey, of whiskey, and of cigars. Latterly, much of the management of the dinner parties had fallen to my lot since Maudie had begun to drink more and more and at the same time had lost her ability to hold her liquor. As a consequence, she often forgot essential dishes on the menu and ruined others.

  The guests lingered a long time over their drinks. When the Brunsons drank, it was neither in the manner of my father and mother who had been maudlin or gay by turns, nor in the manner of Miss Pride whose indulgence at specified hours was less for pleasure than for the observation of custom. With them, it was a ritual which employed its own argot and its own paraphernalia. They drank whiskey high-balls made with ginger-ale, out of glasses decorated on the outside by a horse’s head which, on the inside, underwent a sly metamorphosis into a naked woman. At the end of the third drink, Dr. Brunson would say, “Well, I guess this one can’t be told in mixed company. No, no, I can’t do it.” But he was quickly persuaded that the ladies were not so easily embarrassed, that they themselves could tell much worse, and he would tell a story, usually with a medical background. I, passing the canapés, could not understand it, but I could not have been more shocked, for the laughter that exploded at its conclusion was as brazen and knowing as the look on the face of a small boy who has just chalked an obscene expletive on the sidewalk.

  Tonight, in addition to drinks beforehand, the guests were served wine at dinner and they dallied at the table an unconscionable time. Maudie had complained early in the evening, “Somebody keeps spiking that grape juice I have to drink to keep my strength up. Why, Momma dear, that there’s so all-fired potent, like the feller says, you could float a sledge-hammer on top of it,” and she had staggered out of the house the moment the dessert was served. It was after ten o’clock when I got home, and I was surprised to see the light still bur
ning in the kitchen, but more surprised, when I entered, to find my mother idle for the first time since she had taken up fancy-work. She looked up, smiling.

  “What kind of soup did they have, darling?”

  “Chicken,” I said, warming my hands at the stove. “It’s cold, Mamma. You’ve let the fire go nearly out.”

  “It snowed hard, didn’t it? A big deep snow, wasn’t it? And did they have a salad?”

  “Yes, and chocolate soufflé and two kinds of wine.”

  “Ah,” said my mother. “Ah, how nice! But tell me, Sonia, sweetheart, how deep is the snow?”

  “It’s terribly deep. In some places it was up to my knees and there’s a terrible wind.”

  “It’s funny that you came home alone.”

  “Why? Did you expect someone?”

  “Oh, no.”

  I was taking off my galoshes when she said, “Ivan went to meet you. It was snowing, but he didn’t care about that. He only thought about seeing his precious Sonie.”

  “When did he go?” I cried.

  “Oh, a long time ago. Just after the storm began. Here, have a little tea. You look tired.”

  “Which way did he go?” Though I knew I must find him at once, I could not leave for my amazement at the way she sat there, offering me a cup of tea. What would she be able to say to herself if I found him dead? And I knew, without believing it, that if I did, she would not feel the least necessity of making excuses to anyone, certainly not to herself.

  She laughed uncertainly. “I don’t know which way he went, but he went fast.” And then, reaching out her hand to me she whispered desperately, “Let him go, for God’s sake, Sonia, let him go!”