by M. E. Kerr
It was APE, calling for an unprecedented emergency assembly, immediately!
Sixteen
THE PAINTING OF MARY, Queen of Scots, in her death cell had been donated to Charles School by The Alumnae Association. The artist was a member of the class of 1900. The painting was therefore “priceless,” although it was insured for a thousand dollars.
Before APE’s investigation of Miss Blue’s “gift” was concluded, nearly everyone at the school, including Herbert, had been grilled in her office.
When it was Agnes’ turn, APE placed a pad of yellow-lined paper between them, tore off the top sheet and scratched across it, “Did Carolyn Cardmaker have anything to do with this?”
Agnes read the message, thought a moment, then picked up the pen in front of her and wrote back, “What?”
APE began rubbing her diamond and moaning. “Agnes,” APE wrote across another piece of paper, “I am sick in bed with a doctor at the change that has come over you, at the impudence, disrespect, and chicanery!”
There was no point in punishing her; all privileges had been suspended, including those extended to the Extra Lucky Asses. Until the guilty were unmasked, the innocent would suffer.
A pall hung over the school that even the approach of Christmas vacation couldn’t lift. Everyone was testy and trigger-tempered, many of us suffering from sugar insufficiency since The Sweet Shoppe was closed as well.
When it was announced that the annual Christmas party was to be canceled, Cardmaker told us she was going to confess.
“Let me take the rap for the whole thing,” she said. “Why should all of us pay? It was my idea anyway.”
Sue Crockett said that it was very brave of Cardmaker and gave her a hug of relief.
Agnes and I filed in after her when she went to APE’s office to turn herself in. About ten minutes later, Sue appeared, too.
When APE became coherent, it was decided that the family of each girl who was responsible would immediately wire the school two hundred and fifty dollars, which would be kept in escrow until the painting was recovered. (Miss Blue had left no forwarding address, but had announced she would write when she was settled.)
Cardmaker insisted she intended to “resign permanently” from Charles School, and that there was no point in approaching her father for any two hundred and fifty dollars! Cardmaker began loudly proclaiming her atheism, at the same time noisily questioning APE about what kind of a religious school was it that believed communication with Jesus Christ was a sign of mental instability?
On December 19th, a few days before the beginning of Christmas vacation, Cardmaker was expelled. She was made to leave that day. Her presence was considered a poisoning influence on the student body.
Cute and I helped her carry down her bags. She was wearing that same flimsy corduroy jacket over a nylon dress, even though it was in the twenties out.
“What are you crying for, Cute?” she said. “Isn’t a good Baptist glad to see an atheist getting her comeuppance?”
Cute said, “When you knock the nose, the eye hurts.”
Cardmaker hugged her hard, and that made me start crying.
“If you go to Auburn for Christmas, come see me in Union,” she said to me. “Promise?”
Near dusk, she was hustled out the side entrance just below Little Dorrit. Something like the sound of a trapped coyote dying came from above. It was Agnes waving and wailing, and for the first time Cardmaker’s face gave, too, and the tears streamed down her cheeks as she followed Herbert to the taxi.
Seventeen
I ARRIVED AT PENN Station on the 21st of December around three in the afternoon. The bus I had to catch for Newark, airport didn’t leave until eight that night. My father had advised me to walk directly into the Statler Hilton, and to pass the time in the lobby, in view of the registration desk. I could sit in one of the comfortable chairs and read, or do some of the homework I wouldn’t want to do after I arrived at Grandma Brown’s in Auburn.
Instead, I took a taxi down to 58 West 9th Street.
I kept rereading the list of names under the bells in the entrance. Finally I realized that
Deacon/Brown
was one person: Ruth Deacon Brown, my mother. I had almost forgotten her maiden name, since she had never used it after she married my father. She was always Ruth Karen Brown.
I rang the bell and waited nervously for an answering buzzer to admit me inside the apartment building. There was no response. I tried again, then tried the door, then paced around anxiously trying to decide what I’d do next.
I pressed the Superintendent’s bell, and the buzzer rang instantly.
Once I was inside, a thin young man smoking a pipe appeared in the doorway of a ground-floor apartment.
“I’m Ruth Deacon Brown’s daughter,” I said.
“What do you want, a medal for that?”
“I just want to wait in her apartment, if that’s possible.”
“I don’t know no Ruth Brown.”
“Ruth Deacon?”
“Miss Deacon? Yeah, but she ain’t got no daughter your age. She ain’t got no daughter, period, that I know about.”
“Why would I lie?”
“Why do pigs whistle, miss? Don’t waste my time. Miss Deacon’s at work.”
“Where?”
“You’re her daughter but you don’t know where she works? Cute.”
“I am her daughter,” I said.
“I’m her nephew, miss; I’m her great-grandpa. But I don’t go inside her apartment when she ain’t home.”
“Can I wait here in the lobby?”
“Free country.” He ducked back inside his apartment and shut the door.
There were no chairs in the lobby. It wasn’t a very pretty lobby, just one table with some mail on it, and a chain attached to the table leg and fixed to the wall, so no one could drag the table away.
I stood around for about three quarters of an hour before the superintendent poked his head out again. He shoved a straight-backed wooden kitchen chair out to me and said I could take a load off my feet.
Nearly two hours later I saw my mother step inside the lobby.
I had forgotten how much I looked like her, how familiar she was to me.
She looked at me as though she had just been punched hard and was trying to stay on her feet; and although her mouth opened, for a moment she couldn’t seem to make a sound.
I said, “Hello.”
“Flan! Flan!” She walked over to me and hugged me, and even though I was fighting to keep from crying, I somehow couldn’t hug her back, and I wanted to escape her embrace. She sensed it and backed off.
“Have you been waiting long, Flan?”
“A little over two hours.”
She punched the elevator button and the door opened. We went inside.
“Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?”
“I didn’t know myself.”
“Are you on Christmas vacation?”
“I’m on my way to Grandma Brown’s.”
“I’m so glad you came, Flan! I was working.”
“Where?”
“I work over at New York University.”
“Oh,” I said. “Where Bobby is.”
“He teaches there. I work there and attend classes.”
We got off the elevator on the eleventh floor.
Her apartment was very small: one long, narrow room, with a tiny kitchenette. The furniture was shabby, and there were heavy drapes across the window, which made the atmosphere kind of seedy and dark.
She seemed really pleased, though, and she said, “It’s a real steal. Two hundred and fifty a month!”
I tried to manage something like. “swell,” but it came out, “Well—”
She took my coat and while she was hanging it up she said, “I can walk to work. Isn’t that fantastic? No crowded subways or buses for me!”
I didn’t say anything. She had wall-to-wall carpeting but there were holes in it, and it was practically wor
n through at one point near the door.
“There are some wonderful inexpensive little restaurants nearby, and the Village is very lively. Fun.”
“Great,” I said.
“There’s a marvelous Gothic-type old library practically across the street. The New School is close by. We’ve got trees and flower boxes, did you notice how pretty the street is? And I’m told that last summer some people even planted corn a few doors down.”
I said, “Where does he live?”
“Who’s he?”
“Bobby.”
“Bobby lives on Washington Square Park.”
“How come?”
“How come what?”
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I just wondered why he doesn’t live … closer.”
“Washington Square Park isn’t far.”
“I mean much closer to you, or with you, or something.”
“Oh, that,” she said. “That wasn’t much, Flan.”
“It wasn’t much?”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Oh,” I said. “I thought it was. I mean, it broke up our home, I mean, maybe it wasn’t much, but—”
“It didn’t break up our home, Flan.”
“That’s news to me. I think it’s news to Dad, too.”
“Sit down, Flan.”
“I don’t have to be sitting down all the time, do I?”
“No,” she said, sitting down herself, lighting a cigarette. “I just thought you might like to be comfortable.”
“I’ve been sitting down in the lobby for hours!”
“Flan, you didn’t let me know you were coming. I have a job.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “I did a lot of thinking while I was waiting.”
“About what, Flan?”
“Personal stuff,” I said. “Stuff that involves my personal life!”
“All right,” she said. “I won’t pry.”
“It isn’t that you’re prying. It’s just that I’m into a lot of things you don’t know anything about.”
“I wanted to write you. Your father said you didn’t want to hear from me.”
“If Bobby Santanni isn’t important, what are you doing in New York?”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t important. I said it wasn’t, whatever we had wasn’t. He’s still a dear friend.”
“I don’t give a damn about Bobby Santanni!” I said. “I didn’t come here to talk about Bobby Santanni!”
“Flan, I left your father because I want to be someone in my own right.”
“And because you hated what he forced you to do?”
“Flan, what are you talking about?”
“The television show. The stuff that James Tripp said about you and Dad.”
“Your father never forced me to do anything.”
“It sounded like you had all these orgies or something.”
“There were no orgies, I promise you.”
“I don’t know what to think about anything anymore,” I said. “If you wanted to be someone in your own right, why didn’t you think of that before you had me?”
“I wasn’t adult enough yet.”
“You were over 21.”
“Age has nothing to do with it. I might as well have been thirteen years old when I had you.”
“But you had me!” I said. “I arrived. I’m here. You should have thought of all this other stuff before.”
“Flan, I have news for you,” said my mother, grinding out her cigarette in the ashtray. “I didn’t give up my right to individuality once I had you.”
I thought about it. I shrugged. “I don’t know.” I walked across and sat down on the couch opposite her.
“Flan?”
“What?”
“You’re going to meet a very old person one day. And when you do, you’re going to have only her to answer to, and only her to be responsible to, and only her to look back with and decide what it was all about with…and that old person is yourself. I hope you’ll be prepared for her.”
“That’s hairy,” I said. “Hairy and heavy.”
“But it’s true.”
“You’ll probably send her to bed with a heart attack looking back on your thing with Bobby and God knows what else that went on right under our roof.”
“Your father is an experimenter, Flan.”
“How do I explain that? People see a show like Controversy; how do I explain what they heard, by saying my father is an experimenter?”
“You don’t explain it,” she said.
“I sure don’t! Not even to myself!”
“He’s doing what he believes in. Now I’m doing what I believe in. What about you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not an atheist. I was French-kissed this fall and I wanted to go home and boil my mouth.”
My mother smiled. “What else?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, that’s a start. You’re not an atheist and so far you don’t take to French kissing…. What about this asthma that began last summer?”
“I have a single room because of it. It hasn’t been bad, just two big attacks. But I had to room on Little Dorrit because of it, and Little Dorrit is where Number Fours room. That’s how I met Agnes!”
“Who’s she?”
Well, I told her everything, all about life at Charles School, ending with Dad’s wiring the two hundred and fifty with the message “There’d better be a good explanation for this!”
There was a lot to tell her, too, which astonished me because I’d only been at Charles for three months. But there was a whole little world to tell about, and it was like any world, with things that were hilarious and sad and crazy and unbelievable.
We were really laughing, and when my mother suddenly cried out that it was seven past seven, and I hadn’t eaten, and I had to be at the East Side air terminal by eight, I couldn’t believe the time had passed so fast. But something else: I couldn’t believe all that I had to tell, all that I’d seen and heard and been a part of, and for the first time in my life, I’d been and seen and heard on my own. Do you see what I mean?
I think my mother did.
She rode all the way to Newark with me on the bus. Before I boarded the plane, she put out her hand. “You’re still my little girl,” she said, “but you’re very much your own girl now, too, aren’t you?”
I hugged her good-bye.
It’s always snowing in Upstate New York near Christmas, and that night was no exception. The plane landed in Syracuse, and through a blinding snowstorm with the wind cutting across the open spaces, I could see my father standing by the gate waiting with my grandmother.
I had the loneliest feeling in the world then: that feeling that just when everything was really working out for you, you remembered someone things were really bad for, and your insides went numb.
“Merry Christmas!” my father shouted.
“Merry Christmas!” my grandmother shouted.
I whispered at the storm, “Miss Blue, are you okay?”
I knew the answer was no.
Eighteen
CHRISTMAS AT GRANDMA BROWN’S was okay. I saw Carol MacLean and some of my old friends. Carol repeated what she’d written to me about my mother, that in her opinion my mother was supercourageous to run off with a younger man. I didn’t bother straightening her out on the subject because I don’t think Carol would understand that my mother didn’t run off with anyone. She just wanted out.
If my father couldn’t understand it, or even believe it, why should Carol?
“I certainly hope Bobby didn’t ditch her,” said my father when I told him she wasn’t living with Bobby. She wasn’t even interested in him that way, anymore.
“I don’t think he did. I think what she told me is the truth. She wants to have her own life,” I said.
“Well, what the hell did she have all these years if it wasn’t her own life?”
“Your life?” I suggested.
He pretended not to hear. He said, “She’s probably a lot more involved with Santanni than she let on to you.”
I think my father had to believe that for his ego’s sake. When you think about it, it’s funny, isn’t it? He would rather believe that his wife left him for another man than believe that she just wanted another way of life, independent of his.
My grandmother’s comment was, “Many women can’t resist Italian men. I’ve seen it in the movies.” (My grandmother always pronounced Italian “eyetalian.”)
My father sulked a lot over the holidays, not just because of what I’d told him about my mother, but also because once he heard the whole story of Miss Blue’s “gift,” he gave up all hope of ever seeing the two hundred and fifty dollars again.
“That painting’s probably in a New York City hock shop right now!” he grumbled.
“I don’t know where it is, but I know she wouldn’t hock it.”
“I’m not saying your Miss Blue would hock it. I’m saying the fellow who got it off her would!”
“Don’t,” I said.
New Year’s Eve afternoon, I arrived in Union, to spend the evening and following day with Cardmaker. Then I would return to Charles School.
Cardmaker seemed to be sulking, too.
“Isn’t there some way your father could get you back in school?” I said.
“I don’t want to go back there. I don’t have the clothes for that place. I barely get by in a hole like Union, never mind competing with that bunch.”
“Is your father going to be transferred?”
“That’s what we hear. We don’t know where.”
“It’s a lousy Christmas for you,” I said.
“Oh, I can take anything,” Cardmaker said, “or almost anything. I can take just about anything.”
“Except what?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“You don’t want to talk about it?”
“It’s nothing. It’s just my father. He’s trying to outsmart me,” she complained.
At that point Mrs. Cardmaker announced that dinner was on the table, and four little Cardmakers rushed down the stairs, followed by Cardmaker’s father and Cardmaker and me.
We were all wearing heavy sweaters because the wind came right through the rickety walls in the dining room. Before anyone picked up a fork, Reverend Cardmaker said, “Atheists are not required to bow their heads during grace.”