Hilda and Pearl

by Alice Mattison

  She was lost, and she walked two blocks before she saw where she was. She had been going the wrong way. It was a long walk back to the office and she was exhausted, but now she knew what she was going to do there.

  When she reached the building she hurried up the stairs. There were a few lights on, but almost everyone had gone. That was good. If the place were altogether empty, it would be even better. Pearl went into her own cubicle, which had no door. She would just take the risk that someone might see her. She took off her coat and hung it up. Then she sat down at her desk. There was the letter that she had been typing. Even the second one was full of mistakes. The sentences seemed like the foolishness of a child. “I remain in hope of your pseedy reply,” she had written. Of course she had meant speedy. She had written the letter herself. Mr. Carmichael had told her what he wanted to say—it was to a supplier of buttons—and she had written it.

  Glancing at the letter, she pulled the hairpins out of her head with one hand—a practiced gesture, which she could perform in an instant. For the last few, she steadied the braid as usual so it wouldn’t pull the final hairpins out as it fell. Then, a handful of hairpins in her right hand, she let go with her left and the braid dropped heavily to her back. She opened her desk drawer. She started to put the hairpins into the tray where she kept paper clips, but then thought better of it and opened her hand over the wastebasket under her desk.

  In the drawer was a pair of old scissors with battered black handles. Pearl held the braid back, pulled to the side, with her left hand. With her right hand reaching up behind her, she began to cut. It was hard to do. The scissors were dull and the angle was wrong. It took a long time before she had cut even halfway across the braid. Then she held it with her right hand and tried to cut with her left, but she couldn’t manage the scissors left-handed. Finally she put them back in her right hand and tried to hurry, glancing up a few times. Once she thought she heard footsteps. At last it was done. The braid came away in her hand and she shuddered when she saw it lying on the desk on top of the letter. She reached her hand up and felt her bare neck and the rough ends of her hair. She looked around quickly. On the desk was a manila envelope used for interoffice mail. It had a red fastener and red lines across the front. It had gone to three people and their names were written on it. Someone had brought something in it to Pearl without writing her name on the envelope.

  She turned it over. On the other side it was blank. She put the braid in, and she had to stuff it to get it all in. When she tried to write on it, her fountain pen punctured the envelope. She had to pull the braid out again and see it once more, and that was the hardest part. Now she wrote Nathan’s name and address—his home address—on the envelope. Then she put on stamps from her desk. She stuffed the braid in again and closed the fastener and sealed the flap with tape. Then she put on her coat. Her hat would look terrible. She had a big square silk scarf, and she tied it over her head. She would have to walk a couple of blocks out of her way to find a mailbox big enough for a package. The one on the corner took only letters.

  She put the envelope under her arm and left her cubicle and started down the stairs. Just as she reached the staircase Mr. Glynnis stepped out of the supply room, looking startled. “I didn’t know you were still here, Pearl,” he said.

  “I’m just leaving,” she said.

  “Good night, Pearl.” He stood and watched her as she walked down the stairs, the envelope under one arm, her other hand holding her coat so she didn’t trip. Her head was sore. She’d pulled hard to make the hairs tight and easier to cut.

  “Good night, Mr. Glynnis,” she said.

  6

  IT WAS A SATURDAY MORNING. Nothing like what was going to happen had entered my head. I’m not the sort of woman who lives life beforehand, imagining it. After breakfast I put the baby down for a nap. She cried but then she fell asleep. I took a shower and started to get dressed. I was wearing my slip when I decided to trim my toenails. I sat on the bed, cutting my toenails with a nail scissors and holding the parings in my other hand.

  Nathan was in the living room. I heard him running the carpet sweeper with long slow strokes. Then he put it away and went out of the apartment. I knew he was going down for the mail. I was still cutting my toenails when I heard him coming back, and I knew something had happened. His footsteps were too quick and loud, and without thinking I looked over at the baby. She was in a bassinet in our bedroom. Maybe I looked at the baby to make sure Nathan’s footsteps hadn’t awakened her, not to make sure she was all right.

  I heard him let himself into the apartment, and then he ran past the bedroom doorway, holding the mail, and into the bathroom, and I heard him vomiting. I went running in my bare feet with toenail parings in my fist. Nathan was leaning over the toilet vomiting. There were letters on the floor—a couple of white envelopes and a big manila envelope. I put my hand on his shoulder and he shook it away. “I’m all right,” he managed to say.

  “What happened?” I said.

  I thought he must have seen something terrible when he went for the mail. I thought of an old woman who lived in the next apartment. But even if Nathan had found Mrs. Moskowitz lying dead in the hall, he would not just come inside and vomit.

  “Are you going to throw up any more?” I said.

  He shook his head. He was pale. He flushed the toilet and I said, “Go lie down,” but he sat down on the white tile floor. I dropped my toenail parings in the wastebasket and went for a washcloth. I wet it with warm water and wrung it out and started to wash Nathan’s face with it, but he took it and washed his own face. I left him for a moment to bring a rag to clean the toilet. When I came back, Nathan was still sitting on the floor. His back was against the tub and his head was down, with his hands over his face. “Do you feel faint?” I said.

  “I’m all right.”

  “What happened?” I still thought he’d seen something outside. “Is there something I ought to do?” I suppose I was thinking I might have to call the police or the super.

  Nathan gestured toward the little pile of letters on the floor. I thought he meant that some vomit had gotten onto them. It was smelly in the bathroom. I rinsed out the cloth and hung it on the towel rod. I looked at the mail but the letters were clean. I picked them up. There was something from the Board of Education, but Nathan hadn’t opened it yet, and there was an advertisement from a store that sold baby furniture. I’d been getting things in the mail since I had the baby. The manila envelope was soft and strange in my hand. It was open, and I looked into it and started. I thought it was a dead animal. But the color was familiar. In a way I knew everything right then.

  “I bedded the wench,” said Nathan. I didn’t know what he was talking about. I picked up the envelope and drew out what was in it, and it was a woman’s hair—Pearl’s hair, I realized. Her long, beautiful blond braid, cut off. For a second I thought it meant that Pearl was dead. I couldn’t imagine any other way for her hair to be in this envelope. I tried to think and think, so as to understand what Nathan had said—to remember it, a moment after he’d said it. I stroked the hair and was angry with him for throwing up at the sight of Pearl’s hair.

  “It’s Pearl’s, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Is she all right? For a moment I thought she was dead.”

  “She’s not dead. She cut it off because she’s angry with me.”

  I didn’t know Pearl knew Nathan well enough to be angry with him. “Why is she angry?” I said, and then I remembered what he’d said.

  I didn’t say anything for a minute. Then I said, “You took Pearl to bed?” I was in my brassiere and girdle and slip, barefoot, and I was cold. I realized that I’d been stroking my body as I spoke, stroking the smooth fabric of the slip. It had lace around the top, and I had always liked the color—a cream color, not white.

  I felt as if I were out in the cold air in my slip. For a moment it seemed that I’d feel better if I could only get Nathan off the floor and warm up. �
��Go sit in the living room,” I said, and went into the bedroom and hurriedly put on a skirt and blouse and stockings and shoes and then I added a heavy sweater and buttoned it up to my neck. I already had so much to do, taking care of my difficult baby. She would wake up any minute and I’d wasted her nap wiping vomit when I’d intended to run out to the store while Nathan watched her. Now it seemed I would never be at rest. What had they done, Nathan and Pearl—what had they done to give me more work?

  When I came out, Nathan was sitting on the edge of the couch. He looked up when I came in. Nathan had always looked dignified, but now he looked ashamed and foolish. And I didn’t know why he had talked that way: he bedded the wench. It was a way he talked when I first met him, with his friends at City College. I never liked it. They’d spend evenings listening to jazz on someone’s radio, and then later to symphonies, and he’d take me along. He and his friends would talk about books in that way, or talk about happenings in their lives as if they were in a book, and as if that made them unimportant. When one of his friends asked about my parents, he said, “Hilda is a motherless urchin.” I was embarrassed for Nathan. My mother had died years earlier, but the friend might think I was in mourning right then and that Nathan had insulted me. Yet the friend only said, “Ah, an orphan maiden.” And it was a terrible thing that my mother was dead. I’d cried for years about it, and worn myself out looking after my father and brother.

  I sat down on the chair opposite Nathan and said, “I want to know what happened.”

  “I was very stupid,” he said.

  “I see that.” But that felt pointless to say. “Don’t say that,” I said, which contradicted it, and Nathan looked up, confused, and then looked down again, as if he couldn’t understand anything that was happening, so it wasn’t surprising that he didn’t understand this particular thing.

  He said, “One night I was with Pearl and—and something came over me.”

  “What do you mean something came over you?” I said. “You’re not like that.”

  “I know. But this time—” He stopped.

  “You mean it had never entered your mind before and all of a sudden you were carried away with passion?” This seemed so silly I couldn’t believe it. “When were you even alone with her? Was this at that picnic?”

  They’d gone for a walk together at the picnic. I’d been grateful to Pearl for keeping him company when I was busy with his baby.

  “No, not then.”

  “So when was it?” He didn’t answer.

  “I don’t believe you did it,” I said.

  He looked up at me with dreadful eyes. When he spoke he sounded like someone choking, but he almost screamed. He said, “I did it.”

  I heard the baby crying. I hadn’t even started warming her bottle. After weeks of screaming baby, I’d finally learned to warm the bottle before she got up—to sense when she was going to wake up, or to keep an eye on the clock. I left him and went to pick up the baby.

  Racket was screaming and thrashing her arms and legs, and I picked her up and rocked her, trying to calm her. I tried to guide her arms and legs back in toward her body and to smooth the damp, wrinkled receiving blanket wrapped around her. She was soaked, I discovered when I felt under the blanket. I didn’t like to change her when she was hungry. If she wasn’t hungry she didn’t mind being changed, but would follow my face with her curious, dark, staring eyes. Still, the bottle wasn’t warm yet.

  “Warm up the bottle, will you?” I called to Nathan, hating to say it, because I knew that once I let him do something for Racket, I wouldn’t have a serious fight with him. Yet if I warmed the bottle myself, there would be extra screaming, and the only thing I simply couldn’t bear was more screaming.

  So I changed her, and it gave me a kind of distant pleasure to take off her damp clothes and soaked diaper, to pat her dry with the puffy cotton balls I kept on the changing table, and then to put a little powder on her skinny, thrusting legs and her bony backside. I put a fresh diaper on her, and fresh clothes, and wrapped her crisply in a clean blanket the way a nurse in the hospital had taught me: I laid Racket on a turned-down corner of the blanket and tucked the other corners tightly around her as if she were the filling in a bit of pastry.

  I carried Racket into the kitchen, where Nathan was standing at the stove watching the bottle, which he’d set in a pan of water. I tested the milk on my wrist and sat down right there to feed the baby, instead of going into the living room, where I’d be more comfortable, as I usually did. Nathan continued to look at the pan of water even after the flame had been turned off and the bottle taken out.

  “I wish I didn’t have to tell you,” he said.

  “You weren’t going to tell me?”

  “I didn’t want you to know the worst about me.”

  “Who should know if not me?” I said, not as nicely as the words themselves seem. I wasn’t telling him his wife could forgive him anything. I guess I was saying that houses, where people live with the people they live with, are where vomit and infidelity belong. Ugliness belongs at home and a home has ugliness. I didn’t know what my own ugliness was, but I knew I had some, and I didn’t want Nathan to suggest that I was too pure to know about his dirt.

  “Well, there’s not much to say,” he said.

  “I think there’s a great deal to say. I think you should sit down at this table and say it.” He turned around and sat down. “Pearl is your brother’s wife,” I said.

  “She is.”

  “How long—”

  “Oh, once, once only. Don’t think that, Hilda. I only did it once.”

  “But how long ago did you—”

  Nathan looked across the table out the window, though there was nothing to see because the apartment faced the courtyard. Still, he waited, as if he was watching something. Maybe he was watching a bird.

  “She’s very lovely,” he said in a low voice.

  “Well, yes.”

  Yet I was surprised. I had grown to like Pearl, but I thought she was mousy, even though she was tall. She was pretty, but always pulling back and blinking and apologizing. But when I said it, I discovered that I thought she was lovely, too. It seemed to me that Nathan and I were two ragged old people, wizened by too much knowledge—too much sense, maybe—while Pearl was young, the kind of person who would always be young and not sensible: someone we should protect and cherish, not push into trouble. It was almost as if I’d taken her to bed myself, the way it went through my mind. In another minute it was something else. I went back to being angry with Nathan—just now because he was taking himself so seriously. He was still going on about it. You could see that he liked thinking of himself in this new way, even though he was ashamed.

  “I suppose I hadn’t realized how much of an impression she made on me,” he was saying. “I don’t mean in a permanent, important way. But she was like a flower—and here I was up with the baby nights—and you—”

  “I’m not much like a flower these days,” I said. It was becoming clear to me that I wasn’t going to lose the weight I’d gained when I was pregnant.

  “I don’t mean that,” he said. “I mean you were so serious. You had to be. We both have to be. We’re a father and mother.”

  “And Pearl’s a child?”

  “She’s a girl. She thought I was handsome. I was foolish, Hilda, very foolish.”

  “Pearl said you were handsome?”

  He hesitated. “I can’t remember if she said it,” he said. “Maybe I just knew she thought it.”

  I put the bottle on the table and held Racket against my shoulder to burp her. I was still surprised, each time, that when I patted her, my hand covered her back. She belched loudly and Nathan smiled sadly.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, close to tears.

  I wiped the baby’s mouth where she’d spit up a little, and stood to carry her into the living room so I could put her into the playpen. I still didn’t know anything. He hadn’t told me how it had happened, or when. I wanted to know, eve
n though it seemed as if I shouldn’t want to know. I’d gone through all those weeks, not thinking anything like this was happening. I wanted to insert the information into my memory of the day when it happened.

  “So when was this?” I said, calling over my shoulder. He followed me.

  “A few weeks ago.” Finally he told me it happened the night he and Pearl went to a rally for the Spanish Loyalists, and of course I remembered that they had gone to the rally. I had wondered how they’d find enough to talk about for a whole evening, and figured they didn’t have to talk much—they could mostly listen to the speeches. I thought I recollected that I was asleep when Nathan came home that night. I realized that I’d never asked him about it—what the rally had been like, or how Pearl had behaved. I’d been surprised that she was interested in a rally at all.

  Finally we did sit down in the living room, facing each other, as if we were going to tell each other truths. I discovered that I too had a truth I could tell or not and it was that I liked the power I felt. Nathan had given me power by what he’d done, and I was shocked to realize that I was partly pleased that he had done it—while starting to feel very bad at the same time. But I wasn’t going to say that. “Why did she cut off her braid?” I said. Where was it—what had I done with it? I ran and brought it from the bathroom, in that ridiculous manila envelope. It was the kind of envelope with a little red paper disk and a red string that winds around it. I closed the fastener and sat down again with it on my lap. “Why did she cut it off?” I said.

  “Pearl’s pregnant,” said Nathan.

  “What?”

  “She’s pregnant. She thinks it’s my child.”

  I was so startled that I shoved the envelope off my lap. Then I picked it up. “Well, is it?”

  “Of course not.”

  “How do you know?” I said. This scared me. This scared me more than anything else that had happened. “How do you know it’s not?”

  “Why should it be?” he said. “It was just that one time. She’s a married woman. Surely she and Mike—”