Hilda and Pearl

by Alice Mattison

  Now I chatted with customers and directed people who were lost. I could even direct people to the baby clothes department. It was good that there were still babies. Maybe someday I’d have another one. The first time someone asked me the way to baby clothes—not a mother or a grandmother but a man in a fedora—I watched myself to see if the question would break me, but I was all right.

  I liked giving directions. I wanted to help people even more, and during the slow times, when I was supposed to look busy, rearranging and straightening the stock, I planned what I’d do if someone took sick and collapsed near my counter, how I’d rush around to catch her under the arms and lower her carefully to the floor. I didn’t make friends, or at least, I didn’t go beyond a certain point with the friends I did make. I liked my work friends. Sometimes I worked side by side with a woman for a long time and never learned her first name. I was Mrs. Levenson and she was Miss Bradley or whatever. I had friends with whom I’d never sat down, whom I’d never seen seated. We would talk, of course, when things were slow, but often about the store. The other women told me about the departments where they had worked, the advantages and drawbacks of each one.

  This may seem cold but it was not cold. With each month that passed I felt stronger. Sometimes I let myself remember good times I’d had with Racket, rocking her or playing with her. When she was alive I hadn’t thought of myself as a good mother, but now I could see that I’d been a good mother. I’d loved her. I never learned how to make her stop crying, but I was on her side. I got angry when she cried, but not at her—angry at the setup that made us strangers. I wondered what she would have been like if she’d lived. She had just been starting to speak a few words, but of course they didn’t really sound like someone talking.

  Nathan and I didn’t talk about her. Losing her had brought him closer to Pearl and Mike, though—or at least closer to Simon. He was stiff and formal with Pearl, stiff and subdued with Mike, and I thought he was afraid, after Stalin had signed the pact with Hitler, that Mike’s main subject from then on was going to be “I told you so.” And of course, being Mike, he couldn’t help but give us some of that. “I don’t suppose you’re surprised?” he said.

  “Yes, I’m surprised, Michael,” said Nathan.

  “I could have told you.”

  “You could have told me Stalin was going to sign an agreement with the Nazis? If Stalin is on the side of the Nazis, why did he go to all that trouble in Spain?”

  “Beats me,” said Mike. “I never thought any of those guys had any brains.”

  “Some people think it’s a trick.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m not a tricky person, Michael.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  This was in the lobby of the hospital, of all places. Mrs. Levenson was in the hospital. She’d always had a bad heart, and now it was worse. We had met at her bedside. Now we were leaving together.

  “So where’s Simon?” Nathan said, changing the subject. He needed Simon. I’d been afraid Simon would be too much of a reminder, but Simon was everybody’s comfort. He was a quiet, bright little boy. He’d run to Nathan and beg to be picked up and swung in the air. Nathan didn’t swing too hard or too high and that was what Simon liked.

  “He won’t let me do it,” Mike had said, the first time Nathan had played this way with Simon. “He cries when I do it.”

  “You’re rough with him,” said Pearl. “It scares him.”

  “Who’s rough? I’m not rough.”

  Now Pearl offered us a ride home with them. We still didn’t have a car. She suggested that we stop at their house to see Simon. He’d been left with a neighbor. All the way home, we talked about the coming war. We were all watching it come, those months. I couldn’t remember ever thinking so much about faraway places, even though I was married to Nathan and we’d always talked about politics and current events. Now it was hard to remember that anything else mattered except Hitler being handed Czechoslovakia and marching into Poland. But at least it gave the four of us something to talk about that didn’t make anybody run and hide. Pearl was the most upset, to my surprise, the most insistent that Roosevelt should bring our country into it.

  “What if there’s a draft?” I said. “What if Mike has to go?”

  “Nathan could go, too,” she said.

  “Well, yes, I suppose so.” Nathan was wearing glasses by now. He’d finally had his eyes checked, and it turned out his vision was very poor. “You are a menace, Mr. Levenson,” the eye doctor had said in a friendly way. “It’s not safe to have you moving among us without glasses.” I didn’t think the army would want somebody like that.

  “I don’t want Mike to have to go,” Pearl said now. “Don’t think that. For God’s sake. But Hitler’s going to take over the world if we’re not careful.” She had brought Simon home from the neighbor’s and was taking off his coat. She seized him and kissed him as if Hitler were coming up the stairs. Simon ran to Nathan as soon as he was freed and squeezed between his knees. “Want up,” he said.

  Nathan began to play with him. I saw Pearl watch them with a light in her eyes, and I wondered whether she still thought about Nathan, was even still in love with him, or whether it was Simon she was thinking about now. She was standing in the doorway, about to carry Simon’s jacket to wherever she kept it, but standing still, she turned back, looking quite young and unaware of herself or of me looking at her. I was sitting in the chair where I’d hemmed my skirt after I beat her up, after Racket died. It seemed like a long time ago. Simon had been an infant, but babies grow into children quickly. Looking at Pearl, I felt something rather sweet and new come over me—despite all the fear and misery of worrying about war, which seemed to have replaced my grief, or to have gathered my sorrow into it. I forgave Pearl, that was what it was. I was embarrassed when the word came into my head. It didn’t seem like something modern people did, forgiving. I wished I could say it, but I knew I wouldn’t, certainly not in front of the men. I would have stood and touched her shoulder and said, “Pearl, I forgive you.” Of course the men would have thought I meant something else.

  Whenever I saw Nathan’s mother, for two years, she wailed. She never stopped rocking back and forth. She never quite stood up straight after the death of her granddaughter. She’d ask, “Why didn’t God take me instead? Why not me?”

  I’d get angry with her. “How should I know?” I’d say to her.

  Then when she had gone, I’d cry and ask Nathan, “Why does she do that to me?”

  “She doesn’t mean to upset you.”

  “Then why does she bring it up over and over? How should I know why God took the baby instead of her?”

  “She doesn’t really think you’ll answer her.”

  “I don’t know what to say when she asks that.”

  “I know.”

  Of course the suggestion made me angry because I’d have been delighted to give her to God instead of my child. It wasn’t as if God had suggested the exchange and I had refused. I couldn’t agree with her out loud, though.

  But it also angered me because it was too flattering to her. If such a thing were possible, if there was a God and He needed a certain number of us to keep up the troops in heaven, I knew that this grumpy old lady would never make a suitable substitute for my lively daughter. But I didn’t believe in anything like that—I couldn’t comfort myself with the picture of Racket wriggling for God in heaven.

  “Leave me alone,” I shouted at her once. “It’s harder for me than for you.”

  I thought she’d be angry with me forever, but she only shouted, “Of course harder for you. Who said not harder for you? God forbid I should think not harder for you.”

  Then suddenly one day she died of heart failure. Mostly we were surprised. She wasn’t particularly old and although she had been in the hospital twice, she didn’t act sick. She would clutch her chest when she came upstairs, and we wouldn’t have handed her a heavy package to hold, but we assumed she’d go on that way for a long
time. When she died I thought that at least she would no longer come into my living room and wail, and I wondered whether she had died of a broken heart.

  God didn’t give Racket back even though He had now decided He could use Mrs. Levenson after all. He must have wanted them both. “So send her back!” I found myself shouting at my dead mother-in-law one afternoon when I was alone in the apartment, my arms in the dishpan full of suds.

  “I should have screamed with her,” I said to Pearl one day.

  “About Racket?”

  “Yes. Remember how she used to scream?”

  “Of course. I don’t think it made her feel any better.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. It occurred to me now that I might have asked Mrs. Levenson whether she wanted me to answer her question about God. “What do you mean, answer?” she’d have said. “How should I know from answer?”

  “I’m sorry she died,” I said to Pearl.

  “Me, too,” she said. “I think I mind more than Mike does.”

  “Nathan minds,” I said.

  “Maybe Mike does too,” said Pearl. “It’s hard to know what Mike really thinks.” We were in the playground where we’d sometimes met before. It was a Sunday, and I’d gone over to her house with a knitting pattern she had wanted to borrow. It was the summer of 1940 and Racket had been dead for two and a half years. Simon was three. When I’d reached Pearl’s house, she was about to take him to the playground, and she asked, a little hesitantly, if I wanted to go along. Mike stood by sullenly and watched us talk. I didn’t know if something particular was bothering him or not.

  “Mike is like a boy,” I said now, while we watched Simon play. I pictured Mike zipping up his jacket and tucking his face down, putting his hands in his pockets the way boys do. Even when he wore a topcoat and a hat instead of a cap he kept his head down, looking at the ground and whistling. “He whistles,” I said.

  “Yes,” Pearl said. “Boys whistle.”

  “There are things he doesn’t seem to talk about,” I went on. I wondered if he ever talked about Pearl and Nathan. Well, we didn’t; why should he? But I thought he thought about it. He spoke to Simon as if it was in his mind.

  I suppose Pearl thought it would still be painful for me to go to the playground, but it wasn’t. I’m not made like that. Or everything was painful. Once, the summer after Racket died, I’d gone and sat in that same playground, the unpaved one with the trees, the one we’d liked. It was late in the evening, almost dark, and no one was there. I cried quite a bit there, but I cried quite a bit everywhere that year.

  As we talked, Pearl stood next to the slide, and whenever Simon reached the top and started down, she would go over and crouch, waiting to catch him. He hadn’t yet learned to put his feet down when he reached the bottom, and he was afraid to slide down unless she was there. When we left, Mike had said, “Don’t baby him, Pearlie.”

  When I said there were things Mike didn’t talk about, Pearl didn’t answer because she had gone over to the bottom of the slide once again. She was wearing a dark green skirt and when she crouched, it touched the ground. She laughed at Simon, who was working up his courage at the top of the slide. “Should I come now, Mommy? Should I come now?” he called.

  “Now would be fine, darling.”

  “Would now be fine, too? How about this now?”

  “This now would be fine, too.”

  At last he came down, and she caught him and kissed him. She put him down and shook the gravel off her skirt.

  “Mike thinks like someone in a room without doors or windows,” she said. “He just goes around and around.”

  “So he never changes his mind?”

  “Never,” said Pearl. “He never changes at all. No, that’s not true. He does change. He wears out a path on the floor and then things change. It’s different.”

  “What’s different?”

  “Well, the floor has a slope,” she said. We both laughed.

  I looked up at the leafy trees. It was the time of summer when the leaves seem widest. I’ve always wondered whether they get narrower later. I looked up to see whether the trees were going to help me or whether I was going to be sorry for what I was about to say.

  “Has he forgiven you for your—for that unpleasant experience with—”

  “No, Hilda,” said Pearl. “It was very pleasant. It wasn’t unpleasant until later. Sorry.”

  So she could talk about it more easily than I. Of all things. It silenced me for a minute. Simon had wandered off, watching a bird. Then I said, “I wanted to know whether Mike is still angry with you.”

  “In a way he’ll always be angry,” she said, after a pause. “But he’s worn a place on the floor. Anger’s different when it’s a habit.”

  “He’ll never understand it,” I said.

  “Understand it?” Pearl’s voice was tremulous.

  “The way I do, I guess,” I said.

  We had moved to a bench and Pearl had taken out her knitting, but now it lay untouched in her lap. “So how do you understand it, Hilda?” she said, not looking at me.

  I thought about it. “It was selfish,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “On the part of both of you.”

  “Yes.”

  “But selfishness isn’t a capital crime,” I said. I turned on the bench to talk to Pearl, though I was also watching the trees behind her. The leaves moved a little, up and down. “I don’t want to spend my whole life listening to people apologizing to me,” I said. “It’s insulting.”

  “How is it insulting?” She stared at me. “I don’t understand why it’s insulting.”

  “I don’t either,” I said. Then I added, “It keeps you and me from knowing each other.”

  “Catch me, Mommy,” Simon called now. “Catch me.’”

  “I’ve thought about that,” she said to me, ignoring him, “but I thought it was mostly Racket.”

  “Well, Racket, too,” I said. “Of course.”

  “How could you like me?” she said.

  “And if I hate you?” I said. “How am I better off?”

  She shrugged and picked up her needles. “I don’t know how you’re better off, Hildie. Heaven knows I’m not better off if you hate me.”

  “Catch me!” called Simon again, running past us. This time she stood up and ran over to where he was waiting and picked him up. Then she wiped his nose with a handkerchief she took from her skirt pocket. Then she decided it was time to go home for lunch, and we should pick up Simon’s toys. On the way home she talked about other things.

  After a while we began to see each other all the time again. We’d have each other’s family to our houses for supper. The men were quiet, but they didn’t protest. Or we’d go shopping. Pearl bought a new winter coat that fall, and I went along to watch Simon in the stores while she tried coats on. Pearl was always hungry. I didn’t remember that from before. She was always suggesting that we stop at Schrafft’s or Child’s. We had pancakes at Child’s when we went shopping, or we went to the Automat for baked macaroni and cheese or tongue sandwiches. We usually went shopping on Saturdays. I’d been in the store at work all week, but I didn’t mind. We found things to laugh at, somehow, on those days.

  Simon loved to put nickels in the machines at the Automat and be picked up to open the doors and take the food out. I remember how intently he worked the machines while I grasped his firm waist. Even though Racket had lived such a short time and had been dead for so long, it was always a surprise to me that Simon didn’t kick and struggle when I held him.

  One day in the Automat we met Pearl’s old friend Ruby. She was married now, she told us. She still worked at Bobbie’s. Billy had mostly recovered from his injuries. “He walks stiffly,” she said. “He’s afraid it will keep him out of the army.”

  “He wants to go again?”

  “He still wants to fight Hitler. Billy thinks if he doesn’t get Hitler, nobody will.”

  “So he thinks we’ll be at war soon?” I said.


  “We should have been at war long ago,” said Ruby.

  She had lost Pearl’s address and we all wrote down addresses. Then a week or so later I came home from work and heard voices in the living room, and it was Billy talking to Nathan. I was glad to see him. He’d grown up a lot. He had been like a child when we met him. I remembered him shyly standing in Pearl and Mike’s kitchen, trying to deal with so many strangers. Now he was more confident, but still quiet. He was telling Nathan how sorry he was about the death of Nathan’s mother. I wondered whether they had already talked about Racket. Of course they had, I thought. I walked into the room to say hello and to see whether Nathan had offered him anything to eat, and Billy stood up and came toward me. He lurched when he walked. He pumped my hand for a long time. Then he took my shoulders gently between his fingers and leaned forward to kiss my cheek, aiming the kiss very carefully. “Hilda,” he said.

  “It’s good to see you,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “You’re the one who’s had troubles.”

  I went to bring a fruit bowl. He was talking eagerly to Nathan about his experiences, about the friendliness of people in Spain. Old women had kissed him and cried over him.

  “The winter was rainy, yes?” said Nathan.

  “Rain. Then heat. Oh, boy.”

  I left them and went to start supper. After Billy left, Nathan followed me into the kitchen and stood watching me quietly. “Do you know what he said, Hilda?” he asked me. “He said Ruby wrote him about Rachel, and he dreamed about her for weeks.”

  “There in Spain?”

  “Yes. He said when he has a daughter he’s calling her Rachel. He said he fell in love with her when he saw her.”

  “I remember that he was nice to her,” I said.

  “I didn’t even remember. I just remember him talking about getting killed, with that light in his eyes.”