by Joanna Scott
Then one morning following a particularly restless night, she decided to walk her children to school, her excuse to herself being that she would benefit from the fresh air. At their age, Jackie and Gimp didn’t need their mother as an escort, but neither did they seem to mind. They played tag with friends they met along the way while Helen ambled along behind, and at the first sight of the school they raced each other up to the building, finishing their uneventful journey with hoots and laughter. After the doors closed behind them they ran to a foyer window to wave good-bye. As Helen raised her arm to wave back, she hesitated, struck by an immense and unfamiliar fear. Her children were mere apparitions behind the dusty glass, insubstantial, weightless, and as soon as they disappeared, she burst into tears.
Had she been an experienced worrier, at least she would have understood what she was feeling. But she understood nothing more than that she had to reckon with the fear, whatever its source. Reckoning must involve reason. So she reasoned her way home and spent the rest of the tearless morning planning the next meeting of Jackie’s Girl Scout troop.
Through that fall and winter, Helen rarely had cause to remember her bout of worry. Heavy snowfalls gave the children plenty to do outside, and holiday fund-raising events kept their mother fairly well occupied. With the approach of spring, however, she began to grow restless. She would have taken long afternoon walks, but that wasn’t done by women of her age—not in this town, where the only sidewalks connected the stores along Main Street. Instead, she bought herself a new radio and spent the empty hours learning the words to such popular songs as “The Dipsy Doodle” and “Harbour Lights.”
Toward evening one day in May, while the children played outside in the warm, grainy dusk and Helen attended to bills, the newscaster pressed in monotone through the previous day’s list of crimes, including one involving a hobo who was doused with gasoline and lit on fire while he’d been sleeping on the edge of a playing field in Huntington. The name of the nearby town startled Helen, as if she’d suddenly heard her own name on the broadcast. She dropped the letter opener and almost turned over her chair when she stood. She hurried outside, where she found her children behind the garden shed pounding nails and securing wire mesh to tall wooden stakes. Helen had no idea what they were building and didn’t stop to ask. She just swept them into her arms with rough, impossible strength and squeezed them together as though trying to press one into the other, to make a single child out of two. And for the first time in their lives, as far as she could remember, they struggled to push her away.
The point being that squabs beat hens no matter what, and at two dollars and fifteen cents a dozen, the Owen children are sure to turn a fancy profit. Or such is Jackie’s notion, though Gimp feels compelled to point out that it’s no work for a get-rich-quick kind of person. Which causes Jackie to seize her little brother by his shirt collar and dare him to back out now. But Gimp just wants to be sure, a fair-enough request, so Jackie takes him through her calculations once more: they buy twelve breeding pairs today, they’ll have six hundred birds within eight months. Gimp reminds Jackie that they’ll need a supply of buckwheat. Jackie reminds Gimp that squabs prefer barley during the molting season. And then there’s the cost of two large cages to transport the birds home.
They fall silent when a sudden spasm of darkness turns the morning into night. They hear only the churning of the train’s wheels and the murmuring voices of passengers in nearby seats.
“What’s happened?”
“We’re in a tunnel, Gimp.”
Their hands meet, clasp in the dark, the grip of clammy fingers still comforting to them, though they are almost too old for this contact—old enough, after all, to make a real-life investment. Their business venture, the gist of which they’ve kept to themselves for the simple reason that neither parent has asked them what, precisely, they’ve been up to, will be common knowledge soon enough, once the twenty-four birds are flashing and tumbling across their flying pen.
The children don’t think it at all unusual that neither parent has inquired about the exact purpose of the huge pen they’ve built in the backyard. To them, life at home is like this ride through the tunnel, their privacy intensified by a surrounding darkness. Not that they mind. They prefer to be left alone. Besides, their parents have never found reason to blame them for anything, and while the children don’t exactly think of themselves as perfect, they know they can do no wrong in their parents’ eyes. Even this trip to the city will be forgiven, in light of the practical motive: twelve white-fleshed, fertile pairs of Plymouth Rock homers.
They are still holding hands when they follow the other passengers across the gap separating the train from the platform. The crowd is not the early-commuter throng; they are noontime tourists and travelers, and instead of surging toward the gate they trickle, carrying the young Owens along their surface, two fallen leaves with stems entwined.
And then, nearly as quickly as the tunnel had engulfed daylight, the small group disperses, leaving the children alone in the lower concourse of the station, where they have been once before, on a trip to their father’s office. That was years ago, and the only memory of the visit they retain is of the company’s doorman letting them play with the elevator controls. Now, on their own in the city, having skipped out on their school fair, they are too confused by the many possible directions to be terrified. But terror soon comes to them—delicious, illuminating terror—when they see an old man shuffling along a vaulted corridor, a bent, shrouded figure, and though motion seems difficult for him, he manages to increase his pace as he approaches. He reeks of urine, and the newspapers he has wrapped around his feet crunch softly as he walks. The children stand still, both of them enjoying the strange luxury of fear even as they pray silently that this ghost will pass by and keep walking down the platform and into the endless darkness.
He drags himself to a halt. They can see the perspiration glistening inside his wrinkles. His voice, magically amplified, startles them with its volume and clarity. “What’s that? Ark! Now take a penny, each of you, ark! Give me your hands, come on now, a penny for good luck, two shiny new pennies for two—ark!—naughty pussies.” After grabbing their reluctant hands and pressing a penny in each, the mad old man shuffles on, his head bobbing so close to Jackie that with a quick, wicked thrust he could give the girl a smack of a kiss on her lips. But the man has already forgotten his recent dispensation and engaged one of his many selves in some incoherent argument punctuated by arks and scornful laughter.
The children close their fists around the filthy pennies and wander up the same sloping corridor the man had come down. They know now that they are in a treacherous place, if not actually threatened, and this sense of risk makes them feel important, momentarily raises the purpose of their lives to extraordinary heights, which, after all, has always been their main ambition, ever since they were left to wander where they pleased. They have spent their first decade increasing the simple risks of life in whatever way they could: climbing pine trees up to the wavering top, scooting across busy roads, swimming in forbidden Saverin Lake. Not that they consider themselves more courageous than other children—they are simply addicted to thrill and enjoy nothing better than the suspense of a perilous situation.
The astonishing thing is that they have nurtured their addiction without giving away the secret of their recklessness. At school, they are model students, praised and then ignored by teachers preoccupied with the more rambunctious children. They risk accident and death only when they are away from school and out of sight of their mother and father. Once in a while they invite friends to join them, but mostly they save their rash adventures for themselves, storing up ideas in their daydreams like little scientists planning a series of experiments that might, just might, have terrible consequences, though so far they have survived without a single broken bone.
Lately, under Jackie’s maturing influence, they have started to design new adventures for themselves, ones that are borrowed from the
adult world, that mysterious, alluring Hades, where so many things can go wrong. Unlike their father, whose main impulse in business is caution, and their mother, who likes to claim that most everything “works out,” the children have decided that after the many exciting close calls of their early years, they are ready to invest the small fortune they’ve accumulated from their weekly allowances in their own squab farm. They are either future tycoons or doomed gamblers, or perhaps both. But they won’t know what they can be if they don’t try.
And here they are on a school day in this tremendous Roman bath called Pennsylvania Station, making their innocent way along an arcade lined with snack bars and shops and up a marble stairway to the street, where the momentum of so many individuals—some heading into the station, others dispersing to waiting taxis or across nearby intersections, just as their own father must do on days when he’s not in Boston—makes Jackie and Gimp feel like idlers, and even worse, like children. They don’t want to be just children. They want to be remarkable in some way. But the only reason they stand out from this crowd, if they stand out at all, is that they are children. Children with a mission—on the way to the Washington Market, where they hope to find their pigeons at a bargain price.
They have their neighbor to thank for this, their first business venture. Jackie discovered the book on squabs in Mrs. Parsons’s trash bin, where she’d been digging in search of other treasures, the costume jewelry that Mrs. Parsons accumulated and then discarded or the girlie magazines that came for her boarder, Carl. Why either Mrs. Parsons or her boarder had bought and then thrown away a book on raising squabs for profit, Jackie couldn’t say and didn’t care. But within twenty-four hours of finding the book, financial gain had become her new obsession—and Gimp’s too, since by habit he dedicates himself to his sister’s schemes. That he is uncertain has only intensified the danger involved. Uncertainty, the children know, means the effort is worthy.
But not worthy enough, not yet. Here on a sultry spring day in Manhattan there are too many people, too many open doors and alert policemen for the children to feel themselves in any real danger. Their mission will be accomplished easily at this rate. Without quite realizing what they’re doing they set off walking up Seventh Avenue, away from the direction of the Washington Market and their Plymouth Rock homers. They eat a chocolate bar as they go. They turn east on Forty-second Street, nudging each other as they pass the signs advertising dime-a dance girls. From a shop on Broadway they buy a malted milk with ice cream, which they share amiably, and after they have finished it Jackie tucks her snap purse into the pocket of her jumper, takes her brother’s hand, and leads him across Times Square and through the entrance of the Rialto. A new impulse usually means a new adventure. The children have grown impatient, so they tempt fate by walking through the lobby, where gusts of dusty noontime heat are churned by huge ceiling fans, and past the ticket booth into the theater. No one stops them or calls after them, which both disappoints and relieves the children. Now that they are here they feel compelled to stay for at least a few minutes. Jackie chews her thumbnail, and Gimp shuffles from foot to foot. On the screen, women cheer marching soldiers while a narrator exclaims: “...Any action or policy the Reich elects to adopt!” Whatever he means, it matters little to the children, and they remain standing in the rear of the theater until the newsreel ends. The next newsreel features Chicago policemen who are either grinning or wincing as they club factory workers. The children ease themselves into two seats on the right-hand side of the theater and watch attentively, content to be spectators to something they don’t understand.
After the second newsreel, they rise and hurry into adjacent washrooms, emerging at the same time and without a word heading out of the theater. Back on the street, the heat hits them with the force of a slap, and Jackie orders a lemonade from a vendor. She has already tipped the cup to her mouth when the vendor snatches it away and shrieks at her in Italian, patting his shirt pocket to indicate the payment due, which, according to the sign, is just a nickel, almost nothing when you’re walking around with more than eight dollars in your purse.
But it’s something—more than something—when you reach into your dress pocket, a pocket so ample and deep that you can put your schoolbooks in it, and your snap purse isn’t there!
“My purse, Gimp!”
“What?”
“It’s gone.”
“What?”
“My purse—it’s gone.”
“Your purse?”
“In the theater, maybe...”
“You dropped it?”
“I lost it.”
“Or it was filched. What if it was filched?”
“Oh, Gimp, will you shut up!”
“But, Jack”
“Don’t talk to me, do you hear!”
Jackie is screaming now, a typical response for her in a moment of crisis and all too appropriate, given their predicament. The vendor is shouting too, “Vai, vai!” splashing the lemonade as he gestures for them to leave, and poor Gimp is hopping nervously, almost running in place, as though trying to escape his sister’s wrath. You’d have to look closely to see the mirth behind her fury. For both children, their reactions are those of actors who nearly, though not entirely, forget their real selves on stage. How convincing they are in their panic. How utterly engaging their performance—to themselves, if to none of the indifferent passersby. This is a worthy predicament, one they will remember for years to come. Alone in the middle of the Great White Way, beggared either by bad luck or a pickpocket, reduced to a penny apiece. Never before have they felt so perfectly vulnerable.
HELEN OWEN had a special talent when it came to charity: where other volunteers were met with brittle smiles and refusals, Helen managed to turn virtually every solicitation into a profitable transaction. She’d gone door to door to raise money for the town library. She’d visited her wealthiest friends to raise capital for the expansion of a small local hospital. Helen was known in town for her magical touch, and during the day her face shone with the kind of contentment that belongs only to women who manage to combine prosperity with social purpose. Had she been even wealthier, she would have found her niche as a famous philanthropist. But the Owens were wedged snugly in place just below the pinnacle of the aristocracy. They were what their more desperate friends referred to as well off—not exactly the “economic royalists” maligned by Roosevelt but still miraculously unaffected by the difficult times.
On a typical day, the children would arrive home from school, devour the snack prepared for them by Mrs. Minello, the cook, and then run out to play until suppertime. Helen would come home at about four thirty or five to find Mrs. Minello up to her elbows in raw meatloaf. For the next hour, Helen would listen to the radio and attend to correspondence at the rolltop desk in the den. At six she would call her children in for supper, and they’d come scampering across the yard, grass stains on their clothes, twigs tangled in their hair. They would wash their hands at the kitchen sink and sit down to eat whether or not Dexter was expected home that night. During dinner, Helen would drill the children about their successes at school. When they were through, they’d rush outside to continue work on their fort, or such was Helen’s notion of their project. Eventually they’d return to the house of their own accord, emerging from the dusk like pieces of pale quartz, though until then Helen would sit near the single window in the den listening for any sound—a crackle of leaves, a cough, a brittle laugh—that might belong to some drifter lurking out in the woods. Not that she blamed those men unfortunate enough to have lost their jobs and homes. But as their ranks increased, so did the violence. While she watched her children playing in the distance, she’d imagine all the harm that might come to them. Only after she had them safely inside for the night would she admit the burden of their absence.
Yet she remained determined not to overprotect them, and she kept her worry a secret, privately condemning herself for indulging the faithless emotion and always greeting the children with r
emarkable composure, interrogating them about the next day’s schedule as though they were her adult employees. They in turn were wonderfully respectful of their mother, unlike some other children she knew, and they’d try their best to impress her. Gregory, she hoped, would grow up to be a doctor. Jacqueline would carry on her mother’s good work. But there was plenty of time for them to choose their vocations. For now, Helen tried to allow them ample opportunity to do as they pleased, since she believed that children benefit from privacy—an independent character grows out of an independent childhood, as Helen herself could testify from her own upbringing.
Memorial Day was not unusual in any way. Rumblings of thunder in the late afternoon were not followed by rain, so the children returned outside after their snack. At supper, Jackie described in detail an experiment with helium her teacher had performed for her class the previous week. Gimp announced, for the fifth time in two days, that he’d gotten an A on a spelling quiz. Helen tested them both for a few minutes with words like appetite,conscience, and unanimity, coaching them gently through the more difficult syllables. Then she excused them from the table, and they rushed off for their final hour of play.
With Dexter away taking care of some sort of business that could not wait, Helen spent the rest of the evening in restless solitude. Once the children were in bed, she paged through magazines and eventually fell asleep in her clothes. She woke with a start shortly after 2:00 a.m. Sleep was a useless effort at that point, so she went downstairs to read on the sofa. But though her mind was alert, her eyes were too tired to decipher the print. She tried to doze. She tried rehearsing verb conjugations in French. Finally she decided to go outside for a breath of fresh night air.