The Moment of Tenderness

by Madeleine L'engle

  At last she was able to speak. “Why?” she demanded passionately. “Why, Steve? We aren’t going to let it make any difference. We aren’t going to have an affair. You’re going to stay with Betty and I’m going to stay with Bill, so why shouldn’t we say it just this once? There’s so little real love in the world, isn’t it wrong not to acknowledge it when it happens? What you’ve said is going to make all the difference in the world to me, just to know that somebody sees me as a human being, as Stella, as me. And it can’t hurt anybody, can it, if you know that I’m thinking about you and caring when you’re up all night and tired and maybe discouraged sometimes? We’re not going to say it again or let it make any difference in the way we live our lives, so how can it be anything but good to have said it just this once and to know it for always?” Then she stopped, confused and embarrassed, fearing that in her joy she had said too much, more than he’d meant.

  But after a moment he said, looking at her with his steady, serious gaze, “What a wise little star you are. Yes, we’ll always know, and the knowledge will be good. Now go home, Stella, otherwise I’ll kiss you again and that might destroy everything you’ve said.”

  She stood up and he did not help her into her coat and she knew that at this moment she could not have endured the touch of his hands. She left his office blindly without saying goodbye and drove back to Mt. George and got the children from her neighbor.

  After that, despite the ecstasy of those few minutes in Steve’s office, things seemed to run along pretty much as usual. She and Bill went to meetings, had friends in for cocktails or bridge, Bill played golf and poker with the boys, and Stella took on a Sunday school class. She had Steve in once or twice for the children, but they spoke only of whatever childhood ailment was the immediate problem, and the only way she knew she hadn’t dreamed Steve’s words or his lips on hers was the way his hand always, as though by accident, managed to touch her before he left.

  She wasn’t sure just when she began to sense a new and different antagonism from the natives. One of her neighbors said once, “Bill must do very well, the way you’re able to have Steve Carlton every time one of the children sneezes.” She didn’t think of it at the time, only remembered it later. There was no reason for the feeling, silent and unexpressed for the most part as it was. No one could know of that afternoon in the office, and she and Steve had hardly spoken or looked at each other on the few occasions when they were at parties together. Perhaps it was Betty’s cruel and unerring instinct and caustic tongue.

  She only knew that one night when the baby had a temperature of 104, Bill looked at her and said, “Let’s not fool around with Steve Carlton anymore. We’d better call in the pediatrician, what’s his name, Hunt, from Stonebridge.”

  With the hot, unhappy baby in her arms, she said, “All right, Bill, you call him.” She rocked the baby and sang, softly. It didn’t matter. It didn’t make any difference, to her or to Steve or to Bill or Betty or Mt. George. There’d be something bigger and better to talk about on the party lines soon enough, and the moment had happened; it was there for her forever, the gentleness of Steve’s hands and the feel of his lips and the quietness of his words.

  After the pediatrician, a pleasant enough man, had left, and the baby was asleep and quiet, Stella said, “I’m going out for a few minutes, Bill.”

  “Why?”

  “I haven’t been out of the house all day and I need a breath of air.”

  She put on her old blue tweed coat and walked down the sleeping village street until she came to the Carltons’ house. There was a light on in the front hall, and she could see that his car was not in the garage. She stood there for a few moments in the shadow of one of the elms, resting, not thinking, just leaning against the tree, and while she was standing there, Steve’s car drove up and he put it into the garage and then went, walking slowly, as though he was tired, into the house. Over the garage where his car was she saw a star, quite small, but quietly brilliant. She looked at it for a long time, memorizing its place in the sky, almost as she might have, in the spring, planted a flower in a special place in the garden.

  She looked back at the house again. The light in the hall was out; the house was quite dark. But the star over the garage had not moved, and when she walked home she found that she was humming.

  The Foreigners

  Whenever anybody moves into a village the size of Mt. George, it’s a big event. We all live so close together, we know each other so well, that each new family can actively affect the climate of the town.

  I was one of the first to see the Brechsteins. I was at the store as usual during the noon hour, and Wilburforce Smith came in for some teat dilators for his cows and asked if I’d seen the new people who’d bought the old Taylor house. And about an hour later Mrs. Brechstein came in.

  She had on tight-fitting orange slacks and a chartreuse shirt and dangly bronze earrings. Her two little boys had on shabby blue jeans and one of them had a hole in his T-shirt. It wasn’t the kind of shabbiness we’re used to in the village, where nobody has very much money. It was ostentatious. It was obvious she could have had them dressed any way she liked.

  All right, let’s be honest. I didn’t like her right from the start. There was the way she and the children were dressed and the way she asked me if our eggs were fresh.

  I explained to her that we got our eggs from a neighboring farmer and that they were fresh daily. But the shells weren’t white enough to suit her. I said that in the country many of us prefer the brown eggs for their flavor, and that the white eggs are usually cold-storage eggs. Of course I should have kept my mouth shut, but I’ll never learn.

  She went back to the meat department, and I could hear her saying that she could get a certain cut of meat cheaper at the A&P. I could see Chuck, our butcher, getting a little red in the face, but I had another customer to wait on so I didn’t quite hear what was going on. After a while Mrs. Brechstein came back with filet mignon and calf’s liver and sweetbreads. As I was checking her out and putting her purchases in a bag, I asked her how they were getting on, if they were getting settled all right, and if there was anything we could do to help them.

  She smiled at me condescendingly and said that if she decided to pick up odds and ends at the store it might be simpler for her to have a charge account.

  I didn’t like the words nor the manner of delivery, so perhaps my voice wasn’t very warm when I told her that she would have to speak to my husband about it.

  “The name is Brechstein, you know,” she drawled, “and of course we’re so often confused with the Chosen People. But we don’t happen to be Jewish,” she said, smiling at me tolerantly, as though I hadn’t been able to understand her in the first place.

  “I’m so sorry,” I murmured absently as I put her purchases in a bag.

  As she left, Wilburforce Smith came in again, this time for cigars, and accompanied by the second selectman, Harry Nottingham. “Seen the Jews who bought the old Taylor house?” Harry asked him.

  “Ayeh.”

  “Putting in two new bathrooms,” Harry said. “Must be full of piss.”

  Well, you see, that was all part of it. I don’t mean the Brechsteins. I mean Mt. George. When Hugh and I first took over the general store, there weren’t many people around who hadn’t been born within ten miles of the center. And we, like almost everybody else who moved into Mt. George shortly after the war, had a naive idea, as we filled our houses with furniture and furnaces and families, joined the church and the PTA, that after a year or so we would no longer be considered newcomers but would be accepted as belonging to the village.

  Now let me tell you a story I was told when we hadn’t been here a year. It’s supposed to be true, and even if it isn’t, it could perfectly well have been. It’s the story of the young couple who moved into Mt. George with their infant son. The baby grew up and became a man and then a very old man without moving from the house his parents had brought him to. When he died he was the only one lef
t in his family and the townspeople got together and gave him a fine funeral and burial and had an imposing tombstone erected for him. On it was inscribed, Dearly beloved, though a stranger among us.

  So I wasn’t surprised, one day, when Mrs. Brechstein came into the store and said to me accusingly, “I hear there was a Republican caucus last night.”

  “Yes, I believe there was,” I said.

  “Why weren’t we told about it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose for the same reason we weren’t. They didn’t want us to know about it.”

  “Well, why on earth wouldn’t they want us to know?”

  “Well, until after the war,” I tried to explain, “things hadn’t changed for a long time around Mt. George. The old residents have been running the town for a long time and they want to keep on running it.”

  “Do you think this is a good idea?” she demanded.

  I was filling an order for another customer. “No,” I said as I weighed a peck of apples. “But there isn’t much we can do about it.”

  Wilburforce came in then to get his mail.

  “Ask Wilburforce Smith,” I said. “He used to be a state senator.”

  So Mrs. Brechstein bustled up to Wilburforce Smith.

  “It was posted on the door of Town Hall,” he growled.

  “But who goes and looks at the door of Town Hall?”

  She was so right. When people want anything spread around in Mt. George, they don’t paste a minuscule sign on the door of Town Hall, hidden by the shade of the elm where no one will see it; they make three signs, one for the store, one for the garage, and one for the fire-house. I’d offered time and again to make the signs for town meetings or caucuses.

  And when I wasn’t asked and blustered to Hugh about the comparative cleanliness of Tammany Hall, he said, “Look at it their way. They don’t want newcomers butting in and telling them how to run things. You can’t blame them. Everybody hates change.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Sure you do. Remember looking at the baby tonight and saying you hated having him grow up? Same difference. And around here everything had been going on peacefully for years and years and suddenly after the war a lot of people move in who promptly have quantities of small children, and suddenly everybody has to shell out a lot of money for a new school and taxes go up and naturally everybody yaps.”

  “I think it’s un-American,” Mrs. Brechstein was saying to Wilburforce Smith. “Positively un-American.”

  Wilburforce Smith chewed on his cigar and narrowed his eyes. I thought maybe I was going to enjoy a good fight between the two of them, but Wilburforce shrugged and went out.

  “I don’t understand it,” Mrs. Brechstein said. “I don’t understand it at all.”

  I was really on Mrs. Brechstein’s side, though I hated to admit it. But I tried to explain. I tried to sound just like Hugh when he talked reasonably to me. “Well, you can’t blame them for resenting it when people like us come along and buy up the big old houses for our families and then splash on fresh coats of white paint a lot of the old people can’t afford, and put in flush toilets when they’ve struggled with outhouses, and buy automatic washing machines and dryers and dishwashers. And there’s even the swimming pool. There was a lot of talk about that swimming pool!”

  “I don’t see why there should be,” Mrs. Brechstein said coldly, and I could see she didn’t like being included in the “us.”

  Anyhow, I’d tried to explain it to her and it was all quite true and I understood it, or thought I did, and it still bothered me. It bothered me as much as it bothered Mrs. Brechstein. Because we got plenty of it in the store. We got it from both sides. We heard people say in a perfectly friendly way that everything would be all right if it weren’t for the newcomers; but they hadn’t forgotten we were newcomers. In a store, of course, the customer is always right, and it’s my husband’s displeasure I have to live with if I lose my temper there, not the person’s whose remarks rankle. But it upset me because no one seemed to understand even the simplest things, like the need for a fire escape because there are now thirty pre-school children (including two of mine) in an upstairs fire-trap in an old wooden church every Sunday during Sunday school.

  “Never had a fire,” I heard Wilburforce Smith say when it was brought up at a church meeting. “Aren’t likely to have one.”

  One weekend in the spring when the Brechsteins had been in Mt. George for a little over a month, we were invited out to dinner by the people with the pool. They live quite near the Brechsteins, and my hostess told me she’d invited them, too, and I thought it a commendably neighborly and hospitable thing to do.

  “Aren’t they just fascinating?” she asked me. “We’re so lucky to have cultured people like that move into town.”

  Maybe I just see the wrong side of Mrs. Brechstein, I thought.

  But that was the night that Mrs. Brechstein made the first of her famous remarks. We’d all been for a swim, and in spite of the warmth of the June evening, a cool night breeze had come up, and all of us women congregated in the Pools’ lovely bedroom were shivering as we rubbed ourselves down and dressed. Now, we all knew each other pretty well, having moved into town at more or less the same time and having served together on innumerable church and school committees, and I don’t think any of us are particularly prudish, but there was something a little too deliberate about the way Mrs. Brechstein walked around stark staring naked and then leaned her elbows on Mrs. Pool’s bureau, looking at the pictures of the little Pools and of Mr. Pool, most handsome in his navy lieutenant’s uniform.

  “For a man who’s spent most of his life selling insurance, your husband has quite an interesting mind,” Mrs. Brechstein said to Mrs. Pool. But that, though not exactly the epitome of tact, was not the famous remark. I only came in for the great moment. I looked up from a conversation to see Mrs. Brechstein, still naked, sitting on Mrs. Pool’s bed and pulling one silk stocking up onto one gloriously tanned leg. Her leg was not the only tanned part of her, and her body did not have the usual white areas.

  “Of course, every intelligent woman,” she was saying, “should have at least one affair after she’s married. How else can she possibly continue to interest her husband?”

  The words fell like stones in troubled waters.

  “Well!” Mrs. Pool exclaimed brightly. “Let’s all go downstairs and have some dinner, shall we?”

  The next day almost everyone who was at the party happened to drop in at the store.

  “Of course, she didn’t mean it.”

  “Oh, yes, she did, she meant every word.”

  “She was drunk, then.”

  “No, she wasn’t. She was stone-cold sober.”

  “She drank like a fish.”

  “She can certainly hold it, you have to say that for her.”

  “Well, I’m out of luck if that’s the only way I can manage to hold on to my husband.”

  Oh, I got an earful!

  A few days later I got a different kind of earful.

  The Brechsteins, like everyone else except the Pools, took their children swimming in the pond. Sometimes the mothers swam, too, but most of the time they sat around and kept an eye on the kids and gossiped. They also tried to be friendly to the Brechsteins and their two skinny little boys. When the boys threw stones, nobody liked it, but in all honesty the Brechsteins were not the only people in Mt. George who did not believe in disciplining their kids. But permissive upbringing and allowing the tots to express themselves at all costs seemed to sit even less well on the Brechsteins than anybody else. However, what stuck most in the craw were their responses to such well-intentioned questions as:

  “How are you enjoying life in the country?”

  “It’s much pleasanter than the city, isn’t it?”

  “Isn’t it wonderful for children here?”

  The answers ran: “No, we much prefer the city to the country. We are stuck out here only because of the littlest boy’s health. No
artist can create except in the city, where he is surrounded by other artists. The children have no cultural opportunities here. There are so few people one can really talk with.”

  Naturally, the next thing that happened was someone leaning across the counter, saying, “So-and-so is sure the Brechsteins are communists.”

  I suppose the same thing happens in many communities. Certainly, it has reached a peak of inanity here. The minute Wilburforce Smith and any of his friends and relatives don’t like anything a new resident does, the new resident is called a communist. This kind of gratuitously vicious slander is particularly sickening, and it made me feel for the Brechsteins, though it couldn’t make me like them.

  Come autumn and the start of the school year, the Brechstein boys went to school, and there were quite a few sharp comments about the Brechsteins actually condescending to send their children to our public school, wouldn’t have thought it’d be good enough for them. Mrs. Brechstein spoke loudly on all matters at PTA meetings and Mr. Brechstein joined the Volunteer Firemen, though he wasn’t wanted, which must have been unfortunately obvious. One of the most tactless things he did was to win enormously at the regular weekly firemen’s poker game.

  One evening, about six thirty, as I was waiting for Hugh to come home and the children were setting the table, we heard the sickening wail of the fire siren. It was, fortunately, only a chimney fire, but the next morning it was all over Mt. George that Mr. Brechstein had been telling all the firemen how to do everything. The worst thing about it, Mr. Pool informed us, was that the man had some damned sensible ideas. The firemen had grudgingly followed some of them and hated him all the more for being right. But Wilburforce Smith leaned over the counter, talking to two of the farmers who happened to be in the store, and said, “Damn interfering fool, doesn’t even know what he’s talking about. I wouldn’t raise a finger to help if his house burned down. Serve him right. We don’t want newcomers coming in and telling us to do things we can do in our sleep.”