Ida said could she go upstairs, was there anything, but she stood at the door. She had on her blue kitchen-apron. She came in and the door swung-to behind her. She looked at the things on the table. She said, “Could I take the baby in my room?” She wanted the baby in her room. I should have liked the baby in my room, but he did not like me very much. Mama said, “Leave him in the crib if he is asleep.” Ida might wake him up, she could, why couldn’t she take him to her room? What did the Philadelphia ladies whisper about? The house was very quiet. The clock in the hall ticked—you could hear it tick even if you did not stop to listen. There was scraping on the front doorsteps, that might be Papa coming in—or it might be—what did the Philadelphia ladies think could happen?
We were not all alone, there was Mama, there was Ida, there was Annie with the baby upstairs. Upstairs seemed rather far away. In the old house, the clock was at the top of the stairs, and the stairs went straight up; here they turned on a landing and you could not slide down the bannisters. On the stair wall were some of the photographs of Venice; there was a lady too, lying on the ground with a big book open and a skull (like Papa’s Indian skull on his bookcase); she was someone in the Bible, Mary-someone in a cave with long hair.
We would get some small rocks from the stream that ran in the little valley several fields below the house, for the cave on the putz. Ida had found another box on the floor; she said, “You’ve forgotten a box on the floor.” Gilbert said, “No, I put it there.” Ida lifted the box from the floor, none of us had forgotten it, it was a heavy cardboard box tied with string. It was the most important. It was the box with the animals and the little hut and the wooden fence that folded up, that would run round the edge of the moss and make a field for the sheep to graze in. Ida said, “Where are the scissors?” She cut the string of the box.
There was a picture of Pandora and her box in the Tanglewood Tales that Miss Helen read us, Friday afternoons if we were good, instead of lessons. Pandora let all evil things out of the box, but there was one good thing left; Miss Helen explained it was a myth. The good thing left was hope.
Everything would turn evil in the box but there was hope left, after everything evil had flown out.
We knew what was in this box, it was an ordinary cardboard box, a large one of very tough brown paper. Ida started to roll up the string the way she did, then came to the knots and looked at the string. Then she dropped it on the spread-out brown paper that was for the scraps. It was not time to take out the animals, we did the Christmas-tree things first, but now Gilbert jerked at the top of the box that did not fit like a lid, but was like a box over another box. It stuck and Gilbert jerked at it.
Ida said to Gilbert, “Hold the box.” She got her fingers under the edges and worked the top of the box up; it stood like a box on a box, and Gilbert’s head above it was like the jack-in-the-box when the little wire catch is pushed off the fastener of a jack-in-the-box box.
Jack and Jill went up the hill. Gil Blas was the name of a book Uncle Hartley had, but Gil was a man and not Jack. “I mean, if I am Jill in the picture, the way we played when we were children,” thought Hilda, “then I would be Gil who is short for Gilbert, but we never call him Gil but Gib sometimes.” He did everything first, he made up games for things when we were children, he called me Deetie, people call me Deetie sometimes, that was Gilbert’s name for Sister Mama would explain and people would laugh. Sister or Deetie or other names, but if I were Jill, I would be Gil, we would be “twins.” There were the two alligators at Papalie’s who were twins; they were called Castor and Pollux.
Castor and Pollux, Eric had told us, were really stars in the sky. Ida said, “Take care, don’t jerk at it,” and pushed Gilbert’s hands away. Harold slid down the chair and stood looking. Mama called, “Is that you Charles?” as the front door opened and then shut and Papa came across the hall in his boots; he said “Töcterlein,” not looking at Mama. Papa is not a Moravian, he does not go to church, he met Mama at a German class at the old seminary when Papalie was principal there. I got up and took Papa’s hand. It is me he calls Töcterlein, though that is a German word and Papa is not German. They were not all German really, Mama would explain to the university ladies, they came from Moravia and Bohemia and England, though they had Germans too and Danes in the brotherhood that came to America from Herrnhut, where they went from Moravia when Count Zinzendorf helped them to get to America.
Some of the very old ladies in the old town could not talk English very well, and Papalie had some German books, but Papa had German books, too, about the stars. Gilbert interrupted, jerking at the box lid, and now maybe Mama won’t cut out the gilt paper for new stars. We paste the gilt paper on cut-out cardboard, both sides, and hang the stars on the tree with a bent bit of wire or with gilt thread threaded through a darning needle.
The needles are on the table, the whole of Mama’s workbasket is on the table. There is a strawberry of wax for thread and a strawberry with emery powder for sharpening needles and getting the rust off. There are all these things on the table and Ida is still here and it will get late. The clock will strike. Papa will want his late-evening supper, maybe he wants it now. “I’m going out again,” said Papa, as if he knew what I was thinking, but he looked round the table, as if he came from another world, another country; he was a Russian, his fur cap was in his other hand, he was a path-finder, he had worked on the northern boundary before he came to Lehigh University at Bethlehem.
What it was, was Mama had Uncle Fred and Uncle Hartley and Aunt Laura and Aunt Aggie and Mamalie and the old school and Cousin Ed and everybody in the old town really. She had Gilbert and the new baby upstairs. She had Harold.
Ida and Annie belonged to the house and the kitchen and the baby.
What Papa had was the transit house now and his classes at the university and people who came to see him about the new instruments and reporters from the papers. What Papa had was outside, the old observatory on the hill, the walk across the bridge at night, “like a thief or an astronomer,” as he would say. What he had was the high walled-in bookshelves here and in the old study, the same but with strips of trimmed leather with brass-headed tacks along each shelf. There was the smell of leather; his old gloves had the fingers cut off so that he could manage all those little screws that were so important on his instruments.
He had a broom in the corner of his transit house which was really a little house with windows and shutters that opened the whole roof. Snow blew in and he kept a broom to sweep out the snow from inside his house. What he was, was a pathfinder, an explorer. It was cold outside. He went out in the middle of the night again; he would lie down on his sofa in his study or he would sleep in the afternoon. He was outside this, he was outside everything, where was he? If he came in, everything was different, he was cold, his hand was cold. His fingers were long. My hand was small in his hand. “You have hands like your father,” they said. He said his one girl was worth all his five boys put together. He should not say that. It made a terrible responsibility, it made one five times as much as one should be.
They said, “She is quiet like her father.” They said, “It’s funny the children aren’t gifted with such a brilliant father.”
What was this gift? It took him out of doors, sometimes several different times at night after we were all in bed. He had a lantern like a captain on a ship. He had thermometers, he had glass prisms in his new transit house that Mr. Evans was coming to work with; they made different rainbows of different stars. Mr. Evans told us that, the one time he came. He said he wanted to work with the new instruments because stars were suns, didn’t we know that?
What would happen now? He was not this, he was kind about it, was he really interested?
He had never had a Christmas tree when he was a child.
There was Alvin, who was killed or who died of typhoid fever in the Civil War, there was Papa, there was Aunt Rosa, there was Mercy. Mercy had died when she was a very little girl. I held on to Papa’s hand.
What it was, was there was Mercy, he told me Mercy had done a sampler, Mercy had read the Bible through before she was five—was that possible? Mercy had asked to give the kitten that was going to be drowned a saucer of milk, before it was drowned. That was all, absolutely all, that I ever knew about Mercy.
He said, “Mercy,” and gave a little neighing laugh like a horse, “fed the kitten a saucer of milk before it was drowned.”
Where was the sampler? Had Aunt Rosa the sampler? Aunt Rosa was very quiet, she and Uncle John had been missionaries. She watched us trim the tree one Christmas and did not seem to understand; that is, she did not help us, as if she did not know how to trim a Christmas tree.
No one seemed to belong to Papa when he came in out of the cold, though Mama looked up and Ida said, “Will the Professor want his evening supper now or later?” Everything revolved around him; Mama was sweeping up the bits of gilt paper, she seemed to be thinking of something else. Harold stood looking, Gilbert did not shout now. It was as if he brought into the house the night and the cold, and when he laughed, it was not like Uncle Fred or Uncle Hartley, it was a sort of snort like a horse makes. “Does the Professor’s beard really freeze on his instrument?” the university ladies would ask. Sometimes, they seemed to think it very funny, sometimes they were serious and said, “Such devotion” or something of that sort.
Yes it was true, he must be cold out there alone with the snow drifting into the transit house. Who understood this? Who understood what he was doing? Mama didn’t. “I can’t follow my husband’s work,” she would say to the ladies, “I don’t pretend to.”
Papa did not tell us what he was doing. Mr. Evans seemed very surprised that we did not know all about it. “Your father is doing very important work,” he said. “I suppose he’s explained it to you, on variation of latitude.” We did not dare ask Mr. Evans what that was. Some day, I would ask Papa. I did not want to know really. What it was, was that he was separate, he was not really part of this table with the glass balls, with the tinsel paper, with the work-basket, with the paste pot, with the old gilt fir cones that Mama said we could paint over with some new gilt that she would get when she went in to shop in Philadelphia.
But once at Christmastime, he had taken us out, as if what he did must be different.
He said, “I want to take the children out.”
Mama said, “But now? It’s late, it’s snowing.”
He said, yes he wanted to take the children; we were surprised. Mama and Ida got our coats and mittens, there was snow on the ground and the lamps were lit along Church Street; we walked along with Papa in the snow, in the dark, after dinner along Church Street.
The snow swirled around the lampposts and ahead, you could see the circle like an island where the next lamp was. We got past the grocer’s and on down the empty street; we turned at the end by the seminary, up Main Street where the stores were. We stopped in front of the big toystore or the big store that had all the toys in the window for Christmas, and he told us to stand there and look at the toys and find out what we wanted.
We did not know what to ask for, for day after tomorrow or tomorrow was Christmas. We went in and he said, could we find something that we would all like, something that we could all have together. That seemed hard at first, but it was very easy really for we found a box of animals; then the lady in the store found a bigger box; there were animals set in cardboard, there were about twelve large animals.
The lady said they were from abroad.
There was a polar bear, a camel, an elephant, each an animal in itself, not like the Noah’s Ark animals.
We brought the box home. Mama said, “But it’s not Christmas.” Papa said he got us our present now. “But they better keep it,” said Mama. But we said we knew what was inside. Gilbert held the box, he would not let Ida take it, we took it upstairs, we could have it upstairs if we would go to bed, “It is very late,” said Mama.
Papa shook out the snow from his hat and put his cane in the hat rack. Ida said, “That was quite a treat going out after dark, wasn’t it?” We said, “Yes.”
Those animals were still in the box, and they had lasted, they had not broken, they were very good animals, a little larger than the usual animals, but not too large for the putz. How often had they stood on the putz under the branches, was it two times or was it three times?
We had divided them up, each taking one, then coming round again and each choosing one. Gilbert had first choice and took the elephant, but I did not care; for first, I wanted the deer with antlers, and Harold afterwards said, for first, he wanted the polar bear, so we each got our first animal; this was the way we divided things.
We had done this with the Punch and Judy show; of course naturally Gilbert had Punch and I had Judy and then Harold chose Joey, the clown, and he said he liked Joey better. In a way, I liked Joey better too, but it was natural for Gilbert to have Punch, me Judy, like Jack and Jill went up the hill.
Now there were these other animals, one had almost forgotten them, not quite; that was part of it; it was necessary almost-to-forget between the seasons, then the things came almost-as-a-surprise. There were those animals. Mama had given away the Punch and Judy show when we moved and some of our books. She had not given away the Christmas-tree things, they were still here, or weren’t they? Suppose we opened the box and found that the polar bear was gone or the deer with antlers? Must Papa wait? Yet it was Papa who took us out, everything was different, we had never been out in the snow at night. The snow whirled round the lampposts and each lamppost was an island with its circle of light on the snow.
Even the snow was different, it looked different, it smelled different. It swirled round the lamps and the circle under the lamps. We had crossed the road that runs across Church Street to the bridge and the way along the river to the boats, but we never went there in the winter, nor to the island where he took us on Sundays in the summer because he was very unhappy when he was a little boy on Sunday. That is what I knew about him; he was not happy on Sunday and he had not had a Christmas tree.
He went out in the dark, but that night it was snowing so he did not go to his observatory across the river but took us out. The snow blew round the lamps, and we had crossed the street that runs downhill to the bridge, we had passed Papalie’s house which was really next door to us. Uncle Hartley and Aunt Belle lived there too, and we were going down Church Street, past the Bell House and the Sisters’ House and the Widows’ House and the old seminary and the church where we had our Christmas-Eve candles.
This must have been on the day before Christmas Eve or was it Christmas Eve?
It was a day set apart; for the first time, we went out in the dark in the snow. Harold was small and had to be pulled a little, but Papa did not carry him. Gilbert ran ahead to the lamppost ahead and then turned round and waited for us. He scraped up some snow for a snowball and looked round, but there were none of the schoolboys to throw it at.
There was no one on the street, there were no marks of wheels or footsteps across the street.
There were lights in the Sisters’ House windows. The clock struck but I forgot to count it. It was the church clock. We turned round below the walls of the church that was built up, with steps going up. Then we were on Main Street and there were people in the snow, even with umbrellas and carrying packages. He stopped in front of the window where the toys were.
Papalie was dead. There would be some of the clay sheep he made for us, new each year, or maybe there wouldn’t be. The wool pulled off and got dirty but maybe Mama saved the last clay sheep; they would be the last, with the ram with the wire horns and the lambs with matchstick legs and one or two lambs lying down without legs.
That was the thing.
That was why I waited and why I wondered if maybe Mama had given away the animals, it would be terrible; it had been so terrible that I forgot to care, I did not really care after the first minute, when we came to the new house and everything was empty, with no curtains, and we slept
on mattresses on the floor.
In the empty room, the next day, I said, when Ida and Mama were unpacking the wooden boxes, “Can I have my Grimm?”
Mama looked at Ida and Ida looked in the box where the books were, “I can’t find it,” said Ida, “there is so much to do, run along, run along, ask the packing-man where he put the hammer.”
Mama looked at Ida, there was something wrong.
“But I’ll look,” I said; then Mama said, “Oh, I remember now,” and Ida went out herself to find the hammer.
“I thought at the last, as the fairy book was all coming to pieces”—I knew the worst.
In the new house, with everything empty and no clock ticking in the hall, I knew that something dreadful was going to be told. It was so dreadful that I really didn’t care. Didn’t Mama say we were getting so old now, didn’t she add, “Some poor child who could not have a book,” didn’t she say—what did she say? It was the first thing I asked for when they began unpacking the boxes, but it did not matter. How could it? It was only an old book, it was falling to pieces, she had given it away, some other child. I forgot it then, or rather … the pictures came true in my head.
I could see the first picture, the bright princess with the ball and the frog in the corner to the left and then the large dancing bear and the girl going up the glass mountain with spikes she stuck in the ice sides of the mountain.
I was part of the ice of the mountain, it had happened long ago.
I did not care. Why should I? There was the princess with the brothers, she had long hair and lilies in her arms, there were ravens and the little hut in the forest. All that had been given away. It was not possible—you cannot give away yourself with a star on your forehead and your brothers flying over a tower above a forest and a hut in the woods.
That was the book, it had gone anyway now; Grimm was the children’s Bible, Mama used to say. It was fairy tales, but so was the Greek myth Tanglewood Tales that Miss Helen read in school. It was the same kind of thing, it was real. It went on happening, it did not stop.
The Gift: Novel Page 5