It was quiet in the room and Gilbert was cutting out some paper soldiers with Papa’s shears that he wasn’t supposed to take from Papa’s table, unless he put them back before Papa got home. Harold was helping me with the paintbook that was almost all painted in, and the piano was there, like it was in the old house with Mama’s books of music piled on top; she played Traumerei when I asked her, but she did not play the piano so much. She said I must have music lessons, but it was too far to go to Philadelphia. Doctor Snively said I could come to their house and have a lesson when Margaret and Ethelwyn and Muriel had their lessons, twice a week on Tuesday and Friday. Mama said it would be too much to ask, and Doctor Snively said the children were so happy to have neighbors at last; de Forest was Gilbert’s age or a little older and Margaret was a little older than I. I was between Margaret and Ethelwyn. Soon, I would begin these music lessons, Mama said. The piano was open and there was the Venus that Mama had brought back from Europe, from Paris. The Venus was called Venus de Milo and there were the same pictures we had in the old house, and some more of the photographs of places they had been to in Europe, on the stairs.
The old streetcar or steamcar went past the house once an hour; it was going past soon; we knew when the times were, ten minutes past the hour when it was on time. There was a switch opposite the Fetters’ farm, where the two cars passed each other, the one going to the city and the other coming back, and sometimes they were late. We would wait for the steamcar that ran with a sort of engine, not fastened to the car but part of it. The steamcar went past the house and we waited because perhaps they would come back, but they did not come back, so we went on.
Gilbert went out in the hall, then he came back. Then he took the shears and put them on Papa’s table. “But he hasn’t come back,” I said. Harold was painting a yellow ruffle on a dog that looked like the dog in our old Punch and Judy; the dog, in the colored picture that we were meant to copy the uncolored picture from, had a red ruffle. I did not know if Harold was making it different on purpose; you can hardly see the yellow in the lamplight.
“The yellow will look different in the morning, yellow looks different at night,” I told Harold. I did not say, “But you should have painted the ruffle red,” because we did not always paint the picture the same as the colored picture on the opposite page.
I said, “Yellow looks different in the morning.” Harold said, “I know.” The clock was ticking very loudly. Annie should come in and tell us to go to bed, but when Papa and Mama were out they did not always tell us. Now it would be another hour for the trolley to pass the house. We had a driveway past the house; it would be better, Mama told Doctor Snively or the Ashursts when they drove up and their wheels scrunched the pebbles, in the spring, “The University is having it properly tarred and rolled,” Mama said. There were three big maple trees and a wild cherry tree by the road, but they said it was not any good for fruit, and in the wrong place, anyway, and it would have to be cut down; there were little trees planted back of the kitchen, they were peach trees, but we had not had any peaches yet. The Ashursts sent things from their garden, iris roots and different shrubs for the shrubbery.
Well, now there was only the next car to wait for, or Ida or Annie to come in and tell us to go to bed; Gilbert was waiting, his elbows were on the table, he was pretending not to look at us, but he was looking at us. This was the same table that we had in the old house, in the sitting room there. We put on a white cloth and flowers and presents on this table for birthdays, but there would be no birthday for a long time; all of our birthdays came near together, mine in September, the two boys’ in October. Harold went on painting.
There was a bump on the front porch by the steps, as if someone were coming up, “Perhaps it’s them,” I said, but then it was quiet. Gilbert started putting his new cut-out paper soldier in the shoe box where he had the other old ones. Then I thought I heard someone bump again and I ran out to the front door. I opened the front door. The light from the lamp in the hall showed the porch, it was empty, there were two benches built in the wall that made a little open room of the roofed-in part of the porch by the door.
It was dark and I could not see; the bright light from the hall went over the floor of the porch only as far as the steps, then the dark. I stood and looked at the dark beyond the porch steps and then Papa walked across the light.
He walked right across the floor and I said, “Oh, Papa,” and ran out, with the door wide open. I took his hand and I said, “Oh, Papa,” and he didn’t say anything. He did not hold my hand tight in his hand, he did not take my hand the way he usually did, his fingers did not close tight round my hand the way they always did. It had never happened before that his fingers did not close round my hand.
His hand did not seem to belong to him, his arm seemed like the arm of a scarecrow or a rag doll. I pulled at his sleeve, and his sleeve and his arm did not seem to pull him. I pulled at the overcoat he had on, I pulled at his coat, he was swaying back and forth. Was this a drunk man? Is this how drunk people act, and he had no hat on, and now I pulled him to the open door and I looked at him … and I looked at him.
I pulled him in the door, he stood on the rug on the hall floor. There was the rug on the floor and I did not see anything except Papa’s face, but I knew what was in the hall, but it went far away, then it came clear, then everything in the hall was peculiar; I mean it had some special place and some special reason for being there, as if it were things you cut out of the back of magazines and paste in your paper-doll house. That is not just what I mean, but that is what I mean.
The clock stood there and ticked and it was a clock that belonged to a story, it was a clock that had a door that went into a tunnel, that led to a house in the woods, and the old man and the old lady on the mantelpiece in the hall (that they had brought back with the square dish with the tulip and the rose painted on it, from Dresden) were like an old man and an old lady in a fairy story who come alive after the clock strikes midnight.
The clock would not strike for a little while, the car ran past the house at ten minutes past the hour and the car was late and then we had waited a little, so the clock would not strike the hour for perhaps half an hour or almost three-quarters of an hour. The hour was cut in half, it might be almost the half-hour, because Gilbert had said when he came back from putting Papa’s desk shears back on his table, “The old car’s late, as usual.”
He had said that, I remembered it now. Harold was sitting at the table and I said, “Yellow looks different by daylight,” and he said, “I know.” Harold was sitting at the table and Gilbert was putting his new cut-out soldiers in the shoe box. But really we were in the hall.
Gilbert shut the front door. Harold was there by me and I pulled at Papa’s coat. I pulled at his coat and I pulled him into his study and Gilbert got the lamp from the hall. When he was pushed down in the chair by his table, my face was almost as tall as his head when he was sitting down, so it looked nearer.
The blood was running down from the side of his face that was by me, and there was dust on his coat, and the arm that I had pulled at on the porch hung over the chair.
His eyes were wide open but he did not seem to know us. He sat in his chair. There was the lamp on the table that Gilbert must have put there and Gilbert was not there. Harold and I were alone with him and he did not seem to know us and he did not shut his eyes and his eyes went on looking and looking.
I ran into the kitchen with Harold and we filled the washbasin with water and brought back a towel and Harold stood there and now the water in the basin was almost as red as the blood on his face and his beard was thick with blood and I went on washing his face with the towel and wringing out the towel in water, like Ida showed me how to do when I was a little girl and helped her and Annie wash clothes, but that was in the old house.
This was the new house and we thought, “What fun it will be to move and go to a new house,” and now we were here and we had little peach trees in the back garden by the kitc
hen porch and we had new plants and roots for the shrubbery that the Ashursts sent us. Where was Mama? Was Mama outside, was she dead?
Where was everybody? I went on wringing out the towel and the basin got more red and it did not really seem to matter. Nothing mattered because everything was somewhere else. Gilbert was cutting out paper soldiers and I was watching Harold paint the dog ruffle yellow and we were sitting at the round table in the sitting room and we were waiting for the car that came, if it was on time, ten minutes past the hour, but it was late as usual, Gilbert said.
Where is Gilbert? I must go and empty this basin and get some more fresh water. I must get another towel. But I cannot leave him alone and we are alone in his room. This is his study. There is the desk, there are his ink bottles and his pens and the shears that Gilbert took and that Gilbert put back, and I said, “But he hasn’t come in yet.”
He hadn’t come in but he had been somewhere near and something had happened, while the car went on past the house. Was it robbers? Something had happened that only happens in stories. The Arabian Nights had a picture of a lady whose head might be cut off but it wasn’t, because she went on telling a man in a turban, who was a Turk (or did they say he was Arabian?), a new story. This was a picture in that book or it was the Bible picture when we spread the illustrated Bible open on the floor, before we could read the writing. He was on the stairs, too. On the stairs, He was looking and looking and never shutting his eyes and the thorns made great drops of blood run down his face and Mama thought it was a beautiful Guido Reni.
Harold was there, he held the basin. I could not get the thick blood out of my father’s beard. It tore like my doll’s hair, when it gets tangled. If the water was hot, maybe we could get the thick blood out of his beard. I wanted hot water and I wanted a new towel, but if we went out for some more water, then he would be alone. You cannot leave him alone, staring.
He looks at the bookcase where he has his War and Peace and Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and some German books in German. Those are his reading books (his other books are all along the wall, the other side of the table) and his Gibbon’s Rome. I have tried to read in these books because they have covers striped like marbles, with dark blue on the back and triangles of dark blue on the corners; he said I could read them, but I did not read very far in Gibbon’s Rome.
He is looking at the glass doors of the bookshelf, it is part of an old desk, there is a drawer in the desk that opens; in it, he keeps his pistol. “Did you ever shoot a man?” He said he never did that he knew of, but now someone or something had shot him or hit him, like an Indian with a tomahawk. You could see that something had hit him. If he goes on looking at the glass door of the shelves, above the old desk, where he keeps his pistol in the drawer, I will have to push his head round, I can’t have him go on looking at one thing like that. If he would close his eyes, it would be better, it would even be better if he fell down but we would not be able to get him up; do dead men sit in chairs?
He walked across the bright light from the open door and I said, “Papa,” and he didn’t say anything. What he says, when I say “Papa,” is “little one” or he says “Töchterlein,” and when I take his hand, his hand shuts round my hand like it does, and he holds my hand almost too tight sometimes and he even calls me daughter.
Then Ida was there, she said, “What?” I saw her stand in the door, she said “How? Where?” She went away. She had her hair up, she pins it round her head, she takes it down in front of the little mirror in her room and makes two long plaits of it, but she hadn’t taken it down; I might have thought she was in bed, but I had not really thought about her; now she was there. She went away. The door to the wing opened and Eric and Mr. Evans were there; now I saw why Gilbert had gone away, he had gone to get Eric and Mr. Evans. Ida came back, she had more towels, she pushed me away, she said, “Run away, run away,” what did she mean? She had a bowl, it was one of the big china bowls, there are a lot of them and they all fit in together; she had water in the bowl but we had done all that; Harold still held the basin. She said, “Put it down. I’ll see to your father,” as if he were coming in for his evening coffee, or something; she pushed in front, I could not see Papa. Eric and Mr. Evans stood there in the way.
Now I stood there trying to get round to Papa, but they said, “It’s all right.”
Mr. Evans said, “You children run along”; where were we to run to? Now Mama was standing in the doorway. There was Papa in the chair, Ida, Eric and Mr. Evans and Gilbert and Harold and me, and Mama in the doorway. She said, “Charles.” That is all she said.
She had on a lace scarf or a lace shawl over her head, like she wears when she doesn’t wear a hat, when she goes out at night. It was black lace over her head like the lady on the inside lid of the cigar box that Papa gave me. He saved two boxes and gave them together; mine had the lady with the shawl like Mama had and Gilbert had a man in a big hat with a bullfight on the little pictures round the edge, on the inside of his tobacco box.
They were cigar boxes, there was writing in Spanish, he said it was from Cuba.
Now he saved the two boxes and gave Gilbert the one with the man and me the one with the lady. Maybe Harold was too small for a box. I never, till now, wondered what Harold had, but maybe he was too small. This was in the old house, we cut out pictures for valentines and kept them in the boxes, then we kept firecrackers in the boxes. He always gave us his boxes. Now I must have remembered the box because of the lady with the lace over her head, and the little pictures were of red and white flowers and there was a gold edge around the whole picture on the inside lid, like a valentine. It was like that.
He smoked a cigar after dinner sometimes, or when professors came to talk, but he liked his pipe. The bowl with the tobacco was on the top of the chest of drawers that ran along the wall next to his table. He had them made for his study, before we came here. He let us look over the blueprints with the architect, who came from Philadelphia with the blueprints for the new house, and he would take his pen and make a little mark here, a door here or a cupboard under the stairs. This was that house.
We had watched him draw a square for the extra door in the hall that led out to the field that was now the orchard, since the peach trees were planted. We had seen the blueprint for this room, the double window that looked out on the orchard, the bookshelves built in for his books and nautical almanacs that were on the other side of the table; there was the sofa where he lay down in the afternoons, sometimes when he had been working at night. There was the door where Mama was standing with the lace over her head, there was the wing door that had opened a crack when Gilbert slid in first, that had opened wide when Mr. Evans and Eric walked in.
Gilbert must have run down the wing stairs to get there first. That is what he had gone away for (perhaps even to the observatory or the transit house), he had not really left us alone, but Harold and me were alone for a long time.
Now they did not say, “Where did you find your father?” They did not ask, “Who found him?” They did not say, “But this is your father, were you alone with your father? Did you wash his face? Who got the basin? Who held the basin? Who washed his face?” They did not say any of this, because now Ida had spread a towel over his coat, as if it was the barber’s, and was pressing round his head with her hands.
No one said, “But who found him?” They said, “Run along, run along.” Mama did not look at us, she was looking at Papa. She did not say, “Oh, children, children, who was it found your father?”
What we did was, we sat on the sofa in the sitting room. There was the paint glass on the table and the paintbrush where Harold had dropped it when we ran out, and there was the shoebox with Gilbert’s soldiers. Now I heard the clock tick. I had not heard it for a long time, but it must even have struck because Mama was back and the car only ran once an hour. I did not hear the clock strike. It was long after our bedtime. Gilbert sat at the top of the sofa and I was next and then Harold. We did not say anything to each other.
Eric and Mr. Evans came in, they talked about “concussion” and they wondered how soon the doctor could possibly get here. Who had gone for the doctor? You would think it would be Eric or Mr. Evans; maybe they got Annie to go for the doctor. Where would the baby sleep tonight? What was “concussion”? Had he been out there a long time, had he maybe been on the streetcar before this one? Had it happened an hour before? Or had it just happened when it did? Had he fallen off the car? Had someone tried to kill him? Was he dead? How would they get him upstairs? What was Mama doing? What is concussion? Someone must ask but I did not know if it would be me or Gilbert.
“Yes, yes, yes,” said Eric, very fast, all in one word, and as if he were answering himself, “yes, yes,” very quiet. He stood there and Mr. Evans said, “Concussion of the brain and his collarbone is broken.”
Why did they stand here talking? Why didn’t they do something? Or had Annie been sent for the doctor? What was Mama doing alone with him, had they taken him upstairs, how would they get him upstairs?
“Yes, yes, yes,” said Eric over and over, and he felt for a cigarette packet in his pocket and he pulled it out and threw it on the table. The little bent green cardboard cigarette packet lay on the table. It was lying on the picture of the dog with the red collar. Someone must say something. Gilbert got up and picked up the packet; he said, “There’s a cigarette left, Eric, you threw away a cigarette.” Eric said, “Yes, yes,” and took the cigarette and did not light it.
The Gift: Novel Page 11