«Well, that isn’t too terrible,” Boo Boo said, holding him between the two vises of her arms and legs. «That isn’t the worst that could happen.» She gently bit the rim of the boy’s ear. «Do you know what a kike is, baby?»
Lionel was either unwilling or unable to speak up at once. At any rate, he waited till the hiccupping aftermath of his tears had subsided a little. Then his answer was delivered, muffled but intelligible, into the warmth of Boo Boo’s neck. «It’s one of those things that go up in the air,” he said. «With string you hold.»
The better to look at him, Boo Boo pushed her son slightly away from her. Then she put a wild hand inside the seat of his trousers, startling the boy considerably, but almost immediately withdrew it and decorously tucked in his shirt for him. «Tell you what we’ll do,” she said. «We’ll drive to town and get some pickles, and some bread, and we’ll eat the pickles in the car, and then we’ll go to the station and get Daddy, and then we’ll bring Daddy home and make him take us for a ride in the boat. You’ll have to help him carry the sails down. O. K.?»
«O. K.,” said Lionel.
They didn’t walk back to the house; they raced. Lionel won.
For Esme: —with Love and Squalor
JUST RECENTLY, by air mail, I received an invitation to a wedding that will take place in England on April 18th. It happens to be a wedding I’d give a lot to be able to get to, and when the invitation first arrived, I thought it might just be possible for me to make the trip abroad, by plane, expenses be hanged. However, I’ve since discussed the matter rather extensively with my wife, a breathtakingly levelheaded girl, and we’ve decided against it—for one thing, I’d completely forgotten that my mother‑in‑law is looking forward to spending the last two weeks in April with us. I really don’t get to see Mother Grencher terribly often, and she’s not getting any younger. She’s fifty‑eight. (As she’d be the first to admit.) All the same, though, wherever I happen to be I don’t think I’m the type that doesn’t even lift a finger to prevent a wedding from flatting. Accordingly, I’ve gone ahead and jotted down a few revealing notes on the bride as I knew her almost six years ago. If my notes should cause the groom, whom I haven’t met, an uneasy moment or two, so much the better. Nobody’s aiming to please, here. More, really, to edify, to instruct.
In April of 1944, I was among some sixty American enlisted men who took a rather specialized pre‑Invasion training course, directed by British Intelligence, in Devon, England. And as I look back, it seems to me that we were fairly unique, the sixty of us, in that there wasn’t one good mixer in the bunch. We were all essentially letter‑writing types, and when we spoke to each other out of the line of duty, it was usually to ask somebody if he had any ink he wasn’t using. When we weren’t writing letters or attending classes, each of us went pretty much his own way. Mine usually led me, on clear days, in scenic circles around the countryside. Rainy days, I generally sat in a dry place and read a book, often just an axe length away from a ping‑pong table.
The training course lasted three weeks, ending on a Saturday, a very rainy one. At seven that last night, our whole group was scheduled to entrain for London, where, as rumor had it, we were to be assigned to infantry and airborne divisions mustered for the D Day landings. By three in the afternoon, I’d packed all my belongings into my barrack bag, including a canvas gas‑mask container full of books I’d brought over from the Other Side. (The gas mask itself I’d slipped through a porthole of the Mauretania some weeks earlier, fully aware that if the enemy ever did use gas I’d never get the damn thing on in time.) I remember standing at an end window of our Quonset but for a very long time, looking out at the slanting, dreary rain, my trigger finger itching imperceptibly, if at all. I could hear behind my back the uncomradely scratching of many fountain pens on many sheets of V‑mail paper. Abruptly, with nothing special in mind, I came away from the window and put on my raincoat, cashmere muffler, galoshes, woollen gloves, and overseas cap (the last of which, I’m still told, I wore at an angle all my own—slightly down over both ears). Then, after synchronizing my wristwatch with the clock in the latrine, I walked down the long, wet cobblestone hill into town. I ignored the flashes of lightning all around me. They either had your number on them or they didn’t.
In the center of town, which was probably the wettest part of town, I stopped in front of a church to read the bulletin board, mostly because the featured numerals, white on black, had caught my attention but partly because, after three years in the Army, I’d become addicted to reading bulletin boards. At three‑fifteen, the board stated, there would be children’s‑choir practice. I looked at my wristwatch, then back at the board. A sheet of paper was tacked up, listing the names of the children expected to attend practice. I stood in the rain and read all the names, then entered the church.
A dozen or so adults were among the pews, several of them bearing pairs of small‑size rubbers, soles up, in their laps. I passed along and sat down in the front row. On the rostrum, seated in three compact rows of auditorium chairs, were about twenty children, mostly girls, ranging in age from about seven to thirteen. At the moment, their choir coach, an enormous woman in tweeds, was advising them to open their mouths wider when they sang. Had anyone, she asked, ever heard of a little dickeybird that dared to sing his charming song without first opening his little beak wide, wide, wide?
Apparently nobody ever had. She was given a steady, opaque look. She went on to say that she wanted all her children to absorb the meaning of the words they sang, not just mouth them, like silly‑billy parrots. She then blew a note on her pitch‑pipe, and the children, like so many underage weightlifters, raised their hymnbooks.
They sang without instrumental accompaniment—or, more accurately in their case, without any interference. Their voices were melodious and unsentimental, almost to the point where a somewhat more denominational man than myself might, without straining, have experienced levitation. A couple of the very youngest children dragged the tempo a trifle, but in a way that only the composer’s mother could have found fault with. I had never heard the hymn, but I kept hoping it was one with a dozen or more verses. Listening, I scanned all the children’s faces but watched one in particular, that of the child nearest me, on the end seat in the first row. She was about thirteen, with straight ash‑blond hair of ear‑lobe length, an exquisite forehead, and blase eyes that, I thought, might very possibly have counted the house. Her voice was distinctly separate from the other children’s voices, and not just because she was seated nearest me. It had the best upper register, the sweetest‑sounding, the surest, and it automatically led the way. The young lady, however, seemed slightly bored with her own singing ability, or perhaps just with the time and place; twice, between verses, I saw her yawn. It was a ladylike yawn, a closed‑mouth yawn, but you couldn’t miss it; her nostril wings gave her away.
The instant the hymn ended, the choir coach began to give her lengthy opinion of people who can’t keep their feet still and their lips sealed tight during the minister’s sermon. I gathered that the singing part of the rehearsal was over, and before the coach’s dissonant speaking voice could entirely break the spell the children’s singing had cast, I got up and left the church.
It was raining even harder. I walked down the street and looked through the window of the Red Cross recreation room, but soldiers were standing two and three deep at the coffee counter, and, even through the glass, I could hear ping‑pong balls bouncing in another room. I crossed the street and entered a civilian tearoom, which was empty except for a middle‑aged waitress, who looked as if she would have preferred a customer with a dry raincoat. I used a coat tree as delicately as possible, and then sat down at a table and ordered tea and cinnamon toast. It was the first time all day that I’d spoken to anyone. I then looked through all my pockets, including my raincoat, and finally found a couple of stale letters to reread, one from my wife, telling me how the service at Schrafft’s Eighty‑eighth Street had fallen off, and one from
my mother‑in‑law, asking me to please send her some cashmere yarn first chance I got away from «camp.»
While I was still on my first cup of tea, the young lady I had been watching and listening to in the choir came into the tearoom. Her hair was soaking wet, and the rims of both ears were showing. She was with a very small boy, unmistakably her brother, whose cap she removed by lifting it off his head with two fingers, as if it were a laboratory specimen. Bringing up the rear was an efficient‑looking woman in a limp felt hat—presumably their governess. The choir member, taking off her coat as she walked across the floor, made the table selection—a good one, from my point of view, as it was just eight or ten feet directly in front of me. She and the governess sat down. The small boy, who was about five, wasn’t ready to sit down yet. He slid out of and discarded his reefer; then, with the deadpan expression of a born heller, he methodically went about annoying his governess by pushing in and pulling out his chair several times, watching her face. The governess, keeping her voice down, gave him two or three orders to sit down and, in effect, stop the monkey business, but it was only when his sister spoke to him that he came around and applied the small of his back to his chair seat. He immediately picked up his napkin and put it on his head. His sister removed it, opened it, and spread it out on his lap.
About the time their tea was brought, the choir member caught me staring over at her party. She stared back at me, with those house‑counting eyes of hers, then, abruptly, gave me a small, qualified smile. It was oddly radiant, as certain small, qualified smiles sometimes are. I smiled back, much less radiantly, keeping my upper lip down over a coal‑black G. I. temporary filling showing between two of my front teeth. The next thing I knew, the young lady was standing, with enviable poise, beside my table. She was wearing a tartan dress—a Campbell tartan, I believe. It seemed to me to be a wonderful dress for a very young girl to be wearing on a rainy, rainy day. «I thought Americans despised tea,” she said.
It wasn’t the observation of a smart aleck but that of a truth‑lover or a statistics‑lover.
I replied that some of us never drank anything but tea. I asked her if she’d care to join me.
«Thank you,” she said. «Perhaps for just a fraction of a moment.»
I got up and drew a chair for her, the one opposite me, and she sat down on the forward quarter of it, keeping her spine easily and beautifully straight. I went back—almost hurried back—to my own chair, more than willing to hold up my end of a conversation. When I was seated, I couldn’t think of anything to say, though. I smiled again, still keeping my coal‑black filling under concealment. I remarked that it was certainly a terrible day out.
«Yes; quite,” said my guest, in the clear, unmistakable voice of a small‑talk detester.
She placed her fingers flat on the table edge, like someone at a seance, then, almost instantly, closed her hands—her nails were bitten down to the quick. She was wearing a wristwatch, a military‑looking one that looked rather like a navigator’s chronograph. Its face was much too large for her slender wrist. «You were at choir practice,” she said matter‑of‑factly. «I saw you.»
I said I certainly had been, and that I had heard her voice singing separately from the others. I said I thought she had a very fine voice.
She nodded. «I know. I’m going to be a professional singer.»
«Really? Opera?»
«Heavens, no. I’m going to sing jazz on the radio and make heaps of money. Then, when I’m thirty, I shall retire and live on a ranch in Ohio.» She touched the top of her soaking‑wet head with the flat of her hand. «Do you know Ohio?» she asked.
I said I’d been through it on the train a few times but that I didn’t really know it. I offered her a piece of cinnamon toast.
«No, thank you,” she said. «I eat like a bird, actually.»
I bit into a piece of toast myself, and commented that there’s some mighty rough country around Ohio. «I know. An American I met told me. You’re the eleventh American I’ve met.»
Her governess was now urgently signalling her to return to her own table—in effect, to stop bothering the man. My guest, however, calmly moved her chair an inch or two so that her back broke all possible further communication with the home table. «You go to that secret Intelligence school on the hill, don’t you?» she inquired coolly.
As security‑minded as the next one, I replied that I was visiting Devonshire for my health.
«Really,” she said, «I wasn’t quite bom yesterday, you know.»
I said I’d bet she hadn’t been, at that. I drank my tea for a moment. I was getting a trifle posture‑conscious and I sat up somewhat straighter in my seat.
«You seem quite intelligent for an American,” my guest mused.
I told her that was a pretty snobbish thing to say, if you thought about it at all, and that I hoped it was unworthy of her.
She blushed‑automatically conferring on me the social poise I’d been missing. «Well.
Most of the Americans I’ve seen act like animals. They’re forever punching one another about, and insulting everyone, and—You know what one of them did?»
I shook my haad.
«One of them threw an empty whiskey bottle through my aunt’s window. Fortunately, the window was open. But does that sound very intelligent to you?»
It didn’t especially, but I didn’t say so. I said that many soldiers, all over the world, were a long way from home, and that few of them had had many real advantages in life.
I said I’d thought that most people could figure that out for themselves.
«Possibly,” said my guest, without conviction. She raised her hand to her wet head again, picked at a few limp filaments of blond hair, trying to cover her exposed ear rims.
«My hair is soaking wet,” she said. «I look a fright.» She looked over at me. «I have quite wavy hair when it’s dry.»
«I can see that, I can see you have.»
«Not actually curly, but quite wavy,” she said. «Are you married?»
I said I was.
She nodded. «Are you very deeply in love with your wife? Or am I being too personal?»
I said that when she was, I’d speak up.
She put her hands and wrists farther forward on the table, and I remember wanting to do something about that enormous‑faced wristwatch she was wearing—perhaps suggest that she try wearing it around her waist.
«Usually, I’m not terribly gregarious,” she said, and looked over at me to see if I knew the meaning of the word. I didn’t give her a sign, though, one way or the other. «I purely came over because I thought you looked extremely lonely. You have an extremely sensitive face.»
I said she was right, that I had been feeling lonely, and that I was very glad she’d come over.
«I’m training myself to be more compassionate. My aunt says I’m a terribly cold person,” she said and felt the top of her head again. «I live with my aunt. She’s an extremely kind person. Since the death of my mother, she’s done everything within her power to make Charles and me feel adjusted.»
«I’m glad.»
«Mother was an extremely intelligent person. Quite sensuous, in many ways.» She looked at me with a kind of fresh acuteness. «Do you find me terribly cold?»
I told her absolutely not—very much to the contrary, in fact. I told her my name and asked for hers. She hesitated. «My first name is Esme. I don’t think I shall tell you my full name, for the moment. I have a title and you may just be impressed by titles.
Americans are, you know.»
I said I didn’t think I would be, but that it might be a good idea, at that, to hold on to the title for a while.
Just then, I felt someone’s warm breath on the back of my neck. I turned around and just missed brushing noses with Esme’s small brother. Ignoring me, he addressed his sister in a piercing treble: «Miss Megley said you must come and finish your tea!» His message delivered, he retired to the chair between his sister and me, on my right. I regard
ed him with high interest. He was looking very splendid in brown Shetland shorts, a navy‑blue jersey, white shirt, and striped necktie. He gazed back at me with immense green eyes. «Why do people in films kiss sideways?» he demanded.
«Sideways?» I said. It was a problem that had baffled me in my childhood. I said I guessed it was because actors’ noses are too big for kissing anyone head on.
«His name is Charles,” Esme said. «He’s extremely brilliant for his age.»
«He certainly has green eyes. Haven’t you, Charles?» Charles gave me the fishy look my question deserved, then wriggled downward and forward in his chair till all of his body was under the table except his head, which he left, wrestler’s‑bridge style, on the chair seat. «They’re orange,” he said in a strained voice, addressing the ceiling. He picked up a comer of the tablecloth and put it over his handsome, deadpan little face.
«Sometimes he’s brilliant and sometimes he’s not,” Esme said. «Charles, do sit up!»
Charles stayed right where he was. He seemed to be holding his breath.
«He misses our father very much. He was s‑l-a‑i-n in North Africa.»
I expressed regret to hear it.
Esme nodded. «Father adored him.» She bit reflectively at the cuticle of her thumb.
«He looks very much like my mother—Charles, I mean. I look exactly like my father.»
She went on biting at her cuticle. «My mother was quite a passionate woman. She was an extrovert. Father was an introvert. They were quite well mated, though, in a superficial way. To be quite candid, Father really needed more of an intellectual companion than Mother was. He was an extremely gifted genius.»
I waited, receptively, for further information, but none came. I looked down at Charles, who was now resting the side of his face on his chair seat. When he saw that I was looking at him, he closed his eyes, sleepily, angelically, then stuck out his tongue—an appendage of startling length—and gave out what in my country would have been a glorious tribute to a myopic baseball umpire. It fairly shook the tearoom.
Nine Stories Page 8