by Thomas Tryon
Again the record ended; he turned it over and wound the machine. Following introductory scratchings came the rich sonorous notes of a soprano. Ho-yo-to-ho—Brünnhilde’s battle cry.
“Yah,” said Ada at last, turning from the window, “Die Walküre.”
When he had led her back to the chair and gravely seated her, she said, “Niles, don’t you think sometimes you blame Holland for things that perhaps are not his fault?”
“Maybe, but it was his turn. Well, it was, honest to—”
“Niles.”
“Gosh.” He grinned back at her look. “I remember, don’t I, when it’s my turn?”
“Is that so much to be proud of?”
“No.” He turned this over. “Pride goeth before a fall—”
“‘Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.’”
“Have I a haughty spirit?” His query, coming after further consideration, as though acknowledging the possibility, made her laugh.
“Gracious no.” She smoothed his hair down and kissed it. She reached for the marionette hanging on the wardrobe door: poor tangled king with its cardboard crown, costumed by her from scraps of velvet and lamé left over from a dress Zan had made for herself, and a saturnine face painted by Holland, the eyes not quite straight: King Cophetua. And where, she asked, working to untangle the strings, was the beggar-maid he loved? Niles dug out a hatbox, rummaged, produced a raggedy, woebegone figure, tried to make her bow at the waist, and laughed when she slipped through his fingers to drop into a broken heap in the corner.
“What did you say?” he said, returning to her and the marionette dangling before her.
“How’s that? Did I say something? Why, I must have been talking to myself, mustn’t I? That is a sure sign of age, I expect.”
“You’re only as young as you feel, that’s what Mr. Pennyfeather says.” A smile, both spontaneous and disarming, broke across his face briefly, then dimmed, clouds before sun.
“I went in to see Mother.”
“Yah, I looked for you there.”
“She’s nervous today.”
“I know.”
“I guess it’s because of the funeral and all.”
“I am glad everyone remembered to speak a word to Mr. Angelini after the service.” She shook her head. “That poor soul, he is being made to suffer so for his carelessness. We must remember to try to smile him up so he does not feel quite so guilty. Accidents will happen.”
“That’s what Holland said. Is Aunt Valeria really going away?”
“Yes. For a visit. She has a friend in Chicago, one she went to school with.”
“That’ll be good. Doesn’t she have folks?”
“No, dear. Mr. Russell and his wife went down on the Titanic over twenty years ago.”
He had forgotten. That was why Granddaddy Perry had generously arranged for them to be married in Pequot Landing, right downstairs in the parlor with the minister saying the do-you’s in front of the fireplace and the stair banister garlanded by Grandmother Perry with laurel and apple blossom.
“Aunt Vee’s very unhappy, isn’t she?” Niles said after a while.
“Yes.”
“Mother is too. Tomorrow I’m going down to the Center and buy her a present to smile her up.” He paused to review the available merchandise. “Do you think she might like some Mexican Jumping beans?”
Ada hid her amusement. “I don’t see why not. I imagine jumping beans might be very cheerful. And shall you please ask at Miss Josceline’s if the tube of crimson lake I ordered has come in? I should like to do a painting of the roses before they go by.”
“Yes’m.” The music ended and he got up to change the record again. In a moment the high tenor voice of John McCormack filled the room.
“Isn’t that ‘The Minstrel Boy’?” she asked. “I haven’t heard it in years. It used to be a favorite of Daddy Perry’s, I remember.” Bemused, she hummed a snatch of the Irish air. “Strange, how one forgets the words.”
“Ada?”
“Yes, dear?
“Why did Brünnhilde ride into the fire?”
“My, what made you think of that, the Wagner music? Why, in those days, that is what the women did. It was called immolation. They offered themselves on the pyre of the beloved.”
“Yes, but why?”
“For love, I imagine. When one’s love of the beloved is greater than one’s love of life or of one’s self, one sometimes prefers death. It is not so much an immolation of the body, I think, of one’s physical being as—” she paused to select her words.
“What, then?”
“As an immolation of the heart.”
He thought this over, then: “Was that Mrs. Rowe at the door before?”
“Why, yes. Wasn’t that nice of her, she come to bring us a dish over.” Their nearest neighbor, Mrs. Rowe, was an elderly widow who lived with a housekeeper-companion, Mrs. Cooney, who “did” for her.
“What did she cook?”
“A meatloaf. Now none of your icks, young man, meatloaf is perfectly nice. And it was thoughtful of her to bother. She don’t have to do things like that.” Niles winced: sometimes she sounded so dreadfully “old country.” “Yah,” “Yas,” “dat damn bird.” She handed him the marionette, the strings freed at last.
“There; there’s your King Cophetua, good as new.” She rose and looked at the figure on the floor. “Alas for his beggar maid. Will you stay and listen to some more music or come along with me? I’m going to visit a while with your mother before supper.”
He blinked up at her, eyes troubled. “What is it, Ada? What’s wrong with Mother? Sometimes she seems fine, just like she used to be. Then she gets—” he shrugged a child’s bewilderment—“funny. She gets the time all mixed up. And she can’t remember things. She asked if the ashes were taken out and the furnace hasn’t been on since April.”
“The record, child,” she said, nodding at the Victrola, where the end of the disk scraped under the needle. He got up and put the arm back to the beginning again. “You must be patient with your mother,” she told him. “She will be all right again, in time—please God”—here she made a cross of her thumb and forefinger in the Russian way and kissed it fervently—“she has had a shock. Her mind—her mind wants to protect itself against pain. And sometimes it takes longer for some people to get over things than others, do you see.”
“Yes.” Though from his tone it was not clear if he did or did not.
“Also, you must remember that your mother does not rest well. Often she walks the floor far into the morning. Sometimes she does not sleep at all; the light shows under the door until dawn. And this is very bad, because sleep is a most holy thing. It is while we sleep that we get our mind and our imagination filled up again.” She shaped a bowl with her gnarled hands. “It is like a deep pool, this imagination, and during the day it gets used up, like water, and when we sleep at night the water we have used during the day gets replaced. And if it is not replaced, if there is none to drink of, we are thirsty. It is from sleep that God gives us our strength and our power and our peace, do you see.”
He nodded, impressed by the gravity of her speech. Not to sleep, he decided, must be a very bad thing. “I wish I could help,” he murmured, with a turn to the Victrola handle.
“We help one another by understanding one another: that is the only help there is. And the only hope as well.”
“Hope.” He took this in, turned it over, accepted and, like so much of the rest of the product of her mind, stored it. Listening to the song, he wandered far away, across some darkened landscape where another mocked him and fire failed to warm his body. Out loud he added a final word to all that had preceded.
She turned swiftly and gaped at him. “How’s that, child? Death, you say?”
“Yes, it’s death,” he repeated decidedly, “it’s death that Mother can’t get over.” Dancing the marionette along in the air, he walked back to the window. “That must be awful. Do you t
hink Father felt any pain when he died?”
“We do not know. Hopefully he did not.”
“Yes. Hopefully.” He hooked the strings over the window latch and lay the puppet on the sill, crossing its arms over its breast. “Russell did, though, I guess.” (The glasses; where were the glasses?)
“Did what?”
“Felt pain. I mean, falling on a pitchfork, that must really be painful, don’t you think?”
“Yes, surely.” Another thought. She faced him again. “Niles.”
“Yes’m.”
“Do I imagine to have been hearing a harmonica?”
He laughed. “No, you hear it. That’s Holland. He plays it sometimes.” He did not say how he had just made him quit, how it upset Uncle George.
“Where did Holland get the harmonica?”
“Oh—from a friend.”
“Who is this friend?”
“Just a friend.”
“And this—friend—gave it to Holland?”
“No.” Reluctantly. See? See how she can tell when he’s lying?
“Then?”
“Well, the friend didn’t exactly give it to him. Holland—”
“Yah?”
“—crooked it from him. Or, well, it wasn’t exactly a ‘him,’ it was a ‘her,’ and it wasn’t a friend, it was—”
“Yah?”
“Miss Josceline-Marie.”
“Shoplifting? Oh!” she exclaimed in exasperation. “I did not raise any boys to become thieves.” Standing at the sill, where the marionette lay, a tiny corpse, she observed a bleak, protracted silence, seeming to have shrunk further within herself, her eyes closed, lost in thought, apparently not at all aware of the tenor voice singing again the old Irish melody.
Nor, leaving the room with a look, did she in any way acknowledge the words:
The min-strel bo-oy to the wars is gone,
In the ranks of dea-a-ath you’ll find him . . .
Now there: that’s what he meant. Something was bothering her, though she tried to keep it hidden. Something on her mind. A faintly puzzled air—why was she asking questions about the harmonica? It had to do with Holland, he felt certain. All these looks going around: Mother sorrowful (Aunt Vee, ditto); Uncle George, helpless; Winnie tearful; Holland, mysterious; even Mr. Angelini (looking, Niles thought, sort of like a tribal elder, his dark brows lowered—how long the hairs in his eyebrows were—his look hardly ever leaving the back of Holland’s head as Mr. Tuthill droned on about blasted buds on the family tree). And now Ada. But you never could tell, with Ada. Her looks were often the strangest of all. Russians, being happy, the happiness oozed out of every pore. It was all around them, like the sun. Unhappiness was hidden, as though it didn’t exist. Well, of course she was unhappy about Russell’s getting killed on the pitchfork (no sense in hiding that). Everyone was unhappy; Holland too, Holland . . .
And what, Niles asked himself again, had happened to Russell’s steel-rimmed glasses that were in the loft?
Alone, humming along with the Minstrel Boy song, Niles looked down to see his hand again drawn, as though by some other, some magnetizing, outside force, to his shirtfront, where it crept inside and removed the tobacco tin. He regarded the face of Prince Albert thoughtfully (even he had a Look today!), then unsnapped the lid, raised it, and drew forth the packet of worn blue paper. He unfolded the layers of wrapping—how like the crumpled petals of a rose they were, a blue paper rose—opening it oh-so-gently, that he might not tear the paper further; and for a long time he stared down at its contents, The Thing, The Thing given to him by Holland, that which lay there at the center of the corolla-like layers of tissue, that Thing of shriveled flesh and bone and cartilage that was a severed human finger.
Part Two
Getting darker. Little by little the light is waning. Imperceptible changes. I’m actually feeling a bit drowsy. Even after that dinner. (Imagine, standing in line for what they throw at you down in the cafeteria!) Later on I won’t be able to sleep at all. Never do. If I sleep, I dream. No, not always the same dream, as some do. But, awake, I don’t even like thinking about the dreams I have. Hard to see the face on the ceiling. Or Madagascar, whichever. I’m going to be sure to ask Miss DeGroot about that when she comes. (She should have started her rounds by now.) I’ve been wondering what place it is she thinks it looks like. Maybe it isn’t an island after all; maybe it’s a country. It does look a little like Spain and Portugal together, don’t you think? If you turn your head this way? The whole Iberian peninsula? If you use your imagination a little. Even though Miss DeGroot is Pennsylvania Dutch—big hands, big feet, big nose, the horsy kind—she’s got a lively imagination. I suppose if she looked long enough at that spot she’d probably see it as the Abominable Snowman or something.
I think imagination’s a healthy thing. Makes so much more possible to one, doesn’t it? I know; you’re probably saying Holland never had that sort of imagination; but you’re wrong. He had imagination all right. Lots of it. It isn’t all Niles, you know. Not by a long shot. Do not imagine I am predisposed in his favor as a simple matter of course; if you think this, then I have led you up the garden path.
Given your druthers, which of the pair would you prefer? I am more inclined to identify with Holland; his stamp seems, to me, to be the less counterfeit. My predilection for the underdog, no doubt, and every underdog shall have his day, to coin a phrase. Believe me, Niles is not entirely the paragon he appears, nor Holland quite the knave. People like Holland are, it seems to me, by far the more engrossing; that is to say, endearing. Their ways are winning indeed, but who is unwilling to be won by such charm? Consider: I have described for you a Niles warm, sympathetic, innocent, virtuous, a little droll—fine, to a point—a child possessed of a certain, clear sentience, and certainly a most genuine one. On the other hand, the picture painted of Holland is nearly villainous: aloof, independent, mocking, a cold, wintry boy, and as we have only a moment ago seen, a thief. But here a question arises: why then does Niles engage in such emulation? Such imitation? Why wear his sibling’s shoes? Wonder at his whereabouts? Miss him? Why lie, not on his own bed, but on his brother’s, staring at that face, up there in the plaster, the watermark face, like this one here, in this room?
Ah, you may say, but Niles is lonely. Agreed; and who then are Holland’s friends? The Knobb Street gang? The older boys whistling at the girls outside the Pilgrim Drugstore up at Packard Lane? Do not believe it. Why does Niles watch Holland off to ride the streetcars? And, more to the point, why does he not ride, himself? And, what, I wonder, is the particular significance he attaches to those streetcars as they rattle past the house, the house that was pulled down even before the advent of the buses on the Shadow Hills route? Discovering this would, I think, unravel much of the mystery.
Niles is generous, you say. Agreed. But what of the gifts he has received from Holland? The ring, the blue packet? Admit it—taken by and large, Holland is an entrancing character. Surely he is. And that smile—nonpareil; who could stay mad at him for long?
Not Niles, assuredly, whose smile is no less celestial, and Niles, who knows his twin better than anyone, will defend Holland to the death.
See if he doesn’t.
You have perhaps observed, as I have, how the Hollands of this world are sometimes moved by a depth of passion unlikely to be found in the average child of like age. How their hatreds seem scarcely less ingrained than those to be found in the more mature personality. Yes, you say, you have heard of that shocking business behind the schoolhouse with the little girl, but who of us has not engaged in such frivolous investigations; moreover, the girl was older than he and should have known better. And if Holland did burn down a shack, who was hurt? Not much harm was done, and Ed Joacum was known to have been insurance-poor.
As for that much-talked-about business concerning the Talcott boy, assuredly Holland was there (he himself admitted it) and assuredly the boy did drown, but one ought to discredit—as I have always been inclined to do—an
y oblique allusions to the accident, except for the fact of the boy’s limp, that one shorter leg which for somebody of Holland’s discriminate and sensitive nature must have seemed monstrous enough. He detested the ugly and the grotesque, I will admit; though, for him, as for most of us, it exerted a certain macabre fascination.
Which brings me to the Firemen’s Fourth of July Carnival, grotesque enough in some of its aspects, and which, in a manner of speaking, is a beginning—this at a time when Russell had been buried for several weeks and already most of the family’s thoughts of the death had faded into an increasingly dim past.
Oh—I should mention that there was at that time a new girl in town. She boarded with some people on Church Street and worked at the Ten Cent Store, demonstrating the latest song hits on an upright piano. She was called Rose Halligan but, though she had only been in Pequot Landing a few months, the boys already had a sobriquet for her . . .
1
“Hey Roundheels!”
Dressed in a tight skirt and a blouse the color of dried blood buttoned over a sparrow chest, Rose Halligan ogled the cars on the Ferris wheel. Star-pricked with lights, the contraption turned fitfully, dipping couples out of the dusk and ladling them high into the air. A loudspeaker braying “On the Isle of Capri” vied with the tinny mechanical clatter of the merry-go-round calliope and the electric splat of ladycrackers and cherry bombs.
At the series of hot whistles greeting her from one of the cars, Rose wiggled a shoulder in disdain, tossed her head, and looked away. Rose Halligan didn’t mess with the young fry. With a wink to Holland, Niles waved, called “Woo-woo,” while the ground rose in a flat plane and quickly receded.
“Carmen Lombardo sings through his nose,” he remarked of the music while the car jerked spasmodically, moved, stopped, moved again, then all at once lurched to the topmost position of the wheel, others below dropping to disgorge their loads and board new ones. He looked down at the crowd milling about the postage-stamp lot where a small, tawdry carnival had been thrown together, offering under the sponsorship of the Pequot Landing Fire Department thrills and excitement for one night only. On either side of a narrow avenue carpeted with a debris of strewn popcorn and crumpled Dixie cups, booths, shabby, faded, limp, furnished third-rate amusement: Win-a-Doll; Madame Zora, Stargazer; Chan Yu the Disappearing Marvel; Zuleika, the World’s Only True Half Man-Half Woman.