In the Absence of Angels (17 page)

“Why, Kinny!” said his mother in a slow, pleased way.

“I won’t embroil the child in this!” said his father angrily.

“Little pitchers have big ears,” said Selena with a caustic smile.

“I’m not a child.” He hung his head and looked at his father sidewise. “She’s used to me. I can do it.” His voice trailed off weakly.

“After all, I was the one who had to go in and tell her about Nat,” said his mother bitterly. “All of you avoid anything unpleasant.”

“Maybe the child
could
do it,” said Flora hurriedly.

His mother came around the table and thrust the envelope into his hand. “That’s a good idea, Kinny. Just read to her, like you always do.”

“All right. All right, all of you,” muttered his father, not looking at him. “Just be careful, Kinny.”

Now that their collective eyes, raw and ashamed, seemed to be pushing him out of the room, he felt uneasy. Carefully, he straightened the silver on his plate. There were several large crumbs on the floor next to his chair. With a prim show of industry, he picked them up, one by one, and put them on the cloth. Grinding his shoulder blades together, he left the room.

In the hall, he pressed his face against the cold, stippled wall. There were too many dark-angled halls in this apartment. He wished that the family would leave soon for the summer place, and thought with relief of the house, where you could dash straight through from back to front, out into the sunshine, slamming the door behind you. Stacked at a corner of the hall, rolled-up carpets wrapped in tar paper waited to be stored, giving out a drugged, attic smell. He flicked each one as he went by, rattling the paper in drum time.

Outside his grandmother’s sitting-room door, there were several pictures that had been taken down and swathed in cheesecloth. He spent some time peering at these, trying to make out which was the one of the old bookshop and which the red-coated dragoon and his bride. Through the half-shut door he could see his grandmother in the unlit room. She was snoring softly, head back.

“Grandma,” he said, his voice cutting the cobwebs. “It’s me, Kinny.” He went up and touched her lightly on the arm.

“Ah — oh. Yes?” The folded newspaper slid off her lap and she blinked up at him. Turning on the lamp beside the old cloisonné bowl, he laid the letter in her hand.

“A letter for you. Shall I read it?” It seemed to him that she hunched into herself like an old bird, listening.

“Where’s your father? Where’s Amy and Flora?”

“In the — in the dining room.” He rocked back and forth on his ankle. “Can I use your paper cutter?”

She nodded, drawing her shawl around her, although the dank heat in the room made his lip bead. He got out the paper cutter, rubbing his thumb against the ivory hair of the girl on the handle, and slit the envelope. In the uninflected drone taught in the grade schools, he began to read his father’s high, knotted script.

“My dear Mother: Trust this finds you well and in good spirits. Everything is fine here. The meals are good and the rooms are nice and clean. I miss seeing you and my dear family, but the doctor says that everything is going as well as can be expected, though he still would like to see me go out West this fall. Please God, we will all see each other before then. Keep well and do not worry if I write seldom, as there is very little news here. Your affectionate son, Aaron.”

Rubbing the ball of one thumb ceaselessly in the palm of the other hand, his grandmother looked straight through him. He’d never noticed before how her head shook a little, as if blown by a slight, steady current from behind. “Read it again, Kinny,” she whispered.

He read it again, more quickly, thinking that its phrases sounded a lot like the letters his father sent home from his travels — “please God” and “trust you are well,” and signed always “Yrs. aff., Joe.”

“Let me have the letter.” Searching shakily in the side pocket of the chair, she brought out the thick, beveled magnifying glass. Holding it almost under her nose, she inched it slowly along the letter, then the envelope, then back to the letter again. She sat for a long time with the letter in her lap; then a sharp movement of her arm sent the magnifying glass across the room, where it hit the couch and spun to the floor with the dull, rubbling sound of a top but did not break. He pressed his knees together, listening to the echo.

He saw that she was feeling for the cane. Frightened, he thrust it under her hand, but was reassured by the familiar heavy way she rested on him and pulled herself up in three marionette jerks. The two of them made their way to the sideboard. As she bent over the drawer, he saw the moisture from her eyes run six ways down the channels in her cheeks and fall into the drawer. Turning, she let her sticks of fingers brush his face in a dry gesture.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “You were good to try.” Thrusting the box into his hand, but not releasing it finally, she held her hands cupped around his, and for a moment, they rocked back and forth together, in a movement of complicity and love.

T
HROUGH THE AQUEOUS
summer night, the shop lights along the avenue shone confusedly, like confetti raining through fog. From bench to bench in the narrow strip of park down the center, voices bumbled softly against one another, as from undersea diver to diver, through the fuzzy, dark medium of the evening.

Over toward the river, groups of girls and boys in their teens foraged for mischief and experience in the anonymous blur of the shadows, but Hester, bound to her mother, sat between her and her father’s elderly cousins on a bench that they kept to themselves, repairing somewhat, by this separation, the
déclassé
gesture of sitting in the park. Across from them, in the big gray apartment house, Hester could see the long, lit string of their own windows — at one end the great, full swags of the Belgian-lace curtains of the living room, and around the corner the faint glow of her grandmother’s night light.

Outwardly, it was because of her grandmother that their home swirled continuously with family company, but actually the visitors spent no more than a token time with the old lady, whom longevity had made remarkable but unapproachable other than as a household god. In reality, according to Hester’s mother’s exasperated comments, the visiting was a holdover from the bland, taken-for-granted gregariousness of the Southerner, whereby, in a rhythmic series of “droppings-in,” in corner tête-à-têtes of intramural gossip, they all reaffirmed the identity of the family and of themselves.

Now, after the Sunday-night supper of cold cuts and cheese and pastry, most of the company had eddied away, and only three were left here with Hester and her mother — Rose and Martha, who lived in Newark and came only on Sunday, and Selena, who lived Hester did not quite know where but came most often of them all. Under the incomplete dark of the New York sky, their faces bobbled, uncertain and white, above their sombre, middle-aged dresses, and from time to time they pushed up sporadic remarks through the stifling heat.

“When does Joe get back?” asked Martha.

“Tomorrow morning,” said Hester’s mother. “This is his last trip for the year.”

“Then you go to the country?” said Rose, with her plaintive whine, in which there was a hint of accusation.

“Yes, to White Plains. The same house as last year,” said her mother, as if she regretted the disclosure. She would deplore their visits in conversation, behind their backs, but they would all come anyway, sending her into grudging paroxysms of hospitality.

“Not a breath stirring,” said Martha, twitching her lip with a movement Hester could not really see but knew was there. Martha was a steady little person, dumpy-legged, with a face as creased and limited as her conversation. A milliner, working at home, she specialized in such oddly assembled trivia that Hester wondered often who bought them. She never went hatless and often appeared in rearrangements of the same materials, so that the lilies of the valley of last week, detached now from their wreath of green leaves, turned up limp but enduring on the orange velvet toque of the week before. Martha’s rooms, which Hester had once seen, had the same scattered look, as if her whole life were composed of bits of trimming and selvage that she endlessly, faithfully, turned and made do. On the speckled, polka-dotted, or mustily striped bosoms of her dresses, anchoring her together, there was always the gold brooch lettered “True Sisters,” symbol of a Jewish ladies’ organization that was her extracurricular glory. To Hester, it seemed that this must have some esoteric significance, about which she never dared inquire, since, in so doing, she would be delving impolitely into the personal springs that must lie under the trivia of Martha, would be asking of that cramped, undreaming little body, “Cousin Martha, to what is it you are True?” Another thing that lifted Martha from the ordinary was her tic, which consisted of a wetting of the lips and a side twitch of the mouth that occurred at regular intervals, whether or not she happened to be talking. At first repelled by it, then fascinated by the way Martha and those around her ignored it, Hester had finally come to watch for it and dwell upon it, for it seemed to her a sign that obscure, eternal forces nudged even at the commonplace Martha, twitching at her, saying, “Even under your polka-dotted bosom, under your bits and stuff, we are working, we are here.”

Next to Martha, Rose, her younger sister, whom she intermittently supported, made the muted small sounds that were meant to indicate delicately that her digestion, as usual, was not acting well. Rose was the only one of her father’s cousins whom Hester disliked. With the slack shoulders and drooping neck of the invalid, she sloped inward upon herself, as if it were only by an intense concentration on her viscera that their processes might be maintained, as if the fractional huff-huff of her heart would go on only so long as she was there to listen and bid it. About her there was always the cottony, medicinal smell of indefinite ailments which would never be confirmed, Hester felt unsympathetically, except by that astringent confirmer, death.

“Want some soda, Rose?” asked her mother, “We could run across to the drugstore.”

“No. I’ll be all right,” said Rose, satisfied that her distress had been noted. She turned toward Hester, whose stolidity she was always trying to court. “Getting such a big girl!” she said. “Why isn’t she at camp, with Kinny?”

“She has to make up her algebra at summer school,” said her mother. “Besides, she says fourteen and a half is too old for camp.”

“Fourteen years. Imagine!” said Martha, the involuntary spasm flicking over her face, like an oblique comment. “Why I can remember her in her bassinet!”

“Yes,” said Hester, in a dreamy urgency to say it before anyone else could. “How time flies!”

“Hester!” said her mother.

From Selena, sitting rigid, unyielding, in the supple currents of the dark, came a stifled snort, whether of amusement or disapproval Hester could not quite tell. Of all the adjuncts to their household, Selena was the most constant and the most silent. Spare and dark-haired, the color of a dried fig, she wore odd off colors, like puce and mustard and reseda green. Although they did not become her, she carried them like an invidious commentary on the drab patterns around her, and her concave chest was heavily looped with the coral residue of some years’ stay in Capri as an art student, in her youth. She was the secretive spinster remnant of a branch of the family that had once been rich, so her concealment of her circumstances and her frequent presence at meals provoked occasional discussion as to whether she was still rich but miserly or had lost her money. “Poor Selena,” Hester’s father had once commented. “She’s hungry for
people
.” With her face pursed in her habitual contempt for the family of Philistines, she sat at their table nevertheless, partaking voraciously of something more than food.

“Where does Selena live?” Hester had once asked her mother.

“Oh, somewhere in Brooklyn,” her mother had answered indifferently. “In the house her mother left her, I think.”

“Were you ever there?”

“No-o.” Her mother had shaken her head, amused, with the depreciative smile of those for whom Manhattan was New York. “Someone once told your father she’d sold it. No one really knows, though. She keeps very close.”

“Did you ever see any of her paintings?”

“She painted me once, holding you, just after you were born. Mother and child.” Her mother had laughed slightly.

“What was it like? Can I see it?”

“Oh!” Her mother had thrown up her hands, then brought them together, shaking her head in derision. “I don’t know where it went. I suppose she took it back.”

It had been Selena’s mother, the old grandmother’s elder sister, who had sent the grandmother, long ago, from California, the silver service with the pistol-handled knives the family still used at dinner parties. With it had come the large cup and saucer, covered with beaten gold, that Hester and her brother, long used to hearing their father say, “That cup’s over a hundred years old!,” had taken to calling “the hundred-year cup.” Translating this to Selena, Hester privately visualized her as living in the narrow, high rooms of one of the single houses she associated with the very rich — in a house, perhaps, that was a kind of hundred-year cup of treasure, from which the humdrum touch of people would be inscrutably barred.

Leaning forward, Hester almost touched her hand softly to the coral hanging like strips of rosy twigs on Selena’s flatness.

“I like it better this way,” she said, “than round and smooth, like my baby beads.”

“Oh?” said Selena, raising the furry circumflexes of her eyebrows. “And why do you like it better?”

Accustomed to asking why, rather than to being asked, Hester hesitated, startled. “It’s more real,” she said, finally.

“Real?” echoed Selena, the harsh tang of her voice thrusting the word forward, like a marble, to be felt and examined. Through the dimness, Hester could see her long, saffron face poised on one side, listening, weighing the word and Hester’s use of it.

Emboldened by attention, Hester went further. “Where did you get them all — the corals, I mean?” she asked.