Nothing That Meets the Eye (3 page)

“The murderer lives here now—in the cellar!” Freya whispered.

“Does he?” Aaron asked softly. For an instant he had believed it.

“That's why we have to be quiet, even though we put three circles around the house.”

He followed her into the attic.

“See this window? This is where the husband yelled for help the night his wife got murdered, only he was so scared he couldn't really yell so nobody heard him.”

Aaron looked at the window. He could see the frantic husband screaming and making no sound. The husband wore pale-colored pants like riding breeches, and his black hair was tousled over a handsome head. He looked back at Freya.

“Then the husband fell asleep and had awful dreams, and woke up and ran over the mountains and never came back.” Her mouth was stern as it had been the night on the hills, and her eyes held the sad memory of tragedy. “Now we better go.”

He helped her to close the stiff front door. They walked through deep grass to the road that went into town. She did not talk anymore to him or appear even to notice him, but her acceptance of his company sufficed for Aaron. As they walked, a sense of companionship with her grew in him. And as if to balance some scale in his emotions, a realization of his loneliness came, too. He rejoiced in both sensations. They were an addition to his heart.

On Trevelyan Boulevard, Freya walked more slowly and looked into shop windows.

“See anything you like?” he asked brightly as she stopped before the jewelry shop window.

“Nope.”

She moved on and he walked beside her, thinking he might return to the jewelry shop and buy some little thing for her.

She stopped under the marquee of the movie theater and looked at the panels of stills. The stale, organic, and faintly sweetish aroma common to all theaters, which had thrilled Aaron under marquees in New York, came now through the open doors of the Clement-Olympia.

“Let's go in!” he said.

To share with her the excitement of strange locales, the surprises of the unfolding story, now that he was free of the banality to which he had always been compelled to return, seemed the very highest pleasure.

“I don't feel like it,” Freya said calmly.

Aaron swallowed, and uncertainly followed her as she moved on.

At the drugstore corner, she stopped and looked up at him. “Well, I'm goin' home.”

He was confounded, now that the moment had come. “Wouldn't you like a soda or something first?”

“Nope.” She pushed her hair back. “I know a place almost as good as the house to visit.”

“Where?”

“It's up the river.”

He looked, but could not see any kind of structure beyond the bridge.

“Maybe we'll go there tomorrow.” She stepped off the curb. “Good-bye, Arn.”

He was so astonished by her use of his name, by the fact she remembered it at all, he could only stand looking after her with a fatuous smile.

When he turned and walked away, a figure strolled into his path.

“Eve-nin'!”

It was George Shmid, the man who had been on the porch the day Aaron came to Mrs. Hopley's.

“Evening,” Aaron repeated.

George fell in with him. “Got a new friend,” he said.

“What?” Aaron looked down into George's alert blue eyes, which were fixed upon him smilingly.

George repeated the sentence. His thick lower lip, which he moistened continually, curved up at the corners in a lyre shape. “You know, the kid you was with.”

“Oh, Freya.”

“That's right.” George smiled.

They turned onto Pleasant Street. It had begun to rain lightly, but the rain pattered on the leaves as on a roof, and not a drop came through.

“Where'd you go explorin' today?”

Aaron glanced at him again, remembering that he had told Mrs. Hopley, when she asked him how he spent a certain day, that he had “been exploring.” Still, he could not make himself listen to George with interest, and he did not care. He was too happy in himself to want company. With a vague, half-polite smile, he turned in at the cement walk, lengthened his steps and left George, still murmuring, behind.

V

F
rom that day forth, Aaron's happiest hours were those he spent with Freya. They encountered each other almost every day somewhere in the town, and because they never arranged a meeting place or time, their encounters were casual surprises. They greeted each other as though they had merely stepped across a room. Clement was the room, filled with heroic furniture, interesting bric-a-brac, and magic carpets. Clement was their entire world.

The place up the river which Freya had mentioned was a deserted knife factory. It was a long, low building made of narrow boards once painted red. The stilts at the rear had given way and those in front had been uprooted, so it seemed the place had been half successful at suicide by plunging into the river. Aaron and Freya used an old ladder to enter through a side door.

“What a magnificent piece of rust!” Aaron often exclaimed, delighted by his own eloquence, as they stepped inside. “What a miracle of ­ruination!”

They would make their way down sloping, rotten floorboards that were too dead to creak, toward the broken rear wall where imprisoned river water lapped. Here they would sit on a great comfortable rafter jammed crosswise in the corner, and survey the conglomeration of smashed and tangled machinery. Fingers of sunlight came through gaps in roof and wall, pointing at certain spots as though for their attention. It was their private place. Never had anyone encroached upon it by so much as a glance or a word of reference.

Generally Freya was serious and quiet here. Aaron swung his heels on the rafter and stared with bulging eyes and a bemused smile. He would imagine the place humming, bustling, gleaming, men shouting over the din of machinery, the factory reaching a peak of production, then declining, until its owner sold or died of heartbreak, and the building was abandoned to begin its still-progressing delapidation. Sometimes he merely stared at the cracked belts, rusted cogs, knife parts strewn about the floor, and let anything or nothing ramble in and out of his mind.

Freya might point to some rust-riddled object half submerged in the stagnant water below them. “Look!” Her voice would be an articulate gasp. “Could you ever think of anything so old?”

Aaron would look, silently, his train of thought gently merging with hers. Nothing ever, anywhere, was so old as this.

“Can you imagine it when it was snowing?” Aaron once asked excitedly. “All the shiny machines and knives and the snow outside?”

At other times the place would strike them as terribly funny. The evidence of destruction by man and nature would make them giggle as children must sometimes in church or at funerals. It was this way one afternoon, when they came with bags of penny candies Aaron had bought at the general store.

He helped her onto the rafter, and they sat munching message-bearing hearts, licorice sticks, and taffy kisses that were wrapped in brown and yellow papers which floated in the water below their feet.

“Let's dance!” Freya said.

Catching her hands, Aaron swung her around and around as he turned on the broad rafter.

Then Aaron became conscious of someone's presence. Looking toward the raised doorway, he saw a figure silhouetted. He let Freya swing to a stop against him, her slight weight unbalancing him not at all. The man in the doorway was Pete McNary.

“Hello!” Pete said in a voice of muted surprise.

“Hello!” Aaron called out, almost at the same instant. He released Freya and laughed a little, embarrassed and annoyed. “What are you doing out here?”

Pete remained motionless, his face obscured. “Walkin' home. What are you doin'?”

Aaron could not quite realize he was there, that anyone was able to look inside the place and see him and Freya there. “Not much of anything,” Aaron replied, still smiling. He glanced at Freya, who stood on the rafter with her hands behind her, leaning against the broken wall in a way that reminded him of how she had leaned against the tree the first afternoon he had seen her.

“I heard voices. I didn't know what was goin' on,” Pete went on explanatorily but somewhat self-righteously.

“Oh, we come here now and then,” Aaron said.

Pete looked at Aaron, who looked just as steadily at him. Neither had anything to say. “Well, I'll be gettin' on home.”

Aaron listened to the slow footfalls on the ladder. He put out his hand and Freya took it.

VI

W
hen Aaron asked her again and again about herself, Freya told him she was ten, that she had never gone to school because she helped her mother, who did washing and ironing. But Aaron never knew her to leave him in order to help her mother, or to spend any time at home except to eat and sleep. A vision of Freya's mother at work over other people's laundry never entered his mind, nor did any actuality of it seem to trouble Freya. They were too occupied with the pictures of their own minds, which far excelled those Aaron had found in movies. Freya would never go to a movie with him and he stopped asking her, having less need of them himself.

Often they sat on the hill where Aaron had climbed his first evening, where they had a fine view of the town. With a few phrases they could create for themselves the world of Clement as it had been in Revolutionary times, or when it was peopled with men in tailcoats and women in tight-waisted dresses, when the knife factory sent durable and handsome knives down the river. And doubtless the daydreams he lived with her, in which they governed the fortunes of the people they imagined, satisfied to some extent Aaron's compunctions to bestir himself. Comfort enveloped him on the sunny hilltop. He watched the few cars and pedestrians on Trevelyan Boulevard as he might have watched a puppet show, and felt in harmony with all he saw. Trains chugged like toys into the station, and brought a sense of the benevolence and perfection of the universe. He would try to explain some of this to Freya, but if she understood, she made no sign as she sat beside him and gazed impassively at the town.

The bond between them was lighter than air itself. It was a bond of complete individual and mutual freedom, for neither knew the burden of a single chore or obligation even to each other. There was an understanding between them, however, that they were somehow the chosen people of Clement, that all they saw was mere scenery set for their amusement. Joy sat on their heads, and they betrayed their awareness of it perhaps only in the way, whether together or apart, they walked and looked at things with a kind of arrogant innocence.

VII

“B
een seein' a lot o' that little Wolstenholme girl, ain't yuh?” Aaron blinked at her. He had just come out of the bathroom, and had nearly collided with her in the hall. “Oh, yes,” he said, smiling and frank. He had left Freya not half an hour before. “We take walks quite a lot.”

Mrs. Hopley nodded, and looked at Aaron's belt buckle, which bore the letter B. “Course there mightn't be no haam in it, but some folks thinks otherwise.”

“Harm?” The soap leapt from his hand and flew toward the stairs.

“Might be. Yes. Don't look s'good. A man an' a young child like that.” She delivered her words quickly.

Aaron had gone down a few steps to get the soap. It was covered with lint and was disgusting to hold. He blew on it, opened the washrag and put the soap in its center. When he looked up, Mrs. Hopley's eyes were huge and ugly.

“Not that I see why folks should care much,” she added contemptuously.

“About what?”

Mrs. Hopley eyed him. Then she glanced to the floor as though casting about for a way to speak. Bitterly, as though voicing an opinion to herself, she said, “Not that people should care what happens to trash like the Wolstenholmes!”

“What?”

“Yes, trash. Faather killed in a baarroom brawl. Mother just as trashy as him. Worthless people an' a disgrace to the town.”

“Father killed? Here in Clement?”

“We ain't got no baarrooms in this town.”

Aaron was silent.

“You thinkin' o' gettin' work here finally, I s'pose.”

Aaron's whirling thoughts were checked suddenly and brought to focus upon his own idleness. “Yes, I am.” He wondered if he should explain again, tell her that he had saved his money for just this sort of a vacation.

“I'd set about it, then.” Her eyes moved toward the stairs and seemed to draw her after them.

Aaron was rigid with shame and guilt. He would look for work without delay.

VIII

“M
orning, Pete!” Pete turned in at his shop, fumbling with his keys.

Aaron's lips opened to say “Morning” once more, when a shock went over him. Pete had not spoken to him. Of course he had heard him, must even have seen him. Pete had snubbed him!

Aaron walked quickly past the barbershop before Pete should have time to turn around and to look out his window. He had contemplated being shaved that morning before he went to look for work. It was more than likely an accident, he thought, as he walked on slowly. Still, he was disturbed because he found he had not the courage to enter the barbershop.

He wanted to spend the rest of the morning walking over roads he loved, soothing the irritation Mrs. Hopley's remarks had caused, rationalizing Pete's behavior, but instead he set out grimly for the leather factory, simply because it was the closest place where he might find work and because it was ugly and nothing to his liking. What Mrs. Hopley had said had not touched his conscience about his idleness so much as it had suggested the town might think him a ne'er-do-well if he did not soon get something to do. Now, suppose Pete, for instance, had not spoken to him because he was beginning to think him a good-for-nothing?

The foreman, called outside from a job that had left his hands coated with grease, informed Aaron there was no place for anyone in the factory at the moment. “You'd have to know a little about the business before we took you on as anything but a baler anyway.”