Evergreen (41 page)

Who will care for her? Who will love her? She’s not all that lovable. Sometimes I want to put my hand out to her but she will only shrink from my touch. She always does. There is no enmity between us, never a word, now that she is a woman; still, I know, as one knows such things, that she doesn’t want me to touch her. Ruth says she is jealous of me; I wish Ruth hadn’t said it. Sometimes Ruth says things that are too intimate and I am not prepared for them. Yet perhaps it is true; can it be true?

Jealous of me
. And Anna put her hands to her heated face.

Days go by sometimes when I don’t think of it and then suddenly it strikes me. Like the times when Joseph says, so lovingly, “I think she looks like me, don’t you think so, Anna? She certainly isn’t like you.” No, and not like Joseph, either. Those eyes, the nose, the long chin—He and his mother, all over again. Only without their poise and pride, poor little soul! Almost as if she knew she was born wrong. My fault. My fault.

If I had these thoughts every day I think I’d go mad. But time, as they always say, is merciful and so it has been. One finds a way to favor a wound, to spare a crippled leg. Just once in a while comes a misstep and a cruel thrust.

Last week at the picture gallery (Joseph doesn’t really like exhibits, but he goes to please me, and besides, they’re one of the few recreations that don’t cost anything), I said, unthinkingly, “Goodness! I’ve seen that one lots of times before!” And Joseph said, “You couldn’t have. It says this is the first time it’s ever been on loan.” And then I knew. The walled and fruited garden, trees spread flat against the wall, a woman in a white dress, reading. (“Take it to your room, Anna, books are meant to be used.”) A book on a table, in a room in a house that I can’t forget.

Four years it is since I saw him. There’s been no word; no more cards go between us, since the only one he wants
is one that will offer him what I can’t give. So it is better this way.

The key turned in the front door. “Ma?” Iris called.

“In here, in my room,” Anna called back cheerfully. It wasn’t good for the girl to see that she was in a “mood.” And she took an armful of clothes on hangers and laid them on the bed.

“What are you doing?” Iris stood tall and anxious in the doorway.

The dark brown dress with the white collar made her neck look elongated. The dress was stern and clerical.

“Cleaning out closets. Look at these, they must be fourteen years old, above the knees! And here they are back again. If you keep things long enough they’ll be new again,” Anna said, prattling, feeling a need in Iris to be met with unemotional, trivial words. The world is good, it’s not all that frightening and everything is manageable, such prattle said.

“Where’s Pa?”

“He’ll be late. He and Malone went to Long Island to look at some more property. Their potato farms.”

“He works too hard. He’s not that young anymore,” Iris said darkly.

“It’s what he wants to do.”

“I won’t be having dinner. Carol’s invited me to her house.”

“Oh, nice. Is it a party?”

“No. We’re just going to the movies together.”

“Oh, nice.” That was the second time she had said that and it sounded stupid. “Are you going to change?”

“No. What’s wrong with this dress?”

“Nothing. I just asked.”

“Then I’ll be going. I think I’ll walk, I want some air. What are you smiling at?”

“Was I? I was just thinking, you do have a lovely voice. It’s a pleasure to hear you talk.”

“You’re funny,” Iris said. “Your daughter’s twenty-three
years old and you’re just noticing her voice.” But she was pleased.

Really, her face was attractive when she was pleased about something. It was a fine, intelligent, gentle face. Yet something to which other human beings are drawn was missing. There are children in the kindergarten who stand aside while the others fight and play. Why? What is missing? Whatever it is, one learns early that it isn’t there. Wanting it, trying and wanting so much, one develops a timid posture, smiles too eagerly, talks too much out of a fear that silence is boring and dull. It
is
boring and dull.

Oh, my children, my fairy-tale children who were never born, grouped around me, their mother, smiling in some eternal sunshine! I can’t do anything for you, Iris; I couldn’t for Maury, or for Eric, either.

A gust of wind struck like a stone against the window and Anna got up to draw the curtains shut. The pane was cold as ice. You could almost feel the cold upon the river and the streets below. She thought: It’s colder where Eric is. I should hate it; I like to be warm. But perhaps he will grow up loving it. In a flash she saw him in sweaters and knitted caps, on a sled or on skis. She saw all of that, but not his face, which she did not know.

“Please don’t send any more gifts,” they had written. “It will soon be too hard to explain.”

“I don’t give a damn,” Joseph said.

He wouldn’t know now what love went with the yellow wagon and the stuffed cat, but later, when he was grown, he would remember these things for the joy they had given and, by then, he would know who had sent them. When he was old enough to read they would send books and the giving of books would tell him something about them, what sort of people they were.

“I have to stop this,” Anna said aloud. “It’s been going on all day, a wasted, useless day. I have no right to waste a day. There is nothing I can change.”

She went into the bathroom and brushed her hair. Thank goodness it was still dark red. People said she
looked years younger than her age. Anyway, the forties weren’t old these days. Her hair made an oval frame about her face. She wondered how different her life might have been without her beautiful hair; perhaps no one would have noticed her! The speculation made her smile, appealing to some fortunate dash of irony or humor which was, she knew, the only thing that saved her from her own romanticism.

Then she went into the kitchen and made a cup of tea and some toast with jelly. She sat there stirring the sugar in the cup; the click of the spoon was a homely, reassuring sound in the silence. Tomorrow was Red Cross day again. Perhaps a troopship would be sailing. They never knew until the last minute, when they were summoned to the docks to stand while the young men filed past toward the gangplank, pausing for their cup of coffee and their doughnut. The last time it had been the
Queen Mary
going out, stripped and darkened for her race cross the Atlantic. She remembered that young man on the dock; when Anna handed the cups she rarely looked at their faces, and this was partly out of haste but also because she didn’t want to look at them, knowing where they were going. This time, though, she had looked up and been so startled to see Maury’s face, even the separation between the two front teeth, and the eyebrows rising in an inverted “V” to give the face a faintly wistful gaze. She had held the cup an instant in the air between them, and then he had taken it. “Thank you, ma’am,” he’d said in flat Texas speech, and turned away.

Enough! She got up and emptied the rest of the tea into the sink, took an apple and a book, went into the living room and turned on all the lamps. She was sitting there with the apple core and the book in hand when Joseph came home with Malone.

“Let me fix you a drink,” Joseph said to Malone.

“Just a quick one. Mary’s waiting up for me.” He sat down heavily and as quickly jumped up. “I’ve got Joseph’s chair.”

“Goodness, no. Sit wherever you want.”

A good man. Going quite gray, looking much older than Joseph, although he wasn’t that much older.

“You seem especially thoughtful, Anna.”

“Do I? I was remembering the first time I saw you, up on the Heights. Joseph brought you in, carrying your plumber’s tools. You were going into business together.”

“I remember the day.”

“And the war was just ended. It felt more like a war then, I was thinking, with all the songs and parades. This time it seems like just suffering and getting it over with. We’ve learned more, I guess.”

Malone said, “My boys are in places I never heard of. I looked some up on the map, took me ten minutes to find them.”

I know that my son is dead and I’ve learned to live with the knowledge; I’ve had to. But Malone is tortured every day: Are my sons still alive this morning and will they be alive by tonight? “How’s Mary?”

Malone shrugged. “Worried, as everyone is. One thing’s good, though: Mavis is taking her vows in June. That’s something Mary prayed for, and thank God it’s one thing that’s come true.”

“I’m happy for her,” Anna said truthfully. Mary Malone had been praying that one of her daughters would enter a convent and at least one son become a priest. So half of her prayer had been answered, and for that Anna was glad, although for the life of her she would never understand it.

Joseph came back with the drink. “You know what I was thinking on the ride home? I was reminded of when we started out together, Malone. We had nothing but energy and hope, and it’s not a hell of a lot different now.”

Malone sighed. “Except we’ve learned a few things in between.” He raised the glass. “This drink’s to us! If we don’t make it this time—”

Anna asked, “What do you mean?”

“Didn’t he tell you? We bought the land, three hundred acres of potato farms.”

“I always thought you were joking about the potato farms.”

“No joke,” Joseph explained. “There’s no building going on now, but after the war there’ll be ten years or more to make up for. You remember, when the Bronx River Parkway opened in 1925, how they started building houses, how the towns spread out? It’ll be the same after the war, only more so, because the population’s bigger. And the prices will soar. That’s why were taking every penny—and I mean penny—we can lay our hands on.… After this I’ve got my eye on a farm in Westchester. I want you to go out with me on Friday, Malone.” His words snapped briskly, his alert eyes snapped and he looked six feet tall. “Listen to me,” he went on, “there’s going to be a whole new way of life. People are going to move out of the cities. There’ll be a big demand for low apartment buildings with green space between them. There’ll be a need for shops. People won’t want to go into the city to the stores, so we’ll bring the stores to them. I predict that every one of the major New York department stores will have suburban branches within ten years after the war.”

“You talk as if the war were going to be over tomorrow,” Anna said. “We’ve got a long way to go yet, it seems to me.”

“True. But I want to be ready. Well have something for your boys to do when they come home,” Joseph said, turning to Malone with a smile.

The men stood up and went to the door. “Give my love to Mary. I’ll let you know what time Friday.”

Anna put out the lights and they went to the bedroom. “The salt of the earth,” Joseph said.

“There’s something sad about him, I always think.”

“Sad? I don’t know. Of course he’s got a lot on his mind and always has. It’s no cinch to raise seven children.”

“I suppose not.”

“Still,” Joseph said, drawing off his shoes, “still, I wouldn’t have minded having that many. I think I could have managed.”

“You would have. Sometimes I believe you could manage anything.”

“You mean that? That’s the nicest thing you could have told me. A man likes to think his wife has faith in him. And I’ll confess, Anna. Lately I feel young again! I feel I’m going to accomplish big things, to put us on top of the world.”

She had a vague, floating sensation, hard to define. It was almost a fear, a fear of challenge, of conflict and tension. She thought of the breathless rush of their first ascent, how hard he had worked, and all of it came to nothing. She wanted to say, We’ve had enough of that, let us live quietly in a small way, with no more large undertakings, no more feelers put out into a cutthroat world. And she said, not knowing how else to express all of that, “Joseph, we don’t need to be on top of the world. There’s nothing the matter with the way we are right now.”

“Come on! Nothing the matter? We’ve lived this meager existence for almost thirteen years! We haven’t been any farther than Asbury Park! I want to move out and up. Some day, not too far off, I want to own a house with ground around it. I’ve got a head full of plans for us.”

“A house? Now, at our age? It’s not as if we had a family to rear. What would we do with a house?”

“Live in it! And what do you mean by ‘our age’? Look at yourself! You’re a young woman still.”

“Are you really serious about the house?”

“Not now, not yet, but as soon as I can.”

“Iris wouldn’t want to leave the city.”

“Iris will come, and if she doesn’t, she has her own life to live. Anyway, she’ll probably be married in a few years.”

“I don’t think so. I worry about her so much; I don’t always tell you.”

“I know how you worry. But you can’t be all mother forever.”

“You’re a fine one to talk! You don’t worry?”

He laughed ruefully. “You’re right. We’re a pair of worriers. I suppose were no different from other parents. No,
I’ll correct that. Everybody isn’t like us and maybe they’re right, and were wrong. People owe something to themselves, not just to their children.”

From her dressing table she could see him in the mirror. He had laid the newspaper down and was sitting up in bed, watching her.

“I like your new hair style,” he said.

Since the war began people had started to wear their hair high over the forehead in a pompadour, then flowing softly over the ears. Her mother had worn it that way. More and more Anna saw her mother in herself, or, at least, what she thought she remembered of her mother.

“I didn’t think you’d notice,” she said.

“Do I neglect you so much, Anna? I don’t mean to.”

She laid the brush down, a monogrammed silver brush from a long-ago birthday. “You don’t neglect me.”

“I don’t want to,” Joseph said seriously. “You’re the heart of my life, though I don’t say it well.”

She looked away, down at the pattern of the carpet: three whorls of rose against beige, a spiral, a moss-green leaf, three whorls of rose.

“I’m very glad,” she answered, “since you are the heart of mine.”