Hilda and Pearl (12 page)

Hilda felt better as her pregnancy advanced, and Pearl thought she looked lovely when she went into maternity dresses. Hilda stopped working, and Pearl missed her at the office, although she felt freer. Hilda's birthday came in March, and Pearl made another dinner for her and Nathan and Mrs. Levenson. At the dinner, Hilda said she needed a lightweight maternity dress for spring and summer and Pearl offered to go shopping with her, but Hilda said she liked to shop alone. After the night when Hilda told Pearl she was pregnant, Pearl had thought they were going to be friends at last, but Hilda still pulled back from her at times, and Pearl felt clumsy and stupid when that happened. At other times Hilda was friendlier than before. She had gained a lot of weight, and she said she was ashamed of how big she was.

“You're supposed to be big,” said Pearl.

“I'm too short to look good pregnant,” Hilda said. “You'd look nice. I look like an apple.”

“I think you look beautiful,” said Pearl.

Mike got the job he wanted in April, taking shorthand in the district attorney's office. He worked for the homicide squad, and it frightened Pearl. “The murder's over by the time we show up,” said Mike. “That's the whole idea.” The office would call him when someone was going to make a confession, and Mike would take it down. He and Pearl got a telephone, and several times Mike was called out in the middle of the night. Pearl could tell he was fascinated by the policemen and the criminals.

He came back from his first case at three in the morning, and Pearl got up to make him some cocoa. Waiting for the milk to heat up, she turned over the pages of his notebook to see the confession the murderer had dictated. “What did he look like?” she said, studying the loops and lines.

“A sneaky-looking guy,” Mike said. “I wouldn't have trusted him, but I wouldn't have thought he'd kill someone.”

“Did he stab the guy?”

“Shot him.”

“What does this part say?”

He picked up the book and squinted. “‘After McGuire left, I heard the door again,'” he said. “‘It wasn't locked.'”

“Is McGuire the man he killed?”

“No, McGuire was someone else. The guy we took in claims it was self-defense. McGuire and this other guy jumped him.”

Pearl waited for him to drink his cocoa, rinsed the cup, and pulled the string to turn off the kitchen light. Mike was restless in bed that night, and she too found it hard to sleep.

In the warm weather there were more homicides. Once there were four in one night, and Mike talked about it for weeks. Now Pearl took the subway herself to Fulton Street and walked to Bobbie's. She liked her job and often congratulated herself on being out of the candy store. She heard herself sound competent on the phone—
pleasant:
friendly but not too friendly. If she were calling Bobbie's, she'd be sure whatever she wanted would work out fine, hearing from a receptionist like her.

One day in July Mr. Carmichael approached her as she was getting ready to leave work at the end of the day. Nobody else was around and he glanced to one side before he spoke, as if what he was going to say was a secret. “The fact is, Mrs. Lewis,” he said awkwardly, “Jack and I were thinking about hosting a little dinner.” Pearl was confused, but eventually Mr. Carmichael explained that he and Mr. Glynnis, whose first name was Jack, were inviting her to a party. A man he knew had gone into business as a caterer, and because he was starting out and wanted business, he'd given Mr. Carmichael a discount on a dinner for eight. “My wife's in the country,” he said, “and so is Jack's. But some lady friends of ours said they would come. We're doing it at my house. They send a butler and a maid. It will be a treat.” He wanted her to bring Mike and Hilda and Nathan.

He was younger than she had thought, Pearl realized. Because he was the boss, and older than Mr. Glynnis, she had thought of him as someone her father's age, but he was not more than thirty-five, she decided now. Pearl took time, putting the cover on her typewriter and straightening her papers for the next day. She would love to go to a dinner. She could wear the dress she'd bought almost a year ago for her wedding, a gray silk. She and her mother had hurried into New York and bought it the very day before she was married, her mother grumbling and predicting the worst all the way, though she was mollified by the dress itself, and grew almost sentimental on the subway ride home. Pearl would look beautiful in the dress at the dinner. In her mind, Hilda, Nathan, and Mike stood in front of her typewriter arguing with her, while Mr. Carmichael stood on the other side of it waiting for her to speak.

Hilda would say her maternity dresses weren't fancy enough. Mike hated to dress up and meet strangers. Nathan might not mind, but he'd be on his way to some rally on behalf of the Spanish Loyalists, and if he didn't get there the war would go the wrong way.

“We'd love to come,” said Pearl primly. “Thank you for inviting us.”

“Next Wednesday, then,” said Mr. Carmichael. “I'll tell Jack. I'll give you my address.”

Pearl persuaded Nathan that her job might even depend on their showing up for the dinner. “I don't want them to think we're not grateful.” That made Nathan agree to go, but he looked at her sadly. “You'd be better off forming a union, if you want to protect your job,” he said.

Hilda was glad to go. “I haven't been out of the apartment in months,” she said, “except for dinner at Mrs. Levenson's, and everything she puts in front of me, she says, ‘This you shouldn't eat.' I don't know what pregnant women did eat in her day.”

She didn't care about her dress. “I have that black dress,” she said. “Black is always dressy. Besides, they're going to throw me out because I'm not dressed up?” She'd wear the pearls she'd inherited from her mother, she said. That would make it fancy.

Mike was baffled, but he agreed. “If
you
want to go,” he said, looking mystified but amused.

The night of the dinner was a warm evening in the middle of July. Nathan and Mike wore suits and white shirts and ties. They took their jackets off on the subway and both shook them out and folded them over their arms. Sitting next to Hilda, Pearl watched them. The men hadn't found seats and were holding the pole in the middle of the car—Nathan's hand on top, as befitted the older brother. She hadn't ever noticed that they looked alike. Mike looked so young, with that hair swept over his forehead, and Nathan so much older, with
his
forehead bare, now gleaming under the yellow subway light. And Mike's eyes were blue while Nathan's were brown. But their noses and mouths looked the same. She wondered if Hilda had ever noticed. Mrs. Levenson had, of course, and had probably been waiting for the two inadequate brides to mention it for months. Years, in Hilda's case.

The men put on their jackets outside Mr. Carmichael's house, a brownstone in the East Thirties. Pearl watched the windows to make sure they weren't being observed. They were admitted by a maid, and there was Mr. Glynnis, smiling and blushing, and two women, both smoking, drinking iced drinks in tall glasses. “This is Jean,” Mr. Carmichael said, pointing to the nearer one, who was wearing light blue, “and this is Smokie.” He introduced the four of them. “Would you like to freshen up?”

He pointed Hilda and Pearl into the bedroom, which was more lavish than Pearl had expected, with long lace curtains. “Look, that's his wife,” she said to Hilda. On the bureau was a photograph of a dark-haired young woman with a round, cheerful face pressed in on each side by a child, a smiling boy with neatly trimmed hair and a baby with her finger in her mouth and her eyes fixed on the camera. Pearl took off her hat and ran her comb through her hair—being careful not to disturb the braid—so it would have a little softness. She checked the hairpins.

“Pretty swanky,” said Hilda, tilting her head toward the door. “The one called Jean—did you see her necklace?”

“What, is it real diamonds or something?” Pearl was leaning over to look in the mirror. She didn't think she should sit down in Mrs. Carmichael's vanity chair.

“I don't know,” said Hilda absently, as if she'd now lost interest. “I guess their wives are away....” She patted her hair and waited for Pearl, and the two of them went back to the living room. “Are you having scotch?” asked the woman called Smokie as soon as she saw them. “Have scotch and soda.”

Pearl asked for a Tom Collins because she had drunk it before. Nathan and Mike had whiskey and Hilda had sherry. “Have you lived here long?” Hilda said to Mr. Carmichael. Pearl knew she did that because Mr. Carmichael was standing, and a question always made him sit down. She wanted to show Nathan and Mike. Sure enough, he seated himself and picked up his glass before he said he'd been there for five years.

The maid offered canapés. Pearl said no, because she was afraid she'd drop something on her dress, but then she was sorry and took something right away when the maid came back. There was something on the tray Pearl thought might be pate, but you had to spread it yourself on a cracker and she was sure she'd make a mess of it, so she took one of the light brown puffs near it—almost like cream puffs, but with something unusual inside. “Is it caviar?” she whispered to Jean.

“No, honey,” said Jean, louder than Pearl would have liked. “You wouldn't put caviar into something like this.”

“I hate caviar,” said Smokie. “I don't like to put things into my body that look like caviar. I prefer to be kind to my body. Don't you?”

Everyone murmured that they liked being kind to their bodies. “I use enemas occasionally,” Smokie said.

Jean turned to Hilda. “I couldn't help noticing that you're expecting,” she said. “When is your baby due?”

Mike laughed and stopped himself. Hilda was eight months pregnant and perfectly enormous. “Next month,” she said.

“A Leo!” said Smokie. She had lots of reddish brown hair. “Oh, Lord.”

“That's superstition,” said Mr. Glynnis.

“Oh, really?” Smokie said, shaking her hair. “I can guess your sign of the zodiac just by the way you act.”

“Go ahead,” said Mr. Glynnis.

Smokie looked him up and down and said he was probably a Virgo. “A virgin! You think I'm a virgin?” said Mr. Glynnis—Jack, he had told them to say.

“No, silly—it's just your sign of the zodiac. Or maybe Scorpio.”

“Well, my birthday is September twenty-sixth,” he said.

“Twenty-sixth? You're sure? I'm just certain you're a Virgo, but the end of September is generally considered Libra. You don't seem like a Libra to me.”

Mr. Carmichael—Lester—said he was sure Smokie had many interesting ideas on this subject, but Smokie was asking Hilda what she was going to name the baby, and Hilda was saying that if it was a boy it would be Samuel, after Nathan's father. If it was a girl, she'd be called Rachel. Her mother had been named Rachel.

“You could vary it,” said Smokie. “You could name her Rochelle. A friend of mine has that name. Isn't it nice?”

“I think Rachel,” said Hilda.

Pearl had never heard the name Rochelle, or heard anyone talk about signs of the zodiac before. She didn't know what her sign of the zodiac was. When they stood to go into dinner, she saw that Smokie's and Jean's dresses were tight. Their behinds were outlined.

At dinner, a different servant—a man—poured wine in their glasses. Pearl knew she'd be dizzy if she drank it but she was having a good time. Nathan and Mike had hardly spoken in the living room, but now Mr. Glynnis asked them where they had grown up and tried to remember whether or not he had a friend in their neighborhood in Brooklyn. Pearl thought he probably didn't. They talked about subway stops.

The food was served in a new way. The waiter carried a platter around and tilted it next to Pearl, and she was supposed to take some food onto her plate from the platter. Pearl was afraid she'd take too much or too little, and that she'd handle the utensils wrong. Hilda seemed to have no trouble, and looked as if she had always eaten her dinner in this maddening fashion. Jean said it was a pleasure to see a meal served properly, it hardly ever happened nowadays, and Smokie said they should be careful not to eat foods that disagreed with them.

“It isn't worth it,” she said with bitter cheer. “It just isn't worth it. Now this potato dish looks delicious,” she said, “but I'm sure it would be bad for me. No, thank you.”

There was a fish course followed by lamb. Pearl liked the food very much, although she thought the lamb had too much seasoning. “Now a nice piece of lamb, simply prepared,” Smokie was saying. “There's no harm there.”

Nathan looked at her. “You'd get along with my mother,” he said.

“Does she like lamb?”

“I'm not sure. But she likes to—well, she's careful about food.” Pearl saw that Mike was trying not to laugh again.

Smokie ate the dessert, Pearl noticed, even though she was careful and it was quite rich—a pastry filled with custard and candied fruit. And she seemed to have noticed Nathan for the first time. “Did I hear you're a teacher?” she said.

“History.” Nathan had received a permanent appointment for the coming year.