My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead (5 page)

“Hold your horses,” he would say, with his maddening physicist’s serenity. “Just you hold your horses.”

It took him half an hour to get dressed. He’d stand in front of the mirror and flex his muscles endlessly and admire the line his pectorals made across his broad rib cage, and he always left his shirt until last, even until after he had combed his hair. I found his vanity confusing; he was far from handsome, with his heavy mouth and bushy eyebrows and thick, sloping shoulders, but he loved his reflection and he’d turn and gaze at himself in the mirror from all sorts of angles while he buttoned his shirt. He hated Joel. “There’s a guy who’ll never amount to much,” Preston would say. “He’s chicken. And he’s not very smart. I don’t see why you want him to like you—except that you’re a sucker. You let your eyes run away with your judgment.” I put up with all this because I wanted Preston to walk me part way home. It seemed shameful somehow to have to walk home alone.

Finally, he would finish, and we would emerge from the now deserted school into the dying afternoon. As we walked, Preston harangued me about my lack of standards and judgment. The hunger I had for holding school office and for being well thought of he dismissed as a streak of lousy bourgeois cowardice. I agreed with him (I didn’t like myself anyway); but what was to be done about it? “We might run away,” Preston said, squinting up at the sky. “Hitchhike. Work in factories. Go to a whorehouse. . . .” I leaned against a tree trunk, and Preston stood with one foot on the curb and one foot in the street, and we lobbed pebbles back and forth. “We’re doomed,” Preston said. “Doom” was one of his favorite words, along with “culture,” “kinetic,” and “the Absolute.”  “We come from a dying culture,” he said.

“I suppose you’re right,” I said. “It certainly looks that way.” But then I cheered up. “After all, it’s not as if we were insane or anything.”

“It wouldn’t show yet,” Preston said gloomily. “It’s still in the latent stage. It’ll come out later. You’ll see. After all, you’re still living at home, and you’ve got your half-assed charm—”

I broke in; I’d never had a compliment from him before.

“I didn’t say you were charming,” he said. “I said you have a half-assed charm. You behave well in public. That’s all I meant.”

At the corner where we separated, Preston stood a moment or two. “It’s hopeless,” he said.

“God, do you really think so?” I asked.

“That’s my honest opinion,” he said.

He turned toward his house. I jogged a block or two, and then felt my stomach muscles. When I came to a maple with a low, straight branch, I ran and jumped up and swung from the branch, while a big green diesel bus rolled ponderously past, all its windows filled with tired faces that looked out at the street going by and at me hanging from the branch and smiling. I was doomed, but I was very likely charming.

I ran in the front door of my house and called out, “Mother! Mother!”

“What is it?” she answered. She was sitting on the screened porch, and I could see a little plume of cigarette smoke in the doorway. There was the faint mutter of a radio news program turned on low.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m home, that’s all.”

At the dinner table, I would try to disguise myself by slouching in my chair and thinking about my homework, but my mother and my sister always recognized me. “How was track today?” my sister would ask in a slightly amused way.

“Fine,” I would say in a low voice.

My mother and my sister would exchange glances. I must have seemed comic to them, stilted, and slightly absurd, like all males.

Almost every evening, Sonny Bruster used to drive up to our house in his yellow convertible. The large car would glide to a stop at the curb, and Sonny would glance quickly at himself in the rear-view mirror, running his hand over his hair. Then he’d climb out and brush his pants off, too occupied with his own shyness to notice the children playing on the block. But they would stop what they were doing and watch him.

I would wait for him at the front door and let him in and lead him into the living room. I walked ahead of Sonny because I had noticed that he could not keep himself from looking up the stairs as we passed through the hallway, as if to conjure up my sister then and there with the intensity of his longing, and I hated to see him do this. I would sit in the high-backed yellow chair, and Sonny would settle himself on the couch and ask me about track, or if I’d picked a college yet. “You ought to think carefully about college,” he would say. “I think Princeton is more civilized than Yale.” His gentle, well-bred voice was carefully inexpressive. In his manner there was a touch of stiffness to remind you, and himself, that he was rich and if some disrespect was intended for him he wouldn’t necessarily put up with it. But I liked him. He treated me with great politeness, and I liked the idea of his being my brother-in-law, and I sometimes thought of the benefits that would fall to me if my sister married him.

Then my sister would appear at the head of the stairs, dressed to go out, and Sonny would leap to his feet. “Are you ready?” he’d cry, as if he had never dared hope she would be. My sister would hand him her coat, and with elaborate care he’d hold it for her. It would be perhaps eight o’clock or a little after. The street lamps would be on, but looking pallid because it wasn’t quite dark. Usually, Sonny would open the car door for my sister, but sometimes, with a quick maneuver, she would forestall him; she would hurry the last few steps, open the door, and slip inside before he could lift his hand.

Sonny was not the first rich boy who had loved my sister; he was the fourth or fifth. And in the other cases there had been scenes between my mother and sister in which my mother extolled the boy’s eligibility and my sister argued that she was too young to marry and didn’t want to stop having a good time yet. Each time she had won, and each time the boy had been sent packing, while my mother looked heartbroken and said my sister was throwing her chances away.

With Sonny, the same thing seemed about to happen. My sister missed going out with a lot of boys instead of with just one. She complained once or twice that Sonny was jealous and spoiled. There were times when she seemed to like him very much, but there were other times when she would greet him blankly in the evening when she came downstairs, and he would be apologetic and fearful, and I could see that her disapproval was the thing he feared most in the world.

My mother didn’t seem to notice, or if she did, she hid her feelings. Then one night I was sitting in my room doing my homework and I heard my mother and sister come upstairs. They went into my sister’s room.

“I think Sonny’s becoming very serious,” my mother said.

“Sonny’s so short,” I heard my sister say. “He’s not really interesting, either, Mother.”

“He seems to be very fond of you,” my mother said.

“He’s no fun,” my sister said. “Mother, be careful! You’re brushing too hard! You’re hurting me!”

I stopped trying to work, and listened.

“Sonny’s a very intelligent boy,” my mother said. “He comes from a good family.”

“I don’t care,” my sister said. “I don’t want to waste myself on him.”

“Waste yourself ?” My mother laughed derisively. I got up and went to the door of my sister’s room. My sister was sitting at her dressing table, her hair shining like glass and her eyes closed. My mother was walking back and forth, gesturing with the hairbrush. “He’s the one who’s throwing himself away,” she said. “Who do you think we are, anyway? We’re nobodies.”

“I’m pretty!” my sister objected angrily.

My mother shrugged. “The woods are full of pretty girls. What’s more, they’re full of pretty, rich girls. Now, Sonny’s a very
nice
boy—”

“Leave me alone!” My sister pulled her hair up from her shoulders and held it in a soft mop on the top of her head. “Sonny’s a jerk! A jerk!”

“He’s nice-looking!” my mother cried.

“Oh, what do
you
know about it?” my sister cried. “You’re old, for God’s sake!”

The air vibrated. My sister rose and looked at my mother, horrified at what she had said. She took her hands from her hair, and it fell tumbling to her shoulders, dry and pale and soft. “I don’t care,” she said suddenly, and brushed past me, and fled into the bathroom and locked the door. There was no further sound from her. The only trace of her in the house at that moment was the faint odor in her room of the flowery perfume she used that spring.

“Oh, she’s so foolish,” my mother said, and I saw that she was crying. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing. . . . Why is she so foolish?” Then she put the hairbrush down and raised her hands to her cheeks and began to pinch them.

I went back to my room and closed the door.

When I came out again, an hour later, my mother was in bed reading a magazine; she looked as if she had been wounded in a dozen places. My sister sat in her room, in front of the mirror. Her hair streamed down the back of her neck and lay in touching, defenseless little curls on the towel she had over her shoulders. She was studying her reflection thoughtfully. (Are flowers vain? Are trees? Are they consumed with vanity during those days when they are in bloom?) She raised her finger and pressed it against her lower lip to see, I think, if she would be prettier if her lip, instead of being so smooth, had a slight break in the center as some girls’ did.

Shortly after this, my mother, who was neither stupid nor cruel, suggested that my sister stop seeing Sonny for a while. “Until you make up your mind,” she said. “Otherwise you might break his heart, you know. Tell him you need some time to think. He’ll understand. He’ll think you’re grown-up and responsible.”

Sonny vanished from our house. In the evenings now, after dinner, the three of us would sit on the screened porch. My sister would look up eagerly when the phone rang, but the calls were never for her. None of her old boyfriends knew she had stopped dating Sonny, and after a while, when the phone rang, she would compose her face and pretend she wasn’t interested, or she would say irritably, “Who can that be?” She began to answer the phone herself (she never had before, because it wasn’t good for a girl to seem too eager) and she would look sadly at herself in the hall mirror while she said, “Yes, Preston, he’s here.” She tried to read. She’d skim a few pages and then put the book down and gaze out through the screens at the night and the patches of light on the trees. She would listen with my mother to the comedians on the radio and laugh vaguely when my mother laughed. She picked on me. “Your posture’s no good,” she’d say. Or “Where do you learn your manners? Mother, he behaves like a zoot suiter or something.” Another time, she said, “If I don’t make a good marriage, you’ll be in trouble. You’re too lazy to do anything on your own.” She grew more and more restless. Toying with her necklace, she broke the string, and the beads rolled all over the floor, and there was something frantic in the way she went about retrieving the small rolling bits of glitter. It occurred to me that she didn’t know what she was doing; she was not really as sure of everything as she seemed. It was a painfully difficult thought to arrive at, and it clung to me. Why hadn’t I realized it before? Also, she sort of hated me, it seemed to me. I had never noticed that before, either. How could I have been so wrong, I wondered. Knowing how wrong I had been about this, I felt that no idea I had ever held was safe. For instance, we were not necessarily a happy family, with the most wonderful destinies waiting for my sister and me. We might make mistakes and choose wrong. Unhappiness was real. It was even likely. . . . How tired I became of studying my sister’s face. I got so I would do anything to keep from joining the two women on the porch.

After three weeks of this, Sonny returned. I was never told whether he came of his own accord or whether he was summoned; but one night the yellow convertible drove up in front of our house and he was back. Now when my mother would watch my sister and Sonny getting into Sonny’s car in the evenings, she would turn away from the window smiling. “I think your sister has found a boy she can respect,” she would say, or “They’ll be very happy together,” or some such hopeful observation, which I could see no basis for, but which my mother believed with all the years and memories at her disposal, with all the weight of her past and her love for my sister. And I would go and call Preston.

I used to lie under the dining-room table, sheltered and private like that, looking up at the way the pieces of mahogany were joined together, while we talked. I would cup the telephone to my ear with my shoulder and hold my textbook up in the air, over my head, as we went over physics, which was a hard subject for me. “Preston,” I asked one night, “what in God’s name makes a siphon work?” They did work—everyone knew that—and I groaned as I asked it. Preston explained the theory to me, and I frowned, breathed heavily through my nose, squinted at the incomprehensible diagrams in the book, and thought of sex, of the dignity of man, of the wonders of the mind, as he talked. Every few minutes, he asked “Do you see” and I would sigh. It was spring, and there was meaning all around me, if only I were free—free of school, free of my mother, free of duties and inhibitions—if only I were mounted on a horse. . . . Where was the world? Not here, not near me, not under the dining-room table. . . . “Not quite,” I’d say, untruthfully, afraid that I might discourage him. “But I almost get it. Just tell me once more.” And on and on he went, while I frowned, breathed hard, and squinted. And then it happened! “I see!” I cried. “I see! I see!” It was air pressure! How in the world had I failed to visualize air pressure? I could see it now. I would never again not see it; it was there in my mind, solid and indestructible, a whitish column sitting on the water. “God damn but science is wonderful!” I said, and heaved my physics book into the living room. “Really wonderful!”