My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead (7 page)

“When are your parents coming home?” I asked.

“They went to a double feature. They can’t possibly be out before eleven.”

“They might walk out on it,” I said.

“Oh no!” Eleanor said. “Not if they pay for it . . .”

We ate our scrambled eggs and washed the dishes, and watched the rain from the dining-room windows without turning the light on. We kissed for a while, and then we both grew restless and uncomfortable. Her lips were swollen, and she went into the kitchen, and I heard her running the water; when she returned, her hair was combed and she had put on fresh lipstick. “I don’t like being in the house,” she said, and led me out on the porch. We stood with our arms around each other. The rain was slackening. “Goodbye, rain,” Eleanor said sadly. It was as if we were watching a curtain slowly being lifted from around the house. The trees gleamed wetly near the street lamps.

When I started home, the rain had stopped. Water dripped on the leaves of the trees. Little plumes of mist hung over the wet macadam of the street. I walked very gently in order not to disturb anything.

I didn’t want to run into anybody, and so I went home the back way, through the alley. At the entrance to the alley there was a tall cast-iron pseudo-Victorian lamppost, with an urn-shaped head and panes of frosted glass; the milky light it shed trickled part way down the alley, illuminating a few curiously still garage fronts and, here and there, the wet leaves of the bushes and vines that bordered the back yards and spilled in such profusion over the fences, hiding the ash pits and making the alley so pretty a place in spring. When I was younger, I had climbed on those ash pits, those brick squares nearly smothered under the intricacies of growing things, and I had searched in the debris for old, broken mirrors, discarded scarves with fringes, bits of torn decorated wrapping paper, and such treasures. But now I drifted down the alley, walking absently on the wet asphalt. I was having a sort of daydream where I was lying with my head on Eleanor’s shoulder—which was bare—and I could hear the slow, even sound of her breathing as I began to fall asleep. I was now in the darkest part of the alley, the very center where no light reached, and in my daydream I turned over and kissed Eleanor’s hands, her throat—and then I broke into a sprint down the alley, slipping and sliding on the puddles and wet places. I came out the other end of the alley and stood underneath the lamppost. I was breathing with difficulty.

Across the street from me, two women stood, one on the sidewalk, the other on the front steps of a house, hugging her arms. “It’s not a bad pain,” the woman on the sidewalk said, “but it persists.”

“My dear, my dear,” said the other. “Don’t take any chances—not at our age . . .”

And a couple, a boy and a girl, were walking up the street, coming home from the Tivoli Theatre. The girl was slouching in order not to seem taller than the boy, who was very short and who sprang up and down on the balls of his feet as he walked.

I picked a spray of lilac and smelled it, but then I didn’t know what to do with it—I didn’t want to throw it away—and finally I put it in my pants pocket.

I vaulted our back fence and landed in our back yard, frightening a cat, who leaped out of the hedge and ran in zigzags across the dark lawn.  It startled me so much I felt weak. I tucked my shirt in carefully and smoothed my hair. Suddenly, I looked down at my fingertips; they were blurred in the darkness and moist from the lilac, and I swept them to my mouth and kissed them.

The kitchen was dark. There was no sound in the house, no sound at all, and a tremor passed through me. I turned the kitchen light on and hurriedly examined myself for marks of what had happened to me. I peered at my shirt, my pants. I rubbed my face with both hands. Then I turned the light off and slipped into the dining room, which was dark, too, and so was the hallway. The porch light was on. I ran up the front stairs and stopped short at the top; there was a light on in my mother’s room. She was sitting up in bed, with pillows at her back, a magazine across her lap, and a pad of paper on the magazine.

“Hello,” I said.

I expected her to bawl me out for being late, but she just looked at me solemnly for a moment, and then she said, “Sonny proposed to your sister.”

Because I hadn’t had a chance to wash my face, I raised one hand and held it over my cheek and chin, to hide whatever traces of lipstick there might be.

She said, “They’re going to be married in June. They went over to the Brusters’ to get the ring. He proposed practically the first thing when he came. They were
both
so—they were both so
happy
!” she said. “They make such a lovely couple. . . . Oh, if you could have seen them.”

She was in a very emotional state.

I started to back out the door.

“Where are you going?” my mother asked.

“To bed,” I said, surprised. “I’m in training—”

“Oh, you ought to wait up for your sister.”

“I’ll leave her a note,” I said.

I went to my room and took the white lilac out of my pocket and put it on my desk. I wrote, “I heard the news and think it’s swell. Congratulations. Wake me up when you come in.” I stuck the note in the mirror of her dressing table. Then I went back to my room and got undressed. Usually I slept raw, but I decided I’d better wear pajamas if my sister was going to come in and wake me up. I don’t know how much later it was that I heard a noise and sat bolt upright in bed. I had been asleep. My sister was standing in the door of my room. She was wearing a blue dress that had little white buttons all the way down the front and she had white gloves on. “Are you awake?” she whispered.

“Yes,” I said. “Where’s Mother?”

“Downstairs,” my sister said, coming into the room. “Sending telegrams. Do you want to see my ring?” She took her gloves off.

I turned the bedside-table lamp on, and she held her hand out. The ring was gold, and there was an emerald and four diamonds around it.

“It was his grandmother’s,” my sister said. I nodded. “It’s not what I—” she said, and sat down on the edge of the bed, and forgot to finish her sentence. “Tell me,” she said, “do you think he’s really rich?” Then she turned a sad gaze on me, through her lashes. “Do you want to know something awful? I don’t like my ring. . . .”

“Are you unhappy?” I asked.

“No, just upset. It’s scary getting married. You have no idea. I kept getting chills all evening. I may get pneumonia. Do you have a cigarette?”

I said I’d get her one downstairs.

“No, there’s some in my room,” she said. “I’ll get them. You know, Sonny and I talked about you. We’re going to send you to college and everything. We planned it all out tonight.” She played with her gloves for a while, and then she said, looking at the toes of her shoes, “I’m scared. What if Sonny’s not good at business?” She turned to me. “You know what I mean? He’s so young. . . .”

“You don’t have to marry him,” I said. “After all, you’re—”

“You don’t understand,” my sister said hurriedly, warding off advice she didn’t want. “You’re too young yet.” She laughed. “You know what he said to me?”

Just then, my mother called out from the bottom of the stairs, “Listen, how does this sound to you? ‘Dear Greta—’ It’s a night letter, and we get a lot of words, and I thought Greta would like it better if I started that way. Greta’s so touchy, you know. Can you hear me?”

“I have to go,” my sister whispered. She looked at me, and then suddenly she leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. “Go to sleep,” she said. “Have nice dreams.” She got up and went out into the hall.

“ ‘—Dodie got engaged tonight,’ ” my mother read. “Is ‘got engaged ’ the right way to say it?”

“Became engaged,” my sister said, in a distant voice.

I put on my bathrobe and slippers and went out into the hall. My sister was leaning over the banister, talking to my mother at the bottom of the stairs about the night letter. I slipped past her and down the back stairs and into the kitchen. I found a cold chicken in the icebox, put the platter on the kitchen table, and tore off a leg and began to eat.

The door to the back stairs swung open, and my sister appeared. “I’m hungry, too,” she said. “I don’t know why.” She drifted over to the table, and bent over the chicken. “I guess emotion makes people hungry.”

My mother pushed open the swinging door, from the dining-room side. “There you are,” she said. She looked flustered. “I’ll have to think some more, and then I’ll write the whole thing over,” she said to my sister. To me she said, “Are you
eating
at this time of night?”

My sister said that she was hungry, too.

“There’s some soup,” my mother said. “Why don’t I heat it up.” And suddenly her eyes filled with tears, and all at once we fell to kissing one another—to embracing and smiling and making cheerful predictions about one another—there in the white, brightly lighted kitchen. We had known each other for so long, and there were so many things that we all three remembered. . . . Our smiles, our approving glances, wandered from face to face. There was a feeling of politeness in the air. We were behaving the way we would in railway stations, at my sister’s wedding, at the birth of her first child, at my graduation from college. This was the first of our reunions.

THE LADY WITH THE LITTLE DOG

ANTON CHEKHOV

I

THE TALK WAS that a new face had appeared on the embankment: a lady with a little dog. Dmitri Dmitrich Gurov, who had already spent two weeks in Yalta and was used to it, also began to take an interest in new faces. Sitting in a pavilion at Vernet’s, he saw a young woman, not very tall, blond, in a beret, walking along the embankment; behind her ran a white spitz.

And after that he met her several times a day in the town garden or in the square. She went strolling alone, in the same beret, with the white spitz; nobody knew who she was, and they called her simply “the lady with the little dog.”

“If she’s here with no husband or friends,” Gurov reflected, “it wouldn’t be a bad idea to make her acquaintance.”

He was not yet forty, but he had a twelve-year-old daughter and two sons in school. He had married young, while still a second-year student, and now his wife seemed half again his age. She was a tall woman with dark eyebrows, erect, imposing, dignified, and a thinking person, as she called herself. She read a great deal, used the new orthography, called her husband not Dmitri but Dimitri, but he secretly considered her none too bright, narrow-minded, graceless, was afraid of her, and disliked being at home. He had begun to be unfaithful to her long ago, was unfaithful often, and, probably for that reason, almost always spoke ill of women, and when they were discussed in his presence, he would say of them:

“An inferior race!”

It seemed to him that he had been taught enough by bitter experience to call them anything he liked, and yet he could not have lived without the “inferior race” even for two days. In the company of men he was bored, ill at ease, with them he was taciturn and cold, but when he was among women, he felt himself free and knew what to talk about with them and how to behave; and he was at ease even being silent with them. In his appearance, in his character, in his whole nature there was something attractive and elusive that disposed women towards him and enticed them; he knew that, and he himself was attracted to them by some force.

Repeated experience, and bitter experience indeed, had long since taught him that every intimacy, which in the beginning lends life such pleasant diversity and presents itself as a nice and light adventure, inevitably, with decent people—especially irresolute Muscovites, who are slow starters—grows into a major task, extremely complicated, and the situation finally becomes burdensome. But at every new meeting with an interesting woman, this experience somehow slipped from his memory, and he wanted to live, and everything seemed quite simple and amusing.

And so one time, towards evening, he was having dinner in the garden, and the lady in the beret came over unhurriedly to take the table next to his. Her expression, her walk, her dress, her hair told him that she belonged to decent society, was married, in Yalta for the first time, and alone, and that she was bored here . . . In the stories about the impurity of local morals there was much untruth, he despised them and knew that these stories were mostly invented by people who would eagerly have sinned themselves had they known how; but when the lady sat down at the next table, three steps away from him, he remembered those stories of easy conquests, of trips to the mountains, and the tempting thought of a quick, fleeting liaison, a romance with an unknown woman, of whose very name you are ignorant, suddenly took possession of him.