The Heroines (16 page)

T
hey came in with a bang, feet stamping, girlish shrieks, the door slamming against the stop. I ran down from my bedroom to see what the commotion was all about. A little girl was screaming, pointing at her mother’s breast. She was around my height, and her mother stooped to hush her with her finger. When Mother heard her say the name Pearl, she knew immediately that another Heroine had arrived.

“I am terribly sorry, mistress,” Hester said, then turned to the girl. “Naughty Pearl, thou art a disgrace to me.”

Pearl continued to jerk her body, shriek, and point at Hester’s chest. Her eyes were wild, her hair flying about. She flung herself on the settee and kicked her feet behind her. I found her fascinating and disturbing. I wasn’t prone to tantrums myself, and the sight of her flailing legs and fists filled me with both dread and awe. Pearl was a beautiful girl, with dark thick hair and pale skin. She held a fistful of half-dead sunflowers, which she must have picked from the prairie. The browned petals showered the velvet cushion each time she threw a punch.

“I know what ails her,” Hester said. “Pray thee, mistress, have you a scrap of red fabric?”

“I’ll get the sewing kit.”

Mother remembered that Pearl couldn’t bear to see her mother without the scarlet letter upon her breast. I, of course, didn’t know what was going on, so I followed Mother out to the kitchen. Gretta stood at the sink, scrubbing potatoes in a large aluminum colander.

“What all the noise about?”

“I need your sewing basket. And a scrap of red fabric.”

“Another one here?”

“Hester Prynne.”

Gretta shrugged and wiped her hands on her apron. She rushed to the cupboard and extracted her sewing basket. On the shelf above were fabric scraps, folded in neat rectangles and organized by color. She slid a square of crimson silk out and handed it to Mother.

“Why is that girl screaming?” I asked.

“Her mother lost something that she usually wears. And it bothers her to see her mother without it.”

“What is it?”

“A letter. Her initial.”

I didn’t understand why this would disturb Pearl so, but I didn’t argue. I had no playmates beyond recess in the schoolyard, and even there I often spent a solitary half hour drawing faces on the blacktop with stones. At seven, I didn’t insist on my version of the world. People behaved in ways that I didn’t understand, and I was learning that observation made a more fruitful study than talk. But it was more shyness than slyness. I didn’t know how to demand knowledge and understanding, and back then I would never have pitched a fit like Pearl’s to get my way. Instead I clung to my mother’s bell-bottoms, shadowing her like a loyal pup.

“Are they from a book, too?” I asked.

“Yes.”

When we returned to the foyer, Pearl had calmed down some. Although she sat quietly beside her mother on the settee, what had soothed her was the act of picking petals off the withered sunflowers and pressing them into an A shape on her mother’s chest. Hester endured it with a weary frown. “Thou dost torture me so.”

Mother showed Hester the basket and cloth, and then we all followed Mother down the hall to Sidney’s Room at the northwest corner of the house. It had a private bath, and the previous boarder had cleared out two days before. Mother pushed open the door to reveal a dark room with beamed ceilings, yellowed wallpaper, and dormered windows. The bed had a horsehair mattress and a frayed tan-and-maroon quilt. The windows overlooked the prairie, which was in the last golden throes of autumn, halfway toward its November decay to gray. It was strangely warm for mid-October, and Mother opened the French doors to the porch to let the air circulate. Wicker chairs were stacked on a sunporch that led to the Blue Room next door, which was currently empty.

Hester sat down in the wingback chair and searched the sewing basket for scissors. Mother covered her mouth and watched. This was the first time a Heroine had been disturbed by her change in clothing. Would their clothes disturb them beyond the issue of the red letter? Pearl wore a pair of corduroy overalls; Hester a jumper and blouse. They’d arrived without coats, as the temperature was nearly seventy degrees.

“Pearl, how old are you?” Mother asked. I’m sure she was calculating the plot point.

“Seven years,” Pearl said.

“Same as Penny! Penny, why don’t you show Pearl your room? Maybe she’d like to play with the dollhouse.”

“Okay,” I said. It was unusual for children to come to the Homestead, and as wild as Pearl seemed, I relished the chance to have someone to play with on my own territory.

“Toys are for the idolatrous!” Pearl cried. “And I shall not leave Mother!”

“Shush, child,” Hester said. “This is not one of the children from the village. She shall not harm thee!”

Pearl ran up to me with her fists on her hips. “Should thou triest to pelt me with stones”—she stomped her foot close to my sneaker—”I shall harm
thee
!”

“Mom!” I cried, running behind Mother’s legs. Pearl’s cheeks flushed and her dark eyes flashed wild. I couldn’t believe she’d threatened me like this, right in front of our mothers.

“Was there ever such a child?” Hester said.

“Penny is very friendly, Pearl,” Mother said, stroking my hair, unfazed by the child’s vigorous threat. I hid behind Mother’s legs; she was a kind, protective tree in the woods, and Pearl a mercurial sprite. “She’s never mean to anyone. Right, Penny? You’ll promise.”

Pearl pouted and crossed her arms, and there was something in her trembling lip that touched me. The beautiful bully was afraid, and I so longed for a playmate. “I promise I won’t be mean.”

“Thou hast a house just for dolls?”

“Yes. It has three floors and real furniture!”

“Dost thou hear?” Hester said. She had folded the fabric in three, and without a stencil began to cut a cursive A. “Penny still wishes to play with thee despite thy strange and elfish outbursts.”

“Did thy father make this house for thee?” Pearl asked me.

“Her grandfather,” Mother cut in.

“C’mon. I’ll show you.”

“Thou speakest strange!” Pearl said.

“So do
thou
!” I said.

“Thee!”

“Thou!” I said. “It sounds like you’re praying.”

“If only Providence would hear thee,” Hester said.

In my room, Pearl quickly got to work. The dollhouse held her attention for only a minute or two. The small rooms couldn’t contain her wilderness-bred imagination. Her dismissal of the spool-of-thread table and the tiny plastic dolls discouraged me. But they were hard to move about, and Pearl was interested in drama. Instead, she arranged my stuffed animals in a circle on the floor. She picked up a panda bear and placed him at the top of the circle.

“Hither the governor!” Beside him she set a fuzzy gray shark, a turtle, and a dog with floppy plastic ears. “These art the elders!” She pushed me toward the center of the circle. “Thou art the minister. Stand on the pillory and have thy sentence read.”

I complied, jumping over the stuffed animals and planting my feet in the soft rug. I didn’t really understand what was unfolding, didn’t know what a pillory was, but I figured it was akin to a guillotine, and anyway her fierce commands inspired obedience.

Pearl picked up the panda bear and spoke from behind its head in a deep voice. “Minister, why dost thou go about with thy hand on thy heart? What hidest thou thither beneath thy shirt?”

“Nothing!” I said.

“Liar! Some evil sin is in thee!”

I didn’t know what to say. Mother and I went to church only at Christmas with Grandma and Grandpa Entwhistle. The concept of sin intrigued me, though, despite Mother’s efforts to shelter me from it. I had reached the age of reason, knew that lying and disobeying were considered sinful behaviors in school and at home, so I ventured, “I lied.”

“Speakest of thy lies and thy hidden ways! Is it not true that thou hast met with yonder woman in the woods to plan escape?”

“I did!”

“Why dost thou plan to leave the people who hast made thee their leader?”

“I can’t take it anymore!” I spoke in the dramatic voice of a TV housewife.

“Thou shall pay for thy sins!” Pearl picked up a long stuffed snake with a vinyl forked tongue and started to flail me with it. I dropped to my knees, cowering beneath the soft lashes of the furry toy. I got a peculiar pleasure from her punishment, was stirred by the sound of her English accent as she repeated, “Repent, repent, repent.”

After several minutes, Pearl collapsed on the floor, and we stared at each other across the felt fins, button noses, and clawless paws of the pastel and primary-colored animals. Her eyes bored into mine, her chest heaving from exertion.

“We shouldst go and listen to the mothers. Tell me, dost thou know a way to listen to them without their knowing?”

“We could hide outside on the sunporch. If the doors are still open, we can hear everything from there. C’mon.”

We ran down the hall and then silently crept into the Blue Room, which shared the porch with Sidney’s. The desk and bed were painted marine blue, and a bluebonnet paper lined the walls below the wainscoting. I put a finger to my lips, then tiptoed across the creaky floor. The trick was getting the door open without their hearing. Pearl was stealthy and catlike in her movements, soundless and slant-eyed. I turned the knob and slowly opened the door to the porch. Our mothers spoke in quiet tones, and we pressed against the side of the house and slid closer to the French doors.

“In three days’ time, we shall be at sea. My Pearl will have a father.”

“That’ll be wonderful,” Mother said, pretending, as usual, not to know Arthur Dimmesdale’s tragic fate. “Raising a child alone can be difficult.”

“Where might be the father of Penny?”

“He’s gone,” Mother said. “Like you, I was never married. And like you, I never told anyone who Penny’s real father was.”

I froze. So rarely did Mother even speak of my father that I hardly thought of him myself. He wasn’t a person to me as much as an absence, a void that made me different from the kids at school. I knew that most people had a father hanging around, going to work, but I didn’t really understand the biological imperative of father, that a woman couldn’t have a baby without a man.

“Thou hast felt the scourge of the people’s disdain,” Hester said.

“I have,” Mother said.

I squirmed, wished I understood what Hester meant. But I heard the bond growing between them; I understood that Hester was sympathizing with Mother. They had something in common: their girls and their singleness. Yet, it would be years until I could read
The Scarlet Letter
and truly understand what Mother had risked to keep me. What it would have cost her, centuries before, and how certain puritanical ideas still pervaded the Protestant culture of Prairie Bluff. And how the men could escape any responsibility.

I heard the chair being pushed back, then Mother said, “Are you done stitching it?”

“I am, thank thee.”

“Let me help you get back into the jumper.”

“I shouldst check on Pearl. Glad she’ll be, to see me wearing again my badge of shame.”

Pearl and I backed out of the porch then, and scampered across the floor and back to my room.

The next day, Pearl and I made our way from the garden to the prairie and into the woods. Our mothers were in such deep conversation on the patio, they didn’t notice when we slipped beyond the hedge. It was another Indian summer day, the leaves golden, the sun warm on our heads. We ran like unbridled weeds, though I always trailed her. Even though it was my territory, Pearl led the way. She was one of the fastest girls I’d ever met, and she had no fear of charging into the marshy cattails along the prairie path and muddying her sneakers. Running her hands along the wildflower stalks as if she were strumming a harp, she loosened thistle seeds and dried grass pods. When we entered the woods, under the shadow of the trees, her eyes flickered like the sun between the leaves. The trail of oaks made a golden canopy over our heads. The woods were her true home, and she danced and gathered a bundle of dried-out grasses.

“Stand thee against the tree!” She pointed with the grasses to one great oak.

I stepped against the tree and wrapped my arms behind it, as if bound.

“Witch!” she shouted. “Dost thou know why thou art here before the people?”

“I have sinned.” I lowered my chin to my chest in shame. The strange wave of pleasure ran through me again. I squeezed my eyes shut waiting for her next words.

“Thou hast met the devil in the woods at night. Thou must pay for thy sins!”

She lashed me with the stalks, striking my chest and arms, making thin white scratches on my skin. I pretended that it hurt more than it did, thrashing against the trunk and moaning. “I am not a witch! I swear to God!”

“Witch, witch, witch!” she sang, until she was thoroughly winded.

I relaxed my arms, let them drop to my side, while Pearl caught her breath. “Do you know any other games?” I was growing tired of being the naughty one, however perverse a pleasure it gave me. “Let’s play princesses!”