The Orphan (22 page)

“Jessie tells us you will be in the last half of fifth grade after Christmas,” Mr. Boldhuis said. “At the rate you are progressing, you may well be in high school in a year or so. Have you thought about whether you might want to pursue a college oriented curriculum?”

Charles looked blank. “A college what?”

The adults laughed suddenly, and Mr. Boldhuis said kindly, “We aren’t laughing at you, Charles. It’s just that you are such a literate young man that I forgot I was not talking to someone of seventeen or eighteen, and my vocabulary got away from me.” He smiled his smile at Charles in such a friendly way that Charles laughed.

“I guess I forget how old I am myself sometimes,” Charles said. “I started out this fall reading about Happy and Sally, and now I'm trying to figure out the difference between legislative and judicial branches of government.”

“How remarkable,” Mrs. Boldhuis said, looking straight at Charles over the rim of the tiny liqueur glass. “How old are you, Charles?”

“Thirteen, I guess,” Charles said, feeling uncomfortable at all the attention to what he felt was an oversized and overly awkward body.

“And not only that,” Miss Wrigley said, getting up and smoothing her gray wool skirt, “you would hardly believe how Charles has grown physically since he began school.” She walked to Charles’s chair and took his hand. “Stand up, Charles. I want to show them how much you’ve grown.”

Charles stood, felt awkward and bent over, and Miss Wrigley put a hand firmly in the small of his back, making him stand straight.

“Look at this,” she said, placing Charles on the floor like as potted plant and standing so that her back was against his. “He’s almost as tall as I am, and when he signed up this fall I distinctly remember that I could look at the top of his head.”

Mr. Boldhuis stood up to look at the two and murmured that if Jessie were to take off her heels, Charles might be just a bit taller than she. Miss Wrigley slipped off her low heels and stood in stocking feet.

“Yes,” Mr. Boldhuis said, placing one soft hand on the woman’s head and bumping the boy’s head with his fingers. “Charles has an edge of about half an inch. Isn’t that remarkable.”

Miss Wrigley turned around and swung Charles about with her hand as if he were a museum exhibit. Charles felt like a prize ox and was more than a little flushed at Miss Wrigley’s bumping her buttocks against his during the height comparison. He was finding with some surprise that it was more than Miss Wrigley’s learning and kindly ways that was attractive to him. Charles swallowed and looked at his teacher solemnly, pushing all other thoughts out of his mind and wondering if he was in danger of becoming a sex maniac.

“Charles,” Miss Wrigley said, looking slightly up into the boy’s serious eyes, “how can you have grown so fast?”

“I don’t know, ma’am,” Charles said, “but it’s something all right.”

“Three inches in three months?” Mr. Boldhuis said, laughing. “Why at that rate, one might sit around on dull days and simply watch Charles grow!”

They all laughed at that, and the topic went on to colleges and degrees and questions to Miss Wrigley about when she was returning to Champaign to take her four-year degree from Normal, a conversation that Charles found so opaque that he lost the thread of sense entirely at many points and contented himself with examining the bookshelves beside his chair. Many of the titles Charles had trouble with, and he realized that all of these authors whose names appeared on the spines of the books like cabalistic symbols must be famous and well known to the three adults who had attended college and now moved above the earth in their minds instead of mundanely upon it as did the farmers Charles lived among. Some of the titles were in what must be a foreign language, for even sounding them out, he could make no sense of them. There were two that he supposed must be some sort of humorous books because they had a word like comedy in their titles, but when he opened them, he could see at once they were in languages he didn’t understand. One was called
Divina Commedia
by a person named Dante something, and the other was
La Comedie Humaine
by somebody Balzac, and although they were not in English, they were not in the same language either. Charles felt stunned at the erudition necessary to read three languages as these people must do when he was making such slow progress, as it seemed to him, in mastering one. He felt as he had felt on that day when, having suddenly understood the intricacies of division, he knew the elation of having mastered the four processes of mathematics at last, only to have Miss Wrigley say, “Yes, but there is so much more. Algebra, geometry, calculus, trigonometry.” So that he was stunned again by the endless vistas of the mental world.

Later, in the dining room after they had eaten pie and whipped cream until Charles felt once more sweetly stuffed and a bit sleepy, Mr. Boldhuis read poetry from some thin books, some clever ones by Edna St. Vincent Millay, some brusque ones by Ezra Pound, some silly ones by e. e. cummings, and finally a sad one by the classic Tennyson, some of whose poems Charles had read in his school texts.

Riding back along the highway toward the widow Stumway’s house, Charles sat in the back seat of the old Ford listening to the muted conversation of Mr. Boldhuis and Miss Wrigley in the front seat while the snow whipped at the windshield like storms of arrows, and the cold crept into his shoes. He thought about how large the world really was, and how much there was that he wanted to learn about it. And he resolved to holclon to his piece of the world, to never let it disappear from him at any cost.

Mrs. Stumway’s house had a coal furnace down the basement, but she liked to economize on all but the coldest winter days by using the tall, ornate iron and nickel stove in the dining room. That and the cooking heat from the kitchen kept the two rooms comfortable, and the big parlor had been curtained off with a double thickness of patchwork quilts and bedspreads hung in the archway from hooks that her late husband had installed many years ago. This kept the upstairs bedrooms in a condition of arctic frigidity relieved minutely by opening the floor registers an hour before bed time. Consequently, Charles and the old lady in her aviator’s helmet sat in the dining room each night after supper like some oddly assorted characters out of a fairy tale, the tall, blond boy hunched over the table at his homework, the old gaunt woman in her rocking chair, head tilted to one side as she read in her dusty books or leafed through magazines neighbors would sometimes send over as a kindness. She never read newspapers and had little interest in what the rest of the world was doing, so that Charles depended on school and Miss Wrigley for his contact with life, thinking of his home with Mrs. Stumway as a sort of deep freeze in which he was preserved between the times when he could escape to live in the real world.

It came as a shock, then, when Mrs. Stumway said casually one evening, “Christmas is coming, Charles, and we’re to have some company.”

“Oh?” Charles said, preoccupied with the history of the Civil War and hardly hearing what had been said.

“My daughter Claire will be staying a few days.”

Charles stopped reading and looked up, the words sinking in. “Your daughter?” he said stupidly, looking at the old lady.

“Oh, I have family, young man,” she said, putting down a piece of sewing she had been working on. “I don’t often see them anymore. No, not even when there’s trouble,” she said in a thoughtful voice. “But they write, and I think about them. C1aire’s my youngest, though she’s not so young anymore either, and she’s had her share of trouble.”

Charles sat attentive and dutiful, listening to the old lady’s voice that he seldom heard unless it was giving him directions or assigning tasks about the house. There was something in the back of his mind about the name of Mrs. Stumway’s daughter that bothered him. He could not possibly know her, but he thought of a picture of a young girl in a long black bathing suit. He listened.

“I know you’ll be on your best behavior, Charles, for you are a thoughtful boy. She’s a widow like I am. Poor Bernard, her husband, taken in the prime of his life by that terrible World War and no reason nor rhyme to it.”

She paused and removed her little elliptical glasses and wiped her eyes. “Oh the men in our family, what happens to them? And I said, Claire, you must marry again, for you can still have children - she was only twenty-seven and a lovely girl, but she wouldn’t have any of those men came courting her. Said they were all after Bernard’s estate money or they were mean, or they drank too much, or were restless. None of them good enough, and I guess she knows. She’s been over most of the world on ships and airplanes now. She’s done well with the money and the land he left, hardly lost a cent in the crash. Well, and here she is going on forty-four, no, forty-five next February, middle aged, though she don’t look it.”

Charles sat and wondered why the old woman was saying all these things until he realized she was in a reverie and hardly remembered he was there. Her voice trailed off into a mumbling and then silence, so that the boy was startled by the sudden reemergence of it.

“Oh, but she’s a good girl, a fine person. And Catherine, oh my Catherine, whatever will become of
you
now? All of us left alone, lonely old women. It’s so hard, so hard to be alone, and my poor dear Catherine with her tragedy so fresh and her wild letters full of nonsense.” Mrs. Stumway stopped rocking and bent double to lever herself up out of the chair, pausing on her way to the kitchen to look at Charles as if he had suddenly materialized at the dining room table.

“And you, an orphan, alone like all of us. Do you know what she sent me?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Here now, Charles, I shouldn’t be talking to you about my family, giving out all our private matters, but you’re not one of us, and sometimes I talk on like you can’t understand; like you was a dog or something for an old lady to talk to. There now, Charles, I’m sorry, and I do feel you need to be in a family, for you’re a lone one too, after all.” She leaned over and patted his head, making Charles feel even more like a dumb animal.

Mrs. Stumway moved over to the old secretary with its tall bookshelf encased in curved glass and pulled down the desk part. She rummaged in the papers, looked in the little drawers and found something heavy that she brought back and plunked down on the table. It was a carved piece of stone about four or five inches high that might have been the figure of a bear with a hole bored through the neck for a thong or light chain. It was smooth as if it had been handled by many generations. Charles looked at it for a moment without interest, but something about the shape of the figure was compelling. He reached to pick it up, and as his fingers touched it he felt a tingling as if a static discharge were tickling his skin. He drew back and looked at it again. It had some lightly incised figures or letters all down both sides.

“It’s all right, you can handle it,” the old lady said, pushing it toward him so that it toppled face down with a clunk. “Piece of junk some medicine show fake sold my poor Catherine. Poor woman.” The old lady hobbled out to the kitchen for a drink of water, muttering that the talk about relatives had made her arthritis worse.

Charles reached out to the stone figure again. There was the tingling again, not painful, but as if the stone were in rapid and invisible vibration so that it shook his flesh and bones like waves of sound. He picked it up, holding it tightly. It was cool, a stone, gray and smooth with white lines, and it looked like a standing bear with its muzzle lifted as if howling. The paws seemed held to the sides by a band or belt pulled tight around the whole figure. In all, it looked like any primitive carving, blurred with age and handling, but Charles held it near the lamp and saw a line of very fine markings on the band around the paws, and he felt increasingly uncomfortable. He was aware that Mrs. Stumway did not feel the tingling that he felt, and that there was more to the stone than she imagined. The markings along the sides of the figure resembled crude drawings of clouds, lightning, birds, and stick men, but the intricately curled and flowing figures on the band were of a different sort, like the graceful letters of some unknown language.

He put the stone down on the table. The tingling stopped. He picked it up and held it to his ear, but could hear no sound. On his cheek it was cool, and it made the skin tingle with a buzzing like the dry ice they had played with that night at the PTA party. He put it down, puzzled and a bit afraid. It made him unable to think clearly. What was he doing holding it to his cheek? Why was he picking it up and laying it down so many times? The old woman would think it strange. He picked it up again, unable not to. It tingled.

Mrs. Stumway was standing in the kitchen door looking at him. “You like it?” she said, sipping at the jelly glass of water. “I’d say that you could have it, but just suppose poor Catherine comes for a visit and wants to know where her, what did she call it? her ‘Mawky Stone,’ is. Something like that. Some such trash. Suppose she does, I have to have it here to show her.” She reached down and picked it up.

Charles watched her face to see if she noticed anything. He felt stunned, as if he had been struck on the head with something hard, and for a moment while Mrs. Stumway put the stone figure back in the desk, he could not think. He felt after a moment that for the past few minutes he had been
alone
for the first time in his life, and it was not for some time that he was able to grasp the implication of that feeling.

***

In the final week before Christmas, Charles outdid himself and passed some exams Miss Wrigley had prepared for the fifth grade in the next semester, so that she kept Charles after school on the last day and looked at him with a barely perceptible smile. He was standing before her desk at the front of the room which was getting cold now that the fire had been allowed to die down in the stoves, and he was wondering what had happened with the exam. He had tried as hard as he possibly could, pushing himself every night to study so that the other kids in the school hardly talked to him, or he to them, in those last weeks.