They Came Like Swallows (11 page)

“Hurry up, son,” his father said from the doorway. “Dr. Macgregor is outside with his car, waiting. Say good-by to your mother and then we’ll….”

When Robert came into the hall his mother was standing before the pier-glass with her hat and coat on.
He started toward her, but Bunny was there first, tugging at her and sobbing wildly into her neck.

“Why,” she exclaimed through her veil. “Crying … at your age. What a thing to have happen!” And when Bunny cried the harder, “There, there, angel, don’t take on so!”

Robert hesitated. He saw his father pull out his watch.

“Well, good-by,” he said, though she probably didn’t hear him. “Good-by, Mother. Take care of yourself.” And went on out to the car.

Aunt Clara was waiting for them behind the storm door.

“Well, how are my boys? And how are you, Doctor?”

Robert held his breath while she embraced him. Aunt Clara was a large woman—almost as tall as his father. And on weekdays she didn’t wear any corset.

“Won’t you take your coat off, Doctor? I say won’t you take your coat off?”

Dr. Macgregor set their suitcases down in the front hall.

“Not today, thank you.”

“When James called, I told him to bring the children right over. Mr. Paisley and I were going to Vandalia
for Thanksgiving, but with the epidemic and so many people sick and all, we decided to stay home.”

Blindfolded and set down like the suitcases in Aunt Clara’s front hall, Robert would have known where he was. He would have known mostly by the smell, which was not like the smell of any house that he had ever been in, and not easy to describe, except that it was something like the smell of clothes shut up in boxes for too long a time.

The walls and the woodwork were dark, and the shades always at half-mast, except in the parlor, where they were all the way down, to keep the rug from fading.

While Robert stood with his cap and his overcoat still on, it occurred to him that he might slip out the back door and around the house to the car again, before anybody noticed what he was doing. He could stay with Dr. Macgregor until his father and mother came home, and then everything would be all right. He moved toward the dining-room, but just then Dr. Macgregor put his hand out to say good-by.

“If there is anything you want,” Dr. Macgregor said; “if anything comes up, Robert—”

Aunt Clara answered for him: “If there’s any occasion to, Doctor, we’ll call you. I say we’ll call you.”

It was clear from the tone of her voice that there would be no occasion. In the doorway, with cold air rushing in between his legs, Dr. Macgregor turned and smiled at Robert approvingly. “Be good boys,” he said, and closed the door behind him.

“Well,” Aunt Clara said, “I wasn’t looking for
you quite so soon. Half after nine, your father said. Go stand your overshoes on the register, Robert. There’s snow on them and it’ll stain the carpet.”

Robert had intended to watch until Dr. Macgregor drove away, but he did not dare go to the window when Aunt Clara had told him to do something else. He stood bravely still, however. For they were rubbers, not overshoes. And in the second place, Aunt Clara was not his mother. He didn’t have to mind her. Unless he wanted to, he didn’t have to do anything she said.

“Come upstairs with me, Bunny. I’ll take the spread off, and the bolster, in Grandma’s room. And then you can have some place to lie down. You must be careful for a while. You’ve been a sick boy.”

Although his face was streaked with tears, Bunny was pleased with himself. Robert recognized the symptoms. And he saw that Bunny was making up to Aunt Clara—starting up the stairs in front of her as if she were the one person that he liked and depended on. Just as he did to Irene, or to Sophie, or to anybody who happened to be around and could get him what he wanted. When Bunny and Aunt Clara reached the landing, Robert went over to the register and stood on it, rubbers and all, preserving his independence by a kind of technicality while the hot air came up in waves, around his legs.

As soon as the rubbers were dry he took them off and his overcoat and cap, and went into the darkened parlor. He was looking for a place to put his soldiers. Though it was safe, or fairly so, the parlor would
not do because it was never used except for company. Then Aunt Clara raised the shades halfway and people sat about in the big mahogany rocking-chairs, making conversation. On the piano there was a sea-shell that roared and a big starfish that came apart, once, in Robert’s hands. He could still remember how he felt, holding it and trying to make the broken point stay on. Eventually, in fright, he put the starfish back the way it was, on top of the piano, and hoped that no one would notice. Aunt Clara discovered it the very next day, when she came to dust, and said would he please not touch things without asking.

All Robert wanted was to see what it looked like underneath. But if he had known what was going to happen, he would have let the starfish be.

In the sitting-room over the two doorways were plaster heads—a Negress in a red turban, and another (darker, and larger by several sizes) in a blue. Robert could never make up his mind whether he liked them or whether he didn’t. And so he sat experimentally in various parts of the room, on the leather couch, in the big chair, holding his box of soldiers. Wherever he went, the Negresses followed him with their white eyes. He asked his mother once where Aunt Clara got them, and she said in darkest Africa. But that was only his mother’s way of saying things. Aunt Clara had been to New York with Uncle Wilfred, and come home by way of Niagara Falls. And she had been to Omaha, to a funeral. But she had never crossed the ocean. Robert was quite sure of that. Just as he was sure that the heads were not real heads but plaster, and
the fireplace not a real fireplace, though it had a fancy metal screen that looked as if it were screwed on over a grate.

One time when Aunt Clara was away at a meeting of the Ladies Aid, he took the screws out and discovered that there was nothing behind it but the wall. Only the metal screen wouldn’t go back on again. He tried all afternoon until his mother came to get him, and still he couldn’t make the screws stay in. But it was all right, because his mother told Aunt Clara to have a man come out and fix it, and she’d pay for it. And on the way home she wasn’t even angry with him. For years, she said, she’d been wanting to do the very same thing.

For his part, Robert liked things to be whatever they were. And he liked them to work. Having reached that conclusion, he went and stood before the bookcase, helplessly interested by all the curious objects that he saw there, and that he was never allowed to touch—the coral, the starfish, the shells, the peacock feather, the parrot eggs, the ocarina, the colored stones. When he could not bear to look at them any longer, he turned away to the dining-room and the front hall. It was nearly ten. He waited in front of the cuckoo clock until the little wooden door flew open and the wooden bird fell out, gasping the hour. Then he went on, still searching for a place to put his soldiers.

At the top of the stairs, in the narrow hall, Robert was confronted by the framed high school and college diplomas of Aunt Clara and Uncle Wilfred,
and the Morison coat of arms, and a picture of Grandfather Morison in his casket with all the funeral flowers. To the left were the Spare Room and Aunt Clara’s and Uncle Wilfred’s bedroom, which looked as if it were never slept in, though it was, every night. To the right was Grandmother Morison’s room. He stopped at the door and looked in. Grandmother Morison was in her rocking-chair by the window, and Bunny on the big mahogany bed with a blanket thrown over him. Neither one of them knew that Robert was there. The room was littered with dress-patterns, quilting-pieces, chalk, ribbon, old letters, spools, boxes and baskets and bags.
Come in if you’re going to come in,
she always said.
Or stay out if you’re going to stay out.
… He sniffed (there was a faint odor of camphor) and passed on down the hall to Uncle Wilfred’s study—a narrow dark little room with a cot and a wardrobe and two chairs, a roll-top desk, a typewriter table, and a place in the middle to walk among them. The state agents of the Eureka Fire Insurance Company looked down at Robert from their oval frame, and stared him out of countenance. The wallpaper was brown and like a sickly sweet taste on his tongue. But the wardrobe was exactly what he had been looking for.

He put the soldiers on top of it, back and hidden from sight. As he turned to go out of the room he was stopped by the sound of a train whistle: two long, two short, and then a mournful very long … Robert listened until he heard it again. Two long … two short … And knew all in one miserable second that his father
and mother were on that train; that they had gone away and left him in this house which was not a comfortable kind of house, with people who were not the kind of people he liked; and that he would not see them again for a long time, if ever.

Grandmother Morison could not remember the names of people, or where she put things. “James,” she would say to Robert—“Morison—
Robert”
she would say; “have you seen my glasses?” And they would be on her forehead all the time.

When she had pulled them down, she would talk to Robert in a comfortable way about the
Luisitania,
or the assassination of President Garfield, or the Bombardment of Fort Sumter. And about his Great-uncle Martin, who owned a cotton plantation in Mississippi. And how if the Southern people had only been nice to the darkies and called them
mister
and
missus
there would never have been any war. And about St. Paul. And about Christ, who was immersed in spite of what anybody said to the contrary, because he went down
under
the water and he came up
out
of the water.

So long as Robert did not get up on the bed with his shoes on, or ask questions when she was involved in her crocheting, he could play with anything that
he liked. And by trial and error he discovered that Grandmother Morison’s room was the one place in the house where he was safe. Everywhere else a voice said
Robert
the minute he touched anything. If he grew restless (as he invariably did) and wandered into the Spare Room, or downstairs, it was only a matter of time before he was impaled by Aunt Clara’s voice saying
Robert, I thought I told you not to play with Uncle Wilfred’s scrap-book…. That darning egg, Robert, belonged to your Great-grandmother Burnett. I don’t believe I’d play catch with it, if I were you…. Robert, do you really think that’s a nice kind of a song for you to be singing?
… Until he was afraid to do or say anything, so he sat in the front hall folding and unfolding his hands. Or stood with his nose to the front window, watching the children pass—running, sliding, pushing each other on the icy walks.

He knew all of them by name. The boys who dragged sleds after them, and the little girls who made angels in the snow. He knew what marbles some of the older boys had in their pockets. But if they looked up and saw him, there was no flash of recognition. Nothing but wonder, as though they were looking at a Chinaman. He was cut off from them, estranged. Their mothers had not gone to Decatur to have a baby.

When there was nothing out-of-doors to interest him, Robert would turn and wait for the cuckoo clock to strike. The wooden door flew open, and the noisy little bird fell out, and that restored his interest
in living. Also it reminded him of how he let his mother into the room where Bunny was—a thing he would rather not have remembered. When he had managed to forget it again, he was still aware vaguely that there was something he
had
been worrying about.

One day became for him hopelessly like another. Even Thanksgiving, because Aunt Clara had roast chicken instead of turkey, which was sixty cents a pound. But on the Saturday after Thanksgiving he made a discovery; something that he had overlooked. Under the table in the living-room was an unabridged dictionary, and on top of it seven or eight other big books arranged according to size. He took them all off at once, in such a way that he could put them back again the instant he heard Aunt Clara coming.

Finding the wrong kinds of words in the dictionary was not a crime. They couldn’t put him in jail for it. But it was a thing he would not want to be caught doing, especially by Aunt Clara. It was like telling lies or listening to people who didn’t know he was there.

The best way was to pick a letter (like C), close his eyes, and turn to whatever page he came to:
chilblain … child … childbearing … childbed … childbirth
… He had gone past what he was looking for. “With child,” people said. A woman was with
child (chïld) n.; pl. children (chǐldrěn)… I. An unborn or recently born human being; fetus; infant; baby … A young person of either sex, esp. one between infancy and youth; hence, one who exhibits
the characteristics of a very young person, as innocence….

Robert flushed. He looked around at the empty chairs in the sitting-room and was on the verge of closing the dictionary. Then he thought better of it.

obedience, trustfulness, limited understanding, etc…. “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child.
…” His skin felt warm, under his clothing. He had gone too far again: fetus was the word …
fetter … fettle, fettle … fettling … fetus, foetus (fē’tŭs), n. a bringing forth, brood, offspring, young ones; akin to L.
fetus
fruitful, fructified, that which is or was filled with young … the young or embryo of an animal in the womb….
Bunny came up behind him, so quietly that Robert did not even know he was in the room. Bunny waited a moment, and then made a slight noise. Robert slammed the book together, in panic.

“If she catches you,” Bunny said, “if she finds out you’ve been using her dictionary, you’ll get Hail Columbia!”

“She won’t find out.”

“What’ll you do if she does?”

“Nothing.”

“Why are you so red in the face, then?” “I’m not.” “You are, too.”

“I’m not, either. For cryin’ out loud, Bunny, go play somewhere!”