She was pleased. “Does he? Tell him I’ll come. How’s your father?”
“Not very well. His eyes bother him.”
They walked along in silence until Cal couldn’t stand it any more. “You know about Aron?”
“Yes.” She paused. “Open my binder and look next to the first page.”
He shifted the books. A penny postcard was in the binder. “Dear Abra,” it said. “I don’t feel clean. I’m not fit for you. Don’t be sorry. I’m in the army. Don’t go near my father. Good-by, Aron.”
Cal snapped the book shut. “The son of a bitch,” he said under his breath.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“I heard what you said.”
“Do you know why he went away?”
“No. I guess I could figure out—put two and two together. I don’t want to. I’m not ready to—that is, unless you want to tell me.”
Suddenly Cal said, “Abra—do you hate me?”
“No, Cal, but you hate me a little. Why is that?”
“I—I’m afraid of you.”
“No need to be.”
“I’ve hurt you more than you know. And you’re my brother’s girl.”
“How have you hurt me? And I’m not your brother’s girl.”
“All right,” he said bitterly, “I’ll tell you—and I don’t want you to forget you asked me to. Our mother was a whore. She ran a house here in town. I found out about it a long time ago. Thanksgiving night I took Aron down and showed her to him. I—”
Abra broke in excitedly, “What did he do?”
“He went mad—just crazy. He yelled at her. Outside he knocked me down and ran away. Our dear mother killed herself; my father—he’s—there’s something wrong with him. Now you know about me. Now you have some reason to walk away from me.”
“Now I know about him,” she said calmly.
“My brother?”
“Yes, your brother.”
“He was good. Why did I say was? He is good. He’s not mean or dirty like me.”
They had been walking very slowly. Abra stopped and Cal stopped and she faced him.
“Cal,” she said, “I’ve known about your mother for a long, long time.”
“You have?”
“I heard my parents talking when they thought I was asleep. I want to tell you something, and it’s hard to tell and it’s good to tell.”
“You want to?”
“I have to. It’s not so terribly long ago that I grew up and I wasn’t a little girl any more. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes,” said Cal.
“You sure you know?”
“Yes.”
“All right then. It’s hard to say now. I wish I’d said it then. I didn’t love Aron any more.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve tried to figure it out. When we were children we lived in a story that we made up. But when I grew up the story wasn’t enough. I had to have something else, because the story wasn’t true any more.”
“Well—”
“Wait—let me get it all out. Aron didn’t grow up. Maybe he never will. He wanted the story and he wanted it to come out his way. He couldn’t stand to have it come out any other way.”
“How about you?”
“I don’t want to know how it comes out. I only want to be there while it’s going on. And, Cal—we were kind of strangers. We kept it going because we were used to it. But I didn’t believe the story any more.”
“How about Aron?”
“He was going to have it come out his way if he had to tear the world up by the roots.”
Cal stood looking at the ground.
Abra said, “Do you believe me?”
“I’m trying to study it out.”
“When you’re a child you’re the center of everything. Everything happens for you. Other people? They’re only ghosts furnished for you to talk to. But when you grow up you take your place and you’re your own size and shape. Things go out of you to others and come in from other people. It’s worse, but it’s much better too. I’m glad you told me about Aron.”
“Why?”
“Because now I know I didn’t make it all up. He couldn’t stand to know about his mother because that’s not how he wanted the story to go—and he wouldn’t have any other story. So he tore up the world. It’s the same way he tore me up—Abra—when he wanted to be a priest.”
Cal said, “I’ll have to think.”
“Give me my books,” she said. “Tell Lee I’ll come. I feel free now. I want to think too. I think I love you, Cal.”
“I’m not good.”
“Because you’re not good.”
Cal walked quickly home. “She’ll come tomorrow,” he told Lee.
“Why, you’re excited,” said Lee.
4
Once in the house Abra walked on her toes. In the hall she moved close to the wall where the floor did not creak. She put her foot on the lowest step of the carpeted stairs, changed her mind, and went to the kitchen.
“Here you are,” her mother said. “You didn’t come straight home.”
“I had to stay after class. Is Father better?”
“I guess so.”
“What does the doctor say?”
“Same thing he said at first—overwork. Just needs a rest.”
“He hasn’t seemed tired,” said Abra.
Her mother opened a bin and took out three baking potatoes and carried them to the sink. “Your Father’s very brave, dear. I should have known. He’s been doing so much war work on top of his own work. The doctor says sometimes a man collapses all at once.”
“Shall I go in and see him?”
“You know, Abra, I’ve got a feeling that he doesn’t want to see anybody. Judge Knudsen phoned and your father said to tell him he was asleep.”
“Can I help you?”
“Go change your dress, dear. You don’t want to get your pretty dress soiled.
Abra tiptoed past her father’s door and went to her own room. It was harsh bright with varnish, papered brightly. Framed photographs of her parents on the bureau, poems framed on the walls, and her closet—everything in its place, the floor varnished, and her shoes standing diligently side by side. Her mother did everything for her, insisted on it—planned for her, dressed her.
Abra had long ago given up having any private things in her room, even any personal thing. This was of such long standing that Abra did not think of her room as a private place. Her privacies were of the mind. The few letters she kept were in the sitting room itself, filed among the pages of the two-volume Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which to the best of her knowledge had never been opened by anyone but herself since it came off the press.
Abra felt pleased, and she did not inspect the reason. She knew certain things without question, and such things she did not speak about. For example, she knew that her father was not ill. He was hiding from something. Just as surely she knew that Adam Trask was ill, for she had seen him walking along the street. She wondered whether her mother knew her father was not ill.
Abra slipped off her dress and put on a cotton pinafore, which was understood to be for working around the house. She brushed her hair, tiptoed past her father’s room, and went downstairs. At the foot of the stairs she opened her binder and took out Aron’s postcard. In the sitting room she shook Aron’s letters out of Volume II of the Memoirs, folded them tightly, and, raising her skirt, tucked them under the elastic which held up her panties. The package made her a little lumpy. In the kitchen she put on a full apron to conceal the bulge.
“You can scrape the carrots,” her mother said. “Is that water hot?”
“Just coming to a boil.”
“Drop a bouillon cube in that cup, will you, dear? The doctor says it’ll build your father up.”
When her mother carried the steaming cup upstairs, Abra opened the incinerator end of the gas stove, put in the letters, and lighted them.
Her mother came back, saying, “I smell fire.”
“I lit the trash. It was full.”
“I wish you’d ask me when you want to do a thing like that,” her mother said. “I was saving the trash to warm the kitchen in the morning.”
“I’m sorry, Mother,” Abra said. “I didn’t think.”
“You should try to think of these things. It seems to me you’re getting very thoughtless lately.”
“I’m sorry, Mother.”
“Saved is earned,” said her mother.
The telephone rang in the dining room. Her mother went to answer it. Abra heard her mother say, “No, you can’t see him. It’s doctor’s orders. He can’t see anyone—no, not anyone.”
She came back to the kitchen. “Judge Knudsen again,” she said.
Chapter 53
1
All during school next day Abra felt good about going to see Lee. She met Cal in the hall between classes. “Did you tell him I was coming?”
“He’s started some kind of tarts,” said Cal. He was dressed in his uniform—choking high collar, ill-fitting tunic, and wrapped leggings.