Hilda and Pearl (13 page)

“History!” she said. “You probably know all about world affairs. Now what do you think about Mussolini? Should we be so worried about him? Or is this just something a few nervous Jews are trying to make us worry about?”

Nathan looked at her quietly, then looked sideways at Mike. “I think Mussolini is extremely worrisome,” he said.

Mr. Glynnis was talking at the same time. “World affairs, yes, they certainly are getting complicated,” he said. “Suppose—”

They didn't find out what Mr. Glynnis was supposing. The waiter began serving coffee, and Nathan, holding out his cup toward the silver coffeepot with its curved spout, must have moved the cup at the wrong moment and with too much force, while he said, “Look, if you think Mussolini's some sort of
joke
—” and the coffee arced gracefully onto his pants. He started and the waiter saw what was happening and tilted the pot up, but everyone had noticed.

“Are you scalded?” Smokie asked, jumping up. Hilda ran into the kitchen and returned with a wet cloth. Nathan said he was all right, he was sorry if it had gone on the rug, it was entirely his fault. The waiter apologized, and Nathan clasped him on the shoulder, refusing his apology, insisting he was fine. In the end the waiter led him out to the kitchen. When Nathan came back, Mike stood up. “We have to call it a night,” he said. “Awfully nice of you folks.” Hilda and Pearl found their handbags and hats and they all thanked Mr. Glynnis and Mr. Carmichael and soon found themselves out on the sidewalk, where, to their surprise, it was almost midnight. A light breeze was blowing; it was cool, and the men took off their jackets and put them around the women's shoulders. Without discussion, they walked past their subway stop and toward the next one. Pearl was pleased—she wanted to keep the evening going.

“You did that on purpose,” Hilda said to Nathan then.

“Did what?”

“Spilled the coffee.”

“Why would I do that?”

“I don't know—to change the subject, I guess. So they wouldn't talk about Mussolini.”

“Change the subject!” Nathan said, and he sounded more excited than usual. “I
wanted
to talk about Mussolini—I wanted to talk about Mussolini a great deal.”

“But that would have been worse,” Hilda said. “What if they took it out on Pearl?”

“Oh, it wouldn't matter!” Pearl put in quickly.

“Don't be so sure!” said Hilda.

Pearl was startled. She'd thought it was a party—that it didn't matter what they did.

“Nathan was careless with your bosses—with your job,” Hilda was saying angrily.

Now Nathan sounded angry as well. “I hope you don't feel that way, Pearl,” he said, and his quiet, low voice made her cold. “I don't have much respect for those two, and I don't care to hide my opinions from people like that. That waiter—when I got him in the kitchen I asked him some questions. He's been unemployed for two years. They're paying him almost nothing tonight.”

They were still walking. The night was quiet and chilly, and Pearl felt accused, pulling Mike's jacket closer to her body.

“And those women!” said Hilda, but now she sounded amused, not angry after all. “Those women. They were call girls. That's what they
were
—it's that simple.”

“Do you think so?” Pearl hadn't been sure.

“Of course! Didn't you see their jewelry? And their dresses?”

“They had nice backsides,” said Mike.

“You could certainly discover
that
without trouble,” Hilda said.

“Their poor wives,” said Pearl, thinking of the round-faced woman in the picture on the dresser. “Do you think they suspect?”

“Women can sense that kind of thing,” said Hilda.

“How do they bear it?”

“Maybe it's different for people like that,” said Hilda. “People with money.” When they came to the next subway station, they went down. They got home late, not talking on the walk to their houses, and just waved good night when they separated. “I'm going to take off my shoes,” Hilda called, “and stick my feet in a pail of cold water.”

Hilda gave birth to a daughter, Rachel, on August seventeenth, after a long labor preceded by a four-day hot spell that made her jumpy and uncomfortable. Pearl had brought a couple of meals over and Hilda had barely been civil. She insisted it was too hot to eat anyway. She didn't know why Nathan persisted in eating. It nauseated her to watch him.

The day Hilda gave birth was a little cooler. Pearl walked home from the subway station feeling a slight breeze ruffle her dress, enjoying the air after the subway's stuffiness. When she passed Hilda's building, she hesitated. Then she saw Nathan hurry out. He told her he'd just come back for a shower and a nap. He'd brought Hilda to the hospital in a taxi at midnight and she'd had the baby at eleven in the morning. “It was hard,” he said. “They didn't let me stay with her. She was in pain.” He paused. “I thought it would be different.”

But Pearl could hardly listen. She felt her face breaking into a grin. “What does she look like?” she said. “Does she have hair?”

“The baby?” said Nathan. “I had to look through a window. I didn't realize what it would be like. She's cute—she's skinny, though. She was wrapped up, but she looked skinny. I think she has brown hair.” He looked at her tiredly. “Maybe later I can see her better.”

“What does she weigh?”

“I think about six pounds.”

“I guess that's pretty little.” Pearl stood up on her toes to give him a kiss on his cheek. His cheek felt like Mike's but a little different. She could feel the stubble on his face and it seemed a little softer than Mike's. He had his own smell. She was embarrassed, as if she might have done something wrong. “Can we visit her?”

“Tomorrow or the next day,” Nathan said. “Hilda's pretty knocked out.”

“Okay, tomorrow,” said Pearl. “Congratulations, Daddy.” Nathan grinned at her as she continued walking. She was oddly self-conscious, thinking of him watching her, watching the way the wind picked up the hem of her dress, a lightweight blue-and-white print, and jumbled it around her legs. But when she glanced over her shoulder he was gone.

4

F
RANCES
WAS SORRY SHE'D SHOWN
L
YDIA THE BABY SHOES
. She'd liked burying them in the park, and in a way her secret had been enhanced, but in another sense it was smaller. And she was afraid Lydia would tell someone about them. Several weeks passed, and Lydia didn't mention the shoes. Frances had trouble bringing up the subject. Then Lydia told their teacher about another secret of theirs.

One afternoon, before Simon ran away and Frances and Lydia buried the shoes, they'd been playing at Frances's house, and had started sorting Frances's doll clothes. Neither of them played with dolls anymore, but they had kept them, and Frances had been meaning to go through their clothes and organize them. But one of the dolls was dressed in a nurse's uniform, and without thinking about what they were doing they began a game having to do with a nurse and her boyfriend and the hospital where they worked. After a while they took the nurse doll to Lydia's house because Lydia had a boy doll who could be the boyfriend.

Lydia's mother was surprised when they got the dolls out. “It's for school,” Lydia said. “We're making up a story about nurses for school, and we're using the dolls to help us make up the story.” As far as Frances knew, Lydia was not planning to make up a story until she said that, but now Frances said it would be easy to write a story about the dolls—about nurses and their boyfriends, that is—and they began planning the story as well as playing the game. Before they separated, they wrote about a page, mostly taking turns making up sentences, but after that, though they sometimes said, “This would be good for the story,” they didn't write down anything more. By the time they buried the shoes, Frances had almost forgotten about the story and the nurses.

Then one day—a week or two after the burial of the shoes—Mrs. Reilly, their teacher, called them over and asked them how their story was coming along, and Frances realized that Lydia had told her about it. Frances didn't really like Mrs. Reilly, who was asking them to show her what they were writing, saying she could mimeograph it and distribute it through the school. They could include illustrations.

“Now we have to write that story,” Frances said to Lydia when they left.

“I can't today,” said Lydia. “I have to go to the store for my mother.”

“Do you want me to come?”

“I don't think she'd like it.”

Frances started for home by herself. She wouldn't be able to work on the story alone because the page they'd written was at Lydia's house. It was a cold, windy day but Frances circled past her own block and went to Prospect Park instead of going home. She was still carrying her books. She went to the big oak where they had buried the shoes, but when she came to it, even though she saw no one coming along in either direction, she passed the tree and pretended to be curious about the lake. She went down to the edge of the lake and stood there counting ducks. She even pretended to write down the number of ducks she'd counted in her notebook. Then she went back to the tree. She remembered just where they had hidden the shoes, at a place where a root came out of the ground, and she took a stick and dug in the ground until she felt the sock. She started as if it were alive or as if she hadn't expected it to be there. She didn't want to dig up the shoes without Lydia, though. She put the dirt back and covered the ground with dead leaves.

On her way home she met a neighbor who asked her why she was walking this way when the school was that way. “You still go to the same school, don't you?” she said. Frances said she'd walked a friend home.

“I have checked on the shoes,” she said boldly to Lydia the next day.

Lately whenever Frances had acted as if she were starting a game, Lydia had shrugged and turned away, but this time she answered with the same kind of voice that Frances had used, as if they were already pretending something. “The guilty shoes,” said Lydia. “Were they satisfactory?”

“Without question,” said Frances. Then, forgetting to change her voice, “They're right there.”

“I hope you took precautions.”

“Of course.” Frances was pleased and Lydia was even willing to play the nurse game that day for the first time in a long while. A week later they spent an afternoon at Frances's house working on the story, not even using the dolls. The story didn't really have much to do with the doll game. The game was mostly about clothes; the nurses were always changing, either for dates or to disguise themselves (first to hide from their boyfriends, but lately—this was an invention of Lydia's—because a criminal wanted to harm a patient in the hospital and the nurses had to be unrecognizable so as to hunt him).

In the story they wrote, the nurses first had to meet boyfriends, but it took a long time to write that. At the end of the afternoon they spent writing, one nurse had met a boy named Elliott, but the other hadn't even met her boyfriend yet. The part with the criminal was far off, and Frances wasn't sure they should use it, although Lydia was firm. Now Frances was full of plans, but the next day Lydia had lost interest again, and hurried home alone.

Frances's mother had taken a part-time job doing bookkeeping for a shoe company. She said she'd done similar work when she and Frances's father were first married. Several afternoons a week, now, she was out until after five. She liked Frances to be home when she was at work. “Especially because of the park,” she said. “I don't want you wandering in the park by yourself. It gets dark so early now.”

“I'm with Lydia,” said Frances.

“Even with Lydia. I'm sure her mother doesn't like it either.”

“She doesn't care.”

“Well, I care. This is a difficult time for us, Frances,” her mother said, with a frightening catch in her voice. “Don't make it harder.”

The next day when they were leaving school, Lydia said, “I think we should check on the shoes again.”