Hilda and Pearl (19 page)

She and Mike had a one-bedroom apartment. She knew she wasn't taking Nathan into the bedroom, and knowing that made her know she was going to bed with him. In the living room was the single bed she'd had as a girl. It had been part of their bed when they lived at Nathan and Hilda's, and now it was their couch, with a row of pillows on it against the wall. Her mother had made pillow covers for her of flowered fabric. Pearl sat down on the couch and lifted her face to look at Nathan again. He didn't sit with her but sat at her feet on the floor and then pulled her gently down to him and began kissing her once more. But it was different. It was more reckless, less as if he were telling her a secret no one else had ever heard. This was more energetic; he seemed determined to do wrong and get it over with. Yet it was kind. Nathan's hands, touching her, seemed to be asking, not telling her what would happen. Asking whether she too wanted to do this.

After many kisses he brought the pillows down from the couch and helped her off with her dress and underwear and eased her down. There was a pillow under her head and shoulders and one under her backside. Nathan stood and turned away, still without speaking, and took off his own clothes and laid them on the couch. He didn't exactly fold them, Pearl saw, watching him lovingly from the floor, nervous yet proud of her long body, but he smoothed them and placed them respectfully. That was how he touched her: with respect.

“You're the sweetest girl....” he said. She was amazed at what was happening, amazed that it could happen. Her body responded to him with waves of pleasure, as if she'd been waiting for exactly this event to take place. Nathan's shadowed face hovered over hers, and at the climax he sank into her arms as though he would never stand again. He eased out of her carefully and kept his arms around her. She felt that he was the whole world, that Nathan was the oceans and mountains, the Loyalists fighting in Spain and the thousands of people cheering at rallies. “I love you,” she whispered into his shoulder, inaudibly. “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.” Not out loud.

He dressed quickly. She remained lying on the pillows, watching him, noticing the slope of his shoulder as he picked up his undershirt and put it on, the way his chest hairs curled darkly over its edge when he was wearing it, the flare of his nose, seen from below, as he looked to see where to fasten his shirt cuff. Putting on his pants, he looked at her and blushed. He did not turn red, the way Mike did when he blushed. Nathan's face darkened and he looked aside. Pearl stood up and went into her bedroom for her bathrobe.

He kissed her again before he left, two tiny kisses that barely touched her lips but seemed full of messages. She put her arms around him and held him, and then he left. Her bathrobe was loose and she tied the belt again, then picked up the pillows, smoothed their covers, and arranged them on the couch as usual. She felt dazed and she moved slowly. She took the pile of her clothes into the bedroom and put it on the bed. Then she went into the bathroom. The sight of the toilet reminded her that she wanted to urinate and she did, a long stream that eased her. She felt the urine leave her body with rather more attention than usual, as if her mind were stilled of everything else and she had nothing more to think about. She flushed the toilet and began to fill the bathtub. She took a long bath. The water was Nathan, the pitted tub over whose familiar surface she ran her finger was Nathan. The towel with which she dried her whole body, even her toes, was Nathan. Still without thinking, she was asleep before Mike came home.

Pearl never woke easily, but in the morning, this time, she knew she was happy before she knew why. It was sad that Mike couldn't know and of course wouldn't share in this happiness. In a way it was hard to understand, as if Mike too was simply part of Nathan and would rejoice as she did. She had to remind herself firmly that no one would rejoice.

It was Friday. She went to work. She didn't read on the train, she just sat and looked around her. She had never noticed how interesting people were, how you could know things about them if you just looked. An old woman opposite her had her fingers curled through the hemp handles of a shopping bag, and when the woman stood to leave the train at her stop, Pearl discovered that she could feel how the heavy bag settled and how the handles cut into the woman's fingers.

There were children on the train, high school students. The boys almost made her cry. Even when they seemed outwardly tough or cold or stupid, she could suddenly see that their lips and eyes were innocent, a little fearful, full of hope and uncertainty. She caressed them with her eyes and wanted to bless them. She wanted to bless all the people on the subway, to put her fingers on their foreheads in a half-remembered, half-invented holy gesture. Standing and walking among them, getting off at her stop and joining the throng on the platform, where some people were already mounting the stairs and others shuffled behind her, Pearl discovered that she believed in God.

She was sure they'd be happy, she and Nathan. She didn't know how. At work, she let herself think about him only now and then, as a reward for typing a stack of letters, or for approaching Mr. Carmichael with a difficult question. It would be
all right
, she said to herself over and over.

In the late afternoon, as it was growing dark, she was suddenly afraid. A sheet of fear passed over her body the way it might have if she'd looked up to see a masked gunman in the doorway. She pressed her hands into the papers on her desk. “Are you all right?” asked the bookkeeper, Ruby—Hilda's replacement—walking past her.

“I shivered,” she said, but Ruby kept walking.

She told herself again that everything would be all right, that Nathan would know what had to happen, that if she just waited patiently it would all become clear. She needed to think, anyway. She didn't want to see Nathan just yet, or even speak to him. She wanted to think of him, to run her fingers over his body in her imagination.

All she cared to do in the next days was sing and listen to the radio. She sang love songs. She'd known them for years but had never paid attention to the words. She'd never known that the people singing
loved
someone.

She still had a good time with Mike. He was funny and he was her husband. She neglected the cooking and cleaning for the next week because she was always staring out the window and doing nothing, but that was not right. When her mother dropped in one afternoon and asked what Pearl was making for supper, Pearl didn't know. The next day she bought a cookbook so she could make better meals for Mike. There was nothing wrong with Mike. When she and Nathan spoke at last, he must not be allowed to say anything bad about his younger brother Mike. He might say she should divorce Mike and he'd divorce Hilda, and they'd get married, but she wouldn't agree, at least not right away. They owed a lot to Hilda and Mike and besides there was the baby. She'd tell Nathan they had to keep silent and wait, and see how they felt about each other over the years. Maybe they'd have to wait until Racket was grown up. That seemed hard but worthwhile. She could picture herself, ennobled by love of Nathan, waiting until they could act on their love without hurting Racket.

Pearl went to see Racket and Hilda one afternoon on the way home from work, as she had at first. Of course she felt strange but she told herself that the world was a strange place, people all over were feeling and doing things that they had never expected. Ruby's boyfriend hadn't expected to become a soldier in Spain—he was a student at City College—but he was talking about going. Pearl hadn't expected to marry Mike and that had happened. Things happened.

“I took her for a walk in the carriage,” Hilda said. “I'm glad I got back before you came over.” She was peeling potatoes with the playpen set up next to her, though the kitchen was so small the playpen filled it. Racket was lying in it on her stomach, flailing her arms like a little swimmer.

Pearl picked her up and Racket batted at Pearl's nose. She was a dark-eyed baby, solemn for a moment, but then she laughed. “She laughed with a sound,” Pearl said.

“I know. She did that yesterday, too. It's cute, isn't it?” said Hilda.

The baby reminded Pearl of Nathan. She was the first person besides familiar Mike whom Pearl had touched since she'd touched Nathan. Racket seemed sinewy and busy for a baby, twisting in her arms. Pearl lowered her into the playpen again. She was half relieved, half disappointed that Nathan wasn't there, and she hurried home before he could come in.

As the days passed Pearl noticed that Nathan's touch had changed her. Her breasts felt different. She touched them and shaped them with her hands as she was getting dressed in the morning. She thought they were more beautiful than they had been. She'd never thought of herself as having beautiful breasts, as being beautiful at all, except for her hair, but now she stretched to see herself in the mirror over her dresser and liked the long line of her body. She had good feet—she'd never thought of that either. They were narrow and her insteps were high. She would have liked those feet if she'd seen them in a shoe ad in a magazine.

But she was tired. Just thinking about Nathan tired her. She yawned when she was standing in Mr. Carmichael's office while he explained something he wanted her to do. She had to think about climbing the stairs. When it was finally night, she'd lie in bed next to Mike, thinking of Nathan. Sometimes Mike wanted to make love to her, and she complied, but she was so tired she felt almost nothing. “Come on, sweetie,” Mike would say, “don't you like this? How about this? Do you like this?”

And he'd fondle her. He too sculpted her breasts with his hands. “Baby, I think you're growing,” he said to her one night, a few weeks after her night with Nathan.

“Don't be silly,” she said, smiling.

“Your breasties are really something. I never noticed.”

“You never looked.”

“I looked, I looked, believe me.”

Pearl was frightened, as if Mike were about to discover Nathan's fingerprints on her breasts. She stroked him to hurry him. She felt dry inside. She didn't really want to do this, and it wasn't because he was Mike instead of Nathan. Maybe she was getting her period, she thought, although she didn't recall that being about to get her period usually made her feel this way. She began to try to remember when she had last had her period.

She always meant to write it down, but she never did. She'd been caught by surprise at work more than once, and had had to get permission to run out to the drugstore for sanitary pads. She was pretty sure she hadn't had her period when they'd gone on the picnic, and she knew she didn't have it the day of the rally, October eighth. She counted up. The rally—the day she'd slept with Nathan—was more than three weeks ago. She hadn't had her period
between
the picnic and the rally, because then she'd have been thinking about it when they made love, thinking about whether it was really over and whether he'd mind if there was blood. She hadn't thought about it at all.

But this didn't make sense. Pearl was regular—twenty-eight days. She counted back twenty-eight days—she could hear Mike breathing deeply in his sleep now—but that was October 6, the week between the picnic and the rally. Then she remembered her last period. She'd left work early that day to go to the dentist. She'd said something to Ruby about how it wasn't fair, the dentist and the curse in one day.

She couldn't figure out what that date had been, but it felt like a long time ago. And now she knew what she was thinking about. Pearl was going to have a baby. In the morning she checked her calendar. Her dentist appointment had been September twenty-third. Now it was November fourth. She had to be pregnant. That was it. She was pregnant.

She was sure it was Nathan's child. That explained everything—why she had been so happy, why she had not realized for so long. She had kept it a secret from herself.

Then, “Hey, are you pregnant?” said Mike at breakfast.

“What makes you think that?”

“I don't know. I was thinking about your breasties, I guess.”

“Would that be bad?” said Pearl, blushing. He didn't use that word except in bed. “If I was pregnant?”

“Of course not,” said Mike. “It would be great.”

“I'll go to the doctor and find out,” said Pearl.

“But do you think you are?” said Mike.

“Well, maybe,” said Pearl. “It's too early to tell.” But it wasn't too early to tell. She was pregnant with Nathan's baby. Sometimes she and Mike didn't make love for days, especially if he was working at night. Of course it was Nathan's baby.

This changed everything. She and Nathan might have to act now. They had to stop hiding from each other, at least. She had not seen him since the night they had made love, which was unusual for them. Ordinarily they all visited back and forth. Just before their night together, she had promised Hilda she would pick a day and invite them to dinner. Hilda had said she could bring Racket in the carriage, and take it upstairs in the elevator. Maybe the baby would sleep, and they could talk. Pearl had not thought about inviting them from that day until this.

Now she had to talk to Nathan. She made an appointment with the doctor and she thought about how to talk to Nathan. After a few days she wrote him a note. “Dear Nathan, I have to talk to you about something important.” She thought for a long time about how to sign the note. “Love” wasn't enough. She might have written “love” when he was just her brother-in-law. “All my love,” she wrote, at last, then crossed it out, threw the note away, started again, and wrote her name without any complimentary close at all. She mailed it to Nathan at Erasmus Hall High School, where he taught.