I moved these sounds around in my mind for a while and decided he’d said something about “one summer,” and then deduced it was “
worked
one summer.” I asked him if that was right, and again he nodded his head eagerly. Ulub smiled at his brother’s success.
It might have been better to ask things that could have been answered yes or no, but I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to know (except about the cat), and, anyway, that struck me as a little insulting. Ubub clearly didn’t mind trying; therefore, I shouldn’t either. Then I thought of a question that might really tell me something.
“Did you like them? The Devereaus?”
Both of them shook their heads immediately and fiercely. “Nah!” The syllable exploded from Ubub’s mouth.
“How come?” I asked, noticing the tobacco chewer was leaning forward, elbows on knees and hands clasped before him, rapt, wanting to know, it appeared, the answer.
Ubub looked up at the sky, stretching his long neck, and scratching it, as if he were turning over in his mind the best way to phrase what he wanted to say. Finally he said, “A din tah.” Ulub nodded his head in vigorous agreement with his brother.
“A din tah,” I repeated mentally over and over, trying to figure it out.
A din tah.
I was fairly sure “A” was “They.” “A din” must have been “They didn’t.” But “tah”? What was “tah”? I hated for Ubub to think I hadn’t understood him, so I tried to make it sound as if I were just meditating over the implications of the words, and not the words themselves.
“Hmmm,” I said, myself studying the sky, “so they didn’t . . .”
“Tah.
Tah
-eh—” He tried but couldn’t get out what I bet was some consonant.
“Talk!” I said. “Talk?”
Again, both nodded happily.
“Mr. Wood, you’re saying the Devereau sisters didn’t talk?”
Nod.
“To you, you mean?”
Shake of the head. Both heads. No, they didn’t mean exactly that.
“Nuch . . . N-uhn . . . En-itch Uhu-er.” Poor Ubub. He was trying so hard to be understood.
The old man beside me was frowning as hard as I was over this exchange. He scratched the stubble of gray hair beneath his cap, resettled it on his head, and said, “ ‘Each other.’ Ain’t that what you’re sayin’? They didn’t talk to each other?”
Ulub and Ubub seemed incredibly grateful to him, nodding eagerly.
“They didn’t talk to each
other
?”
Enthusiastic nods. The old man looked mightily pleased and spat out a long stream of tobacco, as if he’d earned the right.
It was a little like playing charades. I wanted to ask, Why not? Why not?, but I doubted the two of them would know, even if they could have expressed it.
“You mean you never heard them talk to each other?”
“Nah du war—” Ubub’s face started working, his tongue trying to form sounds that wanted to stay locked within his mouth, slipping around, getting no purchase, like a climber trying to find secure footing on a glass mountain.
Everyone watched in suspense; we couldn’t help it.
Finally he blurted out, “Mur-rah.”
And Ulub nodded.
Ubub added: “Uh-uhv-win.”
Mary-Evelyn! I thought, at the same time the old man slapped his knee and exclaimed, “Mary-Eva!”
“Mary-Evelyn,” I said. “You’re saying that the sisters
never talked to Mary-Evelyn
?”
Both of them looked at me, at the old man, at each other, nodding all the while.
“But—” I was stunned by this news. Stunned. In whatever my mother (or anyone) had told me about the Devereau sisters, never was
there any suggestion that they were “abnormal” in any way. My mother never said anything about the sisters’ not being able to talk, or anything like that. They came to the hotel, all of them together, or in pairs (never alone, apparently), and with Mary-Evelyn. They must have ordered their food or conversed with the other guests, just like anybody else. So it wasn’t that they
couldn’t
talk, but that they
wouldn’t.
By this time, I had got up off the bench and was standing in front of the Woods. Maybe I could understand Ubub better if I watched his face. “Didn’t you ever hear them say
anything
to Mary-Evelyn?”
Emphatically, Ubub shook his head. So did Ulub, and not, I thought, just in imitation of his brother. No, they had never heard them say anything to her. Then Ubub offered: “Nu-ee th-thun uh uhn ee.” Ulub turned to Ubub and they both nodded, confirming this statement.
And the old man, who’d edged closer to them and was now Official Interpreter, again mouthed Ulub’s word forms and exclaimed: “Funny! They thought it was funny.” He meant the Woods did.
Both nodded and grinned at him.
I knew the Woods didn’t mean funny “laughable,” but funny “strange.” To me it was worse than strange; it was scary.
“But you were only there a short time,” I said. “Maybe they just didn’t want to talk in front of strangers. Or something.”
Ubub considered this, bringing his long, oil-begrimed fingers to his forehead. But he had set his face to a certainty and was shaking his head. He made small, grunting noises and then looked upwards, closing and unclosing his small hands. He had the look of a person who meant to throw a tantrum at God, and I can’t say I blamed him. (I knew all about tantrums.) Then he lowered his head, as if he were in disgrace. (I knew all about disgrace, too.) Ulub simply put his hand on his brother’s arm and patted him into a sort of dark, frustrated quiet.
I thought how awful it would be to be speechless (though I imagined some people—Lola Davidow chief among them—wouldn’t mind too much if such a fate befell me). And since I was pretty sure the Woods neither read nor wrote, how it would be to have no means of communication excepting if they found someone, or some occasion when someone really wanted to understand them, such as this one.
Yet the two of them together (and they were never apart) seemed
almost pleased with things. I’ve always thought it dumb, really dumb, to comment on other people’s happiness—that is, whether they were or were not happy—but the Woods had an air about them as if they
were
more or less happy. Such as when they would be eating their lunch in the Rainbow, listening to the regulars at the counter kidding around, and they’d smile as if they were included in all of the buffoonery. And, naturally, they liked the Rainbow because Maud was there, and always insisted on waiting on them; she wouldn’t let Shirl do it because Shirl teased them—Shirl could bury a lot of nastiness underneath a quirky little smile (and even that smile looked mean, I thought) and pretend she couldn’t understand what Ulub or Ubub were pointing to on the menu. But Maud would tell them the specials and tell them if anything was particularly good that day. They really liked that, being treated like anybody else, and sometimes would ponder over their order, but they always wound up pretty much with the same thing: hot roast beef sandwich and mashed potatoes and gravy.
I wondered, too, if their memories might not even be better than the rest of ours because they could keep them clearer, so to speak, and depended on them more, and were much deeper into their own thoughts than others were. They weren’t clouding over their memories with a lot of talk.
I said to Ubub, hoping he would understand that I had understood him, “You don’t think—you think they never talked to her. To Mary-Evelyn.”
Ubub raised his head, nodding and looking happier. Then he added: “Uf Mur-ur-ah tahn nu-uhn ah-ah-ahnwur.”
This was truly inscrutable. I mulled it over, frowning deeply. I think the “uf” must have been “if.” So I said, “If Mary . . .” They nodded, encouragingly. But what was “tahn”? “Talk,” maybe. “If Mary
talked . . .
”
Heavy nods.
But I couldn’t get the rest. The old man was thinking deeply and finally said—he was really incredible—“No one answered. Ain’t no one answered her, right?”
The Woods were almost gleeful, both of them. “Yuh, yuh,” said Ubub.
“So if this Mary-Evan person talked,” the old man went on with authority, “nobody talked back, nobody answered her.” He spat a stream of tobacco again, wiped the back of his hand over his mouth
and looked at his shoes. “That poor little girl must’ve had the blue devils.”
“What’s the blue devils?” I asked.
Mr. Root pursed his lips, thinking. “Some call it the
de
-pression, like. I call it the worst kind of misery. Misery’s misery.” Then he was silent, as if he knew.
I should have known better than to tell anyone about my exchange with the Woods, but I was so wrought up about what I’d discovered that when I got back to the hotel, I did. It was during Sunday dinner.
We were at the “family table” in the rear of the dining room. Mrs. Davidow, Ree-Jane, Will and me, and, off-and-on, my mother, when she didn’t have to dart through the swing door into the kitchen, her dinner getting cold all the while. She had so much to do at mealtimes that she often ate her dinner standing up in the kitchen.
Lola Davidow certainly didn’t have to eat standing up; by dinnertime she was usually so “oiled and lubed” (as Will put it) that she couldn’t stand up straight, anyway. That night she was eating her steak. Filet mignon, her diet food. She’s always going on grapefruit-and-steak diets, which sounds all right until you throw in the pitcher of martinis. The rest of us were eating fried chicken, including Ree-Jane, except she always gets white meat. That’s understood, and one of the waitresses had got a real tongue-lashing from Mrs. Davidow once because she had made the unforgivable error of putting the white meat in front of
me
and serving the chicken leg to Ree-Jane. The plates were exchanged, but not before I got my fork prongs into that chicken breast and wrenched out a big bite.
This is an ongoing argument for me. It makes me absolutely furious. I wouldn’t mind at all taking turns about the white meat, but to have Ree-Jane always get the favored part of the chicken was unbearable. Neither would I mind so much if my mother didn’t
own
that chicken, so to speak, for it’s she who’s the Paradise part of that “family table”
(you can bet Aurora always gets white meat of chicken), and not the Davidows. Of course, Ree-Jane just gloats fit-to-kill every time fried chicken appears on the menu.
No matter how often I point out this favoritism to her, my mother won’t do anything about it. She always says that guests prefer white meat, and she has to make sure she holds some back in case a party orders it. Well, I said, if that’s the point, then it should be held back from Ree-Jane, too. Why make a fuss about such a little thing? is always my mother’s fuming response as she bangs around the pots and pans preparing to shut down for the night. She can’t stand all of this “dissension,” she keeps saying to me. All she wants is some peace and quiet. Well, I say, all I want is some white meat of chicken.
But this particular dinnertime I didn’t care much about the drumstick I was eating (much to Ree-Jane’s disappointment, I’m sure, for her gloating went unattended), because I was too excited about what I’d found out.
“. . . And they said her aunts wouldn’t talk to her. Isn’t that horrible?”
At the other end of the table, Ree-Jane was laughing, heaving with silent laughter, and I assume had been all during my account. I felt my throat tighten. “What’s so funny?”
The laughter now was audible. The words came out, broken a little: “. . . can just (har har)
hear
it now. I can (har har)
hear
it. You (har har) and the Woods (har har) mumbling and grunting . . .”—and here she made some disgusting sounds intended to mimic Ulub and Ubub.
Her mother shook a little too, with laughter. I will say that Lola Davidow didn’t always back up her daughter in Ree-Jane’s nastier moments. Actually, I don’t think Mrs. Davidow was a nasty person; Ree-Jane was. But Mrs. Davidow was pretty “lubed” tonight, and I guess laughter came easy to her.
Even Will joined in, sucking up to them. That really made me angry, and I flashed him a razor-sharp look. He knew he was being mean and stopped and said, “Well, sometimes I can understand them. Big Bob I can understand sometimes.”
By now my mother’s famous chocolate cake had been served and Lola Davidow (her diet officially forgotten) was raising a large forkful to her mouth. She said that the Wood boys were probably imagining all of it. “It was over forty years ago, how could they remember? I
don’t think they can remember what was around the corner they just turned.” She was mashing her fork against the chocolate crumbs on her plate.
My mother was at least taking my story seriously, although she questioned my conclusion. She said, “I don’t see how the Wood boys could say something like that.” She had appeared briefly with her coffee cup in hand. “The Devereau sisters were very social once they got going, once they got into company.”
“But what about when they were out of company?” I insisted.
Ree-Jane, who was eating the chocolate icing but not the cake, put her two cents’ worth in. “Well, why do
you
care? If it all happened forty years ago?”
I ignored her and asked Mother, “When they brought Mary-Evelyn along with them, did you hear them talk to her?”
“I can’t remember. But I’m sure they must have or I’d have noticed.”
“Why? Adults don’t pay much attention to kids. And you always said Mary-Evelyn was really quiet. So maybe she didn’t say anything herself that would give one of the aunts a reason to answer her. So maybe that’s how it was, and it wouldn’t have stood out as peculiar.”
“You’d be a lot better off,” said Ree-Jane, licking the back of her fork, “trying to get to know some
living
girls your age instead of
dead
ones.” You could tell how clever she was.
She meant that I had no friends. That dreaded subject is always rearing its head. It isn’t technically true, for I do have friends when school’s in session, but school is often somewhere else, for in the winter months we close the hotel, or all of it except for Aurora’s rooms in the attics, where she warms herself with her gin reserve and a portable heater and Marge Byrd to see that she gets meals. (Why the hotel is still standing when we return I can’t imagine.) When they get on this subject of me and my friends, they all yammer at me, sometimes even Will, and it’s terrible.