Plains Song (18 page)

In addition to her art, surprising Sharon, she also proved adept at botany, where she became a specimen
collector, the sill of her bedroom window jammed with bottles of bugs and growing seeds. Blanche pressed leaves well, made excellent pressings and rubbings, but persisted in her chronically bad spelling and reversal of the letter
S.
When this was pointed out she was very attentive, and could make the correction recommended. The following day she would revert to the one she liked. However puzzling, Miss Holroyd felt that time, not instruction, would correct it. One day she would simply see it as it was, and that would be that.

Life at Briarcliffe suited Blanche so well that she was reluctant to go home for Christmas, until Sharon mentioned Cora. Cora had given up writing to people, at least to Sharon, but she welcomed letters from Blanche. Sharon sent her a brief Christmas greeting but received no reply. On her return Blanche explained that a blizzard had kept them in Madge's house and Ned's new basement, where she played Parcheesi with her father and with the Ouija board with Caroline. Madge and Caroline had had colds. Fayrene and Avery had come over with a new baby, on New Year's.

The cold she brought back from Norfork she gave to Sharon, chronically subject to bronchial infections. She was helpful to Sharon, the weekend she spent in bed, but found the time to compose a letter to her father. Sharon observed her: a tranquil study someone like Vermeer might have painted. Her head rested on her left arm, as if she were napping, while she scrawled the oval letters on a pad of paper. She was being a
dutiful child, no more, but it piqued Sharon, lying there with her sniffles and cough while she wrote it. She sealed and went off with it without asking Sharon for a stamp.

The express ride on the North Side elevated brought her to Sharon on weekends, and the Lincoln Park Zoo, as the weather altered, was there just a short walk to the east. At the school she wore the green uniform of her classmates, with the bib at her front and the romperlike bloomers, but Sharon had been careful to outfit her in clothes that emphasized her adolescence. Knee-length stockings somewhat filled out her legs, and firmly attached her to low-heeled patent-leather oxfords, with straps. Her blue straw floater, with a pale yellow ribbon, held in place by an elastic chin strap, she wore tilted back on her head. Two long braids of hair hung free of her back as she walked, dangling ribbons to her waist. Not a girl, it seemed to Sharon, an idling male would molest. She always carried a sketch pad, a red pencil box, a blue purse she held by its strap, and often a paper bag with bread scraps for the pigeons and squirrels. It distressed Sharon to know that she also ate them herself, nibbling on them like cheese.

On weekends Blanche might receive several phone calls from Libby Pollitt, one of the day students, who lived at home in Evanston. Libby shared one of Blanche's afternoon botany classes, and was an avid specimen collector. She called Blanche to tell her of the strange things she had found. “Might I speak to Miss Kibbee?” she would ask Sharon, usually breathing
hard from the climb to her room. Blanche would sit cross-legged on the floor, beside the telephone stand, picking at bits of nap on the hallway rug. Libby's monologue might go on for as long as forty minutes, with no audible comment from Blanche. Sharon had spoken with Libby's mother, Gladys Pollitt, who had called to apologize for her daughter. Her other children were boys, and she found them quite a relief. On Mondays Libby would share with Blanche the specimens she had found on the weekend, which Blanche would bring home in a shoe box and store away in jelly jars with holes poked in the lids.

Sharon felt it would be a special pleasure to Blanche to have a friend of her own, who loved to talk to her, but after each of these calls she was noncommittal. Perhaps her apparent indifference was deceptive, since not once, to Sharon's knowledge, did she forget to tend the seeds and creatures stored away in jars on her window sill. Sharon herself marveled to see the caterpillar become a butterfly, which Libby would then add to her butterfly collection. Nor did chloroforming the creature and piercing it with a pin disturb Blanche as it did Sharon. Blanche was free to grow anything she might care to, but Sharon drew the line about the pin piercing. Discussing this with Blanche, Sharon had been painfully aware of not closing the gap she sensed between them. The child listened, wetting the tip of her finger to pick up crumbs from the table, which she had learned from Cora.

Sharon regretted the commute on the north shore elevated until she found that Blanche was so thrilled
by it she often rode it farther than necessary and had to ride back. The big express train went too fast for Sharon, so high above the streets, with no visible support, but Blanche seemed captivated by both trains and streetcars. On the Clark Street car, when they rode into the Loop, she had to go stand at the front of the car, directly behind the motorman. She liked the clang of the bell, the way the car seemed to rock and dip on the tracks. It was so easy for Sharon to keep an eye on Blanche, her head rising above those around her, that Sharon did not feel the customary apprehension of parents with teen-aged children. On Saturday or Sunday they might attend the matinee at the movie house on Sheridan Avenue. Of course, Blanche had gone to movies with her father, in Norfork, but her avidity for them, the way her eyes “drank them in” (no other words so well described her rapt, wide-eyed enchantment), both amused and disturbed Sharon. Where was she off to, at such moments? In the darkness of the theater, as in a séance, she was exposed and vulnerable in a way that Sharon had never experienced. Yet when she stepped from the lobby into the glare of the street, what she had seen passed from her like a shadow. She saw only movies acceptable to Sharon, so it was hard to judge what types she preferred. The flickering light from the screen revealed her rapt attention, the skin about her mouth glistening with the butter and salt of her popcorn. Eating was part of her absorption. Her sister Caroline drove Madge almost dotty recounting the details of her latest movie, but Blanche soaked them in in a manner
that left no trace. If Sharon troubled to ask her, she might nod that she had liked what she had seen.

Returning from her spring vacation in Norfork, her nose sunburned from the day she had spent with Cora, Blanche brought with her the sheet music of “Lotus Land,” which Caroline had played for her on Cora's player piano. Sharon thought it pretentious, sentimental music of the worst kind. Blanche simply adored it. Would Sharon play it for her? Would Sharon teach her to play it? Sharon did play it for her, attentive, during the pauses, to the way Blanche sat on the bench at her side, drinking it in through her eyes and parted lips.

Fortunately, for them both, she was soon back at the school and had other interests by the following weekend. But Sharon had been shaken. Was it possible that Blanche would come, in her own slow time, to everything that Sharon had assumed and hoped she had put behind her? The ease she had felt in her presence gradually diminished. Her habitual silences, once so comforting, now weighed on her. What
was
on her mind? Twice monthly, now, Blanche wrote to her father, who addressed his letters to her to the school. That piqued Sharon. What was he concealing from her? On her February birthday, to Sharon's embarrassment, he sent her a large box of stale drugstore candy.

From her home in Charlottesville, Shirley Caudwell wrote to Blanche, enclosing a snapshot of herself on horseback. She wanted Blanche to come and visit her in the summer. Would she like to? Although Blanche
liked horses, she was silently noncommittal. Sharon felt obliged to point out that if she visited Shirley she would meet her three sisters, see their wonderful farm, and be driven about in a tassel-fringed buggy. Blanche's habit, while listening to Sharon, was to crumble up pieces of her art-gum eraser and shoot them across the table with a flick of her fingernail. More vexing to Sharon was her habit of trying to conceal the very food she was eating, as if it were something stolen, or denied her, slipping it into her mouth with her head to one side, covertly. Was that something she had learned at the school? Sharon was reluctant to bring it up since it would surely diminish her interest in food. It would be just like her to simply stop eating, rather than be observed.

Late in April, a warm drizzly Saturday, the trees leafing, Sharon walked through the park to the pond boathouse, where she was accustomed to meet Blanche for a soft drink or a dish of ice cream. Because of the drizzle, only water birds were out on the pond. Blanche was usually at a table she liked in the café, from where she could look out over the lagoon, but she was neither there nor down on the pier where the boats were rented. A long-suppressed anxiety regarding Blanche surged up in her like a fever. She waited ten minutes, then went back along the walk that led to the birdhouse. The only person she passed was an elderly man with a dog. Just to the right of the walk, in a storage shed where food was kept for the animals, her eye was caught by bales of yellow hay, almost
luminous in the dim light. Seated on one of the bales, huddled closely, so that both could stroke a bird in the girl's lap, a young man in overalls and red rubber boots had his left arm about the girl's waist. Her head was lowered to look at the bird that she held, her legs dangling just short of the straw-littered floor. With one hand she held the bird, some sort of exotic chicken, and with the other she stroked its plumed, brightly hued topknot. The young man's arm tightened about her waist as he inclined his head to touch her hair. Not lost on Sharon was his silly, conspiratorial smile. The sound that escaped her, an intake of breath, led the young man to glance up. Sharon stared at his beardless, oafish face, then he was gone into the barn's shadows. Hardly aware of what had happened, Blanche raised her head to look at Sharon.

“Oh, Aunt Sharon! Look at the bird.”

With an effort, Sharon moved to look at it closely. Under its topknot was the head of a chicken.

“Where did you get it?”

“He brought it to me—” She looked behind her, then back to Sharon.

“We'd better see it's put back where it belongs,” said Sharon, but Blanche would not be rushed. She stroked the bird, its eyes hypnotically half-lidded. Did Sharon feel they were much alike?

“Did you forget,” Sharon said, “that you were going to meet me?”

Yes, it seemed she had forgotten. “He brought me the bird.”

“You know him?”

“Oh, yes. His name is Jerry. He's nice.”

As Sharon waited, she slipped off the bale of hay, permitted Sharon to dust off her skirt. They walked together in the drizzle to a caretaker raking up manure in one of the outdoor cages. “We found this bird,” Sharon said. “Would you take him?”

Blanche was reluctant to release it.

“It has its own friends,” Sharon said.

“Not that one,” replied the man. “That one's a troublemaker.” He took the bird from her, leaned his rake on the fence, and went off with it.

“Chickens are birds,” said Blanche. “Did you know that?”

Actually, Sharon had not known it. Like Cora, she would have said that a chicken was a chicken. They walked together back to the apartment, where Sharon made some cinnamon toast. Nothing more was said of the matter. How close, Sharon wondered, had she come to an incident from which she, if not Blanche, might never have recovered? During the evening Blanche drew pictures of the bird's head with its half-lidded eyes.

Sunday evening, with Blanche returned to the school, Sharon called Madge to say that Blanche's year of schooling was drawing to a close. She had had a wonderful year, she was poised with people, could assert herself, and had put on some weight that showed in her face. But Sharon was now clear in her mind that what Blanche wanted most was her daddy
and the closeness of her family. She was not a city girl. Madge was relieved to hear her say so, because her father had been wondering why they had her in the first place if she wasn't at home where they could enjoy her, before she got married.

The days and nights Cora was unable to leave the house the world shrank to accommodate her. The farm was what she could see through the porch screen, or the curtains at the front window, the air rising in a shimmer of heat from the graveled road. In the cooling dusk her vision blurred at the pump shed, as if the wick of the lamp had been lowered. From a clump of foliage low on the trunk, dead barkless branches forked from a tree Emerson had planted. The tree was cutting back, as they were.

Although she was first up, Cora waited for Emerson
to clear away the cobwebs blocking the door of the outbilly. When he sat down to breakfast they dangled like bits of veil from the rim of his straw hat. He smoked less, no longer able to keep the tobacco in the bowl of his pipe burning, nor did he complain, as he once did, of the weight at the pit of his stomach.

In October Emerson went with Avery to a cattle sale in O'Neill. It had been Cora's impression Emerson had gone to buy a cow, but he returned with a team of plow horses, it being the noise of tractors, in Avery's opinion, that cut down on the cows' milk. So the two horses would work better as a team, Avery gelded the white stallion.