Some Faces in the Crowd (23 page)

About the best fun he ever had was the first week when he was alone with Winnie while Mama and Daddy were off in California. He had her all to himself at last. Though the memory of it would fade later on, he would never forget entirely the pleasure of being a small boy alone in the house with Winnie. He would remember how soft and warm Winnie felt in bed beside him and how good it was to curl up against her. Tommy liked to pull the covers right over both their heads and play tent and pretend there were wild bears prowling around in the forest of the bedroom. Winnie would play with him as long as he wanted and she was very good at pretending about bears. Most big people didn’t know how to pretend, but Winnie did.

The first Sunday afternoon they were alone was Winnie’s regular day off, but since she would be unable to have any time off until Tommy’s people were back from California, Winnie decided to take Tommy with her for a visit to her sister and brother-in-law’s. He noticed that Winnie’s sister Cloretta wasn’t light coffee brown like Winnie. She wasn’t as pretty and warm-skin-looking at all. Why, she was as white as Mama and Daddy. When he realized that, he was glad in a way. Winnie was his special person and it seemed right that she should be a special color, the color of maple candy, taffy, honey and all the good things that he liked.

There were two people who asked him to call them his Aunt Cloretta and Uncle Floyd, both white and offering him candy and gum, and then there was a friend of the strange Uncle Floyd called George. George worked with Uncle Floyd in some kind of business. All during the afternoon George kept looking at Winnie. They thought Tommy was busy exploring and eating candy but he could see the way the man was looking at her. He kept looking at her, and even when the others were talking he kept looking at her.

George said he had a brand-new car and he wondered if Winnie would like to go for a turn around the block with him. Winnie looked at George and then at Tommy and acted as if she could not make up her mind between them. Her sister Cloretta said, “Go ahead, Winnie. I think it’ll be nice for you. We’ll keep an eye on Tommy for you until you get back.” Tommy didn’t want Winnie to go off and leave him, even with these people who gave him candy and gum. Tommy was very glad when he heard Winnie say, “I’d better not. I gave his folks my word I wouldn’t let him out of my sight until they came home.”

“Then let’s take the kid with us,” George said. “You’d like to go for an auto ride, wouldn’t you, sonny?”

Years later Tommy would not recall what George looked like. But he would be able to recall how he had feared and distrusted this stranger, who was paying more attention to his Winnie than anyone ever had before.

When it was time for Winnie to take Tommy home, George said, “I sure envy you, kiddo. All alone in a house with a beautiful gal like that.”

He was looking right at Winnie. Winnie told him to hush. Tommy couldn’t tell whether Winnie was angry or pleased. George insisted on driving Winnie and Tommy home. George did all the talking. He told Winnie about his job and the things he wanted to do. He said he was a surveyor for the county, working under Floyd. When they saved up enough money they were thinking of going into private business together. George said he would like to live out of town—a little house in the country where he could keep a few chickens and grow his own vegetables—but first he had to find the right girl. Tommy did not like the way he kept looking at Winnie. Or the way he went on talking to Winnie, just as if Tommy wasn’t there at all.

And it made him feel irritable that Winnie kept her head turned around toward this other man and was hardly bothering to look at
him.
He was used to having Winnie pay attention just to him and to nobody else.

As Tommy got out of the car he slipped and fell down. He lay on the sidewalk and bawled and felt terribly injured and Winnie had to pick him up and kiss the spot where he had hurt himself. George stood around helplessly, trying to tell Winnie, above Tommy’s screaming, that he felt this was much more than a casual first meeting and that all he could think about was how soon he could see her again. Winnie hardly heard George, because she was so busy hugging Tommy and saying things to make him laugh so he would be himself again. She carried Tommy into the house and settled him down to his evening routine. In the bathtub Tommy laughed until he was almost hysterical because it had been a hard day and the man was gone and Tommy and Winnie were together again.

For the next few days Tommy did not notice anything different about Winnie. Then one night Tommy’s lights were out—all but the one in the bathroom that was left to guide him through the darkness—and Tommy was supposed to be asleep, when he heard the murmur of grown-up talking. He thought maybe his mama and daddy had come home from California and he got up to find out what they had brought him. He hurried down into the living room and there was that man George talking to Winnie.

“Tommy,
Tommy,
it’s after ten o’clock,” Winnie said.

“I have a stomach ache,” said Tommy.

“I think you’re just tired and need your rest,” Winnie said.

“No, it hurts me, it hurts me
here.”
Jackie Coogan, in his most tragic moments, could not have pointed to his abdomen with a more piteous expression.

“I think he’s a little faker,” that man George said.

“But I can’t take a chance,” Winnie said. “He’s like my own child.”

“You’d be tougher on your own kid,” George said.

All the while Tommy was whimpering as if trying to control himself while in great pain.

“I’m afraid all this is making him nervous,” Winnie said.

“My God, you take care of him from daybreak until his bedtime, isn’t that enough? Is he supposed to own you day and night? I think it’s unwholesome.”

“Shh, please George, don’t upset him,” Winnie begged.

“I’ll see you Saturday night, Winnie,” George said. And then he spoke to Tommy rather crossly. “Now you get over this bellyache business, son.”

Tommy kept waking up and complaining so often of feeling funny in his tummy that Winnie let him sleep in her bed the rest of the night. “Tommy boy, maybe I am spoiling you, but you’re my own little Tommy boy, aren’t you, my own little Tommy boy.” Tommy wished that night would never end and that he could just go on and on safely cuddled up against Winnie in Winnie’s bed.

When Saturday night came Tommy got up an extra time to get a drink of water. Winnie came in to warn him not to use any more excuses for getting out of bed. He noticed something special about Winnie. She had red stuff on her lips like Mama and she was wearing a dark purple dress instead of one of the white or gray ones she always wore. And she had a flower in her hair. She looked very pretty with a flower in her hair, but Tommy knew what it meant. Tommy couldn’t understand why she should pay so much attention to another grown-up when she was only supposed to look after Tommy.

After Winnie turned off his lights again and kissed him good night, he stayed awake on purpose. After a while he heard the front door opening and there was a little grown-up murmuring and then it got quiet again. He sat up and listened and then he swung himself carefully out of bed. It was double disobedience because he didn’t even put his slippers on. He crept down the stairs and spied into the living room. Winnie was on the couch with that man George and he had his arm around her and she was letting him kiss her. She said in a funny kind of whisper, “George, George, stop,” as if she were frightened, but he kept on holding her very hard and pushing his mouth against hers and she sort of sobbed as if she were crying, “Oh George, George darling, what are we going to do?” and he said in that definite way he had, “We’re going to get married, that’s what we’re going to do.” Then Winnie said, “George, I don’t know, I know we love each other, but …”

George interrupted. Tommy was very conscious of it, because he had been warned so many times not to do that. His voice sounded awfully mean and angry to Tommy. “To hell with it. That doesn’t worry me. I want you, Win, and I don’t care how it looks to a lot of narrow-minded dopes.” Winnie’s answer was so much softer that Tommy could hardly hear it. “I know, I know, darling, if we could go away somewhere, but here in this country people would …”

“The hell with ’em,” George kept saying. “I say the hell with ’em. The hell with ’em.”

“If I looked like Cloretta,” Winnie said. “If I could pass …”

“You’re twice as beautiful as Cloretta,” George said. “You’re beautiful, Win. Just keep remembering that. You’re beautiful and—and—a wonderful human being.”

“George, I want to,” she said. “You know I want to but I want to think. I’m not sure. I’m afraid.”

“Well, I’m not,” George said. “I still say the hell with ’em.” He started kissing her again.

Tommy went back to his room and started playing boat in his bed and pretty soon he had all the blankets on the floor and then the sheets were pulled out from the mattress. He got to doing jumping tricks on the bare mattress and he pulled the pillow out of the pillow case and then he pulled the pillow case over his head and kept on jumping up and down higher and higher until he toppled off the bed and bumped his funny bone.

Winnie came running in and saw the tangle of bedclothes and Tommy suffering on the floor and this time she didn’t feel sorry about the bump on his funny bone (which seemed to have spread to his head as well), she was angry at all this extra work he had made for her to do and she said, “Tommy, you’re a little rascal. I’m really angry this time.” Tommy looked up at her as if his time in this world was running out. “Has the man gone?” Then she got even angrier and she said, “That is no business of yours,” and Tommy lost his temper and scratched her and she lashed out and slapped him for the first time in her life and Tommy got purple red in the face and bit her hard on the arm and she screamed and grappled with him and threw him down on the bed with all her might. Then they both cried hysterically.

Later he crept into her bed and she seemed glad he had come and kissed him and hugged him and called him her own darling little Tommy boy. Tommy thought about her kissing that grown-up George and he put his arms tight around her to keep her from getting away.

In the days after that Tommy noticed things about Winnie he did not always know he was noticing but that he would be able to remember later on when he was old enough to look back and see the whole thing as a life and not just as bits and pieces of the troubles and pleasures of being four. Winnie was very good to him, but she was edgy and moody. Once while she was rocking Tommy in her arms she started to cry for no reason at all. Tommy remembered snatches of a strange conversation in the kitchen between Cloretta and Winnie when he was supposed to be playing outside one afternoon. He couldn’t remember all the words but he could remember that Cloretta wanted Winnie to marry their friend George. And Winnie said she couldn’t make up her mind, because there would always be the problem of where they could live and what to do about children. Cloretta said she and Floyd had been afraid of that, too, and they were solving it by not taking any chances. Winnie shook her head and said she wasn’t sure she could do that, she loved children and would love to have George’s children, but something inside her told her it was wrong. Cloretta put her white arms around the creamy coffee-color shoulders of her sister and told her the right thing to do was the thing she, Winnie, wanted to do—that Winnie had always made herself too much of a doormat for the people she worked for—“like the way you work yourself to the bone for that little brat Tommy.” It was time that Winifred Harris started living Winifred’s life, Cloretta said, and wasn’t just some white folks’ Winnie. Tommy knew that Aunt Cloretta wasn’t his aunt and that she was on George’s side and that if they had their way they would take Winnie away from him forever. Tommy hated them and wished he could dump them all in the garbage truck, and he thought of all the horrible things he would like to do to them for trying to steal his one and only Winnie Pooh away from the Tommy she belonged to. He could not understand why grown-ups were so mean. Except for Winnie—and even she had been playing some no-fair tricks on him lately—there weren’t any grown-ups in the world who really cared about Tommy.

One evening when Winnie was serving Tommy his tapioca pudding, he said, “Winnie, are you going to go away and leave me and marry that man and never come back here ever again?”

Winnie said, “Why, Tommy, you know I’d never leave you alone. What gave you that idea?”

“I heard you talking with Aunt Cloretta.”

“Goodness me, little boys have big ears.” Then she said, “Tommy, it’s true that I’m thinking of marrying Mr. Higbee. I’m twenty-eight, and well, most people my age have been married for years. Your mama and daddy were married before they were twenty-eight and you, why you’re going to be so handsome that some nice girl is sure to grab you long before you’re twenty-eight. But don’t you worry that I’m going to leave you until your mother and father are back and we’ve found someone else to take my place. I have a cousin called Emily who is awfully sweet and who would just love to take care of a nice little boy like you. And I’ll bet pretty soon you’d forget all about your old Winnie and you’d love your new Emmy Pooh even more.”

“I don’t want you to leave me,” Tommy said. “I want you to stay with me for ever and ever.”

“I wish you couldn’t hear through walls so well,” Winnie said, “because this whole thing may never even happen at all. So there’s no sense worrying about it ahead of time. I’m not going to leave you for a long, long time no matter what happens.” Then she hugged him, squeezed his ear lobe and said, “I’ll probably stay with you so long that you’ll be the one who finally wants to get rid of me.”

“I never never will, Winnie Pooh,” Tommy said. “I want you to stay with me for ever and ever.”

“Now eat your tapioca,” she said. “You are a something. Only four years old and worrying about these grown-up things.”

The big thing that happened to Winnie Tommy remembered very well. It was like the “Winnie-color” talk he had had with his daddy at breakfast. It was one of the things that made Tommy acutely conscious of Winnie as a color instead of just as a person with a kind of skin that seemed particularly pleasing to him. Maybe Tommy remembered this scene because it was so loud, even louder and more frightening than George had been. Or maybe it was because he had been old enough to realize—even at going on five—that his rivalry with George had come to its turning point.