They Came Like Swallows (12 page)

“I will,” Bunny said, hopefully, “if you’ll let me have your good soldiers?”

“Nothing doing.”

The page was creased where Robert had been reading. He put it back carefully. It might be some time before Aunt Clara used the dictionary, and then she might not be looking for a word that began with C …
The young,
he read,
or embryo of an animal in the womb….

Bunny went out of the room, leaving Robert free to thumb through the
W’s … wolves … wolvish … woman … woman’s rights … womb … The belly … The abdomen … “Transgressors from the womb”—Cowper … Any cavity like a womb in containing and enveloping.
… Robert read and reread, skipping the brackets and the abbreviations but with never a glimpse of the meaning. The meaning was there, but he could not get at it. It was inside the words.

What Robert wanted, suddenly, was to be outdoors in a vacant field, running. He wanted to be running hard, and with a football against his ribs; to be tackled and thrown on something hard like the ground. With a sigh, he closed the dictionary and put the other books on top of it. Then he went to the front door to see if the mail had come. It had, and there was a letter for Aunt Clara, in his father’s handwriting. Robert took it to her and waited, with his heart pounding inside his shirt.

“It’s from your father,” she said, as she wiped her hands on the roller towel in the kitchen. “I say it’s a letter from your father.” She opened the letter and read it from beginning to end, slowly. When she had
finished, she put it back in the envelope and the envelope in the pocket of her kitchen apron.

“Has the baby come?” Robert asked.

“No.”

“Does he say how my mother is?”

“Your mother is fine—getting along as well as can be expected, he says.”

Robert looked at her. “Is that all he says?”

“Yes, that’s all….”

But it wasn’t, Robert assured himself on his way upstairs. He could tell by her eyes. There was something in that letter which Aunt Clara hadn’t told him. He might go to the phone and call Dr. Macgregor, perhaps, and find out how things were. But his mother said not to bother him unless it was something important and this might not be.

But then again, Robert said to himself as he reached the head of the stairs, it might. He turned down the hall and saw at once that Bunny was trying to get at his soldiers. Bunny had pulled Uncle Wilfred’s swivel-chair across the study and was teetering on it, in front of the wardrobe.

“Hey!”

Bunny turned a frightened face upon him and lost his balance. The soldiers fell with him, all the way to the floor.

“I didn’t go to … really I didn’t!”

Robert brushed past him without a word. There were his Cossacks with arms broken off, and heads, and rifles, and the legs of their white horses. His mouth twisted in pity. There were his lancers.

“Damn you,” he said. “Damn you, Bunny …
Damn
you!”

With glue and matches, wire, toothpicks, and pieces of thread Robert worked over his broken soldiers all Sunday morning. Fortunately the legs of certain horses were all in one piece. He could make those legs stay on. And if the horses wouldn’t stand up afterward, he could always pretend that they were lame. Arms could be fastened on with wire, and heads with matches. So that anyone standing off at a distance from them could hardly tell that the soldiers were mended. The trouble was that Robert didn’t play with them standing off at a distance.

Bunny wanted to help, but Aunt Clara said no, Robert didn’t deserve any help after speaking to his brother like that—which was all right with Robert. When Bunny got big enough so that they were both grown up and the same size, he was going to take Bunny out in the back yard and clean up on him. That might not put any soldiers back together again, he told himself (and Bunny) but it would certainly make him feel a lot better. Because every so often, with the soldiers spread around him on the sitting-room floor—an arm here and part of a sword or a helmet
there—he would suddenly decide it was too long a time to wait until Bunny grew up, and that something could be done right then and there. Uncle Wilfred was sitting in the big chair, with the Sunday paper, and so nothing was.

At five minutes to one, Aunt Clara called Robert and Bunny to come wash their hands for dinner. Bunny got to the kitchen sink first and took so long that it was time to sit down before Robert had his turn at the soap. He did not feel obliged, therefore, to wash with any great thoroughness or be too particular about not leaving any dirt on the roller towel Besides, he said to himself as he sat down and unfolded his napkin, he was hungry.

At home it wasn’t considered cheating if he started in on his salad before everyone else had been served. But no sooner did he commence than Aunt Clara spoke to him in a hushed voice.

“Robert, you’ve forgotten something.”

He glanced up in surprise and saw that they were all looking at him—Aunt Clara, Uncle Wilfred, Grandmother Morison, and Bunny. He put down his salad fork and bowed his head. Uncle Wilfred in a disapproving voice said, “Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts….”

Even after the blessing had been asked and they were free to receive it, Uncle Wilfred was not restored to a good humor. So far as Robert could make out,
he
was not responsible. It was the health officer, who had requested that for the duration of the epidemic
the Christian Church (together with all the other churches) close its doors. To Uncle Wilfred’s mind, there was no need for such action.

“It’s one thing,” he said, passing over the wing, which was Robert’s favorite piece of chicken and giving him the drumstick, which he never ate if he could help it; “it is one thing to close the bowling-alley and the pool-halls. But to close the church of Jesus Christ is something else again. Anybody would think that church gatherings are unhealthy—that they’re particularly conducive to the spread of disease.”

Aunt Clara said, “It’s true that there’s lots of sickness about. I say that much is true.”

“Church,” Uncle Wilfred said, “is of so little importance that they can afford to suspend it at the slightest pretext…. There’s no reason that I can see why people who come together for an hour on Sunday should be any more exposed to disease than they are all day long in stores and offices.”

Robert was not hungry now. While Uncle Wilfred was talking, all desire for food left him.

“It’s cold in here,” he said, not expecting that Aunt Clara would get up and go look at the thermometer.

“I declare … seventy-six. Don’t you feel well, Robert?”

He was all right. Perfectly. There was no reason why they should all be staring at him that way.

“Your eyes look bloodshot.”

Robert pushed his chair back from the table. “No,” he said, “I just thought it was cold in here.”
And before he could get upstairs to the bathroom, he was vomiting.

Aunt Clara undressed him, as much as he would let her; and pulled the covers back so that he could get into bed. In a little while, Dr. Macgregor came and took his temperature and asked him questions—all from too great a distance to be of any help. Robert was glad that Dr. Macgregor had come, and sorry when he went away. But there was nothing that he could do about it. He was cut loose. He was adrift utterly in his own sickness.

For three days and three nights it was like that.

Aunt Clara appeared every two hours—now fully dressed, and now in a long white nightgown with her hair in braids down her back. Sometimes her coming was so slight an interruption that he could not be sure afterwards whether she had been there at all. Again she stood beside his bed for an indefinite time, with two white tablets in one hand and a glass of water in the other.

On the morning of the fourth day, Robert awoke from a sound sleep and knew that he was better. He knew also that there was something that he had to find out, as soon as he could remember what it was. Aunt Clara appeared with his breakfast tray.

“Good-morning,” she said. “How do you feel? I say how are you feeling, Robert?”

“Better.”

His voice sounded weak and like the voice of somebody else.

“I think I’ll get up, Aunt Clara.”

“You’ll do no such thing. You’ve been a sick boy, Robert. A mighty sick …”

The letter
… Quite suddenly it came to him. Aunt Clara got a letter and she wouldn’t tell him what was in it. He was going to call Dr. Macgregor and find out how things were. And when Dr. Macgregor came, he was too sick to remember it.

“Aunt Clara, can you tell me how my mother

is?”

“She’s getting along about as well as can be expected, the doctor says. And she’s in the hospital, where she’ll get very good care.”

Robert was not at all satisfied. As soon as she went out of the room, he turned his back to the wall, so that he would not have to look at the insurance agents, and slept. At noon Aunt Clara awakened him to give him his medicine. He asked her the same question and got a similar answer. He closed his eyes and slept and woke up again and slept again until he had disposed of the greater part of a winter afternoon. The street lamp shone in squares upon the ceiling. Turning then, Robert saw, distantly, as through the wrong end of opera glasses, things that had taken place a month before. The last Sunday in October they wedged themselves into the car, among fishing-poles, baskets of food, skillets, automobile robes, water-bottles, and the can of worms. Then they drove out into the country until they came to a special gate. After that they had to crawl through a barbed-wire fence and lug all they had brought with them to a clearing on the banks of a creek.

With the automobile robes spread out on the ground and the food put away, his father went far downstream to cast for pickerel and bass. His mother sat on a high bank where all the sunfish in the creek would come, sooner or later, to be caught by her. Bunny sat near her among the roots of an old tree, and let the fish nibble the bait off his hook while he was dreaming. And Robert went up the creek and over a bridge to a place where he could cast without getting his line caught in the overhanging branches.

His mother smiled at him foolishly from the opposite bank. And it seemed to him that she was smiling at the sky also, and at the creek, and at the yellow leaves which came down, sometimes by the dozen, and sailed in under the bank and out again.

When Robert awoke it was quite dark outside, and what Aunt Clara was saying downstairs came up to him distinctly through the register.

“Yes…. Yes, Amanda….”

Her voice was pitched for the telephone.

“I’m pretty well. How are you? … I say I’m pretty well…. Yes … he’s better, I think … I say Robert’s better. Been asleep off and on most of the day…. Yes … in Decatur…. Yes … in
spite of every precaution … both of them … James, too….”

Robert sank back on the pillow. It was his mother and father that they were talking about. Something had happened to his mother and father while he was sick. Or before, maybe. And Aunt Clara wouldn’t tell him. When she came up with his dinner he would say
How is my mother? You have to tell me.
… But that was not the way that things worked out. Before it was time for his tray, Robert heard the front-door bell ring, and Irene’s voice in the downstairs hall. He sat up in bed feeling very dizzy and not altogether sure that what he heard was not imagined.

“I don’t know, Irene …”

Aunt Clara was arguing with her.

“I say I don’t know whether Robert ought to see anybody or not. He’s still running a temperature and the doctor’s orders are that—”

Robert could not bear it another second.

“Irene,” he called, “I’m up here!”

He heard the sound of high heels upon the stair, and knew beyond all doubt that there was one person in the world who was not afraid of Aunt Clara.

Irene switched the light on. She was very beautiful as she stood in the doorway. Her eyes were shining and she was all in black, with a black fur around her neck. She came and sat down on the bed, beside him, and Robert could smell her perfume. That was a joke. Everything, suddenly, had become a joke. His hands (which she was holding) and the dun-colored wallpaper, the insurance agents. But most of all, the
joke was on Robert himself—for being foolish enough to get sick at Aunt Clara’s house.

“I’ve been to Chicago,” Irene said, as if that too were foolishness.

So much had happened since she sat on the stairs with him. He did not ask why she had gone to Chicago. He did not care. When he was little and did something that he shouldn’t—like turning the hose on Aunt Eth, who was starting out to the Friday Bridge Club—he set out for Irene’s as fast as he could go. If he got there, he was safe. Irene would not let anybody come near him. Her eyes blazed and she put him behind her and said,
James Morison, don’t you touch a hair of this child’s head!”

Robert looked at Irene carefully, trying to memorize her face and the buckle on her hat so that he would have something when she was gone. In her handkerchief there was a sponge soaked in face powder, like the one his mother carried. He listened with only a part of his mind to the story that she was telling—how she got lost on the street in Chicago.

“… When I was sure that I didn’t have the vaguest idea where I was, I went up to a policeman and said
Can you please tell me how to get back to the Palmer House?
And he said
Lady, follow your nose.”

Robert smiled and spoke her name slowly.

“Irene …”

“What is it?”

“There’s a girl who called here a little while ago. Her name is Amanda Matthews.”

“Yes, Robert.”

“They talked about my mother, … When I ask Aunt Clara how she is, Aunt Clara always says
getting along as well as can be expected.”

He could not frame the question that was troubling him, but Irene seemed to know anyway. She nodded to him just as if he had spoken it aloud.

“Turn over,” she said. Then she pulled the covers down and rubbed his back the way she used to do when he was little—rubbed it until he felt drowsy and quiet, far inside of him.