It was always awkward to walk with a new person the first few times. Lorraine cupped her hand under Jean’s elbow, trying to steer her. Anybody could tell it wasn’t working. It only made Jean’s shoulder cramp up.
“It’s better if you just bend your arm and I take hold,” Jean said. At every curb Lorraine stopped abruptly and said, “Step down.” Embarrassing. Why couldn’t she be more subtle?
“You don’t have to announce it. I can tell if you just slow down.” After a while she added, “I know it’s not easy walking with me. It’s better when I don’t have to carry this stupid case.”
“What is it?”
“A typewriter.”
“Why do you have to?”
“I need it both places, to take tests and do homework. The one I keep at home is being repaired.” It banged against her knee when she stepped up onto a curb. She tried to keep it higher by bending her elbow, but it was heavy and her arm began to ache.
“Do you use it in class?”
“Uh-huh.” Jean stopped and shifted it from one hand to the other and Lorraine walked around to take her other arm. “For tests. Oral ones. I have to type “y-e-s” if the statement’s true, “n-o-period” if it’s false.”
“Why the period?”
“Three keys for every answer. The principal told me to. ‘To prevent cheating by listening,’ he said.” Jean smirked. “He didn’t have to worry. The poor guy who cheats off me will fail for sure.”
“How do you study?”
“Oh, Mother reads the chapters to me and I just try to remember. Sometimes she hires people to read to me. There aren’t any Braille textbooks. It doesn’t work very well. I’m no sparkling student.”
They talked in spurts with awkward pauses in between. They only had a few mutual friends. Finally, Jean asked what she’d been wondering. “How far did you walk this morning already?”
“From across the river.”
“But that’s near school. Why did you come way over here?”
“Just felt like it.”
It didn’t make any sense. Why couldn’t someone she cared about walk with her instead of this person she didn’t even know? It made her uncomfortable. If she had to feel dependent, it would be easier to feel dependent on someone she liked being with. Like Tready.
“Do you know my cousin, Mary Treadway?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. She’s actually a year older but we’re still in the same grade. They put two grades together in elementary school, so I skipped third. Anyway, she only lives a few blocks away. She can walk with me from now on.”
Lorraine was quiet the rest of the way to the high school. Jean didn’t talk either. She knew what she did was rude, cutting her off like that, but she didn’t want Lorraine thinking she could be with her all the time. Lorraine wouldn’t fit in with her friends. Too blah. None of the Hill crowd knew her.
Jean didn’t hear much about her any more that year. If Lorraine rode in the station wagon with her boyfriend at lunch again, she didn’t speak, so Jean didn’t know if she was there.
Every day at lunch Jean switched off from one girl to another, making sure not to ask the same one twice in a row. When she couldn’t get anyone else, Lucy or Tready walked with her. It’d be easier if she could always walk with Lucy. “Can’t you just make Lucy do it?” Jean pleaded to Mother one day.
“That wouldn’t be very fair,” Mother said. “She has her own friends her age that she wants to be with.”
“Can’t Henry drive me back?”
“Well, Jean, he’s got other work to do, and that’s his lunch time.”
Jean knew that wasn’t the real reason. It was part of Mother’s plan to help by not helping. “It will be good for you,” Mother had said when high school started, “to talk to different girls while you’re walking.” Easy enough for her to talk to people, even strangers. But she wasn’t asking them for any favors. She didn’t know how embarrassing it was to have to ask every day for the same thing. Even Lucy couldn’t possibly understand. Maybe Icy could, but Icy lived in Litchfield, and for the time being, they had to make their friendship survive on letters alone.
Each day had its share of problems at school, too. One student from each class was assigned to walk her to her seat in the next classroom. Sometimes the pull on her arm felt grudging and she wondered if the person’s face showed it. By scattered dependencies she stumbled through her first two years. She did poorly in Latin her first year, switched to French her second and still didn’t do well. Her third year she signed up for German.
Agnes Jennings taught German. She may have been American, she may have been Irish, but one thing was sure. She wasn’t German. The German Jean heard sounded American. Miss Jennings held Jean after class the first day. “In a week or so, after I get to know the class, I’m going to pick someone to tutor you during study hall. You can go into the teacher’s room and have the lesson read to you.”
“Thank you. I’m sorry to cause a problem.”
“It’s not a problem. If I pick carefully, I think it will work.”
Miss Jennings picked Lorraine Dion. Jean felt her cheeks flush hot when Miss Jennings told her. If Lorraine noticed, she didn’t say anything. When Miss Jennings sent them out of the room to study together, Jean felt Lorraine’s elbow touch her hand so she could hold on, instead of the awkward way she’d done it before. She had remembered all this time.
In their nervousness, they dug into the lesson as a safe relief. When they finished, there was still some of the hour left. “What made you decide to take German?” Lorraine asked.
Jean groaned. “I’ve already tried French but couldn’t spell it. Those phoney old Frenchmen made up their language just to trap anyone who’s never seen the endings of the words.”
“Oh, I guess that would be hard.”
“I could have just as well learned Chinese or even Egyptian with all those funny scratches.”
“Yeah, at least German is spelled the way it sounds.”
“I had the same trouble my first year in Latin.”
“Anybody would with Klimke. He’s a terror.”
“Some people like him, though.”
“They’re the ones who are getting A’s.”
“He sounds so gruff. What’s he look like?”
“Kind of chunky with a wild mop of white hair. Wears vests. Looks like a grandfather, or a college professor.”
“Once he passed back a quiz, and I guess I did better than usual. He shouted in his big voice, right next to my desk, ‘For heaven’s sake, Jean. What did you eat for lunch yesterday? You got a ‘B!’ I nearly died. I probably got all red, and I didn’t know whether to smile or scowl.”
“What’d you do?”
“Just sort of folded up the paper. He didn’t have to make a joke of it. Then when he handed out the grades at the end of the term, even though I passed, he said, loud, so everybody could hear, ‘It would be better if you felt you didn’t have to take Latin next year.’ You can bet I didn’t.”
Jean was a little surprised at how comfortable she felt with Lorraine in spite of that awkwardness two years earlier. The voice coming across the table seemed so plain and natural. They worked through the lessons quickly and they both scored high on the tests.
One day late that fall when they got to the teachers’ room, Lorraine asked, “What’s wrong, Jean? You look upset.”
Just what she hoped Lorraine wouldn’t ask. She’d tried to hold her head down so no one would see. Her eyes were probably red and puffy. Lorraine’s voice sounded kind. Maybe it was okay to tell her. “Is anybody else here?”
“No.”
“The principal sent his secretary out to get me from my first class this morning.”
“What did old pudding-face want?”
She laughed even though a moment earlier she was afraid she’d cry. “I’m excused from science and math.”
“Lucky you! What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing, I guess, only the way it happened. Mr. Collins is my math teacher and he said, right in front of me, like I was a piece of furniture, ‘Frankly, I can’t see how she can ever learn math.’ Only I was sitting right there. He could have at least talked
to
me instead of
about
me. I felt like telling him I’m not deaf or dead. Only blind.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“You should have. Just because he’s a teacher doesn’t mean he knows everything. He’s really the one that’s blind.”
Jean dipped her head. She wasn’t sure whether the hard lump in her throat was because Mr. Collins was insensitive or because Lorraine was the opposite. She tried to think of something else to talk about. “Today in English Miss Fitzsimmons read another poem. We knew it was coming. She started like she always does, squeaking out, ‘Here’s yet another treasure from the literary giants of New England.’” Jean tried to mimic her. “It didn’t make any difference. I still heard George Jameson snore behind me.”
“He doesn’t snore in German class.”
“Of course not. There’s more to Miss Jennings than Miss Fitzsimmons. Who can be afraid of a squeak? What’s Miss Fitz look like, anyway?”
“Like a pencil. Her face is as tall as she is and her hair’s turning gray. She’s not very pretty.”
“Too bad. I wonder if she’ll always be Miss Fitzsimmons.”
“Always? She’s already an old maid, Jean.”
“But she doesn’t sound old. She just sounds small.” It was another shocker, like her blue canary.
That winter Lorraine told her, “I’m going to learn how to write Braille.”
“You are? Whatever for?”
“So I can Braille the German lit book for you. I got a punch and the right kind of paper and I signed up for lessons downtown.”
Jean’s mouth opened, but no words came out for a moment. She shook her head slightly and her eyebrows drew together. “But, Lorraine, it’ll take you forever. You don’t have to do that. Miss Jennings never expected that, and I don’t.”
“I know.” Lorraine’s voice sounded like a bird, so simple, as if what she was saying was as commonplace as saying “I caught a worm this morning.”
Jean went home that day in a daze. No one had ever done anything that took so much time, just for her. Lorraine seemed suddenly older, even older than Tready. Maybe her plain home life had done it. Jean remembered Father talking about the Depression one evening and she wondered out loud how it would affect Lorraine.
“Destined to work on the line at the parts factory,” he said. “Soon she’ll be happy to spend days rolling ball bearings around on mirrors to detect flaws.”
“Father!” she started, but as usual, didn’t know how to counter him. He obviously knew more of the world than she did. “That’s a horrible thing for Lorraine to have ahead of her.”
“Why?”
“Because…” She felt her insides wither, felt his indifference, his superiority cross the dinner table between them. “Because she doesn’t deserve that.”
“The world doesn’t hand out just what people deserve, Jean. You ought to know that.”
She ought to know that. She ought to know that. That didn’t make it right. Didn’t make it so you couldn’t care. But her throat dried and she couldn’t say any more. Not to him.
Chapter Four
In the spring of 1934 Jean invited Lorraine to Hickory Hill for a Saturday. When she told her parents ahead of time, Mother said, “Well, I suppose that would be all right. She’s done a lot to help you in class.”
It was a comment with an edge sharp as Mother’s cut crystal. Mother wouldn’t have said it if she’d asked to have Louise Barnes visit.
As soon as Lorraine stepped in the front door, Jean could tell she was uneasy. “Two matching pianos! You didn’t tell me you had two,” Lorraine said, trailing close behind her through the house. “You have to walk a mile to get around anywhere in here. There could be lots of people in here and no one would know what anyone else was doing.”
“Certainly not me,” Jean said. “I always have to ask.
After Lorraine had gotten over her surprise and they had a snack, Lorraine played “Claire de Lune,” the new piece she was studying. Jean loved it, a new person playing in her home.
On their way to the verandah and the pool, Jean smelled Father’s pipe in the library and stopped at the doorway to introduce her. “You play beautifully,” Father said.
“Thank you.” Then she added in a breathy whisper, “Walls of books.” Two walls, floor-to-ceiling, held leather-bound volumes. Lorraine’s voice trailed off, reading. “Browning, Bronte, Cather, Dickens.” She took a few steps further. “Stevenson, Thackeray, Turgenev. Just like a real library. Has anybody ever read them all?” Father chuckled.
“Mother reads aloud to me on Sunday afternoons and sometimes in the evenings,” Jean said.
“That would take forever. I can’t believe it. A whole room just for books.”
“Oh, we do other things here, too.” It pleased her that Lorraine liked the room, though she didn’t have to make such a big deal of it. She thought of the evening cocktail hours with Father talking from his great cushy leather chair and Mother doing needlepoint by the fire. “We just live in here,” she said. The chairs, lamps, Father’s giant desk nestled in the bay window, they seemed to have taken root, just as the family traditions had, within the library’s paneled walls. Because of that, the library was a holy place—the most private part, the core of the big house. She had grown up in its warming shelter. “It’s cozy,” she said simply, and shrugged. “Come on.”
Jean walked ahead of Lorraine out to the verandah. The boxwood hedge surrounding the pool sent its fragrance across the water. It told her she was close to the edge. She took off her wrap, sat down on the coping and lowered herself in. It felt refreshing. Swimming was the ultimate in freedom, she thought, as she stretched and kicked and then began a lap. On the way back she asked, “Aren’t you going to swim?”
“Oh, I don’t know how. I’ll just stand here in the water.”
“You mean you never learned?”
“No, I guess not. I like watching you, though. Go ahead.”
Jean did vigorous laps, reaching out for the pool wall just in time again and again. It was good to move so fast and energetically. The pool was the only place she could. In the water she was equal. Camp Hanoum had taught her that.
“How do you know when you’re at the end?” Lorraine asked after she stopped. “You never bump yourself.”
“Oh, sometimes I do. It’s like the stairs. After a while, I just know.”