Evergreen (16 page)

“I don’t get much of a chance at it, between Joseph and Maury. They take turns with the earphones. But it is a miracle, really.”

“I read that next year they’ll be putting out a model where you don’t need earphones, so the whole family can
listen at once. You’ll have one, I’m sure, Joseph seems to buy everything in sight.”

“Ruth, do you ever think of where we lived downtown and ask yourself how this happened? I often think, I don’t deserve all this.”

“How it happened? We worked like slaves, Solly and I, and we both deserve whatever we’ve got. Not,” Ruth added, “that we have anywhere near what you have, but we’re doing all right. Solly’s got a clever partner, and there’s a future.”

“Sometimes it doesn’t seem real to me,” Anna said slowly.

“It’s real enough. You’ll find out when you try to keep this big place clean, I can tell you! I should think you’ll be needing a cleaning woman once a week at least.”

“I already have two girls, Joseph called an agency. They’re coming tomorrow.”

“Two girls? How many days?”

“Well, there are two rooms on the other side of the kitchen. So they’ll be living in. Very nice girls,” Anna said hurriedly into Ruth’s silence. “Two Irish sisters. Ellen and Margaret.”

“And to think you were once a maid yourself!” Ruth said.

If she wants to make me angry, she won’t succeed, Anna thought.

“Yes, to think,” she answered calmly, “that I came to this country with a cloth bundle and two candlesticks! Which reminds me, I’d better unpack them before somebody steps on them.”

And reaching into a box, as yet unpacked, by the dining-room door, she took out the candlesticks, heavy ornate silver, very old. She blew the dust off; she set them lovingly on the table.

These, too, had seen so many places before this place! She stood there studying them, then looked around the room at the English china and the French crystal, at all the
costly, fragile, glossy things that now were hers. And somewhere, under the excitement, lay a certainty that was grieving, guilty and afraid. A quiet certainty that this could not, would not, last.

Her parents don’t know she is awake. They think she has finished her homework—she is in the fourth grade and they still don’t get very much of it—and has gone to bed. They don’t know what a hard time she often has falling asleep. Sometimes she gets out of bed and stands at the window. Her room is on the corner; at oblique angles she can see both westward over the river to the lights on the Palisades, and eastward down West End Avenue where fewer and fewer cars pass as the night grows later. She thinks about nothing in particular, just wishes it were already Friday so there would be no school for two whole days; hopes for rain on Saturday so she can read at home and her mother won’t make her go out for fresh air; hopes that on Sunday it will not rain so that she and Papa can have their morning walk around the reservoir.

Their Sunday walk is her special time. Mama sleeps later on Sundays and Maury does too, unless he has plans to go skating or somewhere with his friends. Papa never sleeps late.

“Years of habit,” he says, “of getting up at five. Now I stretch it and get up at six.”

By half past eight they are in the park. On the other side of the reservoir rises the jagged line of buildings on Fifth Avenue. The wind blows, crimping the water. Joggers pass panting in their gray sweat shirts, passing them sometimes
twice in their round, although Papa and Iris walk briskly.

“I love being with my girl,” Papa always says.

Iris loves to be with him. Often she thinks how nice it would be if Mama and Maury went away. (Died? Is that what she means?) Then there would only be Papa and herself at the dinner table, Papa and herself to sit and talk in the library in the evening. She is guilty about these thoughts. Bad, bad thoughts, they are.

Across the corridor now the light shines out under Maury’s door. He studies late, but he has to; he is learning Latin and algebra, he has to keep up his marks to get into Yale. Iris has good report cards too, but it is not as important for her. A girl—a woman—Papa explains, doesn’t have to
do
anything with her education. It’s a fine thing, of course, for her to learn and improve her mind, because then she will be a better wife and mother, a better person. But she doesn’t actually have to
do
anything, the way boys do. Once Mama said someday it might be different, and women would go to work and do all the things men did. But Papa said that was absolutely ridiculous and he’d like to see any wife of his go to work as long as he was able to support her!

She is wide awake. It’s chilly; she puts on her robe, and in bare feet—she likes the rough feel of the carpet on her soles—goes padding down the corridor to stand in the corner where it joins the front hall. From where her parents sit in the library they cannot see her. But she can hear them, and their voices comfort her, especially when she is worried about something. (Often she worries about the math teacher, an impatient angry woman. Math is the only subject in which Iris does not do very well and she is afraid to go to school because of it.)

Sometimes her parents don’t talk at all. Mama is always studying something. Shakespeare or a course at the Museum of Art. Papa often works on rolls of blue paper spread on the table between the windows. He makes a short remark about them. Mama tells him she has taken a
subscription to the Philharmonic on Friday afternoons with Mrs. Davison. Papa says that’s fine, he knows how she enjoys it and he’s sorry he doesn’t, but he might just as well be truthful about it.

Other times they talk about interesting things. Mrs. Malone has had a miscarriage and Mama says it’s too bad but, after all, seven children ought to be enough. She learns that Mama is to have a mink coat; Papa wants her to and they can get a good buy from the furrier on the floor below Solly’s place. She learns that Maury will get a new bicycle for his birthday. Maury is always surprised that Iris knows everything before he does.

She is a little afraid of being found out, but not much. Papa wouldn’t be angry. He is never angry at her. Mama would not be exactly angry, either, but she would get up and say quite firmly, “Little girls belong in bed. And nice people don’t listen to other people’s conversations. Come, Iris.” And Mama would make her go back to bed. That is the difference between Papa and Mama.

Tonight she becomes aware that they are talking about her. She draws in her breath and hears her own heartbeat.

“I wish she would go to camp in Maine. It would do her good, out in the woods with other children.”

“Joseph, she would hate it!”

“Maury seems to get so much out of it. He can’t wait to go back every summer.”

“Maury is Maury and everything’s easy for him. Iris would be miserable.”

It’s true. All that she has ever heard about camp tells her that she would be. The very thought of living in a cabin at the mercy of five other girls, so far from home, from her room where she can be safe, is terrifying.

Last year she had a friend. Amy was a small, quiet girl like herself. They used to “sleep over” at each other’s houses on weekends. They wrote poetry together. They were best friends. Then in the summer Amy went away to camp, while Iris went with her parents to the rented house at
Long Beach. The first day of school she was so glad to see Amy again.

“I wrote some more poems over the summer,” she told her.

And Amy answered, scornfully and very loudly so that other people could hear: “Who cares? I’m too old for that stuff anymore.”

And Iris, shocked and wounded, saw that Amy had changed, had gone over to the “others.” Now she passed Iris in the halls pretending not to see her. Now she and Marcy were best friends. Marcy has long braids that the boys pull. When boys are around, Amy and Marcy always laugh very loud so that the boys come up to them and ask, “What’s funny?” The boys are so stupid, they can’t see that these girls are doing this on purpose so they will notice them.

“Strange,” Papa says, “two children, and so different! The same home, the same parents, and so different!”

Yes, true. Maury is on student council and the lower school basketball team. Next year he will be on the varsity that plays against the city’s other big private schools. People are always surprised that Iris is his sister, although grownups are too polite to show it. But kids in school often don’t believe it.

“You are
not
Maury Friedman’s sister!” they say, and once a girl in her class walked up to Maury after a basketball game and asked, “Are you really her brother? She says you are.”

“Sure,” Maury said, surprised. “Sure I am.”

“Maury is like my brothers,” Mama declares. “Especially Eli. He reminds me so much of him.”

On her dressing table she keeps enlarged snapshots of her family in Europe. Uncle Dan has a chubby wife surrounded by children. Uncle Eli and his wife stand on skis in front of a mountain house with icicles on the eaves. Their little girl is on skis, too. Her name is Liesel. She is Iris’ age and she has long unreal blond hair. Liesel and her parents look like sunshine. Iris’ head is full of thoughts like
that, comparing people with things. Ellen and Margaret are ears of corn, tall and narrow, with large yellow teeth.

Do other people have such thoughts? she wonders. Is there anybody else in the world like me?

Her parents’ voices fall away. She leans forward to hear.

“He’s supposed to be a first-class pediatrician. I thought he was very thorough.”

“And? What did he say?”

“Nothing, really. There’s nothing wrong with her. Peaked looking, but basically healthy, outside of being somewhat nervous. But we’ve known all that.”

“She’s so sensitive!” Papa says. “Do you know what she asked me when we took our walk last Sunday? She said, ‘Papa, do you ever look at your arm and think about how it was made out of people who died hundreds of years ago and wonder whether they would like you if they could know you?’ Imagine, a child of nine saying a thing like that!”

“Yes, she’s a thoughtful child. An unusual child.”

“You know, I often remember when she was only a few weeks old and I used to go in to look at her in the crib. She touched me, Anna, in a way that Maury never did. He was so strong and hungry and healthy. But she! … I used to go to the door and come back to look at her again, and I remember thinking that she isn’t going to find life easy.”

Her mother doesn’t speak, or if she does, Iris doesn’t hear her.

Then Papa says, “She’s my whole heart, Anna! But how I wish she looked like you! It wouldn’t matter that she was timid. People would flock to her anyway.”

“Ruth said the other day that Iris is the kind of plain girl who will improve with age, and I think she’s right.”

“Would you really call her so plain, Anna?”

“It’s hard to judge your own child. But I wouldn’t say she was pretty.”

Not
pretty.
Not pretty
. You might as well say:
You have a terrible disease. You’ll never walk again
. You might as
well say:
You have one month to live, you’re going to die
. And so that’s the way it is. That’s what people think of me.

Now suddenly Papa says, “Anna! Mrs. Werner died! It’s here in the paper. Survived by husband Horace, son Paul, daughter Evelyn Jonas in Cleveland.”

“I didn’t know.”

“You really should read the obituaries. She was just sixty. I wonder what she had.”

“I’ve no idea,” Mama says.

Werner
. Iris never forgets names, rarely forgets anything. Those are the people they met downtown when they went to buy her spring coat last week. And the lady
told
Mama she was sick! Why is Mama telling a lie?

They were coming out of Best’s that day when the lady stopped them on the sidewalk. “Excuse me, but you are Anna, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I’m Anna,” Mama answered. “How are you, Mrs. Werner?”

“Paul, you remember Anna, of course?” the lady said.

The man—he was very tall and looked like the lady, so you could see he was her son—just bowed a little and answered, “Of course.” But he didn’t say a word to Mama.

The lady was really nice. She told Mama, “You were always pretty, but you’ve become even more so.”

Funny red spots came out on Mama’s face. She certainly wasn’t very polite to those people. She always tells me to say thank you for a compliment and she didn’t say a word.

Then Mrs. Werner asked, “Is this your daughter?”

“My daughter, Iris,” Mama said.

So Iris had to shake hands and say, “How do you do?” The lady smiled at her, but the man just looked at her very hard and didn’t smile.

Then the lady said softly, “I see you’ve had great good fortune, Anna.”

Mama didn’t say very much, only, “Yes, I have,” which was unusual because Mama always talked so long whenever they met one of her friends.

The lady had beautiful gray hair, almost silver, and a fur coat like Mama’s. But her eyes were very dark, and the skin below them was dark. She looked sick.

“We’ve moved from the house, you know, on account of the stairs. All of a sudden my heart’s gone bad. But you, you look marvelous! You haven’t got one bit older.”