Hilda and Pearl (29 page)

One day, two or three weeks after Racket had died, I thought I was feeling a little better, and I took a shower and put on clean clothes. I began to think about Pearl, and although she had been humble and scared the whole week after Racket's death, as if she too thought she was going to be prosecuted for murder, I thought of her as uncaring and indifferent. Of course I knew she couldn't mind as much as I did, and it made me angry that the world did not mourn my child as I did, but had gone on without a pause, except that the old woman who'd seen her die had come by one day with Italian cakes and tears, and the wife of the man who'd been driving the car called me and told me her husband cried at night.

I was angry with Pearl, and I thought my anger was merely going to propel me out, maybe into the park. It would be good for me to go for a walk, just a short walk in the cold air, and then I could stop at the store and buy bread for breakfast and a few other things. I had not done any shopping since that day. Mike or Nathan had done it all.

But I walked straight to Pearl's house. I hoped she was not going to be there, although as I walked along, with tears not quite shed, feeling like someone in a play, playing the part of a woman walking along a street, I also did want her to be there. When I reached her building, I ran up the stairs. I felt strong. It didn't make me lose my breath to run. When Pearl opened the door, I stepped in, and to my own surprise I began hitting her. “I came over,” I said, but as I was speaking, I was swinging my arm in my coat and glove, reaching up at her face. She stood there, shocked, looking down at me. I slapped her, not hard, because something was making my arm heavy so that I could hardly move it, and I couldn't get any force behind it. The air pressed it back. But after I slapped her I began pummeling at her face and pummeling with my other hand—my pocketbook slid off my wrist—at her arm and her body.

“Hilda,” she said, and closed the door behind me. I could hear Simon crying somewhere. Pearl didn't try to stop me. At first my blows were like a baby's, weak, but then my strength returned and I hit her sides and back. I threw myself at her and hit her shoulders and legs. She backed up and somehow I pushed her down. I was ashamed, but I couldn't stop. I was sobbing and beating my sister-in-law, still in my gloves, but as hard as I could now, beating her sides and buttocks and legs. I bit her arm through her blouse. I was on top of her.

I could feel her stir at last—it took a long time—and finally she made a pass at my wrists, and then she put both her hands on my wrists and held tight. I felt relief, as if I wanted to be stopped. She held my wrists and I sobbed against her breasts. We were both lying on the floor, on our sides now, sobbing. At last I felt Pearl, who was stronger and bigger than I, release my wrists and put her arms around me, drawing me closer to her. My stockings were torn and I had heard something else rip. I think my heel had got caught in the hem of my skirt.

At last I sat up. Neither of us spoke for a long time. We were both out of breath. “Go and wash,” Pearl said at last.

I took off my coat and my gloves. The fingers of my gloves were split. I went into the bathroom and washed my face and hands and combed my hair. When I came out, Pearl was sitting in the living room nursing Simon, her blouse unbuttoned, a diaper thrown over her shoulder for modesty. Her hair was disheveled and there was a red mark on her cheek.

I sat down, ashamed.

“The hem of your skirt is hanging,” she said. “You'd better fix it. My sewing box is in the bedroom.”

I went for a needle and thread. Then I took off my skirt and sat down opposite her and hemmed it. Most of the hem was down.

“I haven't told Mike I was the one who really did it,” said Pearl. “You told me not to talk about it.”

“I haven't told Nathan,” I said.

“Why didn't you say right away?” she said. “I thought everybody knew it was me, until later.”

“I was confused,” I said. “Then I wanted them to think I did it.”

“I shouldn't have left her outside,” she said. “Everyone knows you can't do that.”

“I know,” I said, “but I might have done it.”

“I don't think so.”

“I don't know what I would have done.”

She moved Simon to her other breast, but didn't drape the diaper over her shoulder this time. “Nathan already hated me before,” she said, stroking Simon's dark head. He was an industrious eater and he made a noise when he nursed. I hadn't watched Pearl nurse him much. At our house she'd taken him into the bedroom.

“No, he doesn't hate you,” I said. “He certainly doesn't hate you.” But I thought that maybe he did. He'd hated himself since he'd gone to bed with Pearl, I knew that, and maybe he hated her, too.

Nathan had never asked me for a detailed explanation about Racket. He didn't want to talk about what happened, or to talk about her. Pearl had gathered most of Racket's clothes and removed them from the house, and Nathan had arranged with the super to store her crib in the basement. I'd put her shoes and a few other things away in a drawer. Already it was almost as if she had never been.

It took me a long time to hem the skirt. We didn't say anything more. Pearl finished nursing Simon and he fell asleep. She sat and held him on her lap for a while, and then she stood up gracefully and carried him into the other room. I made myself watch her, not letting myself think all the obvious thoughts—how it could have been me carrying a baby into the other room, and so on. In fact it hardly ever was me, not that way. Getting Racket to sleep was always a battle. I never glided along with her the way Pearl did with Simon. I don't glide, anyway.

Pearl had kept her hair short after she'd cut off her braid, and she looked young. Her neck looked long. I didn't know whether Pearl would think I was crazy or be mad at me forever for hitting her, or whether she'd just be so embarrassed that it had happened—our lying on the floor crying and me hitting her, wearing my gloves and shoes—that it would be impossible even to talk. I felt meek, let me tell you, sitting there hemming that skirt under orders.

I heard Pearl go into the bathroom. She was in there a long time, and I realized she was taking off her makeup and putting it on again so she could cover the red marks. When she came out she was wearing a fresh blouse and her hair was combed and her face looked nice. She sat down next to me. “I'd give anything to bring Rachel back,” she said. “I hope you know that.”

“You wouldn't give Simon,” I said cruelly. I was angry because she'd said Rachel. She hadn't called Racket Rachel for months.

“No,” she said, and stood up and went into the kitchen. Finally I finished hemming the skirt and I put it on. I followed Pearl into the kitchen. I think I wanted to see whether she would point out how unnecessary that last remark had been. I remembered the way it had felt when she held my wrists to keep me from hitting her any longer, and I think I wanted to see whether she'd do something like that again. But she didn't say anything. She was washing her lunch dishes. I went and put on my coat and took my ruined gloves and my purse and let myself out of the apartment.

After that when I felt like going out I didn't go to Pearl's house. I walked. Sometimes I'd meet a neighbor, and she'd bend her head and speak to me inaudibly. “I beg your pardon?” I'd say, but nobody ever said anything to me that I could hear.

I had very little to do. I read many library books. Sometimes I read a whole book in a day, and later it would be hard to remember that I didn't live in those characters' lives. I never forgot about Racket, though, even while I was reading. Her death was always there.

That winter, the Loyalists were doing badly in Spain, and the American volunteers were retreating with the rest of them. Nathan went to meeting after meeting, and came home shaking his head, saying little. It seemed to be the only thing that could distract him, hearing about the troubles in Spain, hearing people give speeches about Marxism, about economic justice, about the Soviet Union. He read a lot, too—difficult books about economic theory. I wondered how he could pay attention, but I think the books helped him, the way a different man might have been helped by climbing a steep mountain or swimming miles.

Once or twice I went to a meeting with him. I was not tempted to go more often, though the meetings were more interesting than I expected. Nathan said less than he had before about his political opinions. He said less than he had before about everything. We hardly ever spoke. When I think of that winter, I remember silence and grayness. One day Nathan told me he'd heard that Ruby's boyfriend, Billy, had been wounded at Teruel. He didn't know how badly, or where Billy was. He knew a friend of Billy's, and had run into him handing out leaflets.

The next day I called Pearl. She'd seen Ruby. “Ruby wants to visit you,” she said.

“Why?”

“She feels bad about Racket.”

“She has better things to do.”

“Hilda, why do you talk like that?” said Pearl.

“I don't talk like that.”

Pearl went back to talking about Ruby and Billy. Billy had been wounded in the hip. His hip had been shattered, but he was alive. Ruby was happy that he was alive, but worried about him. He was still in Spain. She didn't know much.

“Tell Ruby she can come see me,” I said.

Ruby came a week later. “That sweet baby,” she said as soon as she walked in. “I couldn't believe it when I heard about that sweet baby.”

“Thank you,” I said. I made coffee for her. I got her to talk about Billy. Billy had had to walk across the Pyrenees. He liked the Spanish people. He'd stamped on grapes with Spanish peasants in the Guadarrama mountains.

“His letters aren't really unhappy,” she said, “but he keeps writing about men who died. I'm supposed to visit their mothers. He sends me their names. Not the names of the mothers, thank goodness. He wants me to look in the phone book and see if I can figure out who the relatives are and go visit them. Can you imagine?”

I shook my head.

“It would be so hard,” said Ruby. “I don't know if they'd want me to come. I didn't know if
you
wanted me to, and we'd met before.”

“It was nice of you to come,” I said. It might have been the first friendly thing I'd said to anybody since Racket died. She had died on November 19, 1937, and this was probably late February or early March. That's a long time to go without saying anything nice. It made me like Ruby, because I'd said something pleasant to her, that little lie. Of course I hadn't wanted her to come, any more than the grieving mothers of the boys lost in Spain would. I tried to figure out whether their pain would be worse than mine, whether it made it better or worse that your child had lived for years and you'd gotten to know him, whether it made it better or worse that he'd died for a good cause instead of in a stupid accident. I imagined Ruby going from house to house, making the grieving mothers lie about wanting her to come, and making them feel better because they'd been nice to somebody, dopey little Ruby who still looked about fourteen—well, maybe by now she looked sixteen—and the thought of it seemed funny.

Then I realized that nothing whatever had seemed funny since the day Racket had died. I kept talking to Ruby—”Are you able to write to Billy?” I asked, and she said she kept writing but she didn't know if he always got the letters. She had her hat on her lap and she kept turning it around and around, a little wool hat. But I was thinking different thoughts: I was trying to remember something funny from the months that had passed since November, something funny in the papers or on the radio. We still listened to the radio now and then, and I remembered that we used to laugh at many of the programs, but now I couldn't recall anything funny at all. I suppose we'd stopped listening to the funny programs without even talking about it.

It really wasn't a funny year. Even in the worst parts of the Depression, funny things happened, silly things, just because everyone was so poor. I remember my father offering me his old socks, thinking there must be some use to them when they couldn't be darned any longer, hating to throw them away, and how I'd laughed to think of a time in which a gift from a father to a daughter was used socks. I'd taken them, too. I used them for dust rags or something.

But 1938 wasn't a funny year. Maybe people who didn't lose a baby found something to laugh at, but Nathan and I didn't. I wondered whether he laughed at school. Being with young people—now there had to be funny moments there. Now I was really grateful to Ruby for coming. She had made me think. I gave her more coffee and then she left.

That night I asked Nathan whether anything funny ever happened in his school. He looked out from under his eyebrows at me. He stared as if he had trouble seeing me, and I wondered whether he'd wept away his eyesight. Later it did turn out that he needed glasses. But then it seemed as if he was looking at me through fog and smoke. “Yes,” he said. “There's a little girl. Evelyn Grossman. She's very funny. She's a natural comedienne.”

“Do you laugh?”

“I laugh.” He was reading the paper, and he looked down at it again. Then he looked up. “You think I shouldn't laugh?”

“No,” I said. “I'm glad there's something to laugh at. Tell me something she said.”