The Bad Seed (4 page)

Rhoda said softly, “Sometimes when Leroy is feeling mean, he says he’s lost the key to the park gate, and won’t open it so the children can come in and play. He wants to make people wait and beg him to open it for them. Leroy is a very mean man, I think.”

Mrs. Breedlove’s usual good humor was now completely restored, and she said, “I simply adore little Rhoda’s twang.” She touched the child’s earlobe in affection. “It’s such a wonderful
twang. It’s such a fascinating twang, my darling. Won’t you teach it to me sometime?”

Christine laughed softly, and, touching her child’s hand, she said, “With my shocking Midwestern twang, and Kenneth’s New England one, the poor child didn’t have a chance, really.”

Leroy unscrewed the hose from its faucet and prepared to put it away in the basement, thinking:
Nobody can put nothing over on Rhoda, I’ll say that much for her. And nobody can put nothing over on me, neither. I guess Rhoda and me are just alike.

But in this he was mistaken, as we shall see in time, for Rhoda was able to put into action the things that he could only turn over in his mind as fantasies.

Mrs. Penmark had entered her daughter in the Fern School the previous August; and Miss Burgess Fern, who handled enrollments, said shrewdly, “You must not get the impression that ours is a so-called ‘progressive’ school. We teach the niceties, even some of the elegancies, of fastidious living; but we give our pupils a solid groundwork in practical matters, too. We teach our children to spell accurately, to read with fluency and, where possible, with some expression, as well. We teach arithmetic in the way arithmetic should be taught—from a book and from a blackboard, not on a sandpile in the garden with shells and flower petals for counters.”

“Yes, I know,” said Christine. “My husband and I talked with one of our neighbors at the Florabelle Apartments, a Mrs. Breedlove,
and from what she’s told us, we feel your school is ideal for a child of Rhoda’s temperament.” Miss Claudia Fern entered at that moment, and went to one of the filing-cabinets, as Mrs. Penmark continued in an uncertain voice, “You know Mrs. Breedlove, of course?”

The sisters looked quickly at each other, as though surprised anyone could ask such a question. “
Monica
Breedlove?” asked Miss Burgess Fern in astonishment. “Why, everybody in town knows Monica. She’s one of our most active citizens. She won the Civic Association award a couple of winters ago as the most valuable citizen of the year.”

Miss Octavia Fern came in and sat at her desk. She said, smiling gently, “I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the name Penmark. It’s an unusual name, and I’m sure I’d remember it. Have you been here long?”

“No, not long at all. My husband is with the Callendar Steamship people, and we were transferred here from Baltimore only a week or so ago. We hardly know anyone so far.” Miss Fern sighed, as though approaching an unwelcome task, and Christine, seeing the direction her mind was taking, said in a propitiating voice, “My husband’s people are from New England. The name Penmark is better known there, I’m told.”

“Ours is not an inexpensive school,” said Miss Burgess Fern. “Our tuition is high, which is to accord with the standards we use in choosing our pupils. We reject far more than we select.”

Miss Octavia said, “You will find neither false pride nor snobbery here. We are sympathetic with the problems of children, and we operate on a basis of complete nonprejudice; but we do not consider the best interests of a child are served through minimizing the standards of excellence his ancestors have established, a course of action fashionable in some quarters during the reign of the Roosevelts; and we do not believe it wise to play down what his forebears have accomplished, or to belittle what they have
collected in the way of prestige, fame, or worldly possessions.” She waited, and then said, “In other words, while we advocate the democratic ideal, we are convinced that such an ideal is possible only where all members of a particular group come from the same level of society, preferably a high one.”

Mrs. Penmark turned these remarkable statements over in her mind, and said, “I think you’ll find our family background acceptable.” In a more careful voice she added that she herself had been born in the Midwest, and as a child had lived pretty much all over the country; she had taken a degree at the University of Minnesota, graduating the summer before Pearl Harbor. Her scholastic record had not been distinguished; she had got by reasonably well and that was about all. She hesitated, looked down at her hands, and then said, “My father, to whom I was devoted, was killed in a plane crash during the second world war. His name was Richard Bravo, and he was quite well known at one time as a columnist and war correspondent.”

“Of course, of course!” said Miss Octavia. “I’m familiar with his work. He had imagination and a beautiful prose style.” She turned to her sisters, they nodded in agreement, and she went on. “He was a man of depth and understanding. His death was a great loss.”

“There’s a book of his collected pieces in the library,” said Miss Burgess; but Miss Octavia raised her hand, as though the matter were settled, as though Mrs. Penmark had now established beyond question the eligibility of her daughter, and said, “Our enrollment is limited, as you probably know; and already we have our quota for next term; but my sisters and I will surely find a place for the little granddaughter of Richard Bravo.” Then, rising, she bowed and went out of the room.

Miss Claudia, the youngest of the sisters, found what she sought in the files, and said, “So Monica Breedlove is a neighbor of yours?… At one of the carnival balls—it was the year I came
out—she stepped on my train, and pulled it off. I was so embarrassed! I went home and didn’t dare come back!”

“Monica was the first woman in town to bob her hair,” said Miss Burgess. “And she was the first woman, at least the first respectable one, to smoke in public.”

“When you see her,” continued Miss Claudia, “tell her I think she stepped on my train because Colonel Glass had danced with me three times that evening, and hadn’t danced with her once.”

Christine nodded, and promised to do so; but she forgot until the morning of the picnic, when, as she approached the school, she saw Miss Claudia trailing a paper-filled burlap bag across the lawn. She smiled, remembering, and after Mrs. Breedlove had parked her car, and Rhoda had joined a group near the fig trees, she repeated Miss Claudia’s words. At once Mrs. Breedlove laughed and said she remembered perfectly.

It had happened at the annual fancy-dress ball of the Pegasus Society, and all she’d done, really, was put the toe of her dancing slipper on poor, frowzy Claudia’s train and exert just the tiniest bit of pressure as Claudia giggled and walked away on the arm of Colonel Glass; and, as she’d expected, the train detached itself and pulled away, like something out of an old Marx Brothers movie. The trouble was that the Fern girls, in those days at least, were so hard up for ready cash that their wardrobe was a joint one—a sort of grab-bag which each felt free to use when occasion demanded it. And so they were always arranging, and rearranging, the parts of their wardrobe in different patterns, in different color contrasts, hoping to achieve somehow the illusion of freshness; but since everything was borrowed for the one occasion only, nothing was sewed firmly together, as the clothes of others were sewed; instead, everything was tied and pinned and basted hurriedly, so that it all could be taken apart the next day and used again.

Mrs. Breedlove laughed gaily and fanned herself for a moment in silence; then she went on to say that Claudia had been quite correct in suspecting her motive. She’d done it on purpose, all right, but not because Claudia had danced three times with Colonel Glass—whom she remembered as a pompous and most tiresome man interested in fishing and the regenerative power of discipline impersonally applied—but because Claudia was making such a play for her brother Emory, and she’d determined, no matter what else happened to the Wages family, there wasn’t going to be a disarranged, cowlike Claudia Fern in it!

The two busses were drawn up to the curb, and already some of the children had taken their places. Mrs. Breedlove, looking about her, called to Rhoda, and when the child joined her, she said, “Where is the little Daigle boy, the one who won the penmanship medal? Has he arrived? I haven’t seen him.”

“There he is,” said Rhoda. “Standing there at the gate.”

The boy was pale and remarkably thin, with a long, wedge-shaped face, and a full, pink underlip that puckered with an inappropriate sensuousness. His mother stood possessively beside him—an intense woman with protruding eyes. She plucked anxiously at her passive son, adjusting his cap, smoothing his tie, fiddling with his socks, or dabbing at his face with a handkerchief. He was wearing the penmanship medal pinned to the pocket of his shirt, and his mother, as if knowing somehow that the medal was being discussed, put her arm nervously about his shoulders and lifted the medal in her palm as though it were she, and not her son, who had won it.

Mrs. Breedlove said to Rhoda in an amused, coaxing voice, “Don’t you think it would be a lovely little gesture if you went over and offered your congratulations? If you told him that since you didn’t win the medal, you’re most happy that he did?” She took the child’s hand, as if to guide her toward the gate, but
Rhoda pulled back and said, “No! No!” She shook her head with determination, and added, “I’m not glad he won it. It was mine. The medal was mine, but he got it.”

Mrs. Breedlove was startled at the cold intensity of the child’s voice, but she laughed after a moment and said, “Oh, I wish my instincts were as natural as yours, my dear.” She turned, as though for verification, to Christine, and said gaily, “A child’s mind is so wonderfully innocent. So lacking in guile or deceit.” But Mrs. Penmark had already moved away to speak to Miss Octavia Fern, who had nodded and beckoned to her.

They stood together beside the small side porch where the star jasmine bushes were, and Miss Octavia said, “My sisters and I are so disappointed that Mr. Penmark didn’t come with you today. We’ve never met him, although we’re anxious to do so, since we’ve heard so many pleasant things about him. Everyone says he’s such a capable young man. Actually, we’d hoped to see him yesterday at the closing exercises, but I suppose he was too busy to get away.”

Christine explained that, at this period of his career, her husband’s work kept him away from home much of the time. Currently, he was in South America to make a survey of port facilities along the West Coast. He’d embarked only the week before; the only news she’d had of him thus far was the cable that announced his arrival. She missed him, of course; but she’d resigned herself to the inevitable fact that this time he’d be gone all summer. Had it been possible, he most certainly would have come to the closing exercises of the day before, as he, in turn, had heard much about the Misses Fern, and had often expressed a wish to know them personally.

They seated themselves in rockers on the porch, and after a time Miss Octavia, long used to the unasked questions of parents, said, “Are you interested in what we think of Rhoda, and of what she’s accomplished since she’s been with us?”

Mrs. Penmark said that she was, adding that the child, almost from babyhood, had been something of a riddle both to herself and her husband. It was a thing difficult to isolate, or identify, but there was a strangely mature quality in the child’s character which they found disturbing. Both she and her husband had thought that a school like their own, a school whose accent fell on discipline and the old-fashioned virtues, would be the ideal school for Rhoda—would eliminate, or at least modify, some of the upsetting factors of her temperament.

Miss Fern nodded to a new arrival, pressed one hand against her forehead, as though marshaling her thoughts, and said that, in some ways, Rhoda was one of the most satisfactory pupils the school had ever had. She’d never been absent a single day; she’d never once been tardy; she was the only child in the history of the school who’d made a hundred in deportment, each month, in the classrooms, and a hundred in self-reliance and conservation, each month, on the playgrounds, for a full school year; and if Mrs. Penmark had dealt with as many children as Miss Fern had in her long career as a teacher, she’d realize what a remarkable record that was. She put on her tattered straw hat, and adjusted it over her eyes as protection against the strong morning sun which was now sifting itself insistently through the lifting leaves of the camphor tree. “Rhoda is a conservative, thrifty child,” she went on, “and she’s perhaps the
neatest
little girl I’ve ever encountered.”

Christine laughed and said, “Rhoda is certainly neat. My husband says he doesn’t know where she gets her tidiness—certainly not from either of us.”

Miss Burgess Fern came up, sat in the chair beside her sister, and, after listening a moment, said, “I think the secret of Rhoda’s temperament is the simple fact that she doesn’t need others, the way most of us do. She is such a self-sufficient little girl! Never in all my life have I seen anybody so completely all-of-one-piece!”

Mrs. Penmark sighed, raised her hands with humorous exaggeration, and said, “Sometimes I wish she were more dependent on others. Sometimes I wish she were less practical and more affectionate.”

Miss Octavia, from the depth of her experience with children, spoke gently. “You will not be able to change her. The child lives in her own particular world, and I’m sure it isn’t anything at all like the world you and I live in.”

Miss Burgess said, “The little girl, even at eight, seems able to stand alone, and that is certainly not common at any age.” She got up, walked down the steps, but paused to add, “Rhoda has many qualities remarkable in a child. In the first place, her courage is most unusual. She seems almost without physical fear; she’ll stand up calmly to things that frighten the average child and make them cry, or run away; and she’s certainly no tattletale; that we’ve already found out. Last winter one of our boys threw a stone through Mrs. Nixon’s window across the street, and—”