The Orphan (23 page)

Miss Wrigley looked up at him with her hands folded in front of her as she did when she had something good to tell the kids. She smiled with such affection that it made Charles’s stomach suddenly drop away.

“Charles, I have a Christmas present for you,” she said.

“But you already ...”

“No, I don’t mean the presents I give all the children, I mean something less tangible, but more important.”

“The exam?”

“You did nearly perfectly, Charles. I’m going to register you in grade six for the beginning of school in January.”

“My gosh,” was all that Charles could think to say. The same grade as Paul Holton and Runt Borsold, a grade of Doug Bent. He felt as if he had been left stranded on a height.

“Gosh,” he said again as Miss Wrigley got up and came around the desk and took both his hands in hers.

“You are a truly remarkable young man, Charles,” she said, looking up now into his flushed face. “Oh, Charles, you are going to be a great scholar someday, a brilliant person.” And she threw her arms around him, hugging him hard.

Charles put his arms around Miss Wrigley very delicately, lightly touching her wool jacket. He smelled her hair and felt intensely happy as she pulled back and held him by the shoulders. “I'm so proud of you, Charles,” she said, her eyes looking as if she would cry. “Do you know that teaching in a school like this ...” she began, but then she stopped and turned back to the desk, catching her breath.

When she turned back to Charles, she had become his teacher again, and he realized with amazement that there was not really all that much difference in their feelings, even though he was immeasurably beneath Miss Wrigley in learning and experience. He felt that in that moment he had grown toward adult understanding almost enough to match his rapid physical growth in the past few months.

Then she told him goodbye. She was leaving for the Christmas vacation to be with her family in Joliet and would not be back until the fourth of January when school began again. Charles walked out of the schoolhouse and down the steps in the twilight, feeling the cold hit his teeth, and realized he was still grinning widely. He began a long legged dash through the drifts along the side of the highway, headed for Douglas Bent’s house to tell him the news.

The exciting winter vacation days before Christmas were a round of snowy games, sledding, chases, rabbit hunting with the older men, the cutting of Christmas trees on the Peaussier farm for just about everyone in the farm community, riding the Bents’ horses when they could get permission, jumping from the highway bridge into the snow drifts on the creek bottom. Bashful Kenny Grattan took a dare and grabbed the back bumper of a milk truck and went zipping along on his sled until he hit a patch of bare cinders near the highway turn and came off the sled on his face. Rudy Bent fell through the river ice and had to be rescued with a ladder and was in danger of pneumonia for a few days they said, but he got over it. And Charles got two Christmas presents stuffed in the old widow’s mailbox: a jackknife from a secret admirer (Douglas said it was Brenda Gustafson) and a handkerchief from Flossie Portola with his initials embroidered on it. And he was hard at work making presents too: a carved wooden pistol that was an exact replica of an Army .45 automatic for Douglas, a butterfly carved out of a piece of walnut and a wooden pin to go through the carved hole so it would hold a girl’s hair, and that was for Betty Bailey who would not get it until after Christmas since she was away with her parents visiting relatives in Chicago. And a hand-drawn calendar for 1936 with all the holidays marked with red designs and pictures for Mrs. Stumway was almost finished, since she had said she was always forgetting what week it was. He had already given Miss Wrigley her present, a handsome gilt brooch with a setting of petrified wood which was the only store bought present he had money for and which she had received with much delight.

And then the day before Christmas, Claire Stumway Lanphier arrived, pulling off the highway into the short drive that Charles had shoveled the snow out of and roaring the engine of her new cream-colored Auburn convertible before turning it off. Douglas Bent spotted the car as he and Charles were coming back from the sledding hill across from the schoolhouse. He let out a cry and dropped his sled rope to go hopping in his ungainly, stiff-legged run until he stood panting beside the car. It was different, Charles saw, from the cars he had seen. It had a pointed rear and large shining tubes coming out of the sides of the hood and disappearing under the fenders. In front was a single V-shaped front bumper and a stylized naked woman hood ornament with her head thrown back and her chromium breasts thrust forward to cut the wind.

“Wow, it’s an Auburn Speedster,” Douglas said, touching the cream-colored metal as if it were living skin. “I’ve never seen a real one. I bet it’s the only one in this part of the country.”

Charles watched the smaller boy move minutely around the car, touching it gingerly here and there. He laid a hand on one of the shiny pipes, found it warm and decided the visitor had arrived only a few minutes before.

“I guess it belongs to Mrs. Stumway’s daughter,” Charles said, not overly interested. He could not understand Douglas’s infatuation with machinery and found his patience tried on many occasions when Douglas would have to stop and examine some entirely uninteresting piece of industrial craftsmanship.

“Guaranteed to go one hundred miles an hour,” Douglas was saying. “She must be really rich.”

“I guess she is,” Charles said. “Mrs. Stumway said -” but he stopped rather than talk about what the old lady had rambled on about the other evening. “She’s going to visit for a couple days.” He watched Douglas kneeling in the snow to look under the car, peeking into the interior, and finally became irritated. His feet were freezing. “I got to go in and meet her, Doug.” And then he recalled he had not given Doug his present, and he made that his pretext. He ran into the house, dashed up the stairs to his bedroom without taking off his boots, and rushed back out with the present wrapped in brown paper with Douglas’s name on the home-made tag. He sailed off the top step into the snow, finding Doug still admiring the car.

“Here, Doug. I made it myself, and it’s really authentic.” He laid the package in Doug’s outstretched hands. “What’s the matter?” Charles said, noticing the other hoy’s face turning sad or angry.

“I ain’t got anything for you.” Douglas stood straight with his braced leg at an angle. “Pa said we didn’t need to get things for people outside the family, ’cause ...” He stopped, looking down at the package.

“Geeze, Doug, you’ve already given me so much I can’t ever pay it all back,” Charles said, putting his arm over the other boy’s shoulders. “Merry Christmas, Doug,” he said, patting the boy’s shoulder.

“Merry Christmas, Charles,” Douglas said. He looked up with a smile. “I got something for you after all, and you’re really going to like it. Okay if I bring it down tomorrow?”

“Sure, but you don’t have to if your Pa said not to.”

“Oh, this is okay. It’s already mine, I mean mine to give.”

With that, Douglas hobbled off to the highway, gathered up the sled rope and headed for home with a backward wave. Charles felt sorry for Douglas for a minute, and then he thought, who was he to feel sorry for a guy with all that family and probably a really great Christmas coming up tomorrow. Charles was not overly concerned about presents for himself, as he expected very little, but he did want to give things to people he liked, and he felt that he had pretty well covered the field. Not until this moment did it occur to him that he would have a very slender holiday himself. He thought of it for the time it took to pull his boots off in the porch and then shrugged it away. It just didn’t seem important.

Standing next to the stove in the kitchen, Charles became aware of the new presence in the house by several subtle aromas that he began to perceive as a difference in the environment. There was perfume, of course. Every woman just about had some sort of stuff she put on to smell good, and this perfume was beautifully delicate, not the usual lavender or lilac or rose oil stuff, but something warm, like putting a clean fur up to your nose, a scent that might have been a very exotic flower, perhaps a night flower; and there was an overlay of acrid scent like burned wood. Charles wondered what that could be, since it was new to the house, not like the smell of wood or coal burning in the stove.

“Charles, boy, will you come in the living room?” Mrs. Stumway’s voice came, high and strained, from the newly opened living room.

Charles ran his hand through his hair, but it was sticking up in all directions from wearing his stocking cap. He shrugged again and walked somewhat selfconsciously through the dining room and stood in the wide doorway of the living room.

“Charles, this is my youngest daughter, Claire Lanphier,” the old lady said.

A woman in dark green with some sort of fur around her neck rose from the sofa and offered Charles her hand. As he shook it, he noticed she was holding a glass of light brown liquid in the other hand, and knew it was from her drink that the odor of burned wood came. He looked into Mrs. Lanphier’s eyes, seeing her for the first time as she smiled at him and settled herself back on the sofa. Standing, she had been a bit taller than Charles, her hair pulled back from her face and done in some soft kind of roll behind her neck, around which was a white silk scarf knotted like an ascot, and tucked into the front of the dark green dress which Charles thought must be expensive by the heavy, smooth look of the material. Mrs. Lanphier had a familiar look, he thought, sitting down in the other living room chair and smiling. Her mouth was wide with a full underlip and it turned up at the comers, making a rather pretty and complex curve, even though there were fine wrinkles in her throat and around her eyes. Her nose was long and straight and a shade too large for prettiness, but her eyes made up for that by being wide and blue and very expressive. He noticed that as she talked they acted an accompaniment to her words. Actress’s eyes, Charles thought, taken with the woman’s face as he tried to recall who she looked like.

“So you are the local hero and prodigy, Charles,” Mrs. Lanphier said, and her eyes twinkled to assure the boy she was lightly teasing.

“Now Charles, don’t let her embarrass you ” Mrs. Stumway said. “She’s just a terrible tease.”

Charles could see the old lady was pleased with her daughter, that there was nothing the daughter could do or perhaps had ever done that would not please the mother. He smiled again.

“That hero stuff came in pretty handy for buying clothes and things. I thought about going into the rescuing business, but I guess the Elks wouldn’t pay regular for that sort of thing.”

“He got twenty-five dollars in prize money from the B.P.O.E. in Beecher,” Mrs. Stumway said. “He rescued one of his playmates from the river,” she went on, imitating the newspaper account without thinking.

Charles could see that old Mrs. Stumway’s mind was almost paralyzed with the pleasure of her daughter’s visit. He watched Mrs. Lanphier’s eyes, taking more enjoyment from their changing expressions than from the conversation they accompanied. The talk was of school and local news for a few moments, Charles working up some social enthusiasm as he seemed able to do on any occasion, talking from the top of his mind while he studied the interesting new person in his world. Mrs. Lanphier sipped at the drink in her hand until it was almost gone, and then she opened a flat cigarette case and took out a thin, long cigarette.

“Do you mind, Mother? Charles?”

“I don’t like it, but I guess everyone’s doing it now, even the women,” Mrs. Stumway said, but she didn’t really mind, Charles could tell.

“Charles, would you help a lady trapped in the wilds of the Corn Belt to another Scotch and water?” Mrs. Lanphier held up her almost empty glass plaintively.

“Sure,” Charles said, almost leaping from his chair. “Uh, well, I don’t know how to do it though.” He laughed, holding the glass in his hand as if it were an obscure artifact.

“Two fingers of Scotch,” Mrs. Lanphier said, one eye squinted over the illustrative two fingers, “and the same of water, and some ice.” She looked sad momentarily. “Oh, you have no ice, and with all this winter around too.”

“I’ll get you some,” Charles said. He leaped out of the room, set the glass on the sink and slipped out the back door, reached high up to the right and broke off a long icicle from the porch roof. He looked through it to make sure it was clean, but this time of the year it would be, since the roof had been ice covered for weeks. At the sink again, he unstoppered the bottle of brown fluid, poured two fingers and almost dropped the bottle with the strength of the odor rising from the whiskey. He put water from the pitcher pump into the glass and stirred it with the icicle, broke off a length of the ice that stood up in the glass, took it out and broke it again, getting some of the drink on his fingers. He licked them and shuddered. How could people drink that stuff? He rushed back into the living room with the drink.

“Charles, you are a sweetheart,” Mrs. Lanphier said, taking the dr1nk and admiring the icicle. She said “sweetheart” as if it had capital EE’s in it, making Charles squirm with pleasure. “Will you be my official Scotch and Water and Icicle maker for the term of my visit? Say you will?”

“It’ll be my pleasure, ma’am.” Charles felt as if he had just been knighted. He watched as she took the first sip, waiting for her eyes to approve. She looked up at him over the edge of the glass, and her eyes twinkled again while he felt his heart thump a couple of times.

“Chivalry in the most unusual places,” she murmured. She took a delicate sip from the cigarette, taping its edge on the saucer that served as an ashtray. “Won’t you have a drink, Mother?” she said. “It is Christmas Eve, after all, and we are together for the first time in, how many years?”

“Oh, Claire, I don’t know. I think it must be five or six. I don’t like to drink that stuff, but I will have some of that wine you sent last year.”

“You still have that wine?” Claire began to laugh and leaned back on the sofa. “Oh, Mother, that was last year’s present.”