“Of course, Mrs. Merriam.” Mrs. Byrne bowed politely to Mrs. Merriam at least once a day. “How are you?”
“I am very much disturbed, Mrs. Byrne, and I think you ought to know the facts immediately, which is why I called. Our daughters have been doing some rather indiscreet things.”
“Yes?” said Mrs. Byrne.
“This morning,” Mrs. Merriam went on, “I happened to discover a letter my daughter had written to one of the neighborhood boys. It was a childish,” and Mrs. Merriam laughed shortly, “but improper letter. She tells me that the other girls in the neighborhood have been writing the same kind of letters.”
“Mary?” Mrs. Byrne said.
“Mary indeed,” said Mrs. Merriam. “And Virginia Donald, and of course, the source of it all, Helen Williams. I don’t know, naturally, whose fault it is,” she said lingeringly, “but of course I think the girls should be spoken to.”
“Of course,” Mrs. Byrne said. “I’ll speak to Mary, of course.”
“Harriet also tells me,” Mrs. Merriam said, “that your son has been getting letters.”
“Who from?” Mrs. Byrne’s voice was suddenly flat.
“I think he’s the person to tell you that,” Mrs. Merriam said. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Byrne, to be the one to tell you.”
“You couldn’t do anything else,” Mrs. Byrne said.
“After all, my own daughter is in it too,” Mrs. Merriam said.
“I’ll speak to Mary,” Mrs. Byrne said.
• • •
Marilyn Perlman came into the house quickly, opening the front door with her key. She put her books down on the hall table and read the note sitting there: “Dear, have gone to Mrs. White’s, back about five. If anyone calls take message. Love, Mother.” Marilyn wondered vaguely why her mother always ended even the slightest notes formally; her father had once told her solemnly that the notes left for the milkman always ended, “Yrs. sincerely, R. Perlman.”
The Perlmans’ home was probably the wealthiest-looking on the block, although presumably the Desmonds had more money than the Perlmans, and Mrs. Merriam was vaguely noted for her “taste.” The Perlmans’ living-room was pale green and beige, and Mr. Perlman liked to see a wood fire in the fireplace, although the Donalds had theirs stacked with imitation logs, and the Byrnes had a grate with a red light behind it. When Marilyn came into her living-room she was able to take a book from a bookcase; it was a limp-leather bound volume of Thackeray, but Harriet Merriam, after all, spent Saturday morning dusting the photograph album which lay on a side table in the Merriams’ living-room, and the first secular book in the Byrne house was Pat’s copy of Robinson Crusoe.
Marilyn was reading through Thackeray for words; from Vanity Fair she had gleaned “adorable” and “fearsome” and “horrid”; from The Virginian she already had half a dozen. Her word for today was “storied”; it had turned up in English class in school, and Marilyn had written it on the margin of her English book, for copying later.
With the Thackeray under her arm, Marilyn went into the kitchen and opened a bottle of coke, and took the bottle and the book out to the front porch. The Perlmans’ porch was heavily screened by vines, and in the glider Marilyn was hidden and secure to watch the movement of people up and down the block. She knew some of the people very well; the Ransom-Joneses across the street, and Harriet Merriam, toward whom she felt a respectful sympathy, and James Donald, whom she loved desperately. The Perlmans were far down the block from the Desmonds and Helen Williams, but Helen Williams was a terror to Marilyn and young Mrs. Desmond an ogress. Mrs. Desmond cut Mrs. Perlman on the street, almost certainly not intentionally, but Helen Williams followed Marilyn around the schoolyard, into the schoolroom, and up and down the halls. At home, Marilyn rarely went past the center of the block; to go below the Donald house meant probably meeting Helen. One day, at the noon recess, Helen and a group of friends had found Marilyn reading in an empty classroom and sat down around her, and Helen said, “Perlman, we’ve been looking for you.” (Thinking about it, on her own front porch behind the vines, thinking as she did almost daily, Marilyn remembered the sudden sickness, looking up from her book to see Helen and, cruelly, Harriet Merriam.) “We’ve been wondering,” Helen said, looking at the other girls, who laughed, even Harriet, “we’ve been wondering about Christmas.”
“What about it?” When Marilyn remembered herself in this scene, she saw herself as small and frightened and ugly; Harriet, on the other hand, remembered herself as dirty and fat and overbearing; and perhaps Helen Williams, if she thought of it, remembered herself as friendly and teasing.
“Well,” Helen said elaborately, “in about ten months it’s going to be Christmas again, and you know around here at Christmas on the last day of school all the kids give each other presents.” The story had not been planned; so much might be Harriet’s defense; the girls listened to Helen with smiles and some wonder. “And we thought,” Helen went on, watching first Marilyn and then the other girls, “that maybe when we all got together to draw names for the Christmas presents you maybe would think it was nicer of us just not to put your name in. So you won’t be embarrassed.”
For so long a story it had very little point; Harriet was confused and looked at Helen, frowning. Marilyn put both hands down on the open pages of her book and looked around at Helen and at Harriet frowning and at the other girls, one of whom was fidgeting toward the door, and said, “I don’t know why you want to do this.”
Helen laughed. “Maybe you have two Christmases,” she said. She turned around to the other girls, to Harriet, and said, “Marilyn has two Christmases. One of her own and one she gets in on with us.”
“I don’t get it,” one of the girls said, and the one edging toward the door said, “Come on.”
“Marilyn knows what I mean,” Helen said.
It was the feeling of having them all around her that bothered Marilyn; they were all together, and when one of them left they would all go, even Harriet. They were all looking at Marilyn at once, and she could only look at one of them at a time. She looked at Harriet and said, “If you’re through, I can go back to my book. I was studying.”
“I’ll tell you all about it,” Helen said. She stood up and gathered the other girls and led them out. Perhaps she stopped them outside the door, in a little group in the hall, perhaps she wrote it in a note and sent it around the schoolroom, perhaps it was nothing at all, but Marilyn was afraid of her, and when she wanted someone to die it was always Helen Williams.
She finished her coke and read her Thackeray, and went inside with the book and the empty bottle at half-past four. She put the book back in the bookcase and the empty bottle on the back porch, and went upstairs to her own room, which was the prettiest place she knew, and out of her top dresser drawer she took her notebook and sat down on the bed with it. She opened it to the first blank page, and “storied,” she wrote, and “grisly.”
• • •
Mrs. Roberts was a big woman fortunate enough to be married to a big man, and when Mr. and Mrs. Roberts sat down at either end of their dinner table, the dining-room seemed full and the table setting dwarfed. Jamie Roberts, their younger son, showed signs already of continuing the family tradition: he was broad-shouldered and long-legged, at ten, and looked so emphatically like his father that Mrs. Roberts frequently addressed all her remarks to him when she was quarreling with her husband.
Artie, the older boy (and Mrs. Roberts supposed always that it was because she had never really wanted Artie and then only kept on to have Jamie because Artie was such a disappointment) looked like Mrs. Roberts’s brothers and uncles, small and thin and pale, with colorless hair and eyes and the mouth that in Mrs. Roberts’s Uncle Frank was always half-open. It was difficult for anyone as hearty as Mrs. Roberts to see a puny son at her dinner table and not be angry; Artie was already fourteen years old, and Mrs. Roberts honestly despaired of making a m
an of him. She and Mr. Roberts both spoke to him gently, when they remembered, because secretly they were both a little afraid that a boy who read books instead of playing baseball might someday turn on them with a dreadful sure knowledge that would cut away their confidence and their muscles and leave them insecure and frightened, their stronger son as weak as they.
“Eat, Artie,” Mrs. Roberts said. “You’ve got to get some meat on you.”
“Little exercise,” Mr. Roberts said. He put down his butter knife and looked at his older son appraisingly. “If you’d get outdoors more and get a little exercise, you wouldn’t look like a bag of bones.”
“I eat,” Artie said defensively to his plate.
“Artie would rather play with the girls,” Mrs. Roberts said jovially. “What’s this I hear about you and the girls, Artie?”
“Artie?” Mr. Roberts said.
Jamie looked up with his mouth full, turning his head around the table to hear every word. “Artie?” he said thickly.
“Our son,” Mrs. Roberts said formally down the table to her husband, “has been getting love letters from some young lady.”
“Good for you,” Mr. Roberts said. He laughed and pointed his finger at Artie. “Make them chase you,” he said.
Artie knew that across the table his brother’s broad face was shining with unbelieving delight. “That silly stuff,” Artie said inadequately. He felt himself blushing, his face hot and horrible, and there was a sudden gleeful shout of laughter from his mother and father and brother.
“Look at him,” Jamie howled. “Look at Artie!”
“Why, Artie,” his father said. “Kiss and tell?”
When the laughter died down Mrs. Roberts said with apparently meaningless amiability, “Well, just the same it’s nice to see the girls doing the chasing for a change.”
• • •
“John,” Mr. Desmond said soberly, “your mother has asked me to speak to you.” He had taken Johnny into a corner of the living-room where no one usually sat, in a spirit of manly formality. Johnny sat on a stiff chair, looking his father in the eye, his expression all attention. Mr. Desmond, who found the experience completely enjoyable, went on gravely, “It’s a serious responsibility, John. The responsibility of a father talking like this to his son. And you know you are truly my son.” Mr. Desmond laid his hand on his son’s knee for a minute, and found his own eyes almost tearful. “A man, John,” Mr. Desmond said, “must never take admiration lightly, whether it comes from a silly young girl, or a maturer young lady, or even from a mother or sister or aunt. It is the duty of a gentleman, John, to regard all this admiration as a compliment. It is a compliment, John,” Mr. Desmond went on very earnestly, “in the very deepest sense of the word. I’m proud to know that my son is admired. We must never dismiss the emotions natural to the feminine heart—” Mr. Desmond stopped to chuckle paternally, and lost the thread of his sentence, so he began again, “You’ll find, as you grow older, John, that many women will feel the same way, and you must never dismiss—”
• • •
Helen Williams grabbed her little sister by the hair and shook her wildly back and forth. “Did you tell?” she said. “Did you go and tell, you bad, bad girl?”
Mildred stared wild-eyed. “Grandma,” she whispered.
“She can’t hear you,” Helen said. She shook her sister again. “No one can hear you. You tell me now, did you tell on me?”
“Grandma,” Mildred whispered again. “Mommy.”
Disgusted, Helen let go of her sister and looked down on her, with her hands on her hips. “You just listen to me,” she said in her normal voice, “if you ever tell on me again, if you ever tell anything, I’ll cut out your tongue and I’ll slice off all your fingers and I’ll cut a big hole in your stomach with a carving knife and I’ll hit you with a hatchet.”
• • •
“Look,” Pat Byrne said viciously to his sister, “You cut it out, do you understand?”
“Cut what out?” Mary Byrne said innocently.
Pat looked around to make sure that his father was still reading his paper in the living-room and that the kitchen sounds were going on peacefully where his mother was finishing up the dishes. Pat and Mary were in the hall, and because Pat spoke almost in a whisper Mary kept her voice quiet. “You just cut it out,” Pat said.
“Pat,” Mr. Byrne called harshly from the living-room, “Mary! No secrets whispered around this house!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mary said. She put out her lower lip and turned her back to walk away, but Pat pushed her shoulder and she turned around, her face ready to call her mother.
“You cut out all this dirty stuff,” Pat said. He put his face close to his sister’s and said again almost helplessly, “You just cut it out, that’s all.”
“You’re crazy,” Mary said. “I didn’t do anything.”
“I don’t want any more of those dirty letters,” Pat said. “I don’t care what happens, don’t you write any more to me.”
• • •
Hallie Martin walked slowly down the block, scuffing the loose sole of her shoe through the pink flowers, cautiously experimenting with a side tooth that might very well be coming out. She stopped for a few minutes, open-mouthed, across the street from the Desmond house, watching little Caroline moving around the flowers. Caroline was little and delicate and clean, and Hallie was lean and dirty and wet-faced, and after a minute Hallie moved on down the block without crossing the street.
Hallie, who was nine years old, Jamie Roberts, who was ten, and Mildred Williams, who was seven, were the youngest children around except for Caroline; they were an in-between generation, awed and overruled by the thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, expecting in their turn a younger generation to bully and educate. If Hallie had crossed the street and stood outside the Desmond yard, Mrs. Desmond would have come out on the side porch to sit quietly until Hallie was gone away; if Hallie stayed Mrs. Desmond would finally take Caroline indoors.
“Old Caroline,” Hallie said to herself as she went down toward Helen’s, where the older girls would be, “old Caroline wets her pants.”
At Helen’s house you didn’t bother to ring the bell or call Helen outside; you opened the door and went in, walking around inside the house until you found whomever you were looking for. Mrs. Parnatt, whom the children called Old Lady Parrot, and who was Helen’s grandmother, spent most of the day in a back room with the door locked; when she came out to the bathroom or to the kitchen to make herself coffee they saw an old woman with a tiny head and shoulders and huge from the waist down; an aged Pekinese following her in and out of her room. The dog’s name was Lotus, and when the girls were in Helen’s room next to her grandmother’s, they could hear the old lady crying over the dog, or sometimes stamping around the room and screaming because the dog had fouled the rug.
“That dog snaps,” Helen was fond of saying to her friends. “Some day she’s going to hit him with a chair or something and he’s going to bite her hand off.”
When Harriet Merriam came to the house—the other girls thought this was funny and tormented her with it—she would open the door a crack, peering down the long dark hall inside to see if the grandmother’s door were open. If the door were open that meant that Lotus was abroad, and Harriet would wait outside. “I don’t want him to snap at me,” she said reasonably.
“If he snapped at me I’d kick him in the head and kill him,” Hallie said wisely. “That’s how you kill dogs anyway, kick them in the head.”
“You just kick my grandmother’s dog,” Helen said. She laughed. “My grandmother would bite you.”
In Helen’s room at the back of the house were old fashion magazines and pictures of movie stars and collections of lace and ribbons the girls used to dress up in; Helen’s mother worked in the city, and she bought Helen neat young girl’s clothes which He
len decorated with bows or lace collars or five-and-ten jewelry and wore to school. Sometimes the girls at Helen’s house would go into the dark front room where Helen’s mother sat alone in the evenings, and play records on the phonograph and dance together. Once or twice they brought George Martin in to dance with them, although he was clumsy and had to be bribed with penny candy before he would stand up patiently for a minute or two and walk around the floor holding one of the girls.
“When I go live with my father,” Helen said frequently, “I’ve got to know how to dance and how to dress pretty, because my father is going to take me out a lot and we’re going to travel and everything.”
“Where is your father?” someone, probably Harriet, would ask, and perhaps Virginia Donald would add respectfully, “You’re terribly lucky.”
“My father goes everywhere,” Helen said. “Maybe Paris, or New York. Paris is where they have men who kiss your hands.” She giggled, and it made the other girls giggle too. With a lace shawl over her head, Helen stood up and curtseyed, holding out her hand. “Why, Mr. Paris,” she said in a high voice, “you mean you want to kiss my hand?”
Hallie stood in back of her, shouting, “Why, Mr. Johnny Desmond, you mean you want to kiss my hand?”
And Helen said seriously, “Boy, I’m not going to stay here much longer. I’m going to find my father pretty soon now.”
The Williams family was moving soon; Mrs. Williams had mentioned to Miss Fielding, who was the only person outdoors in the very early morning when Mrs. Williams left to catch her bus to the city, that it was too hard to try to get back and forth every day, and she wanted to put the girls into a city school. Miss Fielding told Mrs. Desmond, who said timidly that perhaps it was just as well. Little Mildred Williams, Mrs. Desmond said, was entirely too sweet and kind to be away from her mother all the time, and Mrs. Desmond added, with a stronger note to her voice, that perhaps the grandmother (out of respect for Miss Fielding’s age Mrs. Desmond did not say “that almost bedridden old lady,” as she did later to Mr. Desmond) was not quite—Mrs. Desmond lifted her hand gently—not quite the person to deal with dear little Helen.