Chapter 4
PAULA, seventeen, and so pretty, found Jimmy, the gardener's son, much more exciting than, as Granny had described them, a string of boy friends, anemic and beardless. And as Granny had, before her, doubtless found Ferris, the flaming-eyed groom. With a selfishness, unintentional but real, the preoccupation with self, to speak of it kindly, of her age group, she did not consider, naturally enough, why should she, Daisy. She did not see, as she gazed fixedly inward, Daisy's red and swollen eyes and the sullen hopeless glance of hatred that was bent upon her, a very gloomy sight, indeed. She didn't notice Daisy at all. She did not know that Daisy's passionate hatred was a much more powerful thing than Jimmy's passionate dalliance. All that Paula had done to Jimmy was give him a taste for his betters, and her only hold on him was her social inaccessibility which he longed to rectify by simple arithmetic and get on with his work, sleep in peace with his little peers. He did not in the least understand what Paula wanted of him and, unsure of himself and vain, he hated her, too, for not letting him finish what he had begun that night. That he finished it down in the village comfortably enough did not heal the wound in his ego. Jimmy, it is apparent, is not in love. Paula, as ignorant as he of what she really wanted, knew a little of what she did not want; she did not want to let go of a delicious new something that had come into her life that seemed, unfortunately, to reside only in Jimmy. She did not question that she loved him-this, then was it-and the shock and mortification of his verbal insult slid away and was somehow rationalized in a young mind that was not used to solving problems. She did not believe that he meant it and saw him again alone just once more. This time it struck home and the boy's stubborn insistence on his own pursuit which seemed to have no reference to herself as a person, and it didn't have any, cured her on the instant, and she jumped out of his arms again and really fled the premises. Jimmy hadn't the least idea how to make the most of the head start he didn't know he had with Paula and maybe he didn't have the time required to seduce her either, which skips at least one small tragedy in the big geode of casualties that few keep track of and are seldom announced; and deprives us of an artistic conclusion, as well, for the time being. Maisie, unaware of current events, might have advised her granddaughter. How had the beautiful and spirited young Maisie, for instance, kept in subjection the groom, Ferris; kept him in his place and at her heels for fifty years, until he had died, an old man, crotchety, arthritic, and puffy in the jowls, his mistress as desirable and saucy in his eyes as in the beginning of their cute flirtation.
Paula's tears, shed easily, left no mark on her lovely face and Daisy had no way of knowing that they were sisters under the skin, in opposition, as it were, for different reasons. Jimmy had easily made both of them cry. It might have worked out better, with Daisy wanting badly what Paula fled from, but Jimmy, the common denominator, had ideas of his own, too, and nothing came out even.
Paula found a young curate who would take much longer than Jimmy, and felt for him something of that chain reaction that the gardener's son had started and it gave her enough for the present until the young captain in the Marines would take over, blurring her girlish sorrow, give her back her feminine stance.
She stopped crying bitterly and secretly in her room and breathed deeply; but nothing is easy, seldom is it within ourselves to erase what has been written.
"Paula, I think you should not be too friendly with Jimmy," said Sissy, a little late. Sissy and Paula had been on their way to church where Paula hoped to have a little time with the young curate after service, and they had met Jimmy who had looked impudently and hotly at Paula and failed to raise his hat. Paula had gazed straight ahead like a lady but she had felt his look. "He ought at least to take off his hat," went on Sissy, but Paula's shining profile did not betray anything but the sweetest innocence and Sissy thought, "Maybe he knows about me!" and blushed, in the foil of Paula's artlessness, at her own earlier transgression as she had not blushed at the time. "He could, you know," she thought, "his father could have seen us; perhaps they even discuss me between themselves!" She shivered and put it aside.
So Paula felt dissatisfied and guilty and insulted all over again, and quickened her step; she tried to conjure up, superimpose, the image of the slim young curate over against the so-male form of Jimmy, and partially succeeded.
But old Maisie, at dinner, interrupted Sissy and Lamby. She caught, way off somewhere as she was, bored with everyday conversation, the tag end of something Lamby was saying that went like, "... I can't think what she said."
"Whore?" offered the old lady agreeably.
Paula blushed as red as a pomegranate and jumped out of her chair, upsetting a glass.
"The child should excuse herself when she has to leave the table," said the old lady.
"Ma-Ma!" said Sissy, more astounded than shocked. "Paula is only seventeen and so sensitive... really, Ma-Ma!"
"Tut! She'll get over it. Lamby, how old are you? It was only yesterday that you wet the bed..."
"I have to go to the John!" said Janey suddenly.
"The what?"
"She wants to go to the bathroom."
"How's that?"
"To the outhouse, mum," said Daisy, who was passing the mashed potatoes, and sometimes had an Irish insight into the old lady's anachronisms.
"Well, why didn't you say so! You can go tomorrow, she added vaguely, "if it doesn't cost too much."
As Daisy left the room Lamby raised her eyebrows at Sissy and Sissy shook her head.
"She's not listening," said Lamby. "Ma-Ma, would you like anything more?"
The old lady did not reply.
"Well, Sissy?"
"The girl doesn't know any better," said Sissy.
"That doesn't solve the problem," said Lamby. "Who do you think it is?" she added avidly.
"The thing is," said Sissy, frowning, and she inclined her head toward Ma-Ma, "she hates someone new fussing around."
"She'll raise a stink," said Lamby. "That's for sure."
"Those girls have them easily," mused Sissy. "Perhaps if we do nothing at all... oh, dear."
"She'll scream bloody murder," said Lamby.
"Do you think I should speak to her?" said Sissy.
"How soon would you say she would have it?" asked Lamby.
"She looks about five months gone," said Sissy. "What is the date today?"
"The date?"
"Yes, what is the date?"
The old lady opened her eyes, rested and fresh from her dreaming, and said, almost hollered, "1066!" It was her one date and she was proud of it. "Shall we have coffee in the withdrawing room," she said graciously. "Darn radio, can't hear yourself think. Mule train..." she hummed.
"She's crazy as a bedbug," muttered Lamby.
"See that you don't wet the bed again tonight," admonished the old lady, "or I'll tell cook pot to let you have any more lemonade."
"Christ!" said Lamby to herself. "I'll kill the old bitch, no foolin'!" and excusing herself, she went up for a big swig of the powerful "lemonade" at the back of her closet, marked Clorox, a cleanser, indeed, for what she had to endure. The heat of it went down into her guts and equalized the adrenalin that had no normal outlet.
Daisy let out a caterwauling scream that shattered the bulbs in the lamps in the living room and moved the solid silver a half inch over in the felt-lined drawers. At the same time Bunce thought he heard something; one imagines that the note was so high, the vibrations so uncountable that perhaps he did, deaf as he otherwise was. Still it wasn't too high for the others to hear it and it lifted them out of their beds. The old lady, packing, in her mind, for a short visit to her sister-in-law in Cockeysville, Maryland, protested. "I'm feeble," she said, "a feeble old woman, shut that claptrap off!... What's that? I don't care if it is Winston Churchill," she mumbled, fancying herself aggrieved and contradicted. Bunce lay down feeling himself deceived and mistaken.
"Yeeee-eee-owowow!"
The hair raised up along his shoulders; and Lamby slid open the door, her face white, shaking hard, as if her dreams had come true and she had murdered the old woman.
"For Christ's sake, Ma-Ma!"
"None of your slang, miss, what's got you up so early?"
"You didn't hear?... what I heard?" Lamby began to doubt the bloodcurdling yell, tried to think back... how many had she had?
Well, there it was again.
"Turn it off!" yelled the old lady.
Lamby fled down the hall to the telephone; it had come to her, she remembered, it was Daisy!
"Hello! Sissy? Daisy! Get over here quick!"
As Lamby waited in the hall for Sissy, as frightened as a young girl might have been by the unknown, chilled and shaken by Daisy's bloodcurdling screams, complete silence, as if the storm had passed, and the swallows did start whistling in the ivy, reigned. It was so still that she jumped when the icebox started up and the milk bottles on the top shelf, too close together, chattered like glass bells from the vibration. She shut her teeth down and waited for the next cry, she wanted to be ready, but it didn't come. She heard Sissy on the porch and opened the door.
"Did you call the doctor?" said Lamby.
"No, I didn't-at this hour. If it's the baby it will take a lot longer, there's plenty of time. I just came over to calm Ma-Ma."
"Oh," said Lamby, "you needn't have bothered."
"I'll go see Daisy, poor thing," said Sissy; she looked pretty and cool and efficient and Lamby felt like an elderly scarecrow and an ignorant fool. Christ! Even at moments like these Lamby's jealousies beat at her chest with clenched fists.
"Daisy!" called Sissy; the girl's door was locked from inside.
No answer.
"Daisy, are you all right?"
Silence.
"Daisy, answer me, do you want the doctor?"
"No, mum," came a sullen reply.
"What is the trouble?"
"Nothin'."
"Why did you scream?"
"I didn't scream, it wasn't me."
"Very well, I am going back home... Won't you let me in?" Silence.
"Daisy! Let me in!"
But nothing more could be got out of Daisy.
"Are you sure you heard her scream?" asked Sissy of Lamby, doubtfully; Lamby smelled strongly of bourbon.
"Jesus Maria," said Lamby.
"It's a little late for me," said the doctor and he gave the sisters, Lamby and Sissy, a scornful hard look. "Call the police."
"Police!"
"It is either homicide or manslaughter," he said.
"Manslaughter!"
Lamby stared in fascinated horror at the thing in the basin, and could not pick up her feet as if she were in one of her anxious dreams, one of her unrequited nightmares.
"Manslaughter!" said Sissy. It was as if the wrong word held their attention and gave them time, kept them from laughing, or in some idiotic way expressing a horror that was looping up their intestines and squeezing their hearts.
"Why, it's a girl," said Sissy softly, as if everything were all right, and a beribboned bassinet in the next room, sweet peas and carnations and a silver cup, and relatives and a glass of wine.
No one in his right mind could accept the little creature, still soft but spotted with dried blood, in the basin. The doctor, from habit, had washed it as best he could and determined its sex for the record, and now he was scrubbing his own arms and drying them. He fixed his tie and peered in the mirror over the basin where the little thing lay exposing its soft and swelling female genitalia that had caught Sissy's attention, saving her from screaming, it seemed so normal. The doctor absent-mindedly drew back his Lips and peered at his shiny white teeth, looked sideways at himself and gave himself a smile. He was rather handsome.
"Do you want me to call the police, or will you?" he said.
"But she couldn't have meant to kill it... why that would be murder," Sissy said. "Precisely; righto."
"I'm going," said Lamby and left. She saw the lighted exit: Walk, don't run.
The big cop from the village paled at the scene of the crime. Sissy had got used to it, but O'Brian saw for the first time, coming in out of the wholesome fresh November day, the blood-spattered bathroom, the slippery floor, and the yellow, drained as it was, absurdly small victim with its wet black hair, its pallid little sucking mouth-and he, too, noted its sex like a fleur-de-lis between its tiny legs.
"Saints preserve us, it's a girl," he said. "An' who may I ask is the perpetrator of this atrocity, miss?" he added, pulling himself together.
"Why, you must know Daisy-she's gone, she left- we found it like this on the floor..." She spread her arms and frowned.
"Sweet Jesus!" said O'Brian, "sure an' it was a terrible accident should happen to no one." He looked at the overflowing toilet and remembered his old woman. He had come back from his beat, sturdy and good-natured, to his young wife of six months and found her sobbing bitterly. "Look what I did! It came out! It drowned!" Daisy should have not lost her head like that, Daisy, his niece, as she did. She had lifted it out, saints preserve us, and cut the cord with a pair of shears, that still lay in the corner, too close. Then, in terror, she dressed in her good suit and ran away with her suitcase, God knows where, to the old country maybe, for refuge. (Father, oh Father, will you forgive me. Yes, child, yes.)
"Sure an' it was born dead anyhow," O'Brian said, "an' then it drowned."
"The blood, all the blood," Sissy said. It was new to her-all the blood. Well cared for, she had always opened her eyes to brand-new babies in lacy shawls and spotless diapers with clean soft skins. She had never even seen their little navels until they were healed and looked like dimples.
"It's a mess to be sure," said O'Brian. "She cut it off with them shears," he mused. The shining cord lay like a coiled spring, a bracelet, under the basin.
"Sure an' the whole thing was a terrible accident," he said.
"Lamby! Sissy!"
"In a minute, Ma-Ma."
"In a minute," the old lady mimicked, "in a minute, in a minute... land sakes!"
She sensed an oblique attention, not wholly hers.
"What is it, Ma-Ma." Sissy closed the door behind her as what had to be done was being done outside. Need they have been so solicitous? The old lady saw only what she wanted to see, responded only to what she wanted to respond to; but she was curious, wanted to catch them off guard; what were they up to? They were canny.
"Fix me a dose of salts," she said. She watched Sissy narrowly, detected something, felt disorder somewhere like a draft. But Sissy had got hold of herself, relieved at O'Brian's easygoing solution, and she smiled gently at her mother as she gave her a diluted dose of what she had asked for.
"Anything else, Ma-Ma?"
The old lady felt there was more to it, but shrugged.
"I told you not to see too much of that boy," she said, closing her eyes. She missed Sissy's real blush. "Get along with you and fetch me..." She looked vaguely around her.
"The New York Times, Ma-Ma?"
"It will do," she said, "it will do."
Daisy, the greenhorn, the bog-hopper, the ninny, left nothing but a little accumulated dirt behind her, a few rusty bobby pins, a half-finished bag of salted peanuts and a 25 cent edition of Bad Girl. They all forgot her as they had in her presence, as they had a series of others who came and went, letting down or taking in the cambric uniforms of servitude, but free, nevertheless, to move on. Nobody cared much except for the inconvenience of breaking in a new one. Daisy's shocking sin was washed away with Ivory soap by a colleen right down the gangplank off the last boat, and as she scrubbed she mingled her tears of desperate homesickness with the suds.
Jimmy, the unrepentant sinner, had taken a broad hint from the big cop, and was well on his way, or else this Deirdre who sobbed into her pillow at night for loneliness might have felt his powerful charm, too, and in a given inexorable time taken the rhythmic beating of child-bearing, the terrible punishment of unlicensed love, the damning evidence that one carries around inside, denying it until the moment it is bloodily expelled by your own frantic efforts and will surely be found. And yet this perfect crime is committed again and again as if young women stood in line for it, longed for it.
Maisie surprised everyone by merely shrugging when the news of Daisy's vacation was broken to her.
"What is your name, my girl?" she said kindly to the pretty Deirdre.
"Deirdre."
"Nonsense!"
"But, ma'am, it is my name."
"No airs, miss, I shall call you Daisy."
"Yes, ma'am."
And so the old lady went right on calling Deirdre, Daisy, as the present made no impression on her whatever and it would take twenty years or more, with all the reminiscing Maisie had on her docket, before she caught up with Deirdre, or the sorry ruin presented to Daisy by the gardener's ardent son.