When the weather was bad and the children were kept indoors, I sat with them on the floor of Benjamin’s room, turning the glossy pages of a volume from his set of the Book of Knowledge. On drowsy afternoons as rain pattered against the windows or snow fell thickly, we mused over what we found explained and illustrated in these books. Commandingly, they scorned or accepted facts as they did food. When I thought of the numbed way in which I had swallowed the information fed me in school, it seemed comical to me that I bothered to argue with these children for whom dislike of something meant that it wasn’t so. She didn’t want the sky to be black forever and ever, Lisa exclaimed tearfully after I had read a long paragraph about the darkness of space. Benjamin pressed a page of the book between his fingers. A tree couldn’t be sliced thin enough to make paper, he asserted, crankily insisting I turn the page at once.

One evening, Mrs. Miller placed before me on the kitchen table a loosely-bound book. In its coarse paper, I could see actual slivers of wood. I started to call Benjamin, childishly gratified at the thought of confounding his stubbornness with proof of what we had read about the manufacture of paper. I suddenly perceived what I was looking at; it was not a photograph of random sticks of wood but of people peering between slats of a shed blotched with tar as black as the sockets of their eyes.

Mrs. Miller was staring at me fixedly. “Turn,” she said.

The next picture was of a pyramid of children’s bodies in front of which stood an American soldier, his hand on his forehead as though to shield his eyes.

“Belsen,” said Mrs. Miller, her voice barely audible.

Soon the newspapers were filled with photographs of death camps. At breakfast, the Millers read a newspaper thrown against the door each morning by a boy on a bicycle. In the evening, Mr. Miller brought home a late edition. It was a gray spring. The humid air carried a smell of earth into the house as the Millers sat silently, Mrs. Miller reading passages in the paper Mr. Miller passed across the table to her after he had marked them with his pen. Each evening, after I had gathered up the papers to put out with the garbage, I read what Mr. Miller had checked. A one-paragraph story caught my eye. It concerned a retired clockmaker who had undertaken to repair the bomb-damaged clock on a town hall in Germany. He had been drawn into the works and killed. There was no more than that.

The clock works must have been huge, must have started so violently, so suddenly into motion that they had begun to consume the old man before he realized what was happening to him. Perhaps the people of the town had gathered on the street below, looking up at the clock, waiting for a sign that it was working again. All the while the old man, caught in the wheels, was dying.

 

I felt obliged to return to the flat in the barrio. Papá was standing in the kitchen drinking coffee. He was moving, he said. He had found a room further uptown. “It’s only one room,” he noted as he wrote out the address. I would stay at the Millers’ on my night off, I said. He looked momentarily uneasy. “I didn’t intend to suggest you couldn’t visit,” he said.

I wanted to tell him that I didn’t care what he was suggesting but I only muttered that I had some clothes to pack.

“By the way,” he began softly. “Did you happen to see among Fefita’s things those two silver forks? You remember? I was fond of them. They seem to have disappeared. Carreno was a low type…I thought he might have—”

“—No,” I interrupted firmly. “I’ve not seen them.”

“Well, good luck then.”

“Can you tell me where Maura went?”

“I know nothing of that old bitch,” he replied.

I snatched up the scrap of paper with his address and started to leave the kitchen.

“Yes! That old bitch!” he repeated with ferocity.

“She was a comfort to Mamá.”

“She weakened her.”

I glanced at his polished shoes, his starched shirt. I thought of him alone, paying attention to himself, nursing his rage.

“These women who slink about the place,” he muttered.

We parted without saying good-bye.

I stopped at Mrs. Alegre’s flat on the second floor. She leaned against her door, an elderly woman with bald patches on her skull. She was drunk, and she smiled at me loosely and intimately. Maura hadn’t been able to find a room, she told me. Maybe she had gone to New Jersey. She’d turn up one of these days.

I walked quickly to the subway, oppressed by the barrio as though it still had some claim upon me. Maura had dropped into darkness. There was nothing left that mattered to me uptown except Ellen Dove, and she would soon be gone.

My father had brought us here, leaving behind him all that he’d disdained, Ofelia Mondragon, Malagita, his mother, so rich she could settle the question of who belonged in this world and who didn’t.

Let him have this waste of streets! One room would suit him. Without the grieving presence of my mother, he would have nothing to recall to him that he hadn’t made a choice, only evaded one.

 

In the heart of the winter, I abandoned my trips to New York. On my days off, I listened to the radio the Millers had given me for my birthday or, when the family was out, took a book from Mr. Miller’s shelves. Most of his books were about plant management—he was vice-president of a small company that made radio components—but there were a few novels, among them one about a poor Mexican community in California. I didn’t like it, but it aroused a new appetite in me. I went on to a long novel which I kept under my bed, the awareness of its presence drawing me through the day to the moment when I could close my door and read.

“How do you like Gone With the Wind?” Mr. Miller asked me one evening.

They had searched my room. I turned my back on his encouraging smile. Why did it matter to them what I read? My heart fluttered with apprehension. The book was all right, I said coldly. The next morning I replaced it on the shelf. It wasn’t until years later, after I had seen the movie which had been made from it, that I learned how the story ended.

I had liked finding my place in the evenings, reading until my eyes grew heavy. Like the heroine, I, too, fell in love with a man made unobtainable by his uprightness and perfection.

I wore Mrs. Miller’s discarded clothes. “Here’s a blouse that would look good on you,” she had said to me one morning. “It doesn’t suit me.” I wanted the blouse but I didn’t want to take it. She sensed that. “Don’t be silly,” she murmured. “Take what you can get.”

Occasionally, she gave me something new she had changed her mind about after wearing it a few times. “Too late to return it,” she would say lightly. I marvelled at such extravagance, and in time, I got over my reluctance to benefit from it.

She watched sharply over my work, holding up the shirts I ironed, looking through each window to make sure I’d not left cloudy patches, running her hands over the surfaces of tables. More and more she came to sit with me while I ate my meals in the kitchen, speaking to me of her worries about Lisa and Benjamin, about the people who were moving into a new apartment house a few blocks away, people, she said, who were “not like us.”

“Like me?” I asked.

She looked shocked. At my question? Had it balked some ritual unthinking movement of her mind?

“Oh, Luisa—you are like us!” She’d flushed at her lie.

Near the end of the time I worked for them, Mrs. Miller began to confide in me more intimately, but in such a roundabout way she might have been giving me instructions on the universal nature of man. “Their heads fill up with business,” she said. “They don’t grow up—they become competent.”

As though ashamed of these clues she gave me of regret and dissatisfaction, she was always more rigorous the next day in her attention to what I was doing; she would recite the day’s tasks to me as I stood in the kitchen, a recitation that had in it a touch of the dry, rebuking tone of a classroom.

I knew they were fond of me. I saw it in their faces—relief, too—when they returned from an evening out to find me drowsing in their living room, waiting up to tell them the children had eaten well—I always told them that—and had gone to sleep when they should have. It could only have been fondness of the narrowest sort. My life did not intrude upon them. I was a pair of hands, the household’s nurse.

I wasn’t ungrateful. I guessed that in the scale of things they treated me well. I was no harried girl hurrying through the night carrying leftovers to a mud hut. At some point, I told them my mother had been a servant, and yes, Malagita had been exotic—leaving them to put what meaning they would to that word. I kept to myself memories of an earthen-floored room flooded with moonlight and the scent of jasmine, a room utterly unlike any room of theirs, undefended against the outdoors by locks and jammed-down windows, where I had risen from my bed and taken only a few steps to find myself on an endless road, the mountain rising in the distance toward a vast sky, I whispered the Spanish words—jazmín, luz de la luna, campo, as fervently as Mamá had once said her rosary.

 

Mr. Miller’s company was diversifying, he said, and had bought a plant in Delaware where he would have to move himself and his family. Alarm at the coming change transformed the placid, uneventful days. The children shammed illness. They fought with each other until they fell exhausted into their beds. The Millers bowed to their tyranny, giving in to every whim as though to forbid them anything at all would bring down their house. It was not their children’s hatred they were so afraid of, I thought, but of their own of their children.

I saw my own fate fly ahead to Delaware joined forever with theirs. I couldn’t go with them. When I told them so, Mrs. Miller looked at me as though I’d broken her heart.

“The children,” she breathed, “they’ll suffer. They’re more attached to you than they are to my mother, their own grandma.”

“Mr. Miller said the house he found is very nice,” I told her. “The school is only a block away.”

“What does all that matter!” she cried with a passion that seemed to throw away her whole life.

“It matters,” I replied with sudden impatience. I retreated to my room.

When we said good-bye, when I stood by the front door with my suitcase among their packing cases, and I saw the distress and uncertainty on Mr. Miller’s face, my spirit quailed at all our unknown destinies.

“Luisa, what will you do now?” Mr. Miller asked sombrely.

“I’ll stay with a friend’s mother for a time,” I replied, “until I find a new job.”

“I’ve written a letter for you,” Mrs. Miller said. “You’ll need a reference.” I took the white envelope from her. Lisa wrapped her arms around me. She had grown so much, her head now rested on my chest. I bent down to kiss the snarled, curly hair that she had not allowed us to brush for days. I heard a wordless exclamation from Mrs. Miller. She looked at me a long time, then bent her head forward until her cheek rested against mine. “We’ll miss you,” she said.

She told me she’d written down their new address and put it in with the reference. “You’ll write to us?” I nodded. I walked down the cement path, turning once to look back. The children were watching me, each standing in front of the narrow window on either side of the door. I knew I would not see them again.

On the train to the city, I read the letter. It said I was dependable, responsible, honest, and competent. It said I had worked as a maid for two years and never given cause for complaint, and that I was very understanding with children. It recommended me highly. It was the first good report card I’d gotten.

 

“Where are you staying?” Papá asked me.

“With Ellen Dove’s mother. I can stay there until I get a job.”

The room he had found for himself faced the west as had the hospital waiting room. He was a changed man from the one I had seen the night Mamá had died; he had put on weight, there was faint color on his cheeks although that may have been only the reflected glow from the setting sun. The window glass looked liquid, a down-running watery trembling. The giant letters on the Jersey shore, Jack Frost Sugar, suddenly lit up.

In a corner stood a carefully made-up cot, a light blanket wrapped around its thin mattress like a bandage. On one of two pegs near the door there was a hanger with a dark blue jacket, the one he wore to work. A cup drained on a small counter. The old armchair was pulled close to the window. Within reach of it stood a large record-playing machine, its doors open, revealing the spines of albums of music.

Papá had left everything of our barrio life behind him. This is what he had always wanted, this bare, clean room. I felt a grudging sympathy.

“Do you need money?” he asked, lifting the top of the record-player and peering into it.

“I’ve saved…I don’t need any.”

“I’m sorry you have no formal training.” He glanced at me, then quickly away.

“But I have.”

“Maid’s training,” he said.

“I prefer it.”

“Do you?” He lifted the arm of the player and lowered it carefully. When he looked back at me, I thought I saw a glimmer of interest in his face.

“It’s my fault,” he said. “If I had taken care of my life, if I’d been firm and seen to things…”

“I’ve been to see Uncle Federico,” I said. “I thought he might know of work.”

Papá gestured toward the window. “I’ve grown fond of that sign,” he said, then added ironically, “After all, is it any less grand than the pyramids of Egypt?”

“He says he’ll ask for work for me among the restaurant clients,” I spoke deliberately as if to a child.

“He’s too dim-witted to be able to help you,” Papá stated.

“He helped you, and Maura.”

“He opened the kitchen door and Maura ran in like a rat, and like a rat, ran out again.”

Sweat suddenly broke out on my forehead. “You’re so cruel,” I said in such a low voice I wasn’t sure he heard me.

“You don’t understand,” he said quietly. “I can see that. You don’t realize that I’m sorry. I’ve learned you can’t do much about anyone’s life. Not your own either. One is carried along, stranded here or there. One day, you find yourself stranded in a place you want to be. That’s all. Accident, chance, luck. I have a little money now. Like you, I’ve saved. You can have some of it. It might help you to become stranded in a place you’d be happier in.”

The room had grown dark. It looked smudged, less clean, too empty. I tried to form words, to say—thank you. My lips were frozen. His offer tasted bitter to me, not water but some medicine for thirst.

In the voice of his new, strange serenity, he said again, “I’m sorry,” and he leaned toward the record player and took an album from the shelf.

As I closed his door and went down the hall, I heard music, a woman’s voice singing, heavy, languorous, in a language I didn’t recognize.

 

“That isn’t what I’d wear for an interview, Luisa,” Mrs. Dove said tentatively. “It’s not the right thing.”

I glanced down at the rough tweed skirt of a suit Mrs. Miller had given me. The shoulders were too tight but it fitted me well enough, I had thought.

“You look very nice,” she said, “but the woman you’re going to see might get the wrong idea.”

She wanted to let it rest at that with no further explanation. I started to take our breakfast dishes from the table. She took them from my hands, saying, “I’ll do that. Save your strength.”

During the week I had spent with her, she had treated me with a distant religious benevolence, a formality, that had enlarged the small rooms. Even about the tweed suit, I thought I had heard a devout note. Once I had seen her disheveled by anguish. She had recovered herself, yet as though the convulsion of her sorrow at Thad’s death was still rocking below the surface, there was a kind of disarrangement about her. There was a look of absence on her face, her gloves were soiled, strands of hair escaped the pins she pushed so sternly into the knot of hair at her neck. She ate her meals as though it was a hard and hopeless duty.

I glanced at the scrap of paper on which Mrs. Dove’s Madam had written the name of the woman I was to be interviewed by, an actress and grandniece of hers. I would have to leave or I would be late. As I started toward the door, Mrs. Dove called out, “Wait!”

I paused. She was uncapping a tube of cream and rubbing it into her hands. I could smell almonds. When she looked at me, her face was transformed by a knowing, derisive smile. She held up her glistening hands and waved them. “You’re a young white girl. They’ll see you different from how they see me—but not so different as you might think. You’re looking for servant’s work. Don’t push clothes like that in front of their eyes.”

“The woman I worked for gave me this suit,” I protested.

“To wear out of her sight,” declared Mrs. Dove.

I changed my clothes and put on an old wool skirt Mamá had made for me, and a brown cotton shirt. As I walked past her to the door, Mrs. Dove reached out and caught my hand, holding it a minute.

“Disguises,” she said. “You recall my boy’s joke about disguises? Although you can’t live if you’re not seen plain by someone. I believe God sees me plain. I don’t care about anything else. I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings.” She released my hand. “You’ll be all right,” she said. She was the only person who had not questioned my decision about becoming a servant. I wondered about that.

 

Eloise Grant from Hollywood, in New York to act in a play, asked me if I had seen her in the movies. I looked covertly around the living room of the apartment she had explained she had sublet, a room in which the entire Miller house could have fitted. I saw huge locked cabinets black with layers of wax, scuffed leather couches and armchairs resting on an enormous stained rug. On the wall hung a gilt-framed mirror in whose murky, dusty depths, I thought I saw storm clouds forming. In what way could such a place be made what Mrs. Miller had liked to call “shipshape”?

Miss Grant, smiling, awaited my answer.

“No,” I blurted out.

She laughed. “One in a million,” she said. “That’s cute.”

“I don’t go to movies often,” I explained, somewhat abashed.

“Don’t worry about it. I’m not vain. I don’t know what my great-aunt told you. But I’m strictly temporary. Plays die suddenly like people. The second it closes, that’s it, and I’m off to the coast.” She paused and scowled at a dark oil painting of a man on his knees praying to a skull. “Just the place to have a crack-up,” she said. Had I been hired?

“Please call me Eloise,” she said.

I called her Miss Grant. At her frequent parties, I wore the short black uniform with a white starched apron she had bought for me. In the top button of the uniform, just below my chin, she would place a red rosebud. The bartenders were out-of-work actors, slender, radiant young men who closely observed the male guests and who often complimented me on my hair, my figure, even my legs; their impish smiles meant to tell me not to take what they said to heart.

In the mornings, Miss Grant made up her face while her first cigarette of the day burned down in an ashtray on the dressing table, her own, she explained to me, which she’d had shipped to New York from Hollywood. “When I look into that particular mirror,” she avowed, “I know exactly where I am.”

She would throw down her mascara brush and walk naked around the huge apartment, make phone calls, drink coffee, suddenly fling herself onto the sofa and grab up one of the dozens of magazines she sent me out to buy. I lined up her beautiful shoes in rows in her closet. They had been made by hand in colors she taught me to name, fawn, apple green, oxblood, cerise, French blue. “They have destroyed my poor tootsies,” she said complacently.

She was usually asleep when I arrived. The silent apartment was brooding, smelling of the brandy-soaked fruit Miss Grant loved to eat and had delivered to her from some fancy food store, perhaps the very one where my father worked. Several times, I found evidence that a man had spent the night, the butt of a cigar, or on a table, extra glasses and plates on which the rich decay lingered of a meal sent up from a nearby delicatessen, and once a raincoat dropped over the back of a chair, its sleeves touching the floor. I left it there. It was gone by the time I started vacuuming.

Maura had made up her face as though it was a photograph she was tinting. Miss Grant studied herself a long time. With a slow, steady hand, she would transform her rather plain features into those of a woman who looked like a model in a magazine advertisement. Her distinction was her forehead, exceptionally high, white and unlined, a dome, below which her face went about its work of expressing the impulses that struck her continually. Her face throbbed like a heart. Above it rose the cool-looking lifeless forehead like the shell of an egg.

Her play ran for nine months. A few weeks after it closed, she packed her crocodile suitcases, her steamer trunk that opened like a great book, and returned to Hollywood, leaving me with two nearly empty bottles of French perfume, a cream-colored, watered-silk affair she had called a cocktail dress with an enormous artificial flower at its neckline, and a different view of the uses of money than I had learned from the Millers.

In the furnished room on 125th Street, a block or so from Riverside Drive where I had moved a few days after I began to work for Miss Grant, I tried on the dress. Its sleeves reached just below my elbows; its hem stopped several inches above my knees. I bundled it up, intending to throw it away. Instead, I kept it for months until its useless beauty oppressed me so much, I put it in the garbage one morning on my way out to work. Its intimation of glamour had faded away like the magic of a charm invoked too often, too frivolously, and not meant for me in any case.

Miss Grant had given me an introduction to a business woman, an old friend of hers, whose small apartment on the east side I cleaned once a week, ironing her blouses and handkerchiefs in the morning, sweeping and dusting in the afternoon. From Miss Doris Mathes, whom I saw twice, once to be interviewed, once when a severe cold kept her at home, I had gotten another job, two days cleaning and occasional help with dinner parties, with the Geldens, a middle-aged couple who were acquaintances of hers.

I shopped for my employers, occasionally served meals, changed their linen, got to know dry cleaners and Chinese laundrymen, took telephone messages, played their radios, poured Lysol into their toilet bowls, and from their soiled sheets and plates, their wastebaskets and garbage cans, found traces of their human passage through the nights and days from which I was able to deduce their habits, their pleasures and aversions, even their pretentions. Rising to their apartments in the service elevators to which I was ordered by doormen, I felt the kind of repose that comes, I imagined, during the recovery from a long illness.

When I had gone to see Uncle Federico to ask him if he knew of any work for me, he had told me the final news of Nana’s fate had not been determined, that it was only realistic to assume she was dead.

Although he blustered and boasted about his ability to find a job for me, I guessed nothing would come of it. I asked him if he had ever heard from Maura. She had not told me why she had left the employ of the Salamanca. He shook his head and shrugged. “These people,” he said, “they don’t fit in. Of the village. Do you understand? They have the habits of village life. Miss Cruz was like a Red Indian in the kitchen.”

I observed that she had been born in Havana and had grown up there.

“Compared to the great city we live in,” he said, smiling tolerantly, “Havana itself is a mere village.”

Before I left, Federico thrust a silver-framed photograph of Atilio toward me. I could see that he was no longer plump but lean and handsome in a brutal way. He was attending classes in a special technical school, Uncle Federico related, the fees all paid for by the government. “Microelectronics,” he pronounced voluptuously, gazing up at the ceiling. “A new field, Luisita, the most important of all. Do you know of transistors?”

“Tell her about the marriage,” urged Aunt Aurelia.

“Yes, yes. The marriage. To an American girl. Do you recall my speaking of the priest who dines at the Salamanca? The one whose car I bought years ago? It is his niece, a good Catholic girl, of course, and Irish, very beautiful—”

“—pretty,” interrupted Aurelia.

I imagined Atilio ascending the long body of an American girl, pressing his stinging, heated flesh against her like a mustard plaster. They invited me to come to the wedding. I said I’d try, knowing I wouldn’t. “Mira!” Aurelia cried out to me, running heavily up the hall as I was about to leave. She was carrying a lavender silk dress in her arms, cradling it like an infant.

“The Mamá’s wedding gown,” she murmured raptly. She hardly took notice of my admiring words or the slow closing of the door.

My work, done and every day undone—was the dull, mechanical movement of a treadle. I dreamed of another life. I wondered if I had become the ghost of the plantation, if the people of the village, walking along the dirt roads at twilight, gazing up at the slowly darkening sky, would, sensing my presence, shiver and retreat indoors. Yet it was the very monotony of my servant’s life that freed me to return in my thoughts to Malagita.

“I have allergies. See to the dust on the Venetian blind slats,” Miss Mathes wrote in one of her curt notes. Another said: “I like things to be streamlined. Make hospital corners on the bed.” Streamlined, I muttered, a new intrusive word which evoked moving metal parts, trains or airplanes, but not her dingy little apartment, its floors hidden by a brown carpet the color of dried mud.

Dwight Gelden, the plump, eleven-year-old son of the Geldens, let himself in with his key after school and delivered his mother’s messages to me. “Ma says clean the refrigerator today,” he told me. Wherever I worked, he found a seat from which to observe me. In one hand he carried a book, his finger serving as a marker. In the other, he carried food. He ate steadily until his mother came home from the adoption agency where she worked. When we heard her key in the door, Dwight stuffed his cheeks and fled to the bathroom.

“Where is he?” she would demand. “Eating? In the bathroom?”

When Dwight emerged, flushed and furtive-looking, she would smile. “Did you perform well in your history test?” she might ask him.

The cold, finicking fashion with which she behaved toward me roused up a desire to go against her. I deliberately misplaced objects or left undone small tasks. On one occasion, the powerful maternal ambition she felt toward Dwight burst forth from her. “He performed beautifully last night at the dinner party,” she said as I was putting away the housedress I wore to clean. She seemed to wait for my confirmation as if, while I had been serving the meal, I had observed only her son.

One afternoon, I discovered a comic book hidden beneath Dwight’s mattress. As I stood there holding it, I heard a movement at the bedroom door. Dwight was standing at the threshold, staring at me, his round, dimpled fists pressed against his belly, panic on his face. As he watched me silently, I put the comic book back where I’d found it.

 

In winter I went to work and returned home in darkness. The brief cold days, the cloud-webbed skies through which on rare occasions the pale winter sun slid, helped to enclose me in my labor. I ate my supper standing up at the sink. I washed my clothes and hung them to dry on a cord I’d stretched across the small bathtub, and I washed hurriedly, seldom glancing in the mirror which hung above one narrow shelf. It held a bottle of aspirin, a tube of Tangee lipstick, and a can of Mavis talcum powder. I didn’t use the talcum. I sniffed it because it evoked, not Maura, who had covered herself with it from her neck to her feet, but Mamá watching her, absently smiling and clutching her bathrobe around herself as a shower of powder fell through the air.

When the days grew longer, when daylight lingered in the sky as I walked up the slope of 125th Street to the large tenement where I lived, I was afraid of the hours that would have to pass before darkness would descend. Darkness and cold had made me a shelter. It was blowing away.

I went to the movies or took long walks along the Drive and Broadway, often not returning to my room until past midnight. The fixed lines of routine were dissolving in the growing warmth which brought a pale green haze to the park beside the river. I strained to comprehend the commotion of my spirit. I felt against my face the damp, light spring wind. It was like a voice speaking indistinctly in a room to which I couldn’t find a door. A dull, intermittent grief for those gone forever was pressed aside by a sharp fresh grief—but for what? Standing on the Drive, I looked across the Hudson at the huge inclines and peaks of an amusement park roller coaster, an illegible scrawl against the sky. I saw the Jack Frost Sugar sign go on like an expelled breath of light. Was my father standing at his window, listening to his music, seeing what I was seeing?

I felt faint and leaned forward to support myself against the stone wall which separated the sidewalk from the narrow park which sloped to the river. Where had Maura gone among the miles of streets? I gasped at the suddenness with which a longing for Mamá’s presence took hold of me. For a second, I thought I heard myself call out for her.

I couldn’t sleep. As I lay in my bed, my legs twitching with exhaustion, an enormous idea came to me, so thrilling that I rose and fled to the window to press my face against the glass already cool with morning.

I would return to San Pedro. I would save money. From now on, I would live like a nun. I would work on weekends, at night, anytime anyone wanted me. No more wandering through the streets where peddlers parked their barrows of damaged sheets and cheap sweaters. A nun didn’t need such things.

Jaded, clammy with fatigue, I washed the slats of Miss Mathes’ Venetian blinds. The grime I rinsed from them settled beneath my fingernails. It didn’t matter. It was a token of my intention.

I always needed money. My clothes were a jumble of barrow bargains and hand-outs from my employers. I would manage. I took a discarded mayonnaise jar home from the Geldens. I washed it and dried it and put it beneath my bed. At the end of two months, I had collected three dollars in it.

My exhilaration passed. It would take years to save enough for my passage to San Pedro. But a possibility had taken root in my mind. My life was touched with a difference.

In May, I found a letter from Ellen Dove in my mailbox. She had tracked me down through her mother to Eloise Grant. It had been months, she wrote, and she wanted so much to see me. I went out at once to a public telephone on Broadway and dialed the number she had written down. “Not here,” a voice said crankily. I went back to my room and waited as long as I could bear to. On the fifth try, I reached Ellen. The fourth time I’d called, an angry female voice had shouted, “Get outa my face! You think I got nothing to do but answer this fucking phone?”

“Hello,” said Ellen’s familiar voice.

“It’s me, Luisa,” I said so weakly that she cried out my name twice. “It’s all right,” I croaked. “Just that—I’m so glad.”

The next Saturday, I went to an address off Amsterdam on 143d Street, to a brownstone house with a high, weathered stoop. Ellen opened the door to me. We embraced like two people who had thought they’d lost each other forever while the landlady, an enormous Negro woman, stood down the hall and watched us, her expression unreadable.

“I told her you were Spanish but all she sees is white,” Ellen whispered as we went up the stairs to her tiny room. Later, she told me the woman had been a famous blues singer in her day but that arthritis had crippled her so she couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs. There were other boarders besides Ellen in the house; everyone pitched in to clean the upper floors and shop for the landlady.

She was thinner than I’d ever seen her. Her face had the starved look of someone who never gets enough sleep.

“I hardly see Momma,” she told me. “I have so much to do. She was angry with me for a long time. It’s better now. Last week, she even talked about Thad. She said despair was the greatest sin and she was committing it every day. She looked at me like I could tell her what to do.”

I saw Ellen whenever she had time left over from her classes and studying. One evening, as I started upstairs to her room, I glimpsed the landlady, who had grudgingly let me in, through the open door of her room. There was music coming from a radio standing on a table next to an empty liquor bottle. She swayed and stepped forward, then backward, shifting sideways liquidly, her huge body keeping exact time to the music.

Ellen didn’t ask me about my jobs. It was as if I had a sickness about which it would be indelicate to speak. We talked about her work. I watched her face more than I listened to her words as though I might learn from the intensity of feeling that gave her eyes such a light what it was that drove her so.

She urged me to come to a gathering—not exactly a meeting, she said—of some friends and classmates of hers. Most of them were students at City College, and they met every few weeks, when they could, to speak of things important to them.

“Now don’t always say no,” she begged.

“I don’t,” I protested.

“Will you come?”

“All right.”

She laughed and snapped her fingers. “Good!” she cried. “I’ll get you yet!”

I don’t recall much of what was talked about in the room of the Negro student, Julian. I sat on the floor among the others; there were eleven of them, men and women, most of them Negroes. I could feel their consciousness of my presence in the determined way they avoided looking at me. But I stared at them, at their hands and clothes, the way they smoked their cigarettes. Julian gestured fiercely. Negro factory workers, welcomed during the war into industry everywhere in the country, were being dropped back into the pits of American life, he said. Ellen watched him as though he were speaking only to her.

I went to other such evenings; it was really Ellen I came to see in the various rooms we met in where people struggled to change their lives with speeches. But perhaps, because the charged atmosphere of those hours—intermittently crackling with talk that went off like a string of firecrackers lit and flung into the quiet of a hot, still summer evening—was so unlike that of my subterranean days, I began to look forward to them. People greeted me, although distantly. I remained anonymous as I did during a dinner party where I served guests and later heard the murmur of their conversation from the dining room while I plunged my hands into soapy water and washed up the dishes. Julian never spoke to me.

“I’m involved with him,” Ellen told me in a severe voice. More softly, she added, “Sometimes I forget Thad.”

I waited, afraid she would say more, afraid she wouldn’t. I made an effort not to stare at her narrow bed with its worn chenille coverlet.

“It’s not what I imagined,” she said. “It’s more terrible. But better, too.” She laughed suddenly. “Don’t say anything,” she said.

She didn’t refer to Julian in any special way again. I watched for signs of pregnancy. I asked her, “Aren’t you afraid?” when she was speaking about Mrs. Dove’s failing health. She frowned. “God, yes. What’s going to happen if she gets seriously sick?”

Poor people, she went on, had no reserve of money for sickness. For an instant, I thought I heard a note of gratification in her voice, almost of triumph.

“I meant pregnant,” I said. “Don’t you worry about that?”

“Haven’t you ever heard of contraception?” she asked irritably. Before I could reply, she began telling me about a program she had learned about at New York University for minority students that provided complete tuition. With a busy, fussy insistence, her hands gripped in her lap, she seemed to be burying my question beneath stones. Sometimes Ellen was poisoned with information.

Several weeks later, despite my resolve not to bring up Julian, even indirectly, I found myself asking her if she was going to marry him.

“You’re such a little girl!” she said angrily. Then she cried, wiping away her tears with her knuckles. “I didn’t mean that,” she said, her voice quavering. “It was unfair. But you want me to tell you something I can’t tell you. Nobody can tell you.”

Maura had said something like that, too.

 

There were no more gatherings during the summer. Ellen got a job working in the kitchen of a resort hotel in upstate New York, and I didn’t see her until the fall. By then Eloise Grant had left New York and I was looking for more work. When I found a day’s job with an old couple on Central Park West, I had to change my other days around. Miss Mathes didn’t care what day I came, but Mrs. Gelden was affronted.

“We can’t reorder our lives at a moment’s notice,” she said. “Just for your convenience.”

Did she really believe it was a matter of convenience? Her dark eyes were narrowed with resentment. Her hair in its tight knot drew her skin up toward her forehead.

“We’re due some consideration,” she went on. “There’s Dwight. He expects you on Fridays. It will disturb him, such a change, even though, of course, he’s such a well-adjusted boy. I’ve never asked you to do woodwork. A child must have consistency. Now I have to ask Professor Stevens to give him his music lesson on a different day. Then the Professor will have to change his entire schedule, I’m sure. I can’t have Dwight coming home to an empty apartment. Mr. Gelden can’t possibly send his shirts to the laundry. He expects them to be ironed on Fridays. The starch those laundries use gives him a rash. You know how delicate his health is. If there are too many shirts for you to iron—”

I couldn’t stand it. “I need the work,” I interrupted, raising my voice. “Miss Eloise Grant left the city and I have to fill that day now.”

“Eloise Grant, the actress?” she asked in surprise. “I didn’t know you worked for her. You didn’t tell me that.” She looked at me with a certain interest. When she spoke again, her voice had softened somewhat although there was always something metallic, hard, about it. “I can’t see why that couple has to have you Fridays. You said they’re home all the time.”

“Their daughter’s job takes her out of town that day,” I explained. “They’re both very frail. She doesn’t want them to be alone when she’s out of reach.”

She sniffed and went to her closet to get her coat.

“Well,” she said, sighing, shutting her pocketbook with a snap. “I suppose we’ll just have to work it out.”

After she left, I seized the dustmop and dusting cloths. Like Ellen, I had my lessons to learn. A servant can disrupt the order of her employer’s life only in dire emergencies, but it is her own connivance in bringing them about that is the accusation made against her. A servant’s face must be blank. I shouldn’t have shouted at her and let her hear my private voice.

I didn’t eat the soup she had left me but went out to a cafeteria nearby. Sitting there in a booth, at midday, I suddenly imagined myself to be a person who could go into coffee shops when she felt like it, whose afternoons belonged to her, who had money in her pocketbook and could stroll along streets boisterous with autumn wind and bright with sunlight.

 

Ellen and her friends were to hold their first fall meeting on the ground floor of an apartment house on Morningside Heights. I stood for a few moments outside the yellow brick building looking out over Harlem. I felt a powerful disinclination to see her and the others, particularly Julian. They came together out of a sense of common experience and purpose; their anger could speak. These embattled few had each other. Because Ellen had asked me to, I had taken home with me, each time I had come, a few mimeographed sheets stapled together, their newspaper, and I had tried to read the accounts of administrative neglect of Negro students, their persecution by teachers, advice on what recourse they had, and sometimes a short poem of lament and angry resolution. My mind had wandered; I had remembered the rough pink sheets of songs Mamá had so prized and Papá had so scorned.

To please Ellen, I had come tonight. I didn’t think I would come again. As I stood there watching the dark fill up the eastern sky, I heard laughter and turned to look through the window of the apartment. I saw Ellen in a dimly lit room, Julian standing next to her. A white man was speaking, one hand holding a cigarette and gesturing. He was older than the others. I could just make out his light hair, his high, narrow forehead. Ellen was listening, but Julian’s head was bent over his pipe. He was scraping it out with a small knife whose blade shone as he turned it violently to and fro. Sometimes the man looked down. I guessed someone sitting on the floor had spoken to him or asked a question. People often sat on the floor, even when there were plenty of chairs.

He looked through the window and saw me. Ellen, following the direction of his glance, began to wave. Reluctantly, I went in.

In the room, people were moving about and talking. I had missed Mr. Greer’s talk, Ellen told me reproachfully, and she knew it would have been especially interesting to me. He had been auditing a class she took on constitutional law, and she and he had become acquainted. She’d asked him to come and speak to the group. I didn’t pay attention to what she said. I was looking at Mr. Greer’s mouth, his thin blonde hair that curled around his ears, and the tweed suit he was wearing, not unlike the tweed of the suit Mrs. Miller had given me and which I had rehemmed yesterday evening. She took my arm and led me to him. “Tom, this is my friend, Luisa de la Cueva. Tom has been living in Ecuador this past year,” she said, turning to me. “He’s written a book on American business interests there and what they’re up to.”

“It isn’t finished,” Greer said quickly. It isn’t finished, I repeated silently, trying to name to myself the quality of his voice.

“Luisa grew up on a sugar plantation,” Ellen went on. “She knows all about Yankee exploitation.”

“The plantation was owned by a Spanish lady,” I said.

“I’d be interested to hear about it,” he said, looking at me steadily. There was a kind of roar from Julian in which I could make out Ellen’s name. She went to him at once.

“Are you a student?” Mr. Greer asked.

“I’m a maid.”

He was silent so long, I wondered if I’d managed to end our conversation and should move on.

“Temporary?” he asked at last.

I laughed without knowing why. “I don’t think so,” I replied. “But you’re not a student,” I added boldly.

“I’ve been one here and there,” he said.

What could he mean? Here and there—the wide-ranging world. In one swoop, he had claimed learning and dismissed it. I grew aware that I was leaning toward him; I saw a slight flaring of surprise on his face. I moved a step away. I tried to repress the smile I could feel forming on my lips, tried to look at him sternly like a person with strong, ready convictions.

“The book I’m writing,” he began, his unblinking eyes fixed on my face so closely, I felt he could detect the faintest involuntary movements of my flesh, “actually, it’s a study of cocoa plantations. But I’d like to hear, very much like to hear about sugar cane. How it was in Cuba. It was Cuba?”

I shook my head. “San Pedro,” I said, and at his blank look, added, “It’s a little island. But not at all—” I broke off and looked at Julian across the room. “It wasn’t the way they talk here—my life.”

“That’s what I would be interested in,” he said. “The human side. I can make up my own rhetoric.”

He waited. Speech abandoned me. He touched my hand lightly. I heard only dimly the voices of other people. “Could I telephone you?” he asked.

“I don’t have a telephone,” I said.

“I have,” he said. He took a pencil and a notepad from a jacket pocket and wrote down a number, carefully tore out the page and held it out to me. When I continued to stand there motionless, he reached out and took my hand and closed it around the paper. His skin was dry and warm.

“Were you standing out there on the sidewalk a long time?” he asked gravely.

“I think so.”

“Are you going to call me?”

“Yes,” I said. His hand dropped away. A man from a group which had been speaking together nearby approached him with a self-important scowl, his mouth opening in anticipation of whatever he was going to say. “Yes,” I said again.

“Hasta luego,” whispered Mr. Greer.

 

After several weeks had passed, I couldn’t recall the words of my brief exchange with Tom Greer, remembering only that he had said something to me in Spanish, a commonplace phrase his whisper had made eloquent. His features grew less distinct although there were moments which took me by surprise when I could see clearly his thin, rather childishly curling light hair and the narrowness of his skull, and the way he had held it, poised and motionless, as an animal does when it raises its head to listen—an antelope or a fox—alerted by some sound.

I had no reason to telephone him. I imagined having to remind him of where we had met, my voice faltering.

Yet the emotion I had felt in his presence would not leave me; it had enveloped me like the garment of a religious order, both a material thing and an emblem of unearthly things—just as, when he had leaned toward me, speaking, he had been so densely there yet intimating, beyond that room, a world not known to me. When his hand had enclosed mine, he had seemed to gather me up entirely.

One morning the urgent desire to see him again died away. I worked that day with a light heart. But at night when I lay down in my bed and turned out the light, I was overcome by such anxious, bitter loneliness that I cried out.

I would have to call him. He had asked me to. It was only a telephone call. It was nothing. I would hear his voice and then I would be all right again. I would do it in the morning. Nothing would come of a phone call. I got up and turned on the light and walked about. The bed was barely disarranged; my room held little. There was no human brightness in the room, only an indifferently wrought order. I have been ill, I thought. This long meditation on Thomas Greer has made me ill.

Just after seven o’clock the next morning, I stopped at a public telephone booth on Broadway, the same one from which I had called Ellen months ago. I knew I had only enough courage for one attempt. If he answered, I would simply remind him he had asked me to call. Or I might inquire after his book.

I didn’t know what I would ask him. I entered the booth wondering fleetingly if I would have felt such apprehension if I had ever entered a confessional box. I knew his number by heart and I dialed it. He answered at the third ring.

“Hello,” Mr. Greer said.

“This is Luisa de la Cueva.”

“I’d nearly given up hope,” he said.

I could tell by his voice that I had waked him. He must be lying in bed, the bed linen crumpled around him.

“So had I,” I said. I had to lean against the booth, such was the wave of joy, of hope, that washed over me.

 

Until I saw Thomas Greer through the apartment house window, I had not thought of my life ahead but always of a place and a time lost long ago, when the bounty of life had been charged with unreasoned meaning and where spirit had not been severed from body.

I told Tom the story of my life. I sat at the foot of our bed. He lay against the pillow, one leg extended toward me, the other bent, a sheet draped across his belly and groin. The lamp light shone on his raised thigh and its thin covering of fair hair, on the bones of his kneecap. I held his foot in my hand. Sometimes I leaned forward and rested my head against his leg. His hand caressed my face and hair. “Nana’s hair grew like a scallop shell,” I said.

Astounded, I traced the passage that had led me to him. All was chance, Papá had said. If Ellen’s mother had been able to afford the Catholic school tuition, I would never have met her. If he had not been writing an article on constitutional law, he wouldn’t have gone to Ellen’s class at the university. Chance! I pressed my face against his pale skin. How could it have been chance?

He told me about himself, suddenly, abruptly, stories that were like secrets rashly offered, as we were coming home from a movie, or drinking coffee in a grill. The names of places and people often changed in his recitals. I might have questioned him, reminded him that the other week he had said he’d lived in Oregon during the first years of his life, not Washington, that he’d described his father as a sheep rancher, not a farmer, that an ulcer, not rheumatic fever, had kept him out of the army, but although I was puzzled, I came to believe that the inconsistencies in his telling were simply a reflection of the hard, bitter life he had led.

A life could not be tried. I gathered up his sorrowful, lonely years and learned them, freeing myself from any belief that depended on mere names and dates.

When I came home before he did, I looked at all the places where we had made love and had talked, and I said his name aloud to myself. Later, it seemed to me, we had held one long uninterrupted conversation the first year we lived together. My desire for his presence often had in it the shock of physical pain. I didn’t know how much more severe it was going to get and I held my breath, knowing nothing could stop it.

Sometimes he would ask me—even though I’d told him many times—how long I’d stood out there on the sidewalk before I’d come into the room where Ellen’s meeting had been taking place, and I saw that my strangeness, when I’d still been an unknown woman, continued to hold mystery for him.

“But you were thinking of not coming in at all, weren’t you?” he asked.

“Yes. I didn’t really want to.”

He put his arms around me and slid his fingers through my hair and pressed my face against his neck. “And then you did,” he said.

 

In 1949, we drove to a small town in Pennsylvania and were married by a Justice of the Peace. A few weeks later, when I could no longer bear the troubling sense of something left undone, I sent a note to my father telling him of my marriage. As I wrote, my scalp prickled faintly. When I had mailed the letter, when it slid away beyond my reach, I felt I’d given away my location to an enemy. His acknowledgment arrived a month later—an insured, carefully wrapped package containing a thick album of records, his wedding present to us. “Wagner!” exclaimed Tom, laughing. When I looked at him, not comprehending, he said, “A Nazi favorite.” I put the album away, holding it gingerly—a joke shared by two men who didn’t know each other.

Tom didn’t finish his book on the cocoa plantations of Ecuador but we carried the manuscript with us wherever we moved. The pages yellowed, the box they were in filled up with crumbling rubber bands. For a while, I continued to work. Tom wrote articles and sold a few. When he was paid, the money astonished me, the amount seemed so immense. He wanted me to quit domestic work, saying I could get a job as a salesgirl or a receptionist in an office. Although I wanted to give way to him in all things, I refused.

“Why?” he demanded.

“We need the money.”

“You’re not answering me.”

“It’s easy work for me. And I don’t have the clothes for the kinds of jobs you’re talking about.”

“We can manage some clothes.”

“But it won’t be for long, just until you—”

“I don’t understand you,” he interrupted. “Who wants to be a domestic if they can be something else?”

“Maybe that’s why. Because I can’t be anything else.”

“You won’t try,” he said. He looked grim. I said no more. I couldn’t. My thoughts were turbulent, inchoate. The brief exchange we had had stirred only the surface of my refusal. I sensed, as I imagined he had, a shapeless lump of obduracy in myself. But I could not lift it up into light. He didn’t talk about it again. And as it turned out, shortly after that conversation he got a regular job on a company magazine published by a large coffee importing business.

Miss Mathes left me an extra week’s pay and a brief note that wished me good luck. But Mrs. Gelden complained bitterly that my two weeks notice barely gave her time to find someone sensitive enough to understand her family’s needs. Was that what I had been, I wondered? She was wearing a blouse I had pressed. What an odd, awful creature she was! I felt a flash of sympathy for her, that beleaguered general, guiding her wretched army, a sickly man, a fat, unlovely boy through the dangerous world. The Birnbaums, the elderly couple on Central Park West, seemed genuinely to regret my leaving, although it was only Mrs. Birnbaum who could say so. Mr. Birnbaum was, as his old wife said, ga-ga by then and bedridden. “You’ve been good to us,” she said, clasping my hand in hers. They were soft as cotton and covered with the baby powder I had always bought for her at a neighborhood drugstore. “Age is the biggest surprise,” she said.

Tom and I lived for several months in a borrowed apartment that belonged to a wealthy acquaintance of Tom’s, Howard Thursby. Then we rented an apartment a block from Riverside Drive on the top floor of a house. It had once been the servant’s quarters, the landlord told us. There was a fireplace in the living room; one of the small bedrooms had been converted into a kitchen. I was mad with happiness the first day we moved in. Tom bought a few small logs from a florist’s shop, and we made a fire and sat in the living room among our few pieces of furniture. I’d been granted a new life.

One night, Tom brought Howard Thursby home for supper. I’d not met him before, and I was startled by his ragged raincoat, his dirty tennis shoes. I listened silently to them talking during supper, and after I had washed the dishes, I went to the bedroom and began to look through Tom’s magazine. Thursby came and stood in the doorway and smiled at me. “What big eyes you have, Grandma,” he said.

How agreeable the conversation of men was at a distance! I lay there, dozing, the magazine falling to the floor. Later, I heard the front door close then Tom calling me. I went out to him, smiling.

“Why did you leave?” he asked. “You acted like a maid.”

I began to gather up glasses and ashtrays, unable to answer him. Why had I left? Men were supposed to be left alone together.

“Stop cleaning up,” he demanded. He took a glass from my hand. “You’re not the maid,” he said patiently. I began to cry and he began to laugh. He shook me. He removed the pins from the coil of hair at my neck. In haste, we undressed. But there was no freedom, no repose in lovemaking for me that night. I was imprisoned in an inner darkness; I was trying to grasp hold of that elusive presence that ordered me to do this or that. My body grew weary. I was glad when love was done with.

We began to quarrel. Tom told me to stop buying such cheap cuts of meat—most of the time, he complained, he didn’t know what the hell he was eating—and I must buy myself some clothes in a good store, not those holes on Broadway. Where had I managed to find that terrible lamp with the silk fringe? It was like the one Ellen’s mother, Mrs. Dove had, I told him. It was time we invited people to dinner, he said.

I wondered why the lamp was terrible. I shuddered as I recalled the pink armchair Mamá had bought for Papá. I set myself the task of trying to learn a different way of seeing.

Ellen visited us several times. There was something wrong about our evenings together, a false ease, an intimacy that vanished in a moment of silence. Was there irony in the way she looked at me, at Tom, at the apartment? He behaved toward her with rough camaraderie that seemed immoderate. I was relieved that she was too busy to visit often.

Tom brought home a woman from his office, Gina Cohen. A stale odor of powder, a rich, throat-tightening perfume rose from her clothes. “I knew how you’d look,” she told me. “He talks about you all the time.” I bent over to open the oven door and look at the chicken I was roasting.

“Tell her about the plantation,” Tom said. “About your grandmother.”

“My grandmother worked in the sugar cane fields,” I said curtly.

“No, no. The other one,” Tom said insistently. “De la Cueva.”

“I only saw her once.”

I set down Gina’s plate. She was smiling at Tom. She was always smiling or chuckling. “You ought to wear your hair on the top of your head,” she told me. “The shape of your face would show more. It’s such a perfect oval.”

I served coffee. Tom held my hand. “Stay,” he said.

“I’ll be right back,” I promised. How relieved I was to be away from them, my hands at work in the sink, the dishes draining on the counter.

When I came back to the table, their saucers were filled with cigarette butts. In the smoke, they leaned toward each other speaking excitedly.

“Tommy has a wonderful idea for a magazine,” said Gina, “All these marvelous new products made from plastic…a hundred things! He said you can get companies interested in a Spanish edition. Think of the markets! All of Latin America!”

“It wouldn’t be easy to raise the money. They’re shortsighted. Greedy and shortsighted,” Tom said.

“You can do anything,” avowed Gina. “Can’t he?” she asked me.

Before she left, she gave me a recipe for chicken. “It won’t keep you away from the table so much,” she promised. “That’s the important thing.”

The summer that I was pregnant, Gina found us rooms on the top floor of an old wooden house near the ocean, an hour by train from the city on Long Island. She often spent weekends with us. One hot morning in August, she appeared at our bedroom door with my breakfast on a tray. She had brought me a brush for my hair. “I love your baby already,” she murmured. I heard the radio in the kitchen, and I was suddenly relieved to think that Tom was there—as though there had been some doubt until that moment where he was. Gina laughed. “You did ring for breakfast, Madam?”

I was faintly embarrassed, thinking, I’m an audience for a play I don’t understand. Gina said, anxiously, “You remember? The bells in the plantation kitchen?”

Had he told her everything I told him?

We walked on the beach at twilight. I looked out at the sea, aware how they slowed their steps for my labored progress. “Let’s sit down, Tommy. Luisa is tired,” she said. It was not tiredness. A terrible pain ripped through my belly. “Oh!” I cried. “I think—”

They half carried me back to the wooden house. Gina’s short, heavy body seemed about to sink into the sand with my weight. She kept up a running comment of extravagant encouragement that oppressed me as though it had been bullying. Tom said nothing. I saw fear on his face. They lowered me to the still warm steps of the house, and Tom went to find a cab on the main street of the little beach town. Gina’s short arm couldn’t reach around me but she tried to. I pulled away from her suddenly. “It’s my baby,” I cried out.

Charlie was born a few minutes after three in the morning. I struggled up out of the anesthesia. “A cab will cost too much,” I said loudly. Then I saw them both by my bed. Tom held my wrist; Gina wept. I felt, for an instant, a paroxysm of love for them. Almost at once, I wanted Gina to disappear.

After they had left, I saw the day was coming. I felt a vast, sweet relief in my body. Poor Mamá had only been sixteen. I was twenty-five. A nurse wheeled a crib next to my cot. She picked up a bundle and handed it to me. The faded blue blanket swaddled the baby. His eyes were closed. He opened his mouth and gave out a faint cry that seemed to travel from a great distance. I held him to me. Now there were two of us.

 

Tom’s work went well. He became in time the executive editor of the magazine. Gina was made associate editor. He went to the conventions in Detroit and Chicago, even California. When he was gone, Gina would drop in to visit me.

It was easier to listen to her when I was holding Charlie. Didn’t I think I wrapped him too tightly? Was I feeding him too often? The stores would deliver groceries—why did I exhaust myself by going out to shop? I smiled, and rested my cheek against his damp, warm head. Gina’s voice was papery as though she lacked enough saliva for the tremendous work of her talking. She talked so much, she imagined she listened.

One evening as she watched me bathe Charlie, she said, “Tom is going up. He’s going to be important.” She paused and looked at me significantly. “Important,” she repeated. She slipped her hand into the water. “Isn’t that too cool?” she asked. I lifted Charlie out and wrapped him in a towel. “You’ll be the wife of an important man,” she said. I sat with my back slightly turned away from her as I nursed him. I didn’t want her to see my breasts.

“Do you know what I’m saying?” she asked intently.

She was telling me a way I ought to be. I glanced at her over my shoulder. There was an expression of desperation on her face. Her thick, milky neck throbbed like a frog’s. I knew suddenly that Tom had complained about me to her.

“What is it I’m to do?” I asked. Charlie wailed. I was holding him too tightly.

“It isn’t the Great Depression, you know, Luisa,” she said in a thin, wheedling voice. “You behave as if it is. I mean, you could buy some clothes. You’d look wonderful in good clothes. And you could think about fixing up this darling little place. And you could—there are people in the company Tom needs to cultivate and have to dinner.”

Charlie had begun to cry steadily. “I’d better take him to his room,” I said coldly.

“Yes, yes…I have to meet someone for a drink,” she cried. “What a big bore! I’d rather stay here with you and sweet Charlie.” Smiling, pulling at her dress, she walked to the front door. Still smiling, she turned and looked at Charlie. “You’d better check for open safety pins,” she said. But I looked back at her stonily, and her gaze fell away.

 

There were times when Charlie cried for so long his face became a candle flame, and I walked through the apartment with him, desperate with his desperation. The discomfort of life begins at once. When I was able to ease his, I felt I had prevailed over it for a little while. I was always tired, yet oddly at rest. I neglected the laundry, the apartment. I ordered groceries on the phone for hastily put together suppers, steeling myself against the wordless criticism on Tom’s face, telling myself with a certain aggrieved satisfaction, that I was doing as he and Gina wished me to do, spending twice as much money as I needed to spend. It had been a month since Papá had sent me a fifteen dollar money order after I’d written him of Charlie’s birth. I’d not yet cashed it. “For your son,” he’d written. Not his grandson. I felt neither grieved by his words nor resentful, only bored and wearied by his old refusal.

Tom came home late one night. I had been missing him all day, full of a melancholy longing for our first days together. I watched him take some papers from his briefcase. I could see beyond him into the bedroom. My thoughts flew ahead to that moment when, his clothes put away neatly as they always were, he would kneel on the bed, his body clenched against the chill, and pull back the blankets to burrow beneath them. When I first put my arm around him, he would seem massive. Then as the warmth of our bodies heated the tunnel we were in, he would become lighter, smaller, and the featureless flesh would turn, under my hand, into a cold earlobe, the silken hair on his chest, a nipple, the rougher skin of his hand, the small sack of his belly, the cluster of his genitals, the heat of his groin and long muscle of thigh, and if I reached down, I could hold in my palm the heel of his foot drawn up against the cold.

I grew aware he was staring at me.

“There’s a woman’s dress shop on Broadway, up at the corner,” he said flatly. “Tomorrow, you can go and buy a bathrobe of your own.” I looked, dazed, at the money he was holding out to me and I plucked nervously at a thread from the old cotton bathrobe of his that I was wearing. His face was expressionless; he looked the way he might have a week, a year before we had met, if someone had said my name to him, before the enormous intimacies that had taken place between us.

I tore off the robe and threw it toward him.

He picked it up from the floor and folded it carefully over his arm. “You’d better put something on,” he said. “It’s quite cold tonight.” He left the room. I was in despair. I reached my hand toward his coat on the chair where he’d dropped it. He returned at that moment in his pajamas. Without glancing at me, he went to the bedroom where he turned on the lamp. I went to the bathroom. He had hung the cotton robe on a hook. I dropped it on the floor and left it there.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed, removing a large paper clip from a sheaf of papers. He placed it with finicking care on the base of the lamp. His white, unblemished feet looked inhuman.

“Please. Don’t speak to me that way,” I said breathlessly.

“I merely asked you to buy yourself a bathrobe,” he replied, not looking up from his papers. “I’m tired of seeing you in mine every day I come home.”

“But it’s late. I was getting ready for bed.”

“You don’t go to bed at six,” he said. “When I come home at six, there you are, trailing around in it.”

“I don’t trail around!” I exclaimed. “I didn’t know it bothered you.” He glanced at me briefly. We were speaking in low voices as though conspiring. “I don’t know what bothers you!” I suddenly cried out.

“I didn’t say it bothered me,” he said coolly.

He had disappeared down a twisting path, twisted into himself. Only his posture, a sullen warning like some faint response as he sat there deliberately attentive to his papers, aroused in me a kind of excitement that seemed like hope.

“Please. Tell me—” I couldn’t think now of what he could tell me. His unavailing remoteness had made me an intruder. Argument would have been a luxury.

“Is that an article for the magazine?” I asked, pointing to the papers. He didn’t reply.

I fell on him, grabbing the papers and scattering them across the bed and the floor. His arm stiffened across my back as he gathered up the folds of my nightgown and moved me off him like a sack. I stamped on the papers.

“Stop it!” he ordered. He began to gather them up. I raised my fist. He caught my arm and held it above my head.

“I don’t want this,” he whispered. “I won’t have this.”

I burst into sobs. “Don’t cry!” he commanded me. My head fell forward until it rested against his shoulder. His grip on my arm loosened. After a moment, I stood back. He bent to gather up his papers.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Come to bed,” he said. We stayed apart on opposite sides of the bed making our own warmth. He fell asleep only a few minutes after I turned out the light.

The next morning, Saturday, a heavy snow was falling. We took Charlie out to the park below the Drive. Barking, excited dogs coursed along the slopes; people held up their faces to the soft languorously falling snow flakes. On our way home, we passed a small crowd gathered around a sobbing boy who struggled to remove his legs from the rungs of his bicycle wheel around which his pants leg was tightly wrapped. Tom gripped his waist, then with his glove in his mouth, deftly unwound the cloth and freed him. “Not a day for a bike,” he said mildly to the boy. People looked at Tom admiringly. They hadn’t heard what I had in his voice—contempt.

He took Charlie home, and I went to the store on Broadway and bought a bathrobe for myself.

The snow continued, a slow, white drowning of sound and movement. The street lamps went on. There was no traffic. The city had ceased its life as a city; the shapes of cars and garbage cans became ambiguous. I stared down from the window at a new world of ownerless objects never to be reclaimed.

Tom didn’t go to work on Monday. He had bought himself a new typewriter. Most of the day he sat in the living room working at it. We hardly spoke. In the white, withering light, I carried Charlie as I went from one task to another. Tom sat straight in his chair, his fingers tapping on the typewriter keys, a cup of coffee on the floor next to him. When had he made the coffee? I hadn’t noticed him going to the kitchen. How swiftly he took care of himself! I tried to think up topics of conversation. It would have required invention in that blighted silence. I lowered Charlie to Tom’s lap. His head bobbed against Tom’s shoulder. He looked over Charlie to the sheet of paper in the typewriter. I picked up the baby and took him away.

I put on my new bathrobe in the late evening. Tom studied it and rubbed the sleeve between his fingers. “There’s a little gap in the seam,” he noted. “It’s not very warm, it it?”

“It’s nylon.”

“I can see that,” he said. He smiled and patted my shoulder.

I went to the window. Behind me, I heard a rustle of paper, the creak of a chair, a match struck and blown out. There was an odd numbness in my shoulder as though he had given me a thump instead of a quick, dismissing touch. The people I glimpsed through their windows in the apartment building across the street were bathed in a light made poignant by the black sky above, the hard glitter of frozen drifts on the street. A woman clutched a small child, lifted it up, then embraced it and rained kisses on its tousled hair; a man spoke to someone I could not see, and laughed and brushed back his hair with both his hands.

Now I heard the rush of water into the bathroom sink, the flushing of the toilet, a brief clatter of the wooden hangers Tom had bought on which to hang his business suits, all the nighttime sounds of his implacable orderliness.

Motionless on his side of the bed, he slept without waking until a pencil line of gray light framed the dark shade at the window. When he left for work, he seemed to take with him a noxious air that had made it difficult for me to breathe. I hung up the nylon robe carelessly, not even turning when I heard it slither to the floor.

He came home with a long box under his arm.

“Try this on,” he said gaily, smiling down at Charlie, who had crawled to him and was trying to grasp his ankles. In the box lay a white wool bathrobe, thin and fine like silk, embroidered with tiny violet flowers. When I put it on, he said, “Lovely. I wasn’t sure it would fit.”

After supper, after I had put Charlie to bed, Tom taught me a card game. We were playing it when the telephone rang. He put down his hand carefully, fanning out the cards, and went to answer it. His unemphatic replies gave no hint of what he was hearing. He returned to the table and picked up his cards. We finished the game. He said, “My father is dead.”

I cried out. He shook his head in mild rebuke. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It doesn’t make any difference.”

 

Had I been so dazed with love in our early days I’d been unable to take in what he had told me? Who had called him on the telephone with the news? Was it an older sister or an older brother? All I knew for sure was that his father had been living in a place called Biloxi, down south. Sometimes I’d mailed the checks Tom sent him once a month.

“Will you go to the funeral?” I asked him the next morning.

“No.”

“Is your brother there?”

He stared at me with the same expression with which he had looked at the foolish boy caught by his bicycle wheel, an expression which seemed to contain an unfaltering judgment on human folly as well as female inattention.

“My sister,” he said dryly. “Bernice. She’s taken care of everything.”

“What did he die of?”

“Heart,” he said. “And alcohol.”

Charlie wailed from his crib. Tom went to get him and walked around the living room, carrying him, until his sobs subsided. His hair was brown like mine, but his eyes were like his father’s. Patiently, Tom held him; it was such a strange patience, answering what had called it out, yet without sympathy. As he lowered the baby to the floor, I glimpsed Tom’s slightly swollen mouth, his blistery child’s lips.

But he had told me about a brother. Ben, he had called him.

What hadn’t he lied about? I thought of little else. On an afternoon a week later, as I was carrying Charlie home from the grocery store, I saw Tom alight from the Riverside Drive bus. I stopped to watch him as he strode toward me, his head down, his walk so quick and contained. He didn’t see me, but went up the stairs to our door, paused to look up briefly at our windows, then went in.

“The subways are improving,” he said as I walked into the living room. “It took only twenty minutes to get here from the office.”

There must have been a look of shock on my face. He began to talk at once, uneasily and disparagingly, about someone on his staff whom he would have to fire. His voice grew louder, his comments on the man’s inefficiency wilder, his eyes never leaving my face as though desperately trying to hold my attention so I wouldn’t see some awful thing in another part of the room.

He knew he had lied. Like me, I was suddenly convinced, he didn’t know why.

 

I bundled up Charlie and took him to see Papá. I suppose I was playacting. I hadn’t heard from him since he had sent me the fifteen dollars. Perhaps there was mischief in what I did. When I put Charlie down on the scrubbed floor of my father’s room, he crawled rapidly to where Papá sat, vigilantly, in his old chair close by his records. Although he had spoken to me without his usual aloofness, and had even scrutinized Charlie’s face with some interest, I saw the truth of his feeling when he hastily drew back his feet until they were nearly pointing sideways. His movement made Charlie halt; he leaned on one plump hand, the other suspended above where Papá’s feet had been, and stared up at him. As if bewildered by what he saw, he turned around and righted himself until he sat facing me. I ran to him and picked him up, patting his back. He stiffened in my arms and turned to look at Papá again.

“You comfort him too soon,” Papá said reprovingly.

We didn’t stay long. At the door, Papá suddenly leaned forward and placed his thin mouth against Charlie’s forehead. Charlie was still for a moment, seeming to reflect upon the brief touch of his grandfather’s lips. Then he thrust his head between my neck and shoulder; I felt the moisture of his breathing on my skin. I said a quick good-bye to Papá, who only looked at me quizzically.

The wind was blowing off the river. I held Charlie close to me as I walked down Broadway through the old neighborhood. The Red Robin movie house had been boarded up. But the variety store was still there, and I peered through its windows. In Mr. Dardarian’s place behind the register stood a young man with bristling black hair. I paused at the corner of the street where our last flat had been. The door that led to the hall was open and had pulled away from its hinges.

As I stood there, thinking, I don’t know what, a little girl skipped out from the hall and onto the steps. She wore no gloves. On her feet were light patent-leather shoes like those Mamá had once bought me, digging them out from a sagging box in front of a dry goods store. The button was gone from one shoe and the strap hung loose. The uneven hem of a cotton dress hung just below her coat. The coat’s hood, fallen between her narrow shoulders, was lined with soiled white fake fur. She lifted a thin hand to her mouth and blew on it. Suddenly she caught sight of me standing there, staring at her. She gazed at me solemnly until, slowly, a smile widened her lips and her eyes crinkled. I wanted to say something to her, to call her nena or querida, to tell her how sweet she was. She turned her head toward the door and seemed to listen. With a last glance at me, a small wave of her hand, she ran back inside. My eyes stung with tears, and I clutched Charlie so hard that he cried out as I hurried to the nearest subway station.

 

Another light snow fell, coating the hardened drifts of the last storm. I stood at the window looking down. People coming home from work at that hour were making their way down the sloping street, their hands pressed against their mouths and chins. Among them, I saw Gina trudging through the fallen snow with tremendous determination. As she passed beneath the amber light of a street lamp, her unsmiling face was as grim as that of someone who has been charged with an arduous and bitter duty.

Charlie, clutching at the edges of a low table, his round face taut with excitement and intent, hooted as he wobbled and swayed. I snatched him up despite his protest and was holding him when Tom opened the door to Gina.

“You see how he already knows me?” she gurgled when Charlie stretched out his arms toward her. “Babies always know me.”

Tom made her a drink. She couldn’t seem to keep her hands from me. I found the feel of them unbearable, as though the damp tips of her fingers communicated to me more directly than speech that she knew of our trouble.

“Tell!” she exclaimed. “Does the robe fit? I told the salesgirl that I had a beautiful, tall, thin friend. Much taller than me. I can’t wait to see you in it!”

My God. What had he told me? Hadn’t he said he’d been afraid the robe wouldn’t fit? Had he actually said he’d bought it himself? I looked at him, and he smiled agreeably. “Luisa’s made stew, plenty for three,” he said.

“Oh, I was hoping you’d ask me,” Gina said archly. She felt in her pocketbook until she had pulled out of its depths a bright yellow mechanical duck. Charlie grabbed for it. “Wait! Wait!” she cried indulgently. She wound it up and set it on the floor. Around and around it waddled as Charlie shouted with delight. Tom and Gina rocked simultaneously back and forth in paroxysms of inexplicable laughter until the duck ran down and was still, a tin webbed foot suspended above the floor.

 

Charlie walked, then ran. He began to talk. When he played with a toy, he was grave and intent. In the late afternoons, he watched at the window for Tom to come home. But when his father entered the apartment, Charlie was shy and clung to my legs.

I learned to give small dinner parties. I had two drinks each night then wine. I welcomed my alcohol-induced detachment toward the transient curiosity of Tom’s business acquaintances, toward Gina’s sharpening scrutiny of my face, her eternal advice.

Once, when we were alone, she suddenly began to cry. She had no one of her own, she said. There had been a marriage long ago. Disastrous. He had been an emotional invalid, entirely dependent on her. Oh, she was so alone! As I tried to comfort her, I thought—she is asking me to hurry.

When I was hard and sure in the bitter knowledge that the marriage could endure, I pitied her. But when I was weak and hopeless, I knew that all three of us were waiting, Gina and Tom and I.

Howard Thursby telephoned when Tom was at work. “Well, hello,” he said. “How is the tolerant Mrs. G.?”

Tom wasn’t in, I told him.

“I saw him last month,” he said. “In a Chicago rooftop nightclub, dancing away the hours with his buxom lady assistant editor.”

I said the baby was crying, I’d have to hang up.

“Guarding the fort, are you,” he said huffily.

I hesitated. “No,” I said impulsively. “I’m lying so I can get off the phone.” I put down the receiver.

On a Sunday, when Tom had gone to get the newspaper, I telephoned Ellen. Charlie was sitting at the table drawing cats on scraps of paper. “I have to get out,” I whispered to her. “I’m dying from this.”

“It’s an awful apartment,” she said, “but there’s a tiny room you could use. I’ve stored some old stuff of Momma’s in it. I’ll find another place for it. Oh, I’m so sorry Luisa!”

I waited another two weeks, like someone, I thought, hanging around a house that’s burned down. One day, I packed two suitcases. Tom saw them when he came home. Charlie was turning the pages of a magazine. I saw his lips move as he recognized letters and said them to himself.

“I’m leaving,” I said.

Tom looked at Charlie. “I can’t stand it,” he said tonelessly.

I looked at his heavy shoulders, his chest, remembering their weight upon me. Charlie turned suddenly. “Why are you standing there like that?” he asked Tom with terrible alarm in his voice.

We didn’t urge each other to try again. We hardly spoke. It was not a battlefield that lay between us but a desolation. Hope had gone. We were against each other.

“Double-crossed,” he muttered once. I averted my eyes from the rancor in his face.

A few weeks after our divorce, when Tom and Gina were married, I recalled something I had read in the Book of Knowledge while the Miller children, restive as always, had urged me to turn the page. The paragraph that had caught my eye described how certain larvae must, in order to develop, attach themselves to the living tissue of another animal. Tom’s and Gina’s marriage had grown inside of Tom’s and mine, fastening itself upon its insufficiency, feeding upon its weakness.

 

Charlie had been silent when I had told him that we were going to live by ourselves for a while. Daddy would come to see him, I said. But Daddy and I couldn’t stay together now.

Silently he ate the supper Ellen had prepared for us. Her apartment down on the lower east side was a smaller version of the ones I had lived in in the barrio. Charlie got up and went to a window that gave onto a narrow shaft.

Ellen told me about her scholarship at New York University. She spoke anxiously about the character committee she would have to go before, along with passing her bar examination. McCarthy had made an inquisition out of the process. She looked searchingly at my face.

“Do you know who Joseph McCarthy is?” she asked. “Do you know about the Korean war? The Brown decision?” Her smile was exasperated.

It was so hot and close in the little room where we were sitting, I began to feel ill. A presentiment of further calamity was given form by the inhumanly sustained baying of a passing ambulance. “Not for us,” murmured Ellen, her fingers pressing my arm.

“I know about those things,” I said. “Politics.”

“Oh, Luisa. Politics aren’t separate from life!”

Charlie began to cry. It was an open-mouth wailing I had never heard from him before. I ran to pick him up. He held himself stiffly. I might have been holding his wooden replica in my arms. Ellen caught hold of one of his hands and kissed it again and again. The hot, thick tears which sprung from his eyes dampened my dress and my neck. What is it, we asked. We begged him to tell us. He had seen a bird fall down, he whispered. Its wings had cut his hand, he explained, nodding his head, his eyes wide and unblinking as they were when he invented a story to tell me.

Ellen and I talked until late. I had thought Tom was my fate, I told her. She listened to me speak of him and the effort of tolerance was in her face. The more I told her, the more I sensed how little I could tell, only a catalogue of wounds given and received, of cruel puzzlement, of disappointed expectations that had left us hard and unforgiving—God knows what they had arisen from—ignorance, solitary imaginings, soft lies. How could I speak of different silences, that first, powerful erotic quiet, the final silence of enmity. That kind of love, she said, was an illness. It lacked purpose, and it collapsed without it. She looked once toward the small room behind the painted glass doors where Charlie lay asleep on a couch. Her face softened. “I remember when my father died,” she said. “He wasn’t much use to anyone by that time, and I was a lot older than Charlie. But I felt a dead chill moving in from the world. You’re not the same—ever again.”

I was silent, quelled by a prescience of the wordless suffering of small children. Did I have a lawyer, she asked? When I shook my head, she said, “Oh, Luisa, you’re making a mistake.” I said hastily that I knew Tom would send money, although I couldn’t expect him to support us entirely; I’d have to work. She studied me, started to speak, then got up and came to my chair and bent down to rest her cheek on my head. “Well, you’re going to need a lawyer before this is over. I’ll be ready.” She straightened up. “Here we are,” she said gently. “I’m still wanting you to better yourself…like they say to us colored folk…why don’t you better yourselves? Do you remember that vile old man who called us ‘nigger girls,’ that time we went to the museum? Christ,” she exclaimed abruptly. “It’s awful, being black in this country, like being electrocuted all the days of your life.” She sighed. “Listen, I’ve got to study a while. You think you can sleep now? That’s Thad’s old cot in there that I made up for you. He was such a hopeful, sunny boy. You remember?”

I lay awake. I tried to think of Thad. It was Tom’s lies I enumerated, adding them up as though their sum might contain truth.

A week later, I returned to the apartment, stopping by the grocer to pick up some cartons. Tom had kept the rooms neat like my father kept his room. I packed away some bed linen and cooking things. The apartment was already unfamiliar to me. I felt like an exhausted thief who must rest in rooms he has robbed. I lay down on the bed. On the floor next to it was a book. Love, its title read, was a many-splendored thing. I guessed Gina had given it to him. It wasn’t his usual reading.

I wouldn’t have to ever see her again, I told myself. There was some comfort in that. I fell asleep in the hot, stuffy stillness. When I awoke, Tom was standing in the doorway looking at me. I sprang up. “What time is it?” I asked dazedly.

“Where’s Charlie?” he asked accusingly.

“Ellen’s taking care of him.”

He moved toward me suddenly and embraced me. We sank back onto the bed. He slipped his hand beneath my blouse; it was cold, I shivered. At once, he removed it and stood up. He looked down to where I had dropped the book. I felt a jolt of fear. I ran out of the bedroom, then I longed to be back. Oh God! It had all been my doing, from the beginning. “I’ll be back to get the boxes,” I called out, my voice breaking. When there was no answer, I said, hopelessly, “I’ll keep the key until then.”

Charlie and I stayed with Ellen until the middle of September. At her suggestion, I looked on Long Island for a place to live and found a small, partly furnished apartment near Kew Gardens, not far from where the Miller family had lived. It would be cheaper for me there, Ellen had said, and easier for a woman alone with a child. She gave me Thad’s cot and a few other pieces of furniture. They had belonged to Mrs. Dove who, two years earlier, had gone back to Ohio to live out her days. A classmate and friend of Ellen’s from the university, a pale, exhausted-looking young man with reddish hair who vaguely resembled Thad, picked up my things in a dilapidated station wagon, and drove them and Charlie and me to the apartment. He was silent throughout the trip as he lit one cigarette after another. When he had carried up the last carton, he said shyly, “I have to study in my head all the time. Just want to say, sorry for your trouble. You don’t have to thank me. It’s like a holiday, getting away from the books.”

In a box, Charlie found an old rag doll of his beneath a frying pan. He climbed onto a small, upholstered chair that had come with the apartment. He curled himself around the doll, holding its head next to his own. I lifted him, still gripping the doll, and sat him on my lap.

“We’ll be all right,” I said. “Charlie?”

The long twilight gave way to darkness.

One weekend before we were married Tom and I had taken a train up the Hudson to an inn in the hills. In the late afternoon, we had set out on a walk. We had found a lake and an old rowboat on its pebbled shore. Tom rowed us out to the middle of the lake and let the oars rest. We floated on water streaked with the color of violets. I had started at a sound. A fish jumping, Tom said. I heard a heavy rustling as though a wind close to the ground had started up. Then I saw four horses walking down a slope through the trees. Down they came, the twilight golden on their moving flanks, their bobbing heads. They had been the spirits of that hour, guardian spirits, I had thought.

I began to tell Charlie about the horses as though it was a tale from long ago, how the great beasts had raised and lowered their hooves among the twigs and fallen leaves, how one, whinnying, had slid and nearly fallen, how the light had glimmered through the tree branches and struck gold from the horses’ bodies, how Tom and I had watched until it had grown too dark to see.

“I think I’m hungry,” Charlie said.

When I put him to bed in Thad’s cot, he reached up and gripped my hand. “Tell me again about the horses,” he said.

 

Tom’s monthly checks paid the rent, the utilities, and not quite two weeks worth of groceries. In those first months of disorder, of pervasive worry, and a wrenching regret that would catch me up suddenly as fear does, it was Charlie, leaning against my knees, at four still amused by baths, by sudden storms, by the stories I told him at night as he lay drowsily on Thad’s cot, who gave me moments of tranquility—even of resolution—when I recalled to myself that what we had, all anyone had, was simply life itself. To foster it, I must become quick and cunning and ready.

One thing led to another. A notice left on the scored table in our lobby gave me the telephone number of a baby-sitter, Maureen Mackey, a high school sophomore, available for weekday afternoons. I found a part-time job in a small nursing home near the public school Charlie was to attend until he began high school. As I scoured dishes and pots and pans in the sink, and wiped off the metal trays which would hold the meagre portions of food to be carried to those patients who, through incompetence or illness, could not hobble into the dining room, I suffered convulsions of panic when I visualized the distracted look on Maureen’s face as I opened the door to her each afternoon at 3:30. At 7:30, I began running toward home as soon as the door of the nursing home swung to behind me.

Nearly always they were sitting on the floor, Maureen, calm, plump, smiling as she played cards with Charlie or watched him draw with a crayon on stationary I’d taken from the nursing home.

“He doesn’t know about God,” she said to me once, reprovingly. “He knows a lot of big words. But you ought to tell him, you know. About God.” I would later, I promised. “I’m Catholic,” she said complacently. She held up a small gold medal she wore on a chain around her neck. “See? St. Christopher. I told him about him. He liked it.”

When the time of Maureen’s graduation drew close, I went to the supervisor of the kitchen staff in the nursing home and asked her if there was a chance I could work in the mornings. When she replied, her voice swelled with the alerted consciousness of her power over other lives. “We got our full staff in the ayem,” she said. “I can’t go round switching people to suit you—or anyone else for a matter of fact. I understand you got a kid but others got their troubles too.”

The next afternoon as I hurried into the staff entrance, I found a middle-aged Negro woman blocking the narrow path that led to it.

“Are you Luisa Greer?” she asked with a tremor in her voice. When I nodded, she said, “Don’t take my job away from me. Miss Ludlow told me you was trying to get on the morning shift. That’s my job. She’ll do what you want before she does what I want. I got three children.” Her hands shook as she fumbled in her pocketbook and took out a cigarette and lit it. She stared at me through her exhalation of smoke, her face impassive.

“I won’t take your job,” I said. “I need more money than they pay here anyhow.” I felt ashamed. Did I need more money than she did? “I mean—I have to get a full-time job.” She looked at me expressionlessly. Only her voice pressed. “Will you tell her? She’s in there now with the dietitian. Will you go there and tell her you don’t want the morning shift?”

I nodded, wanting only to get away from her hard, bitter beggary.

As it turned out, Maureen, after her graduation, continued to live at home for nearly a year. Then, two months after Charlie had begun the second grade, I arrived at our apartment on a cold, dark evening to find him asleep on the hall floor in front of our door.

“Where’s Maureen?” I cried. He sat up rubbing his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. I knelt and held him until he began to wriggle away. On the few occasions Maureen had been unable to come, she had always telephoned me the evening before.

The next morning, after I had left Charlie at school, I stopped by the two-family brick house where Maureen lived. I had not met her mother, but the stolid woman in a housedress who opened the door to me could have been no one else.

“She’s run off with some dago kid,” she said desolately. “The kind of people that are moving into this neighborhood! Next there’ll be niggers.”

“My son had to wait four hours in the hall,” I shouted at her, tears springing to my eyes. “I depended on her!”

“The poor little kiddie,” she said with sudden softness. With her rough red hand, she touched mine. “I’m truly sorry. She’s always been a responsible girl till he come along. I know she’ll be back. She really liked your little fellow.”

Maureen didn’t come back, at least not to us. I began to look for work again. Through an advertisement in the newspaper, I got a job with Mrs. Marylou Justen. Later, a friend in our apartment house sent me to Mr. Edwin Clare, an antique dealer, and when Charlie was eleven, Mrs. Justen referred me to Mrs. Phoebe Burgess. Among these three households, I spent most of the rest of my working life as a servant.

 

In my first interview with Mrs. Justen’s mother, Mrs. Doreen Early, I slipped underground as easily as Charlie slid down the heaps of earth above the great trench in front of our apartment house where a new highway was being put through to eastern Long Island, and I assumed once more, as though there had been no interval, the shallow compliance of a menial.

“I do the interviewing for my daughter,” said the gray-haired woman who opened the door to me in the foyer of the apartment on the upper east side of New York City. She waved at the large room where seven cats slept or cleaned themselves upon shabby armchairs, their upholstery clawed and ragged. On the floor, lying half underneath a piano which had no lid—and made me think of a person without an upper lip—a bearlike dog snored wetly, its head on its paws.

“She had one of her urges,” Mrs. Early said as I looked around, gauging the untidyness of the room. “She took one of what I call her disapproving-looks walks.” She appeared to judge my incomprehension to be a matter of impaired hearing. “Marylou has her peculiarities,” she shouted. The dog lifted its head and yawned. “She imagines she can actually change people by glaring at them, people who speak too loud, people who drag their animals by their leashes, fat people eating conspicuously, women wearing tall ugly hats, and funny gentlemen, sissies in other words. Do take off your coat. I don’t live here. It’s just Marylou and her menagerie. I hope you can iron. You won’t find it hard working for her. She’s fair—” She broke off as the door opened in the foyer. The dog crawled out from under the piano and stood wagging its tail. A tall woman carrying a large bag of groceries came into the living room. “Hi!” she greeted me in a girlish tremolo. She clumped across the room, the dog following her, through a door I supposed led to the kitchen. Mrs. Early was staring at me fixedly with an odd, abashed expression. Mrs. Justen returned with a can opener in one hand, a can of dog food in the other.

“I’m not much good at this,” she said. “But I guess I’m supposed to ask for references. You said on the phone you hadn’t done domestic work for a while.” Her voice trailed off as two of the cats jumped off their perches and came to sit in front of her. “Look at that,” she said musingly. “Is there anything tidier than a cat?” I stared at her startling green eyes, her fuzzy fair hair; she seemed weighed down by her own large bones. On the telephone, I had explained what I could of my situation. Now I handed her a copy of the old letter from Mrs. Miller, still in the same envelope in which she had given it to me so long ago.

Mrs. Justen dropped the can and opener on a chair and read the letter intently. “Well,” she said, handing it back to me. “What a nice letter! I think it would be really swell if you could work here. Do you think a day and a half? I work at home myself. I’m a reader for publishers.” She looked down at the cats who had both begun to purr loudly. “I’m not tidy,” she said, “like cats. Do you like animals?”

“I like animals,” I said. She sighed with what I took to be relief. “That’s great,” she said.

After our supper that evening, I told Charlie about the dog and the cats. “It’s like a zoo,” he said excitedly. “Could I go with you? To see them?” I explained as well as I could that I couldn’t take him with me. I said, you have to go alone to your job. “I see,” he said bravely. It was something he often said when he didn’t see at all.

 

On Sundays, the huge road-building machines were motionless in their trenches. Charlie liked to go out and examine them closely, his hands in his pockets because I had told him he mustn’t touch them. Sometimes we took a picnic to a place where there had been a World’s Fair, where long avenues had been laid down on a marsh. They were empty now. Debris blew through dismantled exhibition halls. On spring afternoons, we took walks in an old cemetery a mile or so away from the apartment house. In a green stillness, Charlie leapfrogged over low tombstones, and I pretended we were in the country. Just beyond a slope where the last line of new grave markers stood, I could see the rising walls of a new apartment house. They were being built everywhere, casting their shadows over the old community of small wood and brick houses and slightly stunted trees.

One day, as we passed the nursing home where I had worked, the Negro woman who had been afraid I would take her job emerged onto the sidewalk and paused to light a cigarette. She looked at me without recognition.

On those mornings I went to the city to work, as Charlie sat sleepily over his breakfast, I moved with frightened efficiency, making our beds, checking his school lunch bag, making sure he had Mrs. Justen’s phone number in his shirt pocket. We parted on the sidewalk, breathing air made dusty and gritty by the road-building. I bent to kiss him, already feeling a painful fluttering of vague fear that would not abate until we were together again. On weekend mornings, we ate long breakfasts and lingered at the enamel table.

“Will you tell me about the hurricanes in San Pedro?” he asked.

“I’ve told you a hundred times.”

“I know.”

“What’s the hardest in arithmetic?”

“Subtraction.”

“Maybe I can help you.”

“You get too nervous, Ma.”

“Let’s go to a movie tonight.”

“Oh, let’s!”

At the early show in the local Loews theater, I sat in a state of blessed ease, hardly aware of what the movie was about but mindful of Charlie sitting next to me, his intent face turned up toward the screen, both of us safe for the moment.

We had little money to spare for movies. I knew I would have to get more work. But on those Saturday mornings when we had the whole weekend for ourselves, I felt a kind of triumph. Drinking too much coffee, I’d watch Charlie as he roamed about the room, and catch an expression of gravity on his face that reminded me of Nana’s look. He loved to hear stories about her, about things she had said, or the way I’d find her, one day stirring a kettle over an open fire, another, sitting in her doorway, smoking her pipe, waiting for me.

What I dreaded most during those early years was illness, Charlie’s or mine. Mrs. Justen wouldn’t pay me if I didn’t turn up. At a sign of a cold in Charlie, I could hear the panic in my voice as I asked him if he’d been sneezing the day before. Toward the end of the month, before Tom’s checks arrived, I couldn’t bring myself to open the drawer in the kitchen where the pile of bills seemed to multiply like cockroaches.

On one Saturday a month, sometimes two, Charlie went downstairs to the small lobby of our apartment house to wait for Tom to pick him up. He would return in the late afternoon and tell me in a careful voice where they had eaten lunch. He was often carrying a new toy Tom had brought him. By the time I had filled my weekdays with work, Charlie went into the city on the subway by himself to see his father, and after that, he didn’t tell me much about what they had done together, only looked at me with solicitude when he came home as though I had been the child who had gone away, not he.

“Do you think we’ll ever go and visit my grandfather?” he asked me one Saturday in May. We were walking to the business section of the village where there was a new shoe store.

“We never got along well,” I said.

“Like you did with Nana.”

“Yes.”

I bought him new sneakers. He wore them home, running far ahead of me and coursing back, his face bright with pleasure. It must puzzle him, I knew, to think he had a relative not so far away whom he had never seen.

A little cat, mewing, its fur dull and patchy, came out from beneath a rhododendron bush and began to follow us. Charlie stooped to pet it. “It’s lost, Ma,” he said, and looked up at me with anguish.

We took it home. Charlie said he was going to call her Bird, and he glanced at me with a smile that was both shy and sly. I was amused by the perversity of the name. He looked thin and shanky, holding the cat. I was suddenly aware of his singularity, his self that was not my self. I went out and bought food for the cat. After she had eaten, she curled up on Charlie’s lap and went to sleep, purring. From time to time, he called out to me—“still sleeping.” I hoped the cat would distract him from thoughts of Papá.

 

For a few months, I worked as a chambermaid in a hotel which claimed to be a luxurious home away from home. An identical design of thick, yellow bamboo stalks with blunt green leaves covered the walls. In each room, along with beds and chests, stood a spindly writing desk, its drawers outlined in gilt. The desks swayed on their thin legs when I touched them with a dusting cloth. Nothing could have dispelled the anxious melancholy of these rooms where only a kind of organic evidence remained of the passage of human bodies, all that I scrubbed and rinsed away from basins peppered with the stubble of shaving, from tubs where wet whorls of hair collected in drains, all the everlasting secret leakings that betrayed the simmering internal marsh hidden in people, their flesh that left damp blotches and stains on bed linen. Once I found a set of false teeth grinning in cloudy water in a hotel glass, and another time, sheets and mattress so soaked with blood, I opened the closet door fearfully, half expecting in that Sunday quiet to discover the victim of a gruesome killing.

As I went about my cursory cleaning, I imagined Charlie lying in bed, planning his breakfast. The wound of separation from him didn’t heal. The pain of it stunned me, took away a careless lightness of heart I vaguely recollected from a time and place I had forgotten.

He grew more competent every year, making his meals when he had to with intent invention, rarely complaining of my absence, offering me, when I got home, a quick smile, a welcome of washed dishes and homework done. But in the middle of the night, I sometimes heard him walking about restlessly, ending up at the side of my bed in the living room, staring down at me whom he thought asleep. I would get up and sit with him at the table and tell him about the places I worked, the people who hired me, hoping the details of my life away from him would bring it closer. “We need a magic telescope,” he said, “that way we’d always know what the other was doing.” We were both wounded, I saw; the sharp cut of life had struck him twice, leaving him with an unchildlike pensiveness.

He had found a friend, Jack Gold, and often when I had walked home from the subway, I would find him playing with Jack in the empty lot that separated our building and the one where Jack lived with his mother. He was a sleek boy with deep-set eyes and black hair like an Indian’s and thin, grown-up hands. I had gotten to know Amy Gold one bitter winter morning after Jack had tied up Charlie with his belt, set him against the apartment house wall and pelted him with snowballs. Jack had been nine then, a year older than Charlie. When Charlie came crying to our door and told me what had happened, I asked him why he hadn’t run away from Jack. “Because then he wouldn’t play with me,” he said.

Mrs. Gold came over a few minutes later. Jack had confessed. She was apologetic, bending over to embrace Charlie with such easy warmth that I felt hopeful, sensing that the incident might result in a larger life for Charlie and me. She stayed for coffee. She was a widow, she told me. Her husband had been killed in a jeep accident at Stuttgart where he had been on overseas duty. She had been working for an antique dealer at the time. Her husband’s pension and a small bequest from an aunt a few months later had made it possible for her to stop working.

“Mr. Clare is not one of your run-of-the-mill queers,” she said. “He’s an expert on Shaker furniture. American stuff of all kinds. He’s always getting called in as a consultant to museums or private collectors. I liked him a lot. He was smart. But when I had the chance to stay home with little Jack, I grabbed at it. I’ve been working all my life, and I was glad to stop, believe you me!”

When I visited her the first time, she watched me closely as I gazed at the sofa and chairs covered in white linen, straw baskets holding plants, and on the windowsill, a row of blue glass tumblers through which sunlight wavered. I murmured how beautiful it all was. Shyly, she said that Mr. Clare had done it all, getting furniture for her at a discount, and helping her sell off hideous Flatbush furnishings she had inherited from her mother.

“When Hal was killed,” she said, “Mr. Clare was so kind to me, kinder than a normal man would have been. We keep in touch on the phone and he always sends Jack a birthday present. But it’s hard to know what to do with a man when you don’t have a sexual lever on him.”

Once away from the distraction of her apartment, her apparent ease in life which I admired and envied, I wondered at the tough echo of “sexual lever.” But as I came to know her, I paid less attention to her imperious statements: “Depression is self-indulgence…there’s no such thing as friendship between men and women…boys need an iron hand…” These were notions she fooled herself with, for, in fact, she was often sad, she had several male friends she had known for years, and the hand with which she touched Jack was gentle, almost timid.

We all had supper together at least once a week. She had a little car. In the hot weather we went to eastern beaches on Long Island for long afternoons, sun-drugged, ringing with the released, joyful cries of our children.

It was, perhaps, from such an afternoon that Charlie invented a history for himself. I was usually unable to attend the special days for parents at Charlie’s school, but I went to see his homeroom teacher.

“Charlie has told me, of course, how your husband drowned at the beach trying to save an old man caught in the undertow—” She stopped abruptly. I had risen straight out of my chair. “Oh, it’s not true!” I blurted out. After I had told her what was true, she looked grave. “Well, we mustn’t let him go on with this fabrication,” she said. I was frightened. I was imagining Charlie alone in the apartment, as I gathered up soiled sheets in hotel bedrooms miles away, thinking up this story of heroism and death to explain an absence he hadn’t understood.

“He’s a good student,” the teacher said. “Don’t be too hard on him.”

When I entered the apartment, Charlie grabbed up the cat and held her close to him, regarding me uneasily over her head.

“You lied about Daddy,” I said.

He dropped the cat and went off to the bedroom. I followed him. He was sitting on his bed, looking haunted. “You told the teacher he’d drowned saving an old man.”

“I didn’t say he had saved him,” he said, his voice quavering.

I sat down beside him. I felt his embarrassment as though it were mine.

“Don’t lie anymore,” I said. “It’s no good. Try not to.”

He began to cry, holding himself apart from me. The cat came and crouched at his feet, purring loudly.

“Look at Bird,” I said softly. “She doesn’t know what’s the matter.”

He wiped away his tears with one thin bony wrist. “It’s not so hard for her,” he said.

On the rare occasions Tom came to the apartment to see Charlie, he would stand silently next to the front door until I had gathered up my pocketbook and coat and was ready to leave. He would stand aside then, his face blank as I passed him. During that minute, Charlie, too, stood in arrested motion at the window. Only the snap of the clasp of my pocketbook broke the stillness. Although I knew he would be taking Charlie out somewhere, I wouldn’t return until late in the day when I was sure he would have gone. I could not bear to enter that polar region twice in one day. I walked for miles, pausing only to drink a cup of coffee. I invented a scene of reconciliation, of some kind of mutual forgiveness. It was no less farfetched than Charlie’s tale of Tom drowning. I knew the vacancy of Tom’s face when he stood by the door was a way to tell me how he loathed everything about the apartment. “Don’t!” I wanted to protest. I was always uneasy about looking at him directly, but I couldn’t help seeing his expensive new clothes. He was getting prosperous. Once I thought I caught the flash of polish on his fingernails. He had a car now, big enough for ten people, Charlie said wistfully.

As I walked, I pondered. It was all a sham, his hatred, my bewilderment, our silence. False! Charlie stood there, waiting by the window, the bones and flesh of our connection. All the rest was pose, confusion, dismay at a life that had died by our hands. There were moments when I craved his presence. As they ebbed away, I felt ravaged as though I’d not gone from my apartment on my own volition but had been driven out.

 

By the time Mamá had been able to buy me shoes, my toes had bent and curled inside the old ones. I was ashamed of my crooked toes. I bought Charlie a new pair of shoes every two months so there would be no blemish on his slender high-arched feet. I couldn’t afford them. I couldn’t afford anything. Amy said the money Tom sent was a pittance, a sin. I ought to get a lawyer. He was probably making a mint. “You have to force men to support their children,” she said sternly.

I would have to find more work. Amy shook her head and sighed. “I hate to see a woman so bullied by a man,” she said. But she offered to telephone among her friends to see if she could find me something. I waited, without the energy to pursue jobs in newspaper ads, or present myself to the dead-faced women who so often ran employment agencies, hoping instead that Amy would turn up something. An inexplicable torpor had overcome me; my life seemed senseless. Yet I felt an intensifying dread each time I counted out the crumpled dollars from Mrs. Justen, or when I opened the pay envelope from the hotel. When Tom’s checks arrived, I was grateful for the brief days of relative ease which would follow. I had only vague impressions of lawyers and divorce courts, mostly gathered from accounts I’d read in newspapers which told of inconceivable sums of money awarded to the aggrieved, luxurious-looking women in the blurred pictures that accompanied the stories.

In hotel rooms, I watched the dust settle back upon the desks. I tightened my lips against ammonia fumes, against the vomit-tinged odor of wax. One Sunday morning, as I slowly walked to a rumpled bed, an elderly man, naked except for his leather slippers, emerged from behind the bathroom door and minced toward me, softly mouthing obscenities.

“Stop that at once,” I shouted.

“All right!” he cried. “Don’t get so mad, little honey.”

He trotted back meekly to the bathroom and closed the door. When I got home that afternoon, Charlie was out somewhere. I looked at the shabby furniture. The apartment was no more than two flimsy boxes.

When he came in, he seemed to have grown a foot since I had left him sleeping that morning.

“You’ve got to leave me a note when you go out,” I said harshly.

“Take it easy, Ma,” he said. “I was just over at Jack’s. See? We made this.” He held out a balsa-wood model of an airplane. I wanted to crush it in my hands. I went quickly to the kitchen and turned the tap on full, as though the rush of water would wash away my unreasoning anger.

 

One morning, I arrived half an hour earlier than usual at Mrs. Justen’s apartment. I changed into the slippers I wore to clean in. The kitchen sink was filled with dirty dishes. She was sleeping, I guessed, so I couldn’t start the vacuum-cleaning yet. I went down the hall toward the bathroom, passing her bedroom. I stepped back. A man was lying next to her, his bare shoulders rising from the blanket, his head nestled between her shoulders. As I stared, I felt a flash of guilt. A servant is often an old child, aged by wearisome labor that is without resolution and issue, but childishly flustered at some unexpected, intimate glimpse into the life of her employers.

I tiptoed back to the kitchen. As quietly as I could, I began to wash dishes. Later, I heard the bathwater running. Mrs. Justen came into the kitchen. We looked at each other silently. She picked up a cat. The dog groaned a greeting from the living room. “I’ve found a home for him in Westchester,” she said brightly. “Isn’t that nice? A friend of mine has hired a car and we’re taking him up today.” I didn’t speak. “Leave the bedroom until last,” she said curtly as she left the kitchen carrying a tray with two cups and the pot of coffee she had made.

I’m not thinking about you, I wanted to tell her. Only about myself. Blindly, I reached for a dish towel. A cat Mrs. Justen had rescued from the street the week before, was crouched on it, staring at me and hoping for its breakfast.

 

Mrs. Justen was in her early thirties. Some weeks, she left me piles of dirty dishes and soiled laundry scattered all over the apartment. Other times there was little for me to do. She cleaned up after her strays herself. She was unpredictable but fair. She gave me two weeks vacation with pay and an extra week’s wages at Christmas. In the mornings, she sprayed herself with a heavy floral perfume before she combed her hair or dressed. During the years I worked for her, she went away twice, once to Maine for a week in late summer, and once to Bellevue Hospital for three months.

Her mother, Mrs. Early, often came to spend the day. She had a kind of irritable vigor, an energy that seemed accusatory, that proclaimed no one else did as much as she did. In her presence, Mrs. Justen grew sullen, moving in her heavy way out of the room where her mother was sitting pasting blurred snapshots in an album, or consulting a cookbook for help in planning a dinner party for Mrs. Justen’s birthday. “I just want to please you,” she said to her daughter’s back, her expression half-pleading, half-scornful, full of strange pride.

They bickered continually, ignoring me as I worked around them. I began, in time, to think they were not indifferent to my presence, that it allowed them to declare their powerful, angry attachment, and that if they had been alone, they might have smouldered in silence.

“One of the books Marylou read for her publisher and recommended is being made into a movie,” Mrs. Early said to me as I washed the window sills. “She’s very literary,” she added. She only spoke in order that Mrs. Justen would hear her admiration. Beatriz de la Cueva would have destroyed herself before she would have pretended to speak to a servant as an equal, I thought to myself.

Mrs. Early smiled appeasingly at her daughter who bent over to buckle on one of her many pairs of broad-strapped sandals. “Darling! Why on earth do you wear those things? You look like an Indian beggar.”

“Because I’m not vain like you, mother,” Mrs. Justen said, glaring at Mrs. Early. “Look at those terrible shoes you’ve got on! What do they have to do with the shape of a human foot?” Even on snowy days, Mrs. Justen’s feet were sandalled. When she had to go out on an errand, she would pull on a pair of huge black rubber boots that could accommodate the sandals which reminded me of those on the feet of the plaster saints I’d glimpsed when Mamá had taken me to Mass.

“And I wouldn’t make so much out of a book being made into a movie. It’s the modern equivalent of a public hanging. We’ll all be made into movies one of these days,” she said. Mrs. Early continued to gaze at her with an admiration that, I had learned, was only another form of provocation. Mrs. Justen snorted and left.

After I had worked for her for a year, Mrs. Early whispered to me that her daughter had been nearly unbalanced by her marriage, and divorce a few months later. “She was a mere child,” she said. “He was one of those fellows, you know, the kind that like other men. I had to manage everything.”

I imagined Mrs. Justen in one of her great peasant skirts, towering over a Mr. Justen who had sheltered briefly in her shadow like someone taking refuge under a tree from a sudden storm, then run away from her. How dismayed she must have been at such an absolute rejection of her large pale body, her fuzzy blondeness, her heavy female self. How had she gotten herself into such a fix? She had kept his name. Had she loved him? I observed her closely that day, but I remained unenlightened.

Mrs. Justen read two newspapers every morning. Her mail, which I usually brought in from the doormat where it was left, consisted largely of appeals for money from various organizations mostly dedicated to protecting animals. When her mother wasn’t visiting her, she would read the manuscripts she got from publishers, lying on the couch while I cleaned around her. Sometimes, she would go to stand at a window, her body arrested like a stone on the edge of a cliff.

The animal population dwindled and swelled as she found homes for strays or took in more.

“As long as people are cruel to animals, they’ll be cruel to each other,” she told me one morning when I found her warming evaporated milk for a battered torn cat she’d found under a bench in Central Park. “This poor creature, Luisa…he goes back to the beginning of his tribe. When Dr. Ingle fixes him, that’s the end of his line.” She spoke in a fluting voice, self-conscious and somewhat affected, the voice which people often used to express their deepest convictions, or perhaps those they wished others to share.

The cat suddenly hissed and ran out of the kitchen. “He felt the strangeness,” she said, “just as we do sometimes.” She placed the saucer of milk near the refrigerator. “So he’ll get the warmth,” she explained. She peered into the living room. “Come, kitty,” she called. “Poor puss. He has reason to be afraid.”

Some years later, she quoted something said by an American Indian: “White man think everything dead.” She had repeated the words with weary gravity, but as soon as they were out of her mouth, we had both burst into laughter. The blunt assertion seemed to reveal the madness of the world. “Certain people,” she said a few minutes later, “have told me my feeling for animals is just hatred for people turned inside out. It makes me wild. My mother is one of them.”