The Freedom in American Songs (9 page)

So I keep my dread of Madame Poirer to myself. Armand has problems of his own, with that Susan. He keeps his socks in their basement because she feels he has too many pairs. To please her, he has gathered them in a garbage bag and carted them downstairs. Each morning he has to go in the basement to get his socks. The wife told me this. She believes she is telling me fondly and we'll laugh about it together, two women who supposedly love my son. But she has no idea how to laugh with me. And does she love him? I wonder about it. For her, everything has to be explained or it doesn't deserve to exist, and how can Armand be explained? What kind of life does he have with her? She's the kind of woman who wouldn't have a clue how to enjoy the story of Madame Poirer's dog without asking for details nobody cares about: “What exactly does it look like, a chastity belt for dogs … is it hand-knotted or do you buckle it?” Everything is official with her—I remember the time she began to ask me about the death of my husband, which happened in Morocco—he was on a bus trip and I didn't go. Well Susan made an interrogation of it: was it a
crise cardiaque
, or was it an
anévrisme
? And how did I find out? And how did I feel at the time?

How did she think I felt? And when I happened to mention that he did not return home—they were not able to send his body here by airplane until three months had passed—well that was a mystery for Monsieur Sherlock Holmes in her opinion.

“Three months? Why three months?”

“Because they had to prepare his body in the Moroccan way, in the way they had then, at that time …”

“What way was that? What do you mean?” Her eyes were like wheels. It was as if I'd told her my husband had run off on some kind of wild escapade.

When I told her they dried him, that's how they preserved corpses, she interrupted, “How did you know it was him?” as if there must have been a mistake. I explained that I had sent for his brothers, who confirmed it was Joseph. “Armand never told me this,” she protested, “Why wouldn't Armand tell me this about his father's death?” Maybe Armand didn't know, I said—he was only sixteen when it happened. Well, you should have seen her then—to her, the story should have gone down as some sort of family heirloom; our own
Les Mille et une Nuits
; not just the death of Joseph, my ordinary husband, who happened to be on a holiday.

I had better warn Armand not to mention Madame Poirer to Susan at all, or she'll invite the woman here to elaborate on the chastity belt over a nice cup of tea and I'll never get rid of … “So happy to see you with your old friend … How marvellous that life is never a dead end but a spiral … and now you needn't feel alone on the days Armand can't come …” Yes, that's her …
marvellous
… and that grating voice of Madame Poirer … I can hear the two of them now, crowding me out of my own room, driving me out on the balcony with its dead spider plant and its view of the exhaust fan on the roof of that takeout next door, some kind of Arabic snack bar, from which stream enticing young men—
beaux jeunes hommes
—devouring delicious-looking shish kebabs. I dream sometimes of descending the fire escape and enjoying my lunch there among them, messy shreds of lettuce and onions
en cascade, agneau brûlé
dripping with juice … Do you know what Susan doesn't know? You wake up one morning, oh yes, Susan, it will get you too—you wake up to find, completely unknown to you before that day, six inches from your face there has somehow loomed a brick wall. Can't you sense it in the distance?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flyaway

 

 

There was a child at the head
of the procession with a nest of flyaway hair on her head and out of all the evacuees coming from Shields and Hebburn and Newcastle I knew that she was the one they were going to give me to look after. Me, aged seventy-six, never married, never had my own child. This one glared over my gate and I knew she didn't want me. She wanted the Heslops across the road with their collie and seven kids, but she wasn't going to get them. You never got what you wanted in the war. I never wanted to open up my house, the house I'd shared with Cinders and before that other cats, forty-seven years, since my own mother died. Oh you should have seen the way the authorities peeled this child away from the procession and nudged her through my garden. Her head was down and she was ill-dressed—her mother must've sewn that knapsack out of an old blanket, blue with fringes, and her stockings were rolled around her ankles in bulges—there was something gruesome and familiar about those stockings—I wondered why she had to wear them in summer. And eat! All that child wanted to do, all she ever talked about, was eat. Where did she think I was going to get bread and milk and raisins and ham in the middle of the war? Really, did they give us enough money to look after these children, and did anyone ask us how we felt? You just had to put up with it; if you said anything you were ungrateful and you weren't doing your part. Gracie, that was her name, and I felt no natural affection for her and she felt none for me. But we tolerated each other. We had to, didn't we.

She was five when she came to me, and her mother was old. Her mother was forty and she worked in the munitions factory in Workington and we saw her only every third or fourth weekend. I don't know what was worse, the mother coming or not coming. If the mother had come more often, things might not have happened the way they did.

I don't know what kind of house the pair had lived in in Shields, but they seemed frightened of what they called the country. I didn't live in the country, I lived on a residential street in Seaton, but they had it in their heads that because there was grass to walk on, we were in an alarming wilderness. The child, Gracie, kept her head down the first three weeks. The place was so green and bright she said it hurt her eyes, and at first she was deathly afraid of my cat just because it caught birds and brought them home in its mouth, the way cats do.

“Why has Cinders got a bleeding bird in his mouth?” she asked.

“Because it's food. You eat chicken, don't you? A chicken's a bird. A cat will never go hungry.”

“Won't it?”

“It will always find a meal somewhere. And Cinders is not a he. Cinders is a lady cat. She's going to have babies soon.”

“Kittens!”

“And I'm going to have to drown them in a bucket.”

The child and her mother must have lived on one of those paved streets in Shields with no plumbing and Roman ruins—the mother mentioned the ruins as if they were something special—and no trees unless you walked to someplace they called Seaview Terrace. This child tried to evade the sight of grass and trees, though I made her go outside every day to get her used to the surroundings.

Having a child in your house when you're elderly is a most trying exercise. A child constantly wants a fairground of some sort, a game, a lollipop, some entertainment. I had never considered my days uneventful or oppressive until that child came into them, but when she sat there in her one skirt, the only skirt in her little sack, day after day, staring at my chairs and carpet and curtains with a pathetic face, I was at my wits' end thinking of something to get her out of my way. I didn't want her to play with the Heslop children across the road because I have not forgotten what that family was like when I was a child, and I didn't like the things they said about me now. I didn't want to have to go over there looking for Gracie and therefore having to encounter that family or have them look at me in the way they did. The thought of it tired me, as did most things. At seventy-six a frail person can be easily tired, and wants quietness. Some people my age can still barge around at full strength, but I can't, and that's just the way it is. I could have pleaded illness to avoid having this evacuee, Gracie, come to my house, and perhaps that's what I should have done. I might have got Doctor Whitfield to write a note saying I had long suffered from … how do people put it? Something ridiculous …
circadian disruption
… but when the call came for guardians I somehow forgot children don't sit in one place all day and behave themselves. I forgot they're unlike the doll I lost long ago, the doll who behaved herself and did nothing but drink pretend tea out of a toy pot I kept refilling from a jug my mother kept for me to play with before our accident. My doll's name was Tilly, short for Mathilda, and she formed the extent of what I know about looking after anybody, and look what happened to her.

The personality of the wild-haired child was, I might have to say, devious. She didn't look for food when I was watching, but if I lay on my bed for a rest, she'd prowl in the pantry, lifting my saucer off the gooseberry jam, sticking her finger in it and licking that finger and sticking it in the jam again. Odious. She was like a mouse with the bread—I'd find the loaf crumbled round the edges where she'd pilfered morsels. I had a crock in which I kept bacon when I was lucky enough to get it from Gerald Bell who keeps a few pigs down the lane, and I know she tore strips of fat off that to eat. This was in addition to bread and herring and raspberries I gave her at noon, sufficient for my sustenance but evidently not for hers. Bread was hard to get, and even the raspberries and goose­berries were scarce, as it was almost impossible not to have them stolen by the Heslop children unless I watched constantly out the window, and who can be vigilant forever? I was overcome by tiredness daily by two in the afternoon, and it was during these afternoon naps that my berries were stolen and other things went wrong.

The first time the milk disappeared I thought Gracie must have drunk it and hidden the bottle. But she wasn't around. Bluebells had made her overcome her fear of the lanes and she gathered bunches that she expected me to put in a jam jar on the sill, so I thought she must be gathering more. But she didn't come home at five for her tea. Five on the dot, she'd normally pipe up, “My tummy's rumbling, Miss Penrice,” and I felt the tiresome obligation of it most heavily. But by six on this day she hadn't come home. I loathed having to do it but I went and knocked on the Heslops' door and she wasn't there either.

At first Mrs. Heslop seemed too distracted to even remember I had Gracie living with me. With seven children and her own evacuee I wasn't surprised. When I insisted she asked did I want to come in and wait until their Terry and Beverley came home and see if they knew anything. No thank you, I said, I'm sure she'll come home on her own. Then Brian came running down the stairs, the youngest, and he said, “I know how to find her!” but his mother shushed him and told me to pay no attention,

“Brian's always making things up.” she said. “You cannot trust a thing he says …” So I went back home and waited.

I remember part of me felt a little bit excited that maybe this was it, the end of Gracie, and me having responsibility for her. Nobody would be able to blame me for losing her—no one expected a seventy-six-year-old guardian to be able to follow a child's every step. Maybe she'd had an accident like the one I had when I was her age. Or maybe she'd been what is called stolen by the fairies. Every village has that happen once or twice in a generation. I suppose those stolen children are really stolen by tinkers or gypsies or what have you … in any case, no one expects an old woman to be able to counteract these things, which are facts of life in any town or city or village no matter what the size, and it's nobody's fault.

But what was I to do next? What was the procedure for the guardian of an evacuated child if harm befell the child or the child went missing? Hadn't we had all been sent notices months before, the bureau of this or that, a name and address of someone to call … but what had I done with mine? I searched the sideboard among the bills and deeds and what have you, but I didn't find it, nor was it in my bedroom, and it occurred to me that even if I found the document with some name on it, a Mrs. Davis or Mrs. Ostle—I fancy it was a Mrs. and not a Mr.—what good would it do me to write them a letter? A letter would take time to reach that Mrs. Somebody, then they'd have to respond, and there was no way such a correspondence would have any effect on what might have befallen Gracie tonight … but why did I feel an exultant leap? … If Gracie didn't come home by nine o'clock, I decided, I'd walk to Bramley's Dry Goods and get Mrs. Bramley to find a policeman. At least people would say I had looked for her.

But Gracie tumbled home at dusk.

“Where have you been?”

“Finding things to eat.”

“Is eating all you think about?”

“… No.”

“Yes it is. What did you find?”

“Spiky things hanging down, then sausage rolls.”

“Who gave you those?”

“A bird and a man.”

She did not ask for food and never mentioned hunger from that night on. Then on a Monday the child and the milk disappeared again, and I also realized I hadn't seen Cinders for some time, and that she must have had her kittens. I convinced myself Gracie was taking the milk to feed Cinders and the kittens in some hiding place, and I felt betrayed by my cat, though I know cats are hardly loyal creatures. Again Gracie came home at nightfall and didn't sneak any bread from the pantry.

Gracie's mother was uppity for someone with a child so down-at-heel, and looked down-at-heel herself, for that matter, except that there was something about the mother's hair and her skin and her eyes and her bearing that said don't you dare look down on me. She had defiant eyes and somehow managed to keep her hair in what they call a Marcelle wave. For a woman with a child whose knapsack was sewn out of an old blanket, and whose own clothing was threadbare, she acted haughtily. “Gracie looks,” she charged on one of her weekend visits, “underweight. She looks as if she is not eating enough. Are you sure she is getting enough at mealtimes?”

“Indeed she is. There is no want of herring or bread or gooseberry jam here.”

“That skin on her knee …”

“She fell in the lane. It's impossible for me to keep up with her, or to stop her from racing around. She fell and little stones got embedded in the skin, and …”

“All the same, it was that way two weeks ago, and it looks no better.” The woman handed me a jar of rosehip syrup from the chemist. “Give her a teaspoon of this every morning and before bedtime. She's run down, for her knee to look like that. She needs vitamins. If this weren't the weekend I would take her to the doctor myself. In fact, where does the doctor live?” She asked this imperiously, and took the child that very afternoon to Gale Terrace and interrupted Doctor Whitfield's Sunday dinner, and when she came back she said Gracie had impetigo and I must do some nursing care. Anything to do with sores or bandages can make me faint, but the haughty manner of this woman prevented me from saying so.

“You will get,” she said carefully, “an extra five shillings a week for your diligence until the knee is healed. And why hasn't she got her woolen stockings on?”

I remembered the loathsome objects. “Aren't woolen stockings in summer far too hot?”

The mother persisted in her haughty tolerance. She was the real mother and I was an inferior substitute. “Have you never heard of diphtheria, Mrs. Penrice? Gracie had it when she was two.”

“But why does she have to wear them now? I mean, it's summer … they're … itchy and …”

“After the diphtheria, she had scarlet fever. She was in the hospital for weeks and I was afraid I might never see her again. They told me, when they let her come home with me, that I had to be militant against draughts.”

“Oh … I remember …”

“You remember what?”

But I didn't want to tell her. I remembered now, long ago … my own mother making me wear the very same kind of stockings though none of my friends had to wear anything of the sort.

The woman looked about to challenge me some more, but I think she feared I might retaliate during the long weeks she was away from her child, working in the shell factory. “Give her this,” she said, producing something I hadn't seen since before the war. I don't know where that woman got a hold of a parkin made with ginger and treacle in wartime, and that night I devoured it with a cup of Typhoo.

“Tell your mother the parkin was lovely,” I told Gracie. “Say nothing about the bird and the man giving you things to eat.” But I never could tell whether Gracie obeyed because I told her to, or for reasons peculiar to her own tendencies toward subterfuge and deceit.

The next time Gracie disappeared I waited by my gate until I saw little Brian Heslop crawl under the brambles to find his dog's chewed ball. I knew how thoroughly it was chewed, and how slimy it was, since it was in my hand. But its slime didn't bother me. I was remembering the day he told his mother he knew how to find Gracie, and his mother shushing him.

“Here it is,” I waved the nasty ball. “I'll give it to you if you promise to help me find out two things.”

“What things?”

“Remember how you knew where Gracie went, the day she was lost?”

“Ma wouldn't let me tell.”

“And who's stealing milk from my doorstep and giving it to the mother cat? Tell me and I'll give you your ball back, and … a slice of bread and gooseberry jam.”