A shooting star, p.40
A Shooting Star, page 40
“She’s got enough troubles. Anyway, she has to go on living with him, he’s her son. I’d only be a source of constant friction.”
“Yes,” Sabrina said. “I suppose you’re right.” She folded the check back into the note, put them in the envelope, and handed them back. The girl did not quite understand.
“Please. I hoped you’d give it to her, and maybe help … explain.”
“I don’t mind explaining, but I won’t let you give the check back.”
“She’d think I took it and ran out. And I tell you something, Mrs. Castro, I like her too well to have her think that. The money would have meant a lot to us, but I won’t take it if she’s going to think I’m a sneak.”
“I can tell her all about it, so she can blame the right party.”
“No,” Helen said, “I thought of that. But she’s too old now to learn how to face up to things. She’s run from everything too long.”
And that was both perceptive and charitable. In fact, everything about this girl was so correct, honorable, intelligent, and self-controlled that Sabrina felt herself veering like a changeable wind, and wishing she would not stand there so self-consciously noble. She thrust the envelope at her, and Helen put her hands behind her back.
“Take it, you fool,” Sabrina said. “Write her another note and tell her your husband cut his toe or something, it’s an emergency.”
“I won’t lie to her.”
“You were just saying she had to be lied to. This note lies to her, doesn’t it?”
“At least if I give the check back she can’t think that’s the reason.”
“Take it,” Sabrina said. “I’ll see that she doesn’t think badly of you. I’ll even lie to her if necessary—I’m used to it. But she wanted you to have that money, and so do I.
“And you don’t think …”
She took the check with her characteristic lack of fuss, almost as indifferently as she would have given it up. She had remarkably clear, steady eyes, and the look she gave Sabrina now was less guarded, friendlier, a searching, wide-eyed curious glance of the kind she had been throwing her way all summer. It occurred to Sabrina that perhaps what had been offered her, and what she had rejected until it was too late, was an admiring younger sister.
“All right, then,” Helen said. “Shall I write another note?”
“I would. She’ll give you up easier if she thinks it’s an emergency. For a while at least she can even be led to assume you’re coming back.”
They looked at one another, rueful. Light from the window behind Helen put a halo of pale gold around the edges of her hair. She made a funny little hunching motion of her shoulders, a gesture of half-humorous renunciation.
Sabrina looked at her watch. “Oh, my Lord,” she said, and with only a hasty word left Helen standing there with her check in her hand. Within a minute, hurrying to get ready for her appointment, she had forgotten her entirely.
CHAPTER 30
FROM THE DOORWAY Barbara took one look at Sabrina’s face. “Oh,” she said, “what’s wrong?” Over her shoulder she yelled until she had shouted down the clamor from the girls’ room. “Yes, it’s Sabrina. But just the same you’re not to get up for another fifteen minutes. You hear? I’ll tell you when. You stay down.”
Steering her heavy front, she led the way out into the patio and shut both halves of the dutch door. “What?” she said.
“Burke’s divorcing me, is all.” From the plastic chair where she had flopped, Sabrina stretched her legs out into the sun past the hard-edged shadow of the overhang. The face she turned up mocked itself.
“Oh, gee!” Barbara said ineffectually, and sank to the edge of a lounge and felt the released ache spread upward from her feet into her legs. She rubbed the veins in her calf. “Why is he?”
“Why? Why do you think?”
“But that was … I mean, I thought you were the one …”
“Yes, isn’t it comical? I thought I was making up my mind, and all the time he was making up his. It’s what’s called seizing the initiative.”
Stretched at ease with mockery on her mouth and a vertical cleft pinched between her eyes, she lit a cigarette and threw the match on the bricks. “I brought it to a head when I sent for my dog. Evidently that was the unforgivable straw that broke the camel’s unbending back.”
Her voice was stagily husky, she lidded her eyes against the smoke like Marlene Dietrich being contemptuously and lazily provocative.
Rubbing her calf, full of sick sympathy, “Tell me,” Barbara said.
Sabrina flipped a letter across; it fell on the bricks and Barbara stooped thickly to reach it. For a moment she looked at Sabrina, morosely staring into the fence corner with her finger tap-tap-tapping on her cigarette, and then she bent her head and read. “Sincerely,” Sabrina burst out, almost before she had finished. “Isn’t that a passionate nature? Sincerely!”
“But … didn’t you say anything about the two of you? Did you just say please send Fat Boy?”
With a jerk Sabrina sat up; her eyes came around in a glance of scorn. “If I’d said anything I’d have had to say whether or not I wanted to come back. I was even thinking I might go, two days ago, but I wasn’t going to write that to him. He should have come to me.”
“Hutchie,” Barbara said, “didn’t he come to you, twice?”
“Oh, sure. Each time full of phony Christian forgiveness. He didn’t want me, he wanted the gratification of thinking well of himself.” Her cigarette dropped to the bricks, she stepped on it with a flash of brown leg, fished another from her purse, lit it, flipped the match, tilted her great eyes sideward.
“I should think you’d want to see him, or call him, and try to work it out,” Barbara said. “I think he cares about you very much.”
Looking up into the little acacia tree, Sabrina bared her teeth. “One consolation, I’ll have pried him away from his precious practice for six weeks.”
“You don’t mean that,” Barbara said. Her hand continued to rub ruefully up and down the distended, aching veins. One more child and she’d be having an operation on those.
“Don’t I?” Sabrina said indifferently.
“Really, I don’t want to mess in your affairs, but I don’t see why you couldn’t have written him, or write him now. Unless Bernard meant more than you said.”
A spasm of disgust passed over Sabrina’s face. Tap, tap, tap went her finger on the ashless tube of the cigarette.
Helplessly Barbara said, “I wish I knew something to say except I’m sorry.”
“Ah!” said Sabrina, galvanized into a stocking-footed prowl up and down the patio. “If you knew all of it you’d be sorrier, or else you’d laugh out loud.” For a second she paused, her lower lip between her teeth, studying the pattern of the bricks. She walked four or five toe-to-heel steps along a crack and teetered there, her smooth, brown, strong, well-kept fingers working against her palm as if rubbing off something sticky. She seemed to grope in amused bewilderment for the right expression to wear, and then she toppled off her balancing of the crack, and laughed, and said, “In your condition you should have lullabies, not stupid stories. I’ll tell you after you’ve had this baby.”
“I won’t have to wait long, then. He’s absolutely kicking me to death.”
Curiosity, a steady, squinted look. “Can you really feel him that hard?”
“Oh, every few minutes. Here, feel.” She took Sabrina’s wrist and held her hand against her belly. They could not quite look into each other’s eyes as they waited. Then a thump, a flop, of that life getting restless to be born.
“Yes!” Sabrina breathed. “My Lord, he’s like a fish on a line.” She took her hand away; her lips were drawn squeamishly back from her teeth. Uncertainly, vaguely embarrassed, Barbara said, “Maybe you’d like a drink.”
“God, yes, could I? Don’t move, I’ll get it. You want one?”
“I wish I could. When you’ve carried a baby this long you’ll do anything to get rid of it, but nothing to hurt it.”
From the doorway Sabrina turned back. Her eyes were wide, blue and bright as some bright mineral. Very softly she said, “How about earlier?”
It took a moment for Barbara to comprehend. The baby twitched again; she thought he turned clean over; her insides rolled with an inevitable, queasy weight. Squirming, still rubbing her aching leg, she stared at Sabrina, hot-eyed in the shadowed door. “Hutchie, you aren’t … you haven’t got caught.”
Nodding left, nodding right, Sabrina for some reason put on a prissy smile. “Guaranteed. I just got the report on the rabbit blood test.”
“Oh, you’ve got to go back to Burke!”
“Can you imagine him accepting a child that’s not his?”
“Couldn’t it be his?”
“No. I wasn’t quite a good enough planner to create an ambiguity. I seem to have been too abrupt, or too honest, or something.” She laughed in a way Barbara did not like, and flung her arms wide. “Isn’t it a dandy? It beats East Lynn all hollow. If I’d found myself pregnant two months ago, after trying for twelve years, how would I have felt, eh? No more doldrums, something to do, Burke and I reunited, hearts and flowers. But I manage it otherwise. Instead of being a sort of wife without children, I arrange to be a sort of mother without a husband. Out into the storm with me. Never darken his door again. Can’t you see me with my head in a shawl and my babe clutched to my breast?” She knocked her knuckles against the door-jamb and produced a short hoarse bark. “If I don’t lose it. Which would you do, if you were I? Pray to keep it, or make sure to lose it?”
The air was ripped by shocking screams. Half to her feet, lurching, Barbara saw the girls jumping around Sabrina, who held them against her legs and directed over their heads a shaky, complicated look. Only one thing it said clearly: Don’t scold them. “Ah, ducks,” she said with a laughing catch of the breath, “you really got me that time!”
“I ought to dust you off with the fly-swatter, you little devils,” Barbara said. Shock was still pumping in her blood, and she felt her belly for the muscles that had been strained when she leaped up. “See if you can do something nice for Sabrina instead of scaring her to death. Go fill the ice bucket for her.” They went, noisy as sparrows, and quarreled over the refrigerator door.
“I gather you won’t contest it,” Barbara said.
Sabrina, biting thoughtfully on her knuckles, spit out a shred of skin scuffed loose by her knocking on the doorjamb. “Oh, how could I? I’m on his side. It would be a pity for him to get saddled with me again. Such a dedicated and selfless man.” She spread her hands against the sides of the door in an exaggeratedly cruciform pose. “I’ve bitched everything,” she said with a sudden lapse from savagery to self-pity. “Just out of some … You know what I should do? I should sell do-it-yourself crucifixion sets, no fuss, no bother, if you can drive three nails you can operate it, no home is complete without …” Her brilliant eyes blinked rapidly, a laugh came throatily up through the words. “I’m like the anti-Semitic Jew in Germany,” she said. “Remember him? He went around wearing a sign saying ‘Down with Us.’ ”
Later, when the children had quit hanging around and gone rather brattishly to play down the street (they expect gifts, Barbara thought; every time she comes, they expect something; it isn’t good for them), Sabrina said, “I don’t know. I could go abroad and have it, I suppose. Or I could go away and get rid of it. Certainly I couldn’t stay here. Mother, for one thing. And imagine sometime walking down a street in the City, all bulging, and meeting Bernard.”
Barbara said curiously, “He doesn’t mean a thing to you, now.”
“When I got involved with him I was sick,” Sabrina said. “Would you stay around somewhere where you’d stuck your finger down your throat?”
They were sitting in the patio again. The casual afternoon sounds of Greenwood Acres belled in the summer air. It was noisier with children than it would be in an hour, when the television programs came on. Barbara had set a sprinkler to going on the bank of shrubs in the corner of the fence, and a pair of linnets and a towhee were ruffling their feathers in the spray. A big dark oval of wet spread up the grapestake fence, the pittosporum leaves gleamed like varnished leather. It was very peaceful and neighborhood-y, and she did not like to think of Sabrina taking her trouble off to bear it alone, since it was hatred, and not love, that was fertile inside her. Once she would have thought it marvelous if she and Sabrina could be pregnant together, and compare notes, and help each other get ready, and have little private jokes. Now it only made her sad. She said, “You wish the baby wasn’t his.”
“I haven’t thought much about it. It shouldn’t matter—it isn’t the baby’s fault.”
“It might be hard to love a baby if you didn’t love its father. Or maybe—I don’t know.”
“Maybe there won’t be any baby anyway. I haven’t demonstrated myself so fertile I can guarantee to pull it off the first time.”
“Don’t you sort of hope there is?”
Sabrina looked at her queerly. She was, thank goodness, much calmer. “That’s your answer, is it? You’d try to keep it.”
“I can’t imagine not trying to.” Barbara shivered a little, pleasurably, thinking of some secret office where a silent nurselike woman might let you in and get you ready, and a man whose face you would not want to see, somebody surgical and heartless and perhaps not even clean, would clean you out like taking the seeds out of a cantaloupe. Ugg. Thump and flop inside her. She said to herself fiercely, Don’t be smug!
As if reading her mind, Sabrina said, “God, I envy you, Bobbie MacDonald! If this had happened right, do you think I wouldn’t be delirious?”
Job’s comforter, she could think of nothing but comforter’s words, and Sabrina had never been one to love Pollyanna. Her way was to anticipate the worst and then treat the worst as beneath contempt. She went inside and fixed herself a third drink, and when she came back carrying bottle and ice bucket and glass, she said gloomily, “I always did envy you, you know. I don’t understand why I ever liked you.”
“Me?” Barbara said in her most comic squeak. She looked down at her swollen front and held out handfuls of her disordered hair.
“Even when we were little. You never wanted anything, you were so blasted unselfish, but you always got things anyway.”
“Name one thing. Except maybe Leonard.”
“That’s a considerable exception,” Sabrina said. Her mood had turned back to humorous savagery. “Mother’s in love with him, did I tell you? She positively twitters when he’s around. We all do. Yesterday when he was quitting she felt worse than if somebody had taken away her diet or her exercises.… What?”
“I said we almost died when we opened Leonard’s pay envelope. He called her up, thinking it was a mistake. It was the sweetest thing for her to do, we’re going to put it in the bank for the baby.”
“But Leonard isn’t the only thing,” Sabrina said, undiverted. “Ever since the very first summer I knew you, in that camp on Fallen Leaf Lake when we were eight or nine. Remember? Who worked like a fiend for four weeks to win the Good Camper Medal? And who did win it?”
“Oh, that was robbery!” Barbara cried. “You earned it twice over. I think I cried when they gave it to me, it was so unfair. I wanted you to win it.”
“Yes, but I didn’t. Remember?”
Remember? How could she forget that place, wanting her children to know it when they got a little older. It was a spot sweetly elegiac in her memory, a place all brown. She could see it simply by closing her eyes—even without closing her eyes, for it was there now, behind what her eyes were looking at, as if a color transparency had been twice exposed. Right before her Sabrina’s face, the sharp sun and shade, the wet green of the fence corner with a fragment of rainbow afloat above it; and beyond those, wavering and faded, the nostalgic vision in sepia: brown shade, air as brown as tea, a brown grove pierced by a slant of sun that touched chestnut-colored on a sugar pine and sorrel on an incense cedar. And in this and through it, protectively colored, the brown tents and shingled cottages, and the little brown people like creatures hatched out from under toadstools on the brown forest floor.
Sabrina was looking at her through a brown glass. She said, “After a quarter of a century I can still tell you exactly how I did in that competition. I got ten points for winning the swimming race, and eight when you and I came in third in girls’ canoeing—”
“If you’d had a decent partner you’d have won it.”
“And I got nine for my natural-history collection. That really made me mad, I had more tree funguses and salamanders and cones and pressed leaves and flowers than anybody, but because it wasn’t put up neatly they only gave me second. And I got seven points in the fishing contest.” She turned her lips inside out. “And four for neatness and bed making.”
Barbara giggled, rather surprised that the brown leg in the chair six feet away did not have a Band-Aid on it somewhere. Sabrina had always loved the visible evidence of wounds. And the face that looked at her amusedly over the glass could be made with only a slight narrowing of the eyes into that other face, just as vivid, thinner, more eager, not less proud and scornful, with its camp pigtails so tight that the eyes were pulled Chinese. The demon camper. She had bossed their tent like an Irish foreman, everyone had been afraid of her will. And being her best friend had been a distinction next door to beatitude.
She giggled again. “Remember the flies?”
“Ah,” said Sabrina, “there was nobody even close on flies. I wonder what brain thought up that idea for a competition? Probably the idea was to teach us how to avoid typhoid and filth diseases, mmm? So I sit in the tent every spare minute with a nice wet newly licked sucker and catch flies on it, and when it dries out I lick it sticky again. I had whole envelopes full of flies all stuck together. And I stood over that Miriam Hodge like a polls inspector when she counted them.”
The giggles came as irresistible as hiccups; as soon as they got control of themselves their eyes met and they burst out again. Barbara, wiping away tears, supposed that there must be some alcohol in Sabrina’s amusement, and some relief in her own. Yet the very thought of that intense little girl sitting idol-still in the brown tent with her fly-trap sucker clenched in her fist made her explode all over again. Sabrina, just taking a sip of her drink, blew spray and bent over groping for a handkerchief.
