Hangsaman (4 page)

This morning Mrs. Waite's initial momentum came from her Sunday casserole which, incredibly complex and delicate, would be devoured drunkenly in a few hours by inconsiderate and uncomplimentary people. When Natalie came into the kitchen her mother was leaning over the sideboard, slicing meat beautifully thin with the butcher knife. “Natalie?” she said without looking around. “Did you hear him?” she went on, without assuring herself that it
was
really Natalie and not Mr. Waite come to announce that the house was on fire. “Did you
hear
him? He's an old fool, he really is.” She held her breath to cut daintily around a bone, and then went on. “Sometimes I think he must be an awful fool, to think people are taken in by his pretensions. Paranoid,” Mrs. Waite announced with satisfaction. “Paranoid. My father used to laugh when he came, he really did. Paranoid. Natalie, I wish Ethel would leave dishes the way I leave them. Little ones inside big ones. It's impossible to believe that anyone can put dishes away in this sort of insane arrangement; she piles them all together without thinking of size or safety. Used to laugh. Sometimes I think he only married me because my name was Charity and it was the fashion then for people like your father to sing songs like ‘Buffalo Gals' and dance a Virginia reel. Charity.
My
father knew what he was doing.”

Natalie's Sunday morning work usually began with the salad greens. She washed lettuce and carrots, tomatoes and radishes, cleaned them and set them in cold water to be made into salad at the last minute. With both hands full of lettuce leaves, now, she stood at the sink watching the waterfall of the cold water running from the faucet through the clear green of the lettuce. It was incredibly beautiful until her hands began to chill.

“Too lazy to do anything for himself,” Mrs. Waite said. “Imagine a grown man taking up square-dancing in New York City. I remember my mother, a real scold
she
was. Her voice up
here
all the time, and I sometimes think your father would profit by her, although before she died she did get pretty quiet without my father. I always used to wonder how people made happy marriages and made them last all day long every day. Seemed to me my mother wasn't happy but then of course I didn't know. Natalie, see that your marriage is happy.” She turned and looked earnestly at Natalie, the knife resting against her palm. “See that your marriage is happy, child. Don't ever let your husband know what you're thinking or doing, that's the way. My mother could have done
any
thing, anything she wanted, my father would have let her, even though probably he wouldn't have known. Of course, by the time he died she was too old.” Mrs. Waite took the thin slices of meat and began to arrange them in the baking dish. “I remember Sundays at home,” she went on.

“You want me to hardboil eggs?” Natalie asked softly.

Mrs. Waite thought, looking around at the kitchen as though the casserole or the lettuce had an opinion she was waiting for. Finally she said, “I guess we'd better, Natalie. Can't ever tell how many will come.” She smiled as she went on, “Sundays at home, we never knew how many were coming. Sometimes we'd go to my grandmother's, or to one of my sisters'. All my sisters married before I did, Natalie, there's something for you.
They
could have told me. Or else they'd come to our house. We never knew. They were like a flock of birds—one would take off for someplace, and then the rest would follow. All big men, small women. My uncles—when I remember them I see them sitting on Sunday afternoons, sometimes in one house, sometimes in another. Take my uncle Charles; I usually remember him sitting in the red chair in our dining room—we had to bring chairs in, they'd be so many at table—or else in the old brown mohair chair he kept by the fireplace in his own house. Aunt—what was her name, Natalie? Who married Charles?”

“Helen,” Natalie said.

“Helen,” Mrs. Waite said. “Well, she used to hate that chair, except I always used to think then that she only made such a fuss because she knew wives always hated their husbands' old dear things and she was afraid no one would respect her if she let him keep the chair without a fuss. Except I don't think she ever paid much attention to doing it seriously.” She slid her knife through the piece of cooking butter on the plate, and began to slice an onion. “Fancy African masks,” she said. “Cheap dirty silver jewelry. Old blues records you wouldn't want to know the words of if you
could
hear them. Anyway, I always remember that uncle sitting in that chair. I guess all young girls—more water there, Natalie—get to hate where they're living because they think a husband will be better. What happens is that a husband's the same, usually. When I met your father he had a lot of books that he said he read, and he gave me a Mexican silver bracelet instead of an engagement ring, and I looked around at my uncles sitting in their old goddam—your father taught me to say goddam, too, and a lot of words else I could tell you if I wanted, although I
do
believe I've outgrown
that
part of it—chairs and I thought being married was everything I wanted. Only of course it's the same, only now it's strangers for Sunday dinner, and your father will be sick all tomorrow if he smokes anything stronger than cigarettes. Let's have a potato salad. I told Ethel to boil extra potatoes yesterday.”

Natalie had discovered that by a slight pressure on a back tooth she could make a small regular stirring pain that operated as a rhythmic counterpoint to her mother's voice; she would not for the world have told her mother that she had a cavity in her tooth, but it was a pleasant change in her body since the day before, and she enjoyed it.

“Ice cream,” Mrs. Waite said. “We always
used
to have ice cream.”

“Tell me,” the detective said insistently, leaning forward, “tell me how it was done; you may rely on my not using the information against you.”

“I don't know,” Natalie answered silently. “I don't remember.”

“I can promise you,” the detective said with great dignity, “that I am a reasonable person to confide in. I can be trusted absolutely.”

“I don't remember,” Natalie told him.

“Of
course
you remember,” the detective said impatiently. “No one can live through such things and not
remember
them.”

“Natalie,” Mrs. Waite said, her hands quiet for a minute while she stared at the wall before her, “what will I do when you're gone?”

Embarrassed, Natalie carefully turned down the flame under the boiling eggs. “I'll be back a lot,” she said inadequately.

“A mother gets very lonesome without her daughter,” Mrs. Waite said. “Especially when it's an only daughter. A mother gets lonesomer than anything in the world.”

One of the things which Natalie most disliked about her mother was Mrs. Waite's invariable trick of putting serious statements into language that Natalie classified as cute. Mrs. Waite, too long accustomed to seeing her most heartfelt emotions exposed, discussed, and ignored, had long since fallen into protecting herself by stating them as jokes, with an air of girlish whimsy which irritated both Natalie and Mr. Waite as no flat statement of hatred could have. Because of this, Natalie—who had sometimes thought of running to her mother with a voluntary expression of affection—said briefly, “You'll find something to do.”

Mrs. Waite was silent. She had set the casserole carefully into the oven and turned her attention to the silverware before she began again, very timidly, “And at home when we had no dishes for all those people we used to ask one of the aunts to bring along . . .”

*   *   *

Lunch on Sundays was a pick-up meal; Mrs. Waite had over the years prevailed upon her husband to accept the fact that the oven would not hold at the same time an unusual meal for his friends and the correct nourishing lunch he believed his due. Although in most ordinary matters Mr. Waite would far sooner have sacrificed his friends than himself, in the question of his hospitality and the probable Monday conversations about it, Mr. Waite was willing, with objections, to forego his own comfort, always believing that it was a temporary measure due to Mrs. Waite's inefficiency and that the next Sunday would see him sensibly fed. Since it was his custom to greet regular occasions with regular remarks, Mr. Waite habitually observed over his Sunday peanut-butter sandwich, “This is not food for a grown man.”

On Sundays Mrs. Waite had an answer for him, probably because originally she had had all the week to prepare it; she habitually answered, “
You
make the dinner and
I'll
make the lunch.”

Standing at the kitchen table next to her father, Natalie looked peacefully at the scene of competence around her. The dishes used in the morning had been washed, the breakfast cups and saucers put away, and the company cups and saucers set out instead. The family napkins, suspended for the present lunch and dinner, reposed on the kitchen mantel to be brought out again on Monday. The very familiar kitchen things—the plant which Ethel kept beside the sink, the smaller teakettle, the plastic-handled tableware—were all pushed back and set aside before the company preparations. Natalie, because her mother and father were bickering, transplanted herself to an archeological expedition some thousand years from now, coming unexpectedly upon this kitchen and removing layers of earth carefully from around the teakettle—“This may have been a cookpot,” someone said wisely, and someone else added, “Or of course a chamber pot; we have no notion as yet of the habits of these peoples.” Further excavations—perhaps three or four days later, and after serious quarrels between the junior and senior members of the expedition, one force maintaining that it would be more sensible to move on; this was an infertile spot for discovery and besides the air was bad—might yield the skull of Natalie, and one, holding her precious head in his hands, turning it over and examining it intimately, might remark, “Look, here, at these teeth; they knew
some
thing of dentistry, at any rate—see, here's one filled, with gold, it appears. Had they any knowledge of gold, do you remember? Male, I should say, from the frontal development.” At that time, of course, Natalie reflected with contentment, her life would be done. There would be no further fears for Natalie, no possibility of walking wrong when you were no more than a skull in a strange man's hands. “And see,” another voice called from the end of the kitchen, “see, here, these very strange objects—ornaments,
I'd
judge. And look here, at these two skeletons here—see, look
here
, they had
children
.”

*   *   *

The garden belonged exclusively to Natalie; the rest of the family used it, of course, but only Natalie regarded it as a functioning part of her personality, and she felt that she was refreshed by ten minutes in the garden between the arbitrary pleasures assigned her by other people. If she sat on the grass at the foot of the lawn, her back against a tree, she could look out over fields that seemed soft at this distance, into mountains far away, since her father had sensibly enough chosen a picturesque location in preference to her mother's choice of something that might
grow
something; thus, at the back of the house, there was a kitchen garden ineffectually tended by Mrs. Waite, which yielded a regular crop of dubious radishes and pallid carrots, and the rest of the land about the house—some three acres of it—was allowed to run to meadow, or vacant-lot, standards. Natalie's garden was in front of the house, and was tended by a gardener who refused to touch the kitchen garden, and this part of the property ended uncertainly in a sort of cliff—if you looked at it from far enough back—below which ran the south road. Behind the house, behind even the kitchen garden, Mr. Waite had graciously permitted trees to grow unmolested, and when Natalie was younger, before the garden and the view from the cliff had taken such a hold of her, she had delighted in playing pirate and cowboy and knight in armor among the trees. Now, however, for some reason only remotely connected with knights in armor, the tree on the grass belonged to her, and she ignored the trees below as dark and silent and unprovocative.

The sight of the mountains far away was sometimes so perfectly comprehensible to Natalie that she forced tears into her eyes, or lay on the grass, unable, after a point, to absorb it—she was, of course, adequately hidden from the windows of the house—or to turn it into more than her own capacity for containing it; she was not able to leave the fields and mountains alone where she found them, but required herself to take them in and use them, a carrier of something simultaneously real and unreal to set up against the defiantly real-and-unreal batterings of her family. There was a point in Natalie, only dimly realized by herself, and probably entirely a function of her age, where obedience ended and control began; after this point was reached and passed, Natalie became a solitary functioning individual, capable of ascertaining her own believable possibilities. Sometimes, with a vast aching heartbreak, the great, badly contained intentions of creation, the poignant searching longings of adolescence overwhelmed her, and shocked by her own capacity for creation, she held herself tight and unyielding, crying out silently something that might only be phrased as, “Let me take, let me create.”

If such a feeling had any meaning to her, it was as the poetic impulse which led her into such embarrassing compositions as were hidden in her desk; the gap between the poetry she wrote and the poetry she contained was, for Natalie, something unsolvable.

Lying on the grass on Sunday afternoon, while her mother and father debated over their guests for the day, she rested her cheek on her arm and lost herself in contemplation of the fields and mountains below her; the sun behind the mountains was, to a Natalie not quite used yet to the triteness of miracle, a calendar gesture, the overdone and typical scene of a grown-up world; she had seen so many bad pictures of suns behind mountains that she allowed herself to find the sun itself ludicrous and unnecessary. But the mountains, relieved of the pressure of the sun, were dark and shadowy, and the fields, still lighted by the sun, were clear and green, and Natalie, lying with her cheek on her arm, felt herself running, lighter than anything she had ever known, running with great soft steps across the world. Her feet brushed the ground—she could feel it, she could feel it—her hair fell soundlessly behind, her long legs arched, and the breath came cold in her throat. The first to awaken, the first to come, misty, into the world, moving through an unpeopled country without a footstep, going up the mountains, touching the still-wet grass with her hands.