The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (5 page)

She wanted to sing. All the songs she knew pushed up toward her throat, but there was no sound. One big boy who had got to the highest part of the roof last week let out a yell and then started hollering out a speech he had learned at High School--’Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Lend me your ears!’ There was something about getting to the very top that gave you a wild feeling and made you want to yell or sing or raise up your arms and fly.

She felt the soles of her tennis shoes slipping, and eased herself down so that she straddled the peak of the roof. The house was almost finished. It would be one of the largest buildings in the neighborhood--two stories, with very high ceilings and the steepest roof of any house she had ever seen.

But soon the work would all be finished. The carpenters would leave and the kids would have to find another place to play.

She was by herself. No one was around and it was quiet and she could think for a while. She took from the pocket of her shorts the package of cigarettes she had bought the night before. She breathed in the smoke slowly. The cigarette gave her a drunk feeling so that her head seemed heavy and loose on her shoulders, but she had to finish it.

M.K.--That was what she would have written on everything when she was seventeen years old and very famous. She would ride back home in a red-and-white Packard automobile with her initials on the doors. She would have M.K. written in red on her handkerchiefs and underclothes. Maybe she would be a great inventor. She would invent little tiny radios the size of a green pea that people could carry around and stick in their ears. Also flying machines people could fasten on their backs like knapsacks and go zipping all over the world. After that she would be the first one to make a large tunnel through the world to China, and people could go down in big balloons.

Those were the first tilings she would invent. They were already planned.

When Mick had finished half of the cigarette she smashed it dead and flipped the butt down the slant of the roof. Then she leaned forward so that her head rested on her arms and began to hum to herself.

It was a funny thing--but nearly all the time there was some kind of piano piece or other music going on in the back of her mind. No matter what she was doing or thinking it was nearly always there. Miss Brown, who boarded with them, had a radio in her room, and all last winter she would sit on the steps every Sunday afternoon and listen in on the programs.

Those were probably classical pieces, but they were the ones she remembered best. There was one special fellow’s music that made her heart shrink up every time she heard it.

Sometimes this fellow’s music was like little colored pieces of crystal candy, and other times it was the softest, saddest thing she had ever imagined about.

There was the sudden sound of crying. Mick sat up straight and listened The wind ruffled the fringe of hair on her forehead and the bright sun made her face white and damp.

The whimpering continued, and Mick moved slowly along the sharp-pointed roof on her hands and knees. When she reached the end she leaned forward and lay on her stomach so that her head jutted over the edge and she could see the ground below.

The kids were where she had left them. Bubber was squatting over something on the ground and beside him was a little black, dwarf shadow. Ralph was still tied in the wagon.

He was just old enough to sit up, and he held on to the sides of the wagon, with his cap crooked on his head, crying.

‘Bubber!’ Mick called down. ‘Find out what that Ralph wants and give it to him.’

Bubber stood up and looked hard into the baby’s face. ‘He don’t want nothing.’

‘Well, give him a good shake, then.’

Mick climbed back to the place where she had been sitting before. She wanted to think for a long time about two or three certain people, to sing to herself, and to make plans. But that Ralph was still hollering and there wouldn’t be any peace for her at all.

Boldly she began to climb down toward the ladder propped against the edge of the roof. The slant was very steep and there were only a few blocks of wood nailed down, very far apart from each other, that the workmen used for footholds.

She was dizzy, and her heart beat so hard it made her tremble.

Commandingly she talked out loud to herself: ‘Hold on here with your hands tight and then slide down until your right toe gets a grip there and then stay close and wiggle over to the left. Nerve, Mick, you’ve got to keep nerve.’

Coming down was the hardest part of any climbing. It took her a long time to reach the ladder and to feel safe again. When she stood on the ground at last she seemed much shorter and smaller and her legs felt for a minute like they would crumple up with her. She hitched her shorts and jerked the belt a notch tighter. Ralph was still crying, but she paid the sound no attention and went into the new, empty house.

Last month they had put a sign out in front saying that no children were allowed on the lot. A gang of kids had been scuffling around inside the rooms one night, and a girl who couldn’t see in the dark had run into a room that hadn’t been floored and fallen through and broken her leg. She was still at the hospital in a plaster parish cast. Also, another time some tough boys wee-weed all over one of the walls and wrote some pretty bad words. But no matter how many Keep Out signs were put up, they couldn’t run kids away until the house had been painted and finished and people had moved in.

The rooms smelled of new wood, and when she walked the soles of her tennis shoes made a flopping sound that echoed through all the house. The air was hot and quiet. She stood still in the middle of the front room for a while, and then she suddenly thought of something. She fished in her pocket and brought out two stubs of chalk--one green and the other red.

Mick drew the big block letters very slowly. At the top she wrote EDISON, and under that she drew the names of DICK TRACY and MUSSOLINI. Then in each corner with the largest letters of all, made with green and outlined in red, she wrote her initials--M.K. When that was done she crossed over to the opposite wall and wrote a very bad word--PUSSY, and beneath that she put her initials, too.

She stood in the middle of the empty room and stared at what she had done. The chalk was still in her hands and she did not feel really satisfied. She was trying to think of the name of this fellow who had written this music she heard over the radio last whiter. She had asked a girl at school who owned a piano and took music lessons about him, and the girl asked her teacher. It seemed this fellow was just a kid who had lived in some country in Europe a good while ago. But even if he was just a young kid he had made up all these beautiful pieces for the piano and for the violin and for a band or orchestra too. In her mind she could remember about six different tunes from the pieces of his she had heard. A few of them were kind of quick and tinkling, and another was like that smell in the springtime after a rain. But they all made her somehow sad and excited at the same time.

She hummed one of the tunes, and after a while in the hot, empty house by herself she felt the tears come in her eyes. Her throat got tight and rough and she couldn’t sing any more.

Quickly she wrote the fellow’s name at the very top of the list--MOTSART.

Ralph was tied in the wagon just as she had left him. He sat up quiet and still and his fat little hands held on to the sides.

Ralph looked like a little Chinese baby with his square black bangs and his black eyes. The sun was in his face, and that was why he had been hollering. Bubber was nowhere around. When Ralph saw her coming he began tuning up to cry again. She pulled the wagon into the shade by the side of the new house and took from her shirt pocket a blue-colored jelly bean. She stuck the candy in the baby’s warm, soft mouth.

‘Put that in your pipe and smoke it,’ she said to him. In a way it was a waste, because Ralph was still too little to get the real good flavor out of candy. A clean rock would be about the same to him, only the little fool would swallow it. He didn’t understand any more about taste than he did about talking.

When you said you were so sick and tired of dragging him around you had a good mind to throw him in the river, it was the same to him as if you had been loving him. Nothing much made any difference to him. That was why it was such an awful bore to haul him around.

Mick cupped her hands, clamped them tight together, and blew through the crack between her thumbs. Her cheeks puffed out and at first there was only the sound of air rushing through her fists. Then a high, shrill whistle sounded, and after a few seconds Bubber came out from around the corner of the house.

She rumpled the sawdust out of Bubber’s hair and straightened Ralph’s cap. This cap was the finest thing Ralph had. It was made out of lace and all embroidered. The ribbon under his chin was blue on one side and white on the other, and over each ear there were big rosettes. His head had got too big for the cap and the embroidery scratched, but she always put it on him when she took him out. Ralph didn’t have any real baby carriage like most folks’ babies did, or any summer bootees.

He had to be dragged around in a tacky old wagon she had got for Christmas three years before. But the fine cap gave him face. There was nobody on the street, for it was late Sunday morning and very hot. The wagon screeched and rattled. Bubber was barefooted and the sidewalk was so hot it burned his feet. The green oak trees made cool-looking black shadows on the ground, but that was not shade enough. ‘Get up in the wagon,’ she told Bubber. ‘And let Ralph sit in your lap.’

‘I can walk all right.’ The long summer-time always gave Bubber the colic. He didn’t have on a shirt and his ribs were sharp and white. The sun made him pale instead of brown, and his little titties were like blue raisins on his chest. ‘I don’t mind pulling you,’ Mick said. ‘Get on in.’

‘O.K.’ Mick dragged the wagon slowly because she was not in any hurry to get home. She began talking to the kids. But it was really more like saying things to herself than words said to them. ‘This is a funny thing--the dreams I’ve been having lately. It’s like I’m swimming. But instead of water I’m pushing out my arms and swimming through great big crowds of people. The crowd is a hundred times bigger than in Kresses’ store on Saturday afternoon. The biggest crowd in the world. And sometimes I’m yelling and swimming through people, knocking them all down wherever I go--and other times I’m on the ground and people are trompling all over me and my insides are oozing out on the sidewalk. I guess it’s more like a nightmare than a plain On Sundays the house was always full of folks because the boarders had visitors. Newspapers rustled and there was cigar smoke, and footsteps always on the stairs.’ Some things you just naurally want to keep private. Not because they are bad, but because you just want them secret. There are two or three things I wouldn’t want even you to know about’ Bubber got out when they came to the corner and helped her lift the wagon down the curb and get it up on the next sidewalk.

‘But there’s one thing I would give anything for. And that’s a piano. If we had a piano I’d practice every single night and learn every piece in the world. That’s the thing I, want more than anything else.’

They had come to their own home block now. Their house was only a few doors away. It was one of the biggest houses on the whole north side of town--three stories high. But then there were fourteen people in the family. There weren’t that many in the real, blood Kelly family--but they ate there and slept there at five dollars a head and you plight as well count them on in. Mr. Singer wasn’t counted in that because he only rented a room and kept it straightened up himself.

The house was narrow and had not been painted for many years. It did hot seem to be built strong enough for its three stories of height. It sagged on one side.

Mick untied Ralph and lifted him from the wagon. She darted quickly through the hall, and from the corner of her eye she saw that the living-room was full of boarders. Her Dad was there, too. Her Mama would be in the kitchen. They were all hanging around waiting for dinner-time.

She went into the first of the three rooms that the family kept for themselves. She put Ralph down on the bed where her Dad and Mama slept and gave him a string of beads to play with.

From behind the closed door of the next room she could hear the sound of voices, and she decided to go inside.

Hazel and Etta stopped talking when they saw her. Etta was sitting in the chair by the window, painting her toe-nails with the red polish. Her hair was done up in steel rollers and there was a white dab of face cream on a little place under her chin where a pimple had come out. Hazel was flopped out lazy on the bed as usual. ‘What were you all jawing about?’ It’s none of your nosy business,’ Etta said. ‘Just you hush up and leave us alone.’

‘It’s my room just as much as it is either one of yours. I have as good a right hi here as you do.’ Mick strutted from one corner to the other until she had covered all the floor space. ‘But then I don’t care anything about picking any fight. All I want are my own rights.’

Mick brushed back her shaggy bangs with the palm of her hand. She had done this so often that there was a little row of cowlicks above her forehead. She quivered her nose and made faces at herself in the mirror. Then she began walking around the room again.

Hazel and Etta were O.K. as far as sisters went. But Etta was like she was full of worms. All she thought about was movie stars and getting in the movies. Once she had written to Jeanette MacDonald and had got a typewritten letter back saying that if ever she came out to Hollywood she could come by and swim in her swimming pool. And ever since that swimming pool had been preying on Etta’s mind. All she thought about was going to Hollywood when she could scrape up the bus fare and getting a job as a secretary and being buddies with Jeanette MacDonald and getting in the movies herself.

She primped all the day long. And that was the bad part. Etta wasn’t naturally pretty like Hazel. The main thing was she didn’t have any chin. She would pull at her jaw and go through a lot of chin exercises she had read in ft movie book. She was always looking at her side profile in the mirror and trying to keep her mouth set in a certain way. But it didn’t do any good.