Lily was very pale. She said, “Oh, I want to help her. I will. But I’ve got to win her confidence.”
Leaving the matter to her, I went down the kitchen back stairs to my studio and picked up the violin, which sparkled with rosin dust, and began to practice Sevcik under the fluorescent light of the music stand. I bent down in my robe and frowned, as well I might, at the screaming and grating of those terrible slides. Oh, thou God and judge of life and death!
The ends of my fingers were wounded, indented especially by the steel E string, and my collarbone ached and a flaming patch, like the hives, came out on my jowl. But the voice within me continued, I want, I want!
But soon there was another voice in the house. Perhaps the music drove Ricey out. Lily and Spohr, the painter, were working hard to get the portrait finished by my birthday. She went away and Ricey, alone, took a trip to Danbury to visit a school chum, but didn’t find her way to this girl’s house. Instead, as she wandered through the back streets of Danbury she passed a parked car and heard the cries of a newborn infant in the back seat of this old Buick. It was in a shoebox. The day was terribly cold; therefore she brought the foundling back with her and hid it in the clothes closet of her room. On the twenty-first of December, at lunch, I was saying, “Children, this is the winter solstice,” and then the infant’s cry came out by way of the heating ducts from the register under the buffet. I pulled down the thick, woolly bill of my hunting cap, which, it so happens, I was wearing at the lunch table, and to suppress my surprise I began to talk about something else. For Lily was laughing toward me significantly with the upper lip drawn down over her front teeth, and her white color very warm. Looking at Ricey, I saw that silent happiness had come up into her eyes. At fifteen this girl is something of a beauty, though usually in a listless way. But she was not listless now; she was absorbed in the baby. As I did not know then who the kid was or how it had got into the house, I was startled, thrown, and I said to the twins, “So, there is a little pussy cat upstairs, eh?” They weren’t fooled. Try and fool them! Ricey and Lily had baby bottles on the kitchen stove to sterilize. I took note of this caldron full of bottles as I was returning to the basement to practice, but made no comment. All afternoon, by way of the air ducts, I heard the infant squalling, and I went for a walk but couldn’t bear the December ruins of my frozen estate and one-time pig kingdom. There were a few prize animals whom I hadn’t sold. I wasn’t ready to part with them yet.
I had arranged to play “The First Noël” on Xmas Eve, and so I was rehearsing it when Lily came downstairs to talk to me.
“I don’t want to hear anything,” I said. “But, Gene,” said Lily.
“You’re in charge,” I shouted, “you are in charge and it’s your show.”
“Gene, when you suffer you suffer harder than any person I ever saw.” She had to smile, and not at my suffering, of course, but at the way I went about suffering. “Nobody expects it. Least of all God,” she said.
“As you’re in a position to speak for God,” I said, “what does He think of your leaving this house every day to go and have your picture painted?”
“Oh, I don’t think you need to be ashamed of me,” said Lily.
Upstairs was the child, its every breath a cry, but it was no longer the topic. Lily thought I had a prejudice about her social origins, which are German and lace-curtain Irish. But damn it, I had no such prejudice. It was something else that bothered me.
Nobody truly occupies a station in life any more. There are mostly people who feel that they occupy the place that belongs to another by rights. There are displaced persons everywhere.
“For who shall abide the day of His (the rightful one’s) coming?”
“And who shall stand when He (the rightful one) appeareth?”
When the rightful one appeareth we shall all stand and file out, glad at heart and greatly relieved, and saying, “Welcome back, Bud. It’s all yours. Barns and houses are yours. Autumn beauty is yours. Take it, take it, take it!”
Maybe Lily was fighting along this line and the picture was going to be her proof that she and I were the rightful ones. But there is already a painting of me among the others. They have hard collars and whiskers, while I am at the end of a line in my National Guard uniform and hold a bayonet. And what good has this picture ever done me? So I couldn’t be serious about Lilys proposed solution to our problem.
Now listen, I loved my older brother, Dick. He was the sanest of us, with a splendid record in the First World War, a regular lion. But for one moment he resembled me, his kid brother, and that was the end of him. He was on vacation, sitting at the counter of a Greek diner, the Acropolis Diner, near Plattsburg, New York, having a cup of coffee with a buddy and writing a post card home. But his fountain pen was balky, and he cursed it, and said to his friend, “Here. Hold this pen up.” The young fellow did it and Dick took out his pistol and shot the pen from his hand. No one was injured. The roar was terrible. Then it was discovered that the bullet which had smashed the pen to bits had also pierced the coffee urn and made a fountain of the urn, which gushed straight across the diner in a hot stream to the window opposite. The Greek phoned for the state troopers, and during the chase Dick smashed his car into an embankment. He and his pal then tried to swim the river, and the pal had the presence of mind to strip his clothes, but Dick had on cavalry boots and they filled up and drowned him. This left my father alone in the world with me, my sister having died in 1901. I was working that summer for Wilbur, a fellow in our neighborhood, cutting up old cars.
But now it is Xmas week. Lily is standing on the basement stairs. Paris and Chartres and Vézelay and 57th Street are far behind us. I have the violin in my hands, and the fatal rug from Danbury under my feet. The red robe is on my back. And the hunting cap? I sometimes think it keeps my head in one piece. The gray wind of December is sweeping down the overhang of the roof and playing bassoons on the loose rain pipes. Notwithstanding this noise I hear the baby cry. And Lily says, “Can you hear it?”
“I can’t hear a thing, you know I’m a little deaf,” I said, which is true.
“Then how can you hear the violin?”
“Well, I’m standing right next to it, I should be able to hear it,” I said. “Stop me if I’m wrong,” I said, “but I seem to remember that you told me once I was your only friend in all the world.”
“But—” said Lily.
“I can’t understand you,” I said. “Go away.”
At two o’clock there were some callers, and they heard the cries from upstairs but were too well bred to mention them. I’d banked on that. To break up the tension, however, I said, “Would anybody like to visit my pistol range downstairs?” There were no takers and I went below myself and fired a few rounds. The bullets made a tremendous noise among the hot-air ducts. Soon I heard the visitors saying good-by.
Later, when the baby was asleep, Lily talked Ricey into going skating on the pond. I had bought skates for everyone, and Ricey is still young enough to be appealed to in this way. When they were gone, Lily having given me this opportunity, I laid down the fiddle and stole upstairs to Ricey’s room. Quietly I opened the closet door and saw the infant sleeping on the chemises and stockings in Ricey’s valise, for she had not finished unpacking. It was a colored child, and made a solemn impression on me. The little fists were drawn up on either side of its broad head. About the middle was a fat diaper made of a Turkish towel. And I stooped over it in the red robe and the Wellingtons, my face flaming so that my head itched under the wool cap. Should I close up the valise and take the child to the authorities? As I studied the little baby, this child of sorrow, I felt like the Pharaoh at the sight of little Moses. Then I turned aside and I went and took a walk in the woods. On the pond the cold runners clinked over the ice. It was an early sunset and I thought, “Well, anyway, God bless you, children.”