Ida said to Gilbert, “Hold the box.” She got her fingers under the edges and worked the top of the box up; it stood like a box on a box, and Gilbert’s head above it was like the jack-in-the-box when the little wire catch is pushed off the fastener of a jack-in-the-box box.
Jack and Jill went up the hill. Gil Blas was the name of a book Uncle Hartley had, but Gil was a man and not Jack. “I mean, if I am Jill in the picture, the way we played when we were children,” thought Hilda, “then I would be Gil who is short for Gilbert, but we never call him Gil but Gib sometimes.” He did everything first, he made up games for things when we were children, he called me Deetie, people call me Deetie sometimes, that was Gilbert’s name for Sister Mama would explain and people would laugh. Sister or Deetie or other names, but if I were Jill, I would be Gil, we would be “twins.” There were the two alligators at Papalie’s who were twins; they were called Castor and Pollux.
Castor and Pollux, Eric had told us, were really stars in the sky. Ida said, “Take care, don’t jerk at it,” and pushed Gilbert’s hands away. Harold slid down the chair and stood looking. Mama called, “Is that you Charles?” as the front door opened and then shut and Papa came across the hall in his boots; he said “Töcterlein,” not looking at Mama. Papa is not a Moravian, he does not go to church, he met Mama at a German class at the old seminary when Papalie was principal there. I got up and took Papa’s hand. It is me he calls Töcterlein, though that is a German word and Papa is not German. They were not all German really, Mama would explain to the university ladies, they came from Moravia and Bohemia and England, though they had Germans too and Danes in the brotherhood that came to America from Herrnhut, where they went from Moravia when Count Zinzendorf helped them to get to America.
Some of the very old ladies in the old town could not talk English very well, and Papalie had some German books, but Papa had German books, too, about the stars. Gilbert interrupted, jerking at the box lid, and now maybe Mama won’t cut out the gilt paper for new stars. We paste the gilt paper on cut-out cardboard, both sides, and hang the stars on the tree with a bent bit of wire or with gilt thread threaded through a darning needle.
The needles are on the table, the whole of Mama’s workbasket is on the table. There is a strawberry of wax for thread and a strawberry with emery powder for sharpening needles and getting the rust off. There are all these things on the table and Ida is still here and it will get late. The clock will strike. Papa will want his late-evening supper, maybe he wants it now. “I’m going out again,” said Papa, as if he knew what I was thinking, but he looked round the table, as if he came from another world, another country; he was a Russian, his fur cap was in his other hand, he was a path-finder, he had worked on the northern boundary before he came to Lehigh University at Bethlehem.
What it was, was Mama had Uncle Fred and Uncle Hartley and Aunt Laura and Aunt Aggie and Mamalie and the old school and Cousin Ed and everybody in the old town really. She had Gilbert and the new baby upstairs. She had Harold.
Ida and Annie belonged to the house and the kitchen and the baby.
What Papa had was the transit house now and his classes at the university and people who came to see him about the new instruments and reporters from the papers. What Papa had was outside, the old observatory on the hill, the walk across the bridge at night, “like a thief or an astronomer,” as he would say. What he had was the high walled-in bookshelves here and in the old study, the same but with strips of trimmed leather with brass-headed tacks along each shelf. There was the smell of leather; his old gloves had the fingers cut off so that he could manage all those little screws that were so important on his instruments.
He had a broom in the corner of his transit house which was really a little house with windows and shutters that opened the whole roof. Snow blew in and he kept a broom to sweep out the snow from inside his house. What he was, was a pathfinder, an explorer. It was cold outside. He went out in the middle of the night again; he would lie down on his sofa in his study or he would sleep in the afternoon. He was outside this, he was outside everything, where was he? If he came in, everything was different, he was cold, his hand was cold. His fingers were long. My hand was small in his hand. “You have hands like your father,” they said. He said his one girl was worth all his five boys put together. He should not say that. It made a terrible responsibility, it made one five times as much as one should be.
They said, “She is quiet like her father.” They said, “It’s funny the children aren’t gifted with such a brilliant father.”
What was this gift? It took him out of doors, sometimes several different times at night after we were all in bed. He had a lantern like a captain on a ship. He had thermometers, he had glass prisms in his new transit house that Mr. Evans was coming to work with; they made different rainbows of different stars. Mr. Evans told us that, the one time he came. He said he wanted to work with the new instruments because stars were suns, didn’t we know that?
What would happen now? He was not this, he was kind about it, was he really interested?
He had never had a Christmas tree when he was a child.
There was Alvin, who was killed or who died of typhoid fever in the Civil War, there was Papa, there was Aunt Rosa, there was Mercy. Mercy had died when she was a very little girl. I held on to Papa’s hand. What it was, was there was Mercy, he told me Mercy had done a sampler, Mercy had read the Bible through before she was five — was that possible? Mercy had asked to give the kitten that was going to be drowned a saucer of milk, before it was drowned. That was all, absolutely all, that I ever knew about Mercy.
He said, “Mercy,” and gave a little neighing laugh like a horse, “fed the kitten a saucer of milk before it was drowned.”
Where was the sampler? Had Aunt Rosa the sampler? Aunt Rosa was very quiet, she and Uncle John had been missionaries. She watched us trim the tree one Christmas and did not seem to understand; that is, she did not help us, as if she did not know how to trim a Christmas tree.
No one seemed to belong to Papa when he came in out of the cold, though Mama looked up and Ida said, “Will the Professor want his evening supper now or later?” Everything revolved around him; Mama was sweeping up the bits of gilt paper, she seemed to be thinking of something else. Harold stood looking, Gilbert did not shout now. It was as if he brought into the house the night and the cold, and when he laughed, it was not like Uncle Fred or Uncle Hartley, it was a sort of snort like a horse makes. “Does the Professor’s beard really freeze on his instrument?” the university ladies would ask. Sometimes, they seemed to think it very funny, sometimes they were serious and said, “Such devotion” or something of that sort.
Yes it was true, he must be cold out there alone with the snow drifting into the transit house. Who understood this? Who understood what he was doing? Mama didn’t. “I can’t follow my husband’s work,” she would say to the ladies, “I don’t pretend to.”
Papa did not tell us what he was doing. Mr. Evans seemed very surprised that we did not know all about it. “Your father is doing very important work,” he said. “I suppose he’s explained it to you, on variation of latitude.” We did not dare ask Mr. Evans what that was. Some day, I would ask Papa. I did not want to know really. What it was, was that he was separate, he was not really part of this table with the glass balls, with the tinsel paper, with the work-basket, with the paste pot, with the old gilt fir cones that Mama said we could paint over with some new gilt that she would get when she went in to shop in Philadelphia.