Mama’s table was easy because we covered her presents with roses.
Eric said, “We don’t know exactly, I mean concussion of the brain is — is if someone gets hit very hard or — er — falls down, then when the head is struck very hard—.” I wanted to know exactly what it was and I could see that Gilbert’s shoe was kicking at the edge of the rug that wasn’t lying quite flat on the floor. If we wanted to get the rug flat, we would have to get off the sofa and lift the sofa, so the little wheel that was fastened in the sofa leg to push it around with would go straight on the rug. We could not get off the sofa, we could not move.
We were frozen stiff to the sofa, in a row, but Gilbert was showing that he could move, if he wanted, by scuffing with his heel at the rug, where it bumped a little, where it had not been pushed quite flat when Ida or Annie had moved the sofa in the morning when they did the sweeping. It was easier, anyhow, for Gilbert to scuff at the floor because his legs were two years’ longer. Harold’s feet were straight out and he was sitting straight up, as if he were having his picture taken.
I could not scuff at the carpet though my feet reached the carpet, but I pushed myself back so that maybe Harold would feel that I wasn’t really waiting so hard, and then maybe Harold would sit back.
“It’s like that,” said Eric, “if a man falls down—”
“Did he fall down, then?” I was the one that was doing the talking. Gilbert was too busy fastening the leather pad over the knee of his black stocking, that didn’t need fastening.
“We — we — don’t know—”
Then the clock sort of hammered like a hammer with nails, and Mr. Evans said, “Probably your father slipped, as he was getting off the car, or the car may have backed unexpectedly — there should have been a lamppost set up at the gate, in the beginning. It’s quite obvious that your father slipped, that his foot slipped.”
Papa wasn’t like that. He wasn’t the sort of person whose foot slipped.
Mr. Evans walked to the window, then he walked back. Gilbert slid oft the sofa.
Mr. Evans said, “I’ll take the lantern and go out and see if—” he stopped and Gilbert said, “I’ll come with you. He lost his hat.”
Mr. Evans said, “No, you wait with the children. I’m only going out to see if I can find any traces — I mean, do you know, Eric, if his wallet and his watch were taken?”
“I didn’t look,” said Eric.
“His wallet is in the inside of his coat, or sometimes his overcoat,” Gilbert said, “and his watch is in the little watch-pocket.”
Mr. Evans said, “Did you see them there?” How could Gilbert have seen them?
“No, no,” said Mr. Evans, “you stay here,” because Gilbert went to the door and was out in the hall, but he came back.
“They put his overcoat on the bench in the hall,” Gilbert said, and Mr. Evans went out and Mr. Evans came back with Papa’s black wallet and he laid it on the top of the piano and he said, “That’s all right.”
He was thinking, and we knew he was thinking, “Then well, it wasn’t robbers,” but did that make it any better? It would be almost better to think it was robbers, that they had hit Papa for something, that there was some kind of a reason for it, not just this waiting and wondering what concussion was. Mr. Evans went into the hall again, then he opened the front door, then we heard his feet go down the porch steps.
His feet went down the steps, the lantern was in the hall of the wing. He could go to the hall in the wing by walking through Papa’s study that had that door that opened into the wing.
He did not go through Papa’s study. He had gone down the porch steps. Then he would turn round the rockery, in the corner between the porch and the path to the wing that led off the drive. If we listened, we might hear when he opened the wing door, but we did not hear.
Gilbert walked round as if nothing were happening and then he took off the lid of the shoebox that his paper soldiers were piled up in. He just took off the lid and shook the box, the way he does to get the paper soldiers in flatter, and he pressed them down with his hands, like he does to make them not take up so much room, and I got up and walked a little.
We were going to walk around the room and we were going to take a book out of the bookshelf, that Papa had made. The bookshelf was on the wall over the sofa. Papa had his workbench and his saw and hammer and tools in the cellar now; “But it’s a perfect workroom,” the ladies from the university said when they were being shown around the house, “and so warm with that huge furnace.” There were high little windows in the cellar and it was like a big room with the windows small and high up. The floor was cement, Eric said the floor was cement. It was hard, but the cellar was not dark like the cellar in the old house and there were the rakes and the hoe there, and we had the same big box with the lid, with our shoe-blacking things in it.
Papa made the shelf over the sofa, it was varnished too. It was William Morris furniture, Mrs. Schelling said, whatever that was, and he made me a bench for my room like that, and he made a wooden table for the porch.
We were going to walk around the room. Gilbert had begun it, and we were going to do things like we always did, so I said, “Harold, you dropped your paintbrush on the floor, did you know?” And Harold slid off the sofa and picked up his paintbrush and he picked up Eric’s cigarette.
He stood looking at the cigarette, as if he did not know what to do next, but Gilbert had picked up the shoebox and was shaking it to get the paper soldiers to take up less room, because the lid bulged when it was on and would fall off if he did not tie it up with string or get a big elastic band from Papa’s table. He would go and ask Papa for a big rubber band for his box of paper soldiers, everything would be just like that, but Harold would have to say something or do something, because just to stand there was not doing what we were doing.
I mean, we were doing a charade or a game we called dumb-crambo, when you act words. But Harold would have to be pushed like you do Laddie and Georgine when they make us have them in our games. Only Harold is older and Harold is not a dumb child, though Mama still says she is worried because he talks so little. But why should Harold talk?
“What’s that?” I said to Harold as if I did not know. “Oh, it’s that cigarette,” I said, “Oh Eric, it’s that cigarette you lost. We found the cigarette you lost.”
Now Eric would come in too and we would play this charade like we did in this room, with the audience sitting in the other room that was the parlor, or people called the parlor a reception room now. The double doors could be shut, so when we played charades we shut the double doors and worked out the word, then we opened them.
Then we left them open where the Rosa Bonheur Horse Fair was on an easel and the picture Mama painted of Willow Eddy—that was a place on the old river, where she used to go with trips with Cousin Ed and Cousin Ruth and where she once went to see a gypsy fortune-teller.
That was a long time ago and that was before Mama married Papa.
Eric took the cigarette.
Then Eric looked at the cigarette.
I often wondered what the fortune-teller told Mama, all of it I mean; Mama said the fortune-teller said, she would have a child who would have a gift, but Mama always said to the university ladies when they talked about Uncle Fred and the Bach Choir at Bethlehem, “It’s funny that the children are not gifted.”
Now, if Eric were playing a charade, he would light his cigarette. Now I could not tell everyone what to do, but I waited and he saw I was waiting.
The fortune-teller said Cousin Ruth would not marry Sammy Martens and Cousin Ruth was cross, Mama said, and Sammy Martens went away to Pittsburgh where his uncle was in the steel works there, and Cousin Ruth never married anybody. The fortune-teller, Mama said, had told her she would marry someone; it would be someone with a gift (or there was something about a gift) or it would be a foreign person who was rich but I do not know who that was, and Mama did not tell us about any foreign people she knew who had come to Bethlehem who were rich, and who had gone away; maybe it was someone from the steel mills there, because people were always coming to talk to Uncle Hartley from Pittsburgh.