Crackpot, p.5
Crackpot, page 5
It would take time, her daddy said, but people would have to learn eventually not to be so mean. Sometimes when the kids were nice she thought maybe the time had come and now it would last forever, if she didn’t do anything to spoil it. She tried to tell them who she was. In the schoolyard she stood, surrounded by her peers, and earnestly told how her grandfather, for twenty whole years now, and maybe even more, had served, was still serving, and didn’t know how to get out of serving, our gallant ally the Czar. If it weren’t for her grandfather the Russian army wouldn’t have a pot or a kettle to eat out of. They’d all starve and lose the war. That’s how important a tinker is. And he did other things too. He had been a soldier for longer than anybody. He had even been sent to fight Japanese soldiers once, though he didn’t like it much. It was too far away from home. But it was his duty so he did it.
Hoda had discovered that “duty” and “honour of your country” were the things you said that made you feel patriotic and just like everybody else in English. In Yiddish the words that felt right when you talked of wars and soldiers were, “When will they stop killing each other like wild animals and come home and look after their families?” But the English feelings were good here, for all the children shared them and were looking at the warrior’s granddaughter respectfully. She forgave them gladly for having laughed at her and called her names so often, and tried to think of something more to tell them.
“What did she say her grandfather was? A stinker?” asked one of the bigger kids at the outer edge of the circle.
“No, he’s a tinker,” Hoda explained. “He mends broken pots, and he can even make new ones, if…”
“Stinker, stinker! Hoda’s grandfather’s a stinker!” The circle was broken. They were scattering from her in all directions. “Stinker, stinker!” The joke was too good to resist. “Hoda’s grandfather’s a stinker!”
“No he’s not!” Outraged, she flung herself after them, now charging in one direction, now veering toward another taunt.
“Run, Hoda, run!” they chanted. “Hoda weighs a ton!”
They weren’t nice. No they weren’t nice. They spoiled everything. They didn’t even seem to care if you had good feelings for them or not. Hoda cared about their good feelings. Why didn’t her good feelings mean anything to them? They shouldn’t be that way. Someday they’d see. Then they’d come to her. And she wouldn’t be mean. She wouldn’t push them off the snow castle, playing rough, no fair, all of them against one, jumping on her and rolling her all the way down, shoving her face in the snow, tearing her toque off and rubbing snow all over her cold ears and down her neck. No she wouldn’t. She wasn’t that way. Alone when they had gone at last she climbed, her exertions punctuated by sobs and sudden bursts of laughter. “You said you wouldn’t let me but I am,” she crowed. And sobbing, “I hate you fuck you I won’t play with you either.”
Catching the echo of her own voice in the crisp winter air she paused a moment, apprehensively examining the shadows that played between the street lamps and yellow-lit windows of the houses across the street from the school. She was sweating again, no longer so cold as when she had stood and begged, at first at the foot of the snow castle and then, after she had laboriously crawled nearly to the top when she thought they weren’t looking, but they were really waiting to grab her and throw her down and jump on her, when she had got away from them at last, and stationed herself over by the street lamp, so she could duck behind it when they threw snowballs. Then she had stood, stamping her feet and growing hoar frost all over, and little burning icicles inside her collar, and around the edges of her gloves her skin onfire, and wet socks itchy inside her moccasins, and answering their taunts, “You can’t!” with her own frost-steaming bawl, “I can so! You can’t stop me!”
“We dare you!”
“I will when I feel like it!”
And she had outwaited them, standing alone finally, under the street lamp, snuffling and muttering to herself when they, having long tired of chasing her off and now tiring of their snow game, wandered home to where their mothers would scold them for lateness and soaking clothes while they endured the brief agony of thawing out before supper. Now she climbed alone, slipping occasionally, and sliding down as a fragile jut of snow gave way beneath a hand or foot. She had outlasted them into a fearsome, never-been-out-so-late-before evening of glinting air and blue shadows and a looming dark school filled with ghosts of shrieking teachers who’d gone crazy mourning lovers lost in ancient wars. Occasionally, no less ominous, crunching through the snow came a mysterious, humped over grown-up she mustn’t talk to if he stopped.
Almost at the top now. I’ll show them. Hoda heard her mother’s anxious voice calling from a distance. “Hoda? Hodaleh? Hoda!” Her mother’s voice, treble, trembling, thin with misgiving, banished fear and relieved her of the lonely evening.
A final heave and Hoda scrambled to her feet, higher than anybody. She could see her mother, half a block down, at the other end of the schoolyard. Flinging up her arms, Hoda blared out proudly in her loudest voice, “I’M THE QUEEN OF THE CASTLE!” And she waited, triumphant, watching while her mother, holding on to her stomach with both hands, broke into a panting trot through the snow, as though afraid to continue to walk lest the child should disappear into the evening again. Hoda’s impulse, after that victorious cry had been rescued from loneliness, was to jump and slide down and run to meet her mother. But her mother’s voice had already changed. Angrily, she was calling out as she bobbed her crooked, hurried path across the schoolyard. “What are you doing here this time of night? Why didn’t you come home from school? Why didn’t you go to Jewish school? You’ll catch pneumonia!”
“I’m the queen of the castle,” Hoda reiterated once again from above, trying to communicate, before it disappeared entirely, the fast-fading glamour of her reign. “They wouldn’t let me play before. I said I would and I did! I wasn’t even afraid, hardly.”
“Come down from there. You’re all wet. I’ve been in every house in the neighbourhood. Your father wanted to call the police. Come down this minute!”
Hoda hesitated still on her hard-won height.
“Are you coming?” Rahel’s voice was sharp, her face very pale and tired, though the child saw only the anger.
“But they wouldn’t let me play with them.”
“You come down this minute. Now is not the time to play!”
Hoda came, finally, and let herself be dragged along home by a scolding mother who punctuated her lecture with an occasional, ineffectual swipe behind, crying out each time she struck, “Oi, frozen! Oi, icicles!” as matted lumps of snow dislodged themselves from Hoda’s coat. Well, so what. Even if the kids did call her fat and didn’t want to play with her; even if her mother, disappointingly, cared only about how wet and frozen she was, he would know. The Prince of Wales would know who was born to become his queen.
And he wasn’t the only one who would know what she was really like, under the spell of fat she couldn’t escape and sloppiness she couldn’t control, like the Frog Princess and Beauty and the Beast and the Ugly Duckling and Cinderella too. All kinds of girls who thought they were the fairest of them all would get a surprise some day, when the young prince who was ripening in his long-chinned, pale-eyed, nondescript, special kind of noble beauty would come from over the seas and not even notice them at all.
To Hoda it was like a promise of all the good things to come when she was finally promoted to a class where the teacher actually seemed to like her. Miss Flake even said to her once, “You have a good head, Hoda. If you apply yourself we may hear great things of you.” She was the only teacher who had ever guessed it so far, and Hoda figured it was probably because she was just freshly over from what she too called “the old country,” though her old country wasn’t Russia, it was really the old country, the dear little island. When she spoke, if you hadn’t seen them riding around out there on top of her big, knuckly gums, you would have thought that her teeth were running around loose in her mouth, and she was trying to hang on to them at the same time that she was pushing the words out past them. You had to listen carefully to understand her, but it was worth it.
“Some of those dumb kids make fun of Miss Flake because she spits when she talks and you get sprayed if you sit in front of her,” said Hoda, laughing a little in spite of herself when she told about it.
“That’s not very nice,” said her mother. “She probably can’t help it.”
“I know. That’s what I say. I think she’s the best teacher in the school, even if she does spit and even if she’s funny looking, with hair on her chin.”
“These are things a person can’t help,” said her mother.
“That’s right,” said Danile. “I never pay attention to what a person is supposed to look like. I ask myself, ‘What is this person really like inside?’”
“Well she’s nice. She’s so nice,” said Hoda with a rush of enthusiasm, “I just love her. She knows everything. She’s even seen the whole Royal Family, more than once. She waited outside the gates of the palace for hours, and they came.” The Royal Family had never disappointed Miss Flake, not once.
“If you wait long enough, they’ll come,” she told the class. “Indeed, once I was very nearly discouraged. I thought, ‘Surely I have been misinformed,’ and I was tempted to leave. It was a very wet day. But…” and Miss Flake’s equine face was suddenly broken open by a convulsive smile, which was not entirely lacking in charm in spite of the fact that her eyes squeezed shut and her teeth, riding recklessly high on her gums, reared up and threatened to leap right out of her mouth. “But I stayed on and they did come after all, you see. Perseverance.” Miss Flake smilingly emphasized the moral of her lesson with another reckless charge of her teeth and a haphazard spray of spit and sibilants across the front of the class.
Of course they came! Miss Flake had not, would not, could not be disappointed, and Hoda felt that her words had anointed her own awed face with special promise that she too would not be disappointed. For Miss Flake loved the Royal Family not with an exclusiveness, like some of the other teachers, as if they were the only ones who had a right to and really knew how. She knew more than all of the other teacher put together. She could tell you what was really going on over there. Daddy himself asked Hoda every day if Miss Flake had any news or opinions about the way the war was going. She really knew things. The Kaiser, for instance. Miss Flake disliked the Kaiser on personal grounds, on the grounds of his bad character. For a man to make war on his own cousin, she said, was very poor form, inexcusably bad taste, caddish, greedy, degenerate behaviour. Miss Flake was very serious about family responsibilities. She had had to look after an idiot brother until he died, or she would have come to settle in the new world long ago. No one had ever heard her actually tell about her idiot brother, but where extraordinary homeliness ruled out a sweetheart killed in a war, good nature and strong family feeling suggested an idiot brother as a logical alternative. And so an idiot brother there had been, as all the children knew.
As Miss Flake saw the war, it was the result of a family quarrel between the three cousins, Czar, King and Kaiser, and the Kaiser had had the poor taste to carry his quarrel with his cousins to this public extreme. A family should show a more united face, and if families did the whole world would and there would be no more wars. All that was needed was for each member to know and to do his duty. In the discussion period after Miss Flake’s current events class Hoda waved her arm about importunately until Miss Flake gave her a chance to speak. Then she heaved herself up from behind her desk and testified that Miss Flake was right and she knew it because she knew some people who had a rich uncle here in this very city and he wouldn’t help his poor relations hardly at all, and they were very poor and everything.
For some reason not entirely clear to herself Hoda refrained from identifying those poor relations and their rich uncle. She would have liked to, in a way, and if anyone had questioned the truth of her testimony she was ready to blurt out an admission, as positive proof, happy to be able to reveal a truth about her special case that proved her to be linked so significantly with kings against kaisers. But she was learning caution, and though she knew from her father that there was nothing to be ashamed of in their poverty, she knew also from her mother that the whole world didn’t have to know about it.
Miss Flake required no additional proof. She accepted Hoda’s little example and with a sigh and a shaking of the head, went on to talk of troubles in the family of nations.
“Maybe your Miss Flake will come and have a glass of tea with us sometime?” suggested Danile daringly, one day. “She sounds like a really intelligent woman, someone you could chew a few words down with.”
“Here?” asked Hoda, startled. It had never occurred to her that Miss Flake could like her well enough to want to come to her house. The idea made her a little afraid. “She doesn’t speak Yiddish.”
“That’s true,” said Danile. “But you could translate for us. And your mother understands a little English.”
But her mother did not seem to be impressed by Miss Flake’s political theories. “If they want to fight why should we have to get killed?” asked Rahel.
“Because we’re their loyal subjects,” explained Hoda patiently, not for the first time. She knew her mother harped so on the subject because she was worried about grandfather Shem Berl the soldier. It was a long time since she had heard from her family, and she didn’t know what ditch he might be lying in now, the gallant Shem Berl, a martyr to these cousins’ wars.
“In my family,” said Rahel, with bitter dignity, “we don’t fight very often, but when we do we do it ourselves and don’t make others go out and fight for us.”
“But Miss Flake says we’re all in the same family,” said Hoda stoutly, hoping her mother wouldn’t argue more and spoil it.
“Sure, for fighting and getting killed,” replied her mother. “For living and letting live and earning a crust of bread and holding our heads up in the world we belong to another branch altogether.”
“I dunno,” muttered Hoda rebelliously, “I dunno.”
“I would like to know what a nice one of them really thinks,” said Danile wistfully.
“You could have plenty of opportunity to, if you wanted to,” Rahel shot out at him tartly.
Danile was silent.
Hoda looked uneasily from one to the other. Of late there had been a curious feeling that ran with rough edges between her father and her mother, cutting them both. She could sense it in the words they said to each other and the way they said them, though she had never heard them quarrel. It wasn’t there all the time, just sometimes, spurting from her mother to her father in a few incomprehensible words, and slashing across his suddenly somehow naked face; and whether or not he answered her, with his low-voiced plea of “What do you want from me?” Hoda could see that feeling spurt right back at her mother, stinging in her eyes. Hoda didn’t want to know what that feeling was, that made them both look so miserable, just as she didn’t want to know that what her mother said about the things she learned in school was true. She tried to dispel the feeling.
“Can I invite her, Ma? Can I invite Miss Flake?”
“Maybe sometime,” said her mother, absently.
“For my birthday, maybe? If I have a party this year?”
“If you have a party,” echoed Rahel non-committally.
“Oh boy!” said Hoda. “Oh boy, Daddy!” she repeated. “You’ll like her too, Mama. You really will.”
“If you like her I’ll like her,” said her mother, in a half-suffocated, brushing-aside kind of voice, as though she was listening for something else.
“Who knows,” said Danile heavily, “I might develop a taste for meeting strangers.”
“Oi Danile,” said his wife quickly, “Oi Danile, I’ll live to tease you for your shyness yet, when you go rushing off, with no time for us anymore.” Her mother’s voice had filled with life again, as though something had been said that she had yearned to hear.
“Oh boy!” said Hoda, once again. She could hardly wait to tell the kids in school that Miss Flake was going to come to her birthday party maybe. But what if one of them went and asked teacher to a birthday party before she did? It wasn’t fair; it was her idea. Well then she wouldn’t tell them! But she wanted to tell them something. All right, she would tell them she knew a secret, all about Miss Flake, Miss Flake and Hoda herself, yes, and her mother and father, all in a secret together. But she wouldn’t tell what it was. Even Miss Flake wouldn’t know yet, because her birthday was a long way away. It would be a long secret and everybody would wonder about it and they’d keep on asking her. Well so what; she didn’t have to tell.
Rahel could not have done better than to call that feeling shyness, which she had grown to suspect was, in Danile, simply fear. She was no less grateful than he for the inspiration that had come to her in a word, before it had even passed through her mind. Now they could speak warmly of his shyness during those long, muttered arguments in the bed to which, for the sake of the child, they confined their quarrels. One could cope with shyness, be persuasive about, argue, rally, insist, all without coming too dangerously close to hurting too deeply, as she had already done out of her own pain and fear once or twice. And all for what? Rahel was past knowing whether the course of action which she had determined for Danile was equal in value to the importance with which she invested it. Suffice that it was the only thing she had been able to think of. Had he agreed without fuss it might never have taken on the force of an obsession with her. But because she recognized Danile’s resistance as symptomatic, she threw all of her remaining energy into overcoming it.
“But what if I can’t learn?” he asked her, as they lay together in the equalizing darkness, on the night when she had accidentally created the theory of his shyness. “What if I can’t learn how to make baskets? A basket has to be made well. How can a blind man make a basket well?”
