Crackpot, p.7
Crackpot, page 7
But no one came. No one would come. Forever; she was stuck forever. She would die here. They would kill her, they, it, all of them. They would do horrible things to her. Despairing, she closed her eyes tightly and pressed her hands against her ears, so as not to see or hear what they were going to do to her. The dust under the bed had crept up her nostrils and exploded suddenly a chain of sneezes, each one of which jerked her painfully against the bar. Exhausted now, she lay quite still. The bar didn’t hurt so much when she lay still.
Gradually, her sobs turned to whimpers, her whimpers faded to little moans and at last, with a sigh, she fell asleep. Blessedly, she remained that way, though not long afterwards daylight cast its punctual gleam through the window, brightening cheerfully on a pair of plump legs, a rolled-up nightgown, and twin rounds of great soft, rosy, vulnerable, innocent bum.
She was still lying thus, cruelly halved and wholly asleep, when Danile poled his way heavily up the verandah steps and into the silent house. It had been a night immeasurably long and inconceivably short, a night of ungraspable dimension, the abyss discovered by the sundering of lives. At the hospital he had sat huddled for a long time after the doctor had come down from the operating room, and had told him, and had expressed his regret, and had gone away. No one came near his blackness to put a hand on his arm and lead him away too. So he sat on. They had forgotten, when they dispersed, that he was a blind man, and that perhaps he might not know his way home. When a new nurse came on duty in the emergency room she must have thought that he was some tramp who had found his way into the waiting room and was dozing quietly on the bench, for she came up and spoke to him rather crisply before she noticed the white cane lying beside him and realized from the way he raised his head and looked at her with infinite blindness that he had not been asleep. She found some one to take him home.
He went straight to the child’s room, opened the door gently, stepped in, and stumbled over her prostrate form. There was a muffled bellow and a violent kicking out of legs which prevented him from regaining his balance, so that he fell forward onto her empty bed. Somewhere below him she was screaming her newly awakened fear and pain. “It hurts! Don’t jump on me! I’ll tell my daddy!” and a further torrent of unintelligible words, accompanied by a frantic kicking out of her feet.
“Hoda? Where are you?” he felt about on the bed. “Don’t cry, I’m here, where are you?”
At the sound of his voice the frightened gibberish resolved itself into a long wail. “I’m here Daddy; it hurts; I’m stuck under the bed!”
Something in Danile gave way and he began to cry. He cried as he heaved up the bed and held it with one hand while he helped her pull her cramped and painful body out from under it with the other. He wept as he gathered her up, big girl that she was, and held her blubbering in his arms. He cried with her as she told him how she had been left alone and they had chased her under the bed and she had got stuck there and how it hurt her now all over. He wept and rocked her gently, so gently that she could not know that he was weeping in anger, a desolating anger such as he had never known before. For a long time he rocked her and comforted her with his tears. And finally, when he thought that tears and anger had already drained him utterly, and she too sat quiet in his lap, she stirred and asked about her mother.
THREE
Uncle was angry. Right from the beginning he had conceived a dislike of Rahel, whom he referred to simply as “the sack.” He disliked her not only because he felt she was somehow responsible for their intrusion into his life, she and that clever family of hers back there, but also because he didn’t like a certain way she had of looking at him.
“I don’t like that sack and I don’t like what peeps out of that sack,” he told his wife, whenever the infrequent occasion arose when his mind was forced to turn away from more important business, to consider his unfortunate relatives.
“That’s my family,” he would declaim bitterly. “My sister, healthy as two women, almost as big as I am, has to let herself get dragged off by the cholera. What does she leave me? The only family I have to turn to in case I should need them, heaven forbid, my only connections that I brought all the way over myself so they could set up a life for themselves like a brother should do for a sister’s child. And what did I want from them? What do I ask for? Nothing! My children should know their own and I should have someone to talk to sometimes. She never wrote me he was blind! Always ‘my sweet Danile, my clever little Danile. Thank you for the money; Danile thanks you too.’ I thought she had a prodigy there. I thought we might even be able to train him for the business.” At this distance in time Uncle could reconstruct touchingly the fine intentions which had been disappointed by his relatives. “So what did they send me all the way from over there? Three sacks.” Uncle had something of a poetic streak in him. “An empty sack, a lumpy sack and an overstuffed sack.”
But of the three Rahel was the sack, and he was furious, as though she had aimed the blow directly at him, when he heard from the hospital that Danile had named him as the man who would take charge of the situation.
“The sack is dead. I have to go bury her,” said Uncle when he heard.
His wife, who listened to everything he said with the same injunction ready on her lips, let it drop without even hearing herself. “Don’t spend money.”
Uncle Nate saw Rahel’s death as an act of personal malice toward himself. “Not enough she had to embarrass me before the whole town by crawling on floors, she has to go and die on me too. On my back it’s easy to lie down. What’s Uncle Nate? A broad back to carry sacks. Come on, tell the whole world, ‘send your cripples to lay their burdens on me.’ God knows I never wished her harm! I signed for them. I welcomed them. You want to make your own living? Be independent then, and my blessing on you. Climb strangers’ walls with a rag in your hand. Never mind your uncle has a name in the community. Let the world laugh. You don’t like Uncle? All right, Uncle doesn’t ask you to be grateful. You live your way and he’ll live his. But die? Who wanted her to die? What does she mean by dying? What will I do with them now?”
Annoyed though he was, Uncle Nate was nevertheless still a man of the community, and he knew the rites of sorrow. He came, for a short period every day, through what he called the “jungle wilderness” of their front yard, up the rickety steps and across the lilting verandah, with his wife close behind him. He sat barefoot on a piece of sacking in Danile’s living room, and with a large and impressive coarseness which had repelled Rahel in life, managed, even from that position, to exude his sense of worth and his consciousness of the great honour he was paying the broad floorboards of this humble house, by enthroning himself so graciously near.
People said, “Ahaah! See, though he’s rich, he follows the way of the land; he shows respect!”
And other people said, for some are never satisfied, “It is easier for him to do it now she’s dead than when she was alive.”
And even Danile, who sat for the most part wrapped in his darkness, rapping on his darkness, rapt and listening in his darkness for an explanation of this further extension of his void, thought in a corner of his mind, “Now Uncle sees that we too are of some account. Not once have we fallen short of a minyan for the prayers.”
Uncle was, indeed, a little surprised, for the old men seemed to have brought the atmosphere of a synagogue to the shack, and they and their wives behaved as though they were mourning someone of note. Food was plentiful, brought daily by the old women, and even uncle’s wife, sitting with the women, but for a while, at first, somewhat aloof, finally broke down and joined in conversation with the others, some of whom had once been friends and acquaintances, before the bliss of financial fortune had proved her of superior clay. She even deigned to ask after their families and mention her own grown children, once she had allowed herself to relax, and was pleased at their simple gratitude that she hadn’t forgotten those whom she had once known. Once the barriers were down she could also, with a few compliments, bring the conversation around to one or two delicious things she had been tasting, and to ask, with the air of conferring favours, for the recipes. The old women were delighted to have something to give to the grand lady, and freely parted with their pinches of this and handfulls of that. In return she was persuaded at last to tell them the secret of the cake which she herself had brought, and was even candid enough to confess, rather touchingly, that though in making the cake, she usually used a dozen eggs for it to be really successful, she had unfortunately, this time, run short of eggs and had used only nine, which explained why the cake was not quite what it usually was. Still, she had left herself without an egg in the house, rather than scant more than three.
The other women assured her that her cake was indeed as good, every bit as good as though it had the required dozen, that the trick was always how you handled the materials, and not exact amounts, and Auntie allowed herself to be persuaded, and gave them the recipe all over again, going through all her magic cooking gestures as well, and received many compliments all over again. When she left, the old women expressed their delight at having discovered that rich though she was she was still as stingy as ever. Imagine cheating a cake of three eggs! It was enough to reconcile you to your own poverty. She had obviously never put a whole dozen eggs into a cake in her life, even for her rich guests, though her husband probably picked them up for nothing while he was out robbing the farmers of their grain. And who believed there were even nine eggs in her cake, anyway? Whom did she think she was fooling? One particularly virulent little old lady, who had parted, in a flush of good feeling, with her favourite recipe, defied anyone to try to tell her that there were more than four eggs altogether in the cake. In fact if there were four there were a lot. Why, the sawdust was hardly holding together! Still, for all that she was stingy and a bit of a fool with the airs she put on, she wasn’t a bad sort. And she hadn’t been so foolish it turned out, to take big Nate with his warty hands after all, when no other girl would look at him. Not that he gave her much of a life, from what you heard, but she was no great bargain either, so they were probably well matched.
Hoda, who had seldom seen her great-uncle and aunt in her life, felt that she ought now to show her disdain by some act of rudeness which would make them realize that she knew all about them. But when it came to it she was too frightened, too much intimidated by something real that they represented, something which, she could tell by the attitudes of those about her, really worked in the world. So she smiled eagerly whenever Uncle looked her way, pulled in her stomach and answered demurely when Auntie remembered to speak to her, was sorry when they were leaving because everyone would act more ordinary again, and was sure she hated them twice as much when they were gone. She consumed nearly all of Auntie’s dry cake all by herself, telling herself as she ate that they were lucky that she didn’t want to be mean during mourning, or she’d have shown them she was somebody and maybe they’d be nicer to her and Daddy after that. Maybe now they’d be nice anyway, because they were sorry they never helped and Mamma had to die.
Hoda ate an enormous number of good things that week. Every time she thought of her mother she went and ate something. There were things to eat she had never even tasted before. With no one to regulate her, even in the very minimal way that Rahel had taken to doing, because the child herself had sometimes complained that other children made fun of her because she was fat, she preyed on the food. Altogether it was an exciting week for her. There were people in the house all the time, more than had ever been at one time before. Everybody was nice, and very solemn when they remembered where they were. Only she herself, Hoda, was afraid that she wasn’t showing the right feelings for the occasion. They all looked at her with such long, sad looks and shakings of the head and said things like “Poor little orphan,” and some of them turned red around the eye rims when they said it and put their handkerchiefs to their eyes, and she felt that she ought to cry too when they did and feel terrible, and sometimes she did, she really did, but sometimes, though she tried to squeeze the right feelings out of herself at the right time, she couldn’t find them, and pretended, and felt just awful about it. So she forced herself through elaborate mental contortions, trying to feel what it was like to be dead, to be like that mound that had lain under the cloth in the living room the first night, with candles at its head and Daddy and everybody sitting around it and Daddy and his friend the shahmus sitting alone beside it all night long, and she had been glad and hoped they wouldn’t fall asleep because if they did it might get up and walk right into her room and she’d die of fear and scream for her mamma, and then what would it do? Would it say, “I’m your mamma!” And would she have to put her arms around it? Yes, she would have to; she ought to be glad to. You have to love your mother even when she’s dead. What would it feel like? But her mother wouldn’t do that, she wouldn’t come; “please mamma, I want you I do, but…” Her mother didn’t want her to be scared.
What would it feel like anyway to be dead, cold, still, without breathing or anything? Once or twice she managed to frighten herself thoroughly, when, after much concentrated imagining, she caught a glimpse of her own cold corpse with herself not in it. She didn’t want to be dead that way! But her revulsion was an insult to the dead, an insult to her mother. She must be a bad, an awful person, because only briefly, at scattered moments, did she really have a terrible feeling, the realization in her stomach that her mother was lost and gone, which she recognized as grief. She tried to hang on to it when it came, for it was a right way to feel though it was awful, but as soon as she sought to reassure herself and others by showing its presence, it was gone, and a kind of gladness, because she was feeling the right way, was there instead. So she caught herself in her own badness again and felt wretched and went again to have something to eat.
By the time the last day of mourning came she was terribly bound up. She spent a good part of the forenoon locked in the closet, bellowing for her mother with utter sincerity. When she was through she was too embarrassed to come out, and was, unbeknownst to herself, the cause of a humiliating accident to one old man who had waited patiently and too long, for her to vacate the bathroom. As a result, just as he had finally bethought himself of an alternative, and had taken a hasty few steps toward the door of the summer kitchen, he was caught short, and had, after a helpless pause, without stopping for goodbyes, to shuffle his way uncomfortably out of the house, leaving his wife to mop up while the other old ladies, eyes tactfully averted, muttered sadly about what becomes of us all.
When Hoda did emerge finally, it was at the prompting not only of the soothing, motherly voices of the old ladies on the other side of the door, and their reminders that it was lunch time, but also of the defiant thought that anyway they could tell from the way she had been crying that she really did miss her mother.
They were surprised, the old ladies who came to show her how to cook, at how well she could already do things. Because her mother had taught her, that was why she already knew, so she could take care of Daddy when her mamma went away to the hospital. She knew all kinds of ways to stuff all the nicest parts which were also the cheapest, because some people didn’t know what to do with them, like spleen and lungs and guts and how to make soup from fish heads and bones they gave you cheap because they had to throw them out anyway. Her mamma had thought of everything. Even Uncle was surprised, when Danile tried to press on him, once the shiva was over, a small wad of dollar bills.
