“I’m afraid I’m going out of my mind,” Katherine said. “You know what my first impulse was when you left me alone? I wanted to take a knife, a sharp knife, and go into my closet and destroy my clothes. I wanted to cut them to pieces. That’s because they’re so expensive. That’s not a sensible thing to want to do, is it? But I’m not insane, of course. I’m perfectly rational.
“I had a little brother who died. His name was Charles—Charles, junior. He was named after my father and he died of some kind of sickness when he was two and a half years old, about Deborah’s age. Of course it was very hard on Mother and Dad, but it wasn’t anything as bad as this. You see, I think children mean much more to us than they did to our parents. That’s what I’ve been thinking. I suppose it’s because we’re not as religious and because the way we live makes us much more vulnerable. I feel filthy with guilt. I feel as though I’d been a rotten mother and a rotten wife and as though this were punishment. I’ve broken every vow and every promise that I’ve ever made. I’ve broken all the good promises. When I was a little girl, I used to make promises on the new moon and the first snow. I’ve broken everything good. But I’m talking as though we’d lost her, and we haven’t lost her, have we? They’ll find her, the policeman said they’d find her.”
“They’ll find her,” Robert said.
The room darkened. The low clouds had touched the city. They could hear the rain as it fell against the building and the windows.
“She’s lying somewhere in the rain!” Katherine cried. She wrenched her body around in the chair and covered her face. “She’s lying in the ram”.
“They’ll find her,” Robert said. “Other children get lost. I’ve read stories about it in the Times. This sort of thing happens to everyone who has children. My sister’s little girl fell downstairs. She fractured her skull. They didn’t think she was going to live.”
“It does happen to other people, doesn’t it?” Katherine asked. She turned and looked at her husband. The rain had stopped suddenly. It left in the air a smell as powerful as though ammonia had been spilled in the streets. Robert saw the rain clouds darken the bright river. “I mean, there are all the sicknesses and the accidents,” Katherine said, “and we’ve been so lucky. You know, Deborah hasn’t had any lunch. She’ll be terribly hungry. She hasn’t had anything to eat since breakfast.”
“I know.”
“Darling, you go out,” Katherine said. “It will be easier for you than staying here.”
“What will you do?”
“I’m going to clean the living room. We left the windows open last night and everything’s covered with soot. You go out. I’ll be all right.” She smiled. Her face was swollen from crying. “You go out. It will be easier for you, and I’ll clean the room.”
ROBERT WENT DOWN again. The police car was still parked in front of the house. A policeman came up to Robert, and they talked for a while. “I’m going to look around the neighborhood again,” the policeman said, “if you want to come with me.” Robert said that he would go. He noticed that the policeman carried a flashlight.
Near the apartment house was the ruin of a brewery that had been abandoned during Prohibition. The sidewalk had been inherited by the dogs of the neighborhood and was littered with their filth. The basement windows of a nearby garage were broken, and the policeman flashed his light through a window frame. Robert started when he saw some dirty straw and a piece of yellow paper. It was the color of Deborah’s coat. He said nothing and they walked along. In the distance he could hear the vast afternoon noise of the city.
There were some tenements near the brewery. They were squalid, and over the door to one hung a crude sign: “Welcome Home Jerry.” The iron gate that led to the steep cellar stairs was open. The policeman flashed his light down the stairs. They were broken. There was nothing there.
An old woman sat on the stoop of the next house, and she watched them suspiciously when they looked down the cellar stairs. “You’ll not find my Jimmy there,” she screamed, “you—you—” Someone threw open a window and told her to shut up. Robert saw that she was drunk. The policeman paid no attention to her. He looked methodically into the cellar of each house, and then they went around a corner. There were stores, here, along the front of an apartment house. There were no stairs or areaways.
Robert heard a siren. He stopped, and stopped the policeman with him. A police car came around the corner and drew up to the curb where they stood. “Hop in, Mr. Tennyson,” the driver said. “We found her. She’s down at the station.” He started the siren, and they drove east, dodging through the traffic. “We found her down on Third Avenue,” the policeman said. “She was sitting out in front of an antique store, eating a piece of bread. Somebody must have given her the bread. She isn’t hungry.”
She was waiting for him at the station house. He put his hands on her and knelt in front of her and began to laugh. His eyes were burning. “Where have you been, Deborah? Who gave you the bread? Where have you been? Where have you been?”
“The lady gave the bread,” she said. “I had to find Martha.”
“What lady gave you the bread, Deborah? Where have you been? Who is Martha? Where have you been?” He knew that she would never tell him and that as long as he lived he would never know, and against his palm he could feel the strong beating of her heart, but he went on asking, “Where have you been? Who gave you the bread? Who is Martha?”
The Summer Farmer
THE NOR’EASTER is a train the railroad christened at a moment when its directors were imbued with the mystery of travel. Memory is often more appealing than fact, and a passenger who had long ridden the train might overlook its noise and dirt each time he entered the Grand Central Station and saw there the name of a northerly three-day rain. This, at least, was the case with Paul Hollis, who rode the Nor’easter on nearly every Thursday or Friday night of his summer. He was a bulky man, who suffered in all Pullmans, but in none so much as he did on this ride. As a rule, he stayed in the club car until ten, drinking Scotch. The whiskey ordinarily kept him asleep until they reached the tumultuous delays of Springfield, past midnight. North of Springfield, the train fell into the balky and malingering stride of an old local, and Paul lay in his berth between wakefulness and sleep, like a partially anesthetized patient. The ordeal ended when, after breakfast, he left the Nor’easter, in Meridian Junction, and was met by his gentle wife. There was this to be said about the journey: It made one fully conscious of the terrestrial distance that separated the hot city from the leafy and ingenuous streets of the junction village.
The conversation between Paul and Virginia Hollis during the drive from the Junction to their farm, north of Hiems, was confined to the modest properties and affections they shared; more than this, it seemed to aim at a deliberate inconsequence, as if to mention the checking balance or the wars might ruin the spell of a mild morning and an open car. The drain in the downstairs shower was leaking, Virginia told Paul one morning in July, his sister Ellen was drinking too much, the Marstons had been over for lunch, and the time had come for the children to have a pet. This was a subject to which she had obviously given some thought. No country dog would last in a New York apartment when they returned in the fall, she said, cats were a nuisance, and she had concluded that rabbits were the best they could do. There was a house on the road with a rabbit cage on its lawn, and they could stop there that morning and buy a pair. They would be a present from Paul to the children, and so much the better for that. The purchase would make that weekend the weekend when they had bought the rabbits, and distinguish it from the weekend when they had transplanted the Christmas fern or the weekend when they had removed the dead juniper. They could put the rabbits into the old duck house, Virginia said, and when they went back to the city in the fall, Kasiak could eat them. Kasiak was the hired man.