Mr. Freeley felt very happy that evening. The store had begun to prosper and he felt that the trips to Madrid, Paris, London, Rome and Venice that would soon be hidden in the dewy grass were the result of his own generosity, his own abundant good nature. Kissing his wife in the kitchen he thought that she was as desirable as she had been when he married her many years ago; or if she was not that, she had at least kept abreast of the changes time and age had worked in him. He desired her ardently and happily and looked at the clock to see how long he must wait before they would be alone. There was a roast in the oven and she moved out of his embrace to baste it and then again to set the table, draw the baby’s bath and pick up the toys, and as he watched her go about these necessary tasks he saw the wanness of fatigue come into her face and realized that by the time she had washed the dishes, ironed the pajamas, sung the lullabies and heard the prayers she might not have the strength to respond to his passionate caresses. This conflict in generative energies left him uncomfortable and after supper he took a walk.
The sky was dark and low but even if it rained, he thought, it would be better for his purposes than a bright moon. He walked out of his neighborhood into Parthenia and thought guiltily of how few eggs would be hidden here. Supermarkets and other changes had left the stores there mostly deserted. Filth was written on the walls and in one of the store windows, beyond the FOR RENT sign, was a display of funeral wreaths made of dry moss and false boxwood. One of these was shaped like a valentine heart and had a banner that said “Mother and Father” draped across its ventricles. This was Water Street, the demesne of the hoods. He saw three hoods standing in a doorway ahead of him and thought they looked familiar.
A week earlier Mr. Freeley had gone to the Easter Assembly at the high school to hear his daughter sing. He had come in late and stood at the back of the auditorium near the door, waiting like any other parent for the appearance of his child. His daughter, although she had no special gifts that he knew of, had been chosen to sing a solo. It was unfortunate that he had come in too late to find a seat. Standing near him at the door was a group of local hoods, whose whispering and shuffling made it difficult for him to give all his attention to the children’s singing. The hoods seemed uncommitted to the performance. They kept slipping in and out the door and he thought how uncommitted they were to anything. They did not play games, they did not study, they did not skate on the ice pond or dance in the gymnasium but they menacingly circled all these activities, always in some doorway or on some threshold, in and out of the light as they were this evening.
Then the pianist began to hammer out the music for his daughter’s solo and he saw the girl step shyly from the ranks of the chorus to the front of the stage. At the same time one of the hoods left his shadowy position at the door and joined a girl who was standing in front of Mr. Freeley. They blocked the view of his daughter. He moved to the left and then to the right, but the hood and his girl were always in the way and he only had a glimpse of his child. He had a good view of the hood and his maneuvers with the girl. He saw him put an arm around her shoulders. He heard him whispering into her ear. Then to the music of “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth” he saw him slip his hand into the front of her dress. Mr. Freeley seized the boy and the girl roughly by the shoulders and thrust them apart, saying so loudly that his daughter looked out at the disturbance: “Cut it out or take it out. This is no place for that kind of thing.” He was shaking with rage and to keep himself from hitting the youth in the face he walked out of the auditorium and onto the school-house steps.
He lit a cigarette with difficulty. He was so deeply disturbed that he wondered if what was really bothering him was not fear for his daughter. He was sure that he had been enraged as a father and a citizen at the unsuitability of what he had just been a witness to during an Easter hymn in a building that belonged, at least in spirit, to the innocent. When his cigarette had burned down he went back into the auditorium. The hoods stood aside to let him pass and he thought he had never experienced such an emanation of naked hatred as came from them toward him.
The hoods in the doorway on Water Street had the same suspenseful attitudes, showed the same choice of half-lights, and he felt a revolting strangeness toward them as if they had not come from another class or neighborhood but had come hurtling down from an evil planet. As he approached them he saw they were passing around a whisky bottle. He could not reproach them for lawlessness and depravity. Lawlessness and depravity were their aspirations. He smelled whisky as he passed the doorway and then he was struck on the back of the head and instantly lost consciousness.
Emile’s alarm woke him at half-past one. While he was shaving a gust of wind slammed the door of his room and woke his mother. Waked so suddenly she sounded heavy and her voice like the voice of a much older woman. “Emile. You sick?”
“No, Mum,” he said. “It’s all right.”
“You sick? You in trouble, dear? Those frozen crab cakes—did they make you sick?”
“No, Mum,” he said. “It’s nothing.”
“You sick?” she asked, still heavily, and then she cleared her voice and seemed at the same moment to clear her mind. “Emile!” she exclaimed. “It’s the eggs.”
“I have to go now, Mum,” he said. “It’s nothing serious. I’ll be back before breakfast.”
“Oh, it’s the eggs, isn’t it?”
He could hear the bed creak as she sat up and put her feet on the floor, but he got by the door of her room before she reached it and went down the stairs. “I’ll be back before breakfast,” he called. “I’ll tell you about it then.” He felt for the chart in his pocket and let himself out the front door.
The stars were shining. It was much too early in the year for there to be anything blooming but a few clumps of snowdrops and the only wild flowers were the speckled skunk cabbages in the hollow but there was in the air a soft fragrance of earth as fine as roses and he stopped to fill his lungs and his head with it. The world seemed fine in the street light and the starlight and young, too, even in its shabbiness, as if the fate of the place had only just begun to be told. The earth, covered lightly with leaves, moss, garlic grass and early clover, was waiting for his treasure.
When there was no sign of Mr. Freeley at quarter after two he began to worry. It was so still that he could have heard a car in the far distance and he heard nothing. He wanted help on his mission, he did not want to do it alone, but at twenty minutes past two he decided that he would have to. He unlocked the garage doors, which, poorly hung, scraped loudly in the gravel. He looked in the back seat. His hoard was safe. When he backed the old car out onto the road the only light burning in the neighborhood was in his mother’s parlor. He was too excited to imagine the mischief she might be up to and she was up to plenty. She had her new friend in Remsen Park on the telephone. “Emile’s just gone out to hide the eggs,” she said. “He just left. I don’t know but I’ve got a feeling he’s going to hide them in the Delos Circle neighborhood. I mean wouldn’t it be just like Mr. Freeley to give everything to those rich snobs and forget his friends in Remsen Park? Wouldn’t it be just like him?”
In another two hours, Emile thought, as he shifted from reverse into low, his mission would be accomplished and, this close to success, he saw how heavily the responsibility had weighed on his mind. A light was burning in a house at the corner but it was a small, narrow window, closely curtained, and he guessed that it was a bathroom. As he watched the light went out. From the top of Turner Street near the golf links he could see all over the village—see how perfect and reassuring the darkness was and how deeply the place slept, and the thought of so many men, women, children and dogs wandering through their labyrinthine dreams made him smile. He stood at the headlights of his car, reading the instructions. Eight eggs at the corner of Delwood Avenue and Alberta Street, three eggs on Alberta Street, ten eggs at the junction of Delos Circle and Chestnut Lane.