Free Summer Crossing by Truman Capote Page A

who has spent her life doing things for others: occasionally the mulling plaintiveness of her voice suggested that she regretted this. “
Kinder, kinder
, I’m asking, a little control,” she said, touching fingertips to her forehead; her hair, ribbed like a washboard and riveted by tiny combs tight against her head, rippled with silver zigzags. “Bernie darling, do like Ida says, don’t bounce balls in the house. Go for Mama into the kitchen and help your brother with the icebox.”
    “Don’t push!”
    “Push him?” said Ida, who had done the pushing. “I’ll cripple the little dope. I’m telling you, Bernie, you bounce balls in the house and I’ll cripple you.”
    To which Mrs. Manzer reiterated her first plea. Her earswere pierced with jet, and these beads tossed like bells as she waved her head, sighing an indistinguishable epithet. On a table beside her there was a small potted cactus-plant, and she tamped the earth around it; Grady, who was sitting opposite, remarked that it was the ninth or tenth time she had repeated this gesture, and deduced that Mrs. Manzer was quite as uneasy as herself: a deduction which helped her to relax somewhat.
    “You understand, my dear lady? Oh I see, you smile and nod your head; but it is impossible: you have no brothers in your family.”
    Grady said, “No, as a matter of fact I have just one sister,” and reached in her purse for a cigarette; but, as there were no ashtrays around, she doubted that smoking would be acceptable to Mrs. Manzer, and so withdrew her hand, wondering, alas, what to do with it: all the parts of herself seemed so cumbersome, which was a good deal Ida’s fault, for Ida, during the last hours, had subjected her to a scrutiny fine as lacework.
    “A sister only? That is a shame. But you will have sons I hope. A woman without sons has no consequence: she is not well thought of.”
    “Well, count me out,” said Ida, a stark, vindictive girl with kinky hair and a sallow, sullen expression. “Boys are hateful; men, too. The fewer the better, I say.”
    “You talk foolish, Ida dear,” said her mother, removingthe cactus-plant to a window-shelf, where a square of Brooklyn sunlight fell upon it desolately. “That is a dried up way of talking; you want more juice in you, Ida dear. Maybe you better go to that mountain place like Minnie’s girl did last year.”
    “She wasn’t to any mountain. Believe me, I’ve got the news on her.”
    It was uncommon, the extent to which Mrs. Manzer and her older son duplicated each other’s traits and features: that blurred ambiguous half-smile, those imposing eyes, the slow spacing of words that characterized the speech of both: it was heart-quickening for Grady to see these characteristics reproduced, and to see them employed to so different an effect. “The man is everything, a delicate everything,” she said, disregarding her daughter’s insinuation, which also was very like Clyde, who ignored whatever he chose to. “And the man inside the child: that is what a mama must guard and trust, like Bernie: a sweet boy, so good to his mama, an angel. That was my Clyde, too. An angel. If he had a Milky Way he always gave his mama half. I’m very fond of Milky Ways. But now; yes, boys grow up changed and they don’t remember the mama so well.”
    “See? Now you’re saying the same thing I say: men are ungrateful.”
    “Ida, dear, please, do I complain? It is right a child should not love the mama the way the mama loves the child; children are ashamed of the love a mama has for them: that is part of it. But when a boy grows into a man it is right his time should be for other ladies.”
    A quiet settled upon them, and there was nothing strained about it, as there often is when silence falls among new acquaintances. Grady thought of her own mother, of the complicated affections that had passed between them, the moments of love that—out of disbelief? unforgiving doubt?—she had rejected; and considering what