Free The Bobby-Soxer by Hortense Calisher Page A

table toward the fire, and swept the whole jigsaw in. “And you—you know what? You can have him if you want him. I’ll help.”
    “Have who?”
    “Don’t pretend, you noodle. Your Wetmore. I’ll write Julie at Dartmouth—she’ll find him.” She put her face to the fire. “I’ll get the whole crowd back. Flopsy and Mopsy too. My sheepdogs. And get in some cats. Cats don’t suck babies’ breath. Though that’s not why they’re not wanted here. They’re incessant movement—that’s true. But babies love that, don’t they? And they like noise.” She picked up a last piece of the puzzle and tossed it in. “Anyway, we’ll have a weekend party that’ll—and invite your Bill.” The poker fell. Turning to the room, she tossed her head so angrily that the tears whipped from it. “You can get him if you want him,” she said through a stream of them. “Just be totally—.” She hunched in, saying it. “Like me.”
    I put my arms around her. I’d just remembered something. I likely would not be coming back here anyway. My mother was returning. On extraordinary business, she’d said this morning. I could hear the whole of Greensboro listening. I had better keep it from her that I had ever been here at all. “Okay. But promise me something.”
    “What?”
    “Just—promise me.”
    “I do.”
    I couldn’t say what it was. My own tears were streaming, and not only for her. “Please—” I said. “Please.”
    “Say it.”
    “Please—keep yourself up.”
    She put her arms around me. I could feel her belly, but it seemed to me that even my mother was in the circle, also my father, and all our joint households—except Craig Towle. Together we breathed in the sorrows of the unrecorded world.
    Down at the bottom, I saw our two sets of saddle shoes.
    I was almost at our doorstep when I saw the light on upstairs in the master bedroom, a term my father made fun of. For a minute I let myself dream that the figure up there was his, but I knew better. My mother and her extraordinary circumstance had come home. Knobby’s room under the eaves was dark.
    Then I heard the car creeping to a stop behind me. Neither we nor the Evamses had one. At this dead-end hour it would be the men from the bar. I stiffened my long neck, which as the armature of my height is my defense and my weapon, though men are inclined to say No, it is the eyes. But when I turned I saw the car was only the Volks. Had she come after me then to spend the night, as unmarried girls do?
    It was Craig Towle. They always paid me my five dollars tactfully, in a white envelope. I could see it in his hand. He beckoned me. I went.
    “She says you’re a breath of outside air. Thanks. I was afraid she wasn’t going to be able to hang on. But now she will.” He still held the envelope. “She’s a lovely girl, you know.”
    I might be some man he was saying this to. I had no way to respond.
    “Who’s that up there?” he said.
    The shadow behind the thin draperies, in what would be its tattered old dressing gown from Paris, was walking up the length of the room, and returning.
    “That? Oh—.” She was going to miss the hat; she tabulated her life by clothes no longer worn. I was glad I wasn’t wearing it. “That’s—our Japanese butler. He sometimes irons up there.”
    “Ah. Didn’t know they ironed. Never had one.” He stared at me as he first had at their door, absently toying now with the envelope. “Remarkable. How you do resemble her.”
    “Who?” He couldn’t be saying this to me.
    He shook himself. “Your—grandmother. Who else?”
    No one had ever said that.
    He saw I hated the idea. “Disregard that. Perhaps it isn’t true.” He was still staring at me. “There’s a group picture she once showed me. Of the family when she and your grandfather first moved to town. She was going to give me a copy. Now I expect she won’t.” He handed me the envelope.
    “I don’t want it. Buy the baby something with it.”
    He glanced