Bad Characters Read online

  On the last little square photograph headed “Somewhere in Germany” he had written, “I am sending you the best present that I have found for you yet. It is something that Helena Rubenstein (as if you knew who she is!) would give a fortune for, but I’m not going to tell you what it is. I like thinking of you trying to guess as you sit there among all your lares and penates and your fresh flowers.”

  Mrs. Ramsey, repeating to herself the phrase “fresh flowers,” regrets that she has not sent out for some lilacs, for the only things in bloom are two white African violets on the sideboard. She feels a little guilty as though she has betrayed Arthur’s picture of her and she thinks of what her daughter, Arthur’s mother, said at dinner last night, “With you, Arthur will not change because you are unchangeable. But in his letters to me, he is becoming more and more unrecognizable.”

  She had forbidden her daughter to pursue this subject: there was a hint of disloyalty in her voice, or was it a hint of fear? The whole last sentence of Arthur’s letter now reechoes in her mind and a slight cloud comes over her face. She feels a touch of cold and decides that she must tell Elizabeth to lay a fire after all. When one is very old and fleshless, one is like a thermometer, registering the least change in temperature.

  But the fire must wait until she has opened her present. She smiles. She knows who Helena Rubenstein is, but it pleases her that Arthur thinks she does not. Perhaps it is a bottle of some rare scent that would so much gratify both of them. The clock at St. Mark’s strikes the quarter hour and she goes to her desk and brings back a pair of scissors. She is so happy that she does not any longer try to imagine what is inside; she rather hopes she has not guessed rightly, that it is not scent, that it will take her completely by surprise.

  Under the outer wrappings there is a shoe-box, and in the box, a parcel in tissue paper, tied with a piece of string. It is something shapeless and even when she has taken it out and has held it a moment in her old wrinkled hands, she cannot tell what it is. It is not a bottle and not a box nor a case; it is rather heavy but its heaviness is of a curious kind: it seems to be a mass of something. She delays no longer and snips the string. There in her lap lies a braid of golden hair. At the top it is ruffled a little as though a girl, just fallen asleep, had tossed once or twice on her pillow; the rest of it is smooth, down to the end, which is tied with a little pink bow. It has been cut off cleanly at the nape of the neck, and it is so long that it must have hung below her waist. It is thick and it seems still so vital in the light that streams through the windows that Mrs. Ramsey feels its owner is concealed from her only by a vapour, that her head is here beside her on the love-seat: she is hidden from Mrs. Ramsey just as Mrs. Ramsey is hidden from the people in the square.

  She pushes the tissue paper with the handle of the scissors and the braid slips to the grey carpet and lies there shining like a living snake. Now the old lady clasps her hands together to end their trembling, and looking at the African violets she admits to some distant compartment of her mind the fact that they are dying and must be removed tomorrow. She speaks aloud in the empty room. “How unfriendly, Arthur!” she says. “How unkind!” And as if there were a voice in the hair at her feet, she distinctly hears him saying, “There’s a war on, hadn’t you heard?”

  A Reading Problem

  One of the great hardships of my childhood—and there were many, as many, I suppose, as have ever plagued a living creature—was that I could never find a decent place to read. If I tried to read at home in the living room, I was constantly pestered by someone saying, “For goodness’ sake, Emily, move where it’s light. You’re going to ruin your eyes and no two ways about it,” or “You ought to be outdoors with the other youngsters getting some roses in your cheeks.” Of course, I knew how to reply to these kill-joy injunctions; to the first I said, “They’re my eyes,” and to the second, “Getting some brains in my head is more important than getting any so-called roses in my cheeks.” But even when I had settled the hash of that Paul Pry—Mother, usually, but sometimes a visiting aunt, or even a bossy neighbor—I was cross and could no longer concentrate. The bedroom I shared with my sister Stella was even worse, because Stella was always in it, making an inventory of her free samples out loud, singing Camp Fire Girl songs, practicing ballet steps and giggling whenever she made a mistake; she was one of the most vacant people I have ever known.

  At one certain time of year, I could read up in the mountains, in any number of clearings and dingles and amphitheatres, and that was in the fall. But in the winter it was too cold, and in the spring there were wood ticks, and in the summer there were snakes. I had tried a pinewoods I was very fond of for several weeks one summer, but it was no good, because at the end of every paragraph I had to get up and stamp my feet and shout and describe an agitated circle on the ground with a stick to warn the rattlers to stay away from me.

  The public library was better, but not much. The librarian, Mrs. Looby, a fussbudgety old thing in a yellow wig and a hat planted with nasturtiums, was so strict about the silent rule that she evicted children who popped their gum or cracked their knuckles, and I was a child who did both as a matter of course and constantly. Besides, she was forever coming into the children’s section like a principal making rounds, and leaning over you to see what you were reading; half the time she disapproved and recommended something else, something either so dry you’d go to sleep reading it or so mushy you’d throw up. Moreover, our dog, Reddie, loved to follow me to the library, and quite often, instead of waiting outside under the lilac bush, as he was supposed to do, he would manage to get in when someone opened the door. He didn’t come to see me; he came to tease Mrs. Looby, who abominated anything that walked on four legs. He would sit on his haunches in front of her desk, wagging his tail and laughing, with his long pink tongue hanging out. “Shoo!” Mrs. Looby would scream, waving her hands at him. “Emily Vanderpool, you get this pesky dog of yours out of here this minute! The very idea! Quick, Emily, or I’ll call the dogcatcher! I’ll call the dogcatcher. I will positively call the dogcatcher if a dog ever comes into my library again.” I had to give up the library altogether after one unlucky occasion when Reddie stood on his hind legs and put his paws on top of her high desk. She had had her back to him, and, thinking she heard a customer, she turned, saying in her library whisper, “Good afternoon, and what may I do for you this afternoon?” and faced the grinning countenance of my dog. That time, in her wrath and dismay, she clutched her head in her hands and dislodged her hat and then her wig, so that a wide expanse of baldness showed, and everyone in the children’s section dived into the stacks and went all to pieces.

  For a while after that, I tried the lobby of the downtown hotel, the Goldmoor, where the permanent residents, who were all old men, sat in long-waisted rocking chairs, rocking and spitting tobacco juice into embossed cuspidors and talking in high, offended, lonesome voices about their stomach aches and their insomnia and how the times had changed. All in the world the old duffers had left was time, which, hour after hour, they had to kill. People like that, who are bored almost to extinction, think that everyone else is, too, and if they see someone reading a book, they say to themselves, “I declare, here’s somebody worse off than I am. The poor soul’s really hard up to have to depend on a book, and it’s my bounden Christian duty to help him pass the time,” and they start talking to you. If you want company on the streetcar or the bus or the interurban, open a book and you’re all set. At first, the old men didn’t spot me, because I always sat in one of the two bow windows in a chair that was half hidden by a potted sweet-potato plant, which, according to local legend, dated from the nineteenth century—and well it might have, since it was the size of a small-size tree. My chair was crowded in between this and a table on which was a clutter of seedy Western souvenirs—a rusted, beat-up placer pan with samples of ore in it, some fossils and some arrowheads, a tomahawk, a powder horn, and the shellacked tail of a beaver that was supposed to have been trapped by a desperado named Mo
untain Jim Nugent, who had lived in Estes Park in the seventies. It was this tabletop historical museum that made me have to give up the hotel, for one day, when I was spang in the middle of Hans Brinker, two of the old men came over to it to have a whining, cantankerous argument about one of the rocks in the placer pan, which one maintained was pyrites and the other maintained was not. (That was about as interesting as their conversations ever got.) They were so angry that if they hadn’t been so feeble, I think they would have thrown the rocks at each other. And then one of them caught sight of me and commenced to cackle. “Lookit what we got here,” he said. “A little old kid in a middy reading windies all by her lonesome.”

  I had been taught to be courteous to my elders, so I looked up and gave the speaker a sickly smile and returned to my book, which now, of course, I could not follow. His disputant became his ally, and they carried on, laughing and teasing me as if I were a monkey that had suddenly entered their precincts for the sole purpose of amusing them. They asked me why I wasn’t at the movies with my sweetheart, they asked me how I’d like to be paddled with that stiff old beaver tail of Mountain Jim’s, and they asked me to sing them a song. All the other old men, delighted at this small interruption in their routine of spitting and complaining, started rubbernecking in my direction, grinning and chuckling, and a couple of them came shuffling over to watch the fun. I felt as if I had a fever of a hundred and five, because of the blush that spread over my entire person, including my insides. I was not only embarrassed, I was as mad as anything to be hemmed in by this phalanx of giggling old geezers who looked like a flock of turkey gobblers. “Maybe she ran away from home,” said one of them. “Hasn’t been any transients in this hotel since that last Watkins fella. Fella by the name of Fletcher. Is your name Fletcher, Missy?” Another said, “I think it’s mighty nice of her to come and pay us a call instead of going to the show with her best beau,” and when a third said, “I bet I know where there’s a Hershey bar not a thousand miles from here,” I got up and, in a panic, ducked through the lines and fled; taking candy from a strange old man was the quickest way to die like a dog from poison.

  So the hotel after that was out. Then I tried the depot, but it was too dirty and noisy; a couple of times I went and sat in the back of the Catholic church, but it was dark there, and besides I didn’t feel right about it, because I was a United Presbyterian in good standing. Once, I went into the women’s smoking room in the library at the college, but it was full of worried-looking old-maid summer-school students who came back year after year to work on their Master’s degrees in Education, and they asked me a lot of solemn questions, raising their voices as if I were deaf. Besides, it was embarrassing to watch them smoke; they were furtive and affected, and they coughed a good deal. I could smoke better than that and I was only ten; I mean the one time I had smoked I did it better—a friend and I each smoked a cubeb she had pinched from her tubercular father.

  * * *

  But at last I found a peachy place—the visitors’ waiting room outside the jail in the basement of the courthouse. There were seldom any visitors, because there were seldom any prisoners, and when, on rare occasions, there were, the visitors were too edgy or too morose to pay any heed to me. The big, cool room had nothing in it but two long benches and a wicker table, on which was spread out free Christian Science literature. The sheriff, Mr. Starbird, was very sympathetic with me, for he liked to read himself and that’s what he did most of the time (his job was a snap; Adams was, on the whole, a law-abiding town) in his office that adjoined the waiting room; he read and read, not lifting his eyes from Sax Rohmer even when he was rolling a cigarette. Once, he said he wished his own daughters, Laverne, thirteen, and Ida, sixteen, would follow my example, instead of, as he put it, “rimfirin’ around the county with paint on their faces and spikes on their heels and not caring two hoots for anything on God’s green earth except what’s got on pants.” Mr. Starbird and I became good friends, although we did not talk much, since we were busy reading. One time, when were both feeling restless, he locked me up in a cell so I could see how it felt; I kind of liked it. And another time he put handcuffs on me, but they were too big.

  At the time I discovered the jail, in the first hot days in June, I was trying to memorize the books of the Bible. If I got them by heart and could name them off in proper order and without hesitating or mispronouncing, I would be eligible to receive an award of a New Testament at Sunday school, and if there was one thing I liked, it was prizes. So every day for several weeks I spent the whole afternoon more or less in jail, reading whatever fun thing I had brought along (Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Misunderstood Betsy, Trudy Goes to Boarding School) and then working away at I Samuel, II Samuel, I Kings, II Kings, whispering so as not to disturb Mr. Starbird. Sometimes, on a really hot day, he would send out for two bottles of Dr. Pepper.

  One blistering Saturday, when I was as limp as a rag after walking through the sun down the hill and into the hot valley where the courthouse was, I got to the stairs leading to the waiting room and was met by the most deafening din of men yelling and bars rattling and Mr. Starbird hollering “Quiet there, you bastards!” at the top of his voice. I was shocked and scared but very curious, and I went on down the steps, hearing the vilest imaginable language spewing out from the direction of the cells. I had just sat down on the edge of one of the benches and was opening Tom Sawyer Abroard when Mr. Starbird, bright red in the face, came in, brushing his hands. Two sweating deputies followed him. “Not today, Emily,” said Mr. Starbird when he saw me. “We got some tough customers today, worse luck. And me with a new Fu.”

  The prisoners were moonshiners, he told me as he led me by the arm to the stairs, whose still up in the mountains had been discovered, because they had drunk too much of their own rotgut and had got loose-tongued and had gone around bragging at the amusement park up at the head of the canyon. There were five of them, and they had had to be disarmed of sawed-off shotguns, although, as Mr. Starbird modestly pointed out, this wasn’t much of a job, since they had been three sheets in the wind. “Whew!” said the sheriff. “They got a breath on ’em like the whole shootin’ match of St. Louis before the Volstead Act.” I told him I didn’t mind (it would give me considerable prestige with my brother and my friends to be on hand if one of them should try to make a break, and I would undoubtedly get my name in the paper: “Emily Vanderpool, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Peter Vanderpool, witnessed the attempted escape of the desperate criminals. Emily is to receive an award at the United Presbyterian Church on July 29th”), but Mr. Starbird told me, a little sharply, to go on now, and I had no choice but to go.

  Go where? I had exhausted every possibility in town. I thought of going to the Safeway, where my father was the manager, and asking him if I could read in his office, but I knew how that would go over on a busy Saturday when the farmers and the mountain people were in town buying potatoes and side meat; my father didn’t have Mr. Starbird’s temperament. Then, vaguely, I considered the front porch of a haunted house at the top of Carlyle Hill but rejected it when I remembered a recent rumor that there was a nest of bats under the eaves; I didn’t want them in my hair, using my pigtails to swing on. I wasn’t too sure I could read anyhow, because I was so excited over the prisoners, but it was far too hot to roller-skate, too hot to explore the dump—to hot, indeed, for anything but sitting quietly beside the lockup.

  I started in the direction of home in a desultory way, stopping at every drinking fountain, window-shopping, going methodically through the ten-cent stores, looking for money in the gutters. I walked down the length of the main street, going toward the mountains, over whose summits hung a pale heat haze; the pavement was soft, and when it and the shimmering sidewalk ended, I had to walk in the red dirt road, which was so dusty that after a few steps my legs, above the tops of my socks, looked burned—not sunburned, burned.

  At the outskirts of town, beside the creek, there was a tourist camp where funny-looking people pitched tents and fill
ed up the wire trash baskets with tin cans; sometimes, on a still night, you could hear them singing state songs, and now and again there was the sound of an accordion or a harmonica playing a jig. Today there was only one tent up in the grounds, a sagging, ragged white one, and it looked forlorn, like something left behind. Nearby was parked a Model T, dark red with rust where its sky-blue paint had worn off, and to it was attached a trailer; I knew how hot the leather seat of that car would be and I could all but hear the sun beating on the top of it like hailstones. There wasn’t a soul in sight and there wasn’t a sound nearby except for a couple of magpies ranting at each other in the trees and the occasional digestive croak of a bullfrog. Along the creek, there was a line of shady cottonwoods, and I decided to rest there for a while and cool off my feet in the water.

  * * *

  After I had washed as well as I could, I leaned back against the tree trunk, my feet still in the water, and opened the Bible to the table of contents, and then I closed my eyes so that I wouldn’t cheat; I started reciting, sofly and clearly and proud of myself. I had just got to Ezra, having gone so far very fast and without a hitch, when a noise caused me to fling back my eyelids and to discover that a man’s big foot in a high buttoned shoe had materialized on the ground beside me. Startled, I looked up into the bearded face of a tall man in black clothes (black suit, black string tie, black-rimmed eyeglasses, black hat—the hat was dented in such a way that it looked like a gravy boat) and into the small brown eyes of a girl about Stella’s age, who wore a tennis visor and a long, dirty white thing that looked like her nightgown.