And ’gins to chide, but soon she stops his lips;
And kissing speaks, with lustful language broken,
‘If thou wilt chide, thy lips shall never open.’”
Clare thought of the magazine he’d gotten from Harry Gifford, of the girls spread across the pages in poses that made him feel this same way, but his mother was sitting there, and his father was sitting there, both of them tensing their eyebrows and lips, and Aldine was looking very hard at her knitting. Her eyes seemed larger, her mouth tighter. But it was Shakespeare, and anything Shakespeare said, you could say in the house. Charlotte was heedless of it all, or—and this suddenly seemed more likely—she was pretending to be heedless, and she kept reading:
“Even as an empty eagle, sharp by fast,
Tires with her beak on feathers, flesh and bone,
Shaking her wings, devouring all in haste,
Till either gorge be stuff’d or prey be gone;
Even so she kiss’d his brow, his cheek, his chin,
And where she ends she doth anew begin.”
“Charlotte,” his mother said sharply, stuffing the shirt she was mending into her sewing basket. “I don’t think this is suitable. Besides, it’s Neva’s bedtime.” She stood abruptly and began gathering Neva’s papers.
“No!” Neva said. “I’m not done!”
Clare made himself look at Opa Hoffman’s picture until he felt no desire. Charlotte’s expression, as she closed the Shakespeare book, was amused, not thwarted, so he was suddenly certain she’d known all about the poem before she’d started it, and that she’d probably gotten a lot farther than she expected.
When Neva’s fit about not going to bed got her nowhere, she asked if Miss McKenna could sing her to sleep, please, please, please, and the two of them left the room. It was five past eight. Clare’s mother tuned the radio to the NBC Blue Network, where the symphonic music had already begun.
Clare stood and stretched, saying, “Well, good night.”
The stairway was cold, as usual. As he climbed the steps, he could hear Aldine singing already. He stood for a moment outside Neva’s closed door to hear her tongue flutter against her teeth when she sang the r’s:
“Bryan O’Linn had no breeches to wear
He got him a sheepskin to make him a pair,
With the fleshy side out and the woolly side in,
‘Whoo, they’re pleasant and cool!’ says Bryan O’Linn.”
He put his own tongue to his teeth and whispered “breeches” until he sounded like her, and he wondered how long it would be before he could slip Venus and Adonis off the shelf and try to make more sense of its phrases.
25
Opal had bought the fabric, enough for two dresses, on the condition that Charlotte would help her. Charlotte knew what that meant—she’d be sewing the dresses while Opal gabbed and watched—but that was fine by Charlotte. She would get to sew, she would get a new dress, and she would have some company, none of which would be true without the material. Besides, Opal had a funny streak and she was a good listener, especially for all things Aldine.
“You should see Clare turn into a puddle every time she enters the room,” Charlotte said, “and Neva starts every sentence with Miss McKenna. Miss McKenna says this and Miss McKenna does that.”
They’d laid the pattern out on the table and had only two hours before they’d have to take it up and set the dinner dishes. Charlotte was aware of her mother in the kitchen, peeling the apples Opal had brought. Opal had of course offered to help; her mother had of course refused.
“And you’d think that the whole island of Scotland must be free of dust the way she complains of it.” She moved her voice up to a thin girlish register. “It’s wooonderful here in Pooodunk a’course but wouldna be dead splendid if it were naw so clarty, don’t you know?”
Opal’s laughter came up from the stomach and only encouraged Charlotte further.
She said, “In the ooold country we looove to sing a sooong and strike a pooose.”
She said, “In New Yooork where you have never been and will never be they have a movie hoose on every bloook.”
She said, “Oh Clay-dance, doon’t you have the dead juiciest eyes.”
“That will be enough, Charlotte!” her mother called from the other room, which only made Charlotte aware of how long her mother had let it go before reining it in.
In a lower voice, Charlotte said, “She’ll soon tell us she’s descended from the Queen of Scotland.”
“Do they have one?”
Charlotte had just put a pin in her mouth but felt it worthwhile to take it out. “Yes, and her name is Aldine.”
It was beautiful fabric, the print a maizey yellow with big red-and-orange asters. The dress would be perfect for spring—tiered skirt and ruffled cap sleeves—and the inverted-V bodice with the gathering at the bust would, Charlotte knew, be more becoming on a full figure like her own than on a wispy type like Opal. She bet Opal knew that, too, because she’d suggested that Charlotte wear her dress only on even days while she would take odd so they’d never both be caught wearing it “side by side.” A perfectly fine idea, Charlotte guessed, but she couldn’t help herself from saying, “But then everyone might think we’re just trading the same dress back and forth.”
When her mother went out of doors with a basket of wash to hang, Charlotte had the chance she’d been waiting for, and told Opal about, as she put it, “The Venus-and-Adonis Affair.”
“You read that out loud?” Opal said when Charlotte had filled her in. They’d both privately read the poem last summer, at least the best parts of it, and later conferred about its contents.
Charlotte nodded. She was cutting the fabric now. “Everybody but Neva nearly turned purple. I thought the Mother might expire and I truly thought Clare was going to pop his cork.”
This brought raucous laughter from Opal, who shrieked, “What kind of cork?” which caused even Charlotte, who was no prude, to shush her. But her mother had heard nothing—Charlotte could see her stringing a sheet along the line, her mouth full of clothespins.
“Here, you cut this,” Charlotte said a moment later to Opal, handing her the scissors. She went to the kitchen and returned with a pencil and slim sheet of paper. Opal suspended her cutting—she was watching Charlotte’s every move.
“What are you up to, Miss Mischievous?” Opal said, but Charlotte barely heard the question, so intent was she upon the task at hand.
26