“Should we be eating those?” Charlotte asked.
“They’re perfectly good,” Mrs. Price said. “I put in lots of sugar.” With the engraved silver spoon, which was so large that syrup splashed on the tablecloth, she dished out two slippery, menacing globes for each person. When she came to the last plate, which was Neva’s, she hesitated. She put the jar down and went into the kitchen, returning with a smaller jar of peach pit jelly and a heel of bread.
“Not pit jelly,” Neva cried. “I want apricots!”
“No,” Mrs. Price said. “When you’re sick, you can’t bear up as well. You can’t take chances.”
“What chances? I want apricots like everyone else!”
“You can have them in California.”
It was all so hopeless. The family was going to California, to the town where lemons grew, and Aldine wouldn’t have a place to live. She didn’t want to eat the apricots, but Mrs. Price stuck her fork in the center of an apricot’s round back and sliced. Then she ate a piece. Ansel didn’t bother to cut his, but simply moved the orb from plate to mouth, chewed, swallowed, and said, “Flavorsome or I’m a fool. What’s the matter with you all?”
Aldine cut her apricots into small pieces and ate each piece in the faith that if she died, he would die, too, a strange and silly thought that shamed her. Everything she could see in the next room—the petit-point rug, the cherrywood secretary, Herr Hoffman’s photograph, Mrs. Price’s radio, Tiffany lamp, and marble-topped occasional table—all had a fragile, abandoned look about them, as if they were the furnishings of a ship that was tipping and taking on water. She remembered how she had stood in that exact spot one September day, bangles clacking, feeling Neva’s little fingers pulling her forward. It seemed a long time ago.
43
Charlotte had told Clare the story about the Stuyvesants while he was washing up for supper, but apricots were his favorite, and he didn’t want her to think she’d scared him so he ate them. They tasted all right. But now, in bed, he felt something besides the usual hunger. It was a kind of dizzy fog. He wondered if it wasn’t the first sign of ptomaine poisoning. Probably it wasn’t but possibly it was. This possibility kept him awake, and when he was awake, he thought of Aldine. He imagined tiptoeing up the stairs, standing at the foot of her bed, and staring at her as she slept. He thought of this all the time. He could never think what he might say if she woke up, but what he wanted to say was something that would turn her into one of those women in photographs who smiled mischievously above naked, round breasts.
He’d never tiptoed upstairs. Always before, he’d thought she’d still be here a week or month from now and now everyone was leaving before anything could happen.
He folded back his blankets, stood up, and tested his stocking feet on the wooden floor. He began to walk. The stairs to the attic didn’t creak beneath his weight, at least not until the top one when it was too late to go back. He stood very still and listened for wind. It was not blowing tonight.
When he pushed open the door and stood within it, the room was much as he imagined it, only more beautiful, for moonlight slanted through the window and washed across the iron bed in the center of the tiny room, the figure under the blanket, the dark hair on the pillow. She was turned away from Clare, but she turned suddenly at his approach, as if she’d been awake all along.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“What are you doing here?” she said, but without real alarm. She kept her voice low, too.
“I can’t sleep,” he said.
She was staring at him through the dimness. She did not seem afraid.
“I thought maybe—” He was listening to his voice, wondering what he would say next. “I thought maybe you could do like you do for Neva. Sing that song about Bryan O’Linn.”
“What?” She sat up and held the blanket over her upper half. She slept in something with long sleeves. She would, given the cold.
“Bryan O’Linn, his wife, and wife’s mother,” Clare whispered, too embarrassed to sing the lyric, “were all going over the bridge together.”
Aldine watched him.
“I can’t remember the next part,” he whispered. This was a bald lie and he supposed she knew it.
“You have to go out of here,” she said in a low voice. “I’ve had enough trouble.”
“Please,” he said. “Just sing it to me. Then I’ll go back down.”
Aldine was quiet. Her face was pale in the moonlight, and her fingers clutched the blanket. “Come here then,” she whispered and when he’d sat down, she sang in the smallest, purest voice.
“Bryan O’Linn, his wife, and wife’s mother
Were all going over the bridge together,
The bridge it broke up and they all tumbled in,
‘We’ll go home by water,’ says Bryan O’Linn.”
Her voice made him feel dizzier. He found himself wondering whether her nightgown went all the way down to her feet, or only to her knees. He shivered. “It’s so cold up here,” he said. “I could bring you an extra blanket.”
“Go back doonstairs,” she whispered. “Clarence, you must.”
Clay-dance. That was how his ear would always receive it.
“Don’t make me go,” he said. The quilt she had on the bed was made from Opa’s old suits. He touched the end that was nearest him and whispered that when he was little, he’d pretended each rectangle was a field and the far edge was the track for his train of stones. “See?” he said, pointing to a herringbone patch. “This here’s wheat.” He pointed to a mustard-colored patch near her thigh. “This one’s corn.” He slowly moved his finger to the black patch that was lying like a hill on her foot. “And this,” he said, “has just been plowed for a kitchen garden.” He left his hand there. She didn’t speak but retracted her foot.
“Aldine is a beautiful name,” he whispered.
She said nothing. He had repeated the name to himself many times, alone and in private. This was the first time he’d said it in her presence.
“Aldine,” he whispered. “I just wanted to tell you, before we leave—” He stopped. Her eyes looked enormous and black. “If we die, for example, I would want you to know.”
“Know what?” Aldine asked, her voice even quieter than his. Clare realized that his breath was visible in the moonlight and his hands were freezing.
“When you sing,” he whispered, “I fall in love with you.”
Aldine watched him. He wanted to move closer, to be near her face, but she didn’t move, and he felt immobilized, his hands still touching the wool of the blanket.
“I could taste the sugar, couldn’t you?” she whispered. “And there was no mold on top. They said Mrs. Stuyvesant scraped mold off the top.”
“Yes,” he said. “I could taste it.”
“The mold?” She pronounced it “moold.”