Herma Read online

  “With Papa leading, they trudged in a procession across the sand to a point almost at the edge of the water. Here Papa set the hamper down and took out of it a plaid steamer robe, which he spread out on the sand. There were only a few other people on the beach, most of them summer visitors from the hotels. Mama unfurled her parasol, and they both sat down. Papa crossed his ankles, pulling up his trousers carefully in order not to spoil the crease. Mama gazed out at the sea with a pleased look, her chin raised a little. The filtered light under the parasol gave her an ethereal and transparent look, as though her flesh was made of some substance like crystal. The light breeze touched and lifted the blue ribbons of her dress.

  Herma glanced at Papa and Mama out of the corner of her eye. They were paying no attention to her. Kicking off her shoes and socks, she tore off across the sand, feeling to be sure the nickel was still there in her pocket. She didn’t stop until she was standing in front of the gaudy red and white kiosk with its striped awning. The ice cream was dispensed by Haroun himself, a clever mahogany-colored man who might have been of almost any age; perhaps he was very old, or perhaps he was only wrinkled by the sun. Herma knew exactly what she wanted. First, however, it was necessary to go through the usual litany. She reached up to the counter, which she could barely see over, and put her nickel on it.

  “Vanilla cone.”

  “Sure you don’t want chocolate or strawberry or pistachio? Pistachio is very good.”

  “No.”

  “Some chocolate sprinkles on it!”

  “No. Just vanilla.”

  “Okey-dokey,” said Haroun. Seizing his scoop, he plunged it into the tub of vanilla and scrounged it around to form a ball. With the other hand he simultaneously slipped a cone from the bottom of the glass receptacle over the counter. With a flair he juxtaposed the two, the scoop above and the cone below, and pressed the thumb-lever so that the ball fell exactly into the mouth off the cone. Then he whipped a paper napkin dexterously around it and passed it across the counter. Herma had to stand on tiptoe to reach high enough for it. She licked it just once and then raced off across the sand with it.

  A few yards away she stopped and examined it, with a solemn and intense concentration. The place where she had licked had virtually smoothed itself out, as ice cream will. In the warm sun it had already reached the preliminary stages of melting. The ivory hemisphere, sagging slightly as she tipped the cone to one side, seemed to tremble at its pores with a faint and evanescent perspiration. With a deliberate and excruciating slowness she raised it toward her mouth, watching it until at last it went out of focus and turned into a cream-colored blur. Her tongue came out and descended to it. The agile and moist little red snake aimed straight at the center, then at the last moment it turned and dodged the summit, and instead made its first quivering contact at the side. Round and round coiled the red tongue tip, skillfully skimming off what was liquid and leaving the soft but solid mass underneath. The pale and glistening mound gradually diminished. Only when it had sunk almost to the level of the cone edge did she allow herself, or more precisely her tongue, to dart directly at the center.

  Now the game changed. The convexity had turned into a concavity, while losing none of its pale deliquescence or its sweet savor to the tongue. This organ now descended into a spiral and gradually deepening orifice the shape of a maelstrom. Deeper and deeper probed the flexible pink tip. The tongue was tiny, but in some way Herma managed to extend it almost to the bottom. Almost, almost! The pink snake quivered but couldn’t make it. In the end she tipped the cone up to get the last of the melted sweetness. A circle of white was printed onto her face around the mouth.

  It was ended, like all other pleasures. Yet she hardly minded. She had bought the ice cream and eaten it. It was hers—not only the ice cream itself, which no longer existed, but the savor and memory of it, which she might cherish in herself secretly for as long as she pleased. As for the slightly soggy shape she held in her hand—like an illustration for a geometry problem—it didn’t interest her. It was only a concavity from which everything important had been removed. She looked into it. It was rather disgusting. She flung it away across the sand.

  Looking up, she found herself confronted by a boy about her age in a sailor suit, who had somehow managed to procure a balloon and was holding it self-importantly on the end of a string. He stared at Herma and his aplomb gradually vanished. What was a balloon to an ice-cream cone! And how rich, how privileged, how profligate must be the child who could eat the ice cream and throw the cone away! Herma felt this, and so evidently did the boy. She trudged past him with hardly a glance. He gazed after her dejectedly, seeming to forget the balloon string in his hand.

  The expanse of sand was wide, and Herma had almost lost her way. No, there was the steamer robe with the two figures on it and the parasol, everything trembling slightly in the sunlight. Herma, cleaning herself with her tongue as she went like a small animal, arrived with only a few sticky vanilla drops on her face. Papa glanced at her mildly. He was sun-warmed and somnolent, and his face was slightly pink under the rim of his hat.

  “Before lunch?”

  Mama said, “You yourself gave her the nickel for the cone.”

  “But I didn’t tell her to eat it before lunch.”

  “You didn’t tell her not to.” And Mama added, “It won’t do any harm. It’s only a little milk and sugar.”

  “That’s it,” said Papa. “Only milk and sugar, and it cost five cents.”

  It was Mama herself, planting her parasol in the sand, who took out the lunch from the hamper. First came napkins, plates, cups, a jar of mustard, another of pickles, the salt and pepper, and finally the lunch proper: chicken sandwiches, potato salad with a star of sliced egg arranged on top, and Herma’s favorite cookies, which had dates in a spiral of glossy brown emerging from the lighter surface. To drink there was a Mason jar of lemonade. Herma failed to eat her sandwich crusts, dropped potato salad on her dress, and mismanaged a cookie so badly that half of it fell in the sand. But no one seemed to notice; Papa gazed out to sea, and Mama nibbled at her sandwich in a ladylike way without allowing even a crumb to fall from her lips. Herma, disposing of the last of her lemonade, and inspecting the fallen piece of cookie but finding it hopelessly sandy, sprang up and ran away across the sand to the edge of the water.

  A wave foamed up and coiled around her ankles. Pulling up the hem of her skirt, she ran after it and chased it back into the ocean where it belonged. But another one was rolling in, snarling and throwing up white feathers of spray. It seemed immense, but Herma knew it would get smaller as it approached her. She even advanced a few steps toward it. Then, as it swept up the sand, she fled—not in panic, but in a game she played with this powerful and playful monster the sea, a game which she knew the sea would finally win, as her audacity grew and the waves went on alternating in their eternal way, some coming a little farther up the beach and some not so far. Her ankles were soaked, then her knees, and finally the hem of her skirt. She tucked the skirt into the elastic bottom of her drawers—glancing around—but Papa was lazy and warm on the steamer robe and seemed not to notice her. Now, with her legs bare, she could chase the waves out farther. But finally—as was inevitable—the biggest one of all caught her with a slap, soaking her thoroughly. She splashed her way up out of the water onto the hard-packed sand and raced away along the edge of the surf, running, running, away from Papa and Mama, until she began to pant.

  Then all at once she stopped. A mile away down the beach was a fantastic apparition: the tents of the Great Pacific Traveling Exposition, a bedraggled caravansary that for some reason had chosen a number of years ago, before Herma was born, to settle on this stretch of sunbaked California beach, putting up its canvas castles, erecting painted signs in the sand, and draping its banners and faded flags to the sea breeze. Although it called itself Traveling, it had been there for some time now and showed no signs of moving on.

  Herma of course had never been down the beach that
far. The Exposition was something that Papa and Mama didn’t even discuss, something like Cantamar, although perhaps for different reasons. It was possible that, like going to restaurants, it only cost too much. But it was not this, Herma was sure. It was that there was something in the Exposition that was—not proper to see—not respectable, that was the word. The great tents, which sagged in some places and stuck up in points in others, had a certain tawdry magnificence to them. Some of them were made of a pale bluish canvas, splotched and faded, and others had once been black but were now an indifferent gray with dustings of white on their peaks, as though snow had fallen on them. Even from a distance the gaudily painted signs and posters could be made out. A curious odor came down the beach from it—a savory smell of things fried in lard, along with the scent of lotion that came out of the door of the barber shop, masculine and yet effete and decadent. She stood looking at this tawdry Araby for a few moments longer. Then she turned and ran back down the beach toward Papa and Mama.

  5.

  By the time the Yellow Dog brought them back to Fourth and Main it was almost five o’clock. The air was still balmy, with a yellow tinge as though there were specks of gold floating in it, tiny and almost invisible. Lazy in the warmth and going more slowly now, they walked the few blocks along Fourth Street and up Ross to the house. Papa still seemed pink and distracted, and Mama too seemed stimulated by this expedition to the beach, but it only made her paler than usual, as though she had shrunk like a flower from the sunlight.

  When they were inside the parlor and the door shut behind them, Papa hemmed once, chewed his mustache, and glanced covertly at Herma. Then, staring at the Dresden doll on the mantlepiece, he offered his opinion that the sea air made one drowsy and the thing to do was take a nap before supper. At this Mama’s paleness left her and a faint flush appeared on her cheeks. She said nothing. But she too evidently thought that a nap would be a good idea, because she went off with Papa into the bedroom. The door shut. There was silence, broken only by the usual clickings and groanings of the house standing warm in the late afternoon sun.

  No one had suggested that Herma should take a nap, so she ran out into the backyard, banging the screen door behind her. Coming home after such an excitement—the hot sun and sand, the complex ecstasy of the ice cream, the kelpy water washing around her legs, even the distant and mysterious squalor of the Exposition—she felt surfeited with the vast richness and profusion of life. The world was kaleidoscopic, variegated, and infinitely meaningful. Nothing was uninteresting, nothing was without significance—nothing was boring or banal. Everything gleamed, like the individual stone in a bright Byzantine mosaic. The whole world of nature was full of curiosities, many of them charged with mystery. Snakes had no legs but could walk, for instance, and hummingbirds kissed flowers instead of each other as people did.

  Flopping down onto the grass, she turned once again to studying the myriad life pullulating under the blades. Two black beetles crawled by, one on top of the other—that was a convenience, for the one at least. For some reason this reminded her of the whole matter that ladies and gentlemen were different sorts of people. Papa was certainly nothing like Mama. He was more severe, his voice was deeper, and he wore different sorts of clothes. He was stronger in all ways, able to lift heavy weights if necessary, even though it made his mustache perspire. The whole world, Herma reflected, was filled with the invisible structure of he and she. Mr. Sampson’s Delilah was a she, God was a he. Ladybugs were she, and all dogs seemed to be he, although Herma was not quite sure about this. Men had big watches, which they pulled out on chains from their vest pockets, and ladies tiny ones. Perhaps even the flowers were she, since the hummingbirds kissed them with their sharp swordlike beaks. And sticks and stones, for all Herma knew. And clouds in the sky. The whole universe, it seemed, was split into this vast dichotomy, which Herma was now become aware of as its details were revealed to her one by one. Ah Sweet Mystery of Life, as the song put it—Mama sometimes sang it softly, tinkling along with herself with one finger on the piano.

  But now Herma began to wonder what it meant that Delilah was a she. She had no children, nor did she have long hair or wear a dress. Getting up off the grass, she went to the fence and peered through the crack in an effort to seek out some evidence on this question. But instead she saw Boy Sampson.

  Boy Sampson was exactly her age but he was not like her at all. He was not curious about things—at least not curious about them in the way that she was. He liked to break things, instead of looking at them intently as Herma did in order to understand them. There he was, just beyond Delilah’s protruding tail, breaking off a branch from the lilac bush. He was a chubby neckless boy with small eyes and hair that grew only on the top of his head, although perhaps this was only the way his Mama cut it. He wrote his usual summer outfit—cotton trousers cut off just above the knee, with the ends unraveled, and a white shirt with no collar. The shirt was not very clean and neither were Boy Sampson’s bare feet—they were dirt-colored up to the knee. The Sampsons were Adventists, Mama said, as though this explained a good many things. This inferior condition, however, did not seem to weigh Boy Sampson down with any shame or modesty. He swanked around the yard like an Arab prince, dominating each bush and blade of grass to bend it to his suzerainty. Herma, with her eye fixed to the gap in the fence, was privy to all the antics that a small boy goes through when he believes that no one is watching him. The things he did were banal and yet significant, like the gestures performed by an actor. In this Theater of the World, she was the audience and he the unwitting but versatile performer.

  First, still swaggering around with the stick in one hand, he stuck the fingers of his other hand into his bottom and scratched himself—that wasn’t nice, unless you did it in your own room with the door closed. He threw away the stick, found something iron in the grass, brushed off the dirt, and tried to see if it was sharp enough to cut his initials on the door of the shed. It wasn’t, and he abandoned it to chase a floppy butterfly that was staggering around in the air a foot or so above the grass. Trapping it in his hand after many failures (he was not very agile), he pulled off one wing and turned it loose to see if it would still fly. It wouldn’t, and he stamped it out with his foot. He found a piece of lath, set it against the protruding root of the fig tree, and tramped on it with his bare foot; it broke with a satisfying snap. He looked for another stick, and found only the green lilac branch as thick as a cane; when he stamped on this it didn’t break and he gave a small yelp of pain. Not angry, only coldly vindictive, he threw it over the fence, where it landed on the grass behind Herma.

  What next? He disappeared down the cellar door and came out with a wooden sword fashioned of another lath, sharpened at one end and fitted with a cross-piece of the same material. With this he tried prodding Delilah in the same place he had scratched himself, but she didn’t seem to appreciate this. She gave a whinny and a stamp. Boy Sampson left off and began cutting the air with his sword, satisfied with its menacing hiss; then he turned to slashing off the heads of the daisies along the fence. He made a little grunt with each slash. The yellow heads flew into the air and toppled down, giving off a sickly odor of things crushed. So much for the daisies. When they were all decapitated he turned to the irises and flags, in a flower bed bordered with stones. They too were quickly dispatched with the wooden sword. His Mama and Papa too, Herma thought, must be taking a nap; but presently they would come out and a terrible retribution would follow. This would be worth waiting for.

  But in fact it did not happen. Instead, Boy Sampson, tiring of his sport and damp with exertion, advanced in an odd spraddle-legged way on the lilac bush. Spreading his legs apart, he began unbuttoning his trouser buttons. There appeared a little pink spout, evidently flexible and just the right size for the fingers so that it could be turned in whichever direction he wanted. This appliance began ejecting a yellow thread. Boy Sampson waved it from side to side, irrigating not only the lilac bush but the stones around it and a b
ee clinging nearby on a blade of grass. The accuracy of the thing was impressive. The bee fell off, drenched in foamy yellow wine, and staggered away to dry itself. Boy Sampson directed his aim back to the center of the lilac bush, which he was also able to drench with precision. At last the golden flow petered out; and now Herma knew what this rather coarse expression meant.

  Boy Sampson replaced the small rosy faucet inside his trousers, after a good deal of hip-squirming. What a convenience! And apart from its usefulness it was a jewel in itself, like a baby’s thumb with a little pink hood at the end.

  Herma decided that she had to have one of those.

  6.

  Only once did Herma go on the Yellow Dog by herself. It was on a day in the autumn a few weeks after the Sunday at the beach. She remembered it for years afterward, not only because of the small thrill of the forbidden connected with it, but because of what had happened later that afternoon; and moreover, in the back of her mind, there was no question that the thing that happened—even though it didn’t affect her directly—was connected in some way with the fact that she had done something she was not supposed to do.

  Her transgression—if that was what it was—seemed a relatively minor thing in itself. Papa had given her a nickel “for being good”—specifically, for sitting quietly during Meeting without squirming, and afterward shaking Brother Goff’s hand in such a dignified and adult way—this made everybody smile—and also because he, Papa, was feeling pleased with himself and expansive because he had just been named Editor-in-Chief of the Blade, Mr. Peebles having finally chosen to retire after so many years.

  So Herma had a nickel, the first money she had ever possessed which was not to be spent for a specific purpose. The next afternoon as soon as lunch was over she dashed out of the house with the coin tucked into the pocket of her dress, and when Mama inquired where she was going, she said simply, “To spend it”—which was true, although the trouble was that when Mama called after her in her anxious voice, “All right. But don’t go too far, dear,” she had simply nodded—and there was where the untruth came in, because she knew that Mama would not have approved of where she was going. The fact was that, try as she would, Herma found herself unable to be totally truthful at all times, especially where adults were concerned.