Herma Page 8

  “Privately?” Mama exchanged a glance with Papa. “But before when you used to come …”

  “She was jus a lil girl at that time. In this case, we have a young woman.”

  This was exactly the point. “Still,” suggested Mama, “perhaps I might just …”

  “Where can I examine her?”

  Mama glanced at Papa, but he was looking the other way out the window.

  “Very well. Dear, go with Dr. Violet.”

  “No.”

  “You had better take her into our bedroom,” said Mama, for what reason she was not quite sure, except that it didn’t seem quite proper for Herma to receive Dr. Violet in her own bedroom. She indicated the door at the end of the hall.

  “It will jus take a lil while.”

  Herma’s mouth was set. “No,” she said again.

  “Herma,” said Papa firmly.

  “Herma, go with Dr. Violet,” Mama encouraged her. “And perhaps afterward,” she added with a false cheerfulness, “we can go to Q. R. Smith’s and …”

  Dr. Violet, not a great talker under any circumstances, took her hand. There was a tussle. Herma was a good-sized girl now, and strong. Papa stood by helplessly, fingering his mustache, and Mama hovered over the two of them with conciliatory hands, not quite touching them, as though she hoped to conjure them toward the bedroom with her gestures. They went down the hall, Herma twisting like an eel, Dr. Violet lurching only slightly as Herma’s jerks ran up his arm into the frock coat. The door closed.

  Papa and Mama exchanged a glance, but neither said anything. Mama sat down in the bentwood rocker and pretended to take up her work, and Papa remained standing by the window. There were sounds of violent tumult from the bedroom. It was as though heavy objects were being flung against the walls, with grunts and small animal cries. Now and then a whistle, as of breath sharply intaken. Some small glass object broke—probably nothing of any great importance, since it made only a small tinkle. Then there was silence for quite a long time, broken only by an occasional bumping. Papa gazed out at the lawn across the street, where the Biemeyers’ old gray cat was ineffectually stalking a robin, and Mama pushed the needle through her work and drew it out on the other side. The door opened.

  Violet came out first, stuffing things into his pockets, and Herma followed after, her hair disarranged, chewing her lip. She was fully dressed but her clothes gave the impression somehow of having been put on in the dark; her dress was askew, one shoe unbuckled, the stocking twisted. She did not meet Mama’s or Papa’s eye. She strode straight to the sofa and plunked down on it, glaring out the window.

  Papa and Mama said nothing.

  Violet sucked his hand, inspected it, and then lowered it to his side. “Well,” he said, “this lil girl is growing right up. Her height and weight are bout normal for her age. The larynx is well developed, and all the reflexes”—he took a small rubber hammer from his pocket and tapped it in his hand as if to show what he meant—“all the reflexes work quite nice. She might put on jus a lil bit more weight. Maybe some cod-liver oil.”

  There was a pause. Papa chewed his mustache. “Her—development is normal?”

  “Oh, yes. She’s coming right along. She is a real lil woman. Of course,” he added, “each individual is jus a lil bit different.” He seemed to stress these last words slightly, as he stuffed the mauve stocking and the stethoscope back into his pocket, and even repeated them. “Jus a lil bit different.”

  But Mama and Papa never did find out what he meant by this, for Dr. Violet, stuffing the two dollar bills down into his pocket along with the newspaper and the cough medicine, inspected the parlor once more, as though he were looking around in it absentmindedly for some object he had lost, and went out the door without another word. It was perhaps only Herma who knew what it was that Dr. Violet had referred to. “I bit him,” she said quite simply.

  9.

  Boy Sampson (who still had no other name in popular parlance, although officially by this time it was Delbert) had grown into an oversized and awkward adolescent, all elbows and knobby knees, without losing his neckless quality or the querulous fixity of his glance. He was tall and gangly now, but he still had the same funny haircut and the same soft and babyish, somehow invertebrate look about him. He was hopelessly in love with Herma, although he himself wasn’t aware of this and was conscious only of a sort of warm and limpet-like urge when he was in her presence. An urge to do something, he didn’t know what; he associated it not with her but with the various other perturbations and dislocations that were going on in his body at this time, so it remained perfectly innocent.

  For her part, she had a contempt for all boys, and this contempt was centered with a particular vehemence on Boy Sampson. He really couldn’t do anything properly. He wasn’t good at sports and he couldn’t drive a nail with a hammer, as she saw watching from her backyard through a crack in the fence. He sucked his thumb and then mouthed an obscenity she was clearly able to decipher. He couldn’t even climb a fence as well as she could. Impeded as she was by a white dress that came below her knees, she shinnied up and seized the boards in her hands, groped with her bare feet like a young monkey, pulled herself up until she lay in prone position on top of the fence, and dropped easily down to the grass on the other side.

  “What do you want?”

  “I need Delilah. I’m going to my Aunt Minnie.”

  With hardly a glance at him she went directly to the shed and began backing the old mare out.

  “You’d better ask Pap.”

  “You know,” she told him with dignity, “that your Papa lets me ride Delilah whenever I want.”

  This being true, he could only watch her sullenly as she bridled the mare and turned her around to face the gate. When they were smaller they had often ridden Delilah together.

  “Let me go with you.”

  “No,” said Herma, “I won’t, because you always make that noise.”

  “What noise?”

  “You know the one. The one you make with your bottom. You always make it when we go riding on Delilah together.”

  “Well, I can’t help it.”

  “I don’t care. It’s not polite and I don’t appreciate it, so I don’t care to have you go riding with me, and that’s all there is to it.”

  She mounted while Boy Sampson watched. Grasping Delilah’s mane in her fingers, she pulled herself up and landed on her stomach on the mare’s back. Then, sitting upright, she stuck her legs down. There she sat on her underdrawers, with the white dress pushed up on either side and her long legs showing above the knee.

  Boy Sampson stared at her. She started up Delilah with a nudge of her bare heel, came to the gate and unlatched it, and rode out, leaving the gate open behind her. He watched, with the air of someone seeing something precious slip irretrievably and hopelessly away.

  Delilah was old and fat but diligent. She clop-clopped along in the soft dust of the street under the shade of the sycamores. She was so broad that Herma’s legs, as long as they were, stuck out with her knees protruding at an angle. Delilah had been to Aunt Minnie’s many times before and almost knew the way by herself. Only once or twice did Herma have to remind her of a turn, with a bare heel nudged into her large warm stomach as soft as a balloon. The way went up Ross Street to Seventeenth, across town on Seventeenth to Main Street, and then out of town through the orange groves that stretched away endlessly toward the mountains.

  Main Street very soon turned into a country road. There were no more sidewalks, and the glossy dark-green orchards went by in even rows like soldiers, separated every so often by eucalyptus windbreaks. There was a smell of orange blossoms and eucalyptus, a buzz of gnats in the air, a distant sound of someone chopping stove-wood. Now and then Herma passed a white ranch house gleaming in the green trees, with a barn at one side and a windmill behind it. There were lemon groves as well as oranges. The lemons you could tell because the leaves were a different color, a lighter green with pale streaks of yellow. They smell
ed different too—a keen bitter essence like some savage perfume from the Orient. It was hot; there was no shade except when Herma passed now and then under a tall row of eucalyptus. The road went straight on, the air over it shimmering slightly in the summer heat.

  About three miles out of town she turned right on an unpaved lane. It had no name; it was called “the road to the Harris place.” Aunt Minnie’s ranch was a quarter of a mile or so down the road, which continued on another few hundred yards beyond it and then ended in the river bottom. The ranch was much like the others, except that it was smaller and more carefully kept. The house of white clapboard was only two rooms wide, and the steep roof and gables made it look like a dollhouse. There were fruit trees and a large walnut with wide-spreading limbs, ideal for climbing. Between the house and the unpainted barn was a yard with chickens scratching in it. Behind the barn was the strawberry patch, and beyond it the even glossy rows of lemon trees began. In the yard a chicken was trying, in vain, to peck open a dried-out walnut. Herma tied Delilah to the apricot tree and went in.

  Aunt Minnie was Mama’s great-aunt by marriage. She had been born, years and years ago, in Castellamare di Stabia, that sun-drenched, dusty, squalid, and half-starved suburb of Naples, a town of flat roofs, dirty children, and spaghetti with sour tomato sauce. She was christened Gelsomina, which means Jasmine—Mina for short. With her husband, an ambitious young shoemaker who had saved a few lire, she embarked for America. But in Boston the bridegroom died quickly, of homesickness perhaps, or quinsy from the unaccustomed cold; and Mina went to work for rich people on Beacon Hill as a maid. Until the son of the family, an impulsive youth named Bertram who wished to be a poet and modeled his life on that of Byron, ran away with her and married her in Albany, New York.

  But Bertram came to realize, first of all, that Byron did not run away with housemaids, second that Byron would never have settled in or even visited a place like Albany, New York, and finally that he, Bertram, probably had very little talent as a poet anyway. So with his bride (still almost a child-bride, she was only eighteen) he went West, like so many other failures, dreamers, idealists, embezzlers, uncaught horse thieves, poètes manqués, disinherited sons, and other victims of the American Dream.

  There was no railroad in those days beyond the Missouri, and so Bertram and his bride joined a wagon train at Council Bluffs, with very little to offer except that Minnie—as the pioneers soon Americanized her name—could make sourdough bread. Bertram played the guitar a little, and believed he could fire a revolver, but was not judged capable of holding the reins leading to a span of oxen, so for the most part he trudged moodily along beside the wagon with his eyes fixed on the horizon. All went well until the company reached the Great Desert of the Utah Territory. There a bunch of Paiutes came out from some red rocks and began riding in circles around the wagon train, whooping and firing off their antiquated and not very effective rifles. The pioneers picked off several of them, but this didn’t seem to discourage the others. The train stopped, somewhat in confusion; there was no time to form the wagons into the traditional circle. Finally the Indians’ horses grew tired of going round and round like a circus, and slowed down, and this made them easier targets. If the pioneers had not planned their defense very well, the Paiutes had not planned their attack at all. They gave up and trotted away, leaving several dusty corpses behind them. On the pioneers’ side, only two oxen were killed, and a small boy named Owen B. Smith; and Bertram.

  They camped where they were for two days, near the little town of Saint George, while they ate the two oxen and buried their dead. Then they went on. Another month of creeping across the desert under an excruciating white sun—two more oxen died, and a woman named Mrs. Peebles—and they came at last over the pass and down to San Bernardino. Everything was green and prosperous. There were alfalfa fields, fruit orchards, and wells of sweet water. Continuing on to El Monte, only a day’s journey from Los Angeles, the company stopped, and there disbanded.

  Minnie had no money, no friends, and only the clothes that could be packed into a wooden box. So, coming somehow or other to Santa Ana—no one was sure about the details—she married Uncle John Harris, who was the brother of Mama’s grandfather. Uncle John was already fifty, but he had two great merits as a bridegroom: he was a widower who was said to have cherished his first wife with perseverance and affection, and he owned a lemon ranch. His first wife was called Aunt Miranda; a ghostly figure in the family annals, since she died before the age of photography. Uncle John himself was a craggy thoughtful man who somewhat resembled Abraham Lincoln, except that he had no whiskers and let his hair grow long. Although he was slow-moving and abstemious, he was a man of deeply concealed passions, and one of his passions was for Minnie. He knew as soon as he caught sight of her that he must have her; and he did have her, only an hour after their wedding, in the cool and darkened bedroom of the ranch house while the white afternoon sun blazed outside. His passion was thereby satisfied, and he never touched her in lust again to the end of his days.

  What Minnie thought of all this was not clear. She never complained, and she told little about herself. At the time of her marriage, as shown in the primitive Daguerreotypes of the epoch, she was a small and slender young woman with dark eyes and glossy black hair, not pretty exactly but with a shiny and intense vivacity, like a blackbird. There she was in her gray silk wedding dress with a single rose pinned to it. Her face was thin and her whole body narrow, her shoulders no wider than a ten-year-old boy’s. But she gazed into the glass eye of the apparatus with an Etruscan calm, an assurance that was highly sensual. Studying these antique brown images, it was possible to understand Uncle John’s need. Since the need was so quickly satisfied, however, they lived together thereafter in chastity like an uncle and a niece, and had no children. Minnie never complained of this either. As for Uncle John, he was kicked to death by a horse at the age of sixty-two.

  Now Minnie was far older than that herself, of course—brown and wrinkled like a dried apricot, with a thatch of white hair, and thin and hard as a fence post. But her eyes were live, and she had the abrupt quick motions, the alert sidewise glance, of the blackbird that she came to resemble more and more. From the long habit of solitude she talked to herself as she worked in the kitchen, and sometimes even sang, in a voice that was a kind of raucous scratching.

  “Sit down, Girl. Where are your shoes?” Her voice was scratchy and creaked like an old well pump. “You smell like horse sweat. You’ve been riding that old mare without a saddle again, and it’s summer. No man will marry you, Girl, if you smell like a horse. Sniff me. What do I smell like?”

  She seized Herma and pressed her face against her own chest, which was enclosed in an old-fashioned linen blouse with a high neck. For the rest, she wore a long straight linen skirt, brown stockings, and men’s shoes.

  “Lemons,” said Herma, pulling away from the linen blouse.

  “A man will marry you if you smell like lemons. Three of them have married me. But nobody will marry you if you smell like a horse.”

  “I don’t care to get married yet.”

  “No, you don’t think you do, but you’re getting to be old enough. Let me see you, Girl.” And she not only looked at Herma but she felt her through the top of the white dress, where there wasn’t anything in particular to be felt, to tell the truth. Herma didn’t care for this.

  “I didn’t have any either, until I was twenty, and hardly any then. Some men don’t mind that. There are men who like all kinds of different things. There are some men,” she said, “who like girls who look like a boy.”

  “There are some men who like boys.”

  Aunt Minnie gave her a blackbird glance. “You are getting old enough to be married. There are some men who like boys, and there are also some women who like women. But you’re too young to bother your head about such things, and besides it would make your Papa unhappy if he knew you knew about them. What do you want to eat?”

  “A prairie biscuit.”
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  They had been called that, in the family, since Mama herself was a child. Aunt Minnie’s sourdough biscuit was a recipe she was never able to explain to anyone else—a handful of this, a lump of that—but above all the morsel of starter dough that was pressed into the rest and kneaded until it dissolved, and then put aside to rise overnight. There was no other starter like Minnie’s—perhaps it was the same one she had brought across the Plains in the wagon train. So no one else could make sourdough like hers.

  Aunt Minnie found a still-warm sourdough biscuit, separated the top from the bottom, and spread the two halves with home-churned butter. Herma ate this to the last crumb, retrieving a fallen fragment of butter with her fingers.

  “Now what?”

  Herma said nothing. It wasn’t necessary. Aunt Minnie knew what she had come for.

  The old woman sighed. “Go to the Cool Room for some ice.”

  Herma took the old-fashioned wooden bucket and went off with it—out the door, across the beaten-earth yard, and down into the room under the water tower. Like most people in the country, Aunt Minnie had her own well. It stood at the edge of the yard by the vegetable garden, with a tall windmill erected over it on an iron tower. On top of the tower the blades turned with a creak, working the pump down below, and the water came up in a pipe and was pushed into a tank on the water tower. This was a square building higher than the house, with a tank on top built out of slabs of wood, unpainted and damp with water leaking through the boards. Down below under the tower, slightly below ground level, was the Cool Room with its stone walls.

  It had no windows, and you had to leave the door slightly ajar so that you could see. Potatoes and onions were kept here, fruit like apples, and even milk, although it soured after a day or two. In the far corner, under a wooden cover like a cellar door, was the ice. It was packed in sawdust, and Herma had to dig down through the damp yellowish mass with its resinous odor to find it. When she came to a chunk of ice she chipped away with the ice pick until she had enough to fill the bucket. She brought back the cream too; it was in a brown crockery pitcher on a low shelf just above the ice.