The Eleventh Virgin · Part I · Chapter 1 2 (2/2)

Adele and June made up their minds that while Mother was in the hospital and Mr. Henreddy was working nights they would take advantage of the freedom and go to the concert. Adele was by nature more cautious and conscientious than June but she longed so to get away from the house that she was easily persuaded to do what she considered a wicked and thrilling thing.

“Suppose the boys tell?” she whispered.

“I know they won’t.” June was very confident of that. “I’ve got something on both of them, and they don’t dare. You didn’t know and you mustn’t tell, but Dan broke a window on the next block and got arrested for it. He made me promise not to tell, but I will if he starts snitching on us. And Dave is fighting⁠—real prize fights⁠—in the back room of the Emery Street saloon. Mother doesn’t know that either. One day he broke a thumb. I promised I wouldn’t tell her, so they won’t dare tell anything that we do.”

It had showered that afternoon, and all the park was cool and moist. People were hurrying to the concert to get seats. A slight breeze stirred the women’s clothes and wafted faint perfumes to June as the children passed them. Every now and then a little toad hopped across the path.

“Everything smells so good!” and Adele sniffed ecstatically.

They arrived at the concert ground early and found seats in the second row of the benches where they faced the bandmaster and could watch his every movement. They waited and waited. There was a continual babble of voices, but Adele and June were silent.

Then Mr. Armand strode through the crowd, and there was a ripple of applause as he came which swelled and swelled. He was tall and lithe. June noticed again with a thrill the aggressive way he carried his shoulders.

Adele nudged her sister as he passed. “He lives next door to us now,” she whispered. “I’ve seen him pass a couple of times. He knows father because he always speaks to him.”

June kicked her under the bench to make her keep quiet. She was irritated that Adele should break the sensuous stillness that enveloped her and she was angry and jealous that her sister should have seen him more often than she. And it was then too, that he passed her seat, which was on the outside by the aisle, and his hand brushed hers. The contact made her catch her breath and an agreeable quiver came to her heart.

For the rest of the evening June gazed at him with an intensity which he must have felt, she reasoned, because every now and then he’d look her way and smile. And all the while the spell grew and grew.

A week later, Mother Grace came home from the hospital with a tiny atom in her arms which she put in a clothes basket on the floor. The family bulldog smelled at it for an instant and woofed joyously. The tip of his tongue stood out as though he would like to give it a mighty and slobbery kiss that would engulf it. But he looked at Mother and slunk away.

Mother seemed tired. She showed no pride in her new possession. All day long she sat at the window with her brows puckered. Although Mr. Henreddy wanted her to go to bed, she stubbornly refused.

A feeling of awe swept over June every time she looked at her mother. Once in a great while when she managed to play with any of the children in the neighborhood, she had caught fragments of conversation which recalled Sadie Spielberger and her revelations. Also, in the tenement on Twenty-second Street, Mrs. Cleary had had a baby and June remembered how she had hidden her head under the covers and strangled the sobs in her throat as sounds came down the airshaft.

June wanted to question Mother Grace about it, but it took more courage than she possessed. It was only when the library grew dusky and the baby, whom father called “Glubb” was being nursed preparatory for bed that she could ask her⁠—“Mother Grace, did it hurt?” and clutch her hand.

“Who’s been saying things to you, or what have you been reading?” Her tone was brusque. “It was nothing much. Wore me out somewhat. Have you got the dishes washed?”

The children had never known what it was to have Mother sick before, so her irritability, added to increased household duties made their lives seem dark. Adele and June used to cry in bed at night. June’s only relief during that long hard summer were the moments when her blood ran fire at Mr. Armand’s glance.

She saw him three times a day regularly. At ten in the morning he left the house; at three in the afternoon he returned; at quarter of eight in the evening he left again for the concert.

All day she thought of him, and she found herself unconsciously imitating his walk, and when she caught herself at it, she felt a hot wave spread over her. Mother Grace used to say he swaggered and June would agree indifferently, although she became acutely self-conscious at the sound of his name. And because the neighbors talked about him behind his back, Mother Grace called him worthless too and said that he went around with other women. June didn’t blame him when she knew his wife.

She was a tall woman⁠—though he was taller⁠—and her hair was shot with grey. The baby was two years old, and once when June and Adele were walking and wheeling Glubb and she passed, she turned to June and said, “Gawd, these brats make me tired.”

In June’s heart she agreed with her, because she was hot and tired and unhappy. But she condemned her for saying what she did because she was his wife. She condemned her big floppy hat too, and her clothes were what Mother Grace called “in bad taste.”

On some golden afternoons June saw Mr. Armand oftener. In the afternoon when he returned, sometimes he took the baby to the park with him and sauntered down the steps and past with his pugnacious chin in the air; and June would look at him defiantly, angry with him for the feelings he evoked, yet loving him all the while.

On the days that he did not send her that sympathetic and exciting glance, she was miserable and sad and when she was alone at night, wallowed in melancholy.

Being at the Tennysonian age, the lines kept coming to her, increasing her mood⁠—

“Dear as remembered kisses after death

Or sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned

On lips that are for others⁠—

Deep as love, deep as first love,

And wild with all regret⁠ ⁠…”

One violet evening his baby was ill. From June’s dusky seat on the porch she could see him pacing up and down the path in front of the house. Every now and then when the baby began to moan, he bent his head and a soft murmur reached her.

It was only occasionally that he played the violin at home and because of this, she had a queer feeling that what he played was for her. Sometimes for a breathless hour or so, she could hear wild, quivering notes that ate her heart out.

He must have seen the worship in her eyes, but she did not mind. She wanted him to know, though she concealed from everyone else how she adored him. She never imagined herself speaking to him, holding a casual, conventional conversation before the house about the babies, the weather or the last concert. But adventures crowded into her mind; his baby toddling out into the street, an automobile swiftly upon it, and June rushing out to save it just in time, but at the cost of her own life. Of course this didn’t happen while Mr. Armand was away. It happened when he could only rush forward, too late to save his child⁠—that June had already done⁠—but in time to hold her in his arms while she died.

There was also the adventure of his wife disappearing with another man and the baby falling ill and June being called in to nurse it back to health and thereby gaining Mr. Armand’s love.

When she realized her thoughts, the absurdity of them rushed over her so that she blushed with shame. Such situations were crude and melodramatic.

The summer faded away; autumn came and with it long walks, sweet-smelling days in the park with Glubb. There were fires from faded leaves on every street and the delicate spirals of smoke were a melancholy incense. The sweet clover in the fields down by the lake where June walked made the air heavy. The soft waves whispered at the breakwater all the day long.

But with the late autumn, school came again and band concerts ceased and she no longer saw Mr. Armand. The sky was muddy, there was no brightness in it. Music had fled with all the little breezes that aroused the soft emotions in her heart.

Long hours of study, the constant struggle in the family, housework and the baby occupied her time and her imagination. There was no more romance.