Significant Things. Helen McLean
England. I’ve never felt at home here.”
“But my dear, what a dreadful situation. However have you managed?”
“I have a tiny income from my father’s estate,” she said, “but it only covers the rent on a one-room apartment and the bare necessities for Edward and me.”
Mr. Rak assumed a wide-eyed expression of mild horror, shook his head slowly from side to side as though he could hardly imagine such a plight.
“My job in the piano showroom is rather badly paid,” she went on, “as you might imagine. I do my best,” she said, smiling up into Mr. Rak’s eyes, “but I do worry. Any time the department manager decides he wants a different pianist, I’ll be out of a job. Only the other day he said I should try to play jazz.”
Mr. Rak made a noise with his tongue. Tsk tsk tsk. “Dreadful,” he said. “Jazz!”
“I might be forced to go into domestic service,” Dolly said, looking very sad, “although even that work is hard to find when one has a child to look after.” She fell silent, looking down into the scalloped white cardboard circlet that had contained her charlotte russe. Mr. Rak said nothing, but simply gazed at her, while his narrow chest swelled to the full extent of its capability, that is to say, almost an inch. Even then he didn’t break the silence. He slowly lifted Dolly’s hand from the white table cloth where it lay, so delicate and long-fingered and pale, and raised it until it was almost touching his lips, all the while looking soulfully into her eyes.
At last Dolly said that she must go, and Mr. Rak leaped to his feet to help her on with her black wool coat. Minutes earlier he’d been jotting her address in his leather notebook, and his little gold mechanical pencil was still lying on the table, partly hidden by the napkin he tossed down when he rose to help her. While Mr. Rak’s back was turned, Edward reached across and gave the pencil a quick push so it rolled over the edge of the table and landed on the carpeted floor, and waited to see whether Mr. Rak would notice he’d forgotten it.
He didn’t. He took Dolly’s elbow and began steering her toward the elevator. “Come along, darling,” she called back over her shoulder to Edward. He swiftly picked up the pencil and put it in his pocket, holding it tightly it in his fingers on the way down on the elevator. He was beginning to feel afraid, of just what, he wasn’t sure, but all the same it made him feel strong to have that pencil in his pocket, as though Mr. Rak himself were trapped down there in the dark, under his control.
Edward already had a collection of beautiful things he kept in the wooden box that his mother had wheedled out of the man at the cigar store. There was a string of glass beads with a silver cross on the end that caught his eye where it lay sparkling in the grass in front of the convent school one day. Another of his treasures was a gold button with the raised outline of a king’s crown on it, which he found on the floor when his mother was buying a card of bobby pins in Kresge’s. He also had several marbles that he’d picked up in playgrounds, including a very large glass one full of wonderful swirling colours. He had pieces of silver paper that he’d pulled out of empty cigarette packages, smoothed out perfectly, and folded up small, but they weren’t as important as the other things. Now he would put Mr. Rak’s gold pencil in his box, and he’d be able to look at it any time he wanted, even draw or write with it if he felt like it, and smelly old Mr. Rak couldn’t get it back, ever in the world, no matter how much he loved it, or needed it when he wanted to write in his notebook. It belonged to Edward.
“Just think, darling,” his mother said a few weeks later, “we’ll soon be out of this horrid little apartment forever. Won’t it be wonderful when Harvey and I are married, and we’ll all be living in his beautiful house? You’ll be able to watch the swans and see all the boats going up and down the river.”
“I like this house. I want to stay here.”
“Oh Edward, this isn’t a house at all. It’s just a little piece of a house.”
“I don’t like Mr. Rak. I don’t want to live in his house. I don’t like swans, either.”
“You’ve never even seen a swan, Edward. And you don’t know Mr. Rak yet. He’s going to be very good to us. He’s going to be your daddy, you know.”
The concept of a “daddy” meant almost nothing to him. He knew only a few children and had never met their daddies. What would you do with a daddy, anyway? Where would he sleep? He certainly wouldn’t want the man in the same bedroom with him and Mummie.
“We don’t need a daddy,” he said. “I like us the way we are.”
“You’ll have a bedroom of your very own, Edward, and lots of toys and books to put in it.”
“To sleep in all alone?”
“Of course. Won’t that be wonderful?”
The boy gave a shriek and burst into tears. Next thing he knew his mother was crying, too, and they were hugging each other.
“Tell him we’re not coming to Iglid,” he snuffled.
“But Edward darling,” his mother said, wiping away her own tears with the hem of her apron and then applying it to his, “we are.”
“Don’t you love me anymore, Mummie?”
“Why Edward, of course I love you!”
“Then tell him we don’t want to come, tell him, tell him, tell him—”
He punctuated these small explosions with sharp angry tugs on the sleeve of his mother’s flower-patterned dress, one of the few nice ones she had. Later that evening when she was undressing she saw that the material had given way at the shoulder seam.
“Oh Edward,” she said sadly, looking over to where he already lay tucked up in bed, “look what’s happened to Mummie’s good frock.”
Dolly’s one interest apart from her son had been the keeping of her scrapbooks and photograph albums, which she had always carried along with her on board the ship, before he was born. Edward had spent hours and hours leafing through these books with her, looking at pictures of Dolly when she was young, of her as a baby with her own mother, who died when she was nine. There was a young Dolly dressed for her first piano recital, another with her music teacher, Miss Smythe, Dolly at twelve holding a bouquet of flowers for having won first prize in a competition. There she was as a teenaged girl standing with her father in the cobblestoned courtyard of a Tudor inn in the English village of Amersham. “That’s your grandfather, Edward. You’ll never meet him. He’s a harsh and cruel man.” Sometimes she had to wipe tears from her eyes when she looked at these family photographs.
There were many photos of Edward’s mother as a grown-up young woman, usually in the company of some good-looking young man, or a group of men and women, in parks or gardens where trees were in bloom, or in front of large buildings in a city that she said was London. Another album was full of photographs taken aboard the Queen Mary, mostly of famous or rich people, film actors and actresses, whose names meant nothing to Edward. Dolly had taken dozens of pictures of her son, too, with her little box camera, and put them into a special album, and she’d also kept a scrapbook especially reserved for nothing but pictures of the British Royal Family. Every Sunday while he was reading the funny papers, his mother went carefully through the sepia-tinted rotogravure section of the Weekend Star, looking for pictures of them to cut out and paste in her book, especially pictures of the handsome young Prince of Wales who was going to be king someday.
“There he is, Edward. Your hair is just the colour of his, did you know that? And his eyes are blue too. You have a stronger chin, though. That comes from my side of the family.”
Every year since his first birthday, Dolly had taken Edward to have his picture taken in a photographer’s studio over a store on Bathurst Street. She had two prints made, one for herself, to put into the album, and the other she sent along with a letter to London. Maybe the person she sent them to never even saw them. She never received a reply, but she went on sending them anyway.
Before