On Thursday the maid was off, and Melissa took care of the baby. He slept after lunch, and she woke him at four, lifting him out of his crib and letting the blankets fall. They were alone. The house was quiet. She carried him into the kitchen, put him in his highchair and opened a can of figs. Sleepy and docile and pale, he followed her with his eyes, and smiled sweetly when their eyes met. His shirt was stained and wet, and she wore a wrapper. She sat by him at the table, with her face only a few inches from his, and they spooned the figs out of the can. He shuddered now and then with what seemed to be pleasure. The quiet house, the still kitchen, the pale and docile boy in his stained shirt, her round white arms on the table, the comfortable slovenliness of eating from a can were all part of an intimacy so intense and yet so tranquil that it seemed to her as if she and the baby were the same flesh and blood, subjects of the same heart, all mingled and at ease. What a comfort, she thought, is one’s skin. . . . But it was time then to change the boy, time to dress herself, time to take up cheerfully the other side of her life. Carrying the child through the living room she saw, out of the window, the stooped figure with his rubbers and umbrella.
A wind was blowing and he moved indifferently through a diagonal fall of yellow leaves, craning his neck like an adder, his back bent under its impossible burden. She held the baby’s head against her breast, foolishly, instinctively, as if to protect his eyes from some communicable evil. She turned away from the window, and shortly afterward there was a loud pounding on the back door. How had he found where she lived, and what did he want? He might have recognized her car in the driveway; he might have asked who she was, the village was that small. He had not come to thank her for her attempted kindness. She felt sure of that. He had come—in his foolishness—to accuse her of something. Was he dangerous? Was there any danger left in Proxmire Manor? She put the boy down and went toward the back door, summoning her self-respect. When she opened it, there was Mr. Narobi’s good-looking grocery boy. He made it all seem laughable—came in beaming and with a kind of radiance that seemed to liberate her from this absurd chain of anxieties.
“You’re new?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know your name.”
“Emile. It’s a funny name. My father was French.”
“Did he come from France?”
“Oh, no, Quebec. French Canadian.”
“What does he do?”
“When people used to ask me that, I used to say, ‘He plays the harp!’ He’s dead. He died when I was little. My mother works at the florist’s—Barnum’s—on Green Street. Maybe you know her?”
“I don’t think I do. Would you like a beer?”
“Sure. Why not? It’s my last stop.”
She asked if he wanted something to eat, and got him some crackers and cheese. “I’m always hungry,” he said.
She brought the baby into the kitchen and they all three sat at the table while he ate and drank. Stuffing his mouth with cheese, he seemed to be a child. His gaze was clear and disarming. She couldn’t meet it without a stir in her blood. And was this sluttishness? Was she worse than Mrs. Lockhart? Would she be dragged figuratively out of Proxmire Manor at the tail of a cart? She didn’t care.
“Nobody ever gave me a beer before,” he said. “They give me Cokes, sometimes. I guess they don’t think I’m old enough. But I drink. Martinis, whisky, everything.”
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen. Now I have to go.”
“Please don’t go,” she said.
He stood at the table, covering her with his wide gaze, and she wondered what would happen if she reached out to him. Would he run out of the kitchen? Would he shout, “Unhand me!”? He seemed ripe; he seemed ready for the picking; and yet there was something else in the corner of his eyes—reserve, wariness. He perhaps had a vision of something better, and if he had, she would encourage him with all her heart. Go and love the drum majorette, the girl next door.
“Oh, I’d like to stay,” he said. “It’s nice here. But it’s Thursday, and I have to take my mother shopping. Thank you very much.”
He went to the house three or four times a week. Melissa was usually alone in the late afternoons and he timed his visits. Sometimes she seemed to be waiting for him. No one had ever been so attentive. She seemed interested in all the facts of his life—that his father had been a surveyor, that he drove a secondhand Buick, that he had done well at school. She usually gave him a beer and sat with him in the kitchen. Her company excited him. It made him feel that he might do well. Some of her worldliness, some of her finesse, would rub off on him and get him out of the grocery business. Suddenly, one afternoon, she said quite shyly, “You know, you’re divine.”
