Part 8 (1/2)
”Well, yes,” she hears, and then her ether like the drawstring of a bag, ”So to throw up the creaus soup she had for lunch, she knows it She wonders if she should go stand by the kitchen sink so as not to make ato Warren and Joanie about e've been discussing Not until they're old enough to understand”
Warren and Joan are playing kings and queens in the backyard
Alice can hear Warren through the screen door yelling at Joan to bring hihness, here it is, your royal highness”
It is Alice's day to be queen, but she doesn't feel like going outside this afternoon Let them play what they want to play
Oh, she loves them, her brother and sister, she's never understood before how much she loves them They are healthy, beautiful, perfect, and unbruised by this terrible knowledge They will be able to go on looking into the faces of their ht into their faces and s has happened
Warren ”How old are you?” Warren asks his mother ”How old are you?” Warren asks hissheets and pillowcases and kitchen towels on the dining room table ”That's for me to know and you to find out”
”Well, what year were you born in?”
She considers, then says, ”1905”
”And now it's 1947”
”Yes”
He thinks about this for a while ”What year was I born in?”
He's asked this question before, often, but is always forgetting the answer
”You were born in 1940 In the early days of the war”
Now he re his mother with the same question So he can hear that shi+very phrase-in the early days of the war The i sun swims before his eyes, blood-red in color like the japanese flag Billy Raabe's got tacked up on his bedrooht silence broken by the high pitched rat-a-tat-tat of bullets, and all this fraguns The War The Second World War
”Was that when Pearl Harbor was?” He loves the words Pearl Harbor He loves hiht
”This was before Pearl Harbor, a whole year before”
”Why was I born then?” he asks
”Because you were”
”Alice was born before the war”
”Yes”
”And Joan, what about Joan?”
His ht today by rows of pincurls
The bobby pins catch winks of light fro pillowcases He can see her tongue ticking off the numbers at the same time her thumb travels down the neat stack-one, two, three, four, five ”Joan?” she says absentmindedly, ”Joan was born in the middle of the war”
The war is like a wide brown tepid river the world's been swi Peace doesn't feel all that different to Warren His body is the same body he's always had, his scraped shi+ns and knees and bony feet, and his face in the hall mirror has the saht he wakes up with a stolass of soestion, that he'd be fine if only he didn't wolf down his food so fast But he knows it's the war that gives him a sto to hold him up and keep hiether like the little dolls Alice cuts out of newspaper, that's how he thinks of himself and his sisters He's located there in the middle, always in the middle, the one as born in the early days of the hich is the thought hein this knowledge And there's tribute too, a place reserved for hinus Flett, born in the blood-red dawn of the war
He alh he understands in an unforrow up, will co boys in the back lane playing Piggy Move Up And it occurs to hiht be another baby born to his faine why he's never thought of this possibility before, and he feels sick the way he does at the beginning of one of his sto his mother about a new baby, but the question seems foolish He can't think hoould broach the subject, ords he could eht put down the towel she was folding and say, well yes, of course there will be a new baby, what did he expect!
A new baby would spoil things Where would it sleep? What naiven to it? It would be born weak, without muscles, too weak and sick and lost to survive
Hishis mind She's done it before and today on this drowsy suain
”Your father and I are too old to have anythis, he feels himself seized by happiness, not because of her assurance that there will be no after-the war baby, but because his mother has offered up this information in a quiet and seriousvoice, her usual scolding and cajoling, her singing and h the others, an aberration, and yet he understands at once that he is hearing, perhaps for the first ti ”What?” he says
”You mean 'pardon?' ”
”Pardon”
She looks at hiain
”Your father and I are too old to have any more babies”
Joan
Joan is so full of secrets that so her to bed at night, leans down and kisses her on each cheek and says, ”My sweetie pie,” and never dreairl's head
Already, at the age of five, Joan understands that she is destined to live two lives, one existence that is visible to those around her and another that blooms secretly inside her head
There are all kinds of facts she knows, facts that no one else can ied one day to squeeze into that narrow dusty place behind the Northern Electric console in the living roolihts of a hillside village Naturally she has told nobody about this, except perhaps a whisper or two dropped to her mother