Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

Most days Mrs. Hazelton wasn’t there to be thought of. The girls knew she was absent when her bicycle wasn’t leaning against the shed, which doubled as her home when she was renting out the house. Whenever the bike was gone (they told their parents) they felt free to peer into Mrs. Hazelton’s window and announce to each other — and later to anyone who’d listen — the marvels inside. Richard remembered the first day of this inventory: how eagerly they had interrupted each other, the eight-year-old and the six-year-old.

“A teeny, tiny sink, and—”

“One bed. A puffy blanket?”

“Comforter,” said the attentive Catherine.

“A kettle. Gold?”

“Copper, I’m afraid,” Catherine said, smiling.

“A rocking chair. A bureau. A rug like a snake?”

“… Ah. Braided.”

“A black stove-thing, fat.”

“That’s for cooking children,” Richard teased.

“Oh, Daddy,” said the oldest, and “She’s not a witch,” said the middle. But the youngest cried. She had been ready to cry anyway, regarding some other matter. “Mrs. Hazelton is a good witch,” Richard explained.

But she might have been the wickedest witch, for all Richard and Catherine knew. They knew only that their landlady was a recent widow and that she worked at the library. They knew that she was tall and spindly; they guessed she was about Richard’s age. Her hair was striped with gray and somewhat wild, as if she were perpetually standing on a bridge in a windstorm. She wore government issue pants and men’s shirts open at the throat.

“There are pictures on her bureau,” the girls told him.

“Pictures of what?” he idly inquired.

“You know, Daddy. People’s faces.”

“Photographs?”

“Yup,” said the middle daughter. “Men. They all wear caps with sivors.”

A few minutes later: “Sivors?” he asked.

“Visors,” explained the oldest.

The one-room, one-windowed shed that Mrs. Hazelton retired to while renting her house stood in the northeast corner of the backyard, separated from the family by the victory garden of tomatoes, beans, and lettuce. “There’ll be squash after we go home, and pumpkins last of all,” Catherine said, grinning at this future abundance. Mrs. Hazelton left vegetables for them in a basket on the back steps. Once in a while they saw her on hands and knees, yanking weeds out of the soil. She wore an overlarge officer’s cap. Occasionally they caught sight of her leaving in the morning or returning in the early evening. But often the bike was still gone at nine o’clock, when the littlest girl was fast asleep and the older ones were in bed with their books. And sometimes it wasn’t until midnight that Richard, reading in his downstairs bed until the hour of the final medication, heard wheels crunch on unyielding soil. He’d look up from the page and wait for the second sound. There: the slam of the little house’s door.

BY THE THIRD WEEK in July he felt well enough to walk to Main Street and back every evening before dinner. In the beginning he walked between his two older children. Then one day he took the youngest along, too, in the old-fashioned stroller that allowed child to face parent, that allowed this parent to gaze at the sweetness of dark brown eyes and the arabesque of lips. He never again left the little look-alike behind.

By the end of July he was taking two walks a day — the one before dinner with all his daughters, and a later one alone, under a sky still patrolled by searchlights. On the first of these nights on the town he had stopped at a pink ice-cream parlor. Working girls sat at tiny round tables. Groups of women and children ate enormous sundaes. The pain within him, never altogether absent, flared. He blamed the harem atmosphere of the place.

The next night he went to a bar. Though he was not much of a drinker, he felt immediately comfortable. Here the walls were of no particular shade, and the dark booths sheltered both military and civilian customers. The radio gave them news from the Pacific. He sat at the counter, making one beer last a long time, testing his pain. The pain did not worsen, as if demonstrating that it could be merciful. Main Street was still busy when he emerged, but his own street was dark. Halfway home he urinated in the shelter of some stunted pines.

Catherine laughed when she smelled beer on his breath. “You old lush.”

“I’m celebrating.”

“Are you!” she said in her sweet melodious way, while a different tune twanged between them: What on earth have we got to celebrate?

THERE WERE VISITS. Banice Bass came, recently discharged from the navy. (Richard had preferred the army. He might have been a major by now. But the military hadn’t wanted a sick, overage doctor, even one in remission, and certainly not one with a pregnant wife.)

The MacKechnies and their four children recklessly used up gas coupons to drive from Providence. Rationing would end soon, they all agreed. Catherine was saving drippings in a can on the back of the range, but that too would no longer be necessary. “The war will stop, and my battle will begin,” he said to Mac on the porch.

“Cobalt,” Mac said right away.

“Yes, we’ll try cobalt,” Richard said, sighing. And he would volunteer for an experimental protocol and hope he wasn’t put in the placebo group.

It was raining. The wives had taken all the girls to a Betty Hutton movie. The MacKechnie boys grumbled quietly over the jigsaw puzzle. Boughs shifted and leaves rustled under the onslaught of rain. There was thunder in the distance and the hoot of ships. Without making a sound a figure pedaled down the strip of earth that was her own path, and onto the street. She wore no rain jacket, no hat. She lifted her wet head; she biked urgently toward the storm, as if it, at least, loved her.

THE BARTENDER WAS A FRIENDLY CHAP. The three or four regulars were also decent fellows. Their talk was always of the end of the war — how long do we have to wait, for Christ’s sake? How many more of us need to be lost? A faded, stringy couple usually occupied one of the middle booths. A group of high-spirited middle-aged women often commandeered a table in the back of the room. One had artificially black curls. Another wore a lot of red. A third had a swishy sort of glamour; she could have played Rita Hayworth’s aunt in the movies. One night they brought along a new woman. She had untidy hair and a mannish way of dressing … He nodded down the length of the bar. Mrs. Hazelton nodded back.

The nods were exchanged on subsequent but not consecutive nights. Sometimes she was there, sometimes she wasn’t.

RICHARD’S BROTHER CAME to visit. Their families were close. His brother’s children were old enough to appreciate the gravity of their uncle’s situation. A mishap occurred: after lunch his middle daughter fell out of the tree. She blacked out for a moment. Richard’s brother, also a doctor, examined her thoroughly — Richard and Catherine anxiously held hands — and pronounced her unhurt. But everybody was shaken. And then, just before dinner, they discovered a puddle under the refrigerator. The food was still edible, but the interior was warming. Catherine knocked on Mrs. Hazelton’s door. No answer. So the sisters-in-law prepared the meal, and the nine of them were already on the porch, eating their salad and hot dogs and corn (“The butter is supposed to be melted,” the middle girl pointed out), when Mrs. Hazelton cycled past. “We’ll get her,” said his children, scrambling from the porch.

She was indeed a witch, if cleverness with stubborn household servants was any test. He watched from the kitchen doorway. Catherine sat at the table. Mrs. Hazelton opened a low door that revealed the refrigerator’s innards. Then she squatted before it, reaching in to twist something and pull something else. Presently a buzzing indicated that the machinery was working again. She beckoned to Catherine. Squatting, they examined the refrigerator together. Why had she chosen Catherine to instruct? he wondered. Wasn’t he the officer here? Both women rose — the graceful younger one in a dotted dress and the angular older one in her dead husband’s garments — and they turned toward each other, then toward him. For a moment they loomed larger than life: Grave Acceptance and her grim sister Defiance. Then they became two people again: sweet Cathy and the backyard widow, whose eyes, blue as a gas flame, flickered at him.