to feel only defiance and triumph. "Maybe to the City. I don't know."
"What do you mean?" In a tiny voice, like a child just beginning to understand a huge and terrible thing. "What do you mean?
"Well really," he said, rounding on her, "I'm a grown man. What do you think? That I'll just hang around this house for the rest of my life? Well, I won't."
The look in her face, of shocked helpless anguish, when all he'd said was what any twenty-year-old might say, when all he felt was the dissatisfaction any ordinary person might feel, made confusion and frustrated common sense boil up in him like a lava. He rushed to her chair and knelt before her. "Ma, Ma," he said, "what is it? What on earth is it?" He kissed her hand, a kiss like a furious bite.
"I'm afraid, that's all. . . ."
"No, no, just tell me what's so terrible. What's so terrible about wanting to advance yourself, and be, and be normal. What was so wrong"—it was spilling out now, that lava, he neither desired to stop it now nor could if he chose—"about Timmie Willie going to the City? It's where her husband lives, and she loves him. Is this such a swell house that nobody should ever think of living anyplace else? Even married?"
"There was so much room. And the City's so far. . . ."
"Well, and what was so wrong when Aub wanted to join the Army? There was a war. Everybody went. Do you want us all to be your babies forever?"
Violet said nothing, though her big pearly tears, like a child's, trembled at her lashes. She suddenly missed John very much. Into him she could pour all the inarticulate perceptions, all the knowings and unknowings she felt, which, though he couldn't understand them really, he would receive reverently; and out of him would come then the advice, warnings, notions, the clever decisions she could never have made. She ran her hand through August's matted, elf-locked hair, no comb could conquer it, and said, "But you know, dear, you know. You remember, don't you? You do, don't you?"
He laid his cheek in her lap with a groan, and she continued to stroke his hair. "And autos, August—what would they think? The noise, and the smell. The—the boldness. What must they think? What if you drove them away?"
"No, Ma, don't."
"They're brave, August, you remember the time, when you were a little boy, the time with the wasp, you remember how brave the little one was. You saw. What if—what if it angered them, wouldn't they plan something, oh something so horrid. . . . They could, you know they could."
"I was just a little kid."
"Do you all forget?" she said, not as though to him, but as though questioning herself, questioning a strange perception she had just then had. "Do you all really forget? Is that it? Did Timmie? Do you all?" She raised his face in her hands to study it. "August? Do you forget, or . . . You mustn't, you mustn't forget; if you do . . ."
"What if they didn't mind?" August said, defeated. "What if they didn't care at all? How can you be so sure they'd mind? They've got a whole world to themselves, don't they?"
"I don't know."
"Grandy said . . ."
"Oh, dear, August, I don't know."
"Well," he said, extracting himself from her, "then I'll go ask. I'll go ask their permission." He rose. "If I ask their permission, and they say it's all right, then . . ."
"I don't see how they could."
"Well, if they do?"
"How could you be sure? Oh, don't, August, they might lie. No, promise me you won't. Where are you going?"
"I'm going fishing."
"August?"
Some Notes About Them
When he was gone the tears rose again to her eyes. She brushed away impatiently the hot drops that rolled down her cheeks, rolled down because she couldn't explain: nothing she knew could be said, there were not the words, when she tried the very saying of it made what she said into lies or stupidities. They're brave, she had said to August. They might lie, she had said. None of that was true. They weren't brave, and they couldn't lie. Such things were true only when said to children, as it's true when you say "Grandy's gone away" to a child, when Grandy is dead, when there is no more Grandy to come or go. And the child says: Where did he go? And you think