The Moth Read Online Free PDF Page B

them was nothing, as I was afraid they’d get it out of me about my mother. The doorbell rang and it was the cop, with a warrant for my arrest. My father rolled his r’s and refused to let him in or say where I was or help him out in any way. We were all three in the front room to listen, and pretty soon the cop went. Then my father went to the phone, and there was some pretty sharp talk, but from the way Sheila and Nancy began looking at each other, I knew it had been fixed up, somehow, and I wouldn’t be arrested. Then my father brought me back to his den and had a look at my chin, that had a mark on it. Then we went into it. “What started this thing?”
    “... I don’t want to talk about it.”
    “What started it?”
    “He laughed at me.”
    “What for?”
    “Making a fool of myself. Crying.”
    “What were you crying about?”
    “I didn’t feel good.”
    “Were you sick?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Are you sick now?”
    “No.”
    “If you were sick, you could hardly thresh him.”
    “Then I wasn’t sick.”
    “You did thresh him?”
    “So the cop said.”
    “So the complaint said, with many affecting particulars, and so several affidavits said, with a startling unanimity.”
    “Then I beat him up.”
    “What are you concealing?”
    “I don’t want to talk about it.”
    “You may go to your room.”
    For the next hour or so there was a lot more telephoning, all of them trying to find out what it was about, and a fat chance I’d tell them. But then the phone rang, and I could tell from the way Sheila began to talk that it was Miss Eleanor, and I knew I had to see her no matter what they did to me for it. I took off my shoes and stepped out the window to the roof of the back porch. There was an arbor at one side with Virginia creeper on it, and I climbed down on that. As I started for the back gate Sheila called. I didn’t stop, and it wasn’t till I got to North Avenue that I sat on the curb and put on my shoes.
    “What happened?”
    “Miss Eleanor, I saw my mother.”
    “Where?”
    “In church.”
    “Ah—the one in green?”
    “I didn’t notice her clothes.”
    “She sat on the aisle? One or two pews back?”
    “Yes, that was her.”
    “And you recognized her?”
    I told how I had felt those eyes looking at me, and about the pat, and the perfume. I broke down two or three times telling about the perfume in the attic, because it seemed so silly, but she held me close and said it wasn’t silly at all, and after I got a little bit under control I let her ask me questions, and answered them, and finally she had it. “I’m sure it was she.”
    “I know it, Miss Eleanor.”
    “I saw her, and do you know what I noticed?”
    “What was it, Miss Eleanor?”
    “How much she looked like you.”
    “Like— me?”
    I had a light, happy feeling, because she’d been so beautiful. “You’re very beautiful, Jack. Now tell me the rest of it.”
    “In the basement, when I got the surplice off, I waited a minute, so I wouldn’t make a holy show of myself, and then I came back upstairs in the church, looking for her. And I looked everywhere, in the vestry room, in the vestibule, in the library, in the chapel, all over. Everybody else was there, saying goodbye to Dr. Grant, but not her. Then I went down in the basement again, and then it hit me and I tried to keep from crying and couldn’t. And then that son of a —”
    “Yes, Mr. Anderson.”
    “Started to whistle Una Furtiva Lagrima.”
    “Mr. Anderson has beautiful hands and an ugly mind.”
    “And I hit him, that’s all.”
    “There’ll be some who won’t exactly weep.”
    “You mean it was all right?”
    “Jack, hitting Mr. Anderson, just because he made himself objectionable in some way, wasn’t so very important, one way or the other, except to let him have it good, if you were going to let him have it at all. Hitting him because it got mixed up with your mother and how you felt about her was beautiful. Silly and utterly