thinner than either of them. He is very thin, his feet long and narrow. He is quite tall for his age—five foot seven—taller than his mother now.
Did she hear Jesse’s father go out this morning so early?—out the back door and into the woods, alone?
If anyone talks about Jesse’s father she smiles and looks away, something passes over her face, quickly, cleverly, and she is silent. She hums under her breath. She sings out loud, meaningless snatches of words. Her hair is curly and tumbles untidily down to her shoulders. Sometimes she is pretty, and Jesse and his sisters are proud of her. At other times, strolling through Yewville, she is sloppy and critical of things in store windows, she talks too loudly, and Jesse and his sisters are ashamed of her, wishing she would stay at home.
That September, not long after school started, Jesse’s sister Jean told him a secret. “What do you
think?
She’s going to have a baby!”
“Who?”
“Oh, you dope! Ma, of course!
Ma
is going to have a baby!”
Jesse stared. He could think of nothing to say.
Jean clapped her hands. “It’s a secret right now but she told me … I’m not supposed to tell anyone else.…”
“… going to have a baby?”
Jesse felt panic. A baby? Another baby?
Bob, the five-year-old, ran over to them and Jesse was startled, thinking for a moment that this was the new baby. Jean picked Bob up and swung him. The flesh of her upper arms was solid and warm. “There’s a surprise coming, a surprise coming,” she crooned. She winked at Jesse over the boy’s squirming shoulder. “Remember, it’s a secret,” she said.
Her happiness stung him.
His mother was going to have another baby. In this little house, all of them crowded together
.…
“How do you know?” he said angrily. “You think you know everything!”
“I know because Ma told me,” Jean said.
“Why did she tell
you
?”
“Because she trusts me. Because I’m a girl.”
“I suppose she told Shirley too?”
“No, not Shirley. Shirley would blab it everywhere.” Jean let Bob down and Jesse saw that her face was hectic with this news, as if the baby were her own. He felt a pang of jealousy at the look of her face, that bemused female secrecy; as if conscious of his feelings, Jean lifted her chin so that she seemed to be eyeing Jesse over the full curve of her cheeks, through her thick brown lashes. “Listen, kid, don’t say anything about it right now. Pa doesn’t know that Ma told me. He’s mad.”
“Why?”
“Because he doesn’t want a baby.”
Jesse stared. He wanted to turn away in panic and disgust—as if Jean had exposed him to something ugly, opening a door and exposing herself, exposing a secret of womanhood he did not want to know.
“There’s trouble over money. Again,” Jean whispered.
“What trouble?”
“Oh, to pay the doctor, you know, the hospital … buying food and all that.…” Jean said vaguely. “You know how Pa gets.…”
You know how Pa gets
.
Jesse put his hands to his head. Confused. Frightened. He felt thehard substance of his skull beneath his wavy hair. He could remember the soft, delicate skull of his little brother, when Bob had been just a baby … so precarious, so dangerous.… And now another baby. Why another baby? Why was she having another baby? Jesse knew what to expect; he could remember everything from last time: his mother would waddle around the house, enormous and self-pitying and tender, her eyes filming over with pain and love, her hands dropping onto her belly, caressing herself. That baby had turned out to be Bob.
Robert Harte
. He himself was
Jesse Harte
. He had two sisters, Jean and Shirley, and soon he would have another sister or brother, all of them crowded into this house, this shanty, with its two back rooms and its “front room” and its kitchen. Jesse wanted to yell into his sister’s rosy, pleased face that they were all crazy—
Instead, he tried to smile.
“Yeah, isn’t it