RACHEL'S SUMMER
71
children to know anything was wrong. Rachel was very angry–
you know what a spirited child she was-and kept saying, 'I'll kill
them, I'll kill them!' I tried to calm her, and said the only thing
that was important was that I should know the truth. And then,
between tears and outbursts of anger, Rachel told me the thing
that made me know the story was not true. Do you know what
it
was?"
I shook my head. I didn't know but I couldn't ask, remember–
ing Rachel too well, and remembering, too, the episode of the
Bible.
"Rachel said, 'Mother, it isn't true, because listen. Today I
couldn't go
in
swimming. All the other kids went in, every one but
me. I didn't because I couldn't. Ask the boys.'"
·I could have cheered.
It
was true, I remembered it perfectly.
Thank God for that old-fashioned idea, I thought, and good ·for
Rachel that she knew it. It told Mother without a shade of doubt–
and me too, now-that Rachel was telling the truth.
I remembered it all, and said so: how Rachel had sat on the
bank waiting for us, while we kids splashed around in the stream,
begging Rachel to come in, and calling her a sissy for not doing so.
I remembered, too, but didn't tell Mother tl,is, how Helen Lincoln
didn't have a bathing suit and went in with her white middy blouse
and bloomers, and how her middy got all wet and showed the points
of her nipples when she stood up. And I remembered how I tried
not to look at her too much, and that I was glad that Rachel, who
wore a middy blouse too, hadn't gone in with us after all.
"Mother, for heaven's sake," I said, "why didn't you ask us?
It
was true, Rachel didn't go in, and we could have told you so!"
"I didn't need to, son," Mother said. "I believed her." She
sighed deeply, but went on with her sewing. "Of course the damage
had been done," she said. "It didn't matter that Rachel was inno–
cent, the story was around town and the only thing to do, then, was
to keep Rachel home for the summer. I wanted to let her go to
your grandmother's, as we had planned, but I couldn't. I wrote to
your father, asking him what to do, and he wrote back to keep her
home, not to let her go away once during the summer, not even for
a weekend. And all during that long summer, her last summer,
poor Rachel wasn't allowed to go away once, not even in September
when the Lincolns invited her to the lake for Labor Day weekend.
She had to stay home with me the whole time, and almost every
