JERRY BUMPUS
381
"It was him," she whispered and an amazing thing then hap–
pened: her expression fell vacant, completely, and showing through
her Asian mask I saw the structure of her skull and, hovering therein,
her redoubtable ancestry, as dour and undeniable as stones and ancient
trees. Astounding! Though Tina Buell had absolutely no awareness of
it, this gel which she considered her "face," no matter whose it was
from one day
to
the next, was fixed to a frame of hard old wood.
"You promised me he would never come back," Tina said-for
earlier I had told h er, whispering behind the ladies' backs, that I had
seen the distressing person who had appeared from the creek yesterday,
and told him to go away forever, and that he had forthwith gone away.
"You lied to me!"-and she socked me in the jaw!
I jumped to my feet with a yelp which woke the ladies. Seeing me
standing, they struggled to their feet. "Bedtime," Ursula said and
yawned like a lion.
"Come along, Tina," Mrs. Sheehan said. "Tell Mr. Green good
night. There'll be more lectures tomorrow."
As they ushered her out, she didn ' t say good night but looked back
with the same plain, wonderfully artless face which stared at me all
night from the reflection on the window, drawing me into that
blackness, deeper and deeper, until by dawn when I saw through again
to the gray world and the heath, I was exhausted, weak with love and
the foolishness of need. Lying on the bottom step, I convinced myself
that in a few hours she would clomp down the stairs, little Heidi the
milkmaid. Or fan fared by imaginary clarions she would come down in
the sweeping gown and modest bonnet of Maid Marian. Or best of all
she would be bound in the impenetrable black of Sister Mary Theresa,
her face trussed and tiny as a daisy screwed into a rock.
"Hi, buster. "
I lifted my head and, looking up a hundred miles to where she
stood at the head of the stairs, I groaned. Her mouth glistened like a
wound, as incredibly red as her hair, and she wore a silver dress so tight
that as she came down the stairs every line of her body, every muscl e,
gleamed like salamanders swimming in mercury. " Hows about a
picnic, big boy?"
And she was serious about the picnic, though Mrs. Sheehan
showed her the sky, which had turned grayish green, and tried to
convince her it would rain at any moment. But our pixie Rita
Hayworth prevailed, and while the ladies sat on the terrace in caps and
