348
PARTISAN REVIEW
"I
wasn't expecting you," she said, meaning that she would have
made more. "Fill up on bread."
Ben finished the stew, and then the bread. There was nothing else to
eat except some cake, which she pushed towards him, but he ignored it.
Now his attention was free, and she said, slowly, carefully, as if to a
child, "Ben, did you go to the office?" She had told him how to get
there.
"Yes."
"What happened?"
"They said, 'Howald are you?'"
Here the old woman sighed, and put her hand
to
her face, rubbing it
around there, as if wiping away difficult thoughts. She knew Ben was
eighteen: he kept saying so. She believed him. It was the one fact he kept
repeating. But she knew that was no eighteen-year-old, sitting there in
front of her, and she had decided not to go on with the thoughts of what
that meant.
It's not my business-what he really is,
sums up what she
felt.
Deep waters! Trouble! Keep out!
He sat there like a dog expecting a rebuke, his teeth revealed in that
other grin, which she knew and understood now, a stretched, teeth–
showing grin that meant fear.
"Ben, you must go back
to
your mother and ask her for your birth
certificate. She'll have it, I'm sure. It'd save you all the complications
and the questions. You do remember how to get there?"
"Yes,
I
know that."
"Well,
I
think you should go soon. Perhaps tomorrow?"
Ben's eyes did not leave her face, taking in every little movement of
eyes, mouth, her smile, her insistence. It was not the first time she had
told him to go home to find his mother. He did not want to. But if
she
said he must....For him what was difficult was this: here there was
friendship for him, warmth, kindness, and here, too, insistence that he
must expose himself
to
pain and confusion, and danger. Ben's eyes did
not leave that face, that smiling face, for him at this moment the bewil–
dering face of the world.
"You see, Ben, I have to live on my pension. I have only so much
money to live on. I want
to
help you. But if you got some money-that
office would give you money-and that would help me. Do you under–
stand, Ben?" Yes, he did. He knew money. He had learned that hard
lesson. Without money you did not eat.
And now, as if it was no great thing she wanted him to do, just a
Iittle thing, she said, "Good, then that is settled."
