CHAPTER FIVE
Mary and the camp-chair sank down together for two inches. Then the chair squeaked and stopped giving in: it stayed where it was in space, poised above the throng of Santo Domingo Indians and dusty crabby tourists like a throne, disregarded on the pueblo roof.
“Well,” she continued, when she was sure the chair had come to rest, “I do know that I’m at my wits’ ends. I’m desperate.” Casually, she drew a handkerchief out of her raffia bag and folded it over her nose, against the dust.
Bob answered, “You wait until you’ve talked to Lucy Parker. Don’t give up hope at this stage. There’s such good material in the boy; you mustn’t give up hope.” He felt that he hadn’t said quite enough, but he was tired. Mary was exactly like a sack when she was in a crowd, he thought a little furtively: limp and useless. Dragging Mary and a camp-chair was very fatiguing. His eyes hurt in the sun but he fought against the impulse to put on the sun-glasses in his vest pocket. Mary looked so odd in hers.
From the plaza beneath there came a confused roaring: a mixture of singing and soft-beating drums where the Indians were dancing to the music of the chorus, heavily overlaid and swamped by a loud conversation going on between people squatting before the house. Bob craned his neck to see over the heads of the Indians who blocked the view. He was trying to find Teddy.
“It’s Blake’s fault,” said Mary, understanding him. “He’s always running off like that: this time he’s taken Teddy with him. It’s very rude of him. I must speak to him again.” She readjusted the handkerchief and settled the glasses on her nose. “This dust. I think he’s a schizoid personality, don’t you? I spoke to Brill about him. If I sell that Patterson property perhaps I might have him analyzed. But he seems so prejudiced against it, and I don’t want to force the child. What do you think?”
“Brill? Analysis is a wonderful thing. Yes, that might help.” He broke off and waved violently. “There’s Lucy now. Lucy! Confound these drums. There, she’s coming over.” He settled back in relief. He was never at his best with a surrounding audience of less than three or four. He loved people and more people; the more the better. There was no limit to his capacity for company; if he should ever have to live completely alone he would go mad. The frantic boredom that had possessed him with Mary grew more peaceful; slowly and completely died as he watched Lucy pushing a way toward the ladder that leant against their roof. She was followed by her daughter Phyllis and her daughter Phyllis’ friend Janie Peabody. Good! Soon there would be activity and noise on the roof around him, and other people would look up to the chattering crowd and say to each other, “That’s Bob Stuart.”
The three women climbed the ladder carefully, with upheld skirts and cautious feeling of the toes.
“Ah-h-h, Lucy,” said Bob lovingly, lending a hand at the last rung. “Phyllis. Miss Peabody. Lucy darling, we were just talking about you. You are to tell Mrs. Lennard everything you know about the California school. She wants to find a school for Blake—you know, Blake.”
“My school?” Lucy sat down cross-legged on the roof and lit a cigarette. “Certainly. Tell me if you want it and I’ll write you a letter tonight. I should think it would be just the thing for you. Phyllis was such a problem before I sent her there. They always are difficult at a certain age, don’t you think?” She turned and flicked an ash at Phyllis, who ignored her by chatting with Janie.
The singing fell to an abrupt end and in the silence shuffling feet were heard. Over an array of backs, fidgeting sweaty backs, they saw green branches jogging, being carried out of the plaza. A fluttering wisp of red shirt moved in the same direction, seen in little jerks as it passed between two fat ladies in khaki hats.
“Oh,” cried Mary, “it’s over, isn’t it? I haven’t really seen anything of it.”
“No, no,” Bob said soothingly. “They start again in a minute. What was all that at your school about psychoanalysis, Lucy? Tell her about it.”
“Won’t she be bored? I always forget the other people may want to watch the dance. It seems impossible that anyone here could be seeing it for the first time. How many times have we seen it, Bob?”
“Oh, I couldn’t say. It’s nothing to what it used to be. I remember a dance at Jemez that I stumbled on by sheer accident. It was in the old days when I was collecting. I was taking a trip to San Ysidro to get a blanket—you could still pick up good things in those days. I was driving with poor old Gertrude and we suddenly turned into the village and there it was. Very shocking.”
Lucy leaned forward and ground out her cigarette against a stone. The sun was paling as if the air had grown suddenly thick. Behind a high yellow sandy cone back of the town, a black cloud peeped.
“Tell us about it,” said Lucy. Down in the plaza the singing swelled triumphantly.
“I couldn’t really. They were having something ceremonial and private—I don’t know just what. There were baskets of fruit and plates of food; the men made obscene gestures with the bananas. Fertility and all that, I suppose. Gertrude was as white as a sheet; she screamed and drove away as fast as she could, but they didn’t pay any attention to us. I was helpless with laughter. You can imagine Gertrude.”
“It’s a wonderful story,” said Lucy. “I should have heard it before. Gertrude never mentioned it to me, but naturally she wouldn’t. Well, Mrs. Lennard....”
The singing stopped again.
“Now is it over?”
“No, that’s just the end of the first clan’s turn. There’ll be a lot more before they call it a day.... It’s a small school; only a hundred or so, and they have a staff psychoanalyst and all the masters really make a specialty of understanding the students. Very modern, of course—you must see the art work. It’s coeducational but not in any silly communist way. I mean it’s individual. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
“I think so. It’s very interesting to me, because Blake is such a special case....”
Lucy nodded deeply. “It’s a school for special cases; that’s the real idea that’s behind it all. The woman who founded it is wonderful. I’ll give you a letter for her. Oh, look, there’s Teddy. Teddy!” She scrambled up and stood on tiptoe, waving. “Of course he’ll never be able to hear me with all this noise.” The singers were chanting in a high falsetto.
“He’s too busy with the courier, mother,” said Phyllis. “He can’t hear you over all those people. Well, my dear, he was quite angry with me. Have you ever seen him really angry?”
“Never,” said Janie.
“I was almost frightened,” said Phyllis. “Of course I don’t really care what he thinks of me, but it was unpleasant for a few minutes. Tell me what you heard about him in New York.”
“Oh, it wasn’t anything definite. They talk so in New York, I think. They always say the same thing. I just heard that he gives terribly amusing parties, my dear, with all of that crowd. And no one is quite sure about him because he’s seen with people like that all the time: of course no one thinks anything of it any more, and I do think that if a person is amusing I don’t think a person’s private life ought to have anything to do with it, but what I heard was.”
“This atmosphere is simply marvelous for young people,” Lucy was telling Mary. “The combination of healthy outdoor life and the peculiar feeling one gets out here of history—the Spaniards, and the Western pioneers, and all that. And the wonderful Indian culture. They imbibe something. Everybody here is so unusually appreciative, haven’t you found it so?”
“The only flaw is that we’re getting to be so famous,” Bob added. “It’s ruining the place. I wish the authorities would pass a law prohibiting all these buses and trippers and outsiders. Nothing kills a place as much as the outsiders.”
“I feel the same way,” said Lucy. “I’m afraid I’m really snobbish about all those visitors. What can they get out of it?”
Jane was saying, “But I’m just going to hold out with what I have until I get back East. You can’t tell what people are going to be wearing this fall until you look around. It doesn’t matter so much here, but....”
“Do you see Blake anywhere, Bob?” said Mary.
“Don’t worry, he’ll turn up at the car. He doesn’t seem to be with Madden just now.”
The crowd was growing sparse. Over the hill beyond the houses cars were leaving in streams, each one silhouetted against the green sky before it crossed the mound and disappeared. As the day faded the land grew wider, more desolate. Under the threatening rain-heavy sky it looked parched and ferocious. Irritated squawks of automobile horns mingled with the thrumming singing voices in the plaza.
Lucy looked down at the people who were hurrying to the cars. “There’s Isobel. How very badly she dresses. Have you heard what they’re saying about her engagement? Gwen was telling me....”
“Mother says I can go in August if I insist,” said Phyllis. “I’m not sure I want to go at all: it’s a very dull season, I believe.”
“Oh, you lucky.”
Now there were such a few people left that Blake was in sight, leaning against a ladder at the far corner of the plaza and gazing ahead of him in a bemused way. The dancers were filing out, going in a listless straggling line to the kiva beyond a row of irregularly outlined houses on the other side. The sun was setting behind the clouds and in a few minutes the prayer for rain would be answered. A fresh damp wind was blowing down upon the village.
Green branches and dry rattles carried by the koshare. They walked slowly, now that their work was done, towards the kiva. Beyond the houses they came into sight again, climbing the hard white steps to the roof, pausing against that green sky as they started down the ladder into the round little house. Red shirts and blue shirts followed with the drums, and a low singing went with them.
“But as Gwen says,” Lucy finished, “there are times when Isobel is so vague that God knows what really did happen. She’ll never tell the real story.”
Mary stood up and put her glasses back into her bag.
“I’ll never forget it,” she said. “A most beautiful picture. Absolutely inspiring.”