The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

FLY AWAY LADYBIRD

“Don’t be melancholy, darling, I’m sure it will all come out all right.”

“But how often have I got to tell you that I’m not melancholy? I’m not melancholy at all. I’m afraid you’re old-fashioned. You just think I ought to be melancholy!”

“It’s all these subterfuges, all this concealment. The way you had to go to the hospital under an assumed name. And signing a false name to the birth certificate. And now living here in this one-horse town! Good lord.”

She smiled at him, as if affectionately amused by his despair, took his arm, and they walked slowly, very slowly, up the little hill in the park. He kept his head lowered, as if thinking, and when he didn’t respond to a repeated tug at his elbow, she brought her face so close to his that her forehead touched the rim of his hat.

“Besides,” she said, “you’re forgetting that the whole idea was mine. Wasn’t it?”

“Oh, I know, but that has nothing to do with it. There’s so much I want to do for you and Bibs, and can’t. You oughtn’t to be living here, buried away like this, and especially as I can only get here so seldom. No. And all the time I have the funniest feeling—”

“What?”

“Well, it makes me laugh sometimes. But I keep feeling that you and Bibs ought to be living with the rest of us.”

“That’s a bright idea. Your wife would be so glad, wouldn’t she?”

“Gosh, yes. Just the same, if you ever saw the other kids—”

He stopped suddenly, and grinned at her.

“That would be all right. But suppose she saw Bibs! She’d know it in a flash.”

They resumed the walk, very slowly, they passed under a maple tree, scarlet leaves had fallen on the path from the scarlet mass above them, and the sweet smoke came up to them from a smudge fire at the bottom of the hill. The delicious melancholy held them still for a moment. They stood under the tree and said nothing.

“That’s for instance why it would be, I suppose, dangerous for you to live in New York. God knows New York’s large enough, but if you ever did meet—”

“It’s got to be postponed.”

“And that’s the sort of thing that makes me sick. This everlasting secrecy. Hole in corner.”

“I told you in the beginning that I knew all about that and was prepared for it. Didn’t I? And that I assumed full responsibility. It’s my funeral, not yours.”

“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of, Enn—”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that!”

“It’s bound to be, at least in some respects. It isn’t good for you. You haven’t met a soul here. The minute you meet people, they’d begin to smell a rat. Mrs. Doane suspects already—I could see it this morning when I met her here with Bibs.”

“Well, what did she do, did she bite you, or give you a dirty look?”

He didn’t answer. He disengaged his arm, took out a cigarette and lit it; then flung the smoking match into a red privet bush. He was frowning. He thought how odd it was that Enn could take the whole situation so calmly. He was even tempted to believe that she was somehow lacking—but lacking in what, he found it difficult to say. Morals? But there could be no question of that—the moral issue had never arisen, there was no such thing. If it was anything, it was something like delicacy. Or was it merely that she was sensible—more sensible than any woman he had ever met.

“O God, Enn, there are so many things. That awful dingy apartment of yours. And the neighbors watching you.”

She took his arm again, and shook him, and laughed, her long gray eyes narrowing provocatively.

“Is that all? Is there something more?”

“Heaps. What about Bibs?”

“How do you mean, what about Bibs?”

“Well, she’s four. She notices things. She knows when I spend the night there. That would be all right, if only—”

“What?”

“She knew I was her father.”

She drew a deep sigh, looked away from him, said nothing. Then she pulled him closer, with her hand under his arm—so closely and so tenderly that to walk thus together, with their knees touching and disengaging, arm against arm and side against side, became difficult, and slow, and self-conscious, a delicious and awkward intimacy.

If I could only go on like this, if only it could always be like this. Their bodies seemed to be saying it, but their faces and minds were averted. He felt extraordinarily touched. It was tragic, it was beautiful.

“I sometimes wonder if you really feel it, Enn.”

“Don’t be a goose.”

“But really, I do.”

“You silly boy, we’ve been over it so often, haven’t we? You must reconcile yourself that Bibs is mine. Not yours, mine. You agreed to that. I wanted her, not you.”

“Oh, I know all that. It’s a good theory.”

They had come to the bench at the top of the hill. Below them the little river, with birches along the nearer margin, turned out of sight under the dilapidated wooden bridge. He remembered how they had come here before Bibs was born—he remembered the last time of all, when she had wanted to come up to see the sunset, and he had tried in vain to dissuade her, and they had climbed up so slowly, and she had turned so white. What was it she had said, something very funny. A quotation from somebody. Oh, yes—“O to be oviparous, now that spring is here.”

“Do you think Mrs. Doane is a good influence, Enn?”

She had sat down on the bench, her hands flat on the green wood, the fingers spread out fanwise.

“Of course. She’s as good as gold. She adores Bibs.”

“I know. But I don’t like the slang.”

“Oh, don’t worry about the slang. Good heavens, if that was all!”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s when I go down to New York to see you; when I’m away—all those weeks. When I come back, Bibs likes Mrs. Doane better than she does me. She always says she wants to stay with Boo. You know she calls her Boo.”

He stood facing her, his head a little on one side, his cigarette lightly held between two fingers.

“And do you think that’s good? Do you think it’s so good?”

“Of course I don’t think it’s good. But what can we do? Somebody’s got to look after her when I go away.”

“But why not be sensible and give up your job, and let me swing it?”

Alternately, she slapped her hands on the bench, in a queer and mountingly mischievous rhythm, then clapped them together before her, wrung them at him, and laughed.

“The possessive male!”

“Possessive nonsense! It’s simply a question of what’s best for you and Bibs. This sort of thing is no good. It’s sure to hurt you both.”

She was still smiling, but as he watched her intently, her expression gradually became one of quizzical scrutiny. She looked up at him sidelong, as if making a careful appraisal.

“Are you sure you’re being quite straight about this? You love Bibs and want her. You love me and want me. You don’t want to be independent. Do you?”

He turned his back and took a few steps toward the edge of the grass slope. At the bottom of the hill he could see a man emptying a basket of dead leaves on the smudge fire: the bright flames shot up for a moment into the basket as if licking away the last few morsels of the year. What Enn said was, of course, perfectly true. Or partly true. But that didn’t really change it—not at all. He watched the man walk slowly along the path and drop the basket into a wheelbarrow. Yes, partly true—he did want to have them, to keep them. And why not? It seemed ridiculous that he shouldn’t. They were—they ought to be—a part of his life.

Enn’s voice floated toward him lightly—it gave him oddly, before he turned, the feeling that she was watching him very closely, very affectionately.

“Don’t be melancholy, darling! It will all come out all right!”

She was laughing at him, laughing at her use of his own words.

“Curse you, Enn—you never can be serious for five minutes on end.” He said this as he walked back to the bench: he sat down beside her and dropped his hat on the grass. “What’s going to happen to her when she goes to school—when she finds that other children have fathers, when they ask her who her father was? I suppose you’ll have to tell her some damned fairy story about it. And then what about me? As she gets older, and sees me around—what’s she going to think? She’s no fool—believe me, she’ll put two and two together and make it sex! And a hell of a lot of good that will do her. She’ll end by hating me.”

“Darling!”

He suddenly felt sorry for himself, he felt hurt and angry and stubborn, he wanted to be urged or comforted, and this feeling was only accentuated when she dropped her hand on his knee and lightly pinched him.

“No, Enn, it’s no use.”

“But darling! you forget there is such a thing as time. Lots can happen, lots will happen. All this is only a phase. When the time comes, I’ll go to New York and get a job there. I’ll adopt Bibs—she’ll take my name, and it will be easy enough later to explain to her that I took her from an orphanage, or that nobody knew who her parents were. You’ll see, it will be quite simple.”

She said this unhurriedly, almost as if with no attempt to persuade—the effect upon him was to make him feel that she was, as always, overwhelmingly reasonable.

“Well, what about me—when she’s older, she’s sure to suspect. What about that?”

“I know, my dear. But there are other things to consider. It might be that you wouldn’t any longer—be coming to see me. We might decide—for Bib’s sake—that it would be better if we separated. You might decide to give us up. Or fall in love with someone else. Or even, just decide to be a devoted father to your own children. After all, you have got them, and you do love them. It isn’t as if you had nothing else. Or as if you need to begrudge me Bibs. Is it?”

“O good Lord.”

“We might as well be practical about it.”

“Practical!”

He took out his leather cigarette case, tapped a fresh cigarette repeatedly on the back of it, and lit it from the stub. Then with his forefinger he touched her hand, which still lay on his knee. She was smiling at him, but her eyes were grave, and he gave her a quick smile in answer.

“You ought to have been a lawyer, Enn. You’re the most devilishly and unmitigatedly reasonable being I ever met. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you had no heart.”

“But you do know better, don’t you.… I’m sorry you’ve got to go back tonight.”

“So am I.”

They were both silent; a curious mutual awareness of peace came upon them, they watched the smoke from the smudge fire, which the breeze was idly sculpturing into a long blue curve over the river, over the tops of the birches. A policeman had stopped to talk to the man with the wheelbarrow. The sun was beginning to be low—he took out his watch. Four o’clock.

“Four o’clock. What time did you say—”

“I told her to bring Bibs here at half-past three. She must be late.”

“She is late.”

“Well, she probably won’t be very late, because she has to go somewhere, she said, at half-past four. She was just to bring Bibs and go. Perhaps if we walk back—or would you rather stay here?”

“Let’s walk.”

They walked in silence, with linked arms, and as they turned the shoulder of the little hill, and saw the park below them, and Bibs running up the narrow path toward them, he began to feel for the first time the full force of what Enn had just been saying—(as usual)—with such extraordinary calm. Separation! Yes. It had been hanging over them for a long time, he had always known that sooner or later the shadow would begin to become substance; it was inevitable—or was it?—and now at last it had been spoken of. Very likely she had foreseen it from the outset—it was like her to foresee things, to plan things—she had known that sooner or later they must separate, and she had quite calmly decided to have Bibs, if only as an insurance against a bankruptcy which might otherwise have been complete. Yes. That was it. And now, as a consequence of the foresight itself, and as a consequence of Bibs, the separation, which she had merely foreseen as a possibility, was gradually becoming a necessity: Bibs, whom she had decided to have as a protection, must now be protected: cause had led to effect, and now effect was leading to cause. It was this—and he knew somehow that the same thoughts were in her mind, the same feelings—it was this that made her now tighten her hold on his arm, now as Bibs came running toward them, with her blue leggings and blue beret and a wilted stalk of blue chicory in her hand, tightly held. This—she was saying—is what you are losing, a part of yourself, which you must lose. And Bibs, who seems to be running straight toward you, chattering and laughing to herself, making up one of her absurd and delicious stories, will not stop here, or greet you, but will pass by and go on, you will never see her again.

“And did you see the Christmas trees, all the Christmas trees, Mummy? They said how-do. I said how-do to them and they said how-do to me.”

“But you haven’t said how-do to Boyar.”

“Will you give Boyar a big kiss?”

“No. Did you see the how-do trees, Boyar?”

“Yes, I saw the how-do trees.”

When Mrs. Doane had gone, they counted the Christmas trees, and said how-do to them, and he took off his hat and shook one of them by the hand.

“And Boo says their fathers were little teeny tiny tiny tiny seeds, no bigger than—no bigger than a—”

“What?”

“No bigger than a pumpkin! An old gray pumpkin man with gray teeth and gray ears!”

“Did Boo say that?”

“Yes, Boo said that.”

“And who was your father, Bibs? Was he a pumpkin man too?”

“Tell Boyar, blueberry.”

The “secret” expression came over her face: she stood still, she held the chicory flower before her, and gazed at it, smiling at her delicious and secret idea.

“No, he wasn’t a pumpkin man. He was a—he was a—he was a—”

She began to squeal with delight, she was planning a joke, a surprise. And at once she announced triumphantly:

“He was a June-bug!”

“A June-bug! Are you sure? Why Bibs!”

“Yes, he was a June-bug. And he flew and he flew and he flew and he flew and he flew!”