E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten
Ingalls Days Like Today
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-29847-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-29847-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Rachel Ingalls was born in Boston in 1940. She spent time in Germany before studying at Radcliffe College, and moved to England in 1965, where she lived for the rest of her life. Her debut novel, Theft (1970), won the Authors' Club First Novel Award, and her novella Mrs Caliban (1982) was named one of the 20 best American novels since World War Two by the British Book Marketing Council. Over half a century, Ingalls wrote 11 story collections and novellas - all published by Faber - to great acclaim, but remains relatively unknown. She died in 2019 after a revival of interest in her work.
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When he left for the war, he left her pregnant. As soon as she realized the state she was in, she told her parents, who disowned her; they’d always preferred the rich neighbors’ son next door and now she’d ruined her chances and theirs.
She went to his mother, who called her a lying whore and slammed the door in her face, saying, ‘My son would never have anything to do with a cheap type like you.’
She got a job in the sort of place where people didn’t mind who did what. She served alcohol and wiped tabletops and cleaned out greasy pots and pans. Her clothes and hair stank of fat, the skin on her hands split and bled. The waitresses who worked side by side with her told her where she could go to get rid of the pregnancy. But she was still in love with him.
When the time came for her to give birth, she couldn’t work any longer. The boarding house threw her out. Her friends had no money. Only one place in town was willing to take her in: the brothel. She knew about the reputation the building had but she was innocent enough to imagine that the real business was the bar and not the rooms upstairs, instead of the other way around. In any case, she expected to die in childbirth.
The woman who kept the place paid for her doctor. And after the birth, as soon as she was well enough, expected to be paid back: for lodging and food, too.
She refused. Every time she looked into the face of her little son and fell in love with him again, she fell in love over and over again with his father, whose presence somewhere in the world was like a promise still unbroken, although he didn’t write.
She’d rather die in the gutter, she said – and take the baby with her.
‘You live here,’ the woman told her. ‘You gave birth here. You know what this place is. Everybody knows. You aren’t married – that makes you an unfit mother. And if I say that you’re one of my girls, I can get the state to claim the child for its protection. In easier times it could be adopted but nobody can afford an extra mouth now. That means the orphanage.’
For most women at the time, it was true, an unexpected child would have been a disaster even if they were married. For most; but not for all. Not for her.
She tried to fight. Four of them came at her. One of them snatched the baby from her and ran into another room. Two others held her while the fourth began to pour liquor down her throat.
For three days she was too drunk to get out of bed. They washed her and changed her clothes, combed her hair and gave her more alcohol while the men lined up in the hallway. A year later, when she came to an arrangement with a dentist from a neighboring town, she found that several of her teeth had been cracked in that initial struggle.
Her lover’s mother set about establishing legal claims to the child as soon as it was born. Since the baby was illegitimate, there was no proof either way as to who the father was, but the authorities decided that a decent home of any kind was better than life in a brothel. They took the baby They gave him to the grandmother.
She was drunk all the time after that until the other girls let her know what had happened to some of their friends: a certain amount of drink could get you in the mood, but if you were falling down every night, you could find yourself out on the street with your ears and nose cut off.
She followed orders, obeyed requests and demands. She became a slave. Behind her mask of compliance, every thing in her was dead except the thought of her child. Whenever she had any time off, she wandered near the house where her lover’s mother lived with the baby. Occasionally she’d walk by the place, looking in quickly at one of the windows and going past without breaking stride. She was afraid that the woman would report her.
She needn’t have worried. As soon as the child was old enough, it became a stranger in a way she hadn’t anticipated – a way similar to that by which she had been made into what she was.
One day she saw both of them out walking in the park: the child toddling, rushing and stumbling while holding on to his grandmother’s hand.
She approached the spot where they were and then stood back, as still as one of the trees, to drink in the sight of her child. In a few moments the boy seemed to notice that someone was staring at him. He stopped moving. He looked at her and smiled, making a little chirping sound of pleasure. He put his free hand into his mouth.
The grandmother turned her head. Her anger must have caused her to clench her fingers; the boy took his hand from his mouth, waved it in the air and began to whine.
‘Look,’ the grandmother said. ‘There’s the bad woman.’ She pointed. ‘What do we say when we see her?’
The boy looked up for confirmation and pointed, copying exactly the direction of the gesture. ‘Whore,’ he said.
‘That’s right, darling. Whore.’
The child laughed. ‘Whore-whore-whore,’ he chanted. He began to jump up and down with excitement. His grandmother joined him: laughing, hopping, shouting and still holding his hand so that the two of them resembled a mismatched team of theatrical entertainers.
The tears ran down her face. She watched her child until the grandmother began to egg him on to make malicious faces, teaching him to stick out his tongue. The next step would be throwing stones.
She was younger and – despite everything she’d been through – stronger than the other woman. But her child’s taunts robbed her of the ability either to attack others or to defend herself. She turned around and walked away.
She waited for her lover, not hoping for much. Victories and defeats followed each other so quickly, and the borders were altered so often that nobody could be certain who was dead or alive in the areas where fighting was going on. No one she knew of had had a letter. That was a small price to pay for their good fortune; neither the town, nor any part of their district, had yet been occupied by the enemy; nor even by front-line troops in retreat, which could also be bad, although at least only the enemy burned everything down when they left.
She prayed for his survival and, as she prayed, she dreaded the possibility of her dearest wish coming true. She shrank from the thought that he’d believe his mother; she’d had a dream in which he was the one who held the child by the hand as they both called her a whore. If the dream came true, she thought, she’d hang herself.
The war lasted almost another two years. As far as anyone could tell, they had won. Or, at least, they hadn’t lost.
He came back in a gang of men he hadn’t known before he’d joined up. Some of them had been from his school but not in the same class. Some had looked like children when they’d marched off in their clean, new uniforms. Now it seemed to him that they resembled professional criminals and that that was probably an accurate way of describing all of them, including himself.
There was supposed to be a parade from the railroad station and down the main street of town to the park, where there would be speeches, applause and the presentation of flowers.
He and his friends had no desire to win approval or keep up appearances or to stand still while pictures were taken of them shaking hands with dignitaries who weren’t worth the saving and ugly women who for five years had been viciously insistent that their boys get out there and fight.
They broke off from the parade as it passed the bar. A mob of them burst through the doors, shouting for something to drink. And, they wanted to know, where were the girls?
Three of the girls came downstairs from where they’d been looking out of the windows at the crowd down in the street. One joined the barman behind the counter. ‘Beer’s on the house,’ someone called out. The soldiers cheered.
He tossed back half his drink and was going through the doorway into one of the smaller, less crowded downstairs rooms when he came face to face with her.
‘Yes, it’s me,’ she said. And before he could ask her what she was doing in a place like that, she told him. She described her parents’ reaction to the pregnancy; and then his mother’s. She explained how she’d ended up in the brothel and how his mother had legally stolen the child. ‘And now,’ she said, ‘she’s taught him – whenever he sees me – to shout “Whore” at me. What your mother’s done to me is worse than anything the enemy ever did to my country.’
‘Come here,’ he said.
She went up close to him and stood obediently while he inspected her.
He tipped up his glass, drained it and threw it into the corner, where it smashed into pieces. He ordered her to come with him. As he shouldered his way through the crowd and out into the open air, she followed.
The streets were empty of people and littered with flowers, confetti and scraps of paper wrappings, advertisements and posters. She walked behind him, wondering whether they were going to the park to search among the crowds. He began to walk faster and faster. She had to skip and break into a run every so often in order to keep up. He led her to his mother’s house.
‘Wait here,’ he said. He tried to open the door, and couldn’t. He stepped back and kicked out hard until the lock gave and the door flew open. He went inside.
She tiptoed up to the window, where she could see the back of his mother’s dress, moving away.
His mother ran to him with open arms. He stopped her in her tracks by shouting at her, ‘Where’s the boy you’re living with?’
‘Boy?’ she...
