Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 8
BY listening hard to the chants of our children we may find out not only The Other Side, we may find out how the world looks to them, though Alice felt that Sara sometimes mixed up things just for the sake of dramatic effect. And she distinctly didn't approve of a chant with which Sara soothed Jamie when she pretended that he was her very own baby; and Sara chanted it in a churchly sort of way, too:
In comes the Holy, Holy Ghost,
A-walking on his hind legs."
Alice was sure that she had never had the Holy Ghost thus represented to Sara, and yet Alice had to pretend not to hear for fear of frightening Sara and making her as mysterious as Robert. But it was hard work to keep quiet because, unlike most children, Sara was born irreligious and scoffing and Alice felt that she sang things like this purposely. It was also through the medium of chants that Alice learned first about Evelyn Dearie.
All mothers who know about them at all are more interested in the companions who come from The Other Side to play with their children than in anything else. Sometimes you'll be sewing and the room all of a sudden gets still and then your baby begins a whispered conversation, until it seems that from one moment to another the invisible child to whom he is talking will step out from the shadows and be there in the room with you.
Alice could never quite believe in the unreality of the two voices. It seemed to her that the child with whom Robert played had always whisked himself out of the room just in time to prevent her seeing him. It was as though you could feel his presence; as though, like the children in story books, he had an invisible cap to pop on his head the moment Alice came in, and she could almost hear him snicker at the joke he was playing on her.
Now in this world it is never wise to meddle with such things. It's better to leave them as they are. No one ever had any good come to him from fraternizing with too great familiarity with the unknown; and it's a very good thing that the children from The Other Side are as shy as they are, as Alice found out through Evelyn Dearie.
She learned through Sara's songs that Evelyn Dearie was Sara's Other Side friend. By keeping quiet Alice was rewarded by hearing Sara cautiously calling:
"Evelyn, Evelyn Dearie!"
Sometimes, children's most delightful fancies have their roots in black dirt. It was through Laurie that Alice identified the fairy child of make-believe with the Evelyn Dearie in real life.
One would like to be poetical in talking about these make-believe children, but the truth was that the real Evelyn Dearie lived down the street and was a fat, unlovely girl who was swung perpetually in a hammock. Laurie spoke thus of her:
"It's broke is my heart with 'Evelyn Dearie this' and 'Evelyn Dearie that,' an' how came 'Evelyn Dearie' to stick in Sara's head I can't tell you, Mis' Marcey. I was walkin' along, and there in her hammock sits Evelyn as fat as Mrs. Mullen's pig, and dressed up in a peekaboo waist, fitting her like a bolster, and under my nose she calls to Sara, and Sara in spite o' me runs in ahead, an' she give her a peanut. An' right then and there her young man up and kisses her in broad daylight. An' 'Evelyn Dearie,' says he, an' there stands Sara, her mouth as wide open as if to swallow an oyster. An' out of her mind Evelyn Dearie won't go."
Perhaps it was because of the origin of her name that Evelyn Dearie was less shy than other make-believe children.
For a while she hovered around the edge of the family circle. She made especially free of the nursery and of Alice's room. Alice, deluded woman, encouraged this. She even felt flattered when Sara would ask her,
"Do you mind if Evelyn Dearie lies down in your bed a little while? She feels tired."
Finally, after these tentative entrances into reality, Evelyn suddenly broke down all barriers, and not in the way to make Tom Marcey recognize her poetic value.
Tom came home tired from his office. He was about to seat himself in his accustomed chair when Sara gave an ear-piercing shriek. Sara was a very accomplished shrieker.
"Oh!" she screamed, "don't sit down there, don't, don't sit down there!"
A bystander would have supposed that a child was being flayed alive. Tom jumped up and looked apprehensively behind him. The chair was empty. He started to sit down again.
"O-o-o-oh, you're sitting down on Evelyn Dearie!" cried Sara. "Evelyn Dearie's in the chair! Don't do it!"
Alice gave her husband a look which means—"Do what you're told without argument." He sat down in another chair. When Sara had gone Alice explained to him who Evelyn Dearie was.
"Now she's begun it," he said with sour cynicism. "I'll bet I'll never be able to sit down in a chair in comfort without hearing her squawk that I'm sitting on Evelyn Dearie."
So it proved. Evelyn Dearie had an unfortunate way of being in the chair that one wanted. Tom scandalized Alice by saying,
"You've got to tell Evelyn Dearie to keep out of my big chair. If Evelyn doesn't want to get squashed tell her to keep out!"