Peewee/Chapter 17
The lack of trust which Peewee had in Beman now thrust itself upon him disturbingly. He looked apprehensively about the room, as the old man led him in and the door was closed behind them. Jeffrey Markyn came toward him and put his finger under Peewee's chin and turned his small face up and studied it. He looked from it to his brother, where he sat beside Mrs. Markyn, holding her hand. She smiled in a strained way to greet the boy. She was very pale. What had they said to her, Peewee wondered, that had made her look like this? Beman, still holding Peewee by the hand, seated himself in his big chair and drew the boy between his knees.
"Now, Mr. Rollins," he invited.
The man who had come with the "flat-foot" seemed to Peewee something between a policeman and a clerk. "Mr. Beman knows I haven't been able to gather much on this," he said. "It's too long ago—six years. The officer here, who was the one that picked up the kid, had forgotten the circumstances, until I showed him the record of the court. I've got a summary of that here."
Peewee stared suspiciously. Was he the kid? "Listen," Beman commanded in his ear.
"He's a tough kid," the man commented, "if you come to that. He's run away from every home they put him in. He run away from the Greenwood Boys' Home, which not many run away from. Before that he run away from the orphan asylum. That's how the court came to send him to the Home."
"Begin at the beginning of the record," Beman said.
"All right." The man referred to a paper. "The officer took the kid up on Cottage Grove Avenue near Thirty-fifth Street," he said. "He remembers that part perfectly."
"That's right," the policeman put in.
"He took him to the Cottage Grove Avenue station."
"What date?" Beman suggested.
"January 17, 1915. He was held at the station until the nineteenth, expecting somebody would claim him. They most always do with lost kids. He couldn't tell his name or where he lived, and there weren't any marks on his clothing. That's right?"
"That's right, the policeman assented.
"On the nineteenth, nobody claiming him, he was turned over to the Juvenile Court. The court judged him to be two, or maybe a little under two years old, and he was assigned temporarily to St. Anthony's Orphan Asylum, expecting someone related to him would turn up. Nobody did, and a year later he was brought in court again on the ground that for the records of the asylum he ought to have a name. The court gave him the name H. Seabury—no record of what is stood for by 'H'."
"Do you remember that?" Beman asked of Peewee.
"No, sir," Peewee said.
"Don't remember having a name given you in court?"
Peewee squirmed combatively. What did all this mean? Why was he expected to remember? He could not understand what was going on. "No, sir," he said.
"Don't remember this policeman taking you up?"
"No, sir."
"Don't remember being lost?"
Peewee looked at Mrs. Markyn. She was paler than before; her blue eyes were wide and fixed eagerly upon him. If she wanted him to remember, he wished that he could.
"Let me try with him," she said to Beman.
She drew him away from the old man and held him against her knee. Her touch, as always, filled him with incomprehensible feelings. He stared distrustfully at the men but pressed closer to her. She was affected, too; her hands shook as they clasped him, her temples whitened and her eyes shone nervously.
"We'll begin," she suggested, "with things that you do remember and see if then you can't remember back. You told me, you know, that you didn't know who your parents were."
"Yes'm," he admitted.
"But that—that woman had told you that she was your mother and had told you who she said your father was."
He winced and gazed at her unhappily. They had told her, then, about the woman. She must, he comprehended, if she knew that, know all the rest. It was not quite clear to him, since the woman had proved not to be his mother, what the effect of this upon her must be. Didn't it matter to her now? He felt vaguely that there must still be pain of some sort in it for her, but she had forgiven her husband, it appeared, for she had let him hold her hand.
"Why did you tell me that?" she asked
He hesitated, doubtful whether to tell her the truth. He might, he decided, do that now, since the other things were known to her. "They said it would spoil your life to know about me," he confessed.
She appeared not to understand. Walter Markyn moved as if startled, and seemed about to speak. Beman scrutinized Peewee curiously. The old man seemed to puzzle over something and suddenly to comprehend, and raised his hand to check Walter. "Let her go on," he commanded.
"Spoil my life?" she echoed. "I don't know what you mean."
Peewee felt relief. He had not been conscious that the necessity he had had of lying to her about himself had made him feel his separation from her until now when the need for that had been removed.
"I was at the house," he confided.
"The house?" She drew her straight, dark brows together, puzzled.
"I went there after my—after that woman told me where he lived." He pointed at Walter. "They were talking there, and they said it would spoil your life to know about me, so I went out and shut the door and went away."
"My God!" said Jeffrey.
The woman comprehended. She drew him closer, her lip trembled and her eyes filled suddenly with tears. "You did that!" she breathed. "You went away so that I wouldn't know! And afterward you refused to tell about yourself because of that! And you so little and so friendless and without a home! Oh, my dear, my dear! But that isn't what I meant. When you said to me that you didn't know your parents, wasn't it a little—just a little bit because you didn't believe the woman when she said she was your mother?"
He reflected. It was not easy, now that he knew Helen Lampert was not his mother, to recall what he had felt about her before. It seemed to him that he had thought her "nuts," not because she said she was his mother, but because of the wildness of her manner and the incoherence of her speech.
"No'm," he told her.
"You believed what she told you?"
"Yes'm."
"You didn't have any memories at all which made you think that perhaps you ought not to believe her?"
He could not understand this.
"No'm," he said, after an interval.
"It didn't make you think back to anybody else when she told you that she was your mother?"
"No'm."
The woman paused uncertainly, looking about with damp eyes questioningly at the others.
"There's nothing to be accomplished this way," Jeffrey answered to her look. "We're asking the impossible of the boy. A child of two couldn't possibly hold such memories for such a length of time and after experiences such as this boy has gone through."
"That's right," Beman replied to him. "It must be accepted only as a possibility. The dates coincide—the night of January 16 and the morning of the seventeenth. An unclaimed child found that morning on the street has grown in the years between to look exactly like Walter. Anything more definite than that you simply must assume. There were, we know, other babies in the same car. The body of the burned child was unrecognizable. There were other, burned, unrecognizable bodies. You can assume if you want that the child belonged to one of them, that the nurse had picked up some other's baby—not necessarily by mistake. She may have been unable to reach the child and tried to save the first other child that offered. You can say that the substitution never was suspected, that Edith's child, escaping in some way, wandered off and was found next morning by the police officer. But it's nothing but assumption. It never can be proved. It might warrant adoption—"
The woman, still clasping Peewee, looked up at him. "It does," she asserted. "It warrants more than that, even though we can never have absolute conviction."
What was going on was incomprehensible to Peewee. He heard the words that Beman and Mrs. Markyn said, but they conveyed no meaning to him. Some child, at some time, had been burned to death in a train wreck. The unfortunate fate of this child seemed to give Peewee warrant for his own anxiety on trains. Who, he wondered, was Edith? Was she Mrs. Cord? Was this some other adoption they were talking of? What he perceived was that whatever was happening was, in its progression, drawing him more intimately to Mrs. Markyn. She held him closer; there was tenderness and protection in her clasp. He enjoyed this, but continued to regard the men with suspicion.
He felt a sudden loss as she stood up, releasing him abruptly. Looking up, he saw her, white now as death, a light of excitement shining in her eyes, and her full lips set tight together. She looked, he thought, like someone to whom some startling memory had just occurred. She left him and went hurriedly to Beman and spoke to him in low tones, eagerly.
Peewee could catch only the words, "I have a letter—"
The old man, listening to her, frowned doubtfully. Peewee had, incomprehensibly, the feeling that she, in need of help, had turned to that violent, harsh but capable old man, as he himself had once done. What help? Jeffrey and Walter had gone closer to them to listen. Beman drew the police officer aside and spoke to him. The officer's reply was clear to Peewee.
"Sure I can get him. Now?"
"My car's outside," said Jeffrey. "Use it."
The policeman went quickly out, motioning to the other man, who followed him.
"I'll go for the letter myself," said Mrs. Markyn. "Walter, come with me."
They too went out. Peewee heard the closing of the entrance door, the sound of motors, and stared doubtfully at the two men. Beman, his gray old cheeks a little flushed, waited in his great chair; Jeffrey paced nervously up and down, halting now and then to exchange words inaudibly with Beman. Peewee wanted to question Beman, but decided not to commit himself by doing so. The long hand of the clock moved half way round before he heard the front door again and the policeman entered followed by another man, whom Peewee felt sure was a policeman too. The new man greeted Beman and Jeffrey as though he did not know them and opened a handbag which he carried and laid articles out upon the table—ink and a little pad and oblong cards with words in small print along the edge of them. Mrs. Markyn and Walter came in hurriedly. The man took the folded note paper which Mrs. Markyn gave him and opened it out under the library lamp and looked at it through a magnifying glass. "It ain't so bad," he said. "Much better than you ought to expect to get under such circumstances. Come here," he ordered.
Peewee hesitated; Jeffrey gently pushed him toward the stranger.
"It's the left hand," the man directed. He took Peewee's small left hand and rolled his fingers one by one upon the pad and then upon one of the cards. "Let's try again," he said, repeating the process.
The conversation of the streets had taught Peewee that they took the finger marks of criminals like this. He did not know exactly why they took his but he resented it. Did they think he had done something? He looked across the man's arm at the letter which Mrs. Markyn had brought, and conceived a certain contempt because of its beginning—"My dearest," it began. A corner of the sheet was black with ink, and half way down the page were five queer blots with a pencil mark around them which made a little hand. It was less easy for him to read handwriting than print, but he spelled out the words written close about the hand: "He's been sitting in my lap, dear, while I wrote and he tipped over the ink bottle; when I started to write again, I found the prints of his five little fingers on the page, so I put his hand back the way it had been and marked around it for you."
Jeffrey drew Peewee back from the table. The man took the cards that he had made and put them close beside the letter and looked at them through a magnifying glass.
The clock, ticking very slowly indeed, became audible in the room. Jeffrey kept hold of Peewee; Walter walked nervously up and down; Beman sat still; Mrs. Markyn strained forward across the table.
What was it, Peewee wondered suspiciously, that was going on? The excitement in all of them was clear to him.
"There's three of them," the man remarked, "that ain't good enough to go by, but the index and the middle finger are plain."
The clock ticked on again interminably. The man looked up at Mrs. Markyn and she leaned eagerly toward him.
"They're the same," he said decisively.
Peewee heard Jeffrey's voice: "My God! think of the strangeness of the thing! That woman, crazed with drugs or with desire to revenge herself on Walter, picked the boy up upon the street because of his likeness to Walter and sends him to us, and he proves to be Edith's baby! No wonder they say God moves in a mysterious way!"
"What's stranger"—this was Walter—"is the attraction Edith has had for him. The boy has shown feeling toward her and toward nobody else."
"That's not necessarily strange." Beman was speaking. "He had been with his mother until he was almost two years old. It's unquestionable that some unconscious memory of her must have been left in him. He didn't know, of course, why she attracted him like that."
Peewee did not find any meaning in these words. Mrs. Markyn was coming toward him. She stumbled slightly, as if from weakness, as she crossed the floor.
"Wait!" Walter warned her. "He doesn't understand. He thinks you're Marion."
She stared at him as if trying to find sense in what he said to her.
"I didn't know that until just now," Walter made clear to her. "When you were speaking to him of himself, he said that it was for your happiness that he hadn't wanted you to know about him. You didn't realize what he meant by that. I'd talked with him, of course; you had too. I can't remember that he ever spoke your name. I assumed it was my wife that he had met and talked with because he said so. Of course I never dared to speak of him before her. The place he saw you, too, was at my house. When you brought him here—"
"The talk was short," Beman broke in. "The boy's mistake is clear enough. I saw it too. He's too bewildered now to understand."
The woman controlled herself. Her body quivered as she drew Peewee to her and clasped him with her trembling arms. Her sweet blue eyes showed comprehension now, shining through tears and strangely deep and tender, as she fought her feelings down.
"Dear, how did you find out who I was?"
He wanted to remember that if it would please her.
"I saw your picture."
"Yes, dear. Where was it? Did it have my name on it? Tell me about the picture."
"It was in the newspaper."
He was trying to recollect.
There had been two pretty ladies in the newspaper picture—this one and the woman he had seen for the first time to-night, when she had leaned from the limousine to speak to Walter and then had driven on. Their names had been below.
"It said Mrs. Walter Markyn," he replied.
"Yes, dear."
"And—." He hesitated. "And Mrs. Cord," he said.
"Who told you, dear, which one was I?"
He could not answer that. Something new to him and incomprehensible, which had stirred within him at her pictured face, had centered all his interest on her. He had choked to think how pretty she was, with what tenderness and sweetness in her look, and he had coupled the name which he had supposed to be his father's unquestioningly with her.
He gazed at her doubtfully.
"Try to understand. I am not Mrs. Markyn. She was the other one. The other name belonged to me. I was Edith Markyn once; now I am Mrs. Cord."
He had trouble comprehending this reversal of his thought. Everything he had done regarding her since he first had seen her had been because he had believed her to be Walter's wife. He merely stared at her, as she kept on talking to him.
She was talking now, it appeared, about the other child—the one who had been burned. That child's father, Peewee gathered, had been a naval officer. In gun practice—whatever that might be—off some place called Porto Rico, he and other men had been injured by an explosion. The child's mother—Peewee was not yet sure who that was—had been at the time in New York with her baby but no other member of her family. Obliged to hasten to her wounded husband, she had sent the child in charge of its nurse to her family in Chicago. The train was wrecked on the Lake Front and the car that they were in was burned. The body of the nurse was found with a dead child whom fire had made unrecognizable clasped in her arms.
It was, Peewee recognized, unfortunate for the woman; she had lost both her husband and her child.
He rather liked the naval officer's name—Lieutenant Arthur Cord. The child's name too had been Arthur. As he reflected on these things, her feelings broke from her control.
"Baby, baby, don't you understand? I am your mother, darling boy—your mother!"
He felt her kisses on his cheeks and mouth; her lips, which had felt always cool and sweet before, were hot, burning almost as Helen Lampert's cracked, puffed lips had burned him. She clutched him as she controlled her sobs.
"I'd brought back with me, dear, your father's things—even my own letters which he had saved. I'd kept them all these years. Thank God for that, for on one of them were the print marks of your baby fingers. Except for those we never could have been sure."
He was not sure that he wanted her to be his mother. What he wanted was that she should be toward him as she had always been, and he did not know exactly how a mother was. Edith raised her eyes, bright with her tears, to Beman.
"And except for you," she said to the old man, "we never should have found out about him."
"It was the likeness," Beman said. "Inquiry about the woman led me to the coroner's man. When he told me she had never had a child the boy's likeness to Walter became inexplicable. Then the boy's record showed the coincidence of dates. It is no more remarkable for him to look like his uncle than if he had looked like his father."
"How much about the boy does Marion know?" Jeffrey inquired.
"Nothing." Walter raised his head. He had been sitting with his face buried in his hands. "She's never even heard of him. We have the boy himself to thank for that." He flushed, looking at his brother and his sister. "A man's past rises up to strike at him—"
"It's buried now with Helen Lampert," Jeffrey replied. He looked at Beman, and the old man nodded.
The manner of the men toward Peewee had changed. There was frankness in their look and liking. He perceived the difference in them without understanding it at first, and still looked at them suspiciously.
But he was commencing to adjust himself. These, he recalled, were members of his family. He was the grandson of the "city-builder," the great-grandson of the still older Jeffrey Markyn. He thought of the great houses in which the family lived. He would be free, he understood, to go in and out of those houses. He would ride, he foresaw, in their motors, and now certainly, if he asked it, they would let him drive the car. His heart beat more quickly at this last thought.
He saw Jeffrey smiling at him, and returned the smile. He stood still within his mother's arms. He looked at Walter. Suddenly a sense of possession came to him in her and in his uncles.
The End.