My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead by Jeffrey Eugenides

Author:Jeffrey Eugenides [Eugenides, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Anthologies, Adult, Contemporary
ISBN: 9780061240379
Goodreads: 1247446
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2008-01-08T06:00:00+00:00

II

It had been rash of him to bring Tonka to act as nurse and companion to his grandmother. He was still very young then. He had worked out a little stratagem: Tonka’s aunt, who went out doing sewing for ‘the gentry’, sometimes worked for an aunt of his, and he had contrived that she should be asked if she happened to know of a young girl, who . . . and so on. The idea was to get a girl to look after his grandmother, whose merciful release was to be expected in a couple of years. Apart from her wages, the girl would be remembered in the old lady’s will.

But meanwhile there had been a number of little episodes. Once, for instance, he was going on an errand with her; there were some children playing in the street, and suddenly they both found themselves gazing at the face of a little girl who was howling—a face that wriggled and writhed like a worm, in the full blast of sunlight. The pitiless clarity of it there in the light seemed to him a symbol of life, over against the orbit of death that they had both just left. But Tonka was ‘fond of children’. She bent down to the child, cheerfully and consolingly, perhaps even slightly amused by it—and that was all, however much he tried to make her see that behind the appearance there was something else. From however many sides he approached it, in the end he always found himself confronted with the same opacity in her mind. Tonka was not stupid, but something seemed to prevent her from being intelligent; and for the first time he felt this wide expanse of pity for her, this pity that was so difficult to account for.

Another time he said to her: “Tell me, how long is it now you’ve been with Grandmamma, Fräulein Tonka?” And when she had told him, he said: “Oh, really? It’s a long time to have spent with an old woman like that.”

“Oh,” Tonka exclaimed, “I like being here.”

“Well, you needn’t be afraid to tell me if you don’t. I can’t imagine how a young girl can manage to put up with it.”

“It’s a job,” Tonka answered, and blushed.

“All right, it’s a job. But that isn’t all one wants from life. Isn’t that true?”

“Yes.”

“And have you got that?”

“No.”

“Yes, no. Yes, no.” He grew impatient. “What’s the sense of talking like that? Can’t you even grumble about us?” But he saw that she was struggling to find an answer, that she kept on discarding possible answers just when they were on the tip of her tongue. And suddenly he felt sorry for her. “I dare say you’ll hardly know what I mean. It’s not that I think badly of my grandmother, poor woman. No, it isn’t that. I’m not looking at it from that point of view at the moment. I can’t help thinking of it from your point of view, and from your point of view she’s a perfect old horror.

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