Chapter 3B

For several weeks I saw Martha Jane only now and then as she walked across the grounds on her way in or out of the project. She caught sight of me once from a couple of blocks away and smiled and waved and yelled Hi.

Meanwhile, it seems my Mom and future step-dad had gone through a brief spat. They started dating again a few weeks later. But my sitter was not Martha Jane. In fact, I had two different sitters at first. The first must not have been very interesting, as I have absolutely no recollection of who they were or how they looked. The identity of the second sitter is also a blank, but I recall that I spent the evening not at home but in the sitter's apartment, across the driveway and at a slight angle from my own building. Through their back kitchen window that night I could see the back door that led to my own apartment. Just to the left was the apartment where Martha Jane and her family lived. At one point that night I saw her in her kitchen; there was no mistaking that pretty face and frizzy auburn hair. I waved to her. Of course, she didn't see me. I went back later and waited for a while but she didn't show again. And by the time the sitter walked me back across the driveway back home, all the lights were out in Martha Jane's place.

When I had not seen her for several more days I bumped into her accidentally just as I was going out the front door on my way to school. She came outside at the same time with her schoolbooks under her arm.

"Hey, hon," she sang as she locked her door. She beamed at me and gave me her best Southern twang. "Where've you been, sugar?"

"where've-you-been-too," I mimicked playfully.

"Well," she went on, making a silly face, "Where YOU been?"

"Well," I said in the same way, "Where YOU been?"

She laughed and gave a mild go-away wave with her free hand. "Oh, silly!" She shook her head. She was wearing a long plaid, pleated skirt and a white blouse. I very clearly remember that morning and how she looked; bright, clean, basic, unpretentious, very very pretty in a simple, uncomplicated way.

We walked a few blocks together. I noticed she seemed to be getting thinner. She also looked tired, but cheerful. It turned out she had been working very hard in school and was overly anxious to do well. "You wouldn't know about that yet," she said, "you're barely in the third grade."

"What grade are you in?" I asked.

"The umpteenth, feels like."

Umpteenth was our private code that meant something akin to forever or infinity.

"I'm coming over Saturday," she said. She had stopped and seemed serious and looked steadily at me without moving.

I said, "Oh. Okay!" and beamed at her. She kept looking at me in the same mysterious way. I didn't know why she wasn't saying anything. She seemed concerned, apprehensive.

"Well," she said after a minute and a short breath, "I am *supposed* to stay with you Saturday night, anyway."

I did not know what she was getting at or what was going on, or why she emphasized the word "supposed". I do remember the moment clearly. I became very tense; I felt suddenly distant from her and didn't know what was wrong.

She asked me pointedly, "Are we still friends, hon?"

"Sure we are," I said.

"I mean... are we still really, really friends?"

I blushed. "Your my own special, very only, very umpeenth-degree friend."

"And you're my special little man, hon," she said, but she wasn't smiling, except weakly, sympathetically.

We talked a little more, I don't remember what we said. She seemed absent minded. It was not until Saturday night that I discovered what she was thinking.

It was all quite complicated. At least, it was for Martha Jane. As an adult I now understand, but as a 9-year-old I could not fathom it. I viewed things more simplistically.

Next Saturday, Martha Jane and I sat and talked after she made dinner and after we cleaned the dishes. Then she studied on the sofa a while. She asked me a series of seemingly unrelated questions, none of which I remember. She was not as openly affectionate as usual and seemed remote, though not at all cold.

Our exchanges were brief and rather formal. She asked me about some uncles of mine who had not returned from the war, and she asked if I ever saw my Uncle Frank--my father's brother and one of the few male relatives in my family who had survived and returned home. I told her that Uncle Frank had not seen me since he finished his last hitch in the Air Corps and decided to come back to the States to go to college on the GI Bill. I told her about his getting wounded in a B-26 in the Pacific a few years ago and how he pulled up his pants leg and showed me the pink scars of the three healed bullet holes in his thigh.

She winced, making an "Ugh" face. She said firmly, "I don't want to hear about it. I've heard enough about the war."

So I didn't say any more. I sat on the floor watching her, trying to figure out how to get through to her.

Martha Jane announced, "My Uncle Joe died, you know."

"Yeah," I said, "Mama told me."

"He was sick for so long, from his war wounds. He lived longer than we thought he would, but... It was hard on Mother. That's two men the war took from her, her husband and her brother." She stared ahead pensively, then blinked awake. "Well. Enough of that."

I said earnestly from across the room, "I'm real sorry, Martha Jane."

She smiled. "Thank you, hon. I know you are. It'll be all right." She looked back at her book and began scribbling in her notepad.

For a long time--perhaps for most of the evening, it seems--she pored over her studies and remained unresponsive.

Later that night I felt she was still mourning, despite saying she would get over it. I had seen a whole neighborhood full of hurt, tragic people: widows, the disabled and the paralyzed, the shot-up and the abandoned of the War. I had seen my mom's sister, my young and plain looking Aunt Martha, when she came to our apartment once in the middle of the night, pounding on our front door and screaming for help until she woke us. My mom scrambled out of bed and I stood in the hallway watching from the bedroom as Mom opened the front door for Aunt Martha, who rushed sobbing into the living room and collapsed in a wailing heap on the sofa. Her husband had beaten her again. Mom and Aunt Martha tried to hide the bloody bruises from me, but I had already seen them on Aunt Martha's face and arms and I knew what the marks meant without being told. Seeing her, I wanted to cry and throw my arms around her--even though she was, unfortunately, one of those adults I didn't trust. She was even more grimly puritanical and prim than my Mom, and a fundamentalist who considered everything an occasion for sin of some kind. But I understood her pain, both physical and emotional, without having it explained to me.

That night occurred some years earlier, when I had just turned 6. The commotion woke up Martha Jane's family next door. She and her sister Evelyn came over in their robes and pajamas and Martha Jane went straight over to me because my mother panicked and was rasping, "Get Speedy out of here, get him out of here!" Martha Jane led me to the bedroom, where I looked up at her and whispered so the others wouldn't hear, "I already saw it."

She looked down at me. "You did what, hon?"

I repeated, looking back to make sure the others couldn't hear us, "I already saw it, Martha Jane. I saw what happened."

Martha Jane knelt down to me in her rumpled bathrobe and looked into my eyes with her warm, striking green ones. "Then," she said eyeing me seriously, "you understand what happened."

I nodded. Then I added, so the others wouldn't hear, "Uncle Bobby hurt her again."

We were alone in the room. I could still see in my mind the earlier glimpse of Aunt Martha's bloody lip and the dark bulging eye, and the blue-black smear on one of her arms. I started crying. I could not stop the tears from falling down my face, despite my attempts at remaining calm.

"Oh, honey," Martha Jane implored, "don't get scared and start crying, now."

"I'm not scared," I sniffled. "I know how Aunt Martha hurts. It makes me cry."

"You--" Her eyes looking into mine softened and seemed to turn to mush. "Oh, you sweet baby."

"Why does he do that to her?"

"I don't know, Speedy. But you are so sweet. So very sweet."

She closed the bedroom door, shutting us off from the sobbing and wailing in the living room, and put me back into bed. She told me it would all be okay in the morning and she understood my feelings. She sat on the bed and said I shouldn't feel bad about not being with the others and she really didn't want me to feel as though I were being "locked away" in the room. She said, "I'll stay in here with you for a while if you want, okay? So you won't be all by yourself?"

I told her, "It's okay if I stay in here, 'cause I know Aunt Martha. I know how she is. She doesn't want us staring at her, she feels all ugly and everything. I'll stay here so she won't feel ashamed. But... they don't have to yell at me. They're always hiding everything and acting like I won't understand."

"No, hon. They're just scared, that's all. They're upset." She stroked my head. She told me she would come back later and that she would tell my Aunt Martha about my concern for her. But I said, "No, don't tell her that."

"But why not? I know she'd appreciate it."

"I don't want you to."

"But, Speedy... honey, why not? What's wrong?"

"I don't... want... you... to."

"But why... ?"

"'Cause every time she sees me, she'll be embarrassed. She'll remember tonight. That's the way she is."

I don't know how long Martha Jane sat looking at me, stroking my hair, with that amazed look on her face. Finally she said, "I have to go in there and help. You sure you'll be all right?"

"Yes."

She sighed and rose and went to the door, but before going out she leaned inside and blew me a kiss. "You're my little man from now on, hon," she said, and closed the door.

That night had taken place some years before and was one of the very early incidents that had so endeared me to Martha Jane, and her to me. Now it was a few years later. And Martha Jane had become more than just a neighbor. More than a friend. And now I saw that she was the one who seemed hurt. Or, at best, worried about something.