The hope was short lived. When Celia pressed the bell marked “Janitor” at the bottom of a short flight of steps at the rear of the ground-floor passage, there was the sound of a sharp slap and a child’s tears, and then the door was opened by a harassed-looking young girl who looked at Celia standing there in her cinnamon coat and said ingratiatingly, “It’s my chest again, Miss. Ma said I should stay home from school until my cough is better.”
She looked again, and her eyes widened uncertainly. She said in a tentative voice, “Celia?”
Her sister Lena. Seven when Celia had seen her last, now promoted to minding a small niece while the mother went out to work, and, from the ironing board and heaped basket behind her, earning her own keep as well. Celia’s tiny flash of pity was swallowed up in a cold revulsion: when you stepped into quicksand, it was keeping your own head above the surface that mattered.
When it became apparent that there was no one else at home or apt to arrive immediately, Celia accepted a cup of tea and inquired matter-of-factly about her parents. Her father was dead, Lena said—pneumonia, last year—and her mother had a kitchen job at Handel’s Bakery. Joseph had taken over the janitorial duties at this and the next building which gave them the apartment rent-free. Rose, the next youngest to Celia and evidently, from Lena’s perfunctory nod, the mother of the child who had given up wailing in favor of staring, was working in a motel.
Celia wasn’t really interested, but she heard Lena out before she asked casually, “What about Stan? Is he keeping out of trouble?”
Because Stan was her lever—and from the flash of alarm in Lena’s eyes, plus the fact that she hadn’t mentioned her brother, the lever would work. Although Celia was not aware of it, many large families had a Stan, a kind of professional black sheep about whom, no matter how undeservedly and thanklessly, protection closes as firmly as covered wagons forming a circle against Indians. At fifteen, Stan had been put on probation by a juvenile court for stealing car accessories; from what Celia remembered of him he would by now have discovered some far more sophisticated ploy.
“Stan’s fine,” said Lena with anxious emphasis, and hastened off the subject with the baldness of thirteen. “What are you doing, Celia? You look good.”
The tone more than the words brought Celia aware of something she hadn’t taken sufficient notice of in her absorption of leading up to Stan. From the outset, her sister had been regarding her with wonder and admiration, taking a close index of the good perfume, the gloves laid down with the handbag, the smoothly wound hair which wasn’t, in accordance with neighborhood custom, peroxided or laquered or tormented into a great hump. Lena was, in fact, giving her the wistfully devouring attention she might have accorded a picture in a movie magazine—and mightn’t this be put to use?
Celia didn’t answer her directly. Instead, with the pensive air she had used to threaten Mr. Tomlinson, she said, “I think you’re old enough to trust, Lena.”
Lena looked at once sly and important, and the child on the cot began to suck its thumb in a captivated fashion. Even a cockroach came out to listen.
“Where I work, there’s a man whose wife is out to make trouble for me,” said Celia, improvising rapidly and leaving Lena’s thirteen-year-old imagination to make what it could of this nebulous statement. “What she’d really like to do is take me to court, so I have to go away for a while.” At the word “court” a whole procession of faceless people whom Celia’s family feared with a blind instinctive fervor seemed to clump through the room—truant officers, welfare workers, probation authorities, policemen.
“She might have private detectives come here. A woman, even,” said Celia, “and if they couldn’t find me they’d make whatever trouble they could for the rest of you. Especially Stan.” This shot was accurate; Lena paled. “So the only safe thing, and you’d better tell Mother and the others, is to say that they’ve got the wrong address and you never heard of me. Have you got that straight?” The cockroach scuttled away, having found nothing with its waving feelers, the spellbound child began to fall asleep around its thumb. Lena said transfixedly, “Yes, okay, gosh, I’m glad you warned us. Don’t worry,” she said kindly at a sudden sharp turn of her sister’s head, “it’s only a rat. Where will you go, when you go away?”
For Celia had stood, mission accomplished, unable to bear this miasma a moment longer. “California,” she said crisply, buttoning her coat. “If I get a job there you’ll hear from me.”
It occurred to her that it might be prudent to seal this pact—if pact it was; everything depended on the depth of the communal fear for, or possibly of, Stan. Even at sixteen his temper had been something to reckon with. Celia suggested that Lena must have a birthday coming up soon, tendered a five-dollar bill, and left. A battered skateboard in the hall was the only menace she encountered between there and the station, but it was not until the train was moving that she allowed herself to believe that she had accomplished a final, scissoring snip.
She half-expected to be asked for a sleeping pill again that night, but although she woke
