Death In The Family, A - James Agee [111]
“You be good,” she said, smiling and looking at them in turn. “I’ll be down in a little while.”
“Come on, Catherine,” Rufus said.
“I’m coming,” Catherine replied, looking at him as if he had spoken of her unjustly.
“Mama”; Rufus stopped near the door. Catherine hesitated, bewildered.
“Yes, Rufus?”
“Are we orphans, now?”
“Orphans?”
“Like the Belgians,” he informed her. “French. When you haven’t got any daddy or mamma because they’re killed in the war you’re an orphan and other children send you things and write you letters.”
She must have been unfamiliar with the word, for she seemed to have to think very hard before she answered. Then she said, “Of course you’re not orphans, Rufus, and I don’t want you going around saying that you are. Do you hear me? Because it isn’t so. Orphans haven’t got either a father or a mother, you see, and nobody to take care of them or love them. You see? That’s why other children send things. But you both have your mother. So you aren’t orphans. Do you see? Do you?” He nodded; Catherine nodded because he did. “And Rufus.” She looked at him very searchingly; without quite knowing why, he felt he had been discovered in a discreditable secret. “Don’t be sorry you’re not an orphan. You be thankful. Orphans sound lucky to you because they’re far away and everyone talks about them now. But they’re very, very unhappy little children. Because nobody loves them. Do you understand?”
He nodded, ashamed of himself and secretly disappointed.
“Now run along,” she said. They left the room. Aunt Hannah met them on the stairs. “Go into the liv—sitting room for a while like good children,” she said. “I’ll be right down.” And as they reached the bottom of the stairs they heard their mother’s door open and close. They sat, looking at their father’s chair, thinking.
Catherine felt more virtuous and less troubled than she had for some time, for she had watched Rufus being scolded, all to himself, and it more than wiped out her unhappiness at his telling her to come along when of course she was coming and he had no right even if she wasn’t. But she couldn’t see how anyone could look as if they were asleep and not wake up, and something else her mother had said—she tried hard to remember what it was—troubled her more deeply than that. And what was a norphan?
Rufus felt that his mother was seriously displeased with him. It was the wrong time to ask her. Maybe he ought not to have asked her at all. But he did want to know. He had not been sure whether or not he was an orphan, or the right kind of orphans. If he claimed he was an orphan in school and it turned out that he was not, people would all laugh at him. But if he really was an orphan he wanted to know, so he would be able to say he was, and get the benefit. What was the good of being an orphan if nobody else knew it? Well, so he was not an orphan. Yet his father was dead. Not his mother, too, though. Only his father. But one was dead. One and one makes two. One-half of two equals one. He was half an orphan, no matter what his mother said. And he had a sister who was half an orphan too. Half and half equals a whole. Together they made a whole orphan. He felt that it was not worth mentioning, that he was half an orphan, although he privately considered it a good deal better than nothing; and that also, he would not volunteer the fact that he and his sister together made a whole orphan. But if anyone teased either of them about not being an orphan at all, then he would certainly speak of that. He decided that Catherine should be warned of this, so that if they