The Bobby-Soxer by Hortense Calisher Read Free Book Online

that a light on over at Evamses’?”
    Now—we knew our next door neighbors’ routine as we did the seasons, or our own worn decks of cards. One bulb on the porch, on a time set, night after night. The same in the basement and attic, when they were away. Lamps downstairs twice a week for the classes, with intervals when they practiced their pupils in the dark. I was a day scholar, and it was often dim there—thin gray shadow in winter and lustered shade in summer, but I never told them so.
    “Shouldn’t there be?” my father said. “I forget. Though in Rio—all that noise, all that light—I sometimes thought of them. Their calm.”
    The two Evamses, who had met at a school for the blind and had been married from it, were the most equable people we knew. Mr. Evams had once been sighted, she never. Because of known genes, they had refrained from having children. Mr. Evams was in real estate, and went over a property so relentlessly before selling it that people were eager to buy from him. She worked in his office. But their real business was being blind.
    “Not upstairs, there shouldn’t be,” my mother said. “They never have a light there. But at this hour, maybe it’s only a reflection. I hate to interrupt.”
    “They would know what they look like,” my father said. “I suppose?” As well as we do, I thought. Their dark as well as their light.
    Their eyes were well formed, if a little sunken, hers under a formidable ridge of bone that a fringe of brown hair made doll-like. Their profiles, both delicately blunted, resembled. Moving as a couple, they had less of that angelic intentness which so often signifies the lone sightless person. Though they loved the theater—the smell and rustle of a top theater crowd was like a good wine, he said—they did not otherwise particularly hunt organized sound, nowadays seldom playing their records. The radio kept them clocked and informed, but was not constant. They enjoyed ordinary noise, they said, and the varying silences in between, which they now and then absentmindedly named to one another as one might classify cloth.
    “The downstairs should be dark too except for the porch,” I said. “They have no classes tonight.”
    After the teaching, mostly to young persons who would themselves teach, their great preoccupation was reading, for which they had a huge library, in a house otherwise too large for them. They hated the talking-books provided people like them. Their four hands passing over the braille were like a duet, and they kept the little rulers for reading it always in a pocket. The nicest thing you could do for them, an act of friendship, was to let their fingers interpret your face, and discreetly your body, for which they divided the sexes, exchanging chirps like tailors. “Our vice,” Mr. Evams would say, “is touch.”
    “Maybe Brenda’s been. And left the light on up there,” my mother said.
    Brenda was their daily, though the Evamses could have afforded a live-in maid.
    “They always check, entering and leaving a room,” I said. “At least when people are there.” For they often gave parties, and at Christmas had a tree like other people, and even house guests. Other times, they lived in their comfortable dark. Mrs. Evams even claimed she could feel the presence of electric light on her skin.
    “They said they would be grateful if warned.”
    We knew what my mother was thinking of: old porch conversations. The town had intruders now, like everywhere else.
    “We better go check.” My father included us. We followed him.
    Our staircase landing, a high-windowed bay broad enough to hold a table, two easy chairs and the seven-foot draecena my mother never forgot to water, was our pride. A glass-helmeted light hung on a chain from the second-floor ceiling, hideous with red and yellow bezels but shining on a space always neat and poised. Quarrels paused on the landing; ideas began.
    Darkness had fallen. The bedroom across the garden was