The Girl in the Window
by Jack H. Simons
I suppose the girl’s picture decorates some mantel somewhere. Her parents long dead. She died before Christmas 1949, an only child, living in a house without visitors as far as I could tell — there cannot be too many who would even remember her brief life. I remember, and I didn’t even know her name. I called her ‘the girl in the window,’ and she called me ‘boy.’
In 1948 my grandfather built a house at the unpaved end of Morningside Drive in Fort Worth, Texas. He used concrete block and two-by-fours to build a house that measured 40 by 60 feet. Grandfather built his ideal of a West Texas ranch house — one story, three bedrooms, a hardwood floor in the front room, and a low-angle gable roof that extended over a northern-facing front porch. Four Doric pillars joined by three elliptical arches supported the porch roof. There the family would sit and talk in the cool of a summer evening.
Grandfather worked on the house on the weekends and evenings after work with the assistance of his two sons, Sam and DB. Whoever laid the cinder block lacked skill, but a heavy overlay of white paint gives it a crude beauty today. Two doors allowed entry into the house: the front door, and the kitchen door on the east side. The front room/dining room occupied the northeast quadrant, the kitchen behind the dining room, a bedroom behind that. Bedrooms occupied the two other corners of the house.
Professional builders began a house in the lot next door some time after Grandfather. The professionals worked faster, so both houses finished about the same time. Where the houses stood near, across from the kitchen door, the new house presented a solid wall but for one large window near its front corner.
I visited my grandparents summer and Christmas. Grandmother’s kitchen contained a small range, refrigerator, and a sink surrounded by minimal cupboards. She ironed in the kitchen with two heavy, cast iron flat irons that she had to heat on the stovetop. I watched as she attacked a starched white shirt, slamming the hot iron onto the fabric, making a great thumping noise on the ironing board.
When I came into the kitchen in the evening, Grandmother talked to me about heaven. She would ask: “Don’t you want to go to heaven?” I would say yes, but suffered some credulity concerning the nature of the place. Death meant little to me. It remained an abstract concept that a four-year-old boy accepted much like an undergraduate might accept a proposition from Wittgenstein.
Grandmother described eternal bliss, the streets of gold. She read the Bible to me: Revelation 21:19-21: “And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald; The fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolite; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, a topaz; the tenth, a chrysoprasus; the eleventh, a jacinth; the twelfth, an amethyst. And the twelve gates were twelve pearls; every several gate was of one pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass.”
“Do you suppose those jewels just lie about?”
“I am sure,” Grandmother said.
I found the idea of streets of gold and the possibility of jewels scattered about heaven’s earth exciting. I don’t know why the matter of stacking up rubies, and emeralds, and pearls appealed to me so. I had just seen the Bud Abbott and Lou Costello movie Africa Screams, and the sight of Lou finding huge diamonds on the jungle floor probably incited my lust for jewels.
Christ, the Bible, the saving of souls were the most common topics of conversation with my grandparents. They sang in plaintive melodies, as my Aunt Tie played on the piano, “I come to the garden alone,” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” One night I noticed that the moon shining through the screen kitchen door refracted to form a perfect white cross.
I commented on the cross while Grandmother ironed, and she took the opportunity to tell me more about Jesus and salvation, and eternity. It all sounded wonderful, but I really wanted to take my shovel to the ground to look for jewels.
In the daytime I banged in and out of the kitchen screen door to play. One day a girl’s voice addressed me through the side window of the house next door.
“Hey, Boy.”
I stopped. “Hello,” I said.
“I’ve seen you playing,” she said.
“I’m visiting my grandparents.”
“I know,” she said.
“I’ve never seen you,” I said.
“No. I am sick.”
She appeared like a pale ghost behind the fine-mesh screen. She seemed tall, thin, and dressed for Sunday School. Her hair stopped at the middle of her ear. She spoke with a little girl’s soft voice. I stood outside wearing my summer uniform of shorts without a shirt or shoes, my hair bleached white, and my body burned brown by the hot sun. The soles of my feet were as hard as animal horn, because I had gone barefoot since April.
I watched her struggle for a breath. An inhaler in her left hand went to her mouth. She wanted to talk about life, and must have waited by the window to see me, because any time I slammed out of the side screen door, she would call.
“I used to play outside,” she said. Then she coughed a little, which she did in all our conversations.
“Do you go to school?”
“No,” I said.
“I like school.”
“Do you go?”
“No. I got sick. I have to stay in the house, now.”
“Why?”
“I have asthma.” She coughed. The inhaler went to her mouth.
“Does that thing help?”
“Sometimes.” She coughed again.
An August sun hammered my head through thin, scudding white clouds.
“You can’t come outside?” I said.
“I can’t breathe,” she said.
“Oh.”
“I go out to see the doctor.”
“Oh.”
“But he comes here most of the time.”
That silenced me.
“You could stay and talk.”
I stayed. She touched the screen with her fingertip.
“The screen is extra fine to keep the dust out.”
She took her finger away.
“You run all the time when you play outside.”
“I guess.”
“I would like to play outside.”
And that describes the way of our talks. When I ran between the houses, she would summon me with “Hey, Boy.” I would stand below her window and stare into her saddened, pale face, and I would stay awhile and she would speak — sing almost — a melancholy threnody without accompanying instruments.
At the end of August I told her: “I’m going back to Norman.”
She didn’t say much, but “Oh.”
“I’ve enjoyed our talks.”
“I have too,” she said.
“Well, goodbye.”
“Goodbye.” She coughed, and the inhaler went to her mouth.
Norman erased my mind of the girl in the window. Football season came, and our family had season tickets. A fog covered the field when we played Nebraska in November. I clearly remember the back of a tall Nebraska lineman wearing a dirty white uniform — and seeing him across the wet grass in the fog. Nebraska lost 41 to 14.
At Christmas we took the Texas Chief to Fort Worth. I played as usual, wearing shoes now because it was winter, banging in and out of the house as usual, living inside my own pleasant universe. A disturbance slowly built up in me as I passed the shut window again and again without hearing a voice or seeing a ghost.
I asked Grandmother: “Where is the girl next door?”
She hesitated a moment, and said in a sad voice: “She died in October.”
“What happened?”
“The poor thing couldn’t breathe. An ambulance came. It didn’t do any good.”
“Oh,” I said.
The news slowed me. I felt a loss that I didn’t understand, but it went away. I ran into the front room to look at the gifts under the Christmas tree.
Header image by Pink Sherbet Photography used under this Creative Commons license
