# Peewee/Chapter 15

When the sound of the closing of the outer door reached them, Beman looked down at Peewee sharply.
"Well," he demanded, "what do you think of it?"
Peewee decided that Beman wanted to be congratulated upon his cleverness.
"We fooled them," he replied.
The old man was gazing at him queerly. "You don't believe it then?"
"What, sir?"
"That she was not your mother?"
Was Beman trying to fool Peewee, too, the boy wondered, or was he merely trying to find out whether Peewee was as smart as he himself was? So long a time had passed that Peewee had forgotten the doubts he had had when ​Helen Lampert had first told him he was her son.
"She told me," he answered conclusively.
Beman's manner changed to one of indecision such as Peewee never had seen in him before. He seemed about to speak and then quite as obviously changed his mind. Peewee admired Beman without having any confidence in him; the comprehension of one another which existed between them did not encourage trust on the part of either.
He did not know definitely why, after leaving the room and going part way down the hall, he turned around and came back noiselessly to look in at the door and see what the old man was doing.
Beman was standing by the table and had taken up the affidavit and was looking it through carefully and with an appearance of perplexity as though it was something which he found it hard to understand. He shook his big head; finally he locked the paper solicitously in the table drawer. Was it possible Beman himself believed the affidavit? His consideration ​of it, which seemed to indicate this, amazed Peewee.
Peewee had intended to leave the house at the first opportunity and go back to the streets. Now, as he went slowly up the stairs toward the room which they called his, he was not so certain he would do that. It was clear that if Beman believed the affidavit, there was nothing he could tell Mrs. Markyn.
Beman on the next day received several visitors. Peewee was not able to catch sight of all these people, and those whom he did see he did not recognize. Some other person was admitted on the afternoon of the second day. Peewee had not seen this person admitted, but in passing through the upper hall he heard voices. One of these was Beman's voice; the other, he was almost certain, was that of Jeffrey Markyn Third, his uncle. Peewee went excitedly part way down the stairs to listen. He had learned that the men of the Markyn family came to Beman's very seldom. It was almost certain, therefore, that if the man in the library was Jeffrey Markyn, Mrs. Walter Markyn was the ​subject of their conversation, Peewee reasoned. The door from the library into the hall was closed; the voices reached him circuitously through an adjoining room whose door was evidently open. But it was unmistakable now that the deeper and more readily distinguished voice, which spoke in answer to Beman's, was Jeffrey's. Peewee did not dare to remain listening on the stairs because of the servants who passed frequently through the hall below. He went on downstairs into the front room below and seated himself on the window sill behind the curtains. He would be thought by anyone who saw him there to be merely looking out at the window, and now he could hear the voices plainly.
"But Walter acknowledged the boy," Jeffrey was saying, incredulously.
Peewee in his interest strained to listen.
"He appears to have done that merely on the statement of the woman." This was Beman's strong old voice, slightly cracked with age.
"The woman," Peewee comprehended, could not be Mrs. Markyn; Beman would have called ​her "Marion." He was not yet certain who "the woman" might be.
"I've talked with the nurse"—Beman's voice was going on—"the one who was taking care of her when she died. Had her here yesterday and talked with her. The coroner's physician came here too—they'd already got an affidavit from him for me, and what he said bore out that statement completely."
It was plain, then, that "the woman" was Peewee's mother. He recalled suddenly the kind-faced nurse in her striped dress who had paced outside the bedroom door while his mother was talking with him, and had come in and freed him from the grasp of her thin, hot hands. He had almost forgotten the nurse.
"The nurse"—Beman was speaking still—"had figured out the circumstances as they must have been. There wasn't anybody she could state her conclusions to. The boy had disappeared and she didn't know Walter's name."
"She agrees with the coroner's man?"
"That's not the question. The statement of ​the coroner's man that the woman had never borne a child isn't controvertible."
Peewee clenched his small hands; this talk, he thought, was hard to understand.
"The nurse simply worked out an explanation of the circumstances. They don't class the case as exceptionally remarkable; it's just from their point of view, a drug addict case. The nurse's name is Sandsby; she's had a lot of experience and was called to attend this Helen Lampert a week before the woman died."
The hard words, Peewee realized, were fewer in this last; if they would use common words he could get at the meaning of their conversation.
"The nurse says the woman talked freely to her. Her talk wasn't always sane; she was an excessive drug user. The nurse says the woman talked continually about a boy. The nurse didn't get the impression from her at first that she believed the boy to be her son. All she told the nurse in the beginning was that she had employed a private police agency to look the boy up. It was after the agency had reported to her that she told the nurse the boy ​was her son who had been taken from her by the courts while he was still a baby. She had lost trace of him afterward, she said, through some confusion of the court records."
"That was what Walter said," was Jeffrey's reply.
"Because the woman told him that. The nurse didn't see the police agency report. She believes now, from some things the woman said to her at the time, that it stated no more than that the boy's parentage was unknown. The woman, the nurse says, had been deeply in love with Walter—that is, as she puts it, with the man who came there afterward. The nurse doesn't know any of the names, except that of the Lampert woman. I didn't tell her any of them, either. The woman never hoped to marry him, of couse. After the affair had been broken off, she left Chicago. The nurse thinks it was because she couldn't bear to stay where she was continually thinking she might see him. She lived in other cities. The life she was leading and the drugs she used finally broke her down and she returned to die here where her family ​lived. Coming back here of course revived her memories of her love affair. Besides that, she saw Walter one day on the street, without his noticing her. That was before the nurse went to her, but she told of it. The nurse's theory is that the woman had regretted, after Walter's breaking off with her, that she had not had a child, and the sight of him renewed that regret. She was getting weaker and less responsible mentally all the time. Later she saw this newsboy and was struck by his resemblance to Walter, and her drug-crazed brain, the nurse thinks, suggested all the rest."
Peewee twisted his small body on the windowsill, perplexed.
"Suggested what?" This was Jeffrey's voice.
"That he was the child whom she wishçd to have. The police report, which could give no other parents for the boy, did not contradict her hallucination. Subsequently her insanity supplied the circumstances necessary to account for her separation from him. That is the nurse's theory."
​Peewee shivered. He did not recall that when the woman, pressing her cracked and burning lips on his, had told him that he was her son, the feeling which she had given him was that she was "nuts." He had heard his father acknowledge the truth of what she said. Then other people had acknowledged it. He had forgotten his first impression in his conviction that it was so. But if he understood Beman correctly, they all had been merely "nuts."
Jeffrey was speaking.
"But you don't agree then with the nurse?"
"As to the woman's motives, you mean?" This was Beman. "It may have been that way, of course. On the other hand, it may have been revenge. When this Helen Lampert saw Walter she may have seen Marion too. The contrast between Marion and herself—poor, hard up and, she may have known, dying—must have been bitter for her. Afterward she saw the boy and noted the resemblance and learned that nothing was known about him. She may very well have felt that here was the chance for her to re​venge herself on Walter by claiming the boy as her son."
"That seems more probable."
"The woman's motive does not matter," Beman continued. "The nurse was there when the woman sent for her father and told him about the boy. She saw Walter, too, when he came there and the woman told him they had a son about whom she had never let him know, and she saw the boy afterward when he was brought there. There was no reason for the nurse, or for any of the others, to doubt the woman's story."
"Not even considering her insanity?"
"Her insanity was not evident, and the likeness appeared to confirm what she said. Have you seen the boy?"
"No."
"He looks exactly like Walter; you can't imagine two faces, feature for feature, more nearly the same."
"Good God! There can't have been still some other woman in Walter's life besides this one and Marion?"
​Peewee stood up, shrinking anxiously.
"You don't understand. I'm not thinking about Walter or Marion now. I'm thinking about Edith." This was Beman.
"Edith! Great heavens! You don't suppose—"
There was silence in the library; for the moment nothing more followed this astonished exclamation, and Peewee was no longer listening to conversation which had already given him more than he could easily understand. The chief fact of this was clear: Helen Lampert had been merely "nuts" or had been lying. It followed that the man who, on the evidence of what she had told him, had admitted his parentage of Peewee was not his father.
He perceived, as he comprehended this, the extent of the mistake resulting from what the woman had said. It had made Walter Markyn give the Lamperts money to keep them quiet about Peewee; it had made Mrs. Markyn unhappy and anxious; it had caused anxiety to Jeffrey Markyn and to Beman. That fierce old man—who, Peewee had learned, took revenge ​upon whoever deceived him—had, under his misapprehension, taken him into his own house and given him new clothes and had him cared for. Now that the deceit of this was known to them, what would they do to the boy who had made them suffer so unnecessarily?
He noted with uneasiness that the silence caused by what had been last said in the library continued. If they were through talking and were to come out, they might see through the curtains against the light. He ran out of the room into the hall, and backed watchfully up the stairs, eyeing the library door until he could no longer see it. He listened, as he continued to back through the upper hall. This brought him to another stairhead, whose winding steps led down to the servants' quarters. Someone was undoubtedly moving in the front hall; it might or might not be merely a servant; he thought the person was beginning to come upstairs. He dashed precipitately down the servants' stair, out at the rear door, across the court and through the passageway between the buildings opposite. He sped down Astor Street to the ​first cross street and doubled back to the Lake Shore Drive. No one had come out at the front door; no one, so far as the evidence of the cross street went, appeared to have followed him from the rear. He walked away, still gazing back at the house.
His chief reason for staying at Beman's had been that he could expect to see Mrs. Markyn. There had been good food there too, and a nice place to sleep. But except for these things he had no very definite personal feeling over what he had heard. He had resented his relationship to Walter Markyn, because it interfered between him and Walter's wife. Wouldn't he ever see her any more? She would not, he thought, have the same anger against him as the others; perhaps he could wait where she took her walk, and she would talk with him, and perhaps kiss him, without feeling that he had to have anyone to take care of him.
He had in his pocket the five dollar bill which she had given him. He found a small store in which only a woman was waiting upon customers and got her to change it. The paper ​money he wrapped in a piece of newspaper, making a careless looking package, and the silver he put in his trousers' pocket. He was beginning to think eagerly about the "loop." Were the boys there whom he had known before? Which of them had been sent to institutions and schools, and which had managed to avoid the authorities?
He followed the alleys south to the river and crossed Wells Street bridge. A clock on a corner told him that it was four o'clock; he had no reason therefore to fear truant officers or police within the "loop." The roar of uninterrupted traffic and sidewalks so crowded that he had to dodge between the legs of pedestrians filled him with delight. He went south to where the wagonmen were delivering the boys their papers and stood watching. He was not, he realized, fitly dressed for business while in the clothes which Walter Markyn had given him. He noted behind a truck in the mouth of the alley a boy absorbedly counting pennies, who was about his own size and dressed in comfortable old clothes with holes at the elbows and the ​knees; and he went guardedly up to face him.
"Trade you clothes," he offered.
The boy surveyed him in astonishment. "What's the big idea, kid?" he inquired. "Gone dippy?"
"No, I ain't."
The boy felt of Peewee's clothes incredulously. "You ain't game," he urged.
They exchanged clothes behind the truck, and the other boy seizing the coat without waiting to put it on, dashed swiftly away down the alley, apprehensive that some authority might interfere with the exchange. Peewee went to the wagonman and got his papers. The sensation of clothes which someone else already had worn gave him a feeling of liberty which he had not enjoyed since his incarceration on the farm. He felt himself—without analyzing this feeling—a part of the city again, as the sparrows were a part. Nobody except small boys paid any heed to the sparrows, and nobody except boys would pay any heed to him.