Ceremony of the Innocent Read Free Page A

nameless distress. Soon there would be imprisoning houses here, shutting off the mountains, walls and roofs and chimneys desecrating her little world.
    As she stood at the edge of the street gutter, her newly restless foot scraped against a page or two of a book. She looked down at the pages and eagerly bent to seize them. But they were stained brown by some disgusting liquid, and only a line here and there was visible. She read: ‘Tope.” There was but a fragment of a poem and she read it:

    “Where every prospect pleases
    And only man is vile.”

    A profound melancholy came to her, as usual wordless and charged only with emotion. “But, it is true,” she whispered to herself, and was startled at the new and disquieting thought. Again, she felt guilt, and shame, but why she did not know. She tucked the stained page down her neck, then ran on, though less exuberantly than before. She only vaguely understood that each day brought a new knowledge that made her briefly miserable. However, she was very young and soon she was skipping again. She remembered the daisies and their mysterious dream of hope, for herself alone.
    She entered a street of little crowded houses, all bleakly illuminated by the sun and showing unkempt lawns and broken picket fences and falling porches. Here there were more people than on the long street, howling and jumping children, screaming and frowzy adults, cracked pavements, decaying paint, and scruffy steps. Above all, here, the phonographs ground away with the latest obnoxious songs. Men in dirty overalls sat on wooden stairs and drank beer. Ellen ran swiftly, and was followed, as customarily, by hoots and whistles. A sense of shyness and degradation almost overwhelmed her and she felt dirty and exposed. A dusty tree, dying for lack of water, spiraled down a dry yellow leaf on her head and she brushed it away. She had begun to sweat; her face was reddened both by mortification and by heat. Then she thought, as always: It is because I am so ugly and so big and don’t look like other people, so I must forgive these men and children and women.
    She ran on more quickly, anxious to outrun the derision and hostility. Love and trust, the Reverend Beale had admonished. I am very wicked, she thought. It is all my fault—someway. I should love and trust; that is all there is.
    She came to the very smallest house on the street, which contained only four diminished rooms, with an outhouse in the rear. However, Aunt May kept it clean and neat, an anachronism among its neighbors. The windows were polished, though most of them had no curtains. The grass was scythed, the little yard bare of everything but yellowing turf. A careful sign hung in the one front window: “Dressmaking and Alterations. Household Help.” Ellen ran to the one door, on the side. Aunt May had painted it pink against the gray clapboard wall. Ellen opened the door and went into the dark little kitchen, which smelled of cabbage, boiling potatoes, and spareribs. Ellen was delighted again. Spareribs was her favorite dish, and one cooked only on Sundays or other holidays. Her foot caught on the seam of the torn linoleum, and an exasperated thin voice said, “Why don’t you pick up your feet, Ellen? You are so clumsy. And you’re late. You know I have to go to the Mayor’s house at two o’clock because he has company, his brother and nephew from Scranton. Go wash. Your face is all red and wet. Dear me, what a provoking girl you are. Your hair is all messed up, too.”
    “I’m sorry,” said Ellen in her resonant voice. She was always “so sorry,” so always, recently, overcome with guilt. She went to the pump and threw cold water over her face and tried to smooth down her rioting hair. She looked into the crackled mirror over the tin sink and her face and hair filled it with color and vitality, and she sighed. Why could she not look like Amelia Beale, the prettiest girl in town?
    “What did that fool of a Reverend talk about