Ruby & Roland

by Faith Sullivan

  When most of the gathered had finished their meals and were nibbling almond cookies, a friend of the professor’s, a young biology instructor, stood in the aisle between the booths and began playing carols on a viola. One after another, his audience started to sing along.

  Whether rye-induced or prompted by a song’s sentiment, more than one eye grew misty as the afternoon wore on. Misty eyes notwithstanding, for me, this was the jolliest Christmas since St. Nicholas had left a china doll with fur-trimmed coat under the tree.

  Before the professor settled our bill, we exchanged gifts: from him, I received a gold-famed cameo. “It looks like your mother,” he said.

  Each week of the new year, I expected to hear that Aunt had died, yet she clung on. Finally, on a particularly dark and bitter Saturday afternoon in late January, Professor Cromwell showed up at the rooming house. Mrs. Lander rang the little bell and called up the dumbwaiter, “Yoohoo, Ruby,” but not in her usual cheerful voice.

  When I came downstairs, Professor Cromwell was sitting in the parlor with Mrs. Lander, their faces grave. Mrs. Lander spoke first. “Professor Cromwell has unhappy news, Ruby. I’ll leave him to tell you.”

  “Your great-aunt has died,” he said, “and her lawyer contacted me, thinking I might know how to locate you.”

  “Why me?”

  “I don’t know. He said he’d be in touch. In any case, the funeral is Wednesday at the Church of the Covenant. Ten a.m. I thought I’d attend. I’ll come for you.”

  In my room, I paced, pursued by Aunt Bertha: admonishing me to keep my feet off the furniture, sit up straight, stop chewing my cuticles, stop whistling, stop touching the lace curtains, stop humming, and stop being five years old, or six, or seven.

  But no. That was behind us, surely. I had listened. It was over. Serena was vindicated. She had tried her best.

  • • •

  Once Serena told me that the summer after she graduated from high school, her own mother had drowned when a ferry boat sank on Lake Erie. Her mother had been visiting a friend in Cleveland. At first, Serena’s father seemed to cope, she said, and life went on. But as weeks passed, he blamed himself for not accompanying his wife. He lost weight and grew forgetful. He stopped shaving or going to church.

  Serena was away at school. Aunt Bertha came to look after Hiram—but instead of looking after him, she aggravated him, and he grew worse. He began wandering away. Eventually he “fell” from the top of a building in downtown Columbus. Serena never suggested that Aunt had driven him to it, but she did tell me, “Aunt should have been more respectful of his grief.”

  Of Denton’s family I knew nothing. He’d been raised by relatives when his parents were carried off by … good God, I couldn’t recall what. Taken in toto, we were an ill-favored family.

  Never, since Serena and Denton’s funeral, had I felt so alone. But why now? I didn’t mourn Aunt. Still, I did want to be part of a family, and we could have been one, if she’d chosen. We could have been a foundation to stand on. So I went to her funeral and I mourned for the family we hadn’t had.

  In the vestibule afterward, a gentleman in a serious blue suit approached us. “Professor Cromwell,” he said, extending a hand and nodding in my direction, “is this Ruby Drake?”

  “It is.”

  “Miss Drake, I wonder if you’d pay me a call … you work at the university, I understand … say, Saturday afternoon?” He handed me a business card.

  Nonplussed, I took it.

  “It’s about Miss Bertha Berryman’s—that is, your great-aunt’s—little estate,” he explained.

  Late that Saturday afternoon, I sat in Mrs. Bullfinch’s parlor. “He says my great-aunt left me her house and a bit of money.” Accepting a glass of bad red wine, I told her, “The rest of her money went to Beatrice, the woman who took care of her, and to the Church of the Covenant. I don’t know what to make of her leaving me anything at all.”

  Mrs. Bullfinch clasped her hands in a flutter. “First of all, I’m thrilled,” she said. “Second of all, I suspect that the professor had a finger in this pie.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He used to call on your aunt, as I’m sure you know. He’s a kind man and lonely. Plus he thinks the world of you. He probably praised you to your aunt, and maybe she had second thoughts about the way she treated you and your darling mother.”

  I couldn’t buy that. “I don’t know,” I said, “that’s very Pollyanna.” I paused; perhaps Mrs. Bullfinch was a fan of Eleanor H. Porter’s novel. “What I mean is, it doesn’t fit the Aunt Bertha I knew.”

  Mrs. Bullfinch sipped her wine slowly and, adopting a philosophical tone, said, “People change.”

  She set her glass down and leaned in. “I remember how Eugene—Mr. Bullfinch—got religion toward the end. He’d always been a holiday Christian, and now here he was wanting to say the rosary every night. The rosary! We weren’t even Catholic.” She shook her head in wonderment. “People can change when they get worried about their souls.”

  All this made me qualmish. “I’m not sure it’s right to take advantage of that.”

  “Take advantage of what?”

  “Of people growing weak and vulnerable toward the end. It seems unethical.”

  “Oh, Ruby, now you’re being silly.” She took a quick gulp of wine. “If a person feels remorse for unkindness, shouldn’t we honor that remorse?”

  Now and then, Mrs. Bullfinch said something quite intelligent, even if it was misplaced. If Aunt had truly had a rational reason for including me in her will, it was this: I had listened.

  I was not to take legal possession of the house and belongings till the middle of April. For this I was grateful. I had feelings to sort out and plans to make. Besides, mid-April would mean the dogwood and forsythia would be in bloom—and lilacs, too, perhaps?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  And indeed, everything was in bloom. Yet, despite the professor observing, “This is the adventure you’ve needed,” I was unsure.

  For one thing, I didn’t quite believe the inheritance. I half-expected that someone had made a whopping mistake, and that the house would end up with the Church of the Covenant.

  For another thing, saying goodbye to Mrs. Lander was more difficult than expected. I’d grown fond of my landlady over the last six months. Though I was only moving a few blocks away, she clung to my hand as if I were sailing to the Sandwich Islands.

  “You must promise to stop by often,” she said, fussing with a loose strand of hair. Her melting blue eyes said she was happy for me; inheriting a house and a bit of money was an outcome nearly as sunny as seeing me married to a good prospect.

  The actual moving of my worldly goods from 557 Chestnut to 864 Beech was half an hour’s work. The lawyer had said I could air the rooms and do some cleaning a week before the move, so when Professor Cromwell carried in my trunk and bags, the house was ready. Well, temporarily. I planned many small changes.

  “Do you want this at the foot of the bed?” The professor stood in the front hall holding the trunk.

  “Yes,” I said and led the way up the stairs. I’d chosen the big front bedroom, with the bay window overlooking the street. I wasn’t bothered that she had died in the room; I wasn’t superstitious in that way, and the electrified streetlights pleased me. I wanted to look out at the night and see them shining like so many moons lined up just for me.

  This house was nearly as large as Mrs. Lander’s, too large for one person. I had already talked to Annie Farrell at the college about moving in, and I would need one or two roomers in order to afford the place. As a single woman of property and responsibilities, I had to consider such matters. The money from Aunt would only keep things going for a year or two.

  After returning to the house from Ming Ho’s that evening, the professor glanced at the windows. “How do you feel about the lace curtains?”

  “What an odd question.”

  “I know you had unhappy memories of them.”

  I
smiled. “I’m thinking about voile.” He laughed. He really was a comfortable and pleasant man. And when Annie moved in, he and she would often be thrown together.

  “He’s in love with you,” Mrs. Bullfinch had recently assured me.

  “You’re wrong,” I’d said. “He was in love with Serena. I remind him of her. What he feels for me is just a reflection of that love.” She looked unconvinced—but, frankly, I didn’t consider her the best judge of matters romantic.

  Later, as the professor was leaving, he took my hand. “I see happy days ahead for you.” He bussed my cheek. “I hope I’ll be a part of that.” Well, of course he would be; we were good friends.

  After I saw him out the door, I went to the kitchen pantry and found a hammer and a jar of nails. I ran up the stairs and flung open the trunk to retrieve the painting of the cowherd: Darling Roland, you will live beside me all my life.

  The photo of Serena and Denton went on the bedside table. Next, I removed the tea set from the trunk and carried it downstairs to its new home in the parlor. I cleared the low table by the front window, straightened the doily, and laid out the pieces of china beneath a lamp with a stained glass shade. How it all sparkled. Oh, Serena, if only you could see. And one day, in Aunt’s backyard, there will be a gazebo. Correction: in my backyard.

  Even during the first days when I wasn’t entirely convinced it was mine, I was like a child arranging and rearranging doll house furniture. I did pull down the lace curtains on the first floor, replacing them with ivory voile. I could do nothing about the like-new brown velour parlor suite, since Aunt had rarely used the parlor. But, at a Catholic church bazaar, I found a couple of pillows with burnt-velvet covers in shades of brown and a soft moss green. They mitigated the elephantine sofa.

  The biggest change, however, was in scraping off Aunt’s dark red wallpaper in the parlor and dining room. The pattern of large, unidentifiable blooms and vines was not merely ugly, it was minatory, menacing. A constant reminder of Aunt Bertha.

  I had no knowledge of wallpapering, but when I’d finished removing the old, scooping it up in armfuls and carrying it to a barrel in the backyard to be burned, I hired a woman from the neighborhood recommended by Mrs. Bullfinch. Mrs. Heidebrink accompanied me to the paint store to choose new wallpaper, and we returned home with a refined pattern of pale green stripes on ivory. Two days later, the parlor and dining room were bright and fresh.

  In the big bedroom, the sepia wallpaper with tortured limbs gave way to yellow tulips in beribboned bouquets. Aunt’s ghost did not haunt my bedroom or my house, even if she did sometimes hector my mind.

  864 Beech was gradually becoming entirely mine. Mine and Roland’s. Everything I did, I did for Roland. Every room I walked through, I walked through with him: imagining him repairing the screen door on the back porch; eating fried chicken, sitting at the kitchen table; digging up crocus bulbs; and, later, making love in the front bedroom, the giant moon in the sky and the smaller ones on the street limning our bodies in the darkness.

  Emma wrote, “On account of the war and demand for crops, Roland is paying off his farm debts. He even bought a tractor. But he’s working too hard.

  “Anyway, he’s glad to be getting out from under. I have to say tho that some of the spunk’s gone out of him. Do not blame yourself, little girl. You did what you had to do. Some things that are meant to be can never be. You know that.”

  If Annie Farrell hadn’t brought home a prospective roomer that evening, a young woman named Delia McDuff, who worked in the dean’s office, I would have blubbered for hours. “Some of the spunk’s gone out of him.” What exactly did that mean? For the first time in weeks, I dreamed of the wild dog.

  Annie moved in on the first of June, taking the back bedroom overlooking the garden. For all her faults, Aunt had kept the yard attractive, with azaleas, mock orange, peonies, and lilacs that were grown to small trees. Along the west fence lay a plot that must once have been a kitchen garden. I would plant carrots and beans and a few other vegetables there.

  Beside the house, to the east, a gravel drive led to the little barn where a horse and buggy were no longer kept. The walls inside held garden tools and, above the stairs, a hay mow housed a jumble of cast-offs. Investigating, I found a standing birdcage; a couple of mismatched dining chairs; unaccountably, a cradle; a wardrobe trunk; also unaccountably a dusty bisque doll of German manufacture; and a long, narrow mahogany table, suitable for the front hall.

  On the first of July, Delia moved in, selecting the bedroom next to Annie’s. Only one bedroom remained vacant, and I decided to leave it that way for the moment.

  From the built-in dining room buffet, I chose a silver tray of Aunt’s, placing it on the hall table, à la Mrs. Lander. “For incoming and outgoing mail,” I told Annie and Delia.

  And then another letter from Dora arrived. “Ruby, you can’t imagine how hard we are working. I told Roland a while back that I want a baby, but he said not now, now we have to work, we have to pay off the debts. And we are paying them off. By this time next year, we’ll own everything free and clear. It’s a weight off Roland’s mind, and off mine, too, I suppose.

  “You say you have a well behind the house. Just like us! Only you have running water in the kitchen instead of a pump. That is so GRAND. And a real bathroom with running water! It takes my breath away.

  “Emma is good to me. Almost like having a mother. But I still miss you. You are my sister. If we weren’t working so hard here, I’d come visit. I could help you water the garden.

  “I have to bring the clothes in off the line now and start supper. I’m sending you love. This afternoon I carried sandwiches and muskmelon out to the field and told Roland I was writing you. He said to be sure to send you his love.”

  On the third of August, when Emma could have little time for writing letters, one arrived. I tore it open immediately, praying that nothing had happened to Roland.

  “Hold onto your hat, Ruby. We took two boys. They are brothers. David and Solomon. They came into Harvester on one of them orphin trains from back east.

  “They are a handful but good. And it’s sad how grateful they are to be took. And by folks who will adopt them if they don’t behave too bad. I can’t wait for you to meet them.

  “These two take the place of two of the babies we lost. Roland has always taken the place of the other. Old God does move in mysterius ways.

  “The boys pitched right in, gathering eggs and such. They want to know everything about farming. I get tired just answering questions. I can see that I am going to fall in love. Henry too.

  “Let me tell you, sister-in-law Hermione was jelus when she saw what good lookers the boys were once we got them cleaned up and into some new clothes. Henry was that pleased.”

  It was like a miracle, if you believed in miracles. David and Solomon. Two biblical heroes. I wrote at once to congratulate Emma and Henry, then sent each of the boys a book of Greek mythology and a Horatio Alger. Within days, thank-you’s arrived in the mail, containing the appropriate number of cross-outs and smudges.

  Harvester life had gone on without me. Something perverse in us does not want the other life we have known, the life back there, to alter. If we should ever return, we want it to be as it was, to reenter it as if we’d never left. For a few days, I was melancholic.

  The time had come to purchase headstones for Serena and Denton’s graves. The stonemason lifted his brow and then smiled when I gave him the two quotations. For Serena: “O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright.” And for Denton: “A woman would run through fire and water for such a kind heart.”

  Professor Cromwell accompanied me the day the stones were laid. A breeze blew and the sun shone, heedless of the occasion. Each of us was silent, occupied with our own recollections and questions.

  Laying a bouquet of lilies on each grave next to the professor’s roses, I wondered how well I had known Serena. We’d been close, but a child can never fully know a parent. And I’d had only twelve
years.

  Serena had been a good deal older than Barrett Cromwell—thirty-seven when she died—but that meant nothing. We love whom we will. Had she recognized that he was in love with her? Had Denton? Had there been accommodations, tensions?

  We were still silent on the ride back to town. At the house, he dropped me with a nod that was an afterthought, while I barely remembered to wave.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  While a war raged in Europe, the summer of 1917 passed quietly in Beardsley. Folks read about the war in the newspaper, of course and orators on speaking tours exhorted us to get involved but, unless we knew someone who’d enlisted or a mother who’d lost a son, life was rather disconcerting in its sameness.

  Then Emma wrote to say that Dennis had signed up and would probably be sent to France if the Allies didn’t win soon. And according to the Beardsley Journal, that wasn’t going to happen.

  Dennis’s enlistment unsettled me. I was fond of the overgrown boy. I asked Emma to send a military address for him, and when it arrived, I prevailed upon Annie and Delia to add their greetings and observations to my letters. It became a competition among the three of us to see who could come up with the drollest or most intriguing tidbits.

  I told Annie and Delia how I had coaxed Dennis into teaching me to smoke. They began ragging him about dragging a good woman low. Now that I was in my own home I smoked as I pleased but on the back porch.

  Delia was a seemingly shy little thing—too shy to flirt with men and almost too shy to speak to them—but something about writing to a faraway stranger revealed another woman. She began gathering jokes and entertaining newspaper items. Finding one of Finley Peter Dunne’s books at the secondhand store, she cut out his Mr. Dooley columns and sent them to Dennis. By October, it was clear that Dennis would not mourn the loss if Delia became his sole correspondent from our household.