On the wall above the dressing table Bess had tacked photos of her mother in her high school graduation gown; of her mother and father on their wedding day on the steps of the First Methodist Church—the only picture of Archer in the house; of Aunt Kate in a limp-looking challis print dress, sitting in a rocking chair in the backyard; of Harriet, all arms and legs, in white shorts and a middy blouse with a big sailor collar; of Jack Comstock, whom she’d left; of Charlie Ridza and Sherman Worley and Sweeney Everett and Donna Olson, along with several other girls in her class, the Class of ’52. Two of them, Betty Beswick and Melva Hardy, were already married. Sad, wasn’t it?
But not so sad as the thought of Harriet marrying DeVore Weiss. How sad and disgusting that was. How common.
Chapter 4
KATE
Reaching for her cane, Kate made her way to the screen door, pushing it open and standing for a minute on the back step, looking at the grass, which needed mowing, and the garden, which wanted weeding. Her arthritis made both tasks impossible. Harriet helped sometimes on Sunday afternoons, but she always made such a project out of it, tying on a big, floppy straw hat like one she’d seen Greer Garson wearing in a movie, and donning gloves! Only in movies did women wear gloves to pull crabgrass.
And Kate didn’t like to ask too much of Harriet. After all, she paid room and board. Fleetingly Kate considered that that would stop if Harriet got married. She would have to find another boarder. But if DeVore Weiss was what Harriet wanted, Kate hoped she got him, though shepherding another woman’s children through the teenage years didn’t seem like the most romantic way to spend a honeymoon. And Harriet was an awful romantic, a deprived romantic.
Maybe Bess would mow the lawn Sunday morning. She didn’t attend the Methodist Church anymore, hadn’t since they’d buried Celia and Archer. The church seemed connected in Bess’s mind with all the rebuffs and losses she had suffered.
Well, Kate couldn’t deny that the accident had been a scandal among the Methodists, among the other denominations as well. The culminating scandal. And Bess was too young to understand that every family had its scandals sooner or later. The sure knowledge that this was true made living in a small town tolerable.
Archer had been drunk. Folks who’d been at the ballroom that night soon broadcast their firsthand accounts around church and around St. Bridget County. Archer had been drunk many times, and he was mean when he was drunk. Kate had thought it was because of his withered arm and being a southerner among close-mouthed northerners. But there was something more, something born in his bones: a simple and awful predilection to grievance, not merely a willingness but a desire to find injury.
Whether driven by injury or not, destroying himself so wantonly and taking his young wife along was a thing that couldn’t be forgiven. Even if she could have forgiven Archer for Celia, Kate couldn’t forgive him for Bess. In a place like Harvester, scandal was a stain that time did not bleach.
Kate stepped down into the yard, leaning on her cane and holding on with her free hand to the sturdy trellis where purple clematis leaped from lath to lath. She couldn’t go into the yard without her cane now. Only fifty-nine last February and already she was half crippled with arthritis.
Slowly, carefully, her back held as straight as a plumb line, she moved toward the bench by the lilacs. Getting down and back up again would be an awful chore, but she wanted to sit here and watch the last of the sun.
Yet, when she was settled, and her eyes swept the fiery opal sky in the west, thoughts of Archer clouded her sight. He was never far from her, but tonight he hovered, taunting. She gave her head a wry twist as though to shrug him away.
To go on hating him year after year wasn’t Christian, of course. But she had made a deal with God about that. If she lived to see Bess safely off to college, without a dreadful mishap that could in any way be laid at Archer’s headstone, she would forgive the man.
Giving up the burden of hate would be a relief. In fact, she believed that the arthritis had come from carrying that burden. God was telling her that hate was onerous and painful. Still, she would mind her own stubborn agenda, shouldering her ill will until Bess was safe.
Lifting a thin, twisted hand, blue knotted veins lacing its parts together, Kate touched the back of her head where it ached and stared unseeing at the gladiola bed.
Her eyes narrowed. Not long after Celia had married him, an ugly tale had surfaced regarding Archer Canby. If only Kate had known of it before the wedding. She never told Celia and she didn’t know if anyone else had. Kate had only got wind of it through Cousin Frieda. Even now she did not like to give it room in her thoughts. It was too sad.
Enough. Stamping the earth impatiently with the cane, the old woman set her jaw and arched her back, seeking some arrangement of her bones that would ease the pain. Her back was bad tonight. Maybe she’d soak in an oat bath later. Martin’s mother had taught her about oat baths when Kate had worked too long in the garden or hauled too many pails of water.
From upstairs, through the open window, came the sound of a bath being run. Bess was washing her hair and bathing. Kate could almost smell the bubble bath, a lily-of-the-valley scent. Bess hated the smell of the cafe. When she came downstairs, she would carry her soiled uniform and her underclothes to the cellar. “If I keep them in the closet, it smells low-class in there.”
At half past seven Bess emerged from the house, wet hair slicked back in a ponytail. She wore a white cotton dress sprigged with yellow marguerites, midriff smoothly fitted, skirt gracefully flared. The sleeves were short and puffed, the neckline sweetheart style. Against the white dress, Bess’s skin was gold as wheat. Her eyes and hair, like Archer’s, were black as molten tar. She looked healthy and insouciant and well shaped.
“Aren’t you pretty!”
“Donna gave me this. It’s too snug for her. I love the skirt.” She twirled, sending the circular skirt flying.
“Where’re you off to?”
“I’m meeting Donna.”
“Movies?”
“Maybe.”
“The Quiet Man’s at the Majestic.”
“We might go to the band concert.”
“It’s a nice night to be outside if the mosquitoes don’t chew you.” Maybe they would go to the band concert. Maybe they would go to the movie. Maybe they would do neither, Kate speculated. Young girls didn’t always do what they said.
“Maybe we’ll walk out to the baseball field and watch the game.”
Maybe. And maybe they would drop in at the Lucky Club. Lucky, my foot, Kate thought.
The Lucky Club, in the basement of the Harvester Arms Hotel, was a 3.2 joint. Harvester was “dry.” No bars sold bourbon or scotch or any of that strong stuff. However, a couple of places, like the Lucky, sold 3.2-percent-alcohol beer, which was considered to be the closest thing to no alcohol at all. “Strong” beer was 5 percent.
Selling 3.2 or any other alcoholic beverage to those under twenty-one was illegal, but the Lucky Club did it and so, for that matter, did the Dakota Ballroom in Red Berry. The county sheriff and the local constables seemed not to notice except when the youngsters were under seventeen.
It hadn’t always been that way. Things had gotten lax. It was the wars, the Second World War and now this Korean mess. People didn’t want to refuse beer to a lad who was old enough to get shot at. And if you served the boy, why naturally you were going to serve his girl. That was how it had started, Kate thought.
Bess had been going to dances at the Dakota Ballroom since she was a high school junior, though Kate didn’t think she’d drunk beer until she was a senior. She knew Bess had been to the Lucky Club, more frequently since graduation, but she didn’t know how much beer she drank when she went there, or how much 3.2 it took to affect a girl’s judgment.
Most of Bess’s senior crowd went, Kate knew, and if she forbade it, Bess would go anyway. Kate didn’t like it, though. It wasn’t the beer. Two or three bottles of beer weren’t going to ruin anyone. During Pr
ohibition she herself had brewed homemade beer for the family, putting it up in old ketchup bottles. No, it wasn’t that.
And it wasn’t the senior boys. She didn’t give them credit for any more morals or self-restraint than they possessed, but if Bess hadn’t been persuaded by Jack Comstock, she wasn’t going to be persuaded by any of them.
What elusive danger, then, waited in the Lucky Club? A chill like an electrical current passed through Kate, and she rubbed her arms with fingers like gnarled roots.
The item in the Standard Ledger, that was what had put her on edge. But Bess wasn’t Celia.
Bess crossed the yard and kissed Kate’s cheek. Kate grasped the girl’s firm arm. “If you and Donna go in a car with boys, don’t let them drive fast.”
“Oh, God, Aunt Kate, I’m not going to get in an accident.”
“And don’t swear,” Kate teased, trying to send the child off with a smile. “Men will think you’re loose.”
Chapter 5
BESS
Bess set out north along Second Street, waving to Cousin Frieda, whose house lay across the street from Kate Drew’s and next door to Constable Wall’s on the corner. Cousin Frieda, nearly as old as Kate, kept everything so clean, her place was an Exhibition of Cleanliness. The grass, dark and unpocked by dandelions, was short and springy, dazzlingly unsoiled. The sidewalk appeared scrubbed, and indeed Frieda did scrub it sometimes, on her hands and knees with a big brown brush. The front windows, westward facing, sparkled in the dying sunset and gave back reflections as unclouded as Frieda’s conscience.
Frieda, in a starched cotton housedress and starched apron, sat in a rocker on the front porch. She lifted a strong, red hand, waving to Bess across Second Street.
“Bess,” she called.
“Cousin Frieda.”
“Your grandma alone tonight?”
“Yes.” Bess paused in front of the McNaughton house.
“Guess I’ll call her to come play bridge. Harriet home?”
“No.”
“I’ll call Marie then.”
Marie was Constable Wall’s wife. The fourth would be Arnold, Frieda’s husband and the proprietor of Drew’s Body and Lube, once owned by Kate’s husband, Martin, and his cousin Arnold together.
“See you, Cousin Frieda.”
The woman rose and hurried into the dim recesses of her lemon-smelling house to phone Kate and Marie, and also to tell Arnold to drive downtown and pick up chocolate ice cream at Anderson’s. All this Bess knew, because it was as it had always been, and as it was supposed to be. She glanced at the Bulova Harriet had given her for graduation—seven forty-five—and turned left toward the school and Donna.
She and Donna had been babies together, their mothers good friends. Before her parents’ accident, Bess had lived in the little five-room bungalow next to Donna’s house. Afterward, Mr. Albers, who owned the bungalow, had sold it to James Timm, the new manager of the grain elevator. Timm and his wife were quiet, childless Holy Rollers who needed nothing bigger than the five small rooms. Even that had seemed excessive. They took up very little space. The house did not embrace them as it had Celia and Bess.
Bess had not been inside the place since it was sold. She loved it, more than when it was her own, but refused every opportunity to step inside. The most recent occasion had come one dark, frigid afternoon late last January.
She and Donna were trudging house to house selling cookies to raise money for the senior trip, and Mrs. Timm had invited them in out of the numbing weather while she fetched her purse. Donna opened her mouth to accept the offered warmth, but Bess lied abruptly, “We’re not supposed to enter customers’ homes.”
How could she stand to see her darling bungalow in the tepid embrace of the Timms? However mild and blameless they were, Bess would always hate them for living in her house. The first thing she would do when she was rich was buy the place back.
Did the house understand that she’d been forced to leave and that she would return for it? Did the dainty rooms recall the touch and sound of her and Celia and Archer?
As she grew older and her parents did not, Bess thought of them as Celia and Archer, not Mommy and Daddy. In a few years she would be older than they, and they would become her children.
The evening was hot and still. Front-room lights were not turned on, and kitchen lights were extinguished as soon as dishes were washed. People sat on porches or in backyards. They laughed or argued softly, or maybe the heavy air muffled the sounds. Even the squeals of children at the corner playing kick the can floated watery and muted.
The night that Celia and Archer died, it had been hot. Bess remembered that. She remembered it all. They had left her at Aunt Kate’s while they went to the dance at the Dakota.
Bess had been very tired, so tired that she cried without reason after Celia left her at the door. When she had undressed down to her underwear, Kate rocked her in the little rocker in Kate’s bedroom and recited nursery rhymes.
Bess’s favorite was about a Queen of Hearts who made some tarts that were stolen by a knave. And the King of Hearts beat the knave and got the tarts back. But each time that Kate recited the rhyme, she ended by hugging Bess and laughing, “Of course, it was really the Queen who beat the knave and got the tarts back. No woman who bakes tarts and has them stolen would wait around for her husband to fetch them! Oh, my, no.”
Bess had fallen asleep on her aunt’s lap and Kate had carried her to bed in the room that was now hers.
Because of the heat, Bess had slept without a gown or a sheet, but a cool, sweet breeze had come up about four-thirty, rustling the branches of the elms outside the bedroom windows and waking her with a chill.
“Mommy’s soul woke me,” she later told Donna, explaining the breeze. “On the way to heaven, she woke me up.”
The grackles were already arguing next door in the McGiverns’ backyard when Bess pulled on the cotton nightie she kept at Kate’s and crept downstairs to sit on the front steps and watch the sun come up. Sunrise was a magician’s trick, the drama of which did not diminish with repetition.
In the kitchen, where she’d intended to pour herself a bowl of puffed wheat, Bess found Aunt Kate in a horrid old black percale dress that she almost never wore. The pocket was mysteriously gone, along with the rose-colored trim. Tiny frizzed bits of thread clung to the dress where the trim had been torn away. Kate sat staring out the window at the alley as if waiting for a car to pull into the drive.
“Your mama and daddy died in an accident last night,” Kate said without turning toward Bess. “The car went off the road and hit a tree.”
Bess continued out the back door and sat on the step. She could not think or feel. When at length an intact thought surfaced, it was The car went off the road. Cars don’t decide to go off the road. Somebody drives them off.
They had gone away and left her, as if she were something negligible that could be abandoned, like an old doll. What now? What about her house? Could she go on living there, renting it from Mr. Albers? Would they let her do that? But where would she get the $20 a month for the rent?
In the months following the funeral, Donna Olson and Donna’s parents had stuck by Bess. They had invited her to dinner and to stay the night at least once a week. Some days Aunt Kate had been unable to look at Bess or talk to her, and the Olsons had understood and had taken her to their house, next door to her own dear bungalow, which was dark and silent, shades drawn, like eyes closed against tears.
Now Donna was waiting on the granite steps of the school, her pink-and-white-striped sundress spread out around her. Donna was a generous, giggling girl with one quirk: she liked to pose as she saw movie stars posed in fan magazines and films. When you came upon her sitting or standing, you were struck by her physical attitude, and couldn’t help wondering who she was this time. She posed as an exercise in self-improvement, presenting to the world a persona more arresting or alluring than she imagined herself to possess.
Tonight’s portrait, Bess intuit
ed, was Olivia De Havilland as Melanie in Gone With the Wind. Cousin Harriet had taken Bess and Donna to see the movie in Sioux Falls when it had come back last year on a return engagement. Melanie was Donna’s favorite film character, and something about the way that Donna had spread her dress out, and tilted her head just so, conjured that tragic southern belle, whom Bess considered impossibly virtuous and sappy.
“God, that’s a neat sundress,” Bess observed. “Did you get it in St. Bridget?”
“My mom made it from a Simplicity pattern,” Donna told her, brushing the back of the skirt. “You can borrow the pattern, if you want.”
Behind the school and across Fifth Avenue lay the park with its band shell, where the summer concerts were played. The park was filling with folks fleeing the oppression of stuffy rooms, where the odor of last week’s liver and onions met the ghost of cigars Grandpa had smoked before the Second World War.
“Let’s sit over there,” Donna suggested, pointing her bag of popcorn toward a row of spirea bushes near one of the park entrances. “There’s Neddy Barnstable,” she observed, nodding in the direction of a young man home from his sophomore year at Yale. “He’s a god,” she sighed.
Mr. Hanson, the band director, though two minutes early, flustered importantly across the forestage of the band shell to the podium as though he were late and expecting a restive audience to fold up its blankets and steal away. With a great intake of breath and a harried glance toward the languid gathering, he mopped his brow with a dish towel–size handkerchief, gave a slight and preoccupied bow, then tapped the baton ferociously against the music stand as the band tuned up.
At length “The Star-Spangled Banner” burst forth from the shell and the audience grunted to its feet, all except the three people in wheelchairs: the smartly dressed Mrs. Herbert Hanlon, whose paralysis Bess knew nothing about; Bess’s distant cousin Caroline, who’d been stricken with polio in 1948; and Orville Nelson, linotype operator at the Standard Ledger and World War One veteran, who’d been in a wheelchair since 1918. Orville always wept when the national anthem was sung. When she was little, Bess had cried along with him.
What a Woman Must Do Page 3