When the song ended, everyone sat down on the grass to swat mosquitoes and hum along with Gershwin, Lehár, and Sousa. Babies crawled and complained on their blankets; little children ran and hid behind trees, then made pilgrimages to the popcorn stand, and fell asleep with their heads on their fathers’ laps. At the fringe of the park a pair of lovers, Sue Ann Meyers, who worked with Harriet, and Arvin Winetsky, stood silhouetted against the waning twilight, their arms linked.
Neither Bess nor Donna had been a member of the high school band, though both had been majorettes. Bess, however, had played the piano for nine years, beginning when she was five. Celia’s piano.
When Bess was six, Celia had heard her putting melodies to Mother Goose rhymes. “Are those pieces that Mrs. Rayzeen assigned?” she asked, hearing the child plink out a sad little melody as she sang a familiar rhyme about poor babes in the woods.
Bess shook her head.
“Where did you learn them?”
“I make them up,” Bess huffed as though she found the question insulting.
“Really? Do you like making up music?”
Bess nodded, resuming the song.
“That’s a very nice song. Do you know how to write the notes on paper?”
“Yes.” She was growing impatient. This conversation was interfering with her work.
“Will you write down the notes to this song?”
“Not till I get them the way I want them. Now, Mommy, you’re interrupting.”
Smiling, Celia turned away. “I’m sorry.”
After Celia’s death the piano had come back to Aunt Kate’s house and, until three years ago, Bess had found solace in it.
Mrs. Stubbs had ruined that.
Bess had taken lessons first from Mrs. Rayzeen, whose husband owned the lumberyard, and later, after Mrs. Rayzeen’s throat cancer was discovered, from Mrs. Stubbs, whose husband was killed on Omaha Beach.
It was soon after Celia and Archer’s deaths, when Bess was seven, that she’d begun the lessons with Mrs. Stubbs. Like Mrs. Rayzeen before her, the new piano teacher had made a fuss over Bess’s playing and exclaimed over her interest in composition, writing notes home to Kate about Bess’s talent, regretting that Sioux Falls was so far away, as Bess ought to have composition lessons from a certain professor at Augustana College.
Smitten with the young Mrs. Stubbs, Bess brought the teacher little treats, fudge or cookies or Black Jack gum. She let her hair grow long like Mrs. Stubbs’s, and each week presented her with a composition, usually with accompanying lyrics full of coincidence and irony. She devoured the teacher’s praise and criticism, hurrying home after every lesson to rework what she’d written and begin a new effort.
Playing her own compositions as well as those assigned by Mrs. Stubbs, Bess was featured prominently at recitals by the time she was ten.
Then one day when she was in the ninth grade, Bess plunged into the house after school, slamming the back door and gasping for air. Dumping an armload of books onto the dining table and snatching a sheaf of compositions from the piano, she hurled herself up the stairs. In the bathroom, she hacked off her long hair, wrapping it in the compositions and setting fire to it in the pink metal wastebasket that Harriet had bought.
“What on earth is going on?” Aunt Kate demanded.
“I’m quitting piano lessons.”
“What?”
“Nancy Proess overheard Mrs. Stubbs in Truska’s Grocery Store talking to somebody—she doesn’t know who—and saying Bess Canby’s stuck on herself and not that good a piano player, either.”
“And you believed Nancy Proess?”
“Why would she lie?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she’s jealous. There could be plenty of reasons. I for one don’t believe that Mrs. Stubbs said that. Get on the phone and ask her.”
“No.”
“You’re not going to ask her?”
“No.”
When Bess failed to show up for her next lesson, Mrs. Stubbs called, inquiring if Bess were ill.
Kate explained what had happened.
Mrs. Stubbs insisted that she’d never said any such thing about Bess, and that she was going to have a word with Nancy. She would get to the bottom of this.
And she did have a word. Nancy denied that she’d said anything.
Several times Mrs. Stubbs phoned the house, asking to talk to Bess, but Bess wouldn’t take the receiver, and eventually the teacher stopped calling.
Bess closed the hinged lid of Celia’s piano and didn’t open it again.
As the piano had done, band concerts brought Celia back to Bess. Every Wednesday summer evening, weather permitting, Celia had brought Bess to the park. And since Aunt Kate didn’t suffer from arthritis in those days, she came along too, lounging on a faded red-and-blue Indian blanket.
When Great-uncle Martin was alive, before Pearl Harbor, he whiled away Wednesday nights playing snooker with the old men at the Huntsman Beer Tavern and Pool Hall, nursing a beer and smoking a cigar. He always arrived home by ten o’clock, bringing with him a bag of mints and a couple of packs of Black Jack gum from Anderson’s Candy and Ice Cream.
On the way home from the concert, Bess and Celia stopped at Aunt Kate’s to say hello to Uncle Martin. He gave the candy and gum to Bess, and Kate sent something home with Celia, half a cake or a package of chops or a jar of rhubarb-strawberry preserves.
Like Uncle Martin, Archer didn’t attend the concerts. But he did not play snooker. Instead, he usually sat at home. The band was terrible, he said; he could hear better on WCCO or at the Dakota Ballroom. Sometimes he went to the ballroom while Bess and her mother were out, even though he wasn’t fond of Old Time. Of the Wednesday-night bands he complained, “I don’t know why they don’t play cowboy music instead of them damned butterflies.” The butterfly was a dance with two men and one woman, or two women and one man, and Bess thought it was beautiful. Still, Archer went to Old Time to aggravate them all. And afterward he picked a fight with Celia.
“Why can’t you come to the dance with me?” he would ask.
“I can’t ask Aunt Kate to take care of Bess two and three nights a week so I can go dancing. Besides, I don’t like Old Time.”
“You too good for Old Time? You’d rather do your high-tone lady act. Lemonade and sour music with a flock of old hens.”
“I like the concerts. I like to be with Aunt Kate. And Bess has a good time.”
“Bring Bess to the dance. She’ll have a good time there. Plenty of people bring their kids.”
“With all that noise and liquor? And middle-aged men out in the parking lot knocking each other down and vomiting on their running boards? What kind of people take children to that?”
“My kind.”
“You don’t have a kind, Archer. You’re an only one.”
The time she said that, he pushed her down hard. Bess had been in her room, but she had heard Celia fall against a dining room chair, knocking it over.
Though Celia wore a housedress to the concert, without fail it was a freshly washed and ironed one that smelled of summer mornings on the clothesline. And it was one with a pretty, gathered pocket or a collar she’d trimmed with a bit of lace edging Aunt Kate had tatted. Sometimes she tucked a small bow in her hair. And her arms and cheeks smelled of lily of the valley.
Often Donna’s family came, too, so the two little girls could skip off to the popcorn stand by themselves, then stroll among the many blankets pretending to be grown-up women discussing their husbands and children.
“My husband is so kind, he never yells at me or Marilyn.” Marilyn was Bess’s imaginary daughter, who started piano lessons when she was two. “He makes two hundred dollars a month, and he gives almost all of it to me. He takes me to the pictures once a week, and he sings and claps when Marilyn plays the piano.”
“My husband is crabby,” Donna lamented. “And sometimes he gets drunk and yells at me and hits me. And he spanks little Darlene. And we don’t have much money, and if
he doesn’t get nicer, I’m going to go stay at my aunt’s.” Then she would add importantly, “Isn’t it a shame?”
Before the band struck up the concluding “God Bless America,” Bess and Donna slipped away from the park, wandering uptown to see if the first showing of The Quiet Man had let out.
Main Street was nearly empty. Constable Wall’s car sat in front of Anderson’s Candy and Ice Cream; a few other cars were lined up in front of the Majestic. The movie wouldn’t let out, said the little clock in the cashier’s booth, for fifteen minutes.
“I don’t want to hang around waiting like I’m a pickup,” Donna said. “Let’s walk down to the Lucky.”
A couple of cars drove slowly by, one filled with boys from Ula who honked and whistled, the other with three college girls, Beverly Ridza and a couple of her friends, with whom Bess and Donna were acquainted from a respectful distance. Was it possible that in two years Bess and Donna would themselves be as smooth and evolved as the girls in the car?
“I’m glad we didn’t stand around waiting in front of the Majestic,” said Donna, who was sensitive about being without a steady boyfriend this summer. “It makes you look desperate.”
Bess didn’t feel desperate. She felt … expectant, as if she were waiting for a package in the mail.
In a few weeks she was going to St. Cloud Teachers College, less than two hundred miles away, a place unlikely to hold a lot of surprises. Still, it was the first step toward something far away and high up, something she would have to stretch to reach. She didn’t know what, only that when she reached it, it would grab her roughly and pull her along, and she would welcome it.
She didn’t want to be a teacher, but Aunt Kate, who’d taught, always said, “Get the certificate anyway. You never know when you might need it.” Bess wasn’t sure she approved of that. It seemed cowardly and awfully bourgeois, but she would do it just to please her aunt, since teaching was what Celia had planned to do before she met Archer. Getting the certificate would ease some longing in Kate, and after she had it, Bess would fly out into the world and find her own fortune.
When she had a fortune, she would ask Aunt Kate to come live with her. If Kate wanted to stay in her own house, Bess would buy her what she needed and hire a cleaning woman.
Earning your own money was best. Bess might marry a rich husband, but she wouldn’t need his money. Aunt Kate had always said, “If you marry for money, you’ll work hard for your wages.” Not that anyone in the family had ever had the opportunity to marry for money.
Aunt Kate also said, “Marry in haste, repent at leisure.” Too bad Celia hadn’t listened to that. Kate had, as well, a number of strictures regarding what not to wear to be married. “Marry in black, wish yourself back” was one. “Marry in red, wish yourself dead” was another. But who would marry in black or red? Pearls were bad luck. “They’re tears,” Kate said. “The more you wear, the more you’ll shed.” Celia had worn simulated pearls when she was married.
The old Harvester Arms Hotel, down by the railroad tracks, fronted onto Main Street, but you went around to the south side, facing the tracks, and down a flight of iron steps to enter the bar. Bess liked the Lucky Club. It inspired small and pleasant expectations, as if truly it might be lucky.
The booths were unpadded pine. Beer signs covered the smoke-darkened wood-paneled walls, a couple of them electric, one with a waterfall that tumbled and frothed, another with foam rising in a pilsner glass and spilling carelessly over the sides. Nobody in Harvester owned a pilsner glass. Well, maybe Mr. Albers the lawyer. He thought he was pretty grand.
Half a dozen customers sat in booths and at the horseshoe-shaped bar as Bess and Donna slid into the third booth. Hammy Kretzmarsky called from behind the bar, “What’ll you ladies have?”
“Two Millers,” Donna called back.
Hammy was, everyone agreed, a helluva nice guy. He was young, good-looking, and bright, so why had he buried himself here, beneath the Harvester Arms, running a three-two joint? In a spot on the road like Harvester, where everyone knew everything about everyone else, one thing they didn’t know was why Hammy stuck around.
Some said he had lost heart when his young wife left him for a wealthy car dealer from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, but Hammy was always sunny and full of stories and harmless gossip. Others said he was socking away money to buy a real bar in Minneapolis, but could you sock away money in the three-two business? Still others said he was writing a book about World War II. He’d been a marine in the South Pacific.
But if Hammy was writing a book, no one ever heard him mention it, and no one asked. You didn’t ask Hammy personal questions, no matter how many evenings you whiled away with him in the Lucky Club.
Bess thought maybe Hammy had a secret lover, possibly a chippy from the south side of town. There weren’t many of those. One or two. Most lit out for Sioux Falls or the Twin Cities, but occasionally an easy girl came along, without fear or ambition, who stuck around to provoke people. Maybe Hammy was seeing that kind of girl, though Bess didn’t see how it could be kept a secret. Most secrets in Harvester were well known.
But Hammy remained a mystery. Such mysteries, such dark knots in the thread of things, prevented people from going mad from boredom in villages.
One of the six other customers in the Lucky was a boy in army uniform with a corporal’s stripes, no one Bess or Donna knew. From one of the little towns around Harvester, Ula or Red Berry or some other such place.
The boy was with another who looked to be a farmer, very sunburned up to a line where his work cap shaded him. Above the line the skin was pale as a kitchen sink. The two were doubtless brothers, both with pale eyes and long thin noses.
The soldier fed coins into the jukebox, and he and his brother punched buttons. The first song was “Laura,” played by Stan Kenton’s band.
Hitching up their belts with self-conscious nonchalance, the corporal and his brother strolled over to Bess and Donna’s booth. “Dance?” the brother asked Donna, and the soldier held out his hand to Bess.
Chapter 6
KATE
Leaning heavily on the cane, Kate rose to observe the last of the abalone-shell twilight. When it had disappeared behind the buildings of Main Street, she began the slow trek back to the house.
Casting a glance at the lilac bushes, she noted the shriveled nubs of last May’s blooms. Should have been pruned as soon as they were through flowering. Now there’ll be fewer blossoms next spring.
She sighed, observing how her garden had shrunk. Only a few perennials these days—peonies and mock orange, lilies and phlox and poppies and such. No more cannas and dahlias and glads. A handful of medicinal herbs. No tomatoes or beans.
And when she was ensconced in that place where Harriet’s friend Rose Miller worked, the Friendship Arms Nursing Home, she’d have no garden at all, no tiny farm, as she liked to think of it. A phrase she’d heard someplace—“he bought the farm”—came to mind. Died, it meant. Her eyes narrowed in a sardonic smile. If death meant that, she wouldn’t mind.
Look at the hydrangea blooms, she thought, how their enormous drooping heads weighed down the slender branches. Pink cheeked and blowzy, they were, like that good-natured hired girl who’d worked for Clara and Chauncey long ago. Bobbing vacuously in the least breeze, the flowers looked slightly simple, but Kate was fond of them, as she had been of the girl whom they all knew to be generous with her favors.
Reaching the back stoop, Kate grasped the trellis again, steadying herself as she climbed the steps. At the top, she rested, shifting her weight and massaging her tender left hip with her free hand. She was a bit weak and nauseated tonight. The “Way Back When” piece lay like something sour and undigested in her middle.
Ten years ago she had been forty-nine—“still a young woman,” Frieda would say—and her husband, Martin, had been dead only eight months. The two deaths, Martin’s and Celia’s, one following so closely on the other, had ripped her roots right out of the ground.
&
nbsp; Death had shadowed Kate since 1917, when her older sister, Clara, and Clara’s husband, Chauncey, had both died of influenza, leaving behind a lovely baby. Celia. Childless, Kate and Martin had adopted the infant, embracing her with love so profound it surprised them.
What a magical child Celia had been. So pretty and bright. Cheerful and kind and helpful as well. Born to be a teacher, Kate had always said. When she was only three, Celia had begged to wipe dishes! With infinite delicacy she had held a saucer, caressing it with the towel until it was dry, then laying it on the seat of a kitchen chair. Think of it.
Until she met that Okie, Celia had never given Kate and Martin a moment’s worry. A day didn’t pass, even now, ten years after the accident, when Kate didn’t ask, “Why? What did she see in him?”
To give the devil his due, Archer had been handsome. And he had had a bad arm. A sensitive, softhearted girl might be drawn by his infirmity, imagining that she could make up for it. No, it hadn’t been that simple. He had been a disease, and Celia had fallen sick with need of him.
Kate whacked at the nearest mock orange bush with her cane, then winced as pain shot out from her wrist and elbow and shoulder. Steadying herself against the trellis, she saw the August night in 1942 settling around her, visible and ghostly.
There on the steps was Celia, dressed in a plain, mauve cotton shift, wearing a single strand of simulated pearls and white pumps that she’d borrowed money to have resoled. Her short dark hair fluffed around her face as if spun from something very fine, and she looked seventeen and innocent again. She held seven-year-old Bess’s hand.
“It’s all right, then, if she stays all night?” Celia had asked, bending to kiss Bess. If Archer drank himself blind and kept them out till dawn, she didn’t want Kate to know.
What a Woman Must Do Page 4