Mary Emma & Company

by Ralph Moody

  Mrs. Sterling was nice to me too, but she didn’t give me any cookies. And when she’d read Mother’s note she just said that she should have known better than to send the flat pieces, and that all the work looked very nice. Then she gave me four dollars, and told me I shouldn’t bother about bringing back the nine cents change, but that I could pick up her basket again on Monday.

  Grace tried to act as if she weren’t especially happy about the ladies saying they liked our work, but Mother didn’t try to cover it up a bit. As tired as she was, she threw her arms around Grace’s shoulders and waltzed her around and round the kitchen floor. Then she gave me a quarter and told me to run up to the baker’s shop and get a dozen cream puffs; that we were going to have a celebration whether we could afford it or not.

  14

  What an Ambitious Boy

  OUR first batch of laundry was barely delivered before Mother began worrying about the next. While we were finishing our cream puffs and hot chocolate she said, “Wasn’t this a lovely celebration! Now let’s talk about the things that will have to be done before we start another batch of laundry. First, we must move all our work below stairs, and we must all sit down to meals together; otherwise our home life would be ruined. The laundry room was dirty enough when we came here, but now that the plumbers are through it is filthy. It must be thoroughly scrubbed and painted. Then we must have several wide shelves for laying out our finished work, and a long table for sorting and sprinkling. Could you build them, Ralph, if we were to buy some new boards at the lumber yard?”

  “Sure I could,” I told her, “but I’d need two-by-fours and nails and spikes, and a saw and a decent hammer.”

  “I think Uncle Frank has tools that he’d let you use,” Mother said. Then she turned to Grace and asked, “What do you think, Daughter; if we had a little gas plate down there for heating our irons, could we make out with those we have until we’re sure we’ll have more stiff shirts and collars to do up? We have so little money left that I’m rather fearful of spending much until our business is more firmly established.”

  “Well,” Grace said, “I think we need irons like Sam Lee’s more than we need shelves and a table. For the next few weeks we could lay the finished pieces out the way we did this time, but without good irons . . .”

  “No, Gracie! No!” Mother said. “I will not have our home so cluttered up that we can’t sit down in the evenings and enjoy it. You are perfectly right about the irons, but we shall have the shelves and table too. Ralph, will you stop in to see Sam Lee on your way to work, and find out from him where we can buy irons and starch such as his? Unfortunately, the note he gave Gracie is in Chinese. Then tonight you can figure out what materials you will need for the table and shelves. In the morning I’ll send Philip up to the Square with a note to the lumberman.”

  Before I went to the store I took Sam’s note back and asked him to tell me where we could buy the irons and starch. He seemed to understand what I was asking him, pointed at his pole-iron, and told me, “Go far low, far low! No givee big plice! See dollah, see dollah!” Then he pointed at the note, smiled, nodded his head and repeated, “Far low, far low!” but that was all I could get out of him.

  Mr. Haushalter didn’t have much trouble in figuring out what the “far low” meant. “Why, bless your soul,” he said, “where else would a Chinaman be sendin’ you to buy Chinese stuff but to Chinatown? I calc’late that ‘far low’ business means you ain’t to do your tradin’ in them fancy emporiums up there where Washington Street commences to go antigogglin’. He wants you to go fer down into Chinatown; down where all them little stores is packed into the alleys like sardines in a can. You know; down there where . . .”

  “No, sir, I don’t,” I said. “When we came through Boston we didn’t go outside of the North Station, so. . . .”

  “Well, bless my soul, there ain’t nothin’ to it,” he told me. “Just get off the subway at Essex. The streets is kind of cattiwompus in that neighborhood, but you won’t have no trouble if you start off towards the east’ard, keepin’ your eye peeled for windas with Chinee writin’ on ’em. But be careful of them Chinamen. Give ’em half a chance and they’ll skin the hide off’n you; you got to dicker with ’em.”

  “I guess that’s what Sam was trying to tell me,” I said. “He pointed at his iron and said, ‘three dollars.’”

  “Then, was I you, I wouldn’t start off with no offer of more’n one-fifty. The Chinee storekeeper, he’ll likely as not start off at about four-fifty, then you’ll have to dicker back’ards and for’ards till you get to the middle.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be doing the dickering,” I told him. “I think Mother and Grace will go.”

  “Gorry! Don’t leave ’em to go in there alone!” he said. “A Chinee trader’d skin ’em out of their money quicker’n you could say ‘scat.’”

  “I guess you don’t know Grace very well,” I said, “but I’d like to go if I had time. Do Chinese stores keep open on Sundays?”

  “In Mass’chusetts? Lord love you, no! Don’t no stores ’ceptin’ drug stores and the likes stay open on Sundays; it’s agin the law.”

  “Well, maybe I could get Mother to let me stay out of school tomorrow afternoon,” I told him, “but I don’t think so. If she would, do you think I could make the dicker fast enough to be back out here in time for work?”

  Mr. Haushalter laughed and slapped his thighs as if I’d said something real funny. Then he rumpled my hair and asked, “You ain’t doin’ a little mite o’ dickerin’ with me, be you? If that’s what you’re up to you’re goin’ at it in about the right way, but I’d have to talk to John ’fore I told you to take a Friday afternoon off. Would it be all right if we leave it rest till mornin’?”

  “Sure it would,” I told him, “but I wasn’t trying to dicker. Do you think Philip could take my place if Mr. Durant should say it would be all right for me to take the afternoon off?”

  Mr. Haushalter laughed again, and said, “Ain’t about to leave go of that string if you can help it, be you? Well, well, well, I calc’late your brother could fill in for you if needs be. ’Pears to be a stout little rascal.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, “he’s real strong, and he’s bigger than I am too, and he could do you a real good job.”

  That time Mr. Haushalter only chuckled, then he told me, “If you hang on like that with a Chinee storekeeper, you ought to do all right, but leave us not put no hens to settin’ till I’ve talked to John in the mornin’.”

  I ran nearly every step of the way when I was delivering my afternoon orders, then I weighed up and tied twenty bags of coal before closing time, so that Philip wouldn’t have too much to do if Mr. Durant said he could take my place.

  Grace, Philip, and Mother were downstairs scrubbing the laundry room when I got home from work, but Muriel had the dining-room table set and supper all ready. After we were at the table and I’d said grace, I told Mother about going in to see Sam Lee, and Mr. Haushalter’s figuring out what “far low” meant, and his saying that maybe Philip could work in my place if she’d let Grace and me go to Boston to buy the irons. Mother looked up at me and asked, “Did he say if I’d let you go?”

  She kept right on looking at me steady, so I had to go back and explain things, but I didn’t mention what Mr. Haushalter said about a Chinese storekeeper skinning her out of her money if she went to do the trading instead of letting me go.

  “Ummm, hmmm,” Mother said when I’d finished, “it rather sounds to me as though you had engineered this expedition all by yourself, but I don’t know that it’s a bad idea. Possibly Gracie could meet you at the carline right after school, but first we’ll have to see how we get along with cleaning the laundry room. I might not be able to spare both Gracie and Philip tomorrow afternoon.”

  For a minute or two Mother sat smiling and looking at the wall behind Hal’s chair. At first I thought she was looking at the picture that hung there. Then I realized that she wasn’t seeing it at all; she w
as just looking. Without turning her eyes, she asked, “Isn’t Chinatown somewhere near Scollay Square, Ralph?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “why? Is there something you want Grace and me to get at Scollay Square?”

  “No,” Mother said, “No, I was just thinking. Uncle Levi lives right near Scollay Square, and if you children should drop around to his room at about getting-home-from-work-time, I’d bet a cookie he’d take you to supper with him. I remember when I was a little girl on Grandfather’s farm in Maine, Uncle Levi took me to Lewiston with him, and he bought me supper in a little restaurant. It was the first meal I had ever had in a restaurant, and I shall remember it as long as I live. Gracie, did you ever have supper in a restaurant?”

  Tears welled up in Grace’s eyes before she could stop them, and her voice was kind of thick when she said, “No, ma’am, but Father bought me a sandwich and an ice-cream soda once when he took me to Denver with him.”

  “Isn’t it lovely to have those little things to remember?” Mother said. “And we have so many of them.” Then she looked at Muriel and asked, “Girlie, do you think you could put Elizabeth to bed and wash the dishes while the rest of us get at that laundry room? Hal, you might tell Elizabeth a story before she goes to sleep, if you’d like to. Don’t you think she’d like the one about Peter Rabbit?”

  If I hadn’t already guessed how much Grace wanted to make the trip to Boston, and how much Philip wanted to take my place at the store, I’d certainly have found it out in a hurry when we went to work on that dirty laundry room. Anybody might have thought that Grace was the boss of a road gang, and that Philip and I—and even Mother—were just common laborers.

  “Ralph,” she told me, “you take that half of the floor over there, and Philip, you take this half! Start in the corners and work back and forth across the room! I’ll get at the ceiling, and Mother, you could do the woodwork and the lower part of the walls, so you won’t have to get up on a stepladder.”

  Philip was the only fat one among us. He wasn’t really lazy, but he didn’t run unless he was being chased, and he didn’t often make anybody mad enough to chase him. That night you’d have thought there were forty wildcats after him. For some reason he tried to make scrubbing that floor a race between him and me, and Grace did everything she could to help him win. She’d jump down off her ladder and help him every time he came to a real dirty place, and she made me wash places over when they were already clean. It was no wonder that Philip beat me, but the sweat was dripping off his chin like rain by the time he’d finished.

  Mother had never let Philip stay up later than ten o’clock, but that night she didn’t say anything about his going to bed, and by half-past-twelve we had that laundry room brand-smacking clean. The lye made the floor boards almost snow-white, but turned our fingernails as brown as if we’d been husking butternuts.

  “Whewwww,” Mother whistled as she gave the last windowpane a final polish, “who would ever have believed that we could do this whole job in a single evening? My! Doesn’t that floor sparkle! Do you know, Gracie, that if we had the paint bright and early in the morning we could have this room all finished, except for the shelves and table, by the time school is out in the afternoon?”

  Philip had been mopping sweat off his face as Mother talked, but the second she’d finished he shouted, “I’ll run up to the Square and get it for you just as soon as the paint store is open. I could be back in plenty of time for school.”

  “My, what an ambitious boy!” Mother said. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with your wanting to take Ralph’s place at the store tomorrow, would it?”

  “If you work in the store you get to eat candy free,” he told her.

  “May eat candy,” Mother corrected him. Then she smiled and added, “But if it should work out that you take Ralph’s place you mustn’t eat more than two pieces of candy. Now run right along and take your bath, and don’t forget to wash the back of your neck and behind your ears. If you’re going to the Square early you must hurry right to bed; it’s way after midnight.”

  While Philip and Mother took their baths Grace helped me figure out the lumber we’d need for the shelves and table, and it was after two o’clock before we were cleaned up and in bed.

  15

  A Mite o’ Dickerin’

  EVERYTHING worked out fine Friday morning. Philip went to Medford Square to order the lumber and get the paint, and Mr. Durant said it would be all right for him to work in my place. As soon as school was out in the afternoon Grace met me at the streetcar line, and from the way she acted anyone might have thought she was my mother. She had on her high-heeled shoes, and her Christmas gloves, and she was carrying Mother’s handbag over her arm as if she were a grown-up lady.

  All the way to Sullivan Square, Grace kept scolding at me because I’d forgotten to shine my shoes. And she wanted to see if my fingernails and ears were clean. I tried to tell her those things didn’t make any difference when we were only going to dicker with a Chinaman and buy irons, but she wouldn’t let me alone. “Hmmmf!” she sniffed. “That’s what you think! Maybe you didn’t know that Mother gave me Uncle Levi’s address, and if he takes us to a restaurant for supper, I don’t want to be ashamed of you.”

  “Well, you won’t have to be,” I told her. “If you could see the daub of paint on the top of your own ear you wouldn’t worry so much about how I look.” That was the only thing that kept her from scolding at me clear to Essex Street. She was so busy peeking at the little mirror inside Mother’s handbag and scratching paint off her ear that she didn’t have any time to pester me.

  Mr. Haushalter was right when he told me the streets in the Chinatown district ran all cattiwompus, and even if we’d had a compass we couldn’t have gone straight to the eastward. So we kept turning corners till we found a street where all the stores had Chinese writing on the windows and signs. There was a Chinaman standing in the doorway of nearly every one, hiding his hands inside his sleeves and jabbering at us as we looked in the windows.

  We were sure we must be in just about the right place, but we didn’t see any store with new irons in the window, so Grace took Sam’s note out of the handbag and showed it to a Chinaman who was standing in the doorway of a secondhand store. From the way he’d been jabbering I didn’t think he could understand a word of English, but he could certainly read Chinese. As soon as he glanced at Sam’s note he opened his door and bowed us in as if we’d been a king and queen. Then he went to the back of his shop, rummaged around for a few minutes, and brought back an old iron with a little crack down one side. He held it out to us, with his thumb over the crack, and said, “Velly good. Four dollar.”

  Grace shook her head and said, “No, that one’s no good; we want a new one.”

  Instead of taking it back, the Chinaman held it farther out toward us and said, “Sree-nine’y-fi’e.”

  “No,” Grace said, “we don’t want it. We want a new one.”

  The storekeeper looked at her blankly, then said “Sree-nine’y.”

  “It’s no use,” Grace said to me. “He hasn’t anything but secondhand junk in here; let’s go somewhere else.”

  If that Chinaman couldn’t understand every word she said, he certainly knew what she meant. “Jus’ a minute, jus’ a minute,” he said, reached under his counter, and brought up a brand-new iron, just like Sam Lee’s. He pushed it across the counter toward us and said, “Six dollar,” just as plainly as I could have said it.

  For a minute I was sort of stumped. I’d expected him to say, “Four-fifty,” and I was all ready to say, “One-fifty,” but with him starting at six, I didn’t know just where I ought to begin. Grace helped me a little bit by giving the pocket of my coat a twitch. “No! One dollar,” I said.

  It must have taken at least half an hour for him to get down to four-fifty, and I must have lost track somewhere along the line; I was already up to a dollar sixty-five. Grace twitched my coat pocket again, then walked away from the counter where she could whisp
er to me. “You’re doing all right,” she whispered, “but be careful of him from now on. Once he made you go up a dime when he only came down a nickel, and if he does it many more times we’ll get stuck. It’s all right to go to three twenty-five, but don’t you go any higher. We’ll try some other place first.”

  It took us another half hour to do it, but we ended up right on three twenty-five. I’d fallen a little bit behind, so that I was at three twenty-five when the Chinaman reached three forty-five, but when we started to go out he came down the last twenty cents in a single jump. That first dicker was our only hard one, and I think our starting to go out helped a great deal. We didn’t have to wrangle more than twenty minutes over the price on the smaller gas irons, and not at all over the price of the spring-pole, the spray can, or the starch. And Grace was positive it was the right kind of starch, because it was in little fine grains, like rice.

  I think I might have saved as much as fifty cents on the small irons and other things, but Grace nodded her head before I was nearly through dickering, and you can’t do any dickering with a Chinaman after your sister has nodded her head. Until the things were all wrapped up and we’d paid our bill, I couldn’t figure out why Grace was in such a hurry to trade. Then she asked the storekeeper if he could tell us the quickest way to get to Scollay Square. The map he drew for us was easy to follow, and by six o’clock we were rapping on the door of Uncle Levi’s room.

  Just after Grace knocked there was a tinkling sound, and when Uncle Levi came to the door he was sort of smacking his lips and brushing his mustache with the back of his hand. “Come in! Come in!” he half shouted when he saw who we were. “Gracie, girl, how be you? What in tunket did you fetch along, Ralph; a wagon tongue and anvil? How’s Mary Emma?”