Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  During the week she was never sad. She sang a great deal, but she had a very small repertoire. I think she knew only “Home on the Range,” “I’ll Build a Coffin of Pine,” “Holy, Holy, Holy,” and the obscene verses of “Frankie and Johnny,” and she had only one tune to which she fitted all the words, like square pegs in round holes, as Dr. Brunson said. Finally she was asked to stop. She did, but the moment the kitchen door banged to and she was on her way home, her voice came thundering back to us.

  She called onions “engerns” and told me to “pack them spuds to the dudes,” and if Mrs. Brunson scolded her, she said with a laugh, “The old heifer’s on the prod agin.” I memorized her expressions and used them in imaginary conversations with men in ten-gallon hats as I rode the range or hog-tied the steers or branded the calves. Under the influence of Maudie’s magazines, which I pored over far into the night after my mother had gone to bed, I began to write a story: “On a cold November morning,” I wrote with a blue pencil on manila drawing paper, “you might have seen, if you had been on the sharp lookout, a shabbily dressed man standing in a dark doorway on the main street of Boise, Idaho. Over his left hip was a bulge and that was a shiny black single-action Colt .44 meant to kill Buck Johnson, steely blue-eyed foreman of the Lazy S 4 later in the day. The party in the doorway was a tough customer and his name was Scrub Maxwell. The men of Boise, who were every last one of them square-shooters, hated Scrub’s innards, for he was a cattle rustler and a scalawag in more ways than one.” There followed a series of unconnected adventures, including stampedes, the discovery of wolves in the chuck-wagon, the puncturing of the bellies of “five million head of pure-bred Hereford white-face cows and bulls as well as calves, heifers and steers that had the bloat off Indian paintbrush.” Miss Pickens, to whom I unwisely showed my story, deplored this intellectual climate as much as she had my postprandial snoozes when my father had given me beer, and my compositions, all upon the same subject, that is, the heroism of the young sheriff, Sonny Marburn, came back marked in a vehement red pencil. And when I wrote in an examination that “st.” was the abbreviation for “steer” she held me up to the class as an outrageous example of the idle mind.

  Maudie left as soon as the Brunsons had begun their dessert and I stayed on to serve the coffee and to wash the dishes. It was strange, rather than embarrassing, to serve Betty and to find her eyes always elsewhere than on me, and after dinner to see her hidden behind a magazine in a corner of the sofa while I cleared her parents’ coffee cups away and brought in the ice-water. But later, when I was washing the dishes, she came into the kitchen and sat on a high green stool, talking with me, telling me the plots of movies she had seen, reporting on her Saturdays in Boston which were filled with visits to the dentist (“My daddy wouldn’t hurt me for the world,” she said, “so I have to go to Dr. Harrison on the Bay State Road.”), with music and dancing lessons, fittings at the dressmaker, excursions to Schrafft’s for hot chocolate with tons of whipped cream, and visits to her Uncle Harry’s house on Beacon Hill. Or she told me about the decorations in her bedroom, as if I had never seen them, had not, on Saturday when she was away and it was my day to clean the upstairs, fondled and pawed the porcelain shepherdesses that supported the lamps on her dressing table, their crooks bursting incongruously into parasols. I had gazed, awed, at the glassy photographs lining the walls, of Bebe Daniels, Clara Bow, Ramon Navarro, Janet Gaynor, Richard Barthelmess, inscribed with grandiloquent scrawls to “Betty.” I had looked through the windows of the doll-house where a whole family was engaged in ossified enterprises: a baby with a rosy backside lay face down in a cradle; a fat old grandmother stood in the bathroom, intently studying the tub as if she wanted to make sure how things looked before she left the house—she wore a hat and a fur-trimmed coat and carried a folded umbrella in one hand and a knitting bag in the other. A mother stood squarely in the center of the kitchen, a china broom lying flat at her feet; and on the roof, the father of the establishment was always emerging from the chimney where he was presumably making repairs; his legs, up to the waist, were invisible from the top but could be seen dangling through the ceiling of the dining-room, his heels nearly touching the rare roast beef (so life-like there were smudges of blood on the platter) and the golden banana which dwarfed the meat, these two dishes being the sole fare of the family from the beginning of my acquaintance with them until the end of it. Two children, a boy and a girl, stood facing each other at opposite ends of the parlor, doing nothing. I was charmed by the tiny kitchen stove with a door that really opened, the delicate round gilt table in the vestibule which showed, through its glass top, a bright blue butterfly with folded wings resting on a shasta daisy, and with the perfect little Christmas tree that stood in the sun parlor, everlastingly green, its bangles and loops of tinsel and tiny Santas proclaiming that to this happy, paralyzed family, Christmas was every day.

  I liked to look at Betty’s collection of tortoise-shell round combs, her barrettes and her grosgrain hair-ribbons, her party dresses with artificial roses at the shoulder, her splendidly equipped writing desk with lavender and pink note paper, a brand new set of Prang’s non-poisonous water-colors, red sealing wax, a gold pen and pencil engraved with her name, and a soft, white leather-bound New Testament with many colored place ribbons given her, it said on the flyleaf, by her loving mother two years before when she had been an angel in a Sunday School pageant. The inscription impressed me: “From your loving mother, Mrs. Robert Killigrew Brunson.”

  Occasionally, when I had washed the dish towels and had swept the kitchen floor, Mrs. Brunson would call out to her daughter, “Go on and make the popcorn if you want to, angel face.” I would stay on then sometimes until ten o’clock if the Brunsons, absorbed in magazines, forgot to send Betty to bed, and as we ate the buttery popcorn (made in an electric drum with a wooden handle which one turned round and round) she might digress from her own affairs to talk about people and things that I knew.

  Once she said, “I don’t know how you stand living next to those awful Kadish simps, chum. Honestly, they’re lousy. Cranberry makes me sick to the stomach to look at him. My mother wouldn’t let me go with them for anything. Do you want to know something? They’re Jews.”

  I was ashamed of my passion for Nathan and I said in defense, but meekly, “My father was a Catholic.”

  “Oh, that’s different,” she soothed me. “Daddy says you don’t have to be a Catholic just because your daddy is. I mean, that’s silly. I mean, well, after all, I’m not a Mason, am I, just because Daddy is?”

  Despite her cordiality, there was a note of reserve in her voice as if my heritage had been discussed and rationalized and not merely accepted. “Anyhow,” she went on, “Daddy has some good friends that are Catholics, but he won’t have anything to do with a Jew.”

  A little later, on an evening when the Brunsons were entertaining, I learned how I was regarded in the household. Someone remarked on my extreme youth, and Mrs. Brunson replied, “But she’s a jewel even so. You see, she was practically born in the pantry of the Hotel here and was trained before I got her.” Dr. Brunson, a rash democrat, said, “She’s good company for Betty, too.” But his wife snapped irritably, “That’s beside the point, Bob.”

  Betty, in our kitchen conversations, had not a trace of the haughtiness with which she had hitherto behaved towards me at school. At the same time, she gave me clearly to understand that our lives would never run parallel. She was to go to a finishing school and afterwards would come out in Boston at a double début with her cousin Frances Barker, the daughter of Mrs. Brunson’s wealthy and successful surgeon brother.

  One evening in March, Mrs. Brunson suddenly cried out during the salad course. We all—all but Betty—knew that her labor had begun several weeks before it should have. In their prudish way, her parents had planned to spare Betty any demonstrations like this and had hoped to have her installed in New York with a distant relative. In the tumult of getting Mrs. Br
unson off to the hospital, the child was all but ignored, her father only casting instructions over his shoulder to Maudie to stay all night in the house and to me to keep Betty company as long as I could. Yet even in his agitation, he recollected her innocence and shouted loudly from the vestibule that he would telephone from Boston as soon as they had selected a baby. She was perplexed by the abrupt departure and a little annoyed since her mind had been made up to receive the baby after her trip to New York, but far from suspecting that she had been misled, she thought her mother had been informed (presumably by telepathy) that a particularly choice specimen was available and that if she wanted it she must make haste to be the first bidder. This delicacy was hard to understand, for in every other way the Brunsons were extremely common or, as they put it, “broad-minded.” I, whose rearing had been far from gentle, had been told that it was unseemly to discuss any adventure remotely connected with the bathroom at the table, but any of the Brunsons might say, without a hint of embarrassment (although, because they always laughed, it was clear that they were somewhat self-conscious), “There isn’t any more toilet paper.”

  Maudie, Betty, and I put up a card table in the parlor and Maudie taught us how to play five-draw, deuces wild. In the midst of the game, she brought us some hot chocolate and said, “Well, boys, let’s lay off for five-ten minutes.” Betty’s mind had not been on the game and she was glad for the recess.

  “Maudie,” she said, “do you think Mummy is terribly beautiful?”

  “Shucks. Of course she is. You know that and you’re just fishing.”

  “I want to be just like her when I grow up.”

  “Don’t you worry,” said Maudie with a wry smile and a wink to me, “you will be. You’re the spittin’ image of her now.”

  “I love her dresses!” cried her daughter in a rhapsody.

  Mrs. Brunson dressed flamboyantly, even when she was pregnant, wearing, in the evening, flowered chiffon dresses that trailed the floor behind and barely covered her knees in front and black satin afternoon dresses touched up with rhinestone gimcracks. She always wore high heels. From her rather large, powdered ears depended tarnished bangles. Her blond hair, lighter than Betty’s, dipped and rose in hard permanent waves that framed a puffy face with orange lips and an orange circle on either cheekbone, eyebrows like peaked black thread and a beak of a pink nose.

  Maudie and I agreed that not only was she the handsomest, she was also the best dressed woman in Chichester.

  “Mummy has style,” said Betty smugly.

  “Yeah,” replied Maudie with a chuckle. “You mean the way she talks.” Betty nodded. Her mother did have a certain style but it was not the kind that prejudiced anyone in her favor. Her everyday language was a mixture of slang and profanity. For years she said “for crying out loud” with an occasional variation, “for crying in the beer,” and something that pleased her was “the cat’s pajamas.” But if she was annoyed with her husband, Maudie, a trades person or myself, she used a fastidious vocabulary and an elegantly sarcastic tone. “My good man, I scarcely mean to imply that all your meat is inferior,” she said once over the telephone to the butcher, “but the cut you have sent me is effroyable,” pronouncing the “effroy” to rhyme with “cloy.”

  Betty, after a moment’s silence, inquired of the cook, “Maudie, when you got your boys, did they come right off the cake of ice or were they down on the shelves underneath?”

  “Honey, I never got my boys that way. I got ’em like the cows git calves.”

  The little girl was startled. The Beelers had used dogs for illustration. She had believed that they were insulting her parents and indirectly calling them liars by stating as fact something contradictory to what she had been taught. Now she was disturbed in her ivory tower to find Maudie, an old woman and a mother, addicted to the same heresy. She asked for a fuller explanation.

  “Well,” Maudie began, “I ain’t saying it’s the same with everybody. Maybe we just tackle it this here way in Idaho.” She talked with an impersonal candor as Betty’s lips began to tremble and tears to falter from her eyes. When Maudie finished, “And I think it’s a mighty shame you never knew about it before. Why, dearie, my boy Horace went to his first bulling when he was four years old,” Betty burst into sobs and buried her face in the woman’s bosom. “It spoils everything!” she cried. “Everything!”

  “Now looky here,” said Maudie, “you just quit that favoring yourself. Do you see Sonie Marburg bawling?”

  But Betty sobbed on and on until finally she drooped with fatigue and Maudie carried her upstairs to bed.

  The telephone did not ring that night, and it was only the next day that we learned what had happened. Dr. Brunson came back to Chichester and, harried, cruelly disappointed, he made no allowances for Betty’s innocence, but announced forthrightly that the baby had been stillborn. A week or so later, Mrs. Brunson came home from the hospital and, quarrelsome in her convalescence, she discharged Maudie with the declaration, “This is an upper-class household, my good woman, and here we do not discuss certain facts, or, to put it in plain English, sex.” But she was obliged to re-hire her when she could find no other cook. She made neither an explanation nor an apology to Betty; moreover, Dr. Brunson decided at the last moment that he could not take her with him to New York to buy the new automobile, and on her birthday she sat in the kitchen on the high green stool with Maudie and me, blowing out the candles and wistfully beseeching me to share my mother’s baby with her.

  Chapter Four

  * * *

  I HAD GROWN stiff from kneeling on the floor of the shop, my head pressed against the splintery work-bench. My hands were blue with cold for the fire in the monkey stove which I had built earlier had died. I must have been there a very long time. It was still some hours before dawn when my mother had jostled my arm and told me to run for Mrs. Henderson and now, from the looks of the shadows, it must be nearly noon. I had alternated a game of Patience with a prayer all morning long, for Mrs. Henderson, a pious woman, had enjoined me to implore of God my mother’s safe delivery, and she must have known my mother very well for she had added that I should pray also that the baby be a girl. Now and then I had made a plea for myself, asking for the fulfillment of the wish I now wished every evening on the first star: “Let me go live on Pinckney Street.” From time to time, carried away with speculations on the décor of Miss Pride’s sitting room, I quit my devotions and went to the window, pretending that I saw there not the bay but the Charles River and that the ungainly dories were the sculls of Harvard crews whose existence I had learned of through Betty.

  Hopestill Mather’s slippers were where I had put them on the day my father disappeared: one, soiled now to a greenish gray, sat forlornly in the corner while the other was pinned to the work table. Miss Pride had written about them. I had opened the letter, addressed to “Hermann Marburg, Esq.,” and read her request that the slippers be sent at once and that my father begin to make her a pair of “stout brown walking shoes.” She expressed her surprise that my father was doing his work with less than his usual speed, but went on to say that his tardiness would be of no consequence if only the slippers were delivered on such and such a date. I assumed that on that day, a month before Christmas, Hopestill Mather would be going to a party. Several times I made an attempt to write to Miss Pride, explaining why they would never arrive, but I tore up each letter when I had finished it, and it was only after a second and much sharper note came from Pinckney Street that I at last sent off my apologies: “My father,” I wrote, “has gone west and will never come back to Chichester again. He went to Cheyenne, Wyoming, to his cattle ranch. I am sorry about the dancing slippers, but he never finished them before he left and he said for me to tell you that he was sorry. He would have written you himself but at the last minute he had so much business to attend to that he did not have time. Yours truly, Sonia Marburg.” A reply came by the return mail: “My dear Sonia: It was very thoug
htful of you to write to me. I regret that your father has left Massachusetts. With best wishes, sincerely yours, Lucy Pride.”

  Even though the envelope had been addressed to me and this was the first letter I had ever received in my life, and even though its author was the one person whom I had never dared dream would write to me, I had been disquieted by it. It was not the brevity that disappointed me so much as it was the finality which was twofold in its implication: it told me that my father would never return (when I had written the word “never” to her, I had only half believed in it) and that now he was gone, she would have no further business with our household. And still, though her meaning was so clear it made my heart ache, so old and habitual were my aspirations that I did not cease to plan my life with her on Pinckney Street. And now, as I was awaiting the birth of my mother’s baby, I was so far removed from the present time and Chichester that each moment of delay was a moment of bliss. A sound recalled me: I was still in tatters, the room was the reeking shack, the March wind through the cracks of the walls had set my teeth to clattering. Someone was tapping on the window and I turned.