Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  “You exaggerate, Lucy,” replied Mrs. Brooks. “You can’t get her father out of your mind. Amy says all the girls like her. Isn’t that the important thing, after all, at her age?”

  “I don’t believe Amy said that, Josie,” said Miss Pride, peering deeply into her cousin’s skull. “Did she now, truly? No, I won’t make you answer, for I know what’s what. But anyhow, it’s not what she does now that worries me, it is what she will do when she has, so to speak, reached the age of discretion. For I am as certain as I am that you are sitting here with me that with her it will be indiscretion. The counselor wrote me that she had been caught smoking. At fifteen, Josie! And that she had tried to run off from camp in a baker’s truck. I won’t have you telling me that these are only a child’s pranks. There is something loose in her character. Her holiday tantrums are blood-curdling! If she were not a child, she would have apoplexy, I’m quite sure—her face turns as blue as the sky.”

  Mrs. Brooks stretched out a consoling hand. “Lucy, you will never change. We can’t all have your self-control, my dear! Why, Amy, your affectionate Amy Brooks, has her temper too. It’s Hope’s lovely red hair, as the superstition goes. But don’t suppose I don’t sympathize with you.”

  “I must confess her hair endears her to me.”

  “It should. She looks more like you every year.”

  As I was removing the plates, Miss Pride said, “By the way, Josie, remind me to show you the pen-wiper this child made for me. Isn’t she clever to be a chambermaid and seamstress when she’s only thirteen?”

  Mrs. Brooks smiled at me and I noticed that her left eye twitched as she did so. “I should say! I expect my Amy and your Hope could learn a great many useful things from her. Is your father a fisherman?”

  “Her father is a fuyard,” said Miss Pride. She explained to me that she had told Mrs. Brooks that my father was a cobbler and added, “You don’t know French, do you, Sonie? It’s German you know, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, ma’am. In German it’s Schuhmacher.”

  Whether Miss Pride appreciated my pen-wiper or whether she compared me, to my advantage, to her niece, I could not tell, but at any rate, she was increasingly cordial to me that summer. She sent me on errands to her room when she was waiting for Mac or settling down to her reading in the lobby. “Run upstairs and bring me a handkerchief, my dear,” she would say, and the “my dear” or “my good child” made me think my case was not an altogether hopeless one. And when she left in September, she gave me a sealing wax kit in token of her approval of the way I made her bed. The wax was rather old and did not go on smoothly and the “S” of the seal was backwards. But I did not care. On the fly-leaf of each of my school books I dripped the blood-red taper and impressed my initials in the molten mound. So that just as each time Miss Pride wiped her pen she remembered me, I remembered her whenever I opened a book.

  3

  My brother Ivan would have granted my mother’s wish and died soon after his birth if it had not been for the constant ministrations of Mrs. Henderson, who was both a generous and a sharp-eyed woman. If her attitude had been preponderantly the first when the baby was born, it was the second that for five winters and summers kept her in daily communication with our household. For she was one of those people we call “good.” There was in her not the impulse to intrude, but to embrace, not to scatter kindness but to mend with it, and to do so not in the light of this or that principle, but because love was her nature. Mrs. Henderson’s reputation was widespread in Chichester and had even reached the Hotel Barstow. Once, in the third summer of Ivan’s life, I heard Mrs. Prather saying to a young relative, “I’m far more tolerant of the Catholics than most of my friends, but I can’t agree with them that everyone must go through Purgatory—oh, I shall, I’m a sinner, but I’ve known people so pure I’m certain it’s the good Lord’s intention they should go straight to Heaven.”

  The girl looked doubtful. “I don’t believe you do know such a person—at any rate it can’t be anyone I’ve ever seen in your house.”

  “No, she has never been in my house. But you know her if you’ve ever had any sewing or mending done when you’ve visited here. I mean Mrs. Henderson who lives on this road up about a quarter of a mile.”

  “Oh, yes, I’ve been there. But how do you know? Surely you haven’t struck up a friendship with her!”

  “There was no need. Her goodness is as plain as the nose on your face.” And she went on to describe the serene household, equipped with children whose manners imitated their mother’s and with a husband who, whatever he might be outside the house, behaved in that atmosphere as commendably as one of his own children.

  The girl was still unsatisfied. “You have given me no proof. What has your seamstress done?” There was a silence. Mrs. Henderson’s advocate could not publish the chief reason for her immediate assumption into Heaven when I was near-by. But when, glancing back at the table from another part of the dining-room where my duties had carried me, I needed not to hear the words issuing so eagerly from her lips: she was, I knew, recounting our “story.”

  No doubt Mrs. Prather, who was a sentimental woman, exaggerated our benefactress’s virtues. Mrs. Henderson was a “natural” and was to be envied and respected as are all people to whom being good seems the easiest part of life. A more sensitive person, one more dedicated to doing good, would have had, as I believe she did not, periods of despair at my mother’s indifference to her services, Ivan’s malicious ingratitude, and my own mercurial humors. She was as patient and dependable as a devoted dog who suffers his master to pull his tail and play all kinds of humiliating tricks on him without once growing angry. If, finding her at our house on my return from school, I saw that her finger was bound up with court plaster, I did not learn from her what the injury was, but rather from Ivan who had done the mischief himself with his sharp little teeth while she was fitting a new suit of clothes on him. And when he planted himself in her path as she was crossing over to our house with a plate of hot food and cried some unpleasantness which he put in the slang he had learned from me and the Kadishes, calling her a “lousy drip” or a “crazy dope” or a “dumb bunny,” she only chuckled and with her powerful hands set him aside like a hurdle made of tissue paper.

  She dressed my brother in the clothes her own children had outgrown and cut them down, taking great pains to make them fit his puny body properly. In the early years, she had been his faithful nursemaid, had, when she was too busy and I was at work or at school, charged her eldest daughter, Sarah, with his care. Between them they had fed and bathed and aired him and taught him to walk and talk. If they had failed to teach him manners (as my mother accused them—she had long since forgotten that she had any responsibility towards him herself), it was not their fault. They had tried to make him learn to say “thank you” and “please” but since in his own home there was no occasion for such delicacy, they had been unsuccessful.

  If Mrs. Henderson deplored my mother’s apathy, she never revealed it. Indeed, she treated her much as she did Ivan, receiving with composure the most outrageous insults, the most preposterous complaints with which my mother besieged her. She had once, soon after Ivan was born, made an appeal to her: “It’s not my business, Mrs. Marburg, but I was wondering if you couldn’t get a place now. There are jobs to be had for the asking in Marblehead and Lynn.”

  My mother stared uncomprehendingly. “And may I ask what Sonie would do if I was gone all day long and nobody was here to have a piping hot dinner for her?” Mrs. Henderson, who knew that I always prepared our evening meal before I reported at the Brunsons’ in the winter and at the Hotel in the summer, sighed. “The child worries me. She don’t look strong. I’ve a good mind to put her on Josephine’s tonic.”

  Even though, since there was a shortage of help, my mother had been offered a slight raise in salary at the Hotel, she steadfastly refused to go back. She spoke of her “disgrace” and said that she
could never face respectable people again. “Respectable people” became, in time, all the world but Mrs. Henderson and myself. If another neighbor—Mrs. Kadish or Mrs. Radcliffe whose society she had heretofore enjoyed—came to call, she bolted the door and slipped into the bedroom where she stood trembling until the knocking stopped. But if she were surprised out of a daydream and looked up to find a caller outside the screen door, she put her finger to her lips and motioned towards the bedroom. “Sh! The child, he’s sleeping.” The visitor, who as likely as not had seen Sarah Henderson sitting with the baby on the beach, put down her offering—a pot of soup or a bowl of pudding—and smiled and went away and finally, wiser after a few more rebuffs, did not come back.

  Although my mother had never particularly liked her neighbors and had rarely returned calls, she had always had sufficient relations with the women of Chichester to remain something like them, and had gone abroad enough to realize that the world was larger than her kitchen. Her walks now became shorter. She no longer, in the summer evenings, sat on the little step beside the door, star-gazing and dreaming of Moscow. Nothing would have induced her to go to the village, for she was afraid of being ridiculed. Once, when a Fuller brush man came and offered to give her, without charge, a toothbrush with black bristles, she believed that the whole community, in the person of this representative, was teasing her for not brushing her teeth. Thereafter, when peddlers came, she pretended to be a deaf-mute and gesticulated at them with a look of hopeless regret on her dreamy face. Her voluntary imprisonment gradually became complete, and for four years, after my brother’s first birthday, she never crossed the sill of our door, save on a series of winter evenings in the last of those years.

  One day, when my brother was about three, Mrs. Henderson came to sit awhile and as she sat, worked at some embroidery for a table runner. It represented a green straw basket from which radiated a bouquet of larkspur and daisies of unlikely colors, these being the satellites to a rose, three times their stature and as big as a plate in diameter. In the void of muslin on all sides of the design, single pansies, petunias, and bachelor’s buttons came fortuitously to life under Mrs. Henderson’s needle. My mother watched, entranced, and as the neighbor filled in a petunia’s corolla, she bent over the work excitedly. “Oh, how magical!” she cried. “Could I ever make those beautiful posies?” Mrs. Henderson assured her that she could, and laying aside her table runner, she took up a piece of plain cloth and gave my mother a lesson in the elementals of fancy-work, demonstrating the “lazy daisy” and the French knot and the feather-stitch. My mother was impatient to try her own hand and when she had finally got a needle threaded and her hoops fitted together, began to copy the stitches. They came out all askew and unrelated; her French knots were rough burls and her draggle-tailed lazy daisies exposed their unkempt framework which should have been on the underside. But she was not in the least disheartened and long after Mrs. Henderson had gone, she continued to practice, admonishing herself, “Ah, Shura, you’re clumsy. All thumbs and butter fingers.”

  The following morning, I found she had got up hours before me, had had her breakfast, and had even washed her dishes and now was back at work on her embroidery. I was sure she would be tired of it by afternoon, but as it turned out, I quite underestimated my mother’s patience with herself. From that day onward she stuck to her late calling with the tenacity, the absorption, and the humility of an artist. When I could not buy cloth for her to embellish, she set to work on her own petticoat or on my winter underdrawers or on the kitchen curtains. Once, being without anything at all and having a great urge to execute some oak leaves and acorns, she ripped open one of our pillows, letting the feathers fly where they would, with the result that for weeks we inhaled down. The ticking, when it was re-stuffed, was still so roomy that what feathers I had salvaged assembled at one end or the other but never spread out evenly. She was so proud of the leaves and acorns which were, to be sure, done in remarkable verisimilitude but interested me less than almost any other of her creations, that she made a new pillow cover to protect them which had the same design, and as it turned out well—better, she felt, than the original—it too required a protector, also bearing the same design, and so on, until it appeared that our pillow was to have as many skins as an onion. And no doubt it would have if Mrs. Henderson had not providentially given us for Christmas a very elaborate pillow case, adorned with hollyhocks, which my mother felt was just the thing to cover all her precious acorns. She would gaze at the pillow and say, “You would never guess what’s underneath!”

  I thought that her activity should be functional and once suggested that we try to sell some of her work. She greeted the proposal with surprise but acquiesced and pulled out from under the bed one of the boxes that had contained skis and was now used as her treasure chest. She could not make a choice: this was the only spray of lilac she had ever made, that was her most successful poplar tree, the dish towel half-covered with a cerise posy had been made in honor of my birthday. She could not part with anything. As our house was becoming overcrowded with her heaps of decorated rags, I at length persuaded her to use the shop as a storeroom, and finding that once the things were out of sight she forgot about them, I advertised them at the Hotel the next summer among the help. Though I realized no money, I sometimes had the luck to exchange a pin-cushion bearing a Russian monogram in cross-stitch for a dozen eggs or a pot-holder in the form of a purple rooster for a pat of butter or a pair of old shoes. Some of her work I still have: a flour sack, smocked in scarlet silk which she gave me one Christmas. She could assign to it no purpose but said she knew I would like “the red.” When this poor thing, its banal legend GOLDEN GRAIN showing through the smocking as GLDE RIN, turns up as I straighten my bureau drawers, Chichester’s long winters return, sprouting their evergreen leaves and everlasting flowers in the snow and the wind.

  After the first rapture of fancy-work had spent itself and she merely burned with a steady, sober flame which only now and again flared forth, as in the case of the oak leaves, she found several supplementary diversions which never lasted but which she undertook when she had nothing to embroider. Thus, on four evenings running one winter, I was commissioned to take dictation from her. I wrote long lists of all manner of things: the names of the guests at the Hotel as far back as she could remember, the nations of the world, kinds of flowers and fruit and fish, the days of the week, and the months of the year. And as she dictated, she drew from memory the designs she had worked in her colored thread, covering page after page of a composition book with likenesses of cosmos and bumblebees. She complained that her memory was bad and she wanted the names of things preserved for her. Even though she could not read my lists, the very paper was reassuring; looking at it, she said, she knew that she had the key to things, even though she could not find the door.

  During the same winter that she employed me as amanuensis, she fell one day to musing on the wicker furniture on the Hotel porch, one piece of which, a rocking chair, had been given us by the manager when it had reached a state of total dilapidation. It was quite useless, but Mamma had dressed it up with a cushion and a tidy each saying “Hotel Barstow” which I had lettered for her and which she had filled in with lavender feather-stitching on yellow Indian-head. She inquired of me if the Hotel chairs were ever cleaned and when I told her I doubted it, at least that I had never been told to do anything with them except to move them into the sun or out of it, she was scandalized. Who knew but what that Mrs. McKenzie, who was always nibbling, had lodged an apple core or nutshells between the cushion and the frame? She began to explore the crevices of our rocking chair with a hairpin and brought up a quantity of lint and poked out to the floor a good deal of fine sand.

  “There!” she cried triumphantly. “What did I tell you?”

  All day she worked at the chair and when I came home from the Brunsons’ that evening, I found a shocking monument of dirt on the floor which she had patiently dislodged. She was wearing a
coat and a scarf on her head and she told me that she had a little business to attend to, would I accompany her and be so good as to find some candles? Since she was, I saw, bent on going and bent also on not divulging where or why or for how long, I agreed, and took Ivan to Mrs. Henderson’s where he directly disrupted the tranquillity of the house with his evil howls, clinging to me as though I were the last familiar spar in that sea of piety and kindness. He bit my leg, at once to declare his ownership and his dependence. One of the little girls, Josephine, offered him a cookie which he threw to the floor in a fury. Unruffled, she picked it up and tried him with a balloon which pleased him slightly. “Now, then, aren’t you ashamed of yourself!” I said and shook him by the elbow. But Mrs. Henderson pulled my brother to her and said soothingly, “Now you run along, Sonie. He’s my boy for the evening. It wasn’t a nice cookie and he had the good sense to see that.”

  It was a fine, cold night with surfaces that split under our feet and a bare sky furnished only with a few stark stars and an austere moon that pitched, in a thousand elliptical and gouty travesties of itself, amongst the waves and whose light resurrected from the shadows shafts of earth and the roofs of sheds and exposed completely a steep incline to the water which seemed, so regular it was, to have been paved by hand with smooth, round stones. We took the road that led to the Hotel and walked fast because of the cold. My mother, companionably holding me by the hand, walked erect and seemed herself, herself of days so long ago that now they had all but slipped from memory since there was so little in her now out of which to construct her as she had been.

  It was the first time in years that we had gone out together and it was this phenomenon, coupled with the vigor of her movement and vivacity of her talk about most trifling matters of the village, and the inexplicable joy in her face, that unburied for me a Christmas Eve when I was four or five years old. My parents took me to a pageant in the Sunday School rooms of the Methodist church on such a night as this. Part of the way I walked between them and part of the way my father carried me, grumbling that I was too heavy. The Christmas tree was as tall as the room and topped by a sugary star, and onto its branches had been grafted incongruous fruits: crimson bulbs and asbestos peaches and tongueless bells, all floured with snow and illumined with a hundred candles whose flames tossed whenever the door opened and closed. The people sang carols, so simple and loud that I could catch all the words, and my father, in a great tuneless voice, roared out the German to the ones he knew. Each child was given a popcorn ball and a glazed apple by a masked and padded Santa Claus. I was terrified, when I received my presents, to see, between his glove and cuff half an inch of black skin! I told Rosalie Kadish the next day and she, after conferring with her brother Nathan, informed me that underneath his fine red suit, Santa Claus was the pastor’s Negro chauffeur.