by Susan Isaacs
Sally sighed. She had started wearing makeup again, and her mother-in-law was giving her the fish eye. Big deal. She’d had it with looking dead from the ass both ways, with people not even seeing her, much less admiring her, when she walked down the street. She had done it for Janie, but it was really funny; when she bought the mascara and the pancake makeup and the rouge and the new kiss-proof lipstick and put them on, Janie had said, “Mommy, you’re beautyful!” The kid had been born with taste. The old lady was giving her dress the once-over, which was t.t.—tough titty—because she wasn’t buying any more ugly, baggy frump dresses.
She’d had it. Just the other night she’d begun thinking how she’d love to pack Janie up and sneak away, take her somewhere nice, like California. He’d be too dumb to figure out where she went. Maybe she’d go to Hollywood and try and get some bit parts in movies. Not be a star or anything. She wouldn’t kid herself. She was a little too old for that. She’d thought about it a lot since. “I think I hear Janie,” she said, rising slowly from the bench.
“She’s perfectly quiet,” Anna said. “She’s only been napping a half hour.”
“Sometimes that’s all she needs.” In her high patent-leather heels, Sally left a trail of small holes in the ground as she tottered on the grass back to the house.
“I wish you’d take your shoes off when you walk on the lawn,” Anna called after her. “It’s not just reseeding, it’s—”
“What?” Sally stopped and turned back toward her mother-in-law. “I didn’t hear you.”
“I said—” Anna began.
“Ow!” Sally yelled. She slapped her hand over her heart, as though saying a fast Pledge of Allegiance, hitting herself with enough force to kill the wasp that had stung her. But it was small vengeance. “Shit!” Her whole chest burned. It was terrible. Sally stared at the Heissenhubers with frightened eyes and then flopped forward.
“Something’s wrong,” said Carl.
Richard ran to her. “Sally, what is it? Sally?” He turned her over. She was slippery with sweat. The spot where the wasp had struck was so swollen it looked like a small third breast. Sally’s eyes rolled in her head. Her breath came in hoarse gasps. “Call an ambulance,” he cried. “Sally, what happened?”
Of course, she’d never tell. Sally had been a city girl, an indoor girl most of her life, or it might have happened sooner. She was fatally allergic to wasp stings. Richard held her head up, but her breathing became more labored. And finally it stopped. Just stopped. The woman who had been Sarah Taubman and Sally Tompkins and Señorita Rosita Carita and Mrs. Richard Heissenhuber died in her husband’s arms a full five minutes before the ambulance came screaming up the street.
After that, all was quiet until Jane awoke from her nap and called, “Mommy?”
3
…according to Jane Cobleigh’s British neurosurgeon, Sir Anthony Bradley, who met with reporters last night. However, the standard American work on the subject, Stupor and Coma, is somewhat more specific. It says…
—Detroit News
Richard Heissenhuber wasn’t a merry widower. Not that he moaned, wept, and mooned over Sally. On the contrary. For three days and nights he sat erect—stiff-legged, dry-eyed—between his parents on a brown horsehair sofa in the Norris J. Vernon Funeral Parlor. A floor fan whooshed air over them, and he continually brushed back the lock of brown hair that blew across his forehead. “I just can’t believe she’s gone,” announced Miss Compton, secretary to the president of Queen City Trust. It sounded like a challenge.
Richard tried to rise to meet it, but the viscous July heat sapped him. He sat poaching beneath his banker-white rayon shirt and his navy winter suit—the only one his mother said was dark enough for mourning. Every few minutes a new trickle of sweat would begin and run down his chest or behind his ear. “Hello, Miss C,” he said. “Sorry to bring you out in such hot weather.” Pimples of perspiration gleamed on her upper lip. Richard saw everyone else was hot too. People paid their respects and left as fast as they could.
He observed neighbors, relatives, and Queen City Trust executives sneaking glance after glance at Sally. He didn’t like it at all. She did not look like a young wife and mother who had come to a tragic, untimely end. Somehow, someone downstairs, some warped Vernon employee, had known precisely what Sally was and had given her the star treatment.
She was laid out peach-cheeked and carmine-lipped, her lids ultramarine, her lashes so thickly coated with mascara they looked like a pair of upside-down eyebrows. Either the navy white-cuffed dress she had worn to Jane’s baptism had shrunk or they had pinned it tight in back, because instead of making her look respectable, like any decent dead woman, it made her look absolutely voluptuous. And though he knew it couldn’t be true, for a minute he thought he heard one of the Queen City officers mutter that she was a real hot number. Then Richard realized that she would be cold forever and that in a few days she’d begin to—He clapped his hands over his eyes and squeezed his fingers into his forehead.
“Richard? Son? Is anything wrong?”
Richard’s knees began to shake and his feet jerked as if he were starting a minstrel number. “The heat,” he managed to whisper. He swooned and would have fallen sideways into his mother’s lap if Ralph Forsyth from the bank had not been standing right near him and grabbed for him and set him straight.
“Thank you, Mr. Forsyth,” he managed to say. A drop of sweat dribbled from his hairline, across his forehead and onto Mr. Forsyth’s sleeve. “Thank you very much.”
“Glad to help, Richard.”
It was not until the next day, with the patter of pebbles and clods of earth raining onto the coffin lid, that he felt safe. It was finally over.
As the weeks passed, Richard realized he missed neither Sally’s company nor her moist heat three nights a week. But he did not enjoy the role of widower. He sensed that no one, not even his parents, to whose house he had returned to live, really pitied him, so what was the point? Everything was the same. No one from the bank had come up to him at the cemetery and patted his shoulder and said, “We’ve changed our mind, Richard, old man. Stay at Queen City. We want you on our team.” All anyone had said was “Sorry” and “Bad luck.” His luck wasn’t bad, it was rotten. What was he supposed to do? And what in the world was he supposed to do with a three-and-a-half-year-old girl? Especially one like Jane, who would not admit her mother was dead.
The Heissenhubers’ dining room was small, and Anna had compensated for its size by papering the walls in a green and pale-yellow stripe, which in fact did make the ceiling appear quite high. She chose a cherrywood dinette set—table, chairs, breakfront—that was a scaled-down version of regular dining-room furniture and took up relatively little space. But the effect was wrong. The Heissenhubers were a big-boned family, and they looked grotesque when they sat down to dinner, like teddy bears at a dollhouse table.
“Eat your meat,” Anna pleaded. A cube of stewed beef cut into thick strings lay cold on Jane’s plate beside three circles of carrot and several peas in a puddle of congealed tan gravy.
“No.”
“Do you know how many coupons that meat is worth?” Carl demanded, referring to the war-rationed beef. “Do you?”
“My mommy says I don’t have to.”
“Jane,” Anna said in the soothing tone the minister had advised, “Mommy’s in heaven with Jesus. Remember we talked about that? Mommy is very happy in heaven and she misses you but she can’t come back.”
“She says I don’t have to eat my meat.”
Carl folded his napkin and put it beside his plate. “Don’t you lie to us, young lady. There’s no one talking to you.”
“Mommy says it’s—”
“Eat that meat!” Carl bellowed.
“It’s dog food and I shouldn’t eat it.”
“Eat it!”
Richard, who had been sitting across the oval dinette table from Jane, said his first words of the evening. “I’ll handle it, Dad.” His parents and his
child looked to him, their curiosity blended, perhaps, with incredulity. “Jane,” he began. Then he stopped, because he couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Yes, Daddy?” She was trying to help him along.
“Jane, you have to eat your meat. It’s good for you.”
“Mommy says it’s smelly.”
“No, she doesn’t.”
“Yes, she does.”
“Jane, it’s Grandma’s beef stew.”
“It’s doody soup, and Mommy—”
“Stop it, stop it! She’s dead.”
“Daddy, Mommy says she loves me and she loves you and you shouldn’t yell at me and you shouldn’t make me eat the meat.”
“Jane—”
“You know what Mommy says? She says—”
Richard stood so quickly his chair crashed backward. He raced around the oval table to Jane’s seat. She lowered her head. Her black braids grazed the tablecloth. Richard seized her fork and stabbed a shred of the meat. With his thumb and index finger, he squeezed Jane’s cheeks, forcing her mouth open. He thrust the fork inside and then withdrew it, clamping her lips together with his fingers. “Chew it. I’m not letting go until you chew it and swallow it.” With a gag no one heard because of her closed mouth, she managed to swallow.
“She swallowed, Richard,” Anna said. “I saw her.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“She did. Really. Didn’t she, Carl?”
“I couldn’t tell for sure.”
“She didn’t,” Richard said.
“Just look in her mouth, Richard,” his mother suggested,
“Open your mouth. Lift up your tongue. All right. Now eat the rest of your meat.” She picked up her fork. “That’s better.” Richard started back to his place. Jane murmured something. He was rounding the table behind Carl, walking back to his seat. “What did you say?”
“Mommy says I can eat now. It was too hot. That’s why she didn’t want me to put it in my mouth. But now it’s just right. Mommy says—”
“Don’t, Richard,” Anna called out, as he charged back to Jane’s place. “See? She’s eating.”
The gray December light in the playground was diffused by the thick web of bare branches that hung, like a canopy, over the row of swings. Anna clutched her tweed coat against her neck and turned to Jane, who appeared dwarfed in the big swing, a swarthy Goldilocks in Papa Bear’s seat.
“Swing,” Anna ordered. “That’s why I brought you here.”
The swing didn’t move. “Grandma, I’m hungry.”
“Dinner’s in an hour.”
“But I’m hungry now.”
“You’ll ruin your appetite.”
“Couldn’t we go home and get just one little thing? Like a doll would eat.”
“No. You have another fifteen minutes in the playground.”
“A bite of apple when we get home? One bite?”
“No.”
“A baby drink of milk?”
“Stop it.”
“My mommy—”
Anna stamped her foot on the ground. “Do you want me to tell your father you’re making up stories again? Do you?” She stomped over to her granddaughter, grabbed the chains that held the swing, and drew Jane up toward her. “Do you?” she demanded.
“No.”
“Then you had better mend your ways, Jane. Do you know what God does to little girls who lie?”
“What?”
“They go straight to you-know-where.”
“Where?”
Anna released the swing abruptly, causing it to arc back farther than it usually did. Jane’s green-mittened hands tightened on the chains. “Your father wants you to be a good girl. Don’t you want to be a good girl? Don’t you want everyone to love you?”
“Yes.”
“Then behave. And for heaven’s sake stop being such a nervous nelly. You won’t fall off the swing.”
Jane was too emotional for Anna’s taste. Nightmares. Fears. Five months after her mother’s death she still dashed to the front of the house each time the bell rang, still was grieved when she realized the caller was not Sally.
But as Anna was well aware, she was a clever child, able, at almost four, to read with a fluency that would have put a first grader to shame. Anna had taught her in just four months, sitting with a pad of paper and writing J-A-N-E in big letters and saying, “That’s you. Jane. See?” The child caught on quickly, although she had asked with irritating frequency to see the word “Mommy.”
Jane had all the intelligence Anna had observed years before in Richard, as well as a strength of will—Anna was the first to admit—her thirty-one-year-old son lacked. But it wasn’t easy, wiping clean the slate the girl’s mother had written on, ordering Jane to control herself when she started jitterbugging on street corners as they walked to church, spanking her for spilling out epithets—she had called Carl a dum-dum—when her way was thwarted.
But the child had her good points. She was affectionate, climbing onto Anna’s lap late afternoons with a storybook and putting her head on Anna’s bosom and her thumb in her mouth after saying “Read to me, Grandma.” And she was surprisingly neat for a young child. They had put her in a small finished room in the attic, but her nightmares about a monster chewing off her arms and legs were so vivid and her screams so shrill they had finally put her cot in a corner of Anna and Carl’s bedroom; Richard was in his old room and it wasn’t right for her to share it with him. Carl went to the grocery store and brought her a cardboard box to keep her toys and books in. She kept the box scrupulously tidy and even insisted on making her own bed, as if to demonstrate that bringing her down from the attic had been a wise idea. And she was actually eager to stick by Anna’s side, to help in any household chore.
Anna glanced over at Jane, who, in her usual cautious fashion, was slowly sliding off the swing, lowering her feet inch by safe inch. “Just get off, Jane. Don’t make a production out of it.” Anna watched her granddaughter’s agonizingly slow descent from the swing. “Jane!” The child’s head was lowered; her dark bangs hung over her eyes like a fringed shade.
Anna’s mouth twisted. The child had her mother’s coloring. Suspiciously dark skin—sallow, really—and that black hair. Like the Italians in the shoe repair store. But at least the child had inherited Carl’s and Richard’s eyes, a beautiful blue. Unfortunately she had also inherited their strong, square chin, their long limbs and broad shoulders. She was simply not beautiful. But not repulsive in the greasy way her mother had been. And she had brains. That might help. Anna only hoped her prayers had been answered, that the child’s willfulness and shocking language were only residues of the tramp’s waning influence. And that morals were not inherited. She reached for Jane’s hand. “Let’s go home. I have to finish supper.”
Grandma was cooking salmon croquettes again and the kitchen smelled. Mindlessly, Jane ran the coloring capsule over and over the white brick of oleomargarine, streaking it bright orange. Her mother had made wonderful things to eat, like Pineapple Star: a famous singer resting after her act on a bed of ice cream. Pineapple had a marshmallow head and chocolate syrup hair and pineapple spear body and, finally, two bright red cherry boobies that she and her mother had laughed and laughed about. Grandma Anna said there was a war on and there was absolutely no excuse for waste and nonsense.
“Jane, put the margarine back in the Frigidaire and then go and get four napkins. And fold them properly. No triangles. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, Grandma.”
Her mother had loved her so much.
Richard would be out of work as of January 1, 1944. He announced, with an understanding smile, “Mr. Forsyth says they need my desk, and besides, they think the incentive of really needing a job will have a bracing effect on me.”
“What?” The funny pages dropped from Carl’s hands.
“I thought you said they’d let you stay if you wanted to,” Anna said.
“Well, you know how things are,” Richard replied. “Anyway
, I’m not so sure they’re wrong. Things work out for the best.”
Anna flushed and turned away. Richard wasn’t the son she’d expected. It was as if the tramp, Sally, had sucked the juices out of him. What remained was a tall, handsome, educated…Anna swallowed. What remained was something less than a man.
Anna could hear every word the woman said. “Not that red,” she intoned. “I told you last week I didn’t care for it. Don’t you remember, Betty?”
“Sorry, Miss Rhodes.” The manicurist slipped the offending color back into its hole in the palette of nail polish bottles on the table between them. It was actually shaped like an artist’s palette; in the middle, black letters said, Fingernail Artistry by Lolette Charnay.
“I want the soft red, two bottles to the left. Not that way, the other way. Left. That’s right.”
She was obviously a career girl, that much Anna could tell. The average Cincinnati housewife would not come to the local beauty parlor first thing on a Saturday morning in a beige wool sheath and brown bolero jacket and brown kid pumps. She wasn’t one of those fast married women out for a good time with a man while her husband risked his life in Italy or the Solomons. No, indeed.
Her clothes were very smart, but her face was somber. Although well into her thirties, she wore no makeup. Her lips had lost most of their color, but they were firmly set and you could tell she meant business. Even as she sat under the dryer with the manicurist massaging lotion into her hand, she tapped her foot, as if measuring out the seconds until she could leave for something important.
She was not wearing a wedding ring. Anna, who was seated across from the woman and who had been studying her in the mirror, found the view blocked by her beautician, who was twirling a row of pin curls on the top of her head. Although the woman wasn’t married, she still could afford to come to the beauty parlor, not only for her hair but for a manicure. Anna herself went every five or six weeks for a cut and set, and once every six months for a permanent, and each time, a Saturday morning, the woman was there. Anna had asked Mr. Charles who she was, and although he was not sure—Mr. Wayne did her—he believed she worked downtown in one of the department stores and lived in the area, in Walnut Hills, with her parents. He thought her mother had gray hair in a feather cut.