[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

  “How many brothers do you have, Miss McKenna?” Neva asked.

  “Not a one.”

  A cursive line of geese passed overhead.

  “How many sisters?”

  “One. Plus a bairn that died.”

  The air smelled of frozen dust. Neva asked what a bairn was, and Aldine told her.

  “How’d the baby die?” Neva asked.

  “Don’t know, really.”

  “Did you come here on a boat?”

  “Aye.”

  The sky was thick with snowless clouds.

  “Was it big?”

  “Enormous.”

  “Sing that song! The one about Bryan O’Linn.”

  “If ye’ll sing it with me.” Aldine turned her eyes to Clare and he felt himself pushed along by currents, brushed by speechless fish. “Do you sing, Clay-dance?”

  He shook his head.

  “Oh, just try,” she said, coaxing him, the black pom-pom quivering slightly on the top of her head as she walked, Charlotte’s borrowed coat engulfing the whole of her, except for her boots, small and precise on the dusty road. “Bryan O’Linn was a gentleman born,” she began, and Neva sang with her in a high cheerful voice. “He lived at a time when no clothes they were worn.”

  Neva laughed when Clare blushed. “Isn’t it funny, Clare?” Neva asked, and she sang, “But as fashion went out, of course Bryan walked in . . .” Neva paused dramatically and then finished, “‘Whoo, I’ll set all the fashions,’ says Bryan O’Linn.”

  Clare smiled but he didn’t sing, and they walked on. “My nose turned leaky here,” Aldine said, touching her glove to her upper lip. “It is this cold in Scotland but my nose never turned leaky.”

  He understood every word she spoke. They were nearly home. The ground was dry. The air was still. There would be no snow, no moisture of any kind. Aldine snuffled and gave out a small moist laugh. He could have kept walking like this for hours.

  “Artemis!” Neva shouted, for there she was, ambling their way, her tail wagging so hard it seemed to rock her bony rump from one side to the other.

  23

  He’d thought it all out, they’re saying now.”

  Neva was leaning against the wall. She stared at her fist. Her father’s voice, in the next room, was low, like at church.

  “He’d dug a big trench and shot the mules so one fell into it and the other one half did. I guess he meant to cover them up but he didn’t. He’d gone out to hunt rabbits so no one took notice. Then he went straight into the barn. Mrs. Tanner saw him go in, but didn’t think anything about it for almost an hour and then she suddenly wondered where his mules were and why it was so quiet so she sent Yauncy out.” A second or two passed. “I guess she feels almost worse about that than the other. Sending Yauncy out.”

  Quiet. Then her mother’s voice. “He knew the Bible. He knew that it was a . . .”

  Neva held one box elder bug in her closed hand. Before, she could feel it scrabbling in there but it was resting now. She didn’t really want to listen to her mother and father but if she made noise now they would know she had been.

  “Mrs. Tanner said he hadn’t wanted dinner. He sat with them, though, while they had soup and bread. She said he looked funny at them. Like he was thinking . . . And here afterward she wondered what all had gone on in his mind, sitting there looking at them, how maybe it would be better if they went all together to the sweet hereafter.”

  Her parents were done talking but they didn’t move. Neither did Neva. She opened her hand and looked at the box elder bug. She blew on it but it didn’t move. She knew what had happened. Charlotte had told her. Mr. Tanner had an accident in the barn, a bad accident, and had fallen from the hayloft and even though Yauncy tried to save him it was too late.

  24

  On Sundays, Clare could almost pretend he was courting Aldine, that he’d brought her home to spend the evening with his family, and she was sitting apart from him, knitting on the sofa, only for propriety’s sake. Usually his father liked to read aloud after supper on that one day a week he wasn’t in the barn or on the tractor. He had read David Copperfield the previous winter, followed by Rudyard Kipling’s poems and stories, and he had then decided they should try Shakespeare. Too bad they had not done Lord By-run, Clare thought, because then he would not have embarrassed himself.

  As his father paged through the Riverside Shakespeare, Neva lay on the floor and drew long-nosed horses that she colored pink and purple. Clare, trying not to stare at Aldine, raked his fingernails across the denim of his pants as if to file them. Charlotte read her own book. His mother sewed under light from the Tiffany lamp. From his place on the wall, Opa Hoffman looked down on all of them like a judge.

  His mother still wore her apron, the one embroidered with the outline of a dish-washing bear, and from the way that she kept glancing frequently up at the clock, Clare knew she was wondering if whatever his father chose to read would be over before the start of her radio program.

  People told Clare he looked like his mother. It was true they were colored alike: light brown hair, light brown eyes, unfreckled skin that darkened in summer like a jar of tea. They had identical slim noses, too, with a nostril flare that Clare thought made him look effeminate. He thought it was probably his nose that had made Aldine call him “Byronic” a few days after his classroom recitation of Lord Byron. What Lord Byron looked like, Clare would’ve liked to know.

  Clare’s father could do accents: English, German, French, or Negro, though he’d stopped doing Irish and Scotch lately because he said Miss McKenna would know him for a charlatan. Finally his father looked up and said they might all take parts in King Richard III.

  “Oh, please, Dad, not that!” Charlotte said. “Let me pick something a little more fun for the rest of us. Come on.”

  The book was handed over, and his father slipped off his glasses, laid them aside, and rubbed his eyes.

  “What about Venus and Adonis?” Charlotte asked. Her father had been moving page by page through the front of the book; she had flipped to the back. “We studied that myth at school. In the Mythology Club.”

  “What is it, Lottie?” his father asked. “Is it a play? I don’t remember it.”

  Charlotte didn’t answer, probably because he’d called her Lottie. She said it made her sound like a big dumb farm girl with pretzel braids. Everyone had called her that until she went away to high school, and now sometimes his father said “Lottie” without thinking. Clare himself employed it whenever he wanted to get her goat, which was fairly often.

  “Venus and Adonis,” Charlotte began, tucking a loose spiral of hair behind her ear. If not for Aldine’s presence, Clare would have gone to bed. He was tired, and with Charlotte reading, there wouldn’t be any funny parts or accents.

  “Who’s Venus?” Neva asked from her place on the rug, close to Aldine’s feet like an adoring dog. Aldine was knitting a hat just like her own for Neva—a hat she’d told Neva was called a bud-ay—and she looked up with a pleasant smile but didn’t stop moving her needles.

  “The goddess of love,” Charlotte said, using her thumb to keep her place. “She fell in love with a handsome mortal but he was killed by a discus.”

  “That’s some oo-ther handsome mortal. I think Adonis is killed by a boar,” Aldine said, and Clare took silent pleasure in the way that her pronunciation sounded both correct and poetic.

  Neva colored a goggle-eyed pony. “A boar?” she asked.

  “Yes, it’s very common,” Charlotte said, not looking up. “People are bored to death all the time. Especially on farms.”

  Clare’s mother pulled a thread taut and looked reproachfully at Charlotte. “I believe Aldine means a wild pig.”

  “Hogs,” Charlotte said. “Pigs. Boars. Boring people. Anyway, let’s just read the story. “Even as the sun with purple-colour’d face,” she began, “Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn.”

  Neva’s pencil lead shushed across the paper, Clare peered at Aldine�
��s ankles, and Charlotte read on. It was just harmonious sound at first, something he listened to as he would listen to classical music on one of his mother’s radio shows, but then something about the way his father’s expression changed and the way his mother lifted her head made him try to change the archaic grammar into meaning.

  “The studded bridle on a ragged bough

  Nimbly she fastens—O, How quick is love!—

  The steed is stalled up, and even now

  To tie the rider she begins to prove:

  Backward she push’d him, as she would be thrust

  And govern’d him in strength, though not in lust.”

  It was about horses, yet it wasn’t about horses. He wished he’d been paying better attention to the verses that came before.

  “So soon was she along as he was down,

  Each leaning on their elbows and their hips:

  Now doth she stroke his cheek, now doth he frown,

  And ’gins to chide, but soon she stops his lips;

  And kissing speaks, with lustful language broken,

  ‘If thou wilt chide, thy lips shall never open.’”

  Clare thought of the magazine he’d gotten from Harry Gifford, of the girls spread across the pages in poses that made him feel this same way, but his mother was sitting there, and his father was sitting there, both of them tensing their eyebrows and lips, and Aldine was looking very hard at her knitting. Her eyes seemed larger, her mouth tighter. But it was Shakespeare, and anything Shakespeare said, you could say in the house. Charlotte was heedless of it all, or—and this suddenly seemed more likely—she was pretending to be heedless, and she kept reading:

  “Even as an empty eagle, sharp by fast,

  Tires with her beak on feathers, flesh and bone,

  Shaking her wings, devouring all in haste,

  Till either gorge be stuff’d or prey be gone;

  Even so she kiss’d his brow, his cheek, his chin,

  And where she ends she doth anew begin.”

  “Charlotte,” his mother said sharply, stuffing the shirt she was mending into her sewing basket. “I don’t think this is suitable. Besides, it’s Neva’s bedtime.” She stood abruptly and began gathering Neva’s papers.

  “No!” Neva said. “I’m not done!”

  Clare made himself look at Opa Hoffman’s picture until he felt no desire. Charlotte’s expression, as she closed the Shakespeare book, was amused, not thwarted, so he was suddenly certain she’d known all about the poem before she’d started it, and that she’d probably gotten a lot farther than she expected.

  When Neva’s fit about not going to bed got her nowhere, she asked if Miss McKenna could sing her to sleep, please, please, please, and the two of them left the room. It was five past eight. Clare’s mother tuned the radio to the NBC Blue Network, where the symphonic music had already begun.

  Clare stood and stretched, saying, “Well, good night.”

  The stairway was cold, as usual. As he climbed the steps, he could hear Aldine singing already. He stood for a moment outside Neva’s closed door to hear her tongue flutter against her teeth when she sang the r’s:

  “Bryan O’Linn had no breeches to wear

  He got him a sheepskin to make him a pair,

  With the fleshy side out and the woolly side in,

  ‘Whoo, they’re pleasant and cool!’ says Bryan O’Linn.”

  He put his own tongue to his teeth and whispered “breeches” until he sounded like her, and he wondered how long it would be before he could slip Venus and Adonis off the shelf and try to make more sense of its phrases.

  25

  Opal had bought the fabric, enough for two dresses, on the condition that Charlotte would help her. Charlotte knew what that meant—she’d be sewing the dresses while Opal gabbed and watched—but that was fine by Charlotte. She would get to sew, she would get a new dress, and she would have some company, none of which would be true without the material. Besides, Opal had a funny streak and she was a good listener, especially for all things Aldine.

  “You should see Clare turn into a puddle every time she enters the room,” Charlotte said, “and Neva starts every sentence with Miss McKenna. Miss McKenna says this and Miss McKenna does that.”

  They’d laid the pattern out on the table and had only two hours before they’d have to take it up and set the dinner dishes. Charlotte was aware of her mother in the kitchen, peeling the apples Opal had brought. Opal had of course offered to help; her mother had of course refused.

  “And you’d think that the whole island of Scotland must be free of dust the way she complains of it.” She moved her voice up to a thin girlish register. “It’s wooonderful here in Pooodunk a’course but wouldna be dead splendid if it were naw so clarty, don’t you know?”

  Opal’s laughter came up from the stomach and only encouraged Charlotte further.

  She said, “In the ooold country we looove to sing a sooong and strike a pooose.”

  She said, “In New Yooork where you have never been and will never be they have a movie hoose on every bloook.”

  She said, “Oh Clay-dance, doon’t you have the dead juiciest eyes.”

  “That will be enough, Charlotte!” her mother called from the other room, which only made Charlotte aware of how long her mother had let it go before reining it in.

  In a lower voice, Charlotte said, “She’ll soon tell us she’s descended from the Queen of Scotland.”

  “Do they have one?”

  Charlotte had just put a pin in her mouth but felt it worthwhile to take it out. “Yes, and her name is Aldine.”

  It was beautiful fabric, the print a maizey yellow with big red-and-orange asters. The dress would be perfect for spring—tiered skirt and ruffled cap sleeves—and the inverted-V bodice with the gathering at the bust would, Charlotte knew, be more becoming on a full figure like her own than on a wispy type like Opal. She bet Opal knew that, too, because she’d suggested that Charlotte wear her dress only on even days while she would take odd so they’d never both be caught wearing it “side by side.” A perfectly fine idea, Charlotte guessed, but she couldn’t help herself from saying, “But then everyone might think we’re just trading the same dress back and forth.”

  When her mother went out of doors with a basket of wash to hang, Charlotte had the chance she’d been waiting for, and told Opal about, as she put it, “The Venus-and-Adonis Affair.”

  “You read that out loud?” Opal said when Charlotte had filled her in. They’d both privately read the poem last summer, at least the best parts of it, and later conferred about its contents.

  Charlotte nodded. She was cutting the fabric now. “Everybody but Neva nearly turned purple. I thought the Mother might expire and I truly thought Clare was going to pop his cork.”

  This brought raucous laughter from Opal, who shrieked, “What kind of cork?” which caused even Charlotte, who was no prude, to shush her. But her mother had heard nothing—Charlotte could see her stringing a sheet along the line, her mouth full of clothespins.

  “Here, you cut this,” Charlotte said a moment later to Opal, handing her the scissors. She went to the kitchen and returned with a pencil and slim sheet of paper. Opal suspended her cutting—she was watching Charlotte’s every move.

  “What are you up to, Miss Mischievous?” Opal said, but Charlotte barely heard the question, so intent was she upon the task at hand.

  26

  Ellie stood in the pantry, a freestanding shed Ansel had built for her when they were first married, a room where even in summer the air smelled of well water and mold. She was taking stock, not that there was much to take stock of. No pork, no beef, and no chicken, but the holidays were coming—Thanksgiving in four days, then Christmas. She had always been good at special occasions. It was why the Harvey House had been her perfect world, and why a farm miles from the closest town was not.

  Ellie would turn forty on Thanksgiving. Her birthday usually fell before or after the holiday, near enough that there was
never any time or thought for another celebration even if Ansel had been so inclined. In Shaker Heights, Ohio, the years when she’d been Herr Hoffman’s daughter Eleanor and the younger, less lively sister of Ida Marie had been full of birthday parties and pink cakes and presents. At eighteen, she’d worn jet beads to Ida’s birthday dance at their house on West Park Boulevard and been paired off with her father’s chosen suitor, Monty Pike, a boy with a lot of money and no kindness in him at all, not even for animals.

  Becoming Harvey Girls had been Ida’s idea because she despised the boys their father picked for her, too. Wouldn’t it be glamorous, anyway, a life on your own, a salary, those smart uniforms?

  “We won’t be on our own,” Ellie had said gloomily, picturing them working in the Cleveland station for about two minutes before their father showed up, but Ida said they’d go to some other state, probably Kansas, because Kansas was packed with Harvey Houses.

  Like most things done by young people, it was poorly imagined. Only later did she know exactly how far it was from Shaker Heights to Emporia: nine hundred miles. And yet she was happy from the very beginning in Emporia, handing cups of coffee and plates of steaming food across the counter to men leaving on the next train. The tables of the Emporia restaurant—mahogany tables, mahogany chairs—had been set with white linen and silver. The clothes of every waitress were pressed and clean, black and white, like English maids in a movie. She stood every day behind the long gleaming counter, waiting for the sound of Ernie’s gong. The train whistle came first, a warning that the train was just a mile away, and then Ernie, who was watching for the first glimpse of the engine, struck that funny Chinese gong. All the orders had been wired ahead and she could hear the cooks stirring, basting, pouring, and frying. There was always something to do, yet there was always time to dream. She’d often felt that the coming train would carry the California hotelier or Hollywood producer who would be so impressed by her efficiency and friendly (but not overfriendly) manner that he would find a reason to stay a few days in Kansas, taking all his meals at the Harvey House and sitting where Ellie Hoffman could take his order for banana pie. And then, after a very refined and respectful courtship, she would become the wife in a household that, like the one of her childhood, required dressing up, formal dinners, and mahogany furniture.