by Belva Plain
“Only one more question. I don’t know why you never want to tell me, but do you ever hear from him?”
“In the beginning I did, but not anymore.”
“You know he’s married again? I heard quite by accident from a woman who lives in the same apartment house.”
Jessie made no answer. A burning soreness which had been absent a long time spread in her chest. Aunt Milly lit another lamp, drawing an amoeba shape of sickly yellow light on the floor. The glass eyes glittered in the deerhead on the wall and the room wavered in gloom.
“God, I hate this damned room!” Jessie cried suddenly. “To think we spent most of our lives in it!”
“You’re upset, and no wonder. Come out on the sun porch and unwind a bit. Then we’ll talk about what you’re going to do.” The clear little voice chirped kindly, “Goodness, what you’ve done with this porch! It’s like sunshine even on a day like this.”
The old wicker furniture and the floor had been painted. A round indigo rug with a scalloped ruby border lay in the center of the floor. Ferns flowed out of hanging baskets at the windows. A brass Indian jug held knitting needles and wool. The room had the boldness and cheerful confidence that is unconcerned with fashion; because everything in it was inexpensive and of purest taste, it looked like a rich man’s simple country retreat.
“I’m glad you got rid of those depressing palms. Uncle Drew always said they belonged in a funeral parlor. And the rug is handsome.”
“I hooked it myself. Have to have something to do in the evenings besides read.”
Aunt Milly looked thoughtful. “It’s really different, Jessie! Original and bright. Somehow it belongs to this century. Do you know what I mean? I do believe you’re an artist, my dear!”
“I’m certainly not an artist.”
“Well, I think you are!”
Jessie closed her eyes. The adrenaline having poured, exhaustion now followed. Nevertheless, her thoughts spun.
At least there would be some money from the house: a respite of sorts. But it was no permanent solution. Oh, if she were a man, she would have been educated for something! But being a woman and a cripple—loathsome word, although the euphemisms were no better—you were supposed to stay home and be taken care of. Yes, but what if it didn’t work out that way? What then? I could have run the plant much better than Father did, she thought. I’m not being conceited, either. I know my defects well enough! I’m sharp-tongued; I tend to be bossy. I’ve got to watch that. But I know I could have run the plant much better than Father did. I can handle people. I’m not afraid of them, at least not as much as to let it show. And I’ve always had a head for figures.
“I never liked it here, do you know that?” Aunt Milly startled the silence. “I always felt sorry for your mother, gay as she was, having to hibernate in Cyprus. It’s only a factory town, plopped down among the farms. Fine if you’re a farmer or you work in the factory, but otherwise there’s nothing here. Especially for you, Jessie. Let’s speak frankly. Small towns like this are narrow-minded. They put people in slots. You’ve always been that ‘poor Meig girl.’ And now you’re poorer than ever.”
“What are you driving at?”
“I think you ought to leave, that’s what You have nothing in Cyprus except memories. And some of those you’d be better off without.”
Always, there was perversity in Jessie. She had never really liked it here and yet since it was, after all, home, she felt obliged to defend it.
“We had some good years before Mother died. You forget,” she said stubbornly.
“I know, but they’re over. You know what? You ought to come to New York.”
“And what would I do in New York, tell me that?”
“For one thing, Uncle Drew and I would be there, so you wouldn’t be entirely alone. And you know what else? I think you should go into the decorating business.”
“Decorating! For Heaven’s sake! You think that’s easy? I couldn’t just put a sign up and open the door!”
“Well, of course not But you do have marvelous taste. And you’ve always made a hobby of antiques; you must have taught yourself a lot.”
“I’ve had no training! I couldn’t possibly—”
“You could take courses toward a degree while you were working. It’s been done.”
“And where would I find customers?”
“I could start you off. I know two people already. There’s a Mrs. Beech who has a little summer place in the Berkshires. A room like this one would appeal to her. Then there’s a friend of mine whose daughter’s being married. They’re pretty strapped financially, but I know you could fix an apartment for her without spending too much.” Aunt Milly held two fingers up. “That’s two, possibly a third. And those women would recommend you to their friends; that’s how it would grow. Jessie, I believe you could do it.”
For the moment Jessie had nothing to say. The idea was so foolish, so daring, that no sensible answer could weigh against it. On the floor near her chair, Claire had left a half-done jigsaw puzzle of George Washington at Valley Forge. Thoughtfully, Jessie studied it, then leaned down and fitted a piece of Mad Anthony Wayne onto his horse.
“You’d have the money from the house to start with,” Aunt Milly urged.
True. And perhaps with very good management and very good luck, it might work. As Aunt Milly said, it had been done before. No. No. It was crazy!
“The world isn’t waiting for me, for Jessie Meig,” she said.
“The world isn’t waiting for anybody.”
That was true, too … To be one’s own mistress! Never to have to ask anybody for anything! Imagine it! Ah, but it was crazy, impossible—
“It would be a whole other environment for you, Jessie. Cosmopolitan people are so much more tolerant. You wouldn’t be an oddity, if that’s what you’re afraid of. A thousand circles crisscross the city with all kinds of people—foreign, artistic, old money, new money—all kinds.”
True. True. And there were such fine schools in the city. Enrichment. Small classes. Claire at Brearley or Spence. That bright, busy mind being fed. Expensive, but what could be more worth working for?
Here the tail went onto the horse; there went a piece of an officer’s tricornered hat; a gilt button; a section of split-rail fence. After long minutes, Jessie looked up. A kind of daring, scared excitement raced through her, catching in her throat.
“You know, Aunt Milly, you may be right! And after all, I don’t have a wealth of other choices, do I?”
On the final morning, she rose early and threaded her way through cartons and barrels to the kitchen. For the last time, she put the coffee on and in a kind of mental fog, waited while the water purred. Two pairs of mourning doves, colored a rosy fawn in the first light, were at the feeder. Fern’s favorite birds, she thought, with a little stab of memory, and stood there listening to their plaint until, something having startled them, they flew off with a squeaky rattle and twitter.
From the farms a quarter of a mile away, a rooster cried its clarion command to the sun and was answered all around the countryside with jubilant and pompous yawp: Behold the day! The old and peaceful, common sounds of home!
“I’m a teary mess,” she said aloud, “and I don’t want to be. I can’t afford it. I’ve got to make sense and order. God, how do I know I can?”
For the last time, she went outside to walk around the house. The gravel crunched and the wet grass was fragrant Above her rose the tower with its gingerbread carvings: carpenter-gothic was the style. Its attic had been emptied of three generations’ flotsam: Grandfather’s motheaten billiard table, a chewed wicker puppy-basket and Father’s gold-tipped walking stick from his dapper youth. Also Fern’s bridal photograph, which Father had tossed there when Jessie came home.
She went back into the house and stood in the bay window where the minister had married her to Martin, she knowing all the time that it was wrong.
So he had married again! A beauty this time, a beauty like Fern? A wo
man whose naked body he could adore, not pity or shudder at? And what of Fern, whom certainly he had adored? Who loved her now? Did he, still? And if so, why then—Dammit, enough of this! You’ll get nowhere, Jessie! Some things are for you and some things are not. Haven’t you learned that yet?
Six o’clock. She went softly up the stairs. Outside Claire’s door stood a carton of books with ice skates and a child’s tennis racket on top. A terrible, crazy panic started in her. What if anything were ever to happen to the child? What if she had died during the night? Oh God! She pushed the door open and went in.
Claire’s long legs lumped the blanket almost as far as the end of the bed. Normal! Tall, straight and perfect! Her mother’s affliction, thank Heaven, was no inherited thing, but only one of nature’s little miscalculations. Like an albino elephant.
The small hand gripped the corner of the pillowcase. Such a vigorous child she was, curious and determined! Not the easiest to rear, but a treasure. A treasure. She shall have everything, Jessie thought, all the joys: dresses, dances, lovers and trips to the stars. And they will all come from me. Damned if they won’t.
She leaned over and touched the child on the shoulder. “Come, darling. Time to get up. Time to go.”
Chapter 18
From her place at the breakfast table Claire couldn’t see the back yard, but she knew that the skimpy forsythia had stretched weak yellow strands over all the board fences between Park and Lexington Avenues. In their own yard, a few scattered hyacinths, left over from what must once have been a lavish garden, had poked through the hard earth. Sparrows chittered and fought. They always grew more strident as spring approached.
Jessie mused across the toast and cereal. “Someday I want to do the whole yard, build a terrace and plant trees. Oh, what jewels these old brownstones are! Just look at those tiles! You’ll never see work like that again.”
Blue tiles covered the fireplace wall. Painted on each was a musical instrument: violin, flute, drum or horn—ten in all, before the pattern was repeated. Claire had counted.
“Portuguese,” Jessie said. “The man who owned this house before the bank foreclosed was a music critic or professor, I think. Poor man.” She sighed. “This room must have been his study.”
Every day Jessie just walked around admiring things: the ten-foot ceilings, the pineapple newel posts, the pegged floors.
“This house was built with love,” she would say.
Claire was bored by such preoccupation with the house. The only thing she really admired was the dumbwaiter on which the meals were hauled up from the kitchen. They ate on the third floor because the dining room was occupied by the business.
Jessie reflected now, “Funny, I had to pay about as much for this little place as we got for the big house and one and a half acres back home. You know, I’ve been thinking, I may rent a proper shop over near Madison Avenue. I saw one that’s fairly cheap. And the business really needs more space. Then we’d have the whole house to live in.” She sighed again, but this time it was a satisfied sigh. “You know Mrs. Brickner, the one who comes with the Pekinese? She wants me to do an apartment for her in Palm Beach. Things haven’t gone too badly for us, have they Claire?” And, without expecting an answer, Jessie picked up The New York Times. “It’s not polite to read at the table, but breakfast is different,” she said.
Claire had expected her to say it, since she did so every morning. She waited for her mother to hand over the second section.
“Here, you read, too. You ought to know what’s going on in the world, now you’re in fifth grade. Yes, look, the ad for that store is in again. Maybe I’ll ask your Uncle Drew what he thinks. Or maybe I’ll just go ahead myself and take it These bad times can’t last forever, can they? And I could be ahead of the game with a long lease at low rent. Anyway, the people who have been coming to me don’t seem to be suffering from the bad times, I must say.” The paper crackled as the pages were turned. “You know, sometimes I wake up and for a minute I think I’ve just been dreaming about these last three years.”
Claire didn’t hear the rest Out of all the thousands of black letters on the spread page, her eye had fastened on a handful, the few that spelled a name: Dr. Martin Farrell. First there was something boring about speeches at the Academy of Medicine, then a short list of names. Dr. Martin Farrell stood out from the rest as if it had been printed in red.
This name was never spoken at home. She had not thought about it for a long time, either, not since she had been quite young. The image “father” came to mind when it did, without specific features, in a sort of blur made up of largeness, tobacco smell and harsh wool. Her concept of “man” came, naturally; from the men she knew: friends’ fathers, the school principal, the doctor and the dentist, with something also of Uncle Drew, a pale figure who sat hack while Aunt Milly did the talking and who, in a restaurant, added up the bill and paid. Of course, there had been Grandpa, but he was dead, and she had been only six when he died in his upstairs room with its sour smell. These, then, were the models out of which “father” was constructed and it existed in some vague recollection, some old sense of loss, long ago.
Surreptitiously, she passed her hand over the print: Dr. Martin Farrell. It must be the right one. There wouldn’t be two, would there?
“It’s eight-fifteen,” Jessie said suddenly, lowering The Times, “and you haven’t finished your breakfast.”
Claire picked up the spoon and began swallowing cereal. Something had fixed itself in her head, something so hard and solid that it was surprising that she had not thought of it before. She drank the milk and got her coat Jessie tied her tartan scarf and kissed her forehead.
“Be careful at the crossing,” she admonished, as she did every morning. “You coming right home after school or going to Carol’s house?”
“Carol’s got a cold. I’ll come home,” Claire said.
She went downstairs. From the front hall, you could look into the shop, which took up the whole first floor. Along one wall were dark shelves with shining objects on them: a marble head of Shakespeare, a clock with a gilded face, candelabra and a porcelain tureen with blue roses on it. Pieces of beautiful cloth were spread like fans on the backs of chairs. There were old, carved chests of drawers and many little tables. There were lamps and pictures and a crimson velvet sofa. All of these things were for sale except her mother’s desk with its tidy, stacked papers and its telephone. Aunt Milly and Uncle Drew said Mother was very clever, and it was astonishing what she had managed to do in only three years. Yes, her mother was very smart. But she was not thinking of her mother.
She hurried down the front steps between the two stone urns, each with its evergreen like a toy soldier in stiff salute. Under the bay window was a neat, small sign: Jessie Meig, Interiors. It still bothered Claire that her mother’s name was different from her own. Sometimes people asked about it. Her mother said it didn’t matter, that here in the city divorce wasn’t anything to be shocked about. Claire knew that was true. There were three other girls in school whose parents were divorced, so it was not at all the way it had been in Cyprus. Still, for some reason, it bothered her this morning.
She went down Sixty-seventh Street swinging her bag of books, arrived at school, sat at her desk and went to lunch as on any ordinary day. But a curious excitement stirred in her all that time.
The subway swayed and roared. She had never been alone in it before. She had copied the address out of the phone book, shown it to the man in the change booth, and been told to take the Lexington Avenue line, get off at 125th Street, then walk two blocks east and one block north.
This was adventure! Being alone and going somewhere was adventure. She thought of Boadicea, blond and bold with her crown, commanding troops against the Romans. She thought of an Indian princess with coarse black braids as glossy as a horse’s tail, riding in prairie wind toward where the Rockies rose.
Suddenly in the window across the aisle, her own reflection flashed. With the green school skir
t hanging below the hem of her coat and the plaid wool scarf around her neck, she bore no resemblance to Boadicea or an Indian heroine, either.
Suppose he didn’t want to see her? Suppose he had a lot of other children by now and hadn’t told anyone about Claire? He might even be terribly angry! Yet something drove her on. She had the directions firmly fixed and didn’t even need to read them again. It puzzled her, when she climbed back up to the lofty afternoon, that all the people on the streets were Negroes. The boys jostling home from school and the women carrying grocery bags were all black. It didn’t seem like New York at all. But she walked briskly, found the correct address, and sure enough, there was a sign in the first-floor window: Dr. M. T. Farrell.
She rang the bell and a tall black man with curly white hair, wearing a white coat, came to the door. He seemed surprised.
“I’m looking for Dr. Farrell,” Claire said.
“I’m Dr. Farrell. Come in.”
She wasn’t sure what to do next, but she said politely, “I’m looking for my father, Dr. Farrell.”
The man smiled. “Well, it’s too bad, but it seems you’ve come to the wrong place.”
She had worked up so much courage and energy and now this! All the courage and energy oozed away like air from a balloon.
“Sit down,” the man said, “and let’s see if we can straighten this out.”
In the cramped, vacant waiting room there were four rows of wooden chairs, one against each wall. Claire selected a chair in the middle of a row. The doctor sat opposite.
“Suppose you tell me about it,” he began.
“Well, you see, I haven’t seen my father since I was three and I’m not sure what he looks like. But his name is Dr. Martin T. Farrell. I think the ‘T’ stands for Thomas. I’m almost sure it does.”
“Now that’s a coincidence, isn’t it? Because I’m M. T. Farrell, too. But my name is Maynard Ting Farrell.”
“When I looked you up in the telephone book, it said ‘?. T. Farrell.’ ”