“You certainly go for those brioches,” she said. “You must like them.”
I remained hunched over my food, wishing she wouldn’t stand behind me, because it’s my experience that from the back one always looks a little like a dog eating—something about the way the head moves up and down. At length she went to the stove for the percolator to refill my coffee cup. She was wearing a starched black pique blouse with a scoop neck and a dark flannel skirt. Along one arm was a set of costume bracelets, of the kind that I remembered had annoyed Todarescu. A scent of perfume mingled headily with the more pedestrian odors of breakfast.
“That makes four you’ve gobbled already,” she said, putting the percolator back, pleased.
“It does?”
She came back to the table and, smoothing her skirt under her, sat down across from me to eat her own breakfast. She took a brioche from under its white napkin in the breadbasket and broke it in two.
“I didn’t realize you liked them this much. I’ll make then often.”
I chewed thoughtfully, mulling several gambits for the subject I must broach. If she gave me an opening herself, so much the better. I raised my eyes and, her own being now bent over her food, took Hester in.
Perspective at the moment exaggerated the geometric molding of her head with its wide brow, high cheekbones and severely parted hair. The hair was a rich auburn, drawn into a tight scroll at the back, giving her a kind of American Gothic look. It was drawn so tight that it gave the illusion of contributing to the slant of her eyes; which could hardly have been the case, as I had out of curiosity tried it in front of a mirror with such hair as there is of my own. She raised her eyes and I abruptly did mine, meeting myself in the mirror that hung, tilted slightly downward, in the wall directly behind her. Mackerel has a long, slender face, its rather peevish constituents relieved by red cheeks and blue eyes that have often been termed “boyish.” Round and yearning, they stand out, among the drawn intellectual’s lineaments, like eggs in the wrong nest. Such, at least, is the way my wife once described them.
“They’ve got a brand new shovel for you, Andrew,” Hester said. “For this afternoon.”
“They have?”
“Centapong’s hardware store donated it special for the occasion. We’ll pick it up on the way down.”
“Will I have to dig the whole hole?”
“I don’t think so. There’ll be several selectmen there and maybe even the mayor. You can all pitch in.”
I drank off my coffee, set my cup down and pushed my chair back an inch or two.
“Hester, I want to talk to you about all that. Not planting this tree in itself—that’s a nice thing and very sweet of the Brownies—but the whole attitude of yours behind it. Frankly, it worries me.”
“What do you mean by that, Andrew?”
“Isn’t it your idea? To do this I mean?”
She nodded, a spoon with a stewed fig on it halfway to her mouth. “Yes. Different organizations are putting in new trees after that hurricane, and I thought it would be nice for the girls to give one this way. Why?”
I paused, wondering if I should have gotten into this. My relations with her were so complex, for one thing. It didn’t seem right calling a housekeeper by her first name, yet it would have been idiotic, and in any case too late, to go back to calling her Miss Pedlock. I therefore did my best to imbue her first name with its equivalent in formality. I must keep my distance, especially if I nursed dreams of terminating her tenure and clearing the decks generally for a successor who was to be my wife. She had passionately declined wages, which I as angrily kept accumulating in escrow. Well, it was too late to retreat now …
“It isn’t remembering your sister as such that I’m thinking of, but the other side of that coin—burying yourself alive in so doing. I know you loved her, as we all did, but in your case I’m afraid I’m beginning to see it isn’t an altogether healthy affection, Hester.”
“How can you say that, Andrew?” she said, lowering the fig back into its dish.
“With the greatest of difficulty, my dear, but also with the best heart. How else is your behavior since her death to be interpreted? You devote yourself day and night to her cause—”
“The clinic is important.”
“You’ll wind up well inside it if you don’t watch out. You keep the house exactly as she did, follow her routines. It’s as though you were trying to step into her shoes.” I had risen to pour myself more coffee, and now returned the pot to the stove. “Her favorite flowers in their accustomed place!” I exclaimed with a gesture toward a vase of roses on the living room piano. As we looked, one or two petals fluttered to the keyboard, as if shaken by the force of my remonstrance. “If that isn’t living with a ghost, what is?”
“Oh, we played duets together as girls.” Hester dropped her gaze and twisted a ring on her finger.
“Well, you’re not a girl now, you’re a grown woman of twenty-eight or so. You’ve got to come out of your shell and live your own life. ‘Let the dead bury their dead.’ Jesus tells us that. So not resuming our life where it was interrupted isn’t just psychologically bad—it’s a sin.”
She continued silent a moment, her head hung. I sat down in my chair again, without immediately drinking my coffee.
“Don’t you have any boy friends?” I asked at length.
The head shook.
Finding this point difficult to pursue with any intelligence, I dropped it and reverted to the numeration of symptoms which I found alarming.
“You wear black.”
“Maybe that’s slenderizing.”
“But you’re thin as a rail as it is, girl!” I picked my napkin up and slammed it down again. “My dear—” I was about to continue, but was cut off by the jangle of the telephone in the next room. “I’ll get it,” she said rising, and raced me for it with friendly hilarity.
I picked up another brioche, broke the nipple from it and sat munching it moodily. I could hear Hester but not distinguish what she was saying. It sounded businesslike and formal; not a personal call.
She returned presently and said, “Just a new member. Another transfer from poor M.E. A Molly Calico,” she read from a slip, which she then set down on the table beside my elbow. “That’s her address. Be sure and put her on your list to call on.”
I picked up my cup and carried it to a bird cage in which two cut-throat finches pecked and fluttered and spat music at disorganized intervals. I stood tweezing my lips at them, whistling a few bars.
“Where there any other calls?” I said. “Like last night?”
“Oh, that’s right. Mr. Turnbull called. He said it was very urgent. He seemed upset again.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That you were out on Kingdom work.”
I squeezed the ear of my cup hard in my fingers, and raised it to drink. The front doorbell rang. It was the mailman and, setting my cup down, I beat Hester to that.
I sat down in the living room to read my mail, breathing rather heavily from the exertions of the morning. I read two personal letters and glanced at some advertising matter.
When at last I looked up, it was to see Hester standing at the window looking out. She was shaking her head. This was so long after the last words between us that I thought she had stationed herself there to deplore the view.
“I just don’t understand you,” she said. “First you say you hate fat in any shape, manner or form. The next thing you want me to go putting on weight.”
Despair turned my manner sluggish. “Well, you do as you think best about that, Hester,” I said, and rose, pocketing such mail as was first class. I went to the vestibule and got my coat and hat.
“Where are you going?” she said.
“Out.”
“Well, if that’s where you’re going, you’d better wear your muffler. It’s cold.”
“I don’t need any muffler. I’m just going to make a few calls.”
She followed me into the vestibule.
“Don’t be late. We’ve got to be there at a quarter to three, so that means we ought to leave here no later than two-thirty. And what about dinner tonight? It should be something simple. Do you like codfish balls?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never attended any,” I said, recalling a joke from an old college revue, and, laughing unco-operatively, hurried out the door and down the porch steps into the street.
Hester stood shaking her head and laughing too. Then, thrusting her head out the door, she called after me in friendly sport, “Anyhow, I’m glad you like my brioches!”
I had been inside Molly’s house only twice, after dates, and had never picked her up there but always met her at our rendezvous. The two times she had asked me in there had been nobody home. The idea of her having parents had therefore never crossed my mind, and so, in the excitement of my approach to her door, I was surprised to find it opened by a plump, very nearly perfectly round little woman in a knit shawl, wearing gold-rimmed eyeglasses. “Yes?” she said.
“I’m Andrew Mackerel—of People’s Liberal Church? To see Miss Calico?”
“Oh, yes. She’s not home. But come in anyway.”
“Not home?”
“She’s out of town.”
“But she called only this morning …”
“She went to New Haven. She’ll be back. She has friends in the theater. That’s one thing she likes about your church—such a wonderful theater. Do come in and we’ll have a nice chat ourselves.”
The parlor into which I was ushered was one about which I had twice had occasion to marvel, even from what I could see of it in the dark. In broad daylight I had all the more reason.
It was furnished on the requirement, dear to the New England mind, of everything’s having once been something else. A coffee table was a former cobbler’s bench, a lamp an erstwhile coffee grinder, andirons were bronze cherubs that had in a previous existence supported coach lights. The room was fragrant with flowers and plants that ascended, in each case, from something other than a vase. There were spice jars from which sprouted tongues of green; a glazed porcupine bristled with kitchen matches. It amazed me that Molly Calico could come of stock exemplified by this taste, until I remembered with a jolt my own. Nothing is more natural, of course, than that extreme environments produce their opposites. The sovereign motif here was Coziness, to which Mrs. Calico herself in no small degree contributed. I was a few mesmerized minutes putting my finger on the exact bell she rang, but after watching her execute a few stitches of the knitting she busied herself with while we “sat,” I had it. It was of the animal illustrations in bedtime stories that she reminded you.
She looked precisely like some clothed and bespectacled forest creature sniffing and philosophizing in its chimney corner. She was Mrs. Tiggy-winkle, who did the washing in the Beatrix Potter books. Or Tabitha Twitchet, who ran the grocery store and did not give credit; or Goody Tiptoes, or all these rolled into one: an anthropomorphic thing in a ruffed gown and, at night of course, a lace cap. Already I could see her pushing moss under the thatch with her nose to keep us snug all winter.
“Now then.” She composed herself with a wriggle. “I like the church becoming again what it used to be—a social center,” she said, hooking up a strand of yarn with her little finger. I saw her smile downward, and deduced that a cat was playing at her feet. It would explain the abundance of hairs that compromised an otherwise immaculate room.
“There’s a going-back-to-old-ways feeling in the air,” Mrs. Calico went on as her needles flew. “Even the winters we’re getting are old-fashioned, if you know what I mean.”
“I think I do,” I said.
“Snow is what it was under McKinley.” She put her knitting by and rose, not that it materially altered our eye levels. “Now then, what will it be—tea or coffee?”
“Either one,” I said. “It makes no difference to me.”
“Then a nice pot of tea it shall be on this cold, nasty day,” she said, and disappeared in a manner that made her seem to have been drawn from the room on strings, like a toy. She was only five feet high and her skirt fell so nearly to the floor that her feet were unseen, as well as undoubtedly shod in felt. She flowed without apparent effort and certainly without sound from my presence, the cat capering in her wake.
She was gone a long time. A tall clock ticked in the hall. I stared at the starched lace curtains hanging stiff as iron down the clean windows. I had the illusion of being a visiting rabbit, whose own feet didn’t quite touch the floor. Out of the tail of my eye I caught the gaze of a general in oils, a man who resembled the Kaiser, though dressed in American regalia. It was an archaic uniform, and the manner in which one gloved hand rested on a sheathed saber conveyed a sense of old turmoils and crowned accomplishments. What came into my mind was what William Jennings Bryan had exclaimed in a Chautauqua oration on the eve of our entrance into the First World War: “The quickest way out of this is straight through it!”
There was a rustle of beaded portieres and a teacart hove into view, laden with goodies.
“The important thing is roots,” Mrs. Calico said, trundling the cart to her chair. I had the sense of being unable to rise, or if I did, that it would be to find myself on all fours and only eight inches high. “From the day I married poor Willard—that would be Molly’s father, who ran away to sea when he was forty-two and she was twelve—it was apparent. I try to tell Molly this. Restlessness is the curse of our time. Put down roots, belong. My husband had been a rover—he was a commercial traveler—but he thanked me for getting him settled, at least till he ran away for good. I did that for him. I gave him roots.”
I was tempted to ask whether she cooked them any special way. Indeed, I wondered if I wasn’t about to be served them myself. However, a slice of pound cake came my way, along with the tea. We stirred our cups and smiled.
“It was touch and go though, at first,” Mrs. Calico mused. “He very nearly drew out the gypsy in me instead. The way he acted on me was amazing.”
“Sort of a catalytic agent.”
“Well, he was an agent for Standard Oil, was what he was, and that had pretty much taken him around the world. So he’d ‘had it,’ as you young people say today, and why shouldn’t he now put down roots rather than pull mine up? At any rate, he came to thank me for it in later years,” she concluded rather shrilly.
I took another cup of tea and another slice of pound cake, resisting the bread and jam offered as option. I tugged my vest down over my tummy, half expecting to find a gold chain there and a watch which I would pull out and exclaim, “Goodness, I must go, Mrs. Woodchuck will be furious.” Instead I sat immobile, my will gone.
“I’m going to join your church, Reverend Pickerel.”
“You are?”
She nodded brightly, smiling. “Our old Reverend Yarrow is gone and I have really no more feeling for M.E. I’ve heard so much about People’s Liberal and exerything they do and this wonderful clinic and all. It’s what we need, it really is. Tell me, do you direct the dramas too?”
“No. We have a man named Todarescu for that. Don’t you know him?”
“Todarescu …” She looked at the ceiling in the effort to recall. “Where have I heard that name?”
“He’s a foreigner, Mrs. Calico. Not our sort really, but he does his job. I thought he might be the one who took Molly to New Haven this morning.”
“It might very well be he. She’s out so much. A fine, healthy, popular girl. Tell me, what play are you doing?”
“It’s called The Lady’s Not for Frying—I mean The Lady’s Not for Burning,” I said. “It’s by Christopher Fry. Dear me, what am I saying, all sixes and sevens today. Anyhow, it’s written in poetry. Or a kind of poetry.”
Mrs. Calico wet a finger end and blotted up the last crumbs from her cake plate. “Poetry went to the dogs under the Taft administration,” she stated. “Modern poets have nothing whatever to tell us.”
“You’re so right. I was saying only the
other day to Mrs. Wilkins, they only write for each other. Well then, why publish it? Why not just send it to one another in letters?”
I should have liked nothing better than to sit in this room while the clock ticked on and the sun’s angle steepened along the figured rug, discussing the Taft administration and the emergence of vers libre under the rotten mob, drawing Mrs. Calico out on this and many other subjects, while we sipped our tea and nibbled our cake. But after a few minutes I rose with the protest that I simply must go. Other forest folk expected me.
“Well, it’s been such a nice visit,” Mrs. Calico said. “And it won’t be the last of our little chats either, never fear, because I’ll tell you something. When I join something, I join.”
She led the way into the vestibule, where I got into my overcoat. She watched me put it on, her hands folded above her stomach, smiling.
“I’ll tell Molly you called, but don’t worry if that slugabed girl isn’t up on time for service tomorrow. I’ll be there. And I’m so glad you believe in being active in all of life, Brother Halibut. Because after all, that’s what Jesus wants us to do, isn’t it?”
Chapter Five
“THANK God you’ve come.”
Turnbull took my hat off and unwound the muffler from around my neck. He drew off my overcoat and hung the wraps on a peg under the one-eyed elk. He seemed even more agitated than usual, but I was prepared for this by the breathless telephone summons I had received on my return home from the tree-planting ceremony. He failed to wrest from my grasp a pair of pigskin gloves, which I myself tucked into an overcoat pocket.
“Maybe now you’ll admit there’s a righteous God,” he said as he led the way into the living room. “When you hear what I’m going to tell you.”
I took my customary chair and prepared for another rehearsal of past rascalities, with details more graphic than most.
“Maybe now you’ll believe in an Old Testament God who visits the sins of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation.”
The Mackerel Plaza: A Novel Page 5