by Dorothy West
He let his lashes tickle her cheek, to stop the sob and make her laugh at his foolishness.
And she did say, “Ben, you’re such a fool.” Her silvery laugh shattered the sob. Presently she was fast asleep in his arms.
Across the moon-washed counties, in the town from which Ben had ridden away with her sister, Serena was trying to coax a smile out of Robert. They were alone in their lamplit night. The little boy, Tim, and Pa were asleep in the next room.
Pa’s sleep was full of little groans. Already his marrow was missing Serena. He had never been separated from her before. When Miss Hattie died, Serena had married a homeless man, and Pa had been glad to give them the whole of the house but a nook for his bed, so that his last child would not leave him, as his wives had left him in the demands of death and his older daughters in the demands of life.
Robert was an orphan man, son of some straw-haired cracker too poor, too uncaring, too conscienceless to feed and clothe his bastard as the bluebloods fed and clothed theirs. Robert had shame in him from as far back as he could remember. He was not the first of his mother’s spawn nor the last. His mother was a nomad. He was just one of the droppings left on anybody’s doorstep, and one that survived. Where his mother was now was in no one’s knowledge. She had long since exhausted the town in which Robert saw birth. He had sustained life in a dozen different holes, wherever there was a hand that held bread. They were hands of whores, of drunks, of the diseased, the outcast to whom a hungry unquestioning child was company in their terrible loneliness of the lost.
Robert had worshiped Serena from the first moment he set eyes on her. White-skinned and fair-haired though he was by the accident of his birth, he was as blackened by grime as a chimney sweep. To him Serena was a walking angel. She was clean. Her hair was combed. She lived with her own folks. She had shoes to wear. She went to school.
In his growing up, Robert learned to do any kind of odd job for a living. There wasn’t any chore beneath him so long as it gave him money for a bar of soap, for sleeping space with the decent poor, for the slow and painful acquisition of one good suit to court Serena in. She was the star by which his life was guided. If she would have him, he would have the world.
But even the realization of the dream did not change his nature. He was like a man holding his breath waiting for something to happen. For the shame in him knew he was not good enough for Serena. Cleo wasn’t talking through her hat. Laboriously he had spelled out her letters when Serena wasn’t around. That was wrong. But he didn’t know very much about wrong and right. And he had to know what Serena’s rich sister thought about him. He had to know if he was right in what he thought about himself.
He was a nothing from the devil’s patch. He had stolen his name from a dying old man who had no more use for it than for the half-loaf of bread he put in Robert’s hand. In Robert was always the fear that, in some moment of dreadful illumination, Serena would discover his nothingness and be done with him.
When Pa had that accident with his hand, Robert felt proud to support him. Pa wasn’t any use to the mill until it healed, and he wasn’t their responsibility, for the accident had happened off their property, while Pa was helping fight a neighbor’s fire that was plainly in no danger of spreading to the mill.
With Pa not contributing there was never quite enough to go around. For Robert was only a handyman. There was in him a weakness from the years of slow hunger that would never let him be a strong-bodied man able to work for a strong man’s wages.
Cleo’s letters, with the money inside them, saved many a supper from being turnover bread and boiled peas and parched-meal coffee. And now here was Cleo’s latest letter, with money in it for fare to Boston, and a few cluttered lines about Lily and some kind of trouble. Though nobody said it in words, and nobody wanted to say it, everybody knew it was almost an act of Providence. Serena’s going and Tim’s would ease the strain of these last weeks, would mean more to eat for everybody.
Robert was ashamed that this was so. For the first time he saw Pa’s house as it was, a poor man’s home, neat as a pin, the holes chinked up, a cloth on the table, every wick trimmed, every chimney glistening, a rug on the floor, sheets on the bed, and the clothes put away, all starched and mended. But now in his heart Robert knew that nobody but somebody who had never known as good would say they didn’t want better. The fear was in him that Serena’s rich sister would open her eyes.
Serena saw his grieving. She had learned how to lighten the darkness into which he slipped so easily. A radiance lit her cherry-red mouth. The dimples appeared in her cheeks as if a tender finger had made little hollows to catch the smiles that they would coax from whomever they bewitched.
He had to smile back. Though his lips curved slowly, his despair was no longer inconsolable. He was willing to be comforted.
“Robert, I’ll write you every day. I’ll write you everything I do. It’ll be like I’m here in this room talking your ear off.”
The shame that was always just there to be tapped made him say diffidently, “Well, it won’t be exactly the same. I can’t read but a little bit. I never went to school.”
She said with tenderness, “There’ll be love in my letters, won’t there? All you have to do is watch for it to spill out the envelope, and hold your heart ready to catch it.”
“You won’t go off and forget to come back?”
“When I forget God’s in the sky, I’ll forget to come back to you. And there’s no way to live and breathe in this world without knowing God’s on high.”
Again her smile reached for his heart and quieted its trembling.
CHAPTER 16
LILY SAW CLEO before Cleo saw her. She descended from the train in helter-skelter fashion, her eyes darting wildly in every direction, and the worry half of her mind imagining that Cleo might come to meet her on crutches, or worse, showing some permanent scar, a razor slash, that Mr. Judson had inflicted on her lovely face. She forgot Victoria, panting behind her with the suitcase that she had forgotten, too. When she spied Cleo — and who would not know her instantly who had known her once? For what had changed her, who was still untouched by time or tribulations? — Lily started running, her hairpins slipping out of place, her hat dipping crazily, and a garter going pop as it left its moorings.
When she reached Cleo’s side, her joy at seeing her unblemished brought tears of relief to her eyes. Cleo’s first awareness of Lily was of those drenched eyes, Mama’s doe eyes holding Mama’s parting tears. The rest, the comic angle of the overdecorated hat, the hair escaping to her shoulders, the sagging stocking, the cheap and wrinkled finery, the people grinning at their tableau, even Vicky, who put down the suitcase and sat on it to wait for her mother and new aunt to get through being mushy — all these irrelevancies were for the moment unnoticed by Cleo in the rush of remembrance those eyes evoked. As they stood tightly embraced, she knew that some part of her interrupted childhood was restored.
But in a moment she gently pushed Lily out of her arms, embarrassed by their public exhibition, mindful now of Lily’s crumpled appearance, wishing to God she had fixed herself up before she left the train, and turned away from her in unconscious disavowal to welcome Vicky. Meeting the grave stare, seeing the fine intelligent face, she claimed the child, and briefly wondered where her dumbest sister had got her.
On their way to the waiting room, where Cleo had left Judy with strict instructions not to stir a quarter of an inch, Cleo airily answered Lily’s anxious questions. Why, of course, she and Mr. Judson were getting along fine. Whatever gave Lily the idea that they weren’t? Her letter? Oh, that! That was when she thought she was going to have a b-a-b-y. Can Victoria spell? They were packed and ready to move, and then she’d been miserable with morning s-i-c-k-n-e-s-s, and hadn’t seen how she could manage alone. And it had only been an attack of indigestion. Well, the joker was that Lily’s frantic reply had given Cleo the confused impression that Lily was in desperate trouble, too. She had promptly sent for Serena and Charit
y, thinking three heads would serve better than one in solving Lily’s problems. Well, the two of them had certainly made a mountain out of a molehill. But out of the mix-up had come this reunion which was worth whatever distress it had cost.
Before Lily’s coming, Cleo had laid down the law to Bart about what his attitude should be. “Don’t speak to her about her trouble. Stay off the subject of Victor. Act like she was just here visiting. Don’t make her feel like a poor relation by setting out to pity her. I want her to have the same kind of time as the rest of us for as long as all of us are together.”
To Lily Cleo said: “Don’t feel bad if Mr. Judson doesn’t ask after Victor. You know how some men act when they get a little money. Look down their noses at other men, and forget they’re on earth.”
Bart’s complete avoidance of any mention of Victor was plain enough proof to shy Lily that a Pullman porter — and very possibly that porter’s wife — was beneath his consideration. She was tongue-tied in his presence, and walked on tiptoe that she might disturb him as little as possible.
Cleo was the one who wept when Charity came, for it might have been Mama walking toward her. The last time Cleo saw Mama, she was hardly any older than Charity was now. She was hardly any different. Almost it was as if Mama were still alive.
Charity put her arms around Cleo, and her tinkling laugh tried to stem her sister’s tears. But only when little Penny began to cry in sympathy did Cleo remember that time had not been standing still.
When Serena reached Boston, her baby sister, with a baby of her own — though it really was too bad he had to be a boy — Cleo’s created world was complete.
Bart gave the visiting sisters the keys to the city. A week or so before their coming he had cornered the banana market. The sinking of the Lucy Evelyn by a German submarine made his shipment the only bananas to be had in the whole city of Boston. There was war, but Germany’s rout would be a matter of weeks. The way Bart figured it, God wouldn’t let a long war undo his prosperity.
Every day was a holiday for the Jericho sisters. A breakfast feast began it. There were peaches and cream, butter-soaked muffins, chops, hashed-brown potatoes, broiled bananas, sliced tomatoes, and pie for whoever had the capacity. Serena unashamedly confessed she never had as good on Sunday, and Charity regretfully refused second helpings because Ben liked her round but might not like her fat. A prodigious late snack brought their crowded day to a close. When they took their happy exhaustion to bed, they talked back and forth until gradually Cleo’s rich compelling voice predominated. The others listened dreamily to Cleo remembering back in a way that cast a magic spell over the South and their sister.
The visiting cousins spent most of their time under Thea’s supervision. It mitigated her mourning to be part of their animation. It improved their speech and manners to mirror her, with the natural imitativeness of children.
They rode on the swan boats in the Public Garden, on which Thea had never ridden as a child, being whisked to the shore at the first sign of summer. They went to Nantasket and rode on real boats, though here, too, the child Thea had never been taken, because it was just a cut above Revere Beach and uncountable cuts below a proper watering place. They visited the landmarks of Boston’s history — except small Tim, who was not yet two. They had picnics in the Fens.
Thea preferred their unrepressed companionableness to social exchanges with their bashful mothers, who bewildered her as much as she bewildered them. They just could not think of her as colored with her fine airs, and never got past greeting her and running for cover. She could not think of them as anything but phantoms, and supposed she would never chat over tea with them. She would have liked knowing how people lived who didn’t live in Boston.
Cleo had the better part of two hundred dollars burning a hole in her pockets in addition to Bart’s nightly bounty. The sisters went shopping every day. Charity and Serena were extravagantly thrilled to walk into any store, to take their turn at any counter, to try on any garment Cleo chose. The thrill got a very good start when they boarded the front of the trolley, expanded through their shopping spree, continued unabated when they ate their ice cream at the time and place of purchase, and increased, if anything, when they walked through the same entrance of the moving-picture palace as anybody else who had paid admission.
Though none of these pleasures, nor the rest of their treats, were unfamiliar to Lily, the money lavished on them was. In her effort to keep up with Cleo, she had spent her twenty dollars in two days, or she supposed she had. She couldn’t think whether Cleo had ever given her back the change from a five-dollar bill the time she borrowed it to pay the ice man because Lily’s purse was handiest. But instead of Cleo being provoked when her money ran out, Lily was thankful to find that Cleo was even nicer, and tucked her even more securely under her wing.
The sisters wrote glowingly to their husbands, and Serena kept her promise to Robert not to leave out anything. Only once or twice did their accounts falter, when the low point of their day had been an encounter with a visitor. Cleo had talked to them so much about what they should and shouldn’t say about their husbands, their husbands’ occupations, their homes, their friends, and Pa that the three simple, honest young women, not wishing to embarrass her, yet not wishing to give false impressions either, had sat like deaf-mutes, while Cleo spoke for them in her characteristic way of taking a nub of truth and stretching it out of all proportion.
On the day that Miss Eleanor Elliot came to call, their heads spun briskly for hours afterward. When the spinning stopped, common sense advised them, even Serena, to let her visit go entirely unrecorded.
Miss Eleanor Elliot, a Vassar graduate, was the maiden daughter of a Negro district attorney, now deceased, whose brilliance had won him high prestige and a house among the rich. He had trotted Miss Elliot all over Europe on his summer vacations, where she had unhappily discovered that after Vassar, and now this, she could never marry a colored man. Marriage did not enter the minds of the European men she met, not because she was a colored American, but because she was not a rich American.
She was not rich now. She had been brought up with too expensive tastes to husband her modest inheritance. It was gone. Miss Elliot’s Back Bay drawing room was now the setting for a Saturday dancing class. Weekly in winter a hand-picked collection of little boys in white gloves and little girls in best dresses formed a double line and made their bows and curtsies to Miss Templeton, their teacher. Miss Templeton was white, genteel, exquisitely tactful, and still a little surprised that Miss Elliot’s offer had been irresistible.
While the installation of the parlor graces went on behind her disinterested back, Miss Elliot’s ringed hands called the tunes from her polished piano, and her thoughts revolved around Vassar and Capri. Her unseeing eyes mirrored the great stone houses outside her window, stately houses now desecrated by Room for Rent signs and new owners. Only Miss Eleanor Elliot and her moulted elegance remained to represent the better whites who had preceded these lesser ones.
Thea had proposed Judy’s name for Miss Elliot’s class. An acceptance was given official stamp with Miss Elliot’s visit of state. As she reached the house, she met Thea leaving it with the four little cousins. Miss Elliot, who had met handsome Mrs. Judson but not her daughter, immediately addressed Penny as Judith, because she was so pretty. When Penny’s surprised expression pointed out her error, she turned her beam on Vicky because she was Cleo’s color. Judy, who was quite used to having her mother denied her, quietly stepped forward to assert her closer kinship.
Miss Elliot cloaked her chagrin with a delicate clearing of the throat, and submitted to being properly introduced. She was enchanted with Vicky’s and Penny’s attractiveness, and proposed to ask Mrs. Judson how long they were staying. She was deeply sorry that bright-haired Tim was too young to be invited to be her most impressive pupil.
Cleo’s sisters could not escape Miss Elliot. She demanded the pleasure of meeting them, with no intention of leaving until she had see
n what they looked like. She was not disappointed, though their accents distressed her. She took it for granted that they were the cream of the South because they were the right color. It seemed to her a great pity that their sparing speech had a noticeable flavor of illiteracy. In Miss Elliot’s opinion the mammy system of the South should be abolished. The nicest children sat at its knee and were taught to maltreat their mother tongue.
“We,” said Miss Elliot, who had formed the habit of saying “we” when her father was living, because it made her feel there was really no difference between being a noted district attorney and being a noted district attorney’s daughter, “we do hope you’ll make a long stay with us.
“Well, my husband —” began Lily, blushing furiously as she did nowadays when mention of Victor was unavoidable.
“Is much easier in his mind with Lily here,” Cleo interrupted smoothly. “His work takes him out of town at least half of the year. There’s no need for Lily to hurry home to an empty house.”
“Pa —” said Serena, wondering if he was able to help a little around the house, or whether Robert still had all the cooking and cleaning to do.
“Father,” Cleo gently corrected, “is more Serena’s baby than she is his. She wore herself thin waiting hand and foot on him when he was ill. It’s time for Serena to think of herself, or let me think for her. I’ve made up my mind to keep her here until I can get some flesh on her.”
“Then, of course,” urged Miss Elliot, turning brightly to Charity, “you won’t want to leave such pleasant company.”