by Dorothy West
“Before you came down,” she said, with quiet wonder, “I was near crazy, not knowing which way to turn. Now I feel like myself. I’m going alone. It’s better my sisters don’t know about anything until Robert’s free and Pa’s beside Mama. I’ll tell them I’m going on business for you. That you got some Richmond property you want to sell to tide you through the winter.”
“You suit yourself,” he said heavily. “They’re your sisters. They’re you-all’s sorrows.”
She put her hand on his arm. “You know I’m not much at saying ‘Thank you,’ but it’s here in my heart.”
He got up. He felt stiff and old. “You’re my wife, Cleo. Who else a woman got to turn to time of trouble but her husband? She was made of man’s rib. She’s part of him.”
“You go on up. I’ll turn out the lights.” She added awkwardly, “Good night, Mr. Judson.”
He was too tired to feel surprise. “Good night, Cleo. Try to get a good sleep. You got a lot of hard travel ahead of you.” He went slowly up the stairs.
She was going down home. She sought for her old images, she tried to reach back to Mama. And she saw her father that Christmas morning at Grandma’s. She saw her mother’s love-washed face beholding the miracle of his being alive.
Suddenly she was glad that Mama had died before Pa. Mama would have been as sad and lonesome without Pa as she — and slowly her stubborn heart yielded — as she would be without Mr. Judson.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 28
THE BELLS of the Mission Church chimed the half-hour. The round, full, magnificent notes rolled down Mission Hill, sending splinters of sound to the very beginning of Protestant Brookline. The April sun, however, shone over the whole of Boston. It penetrated the homemade cold-box that was clamped to an outside window-ledge in Cleo’s kitchen. But there was nothing in the cold-box to spoil.
There was nothing in the big, battered icebox in the back vestibule either. It had not been in use since summer. Even then it was chiefly a depository for chunks of ice until the iceman stoppered his ears to Cleo’s promissory poor-mouth stories. The ice-box had worn itself out by the end of summer, anyway, periodically leaking through all of Cleo’s patches. It could not be jarred a quarter of an inch if the ice was to keep its equilibrium. But every hot day the throat-parched children had unraveled Cleo’s mumbo-jumbo of rags and putty and splints with the ice pick. And there began the disastrous, ever faster drip-drip-drip.
As the last notes thinned into silence, a frown briefly flickered across Cleo’s forehead. She sat at the kitchen table with several parts of the kitchen clock spread out before her. She had flung the clock across the room in an outburst of anger. And that anger of the early morning had not yet wound itself back up. Listening to the tolling bells, she could not quite summon sufficient ill-humor to quarrel about the passing of time. A fleeting annoyance touched her face, but not her eyes.
They were the luminous gray of her grief. Underneath her quick surface emotions a sadness had taken deeper root. There could be no more remembering back without the recollection of a Carolina morning when Pa was borne from Potter’s Field to a sanctified place beside Mama. Over all her bright images of the South there must remain this bitterest one. It had broken the chain of enchantment. She would never again feel separate from the harshness of down home.
She had not seen Pa’s drowned face. Looking down at the plain, clay-encrusted pine box, she had tried to evoke a picture of Pa that would superimpose itself on the knowable ravishment of roaring waters. The picture that rose to her mind and persisted was Pa’s reflection on Mama’s face the morning of the Christmas miracle.
Had love been the real essence of Mama’s beauty? Pa always complained that Mama’s tintypes didn’t favor her. Mama was bashful before a camera, and all she could think of was getting it over. Yet those tintypes were exactly like her when Pa was nowhere in her thinking.
Why was it that Lily and Serena and Charity had grown more and more unlike her in these last years? Was it because they were manless? Had they lost their look of Mama because they lived without men?
Cleo studied the parts of the clock, concentrating on the order in which she had removed them. She had flung Little Ben across the room because it was in her hand when she found the forty dollars Bart had left under it. He no longer put money in her hand. That was a rule he would not alter, no matter how she argued. On his way out in the morning, he tucked whatever he could spare under the kitchen clock. He had done so ever since she tore a two-dollar bill into bits because it wasn’t the five-dollar bill she had asked for.
Last night she had asked him to leave as much as he could in addition to the rent. She couldn’t come right out and tell him it was two months due, and eighty dollars had to be paid by four o’clock today. He would only have demanded to know why she had got behind. And she couldn’t remember why now. Last month it had seemed that other things were more urgent.
The trying thing was, Mr. Judson probably thought he was leaving something extra. Though he was first to agree that everything had gone up during the war and was still up, despite the war’s end in November, she could tell that he did not quite believe her rent had increased to forty dollars. She could not show him her receipts to prove it, for some months there were none to show, other months there was only a terse acknowledgment of twenty dollars received on account, and once in a while there was a receipt for sixty dollars or so. She did not have one rent receipt that read, Forty dollars, Paid in Full. Even if she had, Mr. Judson would believe she had tampered with the figures. And this harum-scarum way of paying had resulted in yesterday’s ultimatum delivered through a dispossess.
“Half-past eleven,” said Charity, lifting the lid from a pot on the stove and trying its contents with a fork. Everything there was in the house had been put together for the children’s noon meal. “This ham hock cooked quick. But it wasn’t much bigger than my fist. Cabbage feels about done, too. But it ain’t any size to speak of. Time I got through cutting off the rotten part, you could put the rest in your eye. I better throw on a chunk or two of wood, though. These little potatoes are still hard as rocks. They must have been frost-bitten. I declare it’s a shame the kind of stuff you buy off a team.” She paused, smiled reminiscently, and ran her tongue along her lips. “Lord, I remember the potatoes Mr. Judson used to bring home. So mealy they melted in the mouth. Now the poor man don’t bring home nothing. The little he’s got, he’s got to get money for. He’s still trying to sell the best, poor man, and we can’t afford to eat it.”
Cleo, piqued at this reiteration of pity for Mr. Judson, said frostily, “You talk so much I can’t think what I’m doing.” She cast about for some topic to discourse on herself. “It’s time those people got here,” she grumbled. “The wife said between eleven and twelve. I want them to decide on the flat before the children come. I wish now I’d told her I had four, and she could like or lump it. I’m sick and tired of people staying a month and moving out because I won’t teach the children to take a back seat. Sometimes I feel I’ll never put another ad in the paper.”
“Plight that dispossess has us in,” Charity dryly observed, “we better thank God you didn’t feel that way this time. And it wouldn’t hurt to thank Him again for having that woman telephone just before the company cut us off.”
“Sometimes I despise the first of the month,” Cleo said bitterly. “Seems like everybody in Boston starts demanding money. They ought to work out a better system for sending out bills.”
Charity clucked in sympathy and bent over the wood-box. Her forearms resembled great hams, though the flesh was no longer solid on her bones. The sorry meals of the past months had not sufficed her insatiate hunger. Now there was scarcely an hour’s lapse between her stolen snacks. The craving never stopped. Bread was her opiate. She was bloated with it. Like a drunkard routing out his hidden bottle, stealthily she would open the bread box, cut two huge slices from the loaf, her hands unsteady, her breathing hard, and make a sandwich of whate
ver she could find, molasses, mustard, cold beans, bacon rind. And upstairs Cleo, forever attuned to the hum of her house, would recognize these surreptitious sounds and move around the room to drown them out and hide from herself this weakness of her sister’s flesh.
Charity lifted the stove lids, piled chunks of wood in the pit, hastily replaced the lids, and prayerfully watched and waited. But her faith was not steadfast. In a few moments smoke began to seep from around the rims of the lids. Charity coughed and backed away.
“I declare,” she said amiably, “it’s first one thing and then another. You cooks with wood to save coal, and you fix to choke to death.” She coughed again.
Cleo, who, at the first explosive sound, had dropped a minute screw just as she found the place it would fit, said irritably: “Well, don’t stand there coughing in my face. Open a window. I’ll have a look at that damper again when the fire goes out. I had it so it could open and shut if you worked it right. You must have fooled with it.” But her tone was only mildly accusing, for she remembered perfectly well the day she had lost patience and slammed it so hard that it stuck.
Charity ventured back to the stove to give a look at her eggless, butterless bread pudding. “I’ll be glad when summer comes for fair. It’s a wonder we don’t both catch our deaths with that window wide open on our backs.”
“Well, for God’s sake, slide it up some. Only a fool would open a window all the way in April.” The exasperation suddenly left her voice. She had finally manipulated the diminutive part. She felt that nothing was impossible. “I’ll get us a gas stove by some hook or crook, and throw that old coal range on the junk heap.”
Charity shut the window, shivering a little inside her old sweater. Outdoors the sun was warming the winter earth, but indoors the floors were still icy. The furnace fire was kept very low to conserve the last scrapings in the bin. Most of the winter the only function it had performed was that of keeping the water from freezing. And it could not do that unaided. On very cold nights little streams of water had been left running from the taps. Early in winter Cleo had pretty thoroughly exhausted her credit with the coal company, which had at last discerned that she was a poor payer to a greater degree than she was a poor woman.
“Lord,” Charity mused, “things’d be different if Mr. Van Ryper had lived. If you was paying him forty dollars a month, he’d make all kinds of improvements. Everything’s being electrified now. Before I came North, I never thought I’d see by anything but a lamp. And now man’s put the sun in a globe. Was a time I’d been scared out of my skin to stick a lighted match to gas. Now everybody’s cooking with it.”
“You never go anywhere. How do you know?” Cleo said crisply to hide her envy of the everybodies.
“That’s what I hear you tell Mr. Judson,” Charity answered quietly.
Cleo fitted a final piece in the clock, then tightened the coils of the mainspring, lightly touched the little lever, and the steady ticktock began. But this time she felt no sense of achievement. The clock had lost its glass face long ago, a leg was missing, the long hand had perversely broken off to the length of the short one, the alarm never rang at the hour it was set to ring, and now it was badly dented. Fixing this old clock was just another patch job. Patch, patch, patch, she thought desperately. There were a dozen things in this house that belonged on the junk pile.
“When I moved in this house, I thought I was on top of the world. I used to think I’d have an automobile by now. And I haven’t even got a decent clock, let alone a gas stove.”
“Old Used-to’s dead,” said Charity harshly. “You and me and even the children know that.” Her voice quieted. “Except Mr. Judson. And many’s the night I spend on my knees asking God to let things be with that good man like they was in his heydey.”
The Mission bells chimed again, fewer notes for the quarter-hour, but with the same velvet sounds.
“Those niggers aren’t coming,” Cleo said stormily. “Why did that woman call me up to say they were. Oh, God, I can’t bear liars. I thought by now they’d be here and gone, and I’d have twenty-five dollars.” She replaced the back of the clock, clamped on the winding caps, and dispiritedly wound them.
Charity sat down at the opposite end of the table and began to cream a mixture of margarine and drippings, which she hoped would taste like butter to the children when she added sugar and lemon, and turned the whole into hard sauce. The pudding itself did not have all the sugar it required, but she expected the hard sauce to disguise this lack.
“Cleo,” she said practically, “wait until twelve o’clock to fret. Lord, poor Mr. Judson was all nervous last night, worrying about renewing his lease. And you’re all nervous this morning.”
“What you wasting pity on Mr. Judson for? What’s he got to be nervous about?” With a quick movement she rose and set the clock in its accustomed place as if glad to be freed from sitting still. She turned and faced her sister. “I’m the one to feel sorry for. He’s got his rent in his pocket right now. I’ve got mine to get. If I had just half of what he’s carrying around, I’d be downtown buying the children spring clothes. Easter’ll be here next week, and they won’t have an Easter hat between them.”
“If they have a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs, that’s all I ask,” Charity said earnestly.
“That’s fine talk for you,” Cleo flung at her. “What do you care about clothes? You haven’t put the first foot outside the front door in four years. You’ve lived for this kitchen. Pretty soon nothing will fit you but a tent. No wonder you’re worried about keeping a roof over your head. I’d worry, too, if I thought they’d have to cut a bigger door to get me out.”
For a moment of shocked silence both sisters held their breaths, Cleo because she had swung too hard at her mark, Charity because the blow had caught her in the heart. Then a great rasping sigh tore from Charity’s throat, and her regular breathing, the hard respiration, began again.
Cleo nervously crossed to the stove and shifted the tea-kettle back and forth to drown out the labored sounds that she never paid any attention to except when, as now, she was made aware that their wellspring was suffering. A drop or two escaped the full spout and sizzled on the hot iron. But in a moment the sizzling subsided, and again there was no barrier between herself and her sister’s torment. She lifted the stove lid with a great clatter and poked at the fire. It snapped and crackled, a tiny spark flew against her cheek, but she did not feel it. Her face was already hot with shame. She longed to tell her sister she was sorry, but she had never been able to master the simple words of apology.
Sensing Cleo’s humbled pride from the outward signs of her restless movements, seeing her unable to summon speech to cloak her confusion, Charity felt compassion submerge her pain.
Softly, gently, she began to laugh, and the little silver bells rose higher and sweeter, sounding sadder than tears.
“I declare,” she said between gasps, “once I got through the door, I’d sure be arrested for blocking the sidewalk.”
Cleo whirled. Her eyes were no longer luminous gray. They were green. She said roughly: “Stop making fun of yourself. You’re not all that big. I’d be the one arrested. I’d kill the first fool who opened his mouth about my sister’s size.”
Outside the Ipswich trolley rumbled by. Charity said quickly, seeking escape from the love and hate on Cleo’s face, “Guess I’ll go see who gets off. I got a feeling it’ll be them folks.”
She walked down the hall to the front of the house. The crushing weight on her small feet was almost unendurable. Pain stabbed her fallen arches with every step. The loud slap-slap of her carpet slippers was ugly and unsteady. She had lamed herself with her gluttony.
She came back in high excitement. “Lord, Cleo, that house across the way, that big house they’ve turned into a what’s-a-name, you know, where the old lady died.”
“I’ll die, too, before you get to tell me. You mean the one they’ve turned into a roadhouse. Well, what about it?”
/> “Well, I guess they’re getting a new stove. I seen them take a nice-looking gas stove out the back door and cart it to the carriage house. Didn’t look to be a thing wrong with it, except I guess it’s too small for a what’s-a-name. It would just do for us. I bet they’d sell it for a song.”
“Then you start singing. Though in my opinion they’d rather hear money talk.”
The doorbell rang, the polite ring of unfamiliar callers.
“Lord,” said Charity, “I was so excited about that stove, I clean forgot to see who got off the trolley. I know that’s them people. I’m going to keep praying till they go.”
Cleo gave a quick glance at the clock. It was almost twelve. “Keep the children quiet, that’s all I ask. If they give you any sass, slap them down. For God’s sake, hustle them back here until those people go.”
“And this,” said Cleo, “is the kitchenette.” She had shown her prospective tenants the second-floor sitting room, whose rather worn furnishings gave the appearance of mellowed elegance, except for springs and insecure handles; the old playroom, which was now a large and sunny bedroom, with Lily’s bed and bureau permanently borrowed; the bathroom, whose joint sharing always proved to be a chimera in a house with four children; and Bart’s former bedroom, the new kitchenette, whose crude fixtures Cleo had had installed in a shady deal with a plumber’s assistant working with suspect materials at hours when neither his heart nor his head was in his work.
The disappointing kitchenette did not dissipate the accumulated approval of the two elderly people whose best meals along with their best teeth were behind them. The quiet street, the solid exterior of the house, the shining brass of the doorbell that Cleo had repaired two days before, after Mr. Benjamin had ruined the spring trying to make her let him in, the graceful staircase, the imposing glimpse of the parlor, the immaculateness of everything, the well-bred woman beside them, were all in accord with the genteel requirements of Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy.