There was no response. Any more than if I had hugged a wooden post. She did not even look at me. As I backed away from her in embarrassment at my mistake, she did not do or say anything that would make it easier for me to get from the kitchen to the front part of the house where I belonged.
IF I had acted differently, I asked myself later — if I had been less concerned with my own feelings and allowed room for hers, if I had put out my hand instead of trying to embrace her, would the truce between the front and the back parts of the house have held? Would she have wiped her hand on her apron and taken my hand? And said (whether it was true or not) that she remembered me? And listened politely to my recollections of the time when she worked in our kitchen? And then perhaps I would have perceived that her memories of that time were vague or nonexistent, so that we very soon ran out of things to say?
I didn’t tell my aunt what had happened. I was afraid she would say “Why did you put your arms around her?” and I didn’t know why. Also, I thought she might be provoked at Hattie, and I didn’t want to have to consider her feelings as well as my own.
The next time I was in Lincoln, a year or two later, Lula was back and saw me coming up the walk and opened the front door to me.
TWICE a day, with dragging footsteps — for he was an old man — Alfred Dyer came up the brick driveway of our house on Ninth Street to clean out the horse’s stall and feed and curry him, and shovel coal into the furnace. His daughter Hattie kept house for my Grandmother Blinn at the end of her life when, immobilized by dropsy, she sat beside the cannel-coal fire in the back parlor, unable to arrive at the name of one of her children or grandchildren without running through the entire list of them. I don’t remember ever being alone with her, though I expect I was. Or anything she ever said to me. I was five years old when she died. The day after her funeral my mother sat down at the kitchen table with Hattie and when they had finished talking about the situation in that house my mother asked her if she would like to come across the street and work in ours.
Hattie was a good cook when she came to us and she learned effortlessly anything my mother chose to teach her. She was paid five dollars a week — two hundred and sixty dollars a year, the prevailing wage for domestic servants in the second decade of this century. If you take into consideration the fact that it was one-twelfth of my father’s annual salary, it doesn’t seem so shocking.
The week took its shape from my father’s going away and returning, but otherwise every day was a repetition of other days, with, occasionally, an event intruding upon the serenity of the expected. My older brother came down with chicken pox and I caught it from him. Or we had company. Or the sewing woman settled down in an empty bedroom and, with her mouth full of pins, arranged tissue-paper patterns and scraps of dress material on the headless dress form. Sometimes my mother’s friends came of an afternoon and the tea cart was wheeled into the living room and they sat drinking tea and talking as if their lives depended on it, and I would go off upstairs to play and come down an hour later to find them gone and Hattie washing the teacups.
Monday mornings two shy children that I knew were hers came to the back door with an express wagon and Hattie gave them our washing, tied up in a sheet, for her mother to do. I knew that old Mrs. Dyer’s house was on Elm Street, near the intersection at the foot of Ninth Street hill, and I assumed that when Hattie finished the supper dishes and closed the outside kitchen door behind her, that was where she went. It may or may not have been true. After three or four days Mrs. Dyer sent the washing back, white as snow and folded in such a way that it gave my mother pleasure as she put it away in the upstairs linen closet.
There were places in that house that I went to habitually, the way animals repeat their rounds: the window seat in the library, the triangular space behind a walnut Victorian sofa in the living room, the unfurnished bedroom over the kitchen. And if I was suddenly at loose ends because the life had gone out of the toys I was playing with, I would find my mother and be gathered onto her lap and consoled. If she was not home I would wander out onto the back porch and listen to the upward-spiraling sound of the locusts.
The dog went to my mother when he wasn’t sure we all liked him as much as it is possible for a dog to be liked, and felt better after she had talked to him. My brother, who was four years older than I, had a running argument with her about whether he was eleven or, as he insisted, twelve. If in the dead of winter my father opened his three-tiered metal fishing box and sorted through the flies, he chose the room where she was to do it in. When summer came she packed a picnic hamper, and my father brought the horse and carriage around to the high curbing in front of the house, and against a disapproving background of church bells we drove out into the country to a walnut grove with a stream running through it. My mother sat on a plaid lap rug and pulled in one sunfish after another, while my father tramped upstream casting for bass. We could have been the only people on earth. I think my mother enjoyed those long drowsy fishing expeditions but in any case she did whatever it made him happy to do. How much he loved her I heard in his voice whenever he called to her. And how much she loved him I saw in her face when he arrived on the front porch on Friday afternoon and we all came out of the house to greet him. As my father stood with his arms around us, the dog wormed his way past my legs so that his presence too would be recognized.
The Christmas holly that the first grade had cut out of red and green paper and pasted on the schoolroom windows was replaced by George Washington’s hatchet, which turned up again on the scorecard that my mother brought home to me from her bridge club. When we looked at the teacher we also saw the calendar on the wall behind her desk: April 1, 1915: April Fool’s Day.
I have learned to read. I can read sentences out of the evening paper. The big black headlines are often about the war between Germany and the Allies. From the window seat in the library I watch as my father stands and holds an opened-out page of the Lincoln Evening Courier across the upper part of the fireplace so the chimney won’t smoke. (The war between us broke out when I was three or four years old. I woke up in the night with a parched throat and called out — it was by no means the first time this had happened — for a drink. And waited for my mother’s footsteps and the bathroom glass against my dry lips. Instead, his voice, from across the hall, said, “Oh, get it yourself!”) The newspaper catches fire and floats up the chimney, and I pull the curtain behind me in order to peer out at the darkness and the piles of snow. In May, where the piles of dirty snow were, the flowering almond is in bloom. It has suckered and spread through the wire fence into the Kiests’ yard. Do the flowers on that side belong to them or to us?
D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation is showing at the movie theater downtown and there are scenes in it that have made all the colored people in Lincoln angry. I am told to stay out of the kitchen.
The sentences we are called on to read out loud in class are longer and more complicated. We have to memorize the forty-eight states and their capitals, and the countries of South America. With a pencil behind his ear, my father goes through an accumulation of inspection slips, making a check mark now and then, and hands them to me to alphabetize. (Spreading them around me on the rug, I am proud to be of help to him.)
Slumped down in her chair, my mother feels with the toe of her shoe for the buzzer that is concealed under the dining-room rug. My brother and I find her searching hilarious. My father wonders why she just doesn’t buy a little bell she can ring. In the end she has to give up, and calls out to the kitchen. The pantry door swings open and Hattie appears to clear away the plates and bring the dessert. She too thinks it is funny that the buzzer is never where it is supposed to be.
HOW many years was she with us? Five, by my calculations. One day I went out to the kitchen for a drink of water and saw her daughter Thelma at the kitchen sink with an apron on. She said she had come to work for us. She was twelve years old but tall for her age. I asked my mother where Hattie was and my mother said, “She’s be
en having trouble with her husband and moved to Chicago.” My mother didn’t say what the trouble was and I assumed it was one of the things that are not explained to children. But I felt the trouble was serious if Hattie had to go away. And her absence made me aware of an unpleasant possibility: Things could change.
To everything that my mother said to Thelma she answered “Yes, ma’am” and “No, ma’am,” but as though she were hearing it from a great distance, and she moved with the slowness of a person whose heart is somewhere else. My mother detected a film of grease on all the dishes and spoke to her about it. When there was no improvement, she decided that Thelma wasn’t ever going to be like Hattie, and let her go.
The good-natured farm girl who was in our kitchen after that was taking classes at night so she could pass an examination and work in the post office. My mother was satisfied with her but spoke regretfully of Hattie, who knew what she wanted done without having to be told.
The school calendar has marched straight on to the fall half of the year 1918. We have learned how to do long division. The women who come to our house in the afternoon put their teacups aside and hem diapers as they sit gossiping. They all know what my mother has told me in confidence, that I am going to have a baby brother or a baby sister. They also know — in a small town there was no way for such a thing not to be known — that my mother had a difficult time when my brother was born, and again with me. Only my Aunt Annette knew that at this time she had premonitions of dying.
My mother hopes that the baby will be a girl, and I am sure that what my mother wants to have happen will happen. Nothing turned out the way anybody hoped or expected it to. My younger brother was born in a hospital in Bloomington during the height of the epidemic of Spanish influenza. Toward the end of the first week in January, Alfred Dyer, coming up the driveway to tend the furnace, cannot have failed to see the funeral wreath on the door.
There is no cure but time. One of my mother’s friends said that, putting her hand on my father’s shoulder as he sat, hardly recognizable, in his chair. I thought about my mother in the cemetery and wondered if she would wake up and try to get out of her coffin and not be able to. But children have to go to school no matter what happens at home. I learned that the square root of sixty-four is eight, and that π is 3.14159 approximately, and represents the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle.
YEARS passed without my thinking about Hattie Dyer at all, and then suddenly there I was backing away from her in confusion. When I told my wife about it she said, “It wasn’t Hattie you embraced but the idea of her.” Which was clearly true, but didn’t explain Hattie’s behavior.
Because my mother was fond of her it doesn’t necessarily follow that Hattie was fond of my mother. My mother may have been only the white woman she worked for. But if this were true I think I would have sensed it as a child. Perhaps — it was so long ago — she neither remembered nor cared what my mother was like by the time I put my arms around her in my aunt’s kitchen.
If I had had the courage to stand my ground and say to her, “Why do you refuse to admit that you knew me when I was a little boy?” I don’t think she would have given me any answer. However, people do communicate their feelings helplessly. Jealousy can be felt even in the dark. Lovers charge the surrounding air with their delirium. What I felt as I backed away from that unresponsive figure was anger.
MY Aunt Edith was married to a doctor and lived in Bloomington. They had no children and she wanted to take the baby when my mother died, but my father clung to the belief that my mother would have wanted him to keep the family together and not let my brothers and me grow up in separate households, no matter how loving. We were too young to shift for ourselves while he was away, and what he needed was a woman who knew how to run a house and take care of a baby. Hattie could have managed it with one hand tied behind her. So could Annette’s Lula. And they would have brought life into the house with them. I cannot believe that there were no more colored women like them in Lincoln. But he thought (and so did everybody else) that he had to have a white woman. The first housekeeper was hired because she had been a nurse. She had nothing whatever to say, not even about the weather. She had never been around children before, and I felt no inclination to lean against her.
My brother and I struggled against the iron fact that my mother wasn’t there anymore. Or ever going to be. Tears did not help. The house was like a person in a state of coma. If Annette had not turned up sometime during every day I think we would all have stopped breathing. Any domestic crisis that arose remained undealt with until my father came home. He never knew when he left the house on Tuesday morning what brand-new trouble he would find when he returned on Friday afternoon. My mother’s clothes closet was empty. Her silver-backed comb and brush and hand mirror were still on her dressing table, but without the slight disorder of hairpins, powder, powder puff, cologne, smelling salts, and so on, they were reduced to being merely objects. How endless the nights must have been for him, in the double bed where, when he put out his hand, it encountered only the cold sheets.
The first housekeeper lasted three months. The second took offense no matter which way the wind blew, and it would have been better to have no one. She made mischief between the two sides of the family and was dismissed when she developed erysipelas. The farm girl passed her examination and gave notice. And so it: went. Each time my father’s arrangements collapsed he turned in desperation to old Mrs. Dyer, and though she was crippled with rheumatism she came and fed us until he found someone to take over from her.
During this period he made an appointment with the local photographer. The result is a very strange picture. My father sits holding the baby on his lap. The baby looks uncomfortable but not about to cry. My father is wearing a starched collar and a dark-blue suit, and looks like what he was, a sad self-made man. My older brother has a fierce expression on his face, as if he means to stare the camera out of countenance. I am standing beside him, a thin little boy of ten, in a Norfolk jacket, knee pants, and long black stockings. The photographer was a man with a good deal of manner, and as he ducked his head under the black cloth and then out again to rearrange the details of our bodies I was threatened with an attack of the giggles, which would not have been appropriate, because my father meant the picture to be a memorial of our bereavement.
Annette and her husband were in the habit of spending the winter in Florida. The first Christmas after my mother’s death she sent him and my Cousin Peg down South without her so she could be with us. Shortly after that I became aware of conversations behind closed doors and then somebody forgot to close the door. Out of fury because she had been dismissed, the second housekeeper had written several unsigned poison-pen letters to my Grandmother Maxwell, in which she said that my father was carrying on with my Aunt Annette. My Uncle Will Bates received similar letters. His response was to put a stop to Annette’s coming to our house at all.
My brother felt that it would be disloyal to my father if he set foot in my uncle’s house. Nothing on earth (and certainly not the awkwardness) could have kept me from being where Annette was. What I didn’t tell her about my feelings she seemed to know anyway. She told Lula to put an extra place at the table for me, and made me feel loved. She also got me to accept (as far as I was able at that age to do this) the succession of changes that came about, a year later, when my father’s grief wore itself out and he put his life with my mother behind him. Children, with no conception of how life goes on and on, expect a faithfulness that comes at too high a price. Now that I am old enough to be his father I have no trouble saying yes, of course he should have remarried. He had always liked women, and without feminine companionship, without someone sitting at the opposite end of the table whom he could feel tenderly about, he would have turned sour and become a different man. He began to accept invitations, and the matchmakers put their heads together.
There used to be, and probably still is somewhere, a group picture of the guests at my father’s
wedding, which took place in the house of my stepmother’s sister, in 1921. The photographer set up his tripod and camera on the lawn in front of the house, and as the guests assembled in front of him there was a good deal of joking and laughter. I had already passed over the line into puberty but not yet reached the stage of hypercritical judgments when I would find the loud laughter of a room full of grown people enjoying themselves unbearable.
DURING the years that my father lived in Chicago his heavy leather grip, that my mother had hated the sight of, remained on a closet shelf unless we took the train down to Lincoln. There were several people he felt obliged to call on whenever he went home, and one of them was Mrs. Dyer, who still lived in the little house at the foot of Ninth Street hill. He expected his sons to go with him. The visits went on as long as she lived. Mr. Dyer was never there, and I think must have died. I was not expected to take part in the conversation; only to be there. And so my eyes were free to roam around the front room we sat in. The iron potbellied stove, the threadbare carpet, the darkened wallpaper. The calendar, courtesy of the local lumber company. The hard wooden chairs we sat on. Mrs. Dyer and my father talked about her health, about changes in Lincoln, about how fast time goes. And then he made some excuse that got us on our feet. As we were saying good-bye he took out his billfold and extracted a new ten-dollar bill. But not one word did either of them say about the thing that had brought him there, which was that in the time of his greatest trouble, when there was no one else he could have turned to, she didn’t fail him.
IN a box of old papers, not long ago, I found an eighty-page history of the town of Lincoln, published by Feldman’s Print Shop, in 1953, when Lincoln was celebrating the hundredth anniversary of its founding. Thumbing through it I came upon a picture of Mrs. Dyer, looking just the way I remembered her. She was beautiful as an old woman, and probably always was. In the photograph she is wearing a black silk dress with a lace collar. Her mouth is sunken in with age, but her eyes are as bright as a child’s, and from her smile you’d think it had been a privilege to stand over a tub of soapy water doing other people’s washing year in and year out. Surrounding the picture there is an interview with Hattie, who had been chosen as “a respected citizen of the community” to give “something of the history of one of our distinguished colored families.” The interview is only five hundred words long, and I assume that much of what she said never got into print. For example, what about her brother Dr. William Dyer? Was the interviewer aware that he had succeeded in becoming a doctor when this was exceedingly rare for a Negro and that he was on the surgical staffs of the best hospitals in Kansas City? Or that he was also among those citizens of Lincoln who were especially honored at the centennial celebration? Perhaps the history went to press before this fact was known. In any case, while Dr. Dyer was in town for the honoring he stayed with her. He had managed to put himself in a position where no white man could summon him with the word “Boy!” She must have been immensely proud of him. The interview does quote Hattie as saying that in Alfred Dyer’s house “there were no intoxicants allowed, no dancing, no card playing, but how we loved to dance! And we did dance when they were away from home.” As long as her father was able to work, Hattie said, he was employed by the B. P. Andrews Lumber Company in town. I suspect he had many jobs, some of them overlapping. It is hard to believe how little people were paid for their labor in those days, but the Dyers managed. They didn’t have to walk along the railroad right-of-way picking up pieces of coal. In the interview, Hattie said she was a year old when she was brought to the house on Elm Street.
All the Days and Nights Page 35