There Was a Time

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  Frank was too young to feel much physical discomfort, though his feet were numbed and his ungloved hands blue with cold. He stared through the dirty windows of the cab, absorbed in seeing. He saw endless streets of drab, dark, wooden houses, the curbs high with snow, the roofs leprous with mingled white and black, the air aswirl with white sand and furious wind. No one seemed about, at ten o’clock in the morning of this March 8th. The veils of snow blew through deserted streets, coiled, and twisted on deserted street corners. The houses were only dim, dark blotches behind these dancing and shivering scarves of thin whiteness.

  “We’ve come to the end of the world,” whimpered Maybelle, wretchedly, cowering in her coat.

  Francis did not answer. He, too, stared through the windows of the cab, which were frosted with ferns of ice. His small face was tight and pent; he kept blinking his little blue eyes. Frank felt more sorry for his father than he did for his mother, though he could not have told why. The cane lay forgotten beside Francis; the valorous little leggings seemed vulnerable and pathetic, the cap too large for the face beneath it. Even the magnificent mustaches had begun to droop.

  After endless heavings and rockings through streets rutted with frozen ice, the cab came to a halt on Vermont Street Frank saw a grocery shop, a tailor shop, and a row of shabby wooden houses, gaunt-looking and abandoned to the assault of winter. He climbed a long flight of steep wooden stairs, dark and gritty. A door at the top opened, and a vicious fat harridan looked down at them, staring in silence from behind a pair of steel-rimmed glasses.

  Maybelle tried to smile. “Good morning,” she said, and her voice was hoarse. “We’re the Clairs. Just arrived.”

  The obese old witch stepped aside, not speaking. She sniffed loudly, though whether with a cold or with disdain, no one could tell. A blast of chill dusty air struck the travellers. Maybelle looked about her, and her warm heart sank, never fully to arise again in America.

  There were two rooms awaiting them. One was a large bedroom and sitting room, containing a big iron bed, all filigree, covered with sunken dank blankets and a patched white bedspread, a couch with a heap of soiled blankets at its foot, obviously for young Frank, a leaning oaken dresser with a blurred mirror, two wooden rocking chairs, a round, uncovered oak table, and, on the floor, worn and patched linoleum of an indefinite brown pattern. A tiny gas heater had been grudgingly lit; its yellowish red flames gave off a stinking odor of unconsumed gas. A gas chandelier, without mantles, hung from the calcimined ceiling.

  The other room was a kitchen, containing a “hot plate” on a wooden box, an iron sink, with a faucet that dripped only cold water, a bare table, and three or four wooden chairs with imitation leather seats. All the coarse cotton curtains hung limply, filmed with soot. An empty wooden cupboard yawned against a wall.

  Every window, narrow and dirty, framed a scene of desolation: wooden roofs, smoking chimney pots grim and black, the sides of wooden house walls, and the dreadful street below.

  For this magnificence, the Clairs were to pay three dollars a week, which Mrs. Clair had assured them was very cheap, as everything was “found,” the heat, the illumination, the furniture.

  “Well,” said the witch, her arms folded under her apron, “you got here all right. Expected you two days ago.”

  Francis removed his cap. He dropped it on the large damp bed. “We had a storm,” he said, trying to make his dwindled voice strong and confident. “Delayed three days.” He paused. “You’re Mrs. Watson, I presume.”

  The old woman grunted. She had an enormous belly under her dirty dress of some black cotton material. Her whitish hair had been screwed into a small knot on the top of her huge head. There were white hairs growing profusely on her chins. Her whole appearance was brutish, callous, suspicious.

  Francis indicated his wife and son with a wave of his hand. “Mrs. Clair, and my little lad, Frank,” he said.

  Maybelle nodded. She dared not speak for fear of bursting into sobs. Frank stared. The old woman deliberately scrutinized Maybelle and the boy. She said: “I hope the kid ain’t a nuisance. First time I let the place to a family with a kid.”

  Francis said: “The lad’s well behaved.” He glanced at Frank fiercely.

  “There’s a school, number 38, up the street,” said Mrs. Watson. “He’s old enough, ain’t he?”

  “Frank’s been to school for a year.” Maybelle spoke for the first time, and with wan spirit. “He’s very good.”

  “Hope he don’t wet the bed,” responded Mrs. Watson, sourly. She stuck out her hand. “Three dollars. That’s to Sunday. It ain’t but four more days, but I’ve kept the rooms for you nearly a week, so you owe it.”

  Francis brought out his money. His fingers shook a little as he counted out three bills. He gave them to the witch, who snatched them from him, stared at them suspiciously, folded them, and popped them into her bosom. She hated “foreigners.” She particularly hated English folk.

  “You’ve gotta use the bathroom that goes with the flat,” went on Mrs. Watson. “It’s my bathroom, too. You’ll find it, going through my rooms, in the rear. There’s a rule about it. You gotta ask me first about a bath, and no more than one bath a week.” She sniffed. “Got any china and things?”

  “Our crates are at the station. I’ve arranged for them to come this afternoon,” said Francis. He seemed smaller in the bleak half-light of the rooms than in England.

  “I have my own bedding,” said Maybelle, with a horrified glance at the bed and sofa. “Good feather beds, and sheets, and pillows.”

  Mrs. Watson looked scornful. “Well, you can use your own. I don’t care. Just hand ’em back when you’re ready.”

  She trundled to the door, shaking the worn floor-boards as she walked. She went out and slammed the door.

  Now there was silence in the ugly, poverty-stricken rooms. Maybelle sat down on a wooden kitchen chair. She began to take off her fine kid gloves. Her fingers trembled violently. Francis moved from window to window, gazing through them. The rooms darkened steadily. The luggage stood abandoned, its good brown leathers seemingly withdrawing into themselves.

  Then Maybelle began to cry wildly. She bowed her face into her hands. Her hat tilted like a huge, flower-trimmed plateau. She crouched on her chair, and gave herself up to her misery. Frank pressed against her, too wretched and frightened for tears. Francis turned from the window and glared at his wife. He said, but his voice was tremulous: “For God’s sake, give over, Maybelle. It can’t be helped. It’s only temporary.”

  But Maybelle cried incoherently: “To think I gave up my nice cosy home for this, with the polished fenders and the fireplaces, and my good beds, and my lovely furniture! To think we left England for this!”

  Francis spoke harshly, out of his own despair and depression and fear:

  “It’s only temporary, I told you. It’s cheap. We’ll save all our money, and go home. Perhaps in two or three years. Ma’s got me a good job in a chemist shop, a drugstore they call it. Twenty-five dollars a week! That’s more than five pound! I’ll get more a little later. We can save fifteen dollars a week; that’s three pound. Three pound a week is seven hundred eighty dollars a year, one hundred fifty-six pound. I’ll be getting more, too. Why, it’ll soon be two hundred pound a year, a thousand dollars! Three, four, five years, and we’ll have a fortune, and back we’ll go. A thousand dollars a year, at least. We can put up with anything for that money.”

  He waited for Maybelle’s comment, but none came. He twirled his mustaches hopelessly. “Think of it as exile,” he said, with less confidence. “Just exile. We’re still young. We can put up with anything for a few years. Then back we’ll go, with our pockets full of money.”

  “Years out of our life in this God-forsaken place,” sobbed Maybelle.

  Francis began to bluster. “You talk like a fool. Where’d we ever get in England? There’s money here. Keep a stiff upper lip, for God’s sake. D’ye think it’s easy for me?” He glanced down at his tremulous hands. �
��I’ve got to wash up,” he said. “There’s the bathroom. In the meantime, you’d better change, and find something warm to put on. The rest of the luggage’ll be here this afternoon. Buck up, Maybelle. Wash the kid’s face. Ma expects us. She’ll have a good dinner ready. Buck up. Things’re never as dark as they seem.”

  He walked out briskly. Maybelle continued to cry with complete desolation. Frank timidly put his arm about her. He could feel her plump shoulders heaving; he could feel the utter abandonment of her grief. “Ma,” he said feebly.

  She caught him to her so vehemently that the breath was knocked out of him. “Oh, my lovey, how can I stand it?” she cried. “This terrible country! I knew we shouldn’ve left home. We’ll never go back, Frankie, we’ll never go back. I feel it, I feel it in my heart! We’ll never see England again—never, never, never!”

  CHAPTER 12

  Mrs. Jamie Clair’s rooming house, “genteel furnished rooms with excellent board and home cooking,” was situated on Porter Avenue near Niagara Street, where it had the full advantage of petrifying gales in winter and cooling breezes in summer. It had once been a mansion, built according to the tastes of somber-souled people of the seventies and eighties, and was painted a dark chocolate brown. It had twin “tower” rooms, excrescences which were like a pair of bulging bellies extending on each side of the second floor. Directly below each truncated tower was a “bow” window, crowded by four narrow panes of rounded glass. One was the window of the parlor, the other the window of the dining room. There was a third story, also, consisting of four tiny dormer windows set in a slate roof. A deep gloomy verandah surrounded the house on three sides, artfully contrived to shut out every vestige of sunlight that might incontinently pierce its way through crowding chestnut trees on the narrow strip of lawn. The trees effectually prevented grass from growing on this lawn, and so a dank area of moss, unhealthily green and spotted, served the same purpose. Almost identical houses stood on either side of Mrs. Clair’s, so close that the side windows of the houses adjoining could be reached by an outstretched hand. The alleyways between them were narrow, dank, gritty with soot. But each house could boast a “back yard,” where attempts were made to raise flowers, mostly sunflowers and nasturtiums and peonies, during the short summers.

  Frank Clair could discover very little difference between this house on Porter Avenue, Bison, New York, and the house in Leeds. Mrs. Clair had succeeded, miraculously, in transferring her atmosphere almost intact to this alien land. There was the same dank air, chill, clammy and shuttered, the same plush and horsehair furniture, the same long gloomy windows shrouded in coarse net and crimson draperies, the same dark carpets and long crepuscular stairways and narrow corridors. Instinctively, she had chosen this house the moment she had seen it. The air was pervaded by the same smell of boiling cabbage, barley, mutton, potatoes and suet puddings, and there was an odor of mingled chloride of lime, wax, coal gas and linoleum which made Francis and Maybelle sniff and stare nostalgically at each other each time they smelled it.

  With the same instinct that had made her choose this house, and furnish it, she had picked her “guests” carefully. Frank heard the same hollow meek coughs in the dining room and hallways and bedrooms. He heard the same apologetic rustlings, the same hushed and apprehensive voices. As in Leeds, these guests were clerks, milliners, dressmakers and bookkeepers. The house was respectable, run like a military barracks, and the food was good. Mrs. Clair invariably had a full house. The hot and tiny rooms under the roof rented for seven dollars a week, apiece, with board, “two meals on Sunday.” The second-floor rooms brought in nine dollars a week, and there were two large front rooms, “parlors,” which paid the incredible sum of twelve dollars each. One was occupied by a Mr. Farley, who owned the drugstore where Francis was to work, and the other had been rented by a “refined” middle-aged widow, a Mrs. Prescott, who boasted an annuity of twelve hundred dollars a year, a fortune. To these, and to these only, did Mrs. Clair unbend. Mr. Farley and Mrs. Prescott were welcomed into the downstairs parlor at any time, and they dined in state with their landlady.

  Mrs. Clair had been forced to increase her household staff to two, a mother and daughter. “These Yankees are so independent, you wouldn’t believe it,” she told her son. These two occupied a lightless little room at the rear of the third floor, and received ten dollars a week between them. “Two pound! said Mrs. Clair with tragic pride. “Think of it! A week’s wages for a family!” She confessed that she had to handle Mrs. Clark and her daughter, Sally, “with kid gloves.” “No sense of responsibility and duty,” she complained to Maybelle. “And impudent. They demand every second Sunday off after four o’clock, and no work after ten at night! It’s unheard of.”

  The Clairs were invited to dinner every Sunday, where Frank sat and shivered in silence, even in the summer. His perceptiveness had increased. He hated this gloomy house on Porter Avenue. He was beginning to hate his grandmother. He rarely, if ever, spoke to her, and this confirmed her in her opinion that the boy was “barmy.” She was sorry for her son, she told Francis, with a deadly expression on her iron countenance. But then, one must always consider the blood of the mother.

  Mrs. Clair was increasingly annoyed with Maybelle, for she had lost the warm pinkness of her English complexion. She had become permanently sallow, with freckle-like blotches on her cheeks. The bright coral of Maybelle’s lips had faded for all time. Now their small pudginess was livid and dry. Even Maybelle’s hair was beginning to lose its flamboyant auburn tint; it had faded, too, become drab and streaked, and its curl had turned into lank strings. But her plumpness remained, not round and firm as before, but flabby, unhealthily limp and shapeless. Her brown eyes, which had never been too vital and sparkling, became heavy and dull. A change was taking place in her, and the change was not comely or pleasant.

  In England, Maybelle, despite her secret dislike of the older woman, had lived in awe of her mother-in-law, and she had rarely betrayed her natural spirit in any clash or encounter. Now Maybelle was becoming sullen. “She never has a civil word for me,” Mrs. Clair would complain privately to her son. “She snaps and snarls at everything. I thought the lad was the apple of her eye, but now she clouts him at every opportunity, and sometimes even I rebel. What’s come over her?”

  Francis did not know. He did not even care. He was a man of shallow instincts and timorous expediency. He was a “pharmacist” in Mr. Farley’s prosperous drugstore on Niagara Street, near West Ferry, and he was receiving twenty-five dollars a week. He had his own problems. It was hard for him to acquaint himself with the new methods of dispensation. He could not reconcile himself to the necessity of learning to mix “sodas,” which he thought vile concoctions. He could not understand why a “chemist’s shop” should sell candy and ice cream and tobacco, in addition to drugs. Moreover, he could not understand Mr. Farley.

  Mr. Timothy Farley was Irish. Francis was at first outraged that he was to work for an Irishman. He’d soon “put the beggar in his place.” But Mr. Farley seemed sincerely and warmheartedly unaware that he had “a place.” He was a kind, fat, jovial little man, with remnants of red hair on a big bald pate, sparkling greenish eyes, a wide and engaging smile, a heavy gold watch chain, and a fine taste in good tailors. He was a widower, with no children. He had the deepest affection for young creatures, either human or animal, and his pockets were always full of candies and gum-drops and chewing gum, which he dispensed with tenderness. He had a rich and booming laugh, hard to resist, though Francis resisted it successfully. In England, of course, Mrs. Clair would never have dreamed of having an Irishman for a “guest.” But things were different in America, and, as she frequently said to Francis, “when in Rome, do as the Romans do.”

  But Francis could not reconcile himself to working for an Irishman. It was “demeaning.” He was as impertinent to his employer as he dared to be, for he was not a man of courage, and his impertinences were almost imperceptible. Mr. Farley did not recognize condescension. He though
t Francis “a funny little feller, with no blood in his veins.” He pitied Francis with all the power of his warm and generous heart, and so he was almost excessively kind to his new pharmacist, and invariably included a box of chocolates for Maybelle, a bag of candy for little Frank, and a quart of ice cream, in the salary he paid Francis every Saturday night. Francis accepted these gifts, given out of instinctive compassion and understanding, with stately graciousness. The gifts soothed him.

  Francis was a conscientious if uninspired pharmacist. Mr. Farley was grateful. He had almost become reconciled to incompetence, slackness and irresponsibility in his employees. And even to cheating at the till. But Francis could be relied upon to be at the shop at exactly eight o’clock in the morning, superintending the cleaning of the floor and the windows, and even doing these tasks himself if the lazy schoolboy on certain mornings decided against the effort of appearing. Francis could be trusted at the till, as was evidenced by a marked increase in receipts. Francis was courteous, if cold, to customers, and his filling of prescriptions was exact, so careful and exact, in fact, that he acquired a reputation among local doctors, even among those who ordinarily did not recommend Mr. Farley’s drugstore.

  Francis’ white coat was invariably immaculate, his hands scrubbed and clean, his person impeccable. He was an automaton, apparently tireless and always precise After six months, Mr. Farley increased his salary to thirty dollars a week, and gave him a check of twenty-five dollars at Christmas.

  Mr. Farley secretly wished that Francis would invite him to his home. He had become very fond of young Frank, who he thought had the face of some fiery but silent saint. He was very sorry for Maybelle, and plied her with patent medicines, to which she was becoming addicted. He listened with endless patience to her complaints of vague and ominous pains, and thought nothing of running back to his shop on Sunday and mixing up a special concoction for her. He would stare compassionately at her fat, flabby face with its petulant lips and shadowed eyes, and say a silent prayer for her in his heart.