Most Anything You Please

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  The memory made her call out as the Ryans opened the door to the street and a gust of wintry air blew in with a few snowflakes. “Mrs. Ryan! Could any of your crowd use a winter coat? I just got new ones for all the youngsters—they outgrow them so fast, you know. But the old coats are still in good shape.”

  Mrs. Ryan, grateful for the offer, stayed to pick up an armload of old coats. Each coat had already been worn through a few winters—the dark green coat passed from Audrey to Marilyn and was now too small for either of them, and the brown coat that Audrey wore for two years was frayed at the cuffs. Alf’s old coat was far too big for Johnny, there was such a gap in age between the boys. Might as well let Jimmy Ryan get some use out of it.

  Enough money for new coats and new boots—in these hard times, when so many families were barely getting by, Ellen knew she had a lot to thank the Lord for. At bedtime, when the day’s work was done, she went through the house, looking at them all, saying goodnight. Audrey and Marilyn snuggled together in the big bed, already both asleep in a tangle of long, skinny arms and legs. In the boys’ room, Frankie snored in the crib. Johnny was asleep on the bottom bunk while up on top Alf was reading a Hardy Boys book by the light of his flashlight.

  “Put that light out and go to sleep, you’ll ruin your eyes,” she said to the glow under the quilt, and closed the door behind her.

  It was a grand feeling, at the end of the day, to sit down in the living room with Wes while he read the Evening Telegram. Susan sat up with them for a half-hour after the dishes were done, paging through a Ladies’ Home Journal, to mark her status as a grown-up. Ellen knitted, using the quiet evening hours to churn out mitten after mitten. When Susan said goodnight and slipped off to the girls’ room, Wes folded up his paper and said, “Well, Nell girl, another day done. How was things in the shop today?”

  “Oh, I can’t complain. I don’t know if I should have ordered in so much ham as I did from Shortall’s, though. I thought people would want more of it, with Christmas coming on.”

  “It’s a worry all right,” Wes said. “Folks will want more candy and the like with Christmas coming on too, won’t they?”

  “I’m getting extra Peppermint Nobs and Kisses from Purity Factories, along with the syrup. They should be delivered Friday.”

  “I passed Alf on my way home from work today, hauling that cart up from old Mrs. Fifield’s place, all the way up Rankin Street. He’s turning into a grand little worker. In a few years I’ll be taking him out on jobs with me.”

  “Was Johnny riding up with him? He loves going around on that cart. I ’low by the time Alf’s ready to start working with you, Johnny will be big enough to do the deliveries himself. He can’t wait.” It was hard to imagine four or five years into the future. Alf would be a young man and the little boys half-grown. Audrey and Marilyn would be young girls, working behind the counter—oh, how grand it would be to have more help in the shop—and flirting with boys when they thought their mother wasn’t looking. The image of it, of all the years to come, made her brain swim.

  “It’ll get easier, girl, never fret,” Wes said.

  “Will it?”

  “It will. Times are hard all over, but this Depression can’t last forever, that’s what the men in the know all say.”

  He generally looked on the bright side, Wes did, while Ellen herself was more likely to scan the skies for the dark clouds that might bring rain. It was good she was that way: someone had to remember to batten down the hatches when a storm was coming. But she counted on Wes to keep her spirits up. She knitted one more row, then cast off. Another mitt done: she’d have a pair for each of the youngsters for Christmas, and a pair of socks too.

  I will believe it, she told herself as she wound up the ball of wool and stuck her needles crosswise through it. It was almost Christmas, a time of hope and joy. She would choose to believe Wes’s happy vision of the future—the shop making money, all their bills paid, the children safe, everyone secure. Just for this week, at least, she would really try to stop worrying about everything that might go wrong, try to be grateful for what they had.

  She remembered this resolution a few days later, when she was down in the shop selling two bottles of Purity syrup to Bridie Kelly. “A treat for the youngsters for Christmas Eve—we got something a bit stronger for the rest of us,” Mrs. Kelly laughed, then added, “But you Methodists are all temperance, I s’pose—don’t approve of a drop even at Christmas?”

  “I’m sure it’s none of my business, Mrs. Kelly.” Ellen rang in the purchase and handed the change across the counter.

  “Nell?” Susan’s voice, from the doorway, interrupted Mrs. Kelly’s wheezy laughter. “Can you—I can watch the shop for a few minutes, could you come up and have a look at the boys? They both woke up coughing, and I think Johnny’s running a fever.”

  What bad luck, sick youngsters at Christmas. Ellen went upstairs to find Johnny’s little face was red with fever and Frankie was warm too. The two of them were coughing and when Johnny gasped for a breath in between coughs she heard the telltale whoop that made her heart sink. Surely she had imagined that; most likely it was just a bad cold. They were both outside playing in the yard yesterday and if they took their caps off Susan might not have had the sense to put them back on. And then Johnny was riding around on the cart with Alf in all the cold wind.

  Ellen let Susan mind the shop for the morning, shooed the older children outside to play in spite of the bitter wind. She spent her morning tending to the two little boys, giving them honey for their coughs and using cool wet towels to try to bring down the fever. Between coughs, Johnny wanted to know if Santa Claus would still come even if they were sick.

  “He will, my love, don’t mind about that. Santa Claus visits the sick children too.”

  “He better. He’s bringing me a truck.” Johnny’s eyes widened as he pulled in another wheezing gasp and coughed again.

  When everyone came home for dinner she went back down to the shop, leaving instructions for Susan, and spent the afternoon worrying. Neither of the little boys was better the next day, Christmas Eve. Wes, of course, assured her it was only a head cold. Ellen told Susan to keep Frankie and Johnny in their room, and ordered Alf to keep out, just in case it was the whooping cough. She sent a message to Wes’s cousin Alice over on Freshwater Road, asking if she could have Aunt Mabel and Uncle Caleb to her house for Christmas dinner instead of them coming to Wes and Ellen as they’d planned. She kept the shop open till the early afternoon, when the man came around selling Christmas trees off a truck. Then Ellen shut up the shop and sent Wes and Alf down to pick out a tree.

  Upstairs, she found Susan peeling vegetables. “The boys is both after falling off to sleep,” Susan said, and Ellen decided to take that as a good sign. The door to the girls’ room was closed and she heard Audrey and Marilyn giggling behind it. “Don’t come in, Mama, you can’t come in!” Marilyn shrieked when she opened the door a crack, and Audrey said, “But can you bring us the twine and scissors, please?”

  “They’re in the kitchen drawer,” Ellen said, and when Audrey slipped out to get the twine and scissors Ellen felt her forehead, which was still cool. In the boys’ room, Frankie was asleep, tangled in sweaty sheets, but Johnny had just woken up and was coughing again. A bottle of cough medicine sat on the nightstand. When did Susan last give him a spoonful, she wondered. Was it too soon for more? Between each cough he gasped, and after the spasm passed, he collapsed into her arms. “Mummy, my chest hurts.”

  “Be a big boy, now. You got to get better before Santa comes at midnight.” But the mention of Santa sparked no light now in his red-rimmed eyes. Ellen wondered if should she mention that Santa really was going to bring him a truck. But no: perhaps tomorrow he would be better and enjoy the surprise.

  Ellen hadn’t had a doctor in the house since Alf, Audrey, and Marilyn all had the measles together when they lived down on Casey Street. S
he went to the hospital to have Johnny and had a midwife for Frankie, so she’d never had reason to call a doctor. Would Dr. Andrews even come out on Christmas Eve? He certainly wouldn’t come tomorrow unless it was life or death. Should she wait till Boxing Day? Johnny started coughing again, sucking in air like he was drowning, and she told Susan to go out and get the doctor.

  He came just as Alf and Wes were setting up the tree in the living room. Frankie was awake and coughing too now, and Ellen was back and forth between him and Johnny with the cool cloths and the cough medicine. “Not a very pleasant way to be spending Christmas Eve, is it?” said Dr. Andrews.

  “Nor for you either, sir. But I ’low people get sick every day of the year, don’t they?”

  “They surely do, Mrs. Holloway. Never a Christmas goes by without a tragedy for some poor family. I just came from an old lady over on Goodridge Street who won’t make it to New Year’s.” He pulled out his stethoscope and listened to each boy’s chest, his face grave. “Now this, this is very serious business, Mrs. Holloway, and not the kind of news anyone wants to hear at Christmas, but I’m sure it is the whooping cough. And your other children have been exposed to it too.”

  Ellen stayed in the boys’ room all evening, letting Susan give the other children their supper of salt fish and raisin bread. The girls were sent off to bed, neither of them showing signs of a cough or fever yet, thank the Lord. Wes, Susan, and Alf decorated the tree, wrapped the presents, filled the stockings. Alf was pleased as punch, Ellen knew, to be given this grown-up role when last year he was sent off to bed with the little ones to let the Christmas magic happen while he slept. Now the only Christmas magic Ellen wished for was that both boys would get better, and none of the others would get sick.

  Marilyn woke with a fever Christmas morning, and coughed over breakfast. Frankie seemed a little better, but Johnny was worse. The longed-for red fire truck, which Ellen had bought with the other gifts at Bowring’s Toyland, made him smile, but he didn’t have the energy to play with it. The opening of presents was subdued, and Marilyn went back to bed with her new doll tucked in beside her. The cough worked its way up through the family from youngest to oldest; Audrey was sick by nightfall on Christmas night. Alf was the only one of the children spared. Susan, like Ellen and Wes, had already had the whooping cough when she was younger.

  The shop was supposed to re-open on the 27th, the day after Boxing Day, but Ellen had neither time nor heart to be down behind the counter. “And it might not even be safe,” she told Wes. “Everyone on the street knows our children got the whooping cough; for all we know we could be spreading it by having the shop open.”

  On New Year’s Day, Frankie seemed a little better at last, and the doctor, making what had become a daily visit, gave his first approving nod. “I think this little fellow is out of the woods,” he said. “He’ll need a lot of rest, still, but he’s on the mend.” Ellen hoped he would say the same about Johnny— after all, the two boys got sick at the same time, so shouldn’t they get better at about the same time?—but the doctor frowned when he put his stethoscope to Johnny’s chest. “I’m afraid this little chap may be developing pneumonia.”

  The day after New Year’s, Wes had to go back to work, and Susan offered to open the shop so Ellen could continue to look after the children. So Susan and Wes went to work, Alf went to school, and Ellen stayed upstairs, making soup and changing sheets and caring for Frankie, who was feeling better and whining about having to stay in bed, and Marilyn and Audrey, who were just now getting into the worst of the coughing spells. Johnny, who did have pneumonia, was getting weaker instead of stronger despite all her care.

  Ellen knelt by her bedside at night and prayed for all the children to be spared, but in her heart she knew that was asking a lot, even from the Almighty. She had five healthy children with not a single loss, not even a miscarriage, and she was fairly sure she was expecting another one. The reckoning was due. It was as if she owed one of them, not to God but to Fate, or some such thing. How could any one woman, any couple, be as fortunate as she and Wes had been? But how could she pick, if she were asked to give up one? She wondered if she would trade this unborn baby, curled tight in her womb, in exchange for Johnny. Dear Lord, if I lose this one I won’t complain, I promise not to shed a tear, as long as you spare my Johnny, she prayed, and then was knocked over by a wave of guilt. Who was she, to juggle life and death like that?

  It wasn’t a choice she was given. Slowly, as the new year of 1938 took shape around them, the coughs were less harsh and frequent, and three of the children got a little better each day. Audrey and Marilyn had missed a month of school but they were bright girls, they would be able to catch up. Ellen knew for sure now that she was pregnant, but she had no time to think about that. All her worries gathered around Johnny, who was still listless, still coughing and struggling for breath, showing no improvement.

  On January 23rd, a month to the day since the whooping cough started, Ellen let Frankie get up and play in the front room. He ran the new toy trucks, his own and Johnny’s, over the rug, making “vroom” noises. Johnny wouldn’t be playing with his truck. Under an oxygen tent in the Grace Hospital, Johnny struggled for breath. The shop was closed again as Susan came back upstairs to care for the three who were recuperating, and Ellen went to the hospital to sit by Johnny’s bedside. She blinked at the cold, harsh air as she stepped outside for the first time since Christmas. The house, the beds of her sick children—this was the only world Ellen had lived in, these past few weeks. She hadn’t even been to church.

  Johnny lived for three days in the hospital. Ellen sat beside her four-year-old, holding his hand. Sometimes she read out loud, as she had been doing to the children throughout their illness. She was reading Treasure Island, which Johnny was probably too young to enjoy anyway, but after he went to the hospital she switched to the Psalms. All those promises of care and protection.

  But not all promises were to be fulfilled in this life. Ellen had always understood this, always known that out of a family of five children, soon to be six, she wasn’t likely to see them all grow to adulthood. Her own mother had lost three of nine. She thought of Johnny riding around on the top of the delivery cart, Alf hauling him with the sacks of groceries. People would say, “Not long now before he’ll be pulling that thing himself,” and Johnny would say, “Someday I be big!” But he wouldn’t be.

  Johnny would be all right, safe in the arms of Jesus. But will I be all right without him? Ellen wondered. She held his hand tightly, and imagined that when he struggled for that last breath, Jesus would come and she would let go of Johnny’s hand and place it in Jesus’s. Knowing who was taking him, and where, she should not have found it as hard as she did to let go.

  AUDREY

  Years from now, Rachel will ask questions like “What do you remember about the war, Nan?” Or Alf’s young ones: “What was the store like in the olden days, Aunt Audrey?” By that time Audrey’s memories will be tangled like skeins of wool in her mother’s knitting bag—Audrey’s never been much of a knitter herself. Earliest memories? Olden days? THE WAR, all in capitals like on a child’s school project.

  By the time she’s in her sixties—which is how long it takes, apparently, before the young ones start showing any interest in anything she might have to say—she finds it hard to piece together which memories belong to which events. She remembers some things sharply: the green tartan of a skirt she once had; the scratchy heavy wool tights she and Marilyn used to wear on winter mornings. She remembers songs, of course, what was playing on the radio or the record player at various important moments in her life. But she doesn’t always have a memory to hang on a tag. The War, for example—she was eleven when it started, old enough that she should remember, as Alf claims to remember, the king’s speech on the radio and the big, bold headlines. But Audrey just remembers the war taking shape around her, forming part of her childhood: blackouts at night and uniforms in the s
treets gradually becoming part of reality. When you’re eleven or twelve, these things are just the way the world is.

  She knows, if she stops to think about the dates, that Johnny was dead and June was born before the war started. Her memories of that Christmas are blurred by time; her mother’s stories are layered over Audrey’s own memories till she can’t tell which is which. Ellen used to tell these stories often when Audrey and the others were growing up, reminding them about the little brother whose memory faded with the years. Those visits from the doctor, so rare in Audrey’s childhood, blend together with the night the doctor came to her mother’s room and, hours later, Audrey and Alf and Marilyn were paraded into the room to see the small, blanket-wrapped bundle that was called June.

  Audrey remembers the green velveteen dress she wore as a bridesmaid for her aunt Susan’s wedding. Not that she and Marilyn and Alf ever called her Aunt Susan. When Audrey was growing up, any woman your mother’s age who was close enough to sit down for a cup of tea at your kitchen table was Aunt Something, regardless of blood relation; any friend of your father’s was Uncle just as much as his brothers were. But Susan, who actually was their aunt, was only a few years older than they were. She had always seemed more like a cousin or an older sister. When Susan got married in the minister’s study in Gower Street church, Audrey got a brand-new dress, bought at the London, New York and Paris downtown. Knee length, padded shoulders, a tiny waist with—did it have a black velvet ribbon around the waist? That’s the way Audrey remembers it anyway—dark green velveteen with black trim, suitable for a winter wedding.