Ceremony of the Innocent

by Taylor Caldwell

  May said, taking off her hat and gloves and putting on her apron, “Isn’t two o’clock yet. I’m early.” She sent a furtive eye about the wooden counters which lined the brick walls, seeking a slice of pie or cake she could purloin for Ellen, or even the small end of a ham.

  Mrs. Jardin perceived that eye. “If you wasn’t so late you could’ve had a cherry tart from yesterday. Kept it for you. Then thought maybe you wasn’t coming, so I ate it myself.”

  May shrugged, rubbed her dry scoured hands together. “Just ate,” she said. “Not hungry. Well, what should I do first?”

  The hot wind rattled the twigs of a tree against the window and the leaves were gilded with light. But it was dusky in the large kitchen and the stove fumed. The red bricks appeared to steam. “You can husk them strawberries in that bowl over there,” said Mrs. Jardin. “Then you can peel them potatoes and wash the lettuce and shell the peas.” The girlish voice became somewhat shrill. “All this work to do, and nobody to help!”

  May Watson had a thought. “Well,” she said with an air of uninterest, “there’s my niece, Ellen. She could come in to help out, during the summer. Maybe a dollar a week, for six days.”

  Mrs. Jardin’s eyes widened incredulously, and snapped. “A dollar a week for maybe only a few hours a day! Alice didn’t get but that for a whole month’s work, for twelve hours a day, seven days a week! Think we are millionaires in this house? I been here for fifteen years and just got another dollar a month, first raise in all that time. That makes nine dollars a month, a whole month, and I’m down here in the kitchen at half past five in the morning and never leave until eight at night! Besides, ain’t that girl of yours still in school?”

  “I want her to be educated,” said May. “Leastways, to finish her last grade. Only right. She writes a fine hand, too, and can keep house. She’d be a help to you, Mrs. Jardin. Always friendly; no sulks. And very willing. Nothing too hard for her to do.”

  Mrs. Jardin’s little eyes narrowed so much that they almost disappeared behind her fat red cheeks. She smirked. “How old’s she? Heard she was fifteen. Too old for school.”

  May hesitated. Then she said, though she winced inwardly, “Ellen’s only fourteen. Not fifteen.”

  “Last I heard from you, May, was that she was just thirteen.”

  “She had a birthday last week, making her fourteen,” said May, wincing inwardly again at the falsehood.

  “And you letting her go to school again in September? Foolishness. All right. I’ll speak to Mrs. Porter about Ellen helping out this summer. Seventy-five cents a week, and her supper, and that’s pretty grand, too, May.”

  It could be worse, thought May. At least seventy-five cents a week would be of considerable assistance, and then Ellen would have a meal here, and that would be a saving. She shrugged. “Anyway, think about it and ask Mrs. Porter, though I’m saying it’s slave wages.” She drew a slow long breath. “And before I get to the work I can tell you now: I want an extra fifty cents for today, and that’s for sure.”

  “You’re crazy,” Mrs. Jardin said, and giggled and shook her head. “Better hurry with them strawberries. They got to soak in sugar seeing they are the first of the season and still a mite sour.”

  May, in spite of her usual brusqueness, was secretly yielding. But all at once she felt a sharp thrust of despair. Her moving hands slowed, stopped. She seldom felt despair, but now it was like a grief in her, sickening, drying her mouth. She said, “I got to have that extra fifty cents. You do the marketing around here. You know how expensive things are these days, prices always going up and up. Four cents, now, for a three-cent loaf of bread, and even that’s smaller.”

  “You want a dollar and a half for not even a full day’s work?” shrieked Mrs. Jardin, aghast. “You really mean that? You ain’t just crazy?”

  “No. I’m not crazy. I won’t get out of here until maybe eleven tonight, and that’s nine hours’ work, and on my feet every minute, and serving and cleaning and washing the dishes, while you go upstairs to bed at eight, nine. I’m human, too, Mrs. Jardin.”

  Mrs. Jardin’s florid face became cunning and was no longer jocular. That’s what you think—being human, she thought. You and that girl of yours! You ain’t got any decency, either of you. Human! She shook a ladle at May. “A dollar’s a dollar, and that’s what you agreed, and it’s a lot of money. Men work twelve hours a day for that, in the sawmills down at the river, and on the barges. A dollar’s a dollar.”

  May did not often feel courageous, but the despair in her had heightened as she thought of Ellen. She lifted her hands from the bowl of strawberries and deliberately wiped her hands on the apron. “All right, then. I’ll go home now—unless you go out there to Mrs. Porter and tell her I want the extra fifty cents. Then what’ll you do? They got company and all, and you can’t do it all yourself. Or maybe Mrs. Porter’ll come in and help you out. She’s big and fat enough.”

  “Mind your tongue, May Watson! You got a bad tongue on you, impudent and such! Talking like that about a lady like Mrs. Porter. No respect for your betters!” But Mrs. Jardin was full of consternation at the thought of sending May away and being left to do all the work herself, and the folks from Scranton being so hoity-toity and wanting everything done right, and Mrs. Porter with her eyes that saw everything.

  “Fifty cents extra,” said May Watson, and she could smell the drunken scent of approaching victory. “Well, why you standing there?”

  Mrs. Jardin was seized with a savage desire to beat May on the head with the ladle she held in her hand. “Outrage!” she cried. “Well, I’ll ask Mrs. Porter, and you better think of putting on that hat of yours and those damned gloves you walk around in!”

  May reached for her hat and held it in her hand and looked inflexibly at her old enemy. “I’m waiting,” she said.

  Mrs. Jardin threw the ladle into the sink and stamped furiously out of the kitchen. May had begun to tremble. Perhaps she had gone too far. A dollar for nine hours’ work was generous. Her tired eyes wandered, helplessly. She saw that a pie had been cut and a large wedge taken from it. She moved as fast as a cockroach, cut a thin new piece and dropped it into the pocket of her apron. Her trembling increased, but so did her despair. Ellen had only one pair of shoes, and they broken and mended too many times, and getting smaller. May shut her eyes and squeezed the lids together tightly, and felt ill and undone. If Mrs. Porter refused, she would have to submit.

  The door opened again and it was Mrs. Porter, tall and massive and flushed in her dark-blue silk dress and ruffles, who entered, followed by the newly smirking Mrs. Jardin. Mrs. Porter was not only jowly and fat; she resembled an aging milkmaid, for her skin was coarse and her mouth brutal. There were gold bangles on her thick wrists, and her fading fair hair was a pompadour of rolls and braids. Her light eyes, wide and red-rimmed with sparse lashes, were the color of skimmed milk. She looked shocked and disbelieving.

  “What is this, May?” she demanded, her usually genteel voice roughened and harsh. “Fifty cents extra for just a few hours, when you agreed to that dollar, which was more than generous.” The silk ruffles rattled about her throat and at the hem of her dress. “His honor, the Mayor, pays his head bookkeeper only six dollars a week, six days a week, and sometimes at night, and Mr. Hodgins is grateful, too! At the rate you’re asking,” and she did a rapid mental calculation, “you’d be getting nine dollars a week! You must be mad, May.”

  “‘Tisn’t like it was for a week,” May said, and visibly trembled now. “It’s just one day, and the landlord’s just raised the rent another fifty cents a month. And my niece, Ellen, has just got to have a pair of shoes. I can buy a pair at the secondhand store for seventy-five cents. She’s just got to have them, Mrs. Porter. I can’t let her get crippled.”

  “I’m not engaged in running an orphan asylum, May,” Mrs. Porter said, and moved her hand impatiently as if waving away an impertinent fly. “Your—niece is old enough, Mrs. Jardin tells me now, to be working for her own li
ving instead of lying about your house only sleeping and eating, a big girl like that! Fourteen.” She glanced at Mrs. Jardin, who was enjoying herself. “Mrs. Jardin tells me Ellen is for hire. I’ll pay her seventy-five cents a week, if you are just sensible, May, and realize the enormity of what you have been asking.”

  Ellen, Ellen, thought May Watson. But she sensed victory again. Mrs. Porter’s voice had taken on a hint of wheedling. So May said, with a stubbornness which pleasantly surprised her, “I got to have the extra fifty cents, ma’am. I really have. Maybe this once, only.”

  Mrs. Porter smiled grimly. She threw out her hands. “Very well, May. But I’ll remember this, I surely will. I never heard of such ingratitude. I’ve been your good kind friend, May, and have called on you often to help Mrs. Jardin in an emergency. But your sort is never grateful! Never. That’s what’s wrong with this world these days. Ingratitude, imposition. You have me at a disadvantage, May. Otherwise I’d dismiss you at once. You should feel deeply ashamed.”

  She looked down at her dress. “And you charged me a dollar for mere slight alterations! A dollar! Just to let out the skirt and add the ruffles.”

  “It was all handwork,” said May. “Not machine work, like all the rest of it. Handwork. Took me three nights. Was more than just letting out the skirt and adding the ruffles. I had to take it all apart, every piece of it, and fit it together. Thought I’d never get it finished. Your waist,” said May with uncommon bluntness, “has got real thick the last two years, Mrs. Porter.”

  The large coarse face above her darkened and appeared to become bloated with anger. “We’re very saucy, aren’t we? Very loose and heedless with our speech, too. The world’s becoming a very ungodly place, May Watson.”

  “It always was,” said May, amazed at her own courage. “Never was any good.”

  Mrs. Porter smiled again, with even more grimness, and said, with meaning, “You ought to know, should you not, Mrs.—Watson?”

  “I certainly do,” said May, and bitterness came to her and she was sick with it.

  The flush on the woman’s face became scarlet and the milky eyes glared. “What did you expect, your kind? Very well. I have guests; I am demeaning myself arguing with you, May Watson. You shall have your extra fifty cents today.” She glanced at Mrs. Jardin, and hesitated. “You can send your girl, Ellen, here tomorrow morning at six sharp, in this emergency. Seventy-five cents a week. We will try her out, at any rate. From six in the morning until Mrs. Jardin dismisses her at about seven. Is that settled at least?”

  “Yes,” said May. “It is settled.”

  Mrs. Porter turned briskly about and did not glance again at the staring and very vexed Mrs. Jardin. She lumbered rapidly from the kitchen to rejoin her family and her guests, her every movement expressing exasperation and disgust.

  “Well, you won,” said Mrs. Jardin to May, who was again squeezing her eyelids together, but now to control tears. “Never thought to see it happen. When Christmas comes, I’m going to get another dollar a month or she can look for somebody else. Maybe I should be thankful to you, May.”

  This new alliance startled May, and she opened damp eyes. “Starving folks to death, that’s what they’re doing,” she said in a quavering voice. “One of these days we’re not going to stand for it any longer.”

  “Amen,” said Mrs. Jardin, and she chuckled. “Get along with them strawberries, now. Dinner’s at five, same as usual on Sundays.” She playfully slapped May on her thin rump with the ladle, and burst into a shrill hymn, in a rollicking tempo again filled with apparent good humor:

  “Yes, we march to Beulah Land, Beulah Land,

  Yes, we march to Beulah Land, in the morning!”

  Beulah Land, thought May, her hands swiftly hulling the berries. Now, where’s that, I wonder? It’s not for my kind, anyway. Hell, more likely, when we got it here, too.

  During his wife’s short absence the Mayor had quickly poured a good quantity of rum into the glasses of his brother and his nephew. He winked at them. “Now fill them up with that damned lemonade,” he said. He was as stout as his wife, but shorter and of a better temper. But he was no less exploitative. His hair was thick and white and silky and he dressed with rich style on Sundays, though he wore decorous black suits during the week in his offices. Today his cravat was broad and held a diamond pin, and his coat was of a gray and white large check, which he considered “sporty,” and his trousers were a gleaming white.

  “Where’s Jeremy?” asked the Mayor’s nephew, Francis Porter.

  Mrs. Porter emerged onto the veranda, frowning, but at the sound of her son’s name she smiled deeply and with pride. “He is having dinner with the undertaker’s niece, from Scranton,” she said. “Her father owns the biggest ironworks there, and she is an only child, like our dear Jeremy. We have hopes,” she added archly, seating herself in a huge wicker chair and sighing softly. “This is the second summer, and I believe the young people write to each other regularly. A very pretty girl, too, and well brought up.”

  “Speaking of pretty girls, I saw a beauty today,” said Francis. He was a tall and very slender young man with fine flaxen hair and open blue eyes, a very delicate complexion with a sharp flush on the high cheekbones, which gave him an interesting appearance, and a wide and gentle mouth. He was almost pretty himself, Mrs. Porter thought without generosity, for she resented the young man’s obvious if somewhat frail handsomeness, unlike her dear Jeremy’s “manly” aspect.

  “Oh?” said Mrs. Porter, arching her pale eyebrows, so sparse that they seemed hardly to be there at all. “Who, I wonder? There’s only one nearly pretty girl in this town.” Her mouth writhed as if with amusement, for she hated Preston, having come from Scranton herself. “Fairly comely. That is the Reverend Mr. Beale’s granddaughter, Amelia. Very nicely brought up, too, and well mannered. About fourteen?”

  “About that,” said Francis. His father, who resembled the Mayor very closely, though he was slightly less massive, laughed. “Francis was bewitched. We saw her on the street this morning, obviously coming from that shabby little church on Bedford. Francis drew up the horses to look at the girl. I confess I thought her beautiful, too.”

  “A sweet little face with a pink mouth, and soft brown hair?”

  “No, Aunt Agnes. She wasn’t sweet at all; she had a strong and lovely face with remarkable coloring. And a great mass of red hair, floating far down her back. A tall girl, a graceful girl.”

  Mrs. Porter drew her brows together, considering. Then she cried, with hilarious delight, “Oh no, Francis! That could be only the very ugly girl called Ellen Watson, whose presumed aunt is right now in my kitchen, helping Mrs. Jardin!”

  “Then it couldn’t be the same girl, for the girl I saw had a magnificent face, very arresting. And I have never seen such gorgeous hair in all my life before. Like a cataract of copper in the sun, and not tied back with any ribbon.”

  “You will observe,” said Walter Porter, “that my son was bewitched. Yes, and I thought her beautiful, too. Very unusual young wench.”

  Francis’ color deepened. “She is not a ‘wench,’ begging your pardon, Papa. She had a look of—well, grandeur. Prideful, even noble. Angelic in another meaning of the term. I have never seen any girl like that before. She was not in the least like anyone else. Especially not in Preston, where everybody looks alike in some peculiar fashion.”

  “I agree with you there,” said Mrs. Porter, sighing. “Very dull people in this town.” She looked at Francis with new animation. “If you hadn’t said she was beautiful, this mysterious girl of yours, I’d think it was Ellen Watson, or that’s the surname her aunt alleges it is. There are quite a few stories—No, it couldn’t be Ellen Watson. Ellen is quite unattractive, a very big girl who looks older than she is.

  By the way, she will be working for me this summer, and you can see for yourself, Francis, that she is not the one of whom you have spoken.” She laughed lightly. “Still, I wonder who the girl is whom you saw. Red hair. Ellen’
s the only one in town who has red hair, though I see that you prefer to call it copper.”

  She had another thought. “Was she prettily dressed, this girl?”

  “No, very poorly, in fact. I noticed her boots were broken, though polished.”

  Mrs. Porter was startled, but she gave her husband’s nephew a sly glance. “I wonder who she is. Well, we will see, tomorrow, Francis.”

  Walter Porter had been musing. Now he said, “It has just come to me. I saw a woman like that, or rather her portrait, when I was about Francis’ age and visiting a friend of mine in Philadelphia. She was young, but was already dead. Let me see: An Amy Sheldon, of a great family, in Philadelphia. She was the mother of my best friend, John Widdimer, but had died shortly after he was born. I visited him during university holidays a few times, and he visited us in Scranton. Remember him, Edgar?”

  The Mayor nodded. “What became of him? I thought he had a glorious future. One of the best families in Philadelphia, and very rich, too, and he was a clever young feller.”

  “Don’t you remember, Edgar?” asked Mrs. Porter. “They had a fine stable of horses and he was always riding. He was killed by a new stallion he had bought, a racer of which they had expected much. Old Widdimer had the stallion shot, which I thought was a dreadful waste of good horseflesh. John was a reckless chap in many ways and insisted on riding the stallion at once, though he was hardly broken to the bit. Very sad affair indeed. Very sad.” He sighed. “I’ll never forget the portrait of his mother. Very like the girl we saw this morning, hair and all, and with such a face! Pity.”