by Unknown
Lucille was silent.
“And I’m afraid the evenings are going to seem long to you. If you’d ever like to go to a picture in town, Alfred, that’s the chauffeur, will be glad to take you in the car.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“Then good night, Lucille.”
“Good night, ma’am.”
Lucille went out the back way, across the garden where the fountain was still playing. And when she put her hand on the knob of her door, she wished that it was the nursery door, that it was eight o’clock in the morning and time to begin another day.
Still she was tired, pleasantly tired. How very pleasant it was, she thought, as she turned out the light, to feel properly tired in the evening (although it was only nine o’clock) instead of bursting with energy, instead of being unable to sleep for thinking of her mother or worrying about herself.
She remembered one day not so long ago when for fifteen minutes she had been unable to think of her name. She had run in panic to the doctor.
That was past! She might even ask Alfred to buy her a pack of cigarettes in town—a luxury she had denied herself for months.
She took a last look at the house from her window. The chintz curtains in the nursery billowed out now and then and were swept back again. The wind spoke in the nodding tops of the poplars like the high-pitched, ever-rippling voices of children.
The second day was like the first, except that there was no mishap, no scraped hand—and the third and the fourth. Regular and identical like the row of Nicky’s lead soldiers on the playtable in the nursery. The only thing that changed was Lucille’s love for the family and the children—a blind and passionate devotion which seemed to redouble each morning.
She noticed and loved many things: the way Heloise drank her milk in little gulps at the back of her throat, how the blond down on their backs swirled up to meet the hair on the napes of their necks, and when she bathed them the painful vulnerability of their bodies.
Saturday evening she found an envelope addressed to herself in the mailbox at the door of the servants’ house. Inside was a blank sheet of paper and inside that a new $20 bill.
Lucille held it by its crisp edges. Its value meant nothing to her. To use it she would have to go to stores where other people were. What use had she for money if she were never to leave the Christiansen home? It would simply pile up, $20 each week. In a year’s time she would have $1040, and in two years $2080. Eventually she might have as much as the Christiansens and that would not be right.
Would they think it very strange if she asked to work for nothing? Or for $10 perhaps?
She had to speak to Mrs. Christiansen, and she went to her the next morning. It was an inopportune time. Mrs. Christiansen was making up a menu for a dinner.
“It’s about my salary, ma’am,” Lucille began.
“Yes?” Mrs. Christiansen said in her pleasant voice.
Lucille watched the yellow pencil in her hand moving swiftly over the paper. “It’s too much for me, ma’am.”
The pencil stopped. Mrs. Christiansen’s lips parted slightly in surprise. “You are such a funny girl, Lucille!”
“How do you mean—funny?” Lucille asked curiously.
“Well, first you want to be practically day and night with the children. You never even want your afternoon off. You’re always talking about doing something ‘important’ for us, though what that could be I can’t imagine. And now your salary’s too much! We’ve never had a girl like you, Lucille. I can assure you, you’re different!”
She laughed, and the laugh was full of ease and relaxation that contrasted with the tension of the girl who stood before her.
Lucille was rapt in the conversation. “How do you mean different, ma’am?”
“Why, I’ve just told you, my dear. And I refuse to lower your salary because that would be sheer exploitation. In fact, if you ever change your mind and want a raise—”
“Oh, no, ma’am . . . but I just wish there was something more I could do for you—and for the children.”
“Lucille! You’re working for us, aren’t you? Taking care of our children. What could be more important than that?”
“But I mean something bigger—I mean more—”
“Nonsense, Lucille,” Mrs. Christiansen interrupted. “Just because the people you were with before were not so—friendly as we are doesn’t mean you have to work your fingers to the bone for us.”
She waited for the girl to make some move to go, but still she stood by the desk, her face puzzled. “Mr. Christiansen and I are very well pleased with you, Lucille.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
She went back to the nursery where the children were playing. She had not made Mrs. Christiansen understand. If she could just go back and explain what she felt, tell about her mother and her fear of herself for so many months, how she had never dared take a drink or even a cigarette . . . and how just being with the family in this beautiful house had made her well again . . . telling her all that might relieve her.
She turned toward the door, but the thought of disturbing her or boring her with her story, a servant girl’s story, made her stop. So during the rest of the day she carried her unexpressed gratitude like a great weight in her breast.
That night she sat in her room with the light on until after twelve o’clock. She had her cigarettes now, and she allowed herself three in the evening, but even those three were sufficient to set her blood tingling, to relax her mind, to make her dream heroic dreams. And when the three cigarettes were smoked, and she would have liked another, she rose, very light in the head, and put the cigarette pack in her top drawer to close away temptation.
Just as she slid the drawer she noticed on her handkerchief box the $20 bill the Christiansens had given her. She took it now, and sat down again in her chair.
From the packet of matches she took one, struck it, and leaned it, burning end down, against the side of her ashtray. Slowly she struck matches one after another and laid them strategically to make a tiny, flickering, well controlled fire. When the matches were gone, she tore the pasteboard cover into little bits and dropped them in slowly. Finally she took the $20 bill and with some effort tore bits from it of the same size. These, too, she meted to the fire.
Mrs. Christiansen did not understand, but if she saw this, she might. Still this was not enough. Mere faithful service was not enough either. Anyone would give that, for money. She was different. Had not Mrs. Christiansen herself told her that?
Then she remembered what else she had said: “Mr. Christiansen and I are very well pleased with you, Lucille.”
The memory of these words brought her up from her chair with an enchanted smile on her lips. She felt wonderfully strong and secure in her own strength of mind and her position in the household. Mr. Christiansen and I are very well pleased with you, Lucille. There was really only one thing lacking in her happiness. She had to prove herself in crisis.
If only a plague like those she had read of in the Bible . . . “And it came to pass that there was a great plague over all the land.” That was how the Bible would say it. She imagined waters lapping higher against the big house, until they swept almost into the nursery. She would rescue the children and swim with them to safety, wherever that might be.
She moved restlessly about the room.
Or if there came an earthquake . . . She would rush in among falling walls and drag the children out. Perhaps she would go back for some trifle, like Nicky’s lead soldiers or Heloise’s paint set, and be crushed to death. Then the Christiansens would know her devotion.
Or if there might be a fire. Anyone might have a fire. Fires were common things and needed no wrathful visitations from the upper world. There might be a terrible fire just with the gasoline in the garage and a match.
She went downstairs, through the inside door that opened to the
garage. The tank was three feet high and entirely full, so that unless she had been inspired with the necessity and importance of her deed, she would not have been able to lift the thing over the threshold of the garage and of the servants’ house too.
She rolled the tank across the yard in the same manner as she had seen men roll beer barrels and ashcans. It made no noise on the grass and only a brief bump and rumble over one of the flagstone paths, lost in the night.
No lights shone at any of the windows, but if they had, Lucille would not have been deterred. She would not have been deterred had Mr. Christiansen himself been standing there by the fountain, for probably she would not have seen him. And if she had, was she not about to do a noble thing?
She unscrewed the cap and poured some gasoline on a corner of the house, rolled the tank farther, poured more against the white shingles, and so on until she reached the far corner. Then she struck her match and walked back the way she had come, touching off the wet places. Without a backward glance she went to stand at the door of the servants’ house and watch.
The flames were first pale and eager, then they became yellow with touches of red. As Lucille watched, all the tension that was left in her, in body or mind, flowed evenly upward and was lifted from her forever, leaving her muscles and brain free for the voluntary tension of an athlete before a starting gun. She would let the flames leap tall, even to the nursery window, before she rushed in, so that the danger might be at its highest.
A smile like that of a saint settled on her mouth, and anyone seeing her there in the doorway, her face glowing in the lambent light, would certainly have thought her a beautiful young woman.
She had lit the fire at five places, and these now crept up the house like the fingers of a hand, warm and flickering, gentle and caressing. Lucille smiled and held herself in check. Then suddenly the gasoline tank, having grown too warm, exploded with a sound like a cannon shot and lighted the entire scene for an instant.
As though this had been the signal for which she waited, Lucille went confidently forward.
NEDRA TYRE
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1912–1990
NEDRA TYRE, a native of Offerman, Georgia, was the author of six crime novels published in a twenty-year period, including Mouse in Eternity (1952), Hall of Death (1960), and Twice So Fair (1971), as well as more than forty short stories, largely published by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Tyre was educated at Emory University in Atlanta and the Richmond School of Social Work in Virginia, and her experience as a social worker, librarian, and teacher particularly informed her fiction, which was deeply psychological and empathetic in nature. Tyre also wrote primarily about the American South, especially Georgia and Virginia, doing so years before the Southern regional mystery took off as a subgenre.
After 1971, though, Tyre stopped publishing novels and her short story output slowed down. Part of this was due to her taking on a staff job for an agency that gave financial assistance to poor children in third-world countries. A larger reason was ill health, including total deafness that struck her in the late 1970s. Tyre was also known to be a woman of great convictions and quirks: According to the Web site Recovering Nedra, devoted to returning Tyre to literary prominence, her friends recalled her “storing books in her oven, only eating lunch at restaurants that provided cloth napkins, traveling the world as a single woman, corresponding with all she met, and developing fondness for teddy bears.”
“A Nice Place to Stay,” first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1970, is among Tyre’s best and most anthologized works, and thus an excellent reintroduction to this unjustly neglected writer. Here Tyre is unflinching about the wretched state of poverty her protagonist grows up in, longing as the girl does for a real home and people who will love her. Naturally, the title takes on multiple meanings, with the last one the most horrifying, if inevitable.
A NICE PLACE TO STAY
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ALL MY life I’ve wanted a nice place to stay. I don’t mean anything grand, just a small room with the walls freshly painted and a few neat pieces of furniture and a window to catch the sun so that two or three pot plants could grow. That’s what I’ve always dreamed of. I didn’t yearn for love or money or nice clothes, though I was a pretty enough girl and pretty clothes would have made me prettier—not that I mean to brag.
Things fell on my shoulders when I was fifteen. That was when Mama took sick, and keeping house and looking after Papa and my two older brothers—and of course nursing Mama—became my responsibility. Not long after that Papa lost the farm and we moved to town. I don’t like to think of the house we lived in near the C & R railroad tracks, though I guess we were lucky to have a roof over our heads—it was the worst days of the Depression and a lot of people didn’t even have a roof, even one that leaked, plink, plonk; in a heavy rain there weren’t enough pots and pans and vegetable bowls to set around to catch all the water.
Mama was the sick one but it was Papa who died first—living in town didn’t suit him. By then my brothers had married and Mama and I moved into two back rooms that looked onto an alley and everybody’s garbage cans and dump heaps. My brothers pitched in and gave me enough every month for Mama’s and my barest expenses even though their wives grumbled and complained.
I tried to make Mama comfortable. I catered to her every whim and fancy. I loved her. All the same I had another reason to keep her alive as long as possible. While she breathed I knew I had a place to stay. I was terrified of what would happen to me when Mama died. I had no high school diploma and no experience at outside work and I knew my sisters-in-law wouldn’t take me in or let my brothers support me once Mama was gone.
Then Mama drew her last breath with a smile of thanks on her face for what I had done.
Sure enough, Norine and Thelma, my brothers’ wives, put their feet down. I was on my own from then on. So that scared feeling of wondering where I could lay my head took over in my mind and never left me.
I had some respite when Mr. Williams, a widower twenty-four years older than me, asked me to marry him. I took my vows seriously. I meant to cherish him and I did. But that house we lived in! Those walls couldn’t have been dirtier if they’d been smeared with soot and the plumbing was stubborn as a mule. My left foot stayed sore from having to kick the pipe underneath the kitchen sink to get the water to run through.
Then Mr. Williams got sick and had to give up his shoe repair shop that he ran all by himself. He had a small savings account and a few of those twenty-five-dollar government bonds and drew some disability insurance until the policy ran out in something like six months.
I did everything I could to make him comfortable and keep him cheerful. Though I did all the laundry I gave him clean sheets and clean pajamas every third day and I think it was by my will power alone that I made a begonia bloom in that dark back room Mr. Williams stayed in. I even pestered his two daughters and told them they ought to send their father some get-well cards and they did once or twice. Every now and then when there were a few pennies extra I’d buy cards and scrawl signatures nobody could have read and mailed them to Mr. Williams to make him think some of his former customers were remembering him and wishing him well.
Of course when Mr. Williams died his daughters were johnny-on-the-spot to see that they got their share of the little bit that tumbledown house brought. I didn’t begrudge them—I’m not one to argue with human nature.
I hate to think about all those hardships I had after Mr. Williams died. The worst of it was finding somewhere to sleep; it all boiled down to having a place to stay. Because somehow you can manage not to starve. There are garbage cans to dip into—you’d be surprised how wasteful some people are and how much good food they throw away. Or if it was right after the garbage trucks had made their collections and the cans were empty I’d go into a supermarket and pick, say, at the cherries pretending I was selecting some to buy. I didn�
��t slip their best ones into my mouth. I’d take either those so ripe that they should have been thrown away or those that weren’t ripe enough and shouldn’t have been put out for people to buy. I might snitch a withered cabbage leaf or a few pieces of watercress or a few of those small round tomatoes about the size of hickory nuts—I never can remember their right name. I wouldn’t make a pig of myself, just eat enough to ease my hunger. So I managed. As I say, you don’t have to starve.
The only work I could get hardly ever paid me anything beyond room and board. I wasn’t a practical nurse, though I knew how to take care of sick folks, and the people hiring me would say that since I didn’t have the training and qualifications I couldn’t expect much. All they really wanted was for someone to spend the night with Aunt Myrtle or Cousin Kate or Mama or Daddy; no actual duties were demanded of me, they said, and they really didn’t think my help was worth anything except meals and a place to sleep. The arrangements were pretty makeshift. Half the time I wouldn’t have a place to keep my things, not that I had any clothes to speak of, and sometimes I’d sleep on a cot in the hall outside the patient’s room or on some sort of contrived bed in the patient’s room.
I cherished every one of those sick people, just as I had cherished Mama and Mr. Williams. I didn’t want them to die. I did everything I knew to let them know I was interested in their welfare—first for their sakes, and then for mine, so I wouldn’t have to go out and find another place to stay.
Well, now, I’ve made out my case for the defense, a term I never thought I’d have to use personally, so now I’ll make out the case for the prosecution.
I stole.
I don’t like to say it, but I was a thief.
I’m not light-fingered. I didn’t want a thing that belonged to anybody else. But there came a time when I felt forced to steal. I had to have some things. My shoes fell apart. I needed some stockings and underclothes. And when I’d ask a son or a daughter or a cousin or a niece for a little money for those necessities they acted as if I was trying to blackmail them. They reminded me that I wasn’t qualified as a practical nurse, that I might even get into trouble with the authorities if they found I was palming myself off as a practical nurse—which I wasn’t and they knew it. Anyway, they said that their terms were only bed and board.