by Philip Wylie
Nora, however, was sure she was going to have to help Mrs. Bailey houseclean.
Probably, she thought, old blood-eye Bailey would make her stand on a stepladder and dust chandeliers and poke at cobwebs all day. Probably the stepladder would fall and she’d break her back. Maybe she’d be told to scrub. Nora had read, once, of a farm woman who decided to clean out the gurry imbedded between some floorboards in an old house. She’d come down with diphtheria, the germs of which had survived in the dirt for twenty-six years. It had been the Black Diphtheria, and the woman had died.
Nora felt her mother and father might easily be damned good and sorry they’d deserted her that day.
In what seemed like no time at all, her mother stood there, in her pretty new gray suit and her fox fur saying, “We’re just about ready! Get your hat and coat and scarf, Nora.”
“Just to go next door?”
“And your arctics. You tell Netta I said you could play outdoors awhile, after lunch. And we’ll come right Lack from Ruth’s dinner, so expect us around three. Four, at the latest.”
“Can’t I go with you?”
“No, Nora, you can’t. And I want you to show Netta what a fine cleaning woman you are, too!”
Looking at the old, spotty, brown dress she’d been ordered to wear, Nora felt the Cinderella legend applied to her—backward. Her last hope died. Solemnly, thinking of the Williams home, of tables heaped with goodies, of the fun of riding all the way to Ferndale, of cousins to play with, Nora put on her scarf, her winter hat, her winter coat, her red galoshes.
“Now,” her mother said, “run on over.”
Nora’s run, Chuck said, was “the most halfhearted in the history of feet.”
The Conner family, mufflered to the eyes, climbed into the Oldsmobile and drove away.
Nora saw them go as she looked through the Bailey front window and listened while Netta scoldingly instructed the colored woman.
Netta, her face covered with a greenish substance called Chloropack and her hair in curlers, as usual, turned to the child. “Upstairs,” she said, “in the linen closet, are stacks and stacks of papers. The first thing I want you to do, dear, is to carry them down cellar. Pile them beside the ash cans.”
Nora went up. The sloppy Baileys had simply tossed what looked like about twenty years’ supply of papers and magazines in the closet. Nora figured it would take a person a thousand years to cart it all to the cellar. She put her mind on the problem. Downstairs, the vacuum was going. The colored cleaning woman, briefly interesting to Nora because she was named Harmony, was now in the kitchen, scrubbing.
She went into the front bedroom and looked out sorrowfully at her own yard. The Bailey cellar door was on that side, which gave Nora her idea. She opened a window. Icy air gushed in from the deceptively sunny outdoors.
Nora carried an armful of magazines down the hall. She pushed them over the window sill. They fell with a satisfying flurry. She brought another. In due time, she had amazingly depleted the stocks of printed matter in the closet. From downstairs came a voice, “What’s that cold draft?” The vacuum slopped and feet pounded. Mrs. Bailey raced into the bedroom. “Good heavens, you idiot! Don’t you know how much it costs to heat a house!”
“I wasn’t going to keep it open any longer. Much. And I can drop the magazines again, into the cellar.”
“Don’t talk back! You’ve chilled the entire upstairs, you lazy thing!”
Netta Bailey was not in a good mood. Cleaning house was far from her favorite task. The new hired woman was proving incompetent. And having Nora about was a liability. The imp had cooled off the hall and bedroom, spread magazines over half the yard, and left a trail of papers from the closet to the window. Furthermore, Mrs. Bailey now realized, having I he child in the house made it practically impossible for her to relax, now and again during this hectic day, with a highball. Nora would unquestionably report the practice as extreme alcoholism.
Nora, on her part, was not in a much better mood. “I’m not talking back,” she said calmly. “I’m explaining. What I’m doing is efficient. If you want me to slave around here for you all morning—”
“Shut up,” Mrs. Bailey said. “Pick up everything in the hall. Then put your things on and go out there in the yard. You’ll have to stack the stuff on the back porch, now. Beau hasn’t been able to get those cellar doors open for two years.”
Fuming silently, Nora obeyed.
She was appalled at the amount of snow-covered lawn upon which the falling periodicals had been distributed. She began to pick them up in a desultory way.
A theory she had often entertained in the past now absorbed her: people picked on her.
There was something about her—maybe she was a genius, and people cannot tolerate superiority—that caused everybody to want to hurt her feelings, make things difficult for her, scold her, measure out a full and acrid—whatever that was—dose of injustice.
Old lady Bailey was on her high horse, too. Nora thought that probably by the time her family got back, old lady Bailey would have locked her in a closet. Things seemed to work out that way for Nora. Her own home was right there, a couple of hundred feet away, and she couldn’t even get in. Probably. She stopped collecting magazines and listened. The vacuum was droning.
She ran across the yard and checked. Front door, back door, cellar, garage. All locked.
Locked against their only daughter.
The Lindner kids, also headed for Crystal Lake, though with only one Flexible Flyer, passed by.
“Whatcha doin’, Nora?”
Nora stared across the Bailey yard, the snow-capped evergreens, the brown wrecks of last summer’s annuals. “Blowing soap bubbles.”
Annabelle laughed. ‘Where’d all those magazines come from?”
“Fell out of a Flying Saucer,” Nora answered. “They’re all printed in Martian.”
Tim Lindner said, “Aw—you’re crazy.”
The sled banged and squeaked down Walnut Street.
Six big airplanes went by. They were above the clouds. There hadn’t been a cloud in the sky, earlier. Ted had said so. Ted was always looking aloft at the weather.
Old needle-face, curler-durler Bailey stuck her pickle puss out the door and whoo-whooed. “Nora! Hurry with those magazines! I want you to pull rugs while Harmony and I lift things.”
And you couldn’t pull them exactly where she wanted them, Nora calculated, if you measured with a solid gold ruler. They’d be lifting and straining and getting red faces—old snoodle-snozzle Bailey would—did colored people get redder?—while she tried to get the Orientals the way they wanted them. Tried and tried and tried and tried.
Nora didn’t so much run away as drift away.
She didn’t so much desert her assignment as take time out.
She didn’t even expect to go as far as Crystal Lake, where the kids in the neighborhood would be coasting. Though it wasn’t much, as coasting went, since her own father had said it was hardly fifty vertical feet from the street to the lake. Green Prairie wasn’t noteworthy for hills.
Nora walked, rather rapidly and looking back frequently, down Walnut, across Sedmon to River Avenue. Crystal Lake lay beyond, quite a distance, beyond Arkansas and Dumond and Lake View; and a block south besides. Nora thought she better not go that far. Moreover, she had eighteen cents, and there were stores on River Avenue. Not many and not big, but stores, including the Greek’s.
She turned north on River Avenue.
Harry and Everett, the two boys who lived over Schneider’s Delicatessen, and went to parochial school, were standing on the corner, at Maple Street. A police car had just gone by, its siren loud, and now another was screaming in the distance. Nora stood at the corner to watch the second cruise car approach, pass and vanish. Only then was she recognized. Harry said, “Hi, Nora.”
“’Lo.”
“Musta been a robbery, or somethin’!”
“Probably just going out to get beers.”
Both boys
looked doubtful. “Sure were tearing,” Everett said.
“I know a man—he goes with Lenore Bailey—that has a Jaguar and he goes about three times as fast as any old cops. That’s a hundred and fifty miles an hour, I guess.”
“You got any money on you?” Harry asked.
“Eighteen cents.”
“Want to pitch?”
Nora looked south on River Avenue, toward parallel rows of frame houses, and north toward a patch of “business” district, of small shops and service stations—a tailor and a florist, the Greek candy store and a used-car lot on which the autos stood in solid ranks with six-inch snow roofs. “I’m supposed to be slaving for old lady Bailey,” she said. “If she misses me, she’ll probably come out like a posse.”
“We could go down to the alley,” Harry suggested. “There’s some swept brick walk. And we’ll watch out for the old fizoo.”
To her surprise, Nora had increased her assets by nine cents when she saw the Bailey car come around the corner. Mrs. Bailey, a coat on and a scarf over her head, the Chloropack wiped away, was driving with one hand and leaning out to peer every which way, yelling, “Nora! Nora Conner!”
Harry grabbed the two pennies on the brick pavement. “Brother! Is she ever mad!”
Everett merely took an appalled look and ran.
The swift defection gave Nora a somewhat exaggerated idea of her predicament. If she had thought the matter over, she would have realized that Mrs. Bailey was—to be sure—annoyed at having her charge vanish. But Mrs. Bailey would not rend her limb from limb. Nora would, at worst, have suffered a severe scolding and perhaps certain deprivations at lunch.
But the sound of Mrs. Bailey’s calling and the sight of her driving one-handed, together with her own sense of guilt, plus the unnerving effect of the Right of her companions, set Nora in motion. She darted from store front to store front on River Avenue. The car approached, inexorably.
Then, just as Nora felt sure she would be overtaken, the car pulled up. Mrs. Bailey went into the fruit store. For Mrs. Bailey was combining two tasks: hunting for her escaped ward and running an errand she had planned for later in the day. Mrs. Bailey was not much concerned about Nora, in fact merely vexed. For when Netta herself had been eleven years old, the streets were her home.
In something like panic, Nora fled across the Pine Street intersection and saw, beyond, a possible refuge. It was one she had seen under construction in the summer and investigated, with several nervous schoolmates, in the fall. She had not known it was still accessible.
What she saw was an open manhole, protected by portable iron guardrails and marked with red flags and a red lantern. The manhole was an entrance to the nearly finished, but not yet used sewer under River Avenue. Watching while great sections of concrete pipe were lowered into the trench had been one of Nora’s occasional occupations on the way home from school. No longer ago than Columbus Day, with five other sixth-graders, Nora had taken advantage of the absence of the laborers and descended the ladder.
They had found a vast, endless tunnel stretching ahead, with gray light seeping in, at Spruce Street and Oak, at Plum and Hickory and presumably at West Broad. The sepulchral echo of their voices had soon caused all but Bill Fennley to scramble back up the ladder. Bill, however, had actually walked through, clear to Hickory. It was generally conceded to be the most remarkable example of daring in the school year.
Nora went down the ladder like a shot.
Underground, it didn’t seem quite so cold. Traffic on the broad thoroughfare rumbled oddly. The great, whitish tunnel led away to infinity, with blurs of light in the distance, just as it had been on Columbus Day. There was a little water in the very bottom of the huge pipe, now, but not much. Old lady Bailey, Nora realized, would never find her now.
The fact restored some of the girl’s aplomb. If she wanted to, she thought, she could stay right there until her family came home. It would be a long wait and she didn’t have a watch but maybe she could tell by the sun, though the sun, she realized, was beginning to get weaker as the clouds thickened.
Another idea occurred to Nora.
She had heard much talk about this new sewer. She had even read about it, accidentally, in the Transcript. It was costing zillions of dollars. It was going to be opened next summer. A new disposal plant was being built for it, on the river, above the bluff, beside the Swan Island Bridge. An “absolutely pure effluent” would be dumped into the Green Prairie River from the plant, though the river was already so muddy and dirty, most of the time, that Nora felt it foolish to clean up the sewage. The line had been completed all the way from Decatur Road to Jefferson, in the heart of the downtown area, and the existing lines would be hooked up with the main sewer in the spring, diverting them from the over-taxed sewer under Arkansas Avenue.
The idea that came to Nora took into account her knowledge of the sewer, Bill Fennley’s safe passage from Maple to Hickory and, in particular, the plain fact that the line furnished an enclosed, secret, presumably direct and simple passageway to Jefferson. True, the way was pretty dark, but mere were no hazards along it. One could walk easily, even run, if a person didn’t mind a little splashing, in the darkish stretches between the manholes and the light they shed into the dim tunnel. Jefferson Avenue went straight past Simmons Park, where the giant mechanical Santa Claus gave out presents to children who drew lucky numbers, and every child could draw, free.
It occurred to Nora that, if she had the nerve, she could progress unobserved and securely from where she stood, dear to Jefferson, where she could emerge, cross the seasonally thronged shopping area, and see the big, red-coated, jolly figure. Maybe even win a prize. She could come back the usual way, on sidewalks, because if she once managed to see the Simmons Park Santa, thus thwarting her parents and evading the worst part of her punishment, it wouldn’t matter to Nora what happened.
Resolutely, she marched away from the brightness that fell from the round hole in the street, toward gloom and a distant ray of light. By the time she had passed beneath the Oak Street intersection, she was a veteran trespasser of sewers and already beginning to wonder if there was any way by which she could assure herself of drawing a lucky number. When you did, the big Santa moved his immense arm and held out a wrapped package to you—candy, mostly—and a mechanical voice said through a loud-speaker inside him behind his moving beard, “Merry Christmas!” He was forty-three feet tall, so making him “work” was an unforgettable marvel. In between, he played music.
She hurried, calm now, intent, full of a delicious excitement.
3
At the Jim Williams home in Ferndale, Beth and Ruth, in the kitchen, were busy preparing the feast. A table, groaning already under stacks of plates, side dishes, preserves, jellies, mats for the hot dishes, silver, napery and favors, waited the onslaught of two hungry families. The silver-headed new baby, Irma, was watching the process of a big family dinner for the first time in her life, round-eyed, lying in a baby pen that had plainly contained other infants and also fended them from the world. Irma seemed pleased with the activity, for she smiled often, burped often, and occasionally shook her rattle.
Ted Conner was upstairs helping Bert fix his radio.
The three men, Jim, Henry and Chuck, sat in the living room minding the baby and such other young Williamses as streamed fretfully through the place. They were killing time, talking about the Sister Cities’ biggest Christmas boom in history.
When the phone rang, Ruth pushed open the swinging door. “Get it, Jim, will you? We’re making gravy.”
Jim went into the front hall and soon returned. He looked unhappy. “For you, Hank. Man who sounds upset.”
Henry Conner lumbered into the hall and said cheerfully, half playfully, “Merry Christmas. This is Henry.”
A very shaky voice came to his ears. “Henry Conner?”
“That’s right. Who is it? What’s the—”
“Been trying to reach you for half an hour! This is headquarters. Brock speak
ing.
Condition Yellow.”
Henry felt as if he’d been hit with a forty-five slug. His knees wobbled and he sat down hard on the hall chair. Then he realized it must be either a gag or some crazy test. If it was a test, it was a terrible time for one. Next, he realized that this sort of situation had been envisaged, and a code designed to cover it, so that only those who knew the code could check back on the announcement. For a moment, the proper words were swept out of his mind. He cudgeled his brain and said, in a voice that was nothing like his own, “How many sacks of potatoes?”
“Maine potatoes,” the voice replied. “And Idahos. I’ve got to break off.”