Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse

by Faith Sullivan

  Elvira nodded but didn’t glance at him. She, too, was soldiering.

  Moments later—or so it seemed—the engine was panting and groaning and letting off steam as it ground forward into the station. The conductor threw down the iron step, and Elvira hurried toward it, handing him her bags.

  Now she turned, as turn she must, and her mask crumpled. Nell rushed to her. “You don’t have to go. You don’t have to go.”

  Hilly tugged at Elvira’s arm and she hauled him into her embrace, tears wetting his shirt. And then she was gone, up the stairs and into the coach, and the conductor was tossing the iron step into the train as a crate was unloaded from the baggage car onto the freight wagon.

  When the depot agent pulled the freight wagon away from the train, the great engine snorted and began to huff. The conductor jumped onto the first step of the passenger car and waved to the engineer. The huge wheels, with inexorable heaves, moved forward.

  chapter eighteen

  THEY CLIMBED THE WOODEN STEPS back to the apartment, neither Nell nor Hilly speaking. An envelope stood propped on the living room table.

  “Elvira,” Nell said, perplexed.

  Dear Nell and Hilly,

  I’m not coming back. I’ve disgraced you. I can’t say more than that. Don’t ask around. Nobody knows about this but me.

  Someday when I’m settled, I’ll write and maybe tell you what I did. Don’t worry—I didn’t steal anything. I have plenty of money to get me by until I’m able to work again.

  I love you more than any kin of mine. All my life I will keep the dress you made me for George and Cora’s wedding.

  If you were with me now, you’d see that I’m throwing you kisses.

  Love,

  Elvira

  Nell fell back into a kitchen chair.

  “What is it, Mama? What does she say?”

  “In a minute. Mama needs to sit a minute.” The poor little girl, Nell thought. I promised her I’d look after her. God forgive me.

  “Mama, why are you crying?”

  “Fetch me a handkerchief from my top drawer, son.”

  When Hilly returned, Nell wiped her eyes. “I’ll read Elvira’s note to you. I want you to hear that she loves you. I want you to remember that.”

  She read, and afterward the boy burst into tears. “Why won’t she come back? And what does ‘disgraced us’ mean?” He pounded the table and buried his head in his arms.

  “Don’t be angry, Hilly. She didn’t want to go. She thinks she did something bad—I don’t know what—and she can’t face us.”

  “Face us?”

  “Think of how you feel when you’ve been naughty. You don’t want people to look at you. You’re embarrassed and ashamed.” He sat aloof.

  “She should’ve told us what it was. Did she shoot somebody?”

  “Heavens, no. I don’t know any more than you do, but I do know that she didn’t shoot anybody.” Nell reached to hold him, but he would not be held. When his father had died, Hilly had been only eighteen months old and hadn’t understood. Now he was six and a half, and understood enough to feel betrayed.

  At bedtime, as Nell tucked him in, Hilly told her, “I think I felt like this when Papa died. I think I remember, Mama. I was a baby, but I think I remember.”

  However, at breakfast the next morning, after Mass, he said, “I don’t care if she never comes back.” He’d been spurned.

  “Well, I care. I love her and want her here with us.”

  “If she confessed to Father Gerrold and went to Communion, God would forgive her, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then why did she leave?”

  “Who knows. She had a powerful reason.”

  When the breakfast dishes were washed and put away, Nell said, “I thought I’d walk out to the cemetery later. Would you like to come?” She needed to move, to work the anxiety out of her limbs.

  “Yes,” he replied from the living room.

  He was lying on the daybed reading from Beautiful Stories About Children. Such a serious boy; Nell worried sometimes. She carried her missal, rosary, and gloves to the bedroom, recalling how Hilly’s first-grade teacher had confided, “When he started reading, it was as though he’d always read.”

  Nell knew that he was reading far better than many of her third graders. Well, it wasn’t surprising. Elvira had taught him his ABCs, even how to read a few simple words.

  Elvira. Where are you? You who’ve never been any place bigger than Harvester.

  After lunch, Nell and Hilly started for the cemetery, Nell carrying a sky-blue parasol Elvira had said Cora had given her, one she’d left hanging on a peg by the door.

  “Would you like to bring your hoop?” Nell asked Hilly.

  He shook his head. “I’m bringing a book.”

  “Me too.” She held up Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. She’d thought at first to bring Tess of the D’Urbervilles, but knew Thomas Hardy was too dark for her mood. Some found a novel of despair to be purgative for their own grief. Not Nell. If she’d had something downright jolly on hand, she would have grabbed that.

  But for the racket of a thousand singing birds, they tramped along in silence. The cemetery wasn’t distant—maybe ten blocks from the apartment. The last bit followed a country road where the chirring of cicadas nearly drowned the birdsong.

  “You’ll never forget Elvira, will you?” Nell asked as they turned into the Catholic cemetery. “She taught you your ABCs.”

  “And she read to me every day. She liked to read out loud, she said. And I liked it when we used to go to the park with Mrs. Lundeen and Laurence.”

  “Maybe on the way home we can stop at the Lundeens’, and if Laurence isn’t down for his nap, you can say hello.” Nell led the way to the second row of graves where Herbert was buried beneath a small granite marker.

  Herbert. He’d been a mercurial man. No—more than mercurial. How many times had he told her that he regretted having married her? He’d proposed while riding one of his high, whirling moods. But when those moods gave out beneath him, he’d fall, as from a cliff, taking her down with him. “Without a wife and kid, I could’ve gone places.”

  “Is it all right to sit on Papa’s grave?” Hilly asked.

  “Of course. He’d be disappointed if you didn’t stop and say hello.” Nell leaned against a nearby headstone and helped a ladybug down from her skirt and onto the grass. “What would you like to tell him?”

  “I wish he was here. Really here, like you and me.” He pulled a seedhead from a plantain. “Now that Elvira’s gone, we hardly have any family.” Hilly told his father about Elvira’s leaving and about the Dickens stories, then he and Nell strolled further along and sat to read, their backs against an old cottonwood.

  Beyond the cemetery fence, the land stretched west to the Badlands. The countryside was an undulating sea of wheat and corn, rye, oats and timothy—a sea of loneliness. Nell looked out at the farms and marveled at those who had first homesteaded them or even pushed on to a more distant outpost, a harder existence. She had never had the itch, as some called it. Oh, she would have loved to travel—to at least see Europe—but that was different. One came home again.

  She was a home girl, warmed by the glow of lamplight, a stove boiling water for tea. To sit in the rocker and read Jane Austen or Hardy, to play checkers with Hilly—these entertainments spoke of her unsophistication, and she did not mind. To be unsophisticated was no crime if you weren’t narrow, and she hoped that her reading kept her from that. Through novels you glimpsed the grim night that could eventually overtake the intolerant.

  Over near the fence, she saw a white cob swan marching across the grass with stately intention, extending its graceful neck and lifting its head as though in greeting. Nell touched Hilly’s arm.

  “A daddy swan,” she breathed. “He’s wandered over from the lake.”

  “I never saw one at the lake, except far off, did you?”

  Nell shook her head. “He looks as if h
e’s come to visit.” The swan did indeed. He approached, not stopping to peck in the gravel path but stepping with purpose and unusual delicacy for so large a bird, until he reached a spot not four feet distant from them.

  For long minutes he stood eyeing them with a sad, bright glance, as if there were things he would have liked to say. At length he cocked his head and turned, wandering away among the graves. Nell let out her breath.

  No buggies stood before George and Cora’s house nor in the drive, so Nell and Hilly rang the bell. Lizzie answered.

  “They’re in the back,” she said, leading the way out to the yard. Cora sat in her wheelchair and George on a wooden bench beneath the grape arbor, each of them with a book in hand. George wore one of the vanilla-white ice-cream suits he favored in summer. From his watch fob dangled a gold charm in the shape of an ocean liner.

  “Visitors,” Lizzie announced.

  Cora laid her book aside and called, “Come join us.” She looked drawn, new lavender shadows in her temples and the hollows of her cheeks.

  Nell and Hilly settled on the bench opposite George. “I hope we’re not intruding,” Nell said. “We’ve just walked out to the cemetery. The lilacs and peonies are beautiful. So mature. Someone must have planted them as soon as the cemetery was marked off.”

  “Eudora Barnstable, when she was a young bride,” George said. “Also the evergreens along the north fence.”

  “I won’t keep you from your reading,” Nell told them. Folding the parasol, she leaned it against the bench.

  “What a beautiful parasol,” Cora noted.

  “Thank you.” Nell recalled Elvira saying that it had once been Cora’s. Perhaps Cora had forgotten.

  Nell tried to sound light but felt heavy and reluctant. “I thought I should ask if Elvira had said anything to you about not coming back. From Chicago.”

  The Lundeens stared. “Not coming back?” Nell saw that she’d knocked the pins from under them.

  “She told us she was taking a vacation,” George said, trying to grasp the situation.

  “That’s what she had told us,” Nell explained. “But she’s been worried lately, or unhappy.”

  Cora’s shoulders flinched.

  An awkward silence. Nell glanced toward the fruit trees at the back of the lot, trying to recall in every detail the parting at the depot. “When we saw her off, I saw that she was distressed, but I thought she must be frightened of the big city.

  “But when we came home, we found that she’d left us a note.” How much should Nell tell them? “She seemed to think she’d done something . . . wrong. I can’t imagine what it could be. She was a good girl.”

  George gave his head a convulsive twist, as though his collar chafed. “Maybe she wrote to us at the store,” he said, tossing down his book. “I’ll check the box at the post office.” He sprang up. “I’ll do that now.”

  He’s taking this hard, Nell thought.

  Eyes squeezed shut, Cora rested an elbow on the arm of the wheelchair, and with thumb and forefinger pinched the bridge of her nose.

  Noting her distress, Nell said, “Cora—don’t. This was none of your doing.”

  chapter nineteen

  DAYS LATER NELL AND HILLY both received cards from Elvira, postmarked “Chicago, Illinois.”

  On the front of Hilly’s was a scene of bathers on Lake Michigan, and on the back:

  Dear Hilly,

  This lake is as big as an ocean, and this city is so big, I’ve gotten lost three times already. I’m leaving before I get lost again. A little package will be coming for you.

  I love you,

  Elvira.

  The picture on Nell’s was of the Palmer House Hotel. The cramped handwriting read:

  Dear Nell,

  I didn’t stay here, but I went in and looked around and had a cup of tea. It’s surely grand. I wish you could see it. I’m leaving today. I’ll write from wherever I end up.

  Love,

  Elvira.

  The following afternoon a harmonica arrived for Hilly. And almost daily, for a while, some item seemed to turn up in the apartment to keep Elvira’s presence fresh. Hilly found a hairpin under the rag rug beside her bed and kept it on the bureau like a museum piece. Nell had the previous Christmas given Elvira a box of monogrammed handkerchiefs; one of these was found mixed in with Nell’s. Then, of course, there was the blue parasol.

  But the George and Cora scrapbook was gone.

  After the harmonica arrived, a week passed with no word. “Would you like me to sell Elvira’s bed?” Nell asked Hilly. She stood in the doorway of his room. “You’d have more space.”

  “Let’s keep it, in case she comes back. I’ll sleep in it till she comes.”

  After three weeks, Nell felt it was time to talk to Juliet Lundeen, to apologize for Elvira. The couple had offered to send her to college, and Elvira had pulled up stakes without thanking them.

  “Come in,” Juliet stood aside.

  Dreading this visit, Nell followed Juliet into the front parlor. Beyond the windows, the afternoon was blinding and hot. But in here, soft northern light, filtered through lace curtains, bathed the room in cool shadow. Though she knew better, Nell sometimes found it hard to believe that people living in such surroundings, with sumptuous chairs and sofas, soft carpets and tea trolleys—like Henry James characters—knew the same worries and sadnesses as the less fortunate.

  “You’ll have a glass of lemonade,” Juliet said, skirts whispering as she left the room and returned, pushing a tea cart.

  “You shouldn’t trouble for me,” Nell said.

  “Nonsense.” The older woman passed Nell a cool glass and a plate with two slices of pound cake. “You can set those on the malacca table,” she said, drawing up a chair and pouring herself a glass. “Now, then, you have the air of someone on a mission.”

  “I’m here to apologize for Elvira.”

  “No need. She already did that herself. Sent me a note from Chicago at the same time she wrote George to say she wasn’t coming back.” She shook her head and bent toward Nell. “I’m worried about that little girl. What’s happened?”

  “I don’t know. All I can think is there’s a man in this.”

  “My thought, too.”

  Less tense now, Nell sliced off a bite of the pound cake. “Beyond that, I have no idea—who it could be or what happened.”

  “In her note she said she was sorry to let me down. She felt she was a disappointment to me, and to you.”

  “She’s never disappointed me,” Nell said. “I couldn’t have asked for a better girl to look after Hilly. We love her dearly. She worked hard and she was sweet-tempered—at least till the last few weeks.”

  Thoughtful, Juliet nodded. She wanted to ask something, Nell saw, but either scruples or delicacy prevented her.

  “I can’t help wondering if she’s . . . expecting,” Nell said.

  “Oh, God, yes,” Juliet sighed, her mouth working. She rose, crossing to a window where she looked out toward the school. “That occurred to me, too, and I’ve hated myself for it.” She turned back to Nell. “But Elvira was a pretty girl, and lively. Men were attracted to her.”

  “Still, we don’t know where she is, so what can we do?”

  “An awful thought. If you hear where she’s gone, let me know. Please. She’s so alone.”

  The following morning, a Saturday of tropical heat, Nell woke to pounding. She’d hooked the screen door and left the inside one open all night, hoping to capture a breath of air. Now, at 7:00 a.m., someone was banging on the doorframe. Elvira?

  “I’m coming,” Nell called, grabbing her robe.

  Hilly wandered into the hall, curious.

  On the landing, Aunt Martha waited, huffing with impatience. “I came as soon as the milking was done,” she said. “You, apparently, are not an early riser.”

  “I was up late reading.” Nell unhooked the screen, and Martha hove in, heading for the rocker.

  “Well, the fat is in the fire now,
” she said, settling down, weapons in place.

  “What’s wrong?” Nell pulled her robe tighter.

  “Elvira! That’s what’s wrong.” Martha struck the flat of her hand on her thigh. “What kind of guardian are you?”

  “Guardian? Elvira’s a grown woman.”

  “Well, she was living under your roof.”

  “And?”

  “And she’s run off pregnant.”

  “Pregnant? What’re you talking about?”

  “Are you telling me she’s run off for no reason?” Martha’s mouth twisted with scorn.

  “I don’t know why she left. I saw her off to Chicago. She said she was taking a vacation.”

  “Well, I tell you, you’re in big trouble.”

  “Trouble?”

  “I heard it from Minnie Monk, and she as school secretary ought to know. They’ve called a special meeting of the school board.”

  “But why?”

  “Because a girl’s in a family way, with no husband, and she was living under your roof while it was going on.”

  “Who says she’s pregnant?” Nell felt not fully awake.

  “Zeke Dormeier just came in from Denver a day ago. He knows what Elvira looks like, and he saw her in the Denver depot. Elvira. In a maternity getup.” Tears sprang to Martha’s eyes. “We’re disgraced.”

  “We?”

  “She’s relation. Everyone knows that. Poor Herbert must be spinning in his grave.”

  Not likely. “I still don’t see why the school board is meeting.”

  Extracting a handkerchief from her reticule and blowing her nose, Martha rose. At the door she paused long enough to warn, “You’ll find out.”

  chapter twenty

  “THE FOOLS WANT TO CANCEL your contract,” Juliet Lundeen said. “They’ve actually scheduled an emergency school-board meeting for Monday night. Laurence is talking to John Flynn now.”

  “The lawyer?” Nell remembered him from George and Cora’s wedding. She gasped, gulping air. Since Aunt Martha’s visit, she had had difficulty breathing.