“I won’t.” Nell took the child’s coat and cap. “Give me your boots. I’ll carry them to the kitchen.”
Noticing Stella in the rocker, Lark drew back.
“You’ll have tea and the lovely Fig Newtons Mrs. Wheeler brought,” Nell said. “Would you like to sit in Hilly’s room? You can watch the street from there. And if you’d like to lie down when you’ve had your tea, go right ahead.”
Seated again in the living room, Nell noticed that Stella’s cardigan was buttoned wrong and that she wore no stockings, despite the cold. Stella had begun weeping silently. “The world is wicked,” she said, her voice phlegmy with tears. She was depleted, operating on nerve alone. In a voice breathless, hollow sounding, like someone whispering down an empty pipe, she said, “I need to tell you something.”
“Take your time.”
Stella laced and unlaced her fingers. “It’s about Hilly. I should have told you when it happened . . . before Memorial Day. Last year.” She wiped at her nose with a balled-up handkerchief. “I’d been at the cemetery, looking after graves. Donald’s cousins.
“I was leaving . . . closing the gate. A car came down the road with men in it. . . .”
She pounded her knees with her fists.
“They were chasing Hilly. All . . . he had on . . . was his shirt.”
Stella began to weep again.
“Go on, dear,” Nell said, patting Stella’s shoulder.
“Then they saw me and . . . and they speeded up. But I saw one man in the backseat. Axel Nelson from the hotel. I looked for Hilly. But he was gone. If I’d had a gun, I’d have killed those men.”
“You mustn’t think of killing. It was killing that broke Hilly’s mind.” Nell squared her shoulders. “Now, sip your tea.”
A visible quiet crept over Stella once she’d been relieved of the story. Her hands were at rest, and she laid her head against the back of the rocker.
“All of Hilly’s troubles are over now,” Nell went on. “You rest for a while.” She fetched a blanket, then carried Stella’s cup to the kitchen. Poor, broken girl.
Later, Stella’s husband—a gentle, beleaguered man—came for his wife. Still later, Arlene Erhardt arrived with pajamas for Lark, still asleep on Hilly’s bed.
“Sit a minute,” Nell said. “What happened today?”
“Lark refused to go to Mass because the priest wouldn’t bury Hilly. Willie hit the roof and dragged her to church. She ran out. Of course Willie went looking for her. I don’t know what he’d have done if he’d caught her.”
Nell nodded. She’d long suspected that Willie Erhardt had a temper.
“And when she comes home tomorrow?”
“Let’s hope he’s cooled down by then.”
“Bring her back here if there’s a problem.”
On Monday afternoon, Nell donned a hat, pulled on her coat and best gloves, and went out.
The Harvester Arms was a rambling old clapboard with a broad porch where rockers lined up in summer, like spinster ladies gathered for gossip. The empty lobby, past its prime, was still impressive. Worn Turkey carpets looking dusty and neglected covered an expanse of oak flooring; electrified chandeliers caught the winter light and lent rainbows to walls papered with flowers no longer in the first flush of their bloom.
Nell removed the gloves, snapping them against the palm of her left hand. From an office behind the desk, Axel Nelson strode forth. “Yes?”
He was maybe fifty, slightly stooped, with a rancorous twist to his mouth. He looked at her from under thick, graying brows.
“I’m Nell Stillman—Hilly Stillman’s mother.”
No reaction.
“Last spring, when Hilly was attacked near the cemetery, I told myself I would shoot the man, or men, who did it.”
“What’s that got to do with me?”
“Yesterday, a witness came to me. This person didn’t know the two young men in the front seat of the car—but she recognized you.”
Nelson put up a hand. “You don’t want to go around telling lies about people, Mrs. . . . Stillman. They might take you to court.”
“They might be sorry if they did.”
“What do you want?”
“I thought what I wanted was to shoot you in the foot, so you’d hobble like my son,” Nell said, looking him over slowly. “But I see that you’re already a cripple.”
With that, she turned, and with a modest flourish pulled on her best gloves.
chapter fifty-eight
AFTER HILLY’S DEATH, Nell stopped playing cards. Games felt trivial; many things felt trivial. But not reading. Reading was a bridge carrying her across a chasm of pain to places where she could view the loss of Hilly from a distance.
Eventually, Eudora said, “Let us in,” adding, “it’s too much trouble digging up bridge-playing women to substitute.” Nell laughed.
And Eudora was right. In their own way, the women were a tonic. They shared her loss and made her laugh. Their gossip did not go amiss.
Today, the foursome of Nell, Barbara Gray, Eudora, and Ivy Shane met in the Shane living room, discussing Harvester’s latest scandal: Arlene Erhardt had left her husband and headed to California with her daughter and sister.
Barbara shook her head. “Oh, dear. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen in Harvester.” Absently scooping up her cards and arranging them, she went on, “And with a child. I call that wrong. A child needs two parents.”
“My Hilly didn’t have two parents,” Nell pointed out.
“That’s different. You were a widow.”
“I don’t know this Arlene Erhardt,” Ivy said. “What’s she like?”
“She was so good to Hilly and me.”
“That’s all we need to know,” Eudora said. “One diamond.”
Nell hadn’t wanted to get into the Arlene thing at bridge club, but one afternoon on their way home from school, Lark and Beverly had stopped in, Lark to inform Nell that she, her mother, and her aunt were moving to California. Lark had been tearful and angry, hoping her mother might still change her mind. But, all the same, the girl was fairly certain she wouldn’t. “What am I going to do,” she wept. “I like it here and I know everybody. I will probably die of lonesomeness. I think I’ve heard of that. I think there was an article in The Saturday Evening Post.”
Though Nell tried to comfort and reassure the child, Lark was beyond being comforted and reassured. Reassurances simply made light of her sorrow.
“But you’ll write to us?” Nell asked. “We’ll miss you.”
Lark nodded. “And someday I’m going to run away from California and come back. You’ll see.”
Re-sorting her cards now, Ivy Shane asked, “Was the husband a brute?”
“Gambled, drank,” Eudora said. “Two diamonds. And I think he hit her.” Nell’s hands palsied at the thought, her own memories forever fresh:
The night had been raw with a dry polar wind sweeping southeast out of Alberta. The sort of cold people described as too cold for snow. Yet there was snow underfoot as she descended. The wooden steps creaked with the cold, as though they might shatter into kindling.
Light shone in a small window at the back of the meat market. Gus was working late, maybe grinding meat for the next morning’s trade. Bent double, Nell shuffled tentatively, holding tight to her belly as if she could shore up something broken or prevent a wall from collapsing. Bert had never used his fists before.
She thrust the memories aside. Here, in Ivy’s home was not the time or place to revisit all that.
“Neddy says the little girl is broken up,” Eudora told them. She looked askance at Nell as if she’d seen something in her friend’s face that caught her attention.
“Who’s Neddy?” Barbara asked. “And could we review the bidding, please?”
“My grandson. You’ve heard me talk about Neddy.”
Nell recalled leading Arlene Erhardt in out of a brisk day last January and thanking her for the tin of oatmeal cookies. “How do you have time
to bake?” Nell had asked. She set the tin aside. “Give me your coat.”
“I can’t stay,” Arlene had said, remaining on the mat by the door. Beneath the coat the woman was still wearing an apron, flour dusting the skirt.
“Lark tells me you’re leaving for California.”
“They say there’re jobs out west. Even for women.” She looked feverish. “We’ll need to find something right away, my sister and I.”
“You’re a brave girl.”
“Not so brave,” she said with a weak smile. “Foolhardy, maybe. But I had to get away.” She looked at Nell. “You understand, don’t you?” Indeed.
The parting was tearful, Arlene clinging for a moment, then hurrying down to the street.
“Write when you’re settled,” Nell called after her.
At the bridge table, Nell reviewed the bidding for Barbara. “Eudora bid one diamond; Ivy, one heart; I bid two diamonds. It’s up to you.” Barbara had grown vague in recent months, forgetting simple things.
At our age, Nell thought, we have to be twice as alert. Is there a stain on this dress? Are these books due at the library? Did I write Mam and Nora this week?
“Two no-trump,” Barbara said. “No, wait a minute. . . .”
From the West, Lark wrote:
Dear Mrs. Stillman,
I am lonesome and I might die of it and I hate California. And my school. And most of the kids. They are not nice like my friends in Harvester. We live in Pacific Beach, in something called a housing project. It’s pitiful looking.
I miss you and Hilly even though I know that Hilly isn’t there. Thank you for sending the picture of Hilly in his uniform. He was very handsome. I liked coming to your house and having tea and cookies. Do you see Sally and Beverly?
When we get our school pictures taken, I will send you one. I hope that you are well.
Love,
Lark
A week after Lark’s letter arrived, Sally Wheeler knocked on Nell’s door. Her mother, she said, was in Mankato, where she’d had an operation; Sally couldn’t remember what it was called. A grandmother was looking after the nine-year-old while her parents were away.
“I think they’re going to put her in the nuthouse,” the girl said, compressing her slender body into the smallest possible shape in an effort to disappear entirely.
“Why do you think that?”
“Because she’s crazy. She cries all the time. She stays in the bedroom and doesn’t come out. She doesn’t take a bath unless I make her do it, and she hardly eats anything. Doesn’t that sound crazy to you?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“You’re just being nice.” Sally chewed a hangnail. “I think they took something out of her. I hope it was the crazy part.”
Nell hugged her. “Your mother loves you. You know that, don’t you?”
Sally shrugged. “Maybe. But what good does that do?”
Soon after Valentine’s Day 1942, Eudora called. “They’ve committed Stella Wheeler to the state hospital.”
It was less than two and a half months after Pearl Harbor, but already windows in town had begun boasting little white flags with stars in the center, signifying a son or husband fighting the war. If the star was gold, the man had been killed. For Nell, each gold star was Hilly’s.
In Hilly’s room the world map was still tacked to the wall. At first, Nell tried to keep up with the battles, but now she followed them at an emotional distance. Sparing oneself life’s sharp corners was a prescriptive for sanity.
But she was worried about Mr. Wodehouse and hoped that he was not somewhere being bombed.
Then one day Eudora said, “Your Mr. Wodehouse is in trouble with the British.” In France, where the Wodehouses were living, they’d been taken prisoner by the Germans, who were treating them with kid gloves, keeping the couple in comfortable captivity. In high dudgeon, Eudora exclaimed, “Do you believe it?”
Apparently unaware of what was happening in the outside world—the internment of European Jews in concentration camps, for instance—Mr. Wodehouse had been prevailed upon to broadcast little messages home, about his treatment at the hands of a humane Germany. The English, nightly bombarded by the Nazis, took offense, as well they might.
“And he an Englishman!” Eudora fulminated, put out with Nell for not taking up the cudgel.
Nell thought long about the news. There must be an explanation. The gentle man who had created Uncle Fred and Jeeves was not one to collaborate with murderers. After all, she’d always assumed that Mr. Wodehouse was an innocent, sequestered in the sunlit world of the Drones Club and Blandings Castle. His work—some thirty-three volumes in her own little collection guaranteed her a witty companion for the remainder of her days. When she glanced at their spines, she was shamelessly proud and refused to feel otherwise. No, she would not abandon Mr. Wodehouse.
She only prayed that the Germans wouldn’t take it into their heads to do away with him before he could be exonerated.
Mr. Wodehouse, she knew, had been born in 1881, five years after her. What a comfort it was that they were growing old together. She hoped she died before he did, so she’d never have to face a future without a new Wodehouse book.
Eudora shook her head whenever she eyed Nell’s bookcase; when Nell actually wrote to him, she threw a grand fit and didn’t speak to her friend for a week.
P. O. Box 63
Harvester, Minnesota
U.S.A.
November 10, 1942
Dear Mr. Wodehouse,
I’m sending this in care of your publisher, hoping that by some miracle it finds you. I feel as if I were posting a letter to the moon.
My friend Eudora, who is a great Anglophile, tells me that you are in trouble in England because of your broadcasts from Germany. I write to assure you that I do not believe you are a collaborator. My companions—the Earl of Emsworth, Aunt Dahlia, and Jeeves (that wisest of the wise)—assure me that Eudora is quite wrong. I am far more inclined to believe them than those who are carried away in a moment of hysteria.
Thanks to another old friend, I have, to date, thirty-three of your volumes, beginning with Love Among the Chickens. Over the years my little world has shrunk, as little worlds are inclined to do. Among those lost was the friend who, year after year, delighted me with your books.
However, that friend kindly provided funds and connected me with a bookseller so that I might be kept current. I remind that dealer to notify me the moment you publish each of your lifesaving works.
You may regard “lifesaving” as extravagant. I do not. When my son Hillyard was in France during the Great War, your books helped to sustain me. And when he came home from that war shattered, I could not have endured the nights of worry without your help.
In more recent days, Hillyard took his own life. Though my friends have been kind, escape from grief was rare. How would I have survived without your people carrying me away to Shropshire and holding my hand in the sunlight of that place? And Lord Emsworth’s Empress—that delightful pig—well, she even moved me to laugh out loud.
So, you see, dear Mr. Wodehouse, no one will ever convince me that you have sided with the Nazi savages. As we say around here, you have been “buffaloed.”
It is crucial that you go on saving lives and sanity, as you have mine. Hoping this will one day reach you, I remain a faithful and grateful friend.
Nell Stillman
chapter fifty-nine
“GODSAKES,” BEVERLY RIDZA SAID, tossing her books down on the daybed, “that Mrs. Draper knows how to give homework.” The newest addition to the grade-school faculty, Mrs. Draper was the widow of a sailor lost at Pearl Harbor. “Look at all this multiplication! And language. I hate language!”
“I don’t,” said Sally.
Fifth graders now, Beverly and Sally were learning the meaning of real schoolwork, of theme papers and serious long division. Nell looked forward to their visits. They filled the apartment with summer all year long. But she also wondered what
attraction there could be in visiting an old widow woman.
For Beverly, it was probably the store-bought cookies and weak tea. Her mother’s job cooking at the Loon Cafe didn’t pay for many treats. Sally’s motives, however, were less clear. Though she was virtually motherless, her father had given up his job on the road and was home full-time now, a baseball coach and history teacher at the high school. Doting grandparents on both sides were frequent visitors. So it wasn’t for lack of love or food that she came around.
“What news do we hear from Lark in California?” Nell asked.
“Her mother bought a bunch of secondhand stuff from some guy in San Diego. He said if you put your hand on a piece of old furniture, it’ll tell you stories. Lark’s gonna try it.” Beverly reached for another arrowroot.
“Wouldn’t it be fun if she sent us the stories?” Nell said, turning to the other child. “Sally, give your mother my best when you write. A day doesn’t pass when I don’t think of her kindness to Hilly.”
Sally finished off her tea. “I write,” she said, “but she doesn’t write back. Daddy says we mustn’t expect it yet. I try not to . . . but isn’t it a mother’s job to write back?”
Harvester saw quite an exodus during the war years: young men, who were drafted as they came of age; and older men, 4-Fs, and some women, who left for jobs in defense plants. It was the dawning of something Nell found alarming, a pulling up of roots, an exchanging of one identity for another. Once close-knit, countless families were now scattered like chaff, never to reassemble. More and more, Nell treasured those friends still gathered around her.
They had met in the bank, and Eudora suggested coffee at the Loon Cafe. The Loon Cafe had not altered appreciably in its many years on Main Street. Four booths, a counter, and eight stools squeezed into inadequate space. In its decor was no hint of a loon or any other water fowl. It could as easily be the Raccoon Cafe or the House Cat Cafe. But it was the place one ducked into for a cup of coffee. Nell and Eudora slid into a booth, each recalling their meeting here with Juliet.
Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse Page 26