“I wanted to try on the little hat, the red one in the window,” Frances said.
The saleswoman had decided by this time that Frances intended only to amuse herself by trying on hats, so when she took the hat from the window and handed it to Frances she smiled politely and watched her adjusting it on her head. Frances tried the hat and patted a strand of fair hair till it curled by the side of the brim. And then, because she was delighted to see that it was as attractive on her as it had been on the mannequin head with the silver face, she smiled happily, noticing in the mirror that her face was the shape of the mannequin face, a little long and narrow, the nose fine and firm, and she took out her lipstick and marked her lips. Looking in the mirror again she felt elated and seemed to enjoy a kind of freedom. She felt elegant and a little haughty. Then she saw the image of the deep-bosomed and polite saleslady.
“It is nice, isn’t it?” Frances said, wishing suddenly that she hadn’t come into the store.
“It is wonderfully becoming to you, especially to you.”
And Frances said suddenly: “I suppose I could change it, if my husband didn’t like it.”
“Of course.”
“Then I’ll take it.”
Even while paying for the hat and assuring herself that it would be amusing to take it home for the evening, she had a feeling that she ought to have known when she first came into the store that she intended to take the hat home. The saleswoman was smiling. Frances, no longer embarrassed, thought with pleasure of going out with Eric and wearing the hat, tucking the price tag up into her hair. In the morning she could return it.
But as she walked out of the store there was a hope way down within her that Eric would find her so charming in the red hat he would insist she keep it. She wanted him to be freshly aware of her, to like the hat, to discover its restrained elegance. And when they went out together for the evening they would both share the feeling she had had when first she had looked in the shop window. Frances, carrying the box, hurried, eager to get home. The sharp wind had gone down. When there was no wind on these fall evenings it was not cold, and she would not have to wear a coat with her woolen dress. It was just about dark now and all the lights were lit in the streets.
The stairs in the apartment house were long, and on other evenings very tiring, but tonight she seemed to be breathing lightly as she opened the door. Her husband was sitting by the table lamp, reading the paper. A black-haired man with a well-shaped nose, he seemed utterly without energy, slumped down in the chair. A slight odor of whiskey came from him. For four months he had been out of work and some of the spirit had gone out of him, as if he felt that he could never again have independence, and most of the afternoon he had been standing in the streets by the theaters, talking with actors who were out of work.
“Hello, Eric boy,” she said, kissing him on the head.
“ ’Lo, Frances.”
“Let’s go out and eat tonight,” she said.
“What with?”
“Bucks, big boy, a couple of dollar dinners.”
He had hardly looked at her. She went into the bedroom and took the hat out of the box, adjusting it on her head at the right angle, powdering her nose and smiling cheerfully. Jauntily she walked into the living room, swinging her hips a little and trying not to smile too openly.
“Take a look at the hat, Eric. How would you like to step out with me?”
Smiling faintly, he said: “You look snappy, but you can’t afford a hat.”
“Never mind that. How do you like it?”
“What’s the use if you can’t keep it.”
“Did you ever see anything look so good on me?”
“Was it bargain day somewhere?”
“Bargain day! Fifteen bucks at one of the best shops!”
“You’d bother looking at fifteen-dollar hats with me out of work?” he said angrily, getting up and glaring at her.
“I would.”
“It’s your money. You do what you want.”
Frances felt hurt, as if for months there had been a steady pressure on her, and she said stubbornly: “I paid for it. Of course, I can take it back if you insist.”
“If I insist,” he said, getting up slowly and sneering at her as though he had been hating her for months. “If I insist. And you know how I feel about the whole business.”
Frances felt hurt and yet strong from indignation, so she shrugged her shoulders, saying, “I wanted to wear it tonight.”
His face was white, his eyes almost closed. Suddenly he grabbed hold of her by the wrist, twisting it till she sank down on one knee.
“You’ll get rid of that hat or I’ll break every bone in your body. I’ll clear out of here for good.”
“Eric, please.”
“You’ve been keeping me, haven’t you?”
“Don’t, Eric.”
“Get your fifteen-buck hat out of my sight. Get rid of it, or I’ll get out of here for good.”
He snatched the hat from her head, pulling it, twisting it in his hands, then throwing it on the floor. He kicked it across the room. “Get it out of here or we’re through.”
The indignation had gone out of Frances. She was afraid of him; afraid, too, that he would suddenly rush out of the room and never come back, for she knew he had thought of doing it before. Picking up the hat she caressed the soft felt with her fingers, though she could hardly see it with her eyes filled with tears. The felt was creased, the price tag had been torn off, leaving a tiny tear at the back.
Eric was sitting there, watching her.
The hat was torn and she could not take it back. She put it in the box, wrapping the tissue paper around it, and then she went along the hall to Mrs. Foley’s apartment.
Mrs. Foley, a smiling, fat woman with a round, cheerful face, opened the door. She saw Frances was agitated and felt sorry for her. “Frances, dear, what’s the matter with you?”
“You remember the hat I was telling you about? Here it is. It doesn’t look good on me. I was disappointed and pulled it off my head and there’s a tiny tear in it. Maybe you’d want it.”
Mrs. Foley thought at once that Frances had been quarreling with her husband. Mrs. Foley held up the hat and looked at it shrewdly. Then she went back into her bedroom and tried it on. The felt was good, and though it had been creased, it was quite smooth now. “Of course, I never pay more than five dollars for a hat,” she said. The little felt hat did not look good on her round head and face.
“I hate to offer you five dollars for it, Frances, but …”
“All right. Give me five dollars.”
As Mrs. Foley took the five dollars from her purse, Frances said suddenly: “Listen, dear, if I want it back next week you’ll sell it back to me for five?”
“Sure I will, kid.”
Frances hurried to her own apartment. Though she knew Eric could not have gone out while she was standing in the hall, she kept on saying to herself: “Please, Heaven, please don’t let me do anything to make him leave me while he’s feeling this way.”
Eric, with his arms folded across his chest, was looking out of the window. Frances put the five dollars Mrs. Foley had given her, and the three dollars left over from her salary, on the small table by Eric’s chair. “I sold it to Mrs. Foley,” she said.
“Thanks,” he said, without looking at her.
“I’m absolutely satisfied,” she said, softly and sincerely.
“All right, I’m sorry,” he said briefly.
“I mean I don’t know what makes you think I’m not satisfied – that’s all,” she said.
Sitting beside him she put her elbow on her knee and thought of the felt hat on Mrs. Foley’s head: it did not look good on her; her face was not the shape of the long silver face of the mannequin head. As Frances thought of the way the hat had looked on the head in the window she hoped vaguely that something would turn up so that she could get it back from Mrs. Foley by the end of the week. And just thinking of it, she felt that faint haughty ela
tion; it was a plain little red hat, the kind of hat she had wanted for months, elegant and expensive, a plain felt hat, so very distinctive.
1931
SISTER BERNADETTE
When Sister Bernadette, who had charge of the maternity ward in the hospital, wasn’t rebuking a nurse in training for some petty fault, she was having a sharp disagreement with a doctor. She was a tall woman with a pale face; she looked very handsome in her starched white headpiece. To her, the notion that her nun’s habit might be protecting her from sharp retorts from the nurses was intolerable. But she simply couldn’t hold a grudge against anybody, and if she had a tiff with a nurse she would wait till she saw the girl passing in the corridor and say innocently, “I hear you’re offended with me,” as she offered the warmest, jolliest smile. When young nurses in training, who were having a bit of idle gossip, saw the sister’s tall, gaunt form, so formidable in the black robes, coming toward them, they often felt like a lot of half-guilty schoolgirls as they smiled good-naturedly. Of course Sister Bernadette had sympathy for all the women who were suffering and bearing children and she was like a mother to them, but it was the small things in the ward that were most important to her. If she saw a man in the corridor carrying a parcel carefully, she would watch him go into a patient’s room, wait till he had departed, then rush into the room and look around to try and guess at once what might have been in the parcel. It was not hard for her to guess correctly, for she seemed to know every object in each private room. All the mothers liked her but were a bit afraid of her. Sometimes forgetting that women were paying expensive doctors to look after them, she would give her own instructions and insist they be carried out completely, as if she knew more about the patients than the doctors did. There was a Doctor Mallory, a short dark fellow with a broad face, a shifting, faraway expression in his eyes, and a kind of warm, earthy tenderness in his manner, who often quarreled bitterly with Sister Bernadette because she ordered a patient of his to take a medicine he had not recommended. He did not know that Sister Bernadette loved him for quarrelling openly with her instead of being just cuttingly polite because she was a nun.
One day Doctor Mallory, looking very worried, waited in the corridor, watching Sister Bernadette’s tall form with the dark robes coming toward him. When he looked into her face he couldn’t help smiling, there was so much fresh, girlish contentment in her expression. But this time he spoke with a certain diffidence as he said, “Sister, I’d like to talk with you a minute.”
“Please do, Doctor,” she said. “You’re not offended again, surely?”
“Oh no, not this time,” he said, smiling warmly. “I wanted to tell you about a patient of mine I’d like to bring to the hospital to have her baby.”
“Now, don’t tell me you’re so afraid of me you have to ask my permission to bring a patient here?” she said, laughing.
“Not at all. Only this girl doesn’t want to come. She’s ashamed. She’s of a good family. I know all about her. But she’s not married and won’t come here under her own name. I said I’d speak to you and you’d fix it up, Sister. Won’t you?”
Sister Bernadette frowned. The doctor was smiling at her, as if he couldn’t be fooled by a harsh refusal. It gave her pleasure to think that he was so sure of her sympathetic nature. But she said sharply, “It’s against the rules to register anybody under a false name, you know that, Doctor.”
“I know it, that’s why I wanted to speak to you, Sister.”
With ridiculous sternness Sister Bernadette said, “What do I care? Do what you want to do. Register the woman as Mrs. Macsorley, or anything else, it’s all the same to me,” and she turned and walked away as though greatly offended. The doctor, chuckling, watched her hurrying along the corridor without looking back.
Sister Bernadette could hardly wait to see Doctor Mallory’s new patient. Five minutes after the woman was brought to the hospital, Sister Bernadette was in the room looking at her with eager curiosity and speaking in a soft reassuring voice. The patient was only a girl with big scared blue eyes and fluffy blond hair whose confidence had been completely destroyed by her predicament. Sister Bernadette was desperately afraid that the young girl, who had been such a sinner and who was now suffering and disgraced, would be afraid of a woman like herself, a nun, who had given her life entirely to God. For some reason she wanted this scared girl to love her. That night, while the baby was being born, Sister Bernadette was in the corridor many times.
During the two weeks the girl remained at the hospital she was treated with a special attention by the nurses who thought she was an old friend of Sister Bernadette. No one suspected that Mrs. Macsorley wasn’t married. Sister Bernadette got a good deal of pleasure realizing that she and the doctor were the only ones who shared the secret. Every morning she paid a visit to Mrs. Macsorley’s room talking about everything on earth, praised the baby, and tried to make the girl feel at home by strutting about like a blunt, good-natured farm woman. The fair-haired, blue-eyed girl, who was really a self-possessed, competent person, was so impressed by the sister’s frank, good-natured simplicity, she sent word out to the baby’s father that there was no reason why he shouldn’t come to see her.
When Sister Bernadette was introduced to the father, a well-dressed soft-spoken, tall man, she shook hands warmly, called him Mr. Macsorley and showed the baby to him. His embarrassment disappeared at once. He felt so much at ease with Sister Bernadette during that first visit that he decided to come every day at noontime. At first Sister Bernadette was delighted by the whole affair; it seemed so much like the kind of thing that was always going on in her ward, making her world seem so rich with experience that she didn’t care whether she ever went outside the hospital. But when she heard that the girl’s lover was a married man, it bothered her to see that he was still so attentive. Though she honestly liked the man and liked the girl too, she said to Doctor Mallory with awkward sincerity, “I don’t like to see that man coming to see the girl so much. Evidently they’re still in love.”
“Does he come often?”
“Every day. And they are both so sure of themselves.”
“It isn’t very nice. It isn’t fair to you,” the doctor said.
“No, no, I don’t mean that,” Sister Bernadette said. “But you know that man is married and has two children. I just mean that the girl at least ought to respect his wife and children and not let him be so devoted to her.” Then Sister Bernadette began to feel self-conscious as though the doctor was misunderstanding her. “Don’t misinterpret me,” she said at once. “The girl can run around with single men as much as she likes and come here as often as she likes as far as I’m concerned …”
“I’ll tell them about it,” the doctor said.
“No. Please don’t. You’d better not say anything,” she said.
Then it was time for Mrs. Macsorley to leave the hospital. Doctor Mallory came to Sister Bernadette and explained that he, himself, was going to find someone to adopt the baby. Coaxing and pleading, he asked if it wouldn’t be all right to leave the baby in the hospital nursery for two days at the most.
Such a request didn’t actually worry Sister Bernadette, but she snapped at the doctor, “It’s absolutely against the rules of the hospital to leave a baby who’s in good health in that nursery after the mother has gone.” In the brief argument that followed she was short- and hot-tempered, and in the end she said, “All right, have your way, but only for one day, mind.”
She didn’t think it necessary to worry till the baby had been left in the nursery for a week. Doctor Mallory was trying very hard to get someone to adopt the baby girl. Sister Bernadette began to think that the child would remain in her nursery till she, herself, did something about it. Every time she looked at the brown-eyed baby she was reminded that she had done wrong in letting the mother register at the hospital under another name. After all, it was just vanity, her eagerness to have the doctor believe her a good-natured person, that was now causing trouble. Perhaps she ought to
reveal the whole matter to the Mother Superior, she thought. In her prayers in the morning and in her evening prayers she asked that someone be found who would take the baby at once.
In the evenings, after ten o’clock feeding-time, she would go into the nursery when the lights were turned down looking at one small crib after another with an expert eye that made the nurse in charge wary. But she stood by Baby Macsorley’s crib, frowning, puzzled by her own uneasiness. She lifted the baby up as though to see it for the first time. The baby was wearing a little pink sweater coat one of the nurses had knitted. Sister Bernadette knew that Baby Macsorley had become the pet of the nursery. Only last night one of the nurses had performed a mock marriage between the baby and another fine baby boy who was being taken home that day. When she put the baby back into the crib she found herself kissing her on the forehead and patting her back, as she hoped, quickly, that no one had seen her.
As soon as she saw Doctor Mallory next day she blurted out, “If you don’t get that baby out of here by tomorrow, I’ll throw it in the snowbank.”
Doctor Mallory was a bit afraid of her now, for he knew that she was a determined woman, so he said, pleading, “Wait till tomorrow. I’m trying to get one particular lady to adopt it. Wait till tomorrow. I’m working with her.”
“You’ll have to work faster, that’s all,” Sister Bernadette said, without even smiling.
Instead of one day, she waited two days longer, but now she was so angry that whenever she went into the nursery and saw the baby, she felt herself resenting the young mother with the candid blue eyes and the baby blond curls and the bold straightforward lover who came so openly to the hospital and felt no shame. Once Sister Bernadette picked the baby up and then put it down hastily for she felt with disgust that the sordidness in the life of the mother and father might be touching her through the baby and disturbing her too much. “I can’t go on thinking of those people,” she muttered, “the baby goes out of here tomorrow.”
Ancient Lineage and Other Stories Page 10