The Dollmaker

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

  Cassie’s lips were shaped as when she kissed Callie Lou, but on her lips was the gum. Her eyes, puzzled, admiring, piqued too, were fixed on Garcia’s face. Instead of a mouth he wore a large pale gray bubble, wonderously thin, round, beautiful like a balloon. Cassie watched, breath held, while it grew larger; she squinted her eyes, waiting for the burst but, lo, none came. The bubble went suddenly into his mouth, neatly, leaving no smear. Then there came such a pop that Cassie jumped and then drew closer as if she would see into his mouth.

  Gertie squinched, and even Miss Vashinski looked around from the card. “It’s terrible stuff, but really quite creative,” she said, turning the card over, making check marks. Finished, and with her finger on a spot, she pushed the card toward Gertie. “Sign here.”

  Gertie hesitated. She had never put her name to anything, joined anything, promised anything. “Could your husband sign?” Miss Vashinski asked, smiling, moving toward the door.

  Gertie flushed. “Oh, I can sign,” she said, and wrote her name with the fountain pen. She looked yearningly toward Cassie. Cassie was watching another gray balloon come out of the boy’s mouth.

  “The door’s this way,” Miss Vashinski was saying, and Gertie followed the brisk tapping heels. “She can come mornings.” Miss Vashinski was opening the door. “There’s only fifty-six in the morning group—sixty-three in the afternoon. The women on the three-to-twelve shift insist on sending their children in the afternoon. You have an older girl to call for her at noon the first few days? Good.”

  The widely opened door into which Gertie had backed was closing. She turned determinedly back to the room. “I’d better help her out a all that riggen.”

  “We teach them that; she’ll adjust,” Miss Vashinski said, with a big bright smile on her bright red mouth and an uneasy glance toward the room where Mrs. White’s voice sounded thinly above an ever increasing babel.

  The door pushed gently on Gertie’s shoulder. She found herself in the hall staring at it while behind her the young girl voice was saying. “This way to the principal’s office, Mrs. Nevels.”

  Gertie, after one long backward glance at the closed door, followed the girl up a stairway and down a hall, past open doors giving glimpses of child-crowded rooms. Nobody noticed their passing except a small man in spectacles happened to look round from something he did on a blackboard. He stopped, chalk uplifted, and stared at her as she went by.

  The principal’s office was smaller than her new kitchen, with nothing in it but books, a table, and a telephone into which a girl was speaking slowly. “I know, but Mrs. Zigorski, we can’t send a kid home on telephone orders. It’s againsa rules. Gimme your number, please … I don’t unnerstand … The principal,” she went on, speaking slowly and resignedly, as if she had already said the same thing many times, “is down in u sewing room. It’s inu basement. He can’t come—not right now on account a so many steps. Wait—Suse.” She was calling now to the blue-banded girl walking away from Gertie. “Canyu unnerstand Hungarian? It’s gotta be Hungarian. It ain’t Polish; it ain’t Ukrainian.”

  The girl called Suse shook her head. “I don’t know nothing. Half u time no more I can’t make out Granma. S’Greek, maybe. I’ll go hunt Sophie. Mrs. Nevels here wants to enter her kids. Yu sure now it ain’t Ukrainian?”

  “Sure.” She turned to Gertie as Suse walked away. “Yu kids is all entered, everything but u family physician.”

  “We don’t have none.”

  “Put down ours. We live close to yu on Merry Hill.”

  Gertie gave a slow headshake, and wished she could see the principal. “It don’t make no difference, nohow,” the girl said. “Them doctors, they’ve got a strong union, stronger than u CIO. They’ll come if they wanta an yu ain’t got seven dollars, an if they don’t wanta come yu seven dollars don’t do yu no good.”

  Gertie stared at the telephone receiver that now and then gave little sounds of bewilderment and trouble. The girl talked into it again and the sounds ceased. She turned again to Gertie, “S’all right to put that doctor down. S’cards gotta be filled.”

  Gertie nodded at last, then watched the girl write on the cards, already quite well filled with Clytie’s neat writing. “Sign,” the girl said.

  And Gertie signed again, three times, then took the rest of the birth certificates and shot papers from the split basket and left them on the desk as the girl directed. She stood an instant looking about her. School letting out time in the afternoon seemed far away. She remembered Cassie was to come home. Clytie would have to leave off lunch in a real school lunchroom—she’d given them all a quarter apiece, just for the first day. “Is they any way,” she asked, “you can git word to my biggest girl to bring her little sister home at dinnertime?”

  “She knows to stop at th kinnergarden door,” the girl said. “Allu kids hafta go home at noon. It’s againsa rules to bring lunch. S’no place to eat it.”

  “You mean,” Gertie said, “you ain’t got no hot lunch? An all th little youngens has to backwards an forwards in this weather?”

  The girl shook her head. “Th little kids don’t come but half a day nohow.” She looked at her fingernails, of a red even brighter than Miss Vashinski’s. “This school ain’t got nothen but teachers an kids. I went to one once in Hamtramck that had everything—even a liberry; yu know, a room with nothen but boo—uks.”

  “They ain’t no gymnasium with a basketball court, an no pretty cooken place?” Gertie asked, more and more troubled.

  The girl shook her head. “We ain’t got no basketball on account we ain’t got no room; we gotta take gym down inu little room inu basement.”

  Gertie turned away, then turned back when the girl called after her: “Oh, Mrs. Nevels, I forgot; yu kids gotta bring soap—strong soap, if they wanna wash. Th water’s awful cold in winter, anu furnace smokes.”

  Gertie tried to smile, but could not, and strode swiftly down the hall toward the stairway. “Mrs. Nevels—Mrs. Nevels.” It was Suse again, running down the hall. “Mr. Skyros wants to speak to you, please.”

  Hurrying behind Suse was the same little baldheaded man in glasses who had stared at her. Behind him was a slender girl with yellow braids worn round her head like a crown. “Mrs. Nevels,” the man said, putting his hand on the basket, “pardon, please, this interruption, but we wanted to ask about this beautiful basket. We have never seen one like it.” He spoke slowly and carefully, like a man who has talked to a lot of people who didn’t understand. “Is it Polish?”

  Gertie shook her head. “It come frum back home. Ole Josiah Coffey made it, one a th last afore he died.”

  “Back home?” he asked, head tilted as he considered the fat sides of the basket.

  “My country is Kentucky.”

  “Oh,” he said, “I didn’t know they made baskets in Kentucky. What is it? It’s not reed or willow or grass or bamboo.”

  “White oak—splints. You know, you split em like house shakes, only finer, way finer,” she said, sliding the basket from her arm, then handing it to him.

  “And there’s not a bit of metal in it,” he said. He held the fat round sides with the tips of his fingers. “It’s such a beautiful brown. You’ve never stained it or anything, have you?”

  “Oh, no. Oak weathers thataway. I allus liked th color a clean weathered oak wood. It’s as pretty as tubaccer when it’s hung up to cure.” She stopped. He was laughing—no noise—just his eyes dancing like Cassie’s. Children were in the doorway of his room gaping at her. She heard a low giggle and then a snicker. He was so little, hardly to her elbow.

  “Isn’t it beautiful,” he was saying. “Tobacco. I saw it only once—one autumn over in Canada. It was curing—all shades of brown.” He for the first time noticed the two acorns and the oak leaf, marked with the light strokes, the few lines with which Gertie made her pictures on wood. He studied it, smiling, then held it out for the girl Sophie to see. “Did the old man do this?”

  The laughter in the doorway was growing lo
uder. “It’s a little old picture I done years back one day when I was a setten a waiten at th mill.”

  “Oh, you carve?”

  “Carve? Oh, you mean whittle—ax handles an sech, but sometimes a little foolishness like a doll fer a youngen.”

  “You must some day carve something beautiful and fine.” He studied her for the first time. “A human head. I believe you could.”

  She wanted to tell him about the block of cherry wood that she was afraid was lost by now, but the children were laughing so. One kept running to the door, peeping then laughing and running away. And if he asked how she planned to make the face, she would maybe let her tongue run on the way she had with the man who wore the star. “Did you want to borry th basket to look at?” she asked, backing away a little.

  “Oh, thank you. I wanted to sketch it,” the girl said.

  “Are you sure you don’t mind leaving it. I guess it’s an heirloom,” the man said.

  Gertie smiled. “I’ve left four youngens here. I oughtn’t to mind leaven a old split basket.”

  “They’ll be all right,” the man said. “They will”—now he didn’t seem himself at all, but was like Miss Vashinski—“adjust. This school has many children from many places, but in the end they all—most—adjust, and so will yours. They’re young.”

  “Adjust?” One empty hand pulled a finger of the other empty hand.

  “Yes, adjust, learn to get along, like it—be like the others—learn to want to be like the others.”

  “Oh.” She pondered, looking down the hall—ugly gray—and at the children laughing in the doorway, then turned to him with a slow headshake. “I want em to be happy, but I don’t know as I want em to—to—”

  “Adjust?”

  “Leastways not too good.”

  He looked quickly about him like one preparing to share a secret, then drew closer. “Maybe they won’t adjust at all.” His dark eyes looked up into her own and were somehow ashamed, sorrowful, like Judas giving back the silver. “Most of us do, but there’s always hope that one—” He jerked a shoulder toward the girl walking away with the Josiah basket, her head tilted, smiling a little as she studied it. “My other talented one has adjusted—perfectly. He’s drawing me on the blackboard now—such talent. He never saw you or the basket in this ugly hall. He has adjusted—cartoons of the teacher—perfect adjustment, exactly what he is supposed to do—according to the comic books.” He patted her forearm. “Your children will be all right. They will, I fear, adjust better than their mother.” And he turned and went quickly.

  As Gertie was going down the stairs, her eyes chanced to look over the banister. Directly below her, coming slowly up from the basement, was a man she thought must be the principal. She couldn’t see his face, mostly just the top of his head, with a pinkish, balding spot hidden like a secret in the center of his light brown graying hair. He walked slowly, like a man who has climbed many stairs and knows he will climb many more. His outspread hands, held carefully away from him, were smeared with black streaks. Gertie, looking down, was puzzled until she remembered the sewing machines, old and broken down. An old sewing machine was a contrary nasty thing. But somehow, from the look of him, she thought he had fixed it. No, the other word—adjusted.

  She wanted to turn at the foot of the stairs and stop by Cassie’s door, but forced herself to walk on. Once outside, she stopped and turned around and stood a long time staring at the gray building in the square of dirty snow. A look of listening was on her face, for from it there came between the sounds of distant trains and traffic a faint humming—like that from factories she had passed.

  FOURTEEN

  FOUR MORNINGS GONE NOW, and this, the fifth. As usual, the alarm had gone off at six o’clock, so that Clovis could be at work by seven. Six o’clock, she understood now, was four back home; too early for getting up in winter. Clovis, never eating enough at breakfast, seemed like, to keep a working man alive, went away in the dark with a bottle of coffee, sandwiches, a piece of pie, and beans in his lunch box. Six-thirty to seven-thirty was pure dark still, like the middle of the night. It was a lonesome in-between time when her hands remembered the warm feel of a cow’s teats or the hardness of a churn handle, or better beyond all things, the early-morning trip in starlight, moonlight, rain or snow, to the spring—the taste of spring water, the smell of good air, clean air, earth under her feet. Her feet remembered the soft earth when they took the few steps over the ice and cement for a bucket of coal. She never lingered searching for the stars. Unless it were quite windy there were no stars, and even in winds so bitter they brought tears, the alley smelled still of smoke and fumes.

  Two mornings now, after searching for some quiet work that would not waken the children, sleeping so close behind the flimsy walls, she had sat in the kitchen whittling on a piece of scrap wood Clovis had bought for kindling. This, like the borrowed kindling, was a maple, harder and finer grained than any she had known. It came in curious little chunks and squares that Clovis had said was scrap from some kind of war plant.

  One little piece had seemed familiar in all the strangeness, and she had began whittling on it. Slowly and aimlessly at first, she had worked, not able to forget the knife, herself, everything except the thing growing out of the wood, as she had used to be in stray moments of time back home.

  The hard white light overhead hurt her eyes and made a shadow on her work. The night sounds of Detroit came between her and the thing in the wood, but worse than any noise, even the quivering of the house after a train had passed, were the spaces of silence when all sounds were shut away by the double windows and the cardboard walls, and she heard the ticking of the clock, louder it seemed than any clock could ever be. She had never lived with a clock since leaving her mother’s house, and even there the cuckoo clock had seemed more ornament than a god measuring time; for in her mother’s house, as in her own, time had been shaped by the needs of the land and the animals swinging through the seasons. She would sit, the knife forgotten in her hands, and listen to the seconds ticking by, and the clock would become the voice of the thing that had jerked Henley from the land, put Clovis in Detroit, and now pushed her through days where all her work, her meals, and her sleep were bossed by the ticking voice.

  Now, between strokes of the knife, she would glance at the clock to make certain that it was not time to waken the children; and the thing in the wood would seem wood only, and not her big-behinded hen that had eaten corn from her lap. But little by little, the hen mastered the clock, and by Friday morning was there waiting in the wood for the knife to free her, a good hen, ready to lay many eggs.

  Gertie was working on a feather of the upcurving tail when a passing train brought back the world of the clock. She glanced at it, then sprang up, and hurried to awaken the children.

  Cassie, though the many strange sounds at night often caused her to cry out with fright, awakened of mornings more slowly than the others. Twice, in her half-sleep, she had run to the door in her nightgown, crying she had to go outdoors; then, awakening quickly to Enoch’s jeering laughter, she had gone silent and ashamed to the bathroom. Quiet, forever quiet, was Cassie. She showed no sign of loving school and feeling at home there as did Clytie and Enoch, or of half hating it like Reuben. More lost and lonesome than afraid, she always seemed like a child away from home.

  This morning’s breakfast was like her others in Detroit. Meekly she sat and put bites of egg and biscuit into her mouth, chewed, swallowed, then took a sip of milk, gagged, set the glass down hastily; then came the trembling, guilty whimper: “I’m full, Mom. I cain’t eat no more.”

  “Aw, Cassie,” Gertie began, and stopped. Scolding her for taking food on her plate and not eating it was no good. She’d have to find something the child would eat. She looked at the half eaten egg, flat-yolked, gray, rubbery white, the biscuit burned on the bottom, too pale on top, smeared with margarine instead of butter. She wasn’t any good at coloring the stuff, but butter cost so. None of them ate the way they had
back home. Enoch was gone from the table, his egg unfinished. But he could snack off and on all morning, for Enoch, like the other third graders, went only half a day, his shift in the afternoon.

  Gertie remembered the clock, looked, and quickly started the job of getting them off to school. Cassie, as always, was tangled up in her snow-pants. Clytie was complaining that she could find no clean handkerchiefs. Enoch was reminding her that it was the day for Cassie’s milk money. This made Clytie recollect that soon the mothers club would have their Christmas bake sale, and couldn’t her mother come and bring something for the sale; and wasn’t there anything she could take for the Christmas basket drive; and how much money could they have for TB seals? Couldn’t they each have at least a dime?

  Gertie took change from the high shelf. She gave milk money, TB money, a can of pork and beans to Clytie, a can of tomatoes to Reuben for the food drive. Each child kissed her with a quick dabbing as it went out the door, hurriedly, for in the alley children were passing. Mike Turbovitch was begging Enoch to come play on the hockey pond, and behind him a girl in a bright red coat was calling Clytie. Even Cassie ran down the steps. Cassie had never told her, but Clytie had said that in the kindergarten room, right up on the wall where everybody could look at it, was a big picture Cassie had painted—a green hill with a black tree.

  Gertie closed both doors on Reuben, the last as always. She looked down at her hand. One nickel was left over the fifteen cents for Enoch this afternoon. Last night at the big store there’d been all that silver left. She had watched the machine and thought a twenty-dollar bill would do it. Then the girl had punched on the sixty-cent tax, and Clovis had reached in his pocket again, brought out a one, and paid it all without a word.

  She had been silent, shaking her head in weariness and wonder, as they drove homeward through the ugly, dimly lighted streets. “I wouldn’t mind so much,” she had complained at last, “if’n all that money ud buy a egg that was real fresh er some good fresh meal.”