The Dollmaker

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

  Sophronie held to the table and swayed only a little as her eyes struggled to meet Gertie’s glance. “Recken I’ll fall on the merry-go-round? If a body fell jist right, they’d punch out their eyes—but I missed.” She made an unsteady motion toward a band of sticky tape on her forehead. “Missed,” she said, and started walking again, squeezing herself between table and wall.

  “Why’nt you lay down an rest fer a few minutes?” Gertie said.

  Sophronie took another unsteady step. “I dasn’t. My relief ain’t come. You know a body cain’t leave the merry-go-round er a moven line.”

  “But yer relief’s here,” Gertie said, and pushed Mrs. Anderson up to the table. “It’s here—th reilef,” she repeated, and hesitantly put her hand on Sophronie’s naked shoulder. “Come on, git over that dizziness so you can go back to work.”

  Sophronie stood leaning on Gertie. Her great red clawlike hands with their calloused palms and bandaged fingers dangled by the puny gray-white body. “I didn’t fall,” she said, smiling, proud, “but I’d better lay down.” She sagged completely into Gertie’s arms, still smiling, proud as she mumbled, “I never fell.”

  Gertie laid her on the sofa, but she roused and looked wildly about her. “Where’s Wheateye? I wantcha tu see her hair.”

  “I seed it,” Gertie said. “It’s real pretty.”

  “I done it myself. I ain’t hardly got time to be a real mother to my youngens no more.”

  She was sleeping when Homer came tiptoeing up the steps and creaking through the kitchen door, peering in like a timid thief. “You can come in now,” Mrs. Anderson said. “Mrs. Nevels got her to lie down and go to sleep. And she,” with a cold emphasis on the “she,” “doesn’t have at most more than an AB in psychology.”

  “There’s no discounting practical experience,” Homer said, and after telling Sophronie’s children, clustering on the doorstep, to go back home and be good, he went on into the living room. He stopped by the heating stove, and with the note-taking look in his eyes, he studied Sophronie as she lay, covered now, on the living-room sofa. He turned to Mrs. Anderson and reminded her that it was past time for them to be going. Mrs. Anderson reminded him they had no baby sitter. Then both turned to Gertie, though it was Homer who did the talking. “And we pay fifty cents an hour, just for sitting, no work at all,” he said, after a rather lengthy explanation of why they just had to go because they couldn’t be rude and refuse a business associate.

  “A boss, you mean,” Mrs. Anderson corrected, and smiled at Homer as she continued, “It would be seventy-five cents for a grown woman—a dollar an hour after midnight.”

  “Oh,” Homer said, and looked at Mrs. Anderson as if he would like to have a word alone with her, but he only cleared his throat.

  “Seventy-five cents,” Mrs. Anderson repeated. “There’ll be almost nothing to do but give Georgie his supper and Judy her bottle—it’s all fixed—when she wakes. They should both be asleep again by eight.”

  When they had gone, Gertie was at first more afraid of Georgie than of Sophronie. But Georgie, in turn, seemed afraid of her and gave surprisingly little trouble. He even stood by the door as she directed while she ran home long enough to get a piece of whittling and tell Clytie to set supper—turkey again, but maybe some of it would be good this time.

  Both Georgie and the baby went to sleep before nine o’clock, and Gertie took out her knife and whittling wood. Back in her own kitchen she had reached for the cross that would, if it be made right, bring in a good bit of money. Her hand had touched it on the kitchen shelf, but after a headshake of disgust she had turned away. If she couldn’t have the block of wood for Christmas, she would, she had suddenly decided, give herself the pleasure of a chickadee for Maggie to go with the St. Francis, finished now. She began working on a little chunk of maple saved from the scrap-wood kindling.

  The chickadee’s belly was roughly rounded out, and a tail feather rising, when there came a knocking, gentle, as if the knocker knew that behind the door there were babies and a drunken woman asleep. It was Mrs. Daly in her good churchgoing clothes, but snowy damp and rumpled as if from much walking about in the snow. She looked as if she had been crying, and her voice lacked the gay ring of the morning when she said, nodding toward the sofa where Sophronie lay: “Christopher told me. Her kids is all right. Anyt’ing I can do?”

  Gertie shook her head. “I figger,” she said, “that when her own youngens is good an sound asleep I’ll carry her home. That is, if her man ain’t back by then.”

  “He’ll set around up atta bowling alley or somewheres till time tu go tu work,” Mrs. Daly said.

  “I hope,” Gertie said, remembering his endless bottles of beer, “he ain’t off somewheres down an with nobody by him.”

  “Not him—Whit ain’t like some,” Mrs. Daly said. “He can take care a hissef.” She was still a moment, sighing, looking toward the living room where Sophronie lay. “I come,” she said at last, “to borrow Miz Anderson’s electric heater. I know she’s got one. I borrowed it last time Max set Maggie’s hair. If yu don’t mind I’ll look inu bathroom where she keeps it.”

  She was back in a moment with the heater, but stopped long enough to explain, “When I got home anu kids told me, I went over dere. Wheateye wasn’t gone tu bed fer cryen. She was before da looking glass looking at her hair. ‘It was cake colorings,’ she says. ‘Momma couldn’t see, an it won’t never come out.’ I went to work. I used everting—oxydol, yellow soap, shampoo soap, denna took Roman Cleanser. It’s like silver now, but she’s wentu sleep, pore t’ing, anu head wet, anu fire out. I couldn’t build upu big fire on accountu I gotta go out pretty soon. Yu kids, dey didn’t see?” she asked.

  “Nobody, I don’t recken,” Gertie said, “but that Miz Bommarita an me an th Andersons and your’n.”

  Mrs. Daly nodded like one relieved. “Them, I imagine, will all keep shut. I told mine to keep shut. Anu cake colorings is outa du kid’s hair. She’ll never know. No use pushing it in Sophronie’s face. It don’t do um no good. If,” she went on, reluctant to speak, but lonesome in her trouble, “feeling bad would make um quit, our father, he’d be home this night.”

  Something about her voice and the way she looked going down the steps into the dark alley made Gertie think of Cassie, afraid of school but going on in spite of the fear. She wished she could think of something to say, and in a moment old Solomon did come to her help, “‘Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.’”

  Mrs. Daly stopped on the bottom step to listen, then nodded. “Ain’t it u truth,” she said.

  Some time around midnight there was another knocking. It was Max with a jar of cold cream and a nightgown. “Mrs. Daly told me she was out like a light, so I thought I’d clean her up good so’s she won’t hafta see drunk make-up when she comes to.” She yawned, the blue rings that had been under her eyes in the morning were bluer now.

  Gertie whispered over the limber Sophronie: “Couldn’t I do it? You need yer sleep.”

  “I’m okay,” Max said. “I ain’t sleepy. I forgot my caffeine pills. None a th girls had none. I’ve drunk so much coffee it’s made me logy.” Then, gently, as over a sick baby, she began cleaning the worst of the make-up off Sophronie’s face. Finished, she stayed with the children during the few minutes it took Gertie to carry Sophronie home and put her to bed.

  The Meanwell unit, exactly like Gertie’s except that there was one bedroom less, was even more cluttered than her own with the celebration of the birthday of Christ. Empty beer and whisky bottles were mixed in with the broken and twisted ribbons and Christmas wrapping paper with its pictures of angels and candles and Santa Claus crumpled and torn into nightmarish little images. She saw a Santa Claus without his head, reindeer without feet, and wingless angels. The new doll buggy, snow-soaked and battered, cluttered the passway to Sophronie’s bedroom.

  Gertie put
her to bed, then went to the other bedroom to look at the boys, sleeping together in the full glare of the unshaded bulb above them, their faces smeared with alley dirt and candy, and streaked as if from tears. Wheateye slept in a baby bed in the same room with the single bed that held the boys. The child’s face was clean, but now and then she gave a kind of sobbing breath and her eye lids were swollen and red. Her hair lay silver white and almost dry across the pillow, moving gently in the warm air from the heater, which careful Mrs. Daly had put a safe distance from the bed.

  She went last to the living room, where most of the space was taken up by a Christmas tree larger than their own. There was a strong smell of scorched paint, for Sophronie, like Clytie, had sprayed the tree with store-bought snow; and the red and green and orange lights still burned, unwinking as the red lights by the railroad tracks when a train had stopped.

  Gertie pulled the cord and the lights went out. Another pull and a newscaster telling of bombers dropping death on the enemy was still. As she walked across the alley, she saw Mrs. Daly silhouetted in her doorway. She stopped when the little woman called to her, her voice thin and lonely-sounding among the tipped over trash cans and across the dirty snow, “Dey okay?”

  “Fine, everthing’s jist fine. I don’t see how you cleaned that hair.”

  “Twas harder ona kid den me. She got Roman Cleanser in her eyes—pore t’ing.” Then, after asking Gertie if she would turn off the heater and lock the door on the children when she went home from the Andersons’, she turned back into her doorway after a last long look down the alley.

  Not long after, when Gertie had almost finished the chickadee’s tail, she heard the Daly door open and shut, and then Mrs. Daly’s feet down the steps and crunching away through the snow. The door did not open again.

  She must have drowsed over the chickadee, for Mrs. Anderson was saying in a low breathless voice, as if she had been running “You forgot to lock the door,” then asking, “Is everything all right?”

  “Fine,” Gertie said. “They’ve slept like fresh-fed lambs. Georgie was good. I sung him to sleep.”

  “Homer’s studies indicate that rocking or singing a child to sleep is bad, very bad,” Mrs. Anderson said, kicking off her slippers, then shaking their snow into the sink.

  “What’s bad?” Homer asked, opening the storm door.

  “The weather,” Mrs. Anderson said.

  Homer glanced at her shoes. “I’d have driven you to our walk instead of stopping at the parking place if you’d told me you’d worn your good suede shoes without rubbers. Snow ruins suede,” he said, bending to appraise the damage.

  “So does old age,” Mrs. Anderson said, looking toward the unlighted living room. “How’s Sophronie?”

  “I took her home,” Gertie said.

  “Lucky, lucky woman,” Mrs. Anderson said. “I thought of her all evening—with envy—peacefully sleeping, unconscious of the fact that two thousand years ago in Bethlehem of Judea, Christ was born. ‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.’ That is so true—so true. One, in order to inherit, must first die. ‘Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.’ For in truth we are all brothers in Christ—But I’d better not say that. It’s communists, don’t you think? We all drink from the same cup—Dear me, that’s worse yet.”

  She had, after much groping, found the string for the living-room light. She jerked it on but continued to stand, her hand lifted to the string, her face upturned as it had been when she looked for the light in the dark. “Homer, do you think it’s possible that Joseph Daly in our alley and Mr. Turbi in Grosse Pointe could have drunk from the same cup? Mr. Turbi is one of Homer’s bosses,” she explained to Gertie, still looking at the light. “And he is in trouble—very great trouble. A Jew has moved into his neighborhood, only six doors away.”

  She gave a shiver, turned away from the light. “Isn’t it horrible? He is certain other Jews will move into the neighborhood. Oh, I wept for Mr. Turbi. The pity of it, to work so hard and be just a little man in a little house, then Providence—no, it was God—I’m sure it was God. No, it would have to be Christ, the Prince of Peace. Jews believe in God, and Mr. Turbi wants nothing Jewish, but Christ was born to a Jewish mother. Dear God, whatever will Mr. Turbi do? Make his own Christ in his own image. Isn’t that what we all do? Here, Mr. Turbi’s Christ, the Prince of Peace, the decontaminated one, sent a war just for Mr. Turbi’s benefit. He got to be a big man in a big company in a big house in Grosse Pointe. The nasty war kept him from buying a new house, but everything in it is new. Sophronie would love it. All new, new, new. The early-American antiques in the living room are so new, everything a new tombstone for the old Mr. Turbi—the poor part—and a Jew has dared, actually dared, move into a house only six doors away.”

  She flung her hands wide and looked at Homer staring at her from the doorway. “Oh, Homer, darling,” and she smiled the strange smile that, it seemed to Gertie, came only when the woman wanted to cry, “isn’t it terrible—the pity of it, poor, poor Mr. Turbi!” She turned back to Gertie, who stood trapped between Homer and the stove, holding her coat. “And Mrs. Nevels, do you know about the Reds? They’re taking over. The unions, Mrs. Nevels, they’re red, red, crimson like Christ’s blood on Calvary we used to sing about in church. Did you know that some unions insist on treating coons like white men? Ugh.”

  “Lena—darling. Please.”

  She held up her hand, gave a slight giggle. “Homer, darling, some day when you say ‘Lena’ that way you’ll forget the ‘darling’ entirely. But maybe that time won’t come until you start taking notes on me. You listened so respectfully while Mr. Turbi discoursed on baseball, but all the same you are suspect. You did not know the batting average of Loy McGafferty. One shows ignorance only of lesser men like—Gandhi. They hadn’t a book in the house.”

  “Lena, you’ve had a cocktail or two too many. The Turbis have a library.”

  “A room done in books, you mean,” Mrs. Anderson said. She looked aggrieved. “Homer, darling, your psychology isn’t working today. Did you take it off and put your Christmas spirit on?” She stretched her arms, yawning. “Oh, Lord, I want to be home. I know you’re right. It isn’t good for children to be separated from their fathers, but couldn’t I go back and stay on the farm with Mom until—” She saw that Homer wasn’t listening.

  He was staring absent-mindedly at his desk, his fingers working through the part in his sparsing hair. “I wonder what she or Turbi was? Italian? Jewish? I can’t decide, for I must admit they are quite nicely smoothed over. If there were statistics available, one could write a most penetrating sociological study of Detroit’s upper industrial class—its origins and its tastes.”

  “But you seemed to find their tastes so interesting. I mean, not just as thesis material,” Mrs. Anderson said, her voice lonesome-sounding.

  “I am a man of many interests, my dear. And in business, you must remember, one has to make a few concessions.” He turned abruptly to Gertie, for he had never noticed that she couldn’t go home until he moved out of the passway. “Speaking of business,” he said, smiling as if he handed her a fortune, “I have some for you. Your wood carving on my desk was noticed even by Mr. Turbi. Mrs. Turbi wondered tonight if you couldn’t make some dolls, something unusual that one couldn’t find in a store. She wants them—they must be different, of course—for the doll collections of two little girls; daughters of business associates, you know. Rather smallish, but nicely featured, and jointed at knees, elbows, and waist, and—Lena, did she say ‘jointed at the head’?”

  “She forgot that, but she didn’t forget to say to try to get them for two dollars each. Five isn’t enough for so much work,” Mrs. Anderson said, looking at Gertie. “Don’t do it for less.”

  “Three ud mebbe be about right,” Gertie said, yawning, moving toward the door, for Homer, taking off his overcoat now, had at last moved.

  “Perhaps if they’re walnut or some good w
ood and …” Homer’s voice had grown more and more absent-minded, and at last stopped altogether as he considered his overcoat held in one hand for hanging. His speculative and slightly displeased glance went from the overcoat to the cuff of the dark blue suit he wore. “You know, dear, we have to begin to think about getting some clothing. This suit—”

  “It’s practically new,” Mrs. Anderson interrupted in surprise.

  “Oh, it’s new enough,” Homer said, his voice displeased as his glance, “but—well, a dark business suit just won’t do for every occasion; for casual wear everybody wears slacks and jackets. Mr. Turbi’s closets are full of—”

  As she escaped through the kitchen, Gertie heard Mrs. Anderson’s lonesome-sounding cry: “Everybody? Is Mr. Turbi then everybody—for us?”

  TWENTY

  EARLY ONE SATURDAY MORNING during Christmas vacation, just as Clovis got in from work, a worried Sophronie came knocking. Her eyes were cold with fright above the rouge and lipstick as she asked if Gertie could watch Wheateye while she went with Whit to take the boys to the doctor, for it was their tonsil taking out day.

  “Sure,” Gertie said, and offered to give Wheateye supper as well as lunch if Whit wanted to stay at the hospital late after Sophronie went to work.

  Sophronie shook her head, and looked more frightened still. “That doc—Edwards is his name—said they didn’t need to go to no hospital.” She took a quick puff of cigarette smoke, and in her agitation swallowed it, then coughed long and hard into her closed fist. “I tried to tell him about onct—it was when we had that place uv our own in Dearborn before Whit got laid off—they was a neighbor woman, she lived right acrost th street. Her little boy had his tonsils out, and she brung him home jist like I’m bringen mine. Nothen atall, her doctor said, jist like mine. I seed her little boy when she brung him home. He got stiller an stiller an whiter an whiter, but they wasn’t no blood a body could see. Fin’ly he looked so still an kinda blue she went off to telephone. He quit breathen, they said, while she was a tryen to git th doctor on the phone. He’d bled to death and swallered th blood.” She shivered. “I wanted mine in th hospital, but that doc wouldn’t do it.”