The Dollmaker

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

  “Mebbe not,” Gertie said. She pondered above the ironing. Enoch’s overalls now. “Mebbe she liked you th first time she seen you an thought you two ud git along good together.”

  “But get along with which one? She’s two people,” Mrs. Anderson insisted.

  Gertie considered Mrs. Anderson instead of the ironing. “Not exactly two people, maybe. Leastways, she’s better off than some. She knows she’s two people.”

  “Du cops, du cops,” Georgie, Enoch, and others were screaming in the alley.

  Mrs. Anderson jerked open the door. “And poor Homer will miss it. I’ll bet Mr. Karadjas is beating up his wife’s boy friend again.”

  “It was th boy friend done th beatin, er so I heared,” Gertie said, following her to the door, open now, filling the room with alley cries.

  “Du cops, du cops is comen.” Wheateye was jumping up and down on the coalhouse crying: “Dey’re gonna git Mr. Daly. Daly’s gotta go to jail. He beat Miz Daly.”

  Above Wheateye’s voice rose the cries of the younger Dalys, running out their kitchen door: “Cops is comen fu mu mudder. Little Sister, her couldn’t wait.”

  “Oh, my God,” Mrs. Anderson breathed, then all sounds were drowned in the screaming of a siren, the sound that had at first thrown the children into ecstasies of joy, near now, louder and shriller than even the best ones on the radio.

  Mrs. Saito, the little Japanese woman who lived on the end next to Mrs. Daly, came hurrying up the alley as if returning from an errand. Though she was the politest person Gertie had ever known, she took no time for knocking now, but hurried through the Daly door. She was hardly inside before a scout car whirled out of the through street into the big alley. Its siren came again in a long shrieking wail as it bounced and careened over the rough ground. The children squealed with joy as it skidded on the muddy gravel in turning sharply to get into the little alley and threatened for an instant to run right through the unit on the end, but disappointingly righted itself in time to stop with a squeal of brakes and a smaller skid in front of the Daly door.

  A policeman sprang out just as Mrs. Daly, neatly dressed, smiling, but walking with difficulty, came down her steps, followed by Mrs. Saito with a small suitcase. The cop helped Mrs. Daly into the car. An instant later she was gone, siren screaming, brakes and tires screeching, and the envious glances of all the alley children following after.

  Mrs. Anderson was for an instant able to say nothing more than, “One would think that after eight she wouldn’t be caught at the last minute like this.”

  Sophronie, who like most of the other night shifters, including Clovis, had been awakened by the siren, stuck her head around the door and smiled, “Lookut th cab fare she saves, though.”

  Mrs. Bommarita, staring wrathfully at her freshly scrubbed walk, spattered with mud from the whooshing scout car, shrugged her shoulders with disgust. “Last time her done it, I just got in this place ana didn’t know her so good. Yu know what she told me: her’d be glad her pains come on so fast her couldn’t wait to call Mr. Daly home from work. S’hard on him, she said. Can yu beat it?”

  “Maggie is the one it’ll be hard on,” Mrs. Anderson said.

  “We’ll all hafta hep watch them little youngens,” Sophronie said. “That Miz Saito, she works a midnight shift. She’s gotta sleep some a th time,” and after yawning a moment she hurried down the alley calling, “Hey, you,” to small Mrs. Saito, struggling now to get a young Daly, who in the excitement had run out without his shoes, back into the house.

  Sophronie and Mrs. Saito were just getting all the little Dalys within doors when Mrs. Schultz, who lived between Sophronie and the Millers, came onto her stoop, and called to Sophronie: “I’ll fix their lunch and watch them till Maggie comes home. I don’t have to sleep like you two.”

  Mrs. Anderson continued silent, but Gertie, feeling guilty, called: “I don’t have to work away from home, an I ain’t got no real little uns. I could watch em an feed em too.”

  “Your turn will come, don’t worry. She’ll be gone at least three days,” Mrs. Schultz said, smiling at Gertie, and Gertie smiled back, admiring the woman. She was held to be the best housekeeper in the alley, and in spite of five children, three of whom were under school age, she did all her own sewing, and often her marketing, for her husband was a fireman, and kept strange hours.

  The little Dalys, when all were combed and in their shoes, disappeared through the Schultz door, from which came inviting smells of apple pie. The alley children came pounding back from chasing the scout car; and Enoch called to Gertie, just turning into her door: “Mom, didja know that if she has it inu scout car she’ll mebbe git her pitcher inu paper? An th baby’s too.”

  “No,” Gertie said, trying not to let Mrs. Anderson see how much this talk of women having babies plagued her. Back home she had never heard the subject discussed at all until after she was married and had borne Clytie, and then only in whispers among the older married women. But here, all of Mrs. Daly’s symptoms, from her morning sickness to her fits of temper, were discussed by everybody in the alley, including Mrs. Daly and her children, often in loud callings such as Enoch called now. Gertie, however, was saved from further embarrassment by Enoch’s sudden remembrance of his perpetual quarrel with her: Why couldn’t he go up to Zedke’s and buy a Coke with Mike? Mike got at least one Coke every day and sometimes two, besides candy. Why was she so stingy?

  Gertie sighed, and turned back into the kitchen, thankful that it was Judy’s nap time and Mrs. Anderson had gone. She looked at the clock; it was almost time to get lunch for the school children; and she glanced anxiously at the banana cream pie she had baked, mostly to tempt Cassie’s lagging appetite.

  Today, however, Cassie ate quite a bit of lunch. Later she played happily enough outdoors, and not always by the railroad fence, for she, like most of the rest of the alley, must be always running here and yonder, calling, hunting little Dalys. But in spite of them all, the stove wrecker slipped around to the front of Victor’s unit where nobody ever played, and using a fork, a spoon, and a nail file dug a hole through Victor’s living-room wall. Nobody knew until Victor flung open his seldom used front door and cried: “But why for because yu gotta dig a hole in mu unit? G’wan, dig a hole in yu own house.”

  But he slammed his door, defeated in the face of the derisive answer: “Oh, yeah? Go cool yu can. Yu ain’t me Uncle Sam. Nobody owns dis project but me Uncle Sam. Yu don’t own nutten.”

  “We’ll have to build fences,” Mrs. Anderson said when the tumult had quieted, and she went on to tell of the time last summer before Judy was born when Claude Jean Meanwell had dug a hole in her bedroom wall. She had been napping when she awakened to soft giggles, but unable to see anything except a small dirty hand waving at her from the wall; she had screamed so with fright, half awake as she was, that Claude had choked with laughter on his popsicle. He had turned blue and alarmed the alley, but the popsicle melted before the rescue squad from the fire department got to the scene.

  Gertie wondered how the summer would be, and looked about for Cassie. She found her soon, off by herself again, by the railroad fence.

  TWENTY-SIX

  THERE WAS DISAPPOINTMENT IN the alley when, after all their troubles with her children, Mrs. Daly did not get her picture in the paper. It was homecoming time for day-shift workers when a blurry-voiced, too stately stepping Mr. Daly, dressed in his Sunday best, announced to all who wanted to hear that he was on his way to see his wife, who had been delivered of a daughter in St. Theresa’s Hospital at two fifty-seven that afternoon. He had gone high-stepping it out of the alley and, according to Mrs. Bommarita, who’d listened through her wall, he hadn’t got home until almost three in the morning; she knew because he’d wakened Maggie, and Maggie’s crying by the wall had wakened her.

  However, next morning, when Maggie stopped by on her way home from mass—she was staying out of school to mind the children but had to leave them long enough for mass—she was her usual smiling self
as she offered Gertie a fifty-cent ticket to a bingo party with door prizes of china dinner plates.

  Gertie shook her weary head against the dishes, and closed her door with relief. It seemed that she had run into the alley a thousand times to see about the little Dalys, two of whom had gone several blocks as stowaways on a milk truck and might have been gone all day had not the driver discovered them and hastily as well as angrily returned them to the alley.

  She forgot about the Dalys when her own came home for lunch. Clytie was angry, splattered from head to foot with mud. “An, boy, did them guys laugh when they whooshed right by th curb in that ole clunker an made us girls jump an scream.”

  Worse than Clytie’s trouble was Gertie’s realization that Cassie was no place in sight. Frightened, she had run down the alley hunting, before she found her fooling along by the railroad fence. “Your dinner’ull be cold,” she called in sharp scolding.

  “I ain’t hungry, Mom. Cain’t I jist stay outside?”

  Gertie, more troubled than angry now, hurried up to her, and saw that she had been crying, and at her, “What’s th matter, honey?” Cassie dissolved in weak hopeless tears, such as she had never shed.

  Gertie picked her up as if she were a baby, and learned as they walked home that: “I wet on myself, Mom. I done it right where all th youngens could see.” And the shamed and sobbing whisper, coming up from the face buried on her shoulder: “An all th youngens they laughed at me. Don’t tell Clytie, Mom.”

  “Lots a little youngens has done sich at school. Don’t feel so bad now, even if that ole Miz Huffacre did talk mean to you. One a these days …” She shut her mouth into a straight hard line. Promises, that was all she’d ever given Reuben.

  “Oh, Miz Huffacre,” Cassie said, “she said lots a little youngens had done sich when they didn’t feel good er somethen. But, Mom, she asked me did you git her note. Mom, do you recken she’s mad at me?” And Cassie cried again.

  She continued to cry with a weary sobbing as Gertie changed her clothing, telling a little lie to the others that Cassie had fallen into a puddle. She was so miserable, not wanting any lunch, that Gertie picked her up and for want of a rocking chair sat on a straight-backed chair in the living room, and tipping back and forth, sang one of Cassie’s favorites: “‘I’ve reached the land of corn and wine; and all its riches freely mine; here shines undimmed one blissful day …’” Her voice, at first low, grew louder as the child snuggled against her, drowsing with half closed eyes, and on the chorus, “‘Oh, Beulah land, sweet Beulah land,’” her voice was forgetful, booming out as in the old days.

  Enoch, eating a sandwich in snatches crouched by the radio, began complaining: “Mom, you’re a maken so much racket I cain’t hear Silver Sam. Sing in her bedroom.”

  “I’d mebbe wake Sophronie er your pop.”

  “Well, sing in mine.”

  “Victor’s got to have his sleep, too.”

  Clytie was calling in a shus-shushing, chiding voice: “Mom, you’re already a waken Pop. I can hear him a groanen.”

  Gertie sat for an instant like one ready to rise. Let Clovis wake up and go now and see Miss Huffacre and learn what was this trouble with Cassie. She looked at the child, and began rocking her again, soundlessly, moving only her body now. Her face down in the crook of her own big arm looked so little and pale and tired, or lonesome, more lonesome than tired, she decided. Maybe she’d doze off and wake up happier; but if they all started talking about Miss Huffacre now she’d start crying again. Gertie continued to rock silently, looking down at the drowsing child, and wanting nothing except the privilege of holding her. But in only a few minutes Cassie came wide awake and looked wildly about her. She slid from her mother’s lap, yawning, but asking, “Can I go outside, Mom?”

  Gertie cleaned her tear-smudged glasses. “Whyn’t you stay inside, mebbe take a little nap? It’s so cold and raw outside, like a January thaw back home; er if,” she coaxed, “you cain’t sleep, you could show me how good you can read. You ain’t read fer me in days and days.”

  Cassie shook her head, glanced at the block of wood. “That wouldn’t be no fun. I hafta play. Cain’t I, Mom?”

  Gertie pondered, studying her; maybe a little running about would make her hungry, take her mind from what had happened at school. She said nothing as Cassie struggled into her snowpants, put on her boots, hurrying a little, her tired sleepy face determined, hard-pressed somehow, like Sophronie’s on her overtime days, when she slept too late and had to fight the clock until time to go to work again.

  Gertie, busy with a washing, saw her in the alley now and then, some-times with Amos, but mostly alone, playing the game of airplane she had learned in kindergarten or singing little songs. The afternoon shift of school was over, and still Cassie played, in front of her own door now, where she and the smaller Dalys and Georgie built a school. Cassie became Miss Huffacre, the side of the coalhouse a blackboard, a piece of kindling wood a pointer. Cassie would point to a knothole and cry: “That word is ‘skip.’ Now, children, show what it tells you to do.” There were many words: “run,” “jump,” “skip,” “sing”; and the children amid much laughter and many shouts did the bidding of each word.

  The fun attracted a little crowd; even Wheateye, eating what looked to be a quarter of a large-sized head of cabbage, watched critically for a time, but at last cried: “That ain’t no blackboard. An yu ain’t no teacher—cuckoo.”

  The bigger Dalys took up the cry of, “Cuckoo, cuckoo,” and Cassie, after standing a moment, red-faced and silent, Miss Huffacre’s smile frozen on her face, dropped the kindling-wood pointer and ran away. Wheateye immediately seized it, and holding it in one hand and the cabbage in the other, continued the school, amid much chewing of and at times strangling on cabbage.

  The Dalys, weary of being pupils, repeated Wheateye’s cry of, “That ain’t no blackboard, yu cuckoo kid,” turning it on Wheateye, who quickly crammed the remainder of the cabbage into her mouth, and so having both hands free, bopped the kindling-wood pointer hard against the seat of Jimmy Daly’s pants, and then on the stove wrecker’s head.

  “I’m the principal, sillies,” she yelled, as they turned in retreat.

  “Yu don’t know nutten,” Jimmy cried. “Youse don’t learn nutten ata ole public school but communism. Da good sisters, dey hitcha ona hands. Come on, kids; da devil’ll gitcha fu goen tuda public school—cuckoo—crazy.”

  “Yu’re expelled,” Wheateye cried. “Git out,” she screamed, ducking dirt from Jimmy, a tin can from the stove wrecker, and at the same time getting in two good licks with the kindling wood, good enough that the Dalys retreated. She saw the Miller children of kindergarten and first-grade size, and called to them to come and play school, then looked about calling: “Cassie, hey, Cassie, come on an play. Yu can be teacher an I’ll be th principal. An bring yu girl friend, what’s her name—Callie Lou. She can be th bad kid, an we’ll make her stand in a corner like we done th other day. An these Millers can be th good kids. Ana Dalys can be th real bad kids wot comes an breaks th winder lights an throws th books ona floor when we’re gone. Come on, Cassie.”

  Cassie’s smile at being called back to play was like a light across her eyes. Her mittened hand went out, seizing the witch child’s hand, and her voice held the old burbling. “Come on, yu mean youngen. Miss Huffacre’s gonna make yu stand in the corner.”

  Jimmy Daly watched her jealously. “Nuts inu bean, hillbilly. Talks to herself. Nuts inu bean.”

  Georgie, coming down his steps, his vigor renewed with a vitamin pill, a rest period, and the prescribed mid-afternoon snack, took up the cry, “Nuts inu bean.”

  Cassie dropped her hand and stood red-faced, looking uncertainly at Wheateye, who was only now swallowing the last of her mouthful of cabbage, tossing her head, wriggling her neck to make it go down in a hurry. The cabbage down, she twirled her kindling wood and cried to Cassie: “Run, honey, run. Them wild mean kids wanta hurt yu little kid. Yu gotta stand up fu yer kid.” />
  The hand flew out, protective now, but Cassie, when almost opposite the door, looked up and saw Gertie watching, listening. Her mother was stern-faced and frowning, for she had been wondering for the last five minutes if she oughtn’t to tell Wheateye to be quiet, or else go somewhere else to play. They’d waken Victor again—and Clovis, too.

  Cassie’s hand dropped, her smile faded, as her mother’s glance touched her, and ever an obedient child, she mumbled to Wheateye, her voice choked and guilty, “They ain’t no Callie Lou.” She ran then, and did not stop until she was out of sight around Max’s corner.

  No one came to Wheateye’s calling, “Come back, come back; we gotta have Callie Lou.”

  Gertie went back into her kitchen to turn down the gas flame under the boiling beans. She bumped her head on the high shelf as she turned, but never noticed it for thinking on Callie Lou, smiling. All this business of doing away with Callie Lou had been a mistake. Suppose Miss Huffacre had heard the child talking to herself and felt about it the way Mrs. Anderson did? Cassie could have Callie Lou at home. She, Gertie, couldn’t kill her when already she lived in the alley.

  She waited a moment on the steps, watching for Cassie, and when she did not come went to the end of the building and around Max’s unit hunting her, smiling. She’d call out, “Lady, lady, bring that black-headed child in out a this raw cold,” or some such, and Cassie couldn’t talk for giggling, and then she’d feel so good she’d eat a great big supper.

  Cassie was not in the paper-littered water-soaked strip of earth between the front of their building and the front of the next, nor was she by the railroad fence. Gertie stood in the alley by the fence and looked about her, uncertain whether to go looking in the next alley or back to the other side of her own building. Quick-footed Cassie had most likely run all the way around as she often did. She wouldn’t stay here in all this smoke, for on the other side of the fence a train stood on the side track. The switch engine was still in front of a long string of boxcars, broken apart at the through street. It had dropped off cars for the steel mill and was waiting, with smoke and steam flying up, to back across the street and pick up the caboose and the other cars.