The Dollmaker

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

  Gertie went on to the alley where Victor, red-faced and covered with sweat, looked mad enough to eat the three nails he had crooked in the wood. She handed Judy to Enoch and considered the nails and Victor. She was so weak, with her legs all atremble, and her arms, too, just from carrying Judy, she knew she couldn’t drive a nail in seasoned oak. But what were the words for telling a body how to drive a nail? She pondered, shaking her head.

  She took the hammer; the feel of it, the same old hammer she had used back home, was good in her hand. Victor held the stringer, and she set another nail by the three he had crooked. It wasn’t easy; the post jiggled in the damp sandy soil, and wouldn’t stay firmly against the iron-like oak stringer; and worse, it seemed like all the alley watched her wrestle with the contrary mess. However, it was only a moment until a great yell of triumph went up from the watching children. She rested, and then worked on until she got four stringers nailed and Victor could start putting up the flimsy little pickets.

  The yells and commotion in general awakened Clovis, who came to the door; and Enoch ran up to him crying, “We’re gonna have a fence, a real fence, Pop.”

  “But won’t it cost a heap? Recollect we’ll have to pay our part,” Clovis said in a low voice meant only for Enoch and Gertie; but Enoch, sticking out his chest almost as much as Mr. Daly, told his father that he had already paid for more than their part with money he’d got for running errands and such, and anyway, he’d managed to get a lot of the stuff for free.

  Gertie looked at Clovis with wonder; strange it was for open-handed Clovis to worry about the bit of money the fence would cost. “You short on money?”

  He shook his head. “Not bad. My pay checks ain’t been so big, missen time like I’ve been. This week that wildcat’ull make me short ag’in—but I recken I can meet all th payments. Th grocery bill at Zedke’s is mebbe gitten kind a big so’s I mebbe cain’t finish it off, but—” He licked his lips and studied her as if loath to trouble her with bad news, then spoke quickly, as if to be finished with the business: “Th trouble is, they’s a heap a talk out at th shop about a speed-up on a parts assembly line—an, well—they’s a bunch a hotheads yellen fer a strike, and everybody in my division ud most likely hafta go out in sympathy. Jist another wildcat, but—” He looked at her worriedly as she continued silent, wiping back her hair with a bended arm. “Gert, you oughtn’t to be out a doen sich. You ain’t able to mind that woman’s youngens, let alone build fence.”

  Gertie had been resting on the steps, but now she got slowly up, glad to feel that some of the quivering was gone from her knees. She turned toward the door; it was almost noon; Judy was hungry and Enoch’s ears were dirty. “I’ll never git my strength back a layen in bed—an already I’m so behind in everything I never will git caught up.”

  THIRTY

  THE HOUSE HUNTING WENT slowly. Mrs. Anderson usually got home late, tired and angry, near tears at times. “One hundred fifty dollars plus utilities for an apartment no bigger than out unit here—no place at all for the children to play. They did us a great favor even to consider taking the children. … Three hundred dollars for a house like that—furnished they call it; it’s so filled with junk there’d be no place for my piano. … But we have to have a place to live—but even after selling the place in Muncie there still won’t be enough for a down payment on the house and all the furniture we’ll have to buy—nineteen thousand they want—it’s almost new, one of the last houses built before the war—but ugh—the decorations: black roses in one bathroom. And it’s all so tiny, just a brick box big enough to hold the gadgets; no place at all for me to paint.” She sighed. “But Homer likes it. Why? The great Mrs. McKeckeran herself found it; it’s in the poorer section of her own neighborhood; and is Homer flattered?”

  The woman might have talked all through supper getting had not Joe come calling, and she remembered she was out of vegetables, though as usual she quarreled at having to buy them from “that smuggler,” as she sometimes referred to Joe, or from “that smuggled one,” by which she meant Joe’s nephew. Gertie went out for potatoes and turnips—cabbage was high now, but turnips, with the tops good enough for a bite of greens, were cheap. Joe smiled at her, and the nephew smiled; he wanted to say something, and studied her face an instant, smiling, hunting the word, but in the end snapped his fingers, laughing at his failure as he said, “No seeck.”

  “Well,” she said, and he nodded, pleased, repeating the word slowly, but it sounded like “weal.”

  It was a cold day with a mist of rain and at times a spit of snow, but Joe’s truck was piled high with flowers for setting which he sold along with the vegetables. Among them were some tiny lavender flowers such as Gertie had never seen. They made her think of the wild Sweet Williams back home—something wild for Cassie’s grave; then Enoch was begging, and Clytie, too: “Buy flowers, Mom. Buy flowers. Miz Schultz has already put pansies in her winder box.”

  Gertie touched the flowers, but firmly shook her head. Cassie’s marker came first. The nephew saw her glance and said, “Flowers,” slowly, smiling as he took a box of marigolds and bent above them sniffing, then held them out for her to smell. She shook her head again, and said the two words Max had told her to say when she wanted to be rid of a peddler, “No money.”

  He pondered a moment, looking past her to the fence, half finished now, with the earth behind it spaded. He turned, and after some consideration selected a box of pansies and a box of the little lavender ones and turned to Joe. Some talking in their language passed between them with Joe at first frowning and shaking his head, but at last he yielded to the insistence of the nephew, who turned to Gertie with a smile of victory as he set the flowers in her basket. “For free,” he said. “Not so hot.” But it seemed to Gertie that the flowers were only a little battered, a little wilted; the roots were damp and living.

  She wanted to thank him, but Max came running down her steps, and as always the nephew had eyes and tongue only for her. It was on Max that he had tried, one by one, the new, important words he gleaned from America; “credit, car, installment, movies, Coke, down payment, priest, mass,” along with the others, such as “dollar,” he seemed always to have known. He would watch her lips, smiling a little as she corrected his pronunciation.

  Enoch begged to set the flowers in a safe place close to the house wall, and where they would get the morning’s sun; but that night at supper Gertie felt guilty about the gift. Her words of, “No money,” to the nephew seemed like begging now when Clovis suggested that she buy more. “But I thought you was afraid you’d have to go out on a strike,” she said.

  He shook his head; some shut-down anger slipped across his eyes. “Not now; that steward that was a tellen us we ought to strike he got—well, kind a hurt an he’s in a hospital.”

  Gertie marveled that he seemed so little pleased; it was bad for anybody to get hurt, but if it had to be somebody she was glad it was the man who had wanted a strike. She started to ask about his hurt, but the children were all in a clamor of talking, and anyway she was tired with her mind wandering. More than anything she wanted to be alone with the man in the woods; but he had been moved again into the living room, for with screens instead of glass the bedroom on the alley was too noisy for Clovis to sleep in by day, and her lately acquired habit of working on the block of wood in stray moments of time through the day disturbed his sleeping.

  She, with Clytie helping, hurried through the hateful kitchen work, but still it seemed hours before the place was quiet, with the children in bed. Then, she was disappointed, angry, too, when just as she had readied herself for the man in the wood with a clean apron and freshly combed hair, the tool-and-die man came. Tonight, he held out to her a strange contraption of steel. “A gift for you,” he said, but looking round her to the block of wood as he went on to explain that the contraption was a part for the jig saw he and Clovis were making for her. This was the piece on which she would lay the wood for sawing. He’d made it in a parts place owned by a m
an he knew, and now he had a little hand work to do.

  She nodded, and tried to show some gratitude for this beginning of a gift; and hoped a little that he would never get it finished, for with the war everything in steel was hard to come by. Conscious of his curious glance on the man in the wood, she turned from it and got down the Christ for the unfinished crucifix, and worked on it while the two men sat by the kitchen table and worked on the jig saw. Tonight, they seemed wrapped in some dour troubled silence until Whit came, asking, “You uns seen th paper?”

  “I seen him,” the tool-and-die man said.

  The other two looked at him with interest. “What’d he say?” Whit asked.

  “He say anything about who he thought done it?” Clovis asked.

  “He couldn’t talk,” the tool-and-die man said. “Th papers didn’t tell th half a it. They didn’t use a rubber hose on him—knucks, lead pipe, and truck tire chains, I’d say.”

  Whit whistled. “Th paper said that when his wife come a runnen, she seen four men jump into th car. You talk to her?”

  The other shook his head. “She was there, but all she could do was bend over th bed and look at him, then turn around and walk back and forth like a crazy woman. ‘What’s he ever done?’ she’d say. ‘He’s always been such a good, sober, steady man,’ she’d say to th man in th next bed—like that had anything to do with it.”

  Whit finished his beer, set the bottle on the table. “You’d ought to a reminded her they killed Jesus Christ,” then added, as the other continued silent: “They’s a heap I think ain’t sorry; some’s sayen he was a commie, or leastways close kin to one.”

  The tool-and-die man lifted his head quickly at that. “You know he wasn’t commie; he did fool around with th Trotskyites a little. But mostly some hate him on account he couldn’t keep his mouth shut—always he hadda pop off on th Black Legion, th Silver Shirts; an one day he tore up some a Father Moneyhan’s literature. That was enough to make him a commie right on th spot.

  “You think,” Clovis asked slowly, guardedly, “it was somebody in th union afeared he’d egg us on to strike that done the beaten?”

  The tool-and-die man was angry now. “If th company can get enough good union men like you believing some union men half killed another union man, it’ll be fine—for th company.”

  Whit pondered, twirling his beer bottle. “He was ina right, too. They’ve set the production quota way too high.”

  “Sure he was ina right,” the tool-and-die man said. “Old man Flint knows we got a no-strike pledge. He didn’t raise th quota; he just took a few men off a line and let th rest do more work—a little a what he done in th depression.” He sighed. “It’s bad, but talks no good, not now; it ain’t safe. I tried to tell that to Bender, but he won’t shut up; he’ll be next, an they’ll kill him.”

  “Mebbe,” Clovis said, “th police can find who’s doen these beatens. Three union big shots beat up and half killed since February—all complainen about worken conditions; th police must be looken hard.”

  Whit broke into derisive laughter, and even the tool-and-die man smiled as he said: “Th police. You think they wanta find out who beat up some a old man Flint’s hands?”

  Not long after, they went away, and Gertie worked on the block of wood. Callie Lou was still tonight, so that she worked in peace, mostly on the cloth-covered shoulder; the shoulder drooped too much, she thought; so tired, so sorrowful. Why so sorrowful, so tired? The world, the block of wood were not herself. She realized that for a long time, maybe all the while she worked, she had been listening; it wasn’t clear two walls away; Detroit, even in its sleep, was too noisy to let human crying come so far, but still she knew it was Max who cried.

  This was different from her crying on the night Gertie had rubbed Enoch; no lostness now, only sorrow—sorrow because her number had won the money. Why so much sorrow, like the man’s wife shivering and crying? What had he done, the man, that they beat him so? She hadn’t bothered to ask, but he couldn’t be much if he ran around with men who got drunk and beat him up. Mrs. Anderson was most likely crying by her wall, sorrowful because she had a man and children. Mrs. Bommarita cried by her wall because her man was far away—maybe he flew tonight, a waist gunner, she’d heard say. And the pretty little Japanese woman so far from her home—maybe she cried, too.

  She realized she was tired, so tired the folds of cloth were blurring. But when she got into bed there was the crying still—plainer now—pure sorrow, like Cassie crying for Callie Lou; and she came wide awake, remembering, reliving, swung about by the tides of anger that made her want to walk the alleys, to pound the walls, to do anything but lie still while her mind went on and on, refighting all the battles lost. If she tore herself from Cassie, there was Reuben waiting, and if from Reuben, the lost land called, and then became a lost life with lost children. She thought of the pink medicine; take enough of it and maybe the anger and the hatred would leave her; she lifted on one elbow, but in a moment lay down again; with the anger and the hatred, the medicine would also take herself; and she had work to do, such a deal of work—the crucifix to finish, baby sitting, the fence to build.

  Next day and on the following days until it was finished, she worked on the fence in what time she could spare from her other work. Victor, who was now forever gay, whistling, or bursting into snatches of songs the words of which she could not understand, though the joy came clearly through, helped in the late afternoons as did the children. Girls as well as boys begged often for the privilege of driving a nail in one of the little pickets or of using the saw. Gertie, working always in a swarm of children, learned soon to keep her hammer in her hand and her nails in an apron pocket, for if she left either hammer or nails loose they were gone with the children.

  She was nailing pickets around by Victor’s corner one morning when she heard a train bell over in the switchyard begin a noisy clanging. She hammered hard to kill the sound, shivering, trembling, crooking the nail, but pounding on until it smashed into the wood, crook and all. Still, the sound, instead of dying, grew louder with the blowing of a train joining in. If the train could have blown for Cassie—she jabbed blindly into her pocket for another nail, but stopped, hammer uplifted when other railroad whistles began a loud, long screaming. These were joined almost at once by the cars and trucks all around her; even Casimir, stopped in front of Sophronie’s, ran out and began to blow his truck horn. Somewhere bells were ringing, then Enoch came shouting, “Mom, Mom, they’ve beat th Germans!”

  Mrs. Bommarita ran down her steps crying! “It’s over in Europe. Joe will come home.” She stopped suddenly and stood in the middle of the alley looking about her, speaking to no one but herself. “Th place where he hadda job sold out.”

  Mrs. Schultz, her baby on one arm, its bottle in her other hand, called to Mrs. Daly, “Maybe things will get cheaper now, an they won’t want so much for a down payment on a house.”

  “Ain’t it grand?” Mrs. Daly called from her stoop. “I’m hoping I can hear dear Father Moneyhan again; they hadda have more room for th war news so’s he went off du air. Wasn’t that patriotic now? We need men like him tu make du country turn around an clean up them communists while we’re at it—that’s what Mr. Daly says.” She nodded her head knowingly as she came on into the alley past the trash cans. “Du red squad anu FBI, dey’ll listen to um now. Oh, da t’ings Mr. Daly knows,” and she looked at Sophronie, who through all the bedlam had continued to hang clothes on the line. Jabbing home the last clothespin, she turned to Gertie, sorting slabs for pickets now, and smiled her timid, fleeting smile. “Well, I recken we’ll all be gitten laid off pretty soon.”

  The shouts of the children and the noise of the bells and whistles and horns gradually died, but the uncertainty, the wonder of what next, lingered in the alleys, and instead of joy there seemed to hang a heavy, troubled stillness. That night at supper Clytie wondered what the depression had been like; she’d heard some of the kids talking at school. Clovis, more silent than us
ual, told her somewhat shortly it was a time when there were about ten times as many men as jobs. His voice was so short and so troubled, too, that Clytie said nothing more; but at last, restless in the heavy silence, she turned to Gertie with talk of the lilac bush in her girl friend’s yard. “Tall as th two-storied house might nigh, an full, completely full, of buds for flowers. Mom, do you recollect any lilac bushes back home? Donna Mae’s mom says th smell, specially on a kinda still rainy day, beats anything you’ve ever smelled.”

  Gertie shook her head. “I don’t recollect any, but whatever they are I bet they cain’t beat wild plum er honeysuckle.”

  A few days later, however, Gertie had to admit that, though the smell of lilac flowers was maybe a shade too sweetish, it was stronger than any flower smell she had ever known. Clytie had brought an armload from her girl friend’s house, and that night in the smothery closeness the smell of the lilacs rose stronger than the chlorine water smell, dwarfing at times even the gas smell. The alley children brought sprays and boughs from the giant bushes set years before in the subdivision by the rusty lamp posts, so that the sweetness hung over the alley like the steel-mill smoke.

  It was on such a day, warmish and still, with a little mist of rain, that Max, dressed as if to go to work, came hurrying, softly sneaking through the front screen door. She stopped on seeing Gertie, and held out her hand empty, asking, but her glance wandered to the fruit jar of lilacs by the radio. “Them lilacs got me,” she said. “Boy, yu oughta see an smell um in New England—better than them in Ohio.” She wiggled the fingers of the held-out hand. “I gotta go. We looked at houses some more yesterday—one kinda nice—oldish, u pretty yard, th biggest lilac bush, full a bloom. Haven a lilac bush allatime could be nice if it could be allatime spring with warmish rain. Yu lost it?”