The Dollmaker

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

  She pretended to be busy pulling up the dead flowers while Joe waited on the other women, but she saw with swift glances from the corners of her eyes that he had help, for she saw a hand reach out with sacks of things. She wondered a moment if it could be the nephew, whom she had not seen in some days, then forgot him in thinking on how it would be to ask Joe for credit. Mrs. Bommarita, the last customer, was paying now, and Gertie, in her embarrassment and eagerness to be done with the business, hurried through her gate, and spoke too quickly and so loudly that Mrs. Bommarita looked around. The woman stopped and listened as Gertie, the empty Josiah basket twisting on her arm, began, “Joe—” She was even more embarrassed when she remembered that Joe was maybe not his name. Max had called all peddlers Joe. “Yu gotta call um something: they’re people,” Max had said.

  Whatever his name, he was studying her confusion now, his dark eyes smooth as ever, “I got—” she began again. “We’re gitten kinda hard run.” She’d better not say Clovis was sick; credit would come harder to a sick man than to one just on strike. “My man’s out on strike. Could I git credit?”

  He considered her a moment longer. “Hokay,” he said, the words almost a sigh, his face angry, the long wrinkles in his cheeks twisted as when he had bawled out the nephew.

  She moved nearer, fumbling over the potatoes; a smear of their black dirt stuck to her sweaty palm. Did it always come so hard, this credit asking? It was Clytie, she remembered, who had asked credit of Zedke. “Home-grown,” Joe was saying over the apples. “Cheap. Sweet potatoes, nice—” He remembered, and never named the price; a striker’s wife on credit could not buy the always expensive sweet potatoes.

  She bought a peck of the cheapest Irish potatoes, and he called in his own language into the back of the truck, apparently for his helper to weigh the potatoes, for he waited motionless for her next order. Gertie’s flustered glance wandered over the produce displayed near the letdown tailgate, and then for the first time it chanced deeper into the truck. She saw then among the fruits and vegetables the moving brightness of a boy’s jacket, shiny green with red sleeves, all of smooth rayon such as that of children’s snowsuits. The nephew, she thought, for he loved bright clothes.

  “Cabbage,” she said, taking her glance and her thoughts away, “that is, if it’s kinda cheap, an good solid heads. A big head I’d ruther have, an then some onions—jist them little cooken kind.” She looked at the abundance spread in front of her, as Joe called to his helper in the back of the truck. The purple home-grown grapes were so cheap—but she couldn’t ask for a penny more credit than what she just had to have.

  She felt water come into her mouth, staring as she was at the grapes. Seemed like in the summer a body got so hungry for all the raw stuff they could eat; it was fall now and none of them had ever had all summer his fill of good fresh fruit and garden truck. A large cabbage was thrust between her and the grapes. She took it, looked at it, hefting, considering. “How much?” she asked, and lifted her head.

  The nephew took the cabbage as he smiled at her, then turned toward the scales. She knew she must, but she could not take her eyes away. It was so dark in the truck, she was imagining there was a bruise about the nephew’s eye; and anyway it was on the right side. She brushed the back of her hand across her eyes; his head was sidewise to her now, bent above the scales, but still the bruise was there, and more plainly the bruised and once-torn ear, covered with some whitish salve, but the wound still showed—like the first time she’d tried to mark a pig’s ear; its pitiful squealing had unhanded her.

  “Lady, yu wanta white onions?”

  She turned quickly to Joe; the boy studying the scales had never noticed her glance. “White,” she said, remembering Clovis’s, “They all sound alike.” The boy would know when she spoke that she talked like the man he had hurt and who had hurt him. He and his people were looking for Clovis as Clovis looked for him; but Whit and Clovis both declared they hadn’t so much as grunted; the tool-and-die man had warned them against it.

  “How many, ladee?”

  She kept her eyes steadfastly on the vegetables, and tried to remember how many of what. “A gallon,” she said at last. The cabbage was below her face again, and the boy, proud of his English and his mastery of the scales said, “Twanty-one cents,” then adding, smiling, “nice—cheap.”

  She looked at him again, not meaning to. He smiled, a warm smile, like when he had given her the flowers. She turned confusedly away, and grabbed the Josiah basket into which Joe had dumped the potatoes to save a bag, then realized the boy had been holding out the cabbage all this time. She reached for it and would not look at him as he reminded her, saying, “Cabbage.”

  She darted toward her door, but stopped when Joe said, “Wait, ladee.” She turned part way back and waited while he took a little worn notebook from a pocket and, after looking at her load, wrote numbers while she stood trying hard not to look at Sophronie’s door or Miller’s door, or even her own, and whispering somewhere below sound, “Please, Lord, get the boy out of the alley, quick.”

  The book closed, and she turned, remembering she must go slowly and not act afraid. But Joe again said, “Wait.” She could not, and, still moving, looked at him over her shoulder. He was smiling like old John when he told her she could have the land. “Ladee,” he said slowly, no longer the seller of vegetables, but a friend, “allatime people gotta strike. Yu gotta strike. Th union.” And in his mouth the word was like a curse, but for her he smiled. “Yu not starve. Credit good. Times good.” He turned and said something to the nephew.

  Gertie, though understanding that Joe was not yet finished with her, continued to move toward her door, watching him over her shoulder. The boy handed out a bushel basket half full of overripe peaches. “Take du peaches. Tomorrow—no good. Spoil,” Joe said, taking the basket from the boy, shoving it toward her. He saw that her arms were burdened, the filled basket on one, the large cabbage on the other. He gave a quick command; the boy came, and stood hesitant on the tailgate. He glanced swiftly around him like one half afraid, and Gertie saw he looked palish, as if he had been sick or some time indoors. Joe gave a swifter, sharper command, and the boy sprang down, took the basket, smiling up at Gertie as if to say that whatever dangers lurked about for him there could be none with her.

  “Automobile—accident,” Joe said, seeing her eyes flick the boy’s face.

  She was unable to thank Joe, unable to think of anything except that in another moment the boy would be on her stoop with Clovis just behind the kitchen door. “No, no,” she burst out, springing away, “I don’t—he mustn’t—”

  Joe patted her arm. “Now—ladee—no charitee—gift. Yu kids lika du peaches.”

  She dashed up the walk, the boy behind her. She glanced quickly at her kitchen door, the inner door ajar just as she had left it, but the blind was pulled; it hadn’t been when she came out. Amos came scooting through a hole in the fence, leaped up to see what the boy carried in the basket, then at once began crying, “Peaches; Mom’s gotta lot a peaches.”

  Gertie set her own basket quickly on the stoop, grabbed the basket of peaches just as the boy started to open the kitchen door, “Thanks,” she gasped, “you’d better hurry back to—”

  “Bring backa da basket,” Joe was calling.

  She heard her own hard breathing as she opened the storm door, and went through the partly opened inner door. “Wait,” she said over her shoulder, struggling with the word, it came through with such a choking. “I’ll git somethen tu put em in.”

  The basket scraped against the narrowly opened inner door, but the door would open no wider, for Clovis was behind it, his long thin body crouched as he looked through the crack the door made in its opening. In one swift glance she saw the side of his face, teeth clenched, still, like the terrible stillness in his crouching body. She looked wildly about for a box, a pot, a sack, anything to hold the peaches. She could see nothing. The boy, she thought, was coming into the kitchen, for he held the storm doo
r part way open. She dumped the peaches onto the floor. They made a little banging thumping, but Clovis did not move, not even his eyes. She shoved the basket through the door. The boy took it, but still he lingered, looking toward Max’s door now, smiling. “Peaches—nice,” he said, moving only when she came through the door. She could neither nod nor answer, and he looked troubled and disappointed, then said again, even more slowly, more clearly, “Peaches nice—cheap. For free.”

  She nodded, and he smiled, pleased that she had understood. “You’d better git on,” she said, low-voiced, almost whispering. “Joe—won’t like it.”

  He smiled as if he understood, but was slow in turning about and looking at Joe, who had finished putting up the tailgate and was bending now to look for children’s legs on the other side of the truck. The boy nodded toward Victor’s stoop. “Max—sick?”

  “Gone,” she said. Clovis was gone too, now. She had felt him move behind her, for he had made no sound; and with the door half shut as it was, the boy, even had he been looking into the kitchen, could not have seen Clovis go.

  She stood, unmindful that Amos and a whole swarm of little children had gone into the kitchen and were messing round in the peaches spilled over the floor. She continued to stand after the truck had disappeared around the end of the alley, nor did she lift her eyes when an airplane screamed overhead, nor shiver when a moment later a through train roared by; but the sound roused her enough that she went within doors.

  She was like a person moving in her sleep as she got the children out of the kitchen, put the peaches into the other split basket, and cleaned the floor. In time she even remembered what it was she had been doing when the truck came. She finished marking out the board of dolls’ legs, then sat a moment, lips mumbling, head lifted at times as she tried to hear the words she would say to Clovis to take all his suspicion away.

  She took the board in to him after Enoch came from school; and she wasn’t certain but she thought it was the first time he had forgot to ask Enoch if he had seen a marked-up man. He was lying on the bed, his folded arms under his head, his eyes on the ceiling. Looking at him, she thought his face was wiped clean of the blind anger; now, it was as when he had worked on the washing-machine motor, a strange business, but a satisfying one, his face said, for he would puzzle his way through it, put it all together, make it work.

  “Clovis,” she said, laying the board on a chair, “that boy—” She stopped in the face of the effort to hear her own voice; she mustn’t sound troubled and excited, but easy and off-like—smooth—that was the word. “That boy, Clovis, he’s been in a car wreck.”

  “Huh,” he said, coming a little out of his machine up there in the ceiling.

  “That bo—kid, he’s been in a car wreck.”

  He looked at her without moving his head, seemed to ponder, and said at last, “Huh—what kid?”

  “Th one come tu th door.”

  “Yeah,” he said, then quickly, “sure, sure,” and flopped away from her, his face toward the wall.

  She stood a moment longer, staring at his back, her lips moving, trying out words. She turned away at last. His voice had been so easy, so soft, the way she’d wanted hers to be, but not meaningless, no, not quite; a Detroit “Yeah,” she had learned, almost never meant yes.

  The machine in the ceiling did not hold Clovis long. He’d found a way to solve it, she thought, for by the time Clytie was home from high school he was restless, pacing the floor, the dolls’ legs left uncut. That night for the first time he came out and ate supper with them all. “Nothen much ails me no more but th scars,” he said, and added a little worriedly, “I’m marked like a sheep.”

  Clytie giggled. “I bet I could fix yu up with a good make-up base an that liquid stocking stuff like Roland O’Rourke. He played a gangster, but allatime you could see he was a right guy. Anyhow, his sweetheart fixed up his face so’s he could go out—that is, in a car atter dark.”

  “That’s better’n nothen,” Clovis said, his voice gay almost as it had used to be when he got paid for a ton of coal he’d given up for a bad debt.

  There was a quick silence when Amos, who had been studying his father, said, “How’dju git hurt, Pop?” He left his food and came and stood by Clovis the better to see the red mark above the eyebrow and discolored jaw.

  Gertie tried vainly to think of something to distract the child’s attention, and then sat silent while both Enoch and Clytie, with a little help from Clovis, explained to Amos how the flu sometimes scarred up people. Enoch turned to her for confirmation. “Mom, yu recollect wotta time Granma Nevels had when last winter—winter before now—her jaw swole up, and her eye turned black with th flu.”

  Her nod was slight, but still a nod, and it seemed to her that Clovis, watching, smiled. He was still gay when, after making certain the early autumn dark had fallen, he went over to the Meanwells’ unit. Whit had been so good to visit him, he thought he’d visit Whit for a change, he said.

  Clovis came home early, and soon after, she thought, but couldn’t be certain, she heard the Meanwell car leave the parking lot. She forgot to wonder when, after the children had finally gone to bed, she began to work on the man in the wood. Then late, very late, there came a tapping on the door, and Clovis, as if he’d been expecting it, hurried to let the knocker in. It was the tool-and-die man, whom she had not seen since a few nights after Clovis was hurt. He smiled at her, and studied the fold of cloth on which she was working. “You’ll have more time now for th man,” he said, and held out the sanding contraption he had apparently just assembled.

  She mumbled some unenthusiastic words of gratitude. He kept looking at the man in the wood, and seemed ready to talk of him or ask her questions, but Clovis was impatient, calling from the bedroom door, “Come on, an let’s see if them sanders is any good.”

  He turned away and closed the door, as if he already knew it must be closed.

  Feeling ever more guilty at the time wasted on the man in the wood, she quit at last and worked again on the dolls. She sat by the kitchen table in the place where Clovis ate, with her chair pulled out into the passway, so that the bedroom door was less than a hand’s reach away. She kept the sandpaper scraping over the old paint on the wood; she knew she didn’t want to try to eavesdrop; there was nothing to hear but the test run of the new sanding machine. Clovis sanded pieces of the dolls in his bedroom with the door closed; working so, there was less danger of letting the neighbors know what he was about or of awakening the children. Tonight was no different from other nights; Clovis was always eager to try out a new machine.

  Once the machine stopped, and she was still, the sandpaper still as she sat, breath held, head tipped toward the door, for the tool-and-die man was saying, a weary arguing in his voice: “Butcha gotta be certain. I’d forget it; th kid was a hired hand doen a job. If we could learn something … Butcha could kill one and he wouldn’t talk—he couldn’t talk to us, not English. If we did do something an it ever got out into th papers, th cops, everybody, would say th union was behind it. Yu gotta keep th union clean. Yu gotta—” The sanding machine had started up again.

  She was so tired, she leaned her head against the door, and through the buzzing on the other side there was, she thought, the arguing still. She got soundlessly to her feet, and went again to the block of wood, and was working by it, kneeling, when she heard a resigned sigh; she looked around, and the tool-and-die man was in the passway, leaving for work.

  Next day, as she came up the alley from hunting Amos, she passed Mrs. Daly out airing the new baby in the old carriage. The little woman looked at her and said, “Yu mustn’t take ut so hard.”

  “What?” Gertie asked, realizing at once that she had turned too quickly, and spoken too worriedly, for Mrs. Bommarita, hanging clothes, was listening.

  “Du strike ana sickness,” Mrs. Daly said. “Yu look like youse was comen down yuself from worry.”

  Gertie tried to smile, but knew she was only pulling her lips back and showing a
ll her teeth. Still, Mrs. Daly sighed and shook her head, then declared that Clovis had been in bed an awfully long time for just the flu, while behind her Mrs. Bommarita watched and nodded. “It’s settled in his face—his teeth—his whole face swole up,” Gertie said, and wondered if they noticed her voice or that her heart pounded so it quivered her dress.

  “Don’t I know?” Mrs. Daly was saying. “Last fall I gotta toothache an it quit, but wudju believe it? Mu nose got as big as three noses, an mu eyes—yu oughta seen my eye—black. I hadda let Mr. Daly take me tudu doctor.”

  “I’m goen tu make Clovis go—if it don’t clear up pretty soon,” Gertie said, breathing easier, moving on toward her gate, then remembering to stop again and say: “It ain’t like he could work. With that strike on an jobs scarce right now, I figger he might as well stay in an take care a hissef.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  CLOVIS WHISTLED NOW AT times, and she wondered at and often feared his gaiety, not gaiety either, just peace, for the machine in the ceiling was put together. He still spoke sometimes of how he would like to find the man who had marked him up, but he could never get back the old ring of helpless anger, and talked mostly, she thought, for the benefit of Enoch and Clytie. Yet, she could not be certain; there were days when he was restless and angry, frowning for long moments into Clytie’s mirror as he studied his scars.

  The marks still held him within doors by day, so that it was she who paid the rent for November. She came away from the project office, fingering the three one-dollar bills, the seventy-three cents left from the last pay check. She counted in her head their total savings; less than thirty dollars now. She did not know exactly; Clovis had taken three one-dollar bills for gas; he planned to go job hunting soon and would need the car. She’d had to buy socks for Enoch; Zadkiewicz didn’t carry socks, and anyway they already owed him close to a hundred dollars. She was still, twisting her head over the sum; it was like a tight collar choking her—more than she had got back home for both Dock and Betsy. She walked again: November was so short, the rent for December wasn’t much more than four weeks away; the rent she had to have seemed bigger than the debt for groceries—and some said the strike might last till Christmas.