The Cape Ann

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by Faith Sullivan


  As we reached the hobo jungle, I scanned the open cellar for anyone new, any latecomer. There was a third man now, one who was clean shaven and looked recently bathed. He’d probably been out scratching for work when I’d come by earlier. He was sitting by the fire, heating a can of Campbell’s Pork and Beans.

  In a sudden flush of temerity, I went to the edge of the basement and called, “Do you know Earl Samson?” Then I was shy and couldn’t believe I had called to them that way.

  The oldest of the three, the one who’d been napping before, glanced at the others. “I guess not, little lady,” he said. “Is there a message if I meet him?”

  But my courage was gone. I shook my head and turned away, hurrying toward home with Hilly. And whom should we sight striding down the track, anger in every step, but Mama.

  “Where in hell have you been, Lark?” When Mama was mad, she didn’t mince words, and it didn’t matter who was around. “I’ve been worried sick.” Reaching us, she grabbed my upper arm, giving me a good pinch. “I sat down to read,” she explained, relief and worry and impatience mixed in her voice, “and fell asleep with the book in my hand, or else I’d have been out here with the brush an hour ago.” She didn’t have the brush with her. If she was feeling guilty for falling asleep and not keeping a check on me, she might not use the brush at all. “I told you to be home for supper,” she continued, grasping my hand and pulling me roughly along at a trot.

  “I brought you a bouquet,” I told her, holding up the mustard and onions, which she ignored. “I met Hilly while I was picking flowers.” Hilly loped along beside us in his tipsy fashion. Mama’s lips were pressed tightly together, so I stopped trying to make conversation.

  It was embarrassing to be dragged along like this. I hoped not too many people were watching, especially not too many first graders. Some mothers covered up their anger until they got home, but Mama would swat me on the backside right in the middle of Main Street if I were being “incorrigible.” Incorrigible was a favorite word of Mama’s. I was an incorrigible nail biter. Papa had been trying to get me to stop biting my nails for as long as I could remember. He’d recently begun weekly inspections. Every Monday at supper, he ordered me to lay my hands on the table while he examined my nails. Last Monday he was so upset, he said if there wasn’t improvement by next Monday, I’d get the back of the brush.

  Papa believed that ladies, big and little, should be as pretty and perfect in every detail as was possible. He had limited control over my too-fine, straight-as-a-stick hair and my scrawny arms and legs (though sometimes he kept me at the table until nearly bedtime to see that I cleaned my plate), but over my fingernails he was determined to prevail.

  The fact was, Mama bit her nails, too, but Papa had long ago despaired of breaking her of the habit. For that reason it was twice as important to him that I be made to quit the filthy practice.

  Mama had painted my nails with pink polish, and when that didn’t discourage me from biting them, she’d dipped them in some foul-tasting stuff, just as she had done to her own. It was no more successful with me than it had been with her.

  I did try to stop. I was still trying. Every night when I went to bed, I asked God to help me, but so far He’d kept out of it. Each night I swore that I would not put my fingers near my mouth the next day. It was a mystery to me how I kept doing it after all my praying and swearing. I must truly be incorrigible.

  I was also an incorrigible dawdler, and as Mama dragged me into the kitchen, she remarked to Hilly, “This child is an incorrigible dawdler. I’m always thinking she’s been kidnapped, like the Lindbergh baby, although I don’t know who would want a dawdler who takes an hour to walk five short blocks home from school. Sometimes longer.” She let go of my hand and held the screen door for Hilly. “Your mother’s going to worry, too, Hilly. I’ll give her a ring.” She started for the living room. “Would you like to stay for supper?”

  Hilly nodded vigorously. “Supper.”

  It was seven-thirty when we sat down to hamburger patties, skillet-fried potatoes, canned peas, bread and butter, and the spice cake with penuche frosting. Papa had not come home. If Papa had been home, Mama would not have invited Hilly to stay. Papa thought Hilly was a “damned nuisance,” always getting under foot when you were coming out of the post office and holding you up, hanging around the Oldsmobile or the pickup with his damned old rag, wiping the fenders and hood. Papa didn’t like it when Hilly came to wash our windows. How did it look to passengers getting off at Harvester to be greeted by an idiot? Someone might complain to the railroad, and then Papa would get the blame. “Magdalen Haggerty says they put a stop to him coming in the Loon Cafe.” Magdalen was one of the two waitresses there and had probably served Papa his supper tonight. Magdalen Haggerty or Dora Noonan. “Shanty Irish,” Mama called them to irritate Papa.

  “They’re good Catholic women who’re at the communion rail every Sunday.” Mama only took communion at Christmas and Easter, one time more than the law demanded, as she pointed out. Papa only took communion at Christmas, Easter, and when we went to visit Grandma and Grandpa Erhardt.

  “Another piece of cake, Hilly?” Mama cut a big square and lifted it onto Hilly’s plate, then she refilled their coffee cups. Seated again, holding her cup in both hands, Mama told Hilly, “Lark has First Communion classes every Saturday morning at the Catholic church. Eight o’clock in the morning she has to be there. That’s pretty early for a six-year-old. Next year she’ll take her first communion. This year she was an angel.” Mama touched me lightly with the offhand, proprietary glance mothers use when discussing a child who is present, the same glance they use while sitting on the davenport and observing that the thing has held up well, but probably needs a new slipcover.

  “The angels,” she went on, “are the ones who escort the First Communion children up to the altar and back to their pews again. They wear white organdy dresses and white organdy wings and silver halos. The wings are separate from the dress. They tie on with white satin ribbon. Well, you can’t send away to Monkey Ward for an outfit like that, the way you can for a party dress. The mothers of the angels had to sew the dresses and the wings, and make the halos. I ended up making two, because Stella Wheeler doesn’t sew, and Sally needed an angel dress. You know the Wheelers, they live a block east of the school in the new cottage. He travels for an office supply company. Stella has bad nerves, but she’s a good soul, always nice to Lark.”

  This was Mama entertaining Hilly. He sat there eating the last crumbs of his cake, mashing them with the back of his spoon and sucking them off, happily enthralled. “Lark, get the picture from the sideboard,” Mama said.

  I went to fetch the studio picture Mama had had taken of me in my white dress, wings, and halo. In order to show the wings, the photographer had taken a side shot. I was kneeling, hands folded in prayer, looking very Catholic and uncharacteristic.

  “Doesn’t she look pretty?” Mama said, handing it to Hilly. “Those wings were hell to make. But you haven’t heard the best. A week before Lark and Sally were going to wear the angel dresses, Sister Mary Clair sent home a note with Lark. ‘Dear Mrs. Erhardt,’ it said, ‘Lark and Sally’s dresses should be long enough to cover the kneecap. Sister Mary Frances and I feel that Lark normally wears her dresses shorter than angels do. Thank you. Sister Mary Clair.’ Tell me, what angel flew down to tell Sister Mary Clair the style they’re wearing in heaven this year?” Mama rose and refilled the cups.

  “Lark likes her dresses short and starched, like Shirley Temple. In my opinion, that’s a lot cuter than below the kneecap, which makes you look like a refugee from a poor Catholic country.”

  Eventually we cleared the table. Mama washed, Hilly dried, and I put away. Hilly was careful and very slow. Mama was finished long before Hilly, so she cut a big hunk of cake and wrapped it in paper napkins for Hilly to take home.

  “You and your mama can have this before you go to bed,” she told Hilly.

  We drove him home in the pickup. H
illy wanted to ride in the back. “Wind,” he said, brushing his hands back over his face and hair.

  Main Street was lighted up and full of the noisy self-importance of a small town Saturday night: cars driving up and down, people hollering across the broad street to each other. All the farmers and half the townspeople were on the streets and in the stores, seeing to Saturday night duties and pleasures.

  When Mama stopped in front of Rabel’s Meat Market, Hilly jumped off the back of the truck and came around to say goodbye. I handed him the cake.

  “Good … bye,” he said. “Thank … you.”

  We waited for him to climb the stairs and open the screen door, then we drove off. “Is Hilly getting his sanity back?” I asked Mama.

  “I don’t know. Sometimes it seems that way.” She didn’t sound as excited as I thought she should. I wanted to ask her why, but I kept quiet. When it came to pressing for answers, I was often shy, as if it were not yet the time for me to know.

  Instead of going right home, Mama drove around town with the windows rolled down. The evening was warm, and there was a Saturday night edge to it, as though something exciting ought to happen. We passed Bernice and Bill McGivern’s. Mama gave the horn a tap. Mama couldn’t carry a tune in a bushel basket, but we sang “Put on Your Old Gray Bonnet.” If they hadn’t known us, people would have thought we were coming home from The Nite Time Saloon.

  Mama pulled the big, galvanized tub out from under the crib when we got home. “Bath time,” she announced, dragging it to the kitchen. While I got undressed and into my pink chenille robe, Mama put kettles of water on the stove to heat. I sat down on the davenport to look at the new Life magazine.

  After my bath, Mama dried me, sprinkled me with Sweet Memory talcum powder, and helped me into a clean nightie. We carried the tub out to the tracks and dumped the water. “It’s almost time for the last freight,” she said. “We’d better use the toilet now.”

  Quietly we crossed the dimly lit waiting room to the restroom. The lights in the office were burning, but we didn’t stop to see if Papa or Art Bigelow was working. Sometimes they both stuck around in the evening until after the second freight.

  As quietly as we had come, we left, scurrying back to our house before the train pulled in and surprised me out and about in my nightie.

  “Do you want a bedtime read?” Mama asked, helping me into the crib.

  I remembered the house plans. They were lying on Mama’s bed. “There’s a pretty house I want to show you.” I pointed to the booklets, and Mama handed them to me. Riffling through the pages until I found #127—The Cape Ann, I held it up. “This one.”

  Mama sat down on the edge of the big bed to study the floor plans and the exterior sketch. “Mmmmm,” she murmured, not at once dismissing it.

  “It has two bedrooms upstairs and one downstairs for your sewing room. And it has shutters. And a big living room, I think, and two dormer windows.” I opened Happy Stories for Bedtime. There was the boy, still sitting in the window. “Look at this, Mama. They made a window seat in the dormer. Can we do that?”

  “This Cape Ann has possibilities,” Mama said, looking up from the plans. “A window seat. Yes. You could keep your toys in there.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. “Oh, yes,” I squealed, bouncing up and down. Did the boy waiting by the sea for his father have toys in his window seat? I bet he did.

  “I like this plan,” Mama said, “because it has a breakfast nook at the end of the kitchen, and the back door’s right here by the cellar-way.” She showed me where the back door was. “We could plant flowers along here,” she added, indicating an area beyond the breakfast nook windows. “Nasturtiums and zinnias and marigolds and poppies. I like flowers that have a lot of color.” So did Sisters Mary Clair and Mary Frances.

  “And hollyhocks?” I begged. “I like hollyhocks.”

  “We’ll grow hollyhocks along the fence.” Mama ran to the kitchen for a pair of shears. “I’m going to cut this out and tack it up on the wall,” she explained, “so we can look at it every day.”

  “Put it up here by the clock.” I stood up to show her where it should go.

  “Yes, that’s good.”

  “Mama, how can we get some money for the house?”

  She finished cutting the two pages from the booklet, then set the scissors aside. “I don’t know,” she said, “but I’ll think of something.”

  7

  SOMETIME IN THE NIGHT, Papa came home and slept in the big bed. But in the morning, and for weeks afterward, Mama was only civil to him and nothing more.

  After church Mama and Papa read the Sunday paper. Papa pored over the sports section, keeping track of the Chicago Cubs, his favorite team and winner of the 1938 World Series. Mama studied the classified ads for money-making schemes. Armed with a grease pencil, she circled anything not requiring the applicant to relocate.

  There were opportunities for refined women to sell Lady Sylvia corsets and undergarments in the privacy of their homes. There were openings for ambitious salespeople to call on friends and neighbors, introducing them to the comfort, durability, and beauty of Ayler’s A-One shoes (“Hard-to-fit Sizes Our Specialty”). And there were once-in-a-lifetime chances for folks with get-up-and-go to make big money as dealers for Bismark brushes (“Brushes for Farm and Home”).

  None of these held much appeal or promise. No work was to be had locally, either, except for sewing or house cleaning or selling magazine subscriptions. But a glut of seamstresses and cleaning ladies and subscription salespeople existed already, so the employment picture was bleak. Bleak was not the same as hopeless, however. “I’ll think of something,” Mama had told me.

  But would she? If there were jobs to be had, the young men down in the hobo jungle would be working. They were always out looking, knocking on doors, scouting the filling stations and junkyards, anyplace there might be something temporary that could lead to something permanent. They would mow your lawn, burn your trash, and wash your windows for a meal and half a dollar. Where, then, would Mama find work?

  Late in the afternoon, Papa fell asleep stretched out on the davenport, the funny papers lying across his chest. Mama pared potatoes and cut up the chicken for supper. At times like this, Mama and I played “Lady Caller.”

  In the bedroom I combed as much of my hair as I could see, pulled on an old navy blue cloche Mama had donated to me, and tiptoed past her as she melted Crisco in the iron skillet. Outside, I adjusted the hat, smoothed my dress, and examined the contents of my red patent leather purse: one powder puff, stiff and lumpy; a pencil stub; a cracked and badly tattered St. Joseph’s missal Grandma Erhardt had passed along when she’d received a new one; a dainty black rosary from the same source; and in the very bottom, jingling as I shook the purse, two pennies.

  Snapping the bag shut, I tucked it under my arm, patted my hair, stepped up to the door, and knocked. Mrs. Erhardt answered, opening the screen.

  “Why, Mrs….”

  “Brown.”

  “Mrs. Brown, it’s nice to see you. Can you come in and visit? I was just putting chicken in the pan to fry.”

  “Thank you. I can only stay a few minutes. I have to get home and make supper for my husband and my little girl.”

  “Well, sit down here at the table. Can I get you anything?”

  “Do you have any penuche candy?”

  Mrs. Erhardt appeared a little surprised by this request. “Yes… let me see.” She went to the cupboard and from the top shelf brought me a candy. “I’m sure you’ll want to save it to share with your little girl after supper,” she suggested, handing over the piece of penuche on a circle of wax paper. “I seem to have forgotten her name.”

  “Myrna Loy.”

  “Myrna Loy?”

  “Yes. Myrna Loy Brown. Don’t you think it’s pretty?”

  “Very. How is Myrna Loy?”

  “She’s fine. She had tonsilitis a while back though.”

  “Was she very sick?” Mrs. Erhardt asked, d
ropping pieces of chicken into a brown bag of flour and seasonings, shaking them, then placing them one at a time in the hot skillet, where they squirmed and sizzled and spattered.

  “I’m afraid she was. She ran a fever of a hundred and four, and she had to have her throat painted every day. The poor thing missed a lot of school.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Will she pass to second grade?”

  “Oh, yes. She’s very smart and she works hard. Her papa is strict though. He doesn’t like A-minuses.”

  “A-minuses don’t seem so bad to me,” Mrs. Erhardt said sympathetically.

  “I know, but Mr. Brown wants her to be the best. The same at catechism class.” I crossed my right leg and swung it importantly. “Myrna Loy has a whole cigar box full of holy medals and those little cards with pictures of Jesus and saints on them. She wins something every week at catechism.”

  “You must be proud of her.”

  “Yes, I am. But Myrna Loy worries about confession.”

  “Why is that?”

  “She has so many sins,” I explained.

  “She’s only six years old!”

  “Six-year-old children can be very bad, even when they’re not trying.”

  “Well, six-year-old children should remember that their mama and papa love them no matter what they do.”

  “Yes, I tell Myrna Loy that, but she worries anyway. Sometimes I think she’ll worry herself to death. Did you ever know anyone who worried themselves to death?”

  “No. I don’t think that happens but once in a blue moon.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. I make Myrna Loy penuche candy, like you do for your little girl, and nice dresses like the ones in the catalog. She has a lot of nice dresses. I sewed her an angel dress for church. That was a lot of work. We had her picture taken, and I sent one to my friend Earl.”

  Mrs. Erhardt turned the pieces of chicken as they browned. When they were all turned, she put the lid on the skillet, lowered the heat, and flicked on the burner under the potatoes. After this she opened a large can of green beans and emptied them into a saucepan. “I don’t think I know about your friend Earl,” she said, pulling out a chair and sitting down opposite me. “Is he from around here?”

 

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