How on Earth had she gotten to be high-class if her papa had lost his farm to debts? What a mystery. Maybe in Chicago she had helped a poor old tramp in the street, who turned out to be a rich millionaire. Father Delias said that every time you helped a stranger, you were entertaining Jesus. Well, maybe Jesus had recognized her goodness and given her a lot of money. Did Jesus ever do that? Did you come home one day and there was a big box of money on the kitchen table? If I watched for the stork and saved Aunt Betty’s baby, would Jesus give me money for #127—The Cape Ann?
Mama handed me a meat loaf sandwich and a napkin. “Try not to get that all over.”
It was difficult to prevent my eyes from wandering toward the woman across the aisle. Everything about her, from her pale kid pumps and delicate silk stockings to her lips, which looked sculpted, drew my interest and admiration.
Her fingernails were perfectly shaped ovals, the moons left bare, the remainder wearing a nearly clear polish with a slight pinkish cast. The tips of the nails had been whitened underneath with white pencil. The overall effect was elegant understatement.
I wanted to hide my own ragged, torn, unhealthy-looking fingers. I studied them, holding tightly to the white bread.
“Mama, if I don’t bite my nails at Aunt Betty’s, will you put white pencil under the tips?”
“Sure. And pink polish on top.”
“And will you leave the moons white?”
She nodded, pouring coffee from the Thermos, then leaning around the edge of the seat and holding up the cup. The woman smiled without opening her lips. The smile raised the corners of her mouth and the corners of her eyes but, in between, there was a cloud of old sadness which had become a feature of her face, like her nose or cheeks. Was it sadness for Earl Samson?
“Move over, Lark. Next to the window, so the lady can sit down.”
She was going to sit next to me. That possibility had not occurred to me. Shyness clamped down on me, sealing my mouth and almost stopping my breath. I edged as far toward the window as possible, pulling my skirt tight around my legs and staring out, unseeing, at the green fields swimming alongside the train.
16
I CROSSED MY ARMS over my chest, hiding my hands in my armpits.
“Why are you sitting like that?” Mama asked, pouring a second cup of coffee.
“Because.”
Mama shrugged and held the cup for the woman, who was making her way across the aisle. Out of the corner of my eye and without turning away from the window, I could see her form approach.
“Sit there, beside Lark,” Mama told her.
“Lark. What a pretty name,” the woman said in her calm, rich voice when she was seated and had accepted the cup from Mama.
“What do you say, Lark?” Mama asked pointedly.
I shook my head and turned still further away from them.
“I guess the cat’s got Lark’s tongue,” Mama told the woman.
“It’s all right.”
For several minutes, as they drank coffee, Mama and the woman spoke very little. Obliquely and with some subtlety, Mama was measuring the woman. The woman submitted as graciously as if she were being fitted for a new dress.
Finally, she spoke. “When I was little, I was so shy, the first week of school I sat with my back to everyone.”
“Really?” Mama exclaimed.
The woman nodded. “We lived on a farm, and when I was five, I went to country school. There were eight other pupils, but I was the only one in first grade. I was the only one who couldn’t read or print, and I was sure that I never would. Mama told me that if I cried, everyone would laugh, so I didn’t cry. But I wouldn’t let them look at me. I turned my chair away so that it faced the wall.
“At the end of the first week,” she went on, “the teacher told us all to draw a self-portrait. I drew the back of my chair and the back of me sitting on it. The teacher didn’t say a word.
“On Monday all the self-portraits were tacked up on the wall, and there they stayed for several weeks. I had a lot of time to see how I looked. I decided I looked like I was in jail. So I turned my chair around.”
“Were you still scared of the children?” I asked, surprised to hear my voice.
“Oh my, yes. But it was easier to have them make fun of me than to be in jail.”
“You’re not shy anymore,” I observed.
“Oh, but I am. Shy people are shy forever.”
“Really?” This was bad news. I considered myself a shy person. I’d thought I’d outgrow it and be like Mama when I was big.
But, if the woman beside me was shy, how was she sitting here, talking to strangers? As if to enlighten me, she continued in her unhurried, gold-colored voice, “There are more shy people than any other kind. In fact, I’ve concluded that shy is normal.”
“How come people don’t seem shy?”
“They pretend. And they sympathize. Once you understand that almost everyone is as shy as you, and that they’re hoping you’ll say something first, you begin to feel… powerful. You have the power to make them easy.”
She sipped her coffee, which must be getting cold. “It makes you feel grown-up.”
Could that be true? My notebook was in my little brown pasteboard grip up on the rack. When we got to Aunt Betty’s, I’d write down what the woman had told me.
“You live in Chicago?” Mama asked. Mama admired and envied people who lived in cities. Mama knew that if we lived in a city, she could find a job.
“Yes.”
“Do you work? I mean, do you have a job?”
“I work at WCH.”
“WCH?”
“A radio station.”
“You work at a radio station?” Mama asked, lowering her voice, as if she’d been given a privileged bit of information. Mama didn’t want anyone else to intrude on this thrilling new friendship until she had extracted for herself every possible clue or instruction for success. “What do you do there?”
“I have a fifteen-minute program in the morning and another in the afternoon. I ask women about their work.”
“What kind of women? What kind of work?”
“Any kind of women, and any kind of work. Each day I have one woman on with me—a dancer, a housewife, whatever—and I ask her about what she does. You’d be amazed how much wisdom women have that they didn’t know they had.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Women at home who listen tell me they learn something they can use almost every day.”
“My God, you’re lucky,” Mama breathed.
“Yes.” The woman understood perfectly what Mama meant.
Mama was deeply agitated. Absently she held up the lunch box. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like a meat loaf sandwich?”
“No. Thank you.”
In a trance, Mama unwrapped the waxed paper from a sandwich and began nibbling. “You lived around here?”
“Five miles west of Weed Lake. Papa lost the farm some years back.”
I’d been right. Now, what about Earl Samson? I couldn’t ask her. Like Mama, I’d been quelled into quivery quiet. Being on the radio was like being a movie star. I was sitting next to someone who was like a movie star. And she was very beautiful, even up close.
The woman lapsed into silence. Something serious was on her mind. It had been on her mind ever since I saw her on the platform. She had forced herself to come sit with Mama and me. Why?
“Have you been visiting your family?” Mama asked.
“I came for Papa’s funeral.”
“Oh,” Mama said, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.” She set her sandwich aside and wiped her hands. “Had he been sick long?”
“He shot himself. They found him in the alley behind the house. He’d blown his head off with a twelve-gauge shotgun.” She suddenly recalled herself. “I’m sorry,” she told Mama. “That was a terrible thing to say in front of your daughter. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” I told her. “I’ve heard of people doing that befor
e.”
“You have?” Mama asked.
“Grandpa Erhardt knew a man whose wife ran off, and he shot his own head off. There were brains all over his back porch, they said, and the dog—”
“Lark, shut up,” Mama snapped.
I flushed hotly and sank into the corner of the seat as close to the window as I could get.
“Papa was worried about money. But he wouldn’t take any from me,” she said, more to herself than to us.
“Is your mother alive?” Mama asked.
“She’s gone to live with my sister in Mankato,” the woman replied, preoccupied. Her papa’s not taking money from her, that would be in her thoughts and dreams a long time.
“It was cruel, his not taking the money,” she said.
Mama folded her napkin, smoothing it on her knees. “What did your papa do, after he lost the farm?”
“He tried doing mechanic’s work at the implement dealer’s, but there wasn’t enough work. People around here can’t afford to hire to have things fixed. They fix them themselves or stop using them. And Papa would have starved before he went on WPA.” Or blown his head off.
Mama nodded. Some thought WPA and the county poor farm were the same. Mama said they weren’t. Not by a damn sight, she said. And anyway, it was wickedness to refuse help if you needed it. It was the kind of pride that goes before a fall.
My mama and papa disagreed about WPA. Papa was a good Democrat, but he said WPA was dole for loafers. Mama said if Papa was out of work and the cupboard was empty, his belly would soon make a better Democrat of him.
Grandpa Browning, who was a Republican and a steadfast admirer of Herbert Hoover, said Mama was a freethinker. It sounded like something I’d like to be, but it was clear that Grandpa Browning lumped freethinkers in with Bolsheviks, gypsies, and fairies. I knew nothing about Bolsheviks and little about gypsies, but fairies were our friends, I knew that. It seemed one of those unreasonable perversities of grown-ups that Grandpa Browning should despise fairies.
“Twenty minutes to Morgan Lake,” the conductor told Mama as he passed, checking ticket stubs.
We would have to leave the woman behind, all her troubles unsolved. Mama looked concerned, as if she were tempted to stay on the train. But Aunt Betty, who was sick most of the time, was waiting for us in her little house near the edge of town.
Mama leaned forward and put a hand on the woman’s. “My name is Arlene Erhardt,” she said. “I live in Harvester. I’m going to stay with my sister Betty in Morgan Lake because she’s expecting sometime around the first of July. She’s sick all the time, and her husband’s on the road. But if I can help you, will you call me or drop me a line?”
Mama grabbed her purse and rummaged impatiently in it, coming up with a pencil and a little book of addresses. Tearing an empty page from the book, she wrote her name and address and our telephone number, 139, on it. She tucked the slip of paper into the woman’s hand. “I know we’re strangers,” she said, “but sometimes it’s easier that way.”
The woman clutched the paper and closed her eyes, as if she might cry. There was a slight heaving of her chest as she breathed, quelling her hysteria, pushing it down, out of her chest, into her belly, where after a while, it would make her sick.
“I have aspirin in my bag,” Mama told her. “Would you like some?”
The woman shook her head.
Mama began talking about this and that. Mama was very good at the kind of talking where the other person didn’t have to answer or even listen if they didn’t want to.
“You need a good vacation,” she advised the woman. “Not the kind where you visit your aunt in St. Paul. You need a vacation where everything is new and different, like California. I have a cousin, Lloyd, who went broke farming out in South Dakota. Didn’t have a pot to pee in. He packed up his wife, and they drove to southern California. He had to borrow fifty dollars from my mother’s Aunt Carrie in Marshalltown, Iowa, in order to make it to Los Angeles.”
I hadn’t known that Cousin Lloyd and his wife, Marlis, hadn’t had a pot to pee in. I guess that there were some things Mama didn’t tell me when I was little.
“The first work they found in California was picking oranges. Then Marlis landed a wonderful job as housekeeper for the widow of some big Hollywood producer. The woman said she hired Marlis because she’d never heard of a crook from South Dakota. That’s because she’d never heard of anybody from South Dakota. Anyway, the woman got Lloyd a job painting sets, and that’s what he does to this day. Crazy about it. Has a real talent for it, Marlis says. They are nuts about southern California. On Marlis’s day off, they go to the beach. A couple of times they’ve driven to Mexico.
“They live free in a little cottage back of this woman’s house, and they’ve got an orange tree and a banana tree right outside the door. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?
“Next year maybe Lark and I will head out there for a visit. My husband works for the railroad, so we get passes to travel. We go in the summer because I don’t like to take Lark out of school. Last summer we went to Corpus Christi, Texas. Normally I wouldn’t go that far south in the summer. Hotter than a gangster’s pistol down there, but a cousin on my papa’s side was terribly sick, looking for work, so Lark and I went down and nursed him for a while and brought him back north.
“This summer we’re sticking closer to home. We’re on our way to my sister’s. She’s expecting her first almost any day, and she’s had a hard time, so we’re going to help out a little. Also, we’re saving our money to build a new house. Lark’s got one all picked out called the Cape Ann.
“But I started to say, if you haven’t been to California, you should buy a ticket and hop on a train. Who knows, a director or—what do they call them?—or a talent agent, might spot you, and the next thing you know, you’d be playing opposite John Barrymore.”
A few minutes later, Mama was handing me down my pasteboard grip. She pulled her own suitcase from behind the seat.
“Here, Mrs. Erhardt,” the conductor said, “let me help you with that.” And he carried the big bag toward the door.
Mama hesitated before the beautiful woman, who was still sitting with us. “Remember,” Mama told her, “there’s Lark and me. Call if you need us.” She lay a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “Your papa has gone to a place where he’ll find out the reasons for everything. Be happy for him.” She patted the shoulder and moved down the aisle. “Come on, Lark,” she called behind her.
But I couldn’t bear to leave without knowing. What if we never met the woman again? Shifting the grip to my other hand, I bent toward her cheek, which smelled of delicate, flower-scented perfume. “Did you ever have a man named Earl Samson working on your papa’s farm? Did he write to you?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Is he a friend of yours?”
“Yes. And I hope you meet him sometime.”
“Lark,” Mama called impatiently.
I hurried along, bumping my grip on the arms of the seats, turning at the end of the car to smile at the woman. Her beauty was a light that shone in my mind when I thought of her, and I thought of her often.
I couldn’t leave the depot platform until the train was out of sight. With our bags beside us, we stood waving, first to the woman and then to the disappearing train itself.
“What was her name, Mama?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why didn’t you ask her?”
“I didn’t want her to feel hounded.”
“What do you think her name was?”
“Something pretty,” Mama said, hefting her heavy bag. “What do you think it was?”
I considered this for a moment. “Angela.”
“Pretty. Angela what?”
“Roosevelt.”
17
THE DOWNTOWN OF MORGAN Lake was only a block long. At the end of that block, the businesses ran out and so did the sidewalk. Poor Mama, in her high-heeled, white pumps, teetered precariously on the sharp gravel stones and dee
p ruts in the street. Fortunately, Aunt Betty and Uncle Stan’s house was just a block beyond the Skelly station.
The yard was dusty and unwatered, the plantings around the porch limp and scraggly. Several pieces of newspaper had drifted into the yard, lodging themselves at the base of the lilac bushes.
The hinges on the screen door were loose when Mama opened it, and she breathed sharply with mild impatience. It was sad to see the little place unattended. Every house, however humble, deserved respect. Of course, Aunt Betty wasn’t able, in her condition, and Uncle Stan was on the road during the week. It was up to Mama and me to lend a hand.
The inside door stood open. “Betty?” Mama called. “Betty?” She plunged ahead into the dim living room and set down her suitcase. To the right, off the living room, was the front bedroom, without a door, but with a sickly green, jacquard-weave drape hung on a wooden pole to provide privacy.
Mama pulled the drape aside. “Betty?” I followed. “There you are. Did I wake you?”
Aunt Betty lay, bloated and dusty looking, on the iron bed. Her face, normally merry and quite rosy, even at age thirty, was gray and swollen and lacking animation.
Mama crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed. The springs squeaked shrilly, and the thin mattress collapsed perilously on that side. Mama paid it no mind, but studied Aunt Betty, gently brushing loose strands of golden red hair back from Betty’s face.
“Feeling pretty bad?” Mama asked.
“I’ll live,” Aunt Betty told her quietly. A weak smile flickered in her eyes, then went out.
“Well, you mustn’t worry about anything now. Lark and I are here to look after you and take care of business.”
“My business is a mess,” Aunt Betty observed dryly, stirring herself a little to glance about the dim room. The living room had merely been dusty and unsure looking, the way rooms were when men were housekeeping. The bedroom was awash in disorder. There were dirty dishes on the table, books and magazines lying everywhere, nighties and underwear discarded in odd places.
The Cape Ann Page 15