The Cape Ann

by Faith Sullivan

  The house was so still, I could hear a clock ticking in the living room or what was presumably the living room. Again I called, “I’ve brought your sheets,” adding, “and a piece of spice cake.” My anxious heart and the ticking clock were all I could hear.

  Then suddenly, soundlessly, she loomed in the inner doorway, tall and displeased, and if she were a child, I would have said, sly. What was there about me to which she had taken such an instant dislike? Why did she not want me at her door? I’d think she’d be happy to have her linens quickly returned and smelling so fine.

  Unhooking the screen, she relieved me of my burden, informing me, “Dey are folted wrong. I vill haff to folt dem again.” She pressed her lips tightly together, rehooked the screen, and turned immediately away.

  “Thank you very much,” I called after her. No response but the ticking clock. I stood rooted to the step. Finally I fled, dashing headlong. In the dusty street, I stopped and swung around, panting and staring at the small house, sheathed in shining white clapboard but looking dark and full of warning.

  19

  WEDNESDAY MORNING, EARLY, AUNT Betty was very sick. I woke to see Mama hurrying to her room with a wet towel and a clean bowl.

  “Stay in bed,” she told me.

  I sat up, pulling the quilt around me. The sun was over the horizon, and the German Woman was out, moving slowly around her yard, plucking a dead blossom, straightening a stake, rooting up a dandelion, and, perhaps I imagined it, listening. Her tightly coined head seemed to incline slightly in our direction.

  “I’m going to call the doctor,” Mama told her older sister.

  “No,” Aunt Betty cried, beyond the green drape. “No. I won’t have him.”

  “Because of the cost? Don’t be a fool.”

  “I won’t see him,” my aunt screamed.

  “What if this is uremic poisoning? You could die,” Mama warned her.

  “I won’t see the doctor! I don’t have uremic poisoning. You get those ideas from Mama. A woman gets the least sick, Mama cries, ‘uremic poisoning.’ I’ll be fine. This happens all the time, and I’m not dead yet.”

  “I’ll pay for the doctor.”

  “No, no, no, no,” Aunt Betty screamed hysterically, and threw something which hit the wall, causing me to jump. Then she began to retch again, but there was nothing left to come up, and she simply made painful choking sounds. “If you call the doctor,” she sobbed, “you’ll never be my sister again.”

  What was the matter with Aunt Betty? I wondered. She’d gotten very fat, it was true, but that didn’t make people sick, did it? When the stork brought the baby, how would she be able to take care of it if she didn’t get well? Mama had said the stork would be bringing the baby any day. How did Mama know that? Who had told her?

  If Uncle Stan wasn’t making any money and they were practically starving, would they let Mama and me take the baby home and keep it until times got better? What was to become of them? Would they go to live on the poor farm? Surely they wouldn’t take the baby there.

  Throwing off the quilt, I dressed myself in my sunsuit and pulled on my shoes and socks. The house still smelled of clean laundry, much of which sat in ironed, folded piles on the dining room table. In the kitchen, I buttered a slice of bread and carried it out to the back step. The step was wet with dew, but I sat down anyway.

  If the stork came from the southeast, as he had in my dream, this would be a good place to watch for him. I watched the sky until my neck ached and the sun lay on top of the garage roof. Then I examined my hands, discovering with a pleasant shock that this was the third day in which I had not bitten my nails.

  “Mama,” I called, racing through the house and into Aunt Betty’s bedroom, “Mama, my nails are growing.”

  “Lark, get out of here,” Mama said, wringing out a washcloth. Aunt Betty had removed her nightie, and Mama was helping her wash herself. I stood staring at my aunt, who sat with her legs hanging over the edge of the bed.

  There certainly was something wrong with her. Her stomach looked as if she’d swallowed a canning kettle. I’d never seen anything so grotesque. The belly button was ready to pop right off and fall on the floor. What if Aunt Betty exploded? I agreed with Mama, we ought to call the doctor right away and find out what could be done. Maybe Aunt Betty needed to pass wind, as Grandma Browning would say. It was hardly any wonder she felt sick to her stomach all the time.

  I backed out of the room and dropped onto the sofa, pulling the quilt over me. I could hear them in there.

  “Have you told the folks that you don’t have any money?”

  “No. And don’t you dare tell them.”

  “Do you know how mad Mama would be if she found out how you’re living?”

  “My loyalty’s to my husband,” Aunt Betty replied stiffly.

  “What kind of husband expects his pregnant wife to starve rather than ask her family for help?”

  “Stan never told me I couldn’t ask. But it would kill him. You don’t understand. Wait’ll you see him, Arlene. He’s not the man he was when he was working for salary.”

  Uncle Stan used to be a bookkeeper over in Mankato, at a big implement dealer there. He drove back and forth to work from Morgan Lake because it was cheaper living in the smaller town. But that dealer couldn’t afford to keep him on salary, so now he was on the road.

  A sweet-natured man, Uncle Stan had a smiling, childlike way about him that made you want to protect him. I understood Aunt Betty’s silence.

  But Mama sounded disgusted. “You’ve got a loyalty to this baby now, and don’t you forget it.”

  “I wish I could be hard like you, Arlene.”

  I could hear the intake of Mama’s breath all the way in the living room. “That is the meanest thing you ever said to me, Betty.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “If you were sorry, you wouldn’t say it. You’re jealous. And you say awful things to get back at me.”

  “Jealous of what?” Aunt Betty asked sarcastically.

  “Jealous that I have enough money to come here and work till I drop and put groceries in your empty cupboard.”

  “You’re the one who’s jealous. You never could stand it that Stan and I were happily married. You’d like everybody to be as miserable as you are. Since you think you’re doing me a big favor, take your damned groceries and go home. I’m not going to eat them. I’d rather starve.” Aunt Betty was screaming now.

  I couldn’t bear to listen. I saw that I was biting the nail on my right index finger, and I started to cry. Running from the house, I heard Mama scream, “When you’ve got a baby that’s starving, too, tell me how much you hate my charity.”

  I ran out to the street, but I could still hear them, so I started downtown, past the German Woman’s house. She was nowhere in sight. Although Aunt Betty’s bedroom was on the opposite side of the house from the German Woman, that stern, listening neighbor could hear every word if she half tried. A spasm of shame shook me, and I broke into a full sprint. It was too awful to think that she might be hearing the cruel things Mama and Aunt Betty were saying. My face burned.

  When the German Woman’s house was out of sight, I slowed to a walk. Even here, near the Skelly station, Mama and Aunt Betty’s words kept striking my brain like little hammer blows. “I wish I could be hard like you, Arlene.” Mama hard? Mama was one of the kindest people I knew. It was true she stood up for herself. She didn’t let people, not even men, “step all over her,” as she would say, but she was Johnny-on-the-spot when someone was down on their luck.

  Of course, Mama shouldn’t have said that Aunt Betty was jealous because we could buy groceries. That made Uncle Stan look bad, and it wasn’t his fault he was poor.

  But the worst was Aunt Betty saying Mama wanted everybody to be as miserable as she was. That was a snake that would lay eggs in my brain. Was Mama unhappy, and I hadn’t known or understood? Frightened, I sat down on the steps of Boomer’s Tavern. I was as much unnerved by my own possible blindnes
s as by Mama’s supposed misery. Was it because I was a child that I hadn’t understood? Maybe it was because Mama was good at hiding her troubles? Maybe I hadn’t wanted to know, or maybe—and I prayed to St. Ann that this was true—maybe Aunt Betty was wrong. That had to be the answer. That Mama might in fact be miserable, that life might not be what it seemed, was unthinkable. I put my hands tight over my ears as if someone were speaking vile truths to me, things a child shouldn’t hear.

  “Little girl,” I heard at last, “little girl, have you lost your ice cream money?”

  Before me on the crumbling sidewalk stood an old man dressed in clean, striped overalls and a clean, blue work shirt. His hair was snow white like Santa’s, and his cheeks were round and pink. I stared at him. If he’d had a beard, I would have thought Santa had materialized out of season, wearing the clothes he wore while working in the toy shop. I studied him. He was plump and his blue eyes did twinkle, didn’t they? I didn’t know what a droll little mouth was, but this man’s mouth did look sort of like a bow when he smiled, one that had been perked up on the ends.

  “Come along,” he said, climbing the steps, “I’ll buy you an ice cream.” I followed him into the tavern. “Mike,” he called to Mr. Boomer, “this little girl would like an ice cream.” Turning to me, he lifted me onto a high stool.

  “Vanilla or chocolate?” Mr. Boomer asked.

  “Chocolate,” I told him, dazed by my good fortune.

  “Two,” said the old man, who had himself come to enjoy an ice cream.

  “Whose little girl are you?” Mr. Boomer inquired, handing me a chocolate ice cream cone.

  “Thank you for the ice cream,” I told the white-haired man. “Arlene and Willie Erhardt’s.”

  “Ain’t your mama sister to Mrs. Weller?”

  “Yes.” Then, remembering myself, “Yes, sir.”

  “Mrs. Weller had her baby yet?”

  “Not yet, but I’ve been sitting out in the yard watching for it. Mama says any day now.”

  “You’ve been sitting in the yard watching for it?” Mr. Boomer asked.

  “Yes. If the stork drops the baby, I’m going to catch it.”

  The two men exchanged glances. Did they think I was too small to catch the baby?

  “I’m stronger than I look,” I assured them.

  “What if the baby comes now, while you’re eating ice cream?” Mr. Boomer asked.

  I’d run off, forgetting about the baby! I started to climb down from the stool.

  “Now, wait a minute,” Santa said. “Look at the time. The stork never comes at noon. That’s when he eats his dinner. You just sit right there and enjoy your ice cream, little lady, and never mind what Mike Boomer tells you. He’s full of malarkey. You know what that means?”

  I nodded. “Republicans are full of malarkey. My papa says we’ve got to trust in Roosevelt, and never mind Republican malarkey.”

  Santa laughed. Mr. Boomer said, “Your pa sounds like a fountain of wisdom. He work for the railroad?”

  I nodded.

  “Thought so. He was in here once or twice with Stan Weller,” he explained to my benefactor. “Works for the railroad out the west part of the state.” He asked me, “Where was that again?”

  “Harvester.”

  “That’s it. McPhee here works for the railroad, too.”

  “Deliver a little freight is all,” Santa said. “Fact is, I gotta get down there now and see what come in last night.” He turned to me. “You like to pal along with me down to the depot?”

  “Yes.” I climbed down from the stool and bid good-bye to Mr. Boomer.

  “Come back tomorrow so I know if the stork dropped the baby,” he called after me.

  Outside the tavern Mr. McPhee and I turned right, heading toward the tracks. McPhee walked with his hands clasped low behind his back. Out of deference, I did the same.

  “You have any brothers or sisters?” he asked.

  “No. Mama says I’ll do.”

  He nodded.

  “Do you have any children?”

  “A boy. Lives over to Mankato.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Forty-five.”

  “Pretty old.”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he have any children?”

  “Two, a boy and a girl. They’re grown up and moved to Minneapolis. Every generation goes someplace bigger,” he observed. “Someday there won’t be anybody here. They’ll all be there.”

  “Did you ever want to move?”

  He shook his head. “Somebody’s got to stay home. If somebody don’t stay home, my ma used to say, there ain’t a home, and I believe she was right. She never wanted to leave Galway, and when she got settled in Boston and had a good job in a kitchen, she didn’t want to leave there. But she met Pa and that settled her hash, she said.

  “He come over from Tralee in ’50. They was married in ’60. And he got into a little trouble in ’68, so he packed ’em both off, halfway across the land.”

  “What kind of trouble did he get into?”

  “Nothing much. A bit of gambling and something to do with a fighter named Kelly. But here they were, on the prairie, where there wasn’t any big kitchens or houses grand enough for a maid, so what was Ma to do? She took in wash and kept a big garden and delivered babies.”

  “And your pa?”

  “He had trouble finding work suited to his talents.”

  “What were his talents?”

  “He was sociable, that was one. And he was willing, that was another. But he didn’t have any skill he could put his hand to. He was off to St. Paul and then Dakota and finally the Yukon. It was always his plan to come back with money. Ma wouldn’t go. Said she’d come far enough from Galway. Said the world shouldn’t think we was all peddlers and pugs and potato bugs with no decent pillow to lay our heads on.”

  “What’s a pug?”

  “A prize fighter. Like Mr. Jack Dempsey and Mr. Gene Tunney.”

  “And Mr. Billy Conn?”

  “Where’d you hear about him?” McPhee laughed.

  “Papa.”

  We had reached the depot. The eastbound passenger had been and gone, and a few cartons were piled on a low freight wagon. The agent saw us approaching and came out to meet us.

  “Got some freight for you, Paddy. See you got company.”

  “This is …”

  “Lark Ann Erhardt.”

  “How d’ya do? You and your ma come in from Harvester Monday.”

  “Yes.”

  “Your pa’s Willie Erhardt. I know him. He still play softball?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Used to play softball every chance he got. Played for the New Frankfurt team. I played second base for Morgan Lake. Got rheumatism in the shoulder now. Can’t play no more. Remember me to your pa. Harold Arndt.”

  Mr. McPhee and I set out to deliver the freight. McPhee pulled the wagon, which bumped and clattered along the broken street. The first stop was Esterly’s Groceries and General Merchandise, where we dropped off the incoming mail pouch and picked up an outgoing one.

  “Mrs. Kraus was in here fifteen minutes ago, looking for the mail,” Mr. Esterly told us. “‘Der train vass here haff an hour already,’” he mimicked. “‘Now I am here. Vare iss my mail?’”

  “She’s a corker,” McPhee agreed. “I got a package on the wagon came for her from Monkey Ward. That oughta hold her.”

  Could Mrs. Kraus be the German Woman? I wondered as Mr. McPhee and I waved to Mr. Esterly and went on our way. Across the street and down to the corner we thumped and crunched, halting outside the implement dealership. Through the big window, I saw a salesman sitting with his feet up on a desk, straw hat pulled down over his eyes. On the wall beside the desk hung a calendar, and above the month of July, a very attractive young woman wearing bib overalls like Mr. McPhee’s only a good deal more fitted, drove a tractor pulling a cultivator through a field of corn.

  Mr. McPhee left the box of tractor parts on the desk, but di
d not wake the sleeping salesman. On we rolled, down a nameless street without paving and with almost no gravel to conceal its washboard surface. The two remaining packages jounced like spit on a griddle, and I minded them to make sure they didn’t fall off. We pulled up before a house so small and tidy, I expected midget German Lutherans to greet us. Out instead came a plump, middle-aged woman with a toothless smile and a Slovak slant to her cheeks.

  Holding aloft the package we had delivered and laughing as though a wonderful joke were wrapped in the brown paper, she explained that her father’s truss was in the box sent out from St. Paul. Being without teeth, she had difficulty with the word “truss,” and she screwed her mouth up carefully, but still managed to spit on her chin. At this she fairly danced with amusement, wiping her chin on her apron.

  Could we stop for kolaches and coffee, she wanted to know when she had calmed herself. McPhee said that we had a minute to spare, and we followed as she flurried away ahead of us to a profoundly spotless kitchen, fishing dentures from a cup beside the sink and popping them into her mouth.

  Giggling, she turned and motioned us to chairs pulled up around an oilcloth-cool table. Through the open window wafted the perfume of sweet peas, coaxed up chicken wire to the sill. The smell of sweet peas mingled insouciantly with garlic and liverwurst and red wine, and prune kolaches, which were cooling on the counter.

  In the backyard a gnarled little man sat dozing on a bench under a grape arbor. Her papa, whose truss we had delivered. She poured delicate china cups full of coffee and milk, and set them before us on matching saucers. From the cupboard she took down china plates from the old country, each hand-painted with fruit and flowers. On these she served our kolaches. Out of a drawer came real linen napkins, elaborately worked with hemstitching.

  Tucking the napkin into the neck of my sunsuit and folding my hands in my lap, I waited for our hostess to be seated. The warm kolache, which nearly covered the plate, sent up messages of buttery flakiness and sweet, oozing prune filling that were painful to ignore. But when you were being so finely served, you must have the character to respond in kind. Therefore, I controlled my impulses while the plump and jolly lady inquired through the back screen whether Papa wanted a kolache and coffee.