The Cape Ann

by Faith Sullivan

  I heard a snapping sound, as of a doctor’s bag closing, and then Mama and the doctor emerged from the bedroom, Mama with tears on her face and a wadded handkerchief in her hand, the doctor with professional concern on his thin face.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow night,” he said as Mama opened the screen door for him and followed him to his car.

  When she returned, I asked, “Is Aunt Betty going to be all right? What did the doctor say? Did he give her medicine?”

  “He left medicine, but he doesn’t know. It depends on her general strength, he said. Go to sleep now.” Mama’s shoulders hung low as she pulled aside the green drape and slipped into Aunt Betty’s room.

  The next morning, which was Thursday, Aunt Betty seemed some better. She sat up in bed, drank tea, and nibbled half a slice of toast. She wore a thin, dimity nightie, and her shoulder bones looked as though they would stab right through the fabric, but she was more spirited and even joked a little with Mama about the previous day’s quarrel.

  I was greatly relieved. I was still fainthearted at the notion of going to the kolache woman, pouring out our problems, and asking for help. I could imagine her saying, “What gave you the idea that I could help? I’m not a doctor.”

  Thursday afternoon Aunt Betty began to slip away from us again. Mama said her fever was rising. Her eyes were glassy, and she trembled with chill. I fetched an extra blanket and sat with Mama in the bedroom all afternoon, taking my nap on the floor. There were times now when Mama’s fear made her seem like a little girl.

  “Where did the kolaches come from?” Mama asked during our vigil.

  “A lady. Her papa showed me how to use the dowsing rod.”

  Mama nodded. “They were good. I had them with tea last night.”

  That evening when the doctor came, Mama asked, “Shouldn’t I put her in the hospital in Mankato?”

  “There’s nothing we can do there that you aren’t doing here, at least until she goes into labor. And it would be more expensive.”

  After the doctor left, Mama sat down on the couch by me and said, “I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing. Should I put her in the hospital?”

  Mama’s self-doubt distressed me. She always knew just what to do.

  “Uncle Stan doesn’t have any money, so how can we take Aunt Betty to the hospital? Anyway, she probably wouldn’t go. She’d fight and cry.”

  “Yes,” Mama said, more to herself than to me. We sat, not speaking, while Mama wrestled in her mind. “I haven’t called Grandma,” she said. “If anything happens, she won’t forgive me.”

  “Call her tomorrow.”

  “Maybe,” Mama said. “I won’t tell Betty.”

  “How come?”

  “She doesn’t want anybody to know how poor she and Stan are,” Mama said softly. “It would kill her if Mama came and saw how things are.”

  “Why shouldn’t people know if you’re poor?” I asked.

  “It’s Uncle Stan. He’s ashamed.”

  I couldn’t understand. After a long silence, I asked Mama another question that had bothered me since we got to Morgan Lake. “Doesn’t Aunt Betty have any friends? Nobody comes to see her.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she sent them away.”

  She used to have a lot of friends.

  I helped Mama drag the armchair into Aunt Betty’s room. “I’ll sit with her tonight,” Mama said.

  We settled down: Mama speaking soft, soothing words when Aunt Betty churned and moaned and sometimes cried out unintelligible entreaties in her sleep; me stiff with fear and theological considerations of guilt. If Aunt Betty died because I was afraid to ask the kolache woman for help, would I have committed murder?

  I couldn’t get comfortable on the couch. Corners of guilt poked me however I arranged myself. I lay, staring out the window at heaven, which was receding from me. I prayed to God not to let Aunt Betty die.

  I got up and went to the bathroom. When I returned, Mama pulled aside the green drape. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. I just went to the bathroom.”

  “You’re not getting sick?”

  “No. My cold’s almost gone.”

  Here was Mama, worrying about everyone, and all I could do was worry about my own soul. Tomorrow, if Aunt Betty was alive, I would go to the kolache woman.

  Across the way the light burned in Witch Kraus’s back bedroom. As I watched, I saw her shadow move across the drawn shade. In a few minutes, her toilet flushed, and a minute later, her shadow again crossed before the shade, and the bedsprings complained as she resumed her plotting against Aunt Betty.

  In the morning, Mama sent me to the store for bread and milk and the mail.

  “Can I stop and say hello to the kolache lady?”

  “On the way to the store,” Mama advised. “I don’t want sour milk when you get home.”

  I think Mama wanted me out of the house for a while, so she could think. Aunt Betty was weaker than yesterday morning. “Stan’ll be home today,” Mama said aloud. “I’ll let him decide what to do.” Then, “But what does he know? He’s the one who let this happen.”

  When I was dressed, I buttered a slice of bread and slipped away, half a dollar in my pocket. A block from the kolache woman’s house, dread grabbed me by the throat. I didn’t know these people. Maybe the woman and her papa would kidnap me and chain me up in their shed, holding me for ransom.

  The kolache woman’s front door was ajar. From the kitchen came sounds of dishes being washed. Maybe I should go downtown and see if McPhee had any packages to deliver.

  “Good morning.” It was the old man. He had come around the corner of the house, carrying a hammer, his shirt pocket heavy with nails. “I have to fix the loose step,” he said, indicating the one on which I sat.

  “Maria!” he called through the front door. “The little girl is here.”

  Before I was ready, I was being swept into the house, through the dark living room that smelled of garlic and furniture polish, and into the kitchen, which still smelled of strong breakfast coffee.

  “Sit,” Maria invited, leading me to the chair by the window, where you could smell sweet peas. On the table a loaf of coarse homemade bread sat on a board beside a bowl of butter. Maria got down a plate and set it on the table in front of me. Slicing off two thick slices of bread, she buttered them lavishly and put them on the plate. “Wait,” she admonished, fetching a jar of her own strawberry jam. With a tablespoon, she spooned out thick red preserves onto the bread, then handed me a knife.

  Before I had spread the preserves from crust to crust, she’d poured me a cup of coffee and milk. “Now,” she said, meaning I should begin to eat, which I did. “Wait,” she said again, laughing at herself and hurrying to the icebox, to return with a big hunk of homemade cheese, from which she hacked off a good size chunk for me.

  While I ate, she poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down opposite me to watch. She enjoyed watching me eat, her eyes following the bread to my mouth, then the cheese, her head nodding slightly as if I were a pupil performing a routine which she had taught me.

  It didn’t bother me to have her watch, since she didn’t criticize, but rather, barely restrained herself from clapping as I finished one slice of bread and took a bite from the cheese. I was casting about for a way to introduce Aunt Betty’s problem.

  When I had drunk my coffee, Maria asked, “Your auntie is sick?”

  “She might die.”

  “A baby’s coming?”

  I nodded. How had she known all this?

  “Aunt Betty vomits all the time,” I told Maria. “And she’s running a fever. Mama doesn’t know what we’re going to do.”

  High up, in a cupboard near the ceiling, behind glass doors, I saw dozens of little bottles with hand-written labels and many little sacks filled, I was sure, with strange, dry, acrid-smelling ingredients, like those in Grandma Browning’s tall medicine cupboard.

  “The doctor has come,” Maria observed.

  “He gave
her medicine, but it didn’t help.”

  “Yes,” she said, as if that were to be expected.

  She asked several further questions regarding Aunt Betty’s illness, some of whose answers I knew, some I didn’t. At last she said, “Your aunt would like a caller.” She gave me a long look from which I tried not to retreat, and this sealed our agreement.

  Relieved, I climbed down from the chair. “I have to go to Esterly’s now,” I said.

  “After papa eats, I will come,” Maria promised, following me to the front door. “I will bring tea.”

  On the wall above the living room couch were two portraits in heavy gilt frames. One was Maria’s papa wearing a colorful uniform, his hair black and glossy, his face unlined and merry. The other was a woman whose hair was wound like Maria’s in circling plaits. Her nose was long and straight, her mouth wide and unsmiling. A woman of strong magic. Maria came of formidable blood.

  22

  RETURNING TO AUNT BETTY’S from Esterly’s, I’d gone out back to sit on the steps and watch for the stork. Shielding her eyes against the midday glare, Mama joined me, gazing out at the pasture and the eastern sky as if she, too, expected to see a stork.

  “It’s good to be outside,” she said. Except for hanging clothes and coming to fetch me from the sidewalk in front of Boomer’s Tavern, Mama hadn’t been out of the house since we’d arrived. Mama wasn’t used to such confinement.

  “The kolache lady’s coming after lunch,” I informed her.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll have to bake something. I wish you’d told me before. It’s almost noon,” she said impatiently, turning on her heel and flustering into the house. “What on earth can I make?”

  I hadn’t told Mama that Maria was coming because I’d already begun to have second thoughts by the time I arrived at Esterly’s. In all my vague plans to secure Maria’s magic for Aunt Betty, I’d ignored what Sister Mary Frances had told the catechism class about magic: mainly, that it was a sin. She had warned us against ever uttering the words “hocus-pocus.” The day she came upon Ronald Oster trying to turn Beverly Ridza into a jackass, waving his arms and hocus-pocussing over her, Sister had grabbed him by the ear, canceled our little recess, and indignantly herded us back to our pews, explaining, as she crossed herself, that hocus-pocus stood for hoc est meus corpus—“this is My body.” To practice magic was to contradict the will of God, she assured us.

  Why did God mind so much, I wondered. I could understand if you were doing bad with your magic. But why did He mind people doing good with it? The Bible said that He was a jealous God. That could explain it. But jealousy was a sin. He expected us to be perfect. It wasn’t fair.

  I didn’t see how God could help loving Maria. She was warm and generous. Also, she was Catholic. And where had her power come from, if not from God? My brain ached with the weight of these thoughts.

  I was sitting on the front porch, when I spotted Maria striding down the middle of the street in her sensible black pumps. She was smoothly girdled and wearing a dark challis print with a white-collared vee-neck. How righteously her coronet glistened in the sun! She looked like the head of the Methodist Ladies Aide.

  Under her right arm was clutched a very large, black handbag. That was where she carried the magic tea and whatever other antidotes she had brought to cure Aunt Betty.

  Witch Kraus was sitting on her front porch, hooking a rug. Punch, punch, punch, the hook went angrily in and out of the canvas. Did I only imagine that her hands clenched the hook as if it were a dagger?

  As Maria drew abreast of the Witch’s house, Witch Kraus called in greeting, “Miss Zelena.” Maria nodded properly but formally in the Witch’s direction and did not break stride in her advance toward Aunt Betty’s beleaguered castle.

  “I have come to see how is your sister,” Maria told Mama when the two of them met, Maria grasping Mama’s hand in a firm clasp. “And you, how are you, I want to know.”

  “I’m fine,” Mama lied, leading Maria into the living room. “My sister’s in there,” Mama explained, pointing to the green drape, “but she’s asleep.”

  “Sure, sure,” Maria said, pronouncing the word as her papa did—“shooor.” “We can sit in the kitchen, where we won’t bother her.”

  Mama led Maria toward the kitchen and the hastily baked crumb cake sitting on the counter, fresh out of the oven. “Have a chair,” Mama invited Maria, “and I’ll get the coffee.”

  When they were both settled at the rickety little table, Maria said, “I am Maria Zelena. I am hearing from your little girl that your sister is sick. I am good at helping sick people. I learn things from my mama, who was well known, even in America, for curing sickness.”

  “We don’t know what it is,” Mama said.

  “It’s everything,” Maria said. “Worry and sadness open the door, and evil flies in.” Seeing that Mama was startled by the word “evil,” she amended, “evil… germs fly in.” Despite the revision, there remained in her eye a cast which spoke to Mama’s instincts.

  Mama rose from the table. “Lark, find your Happy Stories for Bedtime,” she instructed, “and take it out on the front porch.”

  I would rather have had a licking with the brush than leave that room, but it was pointless appealing Mama’s decision. I retrieved Happy Stories for Bedtime from beneath the couch, and let myself out the screen door, closing it softly.

  I sat, legs stretched out before me, leaning against the clapboard porch wall, the book on my lap. Its familiar cover brought Harvester to my mind, and I realized with a shock that I hadn’t thought of Hilly or Sally or even Papa for several days. Aunt Betty’s illness had driven them out of my thoughts. Now I began to worry about Hilly, who did not have Mama and me close to keep an eye on him, but only Mrs. Stillman, who was old and unable to follow him to those places where he might get into trouble, places like cemetery road. Would Sally’s mama look after him? She could barely look after herself.

  I began to drowse, and once I nearly fell over on the porch floor. Sneaking back into the house, I lay down on the couch. From the kitchen drifted the low, intent voices of Mama and Maria, but I was too sleepy to concentrate on their words or on the sharp smell, vaguely familiar to me, which drifted from that direction as well. Maria was brewing her magic tisane, and I was missing the entire ceremony.

  I woke later to the hypnotic sound of Maria’s voice, coming from beyond the green drape. “Yes, yes,” she crooned, “it does not taste good, little girl, but it does not taste bad, you will see, and it will make you better. That’s right, little girl, I will hold the cup. Yes, yes, I will hold the cup. You drink. It won’t come up, you will see. Your sister is holding a bowl, but it won’t come up. It will stay down. You are needing this, little girl, and your body will not throw it up.” And on she crooned, Aunt Betty apparently sipping the healing elixir.

  Later I heard Maria say to Mama, “We’ll fold the sheet back.”

  “She won’t take a chill?” Mama asked.

  “In this heat?” There was a rustling of cloth as the sheet was folded back. “Is there a fan around, you know, one from church?”

  This was a cue for me to help. I ran to the dining room and fetched the two I’d seen lying on the built-in sideboard. They were round pieces of lightweight cardboard, glued to a stick. These particular specimens had pictures of Mary and Baby Jesus on them and, below the picture, “Compliments of Kinder Mortuary, Mankato, Minnesota. Telephone 283.”

  “Good,” Maria said as I handed them to her, and she passed one to Mama. For an hour, until Aunt Betty fell into a deep sleep, Maria and Mama stood, one on either side of the bed, and kept the air moving over her face and exposed arms.

  Before she left, Maria praised Mama for her hard work and gave her instructions for the night ahead. “Plenty of ice?” she asked.

  Mama nodded. “The iceman comes again tomorrow.”

  “If the fever goes…” Maria gestured
upward with her hand. “… then you start the cold cloths. Tonight, more tea. And more tea. For the kidneys. It is hard work. The little girl can empty the pot for you,” she suggested, referring to the gray enamel chamber pot Aunt Betty was using. “All night give her tea when she is awake. The kidneys.” Maria looked sharply at Mama. “Come outside,” she said, tucking her great, black handbag under her arm.

  I crept to the screen door and strained to hear as Mama and Maria stood together on the sidewalk, conferring.

  “It is bad,” Maria said, uncompromisingly.

  Mama’s head jerked to the side as if she’d been slapped. “Is she going to die?”

  “Maybe,” Maria said, making two words of the one—may be. “You and your little girl, talk good words to her,” she advised enigmatically. “I will come tomorrow at the same time. If it is very bad, send someone for me. Maria Zelena. Papa is Ladislau Zelena.”

  As Maria retreated up the street, Uncle Stan’s old black Ford passed her, bouncing and rattling as if the doors would fall off. Mama waited on the sidewalk for him, her arms at her sides now, her back straight. As the car pulled up in front of the house, I ran out the door and past Mama.

  “Uncle Stan!” I called, throwing my arms out to hug him. Whatever his faults, I was very fond of Uncle Stan.

  Slamming the car door, he waited for me, smiling a smile that was worn thin by the week out on the road. I flung myself at him, and he picked me up, holding me in his left arm.

  “Are you glad to see us, Uncle Stan?” I asked him, laying my head against his rough cheek.

  “You bet,” he answered, his voice as tired as his face. Up the walk he carried me. “Arlene,” he said, nodding to Mama and carrying me into the house, letting the door slam behind us.

  “Shhhhh,” Mama reprimanded, following us into the house. “We just got Betty to sleep.”

  Uncle Stan set me down on the couch and lowered himself wearily beside me. He was a good-looking man. Some might have said handsome, in an Irish way. I know a little about Irish ways because, though Papa’s name is German and Mama’s English, there was intermarrying with Irish on both sides, resulting in O’Neill and Murphy and O’Connor branches. My own Grandma Erhardt was a Sullivan. I contained about a third Irish blood, Mama said, though she explained that, when you saw the blood, as I did when I fell and scraped a knee, you couldn’t tell what kind it was. For Uncle Stan, it was the same as for me; his mother had been a Monahan.