The Cape Ann

by Faith Sullivan

  “Not if Maria baptized her.” I watched him closely.

  “She told me she did,” he said.

  He was lying, and his lying was evidence that limbo was bad business. He took one of my hands and shook it. It lay limp in his.

  “Whatever they tell you, deep thinker, God loves us all. Me, you, and your aunt’s baby.” Wouldn’t it be lovely if God was that simple? Like McPhee and like Santa Claus. McPhee let go of my hand and lifted the tongue of the freight wagon, pulling it down the brick platform toward Main Street.

  Mama emerged from the depot with Uncle Stanley close behind, tucking a couple of dollar bills into his wallet, confusion and a desire for confidence fighting each other for control of his features. What had Mama said to him? Her own face wore a take-charge expression. Mama had my grip in her right hand, a bag of lunch in her left, and Happy Stories for Bedtime tucked under her left arm.

  Uncle Stanley swept me up in his arms and asked, “Are you still my best girl?” I hugged him because I knew no better. “That’s my girl. You won’t forget your Uncle Stanley, will you?”

  I shook my head. He clung to me oddly, squeezing me too tightly, as if it really mattered that I was his girl.

  “How about a good-bye kiss?” he asked. I planted one solidly on his cheek. He was hurting my ribs with his hug, but I kept quiet, mindful that I would soon be back on the platform. “That’s just what I needed,” he said, setting me down. “I won’t wash my cheek till I see you again.” He winked at me.

  Turning to Mama, Uncle Stanley said, “Well, Arlene, I’ll see you on Friday then. When d’ya think we’ll have the sale? I have to give them notice at work.”

  “A week from next Saturday. And the week after that you’ll be on your way to California.”

  “Well, I’ll see you on Friday then,” he said again, and took my hand. We walked together to his car. He didn’t want to drive to Mankato and give his notice. He didn’t want to go back out on the road, smiling and shaking hands and not selling anything, staying with aunts and cousins because he couldn’t afford a rooming house. I could feel that sickening reluctance in the grip of his hand. He wanted … what? To climb into bed in a half-lit room with the sheet up around his head.

  Pulling himself up into the car, he said, “Wish me luck.”

  “Good luck, Uncle Stanley. You’ll sell a lot of machines this week. But it doesn’t matter, come home anyway.”

  Hurriedly he put the car into reverse, backed up, then headed out to the street and away. I waved to him although he did not look back.

  From the open window of the withdrawing train, I waved and blew Mama kisses until she was out of sight. She, on the platform, did the same until I was gone. Then I pulled a hanky from one pocket and my ticket from the other, laying the ticket on the seat and clandestinely dabbing my eyes with the hanky. Soon the last of the houses and sheds and rubber tire swings and broken cars disappeared. Now Mama was there, and I was someplace entirely else. Many times before I had visited Grandma and Grandpa Browning alone. I nevertheless felt an emptiness inside my chest, as if, quite literally, I had gone and left my heart.

  When the conductor had punched my ticket and slipped the stub into the metal clip between the windows, I dragged the grip out from behind the seat and hoisted it onto the empty seat opposite mine. Releasing the metal hasps, I opened the flimsy suitcase and extracted from beneath my dresses and underwear the tablet and pencil I had tucked in there while Mama was packing. The sin notebook.

  Mama had taught me to write numbers up to one hundred. When I had entered sin one hundred in the notebook, I hadn’t the temerity to tell her that I needed bigger numbers, so I started over with one. Now I flipped the pages to the most recent entries. I was up to thirty-four for the third time. With the use-blunted lead I printed: “34—killed a baby.” Hastily returning the tablet and pencil to the grip, I closed the case and hauled it back, behind the seat.

  Laying my head down and closing my eyes, I covered my heart with my fist so that no one passing in the aisle could see its wild beating.

  32

  WITH THE REMAINS OF ten years of marriage packed into two cheap pasteboard grips and two cardboard boxes tied with twine, Aunt Betty stepped down from the westbound train in Blue Lake on Monday of the third week in July, Mama right behind her.

  Aunt Betty screwed up her eyes against the sun. “It’s so hot and dusty here,” she said. “And the wind’s always blowing grit in your face.”

  “It’s no hotter here than in Morgan Lake,” Mama told her, grabbing me and giving me a big hug.

  “Oh, it is. Stanley always said Blue Lake was the hottest spot in the state in July and the coldest in January.” She stood on the platform, looking around. “The prairie’s so flat, it’s like living on top of the dining room table.” She hadn’t even said hello to Grandpa and me. “For God’s sake, don’t let them bury me here.”

  “We have to be patient,” Grandma advised Mama on Tuesday.

  “You have to be patient,” Mama replied. “I’m taking Lark and going home. I’ve got my own life to tend to.”

  Upstairs Aunt Betty rested, the oscillating fan on the bureau trained on her. Mama sat at the dining room table, paging through Life magazine, while Grandma perched on a high stool, ironing Grandpa’s undershirts.

  “Did you see this about Japan?” Mama asked idly, continuing to read. “Everybody’s in the army it looks like, except the old men. I’d hate to live there.”

  “It’s the Germans that bother me,” Grandma said. “Did you read the piece about the English? They’re getting ready for another war, it says. I don’t know why countries can’t get along.” She folded the undershirt and added it to a growing pile of ironed underwear lying on the table. “When do you leave?” she asked Mama.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “That soon? I thought I’d have the Dugans and Standishes for Sunday dinner. They’d like to see you.”

  “I have to get home. I hate to think what the place looks like with Willie baching so long.”

  “A few more days wouldn’t hurt.”

  “There’s business to tend to,” Mama said, closing the discussion.

  On the train home the following morning, Mama grabbed my hands in hers and held them up. “Look, Lark, your nails! Look how long they are.”

  It was the first time in memory that my nails had grown beyond the quick and had whitish tips like other people’s. Despite the guilts and worries of the past three weeks, I had not bitten them.

  Now I withdrew them, tucking them under me, grinning imbecilically and staring out the window at nothing, filled with embarrassment and pride.

  “I’m proud of you,” Mama went on. “This afternoon you can walk down to Eggers’s Drug Store and buy a bottle of LaCross fingernail polish. What color would you like?”

  “Pink.”

  “Pink it is.”

  I wished that Angela Roosevelt could see my long nails.

  That afternoon when we stepped across the threshold, Mama halted so suddenly that I ran into her. “My God,” she blurted, surveying the ravages of Papa’s three weeks of keeping house.

  Dirty dishes littered every surface. Precarious towers of plates and cereal bowls teetered, held in bizarre constructions by the glue of hardened vegetable matter and the mucilage of old oatmeal. On the stove, hamburger barnacles encrusted the blackened skillet. Gingerly Mama stepped across the room to the sink and pulled back the curtain concealing the slop pail.

  Seeing that the pails had spilled over, she cried, “Willie, you sonofabitch.” But Papa was away down at the freight room, storing cartons.

  Mama dropped down onto a kitchen chair. “Welcome home,” she said to no one in particular.

  Papa did not show up at his usual lunch hour. I was relieved. When the mess was cleaned up, maybe Mama would calm down. We scrubbed and scraped and washed and dried and wiped up and sorted out. Between times we hauled slops across the tracks.

  “I see what he’s up to,” Mama said.<
br />
  “What’s he up to, Mama?”

  “If he makes coming home bad enough, he thinks I won’t go. My own sister nearly dying, and he’s punishing me.”

  After two hours our furious labors in the kitchen were done. Now Mama turned toward the living room, where Papa’s socks and underwear and shirts were draped over the furniture and strewn across the floor. Ashtrays overflowed. On the arm of the sofa, a brown wound about the size of a dime revealed pale stuffing.

  It was twenty past four when we finished bringing order out of the chaos. Mama lay on the living room couch with a cold cloth on her forehead, a knife pain stabbing her from temple to temple. The drapes were drawn.

  “Bring my purse,” she said. “It’s on the bureau.” From its varied and sweet-smelling contents, she extracted two dimes. “Go get your nail polish. Don’t lose the change, and don’t dawdle.”

  I dawdled a little. While the big clock above the prescription counter pulled the moments to it with a tick and pushed them away with a tock, and Mr. Eggers puttered, measuring and mixing, glancing up occasionally to make certain I wasn’t pouring Evening in Paris talcum into my palm or removing breast pumps from their boxes, I lingered before the Coty’s display, intoxicating myself with the potentiality of being beautiful and smelling of crushed peaches and sandalwood.

  “Was there something you wanted?” the druggist inquired, calling from the chest-high space where he worked with the mortar and pestle.

  “Fingernail polish. Pink.”

  All the way home I caressed the little bottle, turning it upside down and right side up to observe the thick, lush flow of the enamel. In the kitchen I set the bottle on the table. “It’s called Precious Pink.”

  “Put it on my bureau,” Mama told me, pouring mayonnaise dressing over macaroni and tuna salad, a favorite, hot-weather dinner of hers but one which Papa called “Fairy Salad.”

  “Can’t we paint my nails now?”

  “Do you see the time?” she asked, indicating the electric clock. It was five-thirty. “I told you not to dawdle. It’s almost supper time.”

  “Did your headache go away?” I asked, setting the polish on Mama’s bureau beside her perfumes.

  “No such luck.”

  “Is it a migraine?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What’s a breast pump?” I asked, sitting down at the table. “They’ve got breast pumps at Eggers’s.”

  Papa opened the screen door. “What difference is it to you what a breast pump is?”

  “They’ve got them at Eggers’s.”

  “They’ve got plenty of things at Eggers’s that are none of your business.”

  Stirring the mayonnaise into the salad with a big spoon, Mama said, “A breast pump is something—”

  “I said it was none of her business, Arlene,” Papa interrupted.

  “There’s no reason the child shouldn’t know what a breast pump is.”

  Papa closed the inner door and stood before it.

  “It’s too hot to have the door closed,” Mama said. “I’ve got a headache. Please open it.”

  “I don’t want the whole world hearing us arguing about breast pumps.”

  “If you don’t argue, they won’t hear us,” Mama told him, crossing to the refrigerator. “Do you want iced tea?”

  “You know I don’t drink that slop.” Ignoring Mama’s request that he open the door, Papa sat down at his place and, smiling, said, “Let’s not fight.”

  Mama slammed the refrigerator door and set the cold tea pitcher on the table. Papa grabbed her wrist, pulling her down on his lap. “I’m glad you’re home. I missed you.”

  “If you missed me so much, why didn’t you pick the place up before I got home?” Mama asked coldly.

  “I was going to. I thought you were coming tomorrow,” he said.

  “I told you when I was coming.”

  Mama pulled away and went to fetch bread from the cupboard. “Lark and I worked from the time we got off the train till after four o’clock, cleaning up your mess.”

  “I’m sorry, honey. I was going to clean it up. I’ve been so damned busy. Art’s been out sick two days this week. I’ve been running my ass off keeping up.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s over ninety degrees.” She poured herself a glass of tea and put it to her temple. “Not the kind of weather when you want to come home and start scrubbing floors.”

  “Why didn’t you leave it till later?” Papa asked.

  Mama set her glass down hard on the table. “You’re making me crazy with your lying innocence,” she told Papa and hurried into the bedroom.

  Papa sprang up and followed. “You’re calling me a liar?” he demanded.

  Slipping down from the kitchen chair and passing behind Papa into the living room, I hunched myself into the corner of the couch.

  “I’m working my tail off every day, getting by on hamburger every night, and you come home complaining and calling me a liar.”

  “Your ma and pa are happy to have hamburger. How’d you get to be so special?” Mama wanted to know.

  “You leave my ma and pa out of this, bitch.”

  “All right, Willie, let’s just talk about us,” Mama shouted. “What about the four hundred and fifty dollars we don’t have that you lost at poker? Where are we going to get that?”

  “I knew you’d come home screaming about that. I said to myself, ‘The first thing Arlene’s gonna do is throw that four hundred and fifty dollars up to me.’ And, by God, I was right.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t, Willie. You’re not going to make me the villain.” Mama’s voice had the fuzzy sound it took on when she had a migraine. “I didn’t lose the money.”

  “If we’ve got money to support your sister,” Papa spat at her, “we’ve got money for poker. And it’s none of your business how I pay my debts. I’ll take care of them my way.” He barged through the kitchen, knocking over Mama’s chair, and out the door, slamming it behind him.

  I ran to the living room window and pulled the drape aside. Papa climbed into the pickup and drove away, spraying parking-lot gravel behind him. I guessed that he was going downtown to eat at the Loon Cafe, where Dora Noonan and Magdalen Haggerty would laugh at his jokes and serve him extra vanilla ice cream on his pie.

  From the bedroom Mama’s voice was faint. “Lark,” she called.

  I went to her.

  “Put the macaroni in the refrigerator,” she told me.

  “Mama, where’s our car?”

  “What?”

  “Where’s the Oldsmobile?”

  “It’s not in the parking lot?” She opened her eyes to a slit to look at me.

  I shook my head.

  “My God,” she said.

  “Where is it, Mama?”

  “He’s sold it.”

  • • •

  I put the macaroni in the refrigerator, then tiptoed into the bedroom and removed the nail polish from Mama’s bureau. Sitting down at the kitchen table, I pushed aside a plate and studied my hands, examining the ragged nails, bitten back to the quick now. Opening the bottle of polish, I began to paint my fingers, nails and skin, up to the first knuckle. When I had finished, I poured the remaining polish on Papa’s chair and went to bed.

  33

  SEPTEMBER TOOK ME BY surprise. When Mama said, “School starts next week,” I was dumbfounded.

  Arithmetic and the Monkey Ward Christmas catalog were the best things about that autumn. Arithmetic I did not love for itself, but for what it symbolized: another giant step toward adulthood. I longed for third grade, when we would learn handwriting. Then I would have the basic skills to escape from childhood. I half imagined that someone would give me paid work when I could write longhand.

  During kindergarten and first grade, I enjoyed playing “house” or “school” with my friends. Now I wanted to play “office” or “store” or, sometimes, “college,” although I didn’t know much about that. I could only predicate it by saying, “Imagine there are bo
oks all around. Books and books and books.” To which Beverly Ridza, if she were playing, would complain, “Godsakes, that sounds awful.”

  I played with Beverly more in second grade than I had in first. Sally was still my best friend, but Beverly had taught me to swim. Now, when school let out at three, Sally and I and Beverly left together. Sally lived closest to school. I was next, and Beverly lived a block beyond Rayzeen’s Lumberyard in a one-room tar paper shack on the falling-down outskirts of town.

  On Friday afternoons the three of us alternated stopping at Sally’s to study catechism or coming to my house. Mama saw at once that Beverly’s problem with catechism was poor reading. Out came the flash cards she’d made for me and new ones which she made up just for Beverly. Oddly enough, Beverly didn’t seem to mind. She was flattered by the attention and time Mama gave her, especially as Mama did not patronize her or, worse, pity her. The truth was, however, that twice after Beverly left, Mama cried.

  Now that I was in second grade, time seemed to evaporate. My seventh birthday, late in September, flew by before I knew what hit me. Lucky thing I had the new roller skates to remember it by. The fall bazaar at St. Boniface Catholic Church came and went with the same reckless haste.

  The bazaar was held in the church basement in early November. As with the Knights of Columbus picnic, there were booths of baked goods and handiwork and white elephant objects. Games of skill, like ring toss; and games of chance, like bingo; and an enormous wheel of fortune were part of the festivities.

  At the kitchen end of the room, folding tables were set up in a long row and for twenty-five cents you were served a plate heaped with fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, Jell-O salad, and baked beans. When you got around all of that, there was pie or cake for dessert.

  This year Mama let the girls in the catechism class serve the dessert. She made each of us a fancy apron like those she had sewn for the handiwork booth. Sally and I and Beverly, sporting our ruffled aprons, passed up and down the row of tables, carrying plates of dessert, serving from the left and clearing away from the right, and impressing even Sisters Mary Frances and Mary Clair despite themselves.