That brought her to her senses all right, and she said, “Yes, Mrs. Ayres, I’m sorry,” as sweet as could be. I will say for the girl that there isn’t an ounce of vice in her, but the kind of ignorance and thoughtlessness you would find in anyone who hadn’t a stitch of real bringing-up. Which are the exact words I told to Rose McIntyre after I had mentioned how I found the girl laying all over Richard the first week we had her, and Richard helped her with the dishes, and Rose mentioned that the girl’s mother was known all around the Five Corners section as a terrible drunk and bound to end up in the County Home.
“Well,” I said to Rose, “the more’s the reason one has to forgive and forget, and try to be the kind of mother to the girl that she’s never known.”
“Lucille,” said Rose, and you could see she meant it with all her heart, “you’d just naturally like to be the mother of everybody in this whole wide world.”
I had to laugh at the serious way she said it, but I was a little bit proud, too, that she had, no use denying it. Fact is, Rose had absolutely no control over her own Charlie and was always bursting with surprise at the way Richard and Bettina and I seemed to work out our little problems so nicely. No fuss, no hurt feelings; just a little heart-to-heart chat was all. A couple of words to Richard, for example, about how it was only right to leave Junie alone while she was doing dishes, and to remember she was just being paid to work for us and must be respected for it—well, that was all it took.
For a while, after Bettina took up with Matthew Chaves I was afraid it would have a bad effect on Richard, who seemed to be so impressed by Matthew’s sharp tongue and his nasty ways. And for all I know, if I hadn’t stepped in to speak my piece to Richard it might have turned out as badly as I feared.
“Dick,” I said, “I want you to be as courteous and considerate to Matthew as if he were one of the people in your own circle who knows the good things of life. He comes from a slum in New York, he’s had a hard struggle getting up as far as he did, and we have to help him by our example. If you simply close your eyes to the way he dresses and talks and acts, and show him by your example how one does these things, you yourself will be acting like a true gentleman.”
“But he says,” Dick started to explain, “that these things aren’t important, mother. He says …”
“And you mustn’t argue with him about it,” I told him. “All you can do is show him how a gentleman does act. If anything can bring him to the point where he can see how poorly suited he is for Bettina, that will be it, won’t it, dear?”
For that was the other burden I had to bear in the years that should have been so happy with fulfillment: not only had Katherine Ballou entered Harry’s life at the worst possible time, but she had brought Matthew Chaves into Bettina’s life. And Bettina, a child who needed to be prodded into attending any little social gathering where boys would be present, had actually responded to the man as if that was what I had been preparing her for in all the years that had gone into her education and bringing-up.
“I’m from the west side of Manhattan,” Matthew had once told me right out, “the west side right next to the waterfront. And, strange as it seems, I always found it filled with the same kind of people you might meet in any neighborhood you go into. Just average people, good, bad, and indifferent.”
As if I hadn’t driven through that section with Harry and seen for myself it was just one big Five Corners, only a hundred times bigger and more miserable! Or didn’t read the papers enough to know the kind of goings-on you’d find there! It was that which really stung him, I think: that I could look at him and his ways and his background with my eyes open, and not with them tight shut and my jaw hanging down like my daughter did.
What did she see in him? I would say, exactly what some of the girls in Five Corners saw in the young men who lounged obscenely against drugstore windows and pool parlor doorways there. The attraction of plain indecent sexualism and lust openly displayed. Another mother might not admit it, might not pronounce to herself that her own daughter is one with slatterns in Five Corners or down by the ferry district. But I choose to look facts in the face. I always have. I always will.
It was blood telling again, the same blood that touched the old man with scandal in his youth, that led Harry to the kind of affair with a woman like Katherine Ballou that you could imagine in a city tabloid, the same Ayres blood that was in Bettina. Of all of them, only Richard had escaped because, as my sister, Edna, once put it to me, “That boy is more Pickett than Ayres, Lucille, and thank God for that.”
What can a mother do when a Matthew Chaves enters her daughter’s life? She can plead with the girl; she can plead with the man; and she might as well be beating her head against a stone wall. The greatest misfortune that could be recorded was that Bettina knew so little of decent, worth-while young men that she had no basis for comparison. And Matthew Chaves was not one to hesitate in taking advantage of this.
I always knew that if Harry had only stood at my side during this struggle, Bettina would surely have yielded to decency and common sense. But, said Harry (and there is the difference between a father’s heart and a mother’s), it was her life. Her life, mind you, so that she could go straight down the road to perdition for all he cared. After all, my own husband in the eyes of God and man did not hesitate to put his wife aside for the embraces of a cheap, perfumed slut he barely knew, so why should he trouble himself about the mess his daughter intended to make of her life.
But even alone I had fought the good fight, and the fact that Bettina’s eyes were opened that morning to just what kind of man her father was could mean I had victory in my grasp. Standing there by the bathroom sink, her hair in those long braids, her face shining, she looked so much like my little girl of years before that I could have cried. Was it that which gave me strength to tell her right out, “I’ve stood enough! His rudeness, his meanness, everything about him I’ve swallowed till I’m full up to here. But talk about marriage I will not listen to!”
“But it’s come to that now,” she said, looking as if she were ready to cry, and my heart ached for her.
“Then, if it has it’s your business to settle it on the spot. He’s got to get out of this house as soon as he can, and he’s not to show his face around here again!” Those were the very words I said to her, and I said them with a feeling of relief that I had been finally forced to them.
“If that’s the way it is,” she said, “I’m going with him.”
“Where?” I asked her. “Down to that smelly little room of his over the ferry house?”
“If that’s what he wants,” she said. My fine young lady thanking me for twenty-two years of love and devotion.
“Yes,” I said, “so he can lie there and read his books while you work all day to support him.”
“I’ll do that, too,” she said, and that really shook me. If a woman has no more pride than to talk like that what is there left to her?
“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” I said, “because there’s only one thing he wants of you, and that’s what any man wants of any woman. And when he’s had that he’ll go on his way until he finds some other little fool just like you so that he can start the game all over again!”
Her eyes were staring into mine. And she was Ayres then, all Ayres, with that same look the old man got once or twice when he was really wild.
“What makes you think he hasn’t already had that of me!” she cried out.
My heart stuck in my throat, and then looking at her I knew it was just talk. Talk, and no more than that. I swung my hand back and hit her across the face as I hadn’t done since she was in pinafores. “If you ever give me reason to suspect anything,” I said. “If you ever dare talk like that!” And then I had to hold on to the edge of the sink I felt so undone. And with that I knew I must tell her. I knew that Harry had never spoken a word to her as he swore he would, and it was all up to me.
So I told her. Who it is that makes the home and must defend it. It is the woma
n, the wife and mother. And the man willfully fighting against it, betraying it. Unless, perhaps, he were a man like her brother, a man like some of the decent boys with background and breeding enough to show them where their duties lay. “Not,” I told her, “like Matthew Chaves. Or—your father.”
Her face went like a deaf one’s trying to hear and understand something. “No,” she said, “Oh, no.”
“Yes,” I said, “for a year now. With Katherine Ballou. On those little trips to New York when he’s supposed to be working so hard at business appointments. Oh, yes, indeed, for a year now and maybe longer.”
“No,” she said, and her voice got higher as if she were trying to convince herself, and maybe me, that it couldn’t be. “An affair with her?”
It was a bad time, I would never deny that, but it promised a good end. And it was a miracle of good fortune that I had the sense to talk to her as I did before Matthew Chaves chose to speak as he did at the breakfast table, because like somebody throwing a boomerang it only came back to hit him. And the way she reacted to him when he went upstairs to tell her about Katherine Ballou’s death was enough to show me that she was growing up, and growing up fast.
And it was about time.
CHAPTER THREE
When Morten Ten Eyck was picked to be police chief I had it straight from Rose McIntyre (Howie McIntyre was on the Town Council at that time) that he was chosen because he was known to be such a tight man with a penny. That was about the same year the old man did for himself. Very hard times for everybody, of course, and what with the township funds almost gone and Hibbard’s new department store having put the old Ten Eyck store right out of business, it seemed a sensible thing all around. The town could have a good, respectable police chief who would stretch every cent to the limit, and Morten would have some way of putting bread on his table.
“Although,” as Rose put it in that way of hers, “I can just see those old Ten Eycks whirling in their graves at the way one of their precious brood is forced to become a mere cop.”
Well, that is Rose all over, a body who has never learned to swallow the fact that neither her people nor Howie’s were one of the old families, and who is always poking and prodding at it like a sore tooth to show folks it doesn’t matter. It is almost funny to see the way you can get a rise out of her by just mentioning that the Ayres were, of course, Nicholases on the old lady’s side, and were right here in town before there was even any town to speak of. But knowing how she feels about this I make it a point to steer clear of mentioning it. I know, and have brought up my children to know, that it is not what your parents were, but what you are that counts in this world of ours.
Still, I had to go along with Rose when she said that she would be mortified if she were May Ten Eyck, married to a man who actually kept his change in a little purse, and who looked and dressed as if he couldn’t afford to give away a suit until he had worn it down to the last thread. And I have seen him with my own eyes walking along with his eyeglasses barely held together with a piece of adhesive plaster, and he has been going around with that smelly old pipe of his patched with plaster, too, for heaven knows how long.
There is no sweeter woman in town than May herself (although Dutch Reformed), and I made it my business once where opportunity offered itself to mention gently that since Morten was, so to speak, a representative of the town he really ought to make more of an appearance for the town’s sake, especially in front of outsiders.
“Well, if you feel that way, Lucille,” said May, “just tell Morten about it any time you want. After all, dear,” she said, “you and Freda and Rose are taxpayers, and certainly have every right to do so.” Which, I must remark, is a curious way for a wife to talk about her husband and his affairs. For my part, if Harry ever let himself go so that someone had to come to me about his appearance I would have sunk right through the ground with embarrassment, and it would be the last thing in the world I’d do to send them off to Harry himself.
And as for talking to Morten Ten Eyck about such personal matters, it wasn’t something you could do just offhand. He was Dutch all the way through, of course, and he had that square, blocky look, and those pale eyes which hardly invited any real warmth or friendship. And terribly old-fashioned, too, like some of those other families, the Ten Broecks, and the Van Der Meers, who carried on at times so that you’d think this was three hundred years ago, and not right now in 1951 and hardly three hours’ drive from New York City at that.
In my opinion, it was Morten’s old-fashionedness and his narrow ways which did as much to send his store under as anything else, and, as I told Rose, it must have been a hard trial for May, who thought she was marrying money and position and so on, to find it all melting away overnight, and nothing left except a houseful of young ones, each and every one the spit and image of Morten, and Morten himself bringing home hardly enough pay from the town to bring them up properly. Not that anyone ever heard May complain, of course, much as you’d expect her to.
For that matter, no one ever heard Morten complain about anything either, and Harry once told me that at Rotary he was very popular and showed a good sense of humor, although, as I pointed out, any man who depended on the votes of the respectable members of the Town Council to have his contract renewed every five years would naturally butter up to Rotary, which had several influential members on the Council. But he was a good police chief, I must admit, always taking pains to extend himself a little for the better element in town, which, of course, is the important thing.
Knowing his penny pinching it was no surprise to see him driven up to 159 in the ambulance from Sutton General instead of the official police car since this would mean a charge to the hospital fund and not the police. There was the driver and an orderly in front of the ambulance, and Morten and Dr. Greenspan, the town medical officer, in back, and praise be, when they did drive up it was with no sirens or bells sounding off to attract everyone in the neighborhood, likely because it was Sunday, and, of course, the Nicholas Street neighborhood.
They all came walking up the driveway, and when I said something about how long it had taken them Morten seemed to think it over in that maddening slow and deliberate way of his, and then said, “Well now, I guess we were all pretty much at home getting ready for the ball game,” as if he were standing up in a court of law and testifying about something really important.
“Well, Morten,” I said—a little peevishly, I have to admit—“it’s just too bad that poor soul next door didn’t think of that when she fell down and killed herself. Otherwise,” I said, “she would have made sure not to do anything that would spoil your precious ball game.”
This went right over his head, of course, and he just blinked at me. “Did you find her?” he asked. “That is, the body?”
Miss Junie was right there, Johnny-on-the-spot. “I found her,” she said. “I was supposed to take care of the water heater, and when I went in, there she was! It was awful. She was laying there …”
“She was dead,” I said. “I went right down a couple of minutes later and saw for myself.”
Morten took a deep breath. “Well now,” he said to Junie, “you wait here. Or in the house,” he said. “And you too, Lucille, so I can make out my report. Meanwhile, we’ll go take a look.”
So he and Dr. Greenspan and the driver and the orderly all went trooping into 159, and seeing that just the sight of the ambulance in front of the house was drawing more and more busybodies around I took Junie’s arm and Bettina’s, and we went into our kitchen. In my opinion it would take just a couple of minutes for them to get Katherine Ballou’s mortal remains out of the cellar and out of sight, once and for all, so I was pretty much on tenterhooks watching the minute hand of the clock crawl around and wondering whatever in the world was going on in that cellar at 159. Once the thought stabbed me that maybe she wasn’t dead, maybe she’d come walking right out of that door herself with Harry next to her, and that something in his face would show just how he felt about he
r and what was going on. But then I told myself not to be a booby, the woman was dead and gone, and everything was the way it should be.
But it was a long hour, and a hard one on my nerves, before the men finally came out of the side door there. Then they all just stood there while the driver and the orderly went back to the ambulance and drove it right up to the door and the body was put in that way. When the ambulance pulled away only Morten stayed, and he watched there with Harry and Matthew Chaves until the machine was gone, and then the three of them pushed their way through the folks in the driveway and came into the kitchen. There was a little bit of an awkward silence as Morten looked around at all of us, and he finally said, “There’s something very important to talk about. So if you want to go into a room where people won’t be looking through the window …”
“Important?” I said. “What do you mean by that?”
“Well now,” said Morten, “there are some things to clear up, some problems you might say. And I’d just as soon do it private, Lucille, for your sake, and on account of these others here.”
“Morten,” I said very firmly, “now that you’ve taken care of everything so nicely I’m sure there’s nothing so important that we should be made late for Second Service. If you don’t mind …”
“I haven’t taken care of anything yet,” said Morten. “And I think maybe for once you’ll have to miss services, Lucille. And the rest of you, too,” he said, looking around at everyone in the kitchen.
If you can picture a man who always struck me as being very serious being even more serious than usual you can understand why I did not feel I should make any great fuss about the matter. And that even though I knew that the dining room and living room were both a mess—the dining room not completely cleared up from breakfast, and the living room with all the papers thrown around it and probably cigarette ashes and stubs all around, what with Matthew Chaves having been there all morning. Which would make a perfectly delightful tidbit about my housekeeping for Morten to bring back to May, if you please. But I just marched myself into the living room and plumped myself down and let them all trail after to make themselves as much at home as they wanted in the middle of the mess.
The Key to Nicholas Street Page 4