No response. She tried it again, a bit louder. Again no response. Aunt Priscilla took hold of the doorknob. Reluctantly. It was against all the principles of good manners. To open another’s bedroom door. Even a servant’s. But with no sound within, she did open the door, one small slant. Enough to peep inside. Then wider. And she said, “She isn’t here.”
“She must be around someplace.” Katty and I had followed into the room. Katty said, “She can’t have left. She hasn’t taken her things.” The hairbrush was on the bureau. The box of powder and the puff also there. Her nightdress still folded neatly over the back of a chair. The bed already made up. Or was it used last night?
“She’ll be back,” Aunt Priscilla decided. “I’ll dress and then I’ll cook breakfast.”
Mother said, “I’ll give the children some cornflakes and milk to tide them over.” She had already put the kettle on for Aunt Priscilla’s morning tea.
Aunt George came up in the afternoon. She said the same as Aunt Priscilla. “She’ll be back.” Her reasoning was different’ “I owe her five dollars. For last week. She won’t leave without her pay.”
But she didn’t come back. Not that day.
Not the next day. My small suitcase was packed. All else was confusion. Katty trying to curl her hair before closing her suitcase. Aunt Priscilla had packed all of Elektra’s belongings into her own trunk. There wasn’t much. The skirt and shirt she wore to work in, the few cosmetics, even her toothbrush and toothpaste had been left behind, and her undergarments (one to wear, one to wash, one to dry), her bedroom slippers, and an old night-robe that Aunt Pris had given her. Of course she’d taken her purse with her; the one she carried last night wasn’t in the room. There’d be a comb and lipstick and powder compact in it.
Aunt Priscilla was trying to get everything shipshape, as it had been when we arrived. Mother was trying to get her children ready to leave. Aunt George arrival and added to the confusion while insisting, “Of course Elektra’s gone back to Clarksvale. For reasons of her own.” She finally took the Tompkin boys out to Fred, let him keep them busy out by the truck.
I managed to slip out the side door at a propitious moment when all the others were in the house or in front by the cars. I skulked rapidly through the trees until I was on the path that led to High Peak. It wasn’t a real path. Just bumpy earth, pebbles and rocks, bits of green that wasn’t weeds or wild grass, just green stuff. I zigzagged up the path to the promontory at the top. High above the shore. Elektra’s special place. One afternoon when Katty and Linda were being exceptionally boy-crazies, Elektra had let me go with her to the peak. This was her time off from children and chores-why would she take me with her? Maybe because Voss danced with me once in the Paul Jones.
She didn’t talk about him. She didn’t talk when we were there. She just stood on the promontory and looked at the sky or down at the water. Under the promontory but still high on the slope there was a shelf. Not far below the peak. No way to get to it except by zigzagging down the slope and stooping your way under the protruding upper slope. She didn’t take me there. She didn’t go there either. Just pointed it out to me as we leaned over the tip. Scary.
I didn’t want to go there now. She wasn’t there. But she had been here last night. With Voss? A farewell? In each other’s arms. Two into one. “Stop dreaming,” Katty would say. Or my mother. Or anyone if I spoke of it. But I knew. Before I saw the bead, the red glass bead on the green stuff scattered on the earth. She wore those beads to the dance last night. She always wore them with her summer dress, her white dress with the little roses sprinkled across the pattern. The beads almost looked like crystals. Not really. They were pretend, cut like crystals, but made of glass. They were a little handful of beauty to her. She must have searched for them when the strand was broken. Caught on a tree branch, or the button on a man’s jacket. Too dark to find all of them. I looked. There was one out on the tip, but I didn’t go there. I scruffed through the green and found another. And another, with leaf mold patterning it. No more. I hadn’t time to search for more. I ran until the cottage was in sight. Then I just hurried, the beads tight in my left fist. Fred was loading the last of the suitcases.
My mother came to me with, “Emmy, where have you been?” and as she looked into my face, softly, “Saying goodbye?”
She understood the need to say good-bye. To the woods and the water. To some of summer memories. In some secret place you had marked as your own.
Another week and the end of August. Of summer. My mother and the children off for California and school days again. Long good-byes until Christmas. Behind the scenes it had been decided that I would enter Mount Academy this year, the school where the women of my father’s family had all attended to be finished. Katty had graduated there this spring. My mother approved though as a Californian she had been finished there. I would stay on with Aunt Priscilla until school started. Aunt George had assured me that with a diploma from Mount Academy I could attend any college of my choice. Such was its academic standing. Even Cambridge? Yes, even Cambridge. I doubted. Cambridge wasn’t exclusively female, and Aunt Georgie with all her modern ideas and bold businesss maneuvers did not hold with coeducation. It was all right for primary students. Although better for the girls to go to Miss Mastersons and the boys to Albany Cadet. No hanky-panky.
It was one of those last nights before Katty would depart for college. Aunt Pris, Katty, and I had had early supper and cleanup and were relaxing in the living room. Until Aunt Georgie came by. She was again all het up about Elektra. She’d been at some meeting and none of the women knew anything about the disappearance of Elektra. No one had seen her since she went to the lake with us. They seemed to think Aunt Priscilla and Aunt George were to blame.
Aunt Priscilla said, “Stop worrying your head about the five dollars. I was going to have to let her go anyway. She was beginning to show.”
They exchanged a few of their wise looks and dropped the subject.
Later when Katty and I went up to our room, I asked her. “What did Aunt Pris mean? Beginning to show.”
Katty just looked at me. Stared. Finally she said, “You know.”
“I don’t know. If I knew, why would I ask you? ‘Beginning to show’? Do you know?”
“Of course I do. Everybody knows. That she’s going to have a baby. That’s what it means.”
“She’s married!” I could not believe it. But if she and Voss were married …
“No. She’s not married,” Katty stated.
But if she’s not married, how can she-I didn’t ask that question out loud. Some people did. We just didn’t know people who did. I sighed to Katty. “How do you know all these things?”
“Emmy,” she told me, “you find out a lot living with the aunts. You keep quiet and listen and they forget you’re there. And you learn a lot.”
I figured for myself. In a small town you learned things that city girls didn’t know about. Small towns were evolved from farm country. Where life and death were the beginning and end, and in between were all manner of happenings.
Another week of flurry and then we drove with Katty to Albany to put her on the train for New York. Three of her friends were also going to the college on the Hudson. Linda, of course, and Willa and Maleen. The college proctors would meet the train with the school bus.
When we returned to the house late that afternoon, we collapsed into chairs, even Aunt Georgie. I would be the next to go. But only as far as Hudson, where I’d be met by the school bus.
I’d stopped listening to the aunts long before they were talked out. It became tiresome listening to all the memories of Aunt A and Uncle B and Cousins C, D, E, etc. When I didn’t know any of them. They were reminiscing to each other, remembering their own college days.
Finally Aunt Georgie gathered her gloves and string bag and high-stepped to the front door. She’d sent Fred and the car home; she’d be walking. Of course she carried her umbrella as always, to ward off sun or rain.
S
he said to me, “You be ready in the morning, Emmy. I’ll come by for you about ten o’clock.”
Aunt Priscilla showed mild surprise. “You’re taking Emmy along?”
“I certainly am.” Evidently I’d missed something in their long conversation. “She’s the last to see Elektra.”
“I saw her,” Aunt Pris corrected.
“You weren’t with her all evening. Or in the boat.”
I could have told them I knew no more than Aunt Pris. Elektra never talked. She spoke necessary words, but she never talked. Not even phrases like “Is my lipstick on straight?” “Docs my petticoat show?” Things all females say to each other.
Instead I asked, “Where are we going?”
“We’re going looking for Elektra. Find out where she is. Find out why she hasn’t been around for her five dollars. You think of some questions yourself, Emmy. We’ll both ask questions.”
I reacted in my veins. In my bones. I was to be a Miss Paul Pry. I could ask a dozen questions. I could ask Voss: “Where did she spend the night? How did she get back to Clarksvale? How did she break her strand of red glass beads?” But I wouldn’t. It was none of my business. Just the same, I carried the three red glass beads along in my party handkerchief deep in my little purse, where I had tucked them away while we were still at the cottage. While no one was looking at me. Before I got into the car and shared a jump seat with Katty.
I was ready for Aunt George when she arrived next morning. She had walked over. “No sense in taking the car. More trouble than it’s worth.” She was thinking out loud. “We have to prowl.”
We prowled along Town Street, which carried you into Main Street. But we stopped before then. We stopped at the big yellow boarding house where Elektra had lived. A flight of wooden steps led up to the porch. Aunt George didn’t ring or knock on the door, she opened it. She knew her way around here. I followed her. She walked past the staircase that mounted to a second floor, and strode down the uncarpeted corridor, all the way to a door near the back of the house. She knocked a ratatat on that door. And again, stronger. From within now came a voice shouting, “Who’s that come knocking at my door?” Aunt George shouted back, “Just Aunt George, Gammer, that’s who.” Everyone in town called her Aunt George or Georgie.
Came another shout: “George Fanshawe?”
“What other George do you know. Gammer?”
Sometime along the years I’d heard, just like an aside from someone in the family, that Aunt George had been married once on a time. Not for long. That’s why she wasn’t a Davenport like Aunt Priscilla and my father and his family.
“Well, don’t stand out there yammering, Georgie. Come on inside.”
My aunt opened the unlocked door and went in, me following behind her.
“Gammer,” she said, “this is my niece Emmy.”
I managed to stammer a “How d’you do” to the diminutive old woman in the big rocker with varnish peeling from it. This was Gammer Goodwife, supposed to be kin of Elektra. Half-toothless, a browned corncob pipe clutched by the few remaining teeth. A squawky voice like something was caught in her throat. The ironing woman. Hard to believe that those rheumatic cramped fingers could iron ruffles until they rippled. Could iron linen napkins down to the very edge of the hand hem. Could iron lace as delicately as if she’d spun it. She took one look at me out of her spiteful black eyes and dismissed me as without interest.
She had three different ironing boards set up in her large untidy room. One, oversize, for sheets, tablecloths and such; a middle-size one for the usual clothes wash, and a baby one, a sleeve board it was called. Probably for the ruffles and laces. A screen closed off a corner of the room. Behind it, Aunt Georgie told me later, was the bed and washbasin. An old-fashioned rooming house with the bathroom down the hall.
“I don’t have your laundry done,” Gammer spat.
“I didn’t come for my laundry,” Aunt George informed her. “I didn’t bring any this week.”
“Then what you doing here?”
“I’m looking for Elektra.”
“Well, you can see she an’t here.” Gammer set the rocker rocking hard again. “She’s up at the lake with your sister.”
“She isn’t up at the lake. We’ve all left the lake.”
“Did you bring her back here?”
“We couldn’t,” stated Aunt George. “She left before we packed out.”
“Why did she leave?”
“That’s what I want to know. I want to ask her.”
“Well, she an’t here.”
“Where’s her room?”
“She an’t in her room.”
“How do you know she isn’t up in her room?”
Gammer cackled. A cackle laugh. I’d read of them. But I didn’t know there was really such a sound.
She dug her fist into a voluminous pocket in her skirt. “Because I got her key.” She unreeled a long chain attached inside the pocket. On the end of it was a large ring of keys. “She leaves it with me when she’s out of town. So nobody gets into her things.” She beetled suspiciously at Aunt George.
“You haven’t seen her since she came back? You haven’t had any message from her?”
Gammer kept humming “Nnnnoooo” and rocking harder. Like little boys do to make it go faster.
“Then where is she?” Aunt George said. Not exactly to Gammer. At her own frustration.
But Gammer responded. “She’s a Canuck. I told you that before. A Canuck witch.” She restarted the rocker. “She flew away-up high-way up high …”
“On your broomstick,” Aunt George bristled. She’d had enough of Gammer’s antics. She stood up and brushed the dust off her skirt, although the chair she’d sat on had been brushed by her handkerchief before she sat down on it. “If you do see her or hear from her,” Aunt George instructed, “tell her I’m looking for her. To pay her the money I owe her.”
The rocking stopped like that. “You can pay me. I’ll give it to her.”
“I’ll pay her. No one else.”
“You think I’d spend it on myself.”
“I pay what I owe to the one I owe.” With that she stalked out while Gammer was still embroidering her role as a caretaker of Electra’s money as well as her room. I sidled out beside Aunt George. I didn’t want to be left alone in that room with Gammer.
All the way to Main Street Aunt George kept talking to herself, not to me, about the perfidious Gammer and her grandniece. I managed to keep up with her fast walk by saving my breath. Only three blocks to Main Street.
Waiting to cross the street, I could ask, “Now where do we
go?”
“We’ll go to Gus Henschel’s. I understand his nephew, Voss, and that girl were what we used to call an item.”
“Did everybody know?” Somehow I’d thought it was a private affair, known only to Katty and her friends who saw than dancing together.
“It’s the talk of this town the way she went after him.” She was opening the door of the butcher shop before I could think of some excuse to keep from going in there. I didn’t want Voss to see me and think I’d talked about him and Elektra.
Voss wasn’t up front today. His uncle was. He was arranging steaks for his display case. “Morning, Miss Georgie,” he said, but it was a glum morning from his expression. “What can I do for you today?”
“You can let me talk to that nephew of yours.”
“Voss?”
“I understand that is the name.”
He peered over the counter at me. I was too young to be a friend of Voss so he dismissed me from his answer. To Aunt George he growled, “I’d like to talk to him myself. That javel never come back from the lake. That camp has been calling and calling him. He hasn’t been around there either.”
Aunt George was only temporarily speechless. “You haven’t seen Elektra?”
“That the pawky girl been hanging around him all summer?”
“She hasn’t been around lately?”
“Not since
she went up to the lake with your sister. Leastways that was what she told him.”
Both of them gone. Together. But she wouldn’t go without taking her belongings. Yes, she might. If he was in a hurry. He’d have some money with two jobs. He’d buy her a new hairbrush and nightgown.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Uncle Gus was saying. “But he’ll be around once he runs out of money. I paid him before he went off to the lake that Saturday. He’ll be back.”
“I owe Elektra some money. I don’t like to owe money. If either of them turns up, you let me know. Right off. Hear?”
“I ain’t deef, Aunt George. I hear.”
And she stomped away, me trailing. Again talking to herself. “They’ll turn up when they want money.”
I could have told her they weren’t coming back. They had each other. But she wouldn’t have believed me.
II
Ten years ago. Eleven come summer. High school and college over and done. Two years assistant women’s editor on a medium-small-town newspaper. You want to know what an assistant women’s club editor covers? Women’s club meetings. Women’s club social teas. Women’s club holiday occasions. Washington’s birthday cardboard hatchets. Cotton Easter bunnies in straw bonnets. Fourth of July crepe paper firecrackers. September, miniature grandmothers’ school slates. October, take your pick, witches, brooms, jack-o’-lanterns. November, yarn turkeys. No need to illustrate December and January. How often can you write that the decorations were so charming, unique, attractive, amusing-add your own adjectives,
I couldn’t get out of the groove. The editor wanted me where I was. I could spell.
On a September morning, I read on the AP tape, DATELINE CLARKSVALE. HUMAN BONES FOUND AT LAKE QUICHIQUOIS.
I didn’t have to read on. I knew exactly where, and, without knowing, I knew who. And a chance to break from my shackles. I knocked on Editor Briar’s door. His office is a square of window glass, but we observed the courtesy of a knock. He was chewing his pencil. Obviously working on his weekend editorial. Yes, he uses a pencil. A yellow wooden pencil with very black lead.
A Woman’s Eye Page 43