by Ann Petry
Yes, she thought, everything changes, and not always for the best, her mind moving away from the subject of intoxication as she had trained it to do. But her house had changed for the best. Number Six Dumble Street had a very definite air about it—an air of aristocracy. The brass knocker on the front door gleamed, the white paint on the sash of the smallpaned windows, and on the front door, was very white. In this early morning light, the brick of the house was not red but rose colored—the soft pinkish red found in old Persian carpets. The wrought iron railing on each side of the front steps was so intricately and delicately worked that it resembled filet crochet, incredible that a heavy metal like iron could be twisted and turned and bent until it looked like lace.
She gave a little jump, startled, because she heard footsteps close behind her. She turned to see who it was and a man passed her, walking briskly. A colored man. His skin was just a shade darker than her own. Yet he was dressed with a meticulousness one rarely ever saw these days—creased trousers, highly polished shoes, because the back of the shoes gleamed, a dark gray felt hat on his head, the shape perfect.
What could he have thought when he saw her standing still in the middle of the sidewalk? From the back, seen from the back, glanced at quickly from the side, how had she looked to him? Shabby? Old? Like the toothless old women who sat hunched over, mumbling to themselves, in the doorways, on the doorsteps of the houses in The Narrows? The curve of their backs, the dark wrinkled skins, the black glitter of their eyes, the long frowsy skirts always made her think of crones and witches, of necromancy.
Feeling embarrassed, she moved on, walking fast, feeling impelled to take a mental inventory of her appearance. The market basket? It was made by hand by Willow Smith, the old basket-maker. A lost art. Women these days carried brown paper shopping bags, impermanent, flimsy, often replaced. The string handles cut their fingers. She’d had this basket almost forty years. It was sturdy but light in weight; and it was as much a part of her Saturday morning shopping costume as the polished oxfords on her feet, and the lisle stockings on her legs. The shoes had been resoled many times, but the uppers were as good as new. She glanced at her hands—the beige-colored gloves were immaculate; true, they’d been darned, but she doubted that anyone would know it, certainly not a casual passer-by.
She wasn’t bent over, she knew that. She had always prided herself on the erectness of her figure; and now, watching the brisk progress of the man walking ahead of her, she straightened up even more. She couldn’t have looked too queer to him. The plain black wool coat had been brushed before she left the house as had the plain black felt hat—a hat chosen because it would never really go out of style and yet it would never attract attention. She wore it straight on her head, pulled down, but not so far down that it covered her hair—white silky hair. Proud of her hair. Two or three tendrils always managed to escape from the hairpins, and, shifting the market basket to the other arm, she reached up and patted the back of her head, still neat, as far as she could tell with gloves on.
What made me do that, she thought. I know how I look. But all my life I’ve been saying to myself, What will people think? And at seventy I wouldn’t be apt to stop doing it. So a short briskwalking man passes me on the street at a moment when I am standing still and I immediately start checking my appearance. Possibly he didn’t wonder about me. But he looked at me, sideways, quickly, and then away. He isn’t much taller than I am, she thought, still watching him. But he weighs less. Not that I’m fat but I’ve got flesh on my bones—small bones—so I look plump.
To her very great surprise, this man, this welldressed little man, turned in at Number Six, walked up the steps, and lifted the brass knocker, letting it fall gently against the door, repeating the motion so that she heard a rat-tat-tat-tat, gentle, but insistent. That surprised her, too, for very few people knew how a knocker resounded through a house and thus she was always being startled by salesmen or itinerant peddlers who set up a great banging at her front door, enough to wake the dead.
Now that she was so close to him she saw that his dark suit fitted him as though it had been made for him. His posture was superb, head up, shoulders back. He turned toward her just as she started up the steps and she noticed that he wore black shoes—highly polished. Link always wore brown shoes, most of the young men seemed to these days though she didn’t know why. A brown shoe never looked as dressy as a black shoe.
Then the stranger standing on her front steps took off his gray felt hat and bowed and said, “Good morning.”
It was done with an elegance that she hadn’t seen in years. It reminded her of the Governor, of the Major, both of whom managed, just by lifting their hats and bowing, to make her feel as though they had said: Madam—Queen of England—Empress of India.
“Mrs. Crunch?”
“Yes,” she said.
“My name is Malcolm Powther. I’ve taken the liberty of coming to inquire about the apartment that you have for rent.”
“Oh,” she said, startled. The Allens hadn’t even moved yet.
“I am the butler at Treadway Hall. I have been with Mrs. Treadway for nine years,” he said. “I thought I should tell you this so you would know that I can give you references. And also so that you would understand why I came so early in the morning.”
Treadway Hall, she thought. Why that’s the mansion that belongs to the Treadway Gun people. It sat on the outskirts of Monmouth. You could see the red tile roof from far off. The tile had been imported from Holland and installed by foreign workmen, some of whom still lived in the city. Every Fourth of July, Mrs. Treadway invited all the workers from the plant to a picnic. It was written up in the Chronicle. There was always a whole page of pictures of the house, of the park, and the deer in the park, of the lake and the swans on the lake. The driveway that led to the house was said to be a mile long.
She looked at Mr. Powther with something like awe. No wonder he had such an air of dignity. No wonder he was so carefully dressed. Everything about him suggested that his entire life had been spent in close association with the very wealthy. His skin was medium brown, not that she had any prejudice against very dark colored people, but she had never had any tenants who looked as though they were descended in a straight line from old Aunt Grinny Granny. He had a nose as straight as her own. But how had he known that the apartment would soon be vacant? The Allens had lived upstairs for six years and they were moving but not until next week. How had word about this expected vacancy on Dumble Street seeped through the stone walls of that great mansion where he worked?
“How did you know that the apartment would be for rent?” she asked.
His appearance changed in the most peculiar way. At one moment he was a little man with tremendous dignity, his back straight, his shoulders squared, his chin in, head up. And at the next moment all of him seemed to bend and sag and sway, even his expression changed. He flinched as though from an expected blow.
Why whatever is the matter with him, she thought. Perhaps he has gas in his stomach or he’s trying not to sneeze or holding back a cough. Then almost immediately he was all right, he had controlled whatever tremor had passed through him.
“My wife’s cousin told me,” he said, and then after a barely perceptible pause, he went on, “We have to move right away. The city is tearing down a whole block of buildings to make way for one of those new housing projects. We’re living right at the corner of the first block to be condemned.”
“The Allens haven’t moved yet,” Mrs. Crunch said. “But I don’t suppose Mrs. Allen would mind if you looked at the apartment. She’s home this morning. Won’t you come in and I’ll go and ask her.”
She ushered Mr. Powther into the sitting room and indicated a chair near the bay window. Again she thought how very polished he looked, shoes gleaming, the crease in his trousers so perfect. He didn’t sit down until she had turned to leave the room, but out of the corner of her eyes she saw him hike
up his trousers with a gesture that was barely noticeable.
He said, “Oh, Mrs. Crunch,” and stood up. “It’s only fair to tell you that we have three children. It’s not easy to find a place to live at best and with three youngsters—well, it’s almost hopeless. Do you—perhaps you object to children?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “I’m very fond of them.” She paused, and then said quickly, “Of course I would have to get ten dollars more a month for rent. That’s a rather large family—five people. And there’d be more wear and tear on the house. I’d have to get seventy dollars a month.”
There was a flicker of something like amusement that showed briefly in his eyes. She felt she ought to justify the extra ten dollars. “I’ve always had middle-aged childless couples living upstairs. With five in the family instead of two I’d have to paint oftener, allow more for repairs to the walls and floors.”
“You’re quite right,” he said.
“I’ll go up now and see if Mrs. Allen will let you look around.”
She went up the front stairs, slowly—she had to because of what she called her “bad” knees, and cool weather always made the ache in them worse—trying to find a word to rhyme with Powther, not wanting to, but not being able to help herself. She had the kind of mind that liked jingles, so she was forever matching words as she called it, lip-sip, tap-nap, cat-mat, long-song, tea-me, love-dove. Powther? Powther? She gave up and made up a word, then made up a line, Malcolm Powther Sat on a Sowther.
Powther was as difficult a word to rhyme with as Major. After she and the Major were married she spent months trying to find a proper rhyme and never got any farther than:
Along came the Major
He said he would page her.
Even now, eighteen years after his death, there were times when the memory of him assailed her with such force that she could almost see him, hear him—a big man with a big booming laugh that made echoes even in a room filled with furniture and hung with draperies. A man so brimming with life, so full of energy that it would be easy to believe that he’d be coming in the kitchen pretty soon, humming, that she’d hear him shouting, “Hey, Abbie, you got some food for a starving Abyssinian?”
She stopped halfway up the stairs, wondering why she had been so suddenly overwhelmed by this vivid picture of the Major. It was because of that polite, precisely dressed, little man, waiting downstairs in her sitting room. A matter of sheer contrast. The Major had been such a big Teddy bear of a man that even in the last years of his life, when they could afford to have his suits made for him, he always had a rumpled slept-in-his-clothes look. If he sat down for as much as two minutes his trousers wrinkled at the knees, at the crotch, his coat developed creases across the middle of the back, and a fold of material popped up from somewhere around the collar region to give him a hunched-up look. Little Mr. Powther could sit indefinitely and when he stood up his suit would still look as though it had just been pressed.
Once she got after the tailor about the Major’s suits. The tailor, a Mr. Quagliamatti, said, “Mrs. Crunch, it’s not the fault of my suit. It’s the Major. It’s the way he sits, all to pieces, in a chair. I can’t make an elastic suit and that’s what he’d have to have. He sits in heaps and mounds. You make him sit up, make him lift his trousers. He sits every which way and the material is only goods, yard goods, not elastic—”
She was still thinking about the Major when she told Mrs. Allen that some one wanted to look at the apartment. The Major always had a slightly rumpled look but somehow men never looked as—well, as unattractive as women, especially the first thing in the morning. She tried not to stare at the white cloth wound around Mrs. Allen’s head, at the faded house dress with some important buttons missing in the middle so that the dress gaped open over her fat little stomach; couldn’t help glancing down, quickly, of course, to see what she had on her feet. She was wearing sneakers, the laces not tied, and she didn’t have any stockings on. Her bare legs were a grayish brown.
Mrs. Allen said, voice pitched high, “Let somebody see the apartment? At this hour in the morning? Really, Mrs. Crunch—”
“It’s Mr. Malcolm Powther who wants to see the apartment. He’s the Treadway butler.”
“I’m not going to—” Mrs. Allen’s voice went up, way up, high. “The Treadway butler!” she said, her eyes widening. She took a deep breath. “I can’t—wait—you give me ten minutes, Mrs. Crunch. Just ten minutes and I’ll be ready for him. You bring him right up in ten minutes.”
In the sitting room, she kept thinking that Mrs. Allen had the most unpleasant way of squealing when she got excited. She’d be glad when Mrs. Allen moved. It would be a pleasure to have this quiet little man and his family occupying the top floor. She told Mr. Powther that they would go upstairs in a few minutes, meantime she wanted him to notice how very well her white geraniums were doing, all of them in bloom; told him that Pretty Boy, the battle-scarred tomcat dozing in the Boston rocker, was getting old and he wasn’t as lively as he once was; spoke briefly of the way Dumble Street had changed, adding almost immediately that it was a convenient place to live because Franklin Avenue where the trolleys ran was just one block away.
“I think we can go up now,” she said.
This time when Mrs. Allen opened the door of her apartment she almost curtsied. She had fixed her hair and bangs now formed a curly frieze across her forehead. She was wearing a print dress, and highheeled patent leather pumps. There was rouge on her round brown cheeks.
Rather too much rouge, Abbie thought as she introduced Mr. Powther and then stood just inside Mrs. Allen’s living room, listening to the bill and coo of Mrs. Allen’s voice which now sounded as though all her life she had been perfecting the sounds of the dove. She was smiling and nodding and saying, “Don’t you think so, Mr. Powther? You know what I mean, Mr. Powther.”
“I’ll wait for you downstairs, Mr. Powther,” Abbie said. This would give Mrs. Allen a chance to display all her middle-aged coyness, to titter behind her hand, to arch her thin bosom, without the inhibiting presence of one Abigail Crunch.
In the sitting room downstairs, she tried again to find a word to rhyme with Powther, and ended just where she started:
Little Mister Powther
Sat on a sowther.
Whenever she was at peace with the world, and sometimes when she wasn’t, she made up jingling little rhymes, not wanting to, but she couldn’t seem to help it. She jotted them down on the backs of envelopes, on the brown paper bags that came from the grocery store, on the pads of Dexter Linen that she used for letter paper. Having written them down, she couldn’t bear to throw them away; and so she hid them, in bureau drawers, behind the sheets in the linen closet.
She heard Mr. Powther coming down the front stairs, his step light and quick. Little Mister Powther—Sat on a Sowther—she thought.
Mr. Powther said, “It’s a pleasant apartment, Mrs. Crunch. I’ll leave a deposit on it, subject, of course, to Mrs. Powther’s approving the place. Though I am certain she will like it.”
“A deposit isn’t necessary,” Abbie said.
“Thank you so much,” he said. “I wonder if we can move in as soon as Mrs. Allen goes. That is, if Mrs. Powther likes the rooms. We’re in rather of a hurry because the six months’ notice we received expires this coming week.”
It doesn’t need much of anything done to it, Abbie thought. Mrs. Allen was one of those fussbudget housekeepers, who always had a scrub brush or a vacuum cleaner or a dustcloth in her hand. Poor Mr. Allen was kept busy, too. He was always painting or waxing floors or washing windows.
She said, “The Allens move out a week from today. We will need at least three days in which to freshen up the kitchen and bathroom. Will the thirtieth be all right?”
“Thank you so much,” he said. At the door he bowed again.
She watched him go down the steps. He paused for a moment on the sidewal
k and looked up at the branches of The Hangman, and then he was gone.
She supposed the young colored men of Link’s generation couldn’t have manners like Mr. Powther’s, though she didn’t know why. Wars and atom bombs and the fact that there was so much hate in the world might have something to do with it. There were times when she had thought that rudeness was a characteristic of Link’s; that other young men had a natural courtesy he would never have. Then she would see or hear something in The Narrows that suggested all these young men were alike—something had brutalized them. But what?
In Link’s case—well, if they hadn’t lived on Dumble Street, if the Major had lived longer, if Link had been their own child instead of an adopted child, if she hadn’t forgotten about him when he was eight, simply forgotten his existence, if she hadn’t had to figure so closely with the little money that she had—rent from the apartment, pension from the Governor (the Major’s pension)—and eke it out with the small sums she earned by sewing, embroidering, making jelly. If. But she had managed to keep the house, to feed and clothe herself and Link. It meant that she didn’t have much time to devote to him. There was The Last Chance across the street, there was Bill Hod who owned it. He had plenty of money. Sometimes she had believed he was playing cat-and-mouse with her deliberately, cruelly, no—brutally. And she was helpless, unable to compete with him for Link’s devotion.
At supper that night when she told Link about the new tenant, she carefully avoided any mention of Mr. Powther’s beautiful manners; but she couldn’t conceal the pleasure she felt about having him in the house; and she kept talking about the neatness of his appearance.