Do you know, all this time that maid came into the store every day, and every day she bought one chicken. Nothing else. Jane took to dropping in the store when she saw the maid going along, and she says the maid never bought but one chicken a day. Once Jane got her nerve up and said to the maid that they must be fond of chicken, and the maid looked straight at her and told her right to her face that they were vegetarians.
“All but the cat, I suppose,” Jane said, being pretty nervy when she gets her nerve up.
“Yes,” the maid said, “all but the cat.”
We finally decided that he must bring food home from the city, although why Mr. Honeywell’s store wasn’t good enough for them, I couldn’t tell you. After the baby’s tooth was better, Tom O’Neil took them over a batch of fresh-picked sweet corn, and they must have liked that, because they sent the baby a furry blue blanket that was so soft that young Mrs. O’Neil said the baby never needed another, winter or summer, and after being so sickly, that baby began to grow and got so healthy, you wouldn’t know it was the same one, even though the O’Neils never should have accepted presents from strangers, not knowing whether the wool might be clean or not.
Then I found out they were dancing next door. Night after night after night, dancing. Sometimes I’d lie there awake until ten, eleven o’clock, listening to that heathen music and wishing I could get up the nerve to go over and give them a piece of my mind. It wasn’t so much the noise keeping me from sleeping—I will say the music was soft and kind of like a lullaby—but people haven’t got any right to live like that. Folks should go to bed at a sensible hour and get up at a sensible hour and spend their days doing good deeds and housework. A wife ought to cook dinner for her husband—and not out of cans from the city, either—and she ought to run over next door sometimes with a home-baked cake to pass the time of day and keep up with the news. And most of all a wife ought to go to the store herself, where she can meet her neighbors, and not just send the maid.
Every morning I’d go out and find fairy rings on the grass, and anyone around here will tell you that means an early winter, and here next door they hadn’t even thought to get in coal. I watched every day for Adams and his truck, because I knew for a fact that cellar was empty of coal; all I had to do was lean down a little when I was in my garden and I could see right into the cellar, just as swept and clear as though they planned to treat their guests in there. Jane thought they were the kind who went off on a trip somewhere in the winter, shirking responsibilities for facing the snow with their neighbors. The cellar was all you could see, though. They had those green curtains pulled so tight against the windows that even right up close there wasn’t a chink to look through from outside, and them inside dancing away. I do wish I could have nerved myself to go right up to that front door and knock some night.
Now, Mary Corn thought I ought to. “You got a right, Addie,” she told me one day in the store. “You got every right in the world to make them quiet down at night. You’re the nearest neighbor they got, and it’s the right thing to do. Tell them they’re making a name for themselves around the village.”
Well, I couldn’t nerve myself, and that’s the gracious truth. Every now and then I’d see little Mrs. West walking in the garden, or Mallie the maid coming out of the woods with a basket—gathering acorns, never a doubt of it—but I never so much as nodded my head at them. Down at the store I had to tell Mary Corn that I couldn’t do it. “They’re foreigners, that’s why,” I said. “Foreigners of some kind. They don’t rightly seem to understand what a person says—it’s like they’re always answering some other question you didn’t ask.”
“If they’re foreigners,” Dora Powers put in, being at the store to pick up some sugar to frost a cake, “it stands to reason there’s something wrong to bring them here.”
“Well, I won’t call on foreigners,” Mary said.
“You can’t treat them the same as you’d treat regular people,” I said. “I went inside the house, remember, although not, as you might say, to pay a call.”
So then I had to tell them all over again about the furniture and the drinking—and it stands to reason that anyone who dances all night is going to be drinking, too—and my good doughnuts from my grandmother’s recipe going to the cat. And Dora, she thought they were up to no good in the village. Mary said she didn’t know anyone who was going to call, not being sure they were proper, and then we had to stop talking because in came Mallie the maid for her chicken.
You would have thought I was the chairman of a committee or something, the way Dora and Mary kept nudging me and winking that I should go over and speak to her, but I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself twice, I can tell you. Finally Dora saw there was no use pushing me, so she marched over and stood there until the maid turned around and said, “Good morning.”
Dora came right out and said, “There’s a lot of people around this village, miss, would like to know a few things.”
“I imagine so,” the maid said.
“We’d like to know what you’re doing in our village,” Dora said.
“We thought it would be a nice place to live,” the maid said. You could see that Dora was caught up short on that, because who picks a place to live because it’s nice? People live in our village because they were born here; they don’t just come.
I guess Dora knew we were all waiting for her, because she took a big breath and asked, “And how long do you plan on staying?”
“Oh,” the maid said. “I don’t think we’ll stay very long, after all.”
“Even if they don’t stay,” Mary said later, “they can do a lot of harm while they’re here, setting a bad example for our young folk. Just for instance, I heard that the Harris boy got picked up again by the state police for driving without a license.”
“Tom Harris is too gentle on that boy,” I said. “A boy like that needs whipping and not people living in a house right in town showing him how to drink and dance all night.”
Jane came in right then, and she had heard that all the children in town had taken to dropping by the house next door to bring dandelions and berries from the woods—and from their own fathers’ gardens, too, I’ll be bound—and the children were telling around that the cat next door could talk. They said he told them stories.
Well, that just about did for me, you can imagine. Children have too much freedom nowadays, anyway, without getting nonsense like that into their heads. We asked Annie Lee when she came into the store, and she thought somebody ought to call the police, so it could all be stopped before somebody got hurt. She said, suppose one of those kids got a step too far inside that house—how did we know he’d ever get out again? Well, it wasn’t too pleasant a thought, I can tell you, but trust Annie Lee to be always looking on the black side. I don’t have much dealing with the children as a rule, once they learn they better keep away from my apple trees and my melons, and I can’t say I know one from the next, except for the Martin boy I had to call the police on once for stealing a piece of tin from my front yard, but I can’t say I relished the notion that that cat had his eyes on them. It’s not natural, somehow.
And don’t you know it was the very next day that they stole the littlest Acton boy? Not quite three years old, and Mrs. Acton so busy with her Garden Club she let him run along into the woods with his sister, and first thing anyone knew they got him. Jane phoned and told me. She heard from Dora, who had been right in the store when the Acton girl came running in to find her mother and tell her the baby had wandered away in the woods, and Mallie the maid had been digging around not ten feet from where they saw him last. Jane said Mrs. Acton and Dora and Mary Corn and half a dozen others were heading right over to the house next door, and I better get outside fast before I missed something, and if she got there late to let her know everything that happened. I barely got out my own front door, when down the street they came, maybe ten or twelve mothers, marching along so mad they never had time to be scared.
“Come on, Addie,
” Dora said to me. “They’ve finally done it this time.”
I knew Jane would never forgive me if I hung back, so out I went and up the front walk to the house next door. Mrs. Acton was ready to go right up and knock, because she was so mad, but before she had a chance the door opened and there was Mrs. West and the little boy, smiling all over as if nothing had happened.
“Mallie found him in the woods,” Mrs. West said, and Mrs. Acton grabbed the boy away from her; you could tell they had been frightening him by the way he started to cry as soon as he got to his own mother. All he would say was “kitty,” and that put a chill down our backs, you can imagine.
Mrs. Acton was so mad she could hardly talk, but she did manage to say, “You keep away from my children, you hear me?” And Mrs. West looked surprised.
“Mallie found him in the woods,” she said. “We were going to bring him home.”
“We can guess how you were going to bring him home,” Dora shouted, and then Annie Lee piped up from well in the back, “Why don’t you get out of our town?”
“I guess we will,” Mrs. West said. “It’s not the way we thought it was going to be.”
That was nice, wasn’t it? Nothing riles me like people knocking this town, where my grandfather built the first house, and I just spoke up right then and there.
“Foreign ways!” I said. “You’re heathen, wicked people, with your dancing and your maid, and the sooner you leave this town, the better it’s going to be for you. Because I might as well tell you”—and I shook my finger right at her—“that certain people in this town aren’t going to put up with your fancy ways much longer, and you would be well advised—very well advised, I say—to pack up your furniture and your curtains and your maid and cat, and get out of our town before we put you out.”
Jane claims she doesn’t think I really said it, but all the others were there and can testify I did—all but Mrs. Acton, who never had a good word to say for anybody.
Anyway, right then we found out they had given the little boy something, trying to buy his affection, because Mrs. Acton pried it out of his hand, and he was crying all the time. When she held it out, it was hard to believe, but of course with them there’s nothing too low. It was a little gold-colored apple, all shiny and bright, and Mrs. Acton threw it right at the porch floor, as hard as she could, and that little toy shattered into dust. “We don’t want anything from you,” Mrs. Acton said, and as I told Jane afterward, it was terrible to see the look on Mrs. West’s face. For a minute she just stood there looking at us. Then she turned and went back inside and shut the door.
Someone wanted to throw rocks through the windows, but, as I told them, destroying private property is a crime and we might better leave violence to the menfolk, so Mrs. Acton took her little boy home, and I went in and called Jane. Poor Jane; the whole thing had gone off so fast, she hadn’t had time to get her corset on.
I hadn’t any more than gotten Jane on the phone, when I saw through the hall window that a moving van was right there next door, and the men were starting to carry out that fancy furniture. Jane wasn’t surprised when I told her over the phone. “Nobody can get moving that fast,” she said. “They were probably planning to slip out with that little boy.”
“Or maybe the maid did it with magic,” I said, and Jane laughed.
“Listen,” she said, “go and see what else is going on—I’ll hang on the phone.”
There wasn’t anything to see, even from my front porch, except the moving van and the furniture coming out; not a sign of Mrs. West or the maid.
“He hasn’t come home from the city yet,” Jane said. “I can see the street from here. They’ll have news for him tonight.”
That was how they left. I take a lot of the credit for myself, even though Jane tries to make me mad by saying Mrs. Acton did her share. By that night they were gone, bag and baggage, and Jane and I went over the house with a flashlight to see what damage they had left behind. There wasn’t a thing left in that house—not a chicken bone, not an acorn—except for one blue jay’s wing upstairs, and that wasn’t worth taking home. Jane put it in the incinerator when we came downstairs.
One more thing. My cat, Samantha, had kittens. That may not surprise you, but it sure as judgment surprised me and Samantha, her being over eleven years old and well past her kitten days, the old fool. But you would have laughed to see her dancing around like a young lady cat, just as light-footed and as pleased as if she thought she was doing something no cat ever did before; and those kittens troubled me.
Folks don’t dare come right out and say anything to me about my kittens, of course, but they do keep on with that silly talk about fairies and leprechauns. And there’s no denying that the kittens are bright yellow, with orange eyes, and much bigger than normal kittens have a right to be. Sometimes I see them all watching me when I go around the kitchen, and it gives me a cold finger down my back. Half the children in town are begging for those kittens—“fairy kittens,” they’re calling them—but there isn’t a grown-up in town would take one.
Jane says there’s something downright uncanny about those kittens, but then, I may never speak to her again in all my life. Jane would even gossip about cats, and gossip is one thing I simply cannot endure.
A GREAT VOICE STILLED
Playboy, March 1960
THE HOSPITAL WAITING ROOM was an island of inefficiency in the long echoing and white-painted and silenced stretches of the hospital. In the waiting room there were ashtrays and crackling wicker furniture and uneven brown wooden benches and clearly unswept corners; the business of the hospital did not go on with the intruders waiting restlessly, and with every bed in every wing of the hospital filled, it was perfectly all right with the hospital administration to see the wicker chairs and wooden benches in the waiting room empty and wasting space. Katherine Ashton, who had not wanted to come anywhere near the hospital, who had wanted to stay at home in the apartment on this dark Sunday afternoon, who had wanted to cry a little in private and then dine later in some small unobtrusive restaurant—perhaps the one where they did sweetbreads so nicely—and linger over a melancholy brandy; Katherine Ashton came into the waiting room behind her husband, saying, “I wish we hadn’t come. I tell you I hate hospitals and death scenes and anyway how does anyone know he’s going to die today?”
“You’d always be sorry if you hadn’t come,” Martin said. When he saw that the waiting room was empty, he turned back and looked hopefully up and down the hospital hall. “You think we could go upstairs right now?”
“They won’t possibly let us upstairs. Not possibly.”
“We got here first,” Martin said reasonably. “As soon as they let anyone go upstairs, it ought to be us, because we certainly got here ahead of the rest.”
“I’m going to feel like a fool,” Katherine said. “Suppose he doesn’t die? Suppose no one else comes?”
“Look.” Martin stopped walking back and forth from the window to the door and came to stand in front of her, as though he were lecturing to one of his classes. “He’s got to die. Here Angelí is flying down from Boston. And practically the whole staff of Dormant Review up all night working on obituaries and remembrances, and his American publisher already getting together a Festschrift, and the wife flying in from Majorca if they weren’t able to stop her. And Weasel calling every major literary critic from here to California to get them here in time. You think the man would have the gall to live after that?”
“But when I tried to call the doctor—”
“In my business,” Martin said, “you’ve got to be in the right places at the right times. Like a salesman or something. Just by being here I get a chance to meet Angelí, for instance—how long could I go, otherwise, trying to get to meet Angelí? And if I swing it right Dormant could even—”
“Here’s Joan,” Katherine said. “She’s still crying.”
Martin moved swiftly to the doorway. “Joan, dear,” he said. “How is he?”
“Not… ve
ry well,” Joan said. “Hello, Katherine.”
“Hello, Joan,” Katherine said.
“I finally got hold of the doctor,” Joan said. “I called and called and finally made him talk to me. It sounds pretty… black.” She put her hand across her mouth as though she wanted to stop her lips from trembling.
“A matter of hours,” she said.
“My God,” Martin said.
“How awful,” Katherine said.
“Angell’s flying down from Boston, did you hear?” Joan sat tentatively on the edge of a bench. “Anybody upstairs with him?”
“They won’t let anyone go up,” Katherine said.
“Maybe they’re giving him a bath, or something. Or do they bother, if it’s only a matter of…”
“I don’t know,” Katherine said, and Joan sobbed.
“But it’s pretty certain to be today?” Martin asked with a kind of reluctant delicacy.
“You know how doctors talk.” Joan sobbed again. “They had to take me home this morning and give me a sedative, I was crying so. I haven’t had any sleep or anything to eat since yesterday, I was right here all the time until they took me home this morning and gave me a sedative.”
“Very touching,” said Martin. “Katherine and I thought it would look better if there weren’t so many people around, so we haven’t come until today.”
“John Weasel said he’d bring in some sandwiches and stuff later. I plan to stay right here, now, until the end.”
“So do we,” Martin said firmly.
“The Andersons are coming over, and probably those people he was visiting last weekend, they’re probably coming down from Connecticut. And—we all thought it was so sweet—the bar, you know, the one where he had the attack, well, they’re sending over flowers. We all thought it was so sweet.”
Just an Ordinary Day: Stories Page 44