Mrs. Stuart got home, read over the directions for the sweater, and decided it was too hard for her after all, so she traded the directions and the I.O.U. for help around the sleeves to her daughter, who gave her in exchange an I.O.U. promising to help Allen with his arithmetic homework every night for two weeks. Mr. Stuart, dazzled by the sight of his older daughter bending her bright head over her younger brother’s arithmetic, made, of his own free will, an I.O.U. to foot the bill for a steak dinner for four at the Rockville Inn. “It’s such a blessed miracle,” he explained to his wife, “to see the two of them sitting next to each other in peace and quiet.”
Miss Athens, lying in wait morning and afternoon, captured and signed up eleven more twelve-year-old boys.
Frances Stuart was only human, and her golden head was sadly bowed. What girl could live, she wondered, what girl could positively, absolutely live when Florence Crain had drawn the name of Jeff Rogers out of the hat for the Grab Bag Dance? Actually, how could anyone bear it? It was simply too much. Naturally, no one would dream of hinting that Florence Crain had been peeking, but really, the whole thing was just too obvious a coincidence. Frances Stuart believed with all her heart that she would never, just never, live through Friday evening, and naturally Florence would wear the black dress, which was ages too old for her, and probably look utterly evil in it, and it was just all of it too much. For twenty-four hours Frances Stuart contemplated her own sudden death from a broken heart, and consoled herself with the picture of her stricken parents, and even a contrite younger brother bending over her deathbed, while somewhere—perhaps on the bank of a raging river or on a high cliff miles above cruel, jagged rocks—Jeff Rogers breathed her name just once before hurling himself to destruction. For twenty-four hours this was satisfactory. Then Frances Stuart, being not only human but of a certain shrewdness, armed herself with her aunt’s sweater pattern, the I.O.U. for helping with the sleeves, her father’s I.O.U. for a steak dinner for four at the Rockville Inn, and an unopened bottle of cologne, and made for Florence Crain.
Florence was a hard bargainer, but by throwing in a yellow skirt that was too big, anyway, and a further I.O.U. for two sodas at the drugstore, Frances came off with Jeff Rogers for the Grab Bag Dance, and an I.O.U. from Florence promising the black dress for the first dance of the fall season.
The P.T.A. food sale was held on Wednesday evening, and Mr. Smith got there too late. On Friday morning Miss Athens met Mrs. Stuart and her sister in the grocery, all converging upon Mr. Smith and intent on more of Mrs. Smith’s stuffed cabbage and sour cream. “Good morning,” Mrs. Stuart said to Miss Athens as she edged toward the counter. “I’ve been meaning to stop in and say hello. And of course to apologize for Allen’s causing you so much trouble.”
“No trouble at all,” Miss Athens said. “He very kindly helped me with my garden.”
“So I heard,” Mrs. Stuart said. “Actually, I was wondering if you had any I.O.U.’s you would care to trade. Allen is signed up to the absolute limit of his credit, and I still have no one to fix our broken back step. I thought perhaps one of the other boys…”
Miss Athens opened her pocketbook. “As a matter of fact,” she said, “nothing seems to stop them from using my yard as a shortcut, although they do seem to be trying not to step in the garden. I have more promises of help than I can ever use, though it has occurred to me that I could put up a little summer house, or a terrace or something, to use up all these hours of work.” She leafed through a little package of I.O.U.’s signed more or less legibly with the names of various young gentlemen, who still optimistically believed that Miss Athens’ backyard was the shortest way to school. “What kind of boy would you like?” she asked.
“Let me see.” Mrs. Stuart was, in turn, unfolding a little collection of slips of paper. “You have no use for baby-sitters, do you?”
“I can take the baby-sitting ones,” her sister put in. “I have one from my husband promising to put up a television aerial. Or I can trade my own promise to help you with those curtains, Grace.”
“I’m very clumsy with curtains,” Miss Athens said shyly. “I can’t seem to get mine to hang straight.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Stuart’s sister, “I can certainly use a couple of those boys, Miss Athens—I want to build an outdoor playpen for the baby.”
“Fine,” Miss Athens said. “I have four windows in my living room—would three boys at two hours each sound right?”
“Splendid,” Mrs. Stuart’s sister said.
“Wait,” said Mrs. Stuart. “Don’t trade away all your boys, Miss Athens.”
“I get more every day,” Miss Athens said cynically.
“How about dusting?” Mrs. Stuart asked. “My daughter, Frances, has promised half an hour of dusting every day for a week.” She laughed. “Here’s one I don’t suppose you need,” she said. “It’s from Allen, promising to get a haircut every two weeks until fall. It cost me a bag of marbles. How about one promising to substitute for chaperon at the dance Friday night? Or here’s one from the little Atkins girl promising not to give us any of their kittens for one year. Leaf-raking next fall? Snow-shoveling? Allen has been getting desperate. And here’s one from Mrs. Williams promising to make one of those sweet little knitted caps. I got that one from Frances, and she got it from the Williams girl in exchange for a home permanent, and the Williams girl got it from her mother for doing the family marketing and carrying home the packages. Dear me.” And Mrs. Stuart sighed, regarding her handful of papers.
“I could use the dusting,” Miss Athens said. “Is she careful of old china?”
“She will be,” Mrs. Stuart said. “She’ll be fine after the dance on Friday night.”
Mr. Smith spoke hesitantly. “My wife’s been after me,” he said. “I can’t find time to do things, much, and I thought I heard one of you ladies mention a television aerial.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Mrs. Stuart’s sister.
“Only thing is,” Mr. Smith went on, “I don’t know how to go about trading. What do I offer you in exchange?”
Mrs. Stuart’s sister smiled happily. “Stuffed cabbage with sour cream.”
Miss Athens and Mrs. Stuart stopped for a minute to talk, in front of the grocery, and stepped aside as an unfamiliar young woman approached; she started to go into the grocery, hesitated, and then turned to Mrs. Stuart. “Excuse me,” she said, “but isn’t your name Stuart?”
Mrs. Stuart laughed. “Children are the world’s best newspapers,” she said. “I am Mrs. Stuart, I live directly across the street from you. Your name is Boone, you moved in yesterday, and you have two children, one a little girl about four and the other a baby.”
“A boy,” Mrs. Boone said. “Three months old.” She was pretty and smiling and breathless and clearly in the middle of unpacking: her hair was mussed and she was wearing blue jeans. “I’m ashamed of myself,” she said, gesturing at her clothes, “but we ran out of milk for the baby, and I’ve been trying to get dishes put away, and linen out so I could make the beds, and I can’t find anything.”
Mrs. Stuart nodded sympathetically, but Miss Athens, businesslike, took out her package of I.O.U.’s. “Exactly,” she said. “You sound like you could use four or five of my boys.”
Mrs. Boone looked puzzled. Then she said, “Why, I have one of those papers.” From the pocket of her blue jeans she took Mr. Stuart’s I.O.U. promising a steak dinner for four at the Rockville Inn. “I don’t understand it at all,” Mrs. Boone said. “Yesterday a very pretty dark-haired girl—”
“Florence Crain,” said Mrs. Stuart with admirable courtesy.
“Yes, of course. Florence. Mrs. Smith here in the grocery suggested that she might be able to watch the babies for me while I unpacked, and she was really terribly sweet about it, but you know how girls are—she came across a necklace of mine, nothing but costume jewelry and of no value at all, and actually I haven’t worn it for years, but she seemed to think it was just exactly the thing to wear with a black dres
s she has—”
“I know the black dress,” Mrs. Stuart said grimly.
“Much too old for a girl her age, I would think,” said Mrs. Boone, accurately interpreting Mrs. Stuart’s expression. “I told her I would be delighted to give her the necklace, because she had been so very nice with the babies, but she gave me this paper. She said it was a trade. But I believe it belongs to you.”
Helplessly, Mrs. Stuart shook her head. “Not at all,” she said. “It belongs to you. Would Saturday evening be convenient?”
Every year Mrs. Boone made ginger marmalade from a recipe left her by her great-grandmother. One jar of Mrs. Boone’s last-year’s ginger marmalade was a more than adequate trade for two hours of baby-sitting by Frances Stuart, on an I.O.U. earned by Mrs. Stuart by putting new curtains in Frances’ room. The Boones dined so pleasantly at the Rockville Inn with the Stuarts that they felt enthusiastically that they must reciprocate, and Mrs. Boone and Mrs. Stuart eventually became close enough friends for Mrs. Boone to pass on the recipe for ginger marmalade. Mr. Smith was so pressed by requests for Mrs. Smith’s stuffed cabbage with sour cream that he bought half a dozen boys from Miss Athens and used the accumulated labor to build in a small counter across one corner of the grocery, where Mrs. Smith began a little catering service, which expanded in time to such an extent that the Smiths gave up the grocery and took to spending their winters in Florida. Allen Stuart’s sternest case of hero worship took an abrupt fall when Jeff Rogers stopped him on the street after school and offered to pay his way into the movies for a week in return for one of Allen’s I.O.U.’s, the one from Allen’s sister promising to help him with his arithmetic homework every night for two weeks. Bewildered, Allen argued that Jeff did not even take arithmetic, and all that would happen if he had the I.O.U. was that he would have to sit with Allen’s crazy old sister every night. Jeff said yes, he knew. When Allen, disgusted, reported this evidence of the disintegration of a fine mind and a good football player to his sister, he was further confused by her gift of a dollar and the promise to do his arithmetic homework for two weeks. Murmuring, Allen retreated to the Boones’ house to work out an I.O.U. helping Mr. Boone unpack his fishing equipment.
On Saturday afternoon the weather was clear and warm, and the entire town turned out to see Miss Athens, grim-faced, the soul of honor, wearing an undersized gray cap and the number thirteen on her back, select a bat, and walk balefully into the batter’s box. The Rockville Rockets won, one to nothing, and everyone in town remembered, forever after, that unbelievable moment when Miss Athens, seeing the first pitch coming at her, shut her eyes and swung.
THE POSSIBILITY OF EVIL
The Saturday Evening Post, December 1968
MISS ADELA STRANGEWORTH STEPPED daintily along Main Street on her way to the grocery. The sun was shining, the air was fresh and clear after the night’s heavy rain, and everything in Miss Strangeworth’s little town looked washed and bright. Miss Strangeworth took deep breaths, and thought that there was nothing in the world like a fragrant summer day.
She knew everyone in town, of course; she was fond of telling strangers—tourists who sometimes passed through the town and stopped to admire Miss Strangeworth’s roses—that she had never spent more than a day outside this town in all her long life. She was seventy-one, Miss Strangeworth told the tourists, with a pretty little dimple showing by her lip, and she sometimes found herself thinking that the town belonged to her. “My grandfather built the first house on Pleasant Street,” she would say, opening her blue eyes wide with the wonder of it. “This house, right here. My family has lived here for better than a hundred years. My grandmother planted these roses, and my mother tended them, just as I do. I’ve watched my town grow; I can remember when Mr. Lewis, Senior, opened the grocery store, and the year the river flooded out the shanties on the low road, and the excitement when some young folks wanted to move the park over to the space in front of where the new post office is today. They wanted to put up a statue of Ethan Allen”—Miss Strangeworth would frown a little and sound stern—“but it should have been a statue of my grandfather. There wouldn’t have been a town here at all if it hadn’t been for my grandfather and the lumber mill.”
Miss Strangeworth never gave away any of her roses, although the tourists often asked her. The roses belonged on Pleasant Street, and it bothered Miss Strangeworth to think of people wanting to carry them away, to take them into strange towns and down strange streets. When the new minister came, and the ladies were gathering flowers to decorate the church, Miss Strangeworth sent over a great basket of gladioli; when she picked the roses at all, she set them in bowls and vases around the inside of the house her grandfather had built.
Walking down Main Street on a summer morning, Miss Strangeworth had to stop every minute or so to say good morning to someone or to ask after someone’s health. When she came into the grocery, half a dozen people turned away from the shelves and the counters to wave at her or call out good morning.
“And good morning to you, too, Mr. Lewis,” Miss Strangeworth said at last. The Lewis family had been in the town almost as long as the Strangeworths; but the day young Lewis left high school and went to work in the grocery, Miss Strangeworth had stopped calling him Tommy and started calling him Mr. Lewis, and he had stopped calling her Addie and started calling her Miss Strangeworth. They had been in high school together, and had gone to picnics together, and to high school dances and basketball games; but now Mr. Lewis was behind the counter in the grocery, and Miss Strangeworth was living alone in the Strangeworth house on Pleasant Street.
“Good morning,” Mr. Lewis said, and added politely, “lovely day.”
“It is a very nice day,” Miss Strangeworth said as though she had only just decided that it would do after all. “I would like a chop, please, Mr. Lewis, a small, lean veal chop. Are those strawberries from Arthur Parker’s garden? They’re early this year.”
“He brought them in this morning,” Mr. Lewis said.
“I shall have a box,” Miss Strangeworth said. Mr. Lewis looked worried, she thought, and for a minute she hesitated, but then she decided that he surely could not be worried over the strawberries. He looked very tired indeed. He was usually so chipper, Miss Strangeworth thought, and almost commented, but it was far too personal a subject to be introduced to Mr. Lewis, the grocer, so she only said, “And a can of cat food and, I think, a tomato.”
Silently, Mr. Lewis assembled her order on the counter and waited. Miss Strangeworth looked at him curiously and then said, “It’s Tuesday, Mr. Lewis. You forgot to remind me.”
“Did I? Sorry.”
“Imagine your forgetting that I always buy my tea on Tuesday,” Miss Strangeworth said gently. “A quarter pound of tea, please, Mr. Lewis.”
“Is that all, Miss Strangeworth?”
“Yes, thank you, Mr. Lewis. Such a lovely day, isn’t it?”
“Lovely,” Mr. Lewis said.
Miss Strangeworth moved slightly to make room for Mrs. Harper at the counter. “Morning, Adela,” Mrs. Harper said, and Miss Strangeworth said, “Good morning, Martha.”
“Lovely day,” Mrs. Harper said, and Miss Strangeworth said, “Yes, lovely,” and Mr. Lewis, under Mrs. Harper’s glance, nodded.
“Ran out of sugar for my cake frosting,” Mrs. Harper explained. Her hand shook slightly as she opened her pocketbook. Miss Strangeworth wondered, glancing at her quickly, if she had been taking proper care of herself. Martha Harper was not as young as she used to be, Miss Strangeworth thought. She probably could use a good, strong tonic.
“Martha,” she said, “you don’t look well.”
“I’m perfectly all right,” Mrs. Harper said shortly. She handed her money to Mr. Lewis, took her change and her sugar, and went out without speaking again. Looking after her, Miss Strangeworth shook her head slightly. Martha definitely did not look well.
Carrying her little bag of groceries, Miss Strangeworth came out of the store into the bright sunlight and stopped
to smile down on the Crane baby. Don and Helen Crane were really the two most infatuated young parents she had ever known, she thought indulgently, looking at the delicately embroidered baby cap and the lace-edged carriage cover.
“That little girl is going to grow up expecting luxury all her life,” she said to Helen Crane.
Helen laughed. “That’s the way we want her to feel,” she said. “Like a princess.”
“A princess can be a lot of trouble sometimes,” Miss Strangeworth said dryly. “How old is her highness now?”
“Six months next Tuesday,” Helen Crane said, looking down with rapt wonder at her child. “I’ve been worrying, though, about her. Don’t you think she ought to move around more? Try to sit up, for instance?”
“For plain and fancy worrying,” Miss Strangeworth said, amused, “give me a new mother every time.”
“She just seems—slow,” Helen Crane said.
“Nonsense. All babies are different. Some of them develop much more quickly than others.”
“That’s what my mother says.” Helen Crane laughed, looking a little bit ashamed.
“I suppose you’ve got young Don all upset about the fact that his daughter is already six months old and hasn’t yet begun to learn to dance?”
“I haven’t mentioned it to him. I suppose she’s just so precious that I worry about her all the time.”
“Well, apologize to her right now,” Miss Strangeworth said. “She is probably worrying about why you keep jumping around all the time.” Smiling to herself and shaking her old head, she went on down the sunny street, stopping once to ask little Billy Moore why he wasn’t out riding in his daddy’s shiny new car, and talking for a few minutes outside the library with Miss Chandler, the librarian, about the new novels to be ordered, and paid for by the annual library appropriation. Miss Chandler seemed absentminded and very much as though she was thinking about something else. Miss Strangeworth noticed that Miss Chandler had not taken much trouble with her hair that morning, and sighed. Miss Strangeworth hated sloppiness.
Just an Ordinary Day: Stories Page 49