by Willa Cather
Once or twice, when she happened to meet pleasant young Mr. Templeton alone, she had tried to talk to him seriously about his daughter’s future. “She has finished de school here, and she should be getting training of some sort; she is growing up,” she told him severely.
He laughed and said in his way that was so honest, and so disarmingly sweet and frank: “Oh, don’t remind me, Mrs. Rosen! I just pretend to myself she isn’t. I want to keep my little daughter as long as I can.” And there it ended.
Sometimes Vickie Templeton seemed so dense, so utterly unperceptive, that Mrs. Rosen was ready to wash her hands of her. Then some queer streak of sensibility in the child would make her change her mind. Last winter, when Mrs. Rosen came home from a visit to her sister in Chicago, she brought with her a new cloak of the sleeveless dolman type, black velvet, lined with grey and white squirrel skins, a grey skin next a white. Vickie, so indifferent to clothes, fell in love with that cloak. Her eyes followed it with delight whenever Mrs. Rosen wore it. She found it picturesque, romantic. Mrs. Rosen had been captivated by the same thing in the cloak, and had bought it with a shrug, knowing it would be quite out of place in Skyline; and Mr. Rosen, when she first produced it from her trunk, had laughed and said; “Where did you get that?—out of Rigoletto?” It looked like that—but how could Vickie know?
Vickie’s whole family puzzled Mrs. Rosen; their feelings were so much finer than their way of living. She bought milk from the Templetons because they kept a cow—which Mandy milked,—and every night one of the twins brought the milk to her in a tin pail. Whichever boy brought it, she always called him Albert—she thought Adelbert a silly, Southern name.
One night when she was fitting the lid on an empty pail, she said severely:
“Now, Albert, I have put some cookies for Grandma in this pail, wrapped in a napkin. And they are for Grandma, remember, not for your mother or Vickie.”
“Yes’m.”
When she turned to him to give him the pail, she saw two full crystal globes in the little boy’s eyes, just ready to break. She watched him go softly down the path and dash those tears away with the back of his hand. She was sorry. She hadn’t thought the little boys realized that their household was somehow a queer one.
Queer or not, Mrs. Rosen liked to go there better than to most houses in the town. There was something easy, cordial, and carefree in the parlour that never smelled of being shut up, and the ugly furniture looked hospitable. One felt a pleasantness in the human relationships. These people didn’t seem to know there were such things as struggle or exactness or competition in the world. They were always genuinely glad to see you, had time to see you, and were usually gay in mood—all but Grandmother, who had the kind of gravity that people who take thought of human destiny must have. But even she liked light-heartedness in others; she drudged, indeed, to keep it going.
There were houses that were better kept, certainly, but the housekeepers had no charm, no gentleness of manner, were like hard little machines, most of them; and some were grasping and narrow. The Templetons were not selfish or scheming. Anyone could take advantage of them, and many people did. Victoria might eat all the cookies her neighbour sent in, but she would give away anything she had. She was always ready to lend her dresses and hats and bits of jewellery for the school theatricals, and she never worked people for favours.
As for Mr. Templeton (people usually called him “young Mr. Templeton”), he was too delicate to collect his just debts. His boyish, eager-to-please manner, his fair complexion and blue eyes and young face, made him seem very soft to some of the hard old money-grubbers on Main Street, and the fact that he always said “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” to men older than himself furnished a good deal of amusement to by-standers.
Two years ago, when this Templeton family came to Skyline and moved into the house next door, Mrs. Rosen was inconsolable. The new neighbours had a lot of children, who would always be making a racket. They put a cow and a horse into the empty barn, which would mean dirt and flies. They strewed their back yard with packing-cases and did not pick them up.
She first met Mrs. Templeton at an afternoon card party, in a house at the extreme north end of the town, fully half a mile away, and she had to admit that her new neighbour was an attractive woman, and that there was something warm and genuine about her. She wasn’t in the least willowy or languishing, as Mrs. Rosen had usually found Southern ladies to be. She was high-spirited and direct; a trifle imperious, but with a shade of diffidence, too, as if she was trying to adjust herself to a new group of people and to do the right thing.
While they were at the party, a blinding snowstorm came on, with a hard wind. Since they lived next door to each other, Mrs. Rosen and Mrs. Templeton struggled homeward together through the blizzard. Mrs. Templeton seemed delighted with the rough weather; she laughed like a big country girl whenever she made a mis-step off the obliterated sidewalk and sank up to her knees in a snow-drift.
“Take care, Mrs. Rosen,” she kept calling, “keep to the right! Don’t spoil your nice coat. My, ain’t this real winter? We never had it like this back with us.”
When they reached the Templeton’s gate, Victoria wouldn’t hear of Mrs. Rosen’s going farther. “No, indeed, Mrs. Rosen, you come right in with me and get dry, and Ma’ll make you a hot toddy while I take the baby.”
By this time Mrs. Rosen had begun to like her neighbour, so she went in. To her surprise, the parlour was neat and comfortable—the children did not strew things about there, apparently. The hard-coal burner threw out a warm red glow. A faded, respectable Brussels carpet covered the floor, an old-fashioned wooden clock ticked on the walnut bookcase. There were a few easy chairs, and no hideous ornaments about. She rather liked the old oil-chromos on the wall: “Hagar and Ishmael in the Wilderness,” and “The Light of the World.” While Mrs. Rosen dried her feet on the nickel base of the stove, Mrs. Templeton excused herself and withdrew to the next room,—her bedroom,—took off her silk dress and corsets, and put on a white challis négligée. She reappeared with the baby, who was not crying, exactly, but making eager, passionate, gasping entreaties,—faster and faster, tenser and tenser, as he felt his dinner nearer and nearer and yet not his.
Mrs. Templeton sat down in a low rocker by the stove and began to nurse him, holding him snugly but carelessly, still talking to Mrs. Rosen about the card party, and laughing about their wade home through the snow. Hughie, the baby, fell to work so fiercely that beads of sweat came out all over his flushed forehead. Mrs. Rosen could not help admiring him and his mother. They were so comfortable and complete. When he was changed to the other side, Hughie resented the interruption a little; but after a time he became soft and bland, as smooth as oil, indeed; began looking about him as he drew in his milk. He finally dropped the nipple from his lips altogether, turned on his mother’s arm, and looked inquiringly at Mrs. Rosen.
“What a beautiful baby!” she exclaimed from her heart. And he was. A sort of golden baby. His hair was like sunshine, and his long lashes were gold over such gay blue eyes. There seemed to be a gold glow in his soft pink skin, and he had the smile of a cherub.
“We think he’s a pretty boy,” said Mrs. Templeton. “He’s the prettiest of my babies. Though the twins were mighty cunning little fellows. I hated the idea of twins, but the minute I saw them, I couldn’t resist them.”
Just then old Mrs. Harris came in, walking widely in her full-gathered skirt and felt-soled shoes, bearing a tray with two smoking goblets upon it.
“This is my mother, Mrs. Harris, Mrs. Rosen,” said Mrs. Templeton.
“I’m glad to know you, ma’am,” said Mrs. Harris. “Victoria, let me take the baby, while you two ladies have your toddy.”
“Oh, don’t take him away, Mrs. Harris, please!” cried Mrs. Rosen.
The old lady smiled. “I won’t. I’ll set right here. He never frets with his grandma.”
When Mrs. Rosen had finished her excellent drink she asked if she might hold the ba
by, and Mrs. Harris placed him on her lap. He made a few rapid boxing motions with his two fists, then braced himself on his heels and the back of his head, and lifted himself up in an arc. When he dropped back, he looked up at Mrs. Rosen with his most intimate smile. “See what a smart boy I am!”
When Mrs. Rosen walked home, feeling her way through the snow by following the fence, she knew she could never stay away from a house where there was a baby like that one.
IV
Vickie did her studying in a hammock hung between two tall cottonwood trees over in the Roadmaster’s green yard. The Roadmaster had the finest yard in Skyline, on the edge of the town, just where the sandy plain and the sage-brush began. His family went back to Ohio every summer, and Bert and Del Templeton were paid to take care of his lawn, to turn the sprinkler on at the right hours and to cut the grass. They were really too little to run the heavy lawn-mower very well, but they were able to manage because they were twins. Each took one end of the handle-bar, and they pushed together like a pair of fat Shetland ponies. They were very proud of being able to keep the lawn so nice, and worked hard on it. They cut Mrs. Rosen’s grass once a week, too, and did it so well that she wondered why in the world they never did anything about their own yard. They didn’t have city water, to be sure (it was expensive), but she thought they might pick up a few velocipedes and iron hoops, and dig up the messy “flower-bed,” that was even uglier than the naked gravel spots. She was particularly offended by a deep ragged ditch, a miniature arroyo, which ran across the back yard, serving no purpose and looking very dreary.
One morning she said craftily to the twins, when she was paying them for cutting her grass:
“And, boys, why don’t you just shovel the sand-pile by your fence into dat ditch, and make your back yard smooth?”
“Oh, no, ma’am,” said Adelbert with feeling. “We like to have the ditch to build bridges over!”
Ever since vacation began, the twins had been busy getting the Roadmaster’s yard ready for the Methodist lawn party. When Mrs. Holliday, the Roadmaster’s wife, went away for the summer, she always left a key with the Ladies’ Aid Society and invited them to give their ice-cream social at her place.
This year the date set for the party was June fifteenth. The day was a particularly fine one, and as Mr. Holliday himself had been called to Cheyenne on railroad business, the twins felt personally responsible for everything. They got out to the Holliday place early in the morning, and stayed on guard all day. Before noon the drayman brought a wagonload of card-tables and folding chairs, which the boys placed in chosen spots under the cottonwood trees. In the afternoon the Methodist ladies arrived and opened up the kitchen to receive the freezers of home-made ice-cream, and the cakes which the congregation donated. Indeed, all the good cake-bakers in town were expected to send a cake. Grandma Harris baked a white cake, thickly iced and covered with freshly grated coconut, and Vickie took it over in the afternoon.
Mr. and Mrs. Rosen, because they belonged to no church, contributed to the support of all, and usually went to the church suppers in winter and the socials in summer. On this warm June evening they set out early, in order to take a walk first. They strolled along the hard gravelled road that led out through the sage toward the sandhills; tonight it led toward the moon, just rising over the sweep of dunes. The sky was almost as blue as at midday, and had that look of being very near and very soft which it has in desert countries. The moon, too, looked very near, soft and bland and innocent. Mrs. Rosen admitted that in the Adirondacks, for which she was always secretly homesick in summer, the moon had a much colder brilliance, seemed farther off and made of a harder metal. This moon gave the sagebrush plain and the drifted sand-hills the softness of velvet. All countries were beautiful to Mr. Rosen. He carried a country of his own in his mind, and was able to unfold it like a tent in any wilderness.
When they at last turned back toward the town, they saw groups of people, women in white dresses, walking toward the dark spot where the paper lanterns made a yellow light underneath the cottonwoods. High above, the rustling tree-tops stirred free in the flood of moonlight.
The lighted yard was surrounded by a low board fence, painted the dark red Burlington colour, and as the Rosens drew near, they noticed four children standing close together in the shadow of some tall elder bushes just outside the fence. They were the poor Maude children; their mother was the washwoman, the Rosens’ laundress and the Templetons’. People said that every one of those children had a different father. But good laundresses were few, and even the members of the Ladies’ Aid were glad to get Mrs. Maude’s services at a dollar a day, though they didn’t like their children to play with hers. Just as the Rosens approached, Mrs. Templeton came out from the lighted square, leaned over the fence, and addressed the little Maudes.
“I expect you children forgot your dimes, now didn’t you? Never mind, here’s a dime for each of you, so come along and have your ice-cream.”
The Maudes put out small hands and said: “Thank you,” but not one of them moved.
“Come along, Francie” (the oldest girl was named Frances). “Climb right over the fence.” Mrs. Templeton reached over and gave her a hand, and the little boys quickly scrambled after their sister. Mrs. Templeton took them to a table which Vickie and the twins had just selected as being especially private—they liked to do things together.
“Here, Vickie, let the Maudes sit at your table, and take care they get plenty of cake.”
The Rosens had followed close behind Mrs. Templeton, and Mr. Rosen now overtook her and said in his most courteous and friendly manner: “Good evening, Mrs. Templeton. Will you have ice-cream with us?” He always used the local idioms, though his voice and enunciation made them sound altogether different from Skyline speech.
“Indeed I will, Mr. Rosen. Mr. Templeton will be late. He went out to his farm yesterday, and I don’t know just when to expect him.”
Vickie and the twins were disappointed at not having their table to themselves, when they had come early and found a nice one; but they knew it was right to look out for the dreary little Maudes, so they moved close together and made room for them. The Maudes didn’t cramp them long. When the three boys had eaten the last crumb of cake and licked their spoons, Francie got up and led them to a green slope by the fence, just outside the lighted circle. “Now set down, and watch and see how folks do,” she told them. The boys looked to Francie for commands and support. She was really Amos Maude’s child, born before he ran away to the Klondike, and it had been rubbed into them that this made a difference.
The Templeton children made their ice-cream linger out, and sat watching the crowd. They were glad to see their mother go to Mr. Rosen’s table, and noticed how nicely he placed a chair for her and insisted upon putting a scarf about her shoulders. Their mother was wearing her new dotted Swiss, with many ruffles, all edged with black ribbon, and wide ruffly sleeves. As the twins watched her over their spoons, they thought how much prettier their mother was than any of the other women, and how becoming her new dress was. The children got as much satisfaction as Mrs. Harris out of Victoria’s good looks.
Mr. Rosen was well pleased with Mrs. Templeton and her new dress, and with her kindness to the little Maudes. He thought her manner with them just right,—warm, spontaneous, without anything patronizing. He always admired her way with her own children, though Mrs. Rosen thought it too casual. Being a good mother, he believed, was much more a matter of physical poise and richness than of sentimentalizing and reading doctor-books. Tonight he was more talkative than usual, and in his quiet way made Mrs. Templeton feel his real friendliness and admiration. Unfortunately, he made other people feel it, too.
Mrs. Jackson, a neighbour who didn’t like the Templetons, had been keeping an eye on Mr. Rosen’s table. She was a stout square woman of imperturbable calm, effective in regulating the affairs of the community because she never lost her temper, and could say the most cutting things in calm, even kindly, tones. Her fac
e was smooth and placid as a mask, rather good-humoured, and the fact that one eye had a cast and looked askance made it the more difficult to see through her intentions. When she had been lingering about the Rosens’ table for some time, studying Mr. Rosen’s pleasant attentions to Mrs. Templeton, she brought up a trayful of cake.
“You folks are about ready for another helping,” she remarked affably.
Mrs. Rosen spoke. “I want some of Grandma Harris’s cake. It’s a white coconut, Mrs. Jackson.”
“How about you, Mrs. Templeton, would you like some of your own cake?”
“Indeed I would,” said Mrs. Templeton heartily. “Ma said she had good luck with it. I didn’t see it. Vickie brought it over.”
Mrs. Jackson deliberately separated the slices on her tray with two forks. “Well,” she remarked with a chuckle that really sounded amiable, “I don’t know but I’d like my cakes, if I kept somebody in the kitchen to bake them for me.”
Mr. Rosen for once spoke quickly. “If I had a cook like Grandma Harris in my kitchen, I’d live in it!” he declared.
Mrs. Jackson smiled. “I don’t know as we feel like that, Mrs. Templeton? I tell Mr. Jackson that my idea of coming up in the world would be to forget I had a cook-stove, like Mrs. Templeton. But we can’t all be lucky.”
Mr. Rosen could not tell how much was malice and how much was stupidity. What he chiefly detected was self-satisfaction; the craftiness of the coarse-fibred country girl putting catch questions to the teacher. Yes, he decided, the woman was merely showing off—she regarded it as an accomplishment to make people uncomfortable.