Mary Emma & Company

by Ralph Moody

  By the end of February no one could have guessed that we hadn’t been living in that house all our lives—nobody but Mother, and Grace, and I.

  10

  Sunday in Our New Home

  WE’D been living in the house nearly a week before we saw our new landlord. He came to see us Thursday evening, when Grace and Mother were patching plaster in the parlor and I was scraping wet paper off the ceiling. Mother answered the doorbell, showed him in, and said, “Mr. Perkins, these are my two older children, Grace and Ralph. I wonder if you’d excuse me a few minutes; my daughter will need a little help before this plaster dries. Wouldn’t you like to look through the other rooms while we’re finishing? The younger children are sleeping in the one where the door is closed.”

  Mr. Perkins was a big, portly man with gray hair, and he acted sort of gruff when he came in. He scowled as he looked around at the naked walls and the heaps of soggy paper on the floor, and only nodded stiffly when Mother introduced us. He didn’t say a word when she asked if he’d like to look through the other rooms, but turned and started toward the dining room. We’d finished painting and papering that room Tuesday night, then Mother hung the curtains and had the furniture moved in on Wednesday.

  Mr. Perkins went as far as the doorway, stopped and stepped back. I saw him glance over his shoulder toward Mother, sort of as if he expected her to be watching him, then he wiped his feet carefully on a gunny sack I’d put down at the threshold and went on. He was gone four or five minutes, and when he came back he asked pleasantly, “Who did the decorating for you, Mrs. Moody?”

  “We did it ourselves,” Mother said. “Don’t you think my little girl does a rather good job of paper-hanging?”

  “Very good! Very good!” he said as if he really meant it, looked over at Grace and asked, “Where’d you learn the trade?”

  “On the kitchen ceiling,” she told him, “but I didn’t do it alone. Mother and I did it together.”

  “You don’t mean to tell me this was your first try?” he asked.

  Grace grinned and said, “Well, none of it that’s up there now. On the first try we got more of it around our heads than we did on the ceiling.”

  Mr. Perkins laughed out loud and said, “I did the very same thing on my first and last try at paper-hanging. That must have been all of thirty years ago, and on that same kitchen ceiling.” Then he turned to Mother and said, “I’m more than surprised by what I’ve seen. I was pretty well discouraged on renting to a family with a lot of children, but that’s about all a man can get in these big, old houses. How many children do you have?”

  “Six,” Mother told him.

  “Well, that’s quite a family! Didn’t John Durant tell me you were a widow?”

  “My husband died two years ago,” Mother told him. “My youngest daughter was born five months after his death.”

  Mr. Perkins looked back into the dining room, where the top of the walnut table shone like a mirror, and said, “I take it your husband left you pretty comfortably fixed.”

  “No,” Mother said, “I was fortunate enough to buy our furniture at what amounted to a give-away price. My husband had tuberculosis; we will make our own living.”

  Mr. Perkins frowned the least little bit and said, “That won’t be too easy—not for a widow with six small children; not in a town like Medford. What do you plan to do, work out?”

  I don’t think Mother liked the change that had come into Mr. Perkins’ voice. Her own was a bit frosty when she said, “I’m very sorry if Mr. Durant failed to tell you the circumstances before we moved in here. I plan to do fine hand laundry here, and if it had not been for the large room in the basement I should not have taken so filthy a place as this house was.”

  For a second Mr. Perkins’ scowl deepened, then it faded and he said, “It was filthy dirty, at that. I should have got rid of those people years ago, but I didn’t want to spend a lot of money fixing the place up for another batch of kids to tear apart.”

  “My children won’t tear your property apart,” Mother told him coldly, “and I shall not ask you to spend any money on repairs at this time.”

  “Now Mrs. Moody, don’t understand me wrong,” Mr. Perkins said in an apologizing sort of voice. “I can see how you’re bringing up your children; I was talking about the kind of kids we most generally get in these big, old houses that are not too far from the brickyard district. Tell me more about this hand-laundry business; it sounds like a good idea.”

  Before Mr. Perkins left we were real good friends. He told Mother that he’d be glad to pay for all the paper and paint we used in fixing up the house, and that he’d have the set-tubs and gas put into the laundry room if she’d sign a two-year lease. Of course, she said she’d be glad to.

  We finished papering and painting the parlor Friday night, Mother had the furniture moved in on Saturday, and when we were leaving church Sunday morning Mr. Vander Mark asked Mother if she’d mind waiting a few minutes. She told us to walk along slowly, and when she caught up to us she was all aglow.

  “My, isn’t it fortunate we got our parlor finished and moved into yesterday!” she said as she took Elizabeth from Grace’s arms. “Mr. Vander Mark is sending two ladies to call on me tomorrow morning, to talk about our doing their finer pieces of laundry, and I would be mortified to death if we didn’t have a nice clean parlor to entertain them in. I suspect the purpose of their calling at our house is to assure themselves that their garments will be handled in nice clean surroundings.”

  “Well,” Grace said, “if they’re shopping around we ought to get their business; I don’t think they’ll find many washerwomen with cleaner or nicer parlors than ours.”

  “Gracie! Don’t you ever let me hear you say such a thing again!” Mother said in a shocked voice. “Although we shall make our living by laundering for others, we shall never look down upon our occupation, nor let it degrade us in any manner whatsoever—either in our own minds or in the minds of the community. I know of no more honorable occupation—or profession, for that matter—for fine laundering is an art if practiced as we shall practice it, with the utmost skill and artistry. And as for serving others for hire, that is the foundation of our whole society, whether we be doctors, lawyers, ministers or laundresses.”

  “One is respected in a community to the extent, and only to the extent, that he or she respects his own position in life. There are doctors, lawyers, and even clergymen who are a disgrace to humanity, and the disciples of Christ were lowly fishermen. I would not, for all the world, have any one of you children grow up to feel that you were less than equal in every way to any other human being who walks the face of the earth.”

  Grace was acting kind of smarty when she said “washerwomen,” but before Mother had finished she was walking along with her head down. “I’m sorry, Mother,” she said. Her voice was husky and catchy in her throat when she went on. “I didn’t mean that I was ashamed of our taking in washing. I don’t know just what I did mean, but it . . . it makes me boil all over to have rich women from our own church come snooping around to see if we are worthy of it, then passing us out a little work as if it were charity. I don’t mind doing washing, or digging ditches, or anything else, but I hate anything that looks or smells like charity.”

  “It will be entirely up to us as to whether or not it is charity,” Mother told her. “If we give people one penny’s worth less for their dollar than they could get elsewhere, then we will be accepting charity. But if we turn out every single piece as though it were to be exhibited, and charge prices commensurate to the quality of our work, then there will be no woman in our church or elsewhere whom we cannot meet on an equal footing. Don’t feel badly about your outburst, Gracie. It has cleared my thinking as nothing else could have done, and through it we have been able to chart the course that we will follow.”

  Whenever there was something that Mother didn’t want to talk about any more she’d change the subject quickly. That time she turned to me and asked, “Son, how
much coal have we at home?”

  “About a bag and a half,” I told her. “It ought to be enough to run us through Monday.”

  “I doubt it very much,” Mother said. “There is the feel and the smell of a coming storm in the air, and we must have a comfortably warm parlor when the ladies come to call. I think we’d better start our furnace as soon as we reach home. Since we’ve never had one before there may be a few tricks we’ll have to learn about adjusting the drafts and dampers, so we mustn’t risk waiting till morning and then running into some little difficulty.”

  “I suppose not,” I said, “but if we burn up all our coal today we won’t have any to keep the parlor warm when the ladies come tomorrow.”

  “Yes, I’d thought of that,” Mother told me, “but if you’re up bright and early you could bring us two more bags before you started work, and I hope that will be the last coal we ever buy by the bagful; it costs twice as much that way as by the ton. Possibly you could get our bin boarded up and lined with paper tomorrow evening, then I’d order a whole ton of coal delivered on Tuesday morning.”

  “If you’d let me get it fixed up today you could order the ton for the first thing tomorrow morning,” I told her.

  “No, no, no,” Mother said. “We shan’t work on Sundays unless it is at something that is absolutely necessary. And certainly not at a task where one would get himself filthy dirty. My, how short the walk home from church has seemed! I didn’t realize that we were almost at our own doorstep.” Mother stopped for a minute, looked up at the house, and said, “Doesn’t it look nice with the ruffled curtains at the windows? If we can just manage to hold on until we get a profitable business started, it will make us the finest home we ever had.”

  As soon as we were inside the house Mother went straight to the kitchen, lifted the lid from the big iron pot that was simmering on the back of the stove, poked a two-tined fork into the meat, and twisted it a bit. “My!” she said, “this piece of neck isn’t quite as tender as I thought it might be! But what matter? A pot roast is always better for long, slow cooking, and this will need another half-hour. In fact, an hour wouldn’t hurt it. That will allow ample time for Ralph and me to start the furnace and have the whole house warm when we eat. Let’s have dinner in our new dining room, then we’ll have the whole afternoon and evening to enjoy our nice parlor.”

  “Ralph, you might run and change your clothes quickly. Gracie, an hour will give you time to cook the vegetables whole, rather than cut in pieces; they always look so much nicer that way. And, if you like, you might whack up a bread pudding. Muriel, could you set the table for us? This being our first meal in our new dining room, we’ll make it a real festive one. Let’s use the big linen tablecloth and the dishes with the gold band. Philip, you could peel the potatoes for Gracie, and Hal, you might tell Elizabeth a story if you’d like to. I’ll run and change into a wrapper for starting the furnace, but we’ll all put on our Sunday things again before we sit down to the table.”

  When I came back from changing my clothes Mother was pouring kerosene into a lamp at the kitchen table. “Isn’t it fortunate that Mrs. Maddox used lamps?” she said. “With no gas jet in our cellar this will come in awfully handy. You trot along and hunt up a few sticks of kindling and some paper; I’ll be right down with the lamp.”

  We’d looked at the furnace by match light when we first came to see the house, but all we had noticed was that it was big and a little old. When Mother brought the lamp, so we could really see it, it looked as if it might have been the one that was on Noah’s Ark and stood out in the rain forty days and nights. The doors were rusted yellow, the dampers were broken and hanging in pieces, and the pipe to the chimney sagged like a loose rope.

  “Oh, my!” Mother said as she shaded her eyes from the light and walked around the furnace. “Why, it doesn’t appear to have been used in years and years. My, I’m glad we didn’t wait till morning before starting it up! Did you find some kindling?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, “but wouldn’t it be better if I straightened up this stovepipe a little before we lighted the fire?”

  Mother held the lamp high, peered around the furnace and said, “It is a little droopy, isn’t it? Yes, I think it would be well to straighten it up so that we’ll have a good strong draft from the chimney. That always helps when one is kindling a new fire. And you might look to see that the damper is open. Turn it so that the handle is. . . .”

  That’s as far as Mother got. I’d already put my shoulder under the sag, and when I lifted on it the whole line of pipe came tumbling down. Soot billowed up so thick I couldn’t get my breath, and Mother stepped back so quickly that the lamp chimney was knocked off by one of the heating pipes. Quicker than a wink she blew out the flame, and we were left in the blackest blackness that I was ever in. All we could do was to play blind-man’s-bluff until we found the door to the laundry room and got out of there.

  When we reached the laundry, where it was daylight, Mother looked as if she’d been swimming in ink. Her tongue showed bright pink when she spoke, and I’d never noticed before that her eyes were more blue than gray. “Whewwww!” she whistled as she slammed the door shut behind us, “weren’t we fortunate that we put on our old clothes and had no more trouble than we did? Just one flicker of flame can cause flying soot in a closed room to explode. We’ll have to wait a few minutes for it to settle before we can go back in there with a lamp.”

  Grace had run down the stairs as we groped our way out of the cellar, and came hurrying to wipe Mother’s face with a clean towel. “Oh, never mind that,” Mother told her, “but you might bring me a lamp chimney. I broke the other one when the furnace pipe fell and startled me. As soon as the soot has settled we must get on with our fire building, so as not to keep dinner waiting when it is ready.”

  Soot had settled a quarter-inch deep on everything in the cellar by the time we could go back in there. “Well,” Mother said, “it’s a terrible mess, but it might have been much worse. With all that soot in the pipe we could never have kept a good roaring fire in our furnace, and just imagine what a tragedy it would have been if that pipe had fallen when I had this cellar hung full of nice white garments. So often one forgets his blessings in grieving over his mishaps. I’ll set the lamp over here where it will be safe, then we’ll rattle that pipe back together so that we may start our fire quickly.”

  Mother could have found a better word than “rattle” for the way we put the furnace pipe back together. It took us more than an hour. The whole twenty feet of it was so rusted that in places it was no thicker than egg shell, and the ends of nearly every section were bent or broken when they fell. Each piece had to be straightened with a hammer, then wired to the ceiling to keep it in place, and Mother used a whole roll of adhesive tape to patch the holes. When we’d finished she called up to Grace, “We have the pipe all mended, and will have the fire started in a jiffy. If you’d like, you might draw a tub of hot water, so one of us can bathe right away.”

  Mother stood for a minute looking up at the pipe, then she turned to me and said, “Well, it isn’t very pretty, but it ought to do the trick until we can afford a better one. Now if you’d just open that upper door and put in the paper and kindling. We won’t put on the coal until the kindling is burning brightly; it might smother the flame.”

  I took hold of the handle and tried to open the door, but it was rusted in place so tightly that it wouldn’t budge. Then, when I gave it a good hard yank, the handle came off in my hand. “Careful! Careful, Son!” Mother cautioned me. “I wouldn’t for all the world have Mr. Perkins feel that my children were ruining his property.”

  “Well, it looks to me as if this old furnace would be pretty hard to ruin,” I told her, “but I didn’t break it. The handle bolt was almost rusted in two, and it came apart.”

  When I finally managed to break the rust loose and the door flew open Mother held the lamp in front of the opening and looked in. “Good heavens alive!” she exclaimed. “Why, this fu
rnace is stuffed to the brim with ashes and every sort of rubbish imaginable.”

  Then she called, “Oh, Gracie! Just set everything back, so it won’t cook all to pieces, and you might give the younger children a glass of milk all around. We’ve run into a little difficulty, and it might be nearly an hour before we have the fire going and are cleaned up.”

  Way back at the time the Smithers family first moved into the house they must have burned cheap coal in the furnace, then come down to old boards and boxes, and finally to trying to keep the house warm by burning rubbish. We could almost tell when the changes came as we worked our way down through the layers. The pit was filled to the grates with coal ashes and cinders. Most of the first foot above the grates was wood ashes, loaded with bent nails, rusty spikes and old bolts, wedged tight around a solid clinker that must have weighed ten pounds. On top of that the ashes were matted flakes of burned paper, mixed with broken bottles, burned and rusted sardine cans, and all sorts of junk.

  It was a long careful job to empty the furnace without cutting our hands all to pieces, and when we’d taken all the ashes and junk out we found that the clinker was stuck fast to the grate and too big to go through the door opening. I’d just crawled inside with the hammer when Grace came down to tell us that it was past six o’clock, and to ask if she shouldn’t give the younger children their dinner. From the sound of Mother’s voice I knew that she was disappointed. “I suppose you’d better feed them,” she told Grace, “but I did want so much that we have our first Sunday dinner all together in our new home—with all the nice furniture, and china, and the cut-glass tumblers.”

  “Of course we’re going to have it all together,” Grace answered quickly. “I’ll just cut a few thin slices off the pot roast and make them each a sandwich to hold them until you’re finished. There’s water boiling in the teakettle; wouldn’t you like me to bring you down a good strong cup of tea?”