Mary Emma & Company

by Ralph Moody

  If Al Richardson wasn’t a furnace expert, he came pretty near being one, and if it hadn’t been for him Mother’s laundry business might never have got started. He was back at our house by the time I’d finished my breakfast and changed back into my working clothes. And by nine o’clock we’d taken down the old flue pipe and put up the new one. As soon as Mother had come down and looked it all over to see that we had it tight, we started a fire in the furnace, but it didn’t work as well as I’d hoped it would. If we left the ash-pit door and the damper in the funnel open it burned like fury, and didn’t smoke at all, but most of the heat went up the chimney or out into the cellar. If we closed the drafts, even part way, the heat would go upstairs, but most of the smoke went right along with it.

  I knew Al was doing the very best he could, and I think Mother knew it too. It was nearly half an hour after we started the fire before she came down to the cellar again. She looked real nervous, and her eyes were as red as if she’d been crying, but all she said was, “Is there anything I can do to help you boys? I’m just a little mite afraid that if more smoke comes up the ladies may get here before we have the rooms aired out and warmed.”

  “I’m sorry about the smoke, Mrs. Moody,” Al said, “but the heat chamber above the fire box is so rusted there are holes in it, and if we check the fire the smoke goes up with the heat. If we don’t check it a little, the wind is strong enough that it pulls all the heat up the chimney.”

  Mother pinched her lips together for a minute, then asked, “Isn’t there anything we can do to prevent it?”

  “Well,” Al told her, “we could put in both bags of coal and leave the drafts wide open till the smoke burns off, then send the heat up, but that would waste a lot of coal and be very expensive.”

  Mother didn’t hesitate a second. “Do it!” she said. “This is no time to be parsimonious. And if you can get us some good clean heat up there before the ladies arrive I shall be grateful to you for the rest of my life.”

  It took nearly two hours and both bags of coal, but the house was aired out and comfortably warm when the ladies came to call, and Al and Mother have been good friends ever since.

  He and I had planned to have the coal bin all sealed up and finished by noontime, but we hardly made a start on it. The frozen pipes began to thaw and drip at about the time we heard the ladies ring our doorbell. For a while Grace was able to find us pots and pans enough to catch the drip. But before the ladies left, water was squirting from nearly every joint, and the floor was covered with sooty puddles. Grace and Al and I were trying to mop them up when Mother opened the door from the laundry room.

  For a minute or two Mother stood in the doorway, looking around the cellar as if she were taking her last look at a world she had loved. “Well,” she said at last, “it appears that we have quite a task before us . . . and quite an expense. I should have had better judgment than to have left those windows open last night . . . but there’s no use in crying over spilled milk . . . or spilled water. Now let me think where we’d better begin. Ralph, I’ve told the ladies that you’d pick up their laundry this afternoon, and they want it back by Thursday. With this storm blowing it will have to be dried inside, and that will mean plenty of steady, smokeless heat. Al, do you think this old furnace will do it?”

  Al opened the furnace door, looked inside, and shook his head. “Not without an awful lot of coal,” he told her. “Those two bags are just about gone now. I had to waste half of it before I could burn the smoke off, so it wouldn’t go upstairs through these holes in the heat chamber. I could go to the pit for some clay, and patch up the holes when the furnace cools off. If it works you wouldn’t have to waste so much fuel.”

  “Ummm, hmmmm, that might be a good idea,” Mother said slowly, “and in the meantime we could see what can be done about these pipes. Ralph, do you think the leaks could be mended with adhesive tape? Of course, it wouldn’t last permanently, but it might tide us over until we get this first batch of laundry out of the way.”

  Mother and I tried to bind up the leaks in the water pipes with tape while Al tried to plug up the holes in the furnace with clay, but neither of them worked. The clay fell out of the holes as soon as it dried, and the water leaked right through and around the adhesive tape.

  Mother was looking up at the leaking pipes when Al called from inside the furnace to tell her the clay wouldn’t stay in the holes. For a minute or two she just stood there, pinching her lips together, then pushing them out and in, as if she couldn’t make up her mind. “Well,” she said, “my father used to say that it’s a good notion to know when you’re licked, and I guess we’re licked as repairmen. Whether we can afford it or not, we shall have to call in a plumber and a furnace man. But it doesn’t seem to me that we should have to bear the full expense; the furnace was rusted out before we came here, and the water pipes far from new. You boys might take baths while I’m getting a bite of lunch ready. Then, Ralph, you might run over to Mr. Perkins’ house and tell him I’d appreciate it if he’d drop by to talk with me a few minutes.”

  When Mr. Perkins came he and Mother talked for a little while in the parlor, then she brought him down to the cellar. He didn’t say a word when he came in, but walked all around, looking up at the pipes and whistling in kind of a tuneless way. Then he looked inside the furnace and all around it. “See you put up a new funnel,” he said.

  “Yes,” Mother told him. “The old one is right over here. You see it was completely rusted through and filled with soot.”

  “Ummm, hmmmm. Ummm, hmmmm.” Mr. Perkins hummed as he stood looking down at the old pipe. Then he looked up at Mother and said, “Now I’ll tell you, Mrs. Moody, I didn’t figure on spending much money to fix this place up when I rented it for fifteen dollars a month. To put a new furnace in here would cost me near onto a year and a half’s rent, and your lease is only for two. How’d it be with you if I’d have new water pipes put in, and just have the old furnace fixed up so it wouldn’t smoke?”

  Mother had been looking as sad as I always felt when I had to come home and tell her I’d broken somebody’s window, but she chickered right up when Mr. Perkins said that. “Oh, I would never think of asking for a new furnace,” she said quickly. “This one will be quite all right if it’s just fixed so that it doesn’t smoke so badly. And as for the water pipes, I’d be more than glad to share the expense; it was I who let them freeze and burst.”

  Mr. Perkins seemed to be as pleased about Mother’s not wanting a new furnace as she was about his offering to put in new water pipes. “Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said pleasantly, “the frosting probably sprung ’em, but it’s mostly at the joints where they were pretty well rusted out; I’ll take care of it. How you coming along with your laundry business?”

  After Mother had told him that she’d just got her first two customers that morning, and that she’d have to finish their work by Thursday, he said, “Well, well! Then you need things fixed up in a hurry around here, don’t you? I’d best get to a phone right away.” Before Mother could thank him he started away, then turned back and told me, “There’s a shutoff for the water under that heap of rubbish in the far corner. You’d better find it and close it before you’re flooded out.”

  12

  Full Speed Ahead

  AL AND I had to move more than a ton of rubbish before we found the water shutoff. Then we started fixing one of the coal bins to make it dustproof; boarding the walls up to the ceiling, and lining the inside with thick layers of newspaper. Before we had it half finished Mr. O’Brien, the plumber, came with three men, and the foreman of the furnace shop came with two. They were both sore at Mr. Perkins for making them pull their men off other jobs, and as Mr. O’Brien looked over the old pipes and the place for the set tubs he grumbled, “Of all the bullheaded men ever I seen, old man Perkins takes the cake! There’s a week’s work here for ten men, and him demandin’ I get it done by tomorrow night! If it wasn’t for him owning a dozen o’ these old traps and paying his bi
lls so prompt I’d tell him to go soak his head. Well, ’tis a pretty penny ’twill be costin’ him in overtime, and no tears I’ll be sheddin’ for him neither.”

  The men were still grumbling when Mother called me, gave me a slip with two addresses on it, and told me I’d better run right along and pick up the ladies’ laundry. It was lucky that Al Richardson went with me, and that we took his sled. We’d expected to pick up both baskets on one trip, but the first lady gave us as big a basketful as the sled would hold. It was heaped high, with a sheet tucked in over the top, and weighed about as much as Al and I could carry. The wind was still blowing snow in a hurricane, the sled stuck in every big drift, and the sheet that covered the basket kept whipping up like a sail. Then one of us had to chase shirts and underwear while the other kept the rest from blowing away.

  “Good heavens alive!” Mother said when we brought the basket into the kitchen. “Our blessings do seem to be coming in large batches, don’t they? The house running over with plumbers and furnace men, and all this nice business coming in. My, my! I hadn’t expected anything like this. Have you brought both ladies work in this one basket?”

  “No, ma’am,” I told her. “We didn’t stop for Mrs. Humphrey’s. This one was all we had room for on the sled.”

  “My, my!” Mother said again. “Why, here it is, quarter of four already! It’s time you were at the store and Al on his paper route. Oh, I feel badly about this! I told both ladies we’d pick up their work this afternoon, and I’d hate terribly to go back on my word. Gracie, do you suppose you and I could. . . .”

  “No, I don’t suppose anything of the kind!” Grace told her. “But there’s no reason that Philip and I can’t go and get it. He’ll have to be our regular delivery boy if Ralph keeps his job at the store, so he might as well get started on it now.”

  “I know he’s large for his age,” Mother said, “but ten is awfully young to be out in a storm such as this, and it will grow colder as the afternoon wanes.”

  “Get your coat, Philip!” was all Grace said, but she didn’t even need to say that; he was already bringing it from the closet.

  Muriel’s age was halfway between Philip’s and mine, and though she was a shade taller than I she was as delicate as a fawn. While Grace and Philip were pulling on their overshoes, Muriel stood watching them, with a tear in each eye and her lower lip trembling. Mother noticed it, knelt beside her, and asked, “What’s the matter, darling?”

  That’s all it took to make Muriel’s tears spill over. “I want to go too,” she cried. “Hal takes care of Elizabeth, and everybody does something to help us make our living but me.”

  Mother took Muriel in her arms, hugged her up close, and said, “There, there, girlie, don’t cry. You see, if things go as we hope they will, Gracie and I will be busy from morning till night, and you will be the housekeeper who makes a home for us all. You know, dear, there is no woman in the world who has a more important task than making a home for those she loves.”

  When I got to the store I found that more than half of our customers had ordered coal. And I was so busy helping Mr. Durant make the deliveries that I forgot all about Grace and Philip until I met them, way up on Washington Street. It was already after dark, the wind was a lot colder than it had been in daylight, and the snowdrifts had been growing deeper all day. The basket they were trying to take home was even bigger than the one that Al and I took. The sled had tipped over, half of the clothes had spilled out of the basket, and Grace was chasing the pieces that had blown away while Philip held the rest of them down and tried to keep from crying with the cold. That was one time when Grace showed that she was really glad to see me. And she didn’t try to boss me a bit. We divided the load between the two sleds, and tied them down with the rope I always carried when I delivered coal through snowdrifts. With Philip walking ahead to tread a path, me next, and Grace behind, we got along pretty well.

  Our house sounded like a boiler factory when Grace and I took in the second batch of laundry. I didn’t have time to go down to the cellar, because we still had a lot of orders to be delivered from the store. But I could hear pipes clanging together, and the sound of hammering in the furnace came up through the registers as if they’d been megaphones. Mother was busy at the stove, and stopped only long enough to tell me, “We’re going to feed the men right here, so they won’t have to lose time in going home to supper, and they’re going to stay till the furnace is all mended and the pipes replaced in the cellar room. The furnace men have promised to start our fire for us and show us how to control the drafts, but our load of coal hasn’t been delivered, so you’ll have to bring two bags when you come from work.”

  It was nearly eight o’clock before we finished work at the store and I took our coal home. When I got there Mother and Grace and Philip were dodging around between plumbers and furnace men, cleaning the cellar. Hal and Elizabeth had gone to bed, and Muriel was keeping my supper hot. She had a big apron tied way up under her armpits, and was bustling around the kitchen as if she were getting ready to feed harvest hands. If I’d eaten all the supper she dished out for me I’d have burst.

  It took Philip and me all the rest of the evening just to lug the junk and ashes out of the cellar and pile it in the back yard, while Mother and Grace scrubbed the walls and ceiling. Between ten and eleven the furnace men finished their job and built the fire. It burned in good shape, and no smoke went up through the registers, but an awful lot of heat came out into the cellar.

  The old foreman showed me how to set the drafts and dampers, then he stood looking at the furnace and shaking his head. “Lady,” he told Mother, “we’ve did the best we could for you, but you might about as leave try to heat this big house with a hot rock. I calculate this furnace is just about as old as what I be, and in them days they didn’t know nothin’ about insulation. It’ll eat fuel like a cow eats clover if you try to heat them rooms in the attic, and if you keep the ground floor comfortable this cellar’s goin’ to get hotter’n Tophet. Was I you, I’d get me an ash sifter, and at night I’d bank my fire deep with cinders. There’s no profit in leaving a fire burn out, and cinders’ll save you a heap of coal.” He turned to me and said, “Pick out all the dead ones, Sonnie, so’s you don’t get clinkers.” Then he tipped his cap to Mother and said, “Good luck to you, Lady. I wisht there was more I could do to help you, but there ain’t.”

  By midnight Mr. Kennedy and his men had replaced all the water pipes as far as the laundry room. Philip and I had carried out all the rubbish, and Mother and Grace had the cellar scrubbed spick-and-span. It was after one o’clock before we’d all had baths and gone to bed.

  The next morning the storm had let up enough that the snow-plows were out clearing the sidewalks before daylight, but the temperature was way down below zero. Mother had me put up lots of clotheslines in the cellar, then bring two more bags of coal as soon as the store opened. The foreman had used a bag and a half when he built the fire the night before, but all that was left was a red lump the size of a quart dipper.

  When I came home for lunch our kitchen was dripping with steam, and Mother was washing clothes at a pair of tubs set up on chairs. I’d gone down to watch the plumbers connect our new soapstone tubs when Grace called to me from the cellar, “Don’t stand there watching like a ninny! Come help me get these clotheslines tightened up before half this stuff is dragging on the floor!”

  Our cellar looked like a sail loft when I went back there. I’d put up ten lines before I went to work, and nearly every one of them was hung solid with sheets and pillow cases and towels. “Fine laundry, hmmmfff!” Grace sniffed. “This stuff ought to have gone to the wet-wash! Mother’s breaking her back up there, and at two cents apiece the money we get out of this stuff won’t pay for the coal it takes to dry it!”

  “Well, the washings weren’t all sheets and pillow cases,” I told her. “I chased shirts and drawers enough to dress half the people in Medford.”

  “Hmmff! Undershirts and drawers! How are we
going to make a living on those—at two cents apiece! And all the stuff we could make any money on so fancy that it’ll take forever and ever to do it up! Shirtwaists with so many jabots on ’em they’d make a woman look like a pouter pigeon! And every man’s shirt with a stiff bosom and forty-dozen little bits of pleats! They must think Mother’s a Chinaman! If there aren’t at least four-dozen stiff collars and cuffs in the mess I’ll eat it, and Mother doesn’t know any more about doing them up than you do. They had a special department for them in the laundry where she worked. Get hold of this line and help me pull it up, or we’ll have to wash this stuff all over again!”

  Grace was still spluttering when we went up to the kitchen, but Mother stopped her. “Now, Gracie,” she said, “we can only make this task harder for ourselves if we let it annoy us. I should have made it clear to the ladies that we could handle only their nicest garments, but I evidently failed to do so. Unless we can accept our own mistakes in good nature we are not yet ready to go into business for ourselves. Muriel, could you make a pot of hot chocolate and some sandwiches, so Gracie and I won’t have to stop? You children mustn’t be late for school.”

  The stiff collars and cuffs worried Mother a lot more than the number of sheets and pillowcases in those first two baskets of laundry. When I came home from work that evening our kitchen was hotter than Fourth-of-July, the stove top was covered with flatirons, and Grace and Mother were busy at ironing boards. Muriel had kept my supper hot, and as I ate it I watched them. Grace was ironing and folding sheets, and though she made the edges meet square and even she was watching Mother—and Mother was having trouble.

  She spread a half-damp collar out on her ironing board and smoothed it with her fingers until there was hardly a wrinkle in it anywhere. Then she took a fresh iron from the stove, hissed it with a finger moistened at the tip of her tongue, and cautiously slipped it onto one end of the collar. The smooth white linen acted about the way still water does when you toss a pebble into it. Little waves rose at the point of the iron and ran ahead of it as Mother pushed carefully. As soon as they grew to more than tiny ripples she took the iron off, stood it on its heel, and smoothed the cloth again. Then she’d start all over, but as soon as the point of the iron reached the damp cloth the ripples would begin to run.