The Trials of Nellie Belle

by Sydney Avey

  “No! So, she really did end up in the street. Grandmother, you should write this story down. It would make a terrific exposé of economic inequality in McClure’s Magazine. All these people that tried to keep poor Clara in her place—”

  Knuckles drummed on the front door, putting an end to the storytelling. The door strained at the hinges and popped open. School girls dressed in party clothes filled the room with their chatter.

  “Leone, we got tired of waiting for you.”

  “Oh, hello, Mrs. Scott.”

  “Let’s go, Leone. Don’t forget your stuff.” A crafty wink led Nellie to believe that Leone’s friend wasn’t talking about a sweater and a handbag.

  “Off you go then. Enjoy your evening.” Nellie’s hip popped when she rose from the sofa to pick up the coat Leone had left there in a heap, but the young women were out the door like trick-or-treaters on the hunt for sugar. Nellie stood in the center of the empty room, staring at the closed door. She pictured Leone on the other side of the door—hands pushing, feet flying, careening into life—careless of the doors that might one day be closed to her if she followed her heart before using her head.

  It is the way of the world. Nellie closed her eyes and recalled the last time she chanced to see Clara; the proud back, the thin shoulder blades, the unkempt lock of hair that escaped from under her hat and stuck to the back of her neck as she walked down a lonely street and faded into memory.

  PART 2

  PART 2

  Leone

  20 - Depression

  20

  Depression

  Portland, 1929

  If Nellie and John had stayed married, today would have been their fiftieth anniversary. Nellie sat at the kitchen table in the small foursquare house Opal and Felix had managed to buy. To pay the mortgage, Felix was on the road much of the time. Gregarious by nature, he enjoyed the glad-handing that secured him the top salesman position in most business quarters. In his absence, Nellie sat happily at her daughter’s house, pecking away on her Royal portable typewriter, enjoying the peace.

  How like the box house John had built her in Kansas—this little place. Memory rattled the back screen door and blew in on a breeze. Back then, her fingers had ached from the hours of sewing and scrubbing, slicing and chopping. Now Father Time jabbed his fingers of shooting pain into her knuckles and joints. It took more than a good night’s sleep to erase the discomfort, but, in her practiced way, she bent to her task and ignored the insistent complaining of age-stiffened muscles and thinning bones.

  Nellie was deep in her story when the screen door banged again, and Leone appeared in a duster of windblown hair, ill-fitting clothes, and painted red lips. Dumping her schoolbooks on the table, the girl went to the icebox and returned with an orange drink.

  Nellie stopped her furious typing and raised her head. “And hello to you, too. You’d better remove that lipstick before your mother gets home.”

  “Sorry. Hello. How was your day?” Leone smiled sweetly. Turning again to the icebox, she pulled out a bottle of near-beer and dangled it. “Want one?”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  Leone popped the tops off the bottles and plopped in a chair across the table from her grandmother. “Another story?”

  “Hmm.” Nellie leaned over her work and reread the half page she had just typed.

  “Why do you write here instead of where you live?” Leone leaned back in her chair and gulped down half of her bottle of soda.

  Nellie kept her eyes on her work. She threw the carriage across the typewriter and resumed her rhythmic tapping.

  “Too many people coming and going where I live. The light is better here.”

  “Is that your assignment for class tonight?”

  “Hmm; Leone, let me finish this.”

  “I wish I were taking a creative writing class instead of final exams.” Leone cracked a textbook and began to take notes in a binder. Nellie’s fingers danced across the typewriter keys, stopping only to advance the paper in the roller or sip the poor excuse for a drink.

  When Leone finished her refreshment, she reached over and grabbed her grandmother’s near-empty bottle, pulled it up to her lips, and threw her head back quickly. A few drops of amber liquid trickled onto her tongue. Slamming the bottle back down on the table, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and adopted a merchant seaman’s voice, “That’ll wake up your taste buds, matey!”

  Nellie made a sour face. Tap, tappity, tap, ding! She looked up at Leone, elbows planted on the table, chin cupped in the heels of her hands.

  “Grandmother, did you know that Amelia Earhart is preparing to fly an airplane around the world? A woman; think of it!”

  Nellie snorted. “Flight. When I was your age, that’s all I thought about.”

  Leone stared at her. “You wanted to fly a plane?”

  “I wanted to escape the hold other people had on me. Just like Amelia wants to escape gravity. She yearns to cut the tethers others would use to keep her in her place.”

  “So you know who Amelia Earhart is.” Leone leaned back in her chair and doodled her pencil on her notepaper.

  “Of course I do. Do you think my brain has shut down because I’m not working at the moment?” Nellie knitted her fierce eyebrows together and pursed her mouth. Tap, tap, tap, she finished up and snapped the page from the roller. Holding it up in front of her face, she scanned the copy while addressing her granddaughter from behind the legal-sized paper. “I’ll have you know, I have just accepted an offer of employment from an insurance office.” She lowered the paper and leveled a penetrating look at Leone.

  “You are going back to work? Why?”

  “Because I have rent to pay. I will not be beholden to your mother to keep body and soul together. A woman should use her professional skills for as long as possible.”

  “Who is going to watch Jane in the afternoons while mother works?”

  “Your mother will figure out something.” Nellie gathered her papers into a portfolio and placed her writing tools in a pencil box. Another gust rattled the screen door. She shivered.

  “It is always cold in this house. Leone, why don’t you go shut the back door and light the stove?”

  “It gets stuffy with all the doors closed. And when I start the stove before dinner, Mother complains that I’m wasting fuel. She tells me to get up and move about to get warm.”

  “You do that. Move to that door and close it.” How did the girl manage to say so much with just the stubborn set of her shoulders and a loose, sassy walk? Nellie pressed her prim lips together and shook her head in amusement. She looked up at the antique German wall clock somberly ticking away. Nellie had passed this inheritance from Amanda onto her youngest. It looked substantial, hanging here in Opal’s kitchen against a wallpaper pattern of airy white blossoms and feathery Paris-green ferns. Nellie stretched her arms and reached for her loosely constructed, fancy knit sweater.

  Leone flounced back to the table, plopped in her chair, and flipped opened her modern poetry textbook. “I’ve discovered a new poet: Ezra Pound. May I read you one of his poems?”

  “If you must.”

  Leone pulled herself up tall. Hands in constant motion now, words spilled from her mouth. “Pound is a composer of words.” She let that sit. “He plays by ear, not by musical training.”

  She punctuated her statement with a nod of her head and then took off soaring. “Without the constraint of rhyme, reason and affection marry! Every word contributes to an intellectual and emotional coupling—”

  Nellie stood up, retrieved her satchel, and slapped it down so hard the table rocked on the uneven floor. “Poppycock, Leone!”

  She opened the heavy leather bag and jammed her portfolio and pencil box inside. “Alice Meynell, now there’s a poet. ‘A Letter from a Girl to Her Own Old Age’: rhyme and reason.”

  Leone’s eyes caught fire. She opened her mouth to begin her rebuttal, but Nellie raised her finger. “How words sound. How they make you
feel. That’s not nearly as important as what words teach you. Rhyme has a purpose, Leone. Its purpose is to help you remember life’s hard lessons.”

  Leone shook her head so hard that her bobbed hair swung into her moist eyes. “You can’t discount the mystical power of sound, free from constraint, to inform the heart …”

  “Mystical power? Informed hearts? Leone, I tell you, if some of the women I saw in my twenty years in the courts, the women I’m writing about, had paid more attention to the life around them instead of feelings inside them, they would not have found themselves in the predicaments they did!”

  The back porch door squeaked and slammed. Opal bumped into the kitchen, shouldering a heavy tote, trying not to trip over the whippet that trotted behind her and the cat that circled her feet. She set an armload of groceries on the counter and bent down to pull off her street shoes, digging into her dance bag to find the ballet slippers she always wore in the house. She winced as she slipped into them. Then she stood up and tucked a wilted white blouse back into slim black pants, shiny with wear.

  “I could have used your help at the studio this afternoon, Leone.” Opal moved the empty bottles from the table to the sink. The dog danced in circles, his nails clicking on the worn linoleum floor.

  Nellie began packing up her typewriter. The cat leaped onto to the counter and picked her way through the oatmeal-crusted breakfast dishes.

  Opal opened two cans of pet food, wrinkling her nose at the smells of liver, fish, and sour milk. “Did either of you remember to put the chicken in the oven?”

  Nellie looked at the clock.

  Leone’s hand flew to her mouth. “Cripes! I forgot.”

  “Better get to it then, missy.” Nellie stood up and stashed her typewriter in a kitchen cabinet.

  Leone executed a military-style about-face and marched to the stove to light the oven. She grabbed the chicken from the icebox, threw it into the roasting pan, salted it, and shoved it into the oven.

  Nellie sat back down at the table and pulled a bus schedule out of her satchel. She was consulting the timetable when Leone change-stepped past, chin in the air, swinging her arms stiffly.

  “I have to do everything.” Leone sighed dramatically.

  Nellie reached her foot out and tripped her. Leone fell into the table. They looked at each other and burst into laughter.

  “You two.” Opal looked at them with a mixture of exasperation and love.

  “Guess we’ll be eating late tonight.” Leone collected her textbooks and escaped to the front room.”

  “Never mind about me, Opal.” Nellie headed for the door. “I’m catching the bus back to the boarding house. They are expecting me for dinner tonight.”

  R

  Leone arranged herself on the Davenport. Her books lay unopened on her lap, her eyelids drooped, and the day’s petty annoyances receded. She was snoring when her mother’s voice woke her.

  “Where is your sister?”

  How should I know? Leone tried to keep the growl out of her voice: “In her room, I guess,” she offered. “Or out on the front lawn playing, maybe? That’s Grandmother’s job to watch Jane in the afternoons, not mine.”

  Opal appeared in the kitchen doorway, crossed the room, and disappeared down the hallway. When she returned, she leaned against the doorframe and swiped a hand across her forehead. “She’s fallen asleep on her bed. Now I’m going to have a hard time getting her down after dinner.”

  Leone turned a page in her book. In the silence that followed, the clock ticked loudly and the evening newspaper hit the driveway. She got up to retrieve the paper, but Opal stopped her.

  “Leone. If I can’t count on the two of you to watch Jane while I teach class, things are going to fall apart around here.”

  “Sooner than you think, I’m afraid. Grandmother told me this afternoon that she is going back to work.”

  “Well, I guess that’s no surprise.” Opal looked at the clock, then headed back to the kitchen. “Wake your sister at six for dinner.”

  Leone called for the whippet, and they took to the front porch steps together. She sat down on the last step and watched Roxie do her business on the lawn. When the dog came to sit with her, Leone threw her arms around the pup’s neck and whispered in her ear. “It won’t be long before they have one less mouth to feed around here, Rox. After I graduate from St. Mary’s in June, I’m going to LA. I’ve had enough of my mother’s new family.”

  The mostly absent husband, the whiny sister, and the grandmother were never much help. Leone confided all her grievances to the one person in the family who wouldn’t talk back. She pulled gently on the whippet’s ears.

  “Mother and I do all the work around here.”

  Leone let Roxie back in the house and stretched out on the sofa with her schoolbooks. Glancing toward the kitchen, she inched her foot underneath the Copen-Blue and rose-colored knitted afghan heaped atop a thin spot in the upholstery. When her toe knocked against a hard object, she pulled herself upright.

  “Dinner! Leone, wake your sister.”

  No time to investigate the small box she had pilfered from a closet a few days ago, and stashed in the folds of the afghan a few minutes ago. Like everything else in her life, it seemed, she would have to wait until prying eyes were distracted.

  R

  Jane crabbed through dinner. The chicken was too dry, the green beans tough and stringy, the chunks of carrot and celery in the gelled orange salad hard to chew. Leone left half her food on her plate and escaped again to the front room.

  Sounds of water filling the sink and the smell of soap assured her that the day’s dishes would occupy her mother for awhile. Had Jane finally settled down, or would she be running back and forth? Leone craned her neck until she caught sight of Jane’s shadow at play on the kitchen wall, a small hand choosing a color, a tiny finger pressing crayon to page in her coloring book. Likely that was “Children of Many Lands,” a gift from Felix, purchased on his last sales run. Jane always colored inside the lines, so that would keep her busy.

  From the rumpled folds of the afghan, Leone retrieved the box she had found one day while poking around in the coat closet. Grandmother stashed boxes of her belongings all over their house. Leone grimaced at the thought of her own possessions piled so deep in her tiny closet that she had to throw her weight against the door to get it to latch.

  She let that thought go and turned her attention to the wooden box inlaid with a shell design nested in the blanket on top of her knees. There’s probably nothing in the box Grandmother hasn’t told me about, but I’ve never actually seen her letters. She ran a hand over the English walnut parquet lid and traced the shiny white cottage roses with her finger. Turning the tasseled key that had been left in the lock, she held her breath and lifted the lid.

  A stack of envelopes, brittle with age, lay on top. The letters Leone had expected to find, but the tooled leather journal that rested underneath was a bonus. She stifled a small gasp and looked around quickly.

  “So long until tomorrow,” Lowell Thomas signed off the scratchy radio news broadcast her mother listened to every night. A pan scraped across a stove burner, and kitchen utensils clattered in the sink.

  “Leone, come in here please and dry these dishes. I have to put the garbage out.”

  Leone pulled the slim journal out of the box and hid it between the pages of her history book. “Can’t you let the dishes air dry? I’m doing my homework,” she yelled. Then she shut the letterbox and shoved it out of sight.

  A chill entered the room from the poorly sealed front windows. Careful not to uncover the box, Leone pulled the afghan up across her legs and opened the textbook that sheltered the journal.

  She read quickly through her grandmother’s account of the familiar story of Eustace and Helen, her wedding to John, the trip west. She slowed down when she came to an entry that puzzled her.

  Dear Diary,

  Although it pains me to admit defeat, I cannot remain in this marriage. I can no
more abide being a carpenter’s wife in Los Angeles than I could stand being a farmer’s wife in Kansas. The fault is mine. I did not marry for love. I lacked the will to disobey my parents and the imagination that there might be any other path for me.

  As long as John has his brothers, his boy, and his fishing boat, he is content. Meanwhile, I wither. Like one of my mother’s rosebuds that never blossomed, I droop and rot. Not a pretty example to set for my daughters.

  I can wait no longer. I have decided to take the girls and go up north where they say job opportunities abound for people with my skills, even for women!

  Mabel is ready to try her wings; Opal, I worry about. She is more of a homebody and dotes on her older brother. But I want to try my hand at making my way in the world before it’s too late. Is that selfish? No more selfish than John was, marrying a girl fourteen years younger than himself to secure his job and give him children, and then refusing the opportunities to better himself and his family.

  I admit, the prospects of starting over in California dazzled me. I never stopped to consider that John has only his hands with which to make a living, and it made not a whit of difference to him whether he carouses with farmhands or day laborers. I’m the one with wit to see that if I took office employment, we might improve our station in life. We could live nearer the city center. He won’t hear of it. He wants to keep me captive on this patch of dirt outside of town.

  I won’t seek a divorce just now. I will just say I am taking the girls to visit Jessie in Spokane for the summer. It will be hard to leave my spirited boy, but he’ll want his father, that’s obvious. The girls are easier to manage. And I still have a chance to set their feet on higher ground.

  Some days I quake in fear over what I am about to do. Most days I am elated!