Perfect Saturday. I’d made both Tom and Holly mad. I couldn’t even find Holly, and Nini said she thought she’d gone home. The snapshot was as big a mystery as the diary. Nothing was right, in fact, everything was wrong, and the whole day was boring. I thought of going to track practice and explaining to Tom what I’d meant, but I couldn’t do that in public. I was even ready to settle for Sandra Lee’s presence, but when I went next door, I discovered she’d gone skating with dear Harold. As I was about to head back home, I overheard part of a conversation between Aunt Eveline, who’d come to borrow a cup of sugar, and Aunt Toosie:
“If there is an eleventh commandment,” Aunt Eveline was saying, “it is ‘Finish what you start,’ as Papa used to admonish.”
“Which is perhaps why he always made you start,” said Aunt Toosie. “Sometimes when I think of what your life might have been if it hadn’t been for Papa—and Pasie.”
“Pasie? I count myself fortunate for having been like a mother to her!”
“Yes, of course, Eveline, but Papa ruled us like a czar and he made Pasie his czarina. Whatever they wanted, those two, they got, and they trampled you along the way, my dear. You know George would have—”
“I do not feel trampled, Toosie!” Aunt Eveline interrupted. “I am quite content. If only . . .”
I was sure she’d say, “If only my darling Pasie rested in Saint Louis #2,” but she surprised me by saying, “If only I live to see Addie grown and happy!”
“Eveline! Of course you will! You’re not sick, are you?” Aunt Toosie asked anxiously.
“No, Toosie, dear! But sometimes I feel—well, not exactly sick, but a bit tired. I feel as though I’ve led my life, and now, I only have to wait for Addie to grow up!”
I stood in the hallway until I heard Aunt Eveline leave through the back door.
“You were listening,” Aunt Toosie said.
“I didn’t mean to. Aunt Toosie, you don’t think she’s really sick, do you?”
“No dear. Just getting older.”
“Aunt Eveline seems so different when she talks to you. With me she’s—I can’t tell what she’s thinking. And she’s strict.”
“Oh, Addie, she doesn’t mean to be that way with you! It’s just that she changed after Pasie left for Belize. Your mother was like a daughter to her, a beloved daughter. There was almost a whole generation between them, you know, and they had different mothers because your grandfather married again after he was widowed.”
“I know,” I said, thinking that if Aunt Eveline was almost old enough to be my grandmother then my father had been old enough to be my grandfather!
“Eveline had such beautiful hair!” Aunt Toosie continued, “blond and thick, and she wore it in a French knot with little curls escaping around her face. So pretty!” There were tears in Aunt Toosie’s eyes. “Then, after Pasie and George left, she cut her hair and just pushed it back with those ugly combs she still uses. She started wearing glasses, too. I think she did that, not to see better, but to hide her beautiful eyes.” Aunt Toosie gave her nose a good blow.
“I’m sorry, Aunt Toosie,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “Aunt Toosie, do you know who this is with my mother?” I showed her the picture Holly had found.
Aunt Toosie had to dab her eyes. Glancing carelessly at the picture, she said, “One of her beaux. She had so many.”
“Yes, but who is this one?”
Aunt Toosie looked more carefully and laughed. “Well, it’s not your father. He was much older and never wore anything but khaki as far as I can remember! You know, it’s funny—it could be almost any young man of that time. They all looked alike in their knickers and slicked-down hair; they all looked rich, as though they had nothing to do but enjoy themselves. What a different world it was!”
As if to back up her statement, the doorbell rang and Aunt Toosie, peeking out from behind the organdy curtains, said, “Oh, Lord, another beggar!”
Happy days are supposed to be here again, but poor men, needing a shave and decent clothes, still ring our front doorbells. Aunt Eveline has a formula: if they ask for money, she refuses, but offers them a sandwich and milk on the back porch. If they refuse the food, they are not needy enough. Aunt Toosie’s formula is far simpler: when she saw this dull-eyed, raggedy man, she tiptoed to the back without answering.
“They’ve got Eveline’s number!” Aunt Toosie said, watching as the man shuffled down the walk. “Sandra Lee saw chalk arrows on the pavement pointing straight to Three Twenty, and look, he’s going right over there!”
But he didn’t turn in our walk. He just shuffled on.
I topped off this depressing Saturday alone in my room. I fanned it clove-free, stared at the snapshot, worked on the code in my mother’s diary, and flipped through Lad to read the ending first, something I’d never in my whole life done before. After supper, I slunk around the living room until Aunt Eveline’s prying questions about how I felt, and was I coming down with something, got me so mad, I said, “Yes, distemper,” and was sent straight to bed.
Chapter XII
Sundays never vary.
“Hurry, Adelaide, we’ll be late for mass!”
We are never late; we arrive at our regular pew and waste five minutes waiting for the eight-thirty mass to start. In the silence, broken only by soft footsteps hurrying, Aunt Kate’s stomach rumbles loudly. I look at her to make sure no one thinks it is my stomach. Mass begins and I concentrate on my prayer book so Aunt Eveline will think I’m hard at work praying. Mass is over and I pull on Aunt Eveline’s hand, trying to make her hurry, but she has something to say to everyone she ever knew. By the time I get home, I am so hungry even prunes are welcome. The morning is long and boring. Everyone I know stays in bed until time for eleven-thirty mass, so no one is around until one.
Dinner is at one. Aunt Toosie, Uncle Henry, and Sandra Lee hurry in at ten minutes after one. Aunt Kate sighs loudly and marches to the tureen of orange-colored soup. Thirty minutes later, we have finished the Jell-O, but the grown-ups linger over their demitasses, and Sandra Lee and I make our faces look as if we are thinking fascinating secret thoughts so engrossing we have forgotten each other’s presence.
At three, the opera comes on the radio. Aunt Eveline tunes it up full blast so that she can listen as she putters in the garden outside. If it’s one of Verdi’s or Puccini’s operas, she sings along, accompanied (after the Joyful Mysteries) by Aunt Kate.
“Mi chiamano Mimi!” sang the trio this Sunday. Mimi, Aunt Eveline, and Aunt Kate were dying of consumption and digging nasturtiums.
“Blah, blah, blah, blah,” sang Sandra Lee, tone deaf and rude.
“Addie! Ad-die!” Tom hollered above the chorus.
“What?” I hollered back, leaping to the window. Aunt Eveline groaned. Tom and Pumpkin were standing in the nasturtiums and Tom had his skates on, but the groan was for my unladylike response.
I rephrased. “Yes, Tom?” I asked sweetly. “What is it that you wish to inquire about?”
“You have anything to do this afternoon?”
“Why?”
“I’m going skating in the park.”
“I’m not allowed to do anything so foolhardy as put wheels under my feet,” I replied for Aunt Eveline’s benefit. She rose from the nasturtiums and marched into the house. “But I’ll draw animals at the zoo while you skate!”
“I’ll skate by the cages!” shouted Tom generously, as I grabbed my pad and pencil and ran out of the room.
“I figured out what you meant yesterday,” Tom said when I came out on the porch. “I thought you didn’t want to go to the track meet, but you meant you didn’t want to go to dancing school.”
“A brilliant deduction,” I said.
Tom grinned sheepishly. “So long, Pumpkin.” He patted Pumpkin on the head and we put her in the shed and walked to the zoo. Tom carried his skates and hung around while I started sketching.
“Aunt Eveline says that when you draw animals, you should draw their movement,” I explained t
o Tom. “You’re not supposed to outline. Think of the muscle in the lion’s thigh and show it move the leg.”
I tried to remember as I drew. Tom skated around the cages and in the side street. Every once in a while, he’d skate up behind me and watch some more. “Pretty good,” he said. “Not bad.”
After I’d finished a lion and a few monkeys, Tom came back. “When I left home, my mother had gingerbread in the oven. It ought to be done by now. That’s a nice monkey you did there.”
“I’ll come home with you,” I said, closing my drawing pad.
We cornered Aunt Mable as she opened the oven door. She cut two thick slices of hot gingerbread while Tom shook the cream into the milk and filled our glasses. We went outside, and, balancing the milk glasses on the plate of gingerbread and taking turns holding it, we climbed the oak tree by Tom’s window to a place where the trunk forks. We sat there munching the gingerbread and washing it down with milk.
“Tom! Tom! Where are ya, boy?” Uncle Malvern’s voice was thick and fuzzy.
“Don’t answer,” Tom said to me. “He won’t come looking and I don’t want to see him.”
“Tom! Don’t be mean!”
“I can’t stand him.”
“He’s not so bad. No worse than Aunt Kate.”
“What’s wrong with Aunt Kate? She doesn’t drink.”
“She smells of cloves. She’s old.”
“That’s not her fault! What’s so bad about being old?”
“I don’t know. Nothing really. Only I wish . . .”
“What do you wish?”
“I wish I had my mother. Instead of Aunt Kate and Aunt Eveline. My mother’d still be young and pretty. Like other mothers.”
“Aunt Eveline’s pretty! In an old way, maybe, but I like the way she looks.”
“She looks okay. But you don’t understand. It’s awful to have an old guardian, not even a real mother. All the other girls have modern mothers and I have—two old ladies dressed in lavender.”
“That’s not nice of you, Addie!” Tom was genuinely surprised.
“Sandra Lee makes fun of Aunt Eveline’s old-maid ways. And I have absolutely no confidence in her methods of bringing me up!”
“Yeah. Look what a mess she’s made so far!” said the great comedian.
“Ha, ha. So terribly funny.” How would Jane Whitmore get out of a tree with dignity? I tossed my head, and dropped the piece of gingerbread I needed to finish off my milk.
“There y’ar!” Uncle Malvern’s triumphant voice boomed under our dangling feet. “Whatcha up to?” He was lurching back and forth and leering up at us.
“We’re not up to anything, Uncle Malvern,” Tom said angrily. “What do you want?”
“The wheels,” Uncle Malvern said, slurring the word as though it had a j after the l. “The wheels stuck.”
“Come on, Addie,” Tom said to me. “He means the wheels of his perpetual motion machine. I’ll fix them, Uncle Malvern.”
Tom jumped down without looking back at me. He kicked open the screen door and took the hall steps three at a time. When I caught up, he was standing in Uncle Malvern’s room. There, in the middle of the floor, was a card table piled high with the perpetual motion machine. An old erector set connected wheels and more wheels, including a bicycle one. There were tubes, milk bottles, and a battery with loose wires hanging over the edge of the table.
Uncle Malvern huffed and puffed up the stairs. “Won’t go!” he said between wheezes.
“It’s not connected,” Tom said. “Pulled loose.”
“Supposed to go by itself,” said Uncle Malvern sadly. “ ’Petual motion.”
“You don’t suppose you really invented such a thing, do you?” Tom asked mercilessly. He screwed the wires to the battery.
The wheels squeaked and turned, air bubbled out of a tube into the water-filled milk bottle and rose to the surface in gurgles. A drumstick among the turning wheels beat a rhythm as steady as a heart on Tom’s old toy drum.
Uncle Malvern clapped his hands, happy as a smal child with a wind-up toy. “Lookit that boy go!” he said.
Tom was halfway down the steps before he shouted back, “Come on, Addie! Let’s get out of here!”
We got out of the house quicker than we’d come in. “Tom, you’re really mean to your uncle!” I said, panting.
“Listen, Addie. He deserves it. He doesn’t do anything, even for himself. My mother has to do it all.”
“I’m sorry, Tom. Aunt Mable doesn’t seem to mind, and I don’t see why you have to be that mean.”
“Well, how do you think you are to Aunt Eveline? And she loves you. She does everything for you.”
“I’m not mean to her! I love her! Really.”
“You didn’t sound like it a minute ago.”
“She’s all right. I didn’t mean I don’t love her.”
“Funny way you have of showing it, then. I don’t think you love her—or anybody else!”
“Now, listen, Tom!”
Before we could get into a real fight he said, “I have to help my mother with supper. So long.”
“What a martyr!” I called after him. On the way home I tried to figure out exactly how I did feel about Aunt Eveline. I decided love didn’t have much to do with how nice people were to you. Look at how much Aunt Eveline had done for my mother; if my mother had loved her back, she wouldn’t have married my father. She’d stolen my father from Aunt Eveline to spite the man she really loved. She must have done it with what Aunt Toosie called her “winning ways.”
THE WINNING WAYS OF JANE WHITMORE
“Fifi! Fifi, come along now, you silly dog! You’ll spoil your new ribbon.”
With Edmond’s hand under my elbow, I stepped daintily around the puddle. Edmond carried my watercolors. The light in the park was clear after the rain. Drops clung to the Spanish moss so that it hung weighted from the oaks and sparkled like daytime fireflies. The gazebo was washed snowy white.
“Paint those ducks,” cried Edmond, pointing to a duck family paddling around the smooth lagoon.
“No, I prefer that.” I pointed to a swan gliding across the water in front of a dark green background. “Yes, that!” I cried, reaching for my watercolors.
Edmond spread a small mat on the damp earth and we sat close together, not speaking, while I began to sketch. I tried to remember what I’d learned in Florence: Look within, not at outlines.
Edmond chuckled.
“What’s funny?” I asked absently.
“Your swan looks like a pot with a long handle,” he said.
I stabbed the paper with my pencil, snapping the point.
“Jane! What’s the matter?”
“A pot with a handle!”
“I didn’t mean—”
“You did mean! You are mean!”
I didn’t bother to pick up my things. “Come, Fifi!” I stumbled over the roots of a tree and stepped in a puddle, hurrying to get away.
Edmond was picking up scattered brushes and pencils. “Don’t go! Wait, Jane!”
Wait. I was always waiting for Edmond. For ages we’d been going to parties together and everyone assumed we were engaged, but he’d never progressed beyond deep sighs and hand holding, while I waited.
Edmond caught up with me. “Jane, darling, I was joking! You know I love your watercolors.”
I stopped and looked him full in the face. I wanted to make my voice firm. “I don’t ever want to see you again!” wobbled my voice.
He stood staring after me as I stomped off toward home, tears blinding my sight, and Fifi, her new ribbon muddy and bedraggled, yapping at my heels and begging to be picked up. I was through waiting for Edmond. There were other fish in the sea. One was sitting in the porch swing when I got home.
“Hello, George,” I said.
“Hello, Jane.”
“Where’s Eveline?”
“Doing dishes. She said to wait here for her.”
I sat down on the narrow porch swing next to George
. He started to get up.
“I don’t bite,” I said, laughing at him.
Too large for the swing, he had to put his arm in back of me. George blushed, smiled, and settled down, terrified. This was the man who faced wild animals in the jungles of Central America.
“Tell me about Honduras and the banana plantation, George,” I said.
“It’s primitive and fascinating.”
“What are the people like?”
“Mostly Indians, friendly, good workers, if you lead them. I enjoy the work. Of course, the climate is harsh, too harsh for anyone as young and delicate as you.” George smiled and touched my hair with one finger. Noticing the beads of perspiration on my forehead, he added, “You’d melt.” Pause. “And you’re so young. Eveline might be strong enough.”
“Eveline strong?” I cried, amazement in my voice.
“Isn’t Eveline healthy?”
“The climate would kill her,” I said.
“Kill her?”
“The heat. She doesn’t talk about it, doesn’t want anyone to know—she’s really very brave—but she has—she has dangerously high blood pressure.”
“I didn’t know!” George murmured, stricken, absently still playing with one of my curls.
“Oh. Hello.” Eveline walked out on the porch, drying her hands on her apron.
“Eveline!” George leaped to his feet, blushing furiously.
When I finished that scene, I rushed to my Photoplay envelope and snatched Jane Whitmore out I was about to tear her up, but I couldn’t do it. Instead, I tore Edmond to little bits. Then I cried. I’d never again draw anything so beautiful as Edmond Hilary de St. Denis.
Chapter XIII
On Friday I got sick. It was easy. I didn’t try to swallow the prunes. I ate them slowly. When I came to the fourth and last, I let it slide down my throat. It came back up, bringing the first three with it. I knew by Aunt Eveline’s look that I had escaped Friday night dancing school.
“I’m not dying, Aunt Eveline,” I finally managed to say.
“Of course not, dear, of course not! To bed immediately! No school for you and no dancing school!”
That done, I had to give the appearance of regaining complete health by Saturday morning so that I could watch Tom at the track meet. It didn’t work.
Secret Lives Page 7
