by Jane Smiley
They all nodded.
By the end of the last race, it was a little too cold to walk home, so Ruben and Patty gave them a ride in their new Pontiac. It was comfortable, with a wide back seat and plenty of legroom. Frank wasn’t sure that they would see the Rubinos again, but after all he got into the habit, as the year drew to a close, of going with Ruben when he looked at lots for sale. “The smaller the better,” said Ruben. “Nobody wants a pile anymore. You get one of those big places, like if some old lady has died, and you might as well forget selling it. Nobody wants a basement or an attic, or even a goddamn staircase. The car and the house, they are getting to be about the same size.” Frank could see that, he really could.
1950
JOE AND ROSANNA HAD several arguments about the Frederick house, but Joe didn’t take them very seriously, which Rosanna considered to be a sign that he was getting just as stubborn as Frank. Rosanna’s beef was that Joe took better care of the Frederick house than he did of his own house. Every time she went to his place (and why was she bothering? said Joe), there were dishes in the sink, crumbs on the table, clothes in a heap, beds unmade. Was that how she had raised him? The barn was cleaner than the house. She found it especially irritating because he had put in running water, hot running water, and never seemed to use it. He pointed out that he took a shower every day, which was why he had installed the hot water in the first place, but what especially got her goat was that he was over at the Frederick place all the time (not all the time, said Joe), making sure every last dust mote had been captured and shown the door. The kitchen sparkled, the floors sparkled, all that oak woodwork sparkled. Even the windows sparkled, and that was ridiculous, since the blinds were always drawn, to keep the rugs and furniture from fading. Why bother, was what she wanted to know. They hadn’t heard from Minnie in three or four months, not since Joe sent her a money order for her share of the corn and beans he had planted on her property. Joe’s side was that it was a nice place, the nicest around, and did she want it to fall to ruin the way the Grahams’ place had after they had to leave? Once a single window was broken, then it was all downhill from there to having to tear the place down, the way they’d had to tear the Graham place down because it got to be such an eyesore.
“You always have a reason,” said Rosanna.
“Yup,” said Joe, his hand tickling the top of Nat’s head. “I always do.”
“Well, you’d better contemplate the difference between a reason and an excuse. A reason is its own reward, but an excuse leads to disappointment every time.”
Of course, they both knew what she was talking about. The other side of this coin was the way she said, “For goodness’ sake, go into town and at least have a soda at the drugstore. You don’t have to learn to dance in order to play a song or two on the jukebox.” If he did say that he was driving into town, she would say, “Promise me that you will go to one other place besides the feed store.”
“How about the garage?”
“When was the last time you spoke to a woman?”
“Yesterday, I asked the operator to put a call through. Her name is Lynn.”
“Yes, it is, and she’s nice. She’s Maggie Birch’s youngest niece, and a practical girl if ever there was one.”
“I’ll tell her you said so the next time I see her.”
“Joe, you can’t—”
But he snapped his fingers to Nat and walked out of the house. He never allowed her to tell him what he couldn’t do.
In the fourteen inches of snow they had, the Frederick house looked like a Christmas card. He had cleared the front steps, but the railings still had frozen little caps all along their length. Once upon a time, Roland Frederick had done an odd thing and painted the house yellow. It was now faded, but it stood out against the snow, bright and inviting, though of course as cold inside as it was outside.
In the letter he got from Minnie saying that she was returning as a replacement for the assistant principal at North Usherton High School, she wrote, “Don’t be too impressed. I think my main job is counting heads and overseeing detention. Mrs. Ellington got pregnant, and they can’t let the kids see that, so I have a job!” She didn’t say that Lois was coming with her, but when she showed up four days later, it was Lois who was driving the car. Joe was well prepared—he had fired up the basement furnace, and Rosanna had made the beds. Lights were on upstairs and down, and the big cubical house shed its welcoming glow in every direction. Minnie would not let him drag her suitcase up the steps outside or the staircase inside. She thanked him by shaking his hand. Her hair was in a bun, and she wore a warm felt hat. But Lois, who was wearing fur-trimmed boots and a fur-trimmed hat, stood back while he carried her bags in. She said, “Oh, you should have seen the dump where we’ve been living.”
“It was not a dump,” said Minnie. “It was perfectly respectable and clean.”
“And the window of my room looked over an airshaft. I was suffocating.”
“There are worse things than airshafts,” said Minnie.
“Yes!” asserted Lois. “Crowds!”
Minnie turned to Joe and said, “She thinks ten people is a crowd.”
“Isn’t it?” said Joe.
Lois walked into the dining room. It was cleared now of Mrs. Frederick’s bed and sickroom paraphernalia. Joe and Rosanna had tried to remember how it had once been, and pushed the table and chairs back into some semblance of that. Rosanna had actually waxed the floor. The dining room had always been the nicest room in the house, a paneled and glass-cased showplace where parties were meant to be lit by candles. The house, as Walter pointed out, was a city house shipped to the country for some reason. Lois came back joyful, and said, “Home, sweet home.”
Minnie unpinned her hat and set it on a shelf beside the fireplace. She said, “Well, my girl, you’d better figure out something to do here, that’s all I’ve got to say.”
“Mama canned and baked and made brandy-soaked peaches and sewed and knitted and embroidered pillowcases. She was always singing to herself and trying things out.”
“Sweetheart, you don’t know how to do any of those things.”
“So I’ll learn. Better than bookkeeping.”
When Minnie wasn’t looking, Lois took Joe’s hand and kissed him on the cheek. She also invited Nat in, and let him up on the sofa. Joe didn’t get home until after nine, and when he did get home, he washed his dishes and put them away.
ON THE FIRST OF MAY, Andy got a letter from her mother saying that her mother’s uncle Eugen had died, the last person alive during the life of her great-great-uncle Jens. Jens had died in 1890, and had hated all of his living relatives so much that he designated in his will that his estate was to be preserved until they were all “out of the way and could do no further harm,” even the babies. The estate, invested in bonds of some sort, had grown as prolifically as the family, and each member of each generation was to get the same amount, twenty-five hundred dollars. Two days after that, Alex Rubino called Frank and asked if he wanted to buy into a house for sale in Elizabeth, New Jersey—well, not really a house, but a whole block. Frank, remembering all those knickknacks that Rubino had picked up in Germany and sent home, conscious of Patty’s mouton coat and of Rubino’s blue Pontiac, said, “Maybe.” Rubino laughed.
It was a drop-dead perfect deal. This guy Rubino knew was getting together a group of investors to buy up a block of Bond Street in Elizabeth. They had maybe four weeks to do it before the state got there. Governor Driscoll had sworn to get that turnpike done by November ’51, eighteen months. Because he had given himself such a short deadline, the state didn’t have enough manpower to get to every farmer and every shop owner and every home owner in the right of way, so a guy with some pull could get there ahead of time, make a deal or two, and then turn it around. Some of those home owners on Bond Street had expected to be bought out when they expanded Newark Airport, and were a little ticked off when the thing stopped and went the other way, so they had the planes coming in and going out all day an
d now all night, and no way to get out of there. That irritation was gold to an investor. All those folks, at least the ones who weren’t deaf, would take cash and be glad of it.
“How much do you want?” said Frank.
“How much you got?” said Rubino. Frank gave him twenty-two hundred, not without thinking that Walter might have sold the farm for that twelve years earlier.
ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, Joe gave a party. When Rosanna got the invitation—in her mailbox (“Mr. and Mrs. Walter Langdon, Box 32, RR 2, Denby, Iowa”), she didn’t at first recognize the handwriting on the envelope, it was so neat, and when they got to Joe’s house at the designated time, 2:00 p.m. (“Claire, stop kicking the back of my seat, please. You girls are very giggly”), she didn’t at first recognize the place—Joe had put up a fence that confined the heretofore wandering driveway, and planted grass along it. The main part of the driveway went back to the barn, as always wide enough for a tractor and whatever implement it might be pulling, but the branch went off at a right angle now, crossed the front of the house, and stopped at the stand of lilacs that had been out of control but was now cut back. The effect of the fence was to turn the slope in front of Rolf’s old house, which had once dribbled down to the drainage ditch beside the road, into a front yard. Sure enough, there was some lawn growing there, and not just the same old bunchgrass and foxtails. Well, he had planted fescue, it looked like.
Walter stopped the car and came around to open her door. She got right out with the peach pie and said, “You bring the rolls, Claire. Girls, Joe must be around somewhere. Go say hi.”
And the porch was cleared of junk; you could walk right into the house, which was also cleared of junk, and somewhere he had bought a piece of green flowered carpet that he had laid over the linoleum in the living room—covered it almost to the four walls. No curtains on the windows, of course, but the shades were straight and half drawn, and the place was cool and dim. The two cats were lying around when Rosanna walked in, the one on the back of the sofa and the other one on the heat register, but they skittered past Joe as he came through the kitchen door. Rosanna said, “My, my, the place looks better than it ever has, Joey, and you …” Well, she couldn’t say that, but he did look handsome at last. Tall, and dark, and with a nice haircut, his cuffs straight, and his nails trimmed. He looked, in fact, like Walter had when she met him so many years ago and decided that she was going to show her mother and all the others how to be a real farm wife. She kissed Joe on the cheek. Oh, he did look happy. She walked through into the kitchen. And why not? Through the screen door, you could really get a look at his seed-corn field, and it was the best she had ever seen. Knee-high by the Fourth of July, except not here—the corn was hip-high, and the field was as flat and neat as a patchwork quilt. There was one Oma had made—where was that?—called “rail fence,” a simple pattern, green and blue with black accents, as Rosanna remembered. Anyway, Joey’s back field somehow brought that to mind. Between the cornfield and the house (the yard was also cleared, and even the doghouse looked as though it had been painted) he had set two picnic tables, and put cloths on them, and tacked the ends under the tabletops so they wouldn’t flap in the wind.
And then the others started coming in, Mama, and then Minnie and Lois, who was wearing a very handsome black-and-white-checked skirt, and a red scarf around her neck. Minnie was carrying a pan of something covered in a dish towel, which she set on the table, and Lois had a chocolate cake, which she set beside Rosanna’s peach pie, and it was a fine cake, only a little dip on one side.
Rosanna stepped out onto the back porch, and nearly fell over her own ice-cream maker, filled with ice and covered with a towel, which she lifted. Strawberry. He would have bought the strawberries in Usherton, since strawberry season was over. She stuck in her finger, just the tiniest bit, and put it in her mouth. Delicious. Well, he was full of surprises, and it was about time. Claire was right beside her. She said, “Can I have a taste?”
After a moment, Rosanna said, “Well, okay, but go get yourself a teaspoon.”
Claire came back with a spoon, and Rosanna dipped it into the pale-pink coolness. She said, “Don’t tell anyone.”
Walter stepped out onto the porch. He said, “You’re the hostess, Clairy, so go be with your friends,” and she hugged her arm quickly around his waist and then ran after Nat, who had come around the house with a stick in his mouth. Walter said, “Best-looking corn I ever saw.”
“You said that about ours.”
“I did. I was wrong.”
Rosanna smiled.
“I guess that anhydrous is the real thing.”
“Until it blows up.”
“Hell, it’s not going to blow up. Might freeze you to death if you fell in the tank, or suck the moisture right out of your body. They say—”
“Ugh,” said Rosanna.
“Joe is a careful young man. He knows the steps, he says the steps out loud to himself, and he follows the steps. He even says, ‘Put on your gloves,’ and then he does it. I don’t know if I could be careful like that, but he is.”
“Good thing he’s in charge, then,” said Rosanna.
“I’m not disagreeing with that,” said Walter. “I do wish Frankie and Lillian were here.”
“We can go there once the babies are born.”
“When’s that again?”
“I guess October for Andrea and November for Lillian. We can wangle an invitation for Christmas.”
Walter chewed his lip for a second, looking out at the glittering field. Rosanna forbade herself to ask yet again why he wasn’t content. Who was, after all? At last, Walter pointed to the ice-cream maker. “What’s in there?”
“Don’t you want to know,” said Rosanna, as she turned him toward the house.
They ate about four-thirty, when it was cooling down a little. Joe had set up a sprinkler for Claire and her friends. The two girls were also a little young for their age, eleven; they jumped around, shouting in the arc of water, more like eight-year-olds, which was fine with Rosanna. Henry put on some trunks he had (he had learned to swim down in Iowa City) and jumped around with them, then threw on a shirt and played fetch with the dog for at least an hour. And he didn’t make the dog do all the running—Henry had turned into something of an athlete. He had canvas shoes, and he ran with the dog, getting him to leap and race around the yard and down the road and back. Minnie remarked that North Usherton High School was installing a swimming pool, too, if you could imagine that, and might even get a swim team together.
“Who’s doing the farm work?” said Rosanna.
Walter said, “Joe, I guess. Joe is just going to farm every place around Denby by himself.”
They all smiled.
Joe had cooked pork shoulder. The conversation about the table started with Frank and Andrea and Lillian and Arthur and the children, then moved on to Korea. Rosanna hadn’t known that the North Koreans had captured Seoul, but she wasn’t surprised. Then everyone, by unspoken agreement, backed away from that subject, but not before Lois said that a man she knew at the feed store had enlisted. Walter asked who was going to the fair this year, and Minnie said she was helping with the 4-H-ers and she expected Lois to go along.
“Well, I’ll take a pie.”
“Wait a year,” said Minnie, but Rosanna thought the girl should be encouraged. Minnie was always after her to make something of herself and get off the farm, but while Minnie was at school, Lois came to Rosanna and asked to be shown how to do everything—she didn’t know how to cook or sew or even clean, really clean. Oh, she could wipe down a table and wash the dishes in hot running water and put the washed clothes through the wringer. She could crochet but not knit, and Rosanna had taught her how to knit—made her learn the German way, not the English way. But no butter churning, no egg candling or egg gathering or chicken raising, no carding or spinning of wool (even Rosanna barely knew how to do that, but Oma had done it for years). They did dye some wool blue with chopped red cabbage, red onion ski
ns, and white vinegar, and the color was pale but attractive. Lois was knitting it into a vest. Like her mother (poor thing), Lois wanted only to bake—cookies, cakes, pies, hardly even bread. Well, maybe she would reopen that bakery—what was the name of that fellow? Those baumkuchen he had made were about the best thing Rosanna had ever tasted in Denby. She was a nice girl, Lois, and just because she jutted out her jaw every time Minnie said anything to her didn’t mean she was uncooperative. Kids go their own way.
Walter limped in from inspecting that field again. His limp was pretty pronounced some days, not so pronounced other days. Wouldn’t go to a doctor, now that Dr. Craddock had passed on. At the funeral, Walter had whispered in Rosanna’s ear that he was sure there was a carton of Camels in the coffin. The doctor who had bought the practice was named Schwartz, and Rosanna had even said, “You liked Julius. Jews are smart. Good doctors.” Walter had replied, “That’s not it.” But he still wouldn’t go. Rosanna looked away. He made his way around the table, put his hand on the back of her chair as if he really needed the support, then pulled out the chair beside hers and sat down. He said, “I can die now.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake!”
“He knows everything I know, and more.”
“Then it’s time to enjoy it, not to die. Stick around and let him know you admire him.”
“He knows that. He was such a whiny child. Drove me bananas.”
“Well, you drove your ma bananas, too.”
“She told you that?”
“She did. She said you couldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. She might say, ‘No, you can’t do that,’ a hundred times, and you didn’t do it, because you knew you’d get a whipping if you did, but you’d wait about five seconds and then ask again, in the exact same voice, if you could do it.”
Walter burst out laughing. Then Claire ran up to them and said, “Joey says we can serve the ice cream.”
“Ah,” said Walter, “the real supper begins.”
