Victoria tightened her arms around her waist and bit her lip.
“And I’m in the pig business,” Alice rushed on. “When your litters have litters, this whole orchard will be solid pigs. You will be the grandmother pig, and I’ll help you take care of everyone. And our family will make a lot of money. I also talked to Felicity about the two of us making pies to sell. She’s already ten.”
No! Victoria covered her face, then let her hands drop to her sides. The light was changing. The shadow of the house would cover Alice and her pig soon, and it would be too cold for her to stay out. She tapped on the window. Alice looked up and smiled. “Come in, sweetheart,” Victoria called. “Company’s coming.”
*
In the kitchen Victoria scooped the sticky dough out of the bowl and plopped it on her floured board. “Oh Dan, what will Hazel Matlock think, me inviting her over to see the draperies and serving nothing but biscuits?”
“Hazel Matlock would come out here if you served nothing but gizzards. She couldn’t stand to live in that town if you weren’t here to keep her entertained.”
“She brings me business, Dan, getting people to take lessons. And listen, she said the Episcopalians might want a Gethsemane for their vestibule. She’s on the building committee.”
“You’d paint Christ for a bunch of Whiskeypalians?”
“Dan, they’re not all drinkers!”
“I’m teasing, Vic. That’d be grand. Don’t worry about serving biscuits. The English serve biscuits every afternoon for tea. They just call them scones.”
“You made that up.”
“Did you see Alice out there talking to Lillian Gish?” Dan asked. “If only that pig could talk, we’d find out all Alice’s secrets.”
Victoria gave her dough a few light licks with the rolling pin, then smacked out a couple of dozen biscuits with her cutter. “I just dread the day we have to take Lillian to the slaughter house. Last year before she handed over the money for the pig, I explained it all to her, but you know little ones, once they get attached.”
Lots of girls raised pigs, she thought as she slipped the soft disks onto the baking sheet, country girls who dreamed of state fair ribbons. But Alice’s dreams were vaster—a life on the stage and money. When Alice had said she was going to put her Prize for Expression money into buying a pig so she could get rich, her parents should have told her to put that prize money into a decent pair of shoes. Victoria slammed the oven door. It wasn’t natural for a little girl to think about making money.
“I guess you saw the box.” She looked around to see if Dan nodded. “It came while you were gone into town for the paper. The thing is, I have nothing left for my students but dessert plates. And the dresser set Hazel Matlock wanted to get started on is probably in that box. The postman said he had to have his money by Monday afternoon or he’d send it back if we hadn’t paid.”
“That’s his usual policy with you, Vic.” Dan stood faced away, his hand on the hall doorframe, smoothing it as though sanding. “This is kind of a bad time. MacGaffin has been around twice already.”
“I don’t like that man. He comes out here talking like he’s doing us a favor, saving us a trip to the bank. Bankers are not supposed to use henchmen.”
“Henchmen? Vic, the way you talk. MacGaffin is Cartwright’s nephew.”
“MacGaffin is too rough to work in a bank, and Mr. Cartwright should keep him away from us.”
“I believe, Vic, and I’m sure you also have guessed, that Mr. Cartwright hopes the visits from his unpleasant nephew will be a kind of incentive to us to pay the mortgage.”
“Oh for heaven’s sake, Dan, what kind of man would want to threaten a respectable family?”
“Vic, don’t upset yourself. I will take care of the mortgage.”
“A mortgage. It feels scandalous, shameful. This land, your family’s claim, mortgaged.”
He turned around sharply. “Victoria, I can’t stand it when you’re upset.”
“I’m not really upset, I’m just trying to think ahead.”
“For once, trust me. You have enough on your hands. I will figure out the mortgage situation.” He turned and went into the parlor.
Little Alice stepped in from the back porch. “Alice, darlin’!” How long had she been standing there? “Come, let me fix your hair. The company almost here.” She turned Alice around and, taking hold of her braids, twisted them together into a roll along the back of the child’s neck. She took a hair pin from her own head to fasten the do smartly in place, pulled a few strands from Alice’s face, tucked them into the plait, then lay her hands on Alice’s cold cheeks. Still such a little girl.
“I’m okay,” Alice said.
“Oh, I wasn’t checking for fever, Alice. I was—” She sighed. “Thanks for mopping the kitchen floor. I could never have company without you and Felicity helping out.” But in her mind she was feeling not gratitude, but fear. Felicity was ten. Alice only eight. And the next one, whose existence Victoria could no longer make herself forget for long stretches during the day, would be here in late spring. She’d been old to have had a baby when Felicity was born. She pressed her hands on the small of her back and raised her bosom. Perhaps if it was a boy, Dan would take hold in a new way and find some paying work in order to be a good example to his son. The girls, he said, had her for an example and would be quite overloaded if they witnessed any more ingenuity in the house.
Most of her troubles came down to one fateful decision. Fifteen years ago, she’d been fleeing the town social when she ran into Dan Hale. Dashing toward one of the long tables to retrieve her cake stand, she saw him, leaning on one arm, his fingertips actually tapping on the base of the cake stand. The sun shone on Dan’s sandy hair which feathered out from under his boater and on the fine high arch of his freckled nose. He smiled, as lean and friendly as Karl Winberg was fat and shy. Karl’s mother had just made her a handsome offer she felt she needed to escape, and suddenly, here was Dan Hale appearing not to have a care in the world. She gave him a quick nod, then stooped to reach under the table for the hat box in which she had transported four dozen pale pink meringues, her contribution to the refreshments.
Dan gestured to the empty cake stand. “I’ve been doing a land office business here in meringue cookies. The ladies said they’d never tasted the like, and the gentlemen were stuffing them in their pockets.”
She had to smile. Life to Dan Hale was all talk.
“You did this, these cattails?” he asked looking at the scene she’d painted on the top of the cake stand. She reached for the cake stand, but he framed it with his hands cupped to each side. “It quite draws you into its world, doesn’t it—the water so wet, those tall leaves bent as though the breeze had just passed through. Makes you think the baby Moses might have drifted around behind those bull rushes and be there, lying in his basket, watching the sky, waiting for Pharaoh’s daughter.”
“Mr. Hale, goodness gracious. It’s just a cake stand.” No one had ever looked at her china painting like that, with such fanciful ideas.
“You don’t like Biblical allusions?” he asked.
She took up the cake stand, looped the strap of the hatbox over her wrist and with a quick smile at Dan, took off across the lawn. Uninvited, he walked beside her. He’d called upon her regularly, but she’d never invited him inside the Judge’s cold house. After her father was widowed the third time, he sold everything in North Carolina, including his wife’s furniture and drapery, carpets and china. They’d arrived in Oklahoma Territory with nothing she could use to make a home comfortable or beautiful. Her father set up as the Justice of the Peace. She didn’t know if he still had money. But she did know he was capable of violence and her efforts to clear her mind of this failed regularly.
She walked more quickly. The boys had been running foot races in front of the Mayor’s house and had kicked up the dust, so she abruptly wheeled around to walk through lawns, but Dan stayed at her elbow as though they were yoked. “May I carry t
hose?” he asked.
“No, thank you. I’m fine.”
He walked almost sideways, trying to face her. “Lookie here,” he said and produced from his pocket two halves of the speckled shell of a quail’s egg. Her hands were full, but she inspected the subtle colors of the shells in his outstretched palm as they walked.
“Very sad about this quail,” Dan said. “He was a little fella with bucked teeth and no common sense, and the girls didn’t go for him.”
She laughed out loud, then stared. Dan didn’t have bucked teeth; he was handsome in a tender sort of way and clever, and he could be married six times over if he had any prospects. But he didn’t. He had land, his family’s original claim, but he and his elderly father lived out there alone like squatters—a little gardening, but no cultivated fields. What were his plans? As far as she could see, he was as opaque as this eggshell, keeping his character to himself as he drifted with no perceivable direction.
The dust from Main Street blew in their direction and she coughed. Little stones pressed into her thin shoes. Was she getting a corn? What a ghastly, old lady thing to do! Did Dan Hale realize she was older than he was? She wanted to go home and take off her shoes and huddle in the kitchen corner.
The gloom around her increased. She was walking away from an event she’d looked forward to for weeks and heading for the place that most increased her despair—a house, so dark, so devoid of warmth or comfort, it was unfit for human habitation. It was no accident she was an old maid, a girl who had trained herself to live in a shadow, to fix a bland face on loathing.
“I saw you walking with Mrs. Winberg,” Dan said.
“Yes, we talked of light.”
He paused before he spoke this time, and they walked more slowly. “Light is very important to a painter, I imagine,” he said finally.
“Oh goodness, I’m not a painter. I just make hats.”
“And that fancy cake plate? That stream with the cattails? That wasn’t painting?”
The more charming he was, the more anxious she became. His easy conversation, his gentle focus upon her, were what she craved. But she stiffened her back and said, “My father says you are a man with no plans. He says the college seems to have given you a Baccalaureate in Conversation.” Her own bluntness shocked her.
Dan just nodded. “Your father may be right.”
The cake stand was heavy. Even the empty hatbox, dangling from her wrist, was heavy. Dan was silently matching her, stride for stride. She felt her heart crying. “Our big house is too barren inside for company. Father won’t let me fix it up.”
“Ah, the judge likes a spare interior.”
Her father held himself above the town, calling them sod busters and cowhands, and refused to make a home in which either he or his daughter could entertain. The judge likes a spare interior. The stark sound of this called up her own black insides, and she mouthed the word Mama as she always did when she felt herself sliding into despair. “… so you create things for other people’s houses,” Dan was saying. “You’re furnishing the whole town—little pieces of Victoria Jenkins’s imagination sitting on dining tables and pianos and riding around on ladies’ heads.”
“And your mother? Is she well?” she asked trying to change the subject.
He stopped walking and leveled his gaze at her. “My mother lives in Nebraska.” It was obviously a hard thing for him to say.
How could she have forgotten there was no woman out there? “I’m sorry.”
“No, no. It was just that back then in the 1880’s—the prairie and the wind. As a girl in Nebraska she’d been a prizewinner at anything she set her hand to, graduated top of her class at the Normal School, then became a schoolteacher. She played a little spinet at the church—the center of all her friends. But once Dad brought her here, she had no one, not for miles and miles, but me and the old man.” Dan’s eyes, usually glancing off any direct contact, pleaded with her for mercy.
“But you were just a boy then.”
“We took her back to Nebraska.” He was breathing hard, his mouth open. “Please, Victoria,” he asked, “I may still seek your company?”
“Such as it is,” she said. As they trudged on up the road, she marveled at the strangeness of his finding her, another lonely child.
*
After the viewing of the new draperies, to which a larger than expected crowd arrived, parking their buggies and automobiles all along the creek bank in the front, Victoria stood flushed in the hot kitchen. It hadn’t been a formal party. No invitations had gone out, but she’d been huffing and puffing over that cream jersey for so many days, people were curious. The only one she recalled inviting was Hazel, just to drop in and have a look. Of course, when Mr. and Mrs. Hutchins, driving past, stopped to watch Dan through the windows putting up the rods, she told them to stop by as well. They must have told everyone else, including Mrs. Wagonard, the person Victoria least enjoyed entertaining. The woman showed up early as usual, gasping as though Victoria had imposed upon her the walk down the road and up the three front steps. Without one gracious word, she had taken hold of the doorframe, hoisted her abundance across the threshold, and headed straight for the velvet chair.
The guests had devoured six dozen biscuits with butter and peach and cherry jams and coffee and of course chocolate for the children to drink. Toward the end of the afternoon Felicity, her dark hair drawn back on her pale neck, played the piano, Chopin falling out of her fingertips as though she gave it no thought. Alice recited Mr. Stevenson’s “To Alison Cunningham” that always made the mothers teary. Then everyone went home except Hazel and Mrs. Wagonard who still sat in the parlor with Dan. Hazel and Victoria had helped the guests back into their coats. Ah, to have such a woman as Hazel for a friend. She’d looked stunning when she arrived in that long velvet jacket and matching slouch tam with the one long thin feather across the front. Hazel was her best advertisement for hats.
As she gathered the cups and plates left around the living room, Victoria returned her eyes again and again to the cream draperies. Did they mean anything to the girls? Did a beautiful room reassure Felicity and Alice when there hadn’t been any meat in the house for a week? When she herself was a girl, she lived in a beautiful, gracious house. And her father had had money. She had stood before his desk in the beautiful library back in North Carolina, and waited to be noticed.
After coming to Oklahoma nothing important had changed. They were stripped of possessions, and she had grown into a spinster, but she still stood before her father’s desk, waiting to be noticed. He never looked up from his law books, only gestured, pen in hand. “The windows in here—” he said last week.
She hadn’t replied, hoping he would give her the money to hire Old Bill to wash the windows, but he hadn’t, and she hadn’t enough of her mother in her to snap, Father, have you had occasion to notice you’re using the Belle of the County as your hired girl! Then she remembered what she’d come for and said, “We owe for the coal.” Without looking up her father had opened his drawer, taken out two paper dollars and, still staring down at his law book, held them out to her with a casual hand. With two fingers she had pulled the bills slowly from the same hand that had casually tossed aside her Mama’s blood-stained pillow. This memory always flushed her with guilt.
Recalling all this, Victoria let out a little gasp, then looked at Dan, still reading the newspaper. Before returning to the kitchen, she moved the biscuits, butter and jams a little closer to Mrs. Wagonard, so the woman didn’t have to squeeze her great stomach reaching.
Victoria carried the last of the dirty dishes to the kitchen where Felicity stood on a box at the sink, washing dishes while Alice dried. Hazel came out on the back porch and stood at her side as she scraped the few crumbs off the plates into the slop jar for Lillian Gish. “Is Mrs. Wagonard boarding here now?” Hazel whispered and giggled.
“Oh, mercy.”
“I tell you, Vic, when I see her sitting in your parlor in that dreadful hat, without a civ
il word for anyone, dropping crumbs down the cushions as she Hoovers up your delicate biscuits, I want to nominate you for sainthood.”
“Poor old soul. No one ever taught her any manners.”
“One might look at it that way.” Hazel lifted a fallen lock of Victoria’s hair and taking a hairpin from her own coif, fastened it back into place. “On the other hand, one might note she has lived for nearly ten years in a gracious community and been blind to all good examples.”
Victoria covered her mouth to hold back the laugh. She loved when Hazel said spiteful things, the sort of sauciness Victoria’s mother had been free to let fly when they were alone. She glanced in at Felicity and Alice who seemed to be slopping along in their own world.
“And she’s never going to leave,” Hazel continued, “if Dan doesn’t quit reading the newspaper to her like she was his old Auntie. What a swell fellow! Goodness sakes, Victoria, he may not be a Captain of Industry, but he certainly adores you.”
Victoria ducked her head.
“Is that a shipment of china in the front hall?” Hazel asked. “Do you think the dresser set is in there?”
“I haven’t had a chance to unpack it.”
“I’ll come next Tuesday and get started on it if that suits.”
*
As Victoria worked under the lamplight, Dan read to her until his throat was so hoarse he had gone upstairs to bed. She held up the opera cape to see how much farther she had to go in attaching the fur collar. “About a mile,” she whispered to herself and wondered why she’d persuaded Mrs. Woodberry to have a fox collar that reached all the way to the hem of this gorgeous flowered velvet wrap. She put one foot on the floor to push the little rocker, circled her head to ease her neck and re-crossed her feet on her mother’s little embroidered footstool. She smiled recalling her mother telling of standing on this little footstool while the seamstress crept on her knees around her to pin up the hem of her wedding dress. Victoria sighed. She also had stood on the same stool to have her own wedding dress fitted, but now it was her customers who tested the creaking joints of this precious little bit of furniture while she was the one on her knees with the pins.
One Hundred Years of Marriage Page 8
