by Helen Wells
“What’s the Village type?” she asked, startled.
“You’ll find out,” the taxi driver promised. He drove off, narrowly missing two small urchins chasing a beribboned cat.
Cherry, mystified, took a careful look at this street. Nothing ominous here! These demure little houses from Revolutionary days had crisp curtains and white shutters at their many-paned windows. Their brass doorposts gleamed brightly in the sun. Window boxes of geranium and ivy made splashes of color all up and down the little street.
“Now what did that driver mean?”
Cherry picked up her suitcase and mounted two steps from the sidewalk into No. 9. The ground floor of this house was to be theirs, Gwen had written.
In a pleasantly dim hallway, Cherry found a mahogany table piled with mail for several tenants, a bowl of fresh flowers, a carpeted stairway winding upstairs, and a blue door. Beside the doorbell was tacked a neat row of engraved cards: Gwenthyan Jones R.N., Mai Lee R.N., Vivian L. Warren R.N. Bertha Larsen and Josie Franklin had their cards up, too. Cherry fished out her own professional card and propped it in with the others. Then she rang the doorbell, long and lustily.
A scowling, red-haired girl pulled the door open. She had a smudge of paint across her puckish, freckled face, and a row of nails stuck in the belt of her overalls. Her scowl disappeared when she saw Cherry.
“Cherry!” Gwen cried. “What a relief to see someone who doesn’t hate me!” Two sturdy arms, hardware, and Wet paint smudge landed around Cherry. “The late Miss Ames! I thought you were never coming!”
“I thought so myself,” Cherry confessed. She beamed at Gwen Jones. “Aren’t you going to let me in?”
“No,” said Gwen, the scowl returning. She closed the door and pushed Cherry back into the hall. “Ssh. Listen. You’ve got to be on my side!”
“What’s wrong? Who’s on the other side?”
“You’ll hear about it soon enough from the others,” Gwen said glumly. “Oh, golly, are we in an uproar! Cherry, for heaven’s sakes, speak up for me! After all, I did this—”
“Did what?”
The blue door jerked open and a large, plump, fair girl glared at Gwen.
“The kitchen is little and I am big. You knew I would be the cook. And the stove has only one heat: feeble. Hello, Cherry.”
“Hello, Bertha,” Cherry stammered. She had never before seen Bertha Larsen angry. “How are you?”
“I am disgusted. Come in and see what Gwen rented. It is more homelike in the chicken coop on our farm.”
Cherry and a disgruntled Gwen followed the big girl into the living room. Assorted chairs and tables were pushed around, the windows were bare of curtains, and the girls’ half-unpacked belongings were strewn everywhere.
“It’s not so bad,” Cherry said, bright and hollow. “Look at the gold-and-white sprigged wallpaper. Look at the fireplace. Uh—look at—”
A large sob from another room interrupted her.
“Josie Franklin is already homesick,” Gwen snorted.
Bertha quashed the redhead with a glance. “What Josie saw is enough to give anybody a turn.”
Cherry was by now thoroughly bewildered. She saw nothing so far to make Josie cry. She went off down a narrow hallway, found three tiny double bedrooms, and Josie Franklin in the last one.
Josie sat ostensibly weeping over a newspaper. It was opened at the obituary column. She glanced up from behind her glasses at Cherry.
“Look!” Josie pointed a shaking finger. “Dead. Josephine Franklin. Me! My name—right there—Ohhh!”
“Josie dear, it’s not you,” Cherry struggled not to laugh at Josie’s clowning. “It’s somebody else with the same name. You’re not dead.”
“But I don’t want my name in the dead column! It makes me nervous. A fine welcome to New York!”
Cherry pretended to comfort her until Josie gave up the joke and assumed her usual rabbity expression. Suddenly she wailed:
“It’s all Gwen’s fault!”
“Poor Gwen. What is her fault?”
“Greenwich Village. Of all awful places!” This time there was real woe in Josie’s voice.
Cherry ruefully remembered the taxi driver and kept quiet. With relief she heard someone calling her.
It was Vivian Warren, a fragile, pretty girl, running down the long hall and buttoning herself up the back. Cherry ran to meet her halfway.
“Well, hello!” They exchanged hugs. Vivian’s soft, hazel eyes glowed, and her fine, pale skin flushed with pleasure. “Cherry, I hated missing the girls’ reunion at your house this summer.”
“It was fun—forming the Spencer Club and planning this visiting nurse thing. We missed you too, Vivi.”
“I was working,” Vivian said with a little sigh.
As usual, Cherry thought. She felt again the old surge of protectiveness for Vivian, just as when she had come to the girl’s rescue in their nursing school days. Vivian’s family was too poor to help her, and she had had a lonely struggle.
“Vivi, you’re entirely too thin,” Cherry said. “We’re all going to feed you and fatten you up.”
“Hear, hear! Want to help paint bookcases? I was, but I got so tired and dirty, even Gwen relented. That slave driver.”
Cherry’s answer was lost in a roar. Three fire engines raced past their windows. A fresh wail came from Josie. Upstairs someone started to sing scales.
“—wich Village,” Vivian shouted, fingers in her ears. “Gwen’s idea—”
Cherry began to see what Gwen Jones was talking about. She also began to see the other girls’ point. And she had not seen the Village itself, so far. What had Gwen led the Spencer Club into?
And what were Gwen, Bertha and Josie staring at, out the living room window, faces frozen in disbelief?
Cherry and Vivian squeezed in among them and stared too. Crossing the street came a barefoot man in flowing white toga and flowing white beard. He carried a staff and looked utterly unconcerned.
“Who’s that?” Bertha gasped. “Moses?”
Gwen gulped. “Uh—why—he’s a famous dancer or something. Lives down here. You know, lots of artists live down here in the Village.”
“Then what are people like us doing here?” Vivian demanded.
Gwen looked crosser than ever. “I’ve explained and explained. There are twenty everyday folks to one Bohemian around here. The Village isn’t only an art center. It’s a small, friendly village in the heart of New York. Why, we even have a garden.”
“We have?” Cherry exclaimed loyally. She tossed back her black curls. “I must see it.”
“Down the hall and don’t fall through the trap door,” Josie said gloomily.
Cherry sped off. She passed the three bedrooms, went through a dismantled back parlor, and out a back door. But this was no garden by Cherry’s definition. It was a tiny square of grass enclosed by a high, board fence, with a solid row of tall, brick houses looking down on it.
“It feels like being at the bottom of a well,” Cherry thought uncomfortably. “Still, it’s something green, it’s outdoors.” It even had two city sparrows.
She spied a knothole in the fence and was drawn irresistibly to peek through. In the neighbor’s minuscule yard stood a few straggly stalks of corn. Cherry giggled: on her prairies, corn grew eight feet high, by the hundreds of miles.
“Wonder if they keep a cow, too.” She ran back into the house, calling to Gwen for the benefit of the others: “The garden is—er—really a find, in a city of stone and steel. We can even have meals out there.”
Gwen looked grateful. But the others looked grumpy and did not deign to reply. Cherry changed the subject.
“Where’s Mai Lee all this time?”
“Out marketing. Oh! Did you know that Ann Evans—sorry, Mrs. Jack Powell—is living right here in New York too? Ann hasn’t seen this—this lunatic rattrap yet.”
Gwen shouted: “The Village is romantic!”
The others pounced on her. Bertha declared she
would take “less atmosphere and a decent kitchen!” Cherry saw that something had to be done—someone had to come to Gwen’s rescue—before a real quarrel broke out. She said hastily, “Let’s see the kitchen, Bertha.”
Down the hall, crammed into a converted closet, was a small stove, miniature icebox, tiny sink. Shelves were built into whatever inches were left. Cherry whistled. Bertha snorted. Gwen quietly sneaked off.
“Space is very precious in New York.” Cherry tried to smooth things over.
Fortunately the doorbell rang then.
“Must be Mai Lee,” Vivian said, starting to go.
“Let me go!” Cherry said.
She by-passed the packing box and a fairly respectable sofa, and pulled open the blue door. There stood two immense, brown paper bags of groceries, clutched by two ivory hands, and apparently walking on a pair of neat, silk-stockinged legs. Cherry laughed and reached for the paper bags. Mai Lee’s demure face emerged, badly scared.
“Ch-Cherry! Hello!”
“Hello, dear—but have you seen a ghost?”
The other girls crowded around. Mai Lee emptied change from her pocket onto the packing box, and pushed back her satiny black hair.
“I met a tiger on the sidewalk,” Mai Lee panted.
“That’s the Village,” Gwen said brightly. “Always something exotic.”
“Very exotic to have him try to nip my ankle.” The little Chinese-American girl gingerly stuck out her ankle. “It’s a good thing he was a baby and on a leash. A blonde woman had him, she looked like an actress.”
“Probably was,” Gwen said airily. “Isn’t it fascinating to go out marketing and meet celebrities?”
“No!” they thundered at her.
Cherry waved her arms in desperation. “Let’s open the groceries! Let’s have lunch!” Anything to keep peace, even if only temporarily.
Lunch accomplished a truce. The girls fished eagerly in the paper bags, approving the pickles especially. Cherry took a moment to ask Mai Lee about Marie Swift.
“Yes, Marie and I got together in San Francisco, while I was out there visiting my family,” Mai Lee said as she ripped open a box of potato chips. Marie, one of their original Spencer School crowd, had decided to remain with her mother, who was undergoing a long illness. “Marie really is disappointed that she can’t join us,” Mai Lee reported. “I promised her we’d send her bulletins from time to time.”
“And snapshots,” said Vivian. “I brought my camera.” She held out a parcel of cold cuts. “Who wants samples?”
They perched on the packing box and on the few lone pieces of furniture, and had a sort of picnic lunch. After eating they were in a better temper, but not for long.
There came a pounding from somewhere below. The girls searched frantically, and finally remembered the trap door in the hall. When they unlatched it, up popped a gnarled little man, the janitor. He crawled through and demanded:
“Why didn’t ye answer? I’ve been pounding a good five minutes!”
“Why didn’t you use the regular door?” Gwen retorted.
“Because I’m testing this here door, Miss Smarty! Goin’ to nail it down,” and he started banging away.
“Miss Smarty,” repeated Josie under her breath.
“Stop that!” The redhead whirled on her.
“Truce, truce!” Cherry waved her white handkerchief. “Now, look, kids. The apartment isn’t so bad. We can fix it up. You haven’t even tried, all you’ve done is gripe—”
“Cherry’s right,” Vivian said loyally over the janitor’s banging. “We can fix it to suit ourselves—”
The janitor stopped hammering to say tartly, “Ye’ll do no fixing without my permission. Remember this here is a rented place. The stuff in it ain’t yours, Miss Smarty!”
Vivian and Cherry shepherded the girls into the back parlor while the janitor finished his hammering. This room, with windows facing the garden, was not bad. It was square and good-sized and flooded with September sunshine.
“We could make it into a dining room and a sort of study room,” Bertha Larsen admitted.
“But these wooden chairs and table are so dreary,” Mai Lee said. “And battered! Good for kindling.”
“Paint ’em,” Cherry said impulsively. “Bright blue for fun. And—um—we could paper the room. With one of those red, white, and blue Pennsylvania Dutch papers.” Cherry’s black eyes sparkled. “You know, funny little formalized people and birds. Not expensive, either.”
Everyone looked happier, and Bertha Larsen nodded approval. A gleam came into her china-blue eyes.
“I’ll go right away and buy the paint,” she announced. “Then we can paint tomorrow. Because once we report to our jobs on Monday, we won’t have much time to paint.” She added emphatically, “I like Cherry’s idea of painting. It is the only good idea we’ve had.”
“We daren’t paint without the janitor’s permission!” they warned.
“He will say yes,” Bertha answered stubbornly. “Anybody would be glad to have clean paint on that awful old furniture.”
“Wait till we get his permission!”
Bertha grumbled and stalked out of the room. The other girls shook their heads. Big Bertha was usually motherly and patient, almost phlegmatic. She must feel exceedingly disappointed about the apartment to be so cross and stubborn now. In a way, Cherry could not blame Bertha. But they had a lease and could not move, so it behooved them to make the place livable.
Cherry looked out into the hall. The janitor, that terrible little man, had vanished. In a body, prodded by Cherry, the girls moved into the front living room. They settled down to a conference on decorating, excepting Bertha, who was doing some chores in the kitchen. There were a few black looks at Gwen, and a few peppery remarks in return. But the Spencer Club, still prodded by Cherry, began to do something constructive.
“Now, this front room has possibilities,” Vivian pointed out. “It isn’t so much a question of what furniture you have, as how invitingly you can arrange it.”
There was only a couch, two chairs, and a few small tables. But the carpet was passable and the gold-and-white wallpaper really attractive. The fireplace was handsome. Under Vivian’s direction, they collected all the furniture in the apartment except the beds and studied it.
Then they grouped chairs on either side of the stately fireplace, dragged the couch to the opposite wall, and set low tables within easy reach. On the far wall they placed tall, twin chests of drawers, robbing Cherry and Gwen’s bedroom but with good effect.
“It looks better,” they agreed, heartened. They set Gwen’s low bookcases under the street windows. “Let’s get yellow curtains to pick up the gold sprig in the wallpaper. Thin, gold gauze curtains.”
“Made very full,” Mai Lee suggested. “We can make them ourselves. It’s only hemming.”
“We need more lamps,” Cherry fretted. “Yes, Gwen told me she is having a couple of lamps shipped from home. But even so—”
“Well, if we make the curtains, we’ll be able to afford lamps. Crystal ones, maybe.” Gwen was daring to assert herself again. “We can paint the bookcases pale yellow, too.”
“I want plants,” Josie insisted. “And framed photographs of our families and friends all over.”
“And a silver tea service? Certainly.”
It took them almost all afternoon. But everyone felt better now. Peace—a rather gingerly peace—was achieved.
Cherry saw incipient danger signals in the tired droop of Vivian’s slender figure and in Josie’s “hungry” look. To avert trouble, she suggested:
“We’re all too tired to cook. Let’s go out to dinner.”
“Yes, it would be fun to explore,” Mai Lee seconded.
“Incidentally, where’s Bertha?”
They found her, stubborn and not talking, in the tiny bedroom she shared with Josie. She was putting her clothes away and refused to come out to dinner.
“I don’t want to get dressed up. I’ll have something
here.”
“Me too,” Gwen said, plucking at her overalls. “I’ll stay with you, Bertha.”
“No!” said Bertha.
The others more or less defended Gwen, justified her taking the apartment, and said quite firmly that it was time for Bertha to relent. Bertha did not unbend.
“She doesn’t love me,” Gwen sighed. “Okay, kids, I’ll take a fast shower and be ready in five minutes.”
Out they started, cleaned up, hatted, and gloved as befitting a city street. They felt heartless at leaving Bertha alone, and inexplicably uneasy about her. But they also felt quite elegant, dining out in New York.
Eagerly the five girls went along their street, glimpsing lighted windows and handsome apartments. Traffic sounds came softly from the big thoroughfares a few blocks away. Cherry saw a domed Byzantine church tower and flocks of pigeons wheeling in the violet sky: it all looked like an etching at this twilight hour.
Turning a corner, they encountered an orderly stream of men and women coming home after the day’s work. Cherry wondered if the taxi driver had not been prejudiced against the Village—“a Brooklyn patriot.”
A block farther on, there was more traffic, more people and shops. Cherry’s eyes bugged out at the Eighth Street shops. Here were elephant-hide fans from India, bright serapes from Mexico, topazes from Brazil, books from France, a windowful of grotesque masks, another window displaying a single, beautiful sculpture banked in rhododendron leaves.
“Look! Lots of people just like ourselves,” Gwen was saying hopefully. “That woman in the red hat is from Terre Haute, Indiana. Want to bet?”
Cherry, thinking at the moment about Bertha instead of watching where she was going, ran smack into a young man who was not watching where he was going, either. He was fiery-eyed, longish-haired, had spectacles with heavy black rims, and a book stuck under his nose. He muttered something, an apology, in a language Cherry had never heard before, and moved off reading. Cherry was speechless, then choked.
“Well, there’s someone who isn’t from Indiana. I suppose he’s a poet?”
“Or a painter, or a student, or a cartoonist, or a dramatist,” Gwen supplied. She added defensively, “Course, there’re lots of phonies here, too. But there’s an art museum down here, and a university, and fine homes, fine hotels, lots of churches—Why, even Mark Twain lived and wrote here, Miss Middle Westerner!”
