by Emily Hahn
“Oh, you and your casual New York ways!” Ruth made her voice light and gay, but Francie realized her feelings were hurt. Whoever would have expected Ruth to be so touchy?
Worried, Francie dressed that afternoon in great haste, not too meticulously. She hurried over a full half hour ahead of time (three-thirty, Ruth had said they’d begin to come—a queer time for tea, surely), only to be met by her dear old best friend’s sorrowful wail, “Francie! You aren’t wearing a hat!”
This really was bewildering. “Should I have?” asked Francie. “I never used to. None of us did.”
“But this is different,” said Ruth. “It’s different now. The girls will all be wearing hats, especially since you’ve been abroad and in New York and all that, and if you don’t wear one, can’t you see how they’ll talk? They’ll say that you just don’t think we’re worth dressing up for in little old Middle West Jefferson. Oh Francie, couldn’t you—I mean, I’d lend you one of mine, but they’d all recognize it.”
Intimidated, Francie said, “I’ll run home and get one of mine. It isn’t far.”
She had done so, and returned breathless after the first guest arrived. By that time she was in a slightly spoiled mood. It was hard to be gracious to all these girls who were strangers, or at least seemed to be.
“Here’s Gracie. You remember Gracie Waller,” Ruth would say, and Francie would grasp Gracie’s hand and say, “Of course. How are you, Gracie?” and try not to show how staggered she was that this thoroughly grown-up, dignified young matron should be Gracie, the most precocious girl in the class. But she’d also been the one who always got lost at the school parties out somewhere behind the gymnasium, where they were dancing, and reappeared later much the worse for wear.
Or Ruth would come up dragging a grim-looking girl with a bun and introduce her as “Isabelle Hunter—remember old Izzy?” and leave Francie wondering what on earth to say to a stranger who used to be her most hated rival for the affections of—who? Whatever had been that football player’s name? Gone, gone with the old spites, the old longings. And gone, too, was the one boy friend she remembered vividly—Glenn. The first day back she had learned that he was working in a law office in San Francisco. Whatever Jefferson might have been with Glenn—well, better not think of it, she told herself.
They had sandwiches of thin slices of bread, and a number of salty little confections that would have gone better with soup. They had hot rolls, and home-made coffee cake, and tea or coffee. Everybody scolded Ruth jovially for serving so much. They talked about their diets. They sat in a prim circle and, after asking Francie politely about New York, chattered about babies, husbands, engagements, mothers, and church. Most of them were married, otherwise they would probably have left Jefferson. There couldn’t have been much in town to do, Francie reflected for a career woman.
It was bewildering at first, but after a cup of coffee and a cookie Francie began to find it charming, too. She had known these girls when they were long-legged brats together, running from one house to another to play all through the summer, busy with their games and their secret societies and feuds and makings-up. She had known them in high school when they took to giggling loudly when the boys walked by, and kept diaries. And here they were at last, young ladies in high heels and hats (Ruth had been quite right about the hat) with adult preoccupations—family troubles, jobs, all the things they had relegated to their parents in the days before Francie went away. And they were all so busy! Francie felt an envious pang, thinking of how busy they were with their clubs and their hobbies and their work. The others who weren’t there were all away at school, and no doubt they were busy too. Some of the boys were in the Service. Whereas she was only running the house for Aunt Norah.…
A rustle of newspaper in the living room woke her from her sad thoughts. Pop was there, smoking his morning cigar and killing time. Did the crackling sound impatient? Francie thought it did, but her own movements were quick and jerky as she rinsed the plates and stacked them in the washer in the pattern Ada had recommended as most effective. She herself was impatient, and she may have been reading feelings that weren’t there into Pop. It was hard to get used to him taking life easy. It was strange to think he wouldn’t soon be going to his office or embarking on a series of telephone calls, giving directions to his secretary, perhaps ordering her to buy tickets so that he might start off for the Philippines or Haiti or somewhere else far away and exciting.
She was so sure Pop must be fretting that she went to the door and peered in at him. No, he was sitting there looking cheerful, positively cheerful. He wasn’t aware of her scrutiny. Francie went back to the sink, walking hurriedly; she was always in a hurry with the housework, though there was no need for haste. She was eager to learn all about this new, distasteful setup. She wanted to prove to herself—and to Aunt Norah and Pop, of course—that she could be as efficient as anybody when she set her mind to it. It had been rather a comedown, and still was in a way, to discover that the tasks weren’t nearly as demanding as she had expected. Dishwashing? Well, anybody can wash dishes, and here it was a mere matter of learning to work the machine. Cooking? That was still rather tricky. Francie knew there were great areas of the subject that she could explore if she went in for it with a whole heart. But Aunt Norah said Ada had rather got out of the way of cooking a lot of elaborate meals, what with frozen foods and supermarkets and, in a pinch, the corner drugstore. Her easel and paints hadn’t yet arrived from New York, and she was restless without them.
The front door opened again; the floor creaked. Aunt Norah came into the kitchen.
“You’re not overdoing things, dear, I hope,” she said genially. “I hate to see you waste your time at the sink. If you’ve got anything of your own to do this morning, you’d better get it accomplished before eleven-thirty. Remember, we’re going to Uncle Robert’s for lunch.”
“Oh, Aunt Norah, I did forget!” Francie mopped vigorously at the draining board and remembered in time not to sigh, as she wanted to do. Of all the trials of coming home, this program of going to see every relative anywhere within a radius of ten miles was the worst. It wasn’t that she disliked meeting the distant cousins and aunts-by-courtesy again. Without complications, it would have been pleasant. But Francie hadn’t been home long at all before she found out that she was serving as a bone of contention in a community that seemed to want to contend. Normally a placid girl, this quality of theirs, this almost jovial belligerence, wearied and worried her. Her Cousin Biddy was the worst. Biddy was really always in the family’s hair. She worked at it. She lived across town, but every morning she would telephone Aunt Norah in order to plan Francie’s life for the next twenty-four hours.
“Frances Beatrice simply must go and have dinner with Bill and Marie,” she would say flatly. “They’re beginning to notice that she hasn’t done anything about them, Norah. Marie said something yesterday: I could see she wasn’t pleased.”
Aunt Norah always did what she could to smooth matters over.
“Well, I don’t know when she can manage it, Biddy. The child’s doing as well as she can. What day this past week has she had free, I’d like to know?”
“Now Norah, you know that’s not the sort of excuse Marie is going to accept; she heard about Frances Beatrice’s having been to Claire’s house night before last. After all, Claire’s not even related.”
It was typical of Biddy that she should insist on calling Francie by that form of her name which had been given up by everybody else years back when Francie was in high school. By dint of pleading tears and plain downright persistence Francie had persuaded the rest of her world to forget that she had ever been christened “Frances Beatrice.” But nobody ever succeeded in changing Biddy’s mind when she wanted to remember things and the things she remembered were somehow, always, just those you wished would be forgotten. It was always Biddy who would remind you at a large gathering of the humiliating time you overate at the picnic when you were seven years old, and were sick all ov
er somebody’s best dress. That sort of thing. She was also a firm believer in telling people things for their own good. Her relatives were all slightly afraid of Cousin Biddy, and Aunt Norah tried now to placate her.
“There was nothing in that, Biddy; Francie dropped in to see Claire, that was all—Claire did teach her in high school, you know—and she happened to stay on and eat with the family. Where’s the harm in that?”
Francie, overhearing Aunt Norah’s side of the conversation, drew near the telephone anxiously. “What have I done now?”
But nobody ever took time to explain. Francie was merely the bone they fought over, she wasn’t a member of the argument club.
However, since Aunt Norah seemed to be bearing the brunt for any gaucherie her household committed, Francie learned to be as considerate as possible. Pop agreed with her. With Aunt Norah they both made all the rounds. They went to Biddy’s, and they appeased Marie, and they let Uncle Robert take them to the movies when he wanted to go. Francie went out of her way to inspect babies that her relatives’ relatives had produced while she was out of town, and was scrupulous to pay every call her Aunt Norah recommended. All this activity was beginning to pall, especially as it seemed endless. Certainly Biddy remained as a steady sort of duty, self-renewing.
Aunt Norah went upstairs in her stately, cautious way, and Francie took off her apron and hung it up, muttering under her breath. In the next room Pop chuckled.
“Getting you down?” he called.
Francie walked over to the door and stood there. She spoke with careful calm. “I. know I ought to be flattered,” she said, “with so many invitations. But it’s not much fun over at Cousin Biddy’s.”
“I never thought it was,” said Pop. He yawned.
“It’s like people fighting duels for my favors and then walking off and leaving me,” said Francie. “All this arguing about where I’m going to eat dinner Saturday night. And the way they allocate you and me, without so much as asking us! Go here. Go there. No, they can’t, they’ve promised Adele to go with her.… Right in front of us, as if we were inanimate!”
“That’s family solidarity, chicken,” said Pop. “Backbone of the nation.”
He turned the page of his newspaper and went on reading.
CHAPTER 3
Francte looked at the clock. In a house without children, she reflected, this cares-of-housekeeping racket can be much exaggerated. She was aware that she looked at the clock an abnormal number of times in the course of a day: yet what could she do to break this dismal habit or take its place? Repair her clothes? Well, there were nylons to wash, and probably hems to let down or take up. If she looked hard she might find a bit more mending. And then?
The house didn’t answer. It was very quiet. Pop had gone downtown for a cigar or a dozen eggs or a magazine, and Aunt Norah was resting, her door closed. Except for a humming in the kitchen—the refrigerator or the heater or something like that—there wasn’t a noise. It was a strain for a girl whose ears had become attuned to New York streets. She might turn on the radio; scraps of music heard that way sometimes comforted her. But at other times they just seemed to make it worse when they stopped and she realized where she was. Oh, duty could be dull.
She looked out of the window and saw two little boys industriously raking leaves on the lawn. In the street, where the gutter ran furiously in rainy weather, they had built a bonfire of their collection. The flames looked pale in the early afternoon light, yellowish-orange instead of the red you expected of fire, and under the leaves the dying grass glittered with moisture. Indoors the air was still and warm and sleepy. Out there the little boys’ breath steamed, and they looked rosy and alive. Francie obeyed an impulse; she put on her coat and ran out to help with the leaves.
“We can do it all right ourselves,” said the bigger of the two, dubiously. “And there’re only two rakes. We’re being paid for this by the hour.”
Francie felt somewhat let down. “I tell you what I can do, then,” she said. “I’ll get my broom and sweep the sidewalk. Okay?”
Evidently this would not impair their contract, and they consented. For a while everything went pleasantly enough: the autumn wind was crisp and refreshing as she had known it would be. Little by little, with the rhythmic swishing of the broom, she slipped into a nostalgic mood. It was on such a day as this that she would often start out, bundled in her winter clothes, to go to a football game with the gang. Even when it was this cold, even when it was colder, they liked to keep the top down and drive fast in the wind, with their silly flags fluttering alongside the car, and herself squeezed into the front seat behind the windshield, her Glenn driving and somebody else on her other side: possibly somebody in her lap as well. Squeals and giggles and shouted wisecracks were all lost in space as they speeded to the game. And then afterward they would all rush for the Chocolate Shoppe and eat waffles and drink hot cocoa until their toes were thawed out and their noses less red and runny.… Jefferson had been fun. But they were all grown up now. The girls wore hats and attended tea parties and talked like ladies. And the boys …
“Why, Francie!”
The voice was familiar, evoking a number of confused memories. Francie looked up and brushed hair out of her eyes, her fingers clumsy in their mittens.
“Mrs. Stevens!” she cried, and nearly blushed. She felt as if her thoughts might be visible on her face, for certainly in an indirect way she had been thinking of Mrs. Stevens,
Glenn had been Francie’s special friend all through school. It wouldn’t be accurate to call him her boy friend. The words together have a special connotation. Girls with boy friends are on the telephone with them at least once every day. They go out together on Saturday night, they may possibly do their lessons together, they have private dates whenever the boy can afford it, and they hold hands unabashed in company. Glenn and Francie weren’t like that exactly.
Yes, there had been moments when they assumed, and their world assumed with them, that they belonged together. Glenn’s fraternity pin had been a case in point. That pin traveled a lot. Mostly Francie wore it. After a while she invariably gave it back, when she was in a fury about something Glenn had said about her hair or her manners; then they would make up and she would accept it again. And at other times, Glenn gave it to some other girl. Indeed, another girl had worn it for nearly a whole semester. (Did she herself have it now, by any chance, tucked away in her handkerchief box? Quite possibly. Suddenly she had outgrown that preoccupation with fraternity pins.)
Talking to Mrs. Stevens she hurriedly marshaled what she knew of Glenn now, from Ruth and Aunt Norah: it wouldn’t please his mother if she wasn’t up to date. Glenn had gone in for law while she was frittering away her time in Europe. Aloud she said, “What’s the news of Glenn? I’ve owed him a letter, I’m afraid, ever since last Christmas-card days.”
Mrs. Stevens’ face lit up the way mothers’ faces do when their children are mentioned. “He loves San Francisco,” she said, “simply loves it. He’s with his uncle there, you know. We hope he’ll come back after he’s finished his training. I’m sure he would have sent his love, Francie, if he’d known you were here. He was always devoted to you.”
“Oh, it was the other way around, Mrs. Stevens. I adored Glenn!”
And in a funny way, she realized as she spoke, that was terribly true. Glenn was a part of school, and Jefferson, and the smell of burning leaves and all that sort of thing. And more. She’d been thinking of him underneath the other thoughts whenever she saw a new generation of students rushing by happily in their open cars, or when she went past the Chocolate Shoppe and smelled that indescribable odor of ice-cream sodas and hot melted fudge. The country club with its dining room that was turned into a dance floor on Saturday night. The swimming pool. Halloween.… It had been fun, and Glenn had been a large part of the good times. All of a sudden she missed him a lot more than she’d been admitting to herself. She said good-by to Mrs. Stevens and stood for a minute on the pavement, holding the bro
om and watching the older woman as she went on down the street.
“Please, ma’am,” said the bigger little boy, “we’ve finished the fire; it’s out.”
“I ought to be doing something useful,” said Francie. The family was at lunch. Her painting things had arrived that morning, and she’d set them up and then looked at a lot of the work she had done in the last few years.
“Useful?” Aunt Norah was surprised. “You’ve been useful all morning. Never stopped a minute as far as I could see.”
“Oh, that. I meant something outside. Like collecting funds for the deserving poor, the way these other girls are all doing, or painting posters for church bazaars. Surely there is a church bazaar in the making?” asked Francie half-seriously. “Maybe there’s something I could do at the veterans’ hospital. Such an enormous building! We drove past the other day. There must be so many—well, I guess I wouldn’t be terribly good at reading to them. Or whatever.” She paused. “The thing is, I’m going over to Ruth’s this afternoon and she makes me feel as if there ought to be more in my life than there is. I mean, she’s so terribly busy about that baby!”
Aunt Norah laughed and said, “Young mothers! I’ve seen so many of them. They do tend to be self-righteous.”
Pop hadn’t seemed to be listening to the women’s chatter, but now he said, “Don’t worry, chicken; you’re all right.”
Francie didn’t reply. She was afraid of giving concern to these two very kind, dear people. But the fact was, she did worry, and she wasn’t all right. A letter from Penny that morning had made her more restless than ever. Penny, one of her closest friends, was an English girl she had met at school, now happily embarked on a career in New York, learning about stage managing. It was the kind of thing Francie had always expected to do. This life was her duty of course, but so unconstructive! She was neither fish nor fowl, neither career girl like Penny nor wife like Ruth.
