So I went in. Then there was another very sticky patch because she didn’t think to ask me to sit down, being still convinced I must have come on a specific errand and would explain it any minute. By now I was longing to be back in my room and out of this. Fortunately, I’d forgot to let go of my wrist. I was still clutching the skinned place—and considering my embarrassment, I wouldn’t be surprised if I had an expression of acute pain on my face. Anyway, Miss Heater frowned and said, “Have you hurt yourself?”
I took my hand away, and we both looked at my wrist, which had obligingly turned red and angry-looking.
“Why, my dear! How did you do that? I’ll get a Band-Aid,” Miss Heater said, and began to bustle. I protested feebly, but she overrode me and found Band-Aids and iodine, with which she insisted on daubing my wound. This effectively took my mind off my other problems for a few excruciating moments; then she waved me to a chair and sat down herself, meanwhile telling me all about the first-aid course she’d taken during the war. After a moment she broke off, looking embarrassed. “My goodness, here I am chattering away, and you haven’t even said what you came for.” She smiled her flustered, nervous smile, but in the middle of it got to looking at me rather keenly and added, in quite a different tone, “Why did you come, my dear?”
I thought of telling her I’d just come to borrow a Band-Aid—it would have been so convenient and logical. Instead, I heard myself telling the truth. “I just wanted to talk to somebody. I guess I’m lonesome.”
“Are you. Why—I’m so glad you came to me. I feel very flattered.”
She meant it. She turned a faint pink—very becoming—and looked as if I’d given her an unexpected present, which perhaps I had.
I said, “You were so nice to me that time . . . I just thought—if you weren’t doing anything special—”
“I’m almost never doing anything special,” she said frankly.
That made us friends. We began to talk quite naturally—not about Georgetta’s relatives—and within five or ten minutes she’d brought up that knit shop she’d had ten years before. “I just loved working. It didn’t seem like work, you know—I suppose because it was my shop. Half mine, anyway.”
“Oh. You had a partner?”
“Yes.” She studied her hands, as if perhaps she didn’t want to talk about that, then rather jerkily went on. “She—we went broke. The shop never made much money—we had the wrong location. It might have, in time, but . . . well, we couldn’t save it. We’d borrowed money from the bank to start it—buy our yarns and furnishings, and take a five-year lease, and all that. And—when the end came, she just walked out. Went back to Chicago. I’ve had to pay the loan off all by myself.”
“But—my word, how could she do that? Couldn’t she be arrested or something?”
“She never signed the note,” Miss Heater said bitterly. “I did. I never dreamed it would matter. She’d been my closest friend for years.”
For a minute I felt so sorry for her that I couldn’t find a word to say. It was a quite appalling story, I thought. I finally muttered, “That’s a terrible thing.”
Miss Heater smiled with an effort. “Yes. Yes, it was. I’d put all my savings into the business, besides, and lost it all. My brother warned me we were starting too ambitiously—investing too much. He was right. I guess I wasn’t a very good businesswoman.”
“How long did it take you to pay off the loan?”
“I’m still paying it.” Ten years later. She explained: at first she’d done well to pay the interest; finally, she’d found part-time work; lately, her Social Security had helped. “My brother offered to help me, too, but that wouldn’t be right. The debt is my responsibility. It was my mistake.”
Something rang a bell in my mind. “How much is left to pay?” I asked cautiously.
“Just under four thousand dollars. It was seven.”
Four thousand dollars. The light of intelligence belatedly dawned. Why had I thought Mrs. Dunningham owed Miss Heater money? Miss Heater owed the bank. The legacy was meant to pay off this debt for her. Now she wouldn’t get it. Not if Uncle Frosty won his case, which I’d been trying all summer to help him do.
I must have looked a bit aghast, because Miss Heater sat up straight and said, “For goodness’ sake! This is a fine way to cheer you up—tell you all my woes! Look here, I’ll make us a cup of cocoa. Would you like that?”
She began to bustle around her little hot plate, while I tried for a suitably cheered-up expression. We exchanged small talk while the chocolate bubbled; then as she was bringing me my cup, she stopped to pull down the window blind and instead stood still a moment, looking out into the dark back garden and shaking her head a bit. I looked and saw the round beam of an electric torch moving here and there among the rosebushes.
“It’s Mrs. Hockins,” Miss Heater said, with a sad little “tsk-tsk” noise. “Now there’s a woman with far worse trouble than mine. Talk about lonesome.” She pulled down the blind, handed me my cup, and fetched her own as she went on. “That poor woman is utterly lonely. Lost her husband and her son on the same day—automobile accident. Twelve years ago, it was, but she’s never got over it. She ought to move away, you know. Everyone tells her. But she won’t—she lived all her married life in that house, and I guess the associations are all she has left. But that’s exactly what makes it so hard. She can hardly bear to be in the house. Wanders around outdoors instead—if she didn’t have her roses, I don’t know what she’d do. Even in the winter rains she’s out there walking around. She’ll catch her death one of these times. It’s really so sad.”
So the plastic canopy was explained. And from Mrs. Hockins it was simple to get to Mrs. Dunningham.
“Oh, yes,” Miss Heater said. “Mrs. Dunningham was wonderful to her. Mrs. Dunningham was wonderful to everybody. We all miss—” She stopped.
I smiled at her. “You aren’t going to hurt my feelings, Miss Heater. She sounds wonderful. She wasn’t sad about anything, was she?”
“Well—I don’t know.” Miss Heater stirred her chocolate thoughtfully. “There was a kind of look in her eyes. I think she’d seen plenty of unhappiness but just—put it behind her, you know. She was a strong person. But I don’t think she’d had a very happy life—from a few things she said.”
“Like what?”
“Oh—well, once she told me—we were talking about my debt, and security, and so on—and she said she thought security was too highly rated. Said she married to find security and get free of her early life—‘Get out of my cage,’ was the way she put it—but that she’d only got caught more firmly in another cage, and security wasn’t worth it. She told me security wasn’t what I wanted; it was freedom—freedom from the debt, you know. She said she understood that, all right, because when all was said and done, freedom was the only prize worth having.”
And there was Mrs. Dunningham being pithy again, and talking about freedom again, too. I said, “Did she have any children? Or had they died, like Mrs. Hockins’ son?”
Miss Heater blinked, frowned, and said finally, “You know, I’m just not sure. Odd. I knew her quite well, too. I don’t think she ever mentioned any.”
And there I was, with the same old answer. It depressed me so that Miss Heater started worrying about my wrist again.
It wasn’t until I was back in my room, wearily undressing for the second time that evening, that I asked myself why I was so depressed by that same old answer when I should have felt delighted every time I got it. The more people who never heard Mrs. Dunningham mention her daughter, the stronger Uncle Frosty’s case became.
The answer was easy. I didn’t want it to be strong. I wanted it to fall flatter than a bad soufflé before it even started. At some moment in these last weeks, I’d moved over to the legatees’ side, utterly and absolutely—anyway to Mrs. Dunningham’s side. If she was a crazy old lady, then I was a crazy young lady,
and wanted to stay that way. The more I heard of her, the saner she sounded. She’d even understood about traps; she’d been in one herself. She called them cages, but we meant the same thing. I’d have given anything to talk to her.
Too late for that now—but not too late, I told myself grimly, to help her do what she’d intended with her money. It was going to be a shock to Uncle Frosty to learn he’d been harboring a turncoat in his bosom, but I couldn’t help it—I meant to scotch his case if I could. And—it dawned on me as I was pulling my pajama top over my head—I’d have to do it fast.
I yanked the pajama top down, to the ruination of my coiffure, and went over to look at my desk calendar. July 25—a Thursday—my usual day off, but I’d swapped with Rose, who was all but going steady with her dentist now. I’d be off Sunday, uncomfortably soon to go see Uncle Frosty; my case was far from complete, to say nothing of his. Yet also uncomfortably close was August 2, when he and Mona would leave for Mexico. On their return, the summer and my three-month Nirvana would be nearly over.
I dug my journal out from among my nylons and browsed through it to see what I actually had found out. Jolly little about Mr. Bruce and Dave Kulka. Nothing about Mrs. Dunningham’s attitude toward money or Mr. Mulvaney’s motives in bringing her to College Street. I flipped to a fresh page, rapidly noted down the information I’d gleaned from Miss Heater that evening, and finished the entry:
Above all, I must learn if Mrs. D. ever mentioned that daughter of hers—I’ve still several legatees to ask. If she did, to even one person, Uncle F.’s case loses its best legal leg, and mine (mine and the legatees’) is practically won. So somehow, in the next six days, I must tackle Dave, Dr. Edmonds, Mrs. Hockins, Mr. Bruce, and Brick Mulvaney, even if all I do is ask them that one question.
As it turned out, that was the last entry I ever made.
4
Greensleeves
1
I woke up the next day still full of urgency and turncoat determination. And do you know, the entire day turned out to be perfectly blank—or it would have if I hadn’t got desperate at the end of it.
Nobody came in the Rainbow in the morning—simply nobody. Well, Sherry, of course, but I’d already asked him my question. In the middle of the noon rush, Dr. Edmonds and Dave Kulka appeared, only I couldn’t stop fetching and carrying long enough even to say hello, though I did overhear Dave say that he was off for the country at dawn tomorrow to gather weeds and wouldn’t be home till late. That made me frantic because it meant I wouldn’t get a chance at him until Sunday, if then.
The afternoon was devoid of spyees, information, and even hope.
It was about five o’clock when I got desperate and latched onto Mr. Bruce when he came to give me the new menus for dinner. I don’t remember how I dragged Mrs. Dunningham into the conversation—by the scruff of the neck, I expect—but somehow I managed to start talking about her, and doggedly kept on talking about her, without results until I remarked that she took great pains to make friends with people.
“Yes, she did,” Mr. Bruce said thoughtfully. “She was completely alone, you know. I think she needed friends.”
“Oh. No family?” I asked, feeling as though I’d scaled Mount Everest hand over hand.
Mr. Bruce gazed at me in his courteous, unrevealing way and said, “Not that she ever mentioned.”
“Well,” I said, gazing back at him.
Then suddenly there was Helen, asking something about the new pink tablecloth, and there went my hard-won conversation. I wanted badly to push on with it, too, because even though I’d gotten the same old answer, when Mr. Bruce said it, it didn’t seem quite the same old answer. It left me wondering if he suspected there was a family she hadn’t mentioned. Mr. Bruce always left me wondering something.
Saturday was worse than Friday. Mr. Bruce took Saturdays off, and Dr. Edmonds, who usually showed up, didn’t. I asked Sherry why not in an unintentionally exasperated voice that gained me a surprised look as well as the unwelcome information that Dr. Edmonds was spending the day at the library. Saturday evening brought nothing, not even Mrs. Hockins out into her rose beds, and I simply did not have sufficient brass to go knocking at her door.
Then came Sunday and my much-needed holiday. I felt like sleeping till noon, but prodded myself up at ten. As I was eating breakfast, I heard the back screen door bang, and Dave Kulka walked out across the yard. I left my toast in mid-bite and in ten seconds was out the door myself. I didn’t plan any compaign at all, which was reckless of me, but I was feeling reckless. My sole thought was that Mr. Dave Kulka was going to talk to me whether he wanted to or not, and he was going to give me some information for a change. He’d vanished into the little shed behind Sherry’s boardinghouse next door, presumably to get his gardening tools, and when he came out, there I was.
“Good morning,” I said belligerently. No use being Georgetta with him any longer; he’d just tell me to come off it.
He seemed surprised, then amused. “Hi. What can I do for you?”
“You can answer some questions.”
He looked me over, still amused—arrogant as ever—and propped himself comfortably on his spade handle. “OK. Shoot.”
I drew a long breath and said, “Why are you so interested in weeds?”
I don’t know what he’d expected, but not that. He actually forgot to act superior for a minute; he forgot to answer, too.
“Why are you?” I insisted.
“You really want to know?”
“Yes, I really want to know.”
“All right,” he said, straightening and tossing the spade aside. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
He took hold of my arm to turn me back toward the house. For some reason I recoiled as if he’d burned me, then felt perfectly idiotic because he stopped and looked me over again, one eyebrow raised above his black Italianate eye and that mouth of his with its cleft lower lip slowly curving at the corners.
“You hurt my wrist,” I muttered, showing him the Band-Aid.
We both knew he hadn’t touched my wrist, but he merely said, “I’m not going to eat you. I’m going to show you something in my room.”
He pointed to the top of the house, and I nodded as carelessly as I could manage and started for the back door. Nothing whatever occurred to me to say on the way through the narrow little back hall or all the way up two flights of stairs, and he was not one to make chatty conversation, so we merely climbed in silence, arriving eventually in a very small, square hall leading into the only room on the third floor.
The room itself was huge, brownish, rambling, and dim, with steeply sloping ceilings and several deep-set dormers. It was, in fact, the attic, with all the angles and complications of the whole roof defined in reverse, and a lot of cobwebby waste space under the farthest eaves where only a cat could have stood upright. Under the south dormer was a narrow camp bed, neatly made up with old army blankets, and near it a battered chest of drawers and a row of hooks from which a few nondescript garments hung. The remaining usable space was given over to artists’ paraphernalia. The largest casement stood wide open to the back garden, and above it a skylight had been let into the ceiling, so that a fair-sized space was bathed in clear daylight. This space was littered with easels, drawing boards, an old paint-smeared table, Mason jars full of brushes and pens, some sheets of copper, and stacks and stacks of drawings. There were drawings tacked everywhere on the walls, too. All of weeds. All delicately and intricately drawn, yet with a crisp simplicity that reminded me a bit of Japanese prints. Many were duplicates, some only half finished, as if they were preliminary tries at something he was working to achieve. One rickety table held a conglomeration of jam pots, beer cans, and fruit tins all filled with earth and little transplanted weeds, carefully segregated as to kind.
“I collected those yesterday,” said Dave’s casual voice behind me. “I’ve only started to record them.”
He pointed to a couple of sketches on the floor beside a tabletop easel. A fresh sheet of drawing paper was fastened with drawing pins to the board; a glass of water containing one lone spray of tiny lavender flowers stood on the tall stool nearby. It was the spray in the sketches on the floor.
“Record?” I repeated. It seemed an unexpected word to use.
“Yeah. That’s what I’m doing, recording them. Can’t you see they’re not just pretty pictures?”
Both his words and his tone were rude, but I thought I understood why. I said, “I can see they’re a lot more than pretty. I think they’re superb.”
“They’re accurate, too,” Dave growled.
I faced him again and met a look like a blow from those black Renaissance eyes. Obviously, he was suddenly wishing me at the devil, instead of here in his private domain, seeing his private work in progress, his failures and first tries and repeated efforts—his private life. Thin-skinned, that’s what he was. Sensitive and quick-reacting as something with antennae. He hadn’t realized that showing me this room was going to mean showing me himself—and he was beginning to bristle all over.
“Yes, I can see they’re accurate,” I said.
“No you can’t. You don’t know anything about it.”
“All right, I don’t. But they look accurate, even to me. What I’d like to know—and I really would—is why it’s so important that they be accurate.”
He just stared hostilely at me a moment, no doubt trying to make up his mind whether to answer me or simply chuck me out. Then he said, “Ever hear of Audubon?”
“You mean that man who drew birds?”
“‘That man who drew birds!’” Dave mocked. “He recorded—brilliantly—all the known birds of North America. Nobody’s ever been able to touch him. There’ll never be better paintings of birds—or more exact ones. There’d never been anything like them before, either. He put birds on the map. He made everybody see how beautiful they were. And just as they were, without any sentimentalizing or exaggerating.”
Greensleeves Page 16
