Mrs. Mike

by Benedict Freedman

  "I TELL you, I left it in my room." I paused on the stairs uncertain whether or not I should go down. I didn't like Miss Ivy. She spoke in a shrill excited way, and since she had been paying Mother five dollars a week it seemed that her voice had gone up another octave. Mother'd already seen me, so I walked on down.

  "I'm sure you've mislaid it," Mother was saying.

  "Good Heavens, is something missing?" I asked.

  Miss Ivy ignored me. "I couldn't have mislaid all three of them."

  "Three of what?" I asked.

  "The Atlantic Monthly," my mother explained. "She saves them, and now she can't find the last two issues, and—"

  " 'Can't find' is one way of putting it. Why I never even laid eyes on this month's copy. That is, just barely. I hate to accuse anyone in this house, Mrs. O'Fallon, but it seems plain that someone has entered my room, and do you know, I had left a gold ring on the wash stand. It was just fortunate they didn't see it."

  My mother looked very pale and very angry. "I refuse to listen to such insinuations. There's been nobody in your room except myself, to clean. And I think it's just possible that in clearing up after you, I threw out the papers you're missing. If I did, it's your own fault for keeping the room in such a litter."

  "Litter! Well, I like that! Not only is there no privacy here but—"

  I mumbled something about going down to the corner and shut the door on Miss Ivy's list of injuries. It was good to get off by myself and not have to look at graveyards and Emerson's home or Julia Howe's or Booth's or anybody's, but just wander without bothering to go anywhere.

  There were bicycles on the street, but not many. Mostly there were shining black motorcars that honked impatiently at nervous, traffic-leery horses in blinders.

  I hesitated which way to go. I'd seen the downtown district with its steel and cut stone and marble. I'd walked along the Back Bay Fens and wondered why the houses all had their backs to the water. So now I turned toward Beacon Hill. I looked in through tall iron gates at expanses of green lawns, at stone mansions. I passed brick walls that towered over me and imagined the lawns and the houses. I caught glimpses of wonderful flower beds and shaded walks. Once some elegant young ladies were playing croquet and missing the wickets. Once a gardener nodded to me, and I nodded back.

  From the other side of a fence a black spaniel kept pace with me, barking. I laughed when I thought of this little dog beside my Juno, or imagined his shrill yelp lifted against the baying of a deep-chested wolf.

  It was getting awfully warm. I felt hot and thirsty, and there was nothing around me but estates. Well, I thought, I guess they can spare a glass of water. I had to walk another quarter of a mile to find one that had no wall. I turned in at the driveway past all the "Private" and "No Trespassing" signs.

  Rows of flowers lined the drive. They were beautiful, but you hadn't the pleasure of hunting for wild violets under their leaves. These violets were planted to be looked at. There were no surprises, either; in the pansy row there were pansies, and in the jonquil row, jonquils.

  The drive took me up to a gigantic stone house, very massive and very ugly. I hesitated about which door to knock at. I wasn't going to go around to the back, yet I didn't like the looks of the front door. I just knew it would be opened by a butler or a maid in a frilly cap. I decided to try the side door. But I might as well have saved myself the walk, for it was opened by an elderly man in evening dress, white gloves, and a green striped shirt who lifted one eyebrow, a trick I had practiced but never perfected.

  "You wished something?"

  "A glass of water, please. I'm thirsty."

  "I'm terribly sorry, Miss, but didn't you notice the signs? Madame would not—"

  "All right." I walked down the steps.

  "But if you're really thirsty—"

  "Never mind." I walked back the long flowered path and back the five miles to Mother's. I couldn't understand. The water was free, it was supplied by the city. I thought of the hundreds of trappers' cabins throughout the Northwest, the doors left open, the food there for you, the wood cut and stacked.

  When I got home I found they were waiting lunch for me. Mother was in the parlor adding and re-adding the items deductible from her taxes. In keeping house, I had never had to bother about rent, mortgages, taxes, assessments, any of those things.

  Anna Frances told me to hurry down, everyone was hungry, and she was putting on the toast.

  As I washed my hands and face I noticed that they needed it, which proved there was as much dirt on Beacon Hill as any other part of the city. The thought restored my spirits.

  A wail from Anna Frances brought me to the head of the stairs. "Oh, Mother, weren't you watching the toast?"

  "Why, no. You put it on, dear."

  I ran down. Everyone was at the table. I slid into my place, but not quickly enough. My sister waved a black square of scorched toast at me.

  "You could have hurried. I told you I was putting it on."

  Mr. Monts turned to Miss Ivy. "She's always burning the toast."

  "I've never made toast in this house before, so I don't know how I possibly could have burnt any."

  "Why don't you scrape it off?" Mother asked. "It's not so bad when the black part's scraped off."

  "Oh, it's no use!" Anna Frances carried the toast into the kitchen and dropped it into the sink.

  Mrs. Ellison shook her head. "It's wicked to waste food like that."

  "I took a walk to Beacon Hill," I said, smiling around on everyone. But it didn't work because Miss Ivy, who had sat drumming her fingers on the table in an effort to think, said suddenly, "You did too make toast, Anna Frances. It was three weeks ago Friday, when that young gentleman friend of yours was at the house." Then, turning to Mr. Monts, "I knew she had. And you're right, she burnt it then too."

  "It's not the burning of it," Mrs. Ellison said, "it's the waste."

  "If toast can't be a light, even brown," Mr. Monts grumbled, "it's better to eat bread."

  Anna Frances began to cry.

  "For Heaven's sake!" I said, jumping up so hard my chair fell on the floor. "All she did was burn a piece of toast. So you'll go without—or if you must have toast, you'll toast it yourselves."

  "We don't have kitchen privileges," Mrs. Monts said haughtily.

  Mother said, "Sit down, Katie." And I would have, but just then Miss Ivy began fanning herself and saying the smoke from the burnt toast in the kitchen was just reaching her, that it was making her ill. That she was sensitive to smoke.

  What would she have done, I wondered, if she had stood all day in the river with her skin blistering? That smoke she couldn't have waved away with her hand.

  I turned from the table and the faces of the boarders. With a third of a village dead there hadn't been this much commotion. When you've seen bodies lifted from the wells and root cellars that were charred as black as the toast they complained about, when you've seen little Tommy Henderson with his skin flaking off in cinders, and then hear the same words that describe those memories describe the smell of a kitchen or the condition of a gas range—then you realize many things. I knew now how alien these people were to me, how different their whole pattern of thought. Even my mother and sister were irrevocably separated from me. They could never know any part of my life up there. They could never know my children or my husband.

  My husband. That was why I was crying. I'd been seeing Mike as I'd seen him last, standing alone against the Northwest. I understood now. It was the country, the country I was homesick and longing for, that made him Sergeant Mike Flannigan. I'd been unjust, I'd been wrong. I knew it now, and I had to tell him. I had to have his arm around me and his voice telling me the wonderful things about the stars and wolf dung. But mostly I had to explain, to get him to understand the things that had piled up in me. I had to tell him that after the children died I thought I couldn't stand it, that I had to get away.

  * * *

  "But the only t
hing I can't stand is not being with you, not being yours again. Mike, you must let me come back into my own place. I'll never leave you again. I couldn't, you're my life, this is my life ..." And I spread my arms taking in the miles of endless snow.

  He met me at the train. He had put bells on the dogs. Wrapped in a buffalo robe was a little new Juno the Second, whose eyes were hardly open yet. And the big Juno, the team leader, had almost broken the traces to get at me.

  And now I was beside Mike in the cutter. Mike! His voice was low and choked up. He'd start to say things, and then he'd stop and just look at me. Then I'd forget what I was saying and just look at him. After a while I told him about Boston and the boarders. He laughed when I came to the toast and said, "When little things are so important, it's because there aren't any big ones."

  "But everything's big here. Why, look at those firs and all the miles between things, and, and—look at you," I added. His arm tightened around me.

  I tried to tell him how wrong and confused I'd been about everything. But he wouldn't let me. He kept kissing me, over and between and through all the words. He was so good to me and wonderful that it made me cry. I cried, too, because of his lonely nights with no children and no Kathy. My tears turned to sleet, and Mike had to stop and wipe my face.

  "Mike, promise me, we'll live together all our lives and never be away from each other."

  He held me. The reins dropped, and Juno had to pick her own way.

  "We'll start over, won't we, Mike?"

  "Sure." And he made me imitate Miss Ivy again.

  I had to know all about Sarah and Constance and Timmy and old Georges and the McTavishes, and could you get more things at the store with the train so close.

  All of Boston now seemed as unreal to me as the plays I'd seen there. After landscapes that were trimmed and raked and pruned into existence, it was thrilling to skim across unbounded open country. The snow shone and sparkled. The sun struck here and there among the fine particles, touching them with cold fire. I didn't think how beautiful it was. I thought how many times I had watched it before. And now for the first time it was familiar; I recognized it just as I recognized the way the air smelled.

  Mike had been watching me, and now he said, "How does it seem to be home, Kathy?"

  That's it, it was home.

  That night at Sawarage I woke myself up to make sure I wasn't dreaming, that Mike was really beside me. I kissed the pillow close up near his cheek because I didn't want to wake him. He opened one eye and grinned at me.

  "Don't waste 'em, kitten."

  It wasn't until late the next day that we got home. Icy branches arched like crystal domes above the cabin.

  "There's nothing so fine in all of Boston." I jumped out of the sled and ran up on the porch, but Mike got to the door first.

  "Listen, Kathy. It's in a bit of a mess. At first glance it won't look very good. I guess I'm not much of a housekeeper."

  "Don't be silly," I said. "It can all be straightened out." Mike looked dubious, so I prepared myself for the worst and pushed the door open.

  The house was scrubbed, polished and shining. I looked at Mike to see if he had been joking, but one glance at his face convinced me that he hadn't. Everything was in its place, and on the table was a steaming hot dinner.

  Just then I heard the back door close. We ran to the kitchen in time to see Sarah striding off. We called to her, and she raised her arm above her head to show she heard. But she wouldn't call back or even turn to look at me.

  Coming from the crowding, pushing, noisy world, I was impressed again by the delicacy of the Indian women. Sarah did not understand politeness; she understood that we must be alone— that this return was Mike's and mine.

  Twenty-seven

  August 1914, and war. Mike got the news by telegraph the eighteenth of the month, but we had known it was coming since the fourth, when Britain had declared herself at war. It seemed strange that guns we couldn't hear and events we knew nothing of could reach into our remote settlement—but here and there men left their trap lines, sold their equipment, and rode the train into Edmonton.

  It was by train that we got our month-old newspapers. We read them and were shocked, as the rest of the world had been weeks before. The news we received by telegraph in cold, blunt statements made it hard to picture blocked roads of streaming refugees and armies like juggernauts closing in. But these first war editions blazed with atrocities and published photographs of blurred dead bodies and emaciated living ones. I had never seen such tension and excitement as they caused. There were fifteen or twenty people waiting their turn at each copy.

  More deserted trap lines, more secondhand equipment to be bought cheap at the store. Timmy came to say good-bye and to ask Mike to look after his pony.

  I couldn't help saying to him, "Tim, think of your mother."

  "Father'll be with her. Besides, Paul, my brother in Edmonton, has enlisted, and he's got a wife. Besides, I have to go."

  I looked at Tim, a young man now. I sighed and kissed him. The pony whinnied and nickered, and Timmy turned to wave. He wrote to Constance from Camp Valertier, from Quebec, from England, then from St. Nazaire, France. Mike and I got a postcard of the Loire River and one of a cathedral.

  By the end of winter I had delivered five wires, "Missing in action," "Killed in action." I took them on snowshoes into the village and twice off to lonely cabins. I never said anything. I always tried to. But when I handed over the envelope, a man died. Even before it was unsealed, he died. There are no words against death. Death just is.

  Sarah came into the office one day.

  "Make me a cup of tea, Mrs. Mike."

  That very ordinary request frightened me, for in all the time I'd known her Sarah had never asked anything of anyone. I put the water on and sat with her. Mike worked at the desk without looking up. I wondered if Sarah was ill. The water bubbled. I added the tea and let it simmer.

  "Will you have some?" I asked Mike, but he shook his head and I poured only two cups. Sarah drank slowly and steadily.

  "More?" I asked, getting up.

  "No. It is enough." Then abruptly, "Constance's girl, Madeleine, she have babies, she die."

  "Madeleine died?"

  "I take two babies from her. She bleed. I make it stop outside, but inside she still bleed."

  I watched Mike lay down his pen. "She had twins?" he asked.

  "Yes. A boy and a girl."

  No one said anything. We sat and drank tea. Mike returned to his ledger. It grew dark.

  Three hours later the telegraph began to click, that click I had come to associate with death. It almost seemed as if we had been waiting for it. Sarah raised her head and watched Mike closely as he copied the message.

  "MARCH 27—MR. AND MRS. GEORGES BEAUCLAIRE . . . REGRET TO INFORM YOU . . . KILLED IN ACTION ..."

  Mike stood up. "I'll take it over."

  "No, I'll take it." He handed me the telegram. I wanted to crumple it, destroy it, tear the words to pieces. "I'll take it to Constance." I turned to Sarah. "Does she know about Madeleine?"

  Sarah nodded. "She was with her. By now she home."

  "Why? Why does it happen like this? Why both together and why to Constance?"

  Before they could answer me, I went out. I knew there was no answer, and I didn't want any more of that silence.

  Poor Constance, mother of sorrows. Already she was grieving, and then I'd come. But it might help her if it's me, I said to myself. Maybe she'll cry or say something then. It was strange: two taken and two given. Twins. No one had suspected it would be twins, not even Sarah.

  Finally I was there. I knocked and went in. She came toward me.

  "Constance ..."

  I was going to prepare her, to say wise and gentle things, but all I could do was to hold out the telegram. She stood looking at it, but she wouldn't take it. I put it on the corner of the table. I was glad to look away from those violet eyes, from the marble fa
ce.

  She spoke through stiff lips, "Which one?"

  "Paul," I said.

  Next spring it was Timmy, and again I carried it to her. It felt unreal. I had done it all before. I couldn't be doing it now. She was preparing the babies' bottles; she turned to me smiling and saying, "Kathy."

  I stood there where I had stood in the winter, by the corner of the table. Under my hand lay the first wire. It was unopened and thick with dust. She had never touched it. I put the second wire on top of the first and went out without looking at her. I guess it helped her not to have to see it written. Words made you know. They made it harder to dream and pretend. I know all about dreaming and pretending. Sometimes at night I still held Mary Aroon and Ralph in my arms.

  It suddenly seemed strange to me, that silence about the dead. Mike and I never spoke of our children. All this time I had drawn back from any reminder of them. I had forced my thoughts away, flinching if they got too close. Only recently had I allowed myself to think of them, and the pleasure had been more than the pain.

  Now suddenly I wanted to laugh with Mike again about the time Mary Aroon got her head stuck in the porch railing. It had been awful getting her out, and later, when I was telling Oh-Be-Joyful about it, Mary Aroon put her head in all over again to show how it had happened. When we told Mike at dinner he had all he could do to keep her from going through still another demonstration.

  I almost wanted to go back to Constance and tell her that after a while she would be able to think of Timmy, and each time the hurt would be less. Then I remembered her families, her lost families of children, and I felt ashamed. The day my own two had died, on the way to the village, she had tried to tell me something, had started to say something. It was this, of course. I smiled and told myself, "Katherine Mary, you are like a baby that is so pleased with himself for standing up that he doesn't notice anyone else has learned to stand too."

  Mike was staring out the window. Timmy's little cayuse stood in the pasture with her nose laid along the fence. Mike walked to the stove and knocked the ashes from his pipe into it.

  "Sarah was here. I don't know how the devil she knew, but she asked about Tim."