Growing Up Ivy

by Peggy Dymond Leavey

  “Suit yourself,” Charlie said, “but it’s likely two miles, at least.”

  Early the next morning, Ivy joined the procession of pickers carrying pails and baskets and picnic lunches along the road to Elders’ berry farm. Whatever the job, there were always more than enough workers to fill it.

  Charlie, coming from the opposite direction, met her about halfway. He’d rigged a wooden crate to the back fender of his bike and filled it with empty fruit baskets. Ivy declined his invitation to ride the rest of the way on the handlebars.

  She quickly discovered that picking strawberries was hot work, and she was glad she’d rolled up her long hair and tied it with a scarf. In spite of the heat and having to bend over the low plants to find the fruit hanging underneath, the berries were the size of small plums, and it didn’t take long for Ivy and Charlie to fill all their baskets.

  After dropping off Maud’s berries and telling her that Elders would take a dozen eggs in exchange, they delivered the rest to Mrs. Coon and collected their pay for the morning’s work.

  Charlie had brought with him a pocketful of assorted screws to repair the gate at the Chalmers’s place.

  “It’s only temporary,” he said, when Maud came out to inspect the job.

  “Seems it is, every time it gets fixed,” said Maud.

  “That’s ’cos the wood where the hinges are attached is rotten and should be replaced,” said Charlie. “I’ll see if I can find some pieces at home that would do the trick.”

  Ivy’s grandmother went into the house and returned with a glass of water for him. When Charlie saw that she had put some ice chips in it, he felt as if he’d passed some sort of test.

  On Friday, Charlie told Ivy that he had to work his regular job at the golf course the next day and would not be going berry picking. Unfortunately, it was going to be the last weekend for the strawberries. They were getting smaller and harder to find due to the lack of rain, and the Elders wanted to use their own pickers for the last of the crop.

  Ivy went out to the berry farm herself on Saturday, chatting with some of the other women as they moved slowly down the rows. She stayed just until she’d picked what she could carry back herself.

  “We’ll be opening again in a couple of weeks for the raspberries,” Mr. Elder explained as Ivy counted out what she owed him. “Come back then, but be sure to wear long sleeves. The canes are real prickly.”

  Ivy told him that she would be back. After today, she was two dollars closer to that typewriter.

  ***

  Harry Pike had some good news for Charlie when he met his young caddy at the golf course that Saturday. “Floyd says to come round the repair shop when you can, son, and you can talk to him about helping him out. There likely won’t be much in the way of money, but you can learn the ropes, see if it’s what you want to do.”

  “That’s good enough for me,” Charlie said.

  While dropping off the berries to Mrs. Coon yesterday, he’d learned that in September he could take over for Delbert, delivering groceries on his bike. The six dollars a week the job paid would suffice until the repair shop could afford to pay him a wage.

  The round of golf over, Charlie lifted Mr. Pike’s bag of clubs into the car for him. A gust of wind caught the newspaper the man had left on the seat, sending it out into the parking lot. Charlie scurried after it, scooping up pages and trying to put it all back together again.

  “Take it if you want it,” Mr. Pike said, with a wave of his hand. “That paper’s a week old. I want to drive with the windows down anyway, and it’ll just blow all over the place.”

  Charlie forgot the paper in his bike carrier when he got home, and it wasn’t until Sunday morning that he noticed it there. He brought it inside to give to his aunt.

  Rena Bayliss hadn’t spared the nickel it took to buy a newspaper in some time. She immediately spread the Mail & Empire out on the dining room table and sat down to read.

  She was still there an hour later when Charlie came into the room and began rummaging through the drawers in the sideboard, looking for a pencil to mark the measurements on the pieces of wood he needed for the gate at Maud Chalmers’s place.

  “That’s odd.” Rena leaned closer to the paper in front of her. “I wonder if it can be the same person.”

  “Who can?” asked Charlie, jamming a finger into his mouth. He’d speared it on an old pincushion that had been hidden in the drawer.

  “This person in a play over at Port Clear — Frances Chalmers.”

  Charlie wasn’t listening.

  “That’s exactly the same name as that girl your father married — after your mother died.”

  “My stepfather, you mean.” Charlie shoved everything back into the drawer and pushed it shut. “His last name was Chalmers? I never knew that.”

  Rena nodded, without looking up. “Did I never mention it? Well, it’s not important. He wasn’t in our lives for long. I just met him the one time, after Dottie’s funeral.”

  She turned to the next page. “Lots of people have the same last name. It’s likely not her at all. Your stepfather called her Frannie or something, and that’s usually short for Frances.”

  Rena refolded the newspaper and set it behind her on the sideboard. “Enough time wasted for now,” she said, getting to her feet. “I’ve got that old sweater to unravel. Knit us up some good, warm socks.”

  Before Rena was even out of the room, Charlie snatched up the paper and scoured its pages till he found what his aunt had been reading.

  It was an advertisement: Frances Chalmers, starring as Norah, the lead role in a play called A Doll’s House. She was part of a touring summer theatre troupe currently performing in Port Clear.

  Because he’d never been aware of his stepfather’s family name until now, Ivy’s name had not rung any bells for him. But he did know, because Ivy had told him, that her mother was a stage actress named Frances Chalmers.

  Could this actress, now appearing in Port Clear, be the woman Ivy had been waiting for, for so long? And more important to him, could Ivy’s mother and the woman his stepfather had married after his own mother died, be the same person? Or was that just too much of a coincidence?

  Charlie sat back against the chair. That would mean that his stepfather was Ivy Chalmers’s father, the shoe peddler. Holy smoke! He and Ivy could be some sort of distant relatives!

  Charlie tore the ad from the paper and slipped it into the pocket of his shirt. Then he went back to the barn and began sawing the boards for Maud Chalmers’s gate.

  ***

  Maud put an end to Charlie’s theory of connectivity with her usual lack of grace. “Practically family? Nonsense! You two are not related in any sense of the word.”

  She’d known that Alva had brought Dottie’s child back to its grandparents, where it belonged, after the young woman’s untimely death. But how was she to know that child would turn out to be young Charlie Bayliss?

  “I always thought Alva told me Dottie’s name was Bailey,” she said, in her own defence.

  And who would have guessed that Charlie would start coming around here, on the flimsiest of excuses, to see Alva’s girl, Ivy?

  Now, sitting in her rocking chair on the porch, watching how deftly Charlie trimmed away the punky wood and fitted the new sections into the gate, she found that she rather liked the idea of having him as her step-grandson.

  Ivy, crouched on the front steps, had read the advertisement until she could recite it from memory, and with each reading, the level of her anxiety grew. There was no doubt in her mind that this was Frannie. Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House, had been one of her mother’s favourites.

  But the paper that had printed the ad was already a week old. Frannie’s play would end its Port Clear run this Sunday.

  “I remember the strangest dream I had that summer I spen
t with Papa,” Ivy said. “In my dream I was looking everywhere for Momma, but then she came and told me not to try to find her. I wasn’t even looking for her then.”

  Maud pleated the apron on her lap with nervous fingers. “Could be some folks don’t want to be found.”

  “But I’ve got to try, Grandmother. You know that I do. It was just a silly dream. I have to go to her, now that I know where she is.”

  Port Clear wasn’t that far away, and Ivy could get there by bus. She’d use her strawberry money to pay for her ticket. Forget the secondhand typewriter, this was her mother — and so close at hand.

  “I can’t lose her again. She’ll only be there till the end of the week. Who knows where she’ll go after that?”

  Maud realized that there would be no stopping her, but she was equally sure that the girl was headed for another disappointment. She told Charlie as much, while the two of them were searching the shelves in the back shed for a bit of paint to touch up the new wood on the gate.

  “You know, I’ll be eighteen next month,” Charlie said. “I could go with her, if you’d feel better about it. That is, if Ivy agrees.”

  In the end, that was the only way Maud would allow it.

  25

  Finding Frances Chalmers

  Charlie cycled into Larkin on Thursday morning, well ahead of the bus’s scheduled departure for Port Clear. He had a stop to make before he met Ivy, and he didn’t want to risk her seeing what it was that he carried in the crate on the back of his bike.

  When Charlie came through the door of Floyd’s Repair Shop, the owner looked up from the toaster he was rewiring. “Mr. Bayliss,” the man said, “I thought I asked you to come in next week.”

  “You did, sir. But I have something I’d like you to take a look at.” Charlie set a rigid black case on the counter, right under the man’s nose.

  Floyd Hutchins, possessed of the same need as Charlie to know how things worked, set aside his pliers. Releasing the catch on the case, he lifted the lid to reveal a small typewriter, its carriage folded down over the keys.

  When Charlie had first seen it on the desk in Mr. Fennell’s upstairs office, he had paid little attention to the case with CORONA 3 stamped on the lid. It was only when he got thinking about what it was that Ivy was saving her pennies for that he remembered the case, and went back to see if it was still there. He found it still sitting on the swivel chair, where the couple who’d bought the desk had set it.

  Suddenly, he knew that this was what he would accept from Mr. Fennell’s personal belongings.

  “Hope you didn’t go putting oil on this.” Floyd Hutchins, fingers down in amongst the type bars, looked over the top of his spectacles at Charlie. “’Cos if you did, I’m going to have one heck of a time unclogging it.”

  “I didn’t,” Charlie said. “I know someone who really needs this typewriter, so I didn’t want to mess with it. I thought I’d better have you check it over.”

  “Nice little machine,” Hutchins said, after a few seconds’ further inspection. “Very handy how the front of that case folds out. You can use the machine while it’s still inside.

  “That bit of string there, see it? It goes from the main spring to the carriage, and it’s broken. That’s your problem.”

  Floyd Hutchins pushed his spectacles up over his bushy eyebrows and turned his gaze on the lanky youth on the other side of the counter. “This is something you could do yourself, Mr. Bayliss — you’ve got those long fingers.

  “If there’s nothing else I need you to do when you come in next week, you could work on this. I’ll tell you everything you need to know. Then, with a little cleaning and dusting, it’ll be ready for your friend.”

  He closed the case and slid the typewriter onto the shelf behind him, returning his attention to the toaster.

  Charlie wandered around the shop for a few minutes, looking at the worktable filled with manuals, the tools and equipment for repairing radios, and the various items awaiting the repairman.

  “You familiar with radios, Mr. Bayliss?” Hutchins saw Charlie pick up one of the vacuum tubes and examine it closely.

  “No, sir,” Charlie said. “We’ve never had electricity on the farm. My friend Delbert has a radio, though. I’ve listened to the programs at his place. I sure would like to know how it works.”

  “There’s a lot more to it than Amos ‘n’ Andy,” Floyd Hutchins said. “Anything else, Mr. Bayliss?”

  “I guess not. I’m just trying to get an idea of the kinds of jobs you do here. Hope to have my own repair business one day.”

  “Better wait till there’s enough work to keep us both alive,” Hutchins said.

  ***

  Ivy and Charlie were the only ones waiting for the noon bus at the gas station in town that day. Charlie drew lines in the dirt with the side of his shoe and hoped he’d be able to keep his secret about the typewriter until it was ready to present to her.

  Ivy paced, playing with the clasp on her purse, surprised at how nervous she was. She’d been preparing for this reunion with her mother for three years, yet now that it was at hand, she found that her stomach was queasy, as if she were about to give a recitation in front of a roomful of strangers.

  The bus to Port Clear and points west was almost full, but Ivy and Charlie found seats kitty-corner across the aisle from each other.

  Ivy noticed that Charlie kept rubbing his hands on the knees of his baggy grey trousers and glancing back at her. What reason did he have to be anxious? she thought.

  With the announcement that the next stop would be Hardyville, the woman sitting beside Ivy stood up to retrieve her bags from the overhead rack. Ivy slid over next to the window.

  The bus stopped to let the woman off, and Charlie came to sit with her. “You all right?” he asked, aware of the grip she had on the purse in her lap and of her rigid posture.

  Ivy grimaced. “I guess so.” She wished she could relax. “I keep asking myself why — if my mother is well enough to go back on stage — she didn’t at least write to me. She’s been in Port Clear for two weeks. It really does look as if she plans on going home without getting in touch with me. Does she intend to leave me with my grandmother forever?”

  “Would that be so terrible?”

  “It would be nice to know, one way or the other.”

  “Well, you’ll have all the answers soon,” Charlie said. “And if it makes you feel so bad, try not to think about it. We could talk about something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “How about your father? You could tell me just about anything about him and I’d believe you. All’s I know for sure is that he was kind to my mother and me. And Aunt Rena said that after he got married again he came out to see me one time. But I didn’t remember him and he never visited us again.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Ivy. “Let me see now. Yes, Papa’s kind. And he’s generous, too. You know, Charlie, he’d have given you that pair of running shoes for free, if he thought you really needed them.”

  She was thoughtful for a moment. “If you met my father you’d find he doesn’t say much. You might think he’s shy, but he’s not. You should have seen him when those people in Birch Hills confronted us.

  “Sometimes I felt that Papa had this air of sadness about him. I think it’s because of the life he’s had. He’s the kind of man that keeps a lot of things to himself, anyway. Maybe he never met anyone who was interested in hearing what was on his mind.”

  “Until you came along,” Charlie said. “Next time he comes to visit you, I’d sure like to meet him. Properly, this time.”

  “You’re going to be one big surprise, Charlie Bayliss,” Ivy said, smiling. The tension in her shoulders had eased; the change of subject had helped.

  Opening the bag lunch that Maud had packed for them, she handed Charlie one of the
hard-boiled eggs. She unwrapped an oatmeal cookie for herself, but when it was still lying in her lap, untouched, as the bus pulled in to Port Clear, Charlie offered to eat it for her.

  They stepped off the bus in the centre of a small town that hugged the shore of a picturesque bay. Sunlight danced on the water. A banner, strung across the main street, announced a summer festival of plays and band concerts.

  The Port Clear Theatre was a peeling clapboard building next to the town dock. It reminded them both of Willards’ Dance Hall back in Larkin. The back half of the weathered structure stood on tall piers in the water, allowing boaters to tie up underneath. A side door opened onto the wharf and an adjacent park with a bandshell.

  Neither Ivy nor Charlie had tickets for Frannie’s play, nor did they have enough money to buy them. But Ivy was not worried. She had no doubt that she would get into the theatre to see her mother. The name “Frances Chalmers” would be the password that opened the doors for her.

  The two stood in front of the theatre and studied the schedule of performances tacked behind the glass of the display case. There was a one o’clock matinee and an evening show at seven. Since the matinee had started a half-hour ago, they would wait till the final curtain and catch up with Frannie when she left the theatre.

  “It says that A Doll’s House is a three-act play,” Ivy said. “They likely have an intermission before the last act. The actors might even step outside for a bit of air, and if they do, they’ll probably use that door on the side.”

  With no other choice but to wait for that to happen, they wandered into the park and sat down on a bench where they could keep an eye on both the front and side doors.

  Charlie ate the last of the lunch and then strolled, by himself, along the main street, returning to tell Ivy that there was a café across the road where they could buy a cold drink or a hot dog.

  “You go,” Ivy said. “I’ll stay here and keep watch.”

  As soon as the front door of the theatre opened, signalling the end of the matinee, Ivy hurried from the park to get a closer look at the people exiting the building.