“The farmers?” Nell had read about the ones who’d invested heavily in equipment and land during the war. But postwar Europe wasn’t buying their goods. Prices had fallen, and banks were folding.
Nell remained with Juliet the whole day, leaving only to prepare supper for Hilly. Eudora and Ed arrived at five, bearing Juliet’s dinner. Eudora was wan with shock, Ed’s color unnaturally high. Fine red veins laced his nose and cheeks, and he stumbled carrying dinner into the kitchen.
At Laurence’s funeral, the minister read from the Book of Common Prayer: “In the midst of life we are in death.” Oh, God, yes, Nell thought. And the longer we live, the more is it so.
Larry Lundeen, enrolled at St. Olaf College in Northfield but home for the funeral, wanted to leave school to help his grandmother.
“You’re all I have,” he told her. “Let me look after you.”
“I won’t hear of it,” Juliet said. “If I don’t have the businesses to worry me, I’ll grieve myself to death.” She patted his hand. “Besides, I’m tough as nails.”
Nell’s circle was reducing itself to widows and orphans. Before the month was out, Ed Barnstable, too, was gone.
“I’m feeling very old today,” Eudora said one day as she, Nell, and Juliet slid into a booth at the Loon Cafe and ordered coffee and doughnuts. “I don’t want to hear anything about liver pills, Mentholatum, or cascara—at least nothing more than is absolutely necessary.”
“Well,” Juliet said, “I have news.”
“It had better be pleasant,” Eudora told her.
Juliet stirred cream into her coffee. “I’m going to sell the house on Catalpa and build a new little place for myself.”
“What on earth . . .” Eudora turned to face her friend.
“The house is too big and too full of memories. Right now, I can’t indulge myself with memories. I have a bank to tend to.”
“I think it’s a wonderful idea,” Nell said. “What you need now is something . . . fun, and what could be more fun than planning a new nest?”
“New” was a concept Eudora was not altogether comfortable with, but Nell’s point was well taken and Eudora raised her cup in salute.
As they sat ordering coffee refills and a second round of doughnuts, they were perfectly aware that Harvester might look askance at recent widows being out in public enjoying themselves, but each woman had an increasing sense of Time with a capital T.
When Nell had seen Hilly to bed that evening, she sat reading Jill the Reckless by the light of the new floor lamp from Best Ever Furniture. Mr. Wodehouse’s children were forever young, their days forever haloed in sunlight, their time forever Now. She prayed for more Now with her own friends.
chapter forty-eight
“LUCKY LINDY” crossed the Atlantic in an aeroplane in May 1927. In August, Nell received a baccalaureate degree from Mankato State Teachers College. Though the two events were hardly equivalent, Nell allowed herself jubilation at her accomplishment but felt only apprehensive admiration for the flight. I’m one of the folks who happily continued making buggy whips after Ford came out with the Model T, she thought.
Before leaving Mankato, she browsed for an hour in a department store, selecting three new and daringly short dresses. From there she continued along Front Street to Lady Barbara’s Beauty Salon. In the chair, she pulled the pins from her hair and said, “Give me a bob.”
The hairdresser regarded her with doubt. “Are you sure?” She lifted Nell’s thick, waist-length hair in her hands and peered in the mirror. “Last week, a woman was in here telling me that she dreams her hair is long again, and when she wakes up, she cries, wishing it back.”
Nell shook her head. “Give me a bob.”
As anticipated, the first note after her return to Harvester told her: “you look like a whore.” The writer had finally added the w, Nell noted, and tried to dismiss the message. But the words robbed her of the buoyancy she’d felt hanging the three new dresses in the closet. Damn you! Leave me my small pleasures.
But the least change was usually cause for notice and speculation in a village. Had she met a man at college? Each day, Nell expected to hear Aunt Martha on the stairs, come to ferret out some truth. Instead, one afternoon, she opened the door to Agatha, Aunt Martha’s dogsbody.
“Mrs. Stillman,” the woman said, “I’m Agatha, your aunt’s companion.”
“Yes, come in.”
Agatha was a woman with little to distinguish her, apart from a dime-sized brown mole on her chin. As she sat on the daybed, the springs squawked beneath her.
“It’s old and cranky. Like Aunt Martha,” Nell said. The other woman covered her smile with a cotton-gloved hand.
“What can I do for you?” Nell asked.
“Mrs. Stillman is down in bed, and I thought you oughta know.”
“Has she seen Dr. Gray?”
“He says it’s the dropsy. She has fluid around the heart.” Agatha hesitated. “The two of you haven’t always seen eye to eye, I think.” She gave Nell a look of modest inquiry.
“Understatement,” Nell said. “But of course I’ll start coming by if you think she’d want it.”
“She hasn’t got a lot of friends. The sodality ladies come for half an hour, once a week. And Father Gerrold stops by. Not what you’d call entertainment.” Again, the gloved hand to the mouth, as if she’d been naughty.
“Do you think she’d like me to read to her?”
Agatha considered. “If it was something light. She might enjoy that.”
Over the fall and into winter, Nell called on Martha twice a week, initially bringing The Inimitable Jeeves. Happily, Martha found Wodehouse amusing, frequently laughing aloud. This could occasion a coughing spell but did not prevent her from waving a handkerchief and ordering Nell to continue. The wealth and aristocratic titles sprinkled throughout many of the books tickled Martha; in truth, she was not interested in the books chronicling the impecunious.
At the end of a visit in early December, Agatha told Nell, “Dr. Gray was here yesterday.”
“What does he say?”
“Told me he doesn’t expect her to last the winter. Her lungs are filling.”
Nell pulled on her gloves. “I suspected.”
“She hasn’t had a happy life.”
Nell paused.
“One night she was having a spell. Thought she was dying.” Something in Agatha longed to be the keeper of Martha’s story, the doler-out of it. Payment for thankless labor.
“She started talking. What you might call reminiscing. Said she hadn’t been happy since she was a girl. Married the wrong man. She was sweet on his brother but was afraid he wasn’t going to ask her, so she went ahead and accepted . . .”
Agatha glanced over her shoulder as if Martha might wander down the stairs. “. . . Bernard. Then, after she’d married him, she found out t’other one’d bought her a ring.
“Nearly did away with herself, she said. Would’ve if she hadn’t been Catholic.”
“I never knew Bernard had a brother,” Nell said.
“Over t’ Wisconsin.”
On New Year’s Eve, Nell was attending a card party at the Grays but dropped in at Martha’s first. The old woman drifted in and out of awareness but seemed to be getting the gist as Nell read from My Man Jeeves.
“‘Jeeves,’ I said. It was next day, and I was back in the old flat, lying in the old armchair, with my feet upon the good old table. I had just come from seeing dear old Rocky off to his country cottage, and an hour before he had seen his aunt off to whatever hamlet it was that she was the curse of. . . .”
“Nell,” Martha interrupted, “where do we go when we die?”
Nell had not expected this question, not from her aunt. “I think we go where we long to be.”
A watery cough racked the aunt. “And can we be young?”
“We can be what we want to be.”
The old woman died the next day. The following week Apollo Shane phoned. “There’s a small bequ
est for you in Mrs. Bernard Stillman’s will, Nell.”
“Martha barely tolerated me.”
“Well,” he laughed, “it’s only five hundred dollars.”
The bulk of Martha’s estate went to St. Boniface Catholic Church for a new organ, a new kitchen, a new roof for the parsonage, and new concrete steps and balustrade. Martha might not know where she was headed, but she wasn’t taking any chances.
Martha’s house, however, went to Agatha, along with two thousand dollars and the Ford. As John would say, “I’ll be damned.”
chapter forty-nine
AGATHA M. NIGHTINGALE—her full name—took possession of Aunt Martha’s house in a passionate swoop, renting out rooms to two schoolteachers and commandeering Martha’s bedroom with no qualms about sleeping in a deathbed.
After years of taking orders, Agatha finally knew ownership and independence. But since two thousand dollars would not last a lifetime, Agatha had plans.
“Mrs. Stillman,” she said to Nell one day, “I’ve taken it into my head to write something about your . . . about Martha.”
“Surely not a tribute.”
“More like a short story. About her life and, you know, the one that got away. Of course I’d give her a fictitious name, but I’d tell the story pretty much as she told it to me. Kind of a deathbed revelation.”
“And you would write this for . . . ?” Nell studied her surprising guest.
“Well, maybe for a ladies’ magazine? Except, my English could use some help. I’d need someone to, you know, correct it.”
“Editing.” Yet Nell had noted an improvement in Agatha’s English just since Martha’s death. With her new life, Agatha was sloughing traits acquired for her former role, including that simpery habit of covering her smiles.
“And if I sold the story, why, I’d pay the person who edited it some kind of percentage. What do you think . . . ten percent?”
“Well, it would depend on how much work the piece needed. If it were a great deal, I think fifteen percent would be fairer.”
“Hmmm. Yes, I can see that.” Agatha nodded, absorbing this. “But I wouldn’t want anyone to know I needed help. I’d like to be the celebrity, you understand?”
“Entirely.”
The long and short of it, as Bertie Wooster would say, was that Nell, no writer herself, agreed to edit the piece—if it ever saw the light of day, which seemed doubtful. But a week later, Agatha turned up with a dozen pages.
“I drove over to St. Bridget and bought a typewriter,” she explained. “I don’t guess magazines will want handwritten stories.” She hesitated. “Should I come back tomorrow night, when you’ve had a chance to read it?”
Nell sat down with an inner groan to read “A Deathbed Tale,” by Agatha M. Nightingale. Hardly deathless prose, raw and unschooled—but Agatha’s story carried one along. And no one would identify Aunt Martha as a Chicago dowager of storied wealth living in a mansion on Lake Michigan. Nor Agatha, refashioned as the raven-haired, undervalued beauty, Bella Browning.
Editing Agatha’s work turned out to be great fun. The story was shamelessly florid, with a good deal of velvet and satin, strings of diamonds and yards of pearls, but somehow that was its charm.
The next evening, Agatha announced, “I’m sending it to The Woman’s Home Journal; what do you think?”
“Why not?”
Several weeks later, flushed and out of breath, Agatha appeared at Nell’s door, arm braced against the jamb.
“Woman’s Home Journal bought the story!” she wheezed, clutching her side. “Four hundred dollars! And they want to know if I have more.” And after years of yes-ma’aming doctors’ wives and bankers’ wives and the Aunt Marthas of this world, indeed Agatha had plenty more.
Her Woman’s Home Journal debut was front-page news in the Standard Ledger, complete with a photo from Eversol’s Photographic Studio (retouched to eliminate the brown chin mole)—all under the headline “In Our Midst, a Celebrity.”
For the next year, nearly every issue of the Journal boasted “A New Story from Agatha M. Nightingale.” Agatha signed a two-year contract with an option to renew—nobody was going to steal Miss Nightingale away!
Nell could hear John laughing. You women are the cat’s pajamas.
Agatha’s stories survived even the stock-market crash of 1929. In fact, their absurd escapism made them more popular than ever. So, while Harvester teachers took a ten percent pay cut during hard times, Nell’s fifteen percent editor’s fee cushioned the blow.
Meanwhile, Agatha blossomed in the role of Prominent Authoress. By 1930 she was sporting a Tyrolean hat and had taken to tweeds and a walking stick. When people tittered as she sailed out of Lundeens’, she took it as a tribute. To leave a wake was her fondest desire.
“Her stuff’s pure drivel,” Eudora said on the telephone, “but I admire her spirit. Look at the way she took hold of her life! It’s an example to all women. If only I were that resourceful.”
This was Eudora’s first reference to an insolvency Nell had begun to suspect. Meanwhile, young Ed Barnstable was attending the University of Minnesota, and, to his mother’s horror, taking a degree in veterinary science. Still, Nell thought, he and his mother might be comfortable yet—he could make a decent living in this farm community, provided President Hoover lifted the nation out of its economic morass.
Nell also worried about Juliet, who was guiding the Lundeen enterprises. At seventy-three, she was showing the strain of foreclosures.
When Nell stopped at the bank after school one Wednesday, Juliet emerged from her office, hailing, “The very person! You’ve saved me a call.” She removed her glasses and rubbed her eyelids. “I’m taking you and Eudora to lunch at the St. Bridget Hotel Saturday. And I won’t take no for an answer.”
Noting the bruise-color half-circles under Juliet’s eyes, Nell agreed.
Seated in the hotel dining room, the three women spread linen napkins across their laps and sipped ice water from stemmed glasses. The genius of the dining room was that it changed so little from decade to decade: the oil portraits, candle sconces, and the liveried waiters were just as they had been when John treated Hilly and young Larry to dinner.
“Juliet, you look dreadful,” Eudora said.
“You’ve lost weight yourself,” Juliet countered, smiling. She set her handbag on the floor. “I’m tired of being a banker. I have a heavy stone in my stomach, and it’s called ‘Foreclosure.’
“But it’s nothing compared with what those people are going through,” she added. “Can you imagine watching everything you’ve worked for being auctioned off at ten cents on the dollar? The pain, the mortification?”
In 1933 Larry Lundeen packed up the life he’d built in New York and the watercolors with which he’d eked out survival. It was time to join his grandmother, who would never grow old, but had grown exhausted. Three months later, Juliet was dead.
After the funeral, Dr. Gray confessed to Eudora, “The stroke was a blessing. She was full of intestinal cancer.”
“And its name was Foreclosure,” Eudora said.
Following the service, Nell walked home from the Methodist Church, turning down an invitation to stop at Eudora’s for a glass of sherry. Eudora nodded. They’d talk another day. Now they each needed to think about this particular loss.
Female confidantes like Juliet—women whose moral judgments went beyond the conventional—were not thick on the ground. Juliet had never judged Nell for loving John outside marriage and had never scorned Elvira for her pregnancy. It was Juliet and Laurence who had come to Nell after Herbert’s death, almost literally saving her life.
Nell wondered now, as she had for some time: should she have told Juliet that there was a grandchild in California? But it hadn’t been her story to tell, and Elvira had withheld it.
At the apartment, Hilly waited for her. He was reading The Railway Children, a book Juliet had given him. The spine was broken, the pages smeared with heaven knew what, some of them d
impled where tears had wet them.
Removing her hat and gloves, Nell told him, “I think I’ll lie down a while before supper.” She was physically exhausted by Juliet’s death. As she lay staring at the wallpapered ceiling, she found in its random white-on-white pattern portals through which she could escape and often did. On this afternoon, one of the portals—there, to the left—led her down a busy city street and into a park where she sat enjoying a Wodehouse novel. With the distant tolling of Big Ben, she recognized the city for London.
A man inquired, “May I?” before joining her on the bench. “I find the park pleasantest at this twilight hour. What is it the French call it? L’heure bleu.” His manner was such that Nell decided he was not a masher—merely friendly.
She closed the book. “Yes. I like the way the trees turn black as the sun silhouettes them.”
“You’re reading Very Good, Jeeves. Are you enjoying it?”
“You might as well ask a child if she enjoys ice cream. I’m madly in love with Jeeves. If I ever met him, I’d chase him till he said yes.”
The gentleman chuckled. “I’m happy to hear it.”
“I think I own every book Mr. Wodehouse has written.”
“I say.”
“I give his books to friends who’re sick, or sick at heart. They’re medicine.”
“I can’t let you go on. I’m embarrassed. I should have introduced myself. My name is Wodehouse. . . .”
Juliet had willed everything to Larry except the house on Second Avenue. That she gave to the village for a library, along with an endowment for a decade’s upkeep and salary for a librarian—Eudora Barnstable. As usual, Juliet had acted while Providence dithered.
chapter fifty
AT FIFTY-SEVEN, Nell felt orphaned. It was the price one paid for having older friends. They went their way; you remained in place.
Nell, Eudora, and the Grays were the tattered remnants of a hundred card parties, New Year’s Eves, and long afternoons at the lake. Dr. Gray was taking partial retirement, inviting in a new man, Dr. White. Gray to White, Nell mused. The old order passeth.
Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse Page 22
