Hannah, Divided

by Adele Griffin

  Granddad McNaughton spat over his shoulder. “Doubt on every color of the rainbow if you like, but we also both know what’s what. That’s why you steered Mrs. Sweet in my direction. I got stuck in Chadds Ford because nobody pushed me forward.” When he opened his eyes, their pale blue light had become twin embers of anger. “A country doctor. What I could have been! No, you need to learn to speak math with people who are fluent in it. You’ll rust out here, Hannah. You’re rusting already.”

  Hannah listened, though she had heard this speech a hundred times before. “I want to go and I don’t. I’m curious, but confused,” she admitted.

  “Bah!” Granddad retorted. “Curiosity expands us. And the way Mrs. Sweet explained it to me, if you get that scholarship, it sets you on a road that might even lead to a university education. Think of it, Hannah!”

  She nodded as her fingers tapped a pattern on the porch step. To Granddad, curiosity and knowledge were all that mattered.

  “Wipe that frown off your face a minute. I’ve got a riddle for you!” Granddad grinned. “If Hannah May Bennett opens her math book and finds that the sum of the facing pages was two hundred forty-one, what pages did she open to?”

  “Pages one twenty and one twenty-one,” Hannah answered promptly. She spit a watermelon seed in a perfect arc. “That’s too easy. Here’s one for you. Of fifty people at a picnic, forty-one like sardine sandwiches, thirty-five like cheese sandwiches, and thirty like both. How many like neither cheese nor sardines?”

  “That would be … four. Four remaining.” Granddad answered. Then he slapped his knee. “Aha, four. Your ma, your pa, Hepp, and Roy. I don’t know how it is those four can’t get a taste for either of our favorite sandwiches. And everyone knows that cheese and sardines are delicious together, too. Now scat, Hannah. Tell your folks they need to pay me a visit. Tell them I want a word.”

  “Yes, sir.” She tossed the watermelon rind into the box hedge, then stood and pecked Granddad’s cheek. Yet it seemed to her that she left holding the same bag of troubles she’d arrived with. All that Granddad had made clear was his own opinion, as usual.

  Ma was waiting for her at the crossroads. “Mrs. Sweet paid us another visit,” she said. “Seems she found a backer in your grandfather.”

  “I’m sorry, Ma,” said Hannah. “I really, truly am. I’ve been wild and sleepless with sorry. But it seemed only fair that this be Granddad’s business, too. I couldn’t stay quiet.”

  Ma shook her head. “What sort of nature do you have, Hannah, to go behind-hand against your parents?”

  Hannah swallowed hard. The right answer did not rise easily. “This is what Granddad’s always wanted for me. How could I keep it from him, especially with him feeling so low these days?”

  “Your grandfather …” Ma began, and Hannah was sure that Ma was on the verge of recollecting a story about her own youth, and Granddad’s remote parenting, the solitary hours he’d spent in his study, more preoccupied with work than family.

  But she didn’t. “Thirteen years old,” she said instead. “And here I thought Hepp was young to leave home at eighteen.” Her voice sounded small, defeated. Family meant everything to Ma, and for a moment Hannah wanted to throw her arms around her mother and tell her it was all just a lark, because of course she would never leave, of course she wouldn’t run away to Philadelphia simply on account of math. Math! Why, there was plenty of math right here in Chadds Ford. No, she did not have to go all the way to the city to get a proper math education.

  But even as Hannah thought it out, she knew it was not true. There was scant more math that Miss Cascade, or even Granddad, could teach her anymore.

  “I can always come back home,” Hannah said, “if things don’t work out. But at the very least, I owe Granddad a try.”

  Ma nodded, and they walked home in silence, uprooting bunches of watercress along the stream that marked their way. Boiled watercress was not as tasty as it was filling, but a quantity of salt and black pepper and butter made it bearable.

  When Ma spoke again, she was all business. “In Philadelphia, you’ll need to find a church to restore your faith come Sundays,” she said. “And promise you won’t listen to radio muck like Amos ‘n Andy. Nor any of those haunted-house programs, either, that you and Tru love.” She stopped to tug free a bunch of watercress, shaking rocks and soil from its roots. “I can’t conjecture how you’ll take to that city. You had better know, Hannah, even if you have Granddad’s support, your pa’s and my blessing is mixed.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “First Hepp, now you,” said Ma. “I keep faith it’s not for permanent, not with either of you. McNaughtons and Bennetts have lived in Chadds Ford since always.”

  “Of course I’ll come back, Ma,” protested Hannah. “I belong here.”

  But Ma was finished talking. Her eyes slid past Hannah to another patch of watercress and she picked her way toward it, leaving Hannah to trail behind.

  9. THE VIEW FROM BLOOM

  WITH THE EXCEPTION OF Granddad’s, Hannah had nobody’s full blessing. Not even Miss Cascade’s, as Mrs. Sweet had written a letter to her stating that all of the Wexler funding that might have gone to Brintons Bridge School now would be used toward Hannah’s semester of board and tuition.

  Miss Cascade had read the letter out loud to the class while Hannah sat hunched, her shoulders up near her ears and blood tingling in her face. Her teacher’s disappointment was worse than the students’ baffled grumbling, and Hannah felt like a crook, robbing her school-house of its treasures almost by accident.

  Home was hardly a relief. Roy had grown unbearable. He baited and goaded, then mocked her when she complained. “Ooh, stop it, stop it! I’m a scholarship girl now!” he would squeak while pressing the back of his hand to his forehead. But Hannah knew that behind it, he was hurt and sad. Roy hadn’t even finished missing Hepp, and here she was, two years younger than Roy and setting off on her own. Not to mention that she was leaving him to pick up the weight of her chores. Worst for Roy, she knew, was that here was another example of Granddad singling her out, aligning Hannah to his own ambitions.

  It would take some time to set things right with Roy.

  The evening before her departure, Hannah paid a final visit to the Applebee farm.

  “Mrs. Sweet called our telephone. She said don’t pack galoshes,” Tru reported. “When are your folks getting a telephone? It’s awfully convenient.”

  “Pa says it’s foofaraw.” Hannah looked down at her fringed-tongue oxfords, bought just last month for one dollar and seventy-eight cents at Nutley’s: “No galoshes? Boy, she’s discouraged me from bringing much of anything.”

  “I’d put dibs Mrs. Sweet wants to buy you minks and diamonds and trick you over into a real city girl. By Christmas, you might be the worst kind of snob.” Tru’s laugh had an edge to it. Then she reached out and squeezed Hannah’s hand. “Come into the front room and see what the Philco man brought us today!”

  In spite of all their financial strains, Tru confided to Hannah that her pa had taken another bank loan in order to purchase their brand-new, brass-and-walnut Philco-Transitone plus Inclined Sounding Board. The Applebees were fancy like that, always wanting the latest, newest things. It was almost a sickness with some people, Pa said.

  “The only radio scientifically designed as a musical instrument.” Hannah mimicked the advertising announcer’s voice as she tripped a finger across each beveled knob. One, two, three. Three, two, one. One, two three.

  “Stop your tapping. The Witches’ Tale comes on in five minutes,” Tru said. “Let’s listen, but this time, Hannah, you can’t act all scaredy-cat and foolish.”

  “I won’t, I swear.”

  Mrs. Applebee had prepared cherry Jell-O in glass dishes, and she let the girls take their dessert out to the side-porch swing. Tru turned up the volume so that they could hear the program through the open window.

  The fuzz of static soon was replaced by music, heavy and thunderous, followed by
the crash of a rainstorm. Hannah shivered in anticipation. “Skelly Oil now presents The Witches’ Tale. Written and produced by Alonzo Dean Cole,” intoned the announcer in his deep, spooky voice. “Let us now join Witch Magda and her black cat, Satan.”

  “Ooh, I see her! I see Witch Magda!” Hannah yelled.

  “Shh, don’t wreck it!” hissed Tru.

  Hannah shivered and tried to keep from wriggling as she listened to old Witch Magda cooking up her usual diabolical elixirs. Horrifying! She sneaked a peek across the Applebees’ dark pasture. The longer she listened, the easier she could see those hunchbacked witches. There, in the shadows, now swooping slap over the split rail!

  “I’ve got here a potion to melt the flesh of my worst enemies!” Witch Magda cawed as Hannah listened, delirious with dread. Oh, yes, she saw those witches perfectly! Black-robed, the warts on their chins as fat as gooseberries.

  She gave up. “Turn it off, oh, turn it off!” She set down her dish and jumped from the swing. Hands clapped to her ears, she sprinted off the porch, vaulting the stairs in a bound. “Let’s climb Bloom!”

  Bloom was Hannah and Tru’s pet name for the giant maple that grew in the Applebees’ front lawn. The girls had agreed long ago that it was the most magnificent climbing tree in the world. When she reached Bloom’s base, Hannah tore off her shoes and stockings, then jumped and caught the lowest branch, and swung herself up.

  Tru watched a moment, before she ducked into the house to snap off the radio. When she reappeared, she was wrenching off her shoes and running to Bloom.

  “It’s a sorry day when all it takes is a tin-pan rainstorm and a radio actress to put you up here!” Tru clucked her tongue as she wedged herself sidesaddle into one of the branches’ sturdy forks.

  “I’m safe in a tree.” Hannah looked up at the stars. “I like an autumn sky better than springtime, don’t you, Tru?” She pointed. “Look, there’s Cassiopeia.”

  “And Orion, there.”

  “And Sirius.”

  “And the Big Dipper.”

  “I wish I knew the math of stars,” said Hannah wistfully. “What energy they’re made of. What makes them burn.”

  “The view is enough for me.” Tru dropped her gaze from the sky. “Betsy and I bet you won’t last a month in the city, Hannah,” she said. “Who would understand you? My granny says it’s only when folks have known each other since birth that we make allowances for peculiarities.”

  “I’m not peculiar,” Hannah retorted.

  ‘“Course you are! What with your fingers always tapping how they do, and the way you shout out whatever’s in your head, whenever the mood hits!” exclaimed Tru. “There’s no polish to you, Hannah! Oh, don’t glare at me. Maybe I ought not have spoken so truthful. But, listen, I’ve got some luck to pass along about your precious thirty-two.” She grinned. “My uncle Frank told me that you can get thirty-two pounds of starch from a bushel of corn.”

  “That’s a good one, Tru!”

  Tru smiled. “See, Hannah? It’s when you’ve been friends as long as us that you can find the perfect gift.” She hugged herself tighter against the tree and sighed. “I do hope you meet a new friend,” she added after a thoughtful moment. “Temporarily, while you’re there, I mean. All it takes is one chum to make the world shrink to a comfortable size. Wouldn’t you say?”

  “I’d say!” Hannah agreed, though she had never given the idea much thought.

  PART TWO

  10. MUDTOWN

  SHE HAD GROWN UP hearing the whistle of this train, used by the larger dairies to transport milk from Chadds Ford to Media Junction and then on to Philadelphia. Never, though, had Hannah boarded one of the three attached passenger cars. From her seat at the window, she watched the countryside pass by. The train took its journey slow, chugging steadily to stop an interminable time, then chuffing onward again. The stations changed, but the landscape stayed the same, fields and hills dulled to dishwater colors by the overcast sky. She pressed her forehead to the glass and kept count of the trucks and tractors, horses and cows, barns and silos, and the odd automobile.

  In the last few minutes, the flow and curve of the country gave way to the city outskirts of storefronts and paved roads. Red brick and gray stone walls appeared solid before Hannah’s eyes. That’s when she stopped counting. Looked away. Now it that was grinding and whistling to a halt, the journey seemed all at once too quick.

  Filth-adelphia, Hannah heard a man complain as the train pulled to the wide, barren concourse that was Suburban Station. She kept her eyes on her shoes as the train stopped. Head bowed, she stood and collected her bag, and hurried down the stairs.

  Don’t look up, she warned herself. Not yet.

  Inside the echoing station, Hannah followed her feet to the nearest empty bench, where she opened her bag and reclaimed her pungent cheese-and-sardine sandwich. When she first had unpacked it to eat in the train, a young woman sitting opposite had wrinkled her nose and whispered something to the man next to her. Embarrassed, Hannah had hastily dropped the smelly sandwich into the bag’s side compartment alongside her thermos of milk, jam crackers, kerchief, hand towel, bottle of Listerine, cake of soap, and three Q-tips that Ma had deemed necessary for an all-day trip.

  Now Hannah closed her eyes and chewed hungrily. She recalled that morning’s good-byes, which had been strained and brief.

  “If I could spare myself, or even Roy for a day off the dairy, I’d do it,” Ma had fretted. “To settle you in.”

  “I’ll settle myself, Ma,” Hannah had reassured.

  From Pa: “Keep safe, be good.” Pa was inclined to go gruff when he felt a loss.

  And Roy had put in: “Don’t get yourself hit by a runaway truck.”

  The memory of Hepp’s departure weighed on all of them, Hannah knew. The mood was not helped when Granddad surprised them with a visit. Short of breath and leaning hard on his mottled sycamore cane, he had presented Hannah with a brass-and-rosewood ruler. “‘Hide not your talents, they for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade?’” he had quoted with a wink. “So says Poor Richard’s Almanac.”

  “Well, I knew that,” Roy had grumbled. “I was the one who got to be Ben Franklin.”

  “Make me proud, Hannah,” was the last thing Granddad told her. His hand had dropped heavy as a paperweight on her head. “You’re taking the chance we’ve both been waiting for.” His tone so smug that Pa had plucked his cap from its hook and stomped outside to wait in the truck.

  Now Hannah realized she was gripping the bag’s handle so hard that she could feel the beginning of a welt across her gloved palm. She released her hold, unbuckled the bag, and fumbled for the ruler. She tapped it, back and forth, end to end.

  “You, there. Yes, you. Are you the milkmaid I’m sent to fetch?”

  Hannah looked up. A boy who looked to be somewhere between her age and Roy’s was planted, arms crossed, in the space in front of her. He was shabbily dressed in a woolen jacket and an oversized cap that shaded his dark-skinned face. Italian, Hannah guessed. Or Black Irish, or something else. She stopped tapping, straightened, wiped her mouth with her fingers. Nodded yes, although she didn’t like this boy’s tone or being called milkmaid.

  “Christmas!” The boy pointed. “What’s that, a doctor’s bag?”

  “It belonged to my grandfather,” Hannah said.

  “And in it’s all you got?” The boy reached over and hefted its weight.

  “Mrs. Sweet said not to bring much.” Hannah stood and gave her hand for him to shake. “I am Hannah Bennett. Are you … hired by Mrs. Sweet?” she ventured.

  “Hired.” The boy scowled. “That’s called a presumption, you dumb bunny. My name’s Joe Elway.”

  “I didn’t mean to presume,” Hannah snapped back. “Just as I’m sure you didn’t mean to be nasty about it.”

  “Well, ’scuse me, country mouse.” Joe thrust the bag back into her hand. “This way to the hack stand. C’mon.”

  Hannah dropped her eyes to the
ground. Her oxfords, fresh-polished last night by Pa, smacked the wet sidewalk, and she wished she’d worn her galoshes. Rain had flooded the gutters and laid a thin skin of mud the color of chocolate milk on the pavement. She did not look up. On a glance, the city’s patterns were complex and unnatural. They confounded her.

  Instead, she counted her footsteps, the cracks in the sidewalk, the gurgle of horns, how many times Granddad McNaughton’s bag slapped her shin. She listened to the rain rapping the roof of her beret and she tapped a matching beat on the side of her leg.

  Joe whistled through his teeth, and Hannah looked up long enough see a yellow taxicab roaring toward them. In the next moment, it splashed water all over her shoes and skirt. She shrieked and jumped back. “You did that on purpose!”

  “Did not!” But Joe laughed delightedly. “A city stinks and shakes water everywhere when it gets wet. Same as a dog. Nothing you can do.” He opened the passenger door.

  Hannah slid into the automobile with some misgiving. She had been in her father’s truck on many occasions, and gone along on plenty of jaunts in the Applebees’ Ford, but never had she shared a ride with not one but two strangers. She steeled her eyes to her lap and wished Mrs. Sweet had come to collect her in person.

  “If you’d pick your beams off the ground a minute, I can point you out some sights along the way,” Joe said. He leaned up to speak to the driver. “We’re going to Delancey Place, but cut us up Market Street first, wouldja, pal?” He settled back and stretched his hands behind his head. “I’m more a bus-and-trolley man myself, but Mrs. Sweet told me to show you around. Even dropped me half a buck for traveling costs, so I got to honor her squandering. She’ll try to make us pals, only the truth is, milkmaid, I’m your public enemy number one. But I’ll fill you in on that later.”

  Hannah stared ahead and said nothing. This Joe Elway was worse than any boy in Miss Cascade’s class. Even worse than Elgin Winnicker, who liked to pick slugs from his mother’s lettuce patch and drop them down girls’ blouses.