Hannah, Divided

by Adele Griffin

  “Here we’re coming up on City Hall,” Joe continued. “Look, look out the window, wouldja? See the statue on top of that building? That’s Billy Perm, and no building is allowed to rise higher than his head. It’s the law. Cross the street and you’ve got your John Wanamaker’s, the department store, you must’ve heard of it, huh? Piece of the Renaissance in your own backyard—though I’m more of a skyscraper fella myself. Take this one, just went up. Look, wouldja look at it!” Joe rapped the window glass. “One Penn East. Twenty-seven stories high, polychrome, designed compliments of Ritter and Shay, the best architects this city’s known since Frank Furness. And if you’re keen on that, you should see the Packard Building! Well, all right, then, milkmaid, if you won’t give anything the up-and-down, we might as well stop wasting my time. Delancey Place, cabby. You can turn on Eighteenth.”

  Eighteen. Nine times two, or nine plus nine, or three times three times two, or three times six, or thirty-six divided by two. Eighteen was how many men survived the Magellan expedition. Eighteenth of April, 1906, was the day that a terrible earthquake shook San Francisco. Eighteen was powerful, and not necessarily lucky.

  After a few more minutes, Joe said, exasperated, “What are ya, homesick? You’re a real wet blanket, huh? Well, it’s not like I’m jumping out of my socks for you, either.”

  Hannah bristled. Wet blanket! Joe Elway talked as if he were one of Roy’s favorite Dick Tracy thugs. She smiled thinly and said nothing, but she made up her mind that she did not like him.

  11. DOLL FACE

  MRS. SWEET LIVED AT 5 Delancey Place, in a three-story townhouse. She seemed to attract odd numbers like a magnet. Her home was grand, with a large first-floor bay window and a brass doorknocker in the shape of a sharp-eyed fox. Hannah lifted her eyes long enough to appreciate the snug street of houses peppered with lacquered black shutters and fronted with fanlights and dormers and iron-railed stoops. As she faced the front door, her fingers reached out to tap the fox’s eyes. One, two. Two, one. One, two.

  Joe pushed her hand away and knocked, then stepped back and shouted, “Bev-er-leee!”

  From inside came a thud and a scurry and then the door was yanked open by a girl wearing a formal maid’s uniform that did not quite suit her mouse-nest hair and the coltish dangle of her arms and legs.

  “You know I hate it when you yell, Joe,” the girl scolded. “Come in from the rain. What’d I say about an umbrella?” She nodded at Hannah. “Let me take your coat and things. Oh, not your coat, Joe.” She yawned as she held out a hand for Hannah’s wet gloves, jacket, and beret:

  “Sleeping on the job, Miss Lingle?” Joe asked, tossing his jacket and cap for Beverly to catch. He winked at Hannah. “When she’s not pretending to dust around here, Beverly studies piano at the Academy. She’s another Sweet discovery. We’re hoping for great things, ain’t that right, chippy?”

  “Quit it, Joe. Lucky Mrs. Sweet is up in Boston, or she’d slap you sideways for talking to me that way,” said Beverly. “Cook’s off, and I’m chopping carrots for a beef stew, so you’ll have to play host. Take Hannah up to her room and settle her in, how about?” To Hannah, she said, “We’ll make better acquaintance over supper. When I’m not so rushed and rattled.”

  Before Hannah could answer, Beverly bounded off. Now Hannah caught a faint smell of simmering beef. Delectable. Beef stew must be a special Sunday treat.

  “C’mon,” said Joe. “You bunk down the hall from me, only I got a view and you don’t, but that’s how the cookie crumbles, doll face. This way.”

  Doll face! Not even Elgin or Roy was this irritating. Hannah gritted her teeth as she followed Joe across the foyer and up the two flights of polished pine stairs. Thirty-one steps in all, another odd number. Joe’s rapid-fire speech could not distract from Hannah’s astonishment at the details of Mrs. Sweet’s fine house; its parquet floors and papered walls and swaths of cranberry velvet window drapes that pulled back to reveal the wet world of granite and pavement below.

  But Joe demanded attention. His voice was loud, and he kept pivoting to catch Hannah’s eye as he spoke.

  “Most scholarship huckleberries settle in with ordinary families who live outside the city. But ole Sweet likes to keep an eye on her own investments,” he told her. “That’s not to say we’re a team. No sirree, it’s me against you, and us against all the other country rubes. We test for the Wexler cabbage before the end of December.

  “If you score big, you’ll ride free to some fancy school, which helps the universities sit up and take notice. If you turn out to be a dope, well, that’s another story. Back to the cow patch you go. Beverly’s seventeen, and she’s still a dope at everything but piano. She’s been Sweet’s pet this year, even though she flunked the last set of exams back in June. It’s no secret Sweet won’t board a kid longer than one semester, but Beverly’s hanging on for one more try. Full-time student in exchange for part-time scrubbing. Without Sweet, Beverly would have got the boot back to York last year. Ever been to York, Pennsylvania? No? Well, you wouldn’t want to return. Here you go, end of the hall. We’ll be sharing the crapper. It doesn’t got a lock, so you better learn to knock.” He did a short tap dance with this last sentence.

  Joe was not only rude, but also vulgar, Hannah decided. She turned her back and said nothing as she pushed open the door open on a room built plain as her bedroom at home. There was an iron bed, a desk and swivel chair, a narrow wooden bureau and matching wardrobe, and a window that looked out onto a wall of bricks. The softening touches—net drapes, the watercolor that hung from a tack on the wall, a fringed-shade lamp set crooked on the sunless sill—seemed to try too hard for pleasantness.

  “Sharp digs, eh?” Joe’s voice boomed in her ear. “Beverly’s on the ground floor, in the cook’s old room, since the cook is a five-day daily, but which five days depends on her whim. Beverly likes it ’cause it’s easy to sneak out with her regular beau, Charlie. That’s from my mouth to your ears. Say, don’t you want to know how much dough there is versus kids for the Wexler fund?”

  “Not really.”

  “Half as much.”

  “All right, then.”

  “It’s you against me. Like I said.” Joe lingered, whistling. He watched as Hannah took her ruler from her bag to measure and readjust the lamp so that it was centered on the windowsill.

  “That’ll be all, Joe, thank you,” Hannah said finally.

  Joe scowled, then grinned wolfishly and held out his hand, palm up. “Christmas! If you’re gonna treat me like a bellhop, you might as well tip me,” he said. “Make it worth my while. That is, unless you caught on how to handle your public enemy number one, milkmaid.” When she didn’t answer, Joe frowned, made a shallow bow, and shut the door. He was still whistling as he walked down the hall.

  Alone, Hannah felt all the fear she’d been holding back come to rest in an ache behind her eyes. She walked the edges of the room, tapping each corner. No view. A watermark on the ceiling and a scent of ammonia in the air. A cheeky boy across the hall instead of Roy—who could also be taxing, but was family, at least.

  On the bureau, she found a pen and pad of paper. There was a note from Mrs. Sweet on the top page, written in a wind-bent slant. She did her best to read it.

  Dear Hannah,

  I (something) not to be here. Joe will (something a something something) as host. My (something) for the (something). Becca will keep you (something). I’ll be home (something)!

  Teddy Sweet

  Becca will keep you … Mrs. Sweet must be referring to the little wooden doll wedged between the bed’s bolster pillows.

  Hannah went to the doll and picked it up. Becca was dressed in button-up shoes and a heavy gingham smock, and her yarn hair was tied in two plaits.

  Was it mockery? A country doll companion for a huckleberry farm girl? Or was Becca truly meant to be a comfort?

  Hannah tapped the corners of Becca’s artfully sewn patch pocket, then placed her in the bottom drawer of her bureau and shu
t it. Whatever Mrs. Sweet’s intention, she ought to realize that thirteen-year-old girls did not play with dolls.

  12. NO X, BUT PLENTY LEFT OVER

  NOBODY KNEW WHERE THE milk came from.

  “Germantown, I s’pose,” said Beverly when Hannah asked that evening. The three of them were gathered at the kitchen table for their beef stew supper. “The butter-and-egg man’s from Germantown. It’s top-notch, although they bring more than we need.”

  Hannah did not doubt it. There was too much to eat tonight. The stew contained chunks of beef, carrot, onion, and potato generous enough to cut with a fork and knife, and there was whipped syllabub for dessert. Hannah started on the beef, eating from least to greatest, and was only up to onions before she thought her stomach would pop, and yet she could not finish what was on her plate. Beverly, who seemed to be in a permanent state of hurried distraction, was also unable to finish her portion. Only Joe made everything disappear.

  Afterward, watching Beverly scrape the leftovers straight into the garbage bin, Hannah was appalled to see the amount of food wasted. At the farm, anything not eaten was saved in the ice chest for the next night, or fed to the animals, or put aside for the occasional wandering tramp who knew that the X marked on the Bennetts’ back door meant he could find hospitality and a warm supper inside.

  There was no X on Mrs. Sweet’s kitchen door. Hannah had checked. Was that because there were no hungry people in Philadelphia? She could not imagine a band of tramps ringing the bell at fashionable Delancey Place.

  “Mrs. Sweet asked me to deliver you to Ottley Friends tomorrow morning,” Beverly mentioned as they tidied the kitchen together, Joe having shot off as soon as he finished eating. “The school uniform—the gray jumper and middy—are hanging in your closet. We’ll walk, but we ought to leave by seven o’ clock prompt, and no oversleeping, please. I have a piano lesson at seven-thirty.”

  No oversleeping! Hannah had to roll her lips together to resist laughing. At her house, if she or Roy slept past five, they were called lazybones and got last breakfast dibs—bread heels and pan-burnt potato.

  She followed Beverly as she turned off the downstairs lights and locked the doors. “It’s quiet here most days,” Beverly explained. “There’s the radio in the pantry, but Mrs. Sweet discourages school-night listening. We each get to pick one show a week. Joe prefers The Lone Ranger, of course, and I skip between The Romance of Helen Trent and Lights Out, depending if I want tears or chills.”

  “Is there a Mr. Sweet?”

  “Died in the war. Best not to mention it. All right, we’re finished here. I’m going to the parlor to practice. I’ll try to play quiet so as not to disturb you, but it’s Bach, so I might get carried away. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  As Hannah reached the third floor landing, Joe’s bedroom door opened, and he poked his head out. “G’night, milkmaid,” he chimed, singsong. Then he made a mooing noise, stuck out his tongue, and snapped back into his room, turning the lock.

  Don’t provoke and you won’t be provoked. That’s what Ma would have said.

  Politeness counts. That’s what Miss Cascade would have said.

  Joe Elway needed to be taught a little lesson. That’s what Hannah decided. She went swiftly to her room and from her bag unearthed the tin of Miss du Fleur’s Elderberry Essence hair pomade that Betsy had given her for her last birthday. She used her handkerchief to rub a dollop of it onto Joe’s doorknob until it was slippery as a leg of mutton.

  Serves you right, she thought.

  Back in her room, Hannah unpacked and refolded and stacked or hung the few articles of clothing and personal items she had brought. She used her ruler to space her hairbrush, comb, and mirror, as well as to center the watercolor and throw rug.

  Finally, she paced the length of the room thirty-two times, touching each corner for luck.

  After she changed into her nightgown, brushed her teeth, and said her prayers, she slid into the too-soft bed that was not hers, and she closed her eyes against this strange new moonless space. She tapped a pattern up and down her ribs and listened to the rise and fall of her breath.

  Here I am, she thought. Right where Granddad wanted. She tried to be happy about that, but then her mind made a picture of home: of Ma reading the Robertson’s seed catalog while Pa fumbled with his pipe, Roy stretched out on the hearthrug between them. The last thing Hannah heard before she fell asleep was the forlorn plink of Beverly at the piano, the same piece played and broken off and taken up again. It made Hannah feel more homesick than she wanted.

  13. MEETING MR. BARNABY

  WHEN HANNAH OPENED HER eyes into the soft shadows before daybreak, she needed a moment to remember. No milking, no chores. She rose and bathed quickly anyway, then struggled into the unfamiliar gray uniform. It was loose and long, with a slide fastener up the back, and its sewn-in tags read Friendly Frocks. Was that a shop? A catalog? The fabric was not quite flannel and not quite wool and almost itched.

  Dressed, she crept downstairs to the kitchen window with her tablet and pen and waited for sunrise.

  It was not a farmer, however, who appeared with the dawn, slowing his cart and dobbin to the street corner, but a young man in a gleaming white truck. MILK MEANS HEALTH! proclaimed the script along its side. The man was outfitted in a formal uniform; white suit, black-and-white-striped tie, and white gloves. He greeted Hannah at the kitchen door with a small crate of four milk bottles and a tip of his cap.

  “Up early, miss.”

  “Good morning, sir. I was curious to know where the milk comes from.”

  “Why, it comes from a bottling plant, owned by the American Dairy Industry.”

  Hannah thought. “But surely there is a single dairy for our milk?”

  “Ouch, you might have caught me, miss.” The milkman raised his eyebrows. “I’m not familiar with the process from cow to doorstep. I just drive the truck. Thing is, I’ve only had this job three weeks.” He offered his hand. “Name’s Barnaby. I was in lithographs, see, before the last round of layoffs.”

  Hannah shook the gloved hand. “I’m Hannah Bennett, pleased to meet you. My parents run the Bennett Dairy? In Chester County? In Chadds Ford?”

  “Not familiar, sorry.” Mr. Barnaby’s smile stayed friendly nevertheless. “Well, Hannah Bennett, I have nine streets on my route. Nine before eight, elsewise you’re late. It’s the rule.”

  After he left, his truck clattering down the cobblestones, Hannah placed the milk bottles in the electric refrigerator. She marveled at the treasury of food packed inside. Meats, hard and soft cheeses, bottles of juice, paper packets of thin-sliced smoked fish, Hellmann’s real mayonnaise, a tub of fresh horseradish, another of champagne mustard. Where did it all come from? Who made it? How much did it cost?

  Apparently, none of that seemed to matter to Philadelphians. As long as it arrived on time, as long as it was fresh for the taking.

  14. TOO LONG AND WRONG

  FROM HER FIRST STEP inside the school, Hannah saw that Tru had been right. Ottley Friends girls were different. Graceful and glint-eyed, they called to Hannah’s mind a throng of Siamese cats. In their sleek company, Hannah felt as scraggly as Mouser. As soon as she had walked through the door, she wanted to turn around and run.

  For one thing, not one single girl wore a shoulder-length hairstyle. Blunt bobs and flips and pageboys were all Hannah saw as Beverly guided her up the broad stairs to Miss Jordan’s office. A few of the older girls even wore finger-wave marcels. Movie-star styles, all of them! Hannah thought. She herself might as well have arrived in grosgrain-ribboned plaits, like poor Becca, for all she felt her difference.

  If that weren’t bad enough, her Friendly Frocks hemline dropped a good three inches lower than everyone else’s. Between the extra length of hair and extra length of dress, Hannah felt over-burdened, a sensation similar to last night’s when she had gone to bed on a too-full stomach.

  “Welcome, welcome,” greeted Miss Jordan, the school h
eadmistress, in whose care Beverly had dropped her before dashing to her piano lesson. Miss Jordan was a cheerful, energetic package of a woman whose office window was filled with jeweled glass lamps and fern sprays in glazed pots. “This must seem odd to you—a townhouse school. But it’s really very simple. There are five floors, with our dining hall on the fourth floor, and our overnight boarders on the top. The girls take elocution and calisthenics in the ground floor theater.

  “Mrs. Sweet has told me both of your abilities in math and of your struggle with reading. We want you to make great strides in both subjects here. Mr. Cole is an excellent math teacher, and I’ll be supervising your reading lessons myself. Don’t you worry, Hannah. We’ll get you spit-and-polished for the scholarship!”

  Hannah returned Miss Jordan’s informal smile, but was privately vexed. She had been half-hoping that the Ottley girls did not know about her scholarship, and that she might slip into the school day posing as an exotic niece or cousin of Mrs. Sweet’s.

  But Helene Lyon, the snub-nosed, swan-necked girl Miss Jordan had entrusted to guide Hannah through her first week, quickly set her straight.

  “My parents generally believe in education reform to help others less fortunate,” Helene said right off. “We hope you find that Ottley Friends is a honey of a school. And let me say, we’re all charmed to bits that you have this opportunity.”

  Hannah scowled and averted her eyes. It was one thing to have Mrs. Sweet talk about Hannah’s opportunity, but it was quite another to hear about it from a girl her own age. And how exactly was she “less fortunate” than Helene? Perhaps Helene was tactless to everyone. She certainly seemed like a fool, from the way she carried on.

  “Ooh, what a nifty little bag, Bethany!” Helene cried as she and Hannah progressed down the hall. Or, “Say, Ruth Ann, I saw you on Pearl Street yesterday in that positively chic fox-collar coat. Is it from Strawbridge’s?” Ort “Lillian Shay! I want the latest on your lunchtime tête-à-tête with you-know-who!” Helene was so interested in what the other girls had seen or done or purchased over the weekend that she often forgot to introduce Hannah.