ALSO BY FAITH SULLIVAN
Gardenias: A Novel
What a Woman Must Do
The Empress of One
Mrs. Demming and the Mythical Beast
Watchdog
Repent, Lanny Merkel
For Maggie, Ben, and Kate
1
“NEXT YEAR AT THIS time, I want carpenters working on our house,” Mama said.
Papa said nothing. He was reading the paper while Mama made supper. We were having fried pork chops, mashed potatoes with gravy, and Monarch brand canned peas. Mama had baked a couple of apple pies that morning. She never made fewer than two. Papa could eat almost a whole pie at a sitting.
Mama liked to bake pies, and everyone said she was the best pie baker in Harvester, Minnesota. “That’s because the crust is thin and crisp,” she had explained to me, “and the filling isn’t runny.” She’d added quickly, “But I never use tapioca or cornstarch to thicken up the fruit pies.” Her tone implied that moral turpitude was responsible for pies with tapioca or cornstarch.
Mama’s hair was in pin curls because she was going to her bridge club after supper. Bridge club met every other week on Friday. Tonight Bernice McGivern was hostess.
Mama carried the platter of chops and the bowl of peas to the table, then returned to the stove for the potatoes and gravy. Seating herself, she filled my plate, mashed potatoes first. I scooped out a well in the center for the gravy, and she took care to pour it into the depression. Mindfully laying my chop to one side of the potatoes, she spooned peas onto the other.
Papa folded the paper and put it on the floor under his chair. Taking up his fork, he reached across and dragged the tines through my potatoes, laying waste to the dam. Then he laughed as though it were a great joke, which only Mama and I would fail to see.
“Why did you do that, Willie? You know she likes to save the potatoes for last.”
“For Christ’s sake, Arlene. You gonna pick a fight over mashed potatoes?” he asked, continuing to laugh. Papa laughed a good deal, and everyone said he was a good-natured fellow. A real sport, they said. Mama set her jaw and passed him the chops.
With my fingers and my spoon, I shored up the ravaged well.
“Don’t use your fingers, Lark,” Mama admonished.
Mama had chosen the name Lark. Lark Browning Erhardt. Browning was Mama’s maiden name. Papa had wanted to call me Beverly Mary; Mary after the Blessed Virgin. Mama said she wouldn’t hang a name like Beverly Mary on a pet skunk. Where she got the idea for Lark, I don’t know, although one time when I asked, she said that larks flew high and had a happy song.
When Mama told Father Delias that I was going to be named Lark Browning, he said it wouldn’t do; I had to have a saint’s name. Mama, who was a convert, didn’t understand that but she went along. On my baptismal certificate I was Lark Ann Browning Erhardt.
Mama hated her own name, Arlene. “Arlene, Marlene, Darlene, they’re all hayseed names,” she deplored. Even more than Arlene, she hated “Lena,” which she’d been called in school, growing up. Once when Papa called her Lena, just to get her goat, she threw a mustard jar at him.
Rising, Mama came around to my side of the table, took my knife and fork, and helped me to cut my chop. “Next year at this time, I want carpenters working on our house,” she repeated. It was the same thing she’d said earlier, the same thing she’d said a hundred times. Returning to her chair, she warned, “I won’t go on living in this place. If we don’t have carpenters building our house next year, I’m setting a match to this dump.” She rose to fetch the coffee pot. “There are plenty of people in this town who own their own homes, and they don’t make as much money as you do,” she told Papa, pouring coffee into his cup, then into her own.
“What do I care what plenty of people do?” he asked, stirring cream into his coffee.
Mama set the pot on the stove with a bang. “I’m serious, Willie. I want a house.”
I didn’t understand Papa’s not wanting a house. It wasn’t the way he was raised, Mama would say. Grandpa and Grandma Erhardt lived in a nice house with a pair of walnut trees in the front yard. Not a fancy or big house, but nice. We lived in the train depot, a few feet from the tracks.
Papa worked for the railroad. He was the clerk in the depot. He and the depot agent handled the coming and going of trains. They sold tickets and figured out routes and schedules for the passengers who were going far across the country. They accepted outgoing freight, weighing it and toting up the charges, and they unloaded incoming freight, and delivered it, too, if the party couldn’t come down to pick it up. They dealt with mail, and sent and received telegrams. They saw to it that tracks were cleared or switched for trains requiring a siding. It was a busy job. There was a passenger train heading east in the morning, one going west in the afternoon. At least two freight trains came through each day, though these usually came through after supper in the evening.
The trains were big and noisy and dirty, and they smelled of coal, but Mama and Papa and I all loved them, each for our own reasons. I really couldn’t imagine not living beside the trains, but I wanted a room of my own, so I supported Mama’s campaign for a house.
Upstairs above the depot, in an apartment reserved for the depot agent, lived Mr. Art Bigelow and his wife, May, a taciturn, childless couple much devoted to stamp collecting and knitting, respectively.
When Papa came to Harvester, there were no living quarters provided for the clerk and his family. There was, however, a large, empty room at the east end of the ground floor. Its only door opened directly onto the station platform. Mama, who was determined to save money for a house, saw in this room our rent-free living quarters for the next few years. I was a baby then, but she told the story so often that I seemed to remember how it looked.
A space twenty feet by twenty feet, with a fifteen-foot ceiling, it possessed three very tall, stern-looking windows, grimed with the smoke and steam of thousands of trains. The walls were of a narrow, vertical board, painted railway gray, and the floors were dusty, unvarnished oak. In one wall was a cold-water faucet, but no sink or drain. It was difficult to imagine for what purpose the room had been designed, unless the railroad had at some point envisioned it as lay-over quarters for train crews or section gangs. Mama got in touch with the railroad company at once, negotiating a rent-free agreement for us to occupy this daunting, minimal housing.
Papa was daunted, not Mama. “There must be rooms over a store that we could move into,” Papa suggested.
“If we live here,” Mama pointed out, “we can save the rent money for a house of our own.”
“There’s no heat. What’ll we do in the winter?”
“We’ll have a coal stove put in. The railroad has lots of coal.”
“And a bathroom? What about that?”
“We’ll use the toilet off the waiting room. For baths we’ll buy a big galvanized tub, and I’ll heat water.”
“There’s no drain in this room. What’ll we do with the water we run?”
“We’ll carry it over beyond the tracks and dump it.”
Mama had an argument for all of Papa’s misgivings. He was stunned and displeased by her willingness to live “like hoboes.” Mama, who had graduated from high school, whose parents had graduated from high school! (Papa had quit school after the tenth grade.) Mama who had grown up in a comfortable house in a town with paved streets and three railroads. How could such a woman insist that they live in this cold, empty room? And with a baby? In a few months, when the snow came flying, wouldn’t she feel foolish coming to him to complain that she couldn’t keep the place warm and that she was catching pneumonia hauling slop water across the tracks? Then he would have a good laugh.
But Mama didn’t complain, not in the first
years. We were going to save for a new house. In the meantime, she made the depot house as comfortable and attractive as her considerable ingenuity could manage. Linoleum in a tan and cream pattern covered the floor. The walls were painted ivory. A carpenter came with lumber and panels called compoboard, or a name very much like that.
With the four-by-eight-foot sheets of compoboard, he built partitions, and created a bedroom, kitchen, and living room. There were no doors, just doorways, and since the sheets were only four by eight, there was a two-foot gap between the floor and the bottom of the partition, and a five-foot gap between the top of the partition and the ceiling. Mama said the gaps allowed heat from the stove in the living room to circulate. Still, a lot of heat got lost up near that fifteen-foot ceiling, and once the place got cold, it took forever to heat it up again.
In the kitchen, which was the room with the faucet and the door to the outside, Mama had a sink installed, with a drain that went into a pail underneath. She sewed a pretty fabric skirt to hide the pail. As I grew into a child, emptying the pail—pails, actually, as there were three of them—became my responsibility, though Mama helped in the coldest weather. The bedroom held Mama and Papa’s bed, a bureau, a wardrobe, and my crib. You had to walk sideways to move around the furniture.
But, despite its shortcomings, once he’d gotten over the embarrassment of living as we did, Papa grew accustomed to our cramped quarters, and he could see no reason to go to the expense and disruption of building a new house. Mama, on the other hand, grew increasingly dissatisfied.
Clearing away dishes, she told Papa, “I went by the lumberyard this afternoon and got some more house plans I want you to look at.”
Papa reached for the newspaper under his chair.
“Willie, I want you to look at them. We’ve got to get out of here. Lark can’t go on sleeping in a crib. She’s six years old. She needs a room of her own and a real bed. I’ve made as much of this place as I can, but I can’t make it bigger.”
Papa lowered the paper. “Where are you off to?” he asked, taking note of Mama’s pin curls.
“Where am I off to! It’s Friday. I’m off to bridge club. How many years have I been going to bridge club? You still have to ask.” She poured boiling water from the tea kettle into the dishpan and added cold water from the faucet. “Lark, if you’ve finished your pie, would you give me a hand here? I’m going to have to shake a leg if I don’t want to be late.”
“Who’s staying with the kid?” Papa asked.
“You,” Mama told him impatiently, scrubbing an empty pie plate.
“No, I’m not.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, turning without removing her hands from the dishwater.
“I’ve got a poker game.”
Mama stared, disbelieving.
“Now don’t start in,” Papa told her.
“Don’t tell me not to start in. How could you do this? And on a bridge night at that?”
“I forgot.”
“You didn’t forget. Since Lark was a baby, bridge club has been every other Friday.”
“I forgot that this Friday was the ‘other.’”
“You are a liar, Willie. You enjoy spoiling my good times.”
“Well, get on the phone and get a high school kid to stay with her,” Papa said.
“I will not. This is your fault. You get on the phone.”
“I don’t know their names. You’re the one who knows them.” He threw down the paper. “You damned well better get someone before you leave here.”
“The hell I will,” Mama retorted, shoving the clean skillet at me.
“Then take her with you.”
“No. The girls all agreed we wouldn’t bring our kids. If everyone brought one, it would be a madhouse. You knew you were supposed to stay with her tonight. You did this on purpose.”
“For Christ’s sake, Arlene, why would I forget on purpose?”
“Because you don’t like the bridge club.” She turned to face him, the dishcloth in her hand. “You never liked it.”
“A bunch of cackling hens.” A smile began to pull at one side of Papa’s mouth, and he raised his empty coffee cup to hide it.
Mama burst into tears and hurled the wet dishcloth at him, striking the coffee cup and knocking it to the floor, where it shattered at his feet.
“It’s just like our house that doesn’t get built,” she cried. “You sit there eating pie and smirking. Everything is a joke. All my plans,” she choked, “are funny, aren’t they?”
Papa was already out the door and heading down the platform to the depot office. Mama fell upon the dishcloth and flung it against the wall above the sink. “Goddamn him,” she cried, “I’ll show him.”
2
A LITTLE BEFORE EIGHT, Mama emerged from the bedroom, skittery and bright eyed, nerved up for the competition. Stored away for the evening were her anger and tears. Mama loved bridge club: the sociability, the drink or two, the exotic dessert. But especially the competition, the possibility of carrying home first prize. Not that she cared much for the prize itself, a box of fancy face soap or a china ashtray. It was the winning of it. Mama was a competitive apple-pie baker and a competitive bridge player.
Did the bridge club ladies notice this? They were a jolly circle, women who laughed until tears came to their eyes. Their running jokes carried over from meeting to meeting, embroidered and appliquéd with fresh fabric and threads at each gathering until a complex tapestry of humor joined them in a tight sisterhood of group memory.
Papa’s “cackling hens” epithet was not without basis. One or two of the women cackled, a couple of them tittered, some honked or snorted or squealed. But it was a satisfying racket. When Mama entertained bridge club in our living room, I would lie in the crib and wrap myself in the female voices, feeling safe in their company, and wondering if I would ever be part of such a group and have so much to laugh about.
Mama was nourished by the cabala and the kinship, but she was exhilarated by the competition. She had learned the self-deprecating ways of the woman who does not want to be thought hard and grasping, but her artifices could not always cover the nakedness of her need to excel.
Now Mama’s Tabu perfume preceded her into the living room, where I sat folded up on the couch with the spring/summer Monkey Wards catalog.
“You look beautiful,” I told her, thrilled by her bridge night glamour. She wore a simple black dress of an elegant, crinkly fabric. It was one she had made. On one shoulder was pinned a large, round brooch encrusted with different colored stones. It looked old and expensive although she’d bought it for less than a dollar on sale at the Golden Rule department store in St. Paul.
Adjusting an earring, Mama turned her back. “Are my seams straight?”
I said yes, and she came to me and bent to kiss me. I made her kiss me on the mouth so that I would get some of her lipstick on my mouth. She always did that on bridge night. I had to be very careful not to smudge her makeup. We touched lips gingerly, quickly, and immediately I folded my lips inward to savor the thick, fruity taste of the lipstick.
She looked at her watch. “You can stay up till nine, but I want you in your nightgown right away.”
I grabbed her hand, which smelled of Jergens lotion. “If anybody talks about Hilly Stillman, remember what they say so you can tell me.”
She laughed and hurried out through the kitchen to the door. “Have a good time,” I called, closing my eyes until I could no longer smell the Tabu, then returning to the brassieres in the Monkey Wards catalog.
Hilly Stillman stories abounded at Mama’s bridge club, and as I turned the brassiere and corset pages, I wondered if Hilly ever looked at such things. Did he think about people’s naked bodies?
Hilly, a veteran of the World War, was about forty, though he seemed much younger to me. His mother, who was not much more than sixty-five, seemed remarkably ancient.
Bill McGivern, husband of Mama’s friend Bernice, was a World War veteran, too. He remembered
Hilly from before. Hilly’s father died when Hilly was a baby. Mrs. Stillman taught third grade at the public school to provide for herself and little Hillyard. A cousin, a young farm girl, had come to live with them in town for a few years to help out with Hilly, but she got into trouble and had no husband, and she disappeared, evaporated into thin air.
When Mama heard this story, she said, “I hope she lit out for California. I hope it was a married man, and he gave her money to get to California. Maybe she’s in the movies now.”
Mama said this at a sodality meeting and word of it got back to Papa who said that if Mama felt that way, she was no better than that pregnant whore. Mama hit him with a rolled up Liberty magazine and Papa slapped her across the face so hard that she had a bruise and couldn’t go to bridge club or sewing club for a month. After that Mama cooled toward sodality.
I often thought of Hilly Stillman’s cousin and her baby in California. Did they have an orange farm or was the cousin in the movies, as Mama had suggested? I hoped they had an orange farm. It would be pleasant for the baby, playing among the trees and having all the oranges she wanted. Oranges were a luxury in Minnesota in the thirties. Grandpa Browning complained that fellows on relief got oranges but folks who had to work for a living couldn’t afford them. It didn’t occur to me that Hilly’s cousin would be in her middle years now, the baby in its thirties. I imagined them in the warm shade of orange trees, a young mother and her toddler.
Mrs. Stillman nearly lost her job after the cousin took off, pregnant. Although this all happened around the turn of the century, people continued to speak of it in 1934 when Mama and Papa came to Harvester.
A committee made up of several German Lutherans, a number of Baptists, and a Methodist approached the school board and demanded that Mrs. Stillman be dismissed. After all, they pointed out, the offending cousin had been living under the Stillman roof when she got pregnant. Where was Mrs. Stillman when this was going on?
It was a narrow decision. Mrs. Stillman’s job was saved by one vote. The town was divided by the issue, and the German Lutherans decided to build their own elementary school.
The Cape Ann Page 1
