“When we have our house, can Beverly come and stay sometimes?”
“Yes.” Mama turned out the light. “No more talking.”
After our new house was built, Beverly and Sally could stay over whenever they wanted. The new house would be a place where Sally wouldn’t worry and Beverly could have a bath in a real tub. For that matter, I could have a bath in a real tub.
15
EXCEPT FOR A COUGH that hung on, as it always did after tonsillitis, I was well by the time Mama and I left for Aunt Betty and Uncle Stan’s house on Monday, June 19. Dr. White said I could travel to Morgan Lake, but I couldn’t go swimming until the cough was gone.
Now that I knew how to swim, I wanted to be in the water, but there wouldn’t be time for swimming in Morgan Lake, even if the cough went away. I would be watching for the stork.
Papa wasn’t pleased that Mama and I were going to Aunt Betty’s. He hated baching. Seeing us off, he advised Mama, “If Betty’s putting on an act, you turn around and come home.”
Mama bridled. “Betty doesn’t put on acts,” she told Papa, and briskly climbed the stairs into the railway car.
We traveled by the eastbound passenger train, leaving Harvester at ten in the morning. Mama stayed up the night before until after two, baking for Papa and hand washing clothes she decided at the last minute she needed. I didn’t see how she could find excuses to wear so many outfits in a place like Morgan Lake, but Mama was clothes proud. At home she wore cotton housedresses with frilly collars and pockets and pretty buttons down the front, but when she went out, Mama wore the appropriate costume or what she had decided ought to be the appropriate costume. In the entire town of Harvester, maybe in the entire county of St. Bridget, Mama was the only woman who owned jodhpurs and English riding boots. Mama didn’t ride, but she liked to wear the pants and boots pheasant hunting. She was an excellent shot, and smart as money in her habit.
Occasionally Papa turned on Mama, ridiculing her for her wardrobe, but he liked to show her off. And Mama was a superior seamstress who stitched up many of her most unusual costumes herself. You couldn’t always count on Lundeen’s Dry Goods or even the Golden Rule in St. Paul. If you wanted trousers like Marlene Dietrich’s, you’d better be clever with a needle.
Mama also sewed for me. She’d made the dress I was wearing, a summery, poppy-sprigged dimity with smocking across the bodice. It was every bit as nice as what you could buy at Dayton’s in Minneapolis.
I did not want to muss my dress before Aunt Betty saw it, but I was drowsy. The smell of old, innocent dust in the red, plush upholstery; the strong-soap smell of the white linen antimacassar arranged over the tall seat back; the tipsy sway of the murmuring railway car; and the click-clack-clack, click-clack-clack of iron wheels on iron rails led me through the fuzzy curtains of sleep.
When I woke, my cheek against the upholstery was prickly. I had drooled a little from the corner of my mouth, a circumstance always embarrassing to me as I associated it with old, musty-smelling people like Grandma Browning’s Aunt Carrie from Marshalltown, Iowa. I wiped my moist cheek on the inside hem of my dress and picked the tiny grains of sleep from the comers of my eyes.
Mama, sitting opposite, was asleep, her head fallen against the closed window beside her. As with everything she did, Mama slept totally, without qualification or reserve. And sleep took her elsewhere, someplace far away, so that her body was uninhabited. When you shook her, she returned to you from a distant and unfamiliar place—California or Texas, maybe.
My own window was open. Hot, gritty air, laden with the perfume of coal smoke, bathed me—the happy, satisfying smell of going away. Down the aisle came the conductor. “Weed Lake,” he called, his voice drawing out the vowels and rising on “Lake.” He announced each stop as if it were an important place. I wondered, gazing out at the half dozen dusty, unpaved streets crisscrossing each other, the handful of barefaced little houses gathered indifferently around a general store-post office, what secrets, known to the conductor, colored his cry: “Weeeeed Laaaaake!”
The brakeman and conductor let the door close behind them as they stood in that noisy, shifting bridge between two cars, waiting for the train to grind to a halt.
I had to go to the toilet, but it was too late. We were nearly stopped, and it was forbidden to go to the toilet while the train was in the station. I crossed my legs. Weed Lake was always a long stop because our train, the eastbound train, was put onto a siding to await the arrival of the westbound train.
Two passengers alighted separately, the first a sturdy young man of twenty or so, wearing patched and much-mended gray gabardine trousers and a clean, white shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow. On his feet were heavy, brown work shoes, rough and cracked across the instep, but cleaned and polished. He was bareheaded, and the tops of his ears were burned the color of leather. His hair was cut very short, so that it would not soon again require barbering, and it was slicked down from a high, side part. Carrying an ancient and darkened crocodile valise as lightly as if it were a lunch pail, he swung down the aisle, ducking his head again and again to dart a glance out the windows, searching out a face expected or hoped for.
Heart skipping, I asked myself, could this be Earl Samson, come to marry the farm girl he’d left behind? But no, I reasoned, Earl would be older.
The second departing passenger was a stocky, heavy-moving woman about Mama’s age. Her body seemed unwilling to leave the train. She dragged her feet, forcing them toward the door. Above white anklets and oxfords, her featureless body was clothed in a starched, percale housedress whose once-bright flowers were faded to ghostly memories. Below the sleeves, her arms were muscled and red, and on the wrist of her right hand was a huge knot of flesh, hard as an enormous marble. Women developed these cysts during canning season. Grandma Browning always did. Usually they went away during the winter, when the paring and cutting of fruits and vegetables and the tightening of jar lids abated. Sometimes they didn’t.
The woman didn’t look out the train windows. She stared ahead, as though what awaited her were fatally familiar.
Would the once-pretty farm girl who had loved Earl Samson have grown old and colorless like this woman? Could this be that girl? I wouldn’t let myself consider it. I turned my gaze to the brick platform of the approaching depot. The depot agent waited, loose and sweaty, but with a flicker of excitement in his eyes at the oncoming engine. No matter that ten thousand engines had snorted and screeched and groaned to his door. A great steam engine, bearing down, was every time an experience that trembled through you, through your physical parts and through the other parts as well, shaking things up and rearranging them in unforeseeable ways.
Beside the agent a woman waited, a small piece of handsome luggage at her feet. Like the alighting woman, she was about Mama’s age, perhaps a little older. But age was surely the only thing about her that was like the weary passenger in the faded housedress.
The woman on the platform wore a lightweight bisque-colored skirt and an ivory shirt of soft, supple fabric, a cameo at her throat. Over her arm was draped a jacket to match the skirt, and on her feet were pale kid pumps.
Her face, classically oval and with that straightforward plainness that is beauty, was lightly made up. Her dark blond hair, collar length, was straight, but turned under at the last minute (like Jean Arthur’s in You Can’t Take It With You, Mama later said). The woman was not attempting to impress anyone, but she succeeded in impressing everyone.
The tired woman in the percale housedress was handed down by the conductor onto the portable step placed on the platform. Blinded by midday brilliance, she raised an arm and held it across her brow, shielding her eyes and acknowledging a dull pain.
The other woman waited for the first to get her bearings, to emerge into the atmosphere of Weed Lake. At length the unwilling one gazed about, and seeing no one there who was hers, headed in the direction of the general store-post office.
The women weren’t acquainted. The boarding pa
ssenger put her hand in the conductor’s and placed a slender foot on the portable step. The agent passed her small bag to the conductor and studied the woman’s retreating figure.
Along the dusty street, down which the first woman had disappeared toward the town’s meager life, came a hurrying figure, a leggy collection of acute angles and bony corners, wearing a white apron over regular clothes and carrying a carton held out before him—the lunch man.
Back along our route the conductor had taken orders. These were telegraphed ahead to the Weed Lake agent, who carried them downtown to the Depot Diner, where twin tapes of flypaper hung inside the screen door and swayed gently in the breeze. There the agent sat at the counter to enjoy a cup of coffee and doughnut, tiding himself over until after the eastbound and westbound trains met and were sent on their ways. The meeting of the two trains down at the depot was the centerpiece of the town’s day, dividing it into halves: before and after.
The conductor was back on the train, distributing box lunches and punching the new passenger’s ticket.
“Chicago,” he observed, slipping a stub into the clip above her seat. “Live there?”
“Yes.” Her voice was soft without being wispy. An Evening in Paris voice.
The conductor had lost his easy palaver. “A big place,” he offered.
She said nothing, but laid her suit jacket across the seat facing her.
“Like me to put your bag on the rack?” he asked.
“Please,” she answered, again in that peaches-and-cream voice.
The conductor was not at ease, a circumstance I had never witnessed in my hundreds of rides on the train. He couldn’t bear to part himself from this beautiful woman. “From around here … originally?”
“A farm west of town, originally.” There was something odd and disconcerting in her answer. I thought maybe her papa had lost his farm. Where were her papa and mama now? On the county poor farm? The phrase sent waves of cold dread through me. More than once when Papa had gambled, Mama had cried, “You’ll put us on the poor farm, Willie.” The poor farm was much worse than dismemberment or even death.
Maybe the conductor, too, sensed that he’d struck an unhappy nerve. He changed the subject. “You didn’t want a box lunch?”
“No.”
“If you need anything, let me know.” He moved along the aisle, his hand now and then brushing the top of a seat for balance as the train began stopping and starting in screeching fits, transferring us to a siding to wait for the westbound.
I was absorbed by the woman in the suit. She was sitting kitty-corner across the aisle, facing me. For several minutes she stared out the window. A cluster of scruffy-looking town children, reverential in the presence of the train, on which they had never ridden, had gathered on the platform. The agent shooed them back against the depot lest they fall onto the tracks and get him in trouble with the railroad.
After several minutes of being yanked backward and forward, we were on the siding, up against a grain elevator. If I reached my arm out the window, I thought I could touch the hot, sunbaked wood, but Mama warned, “Keep your arms and head inside if you don’t want to lose them.”
Leaning toward her confidentially, I whispered, “Mama, there’s a beautiful lady sitting over there.” I nodded in the direction of the newcomer. “Really, truly beautiful,” I emphasized.
Mama didn’t trust my assessments of beauty, as I was particularly susceptible to women who wore dramatic makeup in substantial amounts, had their hair dyed unusual hues, and adorned themselves with quantities of large, bright jewelry.
“She lives in Chicago,” I went on, “but she used to live here, on a farm west of town. I think her papa lost the farm.” I leaned closer. “Do you think she could be the one Earl Samson wanted to marry? I wish I could ask her.”
“Well, don’t,” Mama warned, rising and taking up her purse.
“Where are you going?”
“To comb my hair and freshen my lipstick. I always feel mussed when I’ve fallen asleep.”
“Can I come?”
“No. You can open our lunch. Do you want me to bring you a cup of water?”
“No. I have to go to the bathroom.”
She looked at her watch. “We’ll only be here a few more minutes.”
Mama smoothed the skirt of her dress and took some pains checking in her purse before starting up the aisle toward the rest room. She caught a glimpse of the new passenger out of the corner of her eye as she went through this small ceremony of preparation.
Mama smiled at the woman as she headed toward the rest room. I knew this although her back was to me. Mama’s head dipped slightly as she passed the woman’s seat, and when Mama had passed, the woman’s face was softened and opened up a little.
Mama was not long in the rest room, but she was freshened up and full of life when she came out again. On her return she paused at the woman’s seat, laughing a bit and saying something which I didn’t catch. The woman smiled and shook her head. Her teeth were small and perfect, like Katherine Albers’s.
Teeth were all Katherine and the woman in the pale suit had in common, however. The set of the woman’s shoulders, straight and uncompromising, and the almost imperceptible cast of her head, as though she were tuned to an engrossing radio program, spoke more of St. Catherine of Alexandria than Katherine Albers of Harvester.
For knowing all the answers at catechism class one Saturday, Sister Mary Frances had given me a little picture of the martyr, St. Catherine. It was a pretty, colored picture with a gilded deckle edge, and on the back, a list of indulgences I might gain if I prayed to or otherwise observed St. Catherine. I did pray to her a couple of times because I liked her looks as she stood, pleasant and determined, beside the windows in the tower her father had had built for her while he was away. Returning from his trip, he had been furious to discover that Catherine had ordered three windows constructed in the tower, in honor of the Trinity, rather than the two her father had specified. My own feeling was that St. Catherine had ordered three windows because, if you were going to be kept in a tower (as she knew she was), the third window’s view would be a godsend you would never regret having. I didn’t think this interpretation took anything away from Catherine’s later martyrdom. I had a special affinity for St. Catherine because of the wheel on which she was to have been broken, and which shattered at her touch, causing her to be the patron saint of wheelwrights and mechanics and, in my opinion, railroads.
“You talked to her?” I exclaimed sotto voce when Mama sat down. How did Mama have the courage to go up to a perfect stranger and, just like that, start talking to them? No wonder Mama didn’t understand why I hated to sell Knights of Columbus picnic tickets. She wasn’t afraid of anything. Maybe Mama should have been a man. Men weren’t afraid of anything, either. Except Hilly. Hilly had been afraid the day Mrs. Wheeler saw him running down the cemetery road. But Hilly was a boy, really.
“Of course I talked to her,” Mama said quietly, opening our lunch box, which lay on the seat beside her. “I asked if she’d like some of our lunch since we’ve got so much. It’s not hard talking to people if you’re thinking about them. If you’re thinking they might be hungry, you’re not worrying about how embarrassing it is talking to them. You ought to remember that.”
I would try. What Mama said was Common Sense. Mama placed great value on Common Sense, and I could see for myself that it made life easier.
“Is she going to have some of our lunch?” I asked. What did a woman like that eat? Maybe she would think meat loaf sandwiches were low-class. Would I be afraid to carry her a meat loaf sandwich? If I told myself that she was hungry, and I was doing her a favor …?
“No,” Mama answered, “she said she wasn’t hungry.” The other train pulled into the station. Pretty soon I’d be able to go to the bathroom.
Mama went on, “I suggested maybe she’d like a cup of coffee from the Thermos later. She said that would be nice.”
Besides the few words I’d hea
rd her speak to the conductor, what did a beautiful, high-class woman talk about? Did she talk about big houses with fancy furniture? Parties where you wore long dresses? If she talked about things like that, what could Mama say? Would Mama tell her about our house in the depot with slop pails under the sink and no toilet? Would she tell her that I still slept in a crib?
Our train was moving again. We’d switched back to the main track and were picking up speed on our way out of Weed Lake. The engine hooted and I stood up.
“I’m going to the bathroom.”
Passing the woman’s seat, I kept my eyes on the floor. The heavy rest room door slammed behind me as the train slewed around a curve. I turned the lock. Carefully smoothing out little folded pieces of toilet paper from the dispenser and meticulously laying them all around the toilet seat—and picking up one or two that fell on the floor—I sat down, greatly relieved, on the noisy toilet.
The soap powder in the dispenser was strong enough to melt diamonds, Mama said. I put some in my wet palm and rubbed it on my hands. It remained gritty and didn’t lather, and in a few seconds my hands felt hot and itchy. Quickly I rinsed them and dried them on the linen roller towel.
Because I was short, I could only see my face in the mirror, and I could only see that by standing on tiptoes. My hair was a mess from sleep. I climbed on the toilet seat. I looked like something the cat had dragged in. My dress was wrinkled and limp. That was the problem with liking a lot of starch in your dresses: when they got mussed, they were pitiful looking. The woman in the pretty suit probably thought I was an Okie.
I wanted to ask the woman about Earl Samson. I had to know if she was the one, and if she’d heard from him. But she was like a queen, and I was just an almost-low-class child.
I smiled at myself in the mirror, straightened my dress, and smoothed my hair with my hands. How ugly I was when I smiled, all gaping gum where baby teeth had been. I smiled with my mouth closed, and looked like a simpering nincompoop. I didn’t have the stuff in me ever to look like that high-class woman.
The Cape Ann Page 14
