Ella Maud

by Nicholas Nicastro

  The strong woman, he declared, is the very bulwark of civilization. “A strong woman means a woman who makes some demands upon the opposite sex. God grant that the day may speedily come when our girls will think as much of themselves as the boys think of themselves, when a girl will stand at her parlor door and demand the young man who enters that as her company he shall be as clean in his life as the young man demands she shall be.”

  “In one of our Tennessee homes there lived a bright, cultured young woman, who put a womanly premium upon her own life and her society. A brilliant young lawyer was paying court at her shrine. He was young and bright and strictly moral, though not religious. He had won her love and gained her consent to her marriage. During the Christmas holidays, with a company of reckless companions, in an unusually hilarious moment, he was persuaded to take wine. Ignorant of the treacherous drink, he was soon intoxicated, and to the delight of his envious companions he was carried to his room drunk.

  “The news was carried to his young lady friend, who retired to her room, buried her face in her hand, fought a battle and gained a victory. Late in the evening of the next day this young man rang the door-bell at her father’s residence. She saw him coming and told the servant she would answer the bell. She opened the door and said to him: ‘I have heard of your last night’s conduct. You have taken my name and our relations into disgrace. You have shown your appreciation and your estimation of me. I cannot receive the attentions of a man who values so lightly his own character and mine. You may go back to your companions, and be my friend no longer. Our roads separate here. Goodbye, sir.’”

  Stuart’s vision of ideal womanhood landed harder in the crowd than his denunciation of drink. It was one thing, after all, to fulminate against the saloons, which would never close no matter what any preacher said. That was the kind of moralism any drunk could risk. But the company of fast women always seemed like a precarious blessing to the men of Elizabeth City. Young ladies were so suggestible, so weak, they might actually be persuaded to withdraw their favors. The prospect was chilling. There was no laughter at this sermon, and the applause after was more polite than enthusiastic.

  The hall was so crowded Ollie and Nell decided not to brave the aisles until the men were gone. They were still in the pew when Stuart and his partner on the preaching circuit, Sam Jones, came out of the rectory. They were a mismatched pair—Stuart was long and elegant, but Jones was short, with the kind of handlebar mustache Ollie associated with lawyers and dry goods salesmen; where Stuart radiated serenity, Jones’ eyes were darty, searching everywhere until they settled on the two Cropsey sisters in their seats.

  “Well hallo!” Jones cried. “You’ll have a long wait, young misses, if you intend to stay until the next revival!”

  “A fair prospect, if we didn’t have to be home soon,” replied Nell.

  “Much as I approve of a woman who knows her sphere, we welcome our sisters in Christ. Especially for preaching that so directly concerns them…”

  Stuart, who had said nothing yet, extended a spidery limb to Ollie. Blushing, she did not shake his hand as much as tap it away. But Nell grasped it without reservation, and shook it so hard that the soul-winner’s arm jangled. He smiled, and they locked eyes on each other for a moment longer than the occasion demanded.

  “A lovely child,” said Stuart, in that molasses voice that seemed to pour through Ollie’s ears and collect sweetly in the pan of her cranium.

  “I warn you, there are hairpins under this hat,” Nell replied.

  “For lending us your presence, you are forgiven.”

  “And what did you think of the Minister’s talk?” asked Jones.

  “I’ve heard nothing like it before.”

  “That is a diplomatic answer,” said Stuart, smiling, “that I will take as a compliment.”

  They spoke for only a few moments, until other petitioners lured the ministers away. But the sisters found themselves as charmed by Stuart’s person as they were compelled by his oratory. He was a figure who embodied quiet, confident manhood, from the loops of his shoelaces to the farthest hair on his head. The tips of his mustache only flirted with gravity. His collar was tight enough for the setting, but loose enough to suggest he didn’t care. There was nothing blustery about him, nothing that enforced his authority with coarseness. It pained Ollie to think of the contrast he made with the Cropsey men.

  The meeting, in fact, left her wrung out, exhausted, and not a little irritated. Sometimes, even the most casual of social encounters left her feeling that way. And yet there stood Nell, not just surviving as Ollie was, but thriving. She seemed ready to exchange a hundred more quips. She seemed to grow taller, her eyes brighter. “How does she do it?” Ollie had asked herself a thousand times, as her energy flagged, and she sank into invisibility beside her younger sister.

  They were picked up in front of the church by Uncle Hen.

  “You’re ten minutes late,” he said as he pulled them into the buggy. “Your father will have words for me.”

  “Let him!”

  “Nell, mind your tongue.”

  Nell was about to reply, but Ollie pinched her forearm. They were no longer ascending the heights of Mt. Olympus with Jones and Stuart. They were being pulled again into the Vale of Ordinariness, where men and women discussing great thoughts were subject to reproach for being ten minutes late. A look of distress came over Nell, of promises withheld and vistas denied. She didn’t speak for most of the ride home, until they were a few moments from the house, and she turned to Ollie.

  “I think I will go the Methodist Church next Sunday.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I’ve never been happy with the Presbyterians. I never chose to go there.”’

  “Don’t you think that’s a matter for discussion?”

  “I am discussing it.”

  “And what if Ma and Pa disagree? Will you go alone?”

  “Of course not,” she said, and flashed a smile. “You will come with me.”

  Her gloved hand patted Ollie’s, and she turned back to look at the river as they drove up Riverside Avenue. The water was so calm the bank seemed to end in a black chasm. The dock at Fearing’s shot into the void like a bridge that was never completed, a fruitless construct reaching toward a shore as distant and unattainable as the half-moon above.

  “What are you girls whispering about?” asked their uncle from the front.

  “We’re becoming strong women!” replied Nell.

  “All right,” he said. “As long as you strong women are indoors by nine-thirty.”

  VII.

  After supper the next day, Nell was in the dining room, trimming one of her winter jackets with a handsome, self-colored fringe. The door-bell rang at about the time Jim Wilcox visited every Thursday evening. Nell didn’t budge from her chair. The bell rang again. Ollie looked up at Nell; her expression was one of absorption in her task, but Ollie knew her sister well enough to see the annoyance in it. She was deliberately making Jim wait.

  The bell rang a third time. Nell pushed her work away, rose, unfurled her arms in a long, time-consuming stretch. The bell rang a fourth time as she went to the front door. After a moment, Ollie followed her, but stayed in the parlor and tried not to be seen.

  Through the glass, Jim watched Nell come down the hall and through the inner doors. From her slowness, he perceived she was distracted. When she opened the door she did not smile, and bowed her head only slightly when he came forward to peck her cheek.

  “Is it a bad time?” he asked.

  “As bad as any,” she replied.

  It was one of those sultry late September days, when the heat brought out the sickly odor of leaves rotting on the ground. Nell had not been outside yet, even to use the privy, because she was so engrossed in her projects.

  She took one of the porch chairs now and looked at him. The hem of her gray house-dress rode over her ankles, and she was wearing a pair of natural rubber slippers over her stockings. His eyes flitted
between her ankles and her face. Nell, meanwhile, was staring at the paper sack he was holding.

  “There was a man at the station selling these,” he said.

  Jim opened the bag. Inside was a dozen small, round, lumpy fruits.

  “Oranges,” she said.

  “Tangerines. From Georgia. First of the season.”

  “Thank you, Jim. I’m sure the children will enjoy them.”

  They plowed another furrow of silence.

  “I get the feeling this is a bad time,” he said.

  “I would have preferred your company the other night, when I asked you to come to the revival.”

  “Oh, that again.”

  “Yes, that again. Would you say I’ve asked many favors of you, in the time we’ve known each other?”

  “No.”

  “Have I been quarrelsome? A burden on you in any way?”

  “Wouldn’t say that.”

  “You couldn’t,” she said. “Yet the one time I ask a special favor of you, you deny me. How should I feel about that?”

  “I guess you’d be sore about it.”

  “You’d guess I’d be sore! Perceptive as usual!”

  Mocking his wits—this was something he was hearing too much of lately. It cut him, but he refrained from responding in kind. Instead, he took the other chair and stared out over the water. Just then, not far offshore, old Ben Shrive was heading out into the Sound. It was easy to tell which shad boat was Ben’s: it had the sail with the long, skinny patch on it, a remnant blue as denim. Under the circumstances, Jim wished he was out on the water with him, splitting the swells, sharing the old man’s cigarettes and his quiet.

  “Look. I didn’t come here to argue. If you want to know, I did my time in the pews. My maw was a regular customer, when her health was better. I heard every sermon with her. I heard it all. I only get a few times a week to spend time with you, Nellie. I’m sorry if I’d rather spend it doing gay things.”

  “I understand that,” she spoke, softer. “But that’s just what I’m saying. You haven’t heard it said like this man did. It’s like no other sermon you ever heard. There were plenty of gentlemen there, more than the ladies. He used the common language. It wasn’t ‘a dose of Scripture and up on your feet for a sing, fellows’. It was a new kind of preaching, and I wanted to share it with you. But you didn’t even give it a chance. You didn’t trust me.”

  “Oh for damnation’s sake, why do you gotta put it that way, Nell?”

  “Language, sir.”

  Jim reached into his jacket for his pewter flask. As he pulled on it, Nell became more irritated.

  “Must you do that now, of all times!”

  Jim laughed. “Is that your new kind of preaching?”

  “I’m going inside—”

  “No, wait,” he said, grasping her arm. Indeed, he had always been free and easy in the way he laid his hands on her. It was never anything indecent, of course—never above the elbow, or below the small of her back. It was just a gentleman’s casual mastery over female flesh. There was nothing like it between her parents, or between her sisters and their callers. She was never quite sure if she liked it.

  “I never hid the fact that I like a drink now and then, Nellie. With the work I do, I’m thinkin’ I deserve it. And to be plain, I don’t like people telling me I’m damned to hell for it—”

  “Language, again.”

  “Damn if you don’t bring it out of me, every time. I don’t know what I’m saying when you’re like this—”

  “You don’t understand. In this church, you earn your redemption by what you do. You choose to be saved. The minister isn’t there just to tell you your fate. He tells you how to save yourself. Why would you be be frightened of that?”

  “Ain’t frightened.”

  “I’m sick to death of them telling me I’ve got no say in where my soul is going. Based on what ignorant people did thousands of years ago! It’s insulting. I’m sick of it.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Isn’t it better to have the power in your hands, based on what you do?”

  Anybody who spent as much time fishing as Jim heard his share of philosophic discussions. He reckoned the backwaters of the Dismal had hosted more such seminars than the halls of any college. Something about such questions always struck Jim as rhetorical, not really inviting an answer but instead the peaceful reflection of a man with a pole and a smoke and nowhere to be for the rest of the afternoon. He had sometimes enjoyed those moments.

  But not this one. Nell was looking at him in a way that demanded a response. He shifted his feet, accidentally kicking over the bag of tangerines. The fruits scattered over the deck, one rolling down the six steps to the front walk. He uncapped his flask.

  “For instance, you can throw that away,” she said.

  The suggestion caught him in mid-swallow. The whiskey hit his throat hard, causing him to choke and cough.

  “What do you say, Jim? Will you do that? For me?”

  She was gazing at him now with an new expression: eyes flashing, lips slightly parted, head inclined toward him — a look of implied reward if he bent to her will.

  “Uh, I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

  “You know. I want you to throw that flask away. Can you do that?”

  “I can do anything I set my mind to, Nellie. But I don’ see why.”

  Her eyes froze. “You don’t see why? I’m asking you. Isn’t that enough?”

  Jim got up to retrieve the scattered tangerines. He got them all back in the bag—except for the one that had rolled down into the front yard—as he thought and cursed and felt Nell’s eyes scorching his back. Then he turned to her, and slipped the flask back into his breast pocket.

  “No,” he said.

  “No?”

  “No, I won’t. I don’t know what devil has gotten into you today, but I won’t be spoke to that way, with demands and such. I ain’t yours to lord over. If I asked you to give up your books for me, would you do that?”

  “That’s different,” she said. “Reading isn’t a mortal sin.”

  “I say anything’s a sin that takes away a man’s innocent pleasures. Pleasures that ain’t hurting nobody else!”

  “So you not only refuse to escort me to the revival, Jim Wilcox, you refuse to do me this one small thing?”

  “I guess. Yeah.”

  “I’m asking for the last time.”

  “I’ve given my answer.”

  “Then please leave. I won’t look at the sight of you right now.”

  She then got up, and padding silently on her rubber slippers, left him alone on the porch. She shut and locked the inner door, and pulled the shade down.

  Later, at supper, young Douglas came in with a sack he had found beside the front walk.

  “Found these oranges outside!” he announced. “They were sellin’ ‘em for a nickel each at the station you know, and now we got a dozen for free!”

  “They’re tangerines,” Nell said, biting off that last word in a way that struck everyone else as odd. Everyone, that is, except for Ollie.

  Jim was furious as he stalked his way back to town. When he was angry, he was given to spitting, which he did in heaving, guttural fashion on the curb. People sitting on their porches watched him anoint their properties, and gave him a hard stare or cleared their throats to express their disapproval, which Jim ignored and invited again with the next expectoration a few doors down. He’d had enough of the petty prejudices of these Riverside Avenue folk.

  He flushed anew at slights he wanted to forget. Once, when he came to take Nell and Lettie to a show, Lettie came out and asked, “No buggy? Why didn’t you harness the horse for us, Jim?” Then Lettie and Nell laughed.

  He was a patient man, a forgiving man, but that remark made him want to throw the bouquet of flowers he’d brought in Lettie’s face. Yes, he’d harnessed the horses now and again, but he did it as a favor, not because it was expected.

  “Because I have been lackey
long enough,” he replied.

  Why did he keep coming to that place? It couldn’t be for the sake of those favors most girls would do their beaus by now, three years into courtship. Nell was pretty—the handsomest girl he knew—but there was too much in her manner that said she understood her value. All the Cropsey girls had it, this lift in their chins, this ever-so-lofty distance. Sometimes he thought they were making fun of him, the way they stood erect when he was near, as if to make a point of how short he was. Lettie had it, and Louise, and especially Olive, whose eye-level made him feel like an insect. The father would barely have anything to do with him. The mother never made him feel more than adequate for her daughter.

  He thought: it must have something to do with where they came from. From being Brooklyn Cropseys, where the name meant something, to here, where it meant nothing at all. Betsy City, where they didn’t even own the property they lived on! The thought gave him a moment of satisfaction—those high-and-mighty-Cropseys, scratching out a living growing potatoes in someone else’s ground. It made him feel so good that he laughed out loud. The driver of a delivery wagon was passing by when he did so, and gave Jim a puzzled look. But Jim didn’t know him, and didn’t care.

  By this time he had reached some of the watering holes near the swivel bridge. These were no more than closet-sized shelters with room for a short bar and a few men to stand. Jim went in and ordered himself a beer. His fingers around the cool glass, and the prickly snap of the liquid in his throat, relieved the unseasonable heat. He began to feel better. The barman, who Jim knew slightly and went by the name of Cab, wiped the bar with the filthy towel. Jim lifted his elbows and his glass.

  “Been down to see that girl?” asked Cab.

  “Yeah.”

  “Lucky man,” he said, and winked.

  Jim finished his drink and drifted back into town. In truth, he didn’t need Cab to tell him he was lucky to have Nell. Nor was she the first girl to tell her man not to drink so much. The scuttlebutt among his co-workers was full of such stories—of female brains filled with guff from the latest itinerant preacher to blow into town. Seemed to him these ministers of the Lord had stopped telling men they should be good, but dwelled instead on the sins of Demon Alcohol. Seemed the ‘new religion’ was all about making excuses.