The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Part 12

"Whom can he have found to talk to already!" she says.

When my father returns he has some paper greenery that he tries to stuff into the nonexistent pants pocket of his pajamas. Tickets for the Irish Sweepstakes, it develops, that McDonough, the paper boy, has sold him. My mother sits still for a moment, then says in a stifled voice that of all the fifty heads of families in this building, it is probable that only my father has the time to learn the name of every mendicant who plies its halls, and hadn't he got a similar packet of tickets last week?-to which my father incautiously replies that the more coverage the better in any gamble. Gamble is one of the money words which produce a known response in my mother; when it does not come as usual I say it for her, since I have my own reasons for currying her favor this morning, and I know by heart all the public expressions of her private terrors.

"Everything going out," I say, "nothing coming in."

My father's reaction to this is such as requires her telling him not to encourage me, and her commanding me to dress at once, or else I shall be late for school.

"Nonsense!" he says, for secretly he resents the school for daring to impose temporal restrictions on any flesh of his flesh. "She has plenty of time." And such is my faith in his faith that, although he has thus made me late morning after morning, and I am consistently punished in the school world for being also a resident of his, it will be years before I am willing to admit that it was he who was out of step with them.

"What time is it?" says my mother, and in the same instant closes her eyes and puts the back of her hand against her capped brow. For there are at least eight running clocks in our house in addition to broken ones in drawers and antique ones with stopped faces-almost one for every room-and not one agrees with any other. And this is so not only in our house, but in the houses of all the uncles and aunts on my paternal side. They all have something in their blood that slows clocks, my mother claims, but this is not true, for one clock we have breaks into rowdy tarantellas in the night and must be forcibly calmed-it is more probable that they confuse them. I do not mind our eight-it gives one such a choice.

"Oh, do you have a headache too," I say quickly. At once my father's hand, dry with years, is at my forehead, as I knew it would be, feeling for temperature. I droop cooperatively and let him see that I, nicknamed "hungry Henrietta," have pushed aside my plate. Death is a word never spoken in our family, since there are so many of an age to expect it, but my father, who will thus deny his own mortality, is always hearing its dragon breath snuffing near the heads of his children, as if he fears that Providence will surely s.n.a.t.c.h from him early what he neglected to take from it until so late.

"Now, Joe," says my mother, "you know as well as I do that she will recover like magic as soon as it's safely ten o'clock!"

"Ah, now, now," he replies, his hand holding safe my cheek, "you know you'd never forgive yourself, if ..."

My mother throws up her hands, and I see that this will not be one of the mornings when, enraged, she will threaten castor oil or the enema, or when, half convinced, she will suggest citrate of magnesia or Feenamint, or any other of those mild unspecifics she claps down us to warn the dark powers that she is aware. She gives me up, the better to concentrate on him. "Tailor came last night," she says. "He brought back your pearl-gray."

My father accepts the prod with grace, having won the first round, and goes off with a tuneless whistle, although he is not a whistling man. This means that even he does not believe me this morning. It is an expression also of his refusal to truckle to schools on principle, on the grounds that they are coa.r.s.e instruments for the shaping of such quality material as he sends them. Above all, it means that his day has begun as a proper day should, easing itself so gently into the whorls of circ.u.mstance that it can scarcely be said to have moved, and with the first prerequisite of a Victorian household-with everybody home.

My mother has barely time enough to dress and to make one rapid round-trip through the apartment, setting higher the fires under everybody's caldron, and there he is back at the table-shaved, spatted, cologne on handkerchief, stickpin in lilac tie. And this provokes her most of all, that while his long view of life is so deliberate, he is not at all dilatory about its detail; it is hardly to be borne that of the thousands of trains he has had to make in his life he has, by not only the neatest but the calmest of margins, never missed one. Time is her enemy, and, she knows, the natural enemy of us all; it is not fair that my father's naive trust in it works for him as pragmatically as some people's trust in G.o.d. She sits at table, thinking of the enviable tohu-bohu of shaving cuts and indigestion in which the other fifty fathers have long since whirled away, and wonders if this morning, just this morning, after the incontestable interval of the Tribune and the grapefruit, she might not be able to get him off with a couple of three-minute eggs.

"Fix you some calfs-brains, Misser Joe?" This is Josie, bearing the first cup of coffee, and one of the clocks has just struck ten. My mother flinches-calves' brains have to be poached, and after the poaching, breaded, and after the breading, fried.

"Mmmm," he says, "and with black b.u.t.ter, eh Josie? Black b.u.t.ter, not brown."

Another clock-sometimes they do their best to be helpful-strikes the hour, and my mother murmurs rapidly and bitterly of all the duties before her, including the fact that she must be off to the bank, to which my father says nothing, for he knows that she will not leave the house before him, although he does not know why. It is because she must protect his reputation, since he will not, and she considers it infinitely low-cla.s.s for a woman to be seen up and abroad when her man is still lounging at home. Forgotten by them, I listen, incognito unless I turn healthy before noon. Nested in the shawls that have been mustered against disease, I mull over which of them is the aristocrat, which the low, over why it is so hard to love the worthy, so warming to be in the presence of one who will allow himself to be deceived. Above all, I wonder which of them is right about Time, not knowing that it is more than my mother and father who do battle here. Contra, contra I hear their dividing voices, as, with an Eurasian aching, I hear them yet.

The doorbell rings and now my father rises, eager, nostrils sniffing the true pursuit of the morning. For the second prerequisite for a Victorian household is that all morning long its doors, front and back, be applied to by processions of those who either bring special services or require them. Before noon we will have had, besides our regular s.h.i.+pment of eggs from coquettishly pastoral places with names like Robin Roost, of French Vichy from the drugstore, and panatela cigars from the little Spaniard in Harlem, also various but unvarying visits from upholsterers, dressmakers, opticians, even a bootlegger whose ton, like all the others, so remarkably suits us-a rococo little man, trapped like us, between two eras, who carries a cardcase and deals only in wine. In between come the variables, perhaps a former servant girl with her new baby, or a long-lost cousin with her old debts (both of them aware that pet.i.tions will not do as well in the afternoon, which is my mother's dominion), or perhaps an old-clothes man who does not yet know that we never ever sell anything off, we only buy. Even he is detained long enough to learn that he has one commodity for which my father will find some way to reward him-conversation.

"It's the Walker-Gordon man," my mother says, in triumph, and my father sits down. This is the man who delivers the special acidophilus milk for my brother, a routine meant to cease in the first month after birth but prolonged by my father so that the heir may have his traditions too. In other respects it has been a failure-the Walker-Gordon man will not stop to talk.

Providentially, Mrs. Huber enters to say that if my father wishes to pay his usual visit to the nursery, will he kindly do so at once, so that she may get her charge out in the sun "while it is high." As soon as he is gone, my mother puts on her hat, not that he will take the hint, but it makes her feel better, and besides, since there is no routine left to him now except his half hour's reading to my grandmother, and since this has been an exceptionally reasonable morning so far, it is just possible that, if no bells ring, she may get him off by eleven, which is at least a half hour better than par.

I am quite used to seeing her go about her housewifery for hours on end thus hatted; she was wearing one on that extraordinary day when, in a similar period of waiting, she suddenly lifted her petticoats, revealing to my pleased eye that although she had laughed at my yellow satin Christmas garters she sometimes wore them, took three steps back, and kicked the dining-room clock. There is red in her eye now as she looks in on me in pa.s.sing, but she will kick no more clocks. The subsequent sal volatile and sweeping-up provided my father with an hour's valid delay, and the clock returned from repair "same like ever" just as the old watchmaker had promised, that is, running ten minutes later than the one in the hall.

But joy of joys, here he is and it is only eleven, and he has actually already completed his devoirs to his mother, his matins to his son-it must be the spring, ding-a-ding, for matters 'gin arise, time's on the run, and father makes for the hatrack, on which his bowler lies. ... And two bells ring.

At the front door. At the back. And now there is no device of wit, verb or cachinnation by which I can follow the final counterpoint of my father, the a cappella exits and returns by which he halts, circles, hedges, rises to the high C of delay, and ultimately, coda, goes.

Let me try. The ring at the front door belongs to Mr. Krauss the cabinetmaker, who comes to us once a month, to feed the furniture. There is nothing outre about this; we have ma.s.ses of elderly wood and veneer that apartment-house heat withers, and Mr. Krauss spends an earnest day feeding linseed oil and casauba to our parched gargoyles, griffons and lion-footed tables, never troubled by any fantasy that he might do as well by placing his supplies in the center of the arena and quickly taking his leave. He is a tall, cavernous German, full of Hegelian pauses through which occasionally climbs one memorable phrase-the kind of old-fas.h.i.+oned workingman whose society is always courted by urban men like my father. The ring at the back door belongs to Cyril, one of the West Indian elevator boys, who can also talk Creole. He has come to borrow my father's roulette wheel, and this I shall not bother to explain; if by now it does not seem perfectly natural, there is no more to be done. No, better to leave them at once, the three of them bogged there forever, Cyril's winsome causerie on one side, Krauss's silence on the other, and my father somewhere in between them, with his foot on the stile.

He goes at last, of course, although I never seem to see him do it, only hearing his parting, customary cry. It is his one mock-fierce threat, one so gay, so mild, so aptly like him, yet its frisson always travels up my spine as no threat of the cat-o'-nine-tails could. "Be a good girl!" he always cries. "Else I'll throw you into the middle of next week!"

Now my mother is left in her bevy of women, free to chivy us back into her century. As dusk advances, her siege of him will be renewed by telephone, and pointed the other way, toward us, as she begins to doubt that he will ever again come in the door she was at such pains to get him out of; for an office where there is plenty of time is just as hard to leave, and all the way up the avenue from the subway station there are cracker-barrels which know Mr. Joe. Now, however, she rests. One more morning has pa.s.sed without realizing her worst fear-that the dreadful, s.h.i.+ftless day will come when he will still be there for lunch.

But he comes, and evening with him, and all his clan gathered to him from block and cranny, and then his star rises to its full. For in the end he draws us all back with him into his calm antipodes. Supper-talk is slowed, appet.i.tes dreamy, now may our griffons protect us, our curtains swaddle. Even my mother has stopped her White Queen running and sinks in her chair, a little muzzy with life, as at those times when she can be persuaded to a single gla.s.s of ruby claret. I fall asleep on the davenport, smelling its ageless, mummy leather, hearing the murmur of the elders. The last thing I see is my father, his eyes sweet with triumph. The vital threads of existence are blending, yet endless, the furniture is fed. We are all together with him in the now, rocking in the upholstered moment, in the fur-lined teacup of Time. The lamps are lit for the night, against that death which is change. And tomorrow, da capo, it is all to do over again.

And now I am awake on another night, tonight. Thirty years have gone by, and I no longer hear the murmuring of the elders. All around me, as I slept back there, my own century was coming to the fore. Flappers, streaking by me in Stutzes and Auburns, were already disappearing over the edge of their era; each day the stock market climbed like the horses of Apollo, yet at nightfall had not come down. Later would come the false stillness of the thirties when hands hung heavy; then, with a proletarian clanking of machinery we would be off again, into a war, into the self-induced palpitations of the forties, as, pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat, we changed matter into light, outdistanced sound, and came roaring out upon the strait turnpike of the fifties in our new pink cars.

And now there is nothing left to outdistance, except Time. I am awake wherever I am; is it on the rim of the world, the lip of the Time-machine? All around me there is a cold, sublunary glare, the sourceless light of science fiction, that greens the skin, divorces cell from cell.

I know where I am now. If there are any G.o.ds in this place I must pray to them, as once one could to the comfortable old evils of Ra or Baal. I must pray to s-s-s, or b-oom. For this place is the middle of next week.

Then, from over the rim of the world, I hear voices, the dividing voices.

"Run! Run!" says my mother. "Can't you run a little faster!"

And then I hear my father's voice, Rhadamanthine, serene.

"You have time," says my father. "All the time in the world." And from the pinpoint where I stand, I can see it, the old place, lit up bravely as a fish bowl against the dark shadows of eternity, moving slowly while it persuades itself that it stands still-the whole improbable shebang, falling through the clear ether silently, with all its house lights on.

May-ry.

MY FATHER, BORN IN Richmond about the time Grant took it, was a Southerner therefore, but a very kind man. All of us-children of his sixties, with abolitionist consciences-knew that. The limits of his malice extended to flies, and to people who hit children or mistreated the helpless anywhere. His pocket was always to be picked by any applicant, and no matter how many times my mother, much more of a grenadier, pointed out where they did him in, he remained the softest touch in the world.

His manners were persistently tender to everyone, and perhaps because he looked and dressed somewhat like Mark Twain and shared a small, redeeming slice of Twain's humor, n.o.body ever seemed to find this saccharine. He was, for instance, the only person I ever knew who could chuck a carriage baby under its chin and goo at it-"Coo-chee-coo!"-without making anybody gag at the sight, or doubt for one minute that it was done out of pure spontaneity and love. Yes, he was the kindest man in the world. Yet, when the time came, it was my father who was purely unkind to our colored maid Mary-May-ry.

May-ry, who must have been about thirty at the time I speak of, was no old family retainer; she had come to work for us, her first job in New York, through an ad in the Times ten years back, when I was very little. Even then, our family had already been forty years away from the South. But my father's memories of the first twenty years of his youth there were deep and final. At bedtime he would often tell us of Awnt Nell, the mammy who had brought him up, although he never mentioned her in public-"too many Southern colonels around already." Awnt Nell had been a freedwoman; even before the War our grandmother, his mother, would never have servants of any other description. He was so firmly proud of this that when I found, flattened away in the old Richmond Bible, a receipt made out to my grandfather for insurance on a slave, I slipped it back and never taxed him with it.

In any case, all that our tradition had boiled down to was my father's insistence that my mother always keep colored help. This was hard on her, since, being German, she could never quite manage or understand them. She had an inflexibly either-or att.i.tude toward trust, plus a certain jealousy of other people's hards.h.i.+ps, that made her stiff with those who had more of them. Also, without any reason to be, she was always a bit afraid of May-ry, referring to her whenever she could as "Die Schwarze." My father did not like this, and often caught her up on it. And n.o.body, at any time, ever said "n.i.g.g.e.r" in our house.

Meanwhile, May-ry and my father kept up their special allegiances. There were of course a thousand ways in which he knew the life she had come from, and she "knew" us. Whenever he would be heard embarking on one of the ritually flamboyant regional anecdotes that my mother couldn't bear, May-ry usually was to be seen edging closer to the company, only as decorous as a uniform could make her, her mouth drawn out like a tulip ready to burst at the familiar denouement-which brought shriek after shriek of her released laughter, followed, under my mother's glance, by a quick retirement. But she and my father also shared more particular sympathy, or professed to, over the rheumatism. As a young man, he had had to take an eighteen-week cure for his at Mount Clemens Spa, and like many diseases contracted early, it had kept him youthful, healthy, and appreciated; on a dull day a loud twinge of it would suddenly announce itself to the house-and to his best audience.

May-ry's rheumatism was of another sort. It was her euphemism for the fact that, periodically, she drank. Whenever she felt a long attack coming on, about every four months or so, she always absented herself from our house on a short trip to Roanoke, where she could lay up in the sun a little. We all were aware of the probable truth-that she was holing up in Harlem with one or the other of the people she had originally come up here with in the wake of the preacher who had brought them all North together. My father knew she drank, and she knew that he knew, but the fiction of Roanoke was always maintained. She was a child-and he loved all children. Just so long as she kept herself seemly in front of him (and she never did anything else), she was only doing what was expected of her, and he the same. "What you recommend I do for my rheumatiz, May-ry?" he might sometimes tease, but this was as far as he ever went.

Once a year, on her paid vacation, May-ry did go to Roanoke. We knew this because just before she was due back, a case of jars of home-canned peaches always arrived. She liked to use them during the year and tell us something about the farm as each jar was opened; these were her anecdotes, and I knew all of the characters in them, from Mooma and Daddy Gobbo down to the cow that always stood with its head over the gate, like a cow in a primer. On rheumatism vacations no jars ever came; only, of a sudden, there would be May-ry back again, scrubbing at the moldings as if these had to be whitened like her sins, cooking up for my father everything she could sink in the brown b.u.t.ter he adored. Between these times, once in a while she failed to come back from her Thursday night off until Monday; when she returned, it would not be she who had been sick, but one of the friends "over on One Hundred Twenny-ninth Street." But someone else there always had to phone for her, so we knew. On these occasions my mother would be furious. She wanted a German girl whose docile allegiance would be to her, whose ins and outs she would know the way my father knew May-ry's. Patiently, he would explain these to her. "They're children, that's all. They can't stand up to us. Never have been able to. Never will. But if you just give them their head a little, they're the best servants in the world. And the loyalest."

Then came Somus. May-ry had always been allowed to entertain her many suitors, evenings and Sundays if she wished, in our kitchen, Father sometimes stopping in to chat with them, to let them know on what terms they were welcome, to have a little Southern cracker-barrel time-and to see that they were the right sort for May-ry. With Somus, this all vanished. Somus was the son of that same preacher of the Abyssinian Church of G.o.d who had brought May-ry up here, and he was the real reason (besides us, she said) why she had never married; she'd been in love with him, hopelessly until now, ever since they'd spatted mud pies together down home. Somus had quarreled with his own father almost from the moment they all came up here and had been away studying for a long time. Now he was here to take his civil-service examinations.

Somus turned out to be just as handsome as she'd said he was. Rebel from the church he might be, but I could never see him, black in his black suit, without thinking Biblically, things like "the ram of G.o.d" and "His nose is as the tower of Lebanon that looketh forth toward Damascus." There was not an inch of ornament upon him, beyond the strict ivory of his teeth, the white glare of his eye. Not that I saw much of him. When Somus took May-ry out, he did just that, took her out, never sat in our kitchen or ate in it; later on we knew that she'd had a bad time getting him to ring at the back door.

Somus. Why he loved May-ry was not hard to tell, quite apart from the fact that she too was handsome, with a shapely mouth, a sweet breadth of brow and eye. She drank-and he didn't approve of that. She dressed high and loud, not even in the New York way but in the bandanna bush colors that antedated Roanoke-and he was forever trying to get her to imitate that sister of his who wore navy blue with round organdy collars. She liked to dance at the Club Savoy-and it pained Somus to find himself still that good at it. Worst of all, she was the staunchest and most literal of Bible beaters, and to an emanc.i.p.ated man, this opium of his people must have been as the devil. So, all told, love between them was foreordained.

She adored him, of course. He was just like his father, strong, dour, and, like many ministers' sons before him, with the genes of faith coming up in him just as hot and strong in other ways-in the very form of his unbelief.

I remember just when the trouble came. It could have been the red spring dress that sparked it. "Kah-whew!" I said, when she showed it to me. It was almost purple, and still trying. "Never get to heaven in that!" Heaven was a great topic between us. "Besides, it'll run."

"Sho' will." She stuck out her chin, pus.h.i.+ng her smile almost up to her nose, her nostrils taking deep draughts of the dress, as if it, all by itself, were perfume. "And me with it. All the way."

"May-ry, tell us about heaven." It was a dull day.

Always willing, she answered me, explicit as if it were Roanoke, as if we had just opened the largest peach jar of all. It was a nice fleshly style of heaven but not rowdy; a touch of the Savoy maybe, but enough pasture for the cow. Triumphant, in the red dress, she entered it.

"Where's Somus? Isn't he there? Where he gonna be?" In these exchanges, exactly like my father, I used to fall into her language.

She cast her head down, furred up her brows under a forehead as smooth as a melon. "He be there," she said after a while, in a low voice. Pus.h.i.+ng out her chin again, she a.s.serted it. "You just wait and see. He be!" And in the same moment she whirled around and caught me at the icebox, my hand in the evening dessert. Was.h.i.+ng my hand at the tap, she warned me, "You go on like you been doing, you gonna come to no good end."

"If I do-how'm I gonna be up there, to see him!" She and I loved to crow at each other that way, to cap each other's smart remarks, in the silly sequiturs of childhood. But this day, something else teased at me to tease her. It wasn't my own unbelief; that had already been around for some time. But in other ways I could feel how I was going on, and I didn't like it either. I was growing out of my childhood. Maybe, like somebody else, I envied her the perfection of hers.

"Listen, May-ry," I said, squinting. "Suppose ... when you get there ... it isn't at all like you said it was. Suppose they don't let you sashay around in any red dress-suppose they just hump you over your Bible in a plain old white one. No music either, except maybe a harp. Oh, May-ry-what the Sam Hill you gonna do if they give you a harp?"

Once more, she considered. The dignity with which she mulled my cheap dialectic already smote me. She raised up and looked at me. "Then I wears my white dress, and I plays my harp," she said, her lip trembling, "and I praises the Lord G.o.d."

I ran and kissed her. "You'll look beautiful, I bet. You'll look pyorely beautiful, pretty as pie."

"You hush," she said, sharp and starched. "Stop that talking like a n.i.g.g.e.r, you hear?" Yes, I forgot to mention that. She was the only one who ever said it in our house.

The next night, Thursday, Somus came to call for her. I was peeping, to see her in the dress, and that was the last time I saw him. Ram of G.o.d again, height six cubits and a span. May-ry looked beautiful. But in about an hour she came back alone, then went out again. I was the only one who saw her. We had the phone call the next morning, one of the several voices never identified but familiar. May-ry's Mooma was taken bad. May-ry was already on her way down there.

The Sat.u.r.day afternoon she returned, nine days later, my mother was out, as May-ry had known she would be. I heard May-ry's voice, talking low to my father, in the parlor. Usually the sight of the place, left to the mercies of the day cleaners from the agencies, would enrage her at once, emboldening her enough to fling off her good clothes for her cleaning smock, bind up her hair, and set to work, meeting no one's eye and loudly scolding the air. But this time, I could see by peeping that she was sitting in the stiffest chair and had not even removed her gloves.

"No, Mr. Joe," she was saying, nervously holding on to her pocket-book. "No, suh-no." No. She had to leave us. Somus say he wouldn't marry her unless she did.

I heard my father "remonstrate" with her, as he always called it. This meant that he was using the same comfort voice that he used on us when delegated by Mother to punish us, the voice with which he helped us toward the first stage of being good again, by mending the amour-propre that we ourselves had injured in being bad.

It was all right, he was saying. Why, it was going to be all right! Whoever expected a girl like her to stay single? Especially when she was being spoken for by a fine boy like Somus. But what was all the fuss about? Mustn't she know that all along we had expected it-that some day or other she was going to want to get married and live out? He put his hands on his spread knees and leaned back, shaking his speckled ruff of hair at her. "Lord, what you women won't do to get a little torment." This too was part of the comfort, to put the offense as quickly as possible in the realm of human nature.

She didn't answer him, although she opened and closed her mouth several times.

"I see," he said after a while, biting at his mustache, "Somus doesn't want you to work at all."

Oh nossuh, it wasn't that. She was able to say this clearly; then she fell to mumbling, her head all the way down. Then she was silent again. He had a hard time getting it out of her. It wasn't that, she said at last. She and Somus would surely have to count on her doing day work. But Somus say what the use of her being up North if she work for home folks? Somus say she won't really be up North until she stop working for people from home.

And now my father really was nonplussed at first, then angry enough to stomp around the room. "Why, good G.o.d in heaven, girl!" (This was just what he always said to me at such times.) What in the name of the Lord had got her into such monkeys.h.i.+nes? Was she going to let that boy sell her down the river? Who was going to treat her better than us-not to mention pay! Didn't she know right well, from talking to the other maids on the roof when she hung out the was.h.i.+ng, how some people treated colored folks up here?

Yes, she knew. She said it in a voice like the Victrola's when something was wrong with its insides, her head hanging down. She didn't expect to be as well off, she said. And she would never forget his kindness-us. But Somus.

So, at last, my father played trumps.

He was standing over her by this time, looking down. "Day job or not, you're going to want some kind of steady family people, aren't you?" He said "ain't you" really, or close to it. "Don't tell me he wants to make you into one of those pitiful agency creatures working from dawn to dusk, getting somebody else's piled-up dirt every day!"

No suh. For the first time, she looked at the moldings.

"Then-" he said, and hesitated. "Now then, May-ry-" His voice dropped to a conspirator's. He rubbed the red spot left on his nose by his pince-nez, as always when he was embarra.s.sed. "Now then, May-ry, what about ... what about Roanoke? You know you got to go there, times you get laid up. You know right well not everybody going to give you the time off we do."

Yes, Mr. Joe. She whispered it. And this was the point at which she stood up, stopped her hands from their fooling with each other, and looked straight ahead of her, as if she were going to speak a piece, or were attending a wedding. "Somus say I got to have that out with you too." She spoke quietly, but she could not look at him. "I never did go there but once a year, on my vacation. And you all knowed it."

He actually put up a hand to ward her off. "Now, now, don't you go and say anything foolish, girl. No need to do what you might regret later on."

"It's true," she said. Even her accent had s.h.i.+fted, hardening toward something like Somus's-who, by some steady effort, had almost none. "I get drunk." Then she turned gray, and started to s.h.i.+ver.

My father stepped back, and he too changed color. It was almost as if she had touched him.

Then a most peculiar scene took place. My father positively refused to consider, to treat, to discuss, to tolerate a hint of what she wanted to tell him and he knew as well as she did. That she'd been lying all these years and wanted the dear privilege of saying so. And she followed him around the room in circles after him, snuffling her "Mr. Joe" at him, all the time growing more halfhearted, confused-ever so often looking over her shoulder to see if Somus, that tower of strength, mightn't have appeared there. But he hadn't. He'd told her what she must do, and left her to it. He was a stern man, Somus, and a smart one-and he understood my father right down to the ground.

Finally, she stopped in the middle of the room and screamed it, exactly like a baby repudiating the universe, her face all maw. "I never was down there but once a year, and you know it. I was getting drunk over on One Hun' Twenny-ninth Street. And you know it, and you know it." Rocking back and forth, she beat her foot on the ground. "I'm going there now. And I'm not coming back." But by this time she was crying like a baby too.

When my father took her to the back elevator, she was still weeping. "Now, now, we'll just forget everything you said," he said. "We'll just forget this whole afternoon. Why, getting married is a serious thing, girl-no wonder you all upset." His voice took on the dreaminess with which he told us our goodnights. "Hush now, hush. You just have yourself a good rest down there in Roanoke." By the time he rang the bell for her, she was already nodding.

When the elevator door opened, she turned back to him. "I'd ruther ... ruther-" But then she choked up again, and we never did hear what.

"Hush now," he said, patting her into the elevator. "And when you come back ... it'll be just like always, hear? Meantime, you send us up some of those peach jars." As the door closed, she was still nodding.

In the succeeding weeks, my mother and father kept a bet on. "You'll see," he'd say, even after the time had long since stretched beyond what May-ry had ever been away before. "She'll have her jobs-and she'll lose them. n.o.body up here's going to appreciate enough what she does do-and what she can't. And she knows it, she knows it." It was almost as if he were echoing May-ry, in a way. Other times, he just worried it aloud. He loved taking care of people. "Who's going to take care of her like us?"

Then, one morning, the box of jars came-the herald. But when the box was opened, the jars were found to be of grape-grape conserve. Now, grapes were all over the shops right here, at the time-it was October. "Idiots," said my father. "What was the address on the outer wrapping?" But it had already gone down the dumbwaiter with the trash. I think my mother knew, but she never said. She was never much for children really. Except for my father. And after that, as more weeks went by and we began the endless series of German "girls" whom I never quite liked or my father either, he submitted, and spoke no more of colored help, or of May'ry. My mother had won, it appeared-and Somus.

But I still yearned sometimes, and wondered. Did she go back to Roanoke? I tried hard as I could to recollect whether there had ever been talk of grape arbors on Fox Road in Roanoke-in the tales that had come out of the peach jars. There had been damson, I knew, and elderberry. Damson too sour for you folks, and all the berries goes to the wine. Had she ever said there were grapes? I couldn't remember, though every now and again for years I tried. Had she sent them from there, or from Harlem? I knew well enough what the box meant, though, same as my father had. It meant pure spontaneity, and love.

Later on, years later when I was teaching in college, there was a girl who looked so much like May-ry-her eyes and that brow-that I had all I could do not to go up and speak to her, ask her who was her mother. Of course I couldn't. How could I be sure, these days, of terms that would be pleasing to her? Besides, I never knew May-ry's last name-or Somus's. That was the way it was, in those days. So I'll never know for sure whether Somus did marry May-ry and she got emanc.i.p.ated, at least enough to work for Northerners, and send that girl on to college. Or whether, by now, she's only been emanc.i.p.ated as far as heaven. If so, I hope she has the dress she wants, and maybe even a little snifter after dinner-and I'm purely sorry I ever was mean enough to insinuate that heaven might be anything else. People should be able to get freed without having to be perfect for it beforehand. Maybe even Somus knows that now. I'm even big-hearted enough to hope that he's with her, either here or there, and has been all along. She'd never be happy without him, so he must be. For if anything had gone wrong, she'd always know whom to come to. And it's been a long time. It's been thirty years now, and she hasn't come back yet.

The Coreopsis Kid.

ON AN AFTERNOON LATE in the Indian summer of 1918, on the lawn of the house from which the Elkin family was returning to the city the next day, a garden party was ending, and the talk there was all of the war, which was ending too. But inside the house-in a room called the "music" room because it held chairs in which no one could settle, a piano on which no one played, and a broken guitar slanted in a corner like a stricken figure-the Elkin child, Hester, lay on the floor, wis.h.i.+ng that the war would never end and that a little old couple called the Katzes had never come to the party at all.

Outside, in the pink, operatic light, all the town guests, most of them Mr. Elkin's elderly retainers, had just gone, looking almost rakish out of their city serge, in the foulards, pongees, and sere straws they had thought proper to the occasion. Her father, who was the head of the family and of the business which supported it, attracted retainers-as her mother often said-as if he were royalty. Even when they were no kin and useless to the point of impossibility, like old Mr. Katz, they swam knowingly toward him out of the sea of incompetents, and he kept them on, out of sympathy, some vanity, and an utter lack of the executive violence necessary to have off with their heads.

Today, all of them had eaten greedily of cakes whose scarce ingredients had been so happily procured, had partaken reverently of Mr. Elkin's claret-meanwhile chattering thinly of what the end of the war boom might do to such claret-consuming incomes as the one which maintained them-and ancient relatives whom Hester had never before seen out of chairs had sat daringly on the gra.s.s. Toward the end of the party, Mr. Katz (thought of by Hester as her Mr. Katz), who had drunk no claret, had nevertheless been found sitting on the gra.s.s too, dazedly preoccupied in wrapping remnants of cake and ice cream, plates and all, in some napkins and a length of string, yards of which projected from a ball in his pants pocket and coiled recklessly in his lap. He and his wife had just gone, gathered up and rea.s.sembled by Miss Lil, Mr. Elkin's forelady, a tall old woman with dead-black hair and a face like a white Jordan almond, who had shepherded them into a taxi, flapped her draperies officiously over their humbled, retreating backs, and climbed in after them with a great show of agility, as one whose competence age had not affected.

Outside the window now, Hester's mother and Mr. Elkin's sisters, Aunt Mamie and Aunt Flora, clinked and murmured over retrospective cups of coffee. The aunts, as per custom, had come out from the city the night before, to "help" in their peculiar way-Flora to check interminably on Mrs. Elkin: "What you have to pay for this chicken, your b.u.t.ter, these berries, Hattie?" and to cap each of her sister-in-law's responses with some triumphantly cawed instance of her own shrewdness in such matters. Mamie would clog the air with vague recipes out of their Southern girlhood, recipes which she seemed to think had an extra and regional delicacy either because these scorned Yankee exact.i.tude for "a pinch" of this and "a piece the size of a walnut" of that, or had some little trick she could never quite recall-"a wild geranium leaf, I think it was"-or had no pertinence whatever to the occasion at hand-like okra soup, when the question was afternoon tea. In addition, both had to squelch any a.s.sumption on the part of the maid that they might be poor relations, and this they did by handily a.s.suming any of Mrs. Elkin's duties which were merely verbal, and by their keenly critical acceptance of service at one magpie sit-down snack after another.

"Good coffee," said Flora.

"The last of the Mocha Joe got from his importer friend," said Hester's mother. It was in the nature of things that Flora's remark was tinctured with disapproval, and Mrs. Elkin's with a hint of scarcities to come.

"I mustn't eat another thing," added her mother. "Kozak says I'm not to gain another ounce beforehand. Did you know-I ate a pound and a half of Seckel pears the night before Hester was born!"

"No wonder she's so greenish," said Mamie's pecking voice.

"I know, I know," said her mother. "The summer hasn't done a thing for her. Autointoxication, Kozak says. He thinks I ought to put her on a farm, let her get built up. I thought maybe next spring, when the time comes. Or afterwards."

Hester inched closer to the window. The family had made the transition from Manhattan to White Plains very late this summer, because of that ailing of Mrs. Elkin's which Hester knew to be connected with the impending birth of a baby. She had guessed this, just as she had long ago concluded that what her parents really wanted, and what they must have wanted her to be, was a boy. To the aunts, and Mr. Elkin's brothers, all girls had been born. At fifty, Mr. Elkin had produced Hester, last in a line of six girl first cousins, the other five of whom-Isabelle, Lucille, Jessamine, Gertrude, and Caroline-were sitting in their own group on the lawn now. All of these were flamboyantly handsome young women, to whom the nine-year-old Hester had never once been likened except, ruefully, in the matter of s.e.x. If the women in her family (as, possibly, in the world) seemed to be of peculiarly dominant natures, it might be because they must never admit to a value somewhat lowered because there were so many of them.

"I've set my foot down with Joe," said Mrs. Elkin. A cup rang decisively in a saucer. "We're not going to take on this place another summer, with the war ending, and n.o.body knowing what business will do. Now he's even talking about a trained nurse, instead of a practical. When we should be cutting down-all along the line."