The Cape Ann (30 page)

“Did you see your sister in there?” Papa asked. “That’s how a woman treats a man if she cares about him.”

Mama looked dumbfounded.

At length she said coldly, disinterestedly, “You’re going back to Harvester from New Frankfurt?”

Papa nodded, wincing and putting a hand to his forehead, where a headache had hold of him.

“I want to know how much money you lost last night,” Mama said.

“You can’t leave me alone, can you?”

“How much?”

“I wrote IOUs. I’ll pay ’em off over the next few months.”

“How much? I’m the one who pays the bills. I’m the one who’s got to figure out how to feed us. I want to know where we stand.”

Finally he seemed to cave in. “I lost a lot.”

“More than two hundred?”

He nodded.

“Oh, God, Willie.” Mama started to cry.

“Jesus, not where my folks can see you, Arlene.”

“How much, Willie?”

“Four hundred and fifty.”

Mama sank down on the porch step, her face in her hands, her shoulders heaving.

“It’s going to be all right, Arlene. You’ll see. I gotta go now.” He began backing away. “When’re you coming home?”

Mama didn’t answer.

“Well, all right then. I gotta go.” He turned and hurried across the street to the car.

As the Oldsmobile pulled away, Grandma Erhardt waved. She was worried about Mama, but she smiled and waved.

When the car had turned the corner and was gone, I said, “Don’t cry, Mama. I love you. Don’t cry.” I dropped the five-dollar bill into her lap.

“Where did you get that?”

“Grandpa Erhardt told me to give it to you when they were gone.”

Then Mama cried harder, and I was sorry I hadn’t waited until later.

AFTER A WHILE GRANDPA
Browning came out on the porch and stood behind Mama. “What’s the matter, Arlene?”

“Nothing, Papa.”

“Willie lose a lot of money?”

“It’s not anything, Papa. I’m just worried about Betty and Stan. What’re they going to do?” She wiped her eyes on the back of her forearm.

“We’ll work something out.”

“What can we work out?” She wanted concrete answers, not “eyewash,” as she called it.

“Your mama and Delia are in there fixing breakfast. We’ll eat and then we’ll talk,” Grandpa told her.

After breakfast I helped Grandma Browning with the dishes while the others remained at the table, trying to work out a future for Uncle Stan and Aunt Betty.

It was Grandpa Browning’s idea that Stan and Betty give up their little house. Aunt Betty, who was in delicate health, would stay with Grandpa and Grandma in Blue Lake while Stan, with a
little money scraped together here and there, would head out in the Model A for California.

“No,” Aunt Betty cried when she heard the last. “Stan isn’t going anyplace without me!” She grabbed hold of Stan’s sleeve as if he were going to be plucked away then and there.

“There isn’t any work here,” Grandpa told her patiently. “What’s Stan gonna do? Now, hear it to the end. As soon as Stan has work, he’ll send for you. If we write to Cousin Lloyd, I know Stan can stay with him and Marlis till he finds something. Fact is, Lloyd might be able to get him on right there where
he
works for the movies.”

Mama was stalwart and resourceful as they sat planning and discussing, businesslike, but positive and encouraging, too. She thought of people they could touch for a little money—a dollar or two here and there—to stake Stanley in his new life, his new adventure, as she put it.

“And we’ll keep a record of everyone’s name and the amount,” she said. “And when you’re on your feet, you’ll pay them back, one by one, plus interest.” They all liked that idea because it wasn’t charity.

When the meeting in the dining room broke up, Alf and Delia climbed into their Model A, subdued and exhausted, saddened but convinced—at least Alf was—that what Stanley was doing was right and necessary.

Mama went as far as the front porch to see them off, while Aunt Betty and Uncle Stan accompanied them to the car. Grandpa Browning stood just outside the screen door, waving. Grandma had not tried to get up from the couch. Her leg was swollen and throbbing. It wasn’t that long ago that the cast had come off her ankle.

Released from her in-laws, Aunt Betty climbed the porch steps. “You damned bitch,” she spat at Mama.

“What’re you—” Grandpa started to interrupt indignantly.

“You damned bitch,” Aunt Betty repeated. “I don’t want to look at you again as long as I live.”

“Help me up from here, Lark,” Grandma demanded.

“You stop that,” I screamed at Aunt Betty and sprang out the door, knocking Grandpa out of the way. “Don’t talk to my mama that way.”

“Jim!” Grandma called, furious to be so helpless. “Help me up here!”

Ignoring Grandma’s cries, Grandpa took a step toward Aunt Betty, grabbing her upper arm. “Girl…”

She wrenched away. “Who do you think you are,” she hissed at Mama, “packing Stan off like he was a kid? You’re so good at bossing people. You sure you’re not a man?” she taunted, bending close to Mama, pulling on the bodice of Mama’s dress.

Mama’s hands flew to Aunt Betty’s hair. “I don’t care if you
did
lose your baby, you can’t talk to me that way!”

At last Grandpa and Uncle Stan fell upon the sisters. Grandma, having struggled to her feet, stood horrified and helpless at the door. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” she kept repeating.

I PEERED THROUGH THE
darkly streaked glass, into the dead café. Dust lay thick along the chipped and rotting windowsill where I leaned, and dust filmed the little counter and the few tables and chairs inside. The cardboard sign tacked on the wall showing a small blond girl eating Butter Nut bread was faded to sepia.

Nothing was ever going to happen again in the café. It was like limbo. Nothing good would happen and nothing bad. Everything was set in place as it would remain forever. Baby Marjorie was someplace like this.

“It’s a good day for ice cream,” McPhee remarked, startling me. He had approached from the depot, where he’d been checking the freight, finding none had arrived.

“What do you think it’s like in limbo?” I asked McPhee when we were perched on the high stools at Boomer’s Tavern.

He looked askance, considered for a moment, then replied, “Like Morgan Lake, I think.” After a minute he asked, “What made you think of limbo?”

“Aunt Betty’s baby. There wasn’t a priest when Marjorie died, so she’s gone to limbo.”

“Maria Zelena tell you that?”

I shook my head.

“Don’t you suppose Maria baptized Marjorie?”

“She’s not a priest.”

“Anybody can baptize a baby if it’s an emergency. That I know.” He turned to Boomer. “Ain’t it so, Boomer? Anybody can baptize if it’s an emergency?”

“That’s my understanding,” Boomer told us.

It wouldn’t alter my responsibility for the baby’s death, but it would make me feel some better to know that she was in heaven.

“Grandpa and Grandma Browning went home today.”

“That so?”

“Monday I’m going on the train to stay with them.”

“That so?”

“Mama’s going to help Aunt Betty have a sale and get packed up.”

As we emerged from Boomer’s Tavern, a little before ten-thirty, I fell in step beside McPhee, hands clasped behind my back.

“Do you think Maria Zelena has the coffee on?” he asked.

As she opened the screen door and stood back to let us pass, McPhee told her, “We’ve come to find out if you baptized the Weller baby.”

I followed him to the kitchen, girding myself for Maria’s answer. How slowly she moved. How very many steps there suddenly were to serving coffee. Reaching down cups and saucers, arranging them at three separate places. Opening a drawer and withdrawing three spoons, laying each beside a cup and saucer, and so on.

When she had lowered herself onto her usual chair in the most unhurried way and tucked an errant strand of hair into the braided crown from which it had escaped, Maria picked up her spoon and held it poised above her cup.

“You want to know if I baptized your aunt’s baby?”

I nodded.

“Is it so important?”

I cleared my throat. “Yes.”

“Why should you worry about this?” she asked.

I couldn’t tell her that I was the one who was supposed to catch the baby if the stork let it fall. I wanted Maria to think well of me.

“I want Marjorie to be happy and see God,” I said, sounding very false.

Maria looked hard at me. “You think the baby won’t see God if she’s not baptized?”

“That’s what Sister said,” I explained.

“You mustn’t believe everything you hear, little Lark.”

“But the catechism says…”

“What kind of god would keep innocent babies out of heaven?” she asked. “A crazy god!”

“Don’t say that!” The catechism had to be right. Without its rules there was no shape to life, no ground under my feet.

“Not everything in church is truth,” Maria went on. “And not all truth turns up in church.”

My chair knocked hard against the stove as I fled from the kitchen. Out the front door I galloped.

I hated Maria. We had become friends, and now she turned out to be a heretic.

AFTER DINNER MAMA SAT
at the dining room table, compiling a list of people who might be willing to lend Uncle Stan a dollar or two for the “adventure.” When the list was complete, she began writing letters to prospective donors.

“What do you think of this?” she asked, turning in her chair to read Aunt Betty her first effort.

Aunt Betty sat in the arm chair, obscured by thick twilight. The wan yellow from the dining room barely brushed her features, and she did not turn toward it as Mama read.

“I’m not calling,” I told Mama.

“Never mind,” she hushed me. “What do you think, Betty?”

“I think Marjorie is just a free drinking glass in a box of soap flakes to you—something to sell your product.”

“Which is?” Mama wanted to know.

“Stanley and me. You’re selling us like soap flakes, Arlene. It’s disgusting. You never heard from any cousins. This whole thing is cheap and trashy.”

Wounded, Mama tried to hide her disappointment. “You’ve got to get people excited, Betty.”

Stan, sitting at the kitchen table smoking a Lucky Strike, called,

“I like the part about ‘courageous and determined to get ahead.’”

Aunt Betty went on, “Going to California and getting a job is what
you’d
like to do, Arlene.” She left her chair, making her way to the table where Mama sat writing.
“I’d
like to stay here and just get by.”

Mama looked at her in amazement. “‘Just get by’? You weren’t just getting by. You were starving. Your baby died because you were starving. I’m sorry if that’s something you don’t want to hear, but don’t tell me you were getting by.”

Aunt Betty stared daggers at Mama. “That’s not true, Stanley,” she assured him, crossing to the kitchen door, her voice tearful. “I wasn’t starving, honey.”

But Uncle Stanley was not in the kitchen. He had vanished, maybe to the alley to finish his Lucky Strike in peace.

“Now look what you’ve done,” Aunt Betty cried, turning to Mama. “Driven Stanley out of his own house. When am I going to be rid of you?”

“In the morning, you silly bitch.” Springing to her feet, Mama threw the letter on the table and hurtled past Aunt Betty, through the kitchen to the little back bedroom.

Slumping against the doorjamb, Aunt Betty rubbed her brow with her fingertips, working her lips savagely. At length her hand dropped to her side. She surveyed the tiny rooms with a tormented, devouring gaze.

In the living room I lay on the couch, pretending to be asleep although I still wore my sunsuit and shoes. Through quivering, slitted eyelids, I watched Aunt Betty. She was like a sad old woman, dry and cold and full of pains. Last Christmas at Grandma Browning’s, she’d been pretty and gay.

But that was Christmas. Uncle Stan was still a bookkeeper then. It was after January inventory that they had put him on the road. At Christmas he was making fifty dollars a month and they were only scraping by, but it was fifty
sure
dollars and they weren’t starving.

Clasping her arms across her belly, Aunt Betty drifted, ghostlike, across the dining room, through the living room, out the complaining screen door, and down the steps.

I sat up, peeking out the lace curtains to watch her glide along the narrow walk to Uncle Stan’s dusty Model A parked on the street. Up into the dark behemoth she climbed and laid her head against the seat. In the deepening twilight of nine-thirty, it was only just possible to see her white hands caress the black steering wheel.

Much later, maybe an hour, the screen door squawked like a parrot, and I turned onto my side, jabbing myself with the corner of
Happy Stories for Bedtime
.