Fervent Charity (12 page)

Mary said, “Oh, there’s no hot water. I forgot to fill the kettle before we sat down.”

“Well, put the kettle on and let’s just visit awhile. Shut the door. Gracia seems to be wearing more potatoes than she ate. I’ll nurse her a few minutes and then she’ll take her nap.”

Mary paused in the doorway to look at Gertrude Kaiser sitting by herself at the table eating her pie, before she shut the door. “I’m worried about Ma. She’s not herself.”

“Well, you know, Mary, she lost part of her mind when Pa died. I told you how I found her that day while you and Walter and Oscar were at the funeral home, she was sitting in that rocker, just rocking and whining and not making much sense, not that she ever did.”

Lena adjusted her daughter comfortably in her lap and the child began to suckle. “I used to think she was just being ornery-like and didn’t want to tell me things, like it wasn’t my business, but she’s Will’s mother and I wanted to know all I could about Will, and I wanted to tell Gracia something about her grandparents, something good if I could come up with anything. So I asked her one day, oh a long time ago, when Will and I were first married, I asked her about Berlin. You know she came here when she was eighteen but she grew up in Berlin. That’s a city. Not like anything we have out here. Not like anything I’ll ever see. But I thought it must have been a change for her, you know, coming out here from a big city, so I asked her and she didn’t remember. How can you not remember eighteen years of your life? Nothing. I said, well, what was the weather like there? What kind of a house did you live in? What did your Pa do for a living? She just didn’t remember anything and I thought she just didn’t want to tell me, but lately I think she really didn’t remember. I asked her things about Will, when he was a little boy. Things like what he liked to do and the kind of mischief he used to get into, and she didn’t remember that either. She told me something once about her sister when they were kids and that’s the only thing I ever got out of her. I wanted my Pa to tell me about Oslo and he told me something but he was only there a couple days before he got on the boat. So he didn’t know much. He grew up on a little farm in the country that sounded just like what we were living on.” Lena shrugged.

“I came over here once—it was I guess about six in the evening. I had made an extra loaf of bread and was bringing it to her, and she was sitting at the table here waiting to eat, and there was another place set. I said, ‘Ma, who’s coming to supper?’ I thought it was nice she was going to have company besides Oscar and Nyla, and she said she was waiting for Pa. And I sat down—right here—and I said, ‘Now Ma, you know Pa isn’t coming back. You were at his funeral. He was killed out there in the barn and then you pulled the barn down. You remember that, now, don’t you?’ And she said to me, ‘Oh, no, he’ll be here. He’s just over at Julia’s. They’re doing the books, and he’ll be home for supper.’”

Lena did such a good imitation of Gertrude’s wheezy voice that Mary smiled in spite of her obvious sympathy for her mother-in-law.

Lena went on in her own voice, “And I said, ‘Ma! Pay Attention! Julia’s gone too! Ma, Julia’s dead and gone. They are both dead and gone.’ She gave me the spooks.”

Mary nodded. “I know, Lena. Once in awhile she…slips. She’s done that with me, too. I feel sorry for her. She is so...alone. It wasn’t so long ago she could really put the fear into her sons.”

“I remember the day she smacked the living daylights out of Walter.” Lena laughed and Mary joined her.

“He had that coming, I’m afraid,” Mary said.

Lena was surprised. She had seldom heard Mary utter an opinion about anything, and never her husband. “Well I guess I feel sorry for her too, sometimes. I guess.”

They hadn’t heard anything from the living room since they had closed the kitchen door. Gracia had fallen asleep in Lena’s arms and she was just buttoning up the last button on her bodice when Walter pushed the door open, startling them both. “Let’s go home, Mary.”

He looked mad as a country goose. Expecting Mary to rise and get her coat to follow him, Lena said, “That’s fine, Mary. I’ll clean up here.”

“No. I’m not going to let you clean up all this alone.”

“Nyla’s here,” Walter said, as if that settled matters.

“Nyla’s not feeling well. She’s upstairs lying down. I’ll be home later, Walter. You go on ahead.”

He looked at her with a slightly open mouth. He didn’t say anything, just grabbed his coat and hat from the entry where he had hung it and stomped out.

“Well, it was a matter of time,” Lena said. “Those boys can’t stand each other for long.”

“I wonder what happened?”

“It won’t matter what happened. They’ll each have their own version and swear to it. So it doesn’t matter. She’s sound asleep. I’ll just put her down here and we can do the dishes.”

“Let me help you.” Mary pulled two chairs over and placed them next to the one Lena had just been sitting on. She put the chairs against the wall with the backs to the outside so the child could not roll off. Then she put some coats down for a soft bed and laid Gracia down gently and covered her with another coat.

Mary opened the kitchen door. Ma was still at the kitchen table. She went to the old woman’s side and placed her hand gently on her shoulder. “Ma? Why don’t you go into the other room and spend some time with the boys. I’ll bring you a cup of coffee.”

“Is there any pie? Didn’t Lena bring pie?”

“Yes, Ma, there’s pie. I’ll bring you some.”

Mary had always been a good, kind woman, but she was different somehow since she’d come back from the reservation. She seemed to hold her own place in the world with more ease, more authority. She was less invisible. Lena credited Gustie with that. Gustie had her own way about her and treated everybody the same. She had treated Mary like anybody else. People in Charity, including the Kaisers, including Lena herself, she admitted with shame, had treated Mary as an empty trinket, an unlikely appendage of Walter, more than his cigar, less than his Percherons.

Lena looked into the living room and found Will dozing upright in the overstuffed chair and Oscar absent. Lena presumed he had gone upstairs. She went back to the kitchen and started the dishes.

When Mary returned, after serving Ma her second piece of pie, Lena said, “See, what I mean? Spooks! And no wonder she’s big as a house. She eats. Then she forgets she eats and she eats again. She can do that all day. For Pete’s sake.”

Dear Miss Augusta,

This letter is not to alarm you. Your father is well. That is, he is not ill. But he has expressed a desire to see you again, a desire he would never communicate to you directly, and he would, I am confident in saying, be most displeased to know that I am writing to you. However, I have served your family for more than a generation and feel a responsibility to speak on his behalf; an old man myself, I know the dispositions of other old men: how pride can stiffen with joints, and stubbornness get in the way of sense and family feeling.

The judge is failing in the way of the old, as I am myself. I have retired, by the way. All my duties at the bank are now under the able administration of my former junior associate, Atlee. I am content to keep the polish high on my collection of old coins and take leisurely visits with dear friends, your father being among them. I believe a visit from you though, however brief, would afford him a measure of peace that he lacks in his old age.

Your most dutiful servant and affectionate friend,

Albert Fitszimmons

Gustie folded the letter and slipped it back into her pocket. She rested her chin in her hand and stared out the window at Moon and Biddie munching hay in the pasture, the sun bright on their backs. A soft dusting of snow covered the earth and made everything sparkle.

She had read the letter so many times she had it memorized, but she still liked the feel of the heavy white paper in her hand and the sight of Fitz’s artful penmanship. This letter was the first thing to inspire even a twinge of homesickness since she had come to South Dakota, and now she was drenched in thoughts of home.

She could feel the cool peeling hide on the massive slanting trunk of the sycamore that stood directly in front of the red brick, ivy-cloaked house in which she grew up. Next door, the curtains trembled from the fish-belly white hand of Hannebelle Rush, who kept watch on the comings and goings of her neighbors.

She stepped again into the foyer, onto the black and white tiles that Oksana kept at a high gloss and entered the kitchen where walnut table and chairs, cabinets and counters gleamed under her incessant polishing. Gustie and Oksana had taken their lunches together there on most days, because the judge never came home, if he came home at all, before dinner.

She watched her aunts in their constant flock of three, flutter into the parlor. The Weird Sisters she called them, but never to their faces, and the only time she had ever seen her father throw back his head in a hearty laugh was the first time she had slipped and it came out of her mouth when she was thirteen that the Weird Sisters were coming to lunch and she would prefer to be out in the garden, reading by herself. He had said it was an apt description as they had a tendency to stir the pot. They were his sisters and he knew them well: Louisa, Margaret, Edith, nee Roemer, now Hartigan, Pryor and Willing respectively. They had in common their widowhood and Louisa’s money―since she had married into the most―and an unconditional devotion to their elder brother, but they were nothing alike in looks or manner.

Louisa, the eldest, was tall, slender, cool as a knife edge, and always striking in elegant blues, which brought out her keen eyes, porcelain skin, and platinum hair. The last time they had all been together, Louisa had flowed around her brother like cool water, coming to rest at his left side, towering over his seated figure. Her right hand hovered lightly above his right shoulder, and like a white bird skimming the surface of a pond, moved across his back to alight for a moment on his left shoulder before flying to her bosom to worry a pearl button.

Margaret, the middle sister, the one always adorned in a froth of peach or pink and trailing shawls and scarves and feathers was an anomaly in Philadelphia. In a town that did not care for show, Margaret glittered and wanted Gustie to do the same: “...now dear, you must wear blue, a blue with the merest
hint
of gray. Too much gray and you’ll go flat. Some accents of ecru and powder blue, perhaps a bit of pale yellow about the face would be quite becoming. Softness, softness, softness! That is what you must strive for as you approach a certain age. And, dear, those glasses! Why must you wear them?”

“I need them to see, Aunt Margaret.”

“But my dear, what is there, really, to see? It is more important that you be seen.”

Edith was the youngest, the dark one, and no amount of corseting disguised the fact that she was thicker and shorter than her sisters. Gravity had not been kind and black did not become her, but she refused to wear anything else, because she was in mourning for Abraham Lincoln and had been since she was sixteen and witnessed his catafalque being pulled through the streets of Philadelphia by a team of exquisitely matched black horses. When she was upset she became a squeaking, shuddering little engine of distress, which manifested most frequently over her niece, who disappointed and mystified her in a multitude of ways.

The only thing Gustie would ever buy for herself was a book. She refused to attend any of Philadelphia’s societal functions, invitations to which the Weird Sisters assiduously obtained for her. She wore most of the clothes they bought her but refused the corsets. It wasn’t that Gustie won her battles with her aunts, she just refused to enter the fray, but she admired their indefatigability. They never gave up. Till the day she up and left them. Gustie smiled. Affection for her aunts had increased with the time and distance between them.

Gustie missed Oksana Chapek, the Roemer’s housekeeper, the woman who had spent the most time with her as a child. If Gustie had any warmth in her own soul, the seeds had been planted there by Oksana.

Not a few seeds had been scattered and watered by Michael Flynn. He had tended the Roemer garden since Magnus had first brought his new bride Philippa to live in the house. Michael Flynn seemed as much a part of the garden as the roots creeping out gnarled and knobby from the base of the ancient oak that had reigned over the northeast corner of their city plot since before William Penn and his band of Quakers had laid out the grid for the city of brotherly love. Nothing much grew in the shade of this tree, but felling such a venerable old native was unthinkable. Instead, when Gustie was a child, Michael and she had fashioned a village under its branches. “My own Lilliput” she had named it. They made miniature houses and laid tiny paths with flat stones and buttons. They built a bridge over a small creek they dug out and lined with more stones and pieces of glass and mirror, and when it rained, it filled up with water and shimmered in the slanting rays of the afternoon sun. They populated their village with a motley assortment of figurines of people and animals. When Gustie had gotten too old to play with her Lilliput, Michael kept it up, and when she was again old enough to take an interest, the village was as if she had never left it. The creek was deeper and retained more water so the grackles and sparrows that haunted the garden preferred it to the iron birdbath. “It’s my little hobby, now you see,” Michael said. “I had to replace a couple of the houses, did ye notice that, girl? They were crumblin’ away lookin’ more like Ireland every day and gettin’ depressin’” Before she left, she had placed in her village square the tiny porcelain figure of a dancer. She wondered if Paddy O’Ryan, the fat and shabby squirrel that Michael fussed and fretted over was still there to knock it down and perhaps steal it as he had some of her other trinkets. She hoped he was.