Lady (26 page)

"He's awfully clever, you know," she was saying to Helen. "He knows all sorts of things -- about animals and cars, and I'll bet he doesn't tell you about his report card. He just gets the best marks at school, and -- you should really be very proud of him and -- my goodness, why don't you let me take the -- the -- ?"

Mrs. Zelinski's look flashed surprise as Ag reached and drew the pan from her unclenched fingers, handing it in back of her to the astonished matron. Then, taking Mrs. Zelinski's hand, she moved the chair aside, and brought her from the corner. She glanced at Mrs. Sheffield, who nodded, and led Mrs. Zelinski back up the aisle toward the far doors, guiding her with one hand cupped on her elbow, the other making comforting patting motions at her back.

"Very well, girls," Mrs. Sheffield called when they had gone out, 'let us continue our lunch." The matron barged out through the kitchen door with the saucepan, and the hall quickly broke into a thunderclap of talk.

After lunch, during the sack and potato races, I heard a constant flow of comment about what a dreadful person Helen Zelinski was, with several people wondering who the little girl was that had calmed her down. Didn't she know Helen was dangerous? Apparently not, for Ag had spent the period of the races engaged in a conversation with Mrs. Sheffield on the steps of the administration building, and later I saw her run into one of the dormitories. Nancy had gotten Rabbit cleaned up and dried off, and he and Dora now sat idling on the swings beside the Softball field. A few moments later Ag came out with Mrs. Zelinski, and they went to join them.

Later, when the races were over, the visitors began their leave-taking. I looked around for Nancy, then walked over to the swings, where Ag was pushing Dora, while Rabbit spoke with his mother. They talked back and forth for some time, she nervously running her hands along the chains and scuffing the toes of her shoes in the dirt. Then she took something from her pocket, and Rabbit ran off toward the ring of booths, which were being closed up and dismantled.

The matron was marching about the grounds with a megaphone, announcing that it was "quarters hour" in five minutes, and Nancy came to round us up; Miss Beale was ready to drive us back to Pequot. I went over to find Mrs. Zelinski with Dora on her lap, earnestly talking to Ag. As I approached, Dora yanked away from her mother, retreating to the farthest swing, where she put her thumb in her mouth and eyed me silently. When Ag said I was her brother, Mrs. Zelinski caught me by both arms, pulling me to her and looking at me with tearful eyes.

"Geez -- thanks. Just -- thanks."

I had no idea what she was thanking me for, and my glance traveled to Ag, who said nothing, only went over to push Dora's swing.

"You know my boy, Harold," Mrs. Zelinski said. "Harold was telling me about you and your family. He says he wishes he looked like you."

"He must mean my brother, Lew. I'm Woody."

"That's who. He says he wishes he looked like Woody." I didn't know what to make of that. I thought Rabbit could have chosen a more likely model; still, I was pleased.

"Be friends with him, please? It'd mean a lot to me, knowin' he's got friends like you kids."

I marveled at the change in her. She'd put on a clean uniform, and her hair was brushed and held back with a celluloid barrette. Her outburst in the hall aside, I thought her mild-mannered, meek almost. There was something particularly engaging in the way she caught my glance and gave me a good look, trying to establish some bridge of communication, and then dropped her eyes, as if unused to such contact with another person.

"It makes it a lot easier, being in a place like this, to know your kids are doing okay. You in the same grade as Harold?"

"He's a year ahead."

Just then Rabbit came running up, holding something in his hand. He darted a look at me as he gave it to his mother. It was a cheap Woolworth's compact, decorated with designs applied in nail polish, and some sequins glued on.

"I guess you don't use rouge yet, Aggie," Helen said, calling her over and giving her the compact, "but one of these days you will, and when all those boys start comin' round, you want to look your best. . . ."

Rabbit took his mother's hand and put a duplicate compact in it.

"What's that for?"

"For you." Rabbit stuck his fists into his pockets and blinked.

"Harold -- you shouldn't ought to spend your money on me. Geez." She shook her head, then drew the children to her and kissed them both. "You gotta spend it on yourself, money's hard to come by these days."

"Don'tcha like it?"

Her chin quivered, and her eyes teared up again as she looked at the cheap compact. "Sure," she said gruffly, then she buried her head against Rabbit's shoulder. Ag grabbed my hand and we walked away from the swings to where Nancy and Miss Beale were waiting with the others for the ride home.

Lady Harleigh came back with Jesse and Elthea ten days later. She looked refreshed and healthy, and though she didn't talk much about their trip, she seemed to have enjoyed her stay away. Elthea had a crepe-paper lei for each of us, having realized her dream of going to the Aloha Room at that hotel in New York. Lady had seen her friends the Hoffmans off for Southampton on the
Queen Mary
, whence they were to go on to Germany, where they had relatives. Jesse, however, was not feeling well after his return, and though he insisted upon cleaning and sprucing the house up, he soon took to his bed for several days.

Lady was most interested to hear of our visit to Meadowland, which Ag related in all its details one evening in the summerhouse, and the next day together they drove down in the Packard to Middlehaven, where Lady had an interview with Mrs. Sheffield, and another with Helen Zelinski. Upon her return, she conferred with Dr. Brainard, and Dora Hornaday was put into the hands of doctors at a Hartford clinic who were to investigate her ear trouble. I also noted that Rabbit was soon wearing new glasses.

It was August when we learned of Blue Ferguson's whereabouts. We knew that his mother had received some letters, postmarked New York, but with no return address. Now the Hartford
Times
had a story that he was listed as leaving for Spain with members of the Lincoln Brigade, who had volunteered to fight with the Loyalists. Porter Sprague took up his post in front of the barbershop, insisting that the Lincoln Brigade was nothing but a pack of Communists, and that Joe Stalin was sending planes to the Loyalists they were fighting with.

I was happy for Blue. In my mind the tarnish of previous events had worn off, and I no longer regarded him as that sullied delivery boy whose market basket I had buried in the drift to spare him shame. Somehow I knew that Blue was going to redeem himself, and that he'd come back to town a hero.

Ma had managed to scrape up the money to send Ag -- still mooning over the vegetable man's son -- to camp for two weeks, and while she was gone, an unhappy incident befell our house. Lady had left Honey with us while on her trip, and the dog had become used to being around our kitchen. She and our Patsy got on well enough, until one day in the hottest weather Patsy must have been feeling the heat, because she went for Honey at feeding time, and there was a wild scramble on the kitchen linoleum. Lew safely dragged Honey off by the collar, but when Kerney tried to catch Patsy, she bit him. It was only Kerney's toe, and he had a sneaker on, but there were teeth marks. Lew took Patsy out to the back yard while Harry and I diddled Kerney until he calmed down -- he was more frightened than anything else. When Ma came home, she patiently heard the story; then, without saying anything more, she put down her purse, took off her hat, and went out back to talk to Lew.

We watched through the downstairs bathroom window. Lew was leaning against the crab-apple tree, with Patsy haunched between his knees while he stroked her, listening to Ma, who sat talking beside him on the grass. None of us could imagine why Patsy had done such a thing, except that she was already pretty old when she originally came to us. We figured she must be fourteen by now. Lew had always said she looked like Asta in the Thin Man pictures, and he really loved that dog; never went anywhere without her.

Ma stayed under the tree when Lew came in carrying Patsy in his arms. He was crying. It was an awful moment -- Lew was the oldest and while we'd seen him mad often enough, neither Harry nor I had ever known him to cry. He went upstairs, washed his face and combed his hair, came down with a piece of rope which he tied to Patsy's collar, and led her away. Harry and I went out and sat on the porch and waited until he came back just before supper, without Patsy. He went up to his room and wouldn't eat. I felt terrible for him, remembering that evening we'd gotten Pat from Mrs. Hooper at the Manor House Inn and how I'd gone off behind the hotel crying, and wouldn't eat my dinner.

We knew what had happened to Pat. Ma had told Lew that she must be put away. She'd offered to arrange the matter herself, but Lew had said that Patsy was his dog and if anybody was going to take her to be gassed, it would be him. After that, he always kept her empty collar hung over the post on his bunk, until he went off and was killed in the war.

One evening Miss Berry called over the fence from her kitchen steps, and I went to see what she wanted. It was cereal boxes, about six months' worth, stacked on her back porch.

"Gee, Miss Berry, we don't send box tops anymore."

She peered at me through her spectacles with a dubious expression. "Aren't they any good?"

"Oh, sure, but that's for kids."

"Goodness, no more Tim McCoy? Well, I guess you're growing up -- pretty soon you'll be tall enough to see over the top of my fence without peeking through the knothole, eh? And I's'pose Kerney's too young for box tops." She sighed, plugged in an outdoor cord, and came down the steps with some electrical paraphernalia. "Now I'm all tangled up, aren't I?"

"Yes, Ma'am." I followed her out to her front lawn, untangling a maze of wires for her as we went. Selecting a spot on the grass, she drove two metal shafts into the ground, explaining that they were electrified, and then sat on her stoop awaiting the bounty of night crawlers which soon came winding up through the lawn, numb from the storm of current buzzing below ground.

"Sorry to hear about your dog, little Patsy. Will you be having another?"

I shrugged; Ma hadn't said anything about another dog. Miss Berry patted my hand, and arranged herself more comfortably on the step. I liked Miss Berry; everyone did. I suppose people more or less took her for granted, like Miss Shedd at the library. She was just around, like a fact of life. She was prudent and wise and respected, but no one really knew her, unless it was her friend Gert Flagler. Though she kept to her own sun parlor and doorstoop, seldom mingling with the townsfolk, she had for years been part and parcel of the community. Hers was the blood of her Puritan ancestors, and the sturdy fiber of the New Englander, hewed and strengthened since the days of the Pequots. Fortitude is not an assumed guise; it is formed in the marrow, bred in the bones through generations. Miss Berry had the virtues of the Yankee, without his vices. She was no bigot, no horse-with-blinders, and if she had her prejudices she kept them well to herself. To me, she smacked of other, older days, of collecting maple sap on frosty mornings, of sun-dried apples, stone walls, spade-bearded farmers, unspoiled woods and fields; days gone by.

The Berrys had been among the earliest settlers in Pequot, boasting a number of sea captains back in the trading days when the town had been a river port. One of her forebears had sailed as mate on the first American ship to circumnavigate the globe, three hundred years after Magellan. Others in her family had piloted the riverboats I so treasured the memory of. Miss Berry could recall much of the town's history and was full of stories about things she'd heard as a girl from her grandfather, about what life had been like around the Green a hundred years ago. In her greatgrandfather's time, cattle and sheep had grazed right there near the Great Elm, fenced in against the wolves that would come and carry them off. Over there, at Colonel Blatchley's house, there'd been an inn, for the first Boston Post Road had gone right past our doors before George Washington's time. Over there, where the Piersons had lived, a spinster miss had devised a way to harvest the local marsh grass and weave it into ladies' bonnets that were every whit as good as the Italian leghorn ones. Where Mr. Paulus's barn stood was the original site of the first corn mill in Pequot, while the old Academy Hall had originally been a seminary for young ladies. Miss Berry herself had once attended the "little red schoolhouse," a one-room antique which still stood at the corner of Valley Hill Road and Welles Street.

It was presently used as a police station, and was close to the house that Lady's mother had lived in when she moved from Knobb Street. I mentioned the fact, and asked what she had been like.

"Old Mrs. Strasser?" Miss Berry gathered and smoothed her ample skirts and folded them onto her lap. "She had a mind of her own, I expect." I suspected Miss Berry was being tactful; most people who'd known her didn't care for Lady's mother. I'd seen pictures of her: a short, squat, stolid-looking woman, with a grim-featured peasant face that made me think of a large potato. She had never lost her thick German accent, and was generally considered to be well below Mr. Strasser's station. Mr. Strasser had been an intellectual, a college professor, and from him Lady had inherited both her looks and her passion for conversation and the arts. I always thought that perhaps her Katzenjammer voice was poking fun at her mother, a mild reproach to beyond the grave.

"She sewed well enough," Miss Berry added. "But she didn't make Adelaide's life any the easier, I can tell you."

"Why?"

"I suppose because she ruled the roost. Ruled her husband, ruled her daughter, and had it all her own way. Such folks usually do. She sent Lady out to bring home the bacon for her, so to speak. Lady has always been too generous a soul. A dear one, if ever there was."

She fell to reminiscing of that long-ago time, even before Lady had married Edward Harleigh and moved to the Green, when she had lived on Knobb Street and kept house for her mother and father. Another Lady, not much older than I, in pinafores and braids, carrying a lunch pail to school, a Bible to church, Lady in button boots and a fur muff, a Lady of maiden innocence and propriety, a girl when McKinley was President, when there were oil lamps on Main Street, and the horsecars went by. I basked in the warmth of Miss Berry's words, she spoke so admiringly of Lady, and when she had done I bragged that Lady's name for me was Ignatz, that we were boom compenions, and that she called me the friend of her youth.