Lady (44 page)

Sitting there on Lady's stone bench, for no reason I could immediately perceive I remembered an incident that happened the summer Jesse had first put down the brick walkway, and the brick circle where I now was. The birdbath was still there then, and I had been filling it for Lady with the garden hose. I went in the kitchen, and she and I sat at the kitchen table eating sandwiches Elthea had made. There was a knock at the screen door, and a tentative voice called, "'Day, Ma'am." It was a tramp, one of the hoboes who were everywhere in those Depression days. We'd often see them sitting in the open boxcars as the trains went by at Rose Rock.

"Good day to you, sir," Lady replied amiably, and asked what he wanted. Well, he said, he was looking for a handout. Could she spare him ten cents to see him along up to Hartford on the trolley? Lady invited him in to sit and have one of Elthea's sandwiches. I didn't like the tramp -- he looked dirty and was unshaven -- but he was a jovial sort of fellow, and soon gave us large chunks of his personal history. He'd held all sorts of jobs, had even been a barker on the midway at the Century of Progress.

"Did you see Sally Rand?" I asked.

"Sure, I seen Sally and her fans. Bubbles, too, but she's tricky, she don't let you see much else, 'cept all them feathers."

"Is that all?" Lady asked, "just feathers?"

"Well, at the finale there you get a peek at her behind -- pardon, Ma'am."

"And you ride the trains, you say?"

"Trains, trains, trains, rode 'em all. But they're hard on a fellow's mouth, if you see what I mean."

"I should think it would be the other end it would be hard on."

"Train shakes up a fellow's teeth somethin' awful. Mine rattle around in there like dice." He was helping himself to his third sandwich. He said that mostly he stayed away from the cities, which had become fearful places, with nothing but breadlines and apple sellers on the comers. He had a wife and a mother at home, but he couldn't get work to support them. He kept to the small towns where good housewives like Lady helped him out.

"You're a lucky kid," the tramp told me, "having a mother like this."

Lady laughed. "I'm not his mother, I'm sort of a -- distant relation."

"That a fact? You got a husband, Ma'am?"

"No, I don't."

"Too bad. A looker like you, too."

Lady hid a smile behind her coffee cup. When the tramp had had a piece of Elthea's lime pie and a glass of milk to wash it down, he got up to go, again asking for ten cents for the trolley. Lady took a bill from her pocket and put it in his hand. The tramp's eyes popped.

"Holy smoke -- a twenty-dollar bill! I haven't seen one in I don't know how long." He stared at it, tugged it a time or two to hear it snap, then pocketed it. "That'll feed me for two weeks at least. God
bless
you -- I didn't get your name."

"Just call me Lady."

"God bless you, lady. And, say --"

"Yes?"

"Could you just let me have the ten cents anyhow? I don't want to break the bill."

She gave him the dime.

And sitting in Lady's October garden, that was what I remembered, a tramp who'd seen Sally Rand, and was working the kitchen doors around Pequot Landing, and Lady, her eyebrows turned up in that way that told of her amusement, and the chuckle of appreciation that grew into the laugh that was hers alone.

God bless you, Lady, I thought.

From the stone bench beside the gazing-globe I saw someone standing in the driveway. Robert Marini's pretty Polish wife? No, my own pretty Italian one. I joined her, and arm in arm we walked down the drive. Worried, she had come searching for me.

"What have you been doing?"

"Looking, just looking."

"For what?"

"Something I lost."

"When?"

"A long time ago."

"Did you find it?" She looked at me so earnestly, with those great dark eyes, so fearful in their Latin gravity, that I laughed.

"Yes, I found it" She seemed relieved, and slid her cold fingers into my glove, and her lips were warm on my ear. "The Mds all right?" I asked.

"They've just come back with Agnes and Harold from seeing the animals."

"Did Rabbit show them the fat badger?"

"Yes. Do you know what Lew said? He said it was 'gross.' Wasn't that a funny word?"

"For Lew or the badger?"

I kissed her cheek and we walked up the Green between the young trees that were replacing the old. People were keeping indoors on that bleak afternoon, and the Green was deserted. No dogs barked among the fallen leaves which flew in gusts, but as we walked along, Teresa and I, I thought I could hear the sound of summer voices under the Great Elm, where children played, and it seemed that the wind sang old songs.

As Miss Berry had said, it's good when one feels the affections of the past. They are among the lasting things -- they will never leave us.

And as Lady had told me, never is a long, long time.