Life Among the Savages (17 page)

I put Sally to bed for her nap, settled Jannie with puzzles and books to rest in Laurie's room, made myself some crackers and peanut butter, and sat down again with my mystery story. About two o'clock the small persistent nagging which had stayed with me since I spoke to Carol suddenly resolved itself when I discovered that the motive for the murder in my book had been a large inheritance. Money, I thought. Hadn't my husband given me a check to cash this morning?

The check was in my pocketbook, along with three quarters and a penny. Although Carol would hardly press me for the price of a loaf of bread and a can of tunafish, today was Tuesday and the laundryman was due. The check was surely too large for him to cash, but if I let the laundry bill go for a week, there was Mr. Williams to be paid for the taxis. If I told Mr. Williams I would pay him tomorrow, I could pay Carol for the loaf of bread and the can of tunafish. But tomorrow was Wednesday and that meant that before school Laurie and Jannie would each need thirty-five cents for milk money and my mind stopped dully before the problem of dividing three quarters into two thirty-five-centses. I was debating shelving the whole matter and going back to bed when there was a knock at the back door, and when I opened it, there was Mr. Anderson. “Missus said I should come right over,” he explained. “Said you had no heat for the kids.”

“The furnace is off,” I said, to clarify the situation. “It's down cellar.” Mr. Anderson—perhaps because of his pressing social obligations—operates always on a strictly cash basis; there is a rumor about him, implicitly believed by me, that if he is not paid immediately he goes right back downstairs and breaks the furnace again. “I hope you can fix it,” I said weakly as Mr. Anderson disappeared down the cellar stairs, conversing cheerily as he went; by the time he had begun a sort of rhythmic banging on the boiler I was in Laurie's room, my back carefully turned to Jannie, examining his wallet, which contained eleven cents—not even enough to solve the milk money problem. I had been hoping for the five dollars his grandparents had sent him for a football, and would have kicked myself when I remembered that I had personally driven him into town so he could spend it on model cars. His bank, however, was on the dresser.

“What you doing?” Jannie asked from the bed. She put down a piece of puzzle to watch me.

“Looking for something,” I said truthfully.

“Oh,” Jannie said. “Is it there?”

“Yep,” I said.

By the time Mr. Anderson came stamping back upstairs I was sitting cheerfully at the dining room table, running my fingers richly through a heap of nickels and dimes. “Just needed starting up, is all,” Mr. Anderson said, frowning dubiously at the ornamental cow which is Laurie's bank and at the table knife I had been using to pry my way into it; “Could of done it yourself.”

I laughed lightly, as befits a lady who would rather rob a bank than touch a furnace, and said, “And what do I owe you, Mr. Anderson?”

“Dollar'll do it,” he said, and watched wide-eyed while I carefully counted out a dollar in nickels and dimes and swept it off the table and poured it into his hand. “
There
you are,” I said. “I hope you don't mind change.”

“Well, thanks,” Mr. Anderson said. He closed his big hand around the money and carried it that way to the back door, and I followed him, talking with animation about how glad I was that there had been nothing really
wrong
with the furnace, and didn't it look like it might stop raining, after all. Mr. Anderson got into his truck, jingling, and drove off down the driveway without looking back, and I went back to my heap of money and began to set it out in piles of nickels and dimes, humming to myself. I could hardly leave the bank entirely empty, in case Laurie picked it up and expected it to rattle, so I reluctantly returned half a dozen nickels to it. That, it turned out, left me enough to pay the laundryman, but for the garbage man, whom I had completely forgotten, I had to resort to Jannie, who was quite poor, and, with Sally's meagre collection of pennies, left me with forty-three cents in pennies and my original three quarters. Carol came with my loaf of bread and my can of tunafish and resolutely declined to take the pennies, because if she took them home she would only have to put them in her penny bank. I had to let the taxi go without paying Mr. Williams, since by that time I had put all the banks carefully back in place and I felt that it might look suspicious to Laurie if I tried paying the taxi fare in pennies. While I was making the creamed tunafish for supper Cliff came to fix the furnace, and I told him that Mr. Anderson had already come, but would he mind getting the top off this jar of mayonnaise? He hit it with a table knife and held it under hot water and tried it in the door jamb and I said I would make a vinegar dressing instead and he said oh, yes, Nancy thought I might like to come over for some bridge tonight; they could get a fourth.

I was about to accept with pleasure when I recalled that our baby-sitter's toll has gone up to forty cents an hour, and since I
had
to have milk money I could afford to play only forty-eight cents worth of bridge, or barely one rubber. So I said, smiling bravely, that I thought I had better stay at home with my fatherless children. Eddie brought my car back about seven; “Carburetor,” he said briefly, wiping the steering wheel with a greasy sleeve before getting out. “All set now.”

My husband called that night and asked how was everything going, and I said well, the car had broken down and the furnace had gone out and I had run out of money and no one could get the top off the mayonnaise. He asked had he better come right home? and I said of course not, everything was fine
now,
except for the mayonnaise. He was just back from having dinner with friends, he said, and was on his way to a poker game.

I went to bed about ten and lay awake for two hours listening to a funny noise going on somewhere in the cellar or the attic or maybe it was only someone prowling around outside. When I woke up the next morning the sun was out and the children were laughing in the kitchen and I lay in bed for a minute thinking of how a day full of troubles and annoyances, like yesterday, always brought a fine day like today, and I must be sure to remember this in future. Cheerfully I made cream of wheat for breakfast, filled the lunchboxes, brushed the hair, tied the shoes, gathered the books, and got everyone shepherded into the car by twenty after eight. “Well, well,” I said, “we're in plenty of time
this
morning.”

“Laurie sits with the girls, Laurie sits with the girrrrrrrls.”

“Now you
listen
—”

“Old Mother
Hubbid
—”

“Children,” I said, a smile in my voice, “let's not be cross with one another on such a beautiful day. Let's all be
happy
, and
glad
the
sun
is out. Let's everyone
smile.”

I pressed the starter.

“Cubbid.”

I pressed the starter again.

 

 

 

THE INDEFINABLE SENSE of harvest entered the house, of apples to be stored away, of Christmas in the perceptible future. A fever of activity seized me, and I painted the girls' bookcase yellow. The lawn furniture came indoors and I began wondering if the snowsuits could go another winter. One day I brought Jannie home a little silk scarf, blue and pink check, and she accepted it with pleasure, remarking that she would surely, surely wear it to school the next day. She wore it tied fashionably around her neck, in a trim bow, and I pointed it out to her father, who said it looked very nice indeed. The next day she had threaded her little scarf casually through the top buttonhole of her jacket; the day after that she tied it loosely around her hair in back. Wondering, I went off and got myself a little purple scarf. I spent fifteen minutes trying to tie it loosely around my hair in back and it made me look like a chorus girl dressed as a rabbit. I gave my purple scarf to Jannie, and she tied it to her pink and blue one, and wore the two together as a belt around the top of her skirt, from which she had removed the shoulder-straps. The next day she had one tied around her wrist and the other neatly folded on her dresser. Timidly I offered her two more, one gold and one green, and the next day Sally came to breakfast with her hair tied into a topknot with the green one; Jannie was wearing the gold one in her hair. I pointed this out to her father, and he said it looked very nice indeed. Emboldened, I came to Jannie with a little white scarf I had bought and asked her to tie up my hair for me and she brought a chair and a hairbrush and worked over me for quite a while, fussing and murmuring and clucking her tongue. Finally she got down and came around and looked at me from the front and sighed and said “Well, go show Daddy.” I went and showed Daddy and he looked at me for a long minute and then looked at Jannie, and Jannie shrugged and my husband said to me, “Whatever happened to that nice blue dress you used to wear? The one I liked?”

I gave the little white scarf to Jannie and went off sullenly and spent the rest of the day mothproofing bathing suits.

Laurie came home from school at about that time with a frightful little ditty which began “Salami was a dancer who danced before the king, and every time she danced she didn't wear a thing . . .” Jannie learned it immediately and they chanted it in chorus. Sally laboriously learned to sing “Jingle Bells.”

Two days before his eighth birthday, Laurie rode his bike around a bend, directly into the path of a car. I can remember with extraordinary clarity that one of the people in the crowd which gathered handed me a lighted cigarette, I can remember saying reasonably that we all ought not to be standing in the middle of the road like this, I can remember the high step up into the ambulance. When they told us at the hospital, late that night, that everything was going to be all right, we came home and I finished drying the breakfast dishes. Laurie woke up in the hospital the next morning, with no memory of anything that had happened since breakfast two days before, and he was so upset by the thought that he had ridden in an ambulance and not known about it that the ambulance had to be engaged again to bring him home two weeks later, with the sirens screaming and an extremely proud Jannie sitting beside him and traffic separating on either side.

We put him, of course, into our bedroom; my mother always used to put sick children into the “big” bed, and I have still that half-remembered feeling that it is one of the signs of being
really
sick, sick enough to stay home from school. My mother, however, never had to cope with anything more complex than my brother's broken arm: I had under my wavering care this active patient with concussion, a broken hand, and various patched-up cuts and bruises; who was not, under doctor's orders, to excite himself, to move his arm; who was not, most particularly, to raise his head or try to turn over; and who was not, it was clearly evident, going to pay any attention to anything the doctor said.

“Now I'm home I can have whatever I want,” Laurie announced immediately I arrived in the room with the tray of orange juice, plain toast, and chicken soup which my mother before me believed was the proper basic treatment for an invalid; he cast a disapproving eye at the tray, and said, “Doc said I could have real food.”

“The most important thing,” I told him, “is for you to keep yourself quiet, and warm, and not excited. That dog, for instance.”

Toby buried his huge head under the pillow and tried to pretend that he was invisible. “What dog?” said Laurie.

“And,” I went on with great firmness, patting Toby absently on the shoulder, “you are absolutely not to lift your head and you are absolutely not to move without help and if you do—”

“I got to go back to the hospital,” Laurie said. He wiggled comfortably into the hollow under Toby's chin. “It wasn't so bad there,” he said. “
Food
was good, anyway.”

“Jannie and Sally are not allowed in this room. No visitors at all for at least a week.”

Shax moved softly into the doorway, looked at me and then speculatively at Laurie, and then walked sedately across the room and went up onto the bed, where he settled down without haste next to Laurie's feet, purring. Laurie grinned at me. “Jannie's already
been
here,” he said. “She was telling me one of her stories while you were downstairs fixing that junk on the tray, and Sally brought me her teddy bear.”

I sighed.

“It's under the covers somewhere,” Laurie said. “Doc said you would tell me all about it, all about what happened.”

“We won't think about it.”

“Doc said I was hit by a car.”

“So you were.”

“I don't remember.” Laurie was accusing. “Seems as though I'd remember
some
thing about it.”

“I think it's just as well,” I said. “Better to remember pleasant things than sad ones.”

“What's so sad about
this?
”

“Keep your head down.” I settled back in the armchair and took up my book. “You go to sleep; I'll sit right here.”

Laurie closed his eyes obediently, but Toby wriggled and Laurie laughed. “Listen,” he said, “tell me about it.”

“There's nothing you don't already know,” I said. “It's all over, after all.”

“Was there a lot of blood?”

“Laurie, surely—”

“
Was
there?”

“There was some,” I said reluctantly.

“On the road?”

“Yes. Keep your head down.”

“Gee,” Laurie said luxuriously. “And the cops—did the cops come? Doc said the cops called him.”

“Officer Harrison was there, and he took charge of everything. It was Sunday and he was home cutting his lawn and he came right over when he heard—when it happened.”