New Mercies (16 page)

Aunt Polly didn’t seem to notice my consternation. “He bought you?” Of course he’d bought her. Slaves were a commodity. Still, the thought that my family had dealt in such commerce disgusted me.

“Oh, I be glad. My old marster, he mean enough to hatch monkeys.” She pushed up the sleeve of her dress and showed me ancient scars like hash marks. “They worse on my back. He beat me scandalous. He done it ’cause I carry on when he sell my child, say that baby belong to him, not me. I been hurt to my heart ever since.” Aunt Polly’s face went rigid. “I guess I been in hell’s kitchen and licked the spoon.”

“Your master sold your baby?”

“Five year old. It his baby, too. He force me.”

The idea of a father selling his own child away from its mother filled me with such loathing that I could not speak. Aunt Polly picked up the mold and began to polish it again. “Welcome. That what I call the baby, ’cause I welcome it. I never see Welcome again.”

“How cruel.” The words sounded patronizing and inadequate.

“Then I get Ezra. After that, no more children do I have. But everything be fine.”

“You’ve been married a very long time, then,” I said.

Aunt Polly cocked her head to one side and frowned. Then
she laughed and rocked back and forth. “Why, God for Glory, Miss Nora, Ezra not my husband. Ezra my boy. His daddy the marster.”

She gave a long, low chuckle as she looked at my astonished face, then found a clean place on the rag and dipped it into the salt again. As she polished, she hummed a tune, a spiritual. I was glad she was looking at the copper mold and not at my red face. It was embarrassing to mistake Aunt Polly for Ezra’s wife, but I was stunned and revolted to learn that Captain Bondurant had fathered him. Watching Aunt Polly rub the metal in rhythmic circles, I suddenly realized that if the captain was Ezra’s father, the blood that flowed in his veins also flowed in mine. Ezra was Amalia’s half brother, and, if my suspicions were correct, my father’s uncle. If Aunt Polly were aware of my shock, she didn’t show it. She hummed, and after a minute, she began singing, “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.”

Ezra came back into the kitchen then. If he was surprised to see me sitting there still, he didn’t let on, just set a handful of herbs on the table and rubbed Aunt Polly’s shoulder. He washed the dishes that Aunt Polly had put into the bucket, dried them, then took the bucket of water with him and went back outside.

“Did Ezra ever marry?” I asked.

Aunt Polly nodded. “To his everlasting misery. Ezra so handsome that all the girls come ’round. He have his pick, but Sukey Pea the only one he want. She too good-looking to be endurable. God ask her if she want good sense, but she say no, she take it out in hips, and hips was what she got. She gone crazy through the hips. Sukey Pea sure could tote herself. That must be what mens want, ’cause Ezra not the only one make a fool of
hisself by her. Sukey Pea married to Ezra, but she like the other mens too much, and she cut loose. One day she just gone like a turkey through corn. I glad, ’cause she make Ezra crazy in his head. He can’t bear to leave her, and he hate to kill her. We never hear about her again. I believe the Lord took her in His bosom by now, ’cause He welcome sinners as much as saints.”

“Did they have children?”

Aunt Polly shook her head. “You don’t have chil’en, neither,” she said. She stated this flatly, and I stiffened to think that Amalia had shared my life with her servants. It was none of their business. But then, Ezra was none of my business.

“No.” I got up then. “I don’t.”

Aunt Polly had finished polishing the mold and set it down on the table, tilting her head to admire the gleaming copper, which was the color of her hair. She must have been a beautiful young woman, I thought. Had Emilie known what was going on between her and the captain? Suddenly, the knowledge of my family’s immorality, combined with the heat, the heavy air, and now the stench of a pair of goats in the doorway, made me want to be away from that place. I stood and thanked Aunt Polly for lunch.

She got up, too, and shuffled behind me toward the door. Aunt Polly’s homespun dress was worn and patched and shapeless. Would it offend her if I made her a gift of a new one? I wondered. She felt almost like family, and in a way, she was. Then for no particular reason, I told her that I was unlikely to have children. “I’m divorced.”

Aunt Polly studied me for a long time. She had to turn her head to one side to look up at me with her good eye. “You a widow,” she said, correcting me.

My face went rigid, although it should have been no surprise that Amalia had read about David’s death in the newspaper and shared the fact with Aunt Polly. “No.” My voice was controlled. “We were divorced before my husband died. I am not a widow.”

Then I turned and made my way back to the big house and the darkness of Amalia’s bedroom.

David and I had met not long after I graduated from college. I worked as a secretary back then, a position that Henry had arranged for me at his bank. Except for Caroline, none of my friends held jobs. In fact, most of my contemporaries were married, and they filled their days with teas, luncheons at the Denver Country Club and the D&F tearoom, mah-jongg parties, and charity events. Such things didn’t interest me then, and I preferred being a part of the business world, even if that meant taking dictation and typewriting letters.

David had moved to Denver from Fort Madison, Iowa, just a few months earlier to take a job at the law firm where he worked until his death, and he had come to the bank to straighten out the account of a client, a widow, who’d told him the bank was siphoning off her funds.

Since it was early on a Monday morning and none of the bank officers had arrived, David asked me to go over the woman’s records with him. After a few minutes, I pointed out that the amount the woman claimed was missing was the same as the checks written to her son. Her signature on those checks differed from the signature of record.

Because the woman’s family and mine were acquainted, I
confided to David that the son was something of a rounder and frequented the back rooms of the gin mills on Lookout Mountain, west of Denver. The gambling games there were known to be crooked, and an ossified young man was an easy mark. Moreover, the boy was fond of women of questionable character, and he had a reputation for lavish spending. Although I did not tell David so, I actually knew the boy quite well, having gone out with him to a party a few weeks earlier. But he’d gotten drunk and treated me like a pushover, so I had taken a taxi home and refused to see him after that.

The fraud had been easy to detect, but David was impressed that I had done so. I was impressed with his pleasant manner and the fact that he treated me more like a colleague than as a member of the steno pool.

That night, David was waiting for me at the employee entrance with a box of Mrs. Stover’s Bungalow Candies. He had noticed I was not wearing a ring and took the chance that I was unattached, he said. Then he invited me to dinner, and since it was Mother’s and Henry’s bridge night, I agreed. He suggested the Brown Palace Hotel dining room, but it was stuffy and expensive, and I believed David was a law clerk, since attorneys did not spend their time looking into bank records, but sent their underlings instead. So I told him that as he was new in town, he should visit the Manhattan Restaurant, which had steaks so tender that you didn’t need a knife to cut them. The restaurant was much cheaper, too, although David didn’t need to know that. When the owner, Richard Pinhorn, greeted me by name, I was pleased to think David might be impressed. Later, he told me he’d thought I might have worked there, probably in the kitchen.

“Let’s have the porterhouse steak for two,” David said.

“Oh, I’m not that hungry.” The steak cost $1.90.

“I am, and I’ll eat part of yours if you don’t want it.” He placed the order. “And we’ll both take the green-apple pie with cheese for dessert.” I thought he’d probably have to live on soup for a week to pay for the three-dollar dinner. I did not know that David’s salary was sizable, and that even if it wasn’t, he could have tapped his trust fund.

We said only a little about ourselves that night. David did not correct my impression that he was a clerk, and I did not apprise him of the fact that Henry was president of the bank. Instead, we talked about moving pictures and books.

“Have you read
The Beautiful and Damned
? It’s F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best work, you know,” David said.

“It’s good enough, but
This Side of Paradise
is much better.”

“Are you always so opinionated?”

“I try to be.”

“Good. A girl who knows her own mind is interesting.”

David talked about an exhibit of contemporary art he had seen in New York, and I told him about the Colorado Rockies. David once said the nicest thing I ever did for him was to introduce him to the mountains. By the end of the evening, I was stuck on him and thought he was fond of me.

“Well shucks. I’ve left my car at my apartment,” David said when we left the restaurant.

It sounded to me as if he’d made that up, self-conscious that his car was a jalopy, or because he didn’t have an auto at all. “Oh, I always take the streetcar,” I told him.

David was too much the gentleman for that, so he called a
taxi. He started to get into the cab with me, but I didn’t want him to see the Marion Street house, because he might think me a wealthy dilettante whose family connections had gotten her a job—which was exactly what I was. So I insisted on going home alone. David paid the driver and then held the door long enough to ask, “Won’t you meet me for a Saturday movie matinee?” Of course I said yes.

On Saturday, David apologized. “I’d been hoping we could make a day of it, but I’ve accepted a dinner engagement with a business associate tonight. It won’t be nearly as much fun as being with you.”

As I hadn’t expected to make a day of it and had planned on dinner with Mother and Henry, I told him that was perfectly all right. We saw
The Custard Cup
at the Isis, and afterward, we walked over to the Loop Café, where we had hot tea and baked apples. We let the time get away from us, and when we finally realized it was quite late, David agreed to let me take the streetcar home this time. He walked me to the stop and when the trolley came along, he held my hand and said, “So long.”

Mother had planned a dinner party that evening for several of my friends, including some boys who were considered quite eligible. She was concerned that, at twenty-two, I had not found anyone special. But though the boys were nice enough, they now seemed limited when I compared them to David. And that was exactly what I was doing when David walked into the living room with Henry. I was thrilled and rushed over to Henry, who said, “David, you’ve already met my daughter, of course.” Henry winked at me. David turned and recognized me, and his jaw dropped.

“Am I the business associate you are dining with, or is Henry?” I asked him.

David grinned and replied, “Is this what you westerners call being buffaloed?”

“Nora had nothing to do with it,” Henry told him. Then he explained it all to me. “David wrote the bank a letter about the girl who had uncovered some improprieties in an account of ours. He thought I ought to know that she had averted an embarrassing situation for the bank. He even thought I should give her a raise. Your mother suggested we invite him to dinner.”

“And what about the raise?” I asked.

“Would you really prefer it?”

Whether we were more embarrassed by Henry’s cloak-and dagger matchmaking or the banana oil we had fed each other, I didn’t know. Both of us were glad that the little charade was over, although we couldn’t have kept it up for long.

David was an immediate hit with Mother and Henry, as well as with my crowd. “He’s as handsome as a man in an Arrow Collar advertisement,” Caroline told me. David was not tall, but he was athletic and had an engaging smile. Two of my girlfriends made a play for him, but David confided to me that they were “dumb Doras.” Besides, from the beginning, it was clear to both of us that we were a couple. We went to the parties and tea dances and dinners, but what we both liked best were the times we went for long drives by ourselves. David did have a car, as it turned out, a Cleveland Roadster, and he liked to drive fast. David was restless.

On the weekends, we headed west up the dirt road to Central
City, an old mining town, where we peered into the windows of boarded-up houses. We drove over the mountain to Idaho Springs on the Oh My God Road, and when we got punctures, I helped David patch the tires. “Any other girl would sit on a rock, looking at her wristwatch,” David said.

We explored the old mine workings and picked up curios. Once, I spotted a bent iron candlestick and showed it to David. “The loop at the top lets you carry it over your finger, and you shove it into the rock with the spike at the end. Or kill rats with it,” I explained.

I threw it back onto the mine dump, but David claimed it, and after that, it became our mission to search the dumps and glory holes for candlesticks. “Want to know how you find a miner’s trash heap?” I asked one day. “You stand in the doorway of a cabin and toss a rock, like this.” I made an easy throw and watched the rock fall. “That’s the dump.”

“It makes sense. You can’t blame a fellow for not taking out the trash in a blizzard,” David said, squatting down near the rock. “This is a regular miner’s midden.” He held up a whiskey bottle that had turned purple.

“At this altitude, the sun turns them that color.”

Over the months, we picked up candlesticks, picks, gold scales, buttons, once a solid gold locket with a woman’s picture inside. David had it repaired and gave it to me for my birthday.

A few of the mines were still in operation, run by one or two men. We walked along the narrow-gauge railroad tracks to the workings and stood in the shadow of the gallows frames, as the mine tipples were called, talking to the miners. They were always polite, courtly sometimes.

“How is the madam today?” one asked me, touching his leather cap.

We invited him to share the picnic lunch that Hattie, Mother’s cook, had packed—a hamper of fried chicken, potato salad, pickles, cookies. We spread a quilt in an aspen grove, and the miner removed his cap and said a little prayer. “When you live in these mountains, you develop religious facilities,” he told us.