Nine Women (19 page)

“What’s more important than me?”

She hesitated, not wanting to tell him, not really, but telling him anyway. “I crochet.”

“All day? You’re crazy.”

“No.” This time she didn’t try to explain how pleasant Sundays were—with the street quiet and empty except for a few wandering dogs. Even kids’ games sounded muted on Sundays, without so much screaming. She’d sit on the front porch with her mother, while Joseph read the newspaper and then, finished, slept soundly in his special rocking chair. Sometimes they were so silent and still that mourning doves perched on the railing and watched them. In chilly weather they sat in the parlor. Joseph dozed in the chair that he had brought in from the porch, the bright red patterned cushions almost hidden by his bulk. Her mother read aloud from the
State Times
or the
Diocesan Chronicle,
news of weddings and births and deaths. She herself sat surrounded by baskets of yarn, all colors, pale sea green her favorite. Her crochet hook flashed faster and faster, in and out, catching, dragging, snaring. The soft wool nets slipped away from her hands, completed.

“Okay,” John said, “so what do you crochet that takes all day, every Sunday.”

“They’re called fascinators,” she said. “You saw me wearing one the other day.”

“That head scarf thing?”

“Not a scarf,” she said. “They’re pretty and they’re warm. I always used to wear mine to church, I made them in two or three different colors to match the altar vestments.”

“What?”

“It seemed respectful,” she said. “Well, ladies began stopping me, wanting to know where I got them, because the department stores don’t have anything nearly so nice. I made some for them, and I found I could do it very fast. So I put a notice in the
Chronicle
. Now I take orders, any color if you bring me the wool and any stitch if you show me what it is. I’ve got lots of orders for Christmas. People don’t mind what they spend at Christmas.”

“Money,” he laughed, “is that all you ever think about? You got a job and you still want more.”

“I’ve been poor,” she said slowly, trying to explain, “and the convent took me in and the nuns taught me needlework, all kinds of needlework. It was like they were making me a present of it. And I can use it now.”

“You are plain crazy,” he said.

Still, every day after work he waited at the streetcar stop. It was December now, with cold winter rain. The early azaleas showed their buds and the sasanquas opened their flat pink and white flowers.

“Something likes this weather,” she said to him, pointing to the gardens as they passed.

“Not me,” he said. “Look,” he said, “make one of those fascinators for me and I’ll give it to my mother for Christmas. She’ll be expecting something.”

“Okay,” she said.

“They look kind of pretty on you, so maybe they’ll do something for her too.”

She felt herself flushing, as pleased as if it had been a proper compliment.

After Christmas the rain stopped. In the parks camellias bloomed and all the big purple azaleas.

“Come to the park with me this Sunday,” he said. “We’ll look at those flowers you’re so crazy about and then we’ll go to the aquarium and watch them feed the seals.”

“I work on Sunday,” she said primly.

“You’re not still making those stupid scarfs,” he said. “Christmas is over.”

“I’m making baby dresses.”

“Don’t tell me the nuns taught you that.”

“They taught me to smock,” she said. “People want real smocking on their baby clothes and I add little embroidered rosebuds too.”

“And people buy that?”

“All I can make,” she said.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m going to walk by your house this Sunday and I am going to see.”

“You’re checking up on me,” she said, and was flattered by the thought. “If you walk past I am going to pretend I don’t know you.”

“What makes you think I’m going to talk to you?” he said. “I just want to look.”

He did. He walked by slowly, looking at the houses on both sides. She did not lift her head from her work, not even when he walked back again.

“I hope you are satisfied,” she said.

“You are crazy, I knew it.”

“No.”

“You don’t ever think of me, I bet. You won’t even miss me when I’m gone.”

She stared at him. “Where are you going?”

“Got your attention that time, didn’t I? You heard about this little thing called the draft, and yours truly is 1A. They’re going to haul me off any day now.”

“I forgot.”

“Well, old Uncle Sam ain’t going to let me forget. Hey, look, next stop is yours. You better ring the bell.”

They stood talking longer than usual that day, leaning against the rough trunk of one of the young oak trees at the corner.

“I bet you won’t even miss me when I’m out there getting shot at.”

“There ain’t any war,” she said, “not unless you know something I don’t.”

“They’re drafting an army,” he said. “You don’t make an army if you don’t plan to use it.”

The last azaleas faded, purple wisteria ran wild along the fences, lost its flowers and put out its leaves; high up on the old buildings the Rose of Montana vine began to show its small pink flowers. Then one day he wasn’t waiting at the streetcar stop, and she rode home alone. He wasn’t there the next day, or the next. The weather turned stormy, fishing boats scurried back into port. It rained so heavily that the streets flooded and she waded home in waist-deep water. By morning the water was down; children were fishing for crawfish in the ditches, all of them playing hooky from school.

Finally he was back, thin and tired-looking. “I got my induction notice,” he said, “four or five other guys too. We all took annual leave and got drunk. Then we took the train to Chicago just for the ride.”

She wasn’t too sure exactly where Chicago was, though she did remember learning about it in geography class. So he had just gone off like that, to a spot on the map …

“We decided we didn’t much like Chicago so we came back. Here’s your streetcar, didn’t you notice?”

Again he disappeared without a word.

“What happened to your boyfriend?” Norma, who sold cosmetics, asked.

“The army,” she said. “And he’s not my boyfriend.”

Norma lifted her eyebrows. “Too bad.”

Evenings Willie May rode home alone, feeling strange and a little hurt that he had not said good-bye. He shouldn’t have just disappeared, she thought.

Joseph retired from the police force, complaining of pains in his chest. The doctor told him to stop drinking beer and lose weight; her mother fussed over him, fixing special meals which Joseph wouldn’t eat. She hid his beer. He started spending afternoons at the Paradise Bar, two blocks away. He liked their draft, he said, a lot better than bottles.

Willie May herself had so many orders for children’s dresses that her mother had to help with the cutting and some of the simple sewing and the ironing and the folding in tissue paper. And she still worked at Woolworth’s. In the summer heat, the air in the store turned musty and sweaty and heavy. The tall fans barely pushed it along the aisles. The floorwalkers complained all day long about dust on the counters, and the clerks polished and rearranged them constantly. Aphids appeared like white frosting on all the potted coleus. Two stock boys took them to the back loading platform and dabbed at the bugs with rubbing alcohol.

In August Willie May got her first order for a christening dress, a peau de soie robe over a long lawn shift. She worked on it for a month, carefully dusting her hands with talcum powder so that her sweating fingers left no mark on the white material.

One Sunday as she and her mother sat on the porch and Joseph dozed in the hammock he had slung between two mulberry trees in the yard, John Denham sauntered up the walk and stood with one foot on the steps, grinning. His hair was so short that he seemed quite bald and he was in uniform. “I got leave,” he said. “You want to take a ride out to the lake and get an ice cream?”

“I’ve got to finish the dress,” she said.

Her mother took the material from her hands and carried it carefully inside.

He laughed. “Your ma says yes.”

“I suppose so,” she said. She was very confused and she did not like the feeling at all. “You surprised me,” she said. “I don’t like being surprised.”

“Look, don’t blame me,” he said; “the army owns me now.”

Her mother said from inside the screen door, “It will take her just a few minutes to freshen up. Would you like some iced tea, what did you say your name was?”

So they caught the streetcar to the lake and ate ice cream cones and walked along the seawall and looked at the muddy water and sat on benches under small pine trees and listened to a band play marches and waltzes and opera overtures. Children skated on the concrete walks and chalked the outlines of hopscotch games. The young women were there in their summer dresses, full skirted and starched crisp against the summer heat. The young men were in uniform.

“What’s the matter with you,” he said. “You’re scowling.”

She answered truthfully, “I felt afraid, all of a sudden.”

He grinned and put his arm around her. “Baby, you got nothing to be afraid of when I’m with you.”

“Oh,” she said. And didn’t tell him she knew he was wrong about that.

They settled finally on a shady bench near a fountain. They could hear the water trickling and bubbling in the wide basin.

“Look,” he said. “You ever think about yourself? Like what you’re going to do next? And why you want to do it?”

“No,” she said.

“Well, you should. Now, you’re a good-looking gal. A real pretty face and a nice figure even if you are too thin. But then, you can be pretty disagreeable and grumpy and you can set that mouth of yours tight like a nun.”

She stared at him, anger beginning in a flush.

“But I still think we ought to get married.”

She stopped, realized her mouth was open, and shut it with a click of teeth.

“It kind of makes sense. We get married, and you stay at your mother’s house, and I come back when they give me leave. You keep working and if I get killed you get the insurance. I’m sure as hell worth more dead than alive.”

Two children were running across the open field, their dresses bright multicolored spots on the green. Water dribbled from the bronze urn held high by a fat bronze boy on the edge of the fountain.

It isn’t real, she thought.

“We go meet my family tonight. I already met yours. Tomorrow I see the priest and it’ll all be arranged when I pick you up after work tomorrow. What do you say to that?”

“All right,” she said. “Fine with me.”

The banns were announced at three masses the next Sunday, and they were married that evening. It was just about the only free time the priest had, there were so many weddings on such short notice.

He came back twice on leave before war started and he was sent to England. Willie May left Woolworth’s for a job at the shipyards. It was hard and dirty work—but she saved her money carefully and watched the total grow slowly month after month. In the second April of the war, her mother died in her sleep. Then Joseph remembered his children in Texas and grew lonesome for them and his grandchildren, and went to spend his last days with them. He did not write, so she never knew exactly how many last days he had.

There were few letters from John, but she did not worry. He was a headquarters clerk and they never got shot at, he told her. “I’m still handling the mail, only now I’m getting paid a lot less for doing it.” He was a corporal, then a sergeant. “If you don’t hear from me,” he said, “you know I’m all right.”

In a way she was glad he didn’t write, nor expect her to write very often. She was just too tired. She worked the graveyard shift at the shipyards—the pay was better—and she never quite got used to sleeping in the daytime with children shouting just outside the window. Once she had her picture in the shipyards’ paper: a group of four women, waving to a newly completed PT boat. She clipped that out and sent it to John. She did not sew or knit or crochet any more; her hands were too stiff and heavy. Occasionally, holding a pencil awkwardly, she would sketch a child’s dress. She always felt better then, when she could dream about the clothes she would make one day for other people’s children, lovely things she herself had never had.

When the war was over, she got a long letter from John, the only one ever. He’d been drinking, he said, and he’d been thinking … There’d been some talk about them having to go into occupation forces, but the captain said that was just stupid, maybe the unit would go, but any guy with nearly five years’ service could get out if he wanted to … And he wanted to. “So one of these days you’ll see me come walking up to the yard and maybe I’ll have one of those big
FOR SALE
signs on my shoulder and we’ll go for a paddle in the canal. Like we used to. You remember?”

She did. It was the best game of the long rainy summers of that faraway childhood.

First the oldest and the boldest and the strongest children gathered the large wood and metal signs one particular realtor installed at his buildings,
C ME FOR SALE C. BELL
the signs said in red and black letters. The children stole them from walls and lawns and hid them away until heavy rains filled all the drainage ditches and canals. Then each large sign became a raft for two children, their paddles the curved fronds of the tall palm trees.

Willie May smelled the freshness of rain-cleaned air and the nutty odor of her own sweat. She was aware also of the presence of another child. (Had that been John? She didn’t know.) She saw her arms (long and thin and spotted with mosquito bites) and she saw the brush-burns on her knees (large dark scabs always bleeding). She was shivering with pride and excitement: the smell of drainage water, the smell of sweet decay, was the smell of freedom.

She was never afraid, though they all knew it was dangerous. Childhood sheathed her, protected her.

The children slid down the grass-spotted mud banks of open drainage ditches to launch their rafts on the slow-moving water. Buoyed by its wooden frame, the sheet of tin floated a fraction of an inch above the surface. Each stroke of the paddle sent a thin sheet of water across it.