Prose (10 page)

Xavier had come to the door and was listening to the story. He was the youngest of the children. First came the twins Francis and John, and after them, Mary and Theresa. They were all fair, pretty children. Mrs. Sennett dressed the boys in overalls and before starting off with them for the cottage every summer she had their heads shaved, so she wouldn't have to bother about haircuts.

Seeing Xavier now, she said, “You bad, noisy children!” He came over and leaned against her chair, and she scrubbed her large hands over his bristly head. Then she told him that she had company, and he went back to the dining room, where Theresa was now reading old funny papers out loud to all of them.

Mrs. Sennett and I continued talking. We told each other that we loved the bay, and we extended our affection to the ocean, too. She said she really didn't think she'd stay with the children another winter. Their father wanted her to, but it was too much for her. She wanted to stay right here in the cottage.

The afternoon was getting along, and I finally left because I knew that at four o'clock Mrs. Sennett's “sit down” was over and she started to get supper. At six o'clock, from my nearby cottage, I saw Theresa coming through the rain with a shawl over her head. She was bringing me a six-inch-square piece of spice-cake, still hot from the oven and kept warm between two soup plates.

*   *   *

A few days later I learned from the twins, who brought over gifts of firewood and blackberries, that their father was coming the next morning, bringing their aunt and her husband and their cousin, also named Theresa, for a visit. Mrs. Sennett had promised to take them all on a picnic at the pond some pleasant day. They were going to cook outdoors and go swimming in fresh water, and they were going to take along cakes of Ivory soap, so that they could have baths at the same time. The men would walk to the pond, and a friend of Mrs. Sennett's in the village had promised to drive the rest of them there in his car. Mrs. Sennett rarely moved beyond her house and yard, and I could imagine what an undertaking the guests and the picnic would be for her.

I saw the guests arrive the next day, walking from the station with their bags, and I saw Mr. Curley, a tall, still young-looking man, greet Mrs. Sennett with a kiss. Then I saw no more of them for two days; I had a guest myself, and we were driving around the Cape most of the time. On the fourth day, Xavier arrived with a note, folded over and over. It was from Mrs. Sennett, written in blue ink, in a large, serene, ornamented hand, on linen-finish paper:

My Dear Neighbor,

My Friend has disappointed me about the car. Tomorrow is the last day Mr. Curley has and the Children all wanted the Picnic so much. The Men can walk to the Pond but it is too far for the Children. I see your Friend has a car and I hate to ask this but could you possibly drive us to the Pond tomorrow morning? It is an awful load but I hate to have them miss the Picnic. We can all walk back if we just get there.

Very Sincerely Yours,

    Carmen Sennett

The next morning my guest and I put them all in the car. Everybody seemed to be sitting on Mrs. Sennett. They were in beautifully high spirits. Mrs. Sennett was quite hoarse from asking the aunt if the children were making too much noise and, if she said they were, telling them to stop.

We brought them back that evening—the women and children, at least. Xavier carried an empty gin bottle that Mrs. Sennett said his father had given him. She leaned over to the front seat and shouted in my ear,
“He likes his liquor. But he's a good man.”
The children's hair shone with cleanliness and John told me that they had left soapsuds all over the pond.

After the picnic, Mrs. Sennett's presents to me were numberless and I had to return empty dishes by the children several times a day. It was almost time for them to go back to school in South Boston. Mrs. Sennett insisted that she was not going; their father was coming down again to get them and she was just going to stay. He would have to get another housekeeper. She, Mrs. Sennett, was just going to stay right here and look at the bay all winter, and maybe her sister from Somerville would come to visit. She said this over and over to me, loudly, and her turbans and kerchiefs grew more and more distrait.

One evening, Mary came to call on me and we sat on an old table in the back yard to watch the sunset.

“Papa came today,” she said, “and we've got to go back day after tomorrow.”

“Is Mrs. Sennett going to stay here?”

“She said at supper she was. She said this time she really was, because she'd said that last year and came back, but now she means it.”

I said, “Oh dear,” scarcely knowing which side I was on.

“It was awful at supper. I cried and cried.”

“Did Theresa cry?”

“Oh, we all cried. Papa cried, too. We always do.”

“But don't you think Mrs. Sennett needs a rest?”

“Yes, but I think she'll come, though. Papa told her he'd cry every single night at supper if she didn't, and then we all
did.
”

The next day I heard from Xavier that Mrs. Sennett was going back with them just to “help settle.” She came over the following morning to say goodbye, supported by all five children. She was wearing her travelling hat of black satin and black straw, with sequins. High and sombre, above her ravaged face, it had quite a Spanish-grandee air.

“This isn't really goodbye,” she said. “I'll be back as soon as I get these bad, noisy children off my hands.”

But the children hung onto her skirt and tugged at her sleeves, shaking their heads frantically, silently saying
“No! No! No!”
to her with their puckered-up mouths.

1948

Gwendolyn

My aunt Mary was eighteen years old and away in “the States,” in Boston, training to be a nurse. In the bottom bureau drawer in her room, well wrapped in soft pink tissue paper, lay her best doll. That winter, I had been sick with bronchitis for a long time, and my grandmother finally produced it for me to play with, to my amazement and delight, because I had never even known of its existence before. It was a girl doll, but my grandmother had forgotten her name.

She had a large wardrobe, which my Aunt Mary had made, packed in a toy steamer trunk of green tin embossed with all the proper boards, locks, and nailheads. The clothes were wonderful garments, beautifully sewn, looking old-fashioned even to me. There were long drawers trimmed with tiny lace, and a corset cover, and a corset with little bones. These were exciting, but best of all was the skating costume. There was a red velvet coat, and a turban and muff of some sort of moth-eaten brown fur, and, to make it almost unbearably thrilling, there was a pair of laced white glacé-kid boots, which had scalloped tops and a pair of too small, dull-edged, but very shiny skates loosely attached to their soles by my Aunt Mary with stitches of coarse white thread.

The looseness of the skates didn't bother me. It went very well with the doll's personality, which in turn was well suited to the role of companion to an invalid. She had lain in her drawer so long that the elastic in her joints had become weakened; when you held her up, her head fell gently to one side, and her outstretched hand would rest on yours for a moment and then slip wearily off. She made the family of dolls I usually played with seem rugged and childish: the Campbell Kid doll, with a childlike scar on her forehead where she had fallen against the fender; the two crudely felt-dressed Indians, Hiawatha and Nokomis; and the stocky “baby doll,” always holding out his arms to be picked up.

My grandmother was very nice to me when I was sick. During this same illness, she had already given me her button basket to play with, and her scrap bag, and the crazy quilt was put over my bed in the afternoons. The button basket was large and squashed and must have weighed ten pounds, filled with everything from the metal snaps for men's overalls to a set of large cut-steel buttons with deer heads with green glass eyes on them. The scrap bag was interesting because in it I could find pieces of my grandmother's house dresses that she was wearing right then, and pieces of my grandfather's Sunday shirts. But the crazy quilt was the best entertainment. My grandmother had made it long before, when such quilts had been a fad in the little Nova Scotian village where we lived. She had collected small, irregularly shaped pieces of silk or velvet of all colors and got all her lady and gentleman friends to write their names on them in pencil—their names, and sometimes a date or word or two as well. Then she had gone over the writing in chain stitch with silks of different colors, and then put the whole thing together on maroon flannel, with feather-stitching joining the pieces. I could read well enough to make out the names of people I knew, and then my grandmother would sometimes tell me that that particular piece of silk came from Mrs. So-and-So's “going-away” dress, forty years ago, or that that was from a necktie of one of her brothers, since dead and buried in London, or that that was from India, brought back by another brother, who was a missionary.

When it grew dark—and this, of course, was very early—she would take me out of bed, wrap me in a blanket, and, holding me on her knees, rock me vigorously in the rocking chair. I think she enjoyed this exercise as much as I did, because she would sing me hymns, in her rather affectedly lugubrious voice, which suddenly thinned out to half its ordinary volume on the higher notes. She sang me “There is a green hill far away,” “Will there be any stars in my crown?,” and “In the sweet bye-and-bye.” Then there were more specifically children's hymns, such as:

Little children, little children,

    Who love their Redeemer,

Are the jewels, precious jewels,

    Bright gems for his crown.…

And then, perhaps because we were Baptists—nice watery ones—all the saints casting down their crowns (in what kind of a tantrum?) “around the glassy sea;” “Shall we gather at the river?;” and her favorite, “Happy day, happy day, when Jesus washed my sins away.”

*   *   *

This is preliminary. The story of Gwendolyn did not begin until the following summer, when I was in my usual summer state of good health and had forgotten about the bronchitis, the realistic cat-and-kitten family in my chest, and the doctor's cold stethoscope.

Gwendolyn Appletree was the youngest child and only daughter of a large, widely spaced family that lived away out, four or five miles, on a lonely farm among the fir trees. She was a year or so older than I—that is, about eight—and her five or six brothers, I suppose in their teens, seemed like grown men to me. But Gwendolyn and I, although we didn't see each other very often, were friends, and to me she stood for everything that the slightly repellent but fascinating words “little girl” should mean. In the first place, her beautiful name. Its dactyl trisyllables could have gone on forever as far as I was concerned. And then, although older, she was as small as I was, and blond, and pink and white, exactly like a blossoming apple tree. And she was “delicate,” which, in spite of the bronchitis, I was not. She had diabetes. I had been told this much and had some vague idea that it was because of “too much sugar,” and that in itself made Gwendolyn even more attractive, as if she would prove to be solid candy if you bit her, and her pure-tinted complexion would taste exactly like the icing-sugar Easter eggs or birthday-candle holders, held to be inedible, except that I knew better.

I don't know what the treatment for diabetes was at that time—whether, for example, Gwendolyn was given insulin or not, but I rather think not. My grandparents, however, often spoke disapprovingly of the way her parents would not obey the doctor's orders and gave her whatever she wanted to eat, including two pieces of cake for tea, and of how, if they weren't more sensible, they would never keep her. Every once in a while, she would have a mysterious attack of some sort, “convulsions” or a “coma,” but a day or two later I would see her driving with her father to the store right next door to our house, looking the same as ever and waving to me. Occasionally, she would be brought to spend the day or afternoon with me while her parents drove down the shore to visit relatives.

These were wonderful occasions. She would arrive carrying a doll or some other toy; her mother would bring a cake or a jar of preserves for my grandmother. Then I would have the opportunity of showing her all my possessions all over again. Quite often, what she brought was a set of small blocks that exactly fitted in a shallow cardboard box. These blocks were squares cut diagonally across, in clear reds, yellows, and blues, and we arranged them snugly together in geometric designs. Then, if we were careful, the whole thing could be lifted up and turned over, revealing a similar brilliant design in different colors on the other side. These designs were completely satisfying in their forthrightness, like the Union Jack. We played quietly together and did not quarrel.

Before her mother and father drove off in their buggy, Gwendolyn was embraced over and over, her face was washed one last time, her stockings were pulled up, her nose was wiped, she was hoisted up and down and swung around and around by her father and given some white pills by her mother. This sometimes went on so long that my grandfather would leave abruptly for the barn and my grandmother would busy herself at the sink and start singing a hymn under her breath, but it was nothing to the scenes of tenderness when they returned a few hours later. Then her parents almost ate her up, alternately, as if she really were made of sugar, as I half suspected. I watched these exciting scenes with envy until Mr. and Mrs. Appletree drove away, with Gwendolyn standing between them in her white dress, her pale-gold hair blowing, still being kissed from either side. Although I received many demonstrations of affection from my grandparents, they were nothing like this. My grandmother was disgusted. “They'll kiss that child to death if they're not careful,” she said. “Oh, lallygagging, lallygagging!” said my grandfather, going on about his business.