The Cape Ann (40 page)

This was my cue to leave them alone to discuss what was really on their minds. Probably Aunt Betty. I let the kitchen screen door slam so they’d know I was out of range. Sitting down on the back step, I inclined an ear toward the dining room. Grown-ups forgot how acute a child’s hearing was.

“You’ve got to do something, Arlene,” Grandma blurted tearfully. “I’m useless. Betty won’t talk to me. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“Do
you
know anything, Arlene?” Grandpa asked.

“Anything about what?” Mama sidestepped.

“About Betty and this Miller,” Grandma huffed, suspicious of Mama’s loyalties.

“No, Mama.”

“If you do, you’ve got to tell us. I can’t hold up my head downtown anymore. This will kill me.”

“It won’t kill you,” Grandpa told Grandma.

“It
will
, I tell you. Our own flesh shaming us, right here in Blue Lake.”

“How do you know she’s shaming you?” Mama asked.

“It’s all over her face. She can’t look me in the eye anymore.” Grandma broke down again. “I’m too ashamed to go shopping. I order groceries over the telephone so no one will see me.”

“Well, that’s just plain silly,” Mama told her with a touch of impatience.

“That’s what I keep telling her,” Grandpa agreed.

Ignoring them, Grandma continued, “You raise a child up and you think you’ve put the right ideas in their head. You think your work is done and you’ve earned your rest. And then, something like this happens, and you don’t know where you’re at. I pray for the Lord to take me now, Arlene. I’m too old for this.”

“Oh, Mama, stop that,” Mama sighed. “You want me to start playing ‘Nearer My God to Thee’?”

Grandma put her head down on her arms and cried. “Fouling her own nest, that’s what she’s doing.”

Fouling her own nest? What did that mean?

WHEN I WAS LITTLE
and had an accident in my sleep, Grandma used to talk about fouling the sheets. But, no, that didn’t apply to Aunt Betty. No. But what could be the problem then, that Grandma was so ashamed she couldn’t go downtown to buy groceries?

It was a quiet, humid, buzzing afternoon, cicadas whining away like tiny machines among the vegetation. There was a new municipal swimming pool. I asked Mama to take me.

“Not during dog days,” Grandma said. “You’ll pick up infantile paralysis, like the Yates boy did last year. He’s paralyzed from the waist down. They say he’ll never be able to farm.”

So I put on my bathing suit and ran through the hose, which was not at all the same. But it was cooling. Afterward, when I was dry, I lay down on a narrow bed on the sleeping porch for a nap.

I loved Grandma’s porch. Wrapped around the front and one side of the house, the screened porch held a couple of twin beds,
one double bed, a wardrobe, a pair of rocking chairs, and a tall wooden cupboard full of Grandma’s home remedies.

All three beds were covered with heavy, white cotton bedspreads. I thought the three beds looked like a little hospital ward I’d seen in
A Farewell to Arms
last summer at the penny movie. They showed old movies outdoors once a week during the summer when the Majestic was closed, and
A Farewell to Arms
, with Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, was one of last summer’s offerings. Gary Cooper was very handsome, though not so much to my taste as William Powell.

Past Grandma’s bed was the tall cupboard containing remedies—powders and dried herbs in brown glass jars, and little brown paper bags with penciled identifications: “tansy,” “camomile,” “mint,” and “catnip,” and so forth.

When the door was opened, the mixed scents rolled out in an aromatic wave. It was a heady experience. There was an element of mystery about the cupboard which intimidated me, even as Maria Zelena’s remedies had. And Grandma had warned me not to poke around in there, especially not among the jars on the top shelf. When I was small, I imagined a little brown gnome living behind the jars, who would bite my fingers if I got too nosy. Even now, if I sneaked a smell of the cupboard, I did so down low where he couldn’t reach me.

When I woke from my nap, it was nearly time for Grandpa to come home. Grandma’s big, silver-colored alarm clock sat ticking loudly, not far away, on the straight-backed chair beside the double bed. Five-fifteen, it said.

Wandering into the kitchen, I asked Grandma, “What time does Aunt Betty get off work?”

“Not till after nine on Saturday.”

“Where’s Mama?”

“She went downtown to have supper with your aunt at the Kitchen Kafe.”

“Are we going downtown in the car tonight?” We always went downtown in the car on summer Saturday nights when I was staying at Grandma’s. Grandpa went to the hardware store and the pool hall, while Grandma visited Ames Dry Goods and the dime store. After that we bought bags of popcorn and sat in the car, talking to friends strolling by, until the stores closed.

“This is little Lark?” people would ask, leaning on the car, foot
resting on the running board, “Arlene’s little girl? My, isn’t she getting big, though. It doesn’t seem possible.”

Putting their heads into the car and addressing me in the backseat, where I sat eating popcorn, they’d ask, “Remember the time you and your mama was visiting, and you come to the birthday party for Hazel Willett?” Then, “Well, of course you don’t remember,” they’d remind themselves. “You were only a baby. You were the
best
baby. Not a peep out of you.”

“We’re not going downtown tonight,” Grandma told me.

“Why not?”

“There’s nothing we need at the stores.”

“Can’t we just sit and eat popcorn and talk to people?”

“Not tonight.”

“Why not?”

“That’s enough talk,” she said with finality, slicing thin slices from a cold ham and laying them on a small platter. “Set the table now. Grandpa will be home before we know it.”

Grandma was enduring me. She did not want to deal with my questions or with the meal she was gathering for the table. She worked absently and without enthusiasm.

Supper was an almost wordless meal. Grandpa announced that he was going down to the pool hall to shoot the breeze for a while later on.

“I don’t know how you can go downtown,” Grandma told him.

“I
haven’t done anything wrong,” he said.

“Well, if you’re going downtown, bring home some chocolate ice cream,” Grandma said with a weary, almost indifferent tone. “We’re nearly out.”

When the table was cleared, the dishes done, and Grandpa had driven off, I asked, “Do you want to play rummy, Grandma?”

“No, child.”

I sat at the table and paged through seed catalogs. Grandma sat in a rocker with her eyes closed, hands folded across her middle. When I had looked at all the seed catalogs, with an eye to what would be pretty in the garden of the Cape Ann, I found a deck of cards in the drawer of the sideboard and played solitaire for half an hour or so.

“Isn’t Mama coming home?” I asked.

“She’ll probably stay downtown till your aunt gets off work.”

I didn’t beat the deck once, so finally I gave up, returned the
cards to the drawer, and felt my way into the darkened living room, pulling the chain on the floor lamp by the piano.

There was new sheet music on the piano, pieces Aunt Betty had bought at the dime store where she worked. “I’ll Never Smile Again,” “All or Nothing at All,” and “It Never Entered My Mind.” I couldn’t read music, so I looked at the pages as if I could, and hit any old keys on the piano. After a few minutes of this, Grandma said, “Why don’t you turn on the radio and see if there’s any music?”

Grandma had the dial of the big console radio set to an Omaha station that broadcast her daytime stories. I flicked the button on. An orchestra was playing “I Concentrate on You.”

“That’s nice,” Grandma said, so I left it.

When Grandpa came home smelling of cigars, he and I each had a dish of chocolate ice cream. I had soda crackers with mine because I liked the sweet and salty together. Then Grandma said, “I’m going to bed. Lark, are you sleeping in your underpants?”

“I guess. Mama didn’t unpack our suitcase.”

“Well, come along then. You’ll sleep on the porch.”

“Where’s Mama going to sleep?”

“I don’t know.”

“When’s she coming home? Aren’t the stores closed now?”

“She’ll be along now soon, I’m sure. Come to bed.”

After Grandpa read the Minneapolis paper, he came to bed, first extinguishing all the lights except the one on the back porch and the tiny night-light on Grandma’s electric stove. Undressing in the dark, he climbed noisily into bed, turning several times like an old dog before finding a comfortable position. Grandma sighed intolerantly and gave her pillow a punch.

I liked to sleep on the porch because there were so many windows, it was like sleeping outdoors. I hoped that Mama was planning to sleep in the other narrow bed while we were visiting Grandma, so we could whisper before we fell asleep at night.

I had had such a long nap that afternoon and so little activity, I was not sleepy. I lay listening to crickets cricking and cars purring along in the dark, coming and going from interesting doings. Several times a car drove by on Cottonwood Street. Each time, I thought it was Mama in the coupe, but it wasn’t.

Grandpa fell asleep quickly and snored softly. Grandma lay awake for a long while, sighing and punching her pillow. Once she reached for the clock and peered at its luminous dial. From where I
lay I could not see the face of the clock, but I thought it must be midnight. I wished that Mama would come home before I fell asleep.

“Married women, both of you!” was the first thing I heard the next morning. Grandma, speaking low and intense, was standing beside the other narrow bed, giving Mama a piece of her mind.

“Oh, Mama, we just drove out to the ballroom to listen to the music. Even married women can listen to music.”

“You can come home and listen to the radio,” Grandma told her.

“Mama, you’re not my boss anymore. I’m twenty-seven years old.”

“While you’re in this house, I’m your boss. I have to hold my head up in this town.”

“Well, we didn’t do anything scandalous,” Mama said, and turned over as if to go back to sleep.

But Grandma wasn’t through. “Keep your voice down. We don’t need to wash our dirty laundry in public.”

“If you’d let me sleep, we wouldn’t be washing it at all.”

“Did you dance?”

“What?”

“At the ballroom. Did you dance? Did Betty?”

Grandpa was already up and sitting at the dining room table, reading the Sunday paper. The bell at St. Matthews tolled people to seven o’clock Mass. Would Mama and I go to nine o’clock, or barmaid’s, Mass?

“I danced, Mama. Betty danced.”

Grandma collapsed into a rocking chair. “Have you lost your minds?”

Mama gave up. She pulled herself up so that her back rested against the iron bedstead. “We didn’t run off to Rio de Janeiro, Mama. We only danced.”

“Married women, without their husbands. What must decent people think? That you’re a pair of loose chippies.”

“Now don’t start on your ‘loose chippies’ sermon, or I’m packing up and leaving for Harvester this morning. There’s not a thing wrong with dancing.”

“There is if you’re a married woman without her husband,” Grandma averred.

“Betty has been a married woman without a husband for
two
years,”
Mama pointed out. “Even married women have to have some fun.”

“They didn’t when I was a girl. Anyway, there’s nothing to prevent your sister from going to California and joining her husband.”

“Except that he hasn’t asked her.”

“Since when does a married woman wait for an engraved invitation to join her husband?”

“Oh, Mama.” Mama’s voice softened suddenly. “You know what I mean. If Stan wanted her out there, he’d say so. He’d send her a ticket.”

Grandma started to cry. “I don’t know what’s wrong with that man. What’s to become of her?”

“I told her to see a lawyer.”

“What for?” Grandma asked anxiously.

“A divorce.”

“Oh, my God, you didn’t.”

“I did.”

“How could you?”

“She’s been deserted.”

“No, she hasn’t. He writes and he says he loves her. It was her losing the baby the way she did. He can’t face her.”

“He’s too weak to take hold.”

“He just needs to grow up.”

“Grow up, Mama? Stan is thirty-three years old.”

“I won’t have a divorce in this family. There’s never been a divorce in this family.” Grandma pulled her hanky from the neck of her dress and cried into it. Then, through her tears, she inquired, “Was Miller at the dance?”

“How should I know?”

“You’ve got eyes, I suppose.”

“I don’t know him.”

“You didn’t meet him when you picked your sister up from work?”

“Oh,
him.”

Grandma waited.

“He was only at the dance for a few minutes, just to see who was playing,” Mama told her. “Then he left.”

“Was Mrs. Miller with him?”

“I didn’t see her.”

Grandma made a little grunting sound of disgust. She did not
believe Mama’s innocent answers, or at any rate, she suspected that there was more to be known which she was not likely to learn.

“I’m a prisoner in this house, Arlene. I don’t even go to Circle.” Circle was Methodist Ladies Aide.

“Mama, that’s just plain foolish. You brought us up right and sent us to church and to Sunday school, and taught us what was what. You can’t blame yourself and neither can anybody else. If you’re in prison, you put yourself there. Nobody else did it.”

“That may be,” Grandma said, “but what’s the difference if I can’t get out?” She pulled herself up from the rocker. “I’m going to get breakfast on. Your papa’s hungry.”

Mama sat, playing with the hem of the sheet and looking thoughtful. No, more than thoughtful. Troubled.

The temperature rose near a hundred and five that day. Grandma did not go to church. She said it was on account of the heat, but I never knew her to stay away from church in the past. When Mama and Aunt Betty and I came home from barmaid’s Mass, we were dripping sweat.