The Dollmaker

  The afternoon was better than the morning. Instead of Enoch with the radio turned low, there was Cassie’s whispering to Callie Lou in the block of wood, softly, so as not to awaken Clovis.

  She had never had a letter in the afternoon mail, and so never watched for the mailman after his morning round. It was Clytie, coming home from school, who saw the letter through the glass. Gertie tore it open eagerly, for it was from her mother. She asked the children to listen to their grandma’s letter, but the wind had lessened somewhat and Mike Turbovitch was calling Enoch into the alley. Amos was standing on the chair by the living-room door, to watch a train go by. Cassie, who thought of her grandma as the one who had hauled her on a sled, was telling the golden child a story of children changed into birds. Clytie had already turned on the radio, so that Reuben alone gave full attention to the reading.

  “‘Dear Gertie and loved ones. This don’t find us so good. I’m glad, Gert, that after being so hard-run so long you have got plenty now. But don’t let the big easy money go to your head. Don’t let poor Clovis work hisself to death to pay for all your fancy fixings. When you are sitting in your fine warm place, pity your poor old mother dragging around in the mud. Your father complains a heap. He don’t do much. But he won’t sell the yoes. I want him to—’” Gertie choked, and struggled to bring out the word until Clovis, wakened by the homecoming children, and now listening in the doorway, asked worriedly if the letter brought bad news. “‘—to sell th land.’” She stammered on. “He don’t need a farm. We can live on poor Henley’s insurance.’”

  Somehow she finished the letter, three more pages given over to her mother’s constipation, the weather, and a long quarreling about factory workers who, she had heard, were striking and holding up the war effort while boys like Henley died. Gertie laid the letter on a kitchen shelf as she heard Clytie say to Clovis, her voice filled with pride, “I’ll bet there ain’t nobody else frum back home has got a Icy Heart but us.”

  Clovis nodded, but Reuben said, “Who cares?” He turned to Gertie, and his voice was mean and sullen, the way it seemed so often now since Mr. Daly’s tongue lashing in the alley. “If’n you’d ha stayed, I could ha hoped Grandpa with them yoes.”

  Clytie corrected him as more and more she corrected them all. “Reuben, quit saying ‘hoped’ fer ‘heped.’ Don’tcha know th youngens—kids—’ull laugh atcha.”

  “Shut up,” Reuben said, and Gertie thought he was going to hit Clytie, but after glaring at her he stalked away to his bedroom, slamming the door behind him.

  Gertie tried to get supper, but thoughts of her father and of Reuben made her absent-minded. Reuben had not played in the alley since the trouble with the Dalys. When he had to go to school or the store, he walked more quickly than was his custom, huddling into himself, cringing before the expected. She had tried at times to talk to him, hitting usually upon school as a topic of conversation, but Rueben wanted no talk with her. His first dislike of his home-room teacher, a Mrs. Whittle, had deepened since Christmas into a sullen hatred that made him speak with contempt of all things done in her room. Before the trouble in the alley, he had liked his other teachers, especially the woman who taught music, and Mr. Skyros, the art teacher, but now he had no good word for anything or anybody at school.

  Gertie in thinking of him felt more lonesome than when she had watched the empty alley. At last she opened his door, asking: “Whyn’t you git out an git some air, son? Th wind’s kinda quieted down.”

  He was kneeling on the bed, his face close to the window above it, and would not look around at her when she came in. She looked over his shoulder through the steamy, smoke-crusted double panes of glass that gave little view except the strip of earth between their building and the next. Unlike the alley, the place was forever empty save for two scraggeldy little half dead maples that stood with the forlorn air of things transplanted into unkind earth. She wondered what it was he saw in the ugliness. She bent above him on the bed and looked sideways past the gray railroad fence, and saw at last what she thought he had been watching. There was a coal car moving slowly through the switchyard, and in spite of the wind-curled smoke and the thickening twilight she could make out the words “COAL,” and lower, smaller, “Kentucky Egg.”

  She was turning away when he said, still looking: “I wonder how many yoes Granpa has got. Funny, a body ud never know it was mighty nigh lamben time.”

  “Yes,” she said, cheered by his talk. “It’ll be spring ’fore you know it. An mebbe we’ll be goen back soon enough to put in some corn. Th war news is good.”

  “Oh, yeah?” he said.

  She went back to the supper getting and worked with conscious carefulness, running the noisy water with half its force, never slamming the icebox door, keeping the radio turned low, shushing, always shushing the children, for Clovis had gone back to sleep. Now, as usual, it seemed there was bad sickness in the house to have a man abed when the children were awake.

  Twice she called softly for Clytie to come cut cabbage for the slaw, but Clytie never heard for listening to the trials and tribulations of Wanda Waxford. Through Christmas vacation Clytie had gone more deeply into the world of the radio people. More and more she would sit on the floor, her arms about her drawn-up knees, her eyes drugged, unseeing, her lips soft, while she listened to tearful declarations of love, long amorous sighs, mysterious rustlings, wicked, forever wicked mothers-in-law, brassy-voiced villainesses, sobbing misunderstood wives, and noble cheated-upon husbands. The doctors, too, were noble; a body would think from the sick-room scenes they never charged a cent.

  Just now, as always before and after and in the middle of Wanda Waxford, a husky-voiced man who could somehow talk so that a body felt you and he were alone together told Clytie to use Amber Soap because her shoulders after its use, her wh-o-ole bo-aw-dy, a-all her body, eeveery bit of her bo-aw-dy would be so-o beauu-uutiful, so-so-o-oft. The voice crooned on about the beautiful body Clytie would have until her eyes softened, glinted, and her lips moistened as she twisted her head about to consider the beauties of her arms and legs. Gertie, watching, thought now as always of Eve listening to the serpent, looking at her own body, becoming aware of the forbidden fruit.

  “Clytie, git in here an hep set up supper.” Gertie knew her voice was too loud, too harsh. The child had done no wrong. She opened her mouth to say something that would soften the harshness, but could think of nothing. Clytie came, smiling, thinking of Wanda Waxford, untroubled by the harshness in her mother’s voice.

  A lonesomeness for the Clytie who used to be rose, sharp as a fresh sorrow. In this new life of hers she didn’t need her mother. Somehow, while she sat lost in the radio world, she seemed further away than when she was gone to the movies that took her on Saturdays, or to the church on Sunday where she and the others, with the Meanwells and her girl friend, went in a bus. It was a good church, Gertie thought, but it was big and far away. The Girl Scouts that took her one afternoon a week were also good, but, like baby sitting, they somehow added to the lonesomeness.

  Tonight, as on many nights, Clovis was late in awakening so that supper for the children was too late. The younger ones were already sleepy, but all had gommed and snacked around until they were not hungry when they came to the table; and anyway the food wasn’t as good as it would have been an hour sooner. Gertie was relieved that Clovis ate it without complaint. She wished it were better. He looked so tired and was getting a peaked, whey-faced look. He didn’t get enough sleep, she thought, for even while he ate he yawned.

  After supper, when the radio was still at last and Clovis and the children had gone to bed, Gertie sat a while whittling in the kitchen. She finished one of Homer’s dolls and began the rough work on another. She soon got so sleepy that for some minutes she did little but nod and yawn and try to blink her eyes into wakefulness. Since Clovis had been put on this shift, she dreaded to go to bed even worse than formerly, for as soon as she got into bed she always came wide awake.

  Tonight was
no better than other nights. She lay rigidly still, inviting sleep, but it would not come. Half her mind wondered how soon the alarm would go off. The other half listened to the wind or, in the spells of silence between the sob and shriek of it, the night sounds of the city, lonelier seeming than by day, as if she lived in a world where nothing else lived. If in the silence she could hear the creek over rocks, the wind in living trees, the bark of a fox, the cry of a screech owl—anything alive, not dead like the clock and the Icy Heart.

  She thought of their debts on the car, Icy Heart, washing machine, radio, dishes, curtains. Her mind kept wanting to add the total, reckon up the interest, that must be more, way more than John’s 5½ per cent. She turned restlessly from side to side, but her mind wouldn’t turn from the debts. What if Clovis got sick? She wouldn’t think. She’d put herself back home. Pretty soon the war would be over and they’d be going back. She still had the more than three hundred dollars she’d saved in fifteen years. And she mustn’t go back without a face for the block of wood. It must be a happy, laughing face even though she’d lost the Christ with the red leaves in his hands.

  She was, instead of the laughing Christ, seeing Reuben’s hurt and angry eyes when the alarm sounded. Clovis, whose hands always awakened first, reached and turned it off. Sleep pulled him back on the pillow, but Cassie awakened whimpering, and Clytie cried sleepily, “Is it school time?”

  Clovis protested as always that there was no need for her to get up. But as always she did, though his lunch was fixed, and there was nothing to do but make coffee. She’d rather be up in the kitchen than in bed unable to sleep for reading the sounds of Clovis—the opening of the icebox, hiss of the gas, slide of the lunch box across the table. Sound for sound that Whit made in the Meanwell kitchen behind the other wall. If she drowsed, the sounds might mix, and Clovis, her man, would cease to be a man and become instead a numbered sound, known only by the number.

  She thought of numbers still when Clovis was gone, and she was back in bed. Numbers instead of people. But she wanted people. People to call her “Gertie.” If she could have an animal to nose her hand, a red bird to watch, even a potted plant. Something alive, she had to have something alive. Remembering roused her to lift on one elbow, smiling a little. She had forgotten the ice flowers on the kitchen window. This morning, before the wind rose to scatter the loose snow and make a body think there was another blizzard, the ice flowers on the glass had shone red as if alive when through them she had watched the sun rise between Mrs. Daly’s chimney and the telephone pole.

  She was glad when two or three days later the children brought from school word that at the term end there was to be a thing called an “open house” to which the mothers were invited so that they could see how it was in school and talk to the teachers about their children. It would be nice to see Mr. Skyros, the art teacher, again, and she wanted to talk with some of the other teachers, especially Mrs. Whittle, who taught Reuben.

  He had come slamming through the door that same afternoon, his eyes blazing, not speaking, and it had taken three questions to find out what ailed him. He was to have “that ole Miz Whittle” another term. Cassie, who would be six in February, had come home shivering. Next term she’d have to learn to read for true. She had to go into “Ole Miz Huffacre’s room,” the meanest teacher, Clytie had warned her, in the whole school.

  “You’ll learn to read same as th others,” Gertie had comforted Cassie, and to Reuben, “You’ve jist got off on th wrong foot with her—keep a tryen.”

  However, doubts tore at her as three days later she walked to the school after having accepted Max’s offer to watch Amos and Cassie until it was time for her to go to work at four-thirty.

  She would, she decided, go first to Miss Vashinski. Cassie liked her so, and maybe she would warn this Miss Huffacre that Cassie might have a lot of trouble in learning to read. Then it came to her that Cassie had only the one Miss Vashinski, but Miss Vashinski had a lot of Cassies, most of whom had been with her for months instead of only a few weeks. The woman wouldn’t recollect her.

  She was hardly prepared when Miss Vashinski right off gave her a great big smile and said: “How do you do, Mrs. Nevels. I hate to lose Cassie. She was so sweet.”

  Gertie smiled. “She hates to leave you, but how can you recollect all th”—Clytie didn’t want her to say “youngens,” but she couldn’t think of the other word—“youngens,” she said at last, remembering too late the word Clytie liked was “kids.” But she went on, flushing, flustered, “Let alone recollect their mamas.”

  Miss Vashinski laughed until her dangling earrings trembled. “I don’t always remember, but I remember you,” she said, savoring a victory. “On Cassie’s first day Garcia spoke, remember? I was almost ready to give up.”

  “He must be talken right along now,” Gertie said. “Cassie says somethen about him ever once in a while.”

  “He’s fine, just fine,” Miss Vashinski said. “You should hear him and Cassie together. The other day we’d had a story about a little girl in Holland—I’d told the children Holland was a country across the ocean, and of course they started talking about countries—you know we have many countries here. Garcia said to Cassie, ‘My country is Mexico,’ and Cassie said to Garcia, ‘My country is Kentucky.’ Wasn’t that sweet?” and she turned to the next mother, but after smiling, turned back to Gertie, who was saying, worried:

  “Cassie’s so afeared that she won’t learn to read.”

  “She’ll learn,” Miss Vashinski said. “She has a high intelligence rating; if she should have trouble, have her eyes checked right away.”

  “Her eyes is good,” Gertie insisted. “She can see th stars an she don’t git up close; she backs off …” She had just remembered her father before he got his double-vision glasses.

  Miss Vashinski had stopped in the middle of a great big smile after getting only as far as, “How do you do, Mrs.—” She couldn’t remember the other mother’s name, and was glad to look at Gertie again. “She could have a kind of farsightedness. I’ll make a note.” She turned back to the other mother, a dark dumpling of a woman in a red and yellow scarf with blue roses, perspiring as she said slowly and timidly, “I—Michael Ospechuk’s mother.”

  Gertie turned away. The woman looked too scared to talk. Maybe she had older ones like Clytie who didn’t like the words she used and told her what to say. She followed a group to the basement, where in a little crowded, sweat-smelling room a great gang of children played with balls and jumping ropes. She realized she was looking at the “gymnasium” of which Reuben had dreamed. Its ceiling wasn’t high enough for even a basketball goal, and it was smaller than a classroom.

  The teacher, a tired, middle-aged woman, smiled as the mothers introduced themselves, pretending like, Gertie thought, she remembered their children. She couldn’t, because she taught all the children in the school above the third grade, and there were, she had heard, 642 children in a building put up forty years before for three hundred. This tired teacher looked as if in her time she had taught them all. But when Gertie introduced herself she smiled and said: “Your son is so cute. At first he was so bashful, and he still won’t do couple dancing with anyone but me. He’s just getting to that age, you know; but in the folk games he’s already one of the best—such a good sense of rhythm.”

  “Seems like Enoch’s smart in everything,” Gertie said.

  “Enoch,” the woman said, looking disappointed, trying to remember an Enoch, “I thought you were Reuben Nevels’s mother.”

  Gertie laughed. “I’m Reuben’s too. I just didn’t figger Reuben ’ud be good at dancen.”

  “Why? I’ll bet you are,” she said, smiling, already turning to another mother who was wanting to know why her Eva Marie had got a U in self-control.

  Gertie looked over her shoulder as she left the room. If she’d been a little girl here, her black sin would have been no sin at all. Clytie had been troubled the first time the gym class danced. Folk games the teacher
had called it, she told her mother, but still it was dancing. She had been relieved when Gertie assured her that it was no sin, not the sinful dancing of which her Grandmother Kendrick had warned so many times.

  Gertie tramped on up and down the building, a big perspiring woman in the crowd of mothers. The warm lights in her eyes grew warmer when she heard Clytie, the blue band of a traffic director on her arm, talking to the telephone in the principal’s office easy as if she’d been born in a house with a ringing telephone. She was smiling widely by the time she had seen Enoch’s home-room teacher and heard what a good boy he was, how well he had adjusted, and how quickly he learned his lessons. She felt proud and happy, remembering that until their coming to Detroit she, with help from Clytie, had given him most of the schooling he had had. She saw him sitting up near the front of the room with a book and some papers on his desk. She looked at him, smiling, until he lifted his head. He turned red, looked quickly away, then down, and began a furious scribbling. She stood an instant watching, her smile dying slowly.

  Mr. Skyros, with his questions about the head in the wood he had heard she was making, and his praise of Reuben’s carving—for in art class he taught, along with lots of other things, carving in wood and soap, even potatoes—brought back a lot of the lost warmth. She lingered a while in the art room, studying the exhibits, and wishing her father could have seen such a room. A hound dog, a clumsy, ugly thing with too little chest and too much belly, made by Reuben, was there for everybody to see. She was ashamed of it and half thought to put it out of sight until two mothers admired it, and then she lingered reaping the nice remarks for a harvest for Reuben.

  It was getting late, the children marching homeward through the halls, before she reached the one room she dreaded—Mrs. Whittle’s. It was empty save for one other mother just coming out, and a woman who Gertie knew was Mrs. Whittle, for she was taking her purse from an open desk drawer. She hesitated in the doorway. She wished the woman, a tall, thin-nish, middle-aged person with a pink and white face above a yellow stringy neck, would invite her in. Mrs. Whittle did glance up briefly, but only turned sharp around to a cupboard in the corner behind her desk. Gertie studied her hair, so neatly and so smoothly fixed in rows and rows of little yellow curls that it made her think of the hard and shiny scallops on some piece of her mother’s starched embroidery. She waited a moment longer, then cleared her throat and said, “Miz Whittle.”