The Dollmaker

  Even Max, hurrying by with an armload of groceries for Victor, stopped to study the lace on a doily, when Mrs. Daly, hanging diapers now, asked her if in all her travels she had seen anything like it. “It’s kinda like little waves,” Max said, standing on tiptoe, obediently peering up at the flapping doily, and trying hard not to shrug her shoulders at it. She turned sharply away, but as she came on up the alley, staring hard at nothing, she continued to repeat, “A wave, I’d lufta see a wave, a great big wave.”

  She looked so lonesome that Gertie, out rolling up her clothesline, smiled on her, and said in comfort, “It must be kinda nice to recollect th sea, somethen like standen on a ridge an looken away at rows an rows a hills; only, them hills in th sea, they’d be moven.”

  “Yeah?” Max said, considering. “A big wave, all white on top but blue black at u bottom—like a cave—a little—no, not blue black. Hell, have I forgot th sea?” A look akin to terror came into her eyes. She came very close to Gertie, and looked up into her face whispering: “I gotta see u sea. I just gotta. Victor’s mom, she’s never seen u sea. She don’t wanta see th sea. She’s never been outa Detroit. She don’t wanta be outa Detroit. She’s gotta stay stuck in Hamtramck—all her life.” She held her gum still, but at last chewed again, repeating slowly, “All her life.”

  “But if a body loves a place,” Gertie said, “an it’s all their own …”

  “Yeah?” Max asked, turning to look back at the billowing hope chest. “An allatime be a kind a watchdog over junk like that—like Victor’s mom?”

  Gertie went on into her kitchen, which, after the sunny, windy outdoors, seemed even smellier and more crowded than usual. She took from the shelf her current piece of whittling, opened the inside door, and sat to work with only the broken storm door between her and the alley. Less than a week ago, before she had finished the ten-dollar Christ, Homer had rushed straight from his work to her kitchen. There he had explained in his neat, carefully worded way with her, as if she were a not too bright child who should be pleased by a grownup’s notice, that he had another doll order for her. This was not a doll for a child. Come to think of it, he didn’t really want a doll. He wanted a figure, he had said, something of good wood, “a bit of folk art. Say, a woman in a sunbonnet and apron, but barefooted of course; and not so broadly smiling as the jumping-jack dolls. It’s for Mrs. McKeckeran, you know.”

  Mr. McKeckeran, he explained without being asked, was a vice president. He was close, very intimate indeed with Mr. Flint, and a most important man. Now, wasn’t it odd that his wife, Mrs. McKeckeran, should stop by his desk and admire the little whittled hen when she almost never came into the offices? “Oh, no, Mrs. McKeckeran did not ask for a doll,” he had answered to Gertie’s rather harsh question. She had been in the middle of supper getting, and his shirts, which she had been afraid he might notice if she moved them, kept flopping in her face as she stirred the gravy.

  He just wanted it ready to give Mrs. McKeckeran when the opportunity arose. He had gone away only after telling her all over again exactly how he wanted the doll, and also reminding her in a voice that Moses might have used to speak of God, that Mrs. McKeckeran was the wife of a most important man.

  Gertie sat now and worked on the doll, using the last of her walnut wood. She tried to hurry so as not to have to work on it when Clovis was awake to watch. He would quarrel as always about the deal of time she took, and start again the planning for a jig saw and patterns. But the knife, as if remembering the old days when it worked as it willed, was slow and awkward, even contrary in the wood, so that the face seemed no face at all.

  She grew more and more disgusted, more clumsy-handed. Outside, the wind blew, the children laughed and quarreled and screamed, and two airplanes, high and silvery against the clean blue sky, made a kind of singing with the children and the wind’s cries and the steel mill. Mrs. Anderson’s Georgie was digging a gold mine by Gertie’s walk, flinging black dirt onto her stoop.

  She roused suddenly from her fight with the doll, and looked about her, wondering, sniffing. She got up, sniffed again through the broken pane, then flung open her door and hurried down the steps. She stood a long time staring at the black earth, rich-looking and alive. At last she squatted and bent her face close to it, and sniffed, her eyes warm as they had used to be when she set the first cabbage plants in early spring; this earth was black as soot, and strange, but the smell of it was much like that of other earth in other springs.

  She sat again and tried to whittle, but thought instead of hens clucking over eggs, sage grass burning at twilight, the good taste of the first mess of wild greens, and early potatoes going into the ground. Potatoes? Good Friday was late enough for the first beans, and in this week was Good Friday. Hands, knife, and doll dropped into her lap together. She had known. She had watched the days on the calendar: time for the rent, the car payments, the curtain man, the Icy Heart; but she’d shut her eyes to spring, the real spring back home. If they went home tomorrow it would be too late to get a mule and a cow and do all the things she would have to do before she could make a corn crop or even a garden. Now, the money she had saved back home for land would have to go to get a start of livestock. Clovis had never been able to pay back the Henley money he had used as down payment on the Icy Heart and the washing machine.

  They couldn’t live back home unless she farmed—at least a little. If they went back in the late summer or fall, they’d starve out on what little Clovis would make with his truck. His truck? He didn’t have a truck. She twisted her head from side to side in an unconscious gesture of agony. Another year—a whole year in this place, and without Reuben; he’d be grown so she wouldn’t know him. He was maybe plowing today, but not his own land with his own mules.

  She was whittling again, grim-faced and still when Mrs. Anderson came, Judy on one arm, Homer’s dirty shirts on the other. She studied the doll that Gertie made, and sighed. “Spring; back home there’s pasture with woods behind it, and I’ve always wanted to paint it when the dogwoods are in bloom; after a rain it’s best when the dogwood trunks are sooty black, and now—” She smiled suddenly, “Maybe next spring.”

  “Mebbe, fer all uv us,” Gertie said, trying to smile, for Mrs. Anderson looked lonesome as Max a few moments ago. “You oughtn’t to feel so bad. You’ve got yer house, an you know you’ll be goen back pretty soon, an—”

  “My, my Callie Lou, you’ve got your lesson good, every word. Why, you’ll be going to the bookmobile and getting books of stories in this coming summertime.” The voice, though low, was warm with love and admiration, yet somehow copied from one that Gertie had never heard, but the little chuckle that came after was pure Cassie. Gertie, her insides all torn from thinking on Reuben and the spring, took comfort from the happiness in the living room, and smiled.

  She caught Mrs. Anderson’s listening look, saw her frown of disapproval. Clovis, when he chanced to hear such talk, frowned just as the woman frowned now. Gertie remembered her promise, and the smile died. Her voice was so harsh and hoarse that Mrs. Anderson looked at her in wonder as she said, “I recken a body has got to say it’s spring.”

  Mrs. Anderson nodded in absent-minded fashion, for she was still the listener, looking toward the other room. “Does she do that much?” she asked, whispering, but loud enough that Cassie heard, and there was silence. “I’ve noticed her in the alley,” Mrs. Anderson went on. “Talking to herself so much is rather bad, don’t you think? She ought to be out playing with the other children or she’ll be like—”

  She might as well have gone on and said it, Gertie thought; but smooth and polite the woman was, reminding her of what she’d done to Reuben without saying his name.

  “You’ll have to help her grow out of that dream world,” Mrs. Anderson advised as Gertie continued silent. “They are, Homer has learned, supposed to give all that up when they are three or four years old. The other children think them queer, and it gets harder and harder for them to adjust.”

  “Yes
,” Gertie said. She was glad that just then Georgie screamed and Mrs. Anderson had to hurry away. She tried to whittle again, frowning on the feet, trying to recollect with half her mind if she had ever seen a barefooted woman in a sunbonnet. Maybe Sue Annie in her garden, when the ground was soft. The knife handle slipped in her cold, sweat-oozing fingers. She drew a deep shivering breath, sprang to her feet, the knife clattering to the floor.

  “Cassie Marie!” The loudness, the anger in her voice, startled her. More like a cry than a calling, a cry for the smell of earth that was her own, a weariness with the nosey, talkative woman, the piece of whittled wood that she had made contrary to the knife, “Cassie Marie!”

  She realized before the last cry was finished that Cassie stood in the passway staring at her, more puzzlement in her eyes than hurt and surprise at her mother’s tone. Gertie looked at the child, then down at the whittling gripped in her hand. She’d made one foot too big. The ugly hateful feet; she had to have anger. “Cassie Marie, you git outside an play. You’re wasten a nice day a setten a jabberen to yerself in this shut-up smelly place.”

  “But Mom, I ain’t a talken to myself.” Cassie stared at her, puzzled.

  “Don’t be a sassen me. You know well as I do you’re talken to yerself. There ain’t no Callie Lou.” Reuben was lost to her, the alley had the others. Henley was dead, his money gone, the land lost, even the doll was Homer’s. Giving up, giving up; now Cassie had to do it. “Didn’t ye hear me? Go on. Play with th other youngens. Git into yer snowsuit an stay out.” She was breathing hard, choked up inside, fighting down a great hunger to seize and hug and kiss the child, and cry; “Keep her, Cassie. Keep Callie Lou. A body’s got to have somethen all their own.”

  Instead, she was still, knife in one clenched hand, doll in the other, as she watched Cassie move slowly backward, her frightened eyes fixed on her mother’s face as she hunted desperately for some proof that Gertie scolded in fun, the way she had used to put a great black storm upon her face, pull her thick black brows together, and even stamp her foot to frighten Callie Lou. Gertie sat again, and tried to fix her glance on the doll that seemed somehow to have taken Homer’s face.

  She would not look up when Cassie, having dressed quickly, squeezed past her chair to get outside. At the door Cassie, so close her body brushed her mother’s knees, stopped, and slowly turned back. Her dismayed, frightened glance touched her mother’s face, went past it then to the block of wood, and Gertie saw the yearning, hungry glance. She opened her mouth, then closed it, the lips pushed hard together, and sat, head bowed over the whittling, while Cassie went through the door and down the steps.

  She couldn’t let her go like that. She flung the doll onto the table, and hurried outside. She had to hear Cassie’s voice again; the sound of it would reassure her, tell her that Cassie wasn’t killed by this killing of Callie Lou. She stopped at the foot of her steps when she saw Cassie a few feet further up the alley.

  The child turned swiftly at the sound of her mother’s coming, but after one glance at her face, stopped and stood a time in silence, looking half hopefully, half fearfully at her. At last she asked, in a low, hesitant voice, “Mom—can I go in now. I’d be still, real still—an not wake Pop.”

  Gertie would not look at her. “You’d jist be a jabberen away a talken to yerself. You need a little air an youngens to play with.”

  “I never talk to—” But, unable to find her mother’s eyes, Cassie was still. She stood looking about the alley in a lost and lonesome way as if she knew nobody, nothing, not even her own home in all the place. Gertie with sudden swiftness strode up to her and pulled a pigtail from under her coat collar, then searched for the forever missing mitten in a snowsuit pocket; then as if taking courage from her mother’s touch, Cassie asked, all in a quick trembling breath, “Mom, don’t you like Callie Lou no more?”

  Gertie squatted by the child on the pretext of straightening her snow-pants, but her hands went instead to Cassie’s shoulders as she looked into her face, and tried to smile. “I’ll bet you can see little girls in my eyes today; it’s sunny.”

  “Mom?” Cassie’s voice was hoarse now close to crying. “You don’t like Callie Lou no more?” And Cassie never hunted little girls in her mother’s eyes, but searched her face for trace of Callie Lou. Gertie got slowly to her feet, her hands straightening the snowsuit hood now, but absent-mindedly, wanting only to touch Cassie, hold her when the voice came again, abjectly begging now, “Mom, why don’t you like Callie Lou no more?”

  Gertie’s face twisted with a forced smile that made her seem as if she bared her teeth in anger to match the anger in her eyes. Her voice was hoarse and ugly as she said: “Now, Cassie, you know there never was no Callie Lou. Back home you never did have nobody to play with but Gyp an th trees—so you thought up Callie Lou. But here, you cain’t go around a talken to yerself; th other—”

  The words so hard to speak were wasted, for Cassie was running away, not holding out her hand, or with giggle filled eyes peeping over her shoulder, but with head down, arms pumping, running as if there were but one thing left to do in the world, and that to run.

  Gertie, worried at first by her wildly running ways, spent much of the afternoon watching her in the alley. But Cassie never ran further than around the buildings or across the big alley to the railroad fence. She lingered longest by the fence, always alone, peeping, Gertie thought, between the cracks of the upright boards at the trains going by and the slowly moving engines in the switchyards.

  That night at supper Clovis quarreled at Cassie because she ate so little, and advised her to get out and get more fresh air while the weather was halfway good, for it would most likely be snowing by Easter. “She’s been out,” Gertie said, her voice so snappish that Clovis looked at her in surprise. Cassie’s almost untouched plate of food troubled her, but she mustn’t let herself think it had anything to do with Callie Lou, or that some strange lonesomeness that hung about the overcrowded little place, as when they had first come, was there because the witch child had gone away.

  However, by next evening Gertie worried less. Though the day had been chill, with a raw wind and black clouds piling in from the north, Cassie had spent most of it in the alley. True, she had stayed, usually alone, in the safe place between the alley and the railroad fence, but that night she seemed happier and ate a fairly good supper.

  Sleety snow set in next day, but Cassie begged so hard to go outside that finally in the afternoon Gertie let her go, partly because she herself wanted to go to a store some blocks away where she had heard there was yellow soap and ham to sell. If she left them all in the house together, they’d maybe be fussing and quarreling enough to waken Clovis. A few minutes after Cassie had gone, Gertie was hurrying into the big alley when she heard from further down the alley the low murmuring: “Don’t cry, Callie Lou. You’re a big girl now. Stay over there across th railroad tracks in them little trees. Nothen’ull hurt you. It’s so cold I’ll hafta go inside. Goodbye now an—”

  Gertie stepped quickly back, but too late. Cassie, just turning away from the fence, saw her and looked so guilty and frightened, as well as cold, that Gertie pretended she had not heard. She was meekly still, shivering with cold, as Gertie retied her babushka and advised: “Honey, it’s so cold an raw outside, you’d better git in. An when I come back I’ll bring you some candy Easter eggs, all colors.”

  However, after all the walking about in the damp cold, Gertie came home with the Josiah basket swinging empty on her arm, her brows drawn together in wonderment. The streets had been so still, more empty-seeming than on a Sunday, and this was Friday afternoon. She had tried three stores, and all were closed. At the third a woman had come to her rattling of the knob, but had only shaken her head, frowning fiercely on the basket as if the carrying of it were a sin.

  She had her own door only part way open before Clytie met her with troubled lamentations, not unmixed with shame. “Oh, Mom, I heard Miz Daly an Miz Bommarita a talken back an forth abou
t you. They seen you go off in th middle a tres ore. I fergot, but looked like you would ha knowed—you’re supposed to stay home an pray er go to church er some kind a movie through tres ore.”

  “Huh?” Gertie asked, sliding the empty basket from her arm, remembering only that it was the Friday before Easter—time to plant beans back home. “What, what is it now, this—”

  Afraid some neighbor might overhear such ignorance, Clytie closed the inside door before she repeated: “Tres ore. It’s when Christ was dyen on th cross. They tell yu over th radio to keep it, an it’s somethen yu gotta keep in Detroit or they’ll call yu a heathen what never heared a Christ.”

  “I ain’t so certain Christ ever heared uv it either,” Gertie said, weary with the long walk in the cold, the angry woman, and now Clytie’s quarreling. “I’d lots ruther recollect him alive a goen to feasts an sich than on this …”

  “Tres ore,” Clytie repeated.

  Gertie, in time, learned the new word, though she sorrowed less for not having known it than for the one she should have known on Easter morning when Christ was risen. Amos cried, Cassie swallowed hard, and Enoch and Clytie were ashamed because on Easter morning their unit was the only one in the whole alley not visited by the Easter bunny.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  HARDLY A CORNER OF the sandwich was gone, and the cocoa Gertie had made especially for Cassie because she, unlike the others, had never learned to like the city milk, was untouched, but Cassie pushed her plate away, and said, gagging a little: “I’m full, Mom. Can I go out an play now?”

  “Don’t ye want a little ’lasses frum back home?” Gertie coaxed. The child’s tired-looking, unhappy face troubled her. All the doubts and wonders that had at times tormented her since she’d done away with Callie Lou more than a week ago came over her now, though her reason told her that a little thing like a mother’s scolding wouldn’t make a child lose her appetite and be restless in her sleep. She was catching cold in this wintry weather after Easter was what ailed her. “You’ve got to eat somethen er you’ll be sick,” she said.