Gertie thought the child looked hopeful, as if, learning her money was gone, she would turn around and go back to bed, and move in time to Hamtramck, into the house with the lilac bush; and in afteryears the girl would thank her, and Victor too, for Max would some day tell him. Their children would laugh in the springs when the lilacs bloomed over the old tale of how Mama once might have run away when she was young and sad because she’d lost that first little baby, and could have been a homeless tramp upon the earth, wandering among men and cities into a lonesome old age—only, the big fool woman she had trusted with her money had lost it.
Eight hundred dollars was enough to pay their debts; the war was almost over. She could maybe sell the washing machine and the Icy Heart for enough to buy a mule. John would let her rent the Tipton Place; there would be enough left from the eight hundred, maybe, to get a cow and some chickens after they’d moved back; it was too late for a corn crop—but her father would let her save some of his wasting hay—her father. She took a step forward as if he were somewhere out the door and she had only to go walking to see him. If he would only write to her. They would take Cassie back; and Reuben would be there. How did he look now? Her mother in her last letter had said nothing of him; she’d only written of what a sweet child Cassie had been; and told of how nightly she prayed to God that Gertie would take better care of the others, and look upon this death of a loved one as an act of God chastising her for her stiff-necked … “Yu lost it?” Max was repeating, with no anger, no worriment.
“Oh, no,” Gertie said. “I allus keep it right by me,” and she unpinned from down in her apron pocket an old tobacco sack into which she had stuffed the roll of bills.
Max seized it, jammed it down into her purse without looking, and after fishing a moment in another part of the purse, brought out a new and shining twenty-dollar bill. She shoved it into Gertie’s apron pocket. “Buy flowers for yu garden. He likes flowers—his mom’s allatime messen around in her yard.” She turned swiftly away, opening the door.
Gertie stared after her with the struggling, wide-eyed look that was often on her face now, then caught Max’s arm. “Child—ye caint go like this. You don’t know where you’ll sleep tonight.”
“Sh-sh,” Max said, glancing toward Victor’s bedroom window. “In a bus headed fer th sea, I’ll sleep. I gotta see th sea. I gotta go to sleep an awake up an hear wheels a rollen under me.”
“But they’s a heap a seas,” Gertie said. “You ain’t twenty years old. You—you need somebody. Ain’t ye got no people, nothen, nobody?”
Max’s chin lifted; she jerked one shoulder toward the window. “I learned there—I didn’t need nobody.”
“But ain’t ya taken nothen—clothes?”
“Leave him th clothes. His stingy mom cain’t never say he spent one nickel on me—my tips I saved is in his bank. When yu got money yucan buy, and I’ve never had no trouble picken up a job. That gospel woman put some heart in me.” She glanced worriedly toward the window. “He worked double shift last night, an oughta sleep late. I figger if a jerk like Homer can get next to a job that’ull give him grub without so much as dirtyen his hands, they’s hope for a girl like me. I think I’ll take a business course—to hell with this barmaid stuff. Th big tips ain’t worth th rubben an th pinchen.”
“I know some people by th sea,” Gertie whispered, reaching from the doorway and pulling Max back up the steps. “They’re a little kin a mine—they went to Hampton Roads, Virginia, to build ships by th sea. They’re good people. Wait, now; I want ye to have their address,” and still holding Max, she got the Bible, and from between its leaves took the paper that held the addresses. Among those once together back home, but now scattered by the war, was that of Laurie Tompkins; no more than a cousin on her father’s side, but after Meg went away the closest thing to a sister she had ever had.
Max took the slip of paper on which Gertie wrote, and after glancing hastily around as if afraid of being watched, opened her purse, and from it took a thin sheaf of papers, held with a rubber band. “I’ll put it here with me,” she whispered.
“Me?”
“Yeah; it’s all a me; see. This I was born; I gotta high-school diploma—Pop taught me more’n I’d ever learn in school, but he wanted me to have one a th things; he read inu paper once about a little school in Alabama wot burned an lost all records—so’s I graduated from it—year before it burned; I was smart at seventeen. I gotta social security number—when I got this last job I never bothered to change it—s’lucky thing.”
Gertie glanced at the little paper. “But you’ve been married, Max—”
Max closed her purse, turned away. “Not me, kiddo—his mom allatime said we wasn’t—so’s I’ll take her word for it—that’s alla me.”
“I’ll bet if he come a beggen this minnit, you’d go back,” Gertie said, grabbing at her again to put the twenty-dollar bill into her hand.
Max’s, “Oh, yeah?” was weak and trembling. On the bottom step she suddenly turned back, flung her arms around Gertie, and gave her a quick embarrassed kiss that landed on her jaw. “I wish you’d been my people,” she said, and was gone, flinging the bill back to Gertie, then crouching low as she ran past Sophronie’s window, never turning her head to Gertie’s calling whisper, “But, honey, we’re kin, close kin,” and more loudly, “Victor’s a good man, such a good steady—”
That night was the worst Gertie had had in many nights; there was some comfort in a hand of the block of wood, a hand cupped, but loosely holding; behind the blank wood above it she could sometimes see the face, eyes peeping through the wood, looking down upon the thing, hard won, maybe, as silver by Judas, but now to give away; the eyes were sad or maybe angry with the loss; it was hard to say, for Callie Lou was flitting again; she was restless, hunting Cassie; lost like Victor. In the late afternoon she’d heard his singing as he moved about the place, maybe drinking the coffee Max had left ready to perk when he flicked a switch. She must have also left a note, for after a time there was silence broken only by the restless tramping of feet. She’d been out in the early twilight watering the marigold bed when with never a word he’d gone down his walk in his Sunday clothes and to his car.
He came home late, long after his going-to-work time; and while she lay alone in her forever too short bed in her place close against the wall she heard him twist and turn in his bed only a few inches away; but still, small sounds, she thought, to keep a tired woman awake; maybe it was the smell of lilacs kept her awake—maybe it was the lilacs wouldn’t let Victor sleep. He and Max had brought home a great armload when they came back from house hunting together. Maybe he didn’t know he smelled them now; but tomorrow he would know, and then it would be too late to throw them away; he could fling them in the through street and let them be crushed by a million cars or he could bury them deep in the earth, but still there’d be the smell—like the train grease on her hands. She hadn’t smelled it then, but now she knew it would be forever on her hands.
Next day, while watching the Anderson children, she lingered much among the flowers she had planted by Victor’s wall; so little, the old maids and asters and cosmos and marigolds, most without even the beginnings of buds, yet over them hung the heavy sweet odor of flowers. It was the children who found the great, unwilted lilac bouquet, pitched pot and all into Victor’s trash can. The children broke the boughs into many little sprigs and made a garden in the spaded ground, trampling it so that Gertie was tempted to warn them the grass would never grow, but did not. Children needed earth as well as grass and flowers.
However, the grass grew; each afternoon, when the house shadow fell over it, the children fought for turns at sprinkling it with the leaky hose borrowed daily from the project office. Many passersby and peddlers—like the home furnishings man, who still came weekly with an outstretched hand, but since, learning of their trouble, now kept his suitcase closed—stopped to admire the beginnings of grass and the borders of flowers by the fence and the house wall.
/> Only Victor never saw the grass and flowers; he came and went on many double shifts, and spoke to no one. The alley quickly learned about his trouble; Mrs. Anderson thought Max had done the proper thing, but Mrs. Daly shook her head and sighed and told him one day to burn candles to the Blessed Virgin and also to St. Jude on the chance that Max was lost. He maybe listened, for he was still, looking at the woman as she spoke, though he stalked away without answering.
Gertie pitied him, but wished at times that he would take a little interest in the fate of the flowers he had wanted so. One afternoon a gang of boys broke several of the flimsy pickets right in front of his window, and he never even knew about it, though he was home awake. It was Enoch who noticed the broken pickets when he and others played hide and seek among the cars in the parking lot at twilight.
Victor never even yelled any more at the little youngens coming in, not to play, but for pure meanness to pinch buds and pull up flowers. Georgie, Gertie guessed, gave most trouble, but there was only one of him; there were so many little Dalys, and for all the attention they gave her outcries she might have been the wind; or if they answered her at all it was with jeers and cries of: “Yu got no right tu fence dis, mu pop says; he’s gonna see du project manager; he’s in good wit him; du gover’ment’s gonna make youse tear dis fence down.”
One Saturday morning when Gertie had done a big washing and had just got the first part of it almost dry on the outside line, Amos came running with the news that the Dalys had pinched all the buds from the cornflowers and dug a ditch in the marigold bed, all on Victor’s side where she hadn’t seen them. Gertie sighed in particular over the loss of the corn flowers; they had with their early buds promised enough flowers for Clytie a bouquet at eighth-grade graduation, and they would have looked so pretty on the white dress Iva Dean’s mother was making for her. She said nothing, but Enoch ran after the Dalys and ordered them out of the yard; but just as they were going through the gate, Jimmy, the one a little bigger than Amos, grabbed up a handful of wet marigold bed by the fence, and threw it, marigold and all, so that it dirtied two of Homer’s white shirts hung on the line to dry.
He and his brothers ran home, but Gertie, not wanting the sight of the despoiled flowers, turned wearily back into the kitchen, where Clovis was eating breakfast. A moment later Enoch came banging in, screaming, almost crying: “Mom, yu gotta stand up fer yer rights. Mr. Daly’ud have us out a th project if we throwed mud on their washen.”
Clovis nodded, and Clytie nodded, and all of them looked at her. She hated the washing of the fine white shirts about as much as she loved the flowers. She hesitated a moment, then whirled about, strode through the door, took the muddied shirts from the line, and went on down the alley toward the Daly door. Her own children followed, and Wheateye ran ahead gathering recruits with her cries: “They’s gonna be a fight. Miz Nevels is gonna beat up on u Dalys.”
Gertie was just going up the steps with children flocking round the Daly stoop, when the screen was flung violently open and Mrs. Daly, red-faced and angry-eyed, glared at her, screaming, “Listen, youse nigger-loven—”
Gertie never knew whether Mrs. Daly meant to call her communist or hillbilly; Mrs. Daly had for an instant looked past her into the alley, and had seen something that made her hands drop from her hips and smiles of welcome sparkle in her eyes; she at once opened the screen door wide as she said in the voice she used when she was walking home from mass: “Do come in, Mrs. Nevels—a little Roman Cleanser is all them shirts needs—but do come in an have some coffee. My, ain’t it a beautiful day?” and she smiled past Gertie into the alley with such joy in her eyes that it seemed the uncombed and grimy children screaming among the overflowing trash and garbage cans were little angels, clean and well mannered, floating by a green and shaven lawn in heaven.
The disappointed children gave a gasp of wonder, and Gertie, mystified, went through the opened door, but could not get into the kitchen, crowded with children and a glugging washing machine, enough to let the door close completely. Mrs. Daly, with a shoe-polish dauber in one hand, for she had apparently been blacking the shoes of Mr. Daly, who sat reading a religious paper in the living room, pushed Maggie closer to the table, pulled Gertie in a little more, and so was enabled to close the screen against the flies; she then looked through it, giggling with satisfaction. “Aint’ he th disappointed one now? Yu thought yu’d take notes on my way a tucken, huh?”
Mr. Daly cleared his throat in disapproval, and Mrs. Daly fell silent, but for a moment longer feasted her eyes on the sight in the alley. Gertie, unable to turn her body without moving the washing machine, twisted her head enough to see Homer moving away from what must have been his listening post by the trash can.
Homer’s disappointed back put Mrs. Daly in high good humor, and before Gertie could protest, for she had only wanted Mrs. Daly to see what her children had done, not wash the shirts, the little woman had seized them, held them an instant under the faucet, and pitched them into the tub where a white wash went round and round in a sea of suds and smell of Roman Cleanser.
Gertie was not allowed to leave until time enough had passed for her to have a cup of coffee, but as the pot was empty and no one could get to the stove without first moving the washing machine, and anyway as Mrs. Daly said, “Nobuddy wants coffee nohow this time of day,” Gertie passed the coffee-drinking time in admiring the baby that Maggie was feeding by the kitchen table. The little one had grown enormously, produced already three freckles, and gave promise of having even more abundant and redder hair than even the stove wrecker.
In spite of the ruination of the cornflowers, Clytie had a bouquet for eighth-grade graduation, though she was annoyed because Gertie could not remember to call it a corsage. Iva Dean’s mother fixed Clytie one of delphinium spears and pink rosebuds, just as nice as the one she fixed for Iva Dean, doing it in the same unasking way as she had made the white thin dress and petticoat that Clytie wore, getting only what help Clytie could give. The two girls had been talking of graduation dresses the day Cassie had been hurt; and later, when Gertie had no mind for anything, the red-headed woman had taken Clytie’s dress upon herself, not even asking Clovis to pay for the cloth, though of course he had.
Gertie sat beside her in the hot, overcrowded place they called the auditorium, though it was little bigger than a classroom, and served as such by day, so small the parents only could be invited to the graduation. It was during the singing that Gertie, who had been staring straight ahead, trying not to think of the last time she visited the school when she had four children in it, heard a faint sniffling, turned, and saw the tears in the redheaded woman’s eyes. She caught Gertie’s glance and blinked them away. “I was just thinken,” she whispered when the singing was finished and the girls, Clytie among them, were filing off the stage, “th boys come—one’s on Saipan, one’s in England now—when times was pretty good; but she was a little accident—come in 1931—Little Depression we used to call her. We hadn’t had our place long, an we never did know where th next payment was comen frum—Ivan lost his job. But they was a job in a little restaurant—cooken—not much, but some leftovers was throwed in—an I hadda wean her.”
The redheaded woman’s husband, a large man with blue eyes and scarred hands, squeezed her with the long arm around the back of her seat, and smiled at Gertie. “Listen to her take all a credit. I hadda raise th kid.” And then to his wife, “Recollect when you was worken how I’d …”
The principal came onto the platform. Gertie was silent, staring in front of her as if she saw and heard all that was said; but the bright lights made black spots swim before her eyes, and the heat and the closeness were worse than in her project kitchen.
She was glad when it was over and wanted to hurry away; but it was the way it had used to be back home after church, little knots of people talking, lingering, blocking her way; the girls gigglesome and gay in their white dresses, the boys stiff, with toothy grins in good new suits they would outgrow before high-s
chool time in the fall.
Many knew the redheaded woman, and with her exchanged compliments of children. Two men whom Gertie did not know spoke to Clovis, and as she was standing, feeling sweaty and plagued because all around her people were talking and she knew no one, a voice she had heard before spoke out of a little knot of people, “How do you do, Mrs. Nevels. Aren’t you proud to be the mother of such a smart, pretty girl?”
Gertie jumped with startlement, but found soon the owner of the voice, and smiled, and nodded and wished she could remember the teacher’s name; someone who taught one subject to all the children. She forgot the woman when she saw a face she remembered—it was turned sideways to her now as it smiled up at a tall girl with tightly curled yellow hair. The other time it had had a handkerchief to its mouth to catch the tears it had no right to shed. She stared hard at it, and soon the owner turned. Then as if to answer her angry question of “Why did you cry?” the woman said slowly, reluctantly, “I’m Miss Huffacre.”
“You teach th first grade,” Gertie asked, the words coming out roughly, accusingly.
“Yes,” and now the other was able to smile. “For forty-two years I’ve taught first graders.”
“What had she done?” Gertie asked, moving closer, and it was as if they were alone.
“Oh,” Miss Huffacre said, and there was sorrow, trouble in her voice, “you didn’t think she’d misbehaved when I sent for you.” She hesitated. “She seemed unhappy—and was so still. She used to giggle and wiggle and have the best time. Oh, I don’t mean she created a disturbance; she was always very quiet but—well, I used to look at her—and you know how the world is so much troubled—two of my boys in one week, neither nineteen—the battle of the Bulge—and you look at them and—well—wonder. Anyway she was so happy, so good to look at there in her own world. I’ve had others like her—always very bright children. Gradually, of course, they grow out of it—gradually. But all at once she seemed so unhappy, and was …”