“And if she didn’t give you too much and she gets in trouble anyway, boy, will she be mad,” Jannie said.
But I went back to the electric store and knocked on the door and called and shook the handle and even tried to see in through the glass of the windows but no one inside would come. It seemed impractical to me to put the ten-dollar bill into an envelope and slide it under the door without an explanation, particularly since I was not at all sure I got it there and I certainly did not want to call public attention to my problem by endeavoring to shout an explanation through the door in hopes of her hearing me from inside. So I turned away reluctantly and started off for the other end of Main Street to the artichoke supermarket. The children watched me from the car, waving enthusiastically as I passed.
I came into the supermarket and found the manager in his cubbyhole. I gave him a friendly smile. “Look,” I said, “I wanted to see you just to ask—”
“Lady,” he said, “there is just absolutely nothing I can do. There hasn’t been any change in prices. I mean, just the normal seasonal change. You can’t really think I—”
“It’s not that, it’s—”
“The principle of the thing. I know.” The manager sighed. “Listen,” he said, “all you dames get mad because of prices and what do you do? You blame me. But what do you think my wife—”
“But I don’t care about your wife, I only want to tell you—”
“Look,” he said. “You want to return the artichokes? You go return the artichokes, and I’ll tell the girl to give you your money back. Not a general policy, remember,” he said, shaking his finger at me warningly. “Don’t think you can come in any old time and bring back artichokes, coffee, bread, anything, you don’t like the price.”
“Thank you very much,” I said. I nodded at him politely and left. So now I’ve got this ten dollars, I was thinking miserably, plodding back to the car.
My children were all leaning out of the car windows in an interested fashion and a policeman was talking to Sally. “Do you want your nice mommy to be arrested?” he asked hotly.
Laurie and Jannie laughed and even Beekman smiled. “Yup,” said Sally.
“Look, honey,” the policeman said in a persuasive kind of voice, “you just give me one penny now and when your Mommy comes back she’ll give you a penny. Won’t she, son?”
“Sure,” Laurie said. “I bet Mom will give you two pennies, Sal.”
“Three,” said Jannie.
Sally deliberated. Finally she said, “You’re a nice man and my little baby Patpuss says you can have her shilling.”
“What?” said the policeman.
“If you promise not to ask little girls for money ever again,” said Sally primly.
“Look, Sal,” said Laurie in haste, “anyway, what’re you going to do with your penny?”
“Bubble gum,” said Sally.
“I bet you if Mommy gets arrested you’re not going to get any bubble gum with that penny,” Laurie said darkly.
“It’s my penny,” Sally said, “and he can’t have it.” She retreated, murmuring, to the farthest corner of the car.
“Please, little girl,” the policeman said coaxingly.
“Shilling,” said Sally with finality, “or nothing.”
“But I can’t put a shilling in a parking meter,” the policeman said.
“Here, officer,” I said, stepping forward generously. “See? I’m putting a penny in the parking meter and now the little girl’s nice mommy won’t be arrested.”
The policeman sighed and wiped his forehead. “Thanks, lady,” he said. “You know, I hate giving tickets for these things and that little girl, she’s got a penny.”
“Really?” I said. I turned and scowled dreadfully at Sally.
“Thank you, lady,” Laurie said with rare presence of mind.
“Well, dears, you are certainly very welcome,” I said through my teeth.
Beekman leaned forward, puzzled, to peer at me through the glass. “Mommy?” he inquired doubtfully.
“Silly baby,” said Jannie, laughing lightly. “Our dear mother will be coming along real soon now.”
“Well, thanks, lady,” the policeman said. He wiped his forehead again and shook his head. “Imagine that poor woman,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Imagine that poor woman.”
The policeman went on down the street and the half-dozen people who had stood around on the sidewalk watching went on back to their own business. I went into the doorway of the music store, where I stood earnestly scrutinizing the new records in the window, and after a few minutes I came back and got into my car.
“You give back that ten dollars?” Laurie wanted to know at once. “Whose was it, anyway?”
I backed the car out of the parking space without difficulty, although Beekman was making a resolute left turn. “Well,” I began warily, “turns out I couldn’t find anyone to give it to. Consequently,” I said, “I still have it. No one would take it,” I said defensively.
“I suppose we better just ask Dad,” Laurie said.
“Well, I meant to bring that up, too,” I said. I turned the car into the parking space of the hot-dog stand and stopped. “Suppose,” I suggested, beginning to wiggle Beekman out of his car seat, “suppose we just don’t bother Dad with it; he always has such a lot on his mind. Anyway, he’d take it. So why don’t we all just go in here and I’ll—”
“I know,” Laurie said, struck with an idea, “let’s give it to him.” He began to giggle. “Tie a ribbon around it,” he said, “and give it to him for Father’s Day.”
“Hey,” Jannie said with pleasure, “let’s just do that.”
“But,” I said, “I was going to use it to buy everybody hot dogs and—”
“Boy,” Laurie said, “I bet he never got a Father’s Day present like that before. Boy!” He wheeled and raced after Sally and Jannie, who were already opening the door of the hot-dog stand; I could see Sally whip around the end of the counter inside and slide up onto a high stool. I took Beekman under my arm and started after them. “Dewey?” said Beekman eagerly.
• • •
Father’s Day was duly observed; the weather grew warm; the incredible day arrived and school was out for the summer. Sally’s nursery school had a little party for the old ones who were graduating into kindergarten the next fall. Jannie was promoted to the third grade. Laurie was promoted to the sixth grade. My husband was invited to teach at the girls’ college just outside our town, and accepted, planning to start in the fall when Jannie went into third grade and Laurie into sixth grade and Sally into kindergarten. I began to think with an uneasy sensation which I finally identified as pure stage fright of the mornings next spring, when Barry would begin nursery school and I would be all alone in the house. I made tentative plans for garden work, and thought that with all the free time I was going to have I might get some reading done. I could even take courses at the college if I wanted to, things I had always meant to take when I was in college and never gotten around to—endocrinology, for instance, or Advanced French. I could reorganize the linen closet and finally get the ragged towels down at the bottoms of the piles, instead of right on top where they always came out for company. I asked my husband what I should do with the long empty mornings I was going to have next spring, and he said that by that time the floors would need another coat of varnish. I said indignantly that I was certainly not going to stay home varnishing the floors all by myself while he was off teaching in a nice cool college, and he said then why didn’t I get some practice cooking? I said I got all the practice cooking I needed, thank you, and went off and mooned over the red and tan jacket Laurie wore when he first went off to nursery school.
Then my mother wrote that Aunt Gertrude was home again, and I really ought to take the children to see her once, before, as my mother said, she “left her cottage for
good.” It was a matter of a two-hour drive each way, which was a lot for me with children in the car, but I had not seen Aunt Gertrude for many years, and my husband was not correct in assuming that my interest was wholly venal. During the greater part of my married life my Great-Aunt Gertrude was in the hospital; Laurie was only a baby when I heard from my mother that Aunt Gertrude had been found by a neighbor lying at the foot of her back steps with a broken hip, and my mother added in a postscript that Aunt Julie had written her that when the old lady woke up in the hospital and found out where she was, and why, the only thing that worried her was what would become of her cats. Finally, the cats were fed and cared for by neighbors, and they bred among themselves as they always had, pure white, and the old ones, unlike Aunt Gertrude, died off, and the new ones grew up. Although the neighbors fed them and tried to take them in, they lived, the young ones as well as the old, around Aunt Gertrude’s back door, sheltering under the steps. The neighbors wrote us that it was amazing, the way the kittens grew up to cry at the door which they had never seen opened.
Aunt Gertrude stayed in the hospital for so many years that the original cats, and the generation following, had all died off or wandered away, but there was a splendid group of pure white kittens at the back door when the doctors finally decided that Aunt Gertrude, so old and so lonely for her cats and her roses and the low echoing ceilings of her little house, ought to be brought home for what the family gracefully called “the little time left to her.” The family brought forward an unmarried cousin to feed the cats and tend the roses and wheel Aunt Gertrude out into the sunlight every morning, and it was generally conceded among the nieces and nephews that all the available family ought to make a point of calling upon Aunt Gertrude at least once before—as my mother so delicately put it—she “said goodbye to us all.” There was, moreover, a pressing, but civilly silent, competition among several of the nieces over the mahogany breakfront which Aunt Gertrude had inherited from our common great-great-grandmother, and which Aunt Gertrude used to keep fancy sewing and catfood in. As a matter of fact, after my mother said that about Aunt Gertrude’s saying goodbye, she added a postscript about how if Auntie said one word about the breakfront I was to let her know at once, and she could fly East if necessary.
“Laurie and Jannie and Sally ought to see her once,” I told my husband with a kind of wistful smile. “They ought to see her once, before she Leaves the Family Forever.”
My husband gave me a long thoughtful look. “You know perfectly well your cousin Barbara is going to get that breakfront,” he said.
“In that little apartment of hers?” I laughed bitterly. “I wouldn’t put it past her, of course, but—”
“Give Aunt Gertrude my love,” my husband said, putting his paper up before his face.
“It’s so many years since I saw her last,” I went on, with a pang of real terror. “She used to scare me so.” The long road over the hills, the thousands of roses, the homemade fruit cake. . . . I shivered. “Petit point,” I said inadequately. “Preserved figs.”
When, at last, with the three older children mumbling uneasily in the back of the car, I came over the long road which brought me into the pleasant valley where Aunt Gertrude lived in her small house with her cats and her roses, I found that a dozen unexpected memories came back at me: the dust, and the woods coming down to the back of Aunt Gertrude’s cottage with the soft hills behind, and the way the cottage itself always seemed so tall until you came right on to it, because of the high stone steps which led up from the road.
“Children,” I said, when we came in sight of the woods, and the roses, and the steps, “children, Aunt Gertrude is very old, you know.”
“Is she a witch?” Sally asked, peering through the car window. “Because if she’s a witch can she eat little children?”
“I want you to behave quietly,” I said, deciding upon a tactful by-pass to Sally’s question, “and there is to be no giggling, and no arguing, and no shoving.”
“Do I have to kiss her?” Laurie asked.
“I rather think not,” I said, remembering suddenly and vividly the soft and wrinkled old cheek which Aunt Gertrude had, so long ago, presented to me. “Just remember that Aunt Gertrude is very old.”
“Is she a hundred?” Sally asked.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” I said.
“Is she a thousand?”
“Well . . .” I said.
“A million?”
Laurie wriggled miserably. “I don’t want to go,” he said.
I stopped the car in front of the high stone steps and turned to look at Laurie. “Look,” I said reasonably, “it’s only this once.”
“But I’m going to break something,” Laurie said. “In that little house, I’ll sit on the wrong thing or I’ll step on something or I’ll fall over or something.”
I laughed and told him, “I stepped on a cat once. Aunt Gertrude laughed, but my mother was embarrassed.”
“Did you get spanked?” Sally asked with interest. “Is she going to say abracadabra, Aunt Gertrude? Witches always say abracadabra. If she’s a million, is that very old?”
We got out of the car, moving slowly, and stood below in the road, looking up at the steep steps and the pink roses above. “I’m scared,” Jannie said; she came over and slipped her hand into mine. “Is Aunt Gertrude big?”
“No,” I said. “Very small.”
“I’m scared,” Jannie said simply.
I took a deep breath. “Come along,” I said, and we went up the steps, me well in advance, and Sally coming far behind on her hands and feet. I found, with a kind of bewilderment, that I had to bend my head to come onto the porch, although Laurie and Jannie and Sally passed easily under the low archway framed in roses, and I knocked on the door with the conviction that it had been only a day or so since I last saw its glass panel, engraved with a floral design, and chipped in the lower right-hand corner. “Ooh,” said Jannie softly as the door opened, and I remembered the rich smells of fruit cake and marmalade and dried rose petals and cinnamon.
It was Cousin Maude who opened the door, and I stood breathless for a minute, the children pressed nervously close to me, while Cousin Maude told me that Aunt Gertrude was as well as might be expected, and, sighing, that Aunt Gertrude seemed as spry as ever, and I reported to Cousin Maude upon the health and prosperity of all the cousins she hadn’t seen recently, and she told me about Uncle Frank and the horse, which I had already heard from my mother, expurgated.
“I brought my children to say hello to Aunt Gertrude,” I explained at last, trying unsuccessfully to step aside from the clinging creatures at my skirts. “They wanted to meet her.” This was a statement so patently false that even Cousin Maude forbore to comment. “Hello, darlings,” she said perfunctorily. “I’ll see if the old bird’s awake,” she said to me.
“I want to go home,” Jannie said, very audibly.
“Me, too,” Laurie said.
Cousin Maude went to the door of the bedroom and listened; the cottage had only two rooms, and I remembered clearly that sounds from one room were heard distinctly in the other; when Jannie began again, “I want to—” I took her hand tight and shook my head violently, and she was unwillingly quiet. Cousin Maude nodded and beckoned us to the bedroom doorway, and, dragging Jannie and followed without enthusiasm by Laurie and Sally, I went to the doorway.
“Aunt Gertrude,” said Cousin Maude in a loud and vivacious voice, “here are some visitors for you, and isn’t that lovely?”
“Oh, go away,” said a voice from within, and I suddenly remembered Aunt Gertrude so vividly that it seemed like my mother pulling me instead of me pulling Jannie.
“Hello, Aunt Gertrude,” I said weakly.
She was lying in bed, with pillows propping her up, and she was wearing a pink satin bedjacket trimmed with lace. After one look at her I recognized clearly that Aunt Gertrude had
remained the wickedest and liveliest old lady in the world and was going to stay wicked and lively, very probably, until she got bored and left her cottage for good. “How do you feel, Aunt Gertrude?” I asked from the doorway; it was involuntary. Asking it, I remembered my mother again and realized that she had felt as nervous as I did now, when I was as scared as Jannie.
“Another one?” Aunt Gertrude said, and chuckled. “Come in, dear,” she said. “‘What’s that you’ve got with you? Children?”
“This,” I said, pulling, “is my son Laurie. And my daughters Jannie and Sally.”
“H’lo,” said Sally, who seemed to be the only one still able to articulate.
Aunt Gertrude waved largely at a long sofa upholstered in apricot satin which stood parallel to her bed. “Sit down,” she said, and, wordlessly, my children obeyed. I stood behind them protectively. Beyond us, the roses touched the windowpane and the sky was blue; inside, Aunt Gertrude leaned forward and regarded us with her old eyes open wide. “Now,” she said. “Tell me what you learned in school today, my dears.” She pointed to Laurie. “You, boy,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“Laurence,” said Laurie in a whisper.
“Named after your Uncle Clifford? Indeed. Good girl.” And she nodded approvingly at me. “And what did you learn in school?” she asked again.
“Fractions,” said Laurie, paralyzed.
“So did we,” said Aunt Gertrude, nodding profoundly. “Loved every minute of it, I did. Never got the footwork straight,” she said in an aside to me, “but no point letting on. Now, you, what’s your name?”
“Joanne.”
“Pretty girl,” said Aunt Gertrude. “Your mother ever tell you about the time I danced with the Prince of Wales?” She laughed hugely. “Mercy!” she said.
“Did you?” Jannie asked, “did you honest, with a prince?”
Aunt Gertrude laughed again. “Let’s see your hair, child,” she said. Jannie came, glancing at me, up to the bed, and Aunt Gertrude touched her hair lingeringly. “Can you sit on it?” she demanded.