High Time (9 page)

‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,’ Miss Tinkham quoted wearily.

‘Well, looks like the day’s right at hand!’ Mrs. Rasmussen replied, pointing to Pierpont and Myrna, who had discovered the sewing-machine and were riding up and down like mad things on the treadle.

‘Hey, boy! Knock that off this minute!’ Mrs. Feeley shouted.

‘Wanna ride! Wanna ride!’ Myrna shrieked.

‘Turn on the radio,’ Mrs. Feeley suggested. ‘Maybe that’ll quieten ’em down!’ The radio was playing a charming pastoral entitled ‘Cow Cow Boogie,’ positively obscene at eight
A.M.

Instead of calming the visitors, the music seemed to work them into a frenzy.

‘Jitterbug, Myrna! Jitterbug!’ Pierpont cried, clapping his hands in a syncopated beat. His sister needed little encouragement. She pointed a tiny finger in the air and began shaking her head from side to side. Soon her skinny shanks were flying about in all directions in the most approved hep-cat fashion. The ladies held their heads.

The music came to an end and Myrna ran down.

‘Just about in time, I’d say,’ Mrs. Rasmussen muttered, grabbing Myrna by the slack of her pants. ‘Them damn pants! They drags round your ankles like hobbles! ’Nother minute an’ you’d ’a’ fell flat o’ your face!’ She wrestled in vain with the recalcitrant drawers, trying to tighten the waistband. She gave up with a sigh: ‘Your hind-end just ain’t designed to hold up pants!’

Pierpont was now free to explore the Ark. He was playing Air Port, diving in and out between the rose velour curtains. Myrna joined him the moment Mrs. Rasmussen released her. Miss Tinkham winced at each crash and bang the children produced. She kept just as far away from them as she could, remembering Myrna’s passion for exercising her perfect occlusion.

‘We sure run into a herd o’ wild elephants, this time,’ Mrs. Feeley said gloomily.

The air was full of the sound of ack-ack guns, the current plague, reproduced with disgusting realism by the youngsters. Miss Tinkham thought she might have an attack of the vapors and Mrs. Feeley’s head was splitting. Even Mrs. Rasmussen’s monumental calm was cracking. The children climbed onto the cherished table with the chromium legs and dived off onto the floor.

‘Z-o-o-o-o-m! I’m a Dive Bomber!’ Pierpont yelled, hitting the floor with a thwack that would have broken every bone in an adult’s body. The ladies were reduced to such a state of inertia that they hadn’t sufficient energy left even to lodge a protest.

Into this mad stampede walked Darleen and a haggard, red-haired young woman with an acute nervous tic; she could be no one but the mother of the wolf-pack.

‘May I present Daphne Garfunkle?’ Darleen said to the gathering at large.

Pierpont and Myrna backed into Miss Tinkham’s room at the sight of their mother.

Mrs. Feeley was fascinated by the tic. It gave Mrs. Garfunkle a certain air of cupidity, as if she expected the ladies to have a hidden agreement and understanding about some unsavory project in the offing. Miss Tinkham regarded their newest acquaintance with the steady gaze of a cobra regarding a snake-charmer. Mrs. Rasmussen wanted to stick a pin in it to see if it was real.

‘Now this is the story:’ Mrs. Garfunkle began.

‘We know the story!’ Mrs. Feeley interrupted. ‘What we wanna know is what you aimin’ to do about it?’

Mrs. Garfunkle’s eye winked twice as fast as usual. The question set her back on her heels. She decided to try a little bluster.

‘Now look here,’ she said nastily, ‘I didn’t ask you to come in and kidnap my children!’

‘Kidnap, hell!’ Mrs. Feeley shouted. ‘Did you know that they’s laws in this state? Did you know you could be announced a unfit mother for them kids? You could be sent to the Reformatory for neglectin’ ’em that way! You takin’ them men in there with them kids! You’d oughta be ashamed o’ yourself! Not to mention the disgrace on their poor, dead dad! Couldn’t even sleep in his grave did he know they wasn’t gettin’ even the up-bringin’ of a alley-cat!’

Mrs. Garfunkle was silent under the blast.

‘Yeah. An’ does the Children’s Society get wind o’ where you been keepin’ ’em, they’ll be took away from you for good! We ain’t what you could call snobs, but that sure ain’t no Salvation Army hotel you’re keepin’ ’em in!’ Mrs. Rasmussen spat her venom.

Darleen looked uncomfortable. The reference to her address and the protracted silence of the children had combined to make her uneasy. She got up and went into Miss Tinkham’s room. In a few minutes she came out, dragging a child in each hand. They had discovered Miss Tinkham’s cosmetics. They had covered their faces with scarlet dots of lipstick and had painted handlebar mustaches on their upper lips with eyebrow pencil. Miss Tinkham emitted a faint squeak, Mrs. Rasmussen rolled her eyes to the skies, and Mrs. Feeley clasped her hands and prayed movingly: ‘Jesus God!’

Suddenly Mrs. Garfunkle was seized with a shaking and quivering akin to an epileptic fit. She jerked and shook and groaned.

‘Gawd!’ Mrs. Feeley cried. ‘Somebody do somethin’! She’ll be speakin’ in tongues in another minute! She ain’t but one jump ahead of a runnin’ fit now!’

The children stared at their mother, entranced.

Mrs. Rasmussen appeared with a towel wrung out of ice-water and put it on Mrs. Garfunkle’s head. Miss Tinkham and Mrs. Feeley took hold of her and laid her on the bed.

‘Get them imps o’ Satan outa here before I bust one of ’em!’ Mrs. Feeley snapped, rubbing their mother’s hands briskly.

Mrs. Rasmussen appeared with some vinegar and ammonia in a saucer. She held it under the woman’s nose and tried to get her to inhale it. Miss Tinkham brought a motheaten afghan and laid it over the visitor. The woman on the brass bed shuddered and lay still.

‘Reckon she’ll sleep it off?’ Mrs. Feeley asked Darleen, who had chased Pierpont and Myrna out to play in the junk-yard.

‘Gee, I don’t know,’ Darleen said. ‘I’ve never saw her like that! Don’t you think we need a doctor?’

‘Nah.’ Mrs. Rasmussen said. ‘They’re all gone off to the war an’ couldn’t do nothin’ for her nohow: she’s fixin’ to have a nervous breakdown!’

‘Looks like she’s got the snakes to me; or else the thin-horrors! Reckon she’s been takin’ somethin’?’ Mrs. Feeley inquired.

‘I don’t think so,’ Darleen answered. ‘Just drinkin’ and carryin’ on. She never stops a minute, or sleeps, or anything. She acts awful funny—she was so grateful when she found you’d took the kids, but the minute she got here she started in to fight and talk back to you. She got fired by the sigh-chiatrist for being what he called a maniac-depressing type.’

‘Gawd! An’ I thought it was just the screamin’-meemies!’ Mrs. Feeley said contritely.

The Noah’s Arkies and Darleen stood like four bedposts watching Mrs. Garfunkle for signs of life.

‘We might’s well have a beer while she’s out cold,’ Mrs. Feeley said. ‘Do you realize we ain’t had a drop o’ beer, with this rat-race goin’ on underfoot? Not since we had our eye-opener? Just goes to show you what a problem life is when you get all wrinkled up in other people’s troubles!’

They had a beer, and Darleen drank some warmed-over coffee. Mrs. Rasmussen said things had come to a pretty pass when she had her hands so full of trouble that she had to offer a body warmed-over coffee.

Mrs. Feeley waved her beer-glass at the inert woman on the bed.

‘Maybe we’d oughta pour a little o’ this skirmish elixir down her! Might do her good!’

But Darleen said Daphne didn’t like beer. The ladies looked at each other in complete understanding: non-beer-drinkers never had any stamina.

‘I think brandy or spiritus frumenti is administered in cases of shock,’ Miss Tinkham said.

‘Well, that’s too bad,’ Mrs. Feeley said, without much conviction. ‘I never keep the nasty stuff on the place! Why, that stuff’ll make you drunk!’

‘I heard that spirits of pneumonia was good,’ Mrs. Rasmussen said. ‘Reckon that I got for washin’ windows would do?’

Daphne Garfunkle must have heard the discussion of the various restoratives the ladies were considering. Perhaps she only
heard with her subconscious mind, but she stirred and tried to sit up—just in time.

‘Don’t try to sit up!’ Mrs. Feeley cautioned. ‘You had a mean turn there!’

Without warning, Daphne broke into heavy, shuddering sobs. She sat in the middle of the bed crying hysterically with closed eyes and a dreadfully contorted face. Miss Tinkham started to put a hand on her shoulder, but Mrs. Feeley restrained her with a shake of her head.

The ladies left the bedside and sat down quietly in the kitchen-end of the room.

Mrs. Feeley said softly: ‘This here’s been bottled up inside of her for a long time—it’s gotta wear itself out! Let her cry her fill! Only thing that’ll do her any good!’

The women tried a little self-consciously to carry on a normal conversation, just as though the horrible breakdown was not happening a few feet away.

‘Beer’s what she had oughta drunk.’ Mrs. Feeley shook her head slowly. ‘Beer pads the ends o’ the nerves with little fat cushions! This couldn’t never o’ happened to none of us!’

‘Poor thing! Trying to escape from herself!’ Miss Tinkham said. ‘A complete personality dis-harmony!’

‘Yeah?’ Mrs. Rasmussen thought that was a lovely name for it.

‘Oh, definitely!’ Miss Tinkham went on. ‘She loathes herself for what she thinks she did to her husband, and subconsciously is striving to destroy the self that is so poorly integrated. A distinct manifestation of the will to die!’

‘You don’t say?’ Mrs. Feeley looked at the other women and cocked her head in Miss Tinkham’s direction, reminding them that this fabulous creature was their friend! Actually lived under the same roof and breathed the same air they did!

‘Darleen! You take notice o’ how Miss Tinkham talks! You might never have another chance to hear nothin’ like that again in your whole life! Sometime you’d oughta hear her recite verses!’ Mrs. Feeley said proudly.

‘Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds,’ Miss Tinkham said, nodding in the direction of the bed.

‘I don’t get it,’ Mrs. Rasmussen said, in a tone reminiscent of the late Calvin Coolidge.

‘Why, hell; that’s as plain as day!’ Mrs. Feeley elucidated. ‘It means a person as was gently born an’ was used to havin’ things nice is a awfuler sight when they do go to the dogs than some ol’ guttersnipe that never was nothin’ to begin with!’

Miss Tinkham beamed at her star pupil.

‘What makes you think she was ever anythin’?’ Mrs. Rasmussen referred to Daphne.

‘It’s hard to say, exactly,’ Miss Tinkham conceded. ‘I may be mistaken, but I feel that there was once refinement and gentility there. Otherwise, how could she detest herself and her way of life so heartily?’

The festering lily stopped sobbing and asked if she might trouble them for a drink of water.

Mrs. Rasmussen chopped some ice and brought the cold drink over to the bed.

‘You feel any better?’ she asked kindly.

The battered face looked up at the four anxious ones, and the bloodshot eyes filled with tears.

‘Don’t,’ she whimpered, her face puckering piteously. ‘Don’t heap coals of fire on my head! After the way I came in here and insulted you!’ She buried her face in Mrs. Feeley’s round, warm tummy.

‘There, there! Forget it!’ Mrs. Feeley soothed. ‘What say we scratch all that out an’ start over, huh?’ She stroked the tousled flaming hair. ‘Where’d you get that red, red hair, girl?’

Daphne looked up and said quietly: ‘Going through hell with my hat off!’

That, Mrs. Feeley decided, was certainly that.

‘You gotta rest, girl!’ she advised. ‘You’re run-down somethin’ awful! Your nerves is shot to hell!’

‘You’re a right young woman,’ Mrs. Rasmussen said. ‘Wouldn’t be bad-lookin’, was you cleaned up some! You got lots to live for! What’s to become o’ them kids if you don’t get a grip on yourself an’ give ’em some raisin’?’

Daphne shook her head.

‘Don’t even talk about it,’ she begged. ‘I keep seeing him in them, and they’re a living reproach!’

‘Reproach, hell!’ Mrs. Feeley snapped. ‘What’s done is done! The hell with that, girl! The shame of it is that you let yourself go this far. But that’s all over an’ done with—if you want it that way! But you’re gonna have to pull yourself up by your own boot-straps! Can’t nobody help you but yourself!’

‘I found that out today!’ Daphne said. ‘Your kindness was more than I could bear. It’s an awful shock to see yourself face to face—and then to want to spit in that face!’

‘Hey, hey! Cut out the dramatics—stop feelin’ sorry for yourself! Listen, girl: what is to be, will be; if it happens in the middle o’ the night!’ Mrs. Feeley said firmly.

‘You had oughta learned your lesson by now,’ Mrs. Rasmussen said.

‘Let the dead past bury its dead, my dear!’ Miss Tinkham advised. ‘Each day is a little life! Each morning a fresh beginning!’

Daphne looked around the circle of faces, and then said to Darleen: ‘How can I ever repay you for bringing me here? They have been so good to me, and they never even laid eyes on me before! I don’t even know their names!’

‘That doesn’t make any difference,’ Darleen explained. ‘That’s just the way they are.’