One Hundred Years of Marriage (11 page)

She hadn’t replied, hoping he would give her the money to hire Old Bill to wash the windows, but he hadn’t, and she hadn’t enough of her mother in her to snap, Father, have you had occasion to notice you’re using the Belle of the County as your hired girl! Then she remembered what she’d come for and said, “We owe for the coal.” Without looking up her father had opened his drawer, taken out two paper dollars and, still staring down at his law book, held them out to her with a casual hand. With two fingers she had pulled the bills slowly from the same hand that had casually tossed aside her Mama’s blood-stained pillow. This memory always flushed her with guilt.

Recalling all this, Victoria let out a little gasp, then looked at Dan, still reading the newspaper. Before returning to the kitchen, she moved the biscuits, butter and jams a little closer to Mrs. Wagonard, so the woman didn’t have to squeeze her great stomach reaching.

Victoria carried the last of the dirty dishes to the kitchen where Felicity stood on a box at the sink, washing dishes while Alice dried. Hazel came out on the back porch and stood at her side as she scraped the few crumbs off the plates into the slop jar for Lillian Gish. “Is Mrs. Wagonard boarding here now?” Hazel whispered and giggled.

“Oh, mercy.”

“I tell you, Vic, when I see her sitting in your parlor in that dreadful hat, without a civil word for anyone, dropping crumbs down the cushions as she Hoovers up your delicate biscuits, I want to nominate you for sainthood.”

“Poor old soul. No one ever taught her any manners.”

“One might look at it that way.” Hazel lifted a fallen lock of Victoria’s hair and taking a hairpin from her own coif, fastened it back into place. “On the other hand, one might note she has lived for nearly ten years in a gracious community and been blind to all good examples.”

Victoria covered her mouth to hold back the laugh. She loved when Hazel said spiteful things, the sort of sauciness Victoria’s mother had been free to let fly when they were alone. She glanced in at Felicity and Alice who seemed to be slopping along in their own world.

“And she’s never going to leave,” Hazel continued, “if Dan doesn’t quit reading the newspaper to her like she was his old Auntie. What a swell fellow! Goodness sakes, Victoria, he may not be a Captain of Industry, but he certainly adores you.”

Victoria ducked her head.

“Is that a shipment of china in the front hall?” Hazel asked. “Do you think the dresser set is in there?”

“I haven’t had a chance to unpack it.”

“I’ll come next Tuesday and get started on it if that suits.”

* * *

As Victoria worked under the lamplight, Dan read to her until his throat was so hoarse he had gone upstairs to bed. She held up the opera cape to see how much farther she had to go in attaching the fur collar. “About a mile,” she whispered to herself and wondered why she’d persuaded Mrs. Woodberry to have a fox collar that reached all the way to the hem of this gorgeous flowered velvet wrap. She put one foot on the floor to push the little rocker, circled her head to ease her neck and re-crossed her feet on her mother’s little embroidered footstool. She smiled recalling her mother telling of standing on this little footstool while the seamstress crept on her knees around her to pin up the hem of her wedding dress. Victoria sighed. She also had stood on the same stool to have her own wedding dress fitted, but now it was her customers who tested the creaking joints of this precious little bit of furniture while
she
was the one on her knees with the pins.

Without a warning sound, Alice appeared in the doorway like a little ghost. “Alice, what on earth? You are supposed to be in bed asleep.” Victoria went on stitching, pulling her strongest needle through the pelt.

“I need to tell you something.” Alice’s voice was very weak and shook with the cold.

“What did you want to tell me?”

“It’s an idea.”

“An idea? That you have to tell me in the middle of the night?”

“There isn’t much time.”

Victoria stopped stitching. “What is it?”

“You need to tell Daddy to get a job, so he will get pay every Friday. That’s how it works for families.”

What families? Which children had she been talking to about their situation? She stared at Alice.

“This would fix all our problems, wouldn’t it? Tell him that you’ve set your heart on it.”

Victoria pulled in a long shaking breath. “No, sweetheart. I never tell him I’ve set my heart on anything having to do with money.”

“Why not!” Alice’s voice was sharp, and her face twisted with anger. “Why?”

“Alice! Hush! I’m surprised at you, using that tone of voice.” Then she put her arm around Alice and spoke very softly. “Your daddy is a wonderful man, but he just will not venture out in worldly matters.”

Alice nodded. Victoria knew she didn’t understand and would have run upstairs having had her say, but Victoria pulled her daughter into her lap and covered the child with the delicate warmth of the opera cape.

As she rocked Alice in Grandmother Hale’s little armless rocker, she felt again how much she missed Dan’s mother. That dear old Quaker. When Dan had asked her about their bringing his mother to live with them, Victoria had said, “Of course. Bring her now.” Dan’s father had died the year before, and they were alone and in love in the house, but she had agreed to this in spite of her fear that a woman with Mrs. Hale’s past might forever alter their new life together.

Victoria sighed and laid her cheek on the head of the sleeping Alice. Horrible though Olivia Jane Hale’s past had been, she was like a quiet ballast in this house where things had a tendency to wobble. Her frail bones always cold, she sat in this rocker near the stove in the kitchen. After her eyes were too dim to read from her precious books of poetry, her tiny fingers darned and mended. When Felicity was born grandmother Olivia Jane could quiet that colicky baby better than Victoria herself. Victoria sniffed in a long, shaky breath. Her girls’ grandmother lived here less than four years and then, just after Alice was born, she quietly died. Washing her mother-in-law’s body and preparing her for the coffin, Victoria had felt an end to the pain she’d borne for so long over not being able to bring the same tenderness to her own mother.

* * *

Monday morning Alice was awake even before the gray light started between the curtains. She was tired of waiting for her sister Felicity to wake up. They needed to make a plan. Three times she’d bumped her with her bottom, but Felicity just snuggled deeper under the quilt.

One of the problems was school. She’d never missed school except when she had the dust pneumonia or her tonsils out or a few half days when she felt iffy in the stomach or Mother thought she might be a little feverish. She’d spent some of her thinking time in the dark figuring out what she’d tell anyone who stopped her on the road and asked why she wasn’t in school.
I have to rehearse for a play. My school dress had to be mended. My mother needs us to take this pig to the farmer.
Us
because she’d have to have Felicity, a ten-year-old, to help her. But Felicity loved school. She skipped fifth grade and was now the smartest pupil in the sixth grade. She must walk along the other side of Lillian Gish.

She gave Felicity a kick. “Mornin’.”

Felicity sat up and looked around their bedroom as though she were still inside a dream. She slid off the bed and walked to the pot in the corner, pushed down her long johns, gathered her nightie into her lap and sat down. Alice, who had already used the pot two or three times through the long night, knelt on the floor in front of Felicity. “I’ve got a real good idea,” she said.

Felicity frowned, her dark hair hanging like a tent from her middle part down over her shoulders. Alice handed her a page from the catalog, farm machinery, and clanked the lid on the pot for her. “We’ve got to do something this morning.”

“Before school?” Felicity pulled her nightie over her head and unhooked her school dress from the back of the door. Alice did the same and started buttoning up Felicity although she herself usually got buttoned up first.

“How about you and me taking Lillian Gish to Mr. Brandt?” Alice asked Felicity’s back. “I will tie a rope around her neck to lead her, but she might get afraid and run off if an automobile backfires. She needs us beside her, so she feels like we’re taking a walk as usual.”

Felicity whipped around. “Not sell her? You can’t.”

Tears stung Alice’s eyes. “We need money for that box.” She twisted Felicity back around and continued buttoning.

Speaking over her shoulder, Felicity said, “No, Alice, Mother wouldn’t want you to do this. Lillian Gish is too young to sell. You can get a lot more for her in a couple of years.”

“If Mother doesn’t have china to paint--”

“Don’t think about that. Lillian is your pet. Besides, we were gonna have bacon after she got big.”

“I don’t want bacon. The postman comes at three o’clock. Are you coming with me or not?”

“And miss school?”

“I can. No one will care.”

“They’ll send the truant officer.”

“Don’t be silly. They’ll just think I have a cough. I’m doing this. I don’t care what you say. It’s my pig.”

“You can’t go by yourself.”

* * *

Alice kept her left hand laid gently between Lillian Gish’s ears and held the rope across in her right hand. Felicity walked on the left. Alice watched the toes of her shoes walk along the road. They passed Mrs. Waggonard’s house, and the dairy farm’s pastures and all the long stretches of field waiting for spring.

Felicity kept looking behind them. “What if the truant officer comes?”

“Don’t say that again!” Alice cried. She could already see Mr. Brandt’s windmill and his silo and now the roof of his barn coming fast over the rise. Her heart pounded.

“Mother wouldn’t want you to do this.”

Alice didn’t answer back this time. In the muddy barnyard she saw Mr. Brandt with his big bucket, dumping corn into a trough where dozens of pigs grunted and snorted and pushed against each other to get to their breakfast. Alice felt sick. She’d taken Lillian Gish her own mush this morning and tried to explain everything, but Mother had called her to come get her books, and she hadn’t said it right—how happy Lillian Gish would be back with her sisters on a real farm. But now she saw the rude hogs didn’t care about each other.

“Good mornin’, girls. You taking the pig to school?”

“No sir,” Alice said. Felicity had stopped back at the gate and just stood watching now.

“So?” Mr. Brandt said, and Alice could tell he was mad they weren’t in school. She looked back for help, but Felicity was getting red in the face. “Go on then,” Mr. Brandt said. “I’ve got another hundert hogs to feed.”

“I need to sell her,” Alice whispered and stepped away from her pig.

“Dat skinny shoat? Naw. You got to wait two years.”

“She’s very clean and nice.”

“You’re not old enough to sell a pig.”

“You said I was a big girl when I bought her with my prize money.”

Mr. Brandt pushed back his hat showing his white forehead.

“My mother needs the money.”

His face screwed up, all the sunburned furrows twisting around his angry mouth. Alice was shaking. Her shoes were sinking in the muddy barnyard. She couldn’t do this. Mr. Brandt’s pigs were just animals. She would take Lillian home where she was happy, but her feet were stuck, and her head was stuck too and couldn’t turn now to get help from Felicity.

“Your ma can’t wait till it’s fattened?”

“She needs the money this afternoon, please. Her heart is set on it.”

Mr. Brandt looked even more angry and turned without speaking and headed back to the house.

As soon as he put the money in Alice’s hand, Felicity turned and ran on down the road to school. Alice didn’t try to stop her. Felicity had been crying so hard, Alice knew she was worried about disappointing her teacher. But Alice couldn’t go to school yet. Her shoes were caked with smelly mud and felt terribly heavy. The wind swept up the grit from Mr. Brandt’s empty field and Alice covered her nose. She’d had dust pneumonia last summer when the sand storms made the sky dark. Mother and Daddy had carried a wet sheet between them through the house, each one holding high a corner. Like a pageant, room to room, they carried the sheet, but they stayed especially long in her room, letting the sheet ripple between them to collect the dust, cleaning the air, so she could breathe.

She’d done the right thing to sell her pig, but she began to cry hard now, sobs shaking her chest and shoulders and pulling her face out of shape. The wind whipped every which way, and it took a long time for her to get back home. Mother wouldn’t want her to go to school, anyway, her stomach feeling so iffy.

When she got to the house, Daddy was just opening the door to let in Mr. MacGaffin. Alice didn’t like him and dashed around back to find her mother to make sure she didn’t send back the box. She stopped at the corner of the house. Mother was in the side garden digging for potatoes.

* * *

Victoria had found only three, small potatoes, and she was surprised even to find these in this dirt she’d searched before. She sat back on her heels and looked at her dirty hands then out at the spindly rows of fruit trees she’d planted, still too young to bear. Sometimes, like now, when she was desperate for help, she thought of Hortense Winberg, a squarish woman on a cane, who had come to the ice cream social that day long ago to make her son’s case to Victoria Jenkins. Swinging majestically across the wide lawn, necklaces and lorgnette chain jingling, old world black dress and huge out-of-date pocketbook swaying with her old lady gait, she approached her milliner. Her son Karl, on the edge of the lawn had shyly lifted his hat to Victoria.

“Darlink, Miss Jenkins, how is the judge’s daughter?” Mrs. Winberg puffed, always full of motherly concern. “Show me vich is yours.”

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Winberg. I tried meringues this time,” she’d nodded to the table.

“I will go before they are all wasted on the ruffians,” Mrs. Winberg said with a twinkle but did not start toward the desserts. “Your hat, as usual, is the best one. Shall I see if my Frieda likes?”