The Cape Ann (26 page)

When they were both settled at the rickety little table, Maria said, “I am Maria Zelena. I am hearing from your little girl that your sister is sick. I am good at helping sick people. I learn things from my mama, who was well known, even in America, for curing sickness.”

“We don’t know what it is,” Mama said.

“It’s everything,” Maria said. “Worry and sadness open the door, and evil flies in.” Seeing that Mama was startled by the word “evil,” she amended, “evil… germs fly in.” Despite the revision, there remained in her eye a cast which spoke to Mama’s instincts.

Mama rose from the table. “Lark, find your
Happy Stories for Bedtime,”
she instructed, “and take it out on the front porch.”

I would rather have had a licking with the brush than leave that room, but it was pointless appealing Mama’s decision. I retrieved
Happy Stories for Bedtime
from beneath the couch, and let myself out the screen door, closing it softly.

I sat, legs stretched out before me, leaning against the clapboard porch wall, the book on my lap. Its familiar cover brought Harvester to my mind, and I realized with a shock that I hadn’t thought of Hilly or Sally or even Papa for several days. Aunt Betty’s illness had driven them out of my thoughts. Now I began to worry about Hilly, who did not have Mama and me close to keep an eye on him, but only Mrs. Stillman, who was old and unable to follow him to those places where he might get into trouble, places like cemetery road. Would Sally’s mama look after him? She could barely look after herself.

I began to drowse, and once I nearly fell over on the porch floor. Sneaking back into the house, I lay down on the couch. From the kitchen drifted the low, intent voices of Mama and Maria, but I was too sleepy to concentrate on their words or on the sharp smell, vaguely familiar to me, which drifted from that direction as well. Maria was brewing her magic tisane, and I was missing the entire ceremony.

I woke later to the hypnotic sound of Maria’s voice, coming from beyond the green drape. “Yes, yes,” she crooned, “it does not taste good, little girl, but it does not taste bad, you will see, and it will make you better. That’s right, little girl, I will hold the cup. Yes, yes, I will hold the cup. You drink. It won’t come up, you will see. Your sister is holding a bowl, but it won’t come up. It will stay down. You are needing this, little girl, and your body will not throw it up.” And on she crooned, Aunt Betty apparently sipping the healing elixir.

Later I heard Maria say to Mama, “We’ll fold the sheet back.”

“She won’t take a chill?” Mama asked.

“In this heat?” There was a rustling of cloth as the sheet was folded back. “Is there a fan around, you know, one from church?”

This was a cue for me to help. I ran to the dining room and fetched the two I’d seen lying on the built-in sideboard. They were round pieces of lightweight cardboard, glued to a stick. These particular specimens had pictures of Mary and Baby Jesus
on them and, below the picture, “Compliments of Kinder Mortuary, Mankato, Minnesota. Telephone 283.”

“Good,” Maria said as I handed them to her, and she passed one to Mama. For an hour, until Aunt Betty fell into a deep sleep, Maria and Mama stood, one on either side of the bed, and kept the air moving over her face and exposed arms.

Before she left, Maria praised Mama for her hard work and gave her instructions for the night ahead. “Plenty of ice?” she asked.

Mama nodded. “The iceman comes again tomorrow.”

“If the fever goes…” Maria gestured upward with her hand. “… then you start the cold cloths. Tonight, more tea. And more tea. For the kidneys. It is hard work. The little girl can empty the pot for you,” she suggested, referring to the gray enamel chamber pot Aunt Betty was using. “All night give her tea when she is awake. The kidneys.” Maria looked sharply at Mama. “Come outside,” she said, tucking her great, black handbag under her arm.

I crept to the screen door and strained to hear as Mama and Maria stood together on the sidewalk, conferring.

“It is bad,” Maria said, uncompromisingly.

Mama’s head jerked to the side as if she’d been slapped. “Is she going to die?”

“Maybe,” Maria said, making two words of the one—may be. “You and your little girl, talk good words to her,” she advised enigmatically. “I will come tomorrow at the same time. If it is very bad, send someone for me. Maria Zelena. Papa is Ladislau Zelena.”

As Maria retreated up the street, Uncle Stan’s old black Ford passed her, bouncing and rattling as if the doors would fall off. Mama waited on the sidewalk for him, her arms at her sides now, her back straight. As the car pulled up in front of the house, I ran out the door and past Mama.

“Uncle Stan!” I called, throwing my arms out to hug him. Whatever his faults, I was very fond of Uncle Stan.

Slamming the car door, he waited for me, smiling a smile that was worn thin by the week out on the road. I flung myself at him, and he picked me up, holding me in his left arm.

“Are you glad to see us, Uncle Stan?” I asked him, laying my head against his rough cheek.

“You bet,” he answered, his voice as tired as his face. Up the walk he carried me. “Arlene,” he said, nodding to Mama and carrying me into the house, letting the door slam behind us.

“Shhhhh,” Mama reprimanded, following us into the house. “We just got Betty to sleep.”

Uncle Stan set me down on the couch and lowered himself wearily beside me. He was a good-looking man. Some might have said handsome, in an Irish way. I know a little about Irish ways because, though Papa’s name is German and Mama’s English, there was intermarrying with Irish on both sides, resulting in O’Neill and Murphy and O’Connor branches. My own Grandma Erhardt was a Sullivan. I contained about a third Irish blood, Mama said, though she explained that, when you saw the blood, as I did when I fell and scraped a knee, you couldn’t tell what kind it was. For Uncle Stan, it was the same as for me; his mother had been a Monahan.

Uncle Stan had the straight, pinched nose, the well-shaped but thin lips, the high forehead and fine cheek bones of an Irish aesthete. But, as so often happens, he had the puckish brows and roguish blue eyes of a barkeep. His brown curls he kept close cropped, in order to resemble an altar boy somewhat less. His skin was palely freckled so that you had to get close to notice. It was easy to understand how Aunt Betty had found Uncle Stan irresistible.

But there appeared to be a streak of Irish hard luck in Stan. It wasn’t just his job—he was lucky to have one at all—but his bad luck at cards and horseshoes and almost anything where chance played a part. Most men with Stan’s ill fortune would have turned dour, but he had learned to laugh when the crucial horseshoe fell wide or his three aces were bettered by four kings.

“Oh, my God,” he would say with a laugh, “do you believe it? What am I? Fortune’s stepchild?”

People loved Uncle Stan for laughing at his hardship, and none loved him for it more than Aunt Betty. “Laughing at bad luck is noble,” she had made the mistake of commenting to Mama. “It’s easy to see, Stan’s descended from kings.”

“And we all know how well the Irish kings have fared,” Mama could not resist responding.

But underneath Uncle Stan’s laughter was a perplexed sadness, which made me feel protective toward him. And if
I
felt protective, what must Aunt Betty feel? Little wonder she was ready to die rather than expose their poverty.

“Get Uncle Stan a glass of iced tea,” Mama told me in order to get me out of the room for a minute.

“I don’t suppose there’s beer?” he asked.

“You know there isn’t,” Mama said, not without patience.

“Iced tea, then,” he conceded.

Mama lowered her voice to a near whisper as I departed, but I knew almost everything she was going to tell Stan: Aunt Betty was near death. The doctor had been called. He had advised not taking Aunt Betty to the hospital in Mankato since there was no money. Would Mama tell Stan about Maria and her magic?

“And Esterlys wouldn’t give us credit,” Mama was recounting as I entered the room, carrying a glass of iced tea and a piece of crumb cake for Uncle Stan.

Surely he had already known about the credit. Why had Mama brought that up when the rest of her report was enough to sink a battleship? Because Mama believed in “getting all the cards on the table.” “If you know the worst,” she’d say, “everything else is less than the worst.” But Uncle Stan looked as though he’d been shot. The color was drained from his face, and though from habit he reached for a smile, he came up empty. His face crumpled and he put his head in his hands. His shoulders shook with soundless sobs.

Mama took the tea and cake from me and headed toward the kitchen. “Help me get supper on, Lark,” she said, leaving Uncle Stan to pull himself together in private.

Mama made scalloped potatoes with slices of ring bologna, like coins, folded in among the creamy potatoes. With this we had canned peas and, for dessert, crumb cake. I was the only one who ate substantially. Uncle Stan remained at the table only long enough to be polite. Then he left us for Aunt Betty. She was sleeping deeply, but her cheeks were the color of dusky roses, not a good sign in a redhead.

When the dishes were dried, I went out back and took up my watch on the step. Pulling the string to extinguish the kitchen light, Mama followed, bringing me a glass of iced tea and milk.

“If Aunt Betty gets well,” Mama told me, “I’m not going to let her stay here and starve.”

“What will you do?”

“I’ll make her go home.”

“Can you do that?”

Mama didn’t answer. Finally she said, “I’ll tell Mama and Papa, and they’ll come get her.”

“She won’t go,” I warned, recalling the conversation I’d heard between Mama and Aunt Betty. “And she’ll hate you.”

“Oh, God,” Mama despaired, throwing her arms tightly around me, “what am I going to do?” Her body tensed with anger.
“He
can’t do anything! It’s up to me.”

Who couldn’t do anything, God or Uncle Stan?

UNCLE STAN SAT FOR
three hours with Aunt Betty, but she didn’t wake. Sometimes he’d get up from the big chair, walk wearily to the window, and stand with his back to the room, weeping.

Periodically Mama looked in, felt Aunt Betty’s forehead, and shook her head. At nine-thirty Mama announced to Uncle Stan, “I’m going to have to put cold cloths on her, or she’ll go into convulsions.” She fetched a big bowl of water and added ice chips hacked from the disappearing block in the icebox. When she began stripping Aunt Betty’s gown, Uncle Stan backed toward the door as if guilt constrained him from viewing his wife’s body in its present unhappy condition.

“Help me with Aunt Betty’s nightie, Lark.” Mama’s voice had a sharp edge that was meant for Uncle Stan, as if she were at the end of her patience with him.

“I’m going for a walk,” he said. “I won’t be long.”

We heard the screen door close softly. “He’ll walk as far as the tavern,” Mama sniped. “Someone will feel sorry for him and buy him a beer.” This was said as though she were disgusted by those who would pity him.

“Don’t you feel sorry for him?” I ventured.

Mama sighed, not sure of the answer herself.

We worked together for an hour. At one point I was so drowsy, I nodded off in the middle of wringing out a cloth. Aunt Betty rose to the surface of consciousness a couple of times, complained of the cold, then, with eyes rolling upward, she fell back into stuporlike sleep.

At length Mama patted Aunt Betty all over with a towel and pulled the sheet up to her chin, not bothering to dress her again in the nightie. Dropping into the arm chair, she told me, “Get
into your nightie and come give me a kiss when you’re ready for bed.”

But when I was ready for bed, Mama was sound asleep in the chair, and I didn’t wake her. Now that I was curled up on the couch, I was no longer sleepy. I remembered the letter I had meant to write Hilly. I would write it tomorrow night. By then the stork might have come.

I would tell Hilly about Maria and her magic tea that was going to make Aunt Betty well. I still had faith in Maria’s magic, notwithstanding that Aunt Betty was near convulsions. And I would also tell Hilly about the Witch who lived next door to Aunt Betty.

Glancing across the narrow strip of yard, I saw the light burning in the Witch’s back bedroom. Was she hooking her rug? No. I’d be able to hear the hook. The bedsprings whined. Was she going to get up and go to the bathroom?

A figure passed before the window shade, moving from left (where a door led to the hall and bathroom) to right (where the head of the bed was pressed against the outside wall, near the window). It was not the figure of Witch Kraus. It was taller and moved like a man.

“Gott im Himmel,” the Witch cried, and the light was immediately extinguished.

Then, while the bedsprings were responding to the arrival of this second person, the Witch whispered angrily, words I couldn’t distinguish. For several minutes, only the muted yielding of springs floated across the dark sea to my window. The Witch and her friend were getting comfortable. I had hoped they would talk out loud so I could listen.

I recommenced thinking of Hilly. How long would it be until #127—The Cape Ann was built, and Hilly could work in the garden with me? Mama would buy me a big galvanized steel watering can like Aunt Betty’s, and Hilly and I would take turns filling it and carrying it up and down the rows of flowers and vegetables … A new sound reached me from the Witch’s bedroom. It was a sort of sighing and murmuring at the same time. Then there was whispering—I couldn’t tell whose—not urgent or angry, but muffled, mixed sometimes with giggles which were obviously the Witch’s.

I couldn’t imagine what the Witch and her friend were up to, although the sounds reminded me of some I’d heard once or twice
at home, when I’d wakened in the middle of the night, needing to use the potty.

“Put it in your mouth,” said the man.

“For Gott’s sakes, be qviet,” the Witch hissed. “You want effrybotty to hear?”

What did the man want her to put in her mouth? Were they eating in the dark in bed? Why not turn on the light so you wouldn’t get crumbs in bed?