The Cape Ann (38 page)

“I can use it,” Mr. Fraker told us candidly, taking his place next to the waitress from the Loon Cafe.

“And now …” Mr. Belling proclaimed with a small flourish of his stubby arm, “it is time for the Bank Nite grand prize.” Pause. “Provided by the management of the Majestic Movie Theater.” Pause. “Two hundred and fifty dollars!”

While we had all known for weeks that the grand prize was going to be two hundred and fifty dollars, a choking thrill ran through us. Two hundred and fifty dollars was as much as some men made in three months.

“Jimmy, will you please spin the basket?”

Jimmy gave it an extra flick, so that it seemed to take forever to come to rest. Our eyes were fixed to that revolving basket of fate. I was chewing on the strap of my purse.

Finally, the basket gave a slow, concluding toss to the tickets, and stopped. For the last time until the Majestic reopened in September, Jimmy unhooked the little door.

Sheila Grubb closed her eyes, bit her lip, and reached her painted fingernails into the wire basket, pulling out the number of the grand prize winner. Checking it against her stub, she gave a little stamp with her foot, and passed the ticket to Mr. Belling with a pretty pout.

After first reading the number silently and waiting what seemed hours, Mr. Belling declared, “The winning number is … 10375. 10375. Who is the lucky patron of the Majestic holding number 10375?”

Beside me, Mama stood up, leaning on the seat in front of her. I wondered if we were leaving before we knew who the winner was. I got up to follow her out.

“Mrs. Erhardt?” Mr. Belling called. “Do you have the winning number?”

Mama nodded.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Mrs. Erhardt seems overcome by good fortune. Could someone give her a hand?”

Bernice McGivern, who’d let out a whoop when she realized that Mama held the winning number, stood up excitedly now, laughing and “oh-mying” and guiding Mama, who moved like a sleepwalker, out into the aisle and down to the stage. Bernice stayed with her until Mama was up the stairs and beside Mr. Belling.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I think we can say that we have a happy and surprised grand prize winner in Mrs. Willie Erhardt of Harvester.”

Dazed, Mama looked around as if unsure where she was. Mr. Belling removed a check from the inside pocket of his jacket and handed it to Mama as Harry Bjornson, holding the flash above his head, snapped their picture.

“Thank you,” Mama told Mr. Belling weakly. “Thank you,” she repeated, turning first to Sheila Grubb and then to Jimmy. “Thank you,” she told the audience. Eventually she thanked Magdalen Haggerty and Mr. Ernest Fraker as well.

Mr. Belling led Mama to the other winners. Their pictures were taken together for next Thursday’s
Standard Ledger
, and the audience all clapped before filing slowly, silently out. Bernice McGivern and I waited at the foot of the stage, as did Mrs. Fraker, who was crying happy tears.

When Mama drifted down the stairs, still stupefied, walking as if on eggs, she stammered, “I’m going…I’m going…into business.”

The day after Mama won the grand prize money, she bought a little white Ford coupe secondhand for a hundred dollars. It would fall apart before a week was out, Papa assured her, and anyway, what did she need with a car of her own?

She needed it for Erhardt’s Typing Service, she pointed out. On the front page of Thursday’s
Standard Ledger
were pictures of Mama accepting the check for two hundred and fifty dollars, and Mama with Magdalen Haggerty and Ernest Fraker, all of them looking vacant and slightly inebriated. Inside was an ad for Mama’s typing business. She would do expert business and personal typing,
it said. For assignments totaling a dollar or more, she would pick up and deliver anywhere in St. Bridget County. If the customer desired, Mama would compose the business or personal correspondence for them. Satisfaction guaranteed.

“You had to wear those pants,” Papa complained, seeing the pictures on the front page. “You’ll be the laughingstock of the county,” he added when he saw the ad on the inside back page.

Mama ran the same ad in the
Red Berry Shopper
and the
St. Bridget Bugle
. But she did not wait for customers to come to her. She had business cards printed, typed up sample letters, and took to the road in her Ford coupe. During the summer months, she took me with her.

In the morning after breakfast, Mama and I picked up the house, then she went immediately to her typewriter. She bought a typing table at the junk shop for a dollar, and made a little space for it in one corner of the living room. Each weekday morning, whether or not there was paid work to do, she typed. If she didn’t have paid work, she typed letters to relatives or more samples to show prospective customers. “Typing is like playing the piano,” she told me. “You have to keep practicing between performances.”

While Mama typed and waited for business calls, I roller skated, or took a long walk past the hobo jungle out into the country, or played with Beverly. I didn’t see much of Sally. Her Grandmother Elway came for an extended visit, and Sally stuck close to home. She was no longer mad at me, yet the distance between us widened inexplicably.

As soon as Papa had his lunch and the kitchen was clean, Mama and I cast off, venturing forth into the wide world in the Ford. Like a little day-sailer, the coupe plied the waters of St. Bridget County, tacking back and forth, from Red Berry to Hazelton, Deer Crossing to Inlet, Bradbury to Dusseldorf, St. Bridget to Harvester, and so on. Some of these were villages of less than five hundred people. No matter. Mama visited every café and gas station, creamery and grain elevator, describing her services, leaving a card, and telling them that she could be reached every morning at the number on the card. In emergencies they could call in the evening.

During the first two weeks of business, Mama had only two assignments: a dunning letter for the P & V Plumbing Company of Red Berry, and a long letter to her daughter from a very old woman in St. Bridget who had seen Mama’s ad in the
Bugle
.

“You’re spending more money on gas for the car than you’ll ever take in,” Papa pointed out.

“I’m spending my own money,” Mama answered.

“We could have put that money down on another Olds.”

Papa was peeved about the way Mama had handled the purchase of the coupe. Instead of coming to him and asking him to find her a car, she’d simply walked into Johnson’s Chevrolet and Buick, and asked if they had any decent cars they’d taken on trade. The sale was in cash and in Mama’s name.

“I’m not losing this one to gambling debts,” she said.

Week by week, Mama’s business picked up. Customers found her efficient yet sympathetic to their needs and problems. Mama was full of clever notions about how they could improve their businesses, or in the case of the old woman in St. Bridget, how she could better things between herself and her daughter in Iowa. Mama always found a way to couch these suggestions so that they appeared to be the
other
person’s idea. It was amazing, they all noted, how much shrewder they were when Mama stopped by.

Summer rolled so merrily along, I regretted having to leave Harvester for a week’s visit to Grandma and Grandpa Erhardt in New Frankfurt, and a two-week stay with Grandma and Grandpa Browning in Blue Lake, but Mama insisted.

“It’s not good for you to be in the car every day. You need to go swimming and fishing and lie around reading books. Or, you can help the grandmas put up preserves. And maybe they’ll teach you to bake. I never seem to have the time anymore.”

All that sounded fine, but I was having a grand time in the car, traveling up and down the county, waving to farmers and counting pheasants. Papa always wanted to know how many pheasants I’d seen and where their nests were. In the fall during hunting season, he’d know where to hunt.

Sometimes I accompanied Mama into P & V Plumbing, which was in Mr. Peete’s garage, behind his house, or into the Dusseldorf Feed and Grain, at the end of Main Street in Dusseldorf. At other times Mama left me at the school playground or the town park, if there was one. St. Bridget had a municipal swimming pool, so I took along my swimsuit and brushed up my skills while Mama spent the afternoon calling on St. Bridget customers. I was able to swim across the pool now, so the lifeguards let me swim in the deep end and jump off the diving boards.

One day we took Beverly along to St. Bridget. The lifeguards there frowned on people swimming in their underwear, so Beverly wore my old, red polka dot suit, which barely covered her necessities, Mama said. I was half-dying to show Beverly how I could jump off the end of the low diving board and swim to the side of the pool. The first thing Beverly did was climb up the high board and dive off. If it had been anyone else, I’d have said she was showing off, but Beverly never noticed whether you were watching or not. Besides, she was always willing to teach you whatever she knew. Beverly just liked a good challenge. Like Mama.

By the end of August, when I returned from visiting the grandparents, Mama was typing all morning on assignments, with never a spare moment just for practice.

“By Christmas I’ll have made back what I spent for the car,” she told me. “Think of it, Lark, I’m going to make enough money next year for a big down payment on the house.”

“The Cape Ann?” I asked, not daring to believe.

“When you’re in the fourth grade, in the spring, we’ll start building the Cape Ann,” she promised.

I was entering the third grade in a week. In a year and a half, two years at the outside, I would have my own room. It seemed forever, and yet very near, very tangible. I imagined myself in a real bed, with no bars, stretching my legs and not being able to touch the foot.

I imagined Hilly and me in the garden, watering the flowers and sampling the sweet, baby peas. Whatever was happening to Hilly’s brain, a garden could not fail to make him happy.

“WHO IN HELL’S WEARING THE
pants in this family?” Papa asked at dinner one night in September. “I want to buy a new car this fall, I tell you.”

“No,” Mama repeated. “We’re saving for the house. We’ve gotten along without a new car for more than a year. It won’t kill us a while longer.”

“Since you started that business, nothing’s the same,” Papa told her. “Suddenly
you’re
making the decisions. By God, I’m putting my foot down. I’m buying a car.”

“You buy a car, and that’s that for you and me, Willie Erhardt.”

What did Mama mean, “that’s that”?

“I work, too,” Papa reminded her. “And I make more money.” He pushed his emptied plate away. “I should have some say around here.”

“It’s got nothing to do with who makes the most money,” Mama said. “Don’t you see that Lark can’t go on sleeping in a crib, for God’s sake? She’s almost eight years old.”

“Well, get one of those daybeds or whatever you call them, and put it in the living room.”

“How can you be so selfish?” Mama asked. “How can it be more important for Willie Erhardt to have a new car than for his daughter to have a decent home?” Mama got up and went to fetch the applesauce cake.

“You’re not going to make me the bogeyman,” Papa told her. “You know what a car means to me. You’ve always known.”

“I won’t pay for it, Willie. I’m saving my money for a house. The money I earn is in
my
name, and so is my car. I won’t sign for a new car for you and lose my own car if you can’t make the payments. If that’s what you’ve got in mind, forget it.”

“I’m just the poor sucker who supported you all these years,” Papa wept, and he shuffled into the bedroom and pulled a handkerchief from the bureau drawer. Mama went on eating her cake.

“Do you believe it?” she said at dinner several nights later. “I was offered two jobs today, two different, full-time jobs. The Ford garage over in St. Bridget wanted me to come to work for them, and Barnstable’s Department Store said they needed somebody like me to reorganize their office. What do they know about me, except that I can type?”

“What did you tell them?” I asked.

“I said no. I said thank you very much, I’m flattered, but I like my independence. They looked so surprised,” she said, and laughed. “I don’t suppose they get a lot of turndowns from women. I can’t tell you how … strong it made me feel.”

“You’re getting real good at saying no to people,” Papa said.

“You don’t understand what I mean,” Mama said.

“What am I, too dumb to understand the English language?”

“Willie, there’s no need to get steamed up,” Mama said. “It made me feel strong to say no because I’ve worked hard getting my little business started, and now that it’s succeeding, I feel confidence, real confidence in myself for the first time in my life. Doesn’t that make you happy, just a little, Willie? Can’t you be a tiny bit proud of me?”

But Papa turned the tables. “Have
you
ever been proud of me? I’ve had a decent job as long as you’ve known me. When other men were going on relief, I provided for you and the kid. You never worried about your next meal. Were you ever proud of me?”

The following day when Mama came home from the road, she had a present for me. “I should have saved it for your birthday,” she said, “but I’ve seen all those pictures you’ve been cutting out.” She handed me a big scrapbook with a red leatherette cover and red cords, like shoelaces, tying it together, so that you could add more pages if you ran out. “It’s your Cape Ann scrapbook,” Mama explained, “for the pictures of rooms and gardens you’re collecting.”

I hugged her so hard she said I nearly broke her gizzard. The scrapbook was another proof that we were going to build the house. It was a pledge. Mama was not a person who went back on her word. I danced around the house with the book in my arms.

How quickly the days escaped. I was very busy. When I got home from school in the afternoon, there was a note on the table from Mama with a list of chores: set the table, empty the slop pails, turn the oven on at four-thirty, scrub three potatoes, etcetera. I felt important being assistant to the president of the company, as Mama had titled me. And Mama paid me well for my help. Fifteen cents a week. That was a nickel more than Katherine Albers got.