The Stories of J.F. Powers (New York Review Books Classics) (31 page)

“Now you’ll see,” said Father Philbert.

“We’ll leave it up to you,” said Father Burner.

I found now that I could not help myself. What followed was hidden from them—from human eyes. I gave myself over entirely to the fear they’d beaten into me, and in a moment, according to their plan, I was fleeing the crucifix as one truly possessed, out of the dining room and into the kitchen, and from there, blindly, along the house and through the shrubbery, ending in the street, where a powerful gray car ran over me—and where I gave up the old ghost for a new one.

Simultaneously, reborn, redeemed from my previous fear, identical with my former self, so far as they could see, and still in their midst, I padded up to Father Malt—he still sat gripping the crucifix—and jumped into his lap. I heard the young missionary arriving from an errand in Father Philbert’s
brother’s
car, late for dinner he thought, but just in time to see the stricken look I saw coming into the eyes of my persecutors. This look alone made up for everything I’d suffered at their hands. Purring now, I was rubbing up against the crucifix, myself effecting my utter revenge.

“What have we done?” cried Father Philbert. He was basically an emotional dolt and would have voted then for my canonization.

“I ran over a cat!” said the young missionary excitedly. “I’d swear it was this one. When I looked, there was nothing there!”

“Better go upstairs and rest,” growled Father Burner. He sat down—it was good to see him in his proper spot at the low end of the table—as if to wait a long time, or so it seemed to me. I found myself wondering if I could possibly bring about his transfer to another parish—one where they had a devil for a pastor and several assistants, where he would be able to start at the bottom again.

But first things first, I always say, and all in good season, for now Father Malt himself was drawing my chair up to the table, restoring me to my rightful place.

HER PENSION FROM the store wasn’t enough. She tried to conceal this from Mrs Shepherd, saying she
preferred
to be doing something, but knew she sounded like a person in need of a job, and she had, after all, come to an employment agency. Mrs Shepherd, however, found a word for it. “Oh, you mean you want to
supplement
your income.” And to that Teresa could agree.

The next day Mrs Shepherd called. She was in a spot, she said, or she wouldn’t ask Teresa to consider what she had to offer. It wasn’t the kind of position Teresa was down for, but perhaps she’d accept it on a temporary basis.

“You know, Mrs Shepherd, I don’t
have
to work.”

“My dear, I know you don’t. You just want to supplement your income.”

“Yes, and I like to be doing something.”

“My dear, I know how you feel.”

“And I’m down for light sewing.”

“Of course you are. I don’t know what ever made me think of you for this—except they want a nice refined person that’s a Catholic.”

Teresa, dreaming over the compliment, heard Mrs Shepherd say, “This party isn’t offering enough. In fact, I hate to tell you what it is. Say, I wonder if you’d just let me call them back and maybe I can get you more money. If I can’t, I don’t want you to even consider it. How’s that?”

“Well, all right,” Teresa said, “but I don’t have to work.”

When Mrs Shepherd called again, Teresa said it wasn’t very much money and not in her line at all and would not be persuaded—until Mrs Shepherd said something indirectly about their friendship.

The next morning Teresa got on the streetcar and rode out into the suburbs. Mrs Shepherd had referred to Teresa’s charge-to-be as a semi-invalid. The poor thing who met Teresa at the door in a wheelchair wore an artificial flower in her artificial hair, but had the face of a child, small, sweet, gay. Her name was Dorothy. She had always been Dolly to everybody, however, and it did seem to fit her.

Teresa could truthfully say to Mrs Shepherd, who called up that evening to ask how things were going, that the poor dear was no trouble at all, neat as a pin, nice as you please, and that they were already calling each other by their first names. Mrs Shepherd was glad to hear it, she said, but she hadn’t forgotten that Teresa was down for light sewing. Teresa only had to say the word if she wanted to make a change.

Teresa’s duties were those of a companion. She went home at night, and had Saturdays and Sundays off. Dolly’s sister, a teacher, got breakfast in the morning and was home in time to prepare dinner. For lunch, Teresa served green tea, cinnamon toast, and a leafy vegetable. Over Dolly’s protests, she did some housecleaning. At first Dolly tried to help. Then she tried to get Teresa to give it up and listen to the radio.

That was how Dolly spent the day, dialing from memory, charting her course at fifteen-minute intervals, from Fred Waring in the morning to Morton Downey at night. In between came the dramatic programs that Teresa, as a working person, had scarcely known about. Dolly was a great one for writing in to the stations. She’d been in correspondence with CBS all during all the criminal trials of Lord Henry Brinthrop (of Black Swan Hall) in “Our Gal Sunday.” She was one of those faithful listeners who plead with the networks to bring back deceased characters, but it wasn’t the lovable ones who concerned her. She said some of the bad ones got off too easily, “just dying.” One afternoon she chanced to dial to “Make Believe Ballroom,” a program of popular recordings, and got the idea that it should include
some
sacred music. (After a week of constant listening, they heard the announcer read Dolly’s letter and ask listeners for their views. Dolly, expecting trouble, wrote another letter, but that was the last they heard of her suggestion.)

They were getting to know each other. Dolly, who had always been an invalid, said she’d hoped in the past that something might be done for her. Now, however, she was resigned to God’s will (she had visited St Anne de Beaupré in Canada, where it had not been God’s will to cure her, and Lourdes was too far and expensive), but, really, she wasn’t to be pitied, she said, when you considered the poor souls in the “leopard colonies.” The sufferings of the “leopards” were much with Dolly, and she sent them a dollar a month, wishing it might be more. They often discussed the leopards—too often to suit Teresa. Dolly had read a great deal about them and knew of the most frightful cases, which she told about, she said, to excite sympathy in herself and others. Teresa said she was having nightmares from hearing about the cases (in fact she wasn’t). “Which one? Which one?” Dolly wanted to know, but Teresa wouldn’t lie anymore to her. Dolly said she was sorry. She didn’t stop her awful stories, however.

Mrs Shepherd called again. “Still getting along famously?”

Teresa, a little disturbed to hear Mrs Shepherd speak of her as a party she’d “placed,” which sounded so permanent, said that she had no complaints.

One rainy afternoon when it was so dark they should have had a light, and with the radio off on account of lightning, Dolly said, “Teresa, I consider you my best friend.” For some reason Teresa was moved to say that she might have married. The first time she had been too young, or so she had been told, and the second time, also the last time, she had been living with some people who hadn’t wanted her to leave them. They hadn’t been relatives or close friends, or even friends until she moved in, just people with whom she’d roomed, that was all. Dolly seemed to understand. Teresa could not say that she did, now, but was grateful to Dolly for not scolding or ridiculing her—others had.

Dolly said, “If you’d got married, Teresa, just think—maybe you wouldn’t be here today. Now tell me how you got your first raise at the store.”

Dolly, for someone who liked to talk, was a good listener, though she occasionally missed the point, or discovered one that Teresa could never find. “You want to hear that again? I declare, Dolly, you’re a funny one.”

So Teresa told her again how she’d seen this notice in the paper that the store had declared a dividend and how she’d worried all night over what she knew she must do in the morning. The first thing, then, after hanging up her coat and hat, she went to the supervisor of the sewing room. The supervisor sat on an elevated chair, a kind of throne in that mean setting, and stared down on the girls below.

“How’d she look, Teresa?”

Teresa made the face she’d made the first time, now an indispensable feature of the story.

“What’d you do then, Teresa?”

“I said, ‘If you please, Miss Merck, I see by the paper the store declared a dividend.’”

Dolly clapped her hands. “How’d she look then?”

“My lands, do I have to go through it all again?”

“Please.”

Teresa made the face again.

“Then what?”

“I said, ‘If the store can declare a dividend they ought to be able to pay me more than five dollars a week. It’s not very much to live on.’”

Dolly crushed her hands to her face. “Oh, Teresa, you shouldn’t have said it!”

“Of course,” Teresa said, “that was years ago. They have to pay good now.”

“Go on, Teresa.”

Now Miss Merck was getting down from her throne and directing Teresa to follow her into the cloakroom.

“Oh, oh,” Dolly said. “Now you’re gonna catch it.”

“I thought she was going to show me the door.”

“Show me how she walked, Teresa.”

Teresa stood up and did a slow goose step across the room.

“Oh, Lord, Teresa! Don’t I pity you!”

Teresa growled a little, which was not in the original Miss Merck, or even in the part as she’d previously played it for Dolly, and it was a great success. Dolly swooned, her head toppling back on her pillow, her eyes closed against the reality of Miss Merck, but still peeking. When she had recovered, Teresa continued—as Miss Merck herself:

“Girl, you’re a poor hand with a needle!”

“Oh, you were not!” cried Dolly.

“Of course I wasn’t,” said Teresa, “but that was part of her game.”

“No!”

“Oh, yes.”

“Go on.”

“Girl, how can you expect to be kept on at the present wage, let alone get a raise?”

“Oh, Teresa, you’re gonna lose your job!”

“I’ll admit I was going for my hat and coat,” said Teresa, pausing to remember.

“Is that all?”

“You know it isn’t.”

“All right, Teresa.”

“But”—and to Miss Merck’s voice something nastier had been added—“sewing isn’t everything. Do
I
sew, girl?”

“What’d she mean? What’d she mean?”

“You know what she meant. She came right out with it then. She wanted me to be her assistant, at seven dollars a week. And she said not to tell the other girls about the dividend.”

“That’s not all, Teresa. You’re not telling it all.”

“That’s how I got my raise. That’s what you asked to hear.”

“Please, Teresa.”

“All right—and when she died I got her job.”

“
Died!
”

“Yes.”

“You got her job when she died—?”

“Of cancer.”

“
Cancer!
”

And now it was just as though they were back on the leopards, with Dolly telling how, one by one, their members fell off. For Teresa the story ended in the raise and promotion, not in her succession to the throne on Miss Merck’s death or the cause of it.

“I’m glad I’m not a cancer person,” Dolly would say when they were looking up birthdays in the almanac. Dolly was fascinated by the Crab in the zodiac, and by Leo, her sign, which reminded her of the early Christian martyrs. “I wouldn’t be afraid to die that way, would you, Teresa?”

“I certainly would.”

“So would
I!
”

Teresa made a mistake when she mentioned her brother and his family and the good time she’d had with them one summer, long ago, at a lake cottage. (She remembered telling her little niece and nephew that she’d like to be one of the cows they saw standing in a flooded meadow, and they’d thought she really meant it. They’d told strangers, in an eating place where they’d stopped, that their aunt wanted to be a cow. “Oh, no, Teresa,” cried Dolly, going deeper into the matter. “And have some rough farmer . . .”) The trouble was that Dolly was forever asking if the little drowning victims she read about weren’t just the age of Teresa’s little nephew or niece, and wasn’t it a wonder they hadn’t all drowned in Wisconsin? Teresa would snap, “They’re grown-up now,” or, “They don’t go there anymore.”

Dolly gave Teresa a package for her niece and nephew one day, saying it was hard to find something that boys and girls both liked. She wouldn’t tell Teresa what was in the package—it was a secret. “Hold it to your ear. Just tell them that. Say it a hundred times to yourself, Teresa, so you won’t forget.” When Teresa got home, she looked inside the package, and a good thing she had. All done up in tissue paper was an old sea shell, with a little card, “Your unknown friend, Dolly S.” When Dolly asked how they’d liked the gift, Teresa said she hadn’t given it to them yet. Finally, one day, tired of being asked about it, she said, “They liked it fine. They use it all the time.”

Dolly was tight. She took the longest time rooting in her purse for the three cents she owed Teresa for a stamp. (She wanted Teresa to buy stamps one at a time, as if expecting the market to break, but Teresa secretly bought a supply and retailed them to Dolly as needed.) And one week Teresa paid the paper boy and never did get it back. Dolly hated the time when she must send her dollar to the leopards. “Well,” she’d say, as if she were a woman in her first pregnancy, “it won’t be long now.” When the day arrived, sweat broke out all over the poor thing. “Oh, come on, cheer up,” Teresa said about the third time this happened, and tossed a dollar into her lap.

Dolly would not take it, she said, taking it. She tried to swear Teresa to a like amount regularly, saying they could rotate the months, which came too often for one. “Pledge yourself, Teresa.”

“I won’t do it, not for you or anybody. And besides I may not be here.”

“Oh, Teresa, don’t say that!”

Then Dolly tried to convert Teresa to her special devotions. But Teresa was wary of coming under Dolly’s spiritual guidance, embarrassed too at the thought of praying with anyone unless in church. When Dolly persisted, rattling off the indulgences to be gained here and there (she kept books and knew exactly how many days she had coming), Teresa said it was her privilege to worship as she pleased.