Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters (42 page)

For a moment Ann Eliza found no words. Not till she learned that she had missed her chance did she understand how many hopes had hung upon it. Even now she did not know why she had wanted so much to see the clock-maker again.

‘I s’pose it’s because nothing’s ever happened to me,’ she thought, with a twinge of envy for the fate which gave Evelina every opportunity that came their way. ‘She had the Sunday-school teacher too,’ Ann Eliza murmured to herself; but she was well-trained in the arts of renunciation, and after a scarcely perceptible pause she plunged into a detailed description of the dress-maker’s ‘turn’.

Evelina, when her curiosity was roused, was an insatiable questioner, and it was supper-time before she had come to the end of her enquiries about Miss Mellins; but when the two sisters had seated themselves at their evening meal Ann Eliza at last found a chance to say: ‘So she on’y had a speck of dust in her.’

Evelina understood at once that the reference was not to Miss Mellins. ‘Yes – at least he thinks so,’ she answered, helping herself as a matter of course to the first cup of tea.

‘On’y to think!’ murmured Ann Eliza.

‘But he isn’t
sure
,’ Evelina continued, absently pushing the teapot toward her sister. ‘It may be something wrong with the – I forget what he called it. Anyhow, he said he’d call round and see, day after tomorrow, after supper.’

‘Who said?’ gasped Ann Eliza.

‘Why, Mr Ramy, of course. I think he’s real nice, Ann Eliza. And I don’t believe he’s forty; but he
does
look sick. I guess he’s pretty lonesome, all by himself in that store. He as much as told me so, and somehow’ – Evelina paused and bridled – ‘I kinder thought that maybe his saying he’d call round about the clock was on’y just an excuse. He said it just as I was going out of the store. What you think, Ann Eliza?’

‘Oh, I don’t har’ly know.’ To save herself, Ann Eliza could produce nothing warmer.

‘Well, I don’t pretend to be smarter than other folks,’ said Evelina, putting a conscious hand to her hair, ‘but I guess Mr Herman Ramy wouldn’t be sorry to pass an evening here, ‘stead of spending it all alone in that poky little place of his.’

Her self-consciousness irritated Ann Eliza.

‘I guess he’s got plenty of friends of his own,’ she said, almost harshly.

‘No, he ain’t, either. He’s got hardly any.’

‘Did he tell you that too?’ Even to her own ears there was a faint sneer in the interrogation.

‘Yes, he did,’ said Evelina, dropping her lids with a smile. ‘He seemed to be just crazy to talk to somebody – somebody agreeable, I mean. I think the man’s unhappy, Ann Eliza.’

‘So do I,’ broke from the elder sister.

‘He seems such an educated man, too. He was reading the paper when I went in. Ain’t it sad to think of his being reduced to that little store, after being years at Tiff’ny’s, and one of the head men in their clock-department?’

‘He told you all that?’

‘Why, yes. I think he’d a’ told me everything ever happened to him if I’d had the time to stay and listen. I tell you he’s dead lonely, Ann Eliza.’

‘Yes,’ said Ann Eliza.

T
wo days afterward, Ann Eliza noticed that Evelina, before they sat down to supper, pinned a crimson bow under her collar; and when the meal was finished the younger sister, who seldom concerned herself with the clearing of the table, set about with nervous haste to help Ann Eliza in the removal of the dishes.

‘I hate to see food mussing about,’ she grumbled. ‘Ain’t it hateful having to do everything in one room?’

‘Oh, Evelina, I’ve always thought we was so comfortable,’ Ann Eliza protested.

‘Well, so we are, comfortable enough; but I don’t suppose there’s any harm in my saying I wisht we had a parlour, is there? Anyway, we might manage to buy a screen to hide the bed.’

Ann Eliza coloured. There was something vaguely embarrassing in Evelina’s suggestion.

‘I always think if we ask for more what we have may be taken from us,’ she ventured.

‘Well, whoever took it wouldn’t get much,’ Evelina retorted with a laugh as she swept up the tablecloth.

A few moments later the back room was in its usual flawless order and the two sisters had seated themselves near the lamp. Ann Eliza had taken up her sewing, and Evelina was preparing to make artificial flowers. The sisters usually relegated this more delicate business to the long leisure of the summer months; but tonight Evelina had brought out the box which lay all winter under the bed, and spread before her a bright array of muslin petals, yellow stamens and green corollas, and a tray of little implements curiously suggestive of the dental art. Ann Eliza made no remark on this unusual proceeding; perhaps she guessed why, for that evening, her sister had chosen a graceful task.

Presently a knock on the outer door made them look up; but Evelina, the first on her feet, said promptly: ‘Sit still. I’ll see who it is.’

Ann Eliza was glad to sit still: the baby’s petticoat that she was stitching shook in her fingers.

‘Sister, here’s Mr Ramy come to look at the clock,’ said Evelina, a moment later, in the high drawl she cultivated before strangers; and a shortish man with a pale bearded face and upturned coat-collar came stiffly into the room.

Ann Eliza let her work fall as she stood up. ‘You’re very welcome, I’m sure, Mr Ramy. It’s real kind of you to call.’

‘Nod ad all, ma’am.’ A tendency to illustrate Grimm’s law in the interchange of his consonants betrayed the clockmaker’s nationality, but he was evidently used to speaking English, or at least the particular branch of the vernacular with which the Bunner sisters were familiar. ‘I don’t like to led any clock go out of my store without being sure it gives satisfaction,’ he added.

‘Oh – but we were satisfied,’ Ann Eliza assured him.

‘But I wasn’t, you see, ma’am,’ said Mr Ramy looking slowly about the room, ‘nor I won’t be, not till I see that clock’s going all right.’

‘May I assist you off with your coat, Mr Ramy?’ Evelina interposed. She could never trust Ann Eliza to remember these opening ceremonies.

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he replied, and taking his threadbare overcoat and shabby hat she laid them on a chair with the gesture she imagined the lady with the puffed sleeves might make use of on similar occasions. Ann Eliza’s social sense was roused, and she felt that the next act of hospitality must be hers. ‘Won’t you suit yourself to a seat?’ she suggested. ‘My sister will reach down the clock; but I’m sure she’s all right again. She’s went beautiful ever since you fixed her.’

‘Dat’s good,’ said Mr Ramy. His lips parted in a smile which showed a row of yellowish teeth with one or two gaps in it; but in spite of this disclosure Ann Eliza thought his smile extremely pleasant: there was something wistful and conciliating in it
which agreed with the pathos of his sunken cheeks and prominent eyes. As he took the lamp, the light fell on his bulging forehead and wide skull thinly covered with greyish hair. His hands were pale and broad, with knotty joints and square fingertips rimmed with grime; but his touch was as light as a woman’s.

‘Well, ladies, dat clock’s all right,’ he pronounced.

‘I’m sure we’re very much obliged to you,’ said Evelina, throwing a glance at her sister.

‘Oh,’ Ann Eliza murmured, involuntarily answering the admonition. She selected a key from the bunch that hung at her waist with her cutting-out scissors, and fitting it into the lock of the cupboard, brought out the cherry brandy and three old-fashioned glasses engraved with vine-wreaths.

‘It’s a very cold night,’ she said, ‘and maybe you’d like a sip of this cordial. It was made a great while ago by our grandmother.’

‘It looks fine,’ said Mr Ramy bowing, and Ann Eliza filled the glasses. In her own and Evelina’s she poured only a few drops, but she filled their guest’s to the brim. ‘My sister and I seldom take wine,’ she explained.

With another bow, which included both his hostesses, Mr Ramy drank off the cherry brandy and pronounced it excellent.

Evelina meanwhile, with an assumption of industry intended to put their guest at ease, had taken up her instruments and was twisting a rose-petal into shape.

‘You make artificial flowers, I see, ma’am,’ said Mr Ramy with interest. ‘It’s very pretty work. I had a lady-vriend in Shermany dat used to make flowers.’ He put out a square fingertip to touch the petal.

Evelina blushed a little. ‘You left Germany long ago, I suppose?’

‘Dear me yes, a goot while ago. I was only ninedeen when I come to the States.’

After this the conversation dragged on intermittently till Mr Ramy, peering about the room with the short-sighted glance of his race, said with an air of interest: ‘You’re pleasantly fixed
here; it looks real cozy.’ The note of wistfulness in his voice was obscurely moving to Ann Eliza.

‘Oh, we live very plainly,’ said Evelina, with an affectation of grandeur deeply impressive to her sister. ‘We have very simple tastes.’

‘You look real comfortable, anyhow,’ said Mr Ramy. His bulging eyes seemed to muster the details of the scene with a gentle envy. ‘I wisht I had as good a store; but I guess no blace seems homelike when you’re always alone in it.’

For some minutes longer the conversation moved on at this desultory pace, and then Mr Ramy, who had been obviously nerving himself for the difficult act of departure, took his leave with an abruptness which would have startled anyone used to the subtler gradations of intercourse. But to Ann Eliza and her sister there was nothing surprising in his abrupt retreat. The long-drawn agonies of preparing to leave, and the subsequent dumb plunge through the door, were so usual in their circle that they would have been as much embarrassed as Mr Ramy if he had tried to put any fluency into his adieux.

After he had left both sisters remained silent for a while; then Evelina, laying aside her unfinished flower, said: ‘I’ll go and lock up.’

I
ntolerably monotonous seemed now to the Bunner sisters the treadmill routine of the shop, colourless and long their evenings about the lamp, aimless their habitual interchange of words to the weary accompaniment of the sewing and pinking machines.

It was perhaps with the idea of relieving the tension of their mood that Evelina, the following Sunday, suggested inviting Miss Mellins to supper. The Bunner sisters were not in a position to be lavish of the humblest hospitality, but two or three times in the year they shared their evening meal with a friend; and Miss Mellins, still flushed with the importance of her ‘turn’, seemed the most interesting guest they could invite.

As the three women seated themselves at the supper-table, embellished by the unwonted addition of pound cake and sweet pickles, the dress-maker’s sharp swarthy person stood out vividly between the neutral-tinted sisters. Miss Mellins was a small woman with a glossy yellow face and a frizz of black hair bristling with imitation tortoise-shell pins. Her sleeves had a fashionable cut, and half a dozen metal bangles rattled on her wrists. Her voice rattled like her bangles as she poured forth a stream of anecdote and ejaculation; and her round black eyes jumped with acrobatic velocity from one face to another. Miss Mellins was always having or hearing of amazing adventures. She had surprised a burglar in her room at midnight (though how he got there, what he robbed her of, and by what means he escaped had never been quite clear to her auditors); she had been warned by anonymous letters that her grocer (a rejected suitor) was putting poison in her tea; she had a customer who was shadowed by detectives, and another (a very wealthy lady) who had been arrested in a department store for
kleptomania; she had been present at a spiritualist seance where an old gentleman had died in a fit on seeing a materialization of his mother-in-law; she had escaped from two fires in her nightgown, and at the funeral of her first cousin the horses attached to the hearse had run away and smashed the coffin, precipitating her relative into an open man-hole before the eyes of his distracted family.

A skeptical observer might have explained Miss Mellins’s proneness to adventure by the fact that she derived her chief mental nourishment from the
Police Gazette
and the
Fireside Weekly
; but her lot was cast in a circle where such insinuations were not likely to be heard, and where the title-role in bloodcurdling drama had long been her recognized right.

‘Yes,’ she was now saying, her emphatic eyes on Ann Eliza, ‘you may not believe it, Miss Bunner, and I don’t know’s I should myself if anybody else was to tell me, but over a year before ever I was born, my mother she went to see a gypsy fortune-teller that was exhibited in a tent on the Battery with the green-headed lady, though her father warned her not to – and what you s’pose she told her? Why, she told her these very words – says she: “Your next child’ll be a girl with jet-black curls, and she’ll suffer from spasms.” ’

‘Mercy!’ murmured Ann Eliza, a ripple of sympathy running down her spine.

‘D’you ever have spasms before, Miss Mellins?’ Evelina asked.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ the dress-maker declared. ‘And where’d you suppose I had ’em? Why, at my cousin Emma McIntyre’s wedding, her that married the apothecary over in Jersey City, though her mother appeared to her in a dream and told her she’d rue the day she done it, but as Emma said, she got more advice than she wanted from the living, and if she was to listen to spectres too she’d never be sure what she’d ought to do and what she’d oughtn’t; but I will say her husband took to drink, and she never was the same woman after her fust baby – well, they had an elegant church wedding, and what you s’pose I saw as I was walkin’ up the aisle with the wedding percession?’

‘Well?’ Ann Eliza whispered, forgetting to thread her needle.

‘Why, a coffin, to be sure, right on the top step of the chancel – Emma’s folks is ’piscopalians and she would have a church wedding, though
his
mother raised a terrible rumpus over it – well, there it set, right in front of where the minister stood that was going to marry ’em, a coffin covered with a black velvet pall with a gold fringe, and a “Gates Ajar” in white camellias atop of it.’