Fair Weather (8 page)

“Papa, I am taking these children home.” Aunt Euterpe’s patience had snapped.

“Take ’em,” Granddad said, walking away already, following the crowds into The Columbian Theater.

Confused, Buster called after him, “Granddad, did you bring Lillian or not?”

Part One

S
omehow Aunt Euterpe found our way home to Schiller Street. It must have been midnight before Lottie and I climbed into the unfamiliar bed. Then she sat up, writing a letter to Mama and Dad. I dashed off a postcard, but she wanted to get everything down before something else happened. Whether she wrote to Everett or not I couldn’t tell, and she didn’t say.

I was almost off in dreamland when we heard Granddad’s stumble on the stairs. He was singing a song, more or less. It was a new one to me. He must have picked it up on the Midway:

Then we slept, and awoke with a jolt. Daylight streamed in. We didn’t know where we were at first. The bedroom, high in the house, was far smaller than our room down home: coffin-narrow and tall with a good deal of mahogany woodwork. The wallpaper was brown vines of ivy. The window was layered with curtains. The breeze was off the stockyards.

Lottie rose up like Lazarus beside me. “Rosie! We’ve overslept, and on our first day.” Her substantial feet hit the floor. Her hair was a rat’s nest. “There’s a clock on the landing.” She elbowed me out of the bed. “Go out there and see what time it is.”

“It’s pretty nearly five-thirty,” I said, rushing back. We’d lolled in the bed like a pair of lazy town girls. Lottie was already pulling her underskirts up beneath her nightgown, grunting with the effort.

Aunt Euterpe’s house had a bathroom lined with tile and bright with nickel fittings. We didn’t tarry to marvel at it. Lottie didn’t approve of the arrangements anyway. She said it wasn’t sanitary to have the privy that near the sink.

But we were glad for the running water. Then she nearly scalped me by jerking my hair into quick, tight braids.

“Pin them up. I don’t want them hanging down my back,” I told her, but she claimed there wasn’t time.

I’d brought a faded calico shirtwaist and a feed sack skirt for every day—a short skirt, sadly. In our old shoes we clattered down the hall past the door of Granddad and Buster’s room, where they seemed dead to the world.

To our relief no one was in the kitchen before us. It was a dim room, and Tip whined at the back door like a lost soul. We handed out a mouthful of cold mutton for him, and he buried it in the yard. Lottie and I had found aprons and set to work.

We’d brought a double dozen eggs from home, now only a day old. An icebox stood in one corner with a pan beneath to catch the drips. Lottie rooted around in it for butter. I built up the fire in the range from stove lengths in a box. I knew that when Lottie got a good look at the stove, she’d hit the ceiling.

She did. “Rosie, we can’t cook in here. The place is a pigsty.”

It was. Nobody had cleaned that range since Grant took Richmond. The whole kitchen was a disgrace, crusted with old grease. We stuck to the floor with every step we took. And cobwebs? Everywhere you looked, like a haunted house.

We stacked the chairs on the table, drew a bucket of water and made suds, tied up our skirts, and fell to it. I laid into the floor with a scrub brush. The kitchen clock struck six as we began. It struck seven as we threw the last pail of black water out in the yard. But we’d lost all track of time.

Now we could get to breakfast, though we were wringing wet. I wondered if there was a slice of ham to go with the eggs, but Lottie said she’d trust nothing in this kitchen that had ever been alive. She told me to beat up a bowl of pancake batter if there were no weevils in the flour. She began cracking our eggs. Lottie never looked more like Mama than when she was standing over a skillet with a spatula in her hand.

To keep up the pace we began to sing, softly, falling back on the old chestnuts we’d sing down home:

Songs like those, and I took my cue from Lottie. Was I beginning to know I couldn’t always take my cues from her?

With a bang like gunfire the door flung back, and there stood Mrs. O’Shay with blood in her eye.

Her hands were on her heavy hips. The very combs propping up her hair vibrated in outrage. “What do you two think you’re doin’ in my kitchen, if you wouldn’t mind telling me?” she bellowed like she was calling hogs.

We nearly jumped out of our drawers. Around Mrs. O’Shay the little maid Bridget peered. Drifting up behind them like the ghost of herself was Aunt Euterpe. She wore a black shirtwaist and a human-hair brooch at her throat. “Oh, dear,” she murmured, seeing me stacking cakes and Lottie looking for the coffee grinder.

“We were just pitching in to fix breakfast,” Lottie said.

“We overslept,” I mumbled, to explain.

Mrs. O’Shay whipped around and stuck her face into Aunt Euterpe’s. “They got no business in my kitchen!” she hollered. “Don’t they think I can cook?”

Wisely, we held our tongues. Aunt Euterpe went paler. “I am sure it was only a misunderstanding.”

It commenced to dawn on us what we’d done. We ought to have been ladylike and lolled in the bed. Then at seven we should have sauntered down to the dining room and waited for whatever Mrs. O’Shay saw fit to serve up. But where we came from, everybody did his share.

Mrs. O’Shay wheeled back at us. “And what have you done to my kitchen?”

Lottie’s shoulders squared. “We’ve cleaned it up,” she said. “It was filthy.”

The word hung in the room. Terrible wrath and something else burned in Mrs. O’Shay’s small eyes. We’d found her out. She couldn’t cook and wouldn’t clean.

“Your aunt never complained,” she said, low and mean.

Our aunt didn’t dare. We held our ground, though I was scared. The spatula hung a little dangerously in Lottie’s hand.

Mrs. O’Shay missed a moment, then turned back on Aunt Euterpe. “I was cook and housekeeper to poor old Mr. Fleischacker before you ever come on the scene,
Mrs.
Fleischacker. And how you nabbed him, I’ll never know!”

I liked to have passed out. Where we came from, people didn’t talk to you like that.

“Me and Bridget are done,” Mrs. O’Shay snarled. “Let them ignorant country girls cook your meals and fetch and carry for you. You’ve seen the last of us! And you can have your house keys back.”

She plunged a big red hand into her apron pocket.

Then the doggonedest thing happened. Mrs. O’Shay’s face went a quick purple. Her mouth flew open, wide as Mammoth Cave. She cut loose with a scream they could have heard back in Ireland.

Little Bridget jumped away from her. Aunt Euterpe fell back. Mrs. O’Shay jerked her hand out of her pocket and held it up before her horrified face. Attached to her longest finger was a snapping turtle.

It wasn’t as big as they get. It wasn’t even as big as a saucer. But it was big enough to have a good strong bite to it. And it didn’t turn loose, though Mrs. O’Shay flapped her hand and the turtle like a wild woman. Its shell swooped in the room with its tiny tail twitching behind.

Screaming like a banshee, Mrs. O’Shay danced a jig of pain across the kitchen. Then she was past us and out the back way, wringing her hand and the reptile as she went. Little Bridget followed at a safe distance, shedding her apron at the door.

In the yard Tip set to barking.

*  *  *

Then it was just Lottie and me over by the range. And Aunt Euterpe turned to stone in the doorway. Behind her Granddad’s old voice welled up from the dining room. “Where’s my breakfast, anyhow?”

Then Buster piped: “Anybody see my turtle?”

*  *  *

Even with a hearty breakfast in us, Lottie and I were cast in gloom and guilt. There were no two ways about it. We’d run off all Aunt Euterpe’s household help.

She drooped dreadfully at her place, though she’d polished off her eggs. It seemed to be the worst morning of her life. “Good help is so hard to find nowadays,” she sighed.

“It’d be the first good help you ever had.” Granddad spoke around a mouthful of pancakes. There’d been no
conversation till now. Nobody had asked him about seeing the real Lillian Russell last night at the theater. And he hadn’t offered.

Aunt Euterpe folded and refolded a dingy napkin. “I believe I had better move into a hotel. Quite respectable people are now living in the better hotels.”

Lottie and I verged on tears. “No, girls,” Aunt Euterpe said, “do not take it to heart. I was rattling around in this big old house anyway. No one pays a call on me.”

We’d come to that conclusion on our own. A silver tray was out on her marble-topped hat stand. It was for the visiting cards of ladies who might call on her. Nobody had.

“Ain’t people neighborly a’tall?” Granddad asked.

“I am in a hard place without Mr. Fleischacker.” Aunt Euterpe fingered her brooch. “A widow’s lot is not easy.” She clung to the grim little ornament at her throat.

“What’s in that brooch anyway?” Granddad squinted down the table over his specs. He saw better without them.

“It is a lover’s knot of human hair,” Aunty said, “all I have left of the person of Mr. Fleischacker.”

“You snipped it off his head?” Granddad seemed interested. Buster certainly was.

“In a manner of speaking,” Aunt Euterpe replied. “He was bald as an egg, but I cut it out of his beard. After he was in his coffin, of course.”

Lottie set aside her fork.

Granddad pondered. The knot of hair under the dome of Aunty’s brooch was gray.

“I take it he wasn’t took from you in the prime of his life,” Granddad said, not unkindly.

“He was eighty-four.”

Granddad blinked. Whatever age he was, he wasn’t yet eighty-four himself.

Aunt Euterpe sighed further, and I read Lottie’s mind. She’d like to get Aunty out of those black widow’s weeds she wore. And if it had been left up to Lottie, she’d have stuck that awful human-hair brooch in the stove.

“You see,” Aunt Euterpe said, “I was Mr. Fleischacker’s secretary. I sat in his outer office and handwrote his letters for him. That was before the advent of the typewriter. I wouldn’t know how to operate a typewriter. . . .” She tapered off.

“Well, it was honest work,” Granddad declared.

Aunt Euterpe turned over a hopeless hand. “Mr. Fleischacker was a widower. I was his secretary. When we wed, people talked.”

“What about?” said Buster, again alert at the wrong moment.

We quieted Buster, and a stillness descended.

I suppose I saw then why Aunty had bothered to invite us to Chicago. She was lonely. I’d had to come to this city jammed with people to see a soul as lonely as hers. It stirred my heart. And Lottie’s too.

Breakfast was over. There wasn’t any pie. We sat in the airless room, hearing the tick of the landing clock. I only wished I could do something about Aunt Euterpe’s sad situation. After all, we owed her something after running off her household help.

Doomishly she broke the silence. “Mr. Fleischacker’s first wife’s friends cut me dead. And we knew no one else.” She stared away at an empty future through the spectacles that gripped her narrow nose.

A tapping sound came across the scrubbed kitchen floor, drawing nearer. Tip stuck his muzzle around the dining-room door. He’d worked the back door open and invited himself into the house. Aunt Euterpe seemed not to notice. Buster noticed, but sat still as a little soldier.