Hannah Coulter (3 page)

We ate while the rest of the household was still asleep, and while we ate we talked. That was our social time. Sometimes Grandmam would tell of her memories of the things that had come to her in her life, many of which by then had been lost, but she spoke of them in her matter-of-fact way, just so I would know. Or we talked of what we had been doing and what we were going to do. She would want to know about school and what my life was like away from her and what I hoped for, and I would tell her while she watched me and listened. She would be studying me. Sometimes I had silly thoughts, and when I told them to her I would know they were silly, she didn't need to say a word. When we had eaten and finished our coffee, we fixed breakfast for the others and went out to milk and do our morning chores.

That was the life Grandmam made for me, and that she used to protect me from Ivy's jealousy and her boys' teasing. It was a good enough life too. After it was over, I realized that it was happier than I had known. We had, you could say, everything but money—Grandmam and I did, anyhow. We had each other and our work, and not much time to think of what we didn't have.

Grandmam saw to it that I worked and learned and saved some money. The time and her character required that. But she also tried to see that I had the pleasures she thought were due me. The “extracurricular activities” at our school were nothing like so numerous as they are now. We had too little money to spare, and all of us children were needed to work at home. But every week we had a ball game that we attended when we could, and parties from time to time, and a sort of May festival at the end of the school year.

When she thought I was old enough, Grandmam allowed me to go on dates with boys. She was strict about the time I was to come home, and the boys would have to present themselves to her before we left and when we got home. She saw to that just by opening the kitchen door and saying, “Young man, come in here and show yourself.”

She was afraid I would blunder into an early marriage by getting pregnant or just by being silly. She said, “You're too good and too smart to go to waste. And you're too pretty for your own good, maybe. It could get you an early start on a miserable life.”

I didn't mind her watchfulness as much as I might have, and maybe that was because I really was not much tempted by the boys I went out with, though they were good boys and I liked them well enough. I knew that I was a temptation to them, but I had not yet met anybody who even Grandmam would have seen as much of a threat to my future. She had told me exactly what to do if ever anybody got fresh with me. I was to remove their hand firmly from wherever they had put it, look them directly in the eye, and say, “Are you ready to try that in front of Grandmam?” But it was going to be a while before I let things go that far.

We were the class of 1940. After we graduated that spring and I had made my speech at the commencement exercises about “the future that lies shining before us,” I had to start wondering what was going to become of me. Now that I was a high school graduate, I felt that I was a grown woman with a life to live and the future, shining or not, before me. I had an idea of freedom, too. I was wanting to leave home. The bad feeling and the ongoing resentment of Ivy and her boys had begun to be a prison to me. Even my good life with Grandmam seemed not enough to keep me there with the whole world waiting, it seemed like, for me to come out into it. But I was lazy-minded and scared too, and was letting myself just drift along, nowhere near to packing my things and saying, “Well, good-bye. I'm going.”

But it wasn't very long before Grandmam saved me any further trouble by making up my mind for me. This was her last gift to me.

One morning when we were finishing our breakfast, she put down her coffee cup and sat looking at me. She did that for maybe a minute, letting me know that she was going to say something important.

And then she said, “Child, dear Hannah, you're grown up now. You have graduated from school. You're a valedictorian. You're smart, and you can do things. This is not the right place for you. You need to go.”

My throat ached and I felt tears on my face, for I knew beyond doubt
that she was right, and there could be no more waiting. I had to go. And it came to me at the same time, as it never had before, how much she had done for me, and how much I loved her and would miss her.

She looked at me a while again without speaking, dry-eyed, and then she picked up a dish towel and handed it to me to wipe away my tears.

“Listen. Tomorrow morning we're going down to Hargrave. I'm telling you now so you can think about it and get your mind in order. We're going to see what we can do.”

 

My father drove us to Hargrave. Grandmam instructed him to take us to a little grocery store on the main road just where the houses of the town began. He was to leave us there and come back for us at a time Grandmam gave him. She had arranged this, as I didn't yet understand, because she didn't want us to be associated with my father's old car, which looked, as she had often said, like the last of pea time. He of course knew exactly what she was up to, and I remember how he grinned.

When he had let us out in front of the little store, Grandmam waited for him to drive away, and then she turned to me. She said, “We are going to see an old friend of mine.”

She looked me over and gave a few improving touches to my dress and hair. I was wearing a navy blue dress with a close-fitting white collar and covered buttons, a very dressy dress, very becoming, that she had given me to graduate in.

She was wearing her good black Sunday dress and her black hat with the violets, her hair neatly done up. As I had never seen her do before, she was wearing too a pair of small silver earrings and a silver broach that matched. To my surprise, seeing her then in the dignity of her best clothes and the strange newness of that day, I saw that my grandmother, as familiar to me as the path to the barn, was a beautiful woman.

Both of us were carrying our purses and wearing gloves.

We didn't have far to go, only two doors to a handsome red brick house in a row of other such houses that stood between the street and the top of the Ohio River bluff. We went across a green lawn with a birdbath and tall trees, and up the porch steps to a door with leaded glass. Through the glass I could see into a hallway where the light was colored by a stained-glass window at a landing on the stairs.

Grandmam raised the loop of a brass knocker and knocked three
times. After a minute we heard steps, and then the door was opened by a white-haired lady, slightly stooped, who looked piercingly at us through her rimless glasses, and then smiled and pushed open the screen door. “Well! Vinnie Steadman! Come in!”

“Hello, Ora Finley,” Grandmam said, not ready to come in yet. She stepped aside and reached for me where I was standing behind her. Patting my shoulder with her hand, she stood me where I could be seen. “This is Hannah Steadman.” She said it proudly, and then to prove her pride she said, “She is the valedictorian of her school.”

I felt myself blush hot to the top of my head, and I had tears in my eyes that I was afraid were going to run over, but they didn't.

“Oh, it's Callie's girl!” Mrs. Finley said in a tone that both sorrowed for my mother and approved of me. She took another of her unhurried straight looks at me and said, “Isn't she fine!” And then, looking back at Grandmam, and with a sort of insistent gesture pushing the screen door wider, she said, “You all come in.”

It was a requirement when she said it that time, and we went in.

We followed her into a pleasant living room with a big window looking out to the front, an ornate clock on the mantelpiece, and under the window a radiator fairly loaded with books and magazines. I could hear the clock ticking in a solemn way that made the house seem proper and formal, as Mrs. Finley herself seemed to be. She and Grandmam sat down in armchairs on either side of the big window, and I perched on the edge of a slipcovered sofa on the other side of the room.

Miss Ora—that was what I was going to call her—and Grandmam talked for a while without reference to me. They had been girls together when Miss Ora's father kept the store at Shagbark. They told each other their news or some of it, spoke of the changing times, and named names from the past. There was pleasure and some laughter in all their talk, for they were happy to see each other. And there was something else too, a sort of tone that made you know they were speaking out of the knowledge of age and widowhood and hard times.

After a while Miss Ora said, “And how are Dalton and Ivy and her boys?”

“The same,” Grandmam said. “As you would expect.”

Seeing Grandmam's reluctance to say more, Miss Ora said, “Hmh!”
and to change the subject looked over at me. She was smiling, but she had sharp, estimating eyes that were not easy to meet, and I blushed again.

“Well, Hannah, you have finished school.”

I could only smile back and nod, but Grandmam was quick to answer for me. “Yes. She made A's in all her studies. She was the number one.”

Miss Ora said, “Yes. I heard you say that.”

“Yes,” Grandmam said, talking as if I were perfectly deaf, understanding rightly that I was too shy to take part. “And now she needs to be getting on. She don't need to be any longer at home.” She pressed her lips together, looked straight at Miss Ora, and nodded, inviting her to come to her own conclusion.

Miss Ora looked back and then said, “I see.”

She had given up talking to me. She said to Grandmam, “And what does she propose to do with herself?”

“She would like to come down here to Hargrave and get a job. There are lots of things she could do. They taught her to typewrite. She can do it fast. And she can write in shorthand. She could work in an office. She could work in one of the warehouses when the market opens. She would catch on. She can do anything.”

When I looked at myself in the mirror at home, I saw myself as a grown woman, but out in the world that was asking me to come into it, I was still a girl. I didn't know what to do or what to say. I had no knowledge of my own that would take me past Shagbark. I was inexperienced and unformed—malleable, I think, would be the word. Grandmam knew it. I was a piece of soft clay. I couldn't be that way for long, but while I was she was determined to mold me into something that could stay alive.

It was news to me that I wanted to live in Hargrave and get a job. But hearing Grandmam say so was a relief to me. All of a sudden I could feel myself taking form. I thought, “Yes, that would be all right. Yes, that is what I want to do.”

“And she's going to need a room,” Grandmam said.

Dr. Finley had been dead only a little more than a year when I came to live at Miss Ora's. He had been an old-fashioned general practitioner, giving whatever help he could wherever it was needed through the Depression, and taking, I gathered, pretty cheerfully just what he could get of what was owed him. His income gave him and Miss Ora a good life in their good house, but nothing extra. After his death Miss Ora started renting rooms, mostly to tobacco buyers who would be there only during the winter.

So that I wouldn't have to share a bathroom with the men, she rented me her only downstairs bedroom with a little bathroom of its own. It was a snug, pretty room, with a bureau and bed and easy chair, and two big windows looking out across the shady lawn to the house next door. If I angled my line of sight enough, I could see, beyond a beautiful copper beech and a weeping willow, the opening of the river valley. With my few possessions that I brought with me to Hargrave, I had only two keepsakes: a picture of my mother and father not long after they were married, and a beautiful piece of embroidery made by Grandmam's mother. I kept them on the bureau, for they were a consolation. I have them yet.

Miss Ora's house and the two on either side made a sort of neighborhood.
There were no fences. Behind the three houses, the backyards mingled into one big garden, with hedges and arbors and lawns and trees and vegetable patches and flower borders that went back to the river bluff. From there you could see the river valley and the big river for a long way up and down. There were fern beds, and gateways with roses trellised over them, and tunnels through the hedges, and a pool with big goldfish, and a gazebo on the brink of the bluff.

This was home to me during the simplest and in some ways the clearest little while of my life. I worked hard while I lived in Hargrave, but after I was settled it was an unworried time. I had never known such prettiness as I found at Miss Ora's. Though she was not by any means a wealthy woman and was busy all the time herself, she had a wisdom that spread order and beauty around her. For me, Miss Ora's was a place of rest. I can remember waking up there early in the morning in that quiet house and hearing the towboats sounding their whistles down in the fog, and a strange feeling of peace would come over me as if from another world.

I had saved enough money to pay my rent and keep me eating for a while, I had enough presentable clothes, and if I ran short of anything I was to write to Grandmam. But I didn't take anything for granted. The morning after I came to Miss Ora's to live, I started looking for work.

I was no good at it. I could work, I knew I could. I had worked at home all my life, and at school I had learned “secretarial skills.” As Grandmam had said, I was a good typist, pretty fast, and I knew shorthand. But as soon as I opened my mouth I sounded like I didn't know anything. I was green as a bean and scared, and I sounded like it. There were people looking for jobs who looked and sounded a lot more capable than I did.