Ladies In The Parlor (2 page)

She had an immense “grandfather’s clock.” It was one of the few in the town. It stood in the hallway, in a space far too small for it. It chimed the hours away in music. A drunken railroader had once broken the glass at the bottom. He offered to pay Red Moll for the damage. She refused to accept the money, but never allowed him to come to her house again. Later she had a bright brass rail placed in front of the clock.

Whenever traveling salesmen “wanted a woman,” they were sent to Red Moll’s house. Often she would “furnish a girl” who would call at the hotel. Returning, she would give Red Moll half her earnings.

While none of these dealings ever made her rich, they kept her from becoming too poor. Red Moll was a woman through whose hands money went like sand. She had but one fear, that of losing her home. That fear made her pay her taxes regularly and manipulate money in every manner possible to keep the home from being mortgaged.

Red Moll never talked of this fear. But those who saw her place pots of geraniums in her “hot room” each fall knew how much she loved her home.

Whenever a child was born in the Blair home, Red Moll would go and help, then leave quietly, without comment. The children learned to lean upon her.

When Leora was eleven, she was allowed to stay all night with Alice. From then on, she came and went whenever in the mood.

Leora spent many hours out-of-doors with Red Moll, who knew the name and nature of every tree in Hardy’s Grove.

When Alice was gone, Leora remained longer with her aunt at each visit. Woman and girl would talk of Alice quietly.

“She’ll get along—she’s that kind,” Alice’s mother once said to Leora.

Alice wrote to them each week. They would read the letters together.

In one letter, Alice begged her mother to visit Chicago.

“You write to her, Leora,” said the mother, “and tell her I’m here whenever she wants to see me.”

Chicago seemed far away to Leora. It was nearly four hundred miles.

She had missed Alice and the picnics which they had together at Hardy’s Grove.

For many minutes she thought of her aunt and Alice, while the lights became dim on the boat, and the dying moon turned the river into gold.

A breeze stirred and chilled her body. She pulled her nightgown more closely about her, and wondered about her brother. Buddy had gone away so often. It might be this was the last time. Leora wished she were a boy. Her brother had said to her, “You ought to get out of this, Sis. I’m goin’ to.”

But how to get out of it—and what to do? Sadly Leora remembered she had promised her mother to stay.

The bed squeaked as her mother rolled over. The odor of nine bodies rushed by Leora, like ill-smelling ghosts, anxious to get out of the window. Fastidious about her body to the verge of mania, Leora had shuddered for years at the close proximity of all her family.

Leora went to the bed for her clothes. Her body ached as she put them on. A fierce sense of loneliness came over her. Rebellion nearly choked her. Stealthily she went down the stairs and into the yard with the burnt brown grass.

She walked about the town, with only the echo of her footsteps for company.

A light was still shining in one house a few blocks from her own. Leora stood in front of it for several moments. The curtains were far up. Moving about inside was Dr. Jonas Farway. He was about thirty-five, with heavy shoulders, a large head, and jaws so heavy they protruded at the sides.

Of medium height, he looked more the athlete than the doctor, though he was popular with all the poorer families along the river.

The girl had often seen him and had heard his name for at least five years. Some months before he had been in her house. Her mother had fallen down stairs and wrenched her ankle. At that time Leora had stood near the bed, by the doctor’s side. When leaving he put an arm about her and held her against him for a moment, so taut that it hurt her breasts. Though it was done playfully, Leora understood.

Her body tingled now as she watched him.

Suddenly the light went out. Leora walked slowly home and lay upon her bed without undressing. Unable to sleep, she stared upward in the dark until dawn. Restless, she rose and sat on the porch until the factory whistles blew at seven.

A clatter arose in the house. The family was getting up.

Her father would soon be home. She had avoided him before. Now she sat quite still. Seeing him coming, she went into the house and took a pair of sharp scissors from the sewing machine drawer and returned to her chair on the porch.

When Blair entered the yard, rattling his tin dinner bucket, he looked in surprise at Leora and half sneered, “You here?”

“Yes, I’m here; I couldn’t sleep from your beating.”

He started toward her and stopped suddenly, seeing the scissors in her hand.

“If you ever lay a dirty hand on me again,” she cried, “I’ll stab you—and if I don’t while you’re doin’ it, I’ll stab you while you sleep. You ain’t goin’ to run me away like you did my brother.”

The startled father asked, “Ain’t he back yet?”

“No, and I don’t think he’s coming back this time.”

“He’s like you,” said the father, “he belongs in the reform school.”

“Nobody thinks so but you. You’re so mean you hate your shadow. He’s a good boy; you just pounded him till he’s like a beaten-up dog, and damn you, you’ll suffer for it. Now I want to tell you, I’m not running away and I’m not going to the reform school, and if you send me, I’ll run away and sneak in the house and stab you. I want you to let me alone. You may be stronger’n me, but that’s no sign you can scare me.”

The mother came to the porch.

“You hear this, Ma?” asked the father.

The flat-breasted woman stood erect. “Yes, I heard it and all I’m sayin’ is—she’s right. God never gave no man the right to beat Leora’s nice body till it’s black and blue’. You drove my boy away—for he ain’t in his bed.”

The mother trembled and sobbed with new-found courage.

The other children gathered about and stared at Leora.

“Take Ma inside,” she said, “And you, Sally, go get us some breakfast.”

The father stared after the mother as the children helped her, still sobbing, inside the house.

“This is a purty thing to come home to.” He stepped toward the porch.

“It’s what you deserve,” the girl said.

“If you don’t put up them scissors, I’ll call the police.”

The girl sneered, “You beat us up, and if we fight back, you call the cops.” She stepped forward. “Go ahead and call them. I’ll tell them what you did to Buddy, and show them what you did to me. We take your beatings because we’re proud, but I’m not proud no more—and I want you to let us alone—every one of us.”

The words stunned the father.

“All right,” he said.

The girl stepped on the burnt lawn. The father went into the house.

Breakfast was eaten in silence. The meal finished, Sally rose and asked, half to herself, “I wonder where Buddy is.”

The children looked at Leora, then at the father. The mother left the table, sobbing. Leora and Sally went to comfort her.

Mrs. Blair had leaned on Leora more than on her other children. Leora, in turn, had mingled contempt and kindness for her. For years she had heard of her mother’s girlhood and of her marriage.

“He was a handsome man then,” her mother used to say. “No better looking man ever made love to a woman nowheres.”

Leora, allowing her mother to dream, would make no comment.

She had suffered long with Blair, a failure at everything. After their marriage they had gone on their wedding trip in a prairie schooner to a homestead which Blair bad taken in the West.

She wore a calico dress of white, sprigged with pink roses. A large sunbonnet was drawn over her hair. It was then the shade of her beautiful daughter’s.

For over three weeks they were on the way. The roads were drifted cattle trails. They did not talk much. When she became tired of gazing at the far horizon she would watch the wagon wheels turning in the sand.

She stayed in a sod house of two rooms with Blair for four years. Unusual in that section, it had a rough pine floor. In all that time she did not go near a town.

Bent by the wind, dusty weeds rattled in the yard.

To keep the rattlesnakes away from their home, barbed wire was laid on the ground at a safe distance from the house. Blair had explained to her that they would not crawl over anything sharp.

She heard a hissing sound one day. A rattlesnake was coiled in a corner. She ran out of the house and would not enter until Blair came home and killed the snake.

She was heavy with child at the time. The fear of losing the baby paralyzed her for days.

Mrs. Blair dreamed vaguely of better times to come, how or when, she did not know.

She would watch the storm clouds gather and disperse. Rain in would now and then splash on the hot earth and disappear. The cattle would moo contentedly and switch their tails as it fell upon them. Thoughts of escape would come to her. The child kicking in her womb made her brush them aside. Besides, a promise made before God was not to be lightly broken by her. If she did not love Blair, he was the only human creature she knew. She clung to him in desperation.

Her nearest neighbors were eight miles to the north, where a dozen cowboys were in charge of a cattle camp. The closest woman lived twelve miles to the south.

Each night, after their animal-like embraces, she would lie awake and listen to the wind in the sand-grass, or the mooing of the cattle roaming about in the dark.

The post office was in a small village thirty miles away. It made no difference. No one ever wrote to her.

She was alone when one baby was born. Blair had gone to the village.

The pains began to gripe her.

Hardly able to bear them, she dug her nails into her palms. Sweat stood on her forehead. In agony, she tore the clothes from her body. She pulled at the bed posts and bit into the flesh of her arms. At midnight she lifted herself from the bed and staggered across the floor. It was then the baby was born. The cord had been wrapped twice around its neck.

She lay for hours unconscious beside the dead child.

A drought came. Blair left the place with ninety dollars after a sale.

For fifty dollars he took over the one restaurant in the village. The bulk of the work fell upon Mrs. Blair. There was food to cook and floors to scrub. From the window, when Mrs. Blair had time to look up from her stove, she could see clothes lines, piles of cans and rubbish, and empty liquor crates at the back doors of the five houses on the other street.

Women known as “the girls” lived in the larger house. These girls satisfied the sex desires of men for sixty miles around.

One of these “girls” came the night Leora was born. She told Mrs. Blair that she was a neighbor woman who wanted to help.

It was this woman who brought Leora into the world. She did not leave the house for three days afterward.

Mrs. Blair named her child Leora after the woman. She often talked of the incident. She had not realized that such a girl could be so kind. When Leora was older, her mother told her of the girl whose name she bore.

Leora was not amazed. In all the years to come she was never to pass judgment on another woman.

In spite of the hardship endured in the West, Leora’s mother longed through the years for the wide land and the open skies again.

Leora was at the doctor’s office before noon. He greeted her cordially.

“I’ve come to talk to you,” she said.

“Yes, yes, my child,” returned the doctor, placing both hands on her rich red-brown hair as though in the act of giving his blessing.

He closed the door of his small private office.

“Now,” he said, “let us hear all about it.”

“It’s nothing much,” she said, “My body stings—I’m afraid it won’t ever turn white again.”

“Dear, dear,” he touched her tenderly. “We can fix that all right.”

“But I don’t want anyone to know I came to you—I want to pay you sometime.”

He laughed softly, saying, “All right, Leora, let us see.”

He pondered for a moment, then asked, “Which part hurts the most?”

“Every part,” was her answer.

He placed her on a small table and left the room for a moment and returned with a large bath towel. Turning the girl on her face, he unbuttoned her dress so that her back was exposed. He rubbed it gently; then allowed his hand to stray over her body. Buttoning her dress, he turned the girl over, and touched her knees. She lay quite still as his hand touched her thighs.

“Does it hurt?” he asked.

She touched his forearm and answered, “No, Doctor.”

His hand went further and lingered.

The girl did not move.

Suddenly he leaned over, pressed his hand more firmly against her body, and kissed her fervently.

Then putting her in a sitting position, he said quickly,

“It will be all right in a few days; just have your mother rub you with witch-hazel and alcohol.” He thought a moment, “and you might cut a lemon in half, then dip it In glycerine, and rub your body every day for about a week—that will whiten it.”

He again put his hands on her hair and held her face to him, “Come at this time tomorrow,” he said as she clung to him.

He watched her down the street and returned to his private office.

“She’s been a woman two years,” he thought. “We’ve drifted together like two lost clouds.”

An impulse tugged at his throat. “Why in hell did I ever get married?” he asked himself, “with new apples growing every year—I’m stuck in an orchard with one.”

He nursed the thought of Leora. He had watched her grow up with the feeling that perhaps some day— He shrugged his shoulders.

His wife knocked at the door and said, “Jonas, your lunch is ready.”

“Thank you, Mary,” was the return, “I’ll be there in moment.”

He mixed a solution to steady his churning brain. He watched the purple liquid roll into the white, then set it on a table. Taking a small grain, he placed it in a glass of water and watched rivulets of purple arise to the top.