Lady (18 page)

The truck, emblazoned with dual legends of "Pequot Landing Blue Coal" and "Copper's Coke" on the sides, stood in the road, while the two coal men, with rubber capes fastened over their shoulders, heaved the burlap sacks off the truck and carried them to the open cellar window. There they were emptied into the chute, and the shiny chunks slid down into the bin below, amid choking clouds of dust. In a moment Nancy's Don't-care-who-hears-me stridencies were ringing from across the way.

"LewisHarryWoody, get yourselves out from under those old coal folks, hear me?" The workers digging the sewer line stopped to chuckle at Nancy's continuing salvos, while Gert Flagler came out on her stoop with some of the dogs and watched with a menacing look on her face, as if to say those coal men sure better not raise so much dust when it came her turn for Copper's Coke. And, inevitably, Ruthie Sparrow had her Seiss-Altags trained on the proceedings from her bay window. So much interest and concern did the ordinary delivery of a winter's worth of coal occasion around the Green in Pequot Landing.

After Jesse and Elthea went off on the trolley car, for their usual Thursday evening, Lew and Harry went home to hear the radio, and Lady called to me, asking if I would take a walk around the Green with her -- to look at the leaves, she said, finally turning in that late, coldish October. She had, she confessed, been feeling melancholy all day -- I suddenly recalled that it was the anniversary of Edward's death, and this perhaps accounted for her edgy behavior. Her mood seemed colored by the close of autumn, by the heightened sense of change, and the dying year. So it was not the red-haired man at all, I decided.

We had often walked like this, Honey close at her side, we hand in hand, and I thought what a tragedy it was that she had lost not only her husband, but, in another sense, herself; lost to what seemed an irrevocable widowhood. I thought, too, of Colonel Blatchley by his own solitary fire, and I wished they might be together, as seemed fitting and proper, with that kindly old fellow to look after her and to keep her from feeling lonely. The street lamps blinked suddenly on, and in the oncoming twilight and the mist which was not quite rain there formed incandescent circles of blue and gold, like little glowing halos around each lamp bulb. With the waning of the mournful day Elthea had lighted the candle of a jack-o'-lantern carved by Jesse and me only yesterday, setting the jagged orange pumpkin grinning in the front window for the time when the younger fry would come ringing doorbells for candy and giveaways. The air was layered with visible striations of haze from leaves raked in piles along the roadway, ablaze earlier but now only dully smoking. The men digging the sewer line had long since left, and their kerosene torches, like sooty black cannonballs, flickered in the gloom. Wetly shining branches dripped onto the half-raked Green, a carpet of deep musty red, and our feet crushed the fallen leaves as we strolled along. Lights came on one by one in the houses, though none but Lady had thought to show a jack-o'-lantem.

"Lovely trees," she said of the elms, in her low voice, its timbre strangely muted. "Next spring they'll be young and green again. They never change, do they?"

"But they're
old
. . . ."

"Ha! A clever observation." Her laugh was short, staccato, and too brief to make me believe at that moment in its sincerity. "Old is old, any way you look at it. And here we are, my young man, your old lady --"

"
You're
not old --"

"But I verge, darling. On the ancient. And here we are, in our old town. We did her proud this year, didn't we? She must be feeling very happy after her three-hundredth birthday. Still, it's not very old, is it? Not like 'Paris France' or 'Venice It'ly.'" Here she gave a nod toward the Sparrows' bay window where the mistress of the house had her binoculars trained on us. "Paris France" and "Venice It'ly" were Ruthie's dreams of romance, and neither city could be spoken of without its country.

"I wish I could leave," I said, throwing Honey's rubber ball for her.

"Of course you do, darling, that's what towns are for, to be left. But they're there to come back to again. Promise that when you're all grown up and gone away, you'll come back and visit the poor gray-haired antique across the Green who once made crullers for you."

"I promise." Honey came panting back with the ball. "Why don't you ever leave?"

"I can't." She said it with an air of utter finality as she took the ball from Honey and tossed it again. "That is to say --" She ran to the dog, retrieved the ball, and came back breathless. When she spoke again, she lightened her tone, a trick I had come to recognize. "What I mean is, I'm a homebody. I have everything I need right here. Mama always said that little girls should play in their own back yards, and I've taken her advice." Turning to me, she shivered a little despite her warm furs, then gave me an affectionate hug which seemed to say to Mrs. Sparrow, This is why I will not go away, because I love this boy and I will stay with him.

"I like it here," she continued, urging a little gaiety between us. "New England may not be Paris France in age, but it's not like the American West, either, where if some Panamint thundermug is sixty years old it's considered an antique. Still, Paris France
is
older. The trouble with New England is that it falls between two stools. I don't think Boston should put on such airs, do you? Hartford doesn't. But then maybe Hartford would if it could manage them. But as for myself, I would like to sit in my warm kitchen with my family, and smell bread baking and listen to the rain on the roof. Ah, my family? Why, that is Jesse and Elthea and all of you, and dear Nonnie, who'll be coming tomorrow night. You are all my family. Families are not necessarily relatives, do you think?"

I guessed not, scarcely daring to notice how, rather than being singled out, I had been generally lumped with my brothers and sisters.

"I think the important thing is caring about someone. It's being by themselves that does people in, makes them old and bitter." Her voice slid into a musing tone, and though she spoke to me I could tell that her thoughts were elsewhere. "Everybody's so busy looking for happiness, but I think real happiness only comes when we are joined to another human being. Otherwise we are lonely, and we suffer for it."

"You like to be alone sometimes. . . ." This I ventured tentatively, and she quickly seized upon it.

"You will learn, my Ignatz, that there is a vast difference between loneliness and solitude. Solitude is a kind of food, we eat of it and it sustains us, but loneliness is a starvation diet -- no one ever got healthy being lonely. To be alone and unloved must be the most terrible thing in the world."

I nodded, knowing she was referring to her having been without Edward for so many years. "Then you're really not lonely?"

"Why . . ." She paused, carefully choosing her response, and looking up at her I could see the rich luster of her eyes, and in them a half-thoughtful, half-dreaming expression. "We are all lonely," she continued after a few more steps. "It's why people keep pets or use the telephone or listen to the radio. It's why they go into bars or write letters, join clubs, have meaningless affairs. . . ."

I said I did not understand this word and she laughed. "Romances, darling. What people are always hankering after -- romances. You'll find out one day. But, to suffer loneliness --" She gave a little shrug, then patted Honey, who kept ever close to her side. "Man is made to suffer, they say."

"Why?"

"I've no idea. It's the way of the world, I guess." She considered this with some gravity, then laughed lightly. "I really don't know. I really don't. But just imagine -- think of the people who go through life and never suffer. Who never feel a thing. There
are
those who do. Be glad you can suffer, be glad you can feel. It's not such a bad thing, do you think, to be made to feel?"

"I'd rather feel good."

"But that's the whole idea. How can you tell if you're feeling good unless you've felt bad, so you have something to compare it to?"

"I'll bet Eskimos know it's cold even if they've never lived in Africa."

"I'll bet they do, too, but I imagine they can get pretty hot, wearing those furs and eating whale blubber -- whale blubber causes body heat, doesn't it?"

I guessed so; that was Lady, always making sense out of my nonsense.

"And," she added, by way of summing up her remarks, "every day, every single day we live, we should live to the fullest, for who knows what tomorrow holds? And we may be sorry that tomorrow came."

"Will you be sorry if tomorrow comes?"

"I hope I shall be very glad if it comes. And when it does, I'll try to live it like today, or yesterday, or --" Again she broke off, in the gently abstract way of hers, as if suddenly, for her, I had disappeared from sight and presence and she were alone. Then, abruptly, she came back. "Well, let's just say that not every day is to be lived like every other day."

This seemed to conclude the conversation, and for some moments we walked along in silence, Honey running to sniff in the leaves and then quickly returning to her mistress's side. I was whistling a few bars of Miss Lee's dancing-school march, then broke off, the attraction I felt for Miss Lee making me feel unaccountably guilty or disloyal to Lady.

Then, a thought coming to mind, I asked, "When the saints go marching in -- does that mean that sinners don't get in?"

"So we are led to believe."

"
None
of them, not even a
good
one?"

"A good sinner -- what, I wonder, is that?"

"Well, someone who -- maybe someone who sins but doesn't really mean to?"

"The Bible tells us that God forgives. Maybe there are some things He will forgive, but not all. There are things people do that not even God may forgive."

Again the silence fell between us as, lost in our individual consciousnesses, we walked back along Lady's side of the Green. My thoughts were suddenly diverted as we came abreast of the grinning orange face in the window, when a troop of Halloween kids appeared among the dripping trees, giggling and growling behind their masks in disguised voices. There was a boy in black sacking painted with white bones, too fat by far to be a skeleton; one something like a witch; a tramp; and two or three other unidentifiable characters in an assortment of attic odds and ends. Lady applauded them enthusiastically and showed them to her doorway, where she turned on the carriage lights and sent me to fetch the trays of candy from the dining room and the bowl of shiny pennies, fresh from the bank that morning.

Then, kneeling before each child in turn, Lady removed the papier-maché faces one by one and exclaimed over each marvelous disguise. The smallest girl -- she must have come from up Main Street somewhere, for I didn't recognize her -- kept behind her redly grinning mask the saddest expression imaginable, and nothing Lady might do could coax the slightest mirth from her until she was again safely hidden behind her paper face; then there came a peal of baby laughter as she filled her paper sack with candy, took a penny, then another, and ran away in glee with the others into the darkness.

"Yes," Lady reflected, watching the grinning faces dash up the Piersons' walk, "extraordinary what a mask may do for one." And, "Extraordinary," she mused as she rose and softly closed the door. She drew me to her, and gave me a great hug, and Honey ran about us in circles, thumping her tail against the radiator.

"I love children," Lady said exuberantly. "I love them."

"Why?"

"Because, dear l'il Ignatz, children are grend and magnifishent creatures -- even when they break my windows. Anyone can make them -- except me, of course; I couldn't -- that requires little enough. But children should be taken as the gift they are. To be happy and rejoice in them, to appreciate them -- that's something grownups often forget to do. To watch them grow, and become, to find the person they really are, that's a wonderful thing." She called me her "boom compenion" then, and with another hug prepared to send me on my way.

"But you'll be left alone," I said as she opened the door.

She fell on her knees and threw her arms more tightly around me. "Darling, don't think such a thing!" She raised my chin and I could see her eyes sparkling in the light from the carriage lamps. "Don't ever feel sorry for me. I have had all that life has to offer. I have lived it as I have wished to, and for me it has been the perfect thing!" She said it so ardently, and with such passion, I could not doubt the truth of it. Still, by lingering and by my own oft-tried brand of implacable wheedling, I got her to agree that we might come over after supper and keep her company until Jesse and Elthea returned.

The old trolley cars are gone now, those splendid, ancient, well-beloved vehicles of yellow-painted wood, whose shape and line were so familiar, whose sight and sound and very odor we knew so well, the clang of the motorman's gong, the buzzer to make the car stop, the worn raffia seats, the leather straps, the rows of cards above the windows advertising "Ipana for the Smile of Beauty" and "Sal Hepatica for the Smile of Health," and Carter's Little Liver Pills. When the day finally came that the trolleys were replaced by buses, and the tracks dug up and removed, we felt a loss, as if part of our lives were gone, that it was one more change among so many changes, and that we were somehow threatened.

It was just such a trolley, with clanging bell and rumble of iron wheels along the track, that marked the arrival of the red-haired man on that Halloween night. I remember it was around nine, for I glanced at the clock just after the trolley went past, stopping to let someone off and then continuing to the end of the line. During supper Ma had been in a particularly gay mood because Nonnie was coming home next day, and afterward we carried our stamp albums over to Lady's, to spend as much of the evening as would be allowed.

She was at that time doing some needlepoint which proved to be a pair of slippers, red and black, with handsome gold designs on the toes, and though she had begun them only that week, with her nimble fingers the work was progressing fast. The slippers were to be a Christmas present for Jesse; she couldn't stand his old carpet slippers any longer, or the shoes with the cut X's for his corns. And the corns, as we knew, were prognosticating a winter of heavy weather. I deftly turned the moment to remind Lady of her promise that if there was enough snow we would have a sleigh ride, earning only the usual response, "We'll see."