Mary Emma & Company (8 page)

It was nearly two o'clock before Mr. Haushalter came back from the funeral, and there wasn't any sense in my going to school for only an hour and a half, so I stayed at the store with him, but he wouldn't say a word about furniture. When I asked him if he'd had any chance to talk to Mr. Maddox, he said, “Why, bless your soul, I talked to him more'n ary other one that was to the funeral. Knowed me right off the reel. Even had me ride out to the buryin' grounds and back in the same carriage with him.”

“Did you get a chance to ask him if . . .?”

Mr. Haushalter chuckled and asked, “'Bout recollectin' the time the hogshead of molasses got away from him? Lord love you, no! I couldn't a-stirred that up again without laughin', and it wa'n't the right thing to do at a funeral. But, by gorry, he recollects folks that hadn't crossed my memory in a score o' years; folks that used to live hereabouts and has passed on or moved away. Well, well well, 'twas a right nice funeral; lots of folks there. It's a pity old Grandma couldn't have saw the nice turn-out for her . . . and all the flowers. Bless my soul, the whole altar of the church was piled with 'em, smelt like a. . . .”

Then he sniffed and said, “Kind of a curious smell hereabouts; spill somethin'?”

“Yes, sir,” I told him, “a little buttermilk spilled on me. Maybe that's what you smell.” Then I stayed away from him as much as I could for the rest of the afternoon, delivering orders and washing shelves in the back end of the store.

It took Mr. Haushalter so long to tell everybody who came in about the funeral that he didn't have time to say any more to me until closing time. Then, as he was locking the door, he said, “Oh, by the way, you might tell your ma to go over to Maddoxs' house after supper, 'long about eight o'clock. Dickie, he'll be there and a-lookin' out for her. Tell her not to make him no offer, and there won't be no need for her to tell him she's a widow woman, or about you children; just say she'd be willin' to take everything in the house off'n his hands—lock, stock and barrel—and let him set his own price on what he wants for it. Tell her there ain't no call to be scairt; Dickie, he's turned out to be a fine man and he won't rob her none.”

Mother was scared, though. Everybody was at the table when I came in from work, and I told her what Mr. Haushalter had said right away, but it upset her so much she couldn't eat the rest of her supper. When I'd finished she said to Uncle Frank, “Why, I could only make myself ridiculous by doing a thing like that! If that house is nicely furnished—even if the things are somewhat old—the amount of money we could afford to spend right now wouldn't make a drop in the pail. Just imagine me walking in there with only a hundred and fifty dollars to my name and telling that man I wanted to buy everything in his house! Why, it would be preposterous!”

Then she turned to me and said, “No, Son. Right after supper you must go over there and tell Mr. Maddox . . .”

“Now wait a minute, Mary Emma,” Uncle Frank cut in, “a hundred and fifty might go a good ways toward buying that furniture if he wants to get rid of it in a hurry, and Hilda and I could scrape up a few dollars to . . .”

“No, Frank! No!” Mother told him. “You and Hilda have all you can do to take care of your own family, and we are
not
going to start leaning on our relatives. We'll buy our furniture piece by piece, as we can afford it.”

“All right! All right!” Uncle Frank said, a little bit irritably. “But don't kick the pail over till you know what's in it. There's no need of going at this exactly as Gus Haushalter said. You might be able to buy the pieces you do need and can afford at a pretty good bargain. Then too, if this man Maddox is as well-off as Gus seems to think, he isn't going to be too hungry for all of the money right away. He might be glad to take a hundred or so down, then let you pay the rest of it out over the next year or two. If you don't want to go, why not let me go over and have a talk with him?”

Mother pinched her lips together for a minute, and then said, “No, Frank, I'll go myself, but you may be sure that if I buy anything, it will be only such pieces as we can afford to pay cash for; we are
not
going into debt.”

From then until eight o'clock Mother was so nervous she could hardly sit still, and when she went out she looked as if she felt the way I used to when I had to take a note home from school that I was sure would get me a spanking. She was gone for more than an hour, and when she came back she was so excited she could neither talk like herself nor stop talking. She seemed to be halfway between laughing and crying when she opened the door, and her voice went all squeaky when she called, “Frank, Hilda, children, you never saw anything like it in all your lives! That house is furnished from cellar to garret with the loveliest old walnut furniture that I've seen in years and years: dressers with acorn handles and marble tops, gate-legged tables and tapestry-seated chairs, four-poster beds and a beautiful square-grand piano, and I've bought every stick and stiver of it for fifty dollars—rugs, bed clothing, and even the dishes and dishtowels. Oh, let me catch my breath a minute before I tell you the rest of it; I've run almost every step of the way back.”

She wiped a tear out of the corner of each eye and sat panting for a minute, then she turned to me with a real sober look on her face and asked, “Did Mr. Haushalter tell Mr. Maddox that Father wasn't living and that we had very little money with which to buy furniture?”

“No, ma'am, I'm sure he didn't,” I told her. “He said they talked about people who used to live around here thirty years ago.”

“Well,” Mother said, “there is something very strange about this. Come to think of it, I don't believe I bought that furniture at all; I think he sold it to me—or rather, came as close to giving it to me as he could and save my pride. And I don't think I thanked him adequately for it. I was so excited that I could only think of getting back and telling you children about it. Just think of it! Less than a month ago I was afraid we might be ruined, and now, within a week or ten days at the most, we shall have the sort of a home that I've dreamed of having ever since I was a little girl.”

She had to stop a minute to keep herself from crying. Then she went on, “And within a month, if all goes well, I should have learned enough about the laundry business that we can strike out for ourselves. Now run along to bed, children; it's getting late and you all need your rest.”

8

A Bigger Chunk than We Can Chew

D
URING
the past week I think everything had gone pretty well for Mother at the laundry. At least she hadn't seemed nearly so tired when she came back at night. Her blisters had all healed, and I heard her tell Aunt Hilda that all she needed before she'd feel safe in starting her own business was a few more weeks of experience. Then, right after she bought the furniture, her nerves went all to pieces.

Maybe knowing that we'd soon be able to move into our own home made her over-anxious, so that she tried to push herself too hard in getting the experience she wanted, or maybe it was just the waiting. Whatever it was, it hit her hard and quick. Monday night little things that she wouldn't usually have noticed irritated her. Tuesday night she snapped at any one of us who made the least bit of noise, and Wednesday night she nearly exploded when Hal dropped a spoon at the supper table.

“Now look here, Mary Emma, you've reached the end of your rope,” Uncle Frank told her. “This business of trying to work at slave labor for ten hours a day, then walking two miles on top of it, is going to kill you. If you want to live to raise these children you'd better quit it, and
right now
.”

From the sharp way Mother looked at Uncle Frank I was sure she was going to scold back at him. She almost glared for a few seconds, then the wind suddenly went out of her sail, and she was close to the edge of crying when she said, “It's not the work . . . or the walking; that doesn't bother me any more. It's that confounded song of Uncle Levi's! All day long, that big wheel above my head keeps up its infernal chant of, ‘round and round the cobbler's bench,' then the splice on the belt comes along and shouts, ‘
Pop
goes the weasel.' I thought it would drive me frantic before six o'clock came tonight.”

Uncle Frank pushed his chair back, came around the table, and hugged Mother's head against him till she was breathing easy again. Then he said, “Come on, Mary Emma, get your coat. You and I are going for a little walk.”

Of course, I don't know what they said to each other while they were out walking, but when they came back Mother was smiling and happy. “It's all over, children,” she told us as she came in. “I'm not going back to work in the laundry again, and I'm not going to be crotchety any more. We'll move into our house the minute the present tenants move out, and I'm going to stop worrying about what might happen to us. With the Lord's help we've been able to make ourselves a good living ever since Father died, and the fortune that has befallen us here in Medford certainly doesn't lead me to believe we will be abandoned now.”

Mother wasn't exactly right when she said we'd move into the house the minute the other tenants moved out, but she was pretty close. Late in the afternoon of January thirty-first the sheriff's van came and moved the Smitherses out. Mr. Durant brought me the keys when he came in from his last delivery, and right after supper Mother, Grace and I went to look the house over. Before we could see anything I had to light matches and hunt around in the cellar for the gas meter. It was the kind that you had to put a quarter into, and that would shut off the gas when the quarter's worth had been used up. The Smitherses must not have put a quarter in for a long time; there wasn't enough gas left in the pipes to make a flicker.

Even though Mr. Durant never did any gossiping, he knew more about the people in our end of Medford, and how they lived, than anyone else—unless it was Cop Watson. And he was right when he told me that the whole house would be dirty. It was worse than that; it was filthy. Mr. Haushalter had told me that both Mr. and Mrs. Smithers were drunk half the time, and that their children were a disgrace to the neighborhood. They must have lived like pigs. The walls were gouged and marked up with crayons, the windows and woodwork were a mess, and I don't think the floors had been scrubbed in years.

When I'd put a quarter in the meter and was able to light the gas Mother looked around with a shocked expression on her face. “Why,” she said, “I never saw such a filthy sty in all my life! Even a hog will keep one corner of its pen clean! Good heavens! I wouldn't think for a moment of putting that lovely furniture into any such place as this!”

Mother stood for several minutes, looking all around with her lips pinched tight together, then she turned to Grace and said, “Well, I don't suppose there is anything that wallpaper, soap and hot water won't cure, but there's an awful lot of work to be done here before we can think of moving in. We'll have to get at it bright and early in the morning.”

We were standing in the kitchen when I'd lighted the first gas jet. After Mother had finished talking to Grace, she asked, “Son, did you bring plenty of matches? If you did we'll light the gas in the other rooms and see what might be done with them.”

Old and dirty as the house was, it was exactly what we needed. It was a great big, two-and-a-half story house that had been built in the 1850's for a single family. But when our landlord had bought it he had divided it, making a flat on the second floor, where the La Plantes lived. On the ground floor there were four big rooms that had been built for a front parlor, a living room, a dining room and a kitchen. On the third floor there were three bedrooms, all with dormer windows and part of the ceiling slanting down with the roof. Inside the front door there was a big square hall, with a winding staircase to the second floor, then a narrower one to the third.

The land sloped down from the street, so that the kitchen steps had to be high, then leveled off into a big yard that was a full story lower than the ground floor. The whole back half of the cellar had once been servants' quarters, with good floors, three windows along each side, and a bathroom that was set back into the space left for a cellar. The tub and basin were made of tin, but that didn't make any difference to us, because we'd never had a bathroom before.

At some time, the inside walls of the servants' quarters had been torn down, leaving a single room the width of the whole house and more than half its length. At the back of it there was a hallway, with a door that opened level with the back yard, and a stairway that led up to the kitchen. In the cellar itself there were bins that would have held twenty tons of coal, and a furnace big enough to have burned it all in a single winter.

After we had gone all through our part of the house Grace was almost dancing, and Mother had either become used to the dirt or was so pleased that she was willing to overlook it. She led us back to the big room in the basement, stood in the middle of it and, after looking it all over again, said, “Won't this be ideal for our business, Gracie? We could have a row of set tubs along those windows at the north, and our ironing boards on the sunny side. No better place could be found for drying clothes in summer than that big back yard. Then, with our having this lovely furnace, the whole cellar could be turned into a wonderful winter drying room. Oh, my! I'm letting my enthusiasm run away with me. With this house so dirty, it will be another week or more before we can possibly get it cleaned up and move in.”

“I don't think so,” Grace told her. “In the beginning we were talking about furnishing the house, room by room, as we could afford it. Just because we were lucky enough to get the furniture all at once I don't see any reason for changing our minds. We'll need hot water to clean with, and to heat it we'll need a stove, so the kitchen is the place we'll have to start. As soon as it's cleaned and papered and painted, we'll have a place to cook and eat. Then we could scrub that big room off the dining room, move in a bed and dresser, and make it into a bedroom for you and Elizabeth. The rest of us can sleep on shake-downs, and we could paint and paper it later. If we can get the kitchen stove moved in tomorrow morning I don't see why we couldn't be living here by day after tomorrow night.”

“Oh, my!” Mother said. “It seems to me that . . . that, as Uncle Frank would say, you're trying to bite off a bigger chunk than we can chew. But you're right about our needing a stove before we can do much cleaning. I'll speak to Uncle Frank about finding a man who does such work as moving. Ralph, you might wait until Gracie and I go up to the kitchen, then turn out the gas down here. We can do nothing here tonight, and with a big day ahead of us you children must have your rest.”

Before I left the store for school the next morning I saw Fritz Young drive past with a kitchen stove on his dumpcart, and a few minutes later Mother and Grace went by with pails full of rags and brushes. By the time I got out of school for lunch our kitchen looked ten times as bad as it had when we first saw it. Mr. Young had knocked a lot of soot out of the chimney when he set up the stove, and Grace and Mother had stripped down wallpaper until it lay in windrows. There had been so many layers that they'd had to soak it to get it off, and puddles of dirty water were standing on the floor between the windrows.

“Don't stand there gawking,” Grace snapped at me when I'd opened the door and was looking in. “Get a basket or a box and start lugging some of this rubbish out!”

“No,” Mother said quickly, “you'd get your school clothes dirty the first thing you did, and I will not have you going to school dirty. Suppose you run up to the store and get us a pound of common crackers and half a pound of cheese. And some tea,” she added. “You might get a whole pound of tea—the better grade—we'll need it to hold us together at this sort of work. You'll find the money in my purse, right over. . . . Gracie, where did I lay my purse?”

Grace was peeling paper off with an old kitchen knife. She didn't look around, but said, “You didn't bring it.”

“That doesn't make any difference,” I told Mother. “At our store most everything is charged. I'll just tell Mr. Haushalter to put it on a pad for us.”

“Not a bit of it!” Mother said almost crossly. “We're not going to run up any grocery bill until we know where the money's coming from to pay it. First you go and ask Aunt Hilda to give you a dollar out of my purse; that should cover it.”

“I'll only need eighty-two cents,” I told her. “The best mixed tea is sixty cents a pound, and a half a pound of cheese is ten, and . . .”

“Never mind that now,” she told me, “but hurry right along. I can't have you being late for school just because we have a little extra work on our hands.”

When I was halfway down the steps she called me back and said, “We're not going to get into the habit of borrowing things, but you might ask Mr. Haushalter if we could use his step-ladder for the rest of the day. I forgot to ask Mr. Young to bring the one from the Maddox house.”

I'd kind of hoped I could get my clothes just a little bit dirty, so Mother wouldn't make me go to school in the afternoon, but I didn't have a chance. Aunt Hilda made me eat some lunch before I went to the store, and by the time I got back to the house it was too late. I had to run all the way to get into class before the last bell rang.

I went right to the store after school, changed into the overalls and blue shirt I wore when I had dirty jobs to do, and was washing shelves when Mr. Durant came in with the afternoon orders. He motioned me over to him while he was putting them up and told me, “You can let those shelves go for now. Till your mother gets that house in shape you can hustle out the afternoon orders and then knock off for the day; she needs your scrubbing more than we do right now. If you want, you can ride the bicycle; sidewalks are getting in pretty good shape again.”

Before five o'clock I had the last delivery made and Mr. Durant told me to run along. When I got to our house the kitchen walls were stripped as bare as a picked chicken. Mother was washing woodwork and Grace was scraping the last remnants of paper off the ceiling. As I opened the door she was saying to Mother, “Hadn't you better stop now if you're going to Medford Square before the paint store closes? Unless we have paper and paste tonight, we'll never be ready to move into this kitchen tomorrow. I don't know how many rolls it will take, but the ceiling is two hundred and eighty square feet, and the walls four hundred and eighty—after allowing for the doors and windows. Do you think one quart of paint will be enough for the woodwork? And we'll need a paintbrush.”

It sounded to me as if that much paper and paste and other things would be more than Mother could handle, so I asked, “Hadn't I better go along and help you carry it, Mother?”

As I looked up to ask, Grace was standing on the stepladder above Mother. She scowled down at me and shook her head hard, then nodded it when Mother said, “Oh, I think I shall be able to manage it all right, Son. It would help more if you could get this mess on the floor cleared up while I'm gone.”

As soon as Mother was down the steps I asked Grace, “What's the matter with you anyway? Don't you know that you told Mother to bring more stuff than a stout mule could carry? Why were you shaking your head when I asked if I could go along to help her?”

“Don't be a ninny!” she told me. “If you went with her she'd have to walk both ways, because there wouldn't be any more than the two of you could carry. This way she won't have to walk home or carry anything. The paint man will bring her back in his delivery wagon. I know he's got one, because it went past Uncle Frank's house just the other day. Now hurry up and get that floor cleaned; you'll have to go somewhere and find me some long boards and a couple of boxes to make a table out of. Wallpaper has to be pasted on the back, and we'll need a long table to do it on.”