The Cape Ann (31 page)

Aunt Betty slipped into the house and stood hugging herself as if she were cold.

Mama appeared at the kitchen door. “You were out there so long,” she said, “I thought you’d fallen asleep.”

“I’ve been thinking.”

“I poured myself a glass of iced tea. Would you like one?”

As Aunt Betty moved across the dining room, she and Mama both said, “I’ve been thinking,” at exactly the same time. They burst out laughing and fell into each other’s arms.

“Let me talk first,” Mama said.

“No, let
me
talk first,” Aunt Betty insisted.

Mama led Aunt Betty to the little table by the window, then fetched a second glass from the cupboard. I sat up, repositioning myself so that I could see them.

Mama opened the icebox and removed the pitcher of iced tea.

“You’re only trying to help Stanley and me,” Aunt Betty conceded. “I see that. It’s just that when you try to think for me, you think up things
I
never would, like going to California.”

“But don’t you see—”

“Let me finish. I know I
should
want to go, but I’m not done with
this
place. I haven’t finished the thinking and crying that needs to be done here before I can root myself up. It’s been less than a week since the baby was born. I’m still walking funny.”

Mama filled Betty’s glass and sat down opposite her at the table. “I understand, I do. I wish there was time for you to say good-bye properly. But every week that you stay, is a week deeper in debt.”

“You don’t know how hard it is to leave the baby.”

“Has Stan tried WPA?” Mama asked. Maybe there was yet a way for Uncle Stanley and Aunt Betty to stay here.

“Relief?” Aunt Betty replied, shocked that her sister could ask.

“From all accounts, it’s better than starving.”

“No, it’s not. This isn’t pride talking, Arlene. WPAers are treated worse than crooks around here. We could never hold our heads up.”

Mama went to Aunt Betty and knelt beside her chair, stroking her sister’s pale, curly hair, which she had always envied. “Then there’s just one answer, isn’t there?” she said, brushing the hair back from Aunt Betty’s hollow, feverish face. “And when you get to California, you’re going to have another baby. I predict it.”

“I don’t think God wants me to have a baby.”

“God doesn’t know what He wants. He’s always giving with one hand and taking with the other.”

“I needed
this
baby.” Aunt Betty spoke softly and looked directly
into Mama’s eyes. “It was going to be my reward for being good and doing without.”

No one was ever going to forget that I let that baby fall.

THE FOLLOWING MONDAY MORNING
, before he went out on the road, Uncle Stanley drove Mama and me to the depot in his Model A. I was leaving for Grandma Browning’s.

Coming out the door at Aunt Betty’s at nine-thirty into the already heavy and somnolent day, Mama observed to me, “You probably won’t be back here. Take a good look around.”

The thought hadn’t occurred to me. For the first time, I was pierced by the little panic and tristesse occasioned by small things passing irrevocably from view.

Clambering into the backseat, I waved to Aunt Betty and looked around at the street, the houses, the trees, and even the old yellow dog lifting his leg on an elm in front of the Witch’s house.

Glancing again toward the porch, I waved once more, but Aunt Betty was gone. We hadn’t pulled away yet, and she was done with me. You shouldn’t do that. When someone was leaving, you shouldn’t go in the house until they’d disappeared, with you waving them out of sight. But I was the one who let the baby fall.

Belching and kicking up dust, Uncle Stanley’s car bounced down Main Street, past the Skelly station and Boomer’s Tavern, Esterly’s Groceries and General Merchandise, and the dead café. At the depot Uncle Stanley went in with Mama to get my ticket. We had nearly half an hour until train time, so I wandered down to the dead café for one last look, a farewell to Baby Marjorie.

Its unaltered condition fascinated me and provoked a sort of disbelief. I studied the room intently, trying to catch it in some small modification. But each chair was precisely as it had been, each dead fly on the interior window sill lay moldering in the very spot it had yesterday. Wasn’t there
something?
Not that I could find. I was strangely comforted by that, and I turned away before Mama had to call me to come.

McPhee, wearing his same striped overalls, was pulling the freight wagon out of the freight room. “So you’re leaving us,” he said.

I nodded. After running out of Maria’s kitchen on Thursday, I was embarrassed to see him. I would do the same again, but it was still a skunk lying in the road between us.

“We’ll miss you.”

People said things like that without meaning them, but I appreciated the kindness. I would miss McPhee. “Do you think you might come to Harvester some time?” I asked.

He leaned on the freight wagon. “Well, I might,” he said.

“If you do, knock on the depot door that’s near the parking lot. That’s where I live.”

“I’ll do that.” He gazed off across the tracks in the direction of the cemetery. “Maria Zelena was sorry that you had to leave all of a sudden that way,” he told me. “She took a shine to you.”

I said nothing. My face was growing warm. I wished he hadn’t brought up Maria Zelena.

“Maria’s got an idea that you worry too much,” he observed, eyeing me sideways while pretending to study the distance.

Why was he embarrassing me when I was leaving? Now was the time to make idle talk and send me away with a smile. Instead, McPhee was stirring everything inside me that I wanted left sleeping. He didn’t know that I had killed the baby. I stood there, dumb as a doorknob.

McPhee looked me up and down. “I said to Maria, ‘The girl’s a deep thinker. She’s not so much a worrier as a deep thinker.’ You’re not worrying yourself about that baby being in limbo, are you?”

“Not if Maria baptized her.” I watched him closely.

“She told me she did,” he said.

He was lying, and his lying was evidence that limbo was bad business. He took one of my hands and shook it. It lay limp in his.

“Whatever they tell you, deep thinker, God loves us all. Me, you, and your aunt’s baby.” Wouldn’t it be lovely if God was that simple? Like McPhee and like Santa Claus. McPhee let go of my hand and lifted the tongue of the freight wagon, pulling it down the brick platform toward Main Street.

Mama emerged from the depot with Uncle Stanley close behind, tucking a couple of dollar bills into his wallet, confusion and
a desire for confidence fighting each other for control of his features. What had Mama said to him? Her own face wore a take-charge expression. Mama had my grip in her right hand, a bag of lunch in her left, and
Happy Stories for Bedtime
tucked under her left arm.

Uncle Stanley swept me up in his arms and asked, “Are you still my best girl?” I hugged him because I knew no better. “That’s my girl. You won’t forget your Uncle Stanley, will you?”

I shook my head. He clung to me oddly, squeezing me too tightly, as if it really mattered that I was his girl.

“How about a good-bye kiss?” he asked. I planted one solidly on his cheek. He was hurting my ribs with his hug, but I kept quiet, mindful that I would soon be back on the platform. “That’s just what I needed,” he said, setting me down. “I won’t wash my cheek till I see you again.” He winked at me.

Turning to Mama, Uncle Stanley said, “Well, Arlene, I’ll see you on Friday then. When d’ya think we’ll have the sale? I have to give them notice at work.”

“A week from next Saturday. And the week after that you’ll be on your way to California.”

“Well, I’ll see you on Friday then,” he said again, and took my hand. We walked together to his car. He didn’t want to drive to Mankato and give his notice. He didn’t want to go back out on the road, smiling and shaking hands and not selling anything, staying with aunts and cousins because he couldn’t afford a rooming house. I could feel that sickening reluctance in the grip of his hand. He wanted … what? To climb into bed in a half-lit room with the sheet up around his head.

Pulling himself up into the car, he said, “Wish me luck.”

“Good luck, Uncle Stanley. You’ll sell a lot of machines this week. But it doesn’t matter, come home anyway.”

Hurriedly he put the car into reverse, backed up, then headed out to the street and away. I waved to him although he did not look back.

From the open window of the withdrawing train, I waved and blew Mama kisses until she was out of sight. She, on the platform, did the same until I was gone. Then I pulled a hanky from one pocket and my ticket from the other, laying the ticket on the seat
and clandestinely dabbing my eyes with the hanky. Soon the last of the houses and sheds and rubber tire swings and broken cars disappeared. Now Mama was
there
, and I was someplace entirely else. Many times before I had visited Grandma and Grandpa Browning alone. I nevertheless felt an emptiness inside my chest, as if, quite literally, I had gone and left my heart.

When the conductor had punched my ticket and slipped the stub into the metal clip between the windows, I dragged the grip out from behind the seat and hoisted it onto the empty seat opposite mine. Releasing the metal hasps, I opened the flimsy suitcase and extracted from beneath my dresses and underwear the tablet and pencil I had tucked in there while Mama was packing. The sin notebook.

Mama had taught me to write numbers up to one hundred. When I had entered sin one hundred in the notebook, I hadn’t the temerity to tell her that I needed bigger numbers, so I started over with one. Now I flipped the pages to the most recent entries. I was up to thirty-four for the third time. With the use-blunted lead I printed: “34—killed a baby.” Hastily returning the tablet and pencil to the grip, I closed the case and hauled it back, behind the seat.

Laying my head down and closing my eyes, I covered my heart with my fist so that no one passing in the aisle could see its wild beating.

WITH THE REMAINS OF
ten years of marriage packed into two cheap pasteboard grips and two cardboard boxes tied with twine, Aunt Betty stepped down from the westbound train in Blue Lake on Monday of the third week in July, Mama right behind her.

Aunt Betty screwed up her eyes against the sun. “It’s so hot and dusty here,” she said. “And the wind’s always blowing grit in your face.”

“It’s no hotter here than in Morgan Lake,” Mama told her, grabbing me and giving me a big hug.

“Oh, it
is
. Stanley always said Blue Lake was the hottest spot in
the state in July and the coldest in January.” She stood on the platform, looking around. “The prairie’s so flat, it’s like living on top of the dining room table.” She hadn’t even said hello to Grandpa and me. “For God’s sake, don’t let them bury me here.”

“We have to be patient,” Grandma advised Mama on Tuesday.

“You
have to be patient,” Mama replied.
“I’m
taking Lark and going home. I’ve got my own life to tend to.”

Upstairs Aunt Betty rested, the oscillating fan on the bureau trained on her. Mama sat at the dining room table, paging through
Life
magazine, while Grandma perched on a high stool, ironing Grandpa’s undershirts.

“Did you see this about Japan?” Mama asked idly, continuing to read. “Everybody’s in the army it looks like, except the old men. I’d hate to live there.”

“It’s the Germans that bother me,” Grandma said. “Did you read the piece about the English? They’re getting ready for another war, it says. I don’t know why countries can’t get along.” She folded the undershirt and added it to a growing pile of ironed underwear lying on the table. “When do you leave?” she asked Mama.

“Tomorrow.”

“That soon? I thought I’d have the Dugans and Standishes for Sunday dinner. They’d like to see you.”

“I have to get home. I hate to think what the place looks like with Willie baching so long.”

“A few more days wouldn’t hurt.”

“There’s business to tend to,” Mama said, closing the discussion.

On the train home the following morning, Mama grabbed my hands in hers and held them up. “Look, Lark, your nails! Look how long they are.”

It was the first time in memory that my nails had grown beyond the quick and had whitish tips like other people’s. Despite the guilts and worries of the past three weeks, I had not bitten them.

Now I withdrew them, tucking them under me, grinning imbecilically and staring out the window at nothing, filled with embarrassment and pride.

“I’m proud of you,” Mama went on. “This afternoon you can
walk down to Eggers’s Drug Store and buy a bottle of LaCross fingernail polish. What color would you like?”

“Pink.”

“Pink it is.”

I wished that Angela Roosevelt could see my long nails.

That afternoon when we stepped across the threshold, Mama halted so suddenly that I ran into her. “My God,” she blurted, surveying the ravages of Papa’s three weeks of keeping house.

Dirty dishes littered every surface. Precarious towers of plates and cereal bowls teetered, held in bizarre constructions by the glue of hardened vegetable matter and the mucilage of old oatmeal. On the stove, hamburger barnacles encrusted the blackened skillet. Gingerly Mama stepped across the room to the sink and pulled back the curtain concealing the slop pail.

Seeing that the pails had spilled over, she cried, “Willie, you sonofabitch.” But Papa was away down at the freight room, storing cartons.

Mama dropped down onto a kitchen chair. “Welcome home,” she said to no one in particular.

Papa did not show up at his usual lunch hour. I was relieved. When the mess was cleaned up, maybe Mama would calm down. We scrubbed and scraped and washed and dried and wiped up and sorted out. Between times we hauled slops across the tracks.

“I see what he’s up to,” Mama said.

“What’s he up to, Mama?”

“If he makes coming home bad enough, he thinks I won’t go. My own sister nearly dying, and he’s punishing me.”