The Cape Ann (49 page)

“Go on,” Mama told me.

Up and down the streets we rode, Papa very quiet. The town was bedraggled in the cheerless gray light. Leafless black trees, twisted and painful-looking, were outlined against dirty snow. Small and shabby and huddled together was how everything looked. And in need of me.

“I don’t think you should worry,” Papa finally said. “I don’t believe your ma is going to leave.”

“Really?”

“You wait and see,” he said. “At the last minute she’s going to get a migraine headache or lose the tickets or something. I’ve lived
with her a long time and I’m telling you, she’s too fond of her bridge club and church work and all her cackling hens to give it up and light out on her own.”

We pulled up in front of Anderson’s Candy and Ice Cream. “What’re you hungry for?” Papa asked.

Nothing. I wasn’t hungry for anything in the world. But Papa was waiting, wanting to please. “Butter brickle.”

He laughed as if at a great joke and opened the door of the truck.

The next morning Papa went to work as usual, winking at me as he closed the door behind him. If Mama was going to get a migraine, she’d have to do it soon. The westbound passenger train was due at one. We were scheduled to travel as far as Blue Lake today, stay over with Grandma and Grandpa until Wednesday, then get back on the train and head for California.

Mama spent most of the morning cooking things for Papa to eat and writing notes to remind him. When a lunch was packed for the trip and our suitcases were set beside the door, she sat down at the typewriter and typed several letters, stuffing a few dollars into each.

“What’s that about?” Aunt Betty wanted to know. “Aunt Carrie?” she asked, reading the address on one of the envelopes. “Why are you sending her money?”

Mama stopped typing. She didn’t look at Aunt Betty but stared at the typewriter, about where the word “Royal” was, and explained, “These are the last of the payments to people who loaned Stan money to go to California.”

“Why on earth should
you
pay them? This is craziness. Have you been doing this all along? This makes me upset, Arlene. These are Stan’s debts.” Aunt Betty sounded as though she were about to cry. We were all on edge and needed little to start us blubbering.

“It was my idea to ask for the money. I wrote the letters. I can’t walk away, leaving these debts. I won’t be free of here if they’re not paid. Anyway, it’s only a few dollars. Most of ’em are already paid. I don’t want you upset. None of this was your idea.”

“Are we going to have enough money? We could pay these after we get settled, Arlene.”

“If we’re careful, I think we’ll be okay. I’ve still got a little
money coming from some of the typing accounts. I’ve asked them to send it general delivery to Los Angeles.”

“Why Los Angeles? I thought we were going to Long Beach. You’re not interfering again, are you, Arlene?”

“I told them Los Angeles because it’s central. What if we decide against Long Beach? We have to go where the jobs are. I’m doing the best I can, Betty. Don’t be so damned suspicious. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

“I’m sorry, Arlene, really I am. You’re doing your best,” Aunt Betty cried, throwing her arms around Mama.

At ten minutes before train time, we set our grips out on the platform. “You’ve got the tickets?” Aunt Betty asked.

“Yes,” Mama assured her. “I’ve got everybody’s. I’ll take care of the tickets.”

Papa came out of the office carrying the mailbag, which he set beside the tracks. Then he rolled the freight wagon out onto the platform. I wasn’t going to see him do that again, I thought. In the distance the train whistled as it approached a railroad crossing east of town.

I ran to Papa. “I don’t want to go, Papa. I don’t want to leave you. Please tell Mama not to go.”

He laughed. “Don’t worry. She’ll have a nice visit with her folks in Blue Lake and enjoy giving me a little scare, and on Wednesday she’ll get back on the eastbound and come home. You’ll see.” He lifted me, although I was getting big, and carried me toward Mama and Aunt Betty. I clung to his neck, trying to believe, as he did.

“Well, ladies,” he said jauntily, as the train appeared, “write if you get work.” He laughed.

The engine ground to a screaming halt and spat steam at us. The conductor lowered the steps. Papa hugged me and handed me up, smiling as I turned to wave. Mama shook his hand. I couldn’t hear what she said, but she was crying. Papa kept smiling. He shook hands with Aunt Betty and helped the conductor with our grips.

As the train pulled away from the depot, Papa waved until we were out of sight. I waved back, trying to memorize everything: Papa, the depot where I had lived for eight years, the Harvester Arms Hotel, the grain elevators, the hobo jungle.

As soon as the train was out of town, Mama handed the tickets to Aunt Betty and hurried back to the rest room. We did not see her again for twenty minutes, and when she returned, her face was red and swollen.

“IT’S NOT RIGHT,” GRANDMA
proclaimed. “To pull up stakes, just walk out, dragging a child across the country to God-knows-where, is not right.”

Mama and Aunt Betty and I sat at the dining room table, facing Grandma. Grandpa had fetched us from the depot, dropped us at the house, and returned to work. All around the dining room our grips stood as if this were a depot waiting room.

“I just thought you’d understand everything I’ve put up with,” Mama said. “Most mothers want a home and security for their children. I want that for Lark.”

“Looks to me like you’re turning your back on a home and security.”

Mama laughed derisively. “If that’s your idea of a home, I’d hate to see your idea of a dump.”

“It’s a roof over your head.”

“Is that all I can hope for in life, a roof over my head?”

“Yes.” Grandma was dead serious. “Haven’t ten years of this Depression taught you anything?”

“They’ve taught me that if I want a home and security, I’ve got to depend on myself for them.”

Now it was Grandma’s turn to laugh derisively. “You poor fool. You think all there is to marriage is a home and security?”

“No. I think there’s love and respect and working together to accomplish something.”

“And did you love and respect Willie?”

Mama got to her feet, moving restlessly to the window, where she stood gazing into the late afternoon darkness and the fresh, heavy snowfall which could turn to a blizzard if the wind blew down from Saskatchewan.

“I tried to,” she said.

“I was against your marriage from the first,” Grandma pointed out. “Your papa and I pleaded with you to wait. You and Willie were never suited. And there was the religion. But you
would
have
him. Your papa and I were old fogies, trying to spoil your happiness. Now we’re old fogies again, trying to spoil your happiness because we don’t believe people should break up a ten-year marriage, especially when there’s a child, and run off to California.”

“Why don’t you tell me that I made my bed, now lie in it,” Mama sighed. She rubbed her arms as if she were cold or imagining herself out in the storm. “I came here so we could spend some time saying good-bye. I don’t know when we’ll see you and Papa again. But it was a mistake. You don’t understand or care that I’ve been miserable.”

“I understand all right, and I care,” Grandma told her. “It’s in the cards that we’ll all be miserable part of our lives.”

I stopped listening to them and concentrated on the rhythmic creak, creak of the rocker. Forward and back I swayed to keep it moving, my hands on the arms, pushing, pulling.

“For God’s sake, Lark, stop that,” Mama cried.

I got down from the rocker and crossed to the window. Out in Cottonwood Street cars drove slowly, wipers brushing aside snow, cleaning the window for more. Headlights illumined the feathery fall. “The old woman’s plucking her goose,” Grandma usually said of such a snowfall. She didn’t say that today.

“The old woman’s plucking her goose,” I said.

No one paid any attention. Tire chains made muffled, clinking sounds in the deep drifts already accumulated in the streets.

When Grandpa came in from work, he stamped his feet on the rug beside the kitchen door. Thick, wet snow clung to them, and to his jacket and cap. His eyebrows and lashes were dusted with flakes, and as the snow melted, it ran down his face as if he were crying. “Don’t know if I’ll be able to get the car out in the morning,” he announced, breathing hard. “May have to walk to work.”

“Get out of those wet things,” Grandma told him. “Hang them by the radiator, but not too close.”

Grandpa glanced around, trying to determine how far the family conflict had progressed. Were they going to be able to talk sense into Mama, or was she going to go off half-cocked to California?

Under the yellow light of the dining room chandelier, supper and the ensuing hours inched forward in stubborn slow-motion, as if the evening were an awkward and heavy burden which we must pull up a long, difficult hill.

Mama tried to make conversation unrelated to our trip. Grandpa
had tacked a world map to the back of the dining room door, and Mama asked him where Hong Kong was, and Wake Island, both of which had recently fallen to the Japanese.

“There’s Japanese all over California,” Grandma told her.

“American Japanese, Mama.”

“What difference?”

Aunt Betty stood at the window and watched the snow falling beneath the streetlight at the corner. “Good thing we don’t have to get to the depot tomorrow morning,” she said. “I don’t think there’ll be a car on the street. It’s filling in again as soon as the plow goes through.”

“Well, you know,” Grandma pointed out, “the weather isn’t perfect in California either. Cousin Marlis says it rains, sometimes for weeks, in the winter, then gets dry as dust in the summer. And she says it’s real cold at night in the winter. She’s got a heavy coat, and she says she
needs
it.”

“I don’t suppose it’s like
this
in Los Angeles more than once or twice a year,” Mama observed dryly.

“You can make fun of me if you want,” Grandma chafed, “but it’s damp along the ocean, it stands to reason. And Lark’s going to have tonsillitis, wait and see.”

“Would anybody like to play a game of five hundred?” Mama suggested. Five hundred was a game somewhat related to whist and extremely popular with Grandma and Grandpa Browning, who played one or two nights a week with friends or cousins.

Mama’s suggestion put Grandma in a quandary. On the one hand, she would enjoy a few hands of her favorite game, but on the other hand, it seemed a frivolous thing to do in these serious circumstances, like dancing at a wake.

“Well, then,” Mama said to Aunt Betty, “would you like to play honeymoon bridge?”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t play five hundred,” Grandma fumed. “Papa, are you up to a game?”

But even five hundred, a pastime ordinarily filled with laughing and joking and good-natured teasing, failed to lighten the atmosphere. And Grandpa called Grandma a fool for bidding nine hearts and going down one, while Mama kept losing track of the unplayed trump cards, a thing she never did.

While Aunt Betty shuffled and dealt in her turn, Grandma observed,
“I don’t know how poor Willie is going to get along. He can’t keep house. He’ll take to drink, Arlene. You’ll have that on your conscience.”

“Poor Willie,” Mama snorted. “The first time I ever heard
you
call him poor Willie. You never had a good word for him before I married him. He hasn’t changed.”

“He’s Lark’s father. I have to feel differently about him because of that, and so should you.”

“Well, I can’t,” Mama said, picking up her cards. “That fellow—what’s his name?—Mussolini, he’s somebody’s father, too, I read.”

Mama sent me to bed at half past eight. She and I and Aunt Betty were sleeping in the big upstairs bedroom that held two double beds—the room with sloping ceilings, under the eaves. If you got out of bed on the side closest to the wall, you had to duck your head so as not to hit it on the ceiling. I always slept next to the wall since I was short.

Leaving the hall light burning, I climbed into bed and pulled the feather bed over me. It was still snowing and showing no signs of letting up. Maybe it would snow so much the trains wouldn’t get through on Wednesday. That would provide an extra day for Grandma and Grandpa to talk Mama out of California. So far, she seemed determined.

But Papa had assured me she would change her mind. I had put my faith in him. And there was still tomorrow. But, if she persisted, I would have to work on the plan to run away. In the spring when it was warm, I would come back. I knew quite a bit about railroads, and I thought I could find my way. Except for Mama, everything I loved was here, in southern Minnesota. All my memories, and all my plans. In California I would be nobody.

I rubbed my feet together to warm them. The upstairs was always cold in winter, except the bathroom. The radiator was left open there. The feather bed would soon warm me, however. I curled down until it covered my ears.

Would Papa remember to bank the fire in the stove before he went to bed? Mama usually did that. Poor Papa. How lonely he must be tonight. And probably cold. I should have reminded him to bank the fire.

My own feet were beginning to warm. When Mama came to bed, she would put her feet against mine, calling me her portable
heater. Outside, two snow plows met at the corner, great behemoths, backing, turning, lumbering forward, like a pair of disgruntled tyrannosauruses. Growling, they passed, one prowling north, one east, combat declined.

The street grew quiet again. And now I heard the marching boots. Even here in Blue Lake, the sound reached me.

Mama and Aunt Betty climbed the stairs at ten-thirty. They were twenty minutes in the bathroom, preparing themselves for bed.

“God, it’s cold in here,” Aunt Betty whispered, pulling the covers up.

“My portable heater has this bed warm,” Mama told her.

When they had turned this way and that, arranged and rearranged the pillows, and finally settled down, Aunt Betty asked, in a stage whisper, “Are we doing the right thing, Arlene?”