We Five (4 page)

Osborne laughed. “Then you're hardly ever forgotten, Molly girl, because I've never known you to hold your tongue for more than a minute at a time. But you're right to set your sights on something better, and I'm very proud of you for signing up for stenographic classes. I only wish you'd let me pay for them. Generally speaking, girls your age who must seek employment to pay for their night classes are girls without papas to provide for them.”

Molly smiled. “I like getting up and going to work each morning, Papa, and keeping myself out of your way. I also like spending time with my four sisters.”

Osborne smiled. “Even though they sometimes treat you like a child?”

“Not a child. Just a new employee who is supposed to know her place.”

“You mean up in the attic making her wee mousey bed out of a litter of excelsior?”

Molly knuckled her father playfully in the arm. “Ye Gods, Papa, you're so droll sometimes.”

Molly put her arms around her father's waist and gave him a hug. He checked his wish to answer the gesture with a paternal pat on the head, since his hands were dappled with shaving lather.

“Only a few days ago Jane said I was flighty-brained and nearly useless. Of course, I
had
just dropped a roll of ribbon on her head.”

“Everyone makes mistakes. But you shouldn't be too hard on Jane for these sudden bursts of exasperation. It cannot be easy living the way your friend Jane does, forced to care for that failure of a junkman brother of hers. I buy dross gold from him for fillings; I think sometimes I'm the only customer he has. I'm certain it's your Jane who brings most of the income into that sibling household. Alas, with her plain looks and unpredictable disposition, she's probably saddled to him
and
to near-impoverishment for the rest of her days.”

“Jane will find someone, Papa—someone who will deliver her from her present circumstances. You'll see. She isn't pretty, but there are men who won't mind such a thing either on account of their own deficient looks or because she's smart and would be an asset in a certain kind of marriage—one built on mutual respect.”

“You sound like a suffragette.”

Michael Osborne pinched his daughter's nose affectionately, leaving a small dollop of white shaving lather there. As she was dabbing the spot away with her handkerchief, he toweled his face dry. “How do I look?”

“Perfectly shorn, Papa, and oh so handsome. Mrs. Barton will fall swooning into your arms, crying, ‘
I do! I will! I must!
'”

Osborne bellowed with laughter. He was a large man and his merriment sometimes came in Falstaffian expulsions. “Oh you think so? Say, is that Miss Maggie I see standing on the corner below? Do you think she knows?”

“Only if your heart-object has told her. I've kept my promise, Papa. I haven't breathed a word about your proposal. Of course, to judge by that severe look on her face, I'm to get an earful from her all the way to Carrie's, and I'm not sure if I can bear it. Everything expelled through those astringent lips will be against the marriage. Against your happiness—
my
happiness—the happiness of her very own mother. Doesn't she know we won't
always
occupy this dreary Polk Street flat? And yes, yes, yes, I know we can't move in with the two of them because their flat is even smaller than ours. But the point I'm trying to make is that things are bound to get better. I feel a turn of fortune is due all of us—long overdue.”

Osborne smiled. He looked deeply into his daughter's wondering eyes. “When your face lights up like this, it reminds me so much of your mother. How dearly she loved life and all its possibilities.”

“And she loved
you
too, Papa. I could see it in the way she looked at you. And I could hear it in those soft sweet sighs of hers when you held her close.”

Osborne sighed too. It was not, however, the same sort of sigh to which his daughter was referring; his was filled with painful, aching remorse. “Had I only been home that day.”

“A thousand times you've said this, Papa. I won't allow you ever to utter that sentence again. We will never know why she did what she did, but at all events, you are not to blame. Would you have forbidden her to take that walk? Of course not. She would have gone out had you been home or had you
not
been home. It makes no sense for you to continue blaming yourself.”

Michael Osborne collapsed into the chair next to his bed. He dropped his face into the cradle of his palms. He took a couple of deep breaths. Molly watched as the tips of her father's fingers pressed into his forehead. Slowly, he raised his head to look at his daughter. “It is difficult for me to believe that all things happen for a reason. For what possible reason did your mother have to die? What was the purpose behind the death of that beautiful baby? For so very long I teetered between life and death myself.”

“You say that, Papa, but I can never believe it. You wouldn't have left me. I know you wouldn't.”

“Of course you're right. When I was lucid, when my thinking was unclouded, I knew that I
did
have something else to live for. Some
one.
”

Molly's father, his eyes now filling with tears from memory and regret, looked deeply into his daughter's equally dewy eyes—eyes the very same shade of blue as her mother's.

“Papa, let's not talk about this—ever again.”

Osborne nodded.

“Promise me now. Promise.”

Osborne nodded again. His expression brightened bravely. “And have we not already moved miles and miles down the road in the journey of our lives? Though Mrs. Barton would never be a perfect replacement for your mother, she's a fine woman, given to only occasional bouts with hypochondria and dyspepsia. And she'll make a boon companion for you and a good wife for me. And—and she makes me laugh, and isn't that the best tonic there is for the affliction of widowerhood?”

Molly nodded. She touched her lips to her father's forehead. Then she turned her head to glance out the window. “It appears,” she noted in an analytical tone, “that Mag has no interest in coming up the stairs to fetch me. Today she simply isn't going to exert herself. She
is
looking up, though.” Molly raised the window sash. She waved. “Hello there, Mag! Top of the mornin' to ye!” An aside to her father: “Sometimes I pretend to be an Irish charwoman. She absolutely
hates
it!” Molly exaggerated her smile for Maggie, so as to rain morning cheer down upon her impatient friend. “I'll be right down!”

“Take all the time you need!” Maggie shouted back up to her. Maggie's smile was manufactured as well, but it was frigid, almost scornful. And then in an exasperated under-breath, she said to herself, “Oh Molly Osborne! How you absolutely
jar
me!”

Molly closed the window. “Good-bye, Papa. I'll be on pins and needles until this evening.”

“Hopefully there'll be no prick at all,” said Osborne. He watched his daughter hurry from the rear rooms of the flat and then listened as the dental parlor's front door, which opened upon the building's third-story landing, was unlatched and then slammed shut. He promptly crossed to the window of the room where he slept and shaved himself and read his paper in the evening. (There were two other rooms, which comprised the Osbornes' “living quarters”: a kitchen, large enough for a small dining table, and Molly's cupboard-sized bedroom.) He looked down upon Maggie. She was shifting her weight, with obvious impatience, from leg to leg. She glanced up of a sudden and caught his gaze, then quickly turned away, the gesture constituting an undeniable cut.

“You will not win this day, you minx,” said Osborne in apostrophe. “I am to be your stepfather, whether you like it or not. I've heard stories of how you've browbeaten your mother into abject subservience, but those days, little Maggie, are over. I won't command arbitrary allegiance from you. But I
will
command respect. I am a good dentist—even if I did learn my craft through itinerant apprenticeship. I am a good father—even if I've had to, of late, carry the burden of being mother as well. And I do not resemble your late father in any respect except that we were roughly the same age when he died. He was a drunkard all his life. I've been a drunkard for two years only, and only by circumstance—circumstances that are finally being put behind me. I will continue to mourn the deaths of my late wife and baby daughter until my last hour upon this earth, but I have ceased doing so from atop a saloon stool. Your mother, Miss Maggie, believes me when I say this. Perhaps in time you'll come to believe me too, and then things cannot help but improve between us.”

Osborne observed Maggie and his daughter Molly as they exchanged perfunctory morning greetings on the sidewalk. He smiled as Molly, lifting her head, and, seeing him standing at the window, waved good-bye. He waved back, though Maggie refused to be witness to any of it, staring ahead, her face set and unemotive. Then the two girls moved along, Molly hooking both of her arms around Maggie's left arm to effect a lively bonhomie, whether the recipient chose to subscribe to it or not.

Michael Osborne had cleared his calendar of patients for that day. Today—the
entire
day was reserved for Clara Barton. Because she was certain to say yes. This he made himself believe. And he was certain they should spend the remainder of the day celebrating her acceptance of his proposal, perhaps by taking themselves to North Beach, where the pounding surf would applaud their decision to be together forever thereafter, and perhaps even replace at long last the mental picture of his late wife, in that very same spot, walking herself into a watery tomb.

___________

Maggie Barton and Molly Osborne had just turned the corner into Bush Street when they were hailed by a bubbly young woman with singing eyes and a massive coil of black hair held upon her head by a superfluity of tortoise-shell hairpins. Whereas Maggie and Molly wore the sedate and understated “uniform” of the female department store salesclerk—starched skirt and soft-toned shirtwaist (the only permissible flash of color being found upon their nearly matching pink-dotted neckties)—the girl beckoning their attention was rigged in an ornately embroidered orange-and-gold men's Mandarin jacket and a fringed Chinese shawl that had been twisted and turned so as to become a nest for her bobbing head. “Do you like it?” she asked, modeling her rig with palms down and projecting out to the sides like those of a posing mannequin—especially one from ancient Egypt. “It's Reggie's jacket, but I made it my own. It's to grab people's attention so I can slip them a printed advertisement for his lecture Thursday night.” The girl handed a piece of paper to Maggie. “You two must share it, because I haven't an inexhaustible supply. Do you think you'll be able to come?”

Molly looked up from the paper. “I'm sorry, but I have my stenography class at that hour.”

The girl, whose name was Mirabella, was on friendly and familiar terms with both Maggie and Molly due to the fact that the three of them had attended grammar school together. She turned to Maggie with the same bright and hopeful look. “What about
you
, Mag?”

“I'll
try
,” fibbed Maggie, “but I cannot imagine your new husband will have many others in attendance. ‘The Extinction of the Human Race' is a very depressing topic for this month's ‘Lecture for the Masses.'”

“And yet it's something to which we should all be giving serious thought. Futurists tell us that humankind may not survive this new century—that the tragedy of Galveston was only the first of many such devastating catastrophes that will, in the end, wipe all human life from the planet.”

Maggie handed the paper announcement back to Mirabella. “You and your newlywed professor husband sound like those sandwich-board-wearing fanatics who stand on Market Street and preach the end of the world. You dismiss the fact that there are a good many others—like that Mr. Bellamy whom Ruth's been reading—who believe quite the opposite. By the way, Mirabella: what does your husband predict will be the nail in the coffin of our species—the one big, final event which will make all humankind disappear forever?”

Mirabella frowned. “Well, it sounds to me like you aren't coming, so I shouldn't tell you
anything
, but of course I will because we're friends. Reggie lists five different potential agents of permanent annihilation.”

“Perhaps you should name them some other time, Mirabella,” said Molly, uneasily. “Mag and I are both late for work.”

“Then I'll walk with you. I should vacate this block anyway. The Salvationists are about to start caterwauling on that corner and they'll drown me out completely.”

Maggie and Molly resumed their brisk walk along Bush with Mirabella falling into skip-step next to them. “First.
Water.
Reggie calls this the Noachial model—whatever that means. Then.
Fire.
Either by the hand of nature or by the hand of man. Oh, let me see. Slow down, will you?
Wind.
Tornadoes, hurricanes—we've seen a good deal of
that
already. Then earthquake, volcano—that sort of thing. ‘Earth eructions,' my horned-rimmed honey calls them.”

“Earth e
rup
tions?” asked Molly.

“No. E
ruc
tions. Like big terrestrial belches. Isn't my new husband clever? He's such a wooz.”

Maggie and Molly nodded as one, or rather like two kittens tracking a playfully dangled bit of twine with their whole heads.

“Anyway, don't we get a taste of
that
from time to time here in wambling ol' Frisco? Oh, do slow down just a smidge. I'm going to trip, I really am. Thank you. And the last one—hum, what
is
the last one?”

“Yes,” sighed Maggie with only slightly masked annoyance, “what
is
the last one? Molly and I are dying to know.”