Читать книгу Our Ernie - Alice Hegan Rice - Страница 3

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The happy-go-lucky Bossel family, of which “our Ernie” was the youngest and most adored member, had managed to exist for years with scarcely more visible means of support than an air-plant. Whatever sustenance it derived seemed to come from its own hilarious and highly congenial society.

The house in which it lived was the only two-story one in Wirt’s Division, a brownstone edifice with a wide porch cutting across its face like a grin, and a tiled roof that tilted over its upper windows for all the world like a rakish hat.

Grampa Calloway, once the proud Captain of the Ohio Queen, had squandered his entire patrimony on the residence, partly to prove that the family derelict could still live like a gentleman, and partly to provide a home for his three motherless grandchildren and their one-armed father, Benjamin Bossel.

At the time he made his magnificent architectural gesture, the old Kentucky city was heading due south, but following the capricious habits of cities it changed its mind and swung to the east instead, leaving Wirt’s Division dangling like a shabby fringe to the skirts of society.

However unfortunate the financial venture had been, the investment had far-reaching effects on the Captain’s progeny. The comfortable elegance of their abode set the Bossels apart from their neighbors, and sustained a family pride that otherwise might have languished. Plate-glass windows demanded washing, concrete steps required scrubbing, ornate iron fences shrieked for paint, and the one pretentious house in the neighborhood had to be lived up to.

Unfortunately, the model exterior was no indication of the interior. Since Grandma’s death six months before, housekeeping had been negligible. To be sure, there were extenuating circumstances, for Rosie was studying to be a trained nurse and away most of the time, the Captain far too elegant to engage in manual labor, Mr. Bossel a night watchman, and Curt, the eldest, too absorbed in being a mainstay to assist with domestic duties.

Then there was Ernie.

At fourteen Ernie was an overgrown blue-eyed, pink-cheeked youngster who confidently expected the world to accept him at the high estimate he placed upon himself. From the hour of his birth he had been the undisputed occupant of the family spotlight, and as he grew older his sphere of influence widened. To be sure, the consensus of opinion was not always favorable. It was generally conceded that he occupied too much cubic space, that he was often bumptious, and sometimes a nuisance. But, nevertheless, eyes twinkled, voices softened, and people smiled when they spoke of the youngest Bossel.

Late one spring afternoon he was sitting on his front porch, characteristically absorbed in trying to achieve the unattainable, by shaving his forearm with the hope of producing a hirsute adornment, when his peace was shattered by an insulting call:

“Hi there, Mellin’s Food!” jeered a voice from the street. “I been layin’ fer you, ‘cause of what you said about my Ma!”

“It’s a dirty lie,” said Ernie affably. “What did I say?”

“That she looked like a walrus.”

“I did not. I said a hippopotamus.”

“Well, what’s the difference?”

Ernie regarded the boy with devastating contempt.

“For pity’s sake, Dutchy, you goin’ on thirteen and astin’ me that? Ain’t you ever been to the Zoo?”

This digression into natural history revealed the appalling fact that Dutchy had not only never visited the Zoo, but that he had never seen an elephant.

“Never heard of such ignorance,” said Ernie. “I got a good mind to take you to the Zoo next Saturday.”

“Where’ll you get the money?” asked Dutchy guardedly.

“Well, I don’t mind putting it up if it will get some sense into your head.”

With this adjustment of a delicate matter, settled to the satisfaction of both parties, Ernie put the knife into his pocket and proceeded around to his back door, where he was greeted with rapturous joy by a sorry-looking canine that answered to the name of Roustabout. As he entered the kitchen, he found his father, apron tied around his neck, mixing something at the stove with his one hand.

Ernie looked at him suspiciously. There was no possible doubt about it, Pop had been crying. A weak redness about his lids and a trembling of the lower jaw were sufficient evidence, even if he were not in the very act of trying to wipe his nose on his elbow.

“What’s the matter?” demanded Ernie.

“ ‘Twasn’t the boss’s fault,” murmured Pop. “Had to have a stronger man to do the night-watchin’. I ain’t blamin’ him.”

“You mean you’re fired?”

Pop nodded. “After ten years. It didn’t ‘mount to much, but it kept you in school and kinder made me feel—” His emotion being too much for him, he put down the spoon and covered his face with his hand.

Ernie was instantly beside him with an arm around his shoulders. He loved his father better than anything in the world, and the shell-shocked, one-armed little man had been his care and companion since childhood.

“Don’t feel bad, Pop,” he implored. “I don’t mind stopping school and going to work.”

“I been a failure,” sighed Pop. “Your Ma ought never to have married me.”

“Then where’d I ‘a’ been?” asked Ernie indignantly, adding as an afterthought, “and Curt and Rosie?”

“That’s right,” admitted Pop. “If I never give the Calloways anything else, I’ve give ’em three fine infants.”

“And look at your war record,” said Ernie. “Ain’t every family got a decoration like you.”

Greatly comforted, Pop went back to his stewpan.

“I was just starting things for Rose,” he said, still sniffling. “This is Bob’s night and I know she’ll want to get through early.”

“Bob’s taking too many nights,” said Ernie, shedding his sweater and washing his hands at the sink. “First thing you know he’ll be wantin’ to marry Sis.”

“Well,” said Pop, “can’t say I’d blame him, can you?”

Hot words leaped to Ernie’s lips, but they were suppressed. The possibility of having to divide Rosie’s affection with another male infuriated him.

“Love’s a singelar thing,” said Pop, gazing pensively into the stewpan. “I ain’t fergettin’ when it struck yer Ma and me. She was a Calloway, and I was raised in a orphan asylum, and not right sure who I was. We run off and got married and from that day to this I ain’t looked at another woman.”

“You was more faithful than some of our family,” Ernie hinted darkly.

Pop looked at him disapprovingly. “You ain’t, by any chance, talkin’ about your Grampa, are you?”

“I sure am. Here Grandma ain’t good and cold in her grave an’ he’s strutting around like a old rooster.”

Pop was obviously shocked.

“You shouldn’t oughter speak disrespec’ful of him, Sonny. You mustn’t never forget that after I got back from Germany, and your Mamma died and left me with you and Curt and Rose and only one arm, it was the Captain that put a roof over our heads and made a happy home for us. He may have his failings, but he’s been like God to me.”

“No better than you’ve been to him! I bet he’s tight this minute,” averred Ernie.

“No,” said Pop, shaking his head, “I saw him ‘bout an hour ago up at the corner. He wasn’t much full.”

“Which corner?” demanded Ernie.

“Well, he was restin’ his feet up there by the Beauty Parlor.”

“I knew it!” said Ernie, savagely, flinging the wet towel in a corner. “What’s the matter with everybody, anyhow? Rosie wantin’ to marry that little sapsucker, Bob Gibbs, and Grampa lookin’ over his specs at that frizzle-headed old widow, Mrs. Myrtle!”

“Here, here, Ernie,” interrupted Pop, “don’t be so hard on folks’ feelings. Love just happens to you like whooping-cough or measles. There ain’t nothing whatever you can do about it.”

At six-thirty Rose returned from the hospital. She was a plump, cheerful, efficient person, who spent her spare moments trying to bring order out of the domestic chaos.

“Pick up that towel,” she ordered her brother. “Don’t put it on the chair. Put it in the clothes basket. What’s the matter, Pop, darling? Caught cold?”

“Quit his job,” said Ernie.

Rose’s face expressed consternation. “Why, Pop, how’d you ever come to quit?”

Mr. Bossel’s under lip worked ominously, and Ernie again rushed to the rescue.

“He quit work just like I’m goin’ to quit school. We’re both fed up on it.”

“I never heard anything so crazy!” cried Rose. “And just when your reports are getting better.”

“Only in science and math,” said Ernie. “I’m rotten in English. This here adverb and adjective business gets my goat. I can most generally tell a noun, but, oh boy! those other things! Conjunctures and propositions!”

Rose, diverted from Pop’s dire news by this appalling exhibition of Ernie’s ignorance, paused in the act of mixing corn-bread.

“Ernie Bossel, I’m downright ashamed of you! If you think you can get by with nothing but cheek and good looks, you got another guess coming.”

“You hadn’t oughter be so hard on him,” intervened Pop, who was setting the table. “It’s a pretty good boy that’s willing to give up his schooling when his Dad loses out.”

“He don’t have to give up school. Curt and I can take care of the family; that is, we can try,” said Rose.

“You won’t have to,” bragged Ernie, encouraged by his father’s commendation. “I got a scheme that’ll fix us all for life. It’s a patent that nobody’s ever thought of before.”

“Perpetual motion, I suppose,” said Rose scornfully.

“No, siree. It’s a pretzel-twister. Ever since the beginning of hist’ry people have been making pretzels by hand. I bet you didn’t know that, either one of you!”

Pop and Rose had to acknowledge that they did not.

“Very well. It took me to think out a machine to make ’em. You take a board and drive nails in it in a certain way and make it revolve. Then you run a roll of dough into the groove and sorter force it round through the nails and it ties itself into the prettiest little knot you ever saw.”

“But what makes the board go round?” asked Pop, impressed but confused.

“Electricity. That’s the only thing I ain’t got going yet. I got the board and the nails, and I been using putty for dough. As soon as I get the old battery started you’ll see a-plenty.”

“In the meanwhile,” said Rose, “you better go in and brush your hair.”

“What’s the good? It’ll go hay-wire again. Nothing but alfalfa.”

“Stuff!” said Rose. “Your hair is beautiful and you know it. Wish I had your wave.”

“I’d rather be bald,” he said with palpable mendacity. “Makes me feel like a fool girl!”

When his brother Curt came in to wash up for supper, Ernie told him about Pop.

“Don’t tell Grampa, and don’t let on about his eyes being red,” he said. “He’s kind of licked, and pitiful.”

“Don’t see how we are going to make it,” said Curt, with his face in the washbowl.

“I do,” said Ernie. “I’m going to work.”

“Fat lot of help you’d be! What you’re going to do is to finish high school, if I got any say-so about it.”

Ernie did not respond. He knew from experience that he was no match for Curt in argument; but he also knew that he was going to carry his point.

They were half through supper when the Captain breezed in. He had been something of a buck in his earlier days, and despite age and reduced finances he still presented a gallant and jaunty appearance, carrying his vices and his virtues with equal pride.

Like the stone-front house, he was at the same time a family asset—and liability. Pop and the boys went without overcoats that he might have a fur collar on his. Rose wore darned gloves and half-soled shoes, but he was always arrayed like a lily of the field, which he resembled in more ways than one.

At an early age he had exchanged his respectable and uninteresting heritage for a mess of pottage, and had thenceforth trod the primrose path. Yet nothing could have looked less like a black sheep than the pink-and-white old gentleman who now gaily took his place at the head of the table.

“What you looking so down about, son?” he demanded of Ernie.

“I’m all right,” said Ernie gruffly.

“Sounds to me like your head’s stopped up.”

“He’s sulking, because I don’t want him to stop school,” explained Rose.

“I’d let him stop if he wants to,” said the Captain. “He’s gone pretty faithful.”

“Talks like an alley rat,” protested Curt. “Nobody would think he was your grandson.”

“You shut up!” cried Ernie. “I ain’t that rotten.”

“You certainly are,” persisted Curt. “Much good your big ideas will do you if you can’t put them into decent English.”

The blow struck home and for once Ernie was without an answer. He gloomily contemplated his big fists as they lay on the red table-cloth. Alone with Pop, he could murder the King’s English and get away with it, and certainly the residents of Wirt’s Division saw nothing unusual in his speech. He felt hurt and abused to have Rose and Curt show him up in an unfavorable light.

“Our Ernie is young yet,” said the Captain, coming to the rescue. “At his age I was more out-of-hand than he is. I had run away from home and was serving as cabin-boy on the Harry Brown. That was the steamer that blew up later down below Vicksburg, just opposite the Jefferson Davis plantation. You all remember my telling you about it.”

They certainly did; they had had no opportunity to forget. Nevertheless, they listened with attention to the oft-repeated tale, for, next to Ernie, it was Grampa who lent color and drama to the household, and, whether he was courting the ladies, getting tipsy, or retelling old adventures, his gusto was contagious.

“Heard a lady saying pretty things about you to-day,” said Rose when he finished his recital.

“And who might that be?” he asked, self-consciously.

“Mrs. Myrtle, up at the Beauty Parlor. Said you had a regular school-boy complexion.”

“She don’t look a day over forty, herself,” countered the Captain, showing fine white teeth.

“She don’t act a day over twelve,” said Curt. “I saw her jumping rope in the back yard.”

“That’s to keep her hips down,” said Rose, wisely.

“She’s got the heart of a child,” said Grampa, gazing absently out of the window.

“Oh yeah?” said Curt.

After supper, Ernie put on his roller-skates and went out on the street. Taking a seat on the curbing, he gloomily contemplated the gutter. His sudden decision to leave school shook the world beneath him. While being more than willing to forego the arduous necessity of getting his lessons and subscribing to dull routine, he nevertheless saw the necessity of an education if he was to scale the heights as he confidently expected.

Heretofore he had listened with indifference to the endless discussions of Pop and Rose and Curt concerning the best way to meet the financial needs of the family. But the sight of Pop reduced to tears had brought the matter home to him.

As he sat plunged in thought, he felt a pair of hands clapped over his eyes.

“Tilly Katzenbach!” he said, catching her wrists and flinging off her hands as if their presence were insufferable.

“Come on, skate with me,” she begged.

“Why should I?” asked Ernie. And having thus shown his masculine superiority, he rose and moved off beside her.

Tilly Katzenbach was the girl, recently moved next door, whose mother had been the cause of the dispute earlier in the day concerning a walrus and a hippopotamus. She was sixteen, large, coarse and noisy. She could outskate any one in the neighborhood, and swear volubly in two languages. She and her family were highly disapproved of by the Bossels, chiefly because Pop’s brutal treatment in a concentration camp, during the World War, demanded hatred of all things German.

“Let’s go over to the Park,” suggested Tilly. “Maybe the ice-cream man is still there.”

“Nothing doing,” said Ernie firmly. “I only got a quarter and I promised to take that bum brother of yours to the Zoo.”

“Which one? Adolph?”

“No; Karl.”

“Can I go?”

“If you got the price,” said Ernie.

This lack of gallantry in no wise offended Tilly. She skated gaily beside him, with occasional side glances of admiration.

“Say, you’re growin’ up, Ernie,” she said. “If you’d wash your face and slick up more, you’d be right cute.”

“You telling me?” said Ernie. “Pity I can’t say the same for you.”

As the conversation promised nothing further in that direction, she changed the subject.

“Where’d you get your iron ring at?”

“Traded with a guy at school for a old flash-light. It’s for rheumatism.”

“You got rheumatism?”

“No, but I got to get some use out of the trade, haven’t I?” he demanded savagely.

“Want to see me do a Dutch Roll?” she asked.

“I ain’t particular about it,” he said with an air of pained fatigue.

“Well, watch me! Look!”

He watched her skilful movements with envy, and when she suddenly went skimming down the street found himself careening after her in hot pursuit. It was reckless of one so inexpert to be intrepid, but he swayed precariously after her until they reached the Park.

Spring was in the air, an impulsive Kentucky spring that leaps right out of winter, and catching the old earth unaware goes dancing away with it under the sweet warmth of the sun. The air was heavy with the scent of locust blossoms, and squirrels scampered in the tree-tops.

Something primitive seized Ernie, and he became a denizen of the forest in pursuit of prey. When he overtook Tilly, at the pergola, he not only caught her but held her in a deathlike grip. Suddenly she relaxed in his arms and, tossing back her tousled red hair, thrust out the tip of her pink tongue. It was then that Ernie kissed her.

Until now girls had played an insignificant part in his existence, and this sudden impulse surprised him so much that he lost his balance. His head went backward, his feet forward, and for an awful moment he and Tilly clutched and lurched, before they went catapulting down the pergola incline, landing at the bottom with Ernie draped about her still upright form like a fluttering flag around a pole. Unable to maintain his dignity before the crowd of derisive youngsters who had witnessed the performance, he ignominiously turned and fled.

On reaching home he saw Rose in the doorway.

“Come in this minute, Ernie Bossel,” she called. “You know it’s Saturday night.”

“I ain’t dirty.”

“You are, too. Everybody will be wanting the tub at the same time!”

“Couldn’t he wait till morning?” asked the Captain, who had joined them.

But Rose was adamant: “Now, Grampa, you stop spoiling Ernie. He knows he’s got to take a bath Saturday night.”

As they entered the side door and passed into the house, a pleasant odor of pop-corn and apples assailed them.

The dining-room was an architectural portrait of the Bossel family, reflecting as it did their pathos and absurdity, their gaiety and inconsequence, their casual disregard for convention. Rosie’s sewing-machine, Grampa’s rocker, Curt’s accordion, and Ernie’s patent were all in evidence, while a fine old Chippendale sideboard stood aloof in bow-legged dignity. But with all its incongruity it was a cheerful, comfortable room that looked as if it would go on forever, living on its memories and the echoes of laughter it had known.

The Captain paused in the doorway and tried to get the attention of its occupants, but Curt was torturing an old accordion into revealing the “Sweet Mystery of Life,” Pop was engrossed in a game of solitaire, and Rose was already putting on her hat to go out.

“Before you all scatter for the night,” said the Captain, clearing his throat, “I got something of importance I want to get off my mind.”

“Can’t it wait till morning?” said Rose. “I got a date.”

“You can’t put a red queen on a red king, Pop,” remonstrated Ernie, looking over Mr. Bossel’s shoulder.

“What comes after ‘At last I’ve found thee—’?” asked Curt, pausing on an agonizing note.

“Say, listen here, you all,” pled the Captain, nervously stroking his chin. “What I’ve got to tell you will be as much of a surprise to you as it was to me. The truth of the matter is, we are going to have an addition to our family.”

The effect of this statement was electrical. Curt dropped his accordion and Pop’s cards flew in all directions.

“Mrs. Myrtle,” faltered the Captain in great embarrassment, “has done me the honor to say she’s willing to marry me. I’m counting on you all to give her a real warm welcome.”

There was an ominous silence, and the Captain proceeded to argue his case.

“I don’t want any of you should think I’m disloyal to Grandma. It’s just because she was such an angel that I want to try another. Mrs. Myrtle is pretty and stylish—”

“And willing,” Curt continued. “I bet you never thought of it till she put it in your head.”

“Maybe not,” admitted the Captain miserably; “but once the idea got in, looked like it couldn’t get out.”

“Like as not she heard about your insurance,” said Curt. “When are you aiming to marry?”

“She selected the thirteenth of July if it don’t fall on a Friday. She says nothing could induce her to marry on Friday the thirteenth.”

Pop hopefully consulted the big picture calendar that hung over the mantel.

“Saturday,” he reported. “Just a day too late!”

The Captain looked so apologetic and dejected, standing twirling his thumbs, that Rose flew to his side and put her arm around him.

“It’s all right, darling. Don’t you worry. We’ll stand by you, no matter what people say.”

“We sure will,” agreed Pop huskily, as he came over to grasp the Captain’s hand.

Ernie maintained a stony silence. The idea of any one taking the place of his beloved grandmother filled him with righteous indignation. For the first time in his fourteen years he stalked off to bed without kissing everybody good night. But it was not until he sat in the bathtub, gloomily soaping his legs, that the full import of the day’s happenings broke upon him. The loss of Pop’s job, his own decision to stop school, the disturbing experience in the Park, and the impending arrival of a strange female combined to pucker his brow and square his jaw. For the first time Ernie Bossel faced the formidable responsibilities of manhood.