Читать книгу Good-bye, Son and Other Stories - Janet Lewis - Страница 12

Nell

THE ROAD on which Cora was walking followed the river, running along on a high green bank. Below there was a sandy beach and a long stretch of shallow water reaching almost to the edge of the channel. The river had built a wide submerged sand bar, here where it turned. On each side of the road the grass was cropped close, fitting each rise and hollow of the ground as the skin of a peach the fruit. Here and there were clumps of blue iris mixed with buttercups. On the right the ground sloped gently away toward farms and woods.

The day was sunny, the water very blue. The balsams and cedars which crowded to the edge of the opposite shore stood tiny and clear. Small figures in blue or white were moving about on the narrow beaches and the docks. She caught a flash of light from the wet side of a boat.

The Catholic church was ahead of her, behind the shadow of its trees. By the wooden gate in the cool shadow she paused. About her feet the earth was brown, littered with twigs and mast. In front of the church, in the yard, the weeds had grown very high. The long grass had drooped and fallen over the path like waves of soft hair. She wondered if the door was locked. Once or twice during the summer she had heard a bell sounding over the still water in the early morning, but service was conducted very seldom. She had never yet been inside the building.

She hesitated, her hand on the gate, then lifted the rusty latch and entered the yard. A few leaves lay on the church steps. The doors were painted brown, with panels of white, from which the paint was flaking lightly. She opened the door and stepped directly into the one room of the church.

It was white and silent. Long bars of sunlight fell through the three high windows and were reflected gently from the walls. The floor was bare. At the far end upon the altar table someone had arranged fresh flowers in vases of green and white pressed glass—daisies and sweet William, but mostly daisies.

The quiet of the room shut her away from the summer noises outside, the slight sound of the water, the wind in the trees, the barking of the heavily furred collies at the farm gates. She sat down in one of the bare straight pews and folded her hands in her lap. She was a small woman. Her head was large, with a wide brow, her hair gray and pinned in flat coils close to her head. At the back of her neck it was still brown, and the loose ends curled. She wore a man’s gray sweater.

She began to think of an old woman with a white, heavy face and coarse, unhealthy skin, a hard mouth with full sensuous lips, lips pale and wet, a face fretful and complaining, broken suddenly by bursts of rowdy humor. The old woman leaned over a banister, shouting to someone in the hall below. Her disordered white hair fell in locks about her face. She held a dirty silk kimono gathered about her great shaking body. It was Nell, her half sister. The children had written:

“We give Mother all the dope she wants now. It keeps her happy and eases the pain.”

“I like it, Cory,” Nell had said once, her brown eyes bright with mockery. “It gives me a good time.”

With the image of Nell the image of the house on Sheldon Avenue came into her mind. It had not been uncomfortable, after all. Neither had it been very attractive. It was larger than they needed, but that had made it possible for Cora to ask her mother and Nell to come to them for a visit. She gave them the large downstairs sitting room, making it into a bedroom. It had a good south light, and she put some ferns in the window to make it gay.

She remembered Nell standing before the walnut étagère with its little mirrors, knobs, and gilded tassels. She was powdering her cheeks with pink, and when she had finished she rubbed a pink paste on her lips.

“I wish you wouldn’t paint yourself,” said Cora. “At your age it doesn’t look right. Makes you look bawdy.”

“Ah bah bawdy,” said Nell with good humor. “I don’t care.”

She put on her hat and knotted a scarf of pink chiffon about her throat.

“Where are you going?” asked Cora.

“Anywhere. Must get out of here. The whole house smells of babies’ didies and cabbage soup. And Mother sits by the window all day and hems dustcloths. My Gawd. I want to go and listen to the elevated trains.”

“You’d better go back to New York if you feel that way about it,” said Cora stiffly.

“Don’t get huffy, honey,” said Nell. “You know I like to be with you, and the children need a rest from me. I only get so tired of all this suburban peace.”

Their mother sat beside the ferns at the window and rocked. A patch of sunlight moved up and down over her knee with regular motion. She offered nothing to the conversation. Nell collected her gloves and her coin purse, and kissed her mother. At the door she kissed Cora and patted her affectionately. Cora said without rancor, “Well, have a good time.”

Nell had been the child of her mother’s first marriage. She was much older than Cora, and her children were grown when Cora’s family was just beginning. They were a helter-skelter lot. Their grandmother found them a little wearing. She liked better to be with Cora and Cora’s quiet little boy. She liked the new baby and the tranquil, busy monotony of the days. She did not mind the smell of cabbage soup.

Cora laid a place for Nell but did not wait supper for her. She was used to her sister’s casual attitude regarding the hours of meals. But as they sat about the table, eating, and talking a little, she grew more and more troubled by the suppressed anxiety in her mother’s face.

The little boy went to bed. Cora’s husband locked himself up with his books. The two women washed the dishes and dried them. Cora saw her mother’s mouth growing grim and tight.

“Don’t worry, Mother,” she said. “Nell’s a grown woman. She can take care of herself.”

“Maybe,” her mother answered.

About nine o’clock she came to where Cora was sitting and said, “I’m going to bed. Don’t wait up for her, Cory.”

Cora followed her mother into her room and sat on the edge of the bed, watching the old woman undress. The old body was like her own. She saw it as a young body, clouded with age. She saw, with every deliberate gesture, the intention to ignore anxiety emphasizing what it was intended to hide. She tucked the covers about the shoulders of the grim little old woman, opened the windows, and turned out the gas jet.

She had the house to herself then, but did not want to read or go to bed. At last she put on her hat and coat and went outdoors.

The night was warm for fall, and rather muggy. She walked north, toward Lake Street, between the wide lawns and the darkened houses. Elm trees were planted in the parkway at regular distances, and their trunks cast oblique shadows on the sidewalk, pointing in the direction in which she was going. In the middle of the block a tree cast two shadows, dimly, pointing in opposite directions. Then the arc light at the next corner took up the work of illuminating the grass, and the shadows fell across the sidewalk toward her feet.

At the elevated tracks, so called, she turned and walked along with them. The tracks ran on the ground here, behind a long fence. The wheels spat and shrieked on the steel rails. She paused in front of a movie theater. It was the end of a show, and the audiences were changing. The lights were bright over the heads of the shifting, talking people, the little white ticket booth, the gaudy billboards. A popcorn man stood at the sidewalk’s edge with his lighted wagon. She looked through the crowd for Nell but did not see her.

At every druggist’s window she stopped and peered past the luminous red and blue or red and green tall bottles. She came to the corner where the streetcar tracks crossed those of the elevated. There was a drugstore on one side of the street and a saloon on the other. On the far side of the elevated tracks was the embankment for the Northwestern Railroad. It was cut into by a square tunnel, dimly lighted, where the rattle of wagons and the noise of horses’ hoofs were jumbled and re-echoed. It was a dreary corner, and yet there seemed to be a good deal of life. Four or five men, waiting for the streetcar, stood in a group at the edge of the sidewalk. A woman much younger than Nell brushed past her. She wore no hat, and her skirt dragged in the dirt. She was drunk, and when she tried to step down into the street she stumbled. One of the men caught her hand and said, “Whoopsy daisy, there, old girl.” She tried to slap his face, but he ducked. She stood there with them, waiting for the car, and the man went on kidding her, spitting on the ground at her feet.

It was a trivial incident, but it made Cora feel sick, and she walked home through a slow drizzle that was just beginning. She went to bed, leaving the light burning, and tried to read. She fell asleep, but could not have slept for very long, for it was only eleven when she woke. It was raining hard, then. She went out on the porch for a last look around. Someone was sitting on the bottom step. There was enough light from the arc at the corner to tell that it was Nell.

They got her to bed and called the doctor. Nell, sitting up in bed, drinking hot water with peppermint in it, insisted that she hadn’t had any dope.

“Just one glass of whisky, Cory,” she said.

She couldn’t remember where she had been or what she had done after that one drink, but her face was sodden like the muddy shoes and wet coat that Cora took into the next room to dry.

That was so long ago.

It had all begun with an illness that had been very long and very painful: cancer. They had checked the advance of the disease for a time. Of late years it had come on again. The doctors had thought it necessary to give her morphine. When the pain began to lessen she found it hard to give up the drug. It worried her, and she tried to substitute whisky. In the end she had succumbed to both, and the death of her husband had made things worse.

Sadness rose in the heart of the small woman in the gray sweater as the shadows were rising slowly among the straight pews and empty corners of the church. She continued to stare at the altar with its country flowers, seeing beyond them Nell as a young lady when she herself was a little girl. Ten years lay between them. Then Cora wore dresses of a blue wool stuff with full skirts and rows of black velvet ribbon stitched on around the hem. Her hair was cropped close to her head. Nell liked to run her hand over the stubby thick curls, and called her sister “Pony.”

Nell was slender in those days, with a warm, pale, dusky skin, and lips that glowed. She was very stylish, with a daring that made even the prim dresses of the period attractive and careless like herself. She was lavish with a perfume she had discovered, a musky, spicy odor that Cora loved. Their mother disapproved of it but did not forbid it, and Cora was glad. She liked to finger the square glass bottles that Nell kept on her bureau. They fitted into a square ebony box, four of them. The box was lined with a deep rose brocade.

Nell had many suitors. She received them in the stately formal parlor with its red velvet furniture and heavy carvings in walnut, rosewood, and mahogany. She let Cora hide in the corner behind the big sofa to listen to the conversation. She liked to lead the boys on until they said ridiculous romantic things, but there was almost no hugging or kissing. She was impatient of being touched. She said, “You know, Pony, I’m not much on this Nearer-my-God-to-Thee stuff.”

Then one day she ran away to New York with a man from out of town. Her mother and stepfather were very stern about it. Cora was afraid to question them, and for three or four weeks she never heard a word of Nell. Once Cora saw a strange, heavily veiled woman standing in their hall, but she was sent upstairs before she heard her speak. As she turned, however, slowly at the landing, her hand on the smooth cold banister, she caught a whiff of Nell’s musky perfume, and when she reached her own room, hers and Nell’s, she sat down on the floor and twisted her fingers tightly in great unhappiness, wondering what her mother was saying to Nell in the big gloomy parlor.

Nell wanted to come home. She was tired of her adventure. Her mother said that she might come if she would leave behind her everything, big or little, which that man had bought for her or given to her. Nell objected. Her mother was firm, and Nell went back to New York. Long after, Cora tried to think just what it had cost her mother to watch Nell go down the flagged walk between the clipped rosebushes, and not call.

Nell came home after two more weeks. She and Cora were in the upstairs room together. Nell gave her a brooch, two golden leaves curved about a row of cherries. No, not cherries. The fine glitter of the gold spikes that held them, and the faceting, breaking them into petals of light, made them more like flowers.

“Don’t show it to Mother,” Nell said, “or I shall have to go away again. It’s the only thing I kept. I had a good time, and I wanted to bring you a present. It’s not very valuable—they’re only garnets.”

That same afternoon she said, “I never let him touch me, Pony. I couldn’t stand him when he got too near to me. But he was good-looking and he took me to the theater, lots.” She laughed. “I don’t know what Father and Mother believe—I don’t suppose they believe that, but it’s true.”

Pony was wonderfully glad to have her home again. The next Sunday Nell walked down the aisle of the First Baptist Church on her stepfather’s arm, looking as lovely as ever. Pony walked behind them, holding her mother’s hand. She thought they were all happy again.

The shadows in the corners of the church were deep, like dust. The sunlight lay higher and higher in the air. The place was innocent and calm. Cora sighed and stirred on the hard bench. This long meditation was all that she could do for Nell, her dear Nell. She could not cry. She could not even be sorry. It was too late. It was time to go home and cook supper for the children, and tell her husband that Nell was dead.