Читать книгу Gardenias in her hair - Martha Ostenso - Страница 3

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Susan sat cross-legged on the attic floor, Grandmother Prescott’s old hump-backed trunk open beside her. June sunlight streamed through the dormer window, and from the back yard below came the dauntless singing of Josie Fink, innocently off key: When the moon comes over the mountain ....

Susan laughed and then reflected that Josie had little to be gay about. But Josie, with her four small fatherless children to provide for, had something of the quality Grandmother Prescott must have had sixty years ago, when she had come, a bride, in a covered wagon up here to a Michigan wilderness from a gentler life in Pennsylvania.

The contents of this old trunk—redolent of moth balls, lavender, and the nostalgic smell of yellowing, crumbling journals and letters and recipes—were all that remained materially of a character that had left the stamp of her spirit both on the lives of the pioneers in a raw and somber land, and on those who had followed to enjoy the fruits of their struggles.

It had not been Susan’s intention to open the trunk this morning. She had come to the attic to look for a lampshade she had stored away last year. But the old green trunk had a lure which she could not resist, even as a small girl in her father’s mansion on the hill.

On November 16, 1878, the young Susannah Prescott had written in her journal: “Rendered lard today, the butchering over and done, for which thank God, the squealing and screaming being such as still haunted my ears last night even under the moaning of the pines and the baying of the wolves in the timber. Then in the afternoon it snowed a good bit more, and Jensine Stormo came over in the cutter and away we went to the quilting bee at Reiters’. They all admired my remnants so much. I stitched my name and the date on a piece for one corner of the quilt, and I wonder if anybody will read it when I’m laid away. Now I’ve got to stop writing, because Martin is coming in with the milk. It’s been a long day, up at five by candle-light.”

Susan gently closed the brass clasp that held the marbled covers of the little book together. In the trunk, folded carefully in a sheet, was the patchwork quilt with the tiny lettering barely decipherable now in the corner. The soft silver spoons and forks, with Grandmother and Grandfather Prescott’s names and the date of their marriage, a hair-line engraving, would be downstairs in the sideboard if Edith and Kit had their way. Why, her sisters demanded, have lovely old things and not use them?

Susan had been firm about it. “You two are so careless you might as easily as not throw a spoon into the garbage can and never know it. Anyhow, Grandma gave me her trunk—with everything in it—for my hope chest.”

She closed the trunk and turned the rusty key in its lock. With the parchment shade under her arm she went down the narrow attic stairs and into Kit’s room, where everything was crisp and clean and shining for her return from Vassar. She took the old shade off the bridge lamp. The amber shade would look newer. The delphinium spires in the white china vase on the window seat were lovely, the olive-and-blue chintz curtains alert and fresh. Kit would be delighted. Susan whistled happily, and glanced carelessly in the mirror.

“Well, really, Sue,” she observed, nodding gravely at her reflection, “you are good-looking! Your mahogany-colored hair tendrils dearly about your noble and alabaster brow, which is unfortunately tanned from gardening. Your wide-set eyes are the night-blue of swallows’ wings, even if the pupils are a trifle large from the slight nearsightedness. Your nose is not aquiline, but neither does it offend. Your skin is slick as an onion—and what are two or three freckles? But it’s your red mouth that was made for laughter and——”

She stared at herself. Love? But where—and when? She was suddenly serious. In another month she would be twenty-three. Would love come to her in East Searle, where for three years now she had devoted her time and energy to making a home for her brother and two sisters? She laughed again, abruptly. One had to laugh, or—well, one just had to!

“Yes, indeed,” she added, “even with a smudge on your nose and a cobweb in your hair, you have your points, Sue Prescott. You ought to use yourself as heroine in a story.”

She puffed out her cheeks, crossed her eyes, set the discarded lampshade on her head, and waltzed out of the room. On the landing, she jerked the lampshade from her head—too late, however, to avoid discovery by Edith, who came hurrying up from the hall below.

Her older sister halted abruptly, midway on the stairs. “What on earth are you doing!”

Sue laughed and set the shade back on her head. “I’ve just discovered that I haven’t anyone to love me because I’m too hard on the eyes.”

Edith flurried past her. “For heaven’s sake don’t go downstairs like that. Forbes is waiting for me in his car. We’re going to play golf. Edwina Vale arranged a foursome——”

Sue took the shade from her head, winced as it caught in a hair, and went on downstairs. There was work still to be done before Kit’s arrival on the evening train.

Susan looked out through the kitchen window and beyond the steepled hollyhocks to the nice length of grassy yard where Josie Fink stood angrily hanging fine, wet linen sheets on the clothes line.

Yes, after years the sheets were still good, because they were of pure linen. In the big house on the hill, where the Prescotts had once lived, no one would have dreamed of having anything else. Grandmother Prescott had railed against that big house her son Theodore had built out of the profits from his lumber business. There was mention of it in her journal under May 20, 1915. “Had another set-to with Teddy today over the new house he’s building on the hill. It would be better for his children if they were raised in a log cabin, as he was, instead of setting them up like young princelings in a mansion where they can look down on the rest of the town. I told him so, and he said a man had a right to ruin his own family if he felt like it—just the kind of thing his father would say when he wanted to have done with an argument.”

Well, the big house had been built and lived in and had finally ceased to play any part in the history of the Prescott family when old man Updyke had bargained shrewdly for it three years ago, a few weeks after the death of Theodore Prescott.

But Susan wasn’t thinking now of the big house on the hill, nor of linen sheets. She was thinking that Josie would soon come indoors to take up her indignant eloquence where she had left off. One should not really permit such liberties in a servant, Susan reflected, but who on earth could regard Josie as a servant?

She wet her finger, tested the iron, and spread Edith’s handmade nightgown, with its webby top, out upon the board. Kit had sent a package of her soiled underthings from Vassar last week, pleading that she didn’t like to pack them with her other clothing when she returned home after graduation, and that it would be much cheaper for Josie to do them anyhow. Kit didn’t know that Susan had always washed and ironed the underthings herself, leaving her brother Nugent’s garments and the heavier laundry to Josie.

Susan guided the iron carefully over the narrow isthmus that joined breast to back on Edith’s nightgown. She couldn’t help wishing that Edith had not gone golfing with Edwina Vale and whoever else was with her to make up the foursome with Forbes Updyke. Forbes was all right in his way—it was Forbes’ father who now owned the white-columned Prescott mansion on the hill. But whatever he was, Edith seemed to be madly in love with him. Or was she madly in love with the idea that, with Forbes for a husband, she would one day get back into the old Prescott mansion, this time as its mistress? Susan wasn’t sure. At any rate, things seemed to be shaping up nicely for Edith.

Susan’s younger sister was different. Kit had set her heart upon Susan’s being present at the graduation exercises at Vassar. But Susan had written a letter full of excuses which Kit would never see through. The truth was simple enough: there wasn’t enough money to meet the bills at the end of each month now, let alone take a journey to Poughkeepsie.

Well, that was a thing of the past. Kit was coming home. She had spent last night with her roommate, Mona Rankin, in Lansing, but had promised to be home on this afternoon’s train. Edith would be in from the golf course before train time, surely. And Nugent would be home for dinner, after his day’s work in the Cruikshank Mills. They would all be together again!

Josie Fink cluttered in, the clothes basket before her. Without stooping, she dropped the basket just inside the door.

“So! You’re at it again, I see!” she exclaimed, her pink-lidded eyes glaring above her freckled cheeks. “After polishin’ the staircase an’ riddin’ up the whole house, from cellar to garret, I’d think you’d sit long enough to draw a natural breath. I s’pose Edith couldn’t lend a hand—she’ll be that tired when she gets back from chasin’ the little white ball all over the country.”

Susan shook out one of Kit’s chiffon step-ins and spread it on the ironing board. “What difference does it make, Josie? I’d rather do this than golf. Anyhow, what’s the use of——”

“That’s you all over! ‘What’s the use?’ Well, I’d make it some use if I had a say in it. I remember when you Prescotts were the quality in East Searle, before your father went an’ lost everything. An’ now you’re workin’ your head off so your two sisters an’ brother can pretend they’re still in the money. What’s money, anyhow?”

There was no sense in taking a lofty attitude to Josie Fink. She was too much a part of Susan’s own workaday life for that.

“I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t like it,” Susan replied. “I love this little house, even if it is only rented. I love working in it, I love digging in the garden, and I really love doing things for the girls and Nugent. And I have lots of time to myself.”

Josie was talking again. “It ain’t fair, that’s what! As Mrs. Riddell was sayin’ just the other day, you’d be the prettiest one in the family if you’d only give yourself half a chance.”

Susan laughed again, but a little impatiently this time. “Of course, Josie! I have my moments. But for goodness’ sake, make us some iced tea while I finish these things!”