Among the Daughters/Chapter 6
Chapter 6
"SHE'S AN EVIL INFLUENCE"
Fireflies sparked in backyard gardens. St. Cecilia's bells tolled eleven. Tomatoes, string beans, lettuce, blended their fragrance in the cool dew.
Silence.
"Sh-sh," breathed Lucy. Her laugh butterflied softly into the night air. Part of each night's game was not to arouse Aunt Mabel, alone in her old-maid bedroom above waiting to pounce. In the porch shadow they could quickly separate if someone passed.
She cupped her hand on his round clipped curly head as he kissed her responding lips. A gesture like a mother's holding a baby's head to nurse.
Maybe, she thought, only men have that shivery feeling. Or can it be I'm not old enough to know the feeling when I have it? Miss Shaver had it when she kissed me, but the girls that night at the Crofter Hotel didn't, the way they laughed at the men. Those men were awful. I guess you get to sound like that awful Horta with men like that. Harry's the same age as Frank but he acts older. Maybe because he's richer and has an auto. The girls are crazy about him. Vida too. She acts silly when he's around. I like him, I guess. He's certainly nice to me. I always think that maybe tonight I'll want him to kiss me. But when he does it's fun but not exciting. Miss Shaver knows how to kiss better. Sometimes girls get married when they're thirteen. In India, or there was that Southern girl in the paper. I like dancing better. Even ballroom dancing. When I hear the music in the theatre I feel the way I want to when Harry kisses me. Or, it's funny, like I feel when I touch the trunks of trees. They are so strong to lean on. Boys always want to lean all over me. They act like they're—hungry. I ought to start practicing dancing again.
"Hey," said Harry, giving her a squeeze, "what're you thinking about?" He had begun to notice her abstraction. She's hard to figure, he thought. You think you can do anything with her, but you can't. She never stops you actually, but you know you got to go slow.
"I was thinking you're a nut and that I've got to go in. Don't make noise or you'll wake my aunt."
She patted him on the cheek, a dismissing gesture which left the boy confused. She was in the house before he reached the sidewalk. He tiptoed unsteadily and then ran with long steps toward his auto parked a block away.
Lucy held the knob of the bedroom door tight to prevent its sudden release tattling to Aunt Mabel that she just had come in. Mae, clutching a shabby rose flannelette dressing gown, stood holding her breath, waiting for the final click of the knob. The room was dark save for a circle of lavender light cast on a cluttered bureau by a dangling bulb over which she had improvised a shade with a lace-edged Georgette handkerchief.
In her high heels Lucy was as tall as her slippered mother. Facing each other they glanced at the ceiling and, when there was no sound from the room above, laughed silently, conspirators against the law, order, and decorum of Twelfth Street.
"Was it a good picture, darling?" Mae whispered.
Lucy picked up her dress by the hem and, with one great yawning stretch, slipped it over her head. "G-r-a-n-d." Her eyes sparkled. "Why don't you and I go again tomorrow night?" She examined her mother analytically. "You know, I think your hair would be cute the style Marguerite Clark wears hers. You look like her."
Mae laughed, pleased. "Especially the way I look now." All thought of self faded as she stood, hairbrush in hand, waiting to serve.
A white combination silked to the floor and became sea foam wreathing Lucy's feet. She stood in shell pink loveliness, unmarred save for a faint pattern on her rosy bottom made by the seat of the cane chair on which she had been sitting while carefully rolling off the silk stockings. To Lucy there was no mystery about her body, or that of her mother's. The lunar visit to herself was accepted as naturally as its visit to her mother.
Mae, regarding Lucy, felt herself more a jeweler with a valuable pink pearl to be kept alive than a mother. She still was bewildered that Lucy could be the fruit of an excruciatingly painful night which had left her body only with ache on her right side, a pain at first attributed to the weight of Charles's body.
But Lucy wasted no reflections on her "looks," as she referred to them, accepting them as she did the elements and ice cream, long since having concluded from personal experience that in a woman outward appearance was more important than anything.
Mae handed Lucy the nightly glass of milk. Mode said hair should be brushed 100 strokes every night. Ninety-nine, one hundred. Mae noted with satisfaction as she finished only one or two shining strands in the brush, and set to work to bind Lucy's sleek gilt curls with rags. Next week the roots would need retouching.
The lavender handkerchief shading the dangling bulb had been Mae's gesture to make their room—except that here the bed was golden oak instead of bug-proof white enamel—a replica of their rooms in roominghouses. Home. Though this house had been Mae's home before marriage there was an appearance of impermanence in this shadowed room. Here the two spent the hours just as tentatively as in roominghouses. Lucy sprawled on the bed under which lay their two suitcases conveniently at hand for any sudden change in plans, voluntary or involuntary. Their clothes hung from hangers on hooks on the door, covered neatly, like costumes in a theatre dressing room, with the same floral cretonne used in the Denver roominghouse. In the bottom drawer of the bird's-eye maple dresser lay unseasonable garments; in the next two, underwear and night clothes. The remaining two drawers contained sewing materials, ribbons, and whatever implements to accentuate beauty were not strewn on top. It had taken a while to get used to so much drawer space; in roominghouses one drawer had to be reserved for food. Utensils, and the always forbidden small gas plate, had been kept locked in a suitcase away from prying landladies. But now the surreptitious meals seemed sweet in remembrance as they faced the grudging plenty of Aunt Mabel's immaculate table where Lucy ate sparingly despite her hunger while wondering what made her aunt so mean.
Inherently unable to conform to Aunt Mabel's Twelfth Street code of decency, they were both nervous from the constant strain of warding off her continually voiced dire threat of eviction. It would be calamitous, Mae thought, if Mabel actually did put them out before they had recouped sufficiently to continue with plans for Lucy. Indeed they already had experienced a frightening taste of what it was like to arrive home at eleven o'clock and find the door barricaded. But Mae had been undaunted. She had lifted Lucy up to pry open their bedroom window, hoisted herself up, and in the morning acted as if the door had not been bolted. Worms of defeat bored at Mabel's innards. She began to devise plans to rid herself of these two ——'s, whom she had come to think of as uninvited guests, spongers, ignoring the fact that this parental home was only half hers, and that Mae, in addition to her half ownership of it, worked hard, sewing at the Bittner Sisters six days a week, sharing living expenses. It was only that Mabel had conserved her share of the little estate, while Charles had dissipated hers in their year together. After all, Mabel wasn't obligated to support them with her little income.
But, despite this fear of losing their room, Mae was not spineless. Behind her soft vacant look was an iron will where Lucy was concerned. Her powdery pink marshmallow cheeks flushed as she faced her virago of a sister at breakfast the next morning, rejecting accusations against Lucy in her light high voice.
Mabel, clad in perpetual mourning for her parents and her own dead hopes, stood at the black gas stove frying her thick strips of bacon which sputtered in unison with her exasperated nasal voice. The morning sun glanced in through starched white scrim across the scrub-bleached floor and found its target in a gleam of ruby currant jelly on the square kitchen table. Clear gem red that only last summer had dripped all night long from a muslin bag hung on the sink faucet. Long calm night, lulled by crickets and flickering with fireflies lighting their flight home among the sweet peas and tomato plants in backyard gardens. Silence undisturbed by the distant warning toot of the Union Pacific as it ground down the foothills and across the plains.
"And that girl of yours," screamed Mabel, as though Mae, slicing bread at a nearby table, were a mile away. "She's no good, no good. Thirteen years old, and out until all hours with boys."
Mae buttered a slice of bread smoothly to its brown edges and pulled the jelly toward her across the white oilcloth as though the jar was too heavy to lift. Out of the sun it lost its sparkle and deepened as did her own grey eyes. She waited for the spluttering stricture to end.
"What do you take me for," demanded Mabel, "a fool?"
A ghostly smile quivered on Mae's lips. The cacophonic diatribe continued as Mae stirred three spoonfuls of sugar into milky coffee.
"She ought to be sent to Reform School—that little snot—before it's too late. All the neighbors know about her—she's an evil influence—corrupting all the boys and girls of the street. And lipstick—thirteen, and she's no better than a street woman. I never thought I'd live to see the day when I would be glad that a niece of mine wouldn't go to church with me. And you too, thank God, with your shameless bobbed hair!"
Mae took a bit of jellied bread and washed it down with the coffee. The hot sweet liquid slid soothingly into her small stomach.
"No wonder Charles left you—any decent man would—you don't know the first thing about the responsibility of a home."
It was a forgotten detail in the pattern of Mabel's endlessly rehearsed peroration of grievance that, jealous of her younger prettier sister, she had been opposed to the marriage, heaping fabricated accusations against Charles. She had been as one possessed in her malicious frenzy to deny Mae a love denied to herself. Mabel still could not forgive Mae the experience of a man's love, and she came to think of Charles as a man Mae could not hold, a man who had married the wrong sister.
Mae remembered Charles's unkind reference to Mabel as a bitch in dry rot. Dapper Charles on his quarterly visits from New Orleans to the Bittner Sisters, Dressmakers, where she worked, finally realizing he could not get her without marriage. Like a wren caught by a heedless boy Mae fluttered and then acquiesced. In the marital bed she experienced no passion. There was warm pleasure though that Charles seemed to need her body, a feeling simultaneously submissive and maternal. She was perplexed but not unbearably hurt when Charles finally deserted when Lucy was six; she felt relief, in fact, when he did not return, as he had after many such departures, laden with soiled linen and a morose petulance. Returning, he had required all her attention, which was the only thing Mae resented; for it meant there was not enough time to devote to Lucy who would sit silently on a tiny chair in the corner of the kitchen staring at the strange man as though waiting for him to leave.
Mabel's screeching rent Mae's thoughts: "There was an article the other day about that girl over on the South Side. You know what happened to her. Now her ma can take care of the baby. She was only thirteen too."
It was time to flush away the obscene stream. Mae took her dishes to the sink and turned the faucet to a rush of water. Sometimes, she thought glumly, starvation was preferable. If it were not for Lucy she would—How could Mabel understand about Lucy and boys? It wasn't her fault they wouldn't let her alone. Anyway, it is better for a girl to know about boys than to be swept away by the first one along as I was with Charles. She dried her dishes, filled a glass of milk, and buttered two pieces of bread.
"That great big lazy—thing—in there," shrieked Mabel, confusing the extent of her anger with the size of the nymph in the nearby room, "she ought to be getting your breakfast. She won't even wash the dishes."
"She'll wash the dishes, and yours too. She doesn't want you to wash her dishes, and neither do I," retorted Mae abruptly, and left her sister facing the substantial fare she required to fortify her spirit against the cross she had to bear.
"Golly," Lucy said, hopping out of bed, "she's mad this morning!"
"Don't aggravate her. I don't know where we would go if she puts us out."
Lucy sat on the edge of the bed holding the glass of milk with both hands. Partly loosed white rag curlers dangled over her ears, and a froth of milk edged her upper lip. She looked cherubic, frail, and troubled.
"Maybe we shouldn't have come. Maybe we can go away soon. Gee, I hope so. Anyway, I've been thinking I can be a cashgirl at Woolworth's Saturdays. They need cashgirls. It isn't hard. Then we could save that money. I'll say I'm fifteen."
But Mae was adamant. "No, if you want to, and it doesn't tire you, do your bar work so it won't be so hard when you begin taking dance lessons. I want you to start as soon as school opens and we have a little money saved up. See that the kitchen is nice and neat when you're through and buy a box of Tintex because that dress is awfully faded." She pulled a brown toque over her neat curls, pulling a few out to puff over each ear. She laid a quarter and a dime on the bureau. "Be sure and drink milk this noon and if you eat out remember to order wholewheat bread and don't forget to weigh yourself—a ballet dancer needs strong bones."
Alone, Lucy took off her nightgown and stood in front of the bureau mirror, moving her arms through the ballet positions. She looked at herself moving her arms as impersonally as a piano student fingering exercises, raising the index fingers slightly while drawing the thumbs closer to the palm. Fingers in position, she turned the palms outward. There, that was it—if only her arms were a little fatter.
She gulped the remaining milk and brought her legs together in a w'ell turned out fifth position, slapping her chest to see whether it felt raised. Her head pressed back onto its axis and her arms curved downward, hands again in stilted position, now turned inward as though holding flowers to hide the pink lotus whose form flowed to separate the thighs from her flat little belly. A gesture of unintended modesty.
Then, slowly, she raised a toe-pointed leg straight back like a draughtsman's compass, her throat tensing under the strain as her arms rose to the side for balance. Incredulity brushed her face and she swung the leg forward to rest the foot on the bureau. Grasping its ankle in both hands she pulled herself forward to touch her temple to her knee. She could not make it.
It had been so easy four months ago at dancing school. Her mouth opened in consternation. She sat down, legs apart, hands on knees, body forward to inspect the reason for this development. Her lips pursed at the indignity her growing curving body had played on her. I wonder, she thought with unusual morbidity, if I'm too old to be a ballet dancer. Maybe I'll have to be just an interpretive Greek dancer.
Lucy's knowledge of the Greeks was limited to draperies interpretive dancers wore at Miss Klemper's. She did not think of the Greeks long. A minute later she jumped up and rummaged about until she found her ballet slippers.
"Ouch," she squealed, for she had grown out of the slippers. She hobbled about for a time, adjusting herself to their smallness. Then humming lightly a tune remembered from her practice, she began a series of petits battements. She felt gay and, looking through the screened window, saw Vida coming along the passage between the two houses.
Vida glanced up automatically as always in hope of seeing Lucy or hearing her. It happened rarely but when it did was invariably in the nature of a new revelation. One day Lucy's high matter-of-fact voice had floated softly out carrying on its wings "Mother, don't you think I ought to wear a brassiere"—she had been studying Mode—and Vida had fled conscious for the first time of her own breasts.
Today Lucy called to her. "Hello, Vida—look, I'm practicing," and held her leg up.
Vida, eager for any crumb of attention from her idol, seeing her stand so indifferent to nakedness was plunged into despondent jealousy because she could not achieve so glorified a state, and it became her ambition to stand naked before someone without dying of shame. She could not wait until, after her next bath, she went naked to ask her mother a trumped-up question.
"What do you mean by walking around without a stitch on, aren't you ashamed of yourself!" screeched outraged Mrs. Bertrand, with the result that Vida wept and sulked the rest of the day.
After the petits battements came grands battements and then changements—which set the door rattling. The Hand of Fate rapped three times. Aunt Mabel's voice screamed, "What's going on in there?"
"Nothing, I'm just practicing," Lucy said meekly.
"Well, you just get out here and practice with a dustcloth and dishpan while I'm at the store," blared Aunt Mabel.
Lucy waited until she heard the back screen door slam and then scrambled into her clothes, unwound the curlers, and brushed the ringlets around her finger. In record time she flipped the dustcloth, washed the dishes, made their bed, and put on high-heeled slippers. She wanted to be out of the house before her aunt returned. She never could practice while Aunt Mabel was home, and there was a whole day to fill.
"I think," she said to the thirty-five cents as she slid them into a cheap white purse, "I think I'll go shopping."
At the corner of Nebraska and Venner stood the giant dressing room of a fairy princess, Lapworth's Department Store.
"I'm looking," she said with dignity, "for something in perfume." The handmaiden at the vast toilet table shoved a pencil into her hair and stood at attention, a glint of recognition in her eyes. Lovingly Lucy caressed crystal phials of colored scents, lifting them gently to her nose after a little shake to expel the sweet vapors. The keeper of the flasks followed her in silence. A woman stood waiting farther along.
"You can wait on her first, I'm in no hurry," Lucy said with a gracious smile.
Reluctantly the saleswoman left and Lucy made for the strategic target of her mission, a row of small open bottles in a wooden rack. A wary eye for the opportune instant and a quick touch from each stopper to ears, nostrils, neck, cheek, and wrists, and as a dividend—the saleswoman leaving to collect change—Lucy was showered from the netted bulb atomizer by a mist of Houbigant's Quelques Fleurs.
The floorwalker, mesmerized by the fragrant trail in her wake, followed to watch as Lucy chose gloves, handkerchiefs, and jewels she would return for tomorrow, she told each clerk. She could not decide between a gold brocade or white beaded evening bag, and would have to reflect whether she preferred a pink silk combination with blue flowers, or vice versa.
But, at last, at the notion counter she found the object for which she had come, a box of Tintex Mae needed to renew the faded blue dress.
She was not finished with Lapworth's however. Music would help to while away the time.
At the piano of the sheet music counter, pounding out the latest hits in dashing if inaccurate frathouse style, sat a pimply young man. With Charlie's help Lucy kept up to date on latest Broadway hits. Broadway, the Fairy Prince who some day would fit the glass slipper to her Cinderella foot. Sometimes, after a music session with Charlie, panicky that she never would get out of Aunt Mabel's house, it was only in Mae's comforting presence that she regained confidence that her mother would manage their escape. This morning her spirits were high.
"Hello, Charlie."
"Lo, Lucy," Charlie said, swinging around.
"Come on, Charlie, play 'Darktown Strutters' Ball,'" she coaxed, shivering her shoulders in a Gilda Gray shimmy. Her rounding narrow body stood rooted with a connoisseur's concentrated listening as he began the Chorus and then, her head back, her lips parted, her feet tapped in place as though she would be plunged into oblivion if she deviated from the spot.
Finishing, Charlie reached for another piece among the scattered sheets on the piano's top. "Listen, Lucy," he said, "here's a new one, just came in, from the Follies, Marilyn Miller's show. I bet you could be a regular Marilyn Miller yourself."
"I hear," said Lucy with great seriousness, remembering photographs in the latest Mode, "she is the Toast of the Town."
"I'll say," was Charlie's only comment, as he had to pay attention to the notes.
At the tune's end he turned around and eyed her intimately. "Howdya like the movie last night?" His voice was insinuating but Lucy was impervious. She had no intention of being sidetracked into going out with Charlie. He played good, but his pimply face was not inviting to those long kisses demanded by boys.
"Thanks for playing for me, Charlie," she said, "you sure play swell—see you again—I have to go now." And she ran off hastily to the lunch at Weber's soda fountain Mae had prescribed. An egg sandwich and a chocolate malted.
After lunch she was tired. Venner Street was a letdown from the imagined bright lights of Broadway and she went to the ladies' room of Delmar's Department Store to rest and then to the pattern counter to look at all the latest pattern books. A nickel was left out of her thirty-five when she went to the five and ten, everything she wanted was much too expensive. It would have been nice to buy a present for Mother but there was nothing but a celluloid butterfly pin for five cents. She wanted to see Mae, the whole day without her dragged, and she started off to Bittner Sisters.