An Unlikely Friendship (8 page)

Then one day Mrs. Holmdel, who lived on Water Street, became ill. Her mammy met Mammy Sally at the market and told Mammy Sally that her mistress had all the signs of cholera. By nightfall Mrs. Holmdel was dead. Word went around from house to house. People knew what the disease was because it had already killed thousands in New York City and New Orleans. Last summer, Pa's sister, Aunt Hannah, had died from it when it visited outlying parts of Kentucky.

Now it was here.

By the end of the first week, ten people were dead of it.

The rest kept their doors and shutters locked, their children inside, and their businesses closed. The town was empty except for the dead carts rattling through to pick up bodies.

"We must leave," Betsy told Pa. "We endanger the children by staying. We should go to Buena Vista." It was her country estate on the Leestown Pike near Frankfort.

"Cholera is in the countryside, too," Pa told her, "and as a city councilman, I must stay. You may take the little ones and the baby and go if you wish, Betsy. I'll send George and Levi with you, and Nelson can drive you to the country."

She decided to stay.

We burned tar in barrels to stave off the disease. Mammy Sally had the other servants wash down the walls with vinegar and spread so much lime about the outside of the house you nearly choked for the smell of it. We were allowed to eat only biscuits, eggs, boiled milk, and water.

One day I ate some mulberries. They were sitting there on the sink in the kitchen and I thought,
What harm can they do?
So I ate them.

Betsy and Mammy found out at the same time and you never did hear such screaming and carrying on. Betsy sent for the doctor. Before he could come Mammy Sally got the ipecac and held my nose as I fought her.

"If the doctor come, he give you mercury chloride," Mammy scolded. "He bleed you. You want that?"

I didn't, so I took the ipecac and threw up. The boys laughed and enjoyed the whole thing. The new baby, David, cried. Pa was furious.

"There are people dying all around us, and you-all are making a mockery of this," he scolded. Pa never scolded, so we quieted down.

In the terrible, ghostly days that followed, we tried to stay out of one another's way, for the crowding in the house. When Levi and George couldn't abide it any longer they sneaked outside to look up and down Short Street, where the living were throwing the dead people out the windows to be picked up by the dead carts that came around for the bodies.

"They're blue," I heard Levi tell George, who was always hungry for otherworldly information. "Their hands and feet are all puckered. Their tongues are hanging out."

I caught them often in whispered conversation and knew they were discussing the victims. Doctor Joseph Boswell had succumbed to the dreadful disease. So had Captain Postlewaite and Mrs. Charles Wickcliffe. I don't know where they got their information from, but they had their ungodly contacts. Besides, though Pa would not let any of us out of the house, he allowed them to go out for an hour every day to check up on Grandma Parker, to see if she was keeping and if she needed anything. I wanted to go, of course, but he wouldn't let me.

And then one evening at supper I looked up from pushing my eggs around on my plate to see them looking at me oddly.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" I asked, only to realize that others at the table would not even meet my gaze. I shivered.

"Is Grandma all right?"

"She's fine," Pa answered, "but, Mary dear, two of your school chums from Mrs. Ward's have died."

I felt such relief that Grandma was all right that I scarce heard him. Then I did hear. "Who?"

"Emily Houston and Charlotte Wallace."

"Oh." I stared down at my eggs and biscuits. Emily and Charlotte. We hadn't been close, but still, now they were dead! What had it been like for them? Had they been frightened? I shuddered and it came to me then. Any of us could die. I could die, too.

I started to cry and got up and went to Pa, who took me on his lap. And nobody, especially not Levi or George, laughed at me. As a matter of fact, they looked most serious.

There came a pounding on our front door then, and Nelson went to answer it. We heard him saying, "Ain't nobody dead here."

Pa set me down and went into the hallway. I was right behind him. So were Levi and George and Ann.

It was Old Sol, the town gravedigger. He was short and squat. Behind him in our drive was his donkey harnessed to his dead cart. "I needs to see Mr. Todd," he said.

"What is it?" Pa asked.

"Sir, I'm outa coffins. I got no more. So I'm askin' at all the houses if the people will go to their attics and find what boxes and chests they got and donate 'em."

"Fine. We'll do that," Pa said.

"I'm runnin' outa space in the church cemeteries. Gonna have to start usin' that trench in the new graveyard on the corner of Main and Limestone."

Main and Limestone! A block from our new house. Levi nudged me.

"You do what you have to do," Pa told him. "I'll have some chests out here for you tomorrow."

They closed the door and Pa turned to us. "It'll give you children something to do tomorrow," he said. "Go to the attic, select the biggest chests, and empty them. Nelson will bring them down to put out front."

We nodded, saying nothing. We were stunned, I think, for since Ma died we were never allowed in the attic. In the attic were her things, and Pa and Betsy didn't want us up there, poring over them and getting all cast down.

Now he was allowing us up there.

"Is that wise?" Betsy asked from the background.

"We're moving soon," Pa told her. "All those things have got to be gone through sooner or later."

T
HE NEXT MORNING
after breakfast Levi, Ann, and I made ready to go to the attic. Halfway up the stairs Levi turned to George who stood at the bottom.

"You coming?" he asked.

I saw the indecision on George's face. "Pa said I don't have to if I don't want."

"Come on." Levi extended his hand. "You and I'll go through Pa's things. All that stuff from the war. Let the girls do the rest."

So we four went to the attic. I was trembling with anticipation. How much of Ma's things had Pa saved? And why hadn't he allowed Betsy to convince him to throw them away?

The boys weren't interested in Ma's things. There was a lot of Pa's old stuff to be gone through from the war back in 1812. One chest was labeled
LEXINGTON LIGHT ARTILLERY
, and Levi and George couldn't wait to get their hands on it.

"You shouldn't be handling those knives and haversacks and guns." Ann was starting to sound more and more like Betsy every day.

As for me, I was already starting to open a chest of Ma's things.

"If it isn't big enough to hold a body, don't bother with it," Levi said with his wicked sense of humor.

I raised the lid of the chest and gasped. Here was everything I imagined as it would be. There were petticoats, silk dresses, shawls, even embroidered aprons. I touched each article reverently.

"Come on, get it out. We don't have all day. You know Pa wants Nelson to bring the chests downstairs by this afternoon," Ann said.

"These are Ma's things, Ann," I told her. Across the attic I saw George looking at me as I raised a tea-colored blouse in the air.

She shrugged. "I know."

"Don't you want to go through them? And see what you'd like to keep?"

She shook her head. "It won't bring her back. Come on, I'll help you stack them in a corner someplace."

I put the blouse down. George went back to Pa's things.

Ann and I had never been close. She was closer to Frances, who spent all her time going to lectures at Transylvania and teas, and sewing things for when it was her time to go to Springfield. Was Ann hiding her true feelings for Ma? Or did she truly not care?

We found an old blanket and wrapped Ma's clothes in them. "I'm going to ask for that shawl," I said, pointing to a black silk one.

"Don't bother," Ann said. "I heard Betsy say everything up here was going out to the first gypsies who came through."

I made a note to ask Pa for what I wanted. Not now, though, not today, not with people throwing dead bodies out their windows and Old Sol collecting boxes and chests for coffins. Pa was a city councilman. He would be busy.

B
Y THE END OF SUMMER
the cholera was past and we who were boarding at Mentelle's were allowed to move our things into our rooms. Pa sent Nelson to accompany me with my baggage and Mama's gold and white ladies' desk in the wagon. Nelson was to carry everything upstairs.

The moving took near all day, and when I got home, the first thing I did was go up to the attic to get the clothes from Ma that Pa said I could have.

They would be kept at Grandma Parker's. She had agreed to it.

I went across the attic room to open the blanket. The clothes were not there! They were gone.

I stood stunned for a minute, thinking. Where had they gone? Had Nelson brought them to Grandma Parker's? I held the empty blanket in my hand, wondering.

Had Ann or Frances become interested in them after all?

And then I was struck with fear. Betsy! And I knew where the clothing had disappeared to.

I went downstairs on shaky legs. I heard her in the kitchen, talking to Mammy Sally about supper.

She saw me standing in the doorway. "So, you're home. How did the moving go? Did you get your room in order?"

I had the empty blanket in my hands. She saw it but said nothing.

"Where is my mama's clothing that was in the corner of the attic in this blanket?" I asked.

"Heavens, Mary, you wanted that old stuff?"

"Where is it?"

"Some strolling players came through today. I gave it to them."

"You gave away my mama's blue taffeta dress? Her lace collars? Her black fringed shawl from New Orleans?"

"Well, it was all old and moth-eaten. What could you possibly want with it?"

"That was for me to decide!" I was crying. Tears were coming down my face. "Pa said I could have it. Nobody else wanted it. Grandma Parker was going to keep it for me."

I was full of rage. And her becalmed manner enraged me more. She had done it to spite me, I was sure of it.

"The attic had to be cleaned out." She raised her voice just a bit. "We're moving."

"I know you're moving. To your fancy new house on Main Street. With all the big new rooms and the red damask curtains and the Belgian carpets. It's all you talk about. All you care about."

She turned on me. "Don't you think, Mary Todd, that I deserve a big new house? Don't you ever think how difficult it's been here with all these children in such close quarters? Don't you ever think of anybody but yourself?"

I turned to run and bumped into Pa.

"What's this?" He put his hands on my shoulders to stop me.

"She threw out Ma's clothes. The ones you said I could have. She gave them away!"

"Don't call your stepmother 'she,' Mary. Show some respect."

Respect! I glared up at him. "Don't you care? I wanted to save those clothes. They were all I had left of Ma."

"You have the desk," Betsy put in.

"Yes, and I aim to keep it away from you," I told her.

"Enough, Mary," Pa said.

I ran. As I ran up the stairs to my room I heard Pa asking, "What is wrong with that child?"

"I don't know, Robert, but you'd better rush right out and buy her ten yards of yellow muslin or a new bonnet or some new kid gloves. It's the only way she'll come 'round," Betsy said sarcastically.

T
HERE IS A HOLE
inside me because of the loss of Mama's clothing, a hole I have never been able to fill. I dream, at night, of crossing that attic room and opening the blanket to find nothing. And searching and searching all over the room, with panic inside me, hoping to find it in some deserted corner.

I see her blue taffeta dress, her lace collars, her black shawl, her tea-colored lace blouse. I hold them up in my dreams at night and they disappear in my hands.

T
HAT SUMMER
, as well as the cholera and the confusion of moving, we had the seventeen-year locusts visiting, singing their monotonous song in the background, no matter what was going on.

They were especially loud the day Liz and I brought our things to the new house. It was brick, and Pa had had the whole thing redone so that, except for the large rooms, it no longer resembled Palmentier's Inn.

Those large meeting rooms had been made into parlors. It had six large bedrooms and a two-room nursery and a new piano in one parlor.

All the furniture was new. There was nothing here that had been my mother's, except for the silverware stored in the pantry.

There was a bathtub in the back hall, and in Pa's study at least two hundred books.

I knew, in an instant, that I could not call this place home. I brought my few things upstairs to the room I was sharing with Liz.

"Which bed do you want?" she asked. She was holding Pierre in her arms, deciding where to put him down.

"I don't care. I won't be here that much," I said dismally. "This is your room, not mine. I'm the guest this time."

"You can have the bed near the window," she said generously. "And I wish you were going to be here all the time. I'm going to miss you, Mary."

I nodded and lowered my head. Tears came to my eyes. And then she gave the conversation a new turn.

"Did you know your brother George refuses to come here?"

My head shot up quickly. "What do you mean?"

"He told me so. He said he's not going to leave the old house. He says it's lonely now, and he doesn't want to leave the place where his mother lived."

Oh sweet Lord,
I thought.
Now were going to have trouble.

A
MID ALL THE
confusion downstairs, Pa stood, directing the servants where to put things and announcing to all of us that we were having a special supper of turkey and hickory-cured ham and cake from Monsieur Giron's tonight at six, and he wanted us all present to celebrate our first dinner in the new house.