Drowning Ruth (15 page)

“Well,” Carl said, slipping past her, “all right. I'll tell them tomorrow never mind coming.”

“And then they'll think I can't manage company. No, the damage is done.” She sighed heavily and returned to the stove where she vigorously stirred with a wooden spoon a substance that had begun to explode in angry bubbles.

Throughout that week she sent Carl on at least one trip to town a day to buy special items like fresh playing cards and cute little pads of paper and quarter length pencils from Baecke's, and nuts and dried fruit and sugar in cubes from Mr. Pucci. She hired Thekla Manigold, one of Mary Louise's younger sisters, to help out for the afternoon and directed Rudy to burrow through the attic for card tables. For three evenings in a row, supper conversation consisted primarily of Hilda's debate with herself over buying a fancy layer cake with pink and yellow roses from Klein's or baking
her own much-admired-in-Tomahawk stollen. She even sewed one of her best handkerchiefs to a ribbon to make Ruth a tiny apron and made her practice walking extra carefully around the room, stopping before each chair to offer the cream pitcher and sugar bowl on a silver tray.

“If this is a nice party,” she told Ruth, “I wouldn't be surprised if we wanted to start a club. My mother and I belonged to three card clubs in Tomahawk, you know.

“Carl,” Hilda said, the evening before the event, “you'll come in, won't you?” She kept her eyes on the applesauce she was spooning onto her plate. “Just for a half hour or so, twenty minutes. I know everyone'd want to see you. And Ruth's been working so hard on the serving,” she added.

Carl looked at his daughter. She hadn't caused any trouble for weeks, months even, but still she wouldn't speak. He wished she
would
cause trouble—there was at least some noise, some expression in that—but what could he do? You couldn't make a child talk. You couldn't even make her break things.

He made a show of chewing his meat, stalling for time. He knew Hilda wanted him for her own sake, not for Ruth's, but what was half an hour? Surely he could be gallant for that little time to please her. She was taking care of his daughter, after all, as well as she knew how. And if that wasn't very well, he realized it wasn't altogether her fault. He'd known his cousin as a child in Tomahawk, and he reminded himself that she could hardly have helped growing into the hard and unpleasant woman she'd become—she'd almost been born that way. “All right, I'll come in,” he said to Hilda. “What time?”

“Oh, let's say four o'clock.” Hilda beamed. “Give people time to settle down.”

The next morning Hilda hurried everyone through breakfast. By dinnertime the stollen was frosted, the cushions plumped, the clean antimacassars smoothed, and the teaspoons polished and examined
for fingerprints. To save time and to keep the kitchen clean, she'd made only cold sandwiches for the noon meal.

“I know you have better things to do than sit around here waiting for a bunch of hens,” she said when Carl and Rudy seemed inclined to linger over their coffee. They drained their cups dutifully and pushed their chairs back.

“You're not forgetting?” Hilda said to Carl at the door. “And you'll put on a clean shirt?”

“I'm not forgetting,” he assured her, while he swung Ruth into the air once or twice. He gave the girl a little push between the shoulders to send her on her way. “You be good, now.”

Hilda went into the bathroom in her slip, and Ruth watched her sponge soap and water under her arms and around her neck. She watched Hilda's hair, charged with one hundred strokes, rise into the air as it reached for the brush and then, under Hilda's artful fingers, coil like a sweet roll behind the woman's head. Wedged between the wardrobe and the wall, Ruth watched Hilda take her corset from the wardrobe, slide her arms through the straps, pucker her lips and blow, until she'd squeezed all the air from her lungs. Her fingers strained to pull the sides together over her waist and ribs. One, two, three hooks done. She took a small, shallow breath and pushed even that air out again. Four. And then they heard a ripping sound. Hilda stopped breathing. The sound ceased. She breathed again, and there it was. One of the seams was giving way.

Quickly, Hilda loosened the hooks to ease the strain. “No, no, no, don't let this happen,” she whispered.

But it had happened. The damage was done. Up one side was a long tear and there was no time to repair it. She sank to the bed and sat for a moment or two, her head bowed. Then she straightened her shoulders, slipped the corset off her arms and dropped it on the bed.

“It's a lucky thing,” she said to Ruth, “I listened to my mama and spent my money on quality when I bought this dress. It fits fine even without a foundation, don't you think?” She turned sideways in front of the mirror, sucked her stomach in and smoothed the fabric over it. “It'll have to do,” she said. “No one's wearing those bulky things anyway nowadays. I heard Mrs. Lindgren saying so just the other week.”

Hilda leaned close to the mirror and examined her face. “Just the teeniest dot of color,” she declared, pressing her finger into the rouge pot and then massaging the paint in a little circle into each pasty cheek.

“Well?” she said, turning toward Ruth, her cheeks a dramatic scarlet from the rough rubbing. “How do I look?”

Ruth pressed her palms to her own rosy face.

Hilda frowned. “I bet you think you're something,” she said. “What's that on your dress? Mustard? Well, you can't wear that now. Hurry up. I don't have all day.”

But there was still plenty of time, and when Thekla arrived, half an hour before the guests were due, Hilda and Ruth were ready and waiting, sitting at the kitchen table, so as not to muss the cushions in the front room.

At three-twenty Clara Gutenkunst and Ida Brummer knocked at the door, and soon after that the rest of the ladies appeared, so that by three-thirty, the appointed hour, the entire party was assembled. Thekla, carrying coats, ran lightly up and down the stairs, and Hilda ushered the ladies in and sat them down around the room. There was to be some general conversation before they got down to the cards, and then, after the first hand, refreshments.

It was a little awkward at the very first, as such things are, with the women uncertain about whether they ought to be addressing every comment to the room at large or only to the one or two seated nearby. Still, this quickly sorted itself out, and as they were all well acquainted, they didn't lack for conversation, especially since one particular topic held great interest for nearly all of them.

Although some asked quite forward questions and craned their necks to take in as much of the house as possible, and others only waited, smiling politely, to hear Hilda's answers, there was hardly a one who was not morbidly curious to see what had become of the place “after all the tragedy this house has seen,” and to hear about Amanda. Of course, one had to be delicate. This was, after all, her own house. And then there was Mary Louise to consider—since “they were such friends.” Nevertheless pockets of gossip buzzed here and there, all around the room: “I understand she cut off all her hair.” “They needed five men to drag her out of the house.” “Tried to drown the little girl, that's what I heard.” “Oh, that poor motherless child!”

Abruptly and rather loudly Hilda said, “Shall we play cards?” She was already snapping the legs of one of the folding tables into place.

“Oh, yes. Let's play,” Mary Louise seconded.

“How would you like us to sit?” asked Leota Prunerstorfen, and those who had been about to pull chairs to the tables any old way hesitated.

“Oh,” said Hilda, and looked blankly around the expectant group. “I hadn't really thought.”

“I think Hattie might head up the first table, don't you, Hilda?” Mary Louise said, and Hattie Jensen, one of the eldest women there and wife of the pastor, nodded and graciously stepped to her accustomed place. “And then Dolly, the second. And Albertina over here, I think.” And she went on, as she knew Amanda would have liked, ably sorting the women into two congenial groups, as if she were arranging flowers.

Hilda withheld the stiff packs of new cards until everyone was seated and then ceremoniously handed one to Hattie Jensen and brought the other to her own table. They were well into their first hand when, above the noise, the kitchen door opened and closed.

“Just a moment,” Hilda said, her cheeks suddenly flushed, and she left her place at the table and hurried into the kitchen.

Rudy had come in with Carl and stood awkwardly in the doorway, holding his hat. Softly, shyly, when Hilda was close, he said, “You look very pretty.”

Hilda looked at him severely and then turned away to take Carl's arm and draw him with her into the front room. “You all know Carl, of course,” she sang out with unnatural gaiety that made the other women glance at one another over their cards. A murmur of “how d'ye dos” rose from the two tables. With his diffident manner, Carl was charming, they all agreed, and they knew he'd been bravely wounded in the war, although Clara and Ida remembered that he'd only been a meatpacker when poor Mathilda married him.

“You'll stay for refreshments, won't you, Carl? Why don't we have them now?” Hilda suggested, which made Hattie Jensen raise her eyebrows, for they were in the middle of a hand, and she seemed likely to win.

Hilda went to the kitchen door. “Thekla, we're ready for our coffee.”

“Sure,” the girl said, “I'll bring it right in.” She closed her magazine and went to the icebox for the cream.

“Where's Ruth?” Hilda looked around the kitchen and leaned down to peer under the sink. “I thought she was in here with you.”

“Now that you say it,” Thekla said, turning in an ineffectual circle to scan the room, “I haven't seen her for quite a while.”

“Well, you oughta been watching her. Find her when you've got the coffee out and make sure her apron's on straight. She's probably filthy dirty by now.”

When Hilda rejoined her guests, she was smiling, but she darted anxious glances toward the door until Thekla had safely deposited all the coffee cups and the two coffeepots on the side table.

“Stollen in just a minute,” Hilda announced and began pouring out. “Cream and sugar, Mrs. Jensen?”

Leota Prunerstorfen, who didn't care for coffee and was hoping a pot of tea might also appear from the kitchen, saw Ruth first. “Ruth Neumann, what the dickens have you got on?”

Then everyone had to look at the little girl standing in the doorway, proudly holding the tray of sugar and cream before her. Pins stuck in all directions out of her hair; her cheeks were smeared a brilliant red, and her little arms were stuck through the straps of some large, lace-trimmed pink garment that hung down to her ankles.

“Why, she's wearing a corset!” Leota exclaimed, and then clapped her hand over her mouth, shocked at her own words.

Best, Carl thought, to act as if this were a joke, and he began to smile, looking at Ruth. Now that she did not quite look like the little girl he knew, he suddenly recognized Mathilda's playfulness in her, and the idea made him sad, but also comforted, in fact, almost happy. It was the first time since her death that he'd thought of his wife and felt happy.

Carefully, Hilda set the cup she was holding down on the tray. And then, looking neither right nor left, not stopping for a coat, she walked through the room and out the front door into the chilly April afternoon.

Mary Louise had lifted Ruth under the arms. “Let's get you cleaned up,” she said, and carried her upstairs.

“We ought to be going,” Hattie Jensen said, pushing her chair away from the table decisively, and that galvanized the group. They got up and someone thought to send Thekla for the coats, and to everyone's relief there was much noise and confusion in sorting out whose was whose.

“She'll get over it,” Ida Brummer said to Carl.

“Yes,” Dolly Brennan said, giving him a motherly pat on the shoulder, “by suppertime she'll be right as rain again, you'll see.”

But they didn't know Hilda. At dawn the next morning she was waiting in the kitchen with her bags packed. “My train leaves at five past seven.”

“But who'll take care of Ruth?” Carl asked helplessly.

Hilda looked at him scornfully. “She's the Devil's child,” she said. “Let him take care of her.”

The sun was warm by the time Carl returned from the station, though the air still whispered of winter. While he collected the eggs and slopped the pigs, Ruth drew patterns with a stick in the mud outside the pigpen. When the animals were fed, Carl lifted Ruth out of the dirt, intending to carry her in. She shrieked and clutched the fencepost, straining away from him with all of her strength. Her boots left muddy streaks on his trousers and she'd soiled herself; he could smell it. Five years old and no better than an animal! He kicked the fence in frustration.

“Then stay there!” He let her slither down his leg and drop back in the muck. He stalked off, walking as fast as his bad leg would allow, and didn't look back until he was inside the house. Then, from the kitchen window, he watched her as he made his coffee. She had thrown away her stick and was using the heel of her hand now to push ditches in the dirt and then the flat of her palm to wipe them smooth again.

The sun beat through the glass, and the yellow kitchen clock ticked thickly over his head. He opened the window, and Ruth glanced up for a moment, startled. She seemed surprised to see the house, to see the window with him in it. She frowned and lowered her eyes again quickly as if she hadn't meant to look.

What the hell was he supposed to do with her? The cat jumped up on the counter and rubbed its back against his elbow. He lifted his coffee cup and swallowed the dregs, rinsed it and left it on the drainboard. He moved toward the door but turned back again. He
wiped the cup with one of his shirttails and placed it gently upside down in the cupboard.

When he picked her up, she screamed again, but this time he held on. He bathed her, dressed her in her best dress. He combed her fine, straight hair and fixed a huge blue bow to the top of her head. Then he put a fresh shirt on himself and hitched the horse to the buggy and they set off for St. Michael's.