Lady (10 page)

There were larks galore: an Easter-egg hunt in Hubbard's meadow; an outing to Pope Park to see some daredevil pilots; birthdays celebrated with trips to the movies -- Grace Moore in
One Night of Love
, and Rudy Vallee in person. She took us all in the Minerva to see Rudy at a vaudeville-movie house; Jesse drove us, and saw the show, too. Lady loved it when Rudy sang "Good Night, Sweetheart," albeit through his nose, and I thought of Edward's carolers singing "Good Night, Lady," on the night they'd become engaged. I watched as her hand slid inside her pocketbook on her lap, and then dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.

Once, I remember, we piled in the Minerva and drove to Holiday Lake, an amusement park some distance away, where we rode the roller coaster and the merry-go-round, and saw the midway. Later, we were in the funhouse, prancing around in front of the crazy mirrors, making our heads disappear and our sides widen. I thought the mirrors were like the goblin's mirror in the Snow Queen. Lady was hanging back with Jesse, who'd come in with us, and I tried to get her to stand in front of one. She was politely reluctant while I, taking advantage of my new position of prominence, got smart and was overly persistent. She flung my hand away and stamped her foot angrily. "No! I don't want to see. They're horrid!" Jesse didn't say anything, but he gave me a look. I felt hot with shame, that I should have made Lady lose her temper. I never tried a trick like that again.

But still, there were the Dreams of a Welsh Rarebit Fiend to be concerned with, and we got into the habit of watching Jesse Griffin's face, as a sort of bellwether which we could read to tell how the atmosphere really was around the house across the Green. Sometimes I would see him at the window, and if he was frowning or otherwise looking dour, I wouldn't go in, knowing that Lady had been seeing Edward's ghost again, or that she'd been having bad dreams. Elthea, too, would touch her finger to her lips for quiet, saying Missus wasn't feeling well, and we'd tiptoe away and try to find something else to do. We soon learned that if you wanted to get on with Lady Harleigh you got on with Jesse and Elthea first.

Porter Sprague made a remark to Mr. Pellegrino, the barber, and somehow it got back to Lady. Mr. Sprague said, watching Lady go by in the Minerva, with Jesse driving, that she was too familiar with her inferiors, and that servants should be kept in their place or there'd be a Communist revolution in the country.

But Lady didn't care. She only laughed and said that Porter Sprague was the sort of man who drops his cigar ash on your rugs and says it's good for moths.

"Besides, everybody has their inferiors. A parlormaid has the upstairs maid; even the lowest person on the scale has the whole race of apes, so he's still more superior than someone else. What Mr. Sprague is afraid of is that the Griffins are superior to
him
. Which, let me add, darling, they are. Fa' goodnitz sakes (she was doing Krazy Kat), Porter Sprague wears lisle ankle socks with clocks on them!"

I knew what she meant, though. When you got to know Jesse and Elthea, you realized that in their way they had few peers. They were, in fact, a most special couple.

There was something in their looks and manner, their carriage and walk, that called up a mixture of the best of the races, African and Caribbean, black and white. To me the sound of their voices had the whisper of ginger and honey; imprecise but lilting cadences which spoke of palms and beaches and ever-sunny skies. They had their own way of expressing things that was unique. Before running the vacuum Elthea would say, "I'm going to make a noise in your ears, now." Or when a kitchen philodendron fell off the windowsill she said, "He must have dropped itself." Or again, if the soda pop was in diminished supply she'd say, "Ginger ale's singing the Doxology," which meant Lady was practically out. Any irritation or complexity Jesse deemed to be "stupidy," and I lived in fear of his judging me so. In their soft accents our commonplace words changed and sounded more beautiful -- "man" became "mon," or "family" "fahmly" -- and altogether they made me want to run away and join the Navy, to see those sparkling islands they had left, where women carried baskets of fruit on their heads, and nobody ever wore galoshes.

"He's an odd number," Colonel Blatchley sometimes pronounced about Jesse, but for all his forbidding frowns he seemed all right to me, as he did to all of us. Still, I don't think he ever got used to having children around the house.

Elthea did, though. Except when Lady wasn't well, she never seemed to mind having us underfoot or trooping in and out of her kitchen, her special domain. We decided it was because, like their mistress, she and Jesse had no children of their own. Elthea Griffin may have been only a cooker of roasts and washer of pots and duster of cobwebs, but, thinking back on her now, I remember her as a person who asked for nothing more than what life had already bestowed on her. All day long we'd hear her softly humming or singing as she went about the house, leaving a trail of melody behind. She may have seemed lackadaisical and carefree, but she was a barrelhouse of energy all right.

I remembered the first time I'd seen her, at the seashore, at the Manor House Inn, and how strange I'd found it -- I was shocked, really -- watching her and Jesse in their swimming suits, discovering that they must be brown all over. Until then I'd thought of Negroes that just their hands and faces were colored, the rest of their bodies white.

Like Jesse, Elthea was tall and thin, with a long neck, and such a graceful way of walking. I decided this was because she'd been allowed to go barefoot year-round as a child. She had a smooth, glossy look, as if she'd just gotten out of a bathtub, and when she was enthusiastic her eyes rolled around like great white marbles. And she had the biggest, widest smile -- how different she was from the grave and dour Jesse. But, as Ruthie Sparrow said, opposites attract; we supposed she was right. Elthea's high humor kept her well in Lady's graces, Lady enjoying people's fun as she did; they were good friends, Lady and Elthea.

She devoured the newspaper, morning and evening, sitting with Lady over coffee and cigarettes at the kitchen table, exclaiming in delicious horror at the latest lurid ax-murder trial or giggling about a raid on a Manhattan love nest. All she wanted to do, she said, was go down to New York City and go dancing at the Aloha Room at a big New York hotel.

Once I asked her why she didn't wear saucers in her lips like we'd seen Negroes wearing in the circus.

"Oh, hon," she exclaimed straight-faced, "they're African folks, I reckon. We're islanders and fisher folks, we just wear geegaws and such."

"What's geegaws?"

"Bangles and rings, you know, like these here." Out shot her arm loaded with bracelets that clattered and rang: Elthea loved all sorts of flashy jewelry, which she wore if it was her day off or not.

"How long have you and Jesse been married?"

"Oh, long time. Just the longest. He's a fine mon, my Jesse."

"Does he like me?"

"Jesse? You? Sure, hon, he likes you just fine." She laughed at the thought of Jesse not liking
anybody
; that was just his way, she said. "Only thing Jesse doesn't like is my laundering."

"Why?"

"I like to do a shirt nice and soft, so's it's comfortable-wearing. But that Jesse, all he wants is for me to do him a shirt with enough starch to stiff a corpse. That's what he says: 'Elthea, stiff me a corpse with that shirt.' Lord, he likes a shirt board-hard."

"Do you miss the island?"

"Sure, hon, folks always misses home. But I like it fine wherever I am. Like it fine right here. This is my home now, me and Jesse, looking after Missus. I must confess it, I like being with rich folks. Back home's nothing but poor folks mostly."

"We're poor."

She shrieked and whacked, first her thigh, then my shoulder, then her bosom; I thought she must have hurt herself. "No, you're not, honey, not by a sight. You're rich. You don't know it, but you're rich. Mon, you don't know what poor
is
. Take Daddy -- that'd be Jesse's daddy -- he lost his work and he was poor, I mean dirt poor. Till Missus helps him out."

"Lady?"

"Yes, hon. She sends money all the time to Jesse's daddy, and Jesse's daddy's family."

Sometimes I'd tried to get Jesse to talk about his island, and what it was like to have grown up in a place so exotic and different from our town, but he'd just hunch his shoulders and say, "Oh, that was a long time ago, I forget." But little by little, from conversations such as these with Elthea, who was always willing to talk if she could work at the same time, I gleaned certain facts and put them together. His people had been fishermen, and earned their living from the sea. Jesse's father was a sort of island patriarch and had had many children. Somehow he'd had an accident and couldn't sail anymore, and Lady, learning of this, had been generous with funds, and for this she'd earned the Griffins' undying devotion.

But still I wondered about Jesse; he could have such a frowning, disapproving air about him, particularly when people came around who he felt oughtn't to come around. Such was the case one afternoon when Mrs. de Sales-Sprague called on Lady. Since the renovation of the septic tank, Lady had made elaborate plans for changes in her gardens, which were now to include the summerhouse, already being built by Mr. Seifert, the carpenter, and a path of herringbone brick to a particular spot where she was going to have a larger birdbath, which would stand in a circle of brickwork and greenery. We were out back, watching the work, Mr. Seifert on the summerhouse, Jesse laying the bricks, when Elthea came across the lawn and announced that Mrs. Sprague was at the front door. Jesse grumbled as he rose, dusted his knees, and went to put on his black coat.

"It's all right, Jesse," Lady said. "Elthea can show Mrs. Sprague out here." Presently Mrs. de Sales-Sprague appeared, large-beaked like a bird -- though hardly a
rara avis
; she was common enough -- and looking as if it hurt her to smile. Evidently she didn't like gaining Lady's presence by way of the kitchen door.

She had come, she said, to verify for herself Lady's decision not to open her house and gardens for the Daughters of the Pilgrims Club after the Tercentenary Pageant. Excusing herself to us, Lady drew her guest across the lawn by the bird feeder, and while I pretended to be interested in Mr. Seifert's carpentering, I indulged in my habitual pastime of eavesdropping.

Mrs. de Sales-Sprague was married to Porter J. Sprague, the richest man in town (Lady was generally conceded to be richer) and they referred to themselves as P.J. and Spouse. She was his second wife, and in a pre-nuptial arrangement he had been forced to agree that she would not surrender her family name, she being a de Sales of Talcottville (which meant merely that they had been in onions when onions were practically legal tender in town), and as she had joined Porter Sprague in body, so she had appended herself to him in name as well. Large, granite-faced, and hyphenated, Mrs. de Sales-Sprague could cast aspersions as seed is broadcast: wide and by the handful. She was never so kind as to howdeedo a child unless an adult was within earshot; like her husband, she abhorred the young, but when there were grownups around she practiced her blandishments inordinately.

After their marriage they had bought the old Harleigh house, which had been Edward's father's and grandfather's, where they resided in aloof affluence, but maintaining a niggardly standard of living that would put Knobb Street folk to shame. They were frequently on view at the A. & P. or the Pilgrim Market where they would for a quarter of an hour pick over the roasts and chops, settling at last on a half-pound of ground meat which did them both for dinner. Spouse thought nothing of marching down to the parish-house kitchen after a church supper and filling up her basket with the leftovers.

I had good reason to dislike her. Because our family were newcomers to Pequot Landing, none of us had been invited to participate in Mrs. de Sales-Sprague's pageant. Ma temporized, saying it was merely an oversight, but while other children were being fitted for Pilgrim costumes, and were given lines to learn, we were decidedly ignored. I felt the snub keenly, and could hardly look at her as she marched back from the bird feeder with a satisfied smirk.

"What a lovely frock," she cooed to Ag. I glanced at Lady, whose expression hinted at a mysterious bargain struck in the matter of her premises and the garden party, a thought reinforced when Mrs. de Sales-Sprague announced that all of us were to be given parts in the pageant. I thought I detected Lady's fine Italian hand in the business as she casually drifted over for a word with Mr. Seifert, disclaiming any immediate interest in the matter.

Shortly after rehearsals commenced, however, another accident befell me which promised to keep me from performing my part.

One day Lew, Harry, and I got the idea of emulating the daring of some barnstorming aerialists Lady had taken us to see at Pope Park. We brought the skate sail out and put it together, proposing to use it to fly off the roof of the chicken house where we all were gathered. It was a simple matter for Lew to climb up and, holding the sail over his head, to make the easy leap into the mulch bed. Then Harry tried it, and, at last, myself. It wasn't much of a jump and certainly no test of Man in Flight.

Lew said what was needed was a higher roof, and the one most readily suggesting itself was that of Lady Harleigh's carriage house. Carrying the sail, Lew led the way across the Green while we followed. Blue Ferguson, who was pulling a Pilgrim Market basket from the back of his truck in the drive next door, came through the Piersons' hedge to see what we were up to.

"We're going to fly," I told him.

"Sure thing? That's pretty high, isn't it?" He sighted up to the roof and gauged the distance to the ground. I could tell that it had become a question of who was to bell the cat, for I saw that both Lew and Harry were having doubts. Seizing my chance to show off in front of Blue, I took the sail and climbed up into the loft above the space where the sleigh was stored, and from there by ladder to the roof, close to the gilded weathercock.