Lady (4 page)

But it was to be many years before I discovered why she had laughed when she swept out of the moonlit rose garden.

"Trees are God's most perfect race."

I recall Lady saying that to me once in one of her more dour moments when she was inclined to view God's race of men cynically. The trees are mostly gone now, but returning to the Green I still call up their images, they were so much a part of those times. And the Great Elm -- what a tree was that! It grew halfway between our house and hers, one hundred feet high, the trunk almost forty feet in circumference, and must have been something short of two centuries old when it died of the Dutch blight. But while it lived, how grand it was. I think if anyone ever doubted God, one only had to look at that massive, lofty, natural creation to believe in Him again.

As in your small town, or anyone's, there was nothing much to do in ours back then, no place to go or anyone to see. In one geographical sense we were fortunate, for we lived "next door" to Hartford, the capital of the state, where you could make the five-mile trolley ride "upstreet," as it was called, and ride the escalators in the department stores. But Pequot Landing was a place whose today was unimportant and whose Colonial yesteryear, if historically remarkable, seemed, at fifth remove, dull and bookish; the town was only in our childhood emerging from the Icebox Age into that of the General Electric Refrigerator.

We lived on the less fashionable east side of the Green where the trolley tracks went by. For years our father, George Woodhouse, had worked at the old Jewett Belt Company out on Park Street in Hartford, saying that when he had saved enough money he would like to have a place in the country, just an old place he could fix up and where he could raise fruit trees and chickens in his back yard. And after moving our large family to Pequot Landing, the first thing he did was to plant the small but long-dreamed-of orchard behind the garage. He spaded out the holes, carried the trees himself, and one by one planted them -- four cherry, four pear, four quince, four plum -- and when he had tamped them down and watered them, he took a snapshot for posterity, came into the house, showered, and brought my mother to the bedroom, where he made love to her, suffered a heart attack, and died.

The old place never got fixed up.

Pa hadn't left much insurance, but Ma, a dauntless woman, found employment at the Sunbeam Laundry on the southern edge of the city, fifteen minutes away by car. Because she'd had to sell the family Auburn for funeral costs, she spent forty-five minutes each way on the trolley. Things were never easy for Ma. She was away from the house more often than she was there, and when she came home she was tired and sometimes cross, and she brought all her laundry problems with her. She seemed often bewildered by the brood our father's death had left her in charge of, but she tried hard to bring us up decently and intelligently. A simple woman, she never attained to the chic or "quality" of the country-club wives, nor did she have Lady's color and elegance, but she had her own style and humor. She hated being poor. I think it was her humor that most often saved her, for she never got over Pa's death, and until the day that she herself died his military brushes rested on the lace runner on the bureau.

The house was ample and ramshackle and tired, with tan printed paper on most of the walls, a furnace that clanked heroically but never sent up much heat, a kitchen that was barely adequate, with an intransigent stove and a balky sink, and crayoned yardstick marks on the door jamb which recorded our heights at every stage. The other rooms were small and chopped-up and the large pieces of furniture were catty-cornered everywhere. It seemed you were always meeting yourself coming and going; if not yourself, then Nonnie or Lew or Harry or Aggie or Kerney, or Patsy, the dog.

It became our mother's constant refrain that if she must live "in the country," she was just as glad it was Pequot Landing, which she thought was having the best of both worlds, urban and rural. Just south of us, where the elms stopped and the macadam became a dirt road, lay some of the richest agricultural land in the Connecticut Valley. Much of it Harleigh holdings, it was dotted with farms, with red barns and hayricks, corn-cribs and silos. A patchwork quilting of cornfields and truck-garden plots spread either side of the road, and there were wide pastures where cows and horses grazed. Even in the backyards on our street, barns and chicken houses were not uncommon, and though to us city people it seemed strange at first, for the old-timers it was no surprise at all to find a cow housed in a shed beside the car in the garage, as next door at Mrs. Flagler's. Nonnie immediately put herself to saving household money so we could have our own cow, but she was never able to save enough, and our milk came to the back door, pasteurized and in Smith's Dairy bottles ("A Quarter of a Century of Dependable Service").

With Ma working five full days and half a Saturday at the Sunbeam, it fell to our eldest sister, Nonnie, sixteen, to look after us and the house. Nonnie was a thoughtful, serious girl who took her motherly duties to heart. Old beyond her years, she tried to see to it that our arctics were buckled when it snowed, that our mittens were threaded on strings through the sleeves of our windbreakers, that we didn't hide our uneaten salad lettuce in the china tureen, that our rooms were straightened, that we didn't fight. Hopeless tasks, all.

My two older brothers, Lew and Harry, were twelve and ten when I was eight, and I didn't see them much, except at mealtimes. They had a gang of their own, and while they were allowed off on one of the islands in the river, where they could pitch a tent and stay out all night, I, too young, was left alone in the sleeping porch where we had bunk beds, and there I would lie, wondering when I would be old enough to sneak Lucky Strikes and swear and sleep on the island.

There was Aggie, of course, but though I loved her I didn't want to be with her all that often. Ag came between Harry and me in age and was "a walking romance" as Ma called her, because she spent so much time holed up in her room, getting gingersnap crumbs in her sheets as she read mushy stories in the
Woman's Home Companion
or the
Delineator
. True, Ag
was
romantic, soft, and sweet, with big surprised eyes that teared up for almost no reason, and long unmanageable legs whose bony knees she tried in vain to hide under her skirt. No doubt of it, she was shy, she blushed all the time, and was almost self-effacing, as if she were afraid someone might discover that she was living on this planet. But Ag had ideals and principles; she believed in things, passionately, profoundly, energetically.

Kerney was only three, and everyone fussed over him. It made me mad that just being the youngest could produce such attention, and I wanted to holler with frustration as they all stepped over me to see what Kerney wanted, or to assure him that he was "the
best
little boy in the world."

I would go to my bunk and hang my chin on the railing, looking over to the Harleigh place, hating our house and wondering what it must be like to live in
that
house, so grave and still and solitary at night, and secretly scheming how I might one day storm the castle across the Green.

As we came to know her better, the two sides of our new neighbor's personality were made clearer to all of us. She was gay and bewitching, both interesting and interested; she charmed where she went, reproached no one, offered no argument, never connived or gossiped -- nor would tolerate it in others -- helped where she might, lived her life generously and nicely, and was, we all felt, lonely.

Lonely, and -- strange. We talked about it among ourselves, and wondered, and worried, too. When at last we were made at home in her house, it was often difficult to ignore the furtive looks, the murmurs aloud, the absently contracted fists which she, becoming suddenly aware, would turn into a feigned examination of her manicure, the tension in the throat cords as though to swallow were difficult, the abstracted lapses succeeded by a sudden waking as from a dream, the fugitive pain that came and went behind her eyes.

But all of this became disclosed to me by gradual degrees, for at that time she was still merely "the lady across the Green," and really all I knew about her was that she was nice, and had lost her husband, as our mother had. It was only after the first visit of Mr. Ott, the mysterious man with red hair, that I realized how deeply troubled she was.

He appeared one evening early in January two years after Franklin Roosevelt became President, when I was about to turn eleven. Only the day before, the forlorn Christmas trees lay with the ashcans in front of all the houses around the Green.

It had snowed briskly all morning, but had stopped by the time school let out. When we arrived home, Lew and Harry started arguing about who was to have the lucrative task of shoveling Mrs. Harleigh's walks, because whoever didn't would shovel ours for nothing or Gert Flagler's for not much more.

A board fence enclosed our property at the two sides, and over this fence to the right were the Sparrows, and to the left the lady companions, Miss Berry and Mrs. Gertrude Flagler. They had pets aplenty -- a dozen small dogs and a canary -- but not a man in sight. Miss Berry's first name was Mary, but she was too nice for us to make use of the obvious euphony of her names. Some of the guys from the feed store would walk by hollering, "Mary Berry's got beriberi," or, "Mary Berry loves Harry Carey," but Miss Berry, whose hearing might have been better, would only nod and smile. She always saved us empty boxes so we could send the tops away for radio premiums: Quaker Oats for Bobby Benson, Cocomalt for Buck Rogers, Ovaltine for Little Orphan Annie, Wheaties for Jack Armstrong. And there were wooden codfish boxes just right for keeping things in. Miss Berry, formerly a private nurse, was practically an institution in the town. People said that she had been beautiful when she was young, but with her plain, gray, wrinkled face, her steel-rimmed glasses, her collars edged with lace and a little velvet bow at the neck, and voluminous skirts whose hemlines far exceeded the dictates of either modesty or fashion, who would have taken her for anything but a perennial spinster?

Gertrude Flagler, on the other hand, favored tailored suits of seat-sprung tweed. She chopped her salt-and-pepper hair off at the ears and squeaked around in heavy brogans when she went out selling Spencer foundation garments, lugging a gigantic merchandise catalogue door-to-door. It took little to put her into a state of rage, and she was the large and constant target of our inventive deviltry when we were feeling prankish. (There had been a Mr. Flagler somewhere, but that was in the long ago, and no one ever seemed to know what had become of him.)

She got around in a secondhand Chevy, and as a driver she was a menace. Seldom did she maneuver the car from the garage without hitting the clothes reel; seldom did she get back to the garage without scraping the telephone pole or the fence, over which we could often hear her deep, rumbling voice, swearing like a sailor.

"God damn it, Mary, someone must have moved that fence -- look at that car door!" "God damn it, Mary, what's wrong with raw milk? You want pasteurized, you pay for it, but I'm not getting rid of Bossy." "God damn it, Mary, who left the rake in the driveway, the handle dented my fender!" Miss Berry endured these tirades by possessing herself in silence, and never offered argument. Miss Berry was noted for her stoicism; still it could never have been easy, living with the perpetually wrought-up Gert Flagler. And if, in a sense, Miss Berry was like a rock, she refused to be the flint from which her steely friend might strike sparks.

It was said of Gert Flagler that she could pinch a penny till the Indian said "How." Consequently, we always avoided the opportunity of obliging her with our slave labor. Not so with Mrs. Harleigh, who paid generously. Lew and Harry had come to fists and punches, until finally Lew swore and said the hell with it, he didn't care who shoveled Mrs. Harleigh out. He kicked over the kitchen chair and slammed down into the cellar. Harry's nose was bloody, and he said he didn't care, either, so I got to do the job.

I took a snow shovel from the back porch, and walked in the plowed roadway around the Green, heading for Mrs. Harleigh's. Glancing back, I saw Miss Berry, in her sun parlor, watering the sansevieria plant she kept in the window in a blue pot. That plant had been there as long as I could remember, so had Miss Berry. When I came to the Harleigh house, I began at the front door and worked my way down the flagstone paving to the street. I was sweating under my mackinaw and goggled leather aviator's helmet when the Griffins, Elthea and Jesse, came out the door to catch the streetcar. They usually took Thursday and Sunday afternoons and evenings off -- generally the case with household help in Pequot Landing -- and they often went upstreet for dinner and the movies. Shoveling a path for them, I whistled at Elthea, who looked like a flapper with her bell-shaped hat, the muskrat coat Mrs. Harleigh had given her, and her open galoshes whose metal fasteners clicked and clattered as she came down the walk at Jesse's side.

She laughed and did a little sashay, arm in arm with Jesse along the roadway to the streetcar stop. I waved them off when the trolley came, and as they climbed aboard I saw Blue Ferguson, the Pilgrim Market boy, pulling his truck into the Piersons' next-door drive. Falling back in a drift, I snapped up my frosted celluloid goggles and sucked the snow from my mitten fingers while catching my breath. There was a snowball fight in progress out on the Green, and I ignored the calls to join the battle, reminding myself that my chore was not to be taken lightly. I had never shoveled Mrs. Harleigh out before and I wanted to prove my mettle.

Mr. Marachek, the postman, came along the roadway wearing earmuffs and tooting his whistle for the afternoon mail. Mr. Marachek, an emigrant from Czechoslovakia, was our friend; he always saved us the stamps on letters from his family in the old country. Tooting me a couple of whistles, he waved and went around to the far side of the Green.

Pretty soon, here came Rabbit Hornaday, with a rusty, beatup snow shovel. He watched the fight but wasn't asked to join, and after a while he trudged across and hung about at the end of the drive, peering at me through his thick glasses, which had practically steamed over.