The Beggar Maid (29 page)

S
omething woke Rose early the next morning. She was sleeping in the little porch, the only place in Flo’s house where the smell was bearable. The sky was milky and brightening. The trees across the river—due to be cut down soon, to make room for a trailer park—were hunched against the dawn sky like shaggy dark animals, like buffalo. Rose had been dreaming. She had been having a dream obviously connected with her tour of the Home the day before.

Someone was taking her through a large building where there were people in cages. Everything was dim and cobwebby at first, and Rose was protesting that this seemed a poor arrangement. But as she went on the cages got larger and more elaborate, they were like enormous wicker birdcages, Victorian birdcages, fancifully shaped and decorated. Food was being offered to the people in the cages and Rose examined it, saw that it was choice; chocolate mousse, trifle, Black Forest cake. Then in one of the cages Rose spotted Flo, who was handsomely seated on a thronelike chair, spelling out words in a clear authoritative voice (what the words were, Rose, wakening, could not remember) and looking pleased with herself, for showing powers she had kept secret till now.

Rose listened to hear Flo breathing, stirring, in her rubble-lined room. She heard nothing. What if Flo had died? Suppose she had died at the very moment she was making her radiant, satisfied appearance in Rose’s dream? Rose hurried out of bed, ran barefoot to Flo’s
room. The bed there was empty. She went into the kitchen and found Flo sitting at the table, dressed to go out, wearing the navy blue summer coat and matching turban hat she had worn to Brian’s and Phoebe’s wedding. The coat was rumpled and in need of cleaning, the turban was crooked.

“Now I’m ready for to go,” Flo said.

“Go where?”

“Out there,” said Flo, jerking her head. “Out to the whattayacallit. The Poorhouse.”

“The Home,” said Rose. “You don’t have to go today.”

“They hired you to take me, now you get a move on and take me,” Flo said.

“I’m not hired. I’m Rose. I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

“You can make it. I won’t drink it.”

She made Rose think of a woman who had started in labor. Such was her concentration, her determination, her urgency. Rose thought Flo felt her death moving in her like a child, getting ready to tear her. So she gave up arguing, she got dressed, hastily packed a bag for Flo, got her to the car and drove her out to the Home, but in the matter of Flo’s quickly tearing and relieving death she was mistaken.

S
ome time before this, Rose had been in a play, on national television.
The Trojan Women
. She had no lines, and in fact she was in the play simply to do a favor for a friend, who had got a better part elsewhere. The director thought to liven all the weeping and mourning by having the Trojan women go bare-breasted. One breast apiece, they showed, the right in the case of royal personages such as Hecuba and Helen; the left, in the case of ordinary virgins or wives, such as Rose. Rose didn’t think herself enhanced by this exposure—she was getting on, after all, her bosom tended to flop—but she got used to the idea. She didn’t count on the sensation they would create. She didn’t think many people would be watching. She forgot about those parts of the country where people can’t exercise their preference for quiz shows, police-car chases, American situation comedies, and are compelled to put up with talks on public affairs and tours of art galleries and ambitious offerings of drama. She did not think they would be so amazed, either, now that every magazine rack in every town was serving up slices and cutlets of bare flesh. How could such outrage fasten on the
Trojan ladies’ sad-eyed collection, puckered with cold then running with sweat under the lights, badly and chalkily made-up, all looking rather foolish without their mates, rather pitiful and unnatural, like tumors?

Flo took to pen and paper over that, forced her still swollen fingers, crippled almost out of use with arthritis, to write the word
Shame
. She wrote that if Rose’s father had not been dead long ago he would now wish that he was. That was true. Rose read the letter, or part of it, out loud to some friends she was having for dinner. She read it for comic effect, and dramatic effect, to show the gulf that lay behind her, though she did realize, if she thought about it, that such a gulf was nothing special. Most of her friends, who seemed to her ordinarily hard-working, anxious, and hopeful people, could lay claim to being disowned or prayed for, in some disappointed home.

Halfway through she had to stop reading. It wasn’t that she thought how shabby it was, to be exposing and making fun of Flo this way. She had done it often enough before; it was no news to her that it was shabby. What stopped her was, in fact, that gulf; she had a fresh and overwhelming realization of it, and it was nothing to laugh about. These reproaches of Flo’s made as much sense as a protest about raising umbrellas, a warning against eating raisins. But they were painfully, truly, meant; they were all a hard life had to offer. Shame on a bare breast.

Another time, Rose was getting an award. So were several other people. A reception was being held, in a Toronto hotel. Flo had been sent an invitation, but Rose had never thought that she would come. She had thought she should give someone’s name, when the organizers asked about relatives, and she could hardly name Brian and Phoebe. Of course it was possible that she did, secretly, want Flo to come, wanted to show Flo, intimidate her, finally remove herself from Flo’s shade. That would be a natural thing to want to do.

Flo came down on the train, unannounced. She got to the hotel. She was arthritic then, but still moving without a cane. She had always been decently, soberly, cheaply, dressed, but now it seemed she had spent money and asked advice. She was wearing a mauve and purple checked pants suit, and beads like strings of white and yellow popcorn. Her hair was covered by a thick gray-blue wig, pulled low on her forehead like a woollen cap. From the vee of the jacket, and its
too-short sleeves, her neck and wrists stuck out brown and warty as if covered with bark. When she saw Rose she stood still. She seemed to be waiting—not just for Rose to go over to her but for her feelings about the scene in front of her to crystallize.

Soon they did.

“Look at the nigger!” said Flo in a loud voice, before Rose was anywhere near her. Her tone was one of simple, gratified astonishment, as if she had been peering down the Grand Canyon or seen oranges growing on a tree.

She meant George, who was getting one of the awards. He turned around, to see if someone was feeding him a comic line. And Flo did look like a comic character, except that her bewilderment, her authenticity, were quite daunting. Did she note the stir she had caused? Possibly. After that one outburst she clammed up, would not speak again except in the most grudging monosyllables, would not eat any food or drink any drink offered her, would not sit down, but stood astonished and unflinching in the middle of that gathering of the bearded and beaded, the unisexual and the unashamedly un-Anglo-Saxon, until it was time for her to be taken to her train and sent home.

R
ose found that wig under the bed, during the horrifying cleanup that followed Flo’s removal. She took it out to the Home, along with some clothes she had washed or had dry-cleaned, and some stockings, talcum powder, cologne, that she had bought. Sometimes Flo seemed to think Rose was a doctor, and she said, “I don’t want no woman doctor, you can just clear out.” But when she saw Rose carrying the wig she said, “Rose! What is that you got in your hands, is it a dead gray squirrel?”

“No,” said Rose, “it’s a wig.”

“What?”

“A wig,” said Rose, and Flo began to laugh. Rose laughed too. The wig did look like a dead cat or squirrel, even though she had washed and brushed it; it was a disturbing-looking object.

“My God, Rose, I thought what is she doing bringing me a dead squirrel! If I put it on somebody’d be sure to take a shot at me.”

Rose stuck it on her own head, to continue the comedy, and Flo laughed so that she rocked back and forth in her crib.

When she got her breath Flo said, “What am I doing with these
damn sides up on my bed? Are you and Brian behaving yourselves? Don’t fight, it gets on your father’s nerves. Do you know how many gallstones they took out of me? Fifteen! One as big as a pullet’s egg. I got them somewhere. I’m going to take them home.” She pulled at the sheets searching. “They were in a bottle.”

“I’ve got them already,” said Rose. “I took them home.”

“Did you? Did you show your father?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, well, that’s where they are then,” said Flo, and she lay down and closed her eyes.

Who Do You Think You Are?

T
here were some things Rose and her brother Brian could safely talk about, without running aground on principles or statements of position, and one of them was Milton Homer. They both remembered that when they had measles and there was a quarantine notice put up on the door—this was long ago, before their father died and before Brian went to school—Milton Homer came along the street and read it. They heard him coming over the bridge and as usual he was complaining loudly. His progress through town was not silent unless his mouth was full of candy; otherwise he would be yelling at dogs and bullying the trees and telephone poles, mulling over old grievances.

“And I did not and I did not and I did not!” he yelled, and hit the bridge railing.

Rose and Brian pulled back the quilt that was hung over the window to keep the light out, so they would not go blind.

“Milton Homer,” said Brian appreciatively.

Milton Homer then saw the notice on the door. He turned and mounted the steps and read it. He could read. He would go along the main street reading all the signs out loud.

Rose and Brian remembered this and they agreed that it was the side door, where Flo later stuck on the glassed-in porch; before that there was only a slanting wooden platform, and they remembered Milton Homer standing on it. If the quarantine notice was there and not on the front door, which led into Flo’s store, then the store must
have been open; that seemed odd, and could only be explained by Flo’s having bullied the Health Officer. Rose couldn’t remember; she could only remember Milton Homer on the platform with his big head on one side and his fist raised to knock.

“Measles, huh?” said Milton Homer. He didn’t knock, after all; he stuck his head close to the door and shouted, “Can’t scare me!” Then he turned around but did not leave the yard. He walked over to the swing, sat down, took hold of the ropes and began moodily, then with mounting and ferocious glee, to give himself a ride.

“Milton Homer’s on the swing, Milton Homer’s on the swing!”

Rose shouted. She had run from the window to the stairwell.

Flo came from wherever she was to look out the side window.

“He won’t hurt it,” said Flo surprisingly. Rose had thought she would chase him with the broom. Afterward she wondered: could Flo have been frightened? Not likely. It would be a matter of Milton Homer’s privileges.

“I can’t sit on the seat after Milton Homer’s sat on it!”

“You! You go on back to bed.”

Rose went back into the dark smelly measles room and began to tell Brian a story she thought he wouldn’t like.

“When you were a baby, Milton Homer came and picked you up.”

“He did not.”

“He came and held you and asked what your name was. I remember.”

Brian went out to the stairwell.

“Did Milton Homer come and pick me up and ask what my name was? Did he? When I was a baby?”

“You tell Rose he did the same for her.”

Rose knew that was likely, though she hadn’t been going to mention it. She didn’t really know if she remembered Milton Homer holding Brian, or had been told about it. Whenever there was a new baby in a house, in that recent past when babies were still being born at home, Milton Homer came as soon as possible and asked to see the baby, then asked its name, and delivered a set speech. The speech was to the effect that if the baby lived, it was to be hoped it would lead a Christian life, and if it died, it was to be hoped it would go straight to Heaven. The same idea as baptism, but Milton did not call on the Father
or the Son or do any business with water. He did all this on his own authority. He seemed to be overcome by a stammer he did not have at other times, or else he stammered on purpose in order to give his pronouncements more weight. He opened his mouth wide and rocked back and forth, taking up each phrase with a deep grunt.

“And
if
the Baby—
if
the Baby—
if
the Baby—
lives
—”

Rose would do this years later, in her brother’s living room, rocking back and forth, chanting, each
if
coming out like an explosion, leading up to the major explosion of
lives.

“He will live a—good life—and he will—and he will—and he will—
not
sin. He will lead a
good life
—a
good life
—and he will not
sin
. He will
not sin!

“And if the baby—if the baby—if the baby—dies—”

“Now that’s enough. That’s enough, Rose,” said Brian, but he laughed. He could put up with Rose’s theatrics when they were about Hanratty.

“How can you remember?” said Brian’s wife Phoebe, hoping to stop Rose before she went on too long and roused Brian’s impatience.

“Did you see him do it? That often?”

“Oh no,” said Rose, with some surprise. “I didn’t see him do it. What I saw was Ralph Gillespie
doing
Milton Homer. He was a boy in school. Ralph.”

M
ilton Homer’s other public function, as Rose and Brian remembered it, was to march in parades. There used to be plenty of parades in Hanratty. The Orange Walk, on the Twelfth of July; the High School Cadet Parade, in May; the schoolchildren’s Empire Day Parade; the Legion’s Church Parade; the Santa Claus Parade; the Lions Club Old-Timers’ Parade. One of the most derogatory things that could be said about anyone in Hanratty was that he or she was fond of parading around, but almost every soul in town—in the town proper, not West Hanratty, that goes without saying—would get a chance to march in public in some organized and approved affair. The only thing was that you must never look as if you were enjoying it; you had to give the impression of being called forth out of preferred obscurity, ready to do your duty and gravely preoccupied with whatever notions the parade celebrated.