The Beggar Maid (4 page)

Flo is shrieking too.
Stop, stop!

Not yet. He throws Rose down. Or perhaps she throws herself down. He kicks her legs again. She has given up on words but is letting out a noise, the sort of noise that makes Flo cry,
Oh, what if people can hear her?
The very last-ditch willing sound of humiliation and defeat it is, for it seems Rose must play her part in this with the same grossness, the same exaggeration, that her father displays, playing his. She plays his victim with a self-indulgence that arouses, and maybe hopes to arouse, his final, sickened contempt.

They will give this anything that is necessary, it seems, they will go to any lengths.

Not quite. He has never managed really to injure her, though there are times, of course, when she prays that he will. He hits her with an open hand, there is some restraint in his kicks.

Now he stops, he is out of breath. He allows Flo to move in, he grabs Rose up and gives her a push in Flo’s direction, making a sound of disgust. Flo retrieves her, opens the stair door, shoves her up the stairs.

“Go on up to your room now! Hurry!”

Rose goes up the stairs, stumbling, letting herself stumble, letting herself fall against the steps. She doesn’t bang her door because a gesture like that could still bring him after her, and anyway, she is weak. She lies on the bed. She can hear through the stovepipe hole Flo snuffling and remonstrating, her father saying angrily that Flo should have kept quiet then, if she did not want Rose punished she should not
have recommended it. Flo says she never recommended a hiding like that.

They argue back and forth on this. Flo’s frightened voice is growing stronger, getting its confidence back. By stages, by arguing, they are being drawn back into themselves. Soon it’s only Flo talking; he will not talk anymore. Rose has had to fight down her noisy sobbing, so as to listen to them, and when she loses interest in listening, and wants to sob some more, she finds she can’t work herself up to it. She has passed into a state of calm, in which outrage is perceived as complete and final. In this state events and possibilities take on a lovely simplicity. Choices are mercifully clear. The words that come to mind are not the quibbling, seldom the conditional. Never is a word to which the right is suddenly established. She will never speak to them, she will never look at them with anything but loathing, she will never forgive them. She will punish them; she will finish them. Encased in these finalities, and in her bodily pain, she floats in curious comfort, beyond herself, beyond responsibility.

Suppose she dies now? Suppose she commits suicide? Suppose she runs away? Any of these things would be appropriate. It is only a matter of choosing, of figuring out the way. She floats in her pure superior state as if kindly drugged.

And just as there is a moment, when you are drugged, in which you feel perfectly safe, sure, unreachable, and then without warning and right next to it a moment in which you know the whole protection has fatally cracked, though it is still pretending to hold soundly together, so there is a moment now—the moment, in fact, when Rose hears Flo step on the stairs—that contains for her both present peace and freedom and a sure knowledge of the whole down-spiraling course of events from now on.

Flo comes into the room without knocking, but with a hesitation that shows it might have occurred to her. She brings a jar of cold cream. Rose is hanging on to advantage as long as she can, lying face down on the bed, refusing to acknowledge or answer.

“Oh come on,” Flo says uneasily. “You aren’t so bad off, are you? You put some of this on and you’ll feel better.”

She is bluffing. She doesn’t know for sure what damage has been done. She has the lid off the cold cream. Rose can smell it. The intimate, babyish, humiliating smell. She won’t allow it near her. But in
order to avoid it, the big ready clot of it in Flo’s hand, she has to move. She scuffles, resists, loses dignity, and lets Flo see there is not really much the matter.

“All right,” Flo says. “You win. I’ll leave it here and you can put it on when you like.”

Later still a tray will appear. Flo will put it down without a word and go away. A large glass of chocolate milk on it, made with Vita-Malt from the store. Some rich streaks of Vita-Malt around the bottom of the glass. Little sandwiches, neat and appetizing. Canned salmon of the first quality and reddest color, plenty of mayonnaise. A couple of butter tarts from a bakery package, chocolate biscuits with a peppermint filling. Rose’s favorites, in the sandwich, tart and cookie line. She will turn away, refuse to look, but left alone with these eatables will be miserably tempted, roused and troubled and drawn back from thoughts of suicide or flight by the smell of salmon, the anticipation of crisp chocolate, she will reach out a finger, just to run it around the edge of one of the sandwiches (crusts cut off!) to get the overflow, get a taste. Then she will decide to eat one, for strength to refuse the rest. One will not be noticed. Soon, in helpless corruption, she will eat them all. She will drink the chocolate milk, eat the tarts, eat the cookies. She will get the malty syrup out of the bottom of the glass with her finger, though she sniffles with shame. Too late.

Flo will come up and get the tray. She may say, “I see you got your appetite still,” or, “Did you like the chocolate milk, was it enough syrup in it?” depending on how chastened she is feeling, herself. At any rate, all advantage will be lost. Rose will understand that life has started up again, that they will all sit around the table eating again, listening to the radio news. Tomorrow morning, maybe even tonight. Unseemly and unlikely as that may be. They will be embarrassed, but rather less than you might expect considering how they have behaved. They will feel a queer lassitude, a convalescent indolence, not far off satisfaction.

One night after a scene like this they were all in the kitchen. It must have been summer, or at least warm weather, because her father spoke of the old men who sat on the bench in front of the store.

“Do you know what they’re talking about now?” he said, and nodded his head toward the store to show who he meant, though of course they were not there now, they went home at dark.

“Those old coots,” said Flo. “What?”

There was about them both a geniality not exactly false but a bit more emphatic than was normal, without company.

Rose’s father told them then that the old men had picked up the idea somewhere that what looked like a star in the western sky, the first star that came out after sunset, the evening star, was in reality an airship hovering over Bay City, Michigan, on the other side of Lake Huron. An American invention, sent up to rival the heavenly bodies. They were all in agreement about this, the idea was congenial to them. They believed it to be lit by ten thousand electric light bulbs. Her father had ruthlessly disagreed with them, pointing out that it was the planet Venus they saw, which had appeared in the sky long before the invention of an electric light bulb. They had never heard of the planet Venus.

“Ignoramuses,” said Flo. At which Rose knew, and knew her father knew, that Flo had never heard of the planet Venus either. To distract them from this, or even apologize for it, Flo put down her teacup, stretched out with her head resting on the chair she had been sitting on and her feet on another chair (somehow she managed to tuck her dress modestly between her legs at the same time), and lay stiff as a board, so that Brian cried out in delight, “Do that! Do that!”

Flo was double-jointed and very strong. In moments of celebration or emergency she would do tricks.

They were silent while she turned herself around, not using her arms at all but just her strong legs and feet. Then they all cried out in triumph, though they had seen it before.

Just as Flo turned herself Rose got a picture in her mind of that airship, an elongated transparent bubble, with its strings of diamond lights, floating in the miraculous American sky.

“The planet Venus!” her father said, applauding Flo. “Ten thousand electric lights!”

There was a feeling of permission, relaxation, even a current of happiness, in the room.

Y
ears later, many years later, on a Sunday morning, Rose turned on the radio. This was when she was living by herself in Toronto.

Well sir.

It was a different kind of place in our day. Yes it was.

It was all horses then. Horses and buggies. Buggy races up and down the main street on the Saturday nights.

“Just like the chariot races,” says the announcer’s, or interviewer’s, smooth encouraging voice.

I never seen a one of them.

“No sir, that was the old Roman chariot races I was referring to. That was before your time.”

Musta been before my time. I’m a hunerd and two years old.

“That’s a wonderful age, sir.”

It is so.

She left it on, as she went around the apartment kitchen, making coffee for herself. It seemed to her that this must be a staged interview, a scene from some play, and she wanted to find out what it was. The old man’s voice was so vain and belligerent, the interviewer’s quite hopeless and alarmed, under its practiced gentleness and ease. You were surely meant to see him holding the microphone up to some toothless, reckless, preening centenarian, wondering what in God’s name he was doing here, and what would he say next?

“They must have been fairly dangerous.”

What was dangerous?

“Those buggy races.”

They was. Dangerous. Used to be the runaway horses. Used to be a-plenty of accidents. Fellows was dragged along on the gravel and cut their face open. Wouldna matter so much if they was dead. Heh.

Some of them horses was the high-steppers. Some, they had to have the mustard under their tail. Some wouldn step out for nothin. That’s the thing it is with the horses. Some’ll work and pull till they drop down dead and some wouldn pull your cock out of a pail of lard. Hehe.

It must be a real interview after all. Otherwise they wouldn’t have put that in, wouldn’t have risked it. It’s all right if the old man says it. Local color. Anything rendered harmless and delightful by his hundred years.

Accidents all the time then. In the mill. Foundry. Wasn’t the precautions.

“You didn’t have so many strikes then, I don’t suppose? You didn’t have so many unions?”

Everybody taking it easy nowadays. We worked and we was glad to get it. Worked and was glad to get it.

“You didn’t have television.”

Didn’t have no TV. Didn’t have no radio. No picture show.

“You made your own entertainment.”

That’s the way we did.

“You had a lot of experiences young men growing up today will never have.”

Experiences.

“Can you recall any of them for us?”

I eaten groundhog meat one time. One winter. You wouldna cared for it. Heh.

There was a pause, of appreciation, it would seem, then the announcer’s voice saying that the foregoing had been an interview with Mr. Wilfred Nettleton of Hanratty, Ontario, made on his hundred and second birthday, two weeks before his death, last spring. A living link with our past. Mr. Nettleton had been interviewed in the Wawanash County Home for the Aged.

Hat Nettleton.

Horsewhipper into centenarian. Photographed on his birthday, fussed over by nurses, kissed no doubt by a girl reporter. Flash bulbs popping at him. Tape recorder drinking in the sound of his voice. Oldest resident. Oldest horsewhipper. Living link with our past.

Looking out from her kitchen window at the cold lake, Rose was longing to tell somebody. It was Flo who would enjoy hearing. She thought of her saying
Imagine!
in a way that meant she was having her worst suspicions gorgeously confirmed. But Flo was in the same place Hat Nettleton had died in, and there wasn’t any way Rose could reach her. She had been there even when that interview was recorded, though she would not have heard it, would not have known about it. After Rose put her in the Home, a couple of years earlier, she had stopped talking. She had removed herself, and spent most of her time sitting in a corner of her crib, looking crafty and disagreeable, not answering anybody, though she occasionally showed her feelings by biting a nurse.

Privilege

R
ose knew a lot of people who wished they had been born poor, and hadn’t been. So she would queen it over them, offering various scandals and bits of squalor from her childhood. The Boys’ Toilet and the Girls’ Toilet. Old Mr. Burns in his Toilet. Shortie McGill and Franny McGill in the entrance to the Boys’ Toilet. She did not deliberately repeat the toilet locale, and was a bit surprised at the way it kept cropping up. She knew that those little dark or painted shacks were supposed to be comical—always were, in country humor—but she saw them instead as scenes of marvelous shame and outrage.

The Girls’ Toilet and the Boys’ Toilet each had a protected entryway, which saved having a door. Snow blew in anyway through the cracks between the boards and the knotholes that were for spying. Snow piled up on the seat and on the floor. Many people, it seemed, declined to use the hole. In the heaped snow under a glaze of ice, where the snow had melted and frozen again, were turds copious or lonesome, preserved as if under glass, bright as mustard or grimy as charcoal, with every shading in between. Rose’s stomach turned at the sight; despair got hold of her. She halted in the doorway, could not force herself, decided she could wait. Two or three times she wet on the way home, running from the school to the store, which was not very far. Flo was disgusted.

“Wee-pee, wee-pee,” she sang out loud, mocking Rose. “Walking home and she had a wee-pee!”

Flo was also fairly pleased, because she liked to see people brought down to earth, Nature asserting itself; she was the sort of woman who will make public what she finds in the laundry bag. Rose was mortified, but didn’t reveal the problem. Why not? She was probably afraid that Flo would show up at the school with a pail and shovel, cleaning up, and lambasting everybody into the bargain.