The Eighth Day (8 page)

“He's well.”

“Yes.”

“Show the letter to your sisters.”

“Mama, you dropped the money.”

“Yes . . . ? well . . . ? put it away safe somewhere.”

Sophia followed her brother's instructions precisely. She went down the main street. The calendar was in Porky's window. In the early afternoon when there are few people on the street she returned into the town carrying an old pair of Lily's shoes. A customer in stocking feet was waiting for a repair. Sophia and Porky, who had never entered a theatre, played a long scene about heels and soles and half-soles; a letter glided from his hand to hers. She continued walking south and sat down on a step of the Civil War monument. She opened the envelope. It contained a stamped envelope addressed to “Mr. Trent Frazier, General Post Office, Chicago, Illinois,” a sheet of writing paper, a dollar bill, and his letter. He was well. He was growing so fast she wouldn't know him. He had begun by washing dishes in a restaurant, but he'd been promoted and now he was helping the cooks in the kitchen. Every minute they were calling, “Trent, do this,” “Trent, do that.” He thought maybe he'd be a clerk in a hotel next. Chicago was very big; he didn't know what all those people were doing on earth. It was a thousand times bigger than Coaltown. He kept thinking about the day when she would come and see him in Chicago. He saw a place the other day where it said “School of Nursing.” “Well, that's where you're going, Sophie.” Only Roger, Dr. Gillies, and her father knew that Sophia dreamed of being a trained nurse. “I guess you know I sent Mama two dollars. I can send more soon. Here's a dollar for you to put in your secret bank. Stop in at Mr. Bostwick's and see if he won't buy some of our chestnuts. They're the only ones for miles around. Here in Chicago they're twelve cents a bushel. That's last year's. If you get short of pencils Miss Thoms will give you some. She has them to burn. Now write small, Sophie, so you can get a lot of words in. Write the very day you get this letter. I guess nobody ever was as glad to get a letter as I'm going to be when you write me. How's Mama's voice? What things have you been having to eat? When there's reading aloud, do you ever laugh any? Don't forget what I told you about being downhearted. You wouldn't be like that. We're going to win. I forgot to tell you not to let Mama know that you get letters from me, but I guess you knew that. Roger. P.S. Now I wish I hadn't changed my name. We don't care what a billion people think. Papa didn't do it. P.S. II, I think of you and Mama and the house every night at
NINE O'CLOCK, SO
make a note of that in your think box. P.S. III, How are the oak trees Papa planted getting on? Measure them and tell me.”

The days went by. The vegetable garden and the chickenhouse fed them. They drank linden tea made from the petals of their own tree. Sophia bought no more coffee—a cutting deprivation for her mother, who made no comment. The money dwindled away: flour, milk, yeast, soap. . . . ? Long before winter Sophia began picking up coals at the edge of the railroad yards as many of the poorer sort did. Often in the early dark the women and girls of the town would stroll by “The Elms,” affecting an easy nonchalance. On six evenings of the week no lights showed in the house. All Coaltown waited in suspense: how long can a widow—a virtual widow—with three growing girls exist without money?

Constance was a child. She could not understand why she was withdrawn from school or why she was forbidden to accompany Sophia on her daily trips into town. At certain hours she would steal upstairs to a window overlooking the main street. She watched her former friends go by. Lily had always been a dreamer. Even during the trial she gave little attention to what was passing before her. She was not asleep, she was absent. Three things that were essential to her were missing: music, a continuous stream of new faces, and young men whose privilege it would be to admire her. She was neither melancholy nor sullen. She did willingly and well what she was called upon to do. All the Ashley children were slow-maturing, Lily most so. Her absence was a waiting. She was like a sea anemone that lies inert and colorless until the tide returns and flows about it.

Beata Ashley held herself as straight as before. There were no idle hands at “The Elms.” The house was spotlessly clean. The attic and cellar were put in order. Many discarded objects were found that could be mended and put to use. The garden, orchard, and chickenhouse were given more attention than ever before. There were lessons. Supper was early, followed by reading aloud until darkness set in. They went through their four novels by Dickens and their three by Scott, their
Jane Eyre
and their
Les Misérables.
All agreed that Miss Lily Ashley was very fine in Shakespeare. On Thursdays only French was spoken and candles burned until ten. The “Second Thursday” balls were very brilliant. There was dancing to the music that issued from the horn of the gramophone. A throng of handsome cavaliers surrounded the beautiful Miss Ashleys. On each occasion a distinguished guest of honor was present—the beautiful Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt or the French Ambassador. After dancing a delicious
souper
was served. The menu stood on a wire rack before the guests:
Consommé fin aux tomates Impératrice Eugénie
, a
Purée de navets Béchamel Lilt Ashley
, and a
Coupe aux surprises Charbonville.
The exquisite viands were to be partaken with a
Vin rosé Château des Ormes 1899.
All the children had known some German since infancy. The anniversaries of German poets and composers were observed with fitting ceremony. Lectures were delivered by the eminent Frau Doktor Beata Kellerman-Ashley, who could recite Goethe, Schiller, and Heine from memory by the hour. Unfortunately the piano had been sold to the secondhand man from Summerville, but the girls had heard Beethoven sonatas and Bach preludes and fugues scores of times. A little humming brought them alive again.

The events that had befallen Beata aroused in her no sense of wonder, or even of interrogation. To her they were crushing and senseless. Yet she expressed no grief and no complaint. She showed no sign of resentment except, perhaps, in her refusal to be seen on the streets of the town. She appeared to be in full control of herself, but one faculty she had totally lost. She was incapable of planning. Her mind refused to confront the future. It slid away from any contact with the morrow, with the oncoming winter, with next year. Nor did it revert to the past. She mentioned her husband only at long intervals and with visible effort. The hoarseness that had clouded her beautiful speaking voice gradually disappeared. It returned only on the days when members of the police force called to question her—not during those brutal interviews but after them.

She bore a burden that she mentioned to no one, insomnia—the insomnia of one to whom the future seems a corridor without light and without turning, the insomnia of the unshared bed. The insomnia was woeful because she knew it would soon make her old and haggard and it was terrifying because she feared it would lead to madness. The sleepless nights were additionally hard to bear because she could not afford a light to read.

She bore another burden, a deep unease to which she could give no name. There is no precise name for it in the three languages she knew. Beata Ashley was a rigorously moral woman. She divined that she was drifting toward some peril. Listlessness? Sloth? No. Insensibility? No. One form it took was recurring irritability
at its opposite
—Sophia's will to survive, Constance's yearning to rejoin her schoolfriends, Lily's unspoken assurance that some radiant future lay ahead of her.

All mothers love their children. We know that. But maternal love is like the weather. It is always there and we are most aware of it when it is undergoing change. Meteorologists have an odd way of saying “We may expect some weather during the coming week.” Maternal love at “The Elms” was little noticed. Constance was once heard to say to her best friend, Anne Lansing, “Mama loves us best when we're sick and when I broke my arm.” Beata Ashley would probably have been more stricken by the loss of a child than by the disappearance of her husband, for the greatest griefs are those accompanied by self-reproach. Lily was her mother's favorite—a partiality Lily took for granted. Beata Ashley's love for her husband was of such a degree and such a nature as left little room for other affections. In addition, she brought to her relations with her daughters a vague, diffused low opinion of women—of which she was unaware. This, as so often, was inherited from her mother. Clotilde Kellerman,
geborene
von Diehlen, held a low opinion of men, a lower opinion of women, and a large self-esteem. Beata Ashley had feared her mother, then fought and defeated her; but she had not liberated herself from her mother's attitude to women. She did not like the way women's minds worked, the things they said, the life that had been assigned to them. (The only thing that ever rendered her impatient with her husband was her knowledge that John Ashley held a directly opposite view. Conversations with men soon bored him, save when they dealt with a collaborative process. His relations with the foremen in the mine were excellent.) During the months following the dramatic reversal in her life Beata Ashley was often overcome with waves of weariness and irritation at the company she kept—at this unremitting petticoat society, at all this ignorant virginity. She reproached herself bitterly for these exasperations. She hated injustice and knew that she was unjust. This attitude did not escape the girls. They felt—even Lily—that they were in some way inadequate to her, perhaps to life itself, and it made them difficult company for one another.

Sophia had assumed that in all homes mothers and daughters were “like that”; it's fathers who love girls. It was now five months since John Ashley had crossed his doorstep. Sophia was indeed a trial to her mother. She breathed resolution. The charge laid upon her by her brother filled her with happiness. These were the months when Beata Ashley, for all her outward serenity, was turning her face to the wall. She was gliding toward some finality. Toward merciful death. She was like a woman adrift with others in an open boat at sea. Her hunger and thirst had passed into numbness and she resented the raising of a banner for rescue, the bailing out of the rising flood, and all this peering toward the horizon for the palm trees of an island.

Undiscouraged, Sophia bent all her thoughts on dollars—their beauty, their rarity, their promise. Everything her eyes rested on contributed to hope's constructive faculty. She had read in the novels of Dickens about seamstresses and milliners, but such work would find no patronage here: the stony glances of the women of Coaltown told her that. Besides, their friend Miss Doubkov was the town's dressmaker. There were two restaurants in Coaltown—the dining room at the Illinois Tavern and a bad-smelling shanty by the depot; there was no need for another. Every house in town did its own laundry; there was a Chinese laundryman for drummers and bachelors. One project presented itself to her, however, with increasing force. She viewed it from all sides. The obstacles seemed insurmountable. Nevertheless, she found one encouraging factor, then another, then another. At the southern end of the town—opposite the Lansings' “St. Kitts”—stood a vacant and dilapidated building that had once been a mansion of some pretension. High weeds filled the yard. Two soot-blackened signs hung crookedly from a pillar on the verandah:
FOR SALE
and
ROOMS AND BOARD
. It had served, long after its days as a boardinghouse, as a refuge for vagrants, for unemployed miners, for coughers and “tumblers,” for the crippled and the aged. Sophia remembered reading a book called
Mrs. Whittimore's Ark.
It told of how a widow with a large family of boys and girls opened a boardinghouse by the sea. The Ashley girls had found it very funny. It contained a good deal of merriment about the threat of going to the poorhouse. The lodgers included dear old absent-minded men and fussy but kindhearted old ladies. There was a handsome young medical student who fell in love with the oldest Miss Whittimore. On one occasion this young lady went to a sinister pawnbroker's store to sell her mother's pearl locket. Sophia did not understand why this was pictured as a degrading and desperate last resource. She wished that Coaltown had a sprinkling of pawnbrokers. The book ended happily when a rich man engaged Mrs. Whittimore to be the housekeeper in his castle on the hill. Sophia found the tattered volume in the attic and read it again, this time without a smile. It contained suggestions that would be useful to her. Apparently boarding-house keepers have difficulty with lodgers who try to steal out of the house by night without paying their bills. Mrs. Whittimore met the problem by stretching threads across the stairs and attaching cowbells to them. The absconder, terrified by the inexplicable din he had aroused, would hurl himself at the front door only to discover that the resourceful Mrs. Whittimore had covered the knob with a film of soap. If there was a lodger whom she wished out of the house (Mr. Hazeldean, who helped himself to half the meat on the platter, or Mrs. Riemer, who found nothing to her liking), the children and other allies were instructed to gaze fixedly and in alternation at their chins and shoes. The victims of this persecution—it was called “smoking them out”—soon sought less unnerving accommodations. Mrs. Whittimore spared matches in the kitchen by striking fire from flint; she offered rabbit stew as chicken; she made soap of hog fat and a distillation from wood ashes. Sophia felt that the rediscovery of this book was a happy coincidence, but the lives of the hopeful abound in happy coincidences. She resolved to open a boardinghouse at “The Elms” and she lost no time about it. She called on Miss Thoms, her father's friend at the mines' office. Miss Thoms had spent a lifetime at the margin of penury; her store of hope was barely sufficient to sustain herself. She offered little encouragement, but promised two chairs, some tableware, and a whatnot. Sophia arranged a clandestine interview with Porky. Porky thought. “Yes, Sophie,” he said, “start right now having a lamp on in the front room evenings. It don't look good to have a house dark.” (He left a can of kerosene at the back door the same evening.) “My mother makes rugs. I've got two to give you. I've got an extry chair.—Go right to Mr. Sorbey at the Tavern and tell him about it. You can't have him be an enemy to you. And you can't ask cheaper prices than him. Lots of times he's crowded and his guests have got to sit downstairs in the lobby all night. I think he'd send some over to you. I've got an uncle with a bed he's not using.”