off to Forest Park, to the roller coasters and scenic railways. They would ride out in an open car, watching the dust and the torn papers fly up from the street at the rush of the wheels, and after the fun in the park was over they would cross the street to a cheap German restaurant, and have beer and cheese sandwiches with rye bread.
Archibald Martin had a way of getting jobs easily, but he had a way of losing them too. When he was working he contributed his share to the expenses of the house, and when he was out of work he didn’t. When he was out of work he spent most of his time at home, which pleased the girls and made things merrier. They said, “After all, Gran’s rich.” He made a few investments. Some of them were successful, but several times he was obliged to apply to his mother-in-law for help, when luck had been against him. Then he had a famous chance to make good money and pay back all he owed, if Gran would only lend him a little capital to start things off.
The old lady objected. Martin sat with hurt, surprised eyes, his fingers fidgeting with the ends of his sandy beard. He said, “You have always been so generous. I thought I could surely count on you, and it’s all for your good. In fact it’s mainly for the sake of paying back what I owe you. I don’t like to owe you money.”
Mrs. Wilkey said dryly, “I don’t object to your owing me money, Archibald, or to giving it to you either. In a way, all that I have given you has been yours, or would have been yours sooner or later. It’s simply that, if this goes on, there will presently be nothing at all to give you. I don’t know that it’s exactly fair to your daughters, either. You’re spending their inheritance.”
“But, Gran,” he said, “I am going to restore their inheritance.”
Mrs. Wilkey deliberately clipped the end of a thread from a sock she was mending. “Very well,” she said at length. “If the girls consent to your investing this money, I will let you have it, but I want it plainly understood that you are, all of you, receiving your share of the inheritance now.”
She began to hunt for a fresh needle in the red cotton tomato, and as she said nothing more, and did not look up from her search, Martin rose and went awkwardly and silently out of the room.
The girls were delighted at the prospect of rehabilitating the family fortunes, and Gran drew the check that Archibald required.
He bought a bunch of sweet peas for Gran on his way home from the city that night, and Gran was pleased with them. He bought them at the secondhand flower stand on the lower bridge of the elevated station, and they withered quickly, but that did not matter.
When Sue, Kate’s oldest daughter, divorced her husband, there had been nothing else to do but come home to the yellow house, bringing the two children, Leo and Sophia. Sue got herself a job in a firm of interior decorators and paid her share of the expenses of the house. Gran gave her the barn for an office and workshop, and she set up business for herself, moving her worktables into the carriage room and wheeling the antique surrey and barouche into the corner. It was too late to sell them. Nobody wanted a barouche. Nobody wanted a low green cutter with pictures painted on its sides. Will, the divorced husband, came regularly to see her, preferring to bring the monthly check in person. “Alimony night,” Sue would call, running upstairs. “I must get into my chauncy earrings.” Will had been divorced for drinking, and he lived in hopes of conquering himself and being reinstated in his family, but Sue liked him better as a lover than as a husband. He was a slender dark-eyed man with a silky black mustache. He drew marvelous pictures for the children and always had a pocketful of finely pointed pencils.
“Come now,” Mary heard Sophia saying to Frances, “my father’s here, and your father’s coming over, and you’re going to stay for supper. Come and tell Annie and hear her say, ‘With the help of God and a couple of policemen.’” Mary stood in the hall, holding the telephone, waiting for her husband to answer. Presently she heard the children in the kitchen.
“Can you get supper for four extra tonight?” said Sophia, and Annie answered, “With the help of God and a couple of policemen I can. Get out of here now, the two of you.”
The children tiptoed past her, very pleased, and went into the parlor to beg for pictures.
It was the middle of February, a week before Gran’s eightieth birthday. The house was sheeted in a sticky, sleety rain, and the afternoon was dark. In Sue’s room Sophia, Frances, and Roberta were making paper roses by gaslight. Sue looked in occasionally to see how things were going and issue directions. Marianne Martin came in once or twice but did not stay. She was spending the afternoon with Mrs. Wilkey to keep the old lady busy.
Frances and Sophia were curling the edges of petals on a hatpin. They stretched the centers a little with their thumbs, making them hollowed and flowerlike, and dropped them into a box. Sometimes Frances shook the box and raked the pink shells about lightly with the tips of her fingers, thinking of her aunt Roberta’s rose jar. She liked the paper petals as well as the real ones. By and by Cousin Sue and Cousin Marianne would build them up into flowers, fastening them to a stem, binding the stem with green and attaching green leaves. There were already big boxes of flowers in the closet and under the bed. Her aunt Roberta was cutting out petals from a pattern, breathing heavily as she worked and stopping often to watch the little girls. The house was full of conspiracy. When it came time for Frances to go home to supper, Cousin Sue brushed her off with a whisk broom.
“It would never do to have you running in to kiss Gran all covered with pink scraps. She’d smell a mouse. Yes ma’am, smell a mouse and see it brewing in the air.”
When the birthday came a long table made of boards and sawhorses was set up in the big red-curtained dining room, and decorated with pink and green. The room was festooned with roses and lighted with candles, and there were pink and green baskets full of nuts at everyone’s place. There was a big white mint candy, the size of a cooky, for everyone, too, marked in pink sugar with “Eighty.” The birthday cake was in the kitchen, waiting to be lighted, but Frances and Sophia had seen it before Annie chased them out. It had eighty little pink candles around it in a ring.
The children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and the sons- and grandsons-in-law gathered in Mrs. Wilkey’s room, upstairs, and descended to the dining room in a grand march. Mrs. Wilkey headed the procession on the arm of Archibald Martin, and Frances and Roberta brought up the rear, quivering with excitement. Annie stood at the door in a fresh white apron to usher them in.
There were eighteen of them at the table. They jostled each other and talked all at once, resembling each other, if taken in the proper order, like the progressive chords in a harmony which lead from one key to another.
Annie brought in the cake with its circle of little flames, and Marianne pounded on the table and cried, “Speech, Grandma, speech.” Mrs. Wilkey stood up, the candles making funny upward shadows on her face, and everyone cheered. Sue said, “Don’t cry, Gran.” Mrs. Wilkey looked down the long table. The tears shone on her cheeks, she made her speech, and cut the cake. Frances did not eat her white candy with the pink letters, but saved it to look at.
One morning in the autumn after Gran’s eightieth birthday Mary sat with her mother in the upstairs room. The elms were turning brown. The trolley cars on Lake Street, a block away, sounded muffled and far, as if the haze in the air had enveloped sound as well as form. Both women were sewing. Mrs. Wilkey seemed to put off what she had to say as long as she could. When she had folded her work and laid it aside she made her announcement in a voice from which old age had gradually withdrawn the timbre.
“I’ve sold the house, Mary.”
“Oh, Mother.”
“I haven’t yet told Kate. The agreement allows me the use of it as long as I
