came home after two more weeks. She and Cora were in the upstairs room together. Nell gave her a brooch, two golden leaves curved about a row of cherries. No, not cherries. The fine glitter of the gold spikes that held them, and the faceting, breaking them into petals of light, made them more like flowers.
“Don’t show it to Mother,” Nell said, “or I shall have to go away again. It’s the only thing I kept. I had a good time, and I wanted to bring you a present. It’s not very valuable—they’re only garnets.”
That same afternoon she said, “I never let him touch me, Pony. I couldn’t stand him when he got too near to me. But he was good-looking and he took me to the theater, lots.” She laughed. “I don’t know what Father and Mother believe—I don’t suppose they believe that, but it’s true.”
Pony was wonderfully glad to have her home again. The next Sunday Nell walked down the aisle of the First Baptist Church on her stepfather’s arm, looking as lovely as ever. Pony walked behind them, holding her mother’s hand. She thought they were all happy again.
The shadows in the corners of the church were deep, like dust. The sunlight lay higher and higher in the air. The place was innocent and calm. Cora sighed and stirred on the hard bench. This long meditation was all that she could do for Nell, her dear Nell. She could not cry. She could not even be sorry. It was too late. It was time to go home and cook supper for the children, and tell her husband that Nell was dead.
The House
THE HOUSE AND BARN were painted yellow with white trim. The house was large, three stories high, with a many-gabled roof. On each ridgepole stood a white wood fence in arabesques. A large covered porch ran from the front of the house halfway around the south side, a white porte-cochere opened on the north to the graveled drive, and there were various small balconies and bay windows which enlarged the simple shape of the building. The barn was big enough for a carriage room, stalls, a manger, and an apartment for the gardener and his family. The barn and the house were surrounded by low bushes, snowball, syringa, yellow spicebush. At the end of the smooth lawn was a small maple grove. Near the barn were the rose garden and the strawberry beds. To the north of the house two or three clumps of purple lilac had made themselves into a small forest. The trees about the house were elm, box elder, pine. When the house was first built, the lawn smoothed, the rose garden planted, the two empty blocks across the street had been cornfields, and the blocks to the north nothing but prairie, where violets and wild strawberries grew in the long grass. Little by little, as the suburb became popular, the vacant lots filled with homes, and the Wilkey estate was left rather like some old English hunting ground in the middle of a city. The children in the neighborhood thought of it as such. It provided vistas, ambushes, and retreats. No one ever told them not to climb in the maple trees or chased them off the roof of the barn. At the end of the block was a pasture where the old cow grazed. It was surrounded by a board fence, and a cluster of mulberry trees grew near the fence. The trees were too frail to climb, and Frances Donalson and the redheaded Niles boy used to sit on top of the fence, picking berries from the lacy boughs and watching the cow wade through deep clover stems. Frances Donalson’s grandmother lived in the yellow house. Her father was Jesse Donalson, a gentle-faced young man with graying hair and skin. He taught chemistry in the high school, and a slight acid odor from the laboratory clung always to his clothing. Her mother was Mary Wilkey. Her aunt Roberta and her aunt Kate lived in the big house with her grandmother, along with her uncle Archibald and her cousins and second cousins, the children and grandchildren of Aunt Kate and Uncle Archie. The second cousins were near her own age, slightly older, however, and more advanced in their amusements. They didn’t think much of sliding down the barn roof. The first cousins were old enough to be her aunts. There were five of them. Three of them were married and had homes of their own, but since they were always dropping in for supper, for lunch, to use the sewing machine, to visit Grandma, to visit each other, to plan parties and expeditions, they might as well have lived there, as far as it concerned the imagination of the little cousin or the labors of Annie.
Annie lived on the top floor. The top floor was attic except for Annie’s room, which was plastered and ceiled. Frances sometimes went upstairs to visit her, shutting the stairway door behind her carefully and climbing the steep dark way toward the dusty sunlight. The attic smelled of warm wood, mice, and old boxes. It was like a front yard to Annie’s room, which smelled of soap and prayer books.
In her aunt Roberta’s room, which was on the first floor, were a porcelain mandarin who nodded his head, a rose jar smelling of cinnamon, and a snowstorm in a globe. When you held the glass ball still in your hand the snow settled gently upon the roof of the tiny mill and on the small green bushes. When you shook it the snow rose again into the air and it stormed. Under the bed were many boxes full of carefully tied packages. A few of these were letters, but most of them were old theater programs, church programs, rolls of wrapping paper, brown paper bags, smoothed and folded carefully. There were a great many of the little gay paper fans, advertising summer drinks, which the drugstores give away in hot weather. Aunt Roberta saved things without knowing why she was saving them. No one was allowed to touch them. When she went out walking she carried her pocketbook, an extra wrap, and a brown paper parcel. Sometimes she had forgotten what was in the parcel, but she carried it because she would not have felt properly equipped without it. Once she had suffered from a disease of the skin, and her legs had been heavily bandaged. Over the bandages she wore a pair of white stockings, and over the white stockings a dark pair. After her skin was healed she was persuaded to give up the bandages, but she never gave up the white stockings. Frances was very fond of her aunt Roberta. They went walking together, and Roberta bought paper dolls, whole regiments by the sheet, and sticks of sweet paraffin gum, done up in colored wrappers with fringed ends. Sitting on the hassock by her aunt Roberta’s armchair, Frances cut out the regiments and arranged them in military fashion on the floor, and her aunt leaned over her, watching in admiration.
Roberta was the oldest of Mrs. Wilkey’s daughters. Her hair, once brown, had turned an even iron gray, become wiry and crisp. It looked frowzy, no matter how often it was combed. Her skin was brown, and her eyes shortsighted. She refused to wear glasses, and scowled, even when she smiled. One day Mary, entering by the front door, had found Frances and Roberta in the hall, weeping and clinging to each other. As far as she could find out from their answers, Kate had scolded Roberta for making Frances cry, Roberta had cried, and Frances had wept for Roberta. They were joined together against Kate, the old child and the young child comforting each other.
James Wilkey left no large oil portrait of himself to gaze down upon his grandchildren from the parlor wall. There were a few daguerreotypes in velvet cases in Mrs. Wilkey’s top bureau drawer, but the house itself was a more accurate portrait. The height of the doors, the largeness and uprightness of the furniture, the spaciousness of the rooms, seemed to indicate an erect, gray coated figure moving among them. Mrs. Wilkey’s plump short person passing with rapid step from dining room to living room, from living room to hall, oversaw these rooms for someone else. As she grew older she went about the house less and sat more in her large sunny bedroom on the second floor. Kate also kept to her own room a great deal, being a semi-invalid, a heavy, white-haired woman, lying in bed with a faded pink bed jacket about her shoulders. Kate’s children filled the house.
They were a gay lot. They never had enough money to dress as they would have liked to, but what money they had they spent on clothes, and were endlessly revising old clothes, to be a little more smart, a little more fresh. They left their scissors and tape measures on the parlor chairs, along with scraps of ribbons, basting threads, faded bunches of cloth flowers. They made their own hats, beginning sometimes fifteen minutes before the hour when they wanted to wear them. They had many beaux, but when beaux were short they commandeered their father, calling him Archie and tweaking his necktie. They would take off his gray felt hat and put it back on his head at a rakish angle, and kiss him behind the ears. They liked classy shows,
