to rent my house to him. I like to do business with a businessman. Tell you what. We’ll settle on a rental of twenty-five dollars. Ah, that pleases you, doesn’t it? But there’s a condition to it. I’d want your husband to take care of minor repairs. You see, I’m a tired old man, quite unused to being a landlord. I’d hate to be called out of bed in the middle of the night to see about a frozen water pipe.”
The matter was settled at once and Cleo handed over the money. Mr. Van Ryper found a scrap of paper and a stub of pencil in his pockets, and paused in the writing of the receipt to make an inquiry. Did Mrs. Judson want it in ink? Cleo answered hastily and heartily that pencil was fine.
WHEN THE DOOR CLOSED BEHIND HER, Cleo drew a long contented breath. Then she walked briskly to the trolley stop, with Judy bobbing alongside again.
“Are we going home now?” asked Judy, who had been hurried through a scant breakfast and was hopeful of an early lunch.
“We’re going to your father’s store,” said Cleo abstractedly. “Now don’t ask any more questions. Try saying your table of twos. Bet you can’t finish before the trolley comes.”
Judy opened her mouth with alacrity, because it was rare that her mother took time to admire her accomplishments. But Cleo said briskly, “Try saying them silently. I’m thinking.”
Her mind was revolving around her sisters, plotting the most direct route between the two points of wish and fulfillment. All of her sisters were as blind as bats when it came to their husbands. They loved them. What could they find in them to love? Not a man among them was a decent provider. Serena and Charity worked in service whenever times were harder than usual. Lily would have gone to work, too, if she could have taken her child on her job as her sisters did in the South.
What kind of way was that for her sisters to live, from hand to mouth, from payday to payday, from what she could scrape up to send them? Yet they still believed they belonged to their husbands, for richer or poorer, in sickness and health. If they demanded no more of life than a man in the house, it was time someone else demanded more for their children.
Serena and Charity were still down home. But Lily had left the South when Pa in his lonesomeness married Miss Hattie. Lily was scared of mild Miss Hattie, who had never raised her voice in her life. But Lily was scared of everything, including her shadow. When she was little, she had to be put to bed before the lamps were lighted. If she saw her shadow, she screamed like a banshee, and ran like something was after her.
The old folks said Mama had birthmarked Lily the time old Spot went mad in the yard and came near chewing a hunk out of three-year-old Cleo, who had been teasing the poor old dog to play all the long hot day. Mama had never held a gun in her life. But she ran and grabbed Pa’s hunting piece and aimed true, though she was shaking with fright. She was white as death when she fired. Her color didn’t dreen back for two days, and Lily was born before it did. Lily came into the world so white she wouldn’t have browned in an oven, and she was always the scariest thing on two feet. The old folks said she was marked.
Cleo’s letters home, after Pa’s second marriage, didn’t include one kind word about Miss Hattie. She couldn’t bear the thought of the woman who had taken Mama’s place, and she tried to turn her sisters against her. She succeeded in turning Lily, who had always believed anything Cleo told her. Lily let herself believe that Miss Hattie didn’t want Mama’s children anywhere near her, reminding her, whenever she looked at them, of Pa’s greater love for another woman. She grew so nervous around Miss Hattie that Pa decided to send her up North to her married sister.
She got as far as New York. But she might as well be at the North Pole. For Cleo had never been able to visit her. She had talked too freely to Mr. Judson about her fears for her timid sister in such a wicked city. He had acquired the same fears for her and refused to let her set foot in Sodom.
Lily had never been to Boston. When she got off the train in New York, she promised God she would never get on another one as long as she lived. It was weeks before she recovered from the animality of Jim Crow, and the additional horrors of sweating through hot waves of nausea, of swooshing through tunnels of terrible blackness, of riding high above swirling water, of fighting off sleep to watch her belongings, of feeling her eyes and her unrelaxed limbs ache with weariness each morning.
In Washington, Victor Bates, a Pullman porter, had taken her under his wing. All the way to New York he ran back and forth between his duties and her coach. She was eighteen, and her youth and helplessness made him accept her as his charge. She clung to the comfort and masculine strength his kind brown face and big broad frame personified to her grateful heart.
When they reached New York, she refused to be put on the Boston train. She said she would die if she rode another mile. In one of her rare seizures of stubbornness, when fear gave her the courage to hold fast, she stood firm as a rock in the middle of the station, with muttering people pushing past her.
Victor took her to a married friend’s house. He thought if she rested a day, she would feel differently in the morning. But after an evening in her company, with her liquid eyes never leaving his face, he knew he did not want her to go to Boston either.
Victor Bates was no worse than the average second-rate husband, Cleo conceded. But he was a road man. Lily spent half of her nights alone, with only a sleeping child to look to for protection. Victoria was going on seven. It wasn’t doing her any good to have a jack rabbit for a mother. She and Lily would be better off in Boston, where Cleo could look after them both, than in New York with one little man who spent most of his time bowing and scraping to white folks.
Yet all of this was rationalization. Though Cleo did not know the word, and would not have admitted that its meaning was applicable, her yearning for her sisters was greater than her concern for them. All of her backward looks were toward the spellbinding South. The rich remembering threw a veil of lovely illusion over her childhood. Her sisters, with their look of Mama, would help her keep that illusion alive. She could no longer live without them. They were the veins and sinews of her heart.
“Here comes the trolley car,” said Judy, who had finished her table of twos and was patiently reviewing her table of threes because she knew Cleo’s shut-away face and the uselessness of intruding her image on the broad bright canvas that Cleo called “long before you were ever thought of.”
The trolley halted and they boarded it. There were several vacant seats at this hour of the day. Cleo herded Judy into one that was farthest away from the other passengers, who were, as usual, mildly diverted by the pair. Judy stared slightly open-mouthed while Cleo opened her purse, extracted the rent receipt, and wondered exasperatedly why children seemed to have nothing to do but mind the business of grown-ups. She rummaged around in the bottom of her bag, finally gave up her useless search, and surreptitiously surveyed the passengers. She settled on a lone man and pointed him out to Judy.
“You see that man? Go ask him nicely to lend your mother a pencil. Tell him I want to write an address before I forget it.”
Judy rose eagerly, feeling important, and started down the aisle.
“Judy!” Cleo called softly.
She turned and gaped at her mother.
“A pencil with an eraser.”
Judy came back and hung over Cleo. Cleo held the pencil poised and looked at her coldly. Then her face cleared. “Now,” she said sweetly, “go ask the conductor if this trolley goes to Scollay Square. My, but you’re a big girl!”
