Negro neighborhood. There were white people everywhere with sallow-skinned, thin, austere Yankee faces. They had the look that Cleo coveted for her dimpled daughter. She was dismayed by Judy’s tendency to be a happy-faced child, and hoped it was merely a phase of growth. A proper Bostonian never showed any emotion but hauteur. Though Cleo herself had no desire to resemble a fish, she wanted to be able to point with the pride of ownership to someone who did.
The Village trolley came clanging up Boylston Street, and Judy clambered up the steps, pushed by her mother and pulled by the motorman. Cleo was pleased to see that there were no other colored passengers aboard. The occupants of the half-filled car were mostly matrons, whose clothes were unmodish and expensive. All of them had a look of distinction. They were neither Cabots nor Lowells, but they were old stock, and their self-assurance sat well on their angular shoulders.
They did not stare at Cleo and Judy, but they were discreetly aware of the pair, and appreciative of their neat appearance. Boston whites of the better classes were never upset nor dismayed by the sight of one or two Negroes exercising equal rights. They cheerfully stomached three or four when they carried themselves inconspicuously. To them the minor phenomenon of a colored face was a reminder of the proud rôle their forebears had played in the freeing of the human spirit for aspirations beyond the badge of house slave.
The motorman steered his rocking craft down a wide avenue and settled back for the first straight stretch of his roundabout run. Cleo looked at the street signs, and her heart began to pound with excitement. This was Brookline. There wasn’t another colored family she knew who had beaten her to it. She would be the first to say, “You must come to see us at our new address. We’ve taken a house in Brookline.”
She began to peer hard at house numbers. A row of red-brick houses began, and Cleo suddenly pulled the bell cord.
“We get off here,” she said to Judy, and shooed her down the aisle.
Cleo walked slowly toward the number she sought, taking in her surroundings. Shade trees stood in squares of earth along the brick-paved sidewalk. Each house had a trim plot of grass enclosed by a wrought-iron fence. The half-dozen houses in this short block were the only brick houses within immediate sight except for a trio of new apartment houses across the way, looking flat-faced and ugly as they squatted in their new cement sidewalk.
In the adjoining block was a row of four or five weathered frame houses with wide front porches, big bay windows, and great stone chimneys for the spiraling smoke of logs on blackened hearths. The area beyond was a fenced-in field, where the sleek and beautiful firehorses nibbled the purple clover and frisked among the wild flowers. Near-by was the firehouse with a few Irish heads in the open windows, and a spotted dog asleep in a splash of sun.
Directly opposite from where Cleo walked was a great gabled mansion on a velvet rise, with a carriage house at the end of a graveled drive. The house was occupied, but there was an air of suspended life about it, as if all movement inside it was slow. Its columned porch and long French windows and lovely eminence gave the house grandeur.
A stone’s-throw away was the winding ribbon of the Riverway Drive, over which the hooves of carriage horses clip-clopped and shiny automobiles choked and chugged. Beyond were the wooded Fens, at the outset of their wild wanderings over the city to Charlesgate.
Cleo was completely satisfied with everything she saw. There were no stoop-sitters anywhere, nor women idling at windows, nor loose-lipped loiterers passing remarks. Her friends who lived in Dorchester, or Cambridge, or Everett had nice addresses, of course. But Brookline was a private world.
She stopped and glanced down at her daughter to see if her ribbed white stockings were still smooth over her knees, and if the bright ribbons on the ends of her bobbing braids were as stiff and stand-out as they had been when she tied them. She scanned the small upturned face, and a rush of protective tenderness flooded her heart. For a moment she thought she had never seen anything as lovely as the deep rich color that warmed Judy’s cheeks. She herself had hated being bright-skinned when she was a child. Mama had made her wash her face all day long, and in unfriendly moments her playmates had called her yaller punkins. Now her northern friends had taught her to feel defensive because Judy was the color of her father.
“Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to,” Cleo warned Judy, and mounted the steps of the house before which they stood.
In a moment or two a colored maid responded to her ring. She looked at Cleo with open-mouthed surprise, then her look became sly and secret. “Y’all come see about the house?” she asked in a conspiratorial whisper.
“I beg your pardon,” Cleo said coolly. “I’ve come to see Mr. Van Ryper.”
The maid’s face froze. She knew these stuck-up northern niggers. Thought they were better than southern niggers. Well, all of them looked alike to the white man. Let this high-yaller woman go down South and she’d find out.
“Step inside,” she said surlily. “You’re letting in flies.”
“I’m sorry,” Cleo said sweetly. “I see a big black fly got in already.” With a dazzling smile she entered the house, and instantly drew a little breath at sight of the spacious hall with its beautiful winding stairway.
“What’s the name?” the maid asked briefly. If this woman wanted to be treated like white folks, at least she wasn’t going to be treated like quality white folks.
“The name is Mrs. Judson,” Cleo said readily. She had been asked a proper question, however rudely, and she was perfectly willing to answer it. This peevish incivility was much less insulting than the earlier intimacy. If she had wanted to gossip with the servant before seeing the master, she would have used the back door.
“Wait here,” the woman said, and began a snail-pace ascent of the stairs, with her rocking buttocks expressive of her scorn.
“Always remember,” said Cleo loudly and sweetly to Judy, “that good manners put you in the parlor and poor manners keep you in the kitchen.” The maid’s broad back seemed to swell the seams of her uniform. “That’s what I’m paying good money to your governess for,” Cleo added impressively. “So you won’t have to wear an apron.”
Judy stared down at her shoes, feeling very uncomfortable because Cleo’s voice was carrying to the woman on the stairs. Miss Binney always said that a lady must keep her voice low, and never boast, and never, never say anything that might hurt somebody’s feelings.
“She heard you,” said Judy in a stricken voice.
Cleo gave her a look of amiable impatience. “Well, I expected her to hear. Who did you think I was talking to? I certainly wasn’t talking to you.”
Her eyes grew lively with amusement as she studied her daughter’s distress. Sometimes she wondered where she had got Judy. Judy had no funny bone. Thea was probably responsible. She had no funny bone either. Their diversions were so watery. What was the sense in Judy’s taking delight in a dog’s wagging tail if she was going to miss the greater eloquence of that woman’s wagging rear, and then look shocked when her mother talked back at it? You really had to love Bostonians to like them. And the part of Cleo that did love them was continually at war with the part of her that preferred the salt flavor of lusty laughter.
Her eyes clouded with wistfulness. The more the years increased between the now and the long ago, the more the broad A’s hemmed her in, the more her child grew alien to all that had made her own childhood an enchanted summer, so in like degree did her secret heart yearn for her sisters. She longed for the eager audience they would have provided, the boisterous mirth she would have evoked
