Ella Maud Read online

  She became conscious of a strange sound. It was an intermittent chirping, like a bird’s, and it came from the vicinity of the sofa. Had the cat brought another live animal into the house? She would have looked for it, but didn’t interrupt Nell and Jim. They were making the most inane of small-talk, as Jim went on smiling and Nell sat and blushed and looked into the carpet.

  “So how do you find Betsy City so far?” he was asking.

  “I find it exceedingly fine,” she replied.

  At this lie, Ollie coughed into her hand.

  “Compared to the big city like Brooklyn, it must be awful dull.”

  “It has its compensations.”

  “That it does. I’ve been here all my life, and have no plan to leave.”

  “Have you traveled up north, Mr. Wilcox?”

  “Only as far as Norfolk. My boss hired a bunch of us to take a boat up there last year, through the canal. She was the sweetest little skipjack.”

  “How fascinating. Did you see any Red Indians?”

  Jim laughed. “Not a one. But the fishing was good.”

  They went on like this until Ollie stood up to gather the service. This indicated that the interview had gone on for the appropriate time.

  “I sure do appreciate your mother receiving me, Miss Olive,” said Jim, taking his cue. “Miss Nell, may I call on you again?”

  “Of course you may.”

  Nell walked him into the hall, and that strange chirping followed him.

  “Nell, may I talk to you outside for a minute?”

  Nell glanced to Ollie, who shrugged.

  On the porch, Jim reached into his jacket pocket. From it he withdrew something Nell could not have expected: a live bluebird. It was a fine specimen, with plumage as blue as Nell’s own eyes. She peeped with delight as he held the bird under her chin.

  “He’s yours,” Jim said. “What would you have me do with this fellow?”

  “Fellow? It’s so beautiful, it must be a girl.”

  “Of course! How could it be otherwise?”

  She looked into Jim’s eyes with frank wonderment. “You had that in your pocket the entire time?”

  “Well, I didn’t exactly catch her in your parlor.”

  “You are a unique fellow, Mr. Wilcox. I think you know what to do.”

  Jim opened his hand. The bird stood on his palm for a moment, as if surprised it had not been eaten. Then it lit out with a fluttery blur.

  From the porch, Nell watched Jim cross the front yard to the road. Jim, resisting temptation, did not look back, but kept walking with an easy, swinging gait that declared his good fortune to the world.

  She was still watching him when her father came around the side of the house.

  “So who’s the bantam?” he asked her.

  IV.

  The dining room at Seven Pines was used for more than dining. Far from reserved for formal gatherings and holidays, it was a place for casual evenings. Strangers were shown into the parlor, where all the best furniture, curtains, rugs and bric-a-brac were on display. The dining room, however, was for household and friends. Equipment for play—checkerboards, chess sets, decks of cards—were kept there, as would the master’s collection of pipes, and the family’s musical instruments, and the sewing boxes of the women and girls. Meals were served, of course. But the time spent dining in the dining room dwindled in comparison to the time conversing, reading, playing, and otherwise entertaining each other, in the long nights before electricity.

  The Cropsey dining room was entirely typical. It had a heavy mahogany table, lined with matching chairs. The sideboard did not match but was of the same heavy wood, with drawers for the china and the three kinds of tablecloths—linen for breakfast, finer linen for dinner, and oilcloth for messier activities. Two armchairs sat by the front window, with a little bookcase between them.

  Most evenings, the girls gathered around the table, mending clothes, making alterations for the season, or doing ornamental needlework. When they had it in mind to make dresses, they covered the table so completely with paper patterns that their father complained there was not a spot to put down his newspaper. Lettie’s contribution to industry was a wreath spun out of hair collected from everyone in the family. The project involved braiding the individual strands, and weaving in dried flowers and other bits of ornament for a keepsake that would be framed and displayed in the parlor.

  She had done this work, and her sisters their sewings, by the light of oil lamps that were painfully dim. And indeed, few of the homes on Riverside Avenue had electricity yet. Even if they did, Mary Cropsey would have found the light of one of those newfangled bulbs painfully garish. To her, the amount of light in a house at night was a moral issue: too much was profligate, indicating misplaced priorities. Better a homemaker need glasses by thirty years old than declare her lack of economy to the world. And so Nell and Ollie went on with their needlework, and Lettie braiding her wreath, and resigned themselves to inevitable nearsightedness as the price for fine heirlooms.

  Jim Wilcox became a fixture in the Cropsey dining room. He came over after work every Tuesday and Thursday, and Sundays too. He was there for Nell, but all the Cropsey girls came to look forward to his arrival. He brought them treats: fresh fruit, cakes, sticks of hard candy, shellfish from the docks if it was fresh. Nor did he neglect the brothers. Douglas got a fishing rod Jim used himself as a boy, and William H. a yo-yo carved out of whalebone. The children raced each other to the door when he knocked, thundering down the stairs and plunging through doors with a deafening racket.

  William Cropsey himself never got up to answer Jim’s knocking. In fact, other than a brief inspection during Jim’s second visit, Mr. Cropsey paid scarce attention to this other adult male in his house. He never sat in the dining room on the evenings when Jim was there. If he was working in the garden outside or in the work shed at the back, and Jim offered to help him, Cropsey would never accept. Instead, he would thank Jim in such a perfunctory way it seemed to Nell to verge on rudeness. She told him as much—to the general discomfort of the rest of her family. But her father did not apologize, and didn’t change.

  Jim came to evenings at the Cropseys and took his usual chair by the window. He was unfailingly pleasant, speaking only in the most polite and general terms, and never dominated conversation. When Uncle Hen brought out his fiddle and Nell her harmonica, he would lean forward, beating the tune on his knee, beaming from ear to ear. Once he took a pair of spoons from the sideboard and joined in. This was as happy a moment as Nell could remember since moving away from Brooklyn. Alas, Jim never played the spoons again after word came down from the matriarch (indirectly, of course) that she did not appreciate her utensils being used in that way. It was—until the very end—the sole thing Jim did of which Mary Cropsey disapproved.

  If he was allowed to stay long enough, he would pitch in to help the girls prepare the table for breakfast the next day. After laying on the morning tablecloth, they would put out the tea cups and the saucers, the napkins and egg cups and the brass tray with bottles of oyster ketchup, anchovy sauce, and mustard. And when that was done, Nell would turn down the lamps. Jim would watch as the light drained from her face, fading from yellow to red as her eyes flitted and glanced at him. Those last, dusky rays of light seemed to shine through her, lighting her from within, making her every inch the ethereal domestic angel of his dreams. To his eyes, she was as beautiful as one of those wild-haired sirens on the labels of soap wrappers and biscuit tins. This sometimes moved him to take liberties. But she would deflect him deftly, with a smile, and see him out onto the porch. There she would give him a kiss on the cheek, and see him on his way into the night.

  Not so long after, the family’s confidence in Jim rose to the point where they’d let him take Nell out for the evening. There were regular shows at the Academy of Music, where she particularly enjoyed the classical offerings and the legitimate dances. Jim preferred the comedies and burlesques, but he was gentleman enough to make it see
m as if he enjoyed the odd concerto—especially when he subtly slipped his hand over her’s, and Nell allowed him to caress her fingers. Ollie, playing chaperone, gave her sister a sharp tap on the arm. Jim withdrew his hand. But both he and Nell would sit with smiles on their faces, as if they shared a secret.

  On nice days Jim took Nell (and Ollie, or Lettie, or whomever was chaperone) out in a rowboat. He would take them across the river to the Camden side, where they’d have beer and oysters fresh from the reef. On the way back, Nell would have preferred to float a bit, like she did with her sisters, but Jim wanted to keep rowing, to show his strength.

  Sometimes during these wanderings Nell would remove a glove and let her hand trail in the water. When she took it out, her fingers were slightly discolored, and smelled of turpentine. The smell was not native to the river — there was a varnish factory on the shore that dumped its waste into the water. But Nell didn’t mind. To her nose, the odor betokened a cleansing, antiseptic modernity.

  There were horse races at the Fairgrounds, which were less than a mile south of Seven Pines. Nell went for the thrill of the event, and to see all the ladies of the town dressed in their finest hats and frocks. Jim liked the betting. He would try to get the Cropsey girls interested in the pastime, explaining what ‘odds’ and ‘handicaps’ meant and the various kinds of wagers. The girls understood it all, but feigned disinterest, because the activity seemed—if not disreputable—so thoroughly masculine. If they did bet, it would always be on the basis of which horse was the handsomest, or had a prettier name. Sometimes, this strategy worked better than Jim’s sophisticated calculations.

  In the summer, there was rollerskating at the town rink. Like the races, this was popular with the sexes for different reasons: for the ladies, it was the exhilaration of movement, as when the Cropsey girls formed a line and played “crack the whip”; for the gentlemen, it was the likelihood that the ladies would end up prone on the ground, their ankles and hopefully their shins showing.

  Jim skated like he rowed: with a furious intensity. After he took a few slow turns around the rink with Nell on his arm and a sister on the other, Nell would sense his impatience, and turn him loose. Jim launched himself, orbiting the rink with his shoulders down and arms pumping like the cranks of a locomotive. He was fast, and delighted in his speed, but also graceful, never colliding with anyone. When he lapped the girls, he doffed his cap as he coasted by.

  Nell watched him with a faint look of vicarious delight—with all her stays and undergarments and the weight of skirts around her legs, she could never hope to skate that fast. Ollie looked at the other townspeople, who observed Jim with an amusement that struck her as less than flattering. In fact, it seemed to her as if they were laughing at him. His exertions, far from conveying strength and grace, seemed in their eyes to be comedic. Instead of a charging bull, his hunched-over posture made him seem ever so chimp-like.

  Ollie held public opinion in breezy disdain, but that only applied in the abstract. When her family was involved, she found herself utterly conventional. Jim, after all, was a native of the town, and was better-known around the rink than the Cropseys. If his reputation was that of a public clown, what might that do to Nell’s, by association with him? Or to any of the other members of her family, for that matter? As Ollie watched Jim glide by, cap resting with mock solemnity on his heart, these thoughts assaulted her.

  Jim had been courting her for three months when Nell at last asked her opinion. It was a Sunday night after Jim had left, and the sisters were in the bed they shared. In the faint, watery light of a half-moon, Ollie could just make out Nell’s face, turned toward her on her pillow.

  “So what do you think of our Mr. Wilcox?”

  “You mean your Mr. Wilcox.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Ollie rolled away, hiding her face from Nell. “What do you like about him?” she asked.

  “He’s sweet. He’s good-looking. He makes me laugh.”

  “Those are good things.”

  “He’s ever so strong, too. He lifted me into the buggy once when there was a puddle. I felt as light as goose down.”

  “Well, he does lift things as an occupation.”

  There was a pause as they listened. The windows were open, and there were frogs in the trees along the road. Somewhere on the river, a languorous bell tilted as a boat rocked at anchor.

  “So you won’t be plain with me?” Nell asked.

  “I don’t see how it matters what I think. But if it’s that important to you—he’s a fine fellow. We certainly can’t fault his persistence.”

  “And his attention. I’ve never caught him looking at someone else.”

  “That’s something,” Ollie replied.

  “Well, I know you don’t like him.”

  “You know nothing of the kind. I like him fine.”

  The grandfather clock in the hall chimed midnight. Ollie knew it would have been better to let the conversation lapse, but gave in to temptation:

  “I don’t put any stock in what’s said. And you shouldn’t either.”

  Ollie wanted to snatch these words back the second they left her lips.

  “What have you heard said?” Nell demanded. And when the other hesitated, she added, “Well?”

  “Nothing. Just idle chatter. It’s not worth a minute’s sleep.”

  “I’m sure it isn’t. What is it?”

  “It’s just…that he was the first one to court you since we moved here.”

  “And I should have broken some other hearts first?”

  “Something like that.”

  Nell rolled over, so the sisters now had their backs presented to each other.

  “And do you agree with them? That I should have rejected Jim just because he was the first?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Good.”

  Soon the rhythm of Nell’s breathing told Ollie she was asleep. In all their years sharing bedrooms, the younger sister had always slept easily. Ollie rolled on her back, and on her side, and back again. For lying, for reporting what she thought as general gossip, she sweated with regret. She lay like that, basted by self-loathing, until the clock chimed one. Then she muttered a single word into the darkness:

  “Damn.”

  V.

  I went down to de ribber, I didn’t mean to stay,

  But dere I see so many gals, I couldn’t get away…

  At sixty acres, the farm the Cropseys rented from the Fearings was one of the largest in the city. William Cropsey took a measure of satisfaction from this, and felt responsibility for making the ground productive. From the very first year of his tenancy, he was determined to take full advantage of every square inch of ground. His crop of choice was the Irish potato.

  As the climate afforded the possibility of three crops a year, this entailed a lot of seed potatoes. Before a crop was sown, the Cropsey children were assigned—in addition to their other household duties—to prepare thousands of them for setting. In the yard, he and Uncle Hen set up planks on sawhorses for rude tables; the children had to stand at them (no chairs allowed) and cut the seed potatoes into pieces. Each piece had to contain at least two eyes—a condition Cropsey enforced by inspecting every one. Once approved, the pieces were left on the tables under canvas covers for two weeks, to cure.

  The cutting was done with ancient, dull knives Cropsey kept in a bucket in the shed. They were dull on purpose, for the drudgery of the job, the hours upon hours of eye-finding and sectioning, put the children into a half-stupor that could easily result in cut fingers.

  Ollie dreaded those days. To avoid the midday heat, she got up before dawn to wash, dress and help prepare breakfast for the family. She was out at the tables as the sun rose, and stayed there for at least four hours. She wore canvas gloves, because she had learned from experience that the roughness of the knife handle, and the repetitive motion of slicing and slicing again, would have worn her bare hands raw. Her father was always there, always ready with st
urdy aphorisms like “One saves oneself much pain, by taking pains” and “No one ever plowed a field by turning it over in his mind.” The first piece of poorly sectioned potato he would merely throw aside. If he found another, he would throw it in the cutter’s face. There was rarely a third.

  Despite his supervision, Ollie’s mind wandered. On hot days, she wondered how few layers of clothing she could get away with—might she manage with just drawers, chemise and her dress? But of course her mother would notice the lack of petticoats merely from the way her skirts draped. Or else her brothers would, and delight in telling their parents when their sisters went out sans pudeur. As she sank into the monotonous, repetitive task, her mind assumed a state much like dreaming. She envisioned standing in the boat as Wilcox rowed Nell and her back from Camden, the breeze in her hair, which was suddenly loosed from its pile on her head and left to fly. The sensation of her hair against her neck was alien to her. She had been told she had a handsome head of it, black and lustrous like the body of a grand piano. She imagined her hair spread on the surface of a piano, pouring over the stand and among the ivories—and blushed at the indecency. But she also felt her blood quicken.

  Such silly thoughts. At night, in the dark, she would sometimes grab a handful of her hair and clasp it over her nose. She liked her smell, a floral hint mixed with straw and sweat and soap grease. She never did this when there was a chance Nell was awake and might see her. Once, her curiosity got the better of her and she leaned over Nell. The latter’s breathing was slow and deep, so Ollie bent down and buried her nose in her sister’s tresses. To her surprise, Nell’s personal perfume was different—it was sugary, like gingerbread, though it was not the holidays and they had done no baking that day. She lingered there for too long, until Nell suddenly turned over in her sleep and Ollie almost swooned with mortification. She bolted back to her side of the bed. Whenever she thought back on this incident, as when she cut potatoes, she felt that humiliation again, as it ripened into a pang of shame.