Grab Bag Page 13

  After we ate, she put on her hat. “I’m going over to see how Aunt Julia survived the night,” she said. “You’re coming with me, Davy.”

  “Aw Ma,” I said, “do I have to?”

  “You certainly do. If you think I’m going to trust you out of my sight after what happened last night, you’re just as loony as your father.” Ma began to laugh again. “Honestly, you two!”

  So we walked up Maple Street, but just before we got to Aunt Julia’s, we met the delivery boy from the ice cream parlor bringing the weekly box of melachrino creams. All of a sudden Ma got the same funny grin on her face Pop did when he started telling Aunt Julia about the burglar. She stopped the delivery boy.

  “I expect those are for my aunt,” she said. “We’ll take them in for you.”

  The boy thanked her, handed her the package, and whizzed off on his two-wheeler. I was watching him go, wishing I had a bicycle, when Ma nudged me in the ribs.

  “Davy, take this candy, quick, and get it out of sight.”

  I grabbed the box and stuffed it down my blouse. We boys all wear middy blouses with drawstrings that tie around our waists. They make handy sacks for swiping apples and stuff. I worked the melachrino creams around to the small of my back so they wouldn’t stick out too much.

  “What am I supposed to do with it, Ma?”

  “Skin over to Miss Hatherton’s and leave it on her doorstep, then ring the bell and run. Try not to let anybody see you.”

  “But Ma, they’re for Aunt Julia.”

  “Don’t argue, Davy. You were quick enough to help your father.”

  She giggled a little, then made her face all stiff and solemn and went on to the house. I slid over to Miss Hatherton’s and left the box like Ma told me to, then I hurried back to Aunt Julia’s. If there was going to be another rumpus, I wanted to be in on it, even if I didn’t see anything funny about giving away two pounds of perfectly good chocolates to a sappy schoolteacher like Miss Hatherton.

  I met Ma and Aunt Julia just coming out the door. “We’re going to take a little walk,” Ma told me. “Aunt Julia needs some fresh air and exercise to calm her nerves.”

  “My nerves are perfectly calm, Alice.” Aunt Julia was fiddling with the catch of her parasol. “After living with your Uncle Hiram all those years, it would take more than a burglar to upset me. Anyway, I guess I taught him a thing or two. I only hope John remembers to bring over the glass and fix that broken windowpane.”

  Poor Pop! All he’d got for his trouble was another odd job. Ma and Aunt Julia started down the street. I tagged along behind. After they’d gone a little way, Ma said, “Do you mind if we stop in at Millie Hatherton’s for a minute? I want to borrow one of her crochet patterns.”

  “I thought you hated to crochet,” said Aunt Julia.

  “Well, I’m trying to learn to enjoy it,” Ma mumbled.

  Anyway, they went up and rang Miss Hatherton’s doorbell. The box wasn’t on the doormat any more, I noticed. I hoped she’d have the decency to pass it around, at least.

  I needn’t have worried. We’d hardly got inside the door before Miss Hatherton was waving that fancy two-pound box of melachrino creams under our noses. She made sure Aunt Julia saw the card saying, “With Miles Peabody’s compliments,” too.

  All of a sudden Aunt Julia was looking pretty sick. “No thank you, Millie,” she said when Miss Hatherton offered her the box of candy.

  “But Aunt Julia,” I piped up, “I thought you were crazy over melachrino creams.”

  “I don’t care for any, thank you,” she said in a voice cold enough to freeze the whiskers off a polar bear. “Alice, I believe I’d better go home. My nerves are a trifle on edge this morning.”

  She was halfway home before she spoke another word. Then she let go. “That whey-faced Millie Hatherton!”

  “Most people think Millie’s rather an attractive young woman,” said Ma.

  “Young, indeed! She’s thirty-five if she’s a day. And how anybody could abide that sweet-sweet voice and those silly curls dangling over her forehead—Aunt Julia flounced into the house and practically slammed the door in our faces.

  “What’s got into her?” I said. “She claimed she wasn’t nervous before.”

  “Women’s nerves are funny things.” Ma was smiling again, don’t ask me why. “Run on ahead and set the table, like a good boy. Your father will have to eat his lunch in a hurry if he’s going to fix that window.” She was laughing out loud by the time she finished talking.

  “I don’t see what’s so funny,” I said.

  “You will, some day. Now if Miles Peabody only has sense enough to keep quiet.”

  “About what, Ma?”

  “Honestly, men are so dense.”

  I didn’t know whether she meant Mr. Peabody or Pop or all three of us, so I just went and set the table. Pop came home, gobbled down his grub, and tore off to set that pane of glass for Aunt Julia. He was pretty sore about it when he left, but he came back grinning like a catfish.

  “Guess what, Alice? Miles Peabody stopped by to see how your aunt was doing after her scare, and she fell all over him. Asked him in for a bite, waited on him like a king, fed him two pieces of pie. Last I saw, she was sitting on the arm of his chair, tucking a pillow behind his head and lighting his cigar.”

  He grabbed Ma and gave her a big hug. “Guess your old man’s not so dumb after all, eh?”

  Ma stuck her head up over Pop’s shoulder and winked at me. “You’re wonderful, John.” The queer thing was, she sounded as if she meant it.

  So that’s how Mr. Peabody got to be Uncle Miles. Pop told him the real story about the burglar quite a long time after the wedding. Uncle Miles almost laughed himself sick. So then I told him about Miss Hatherton and the melachrino creams and that’s when he gave me the genuine timber wolf’s tooth. He said I’d earned it. I still don’t quite see how.

  Force of Habit

  TWICE IN MY LIFE I have had the interesting experience of dreaming an entire story from start to finish, writing it down the next morning, and later selling it. This was the first, and is the only story of its kind I’ve written so far. It was published in Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine, July 1965, as “Quietly, by Night.”

  I had been sleeping badly ever since my husband died. My first night in the new apartment was not likely to be a good one. I put off going to bed as long as I could, but at last it became pointless to sit up any longer.

  It is a disagreeable business, taking off your warm clothes long after the heat has gone out of the pipes in a house that is not your own. Your nightgown is cold, the bathroom is cold, the sheets are coldest of all when there is no long-familiar though perhaps not greatly loved body sharing them with you. I had a hot water bottle, but it seemed a ridiculously small thing in the midst of so much emptiness. So I lay and shivered.

  At least the place was quiet. Below me lived two deaf old sisters. Above was only the dressmaker’s flat, empty now that the woman had died. I’d happened to notice the obituary notice in the paper because it was near my husband’s. Suddenly while at work, it had said. There was still a dirty card reading SERAPHINE LABERES, DRESSMAKING AND ALTERATIONS stuck over the mailbox. If she’d gone a week earlier, I could have had my choice of the two apartments. Perhaps the top floor would be lighter and airier. But the middle was always the warmest, my brother-in-law told me.

  It certainly was quiet. “Next door to a convent,” my brother-in-law kept reminding me, as though this was an advantage. In fact neither one of us know the first thing about convents, and very little about the Protestant church with which we fancied ourselves to be affiliated. My brother-in-law is one of those fat, red-faced men who like to point out the obvious in loud, hearty voices with a view to cheering one up. I was sick of him and his everlasting good intentions.

  Gradually, as my body warmed the bed, I began to experience something like a sense of comfort. All that was behind me now: Henry’s illness, the hospital visits, the funeral, the awkward condo
lences and the forced replies, the exhausting and harrowing toil of breaking up my long-established household, the disagreeable business of the insurance. My brother-in-law really had been helpful over that. He enjoyed making the company disgorge money just because somebody had died, even though neither the loss nor the gain was his. “Nicely provided for,” he’d kept repeating, pleased as though he’d been the farsighted one himself.

  There was plenty for me to live on. Nevertheless, I should find something to do. I was not used to being idle. It might be pleasant to hold a job again, if one could be found in our gone-to-seed mill town. I could leave this quiet three-room flat every morning and not come back until suppertime. In between, there would be things to do and people to talk to. Not that I was much of a talker myself, but others would chat and I should hear the cheerful noise of voices. And on the weekends when my brother-in-law’s wife telephoned to invite me to Sunday dinner, I could say, “Thank you, Martha, but I’ve been working all week and I have to stay home and clean my rooms.”

  Grateful to have a plan, I dropped off to sleep.

  As I mentioned, I had not been sleeping well and it took very little to wake me up. A flicker of lights on the ceiling did it this time. I lay for some while on my back, looking up at them, wondering what they could be. They were too small and feeble to be car lights; they moved in a confused, vaguely circular pattern. Finally I reached for my robe, stuck my feet into my slippers, and padded over to the window.

  Two thoughts passed through my mind at the same time: “What on earth are they doing?” and “My brother-in-law was wrong.”

  Next door to a convent was not such a quiet place after all, it appeared. The nuns were conducting some sort of candlelight ceremony in the narrow, iron-railed garden below my window. I could barely make them out, ungainly shapes in their old-style long black robes, each with a lighted taper casting occasional yellowish gleams on her gray-white cowl. The flames looked so weak I wondered how they could possibly shine into my room, yet when I looked behind me, there were those tiny spots of light still reflected on the ceiling.

  I tried to make out what they were doing, but there seemed no pattern or sense to their milling about. With some difficulty, I counted them. Fourteen. The number carried no significance that I knew of. After a while I got bored watching them and went back to bed. At once, as though I’d flipped a switch, the lights were gone. Out of curiosity I got up and went over to the window again. The garden was empty. I lay down once more, wondering if they did this every night and whether I’d get used to it.

  The following day turned out far different and far busier than I had anticipated. To begin with, I still had a good deal of unpacking and settling to do. In the midst of this, the telephone man came. No sooner had he got the instrument installed than I impulsively picked it up and called the town library, where I’d worked before my marriage. Miss Harcourt was still there, quite old by now, of course, but she remembered me.

  “Anna Harris. No, it’s Anna Goodbody now, isn’t it? … Indeed we’d rejoice to have you back. It’s so hard to get anyone suitable nowadays, with all the halfway intelligent girls moving away where they can get higher pay.” And so on, for quite a while. She asked if I could fill in at the North Branch that very evening, as it was the regular woman’s daughter’s birthday and she’d been hoping to get off.

  Happy to be of use again, I said yes I thought I could manage all right and no I didn’t mind a bit, though I couldn’t make out whether I was not supposed to mind the short notice or the low wages. After a very complicated series of phone calls, it was arranged for me to be on duty at seven o’clock. This meant a quick pressing out of a suitable dress, a scratch supper, and a fast walk to the North Branch.

  I got through the two hours easily, glad to be back in the musty-smelling old building I had been so glad to leave twenty-seven years before. Whoever was in charge of the North Branch these days had been sadly neglectful about reading the shelves. I managed to get quite a lot of the nonfiction straightened out as not many borrowers came in and only three or four teenagers giggled halfheartedly at the reference tables. I went home thoroughly tired and quite pleased with myself.

  That night I had no trouble falling asleep, but I was awakened sometime after midnight by the nuns’ little lights flickering on my ceiling. I tried to ignore them but I suppose I was too keyed up after my whirlwind day. Anyway, I got out of bed again and went to look. There they were, each with her candle, moving around in that same aimless, wavery circle.

  Knowing nothing about Catholic orders, I was free to speculate. Maybe this was one of those cloistered convents where nobody spoke. They weren’t speaking now, anyway, the sound would have carried up to me. Maybe they weren’t allowed out in the daytime. To be sure, I saw nuns around town fairly often, but perhaps they were from a different convent, or perhaps some could go and others had to stay. It seemed odd, but the whole concept of the religious life is beyond me. I gave up wondering and idly counted them again. Fifteen. One more than the night before. Unless I’d counted wrong.

  I had not. Every night after that, I witnessed the same performance. Every night there was one more nun in the yard. It got to be a sort of game. I dropped off about half-past ten, fully expecting to be wakened roughly two hours later. When the lights started to flicker on the ceiling, I got up, counted the number of candle flames—this was easier than trying to sort out the black shapes of the nuns themselves—and went back to bed. As soon as I was back under the covers, the lights would disappear from the ceiling. It was as though I controlled the amount of time those poor creatures were allowed to spend in the yard, and I must admit it gave me a queer feeling.

  What with these nightly interruptions, my job, and keeping up the apartment, I found I was always tired, and I must have looked it. Miss Harcourt spoke to me.

  “I hope the work here isn’t too much for you, Anna.”

  “Oh no,” I said. As a matter of fact, it was nothing compared to when Henry was alive. “It’s just that I haven’t been getting enough sleep on account of the nuns.”

  “The nuns?” She stared at me, quite startled. “Whatever do you mean?”

  I explained about the nightly perambulations and the lights on my ceiling. She shook her head.

  “That is strange. I’ve lived here all my life, and I never heard of such a thing.”

  “I thought perhaps they couldn’t go out during the day or something,” I ventured.

  “No, that can’t be it. They are a working order. A number of them teach at the parochial school. You must have seen them in here about the Catholic book lists. Some of the others run the thrift shop and that little place beside it that sells religious statues and whatnot. I believe they also go around visiting shut-ins and taking food to the needy. This is a poor parish, you know, since the mill closed down.”

  She didn’t have to tell me that. One had only to walk down our main street and look at the dirt-streaked store windows, many of them empty except for torn paper signs with maybe a flyspecked cardboard display or a forgotten paper coffee cup, and see the women shuffling along in cheap, thin old coats with the hems dragging and sleazy kerchiefs tied over their curlers.

  “I simply cannot understand what they’d be doing out there at that hour of the night,” Miss Harcourt was still fussing. “Perhaps if you spoke to the Mother Superior, she could have them use the other side of the yard.”

  “How many are there?” I asked her.

  “I really couldn’t say for sure. Quite a large group, I believe, many of them fairly old. They were brought here not long after the war, when things were booming, and apparently just stayed on. Nowhere else to go, I suppose, like the rest of us.” She sighed and went back to her dingy office, leaving me to cope with the week’s circulation records.

  Over the weekend it wasn’t so bad, as I could sleep late both mornings. There was also the pleasure of refusing Martha’s invitation to Sunday dinner. She and my brother-in-law took the news of my job as I had e
xpected, pleased that they now had an excuse not to bother with me, annoyed because I’d taken the step without consulting them. I didn’t care. Already my life was taking on a pattern in which they would have no part.

  I did think of dropping a gentle remark to my brother-in-law that life next door to a convent was less rosy than he’d painted it, but I refrained. He might feel it his duty to take steps, and I did not want him interfering. After all, if the nuns chose to exercise in their own garden, whose business was it but their own?

  By the following Wednesday afternoon, when I caught myself falling asleep over the books I was mending in the staff room, the mellow mood had worn off. My nightly count had reached twenty-two by then. The mailman had told me there were fifty—sisters, he called them—in residence at the convent. That probably meant I had twenty-three more nights of broken sleep to endure. Then, for all I knew, they’d be starting over again. Honestly, it was too much.

  Glancing up from my work, I happened to see one of the daytime nuns passing toward the circulation desk. I got up and went out to intercept her.

  “Good afternoon,” I said quite politely, all things considered. “I’m Mrs. Goodbody. I happen to be a neighbor of yours.”

  “A neighbor?” She was an elderly woman as Miss Harcourt had said she’d be, good-natured and not particularly bright looking, wearing gold-rimmed glasses that had been clumsily mended with adhesive tape. “Oh, you mean you live in the house next to the convent. Then you must have known our dear Seraphine.” She beamed as though that made us friends.

  “No, I’m afraid I never did,” I told her. “I moved in just after she died.”

  I don’t think the nun heard me. “We all miss her so,” she went on, picking at the frayed edges of her sleeves. “She was so wonderfully kind to us.”

  She made the sign of the cross and wandered on to join another of her order who was talking with Miss Harcourt at the desk. I didn’t like to go chasing after her again. Feeling defeated and cross, I went back to mending books. A few minutes later, Miss Harcourt came in.