To-morrow Morning (Parrish)/Chapter 9
THE playroom had been the library once, and Joe's sets of de Maupassant and Balzac were still in the bookcases, but Puff the Pomeranian, the Brownie books, and Miltiades Peterkin Paul were in among them. Under Joe's desk was the cave of Jodie's lion, in private life a bamboo footstool, and glass marbles with their clear twisted colors lay on the carpet and felled the unwary. The tricycle lived behind the playroom door. Through the hall, into the parlor, past the piano, and back into the playroom—that made a race course that Jodie pedaled many times a day, head down, cheeks scarlet, sometimes crying, "Giddap, Clara, old girl!" sometimes, "Choo, choo, choo, choo! Dang dang!" To take a quick turn through the bead portières, the strands sliding over him, cascading tinkling about him, into the dining room and out again, was a forbidden joy often indulged in.
Now the children sat in a solemn row on the old humpy sofa where Joe used to lie and read. Jodie and Charlotte, and Hoagland, too, of course. He was always there, unless they were at his house. Old Shep dozed at their feet, and Kate in her black dress sat opposite them, about to explain how careful they must be, and why, to begin with, they could no longer have chocolate ice cream and orange water ice from Goff's every Sunday. This seemed to her such bad news that she could hardly bear to tell it to them. She clasped her hands tightly in her lap, feeling as much of a child as they, wanting to ask their advice.
Jodie had been stamping himself with the Brownie rubber stamps and the magenta ink pad Carrie Pyne had given him. Carrie's presents! How Kate dreaded them! The box of tools, the wild little kitten that ran up the curtains and clung there, spitting and bristling, now these Brownies, all over the house, under curtains, behind chairs at first, then out in the open, on white door panels, among the petals of wall-paper roses, so that there had been prohibitions and tears. Now there was the Brownie dude in the middle of Jodie's forehead, the Brownie policeman on the back of one hand, and the Chinaman Brownie on the other, which was also ornamented with a large lead horseshoe ring from one of the crackers at Laddie Baylow's birthday party. From the buttonhole of his Russian blouse a sweet pea hung a long mouse tail of green stem. Now where had he gotten that on this day of icicles, Kate wondered. Perhaps he had been down the hill calling on Mr. Clark at the greenhouse. What a funny, mysterious little boy he was, living his own life, safe in his own world, generally. She wanted to take the round face between the palms of her hands, to kiss the top of the silky head with its plume of cowlick. What did the future hold for her little boy? What weapons had she and Joe put into his hands? So loving, so terribly sensitive. When from his own world he came into the outer world, became aware of other people, he was so vulnerable. In radiant delight, he was ready to droop at a glance. "I'm afraid he inherits the artistic temperament from me," Kate thought with sad complacence.
A darling little boy, but he worried her sometimes. He had hours of mimicking people, thinking he was funny. That was atrick he had picked up from Hoagland.
"Now, Jodie, that isn't funny; that's just tiresome!"
And Jodie would echo, mincingly, maddeningly:
"Now, Jodie, that isn't funny; that's just tiresome!"
"Mother's sorry she has such a silly little boy."
"Mother's sorry she has such a silly little boy."
Then he would go around the corner to play with Opal Mendoza, the little girl the Chestnut Street children weren't allowed to play with and couldn't keep away from.
"I simply can't keep him away!" Kate moaned to Mrs. Baylow and Mrs. Jackson.
"Don't I know it! Laddie acts as if he was bewitched!"
"So does Dorothy. She says Opal has life-sized paper dolls with crêpe-paper dresses, and Mrs. Mendoza gives them all pretzels to eat. But, goodness! that doesn't explain anything! I don't know what's got into the children. Those Mendozas! Nobody knows who they are."
"The more I tell Jodie he mustn't go there, the more he wants to."
"So does Laddie. He just up and goes!"
Opal's father was a traveling man; her mother lived hidden by dirty lace curtains. Other gentlemen were at the house a good deal when Mr. Mendoza was away, so Lizzie told Kate. Opal knew how babies came. Opal had seen her father in bed with her mother, and described what she had seen to a scarlet, bewildered group of little girls, squatting, heads together, behind a snowball bush. Opal could beat the boys in a race; she could jump rope longer than anyone, and faster ("Salt, vinegar, mustard, pepper!"), her locket with a turquoise set in a star leaping, hitting her chest. Lizzie, going past the Mendozas' on her Thursday out, had caught the enchanted Jodie turning somersaults with Opal, and had dragged him home, followed by Opal's sweet shrill chant:
"Jodie is a ba-by, and Lizzie is a bug-ger! Lizzie's a bug-ger! Lizzie's a dirty bug-ger!"
Opal's delicate skin was like satin, crusted under her small nose; her ears were dirty; her finger nails were black crescents. Lizzie said she had "things" in her matted spun-silk hair. Extravagant eyelashes curled back from eyes like drowned forget-me-nots. One Sunday, wearing a shirred pink silk bonnet trimmed with dirty white ostrich tips, she turned up at St. Stephen's for Sunday school. There was nothing to do but put her into the class with Charlotte Green and Dotty Jackson and Gladys Blunt.
"What could I do?" wailed Mrs. Partridge to her husband. It is not the first time that a socially climbing lady has caused consternation in the church.
Opal was the only child who didn't have to go home when the shadows began to fall. She would drift up and down Chestnut Street, playing by herself, glimmering through the dark, singing her sweet shrill songs, and respectable children eating their milk toast, brushing their teeth, or saying their prayers heard her, and longed to be out there with her, playing in the night.
It was she who taught Jodie the naughty words that made Kate weep. But Opal had nothing to do with that darkest day of all when Jodie told a lie.
Kate, squeezing warm rain from the rubber bulb sprinkler on the plants in the parlor bay window, saw that a cluster of fragrant waxy buds had been knocked off the lemon tree, a gift of other days from the Cedarmere conservatory, and burst into lamentations.
"Now look at that! Those lovely buds, just as they were coming out! I've been watching them and watching them, and now look at them! Now how in the world did that happen? Could that bad little cat have climbed up there? Mercy! I wouldn't have had that happen for the world! Look, Lizzie! This lovely bunch of buds! Now how do you suppose that happened?"
Lizzie, coming in from clearing the lunch table, pointed at Jodie, stomach down on the rug, crayoning the pictures in a volume of Chatterbox, and mouthed silently: "Ask him."
"Jodie, do you know how these buds got broken off?"
Never was anyone so small, so flat, so absorbedly busy.
"Jodie! Mother's speaking to you! Do you know who broke these buds on mother's lemon tree?"
Jodie put his head down on his arm, and scribbled with the vermilion crayon until it broke. "Pussy," he said in a muffled voice.
Kate went through the afternoon with a heart like a stone. Oh, Joe, I've failed you, she thought. I've let our little boy turn into a liar. Oh, if you were only here to tell me what to do! She could hardly eat any supper; she kissed Jodie good night with a tragic face.
At nine o'clock, as she sat working on one of the green linen frames, heart shaped and decorated with water-color roses and raised gold squiggles, that Mrs. Martine had ordered for Christmas, a small shaky voice called from the top of the stairs.
"Mother" And then in growing panic: "Mother! Mother!"
She ran up to him.
"Mother! Mother!"
"Here I am, darling! Where's mother! Don't cry so, my precious! Tell mother what's the matter."
Sobbing, he told her.
"M-mother—it wasn't p-pussy broke the plant—it was me"
He clung to her; she comforted him, forgave him, until his wild crying was over and he was able, a repentant cherub, to say prayers punctuated by last loud hiccuping sobs.
"Our Father, who art in heaven, Harold be thy Name"
"Our Father, help me to be a good mother to my Jodie," Kate prayed with him, in her heart.
After her husband's death she had felt dead in body and mind. She could not sleep; she could not really wake. But her love for her little boy, her hope for his future, pierced through to her, waking her, breaking her.
Now she sat opposite the three children, appealing to them.
"We must all be very careful, children, and save every penny we can. You'll help me, won't you?"
"Yes, Aunt Kate!"
"Yes, Mrs. Green!"
"Yes, mother!"
Jodie agreed from amiability, Hoagland to be companionable. But Charlotte was thrilled. All the heroines of her favorite books were poor—Jo March, Polly Pepper. Her cheeks burned brighter pink, her eyes glowed behind their glasses. She would make money, somehow, and buy butter for their dry bread—find a recipe for potpourri or wonderful little almond cakes somewhere, behind a secret panel, the way girls did in stories, or paint calendars with sprigs of holly and sell them for Christmas presents. She saw herself cooking—up to the elbows in soapsuds—singing as her hot iron went to and fro, making its shining road, like the girls in Mrs. Whitney's books, who were all so poor, and lived in such an atmosphere of roses and raspberries and fresh white ruffles. "Goody! Goody!" she thought, exalted. "We're going to be poor!"
"And we mustn't expect Santa Claus to bring so much as usual this year—Oh, he'll come, Jodie, of course he'll come, but we mustn't be disappointed if he doesn't bring so many toys as last year."
A quivering Jodie relaxed as Hoagland and Charlotte rolled amused eyes at each other. Hoagland even had to cover his mouth with both his hands, at the mention of Santa Claus, but he and Charlotte said nothing, humoring the young and innocent.
And after all, there were more presents than ever before. Everyone remembered the two little Greens that first Christmas after Joe died.
Kate and Lizzie trimmed the tree, hanging the silver bugles, the rosy bubbles, while the tears went on rolling down Kate's face, and Lizzie was sniffing and saying she had a cold.
"I guess I'll make me a hot lemonade before I go to bed. "You better have one, too, Mis' Green."
"I'll have to get the stepladder, Lizzie; I can't reach to put this star on the top."
"I'll get it." Lizzie ran out into the kitchen and took the opportunity to throw her apron over her head and have a good cry, while Kate put her face down in hands stained by the branches of the little balsam tree. Joe! Joe!
When Lizzie came back they were both firmly cheerful.
"Look at this sugar apple! It started in with the brightest red cheek you ever saw, and it gets paler every year. Jodie can't resist licking it."
"Honest, Mis' Green, didja ever see anything like this doll house? And all the extras, the father and the little carpet sweeper and everything!"
Their faces glowed gently, like two good little girls, as they looked again at the magnificent dolls' house that had come for Charlotte. All the extras, as Lizzie said—the father in full evening dress with waved yellow china hair, the mother in a pink ball gown, the pink-and-white wax cockatoo in a gilt wire cage. And the doll-house food! Ham and eggs, fish with a tiny round of lemon and a touch of paper parsley, sausages, pink pudding with squiggles of chocolate, a little roast chicken.
Master Hoagland Driggs, Jr.'s small calling card was tied to the chimney with holly-red ribbon. Lizzie looked at it, sniffing.
"That one! I'd Master Hoagland Driggs, Junior him, if he was mine!" she said, severely.
"Listen, Lizzie! St. Stephen's chimes! It must be midnight!"
("One of those bells is dreadfully cracked.")
Come and behold Him born the King of angels;
("Sounds awful pretty, though, don't it?")
Oh come, let us adore Him,
Oh come, let us adore Him, Christ the Lord.
"Merry Christmas, Lizzie," Kate said, smiling, with wet eyes.
"M-merry— Oh, dear!"
"Everything's done. Doesn't it look wonderful? I can hardly wait to see the children's faces in the morning!