Chapter 2: One More

The wall was lath and plaster and the bed stood against it. Two women had drawn their chairs up to a lamp on the other side, and every word came through, and after a while they stopped minding whether it did.

“Dilly. Are you listening to me, or are you counting the cracks in the plaster?”

“I’m listening.”

“Then say something back.”

“I’m saying something back.”

Fanny had been born in this house, her mother before her and her mother’s aunt before that, and she carried what she knew the way another woman carries a purse: close to the body, counted often, and opened when there was somebody worth opening it for. Dilly was sixteen and soft and afraid of being spoken to by anyone above stairs.

“Did you see old Mrs. Vance’s face at the burying?”

“I saw it.”

“Then you know what it did.”

Dilly said nothing. Fanny took the silence for an invitation, which it was not, and went on anyway.

“The look came across the open ground at the burying and landed on Mrs. Walter Vance, and it stayed on her back all the way to the house. And then yesterday noon the word goes round that the child is to stop where she is and her meals are to be carried up. Nothing said about the rooms. Nothing said about what was promised before. Carried up.”

“She said the fever’s not off her.”

“The fever,” Fanny said, “has been saying a great deal lately. The fever sat in the back parlor last night and told Mrs. Hale the linen was to go to the wash Friday and not before, because the house is not to smell of soap when there’s company.”

Dilly laughed and put her hand over her mouth.

“Anyhow you know why the old lady’s got her knife out.”

“The widow.”

“Her own girl in black a year, and Mrs. Aldridge coming up Water Street this morning in the Philadelphia carriage with her trunks on behind.” Fanny counted on her fingers, which she did when she had a list. “The burying Wednesday. The carriage this morning. The south room fired since six for her boy, which is more than the front parlor’s had, and the front parlor is where the company sits. That’s three in one week, and she’s not the sort to swallow three.”

“And Mr. Walter?”

“Up at the mill with the old man’s hand on him any hour of the day. Made a place for him and can take it away, and don’t think the old lady doesn’t know it.”

“It’s all peddling money,” Dilly said, trying it out.

“It’s all peddling money,” Fanny said, “and where’s the harm in it? My grandmother sold worsted off a barrow and she was never ashamed of it. But money buys you a pew and a bridge with your name on it and a clock on the courthouse, and it does not buy you a grandfather, and I’ll thank nobody to tell me different. And it’s a fine thing to hear a woman count which wife’s children you are as though it were a Bible and not a ledger.”

“Fanny.”

“Well, and it’s a fine thing for this house to be counting at all. There’s families in this county would give their eyes for what this house has got, and they don’t sit at table counting wives.”

“Was it true about the pond?” Dilly said. “My mother told it, but my mother tells things wrong.”

“Your mother tells things wrong. My mother was in this house then. The old man had the two of them down by the pond — his own girl, the one that’s a widow now, and the cousin he raised, the one that’s coming this morning — and the judge and his son came round the far side. The son. The one that had been out in the weather with his father and come home with a name and no wife. And the old man walked them along the water as slow as you like. And the son looked, and he took the pretty one.”

“And the old lady had wanted the match for her own girl.”

“She’d have had it in writing if she could have got it in writing. And after, there was nothing she could say, because the boy did the choosing and the choosing was done in front of his father.”

“Handsomest man in Philadelphia, they say.”

“They say. And the old man got him for the price of a doctor and a night’s lodging at the canal, and don’t let anybody tell you that wasn’t money well spent.”

“You shouldn’t say that.”

“I’m not saying it. I’m saying what the town says. The town says a great deal more than I do.”

“And her boy this morning?”

“You were at the window yourself.”

“I saw his hat.”

“His hat,” Fanny said, with scorn. “I saw the whole of him on the step. He’ll be handsomer than his father, and his father was a picture, and I’ll tell you what else: he’ll know it before he’s twenty and it’ll do him no good at all.”

“Hush. What if she hears?”

“She’s asleep.”

“She’s been asleep three days.”

“Then she’ll sleep a fourth.”

“She’s eight years old,” Dilly said, “and she’s got nobody at all.”

“She’s got a room and a fire and you and me,” Fanny said, “which is more than you had at eight, and more than I had, and I was born here.”

“She’ll be down today, then,” Dilly said. “With the rest of them.”

“She’ll not, and you’ll hear a number before noon that has her in it.” Fanny set her hands on her knees. “Her own’s four girls. She’ll say five.”

“Five?”

“Five,” Fanny said, “and she’ll count the one in the back room this week and not next, and I’d like to see the woman in this county who counts truer.”

“Well,” Dilly said, and then nothing else.

“Now come on. There’s the front hall carpet to go over again before noon and Mrs. Hale has counted the spoons twice already.”

“She’ll count them a third time.”

“She will.”

On the other side of the wall the chairs scraped and the door opened, and their voices went out into the passage and away along it and down the back stairs, and the room went quiet.

She had listened to the whole of it without moving, and now she took it out and went over it the way a woman goes over a market list.

Her mother had been hired to sew. That was the first line of it and there was no getting around it. Lena had come into this house with a workbox and no people, and she had died in a room over a kitchen, and she had been buried in the free ground behind the churchyard, which is where the county puts people who have nobody to pay for a stone. There was no uncle with a yard, no cousin in the freight office, nobody whose name could be dropped in a room and picked up again.

Her father was the second son. He had a good word from everybody and a place at the mill that his father had made for him and could take away. He was not the son who ran things. He was the son who was liked.

And she was a ward. The word had been chosen the way a coat is chosen for a boy who will grow into it: large, plain, and not to be discussed.

That was the top of the sheet.

The bottom of the sheet was a room, a fire, a jug filled every morning, meals carried up on a tray, and two women in this house who knew her name and used it.

There were girls in this town who slept four to a bed over a shop and were at the mill by six.

So: not a step up. Not a step down either. Middling. She lay and looked at the ceiling and let the arithmetic run out, and it came out where it had come out the day before and the day before that.

There was a thing to be done with the afternoon, and she had already decided against it. She went over it once more anyway.

Down the front stairs, washed and dressed and put into the black, into her aunt’s old sitting room, and stood in the doorway with her hands folded until somebody noticed her. That was the whole of it. Somebody would say her name. Somebody would say, poor thing. She would be a small sad sight for the length of one afternoon, and then her aunt would go back to Philadelphia on the train with her trunks and her boy, and the house would close over the place where she had been.

What it bought: an aunt’s word. And her aunt would be gone in a fortnight. The woman who decided what came up on the tray would still be here.

What it cost: standing up on the third day of a fever, and the whole house knowing she had put herself forward on the one afternoon she had been told to keep to her bed, and questions. Questions were the worst of it. A child is asked things and is expected to answer like a child.

So: no.

What she had would do. She turned it over and could find nothing wrong with it, and she was not going to get a better position by being seen on a Thursday.

What she wanted, more than the aunt, was to be told things. That was the cheaper habit, and it had paid for itself twice over before noon. On the other side of the wall, in one hour, there had been more than she had got out of the whole house in two days: who had died and who had been buried and who had looked at whom at the burying, which wife’s children were worth what, and how much of the county’s goodwill this family had bought with a doctor’s bill. Two women talking on the other side of a wall are the cheapest newspaper in the world.

The chair scraped. A hand came down on the latch.

“Come in,” she said.

Fanny came in with the tray and set it on the stool and stood back from it with her hands folded one over the other, the way she did everything. She was twenty-two, and she had a great deal of this house in her head, and she had never in her life been in a room where she did not know more than the person she was speaking to.

“You’re awake, then.”

“I’m awake.”

“There’s water in the jug. There’s bread and there’s a little soup, and it’s not much of a soup, but the kitchen has the dinner on and the dinner is the dinner. And if you’ll sit up and let me do your hair, you can be down the front stairs in a quarter of an hour in the blue, and nobody will know you’ve been ill at all.”

“Did she send for me?”

Fanny’s hands came apart and went back together.

“Did she send for me?”

“She has a house full,” Fanny said. “She has a great deal on her this morning.”

“That isn’t the same thing.”

“It’s near enough.”

“It’s not near enough for me to go down the front stairs on.”

“Miss Ada.” Fanny took a breath and put it out again, which in a woman like Fanny was the same as another woman raising her voice. “It isn’t a sending. It’s a coming. Do you understand me? There’s girls in this town that would—”

“I understand you.”

“Then—”

“If it’s a coming, then when she wants a coming she’ll send word and I’ll come.”

“Your mother’s buried a day,” Fanny said, and then stopped herself, because it was not a thing to say in a room, and she knew it.

“A day and a half,” Ada said. “Go on.”

Fanny stood there. The clock in the passage below struck, and she did not look at the door.

“I only mean,” she said, “there’s nobody in this house that will speak for you but her. Nobody. You’ve no mother and your father’s got a soft way with him and the old lady has never in her life looked at this end of the house. So when a door opens you go through it, Miss Ada, that’s all I’m saying, and I’ve said it now and I’ll say it once more tomorrow if I have to and you’ll not listen then either.”

“I’m listening,” Ada said. “I’m thirsty, and I’m hungry, and I’d like the bread before the soup.”

Fanny looked at her for a long moment.

“Eight years old,” she said, to the tray.

“Nine in August.”

“Eight years old,” Fanny said again, and took up the jug, and filled the cup, and set it down hard enough to rattle.

She went to the door and stood with her hand on the latch and looked back once, and whatever she was looking for she did not find, and something in her face closed, the way a purse closes, and then she was gone, and her feet went off along the passage quick and hard.

Ada sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. Her feet did not reach the floor. She ate the bread and left the soup to cool and let her feet hang.

By two o’clock the front of the house smelled of beeswax and the back of the house smelled of the dinner.

Mrs. Aldridge’s old sitting room was on the east side, two windows and a fireplace and a sofa with carved arms, and it had been hers since she was a girl in this house, and nobody had been let have it since.

She stood at the window with her gloves still in her hand.

“Well,” Cornelia said, coming in with both hands out. “There you are. You’ve not changed. I’d say you’ve not changed at all.”

“You’re kind. I’ve changed a great deal, and I’ve brought a bigger trunk.”

Cornelia laughed at that, and it was a real laugh, and she was looking around the room while she laughed.

“You’ll want to see them.”

“I’ll want to see them.”

“Every one of them,” Cornelia said. “Three boys and five girls, and not one of them a trouble to me.”

She turned to the door and raised her voice without raising it much.

“Come in. In order, now. Hattie first.”

They came in one behind the other, washed and brushed, in their good clothes.

“Hattie,” Cornelia said again, and the eldest girl came forward and made her curtsy and said, “I’m very glad to see you, Aunt,” in a voice that had been practiced in the passage.

Then the eldest boy, whose collar had been chosen for him that morning and who bowed from the waist, too far.

Then the second girl, who stood straight and was asked a question and answered it correctly.

Then the second boy, who had to be turned around by the shoulder.

Then the third girl, who came as far as her mother’s skirt and no further.

Then the third boy, the youngest of the boys, whose sleeve had been let down for him and not sewn.

Then the last of the girls, who was brought forward by Hattie’s hand and did her curtsy without being told twice, and then went and stood against the wall, out of the way, where she could see everybody.

Seven of them stood in the room.

“You’ve a fine family, Cornelia.”

“I’ve a fine house to keep them in,” Cornelia said, “and I keep it myself, and I don’t say that to praise myself. There’s a great many women in this county would have gone to pieces, and I have not.”

“You’ve not gone to pieces.”

“Not once.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Aldridge, “it’s a great deal of work and nobody ever sees it, and I have seen it.”

She praised the children the way a woman deals out coins at a fair: one to each, and not a great deal to any of them. Hattie was to have a new dress for the summer and was told so. The second girl was asked whether she could write a letter and said that she could, and was praised for it. The littlest was asked whether she could spell her own name, and would not say, and was praised anyway, and put her thumb in her mouth.

Her eyes went along the girls and stopped and came back and went along them again, and whatever she was measuring she kept, and asked the eldest boy whether he meant to go to the academy.

“I do, Aunt.”

“And what will you do there?”

“Learn things,” the boy said, and his mother laughed.

Cornelia said, “And your—” and then, more carefully, “and Mrs. Vance? She keeps well?”

“She keeps,” Mrs. Aldridge said. “She met me at the door and told me about the bridge before I had my bonnet off.”

“Was she.”

“She was.”

Cornelia let that go.

The light had got round to the far end of the room and the fire had been built up twice before Mrs. Aldridge said, “Where’s Theodore? Somebody fetch Theodore.”

“He’s been up in the rooms with a book since three,” one of the maids said.

“Then he can put the book down. Tell him his cousins are here.”

He came down without being told twice, and he stopped in the door and looked at the room, and he had his father’s way of standing still before he came into a place.

“Come here,” his mother said, and took him by the shoulder and turned him toward the row, and said, quietly, with her mouth near his ear, “Three boys and five girls. Mind your manners.”

He went along the row and shook the boys’ hands and bowed to the girls, and said the right thing to each of them, and did not hurry.

He counted things. His father called it the mark of a careful mind and his mother called it a waste of a fine afternoon.

He had counted them as they stood in the row, and he had got to seven.

“Mother,” he said. “Isn’t there one more?”

“One more?”

“There ought to be one more.”

His mother’s smile held where it was a moment longer than a smile holds, and then it went out of her face.