Chapter 4: Nobody Said Her Name

Theodore came back to the east rooms at five, with the last of his cousins gone out through the yard gate. He was eleven that spring, and he had never been in this house before Tuesday.

His mother had her shoes off and her shawl around her shoulders, which was as undressed as she ever let anyone see her. Her woman sat by the window with a lapful of mending. His mother looked up from her cup.

“Did you quarrel with your cousins?”

“No.” The question put his back up, and he showed it by standing straighter. “We were guests.”

“You’ve been standing in the middle of the room since you came in.” She nodded at the chair. “Sit down. You’re your father’s son. If you’d quarreled you’d have come in with your lip split and your mind made up, and you’d have told me the other boy started it.”

Theodore sat.

“You’re all Aldridge,” she said, watching him. “I’ve looked for my own face in you since the month you were born, and it’s the judge’s eyebrows and your father’s way of standing still.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s the best thing about you.” She drank. “Your aunt was telling me at tea what Mr. Vance said before I was married. That your father had been the steadiest man in Philadelphia, and that the one time in his life he behaved like a young man was when he chose me.”

She turned her cup a quarter turn in the saucer. There was color in her face, and she was put out about it.

Theodore had never in his life seen his mother put out by anything but the grocer’s scales. He looked at the fire until it was over.

“It’s not the cousins,” he said.

“I didn’t suppose it was.”

“I don’t care to speak of my elders.”

He said it as a quotation. Then he spoke of them.

“At the table my aunt said the little one was mending. Then she said the mother was buried yesterday, and that the sewing woman had been eleven years in this house, and that Uncle Walter was the one who had her brought into it.” He had it by heart, the way he had everything by heart. “And she smiled while she said it. Not after. With the words.”

His mother turned the cup another quarter turn.

“Ada,” she said. “The girl’s name is Ada.”

“Ada.”

“Your aunt has kept us fed since Tuesday, and had the good china out, and put us in these rooms, and she has been on her feet the whole while. If her face did something she didn’t mean, at the end of a day like that, I’d let it go.”

Theodore looked at her.

It was not a rude look, and it was worse than a rude look. It was the look of a small committee that had heard the evidence and found it insufficient, and he was too well brought up to say so in front of a servant.

His mother held it as long as she could. Then she said, without turning her head, “Go down and see about the dinner. Shut the door after you.”

The woman put her mending in the basket and went out.

“Bring your chair,” his mother said.

He brought it.

“Now.” She set the cup down. “You’ve been taught that a man is judged by what he does. That’s a good rule. It will serve you at the bar. Do you know what your aunt has done for that child?”

“She took her in.”

“Eleven years. She has fed her and clothed her and had her taught her letters, and sat her at the table with her own seven. She might have sent her down to the kitchen, and half this town would have called that sensible, and the other half would have called it no more than was due.” His mother sat back. “None of that is a warm feeling that comes over a woman in the night. It is a decision she makes every morning before she has had her tea.”

“Then she needn’t grieve at all,” Theodore said. “That’s what I’m to understand.”

“That’s not what I said, and you know it. Don’t put words in my mouth to make them easier to knock down.”

Theodore opened his mouth.

“Don’t. I’ll ask you something instead, and you’ll answer, because you can’t do otherwise. Cousin Roy.”

He blinked.

“Cousin Roy. In and out of the freight office since he was fifteen, and out more than in. He has never cost you a dollar in his life and he never will, and he will never stand between you and your father’s good opinion, or the front of any room you walk into, because he hasn’t the brains for it.” She let that sit. “And you cannot abide the sight of him. I’ve watched you be civil to him for exactly as long as your father was in the room. Not a minute longer.”

“He’s ill-mannered,” Theodore said. “He’s shiftless.”

“He is. And you’re not obliged to like him, and there’s not a soul in this family thinks the worse of you for it.” His mother’s voice did not rise. “So. Why is your aunt obliged to be fond of the woman who had her husband’s child?”

The fire took a log and settled. Theodore looked at his hands.

“I was hard on my aunt,” he said.

“You were.” She said it without softening it, and then she softened it. “And you’ll be civil to her tomorrow, which is more than most men manage once they’ve been shown a thing.”

He sat a while.

“Seven at the table,” he said, “and not one of them said her name.”

“Very likely they were told not to.”

“That’s worse.”

His mother turned her hand over. “Yes. It generally is.”

“Will you go to her, then? Not tomorrow. When you can. Will you go?”

“I’ll go when I can go without a parade.” She set her cup in the saucer. “Look about you, Theodore. Do you think there’s a servant in this house that hasn’t been told to watch me? If I go up that back stair with my woman behind me and my good cloak on my back, then by supper every girl in the kitchen will know the child is a card to be played. And there’s them in this house would play her against your aunt for the pleasure of it, and them that would make her life a misery to be even with me. She is better where she is a few days more.”

Theodore thought it through and could find no flaw in it.

“Give me till Sunday,” his mother said. “I’ve people to see, and half of them don’t want to see me.”

“Then don’t move,” he said.

“Don’t move?”

“Not Sunday. Let me.” He sat forward. “The house has been scrubbed since Tuesday. There’s the good china out and a fire in every room they’ll let you into, and she’s had a fever, and her mother is barely in the ground, and not one of the seven has said her name. Somebody ought to go up and say it to her. I’m little. Nobody looks at me twice. Let me be the one. Let her know she has kin in this house, and that somebody in it knows her name.”

He looked at her. He had her eyes; everybody said so, and it was the only part of him she had got.

His mother reached out and put her hand on his head.

“I was about your age,” she said, “when I lost my mother.”

She said nothing else about it. Theodore sat still under her hand. He had told her once, at seven, that he was too old for it, and she had not forgotten; she rubbed his head twice, which was the number she had settled on, and took her hand away.

“What would you say to her?” she asked.

“I don’t know. ‘Good afternoon,’ to start with.”

His mother laughed, one breath of it, and then was quiet again.

“Ring for the lamps,” she said at last. “And have your other collar pressed for the morning.”

He got up. At the door he looked back. His mother had not taken up her book, and her hands were in her lap, working the fringe of her shawl between her fingers, and the daylight was going out of the window behind her.