Chapter 3: Say It Again

The telephone booth on the corner of Vine and Ninth had a folding door that wouldn’t latch, and Clara stood with her shoulder against it to keep it shut and her free hand over her other ear. Traffic went by on Vine. Somebody had scratched a name into the glass at eye level and then scratched it out again.

Frankie’s voice came through the wire in pieces. Every sentence started and broke.

“—swelled up so he can’t get his eye open. Three teeth, Clara. Three.”

“Lower your voice.”

“Raymond Kessler can go to hell and I hope he—“

“Frankie.” Clara turned her face into the corner of the booth. “Lower your voice. And you didn’t call.”

“I couldn’t.”

“All right.” Clara looked at the scratched-out name. “It was the containers. The ones that got held at the port. Eli put Wes on them.”

The wire was quiet a moment. Frankie’s breath came back wet.

“That’s the thing it was,” she said.

“All right.”

“Dad has to put him in front of Chief Crane looking like that. You know what that’s going to look like.”

“I know what it’s going to look like.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

The booth smelled of pennies and of somebody’s wet wool. A woman went by with a market bag and a boy holding the bag’s other handle, the boy leaning back with his whole weight, and they went out of sight up Vine.

“I’m going to see Eli,” Clara said. “And I’m going to end it. The engagement.”

More crying, then a wet sniff, and then Frankie said, “You’d be safe. You’d marry him and he’d have to make it right. That’s what I’d do.”

“With his ring on my hand, every question I asked after that would be a question I asked my husband.” Clara moved the receiver to her other ear. “I’d still get no answer. And I can’t stand up to that family. Not over Wes. There’s nothing in it for me.”

Frankie blew her nose away from the wire and came back. “Maybe you find somebody better.”

“Maybe.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“I believe my mother’s been up since five and I’ve got one more call to make.” Clara put her forehead against the glass. “Don’t come to the house. If anybody asks, I was upstairs the whole night and I never came down. Don’t say my name to anybody today. Not the men from the department. Not your father’s clerk.”

“I won’t.”

“Is Wes going to be all right?”

“He’s alive,” Clara said. “Raymond Kessler could have done worse and he didn’t.”

“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“No.” Clara turned her back on the street. “Put a cold cloth on him. Cold, not hot. Tell him I asked.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Goodbye.”

She got the operator and gave the Kessler number and fed the coins in, and it was not Eli who picked up.

“Kessler residence.”

“Miss Whitaker for Mr. Kessler.”

“One moment.”

The wire clicked and there was a room behind the silence, a heavy door somewhere, a man’s shoe going along a hard floor. She stood with her shoulder against the folding door and watched the crates go in the grocer’s back door, one, two, and the hand truck come back out empty.

“Miss Whitaker.”

It was the same man. She had spoken to him twice before on this number and had never learned his name.

“Mr. Kessler is in. He asks that you be ready. He’s sending a car.”

“I only need to speak with him on the telephone.”

“He asks that you be ready.”

“I’ll be ready,” she said, and hung up before she could hear anything else, and stood a moment in the shut box with her hand still on the receiver, and then pushed the door open with her shoulder and went out into the morning.

The house was two blocks and a corner away, and she walked it, because the streetcar would have put her at the door too fast.

Lilac came over the fence from the yard next door and hung into the walk, going brown at the edges, and it dropped on whoever came through, on the shoulders and in the hair, and under the lilac the boards held the damp of the night and smelled of wet wood. Somebody was already doing wash, a woman two doors up, and the laundry soap came over the fence on the air, that flat gray block smell.

The family had lived on Halloway Road once, in a house with a lawn and a carriage house and an elm in front. That was before her father got the ledgers at the funeral and put the house and the land and her mother’s shop up against a sum of money, and went to Cleveland with a woman from a road company and a trunk. What was left of the family had this: a brick walk-up on a street built for men with jobs in the packing houses, eleven of them inside it, the rent paid by a great-uncle who called the arrangement a loan and never came to visit.

The front hall was dark and smelled of cabbage and of the coats on the hooks. There were shoes under the bench, four pairs, and none of them hers.

“—ruined. Look at it. Look at the color of it—“

Clara put her bag on the newel post and went along the hall.

Her mother stood in the middle of the kitchen with a wet dress over both hands, and Aunt Pauline was in front of her, close, with her chin out, and the dress was running water off the hem onto the linoleum.

“I told you cold water,” Pauline said. “I said it twice in this kitchen, in front of your daughter, cold water. What do you do? You put it in with the sheets.”

“I didn’t put it in with the—“

“Look at it.”

“It’s a green dress,” her mother said. “It takes up color from—“

“It’s ruined is what it’s done. My one good dress, and it’s ruined by a woman who can’t be told anything.” Pauline got a hand into the wet fabric and pulled, and the dress stretched between the two of them. “I don’t know why I leave anything in this house. Jinxed. That’s what you are. A jinx on this family, and there’s not one of us can say different.”

“Give it here.”

Clara took the dress out of her mother’s hands. It came, heavy, and she turned and dropped it on the floor at Pauline’s feet. The hem landed in the wet and folded over itself.

“Clara,” her mother said.

“It’s on the floor,” Clara said. “It can stay there.”

“Don’t you take that tone with me in this house—“

“Is she the maid here? Answer the question, Aunt Pauline. My mother. Is she the hired help? Because I have watched her do your washing and your mother’s washing and cook for eleven people, and I have not seen one dollar of wages come out of anybody’s pocket for it.” Clara heard her own voice go up and did not bring it down. “The dress is green and the water was hot. Take it up with the store that sold you a dress that runs. Take it up with somebody who owes you. She doesn’t owe you.”

“She owes me a dress,” Pauline said. “And you can stand there with your mouth, miss, but your father—“

“Say it.”

“Your father put us here.”

“He did.” Clara took one step in. “And how much of what he took went into your kitchen? How much of my mother’s money, my mother’s shop money, went to your table? I remember this family in a house with a lawn and I remember who paid for the coal in it, and it wasn’t your husband.”

The house had gone quiet. Somebody on the stairs had stopped and did not come down.

“We’re not the ones who took it. We’re not the ones who ran off to Cleveland with a woman who sings in a—“

“Don’t.” Clara’s voice was flat now. “Not one word about that woman in front of my mother.”

“Then don’t tell me my business in this house.”

“It’s Grandmother’s house.”

“It’s the family’s house.”

“Fine. It’s the family’s house.” Clara turned to take them in, the hall, the stairs, the faces at the top of the stairs. “We hate him. All of us hate him. The same thing was done to all of us. So why is it her? Nobody in this house can find the man to shout at, so you shout at the woman he left behind.”

“Enough.”

Neil came out of the parlor with his newspaper still folded in his hand, and he stood in the doorway and there was no room on either side of him, and he brought the paper down on his palm, once.

“That’s enough out of you. You’ve got a sharp tongue in your head and nothing behind it. Your mother’s raised you to talk back to your elders, that’s plain. No one taught you manners.”

“My mother taught me to work,” Clara said.

“You stand in this hall and you call your grandmother’s name into it and you call that work?” He looked around at the others so that they could see he was looking. “Nobody taught you a thing. That’s what happens when there’s no man in the house to teach it.”

“Neil.” Her mother’s hand was on Clara’s arm, wet from the dress. “Neil, she’s tired, that’s all.”

“She’s a mouth.” He turned the paper over in his hands.

Aunt Marian had come out of the parlor while they were shouting and stood in the doorway with her hand on the frame, and she was smiling the way she smiled at card tables.

“She ought to know what she’s standing on, then,” Marian said, “since she likes the sound of her own voice so much. The Kesslers don’t want her. Haven’t for a year. The whole city knows it and this one goes around giving herself airs in her grandmother’s house.”

Her mother’s hand was on her arm. Her mother had stood in that kitchen for twenty minutes being called a jinx with the water running off the dress onto the floor, and had said nothing back, not once, not in all the years.

Her mother meant to hang herself when the last of them was grown. Not soon. When Toby was off her hands and there was nothing left in the house that needed her, and she had been meaning it for a while, and she had never said so to anybody. She got up at five and did other people’s washing. She had three children who still spoke to her and one who did not.

Her fingers were wet on Clara’s arm and they did not let go.

Clara looked at Marian’s face and said, “Say it again.”

“I only said what—“

“Say it again, and say it to him.”

The hall was very quiet. The light in it had changed, and the screen door was open, and somebody was standing in it.

Aunt Marian followed Clara’s eyes and her face changed in stages, first with annoyance at being made to turn, then with not understanding, then with the understanding. She took hold of the door frame.

Eli Kessler stood in the open door with the morning behind him. He had not knocked. The door was open and the screen with it, and he stood in the frame of it with the light coming over his shoulders. His coat was dark and buttoned and fitted at the shoulder and the waist; it had been made for him. His hat was in his hand. The hair at his temple had been cut that week.

There was a car at the curb. Clara could see one corner of it through the door, and the shine of it in the sun.

Nobody said anything.

Eli came in two steps and stopped, and he did not look at the room, he looked at Marian, and he said, “Who said it?”

“Mr. Kessler—“ Neil had the paper down at his side now.

“I heard it from the walk.” Eli turned his hat once in his fingers and turned it back. “I’d like to hear it again, from the one who said it.”

Nobody said anything. Marian’s mouth had opened. Nothing came out of it.

“Ma’am,” Eli said. “Was it you?”

“I only—“ Marian said.

“My wife meant nothing by it,” Neil said.

“Then she can say it to my face and mean nothing by it.” Eli’s voice was not raised. It did not need to be. “Miss Whitaker and I are engaged to be married. Her mother and I are—“ he turned his head and found Maggie, and inclined his head to her, and for a moment the whole manner of him changed, and then it was back—“Mrs. Whitaker. You’re looking well.”

“I’m not,” her mother said. “But you’re kind.”

“Nobody in this house needs to wonder about the intentions of my family. If you have a question, you can bring it to my office in daylight and I’ll answer it there.”

“Mr. Kessler.” Her mother had both hands together in front of her now, and her voice had gone soft and level, the way she brought a room back in order. “It’s been a hard morning and it’s nothing to do with you, and I’d be grateful if you’d not think on it.”

“Mrs. Whitaker, for your sake I won’t.” He put his hat on. “I came to take Miss Whitaker to lunch. If it’s inconvenient—“

“It’s convenient,” her mother said. “Go on, Clara. Go.”

Clara looked at her mother.

Her mother’s eyes went once to the dress on the floor and came back. “Take your bag.”

“I don’t need the bag.”

“Take a comb, at least.”

Clara went up the stairs past the faces, and in her room she stood at the glass and pushed her hair back and did not change her dress, which was the gray one, which had been ironed on Sunday and looked it. She took her comb out of the drawer and put it back. She came down.

Eli was waiting in the hall with his hat in his hand again. Neil and Marian had gone into the parlor and the parlor door was shut. The dress was still on the floor where Clara had dropped it, in the wet, and Aunt Pauline was still standing over it and had not picked it up. Eli’s eyes went to it and came back.

“Your mother,” Eli said, “has more sense than the rest of them put together.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Say a good thing about her so that I’ll forget the rest.” Clara went past him out the door and down the steps, and the man on the walk turned and opened the car door for her.

There were four of them. She had not seen that at first, because two were at the curb and one was across the street by the fence with a newspaper folded under his arm, and the fourth was already in the front seat with the engine going. The two at the curb had their coats on in the sun, and the coats hung a certain way at the hip. The one at the fence had been there since she came home, she thought. She thought she remembered the newspaper.

She got in. The leather was cold through her dress and smelled of the last man who had sat in it, and the car was high off the ground and she could see the lilac going brown over the fence, and Pauline in the front room with her hand at the curtain, and her mother not at the window.

Eli came in the other side and the car went out into the street.

“I’m not going to marry you,” Clara said.

“I know,” said Eli, and looked out the window.