Chapter 17 #6
“Six or seven years ago. After my husband died,” Charlie said.
“I lost Henry four years ago from a heart attack. How’d yours go?”
“The war. He went over.” I rinsed the beans. That math didn’t quite add up. The Great War had ended what, almost fifteen years ago? Meg was only eleven.
Charlie pressed her sleeve to her brow to keep from dripping sweat on the napkins. Her cheeks were bright pink, and she looked ready to faint in that wool dress.
“Dear, I hope you don’t mind my saying so.” Mrs. Tartt took a breath. “But we might need to do something about that dress.”
Charlie set the iron upright. “If you have a uniform here, I’d be happy to wear it. I can take it in if it needs it.”
“Heavens, that’d look worse, a white—” Mrs. Tartt stopped. “Have you done much sewing before?”
“I’m pretty good.”
Mrs. Tartt stood up. “Come up to the guest room with me. Birdie, you come too.”
We followed her up the back stairs, into the guest room next to Frances’s. Mrs. Tartt opened a huge, pastel-green-painted wardrobe, two, three, all four doors. The thing was packed full of hanging clothes. She must’ve saved everything she’d owned since she’d gotten married.
“Some of these things are probably twenty, thirty years old. Course they’ve all gone out of style, but they used to be the bee’s knees, as the young people say.
” She chuckled and ticked through hangers, and the smell of cedar drifted out.
She took out a pale pink floor-length dress with a high lace neck.
“I remember wearing this for my twentieth-anniversary luncheon. I couldn’t fit a leg in it now.
” She laid it on the bed and went back for more.
A white dress with huge sleeves and Victorian ruffles, a fluffy navy skirt down to the ankles, an ice-blue day dress, a wine-colored knit that buttoned down the front.
“I declare, I don’t think I ever wore that one.
Oh, and this …” She held a long green silk gown up to her.
“I danced into the New Year, 1922, in this one, right there in the backyard. Charlie, you’re petite, but you’ve got some up top like me.
Think you might could shorten these hems and make some of them do? ”
“I—yes.” Charlie’d watched each dress come out of the wardrobe, but she hadn’t moved. She looked stunned that Mrs. Tartt would make such a kind offer.
“Frances turned her nose up at the idea, saying she prefers to buy new.” Mrs. Tartt picked out a black dress and held it out to Charlie. “I believe this one suits you. Hold it up in the mirror.”
Charlie held it against her. It was silky and thin, with short sleeves and a little round collar. A few inches shorter than me, she was curvier and bustier than me and Frances.
“Thank you, Mrs. Tartt,” she said. It sounded solemn. It sounded like nobody’d been kind to her in a long time.
“Maybe Charlie can fix this one up for you, Birdie,” she said and handed me a flowery poplin cotton. I preferred the dark wine-colored knit one she’d set out; it reminded me of the color in Neilson’s. “I imagine you’re getting tired of wearing those same three blue dresses all the time.”
“Thank you,” I said, knowing that meant she was tired of looking at them. But she was too nice to say that. She looked happier than I’d seen her in a week.
As she slid more hangers over in the wardrobe, she said, “I don’t know why I kept all these old things, Henry’s clothes and Rory’s baby clothes too. Birdie, if you or Frances had a little boy … I tell you, I used to dress Rory up in the prettiest collars.”
I thought of the only photograph Rory had taken with him, him as a blond-headed boy of two in an itchy lace-necked suit, sitting on his mama’s lap. He had his lip pulled in, so intent on staying still to please his parents.
“Birdie, why don’t you and Charlie bring my old Singer down from the nursery up in the attic, and Charlie can get started.”
The next morning, I struck a match and turned the knob on the stove and held the flame to the eye. No gas. I flipped it off and prayed. Maybe I’d’ve had better luck if we’d gone to church today, but nobody was in any state to go.
Charlie stood at the sink, wearing Mrs. Tartt’s light blue cotton day dress, slimmed and hemmed so it hit mid-calf, under an apron.
It was simple, but the light color brightened her face and the dark circles under her eyes were already fading.
She’d set her hair and pinned the curls back, and I realized, Charlie’s not just pretty, she’s very pretty.
At the kitchen table, Frances was thumbing through a magazine, rattling on about the Orphan.
Last night Frances had called me a sucker for letting Charlie stay here. “I’m a sucker for letting her clean our porches and cut our grass and do our wash and ironing?” I’d said, to which Frances’d asked, “She’s ironing now? Well, then I have a few things for her to press.”
“Pripp telephoned today and said every volunteer has to work a few days a month in the office now, and also, what with Mildred gone and all—”
“Frances, hand Charlie the butter dish so she can soak it,” I said, trying the gas again.
Frances passed her the butter dish, but she’d yet to look Charlie in the eye. “And what with Mildred gone, Garnett’s also making everybody spend one night a month in the toddler room,” Frances said. “At least it’s downstairs, but it gets so hot in that little room.”
I saw Charlie’s jaw tense at Garnett’s name. “When are you going back in?” I asked Frances. I hoped the answer was soon. Lately, this big old house had started to feel smaller.
“Pripp said I’m not on the schedule again until next week,” Frances said.
Charlie turned the sink off. She’d been listening closely. “How many days a week do you usually volunteer?” she asked Frances.
Frances frowned in Charlie’s direction like Why is this person even talking to me?
“She cut me back to two days since we’re down to only three toddlers.
The rest are just big girls. Which of course are past helping.
” She sighed and turned a page. “They’ll go off and have their own babies and leave them to starve, it’s just how they were raised. ”
I saw Charlie’s knuckles gripping the butter dish. She looked like she might throw it at Frances. “Charlie, I gotta show you something. Franny, go tell Mrs. Tartt … lunch’ll be ready at noon.” It was only ten, but I pulled Charlie past Frances, into the maid’s room, and shut the door.
Charlie was shaking her head at me. “Does she really believe that nonsense?”
“She’s only regurgitating what she’s heard, she doesn’t believe that. She just—doesn’t know it yet.”
“I did not leave my child to starve! She needs to know that!”
“I know you didn’t. But like I said, she’s on Garnett’s side, so let’s just try and keep the peace.”
We were completely out of gas in the Duparquet oven.
No amount of praying or holding my mouth just so could get it going, and if we paid them the ten dollars we owed them, we’d only have about twenty-five dollars left.
We. I was thinking of it as we, when we Calhouns had even less.
So for lunch, I made a tuna fish salad with pickle on the side, which Frances said she really enjoyed.
There were probably twenty cans of it in the pantry and I wondered what she’d say next week when she was still eating tuna fish salad.
In Rory’s study, I sat at the big desk with all the bills I’d found stuffed in drawers in here and hidden upstairs in his room.
The resident bookkeeper couldn’t stand not knowing how much the Tartts owed and who they wouldn’t be paying it to, but it was also in the hopes that I’d find some kind of good news, even if it was just a birthday card with a quarter taped inside, before I told Mrs. Tartt her options.
I was also looking for any hint of where Rory might’ve gone, though even if we did find Rory, what would we do then—demand he bring it all back? What were the chances of that?
The bills were endless. They now owed Neilson’s a whopping eighty-five dollars and fifteen cents—I’d need to make sure Frances returned those clothes along with that beautiful white coat I never even tried on.
The gas bill, the ice bill, the Oxford Eagle, all overdue.
The only good news was when I found one for Richard’s Shoe Store, which had already gone out of business.
Sorry, Richard. I dropped the bill in the waste can.
The most alarming bill, though, was from Oxford Light Company for eighteen dollars and seventy cents.
It was stamped in red with Disconnect Notice and was overdue by six months.
When I got all the Southern Bell telephone bills together, I compared the numbers called to the little telephone directory.
There were several to Mary Pepper Jones, Pripp Yancey, the Unique, the barber shop, and all sorts of businesses in town.
The rest were marked Incoming. I remembered it again, the faint ringing of the telephone that night I’d gotten drunk and turned the water closet into my bedroom.
Still, I picked up the receiver and asked Silva, the operator, was there any way to find out who’d called us.
She said not that she knew of but to please tell Mr. Tartt he was overdue twenty-three dollars and fifty-odd cents.
And then I found something, finally: a single receipt for thirty cents from a Billups filling station, North State Street, Jackson, dated two weeks ago.
That was after Rory’d been fired. So he really had gone to Jackson.
But if it wasn’t for a bank client, then good Lord, for what? Or, rather, for who?
Frances was sitting cross-legged on the carpet in the front sitting room, ripping a page out of a Photoplay magazine, flapping through more pages, ripping out another.
I sat on the floor and showed her the receipt. “I found a receipt from a filling station in Jackson. After Rory was fired.”
She narrowed her eyes on it. “I knew it.”
Did she know Rory’s inclination? Her eyes were sharp, determined. I hoped this meant we could have a real conversation about Rory now.
“You think he’s down there too, don’t you? Seeing that woman, Esther Royal, who he went to all those parties with the year before he met me.”
“I don’t think … he’s with a woman, Frances.”
She sniffed and ripped out another magazine page. As far as Frances’s moods went, I preferred furious to helpless. Furious felt like progress.
“Neilson’s said you only have a week to return those clothes. So you need to take them back by Tuesday.”
She slumped, her anger melting into something meeker. “I know. I will.”
“I’m sorry, Franny.”
She bit her lip and looked at me. “Would you … do it?” I reckon she knew I wasn’t gonna give her a quarter for the taxi either, so she was imagining herself walking up Lamar Boulevard with all those boxes.
I shook my head. “You need to do this, Franny, but I’ll walk with you and help you carry them all so it’ll only take us the one trip.”
She nodded. “How much worse is this going to get, Birdie?”
Oh, Franny. “Don’t think about worse, think about better.”
I went back to work in Rory’s study. The sun had slipped behind some dark clouds.
Oh dear Jesus, maybe it’ll rain. I flipped on the desk lamp with the green shade.
While I recorded bills in the ledger, I could hear the faint whirring of Charlie’s sewing machine through my open window.
It was covered up by the distant sound of gravel crunching, a motorcar.
We didn’t get much traffic out here. I cocked my head to listen, hoping it wasn’t one of Frances’s friends coming to see about her, or to snoop because of the gossip Pripp was spreading.
The sound of the engine faded or maybe it’d stopped, and then, a few minutes later—
Poof.
Out went the desk lamp. The electric fan slowed and stopped. Through the window, the sewing machine stopped whirring. There was a moan from the front sitting room. Around me settled an eerie stillness that this house probably hadn’t known since … what had Mrs. Tartt said, 1922?
We all found one another in the kitchen.
“On a Sunday?” Mrs. Tartt said, lips trembling. I think their turning the electricity off plain ole hurt her feelings.
“I’ll try calling the powerhouse,” I said.
I asked Silva to connect me, but it rang and rang. When she came back on the line, she said, “I just asked Mrs. Wallace here, and she said they ain’t open till Monday morning.”
We owed Oxford Light almost nineteen dollars, and we were down to about thirty-five. I wasn’t sure what I’d say to them in the morning, but I couldn’t stand the thought of parting with more than half the Tartts’ money.
Luckily the sun was a good two hours from going out too.
Charlie and I toted six dusty red hurricane lanterns up from the cellar, the wire hangers looped up our arms. For supper I made a feast of all the spoilable things from the icebox that didn’t require cooking—the leftover tuna fish with mayonnaise and pickles from lunch, sliced tomatoes with a generous dollop of mayonnaise, and that morning’s biscuits with mayonnaise—we’d run out of butter.
I knew by morning the ice block would be gone too.
We’re alright, I kept repeating in my head.
Long as we have our health and food to eat and water.
Thank God the well still worked, though the electric pump didn’t. Fine, we’d pump it by hand.
By the time the three of us sat down for supper, the house had gone dark as the wrong side of a coffin lid, as Meemaw’d say.
I could hear Charlie outside, pumping water into buckets to haul upstairs.
Shadows from the oil lanterns leapt and danced on the walls, and for a second no one moved.
Frances stared at the dishes I’d set out.
“Why is there so much mayonnaise on everything?” she asked in a small voice. It sounded like it confounded her. When I looked at it, it confounded me—I’d really panicked with the mayonnaise, hadn’t I?
“We’re gonna be fine, Franny,” I said. “People’ve lived like this for thousands of years.”
Mrs. Tartt said nothing, just very deliberately spread mayonnaise on this morning’s biscuit.
“We didn’t even get the lights on in Footely until ’27, Franny. Remember when the Tates ran the power line out to us?”
Still, no one said anything to this.
“Jesus didn’t have electricity either,” I said softly, sort of joking.
Mrs. Tartt nodded, her hand holding the biscuit trembling. “I suppose if he could do it for thirty-three years, we can do it till tomorrow,” she said.