Good-bye, Son and Other Stories. Janet Lewis
couldn’t remember where she had been or what she had done after that one drink, but her face was sodden like the muddy shoes and wet coat that Cora took into the next room to dry.
That was so long ago.
It had all begun with an illness that had been very long and very painful: cancer. They had checked the advance of the disease for a time. Of late years it had come on again. The doctors had thought it necessary to give her morphine. When the pain began to lessen she found it hard to give up the drug. It worried her, and she tried to substitute whisky. In the end she had succumbed to both, and the death of her husband had made things worse.
Sadness rose in the heart of the small woman in the gray sweater as the shadows were rising slowly among the straight pews and empty corners of the church. She continued to stare at the altar with its country flowers, seeing beyond them Nell as a young lady when she herself was a little girl. Ten years lay between them. Then Cora wore dresses of a blue wool stuff with full skirts and rows of black velvet ribbon stitched on around the hem. Her hair was cropped close to her head. Nell liked to run her hand over the stubby thick curls, and called her sister “Pony.”
Nell was slender in those days, with a warm, pale, dusky skin, and lips that glowed. She was very stylish, with a daring that made even the prim dresses of the period attractive and careless like herself. She was lavish with a perfume she had discovered, a musky, spicy odor that Cora loved. Their mother disapproved of it but did not forbid it, and Cora was glad. She liked to finger the square glass bottles that Nell kept on her bureau. They fitted into a square ebony box, four of them. The box was lined with a deep rose brocade.
Nell had many suitors. She received them in the stately formal parlor with its red velvet furniture and heavy carvings in walnut, rosewood, and mahogany. She let Cora hide in the corner behind the big sofa to listen to the conversation. She liked to lead the boys on until they said ridiculous romantic things, but there was almost no hugging or kissing. She was impatient of being touched. She said, “You know, Pony, I’m not much on this Nearer-my-God-to-Thee stuff.”
Then one day she ran away to New York with a man from out of town. Her mother and stepfather were very stern about it. Cora was afraid to question them, and for three or four weeks she never heard a word of Nell. Once Cora saw a strange, heavily veiled woman standing in their hall, but she was sent upstairs before she heard her speak. As she turned, however, slowly at the landing, her hand on the smooth cold banister, she caught a whiff of Nell’s musky perfume, and when she reached her own room, hers and Nell’s, she sat down on the floor and twisted her fingers tightly in great unhappiness, wondering what her mother was saying to Nell in the big gloomy parlor.
Nell wanted to come home. She was tired of her adventure. Her mother said that she might come if she would leave behind her everything, big or little, which that man had bought for her or given to her. Nell objected. Her mother was firm, and Nell went back to New York. Long after, Cora tried to think just what it had cost her mother to watch Nell go down the flagged walk between the clipped rosebushes, and not call.
Nell came home after two more weeks. She and Cora were in the upstairs room together. Nell gave her a brooch, two golden leaves curved about a row of cherries. No, not cherries. The fine glitter of the gold spikes that held them, and the faceting, breaking them into petals of light, made them more like flowers.
“Don’t show it to Mother,” Nell said, “or I shall have to go away again. It’s the only thing I kept. I had a good time, and I wanted to bring you a present. It’s not very valuable—they’re only garnets.”
That same afternoon she said, “I never let him touch me, Pony. I couldn’t stand him when he got too near to me. But he was good-looking and he took me to the theater, lots.” She laughed. “I don’t know what Father and Mother believe—I don’t suppose they believe that, but it’s true.”
Pony was wonderfully glad to have her home again. The next Sunday Nell walked down the aisle of the First Baptist Church on her stepfather’s arm, looking as lovely as ever. Pony walked behind them, holding her mother’s hand. She thought they were all happy again.
The shadows in the corners of the church were deep, like dust. The sunlight lay higher and higher in the air. The place was innocent and calm. Cora sighed and stirred on the hard bench. This long meditation was all that she could do for Nell, her dear Nell. She could not cry. She could not even be sorry. It was too late. It was time to go home and cook supper for the children, and tell her husband that Nell was dead.
The House
THE HOUSE AND BARN were painted yellow with white trim. The house was large, three stories high, with a many-gabled roof. On each ridgepole stood a white wood fence in arabesques. A large covered porch ran from the front of the house halfway around the south side, a white porte-cochere opened on the north to the graveled drive, and there were various small balconies and bay windows which enlarged the simple shape of the building. The barn was big enough for a carriage room, stalls, a manger, and an apartment for the gardener and his family. The barn and the house were surrounded by low bushes, snowball, syringa, yellow spicebush. At the end of the smooth lawn was a small maple grove. Near the barn were the rose garden and the strawberry beds. To the north of the house two or three clumps of purple lilac had made themselves into a small forest. The trees about the house were elm, box elder, pine. When the house was first built, the lawn smoothed, the rose garden planted, the two empty blocks across the street had been cornfields, and the blocks to the north nothing but prairie, where violets and wild strawberries grew in the long grass. Little by little, as the suburb became popular, the vacant lots filled with homes, and the Wilkey estate was left rather like some old English hunting ground in the middle of a city. The children in the neighborhood thought of it as such. It provided vistas, ambushes, and retreats. No one ever told them not to climb in the maple trees or chased them off the roof of the barn. At the end of the block was a pasture where the old cow grazed. It was surrounded by a board fence, and a cluster of mulberry trees grew near the fence. The trees were too frail to climb, and Frances Donalson and the redheaded Niles boy used to sit on top of the fence, picking berries from the lacy boughs and watching the cow wade through deep clover stems. Frances Donalson’s grandmother lived in the yellow house. Her father was Jesse Donalson, a gentle-faced young man with graying hair and skin. He taught chemistry in the high school, and a slight acid odor from the laboratory clung always to his clothing. Her mother was Mary Wilkey. Her aunt Roberta and her aunt Kate lived in the big house with her grandmother, along with her uncle Archibald and her cousins and second cousins, the children and grandchildren of Aunt Kate and Uncle Archie. The second cousins were near her own age, slightly older, however, and more advanced in their amusements. They didn’t think much of sliding down the barn roof. The first cousins were old enough to be her aunts. There were five of them. Three of them were married and had homes of their own, but since they were always dropping in for supper, for lunch, to use the sewing machine, to visit Grandma, to visit each other, to plan parties and expeditions, they might as well have lived there, as far as it concerned the imagination of the little cousin or the labors of Annie.
Annie lived on the top floor. The top floor was attic except for Annie’s room, which was plastered and ceiled. Frances sometimes went upstairs to visit her, shutting the stairway door behind her carefully and climbing the steep dark way toward the dusty sunlight. The attic smelled of warm wood, mice, and old boxes. It was like a front yard to Annie’s room, which smelled of soap and prayer books.
In her aunt Roberta’s room, which was on the first floor, were a porcelain mandarin who nodded his head, a rose jar smelling of cinnamon, and a snowstorm in a globe. When you held the glass ball still in your hand the snow settled gently upon the roof of the tiny mill and on the small green bushes. When you shook it the snow rose again into the air and it stormed. Under the bed were many boxes full of carefully tied packages. A few of these were letters, but most of them were old theater programs, church programs, rolls of wrapping paper, brown paper bags, smoothed and folded carefully. There were a great many of the little gay paper fans, advertising summer drinks, which the drugstores give away in hot weather. Aunt