One Basket.
by Edna Ferber.
The Woman Who Tried to Be Good [1913]
Before she tried to be a good woman she had been a very bad woman--so bad that she could trail her wonderful apparel up and down Main Street, from the Elm Tree Bakery to the railroad tracks, without once having a man doff his hat to her or a woman bow. You pa.s.sed her on the street with a surrept.i.tious glance, though she was well worth looking at--in her furs and laces and plumes. She had the only full-length mink coat in our town, and Ganz"s shoe store sent to Chicago for her shoes. Hers were the miraculously small feet you frequently see in stout women.
Usually she walked alone; but on rare occasions, especially round Christmastime, she might have been seen accompanied by some silent, dull-eyed, stupid-looking girl, who would follow her dumbly in and out of stores, stopping now and then to admire a cheap comb or a chain set with flashy imitation stones--or, queerly enough, a doll with yellow hair and blue eyes and very pink cheeks. But, alone or in company, her appearance in the stores of our town was the signal for a sudden jump in the cost of living. The storekeepers mulcted her; and she knew it and paid in silence, for she was of the cla.s.s that has no redress. She owned the House with the Closed Shutters, near the freight depot--did Blanche Devine.
In a larger town than ours she would have pa.s.sed unnoticed. She did not look like a bad woman. Of course she used too much make-up, and as she pa.s.sed you caught the oversweet breath of a certain heavy scent.
Then, too, her diamond eardrops would have made any woman"s features look hard; but her plump face, in spite of its heaviness, wore an expression of good-humored intelligence, and her eyegla.s.ses gave her somehow a look of respectability. We do not a.s.sociate vice with eyegla.s.ses. So in a large city she would have pa.s.sed for a well-dressed, prosperous, comfortable wife and mother who was in danger of losing her figure from an overabundance of good living; but with us she was a town character, like Old Man Givins, the drunkard, or the weak-minded Binns girl. When she pa.s.sed the drug-store corner there would be a sn.i.g.g.e.ring among the vacant-eyed loafers idling there, and they would leer at each other and jest in undertones.
So, knowing Blanche Devine as we did, there was something resembling a riot in one of our most respectable neighborhoods when it was learned that she had given up her interest in the house near the freight depot and was going to settle down in the white cottage on the corner and be good. All the husbands in the block, urged on by righteously indignant wives, dropped in on Alderman Mooney after supper to see if the thing could not be stopped. The fourth of the protesting husbands to arrive was the Very Young Husband who lived next door to the corner cottage that Blanche Devine had bought. The Very Young Husband had a Very Young Wife, and they were the joint owners of Snooky. Snooky was three-going-on-four, and looked something like an angel--only healthier and with grimier hands. The whole neighborhood borrowed her and tried to spoil her; but Snooky would not spoil.
Alderman Mooney was down in the cellar, fooling with the furnace.
He was in his furnace overalls; a short black pipe in his mouth. Three protesting husbands had just left. As the Very Young Husband, following Mrs. Mooney"s directions, descended the cellar stairs, Alderman Mooney looked up from his tinkering. He peered through a haze of pipe smoke.
"h.e.l.lo!" he called, and waved the haze away with his open palm.
"Come on down! Been tinkering with this blamed furnace since supper.
She don"t draw like she ought. "Long toward spring a furnace always gets balky. How many tons you used this winter?"
"Oh-five," said the Very Young Husband shortly. Alderman Mooney considered it thoughtfully. The Young Husband leaned up against the side of the water tank, his hands in his pockets. "Say, Mooney, is that right about Blanche Devine"s having bought the house on the corner?"
"You"re the fourth man that"s been in to ask me that this evening. I"m expecting the rest of the block before bedtime. She bought it all right."
The Young Husband flushed and kicked at a piece of coal with the toe of his boot.
"Well, it"s a darned shame!" he began hotly. "Jen was ready to cry at supper. This"ll be a fine neighborhood for Snooky to grow up in!
What"s a woman like that want to come into a respectable street for, anyway? I own my home and pay my taxes--"
Alderman Mooney looked up.
"So does she," he interrupted. "She"s going to improve the place--paint it, and put in a cellar and a furnace, and build a porch, and lay a cement walk all round."
The Young Husband took his hands out of his pockets in order to emphasize his remarks with gestures.
"What"s that got to do with it? I don"t care if she puts in diamonds for windows and sets out Italian gardens and a terrace with peac.o.c.ks on it. You"re the alderman of this ward, aren"t you? Well, it was up to you to keep her out of this block! You could have fixed it with an injunction or something. I"m going to get up a pet.i.tion--that"s what I"m going----"
Alderman Mooney closed the furnace door with a bang that drowned the rest of the threat. He turned the draft in a pipe overhead and brushed his sooty palms briskly together like one who would put an end to a profitless conversation.
"She"s bought the house," he said mildly, "and paid for it. And it"s hers. She"s got a right to live in this neighborhood as long as she acts respectable."
The Very Young Husband laughed.
"She won"t last! They never do."
Alderman Mooney had taken his pipe out of his mouth and was rubbing his thumb over the smooth bowl, looking down at it with unseeing eyes. On his face was a queer look--the look of one who is embarra.s.sed because he is about to say something honest.
"Look here! I want to tell you something: I happened to be up in the mayor"s office the day Blanche signed for the place. She had to go through a lot of red tape before she got it--had quite a time of it, she did! And say, kid, that woman ain"t so--bad."
The Very Young Husband exclaimed impatiently:
"Oh, don"t give me any of that, Mooney! Blanche Devine"s a town character. Even the kids know what she is. If she"s got religion or something, and wants to quit and be decent, why doesn"t she go to another town--Chicago or someplace--where n.o.body knows her?"
That motion of Alderman Mooney"s thumb against the smooth pipe bowl stopped. He looked up slowly.
"That"s what I said--the mayor too. But Blanche Devine said she wanted to try it here. She said this was home to her. Funny--ain"t it? Said she wouldn"t be fooling anybody here. They know her. And if she moved away, she said, it"d leak out some way sooner or later. It does, she said. Always! Seems she wants to live like--well, like other women.
She put it like this: she says she hasn"t got religion, or any of that.
She says she"s no different than she was when she was twenty. She says that for the last ten years the ambition of her life has been to be able to go into a grocery store and ask the price of, say, celery; and, if the clerk charged her ten when it ought to be seven, to be able to sa.s.s him with a regular piece of her mind--and then sail out and trade somewhere else until he saw that she didn"t have to stand anything from storekeepers, any more than any other woman that did her own marketing.
She"s a smart woman, Blanche is! G.o.d knows I ain"t taking her part--exactly; but she talked a little, and the mayor and me got a little of her history."
A sneer appeared on the face of the Very Young Husband. He had been known before he met Jen as a rather industrious sower of wild oats. He knew a thing or two, did the Very Young Husband, in spite of his youth!
He always fussed when Jen wore even a V-necked summer gown on the street.
"Oh, she wasn"t playing for sympathy," went on Alderman Mooney in answer to the sneer. "She said she"d always paid her way and always expected to. Seems her husband left her without a cent when she was eighteen--with a baby. She worked for four dollars a week in a cheap eating house. The two of "em couldn"t live on that. Then the baby----"
"Good night!" said the Very Young Husband. "I suppose Mrs. Mooney"s going to call?"
"Minnie! It was her scolding all through supper that drove me down to monkey with the furnace. She"s wild--Minnie is." He peeled off his overalls and hung them on a nail. The Young Husband started to ascend the cellar stairs. Alderman Mooney laid a detaining finger on his sleeve. "Don"t say anything in front of Minnie! She"s boiling!
Minnie and the kids are going to visit her folks out West this summer; so I wouldn"t so much as dare to say "Good morning!" to the Devine woman. Anyway, a person wouldn"t talk to her, I suppose. But I kind of thought I"d tell you about her.
"Thanks!" said the Very Young Husband dryly.
In the early spring, before Blanche Devine moved in, there came stone-masons, who began to build something. It was a great stone fireplace that rose in ma.s.sive incongruity at the side of the little white cottage. Blanche Devine was trying to make a home for herself.
Blanche Devine used to come and watch them now and then as the work progressed. She had a way of walking round and round the house, looking up at it and poking at plaster and paint with her umbrella or finger tip. One day she brought with her a man with a spade. He spaded up a neat square of ground at the side of the cottage and a long ridge near the fence that separated her yard from that of the Very Young Couple next door. The ridge spelled sweet peas and nasturtiums to our small-town eyes.
On the day that Blanche Devine moved in there was wild agitation among the white-ruffed bedroom curtains of the neighborhood. Later on certain odors, as of burning dinners, pervaded the atmosphere. Blanche Devine, flushed and excited, her hair slightly askew, her diamond eardrops flashing, directed the moving, wrapped in her great fur coat; but on the third morning we gasped when she appeared out-of-doors, carrying a little household ladder, a pail of steaming water, and sundry voluminous white cloths. She reared the little ladder against the side of the house, mounted it cautiously, and began to wash windows with housewifely thoroughness. Her stout figure was swathed in a gray sweater and on her head was a battered felt hat--the sort of window--washing costume that has been worn by women from time immemorial. We noticed that she used plenty of hot water and clean rags, and that she rubbed the gla.s.s until it sparkled, leaning perilously sideways on the ladder to detect elusive streaks. Our keenest housekeeping eye could find no fault with the way Blanche Devine washed windows.
By May, Blanche Devine had left off her diamond eardrops--perhaps it was their absence that gave her face a new expression. When she went downtown we noticed that her hats were more like the hats the other women in our town wore; but she still affected extravagant footgear, as is right and proper for a stout woman who has cause to be vain of her feet. We noticed that her trips downtown were rare that spring and summer. She used to come home laden with little bundles; and before supper she would change her street clothes for a neat, washable housedress, as is our thrifty custom. Through her bright windows we could see her moving briskly about from kitchen to sitting room; and from the smells that floated out from her kitchen door, she seemed to be preparing for her solitary supper the same homely viands that were frying or stewing or baking in our kitchens. Sometimes you could detect the delectable scent of browning, hot tea biscuit. It takes a determined woman to make tea biscuit for no one but herself.
Blanche Devine joined the church. On the first Sunday morning she came to the service there was a little flurry among the ushers at the vestibule door. They seated her well in the rear. The second Sunday morning a dreadful thing happened. The woman next to whom they seated her turned, regarded her stonily for a moment, then rose agitatedly and moved to a pew across the aisle.
Blanche Devine"s face went a dull red beneath her white powder. She never came again--though we saw the minister visit her once or twice.
She always accompanied him to the door pleasantly, holding it well open until he was down the little flight of steps and on the sidewalk. The minister"s wife did not call.
She rose early, like the rest of us; and as summer came on we used to see her moving about in her little garden patch in the dewy, golden morning. She wore absurd pale-blue negligees that made her stout figure loom immense against the greenery of garden and apple tree. The neighborhood women viewed these negligees with Puritan disapproval as they smoothed down their own prim, starched gingham skirts. They said it was disgusting--and perhaps it was; but the habit of years is not easily overcome. Blanche Devine--snipping her sweet peas, peering anxiously at the Virginia creeper that clung with such fragile fingers to the trellis, watering the flower baskets that hung from her porch--was blissfully unconscious of the disapproving eyes. I wish one of us had just stopped to call good morning to her over the fence, and to say in our neighborly, small-town way: "My, ain"t this a scorcher!
So early too! It"ll be fierce by noon!"
But we did not.
I think perhaps the evenings must have been the loneliest for her. The summer evenings in our little town are filled with intimate, human, neighborly sounds. After the heat of the day it is pleasant to relax in the cool comfort of the front porch, with the life of the town eddying about us. We sew and read out there until it grows dusk. We call across lots to our next-door neighbor. The men water the lawns and the flower boxes and get together in little, quiet groups to discuss the new street paving. I have even known Mrs. Hines to bring her cherries out there when she had canning to do, and pit them there on the front porch partially shielded by her porch vine, but not so effectually that she was deprived of the sights and sounds about her.
The kettle in her lap and the dishpan full of great ripe cherries on the porch floor by her chair, she would pit and chat and peer out through the vines, the red juice staining her plump bare arms.
I have wondered since what Blanche Devine thought of us those lonesome evenings--those evenings filled with friendly sights and sounds. It must have been difficult for her, who had dwelt behind closed shutters so long, to seat herself on the new front porch for all the world to stare at; but she did sit there--resolutely--watching us in silence.