The streetcar line started at the New Latham Hotel and ran past the baseball park and the county jail, past the state insane asylum, and on out to the cemetery and the lake. The lake was actually an abandoned gravel pit, half a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide, fed by underground springs. Its water was very deep and very cold. The shoreline was dotted with summer cottages and between the cottages and an expanse of cornfields was a thin grove of oak trees. Every summer two or three dozen families moved out here in June, to escape the heat, and stayed until the end of August, when the reopening of school forced them to return to town. After Labor Day, with the cottages boarded up and the children’s voices stilled, the lake was washed in equinoctial rains, polished by the October sun, and became once more a part of the wide empty landscape.
On a brilliant September day in 1912 the streetcar stopped in front of the high school, and a large, tranquil colored woman got on. She was burdened with a shopping bag and several parcels, which she deposited on the seat beside her. There were two empty seats between the colored woman and the nearest white passengers, who nodded to her but did not include her in their conversation. The streetcar was open on the sides, with rattan seats. It rocked and swayed, and the passengers, as though they were riding on the back of an elephant, rocked and swayed with it. The people who had flowers — asters or chrysanthemums wrapped in damp newspaper — rode as far as the cemetery where, among acres of monuments and gravestones (Protestant on the right, Catholic on the left), faded American flags marked the final resting place of those who had fallen in the Civil or Spanish-American wars. It was a mile farther to the end of the line. There the conductor switched the trolley for the return trip, and the colored woman started off across an open field.
A winding path through the oak trees led her eventually to a cottage resting on concrete blocks, with a peaked roof and a porch across the front, facing the lake. Wide wooden shutters hinged at the top and propped up on poles gave the cottage a curious effect, as of a creosote-colored bird about to clap its wings and fly away.
The colored woman entered by the back door, into a kitchen so tiny that there was barely room for her to move between the kerosene stove and the table. She put her packages down and dipped a jelly glass into a bucket of water and drank. Through the thin partition came the sound of a child crying and then a woman’s voice, high and clear and excitable.
“Is that you, Adah Belle?”
“Yes’m.”
“I thought you’d never come.”
The colored woman went into the front part of the cottage, a single disorderly room with magazine covers pasted on the walls, odds and ends of wicker furniture, a grass rug, and two cots. Japanese lanterns hung from the rafters, as if the cottage were in the throes of some shoddy celebration, and the aromatic wood smell from the fireplace was complicated by other odors, kerosene, camphor, and pennyroyal. A little boy a year and a half old was standing in a crib, his face screwed up and red with the exertion of crying. On his neck and arms and legs were the marks of mosquito bites.
“What’s he crying about now?” the colored woman asked.
“I wish I knew.” The woman’s voice came from the porch. “I’ll be glad when he can talk. Then we’ll at least know what he’s crying about.”
“He’s crying because he miss his Adah Belle,” the colored woman said and lifted the little boy out of the crib. The crying subsided and the child’s face, streaked with dirt and tears, took on a look of seriousness, of forced maturity. “Don’t nobody love you like Adah Belle,” she said, crooning over him.
“Virginia saw a snake,” the voice called from the porch.
“You don’t mean that?”
“A water moccasin. At least I think it was a water moccasin. Anyway it was huge. I threw a stick at it and it went under the porch and now I’m afraid to set foot out of the house.”
“You leave that snake alone and he leave you alone,” the colored woman said.
“Anything could happen out here,” the voice said, “and we haven’t a soul to turn to. There isn’t even a place to telephone.… Was it hot in town?”
“I didn’t have no time to notice.”
“It was hot out here. I think it’s going to storm. The flies have been biting like crazy all afternoon.”
A moment later the woman appeared in the doorway. She was thirty years old, small-boned and slender, with dark hair piled on top of her head, and extraordinarily vivid blue eyes. Her pallor and her seriousness were like the little boy’s. “Adah Belle,” she said, putting her white hand on the solid black arm, “if it weren’t for you — if you didn’t come just when I think the whole world’s against me, I don’t know what I’d do. I think I’d just give up.”
“I knows you need me,” the colored woman said.
“Sometimes I look at the lake, and then I think of my two children and what would happen to them if I weren’t here, and then I think, Adah Belle would look after them. And you would, Adah Belle.”
The little boy, seeing his mother’s eyes fill with tears, puckered his face up and began to cry again. She took him from the colored woman’s arms and said, “Never you mind, my angel darling! Never you mind!” her voice rich with maternal consolation and pity for the lot of all children in a world where harshness and discipline prevail. “This has been going on all day.”
“Don’t you worry, honey,” Adah Belle said. “I look after them and you, too. I got you some pork chops.”
“Then you’ll have to cook them tonight. They won’t keep without ice. The first of the week I’m going in and have things out with the ice company.” The white woman’s face and manner had changed. She was in the outer office of the Draperville Ice & Coal Co., demanding that they listen to her, insisting on her rights.
“That flying squirrel been into the spaghetti again,” Adah Belle said.
“You should have been here last night. Such a time as I had! I lit the lamp and there he was, up on the rafter —” The woman put her hands to her head, and for the moment it was night. The squirrel was there, ready to swoop down on them, and Adah Belle saw and was caught up in the scene that had taken place in her absence.
“I was terrified he’d get in my hair or knock the lamp over and set fire to the cottage.”
“And then what?”
“I didn’t know what to do. The children were sitting up in bed watching it. They weren’t as frightened as I was, and I knew they oughtn’t to be awake at that time of night, so I made them put their heads under the covers, and turned out the light —”
“That: squirrel getting mighty bold. Some one of these days he come out in the daytime and I get him with a broom. That be the end of the squirrel. What happen when you turn out the light?”
“After that nothing happened.… Adah Belle, did you see Mr. Geliert?”
The colored woman shook her head. “I went to the back door and knock, like I ain’t never work there, and after a while she come.”
“Then she’s still there?”
“Yes’m, she’s there. She say, ‘Adah Belle, is that you?’ and I say, ‘That’s right, it’s me. I come to get some things for Miz Geliert.’ ”
“And she let you in?”
“I march in before she could stop me.”
“Weren’t you afraid?”
“I march through the kitchen and into the front part of the house with her after me every step of the way.”
“Oh, Adah Belle, you’re wonderful!”
“I come to get them things for you and ain’t no old woman going to stop me.”
“She didn’t dare not let you in, I guess. She knows I’ve been to see a lawyer. If I decide to take the case into court —”
With the single dramatic gesture that the white woman made with her bare arm, there was the crowded courtroom, the sea of faces, now friendly, now hostile to the colored woman on the witness stand.
“You going to do that, Miz Geliert?” she asked anxiously.
“I don’t know, Adah Belle
. I may. Sometimes I think it’s the only solution.”
From her voice it was clear that she also had reason to be afraid of what would happen in the courtroom. If anybody is to blame, Mildred is, her friends were saying over the bridge tables in town, women grown stout on their own accomplished cooking, wearing flowered dresses and the ample unwieldy straw hats of the period. Their faces flushed with the excitement of duplicate bridge and the combinations and permutations of gossip, they said, If she can’t stand to live with Harrison, then why doesn’t she get a divorce? Behind this attack was the voice of fear (in a high-keyed Middle Western accent), the voice of doubt.
They were not, like Mildred Geliert, having trouble with their husbands. Their marriages were successful, their children took music lessons and won prizes at commencement, and they had every reason in the world to be satisfied (new curtains for the living room, a glassed-in sun porch), every reason to be happy. It was only that sometimes when they woke in the middle of the night and couldn’t get to sleep for a while, and so reviewed their lives, something (what, exactly, they couldn’t say) seemed missing. The opportunity that they had always assumed would come to them hadn’t come after all. You mark my words, the women said to each other (the words of fear, the counsel of doubt), when cold weather comes, shell go back to him.
But could Mildred go back to him? After all, with his mother staying there keeping house for him, he might not want her back.
Oh he’ll take her back, the women said, on the wide verandah of the brick mansion on College Avenue. All you have to do is look at him to tell that.…
The hangdog expression, they meant; the pale abject look of apology that didn’t prevent him from nagging her about the grocery bills or from being insanely jealous whenever they were in mixed company and she showed the slightest sign of enjoying herself.
But it really was not fair to the friends who had stood by her again and again. The first two times Mildred Geliert left her husband, the women one and all stopped speaking to him, out of loyalty to her, they said. And then when she went back to him, it was very embarrassing to go to the house on Eighth Street and have to act as if nothing had happened. This time when he tipped his hat to them, they spoke. There’s no use fighting other people’s battles, they said, slipping their pumps off surreptitiously under the bridge table. They never thank you for it. Besides, I like Harrison. I always have. I know he’s difficult, but then Mildred isn’t the easiest person in the world to get along with, either, and I think he tries to do what is right and she ought to take that into consideration.
The tragic heroine takes everything into consideration. That is her trouble, the thing that paralyzes her. While her lawyer is explaining to her the advantages of separate maintenance over an outright divorce, she considers the shape of his hands and how some people have nothing but happiness while they are young, and then, later, nothing but unhappiness.
Much as I like Mildred, the women said, driving back from the lake after listening to a three-hour monologue that had been every bit as good as a play, I can’t get worked up over it anymore. Besides, it’s bad for the children. And if you ask me, I don’t think she knows what she wants to do.
This was quite right. Mildred Geliert left her husband and took a cottage out at the lake, in September, when all the other cottages were empty and boarded up, and this, of course, didn’t solve anything but merely postponed the decision that could not be made until later in the fall, when some other postponement would have to be found, some new half measure.
Did you hear her ask me if I’d seen Harrison? the women said as the carriage reached the outskirts of town.
She wanted to know if he’d been at our house and I said right out that Ralph and I had been to call on his mother. She knows the old lady is there, and I thought I might as well be truthful with her because she might find it out some other way. I was all set to say, “Well, Mildred, if we all picked up our children and left our husbands every six months —” but she didn’t say anything, so naturally I couldn’t. But I know one thing. I’m not going all the way out there again in this heat just to hear the same old story about how Harrison wouldn’t let her go to Peoria. And besides she did go, so what’s there to get excited about? If she wants to see me, she can just get on the streetcar and come into town. After all, there’s a limit.
The limit is boredom. Unless the: tragic heroine can produce new stories, new black-and-blue marks, new threats and outrages that exceed in dramatic quality the old ones, it is better that she stay, no matter how unhappily, with her husband. So says the voice of doubt, the wisdom of fear.
IN the front room of the cottage out at the lake Adah Belle said, “She’s been changing things around some.”
“What?”
“She’s got the sofa in the bay window where the table belong, and the table is out in the center of the room.”
“I tried them that way but it doesn’t work,” Mildred Geliert said.
“It don’t look natural,” the colored woman agreed. “It was better the way you had it. She asked me did I know where to look for what I wanted and I said I could put my hands right on everything, so she sat down and commenced to read, and I took myself off upstairs.”
“When Virginia was a baby, Mother Geliert came and stayed with her so Mr. Geliert and I could go to Chicago. When I got back she’d straightened all the dresser drawers and I thought I’d go out of my mind trying to figure out where she could have put things. She’d even got into the cedar chest and wrapped everything up in newspaper. She smiles at you and looks as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, and then the minute your back is turned — Did she ask for me?”
“No’m, I can’t say she did.”
“Or about the children?”
The colored woman shook her head.
“You’d think she might at least ask about her own grandchildren,” Mildred Geliert said. Her eagerness gave way to disappointment. There was something that she had been expecting from this visit of Adah Belle’s to the house on Eighth Street, something besides the woolens that Adah Belle had been instructed to get. “Was there any mail?”
“Well, they was this postcard for little Virginia. It was upstairs on the table beside the bed in her room. I don’t know how that child’s going to get it if she’s out here. But anyway, I stick it inside my dress without asking.”
“It’s from her Sunday school teacher,” Mildred Geliert said, and put the postcard — a view of stalagmites and stalactites in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky — on the mantel.
“While I was at it, I took a look around,” Adah Belle said.
“Yes?”
“Judging from the guest-room closet, she’s move in to stay.”
“That’s all right with me,” Mildred Geliert said, her voice suddenly harsh with bitterness. “From now on it’s her house. She can do anything she likes with it.” As she put the little boy in the crib, her mind was filled with possibilities. She would force Harrison to give her the house on Eighth Street; or, if that proved too expensive for her to manage on the money the court allowed her, she could always rent those four upstairs rooms over old Mrs. Marshall. Adah Belle would look after the children in the daytime, and she could get a job in Lembach’s selling dresses or teach domestic science in the high school.
“She save brown-paper bags. And string.”
“Don’t get me started on that,” Mildred Geliert said. “Did she say anything when you left?”
“I call out to her I was leaving,” Adah Belle said, “and when she come out of the library she had these two boxes in her hand.”
“What two boxes?”
“I got them with me in the kitchen. ‘Will you give these to the children,’ she says. ‘They’re from Mr. Geliert. I don’t know whether Mrs. Geliert will want them to have presents from their father or not, but you can ask her.’ ”
“As a matter of fact, I don’t,” Mildred Geliert said.
Out in the kitchen she broke the string on the larger package an
d opened it. “Building blocks,” she said. The other box was flat and square and contained a children’s handkerchief with a lavender butterfly embroidered in one corner. “I wish he wouldn’t do things like that. With Edward it doesn’t matter, but the sooner Virginia forgets her father, the better. He ought to realize that.”
“He don’t mean no harm by it,” the colored woman said.
Mildred Geliert looked at her. “Are you going to turn against me, too?”
“No’m,” Adah Belle said. “I ain’t turning against you, honey. All I say is he don’t mean no harm.”
“Well, what he means is one thing,” Mildred Geliert said, her eyes fever-bright. “And what he does is just exactly the opposite!” The next time they drove out, her intimate friends, to see her, she would have something to tell them that would make them sit up and take notice. It wasn’t enough that Harrison had driven her from the house, forcing her to take refuge out here, in a place with no heat, and fall coming on; that didn’t satisfy him. Now he was going to win the children away from her with expensive gifts, so that in the end he’d have everything and she’d be left stranded, with no place to go and no one to turn to. He’d planned it all out, from the very beginning. That would be his revenge.
“What you aim to do with them? Send them back?” Adah Belle asked, looking at the two boxes she had carried all the way out from town.
“Put this on the trash pile and burn, it,” Mildred Geliert said and left the kitchen.
Outside, under a large oak tree, a little girl of five, her hair in two blond braids, was playing with a strawberry box. She had lined the box with a piece of calico and in it lay a small rubber doll, naked, with a whistle in its stomach. “Now you be quiet,” the little girl said to the doll, “and take your nap or I’ll slap you.”