As usual Aunt Sophie had offered to let Miss Mix sew for Emily, too, but Emily had declined.
“No thank you, Aunt Sophie. I shan’t bother now while you’re so busy with Annette.”
“We certainly are busy,” Aunt Sophie had replied with obvious relief. And Emily was glad that she didn’t press the point. Emily took no interest in clothes this fall. What use would clothes be when she wasn’t going away?
Not everyone was going away to college, of course. But the girls who were staying home were registering at Teachers’ College or business college or the German Catholic College on the hill—all except one or two who were getting ready to be married.
“Married! Someone from our class!” the girls exclaimed to each other in amazement.
Everyone was busy with new enterprises—except Emily. She busied herself with the enterprises of the others. She clung to the girls, sharing their fevers of shopping and sewing, their trips to the doctor and dentist, the excitement which possessed them. She came closer to Annette than she had ever been. When the Epsilon Iotas wrote asking Annette for dates for rushing parties, Annette actually crossed the slough to tell her cousin.
“Why don’t you get a telephone!” she scolded. “But I just had to come. I can’t talk to Gladys, for no sorority has asked her for dates—and it’s so terribly important. Sororities are the most important thing in college, Em.”
Emily laughed at that.
“Well, for me they are!” insisted Annette, laughing too. “After I’m in a sorority and have gone to a few formals, I’d just as soon quit and get married.”
“Who to?” asked Emily, too interested to be grammatical.
“Why, I don’t know! Maybe Don, if I can make him ask me.” Annette gave her little merry laugh. “Come on back with me, and see the negligee Mamma found at the Lion. Gee, with all these clothes I feel as though I were getting married now!”
There was a round of luncheons, teas, and card parties for the girls who were going away. Even Emily gave one—for Annette. She was too sensitive about her home to entertain often. But the giddiness got into her blood.
Telling her grandfather about the plan with elation, she started house-cleaning. She took up the carpets and pounded them out on the lawn. She took down the lace curtains and washed and starched and stretched them. She scoured the windows, and wiped the picture frames, and carefully bathed the knick-knacks in the what-not, and polished all the heavy old furniture, poking zealous fingers into carved bunches of grapes atop the sofa and side chairs.
Washing the yellow keys of the piano she thought, “I’ll buy some sheet music to make this look more up to date.”
She longed, as always, for new furniture and modern innovations—a furnace, a sleeping porch, and especially a bathroom! But she tried to shake such ideas out of her mind.
“I’ll fill the house with flowers. It really will look sweet. Now, if I could only think what to give them to eat!”
The other girls served such novel refreshments—cheese fondue, shrimp wiggle, rice pilaff, and marvelous concoctions of marshmallow, pineapple and whipped cream mixed together. They learned about them from their mothers who served such things at luncheons. Emily was bewildered by them.
“What’s the best thing I cook, Grandpa?” she asked.
“New England boiled dinner,” he answered promptly.
“But, Grandpa! I’m thinking of my party. The girls are going to stay to supper. I want to give them something nice.”
“Roast chicken?” he asked hopefully. “And that giblet gravy your grandmother taught you to make? There’s nothing wrong with your apple pie either.”
“I’d like something new.”
“How about frogs’ legs?”
“Grandpa!” She jumped up eagerly. “That’s just the thing! If you see Kalil, call him in, so I can order some.”
“I see him every day. He comes to get minnows for fishing,” her grandfather answered. And sure enough, the following morning he appeared with Kalil, trailed by Yusef as usual.
Kalil was delighted with the enormous order.
“We will bring an army, a big, big army of frogs’ legs!” he cried. “There not be any frogs left in the slough.”
The idea of a party seemed to enchant him. “You give them sweets? You play music?”
“Is that what you do at your parties?”
“Yes, ma’am. The Syrians like flutes. And they like drums.” He blew an imaginary flute and beat an imaginary drum, his round eyes sparkling.
Emily laughed. “Well, we’ll play the piano! Now be here early with the frogs’ legs, please.”
When the great day came the little house looked its shining best. The windows were open, framing the green lawn, and the garden still full of summer flowers, and the slough where sumac was reddening and red-winged blackbirds were gathering in flocks. Her grandfather had retired to his room.
“I’ll fix my own supper. Don’t pay any attention to me. Just have a good time,” he had said. And Emily knew they would have a good time as soon as she saw the girls spilling out of Gladys’ Reo.
All of them, except Emily, had their hair up now…in pompadours thrust forward with combs in front, in side pompadours well padded with rats, in puffs and curls and psyche knots, often banded with ribbon. In their long tight dresses they looked like young ladies, but they were behaving like children.
“They’re on a tear,” Mabel called. Like Emily, Mabel enjoyed, rather than participated in, such moods of silliness.
“It’s our last chance before college gets us,” shouted Nell.
“We can feel its awful clutch!”
Up in Emily’s bedroom where they went to lay their wraps, Gladys discovered the class pictures. She seized a photograph.
“My heart leaps up when I behold,
Scid’s picture in my hand…”
Emily’s shy smile widened and she broke into a laugh.
They ran downstairs and out to the lawn to play children’s games—leadman, and statues, and in-and-out-the-windows.
They noticed Emily wearing the Progressive Party pin and shouted, “Sock ’em, Teddy!”
“Emily’s a Bull Mooser!”
“She’s a New Woman!”
“That reminds me of my recitation,” cried Annette, and pushing them to the grass, she delivered Rudyard Kipling’s new poem about the female of the species.
Inside again, Gladys rushed to the piano. They sang loudly “When the Midnight Choo-choo Leaves for Alabam” and “Oh, You Beautiful Doll” and a song about two little love bees buzzing in a bower. When they sang that one Gladys, impersonating Hunter, dropped to her knees at Ellen’s feet.
They stopped singing and talked about boys.
Mabel said Annette should favor Jim Baxter over Don. Jim Baxter! thought Emily. He was nice enough; and a football star, of course; but just a big hulking—pumpkin head! How could Mabel mention him in the same breath with Don?
But others agreed. “That Don Walker is conceited.” “He certainly is. He has the most superior air.”
Emily flashed out, “That’s because he is superior.” After she had spoken she flushed, but nobody noticed.
“Em’s right,” said Annette. “He’s very intellectual. He admitted to me that he found high school pretty childish…”
She was silenced by a thrown cushion.
Although they ate early, the September twilight had already fallen. Emily didn’t have place mats—which were the stylish thing, of course—but candlelight shone graciously on her grandmother’s gleaming damask, the heavy silver, the thin pale dishes. And the frogs’ legs were highly successful. They not only caused excitement and merriment but they were delicious as well, and so were the scalloped potatoes, and the garden vegetables, the hot biscuits with homemade gooseberry preserves and the fresh peach pie.
Emily sat at the top of the table, a quiet little smile on her mouth. It delighted her that the girls had had such fun. She would remember for a long time, when they were
all away, Gladys at the piano, Annette reciting with her ridiculous gestures:
“The Female of the Species,
Is more deadly than the male…”
There was only one moment when she felt anything but happy. That came when the girls were leaving and Gladys, sitting down at the piano again, struck up the University of Minnesota hymn:
“Minnesota, hail to thee,
Hail to thee, our college dear…”
In leaving, Annette put her arm around her. “It was a wonderful party, Em. You ought to give them oftener! I’m glad I’m going to college if it makes you entertain.”
Ellen said soberly, “I wish you were going, too, Em.”
Mabel added, “So do I.”
Emily didn’t know what to answer, but fortunately Gladys broke in, “Let’s go up to the high school tomorrow and show off! What do you say? Watch the poor kids toiling!”
“Let’s wear our new fall clothes!”
“Oh, let’s! Let’s!”
So when they started out next morning, Emily, in a Peter Thompson suit with a red hair ribbon, was the only one who looked like a school girl. The others were impressive in gigantic velvet hats and long slim suits; Gladys Dunn’s was slit to the knee.
Hilariously they climbed Walnut Hill and passed through the big front doors of the high school. Inside was the familiar smell of chalk dust and healthy perspiration. The stairs were crowded, but the students seemed younger than they had seemed last year. They seemed to belong to a different world.
When the others went into the Social Room, Emily lingered in the upper hall, looking in the trophy case at the debating cup she and Don had helped to win.
“I wish Stewie was here,” she thought. “I wonder who’s coaching the debating team this year.”
She hailed Jerry Sibley and asked him.
“The new civics teacher.”
“What’s his name?”
“Mr. Wakeman.”
“I’ll bet he isn’t as nice as Stewie,” Emily said.
Then the bell rang and the visiting alumnae marched self-consciously into the Assembly Room where the faculty sat on the platform—Miss Clarke, Miss Fowler and the rest—ranged behind Miss Bangeter, the queenly principal.
Annette nudged Emily. “Good looking!” she whispered, indicating a newcomer among the teachers, a large young man with an air of easy self-possession.
“It must be Mr. Wakeman, the new civics teacher,” Emily said. “He’s coaching the debating team.”
After the exercises they scattered to the various classrooms, speaking in new familiarity with the teachers. Several of them asked, “What are you going to do, Emily?”
“Just take care of Grandpa,” she always answered cheerfully. She was consistently cheerful and matter-of-fact.
It was hard to maintain this attitude, however, during the next few days. One by one her friends went away, and there was a train party for each. Mabel Scott left first; Vassar was so remote. Then Hunter and Ellen departed for Carleton, and Nell for St. Catherine’s. Last of all went the large gay group headed for the State University at Minneapolis.
Walking to the four forty-five, Emily saw a line of birds weaving through the sky. Even the birds were going away!
The seekers after knowledge were waiting on the station platform, rimmed with parents. Jim Baxter looked glum. Fred Muller’s face was shining under well-brushed blond hair. He was going to study to be an architect.
“Wish me luck, Emily,” he said.
Scid, a flower in his buttonhole, was making jokes about Gladys’ slit skirt. Gladys chased him down the platform. Don, in a new ulster and new snap-brim gray hat, smoked cigarettes and acted old and worldly.
He didn’t say a private word to Emily. He was busy teasing Annette. “Everyone will know you’re a freshie!” he told her, for her new tailored suit was green, and her big hat was green, and she wore a flat green bow at the neck of her waist.
At last, with expectantly swinging bell, the train pulled in. They all piled into the parlor car, and Emily looked around with interest at the big easy chairs, the large well-polished windows, the racks for luggage, the white-coated porter. She had never traveled—not even to the Cities.
“All aboard!” shouted the conductor, and everyone climbed off except the travelers, who came out to the observation platform. Still jokes were shouted, and messages, and admonitions, but a whistle blew, and slowly, inexorably, the train pulled away.
Aunt Sophie was dabbing at her eyes.
“Don’t be silly!” Uncle Chester said. “You can go up to see her next week.”
“But we’re going to miss her so! You’ll have to come to see us often, Emily.”
“I will.”
She refused a ride and walked briskly up Front Street, trying not to feel as though a trap door had shut.
Dusk was chilling the air but it smelled of September, of beginnings. September was a month of beginnings—or ought to be. She checked that thought.
“Now, I’m not going to let this get me down. I’m not made that way. Thank God, I have a backbone, and a good stiff one, too…”
She started over the slough.
“I’m sorry not to be going to college, of course. But you can’t have everything. I have my home—and Grandpa. There must be lots I can do.”
The slough was noisy with birds and frogs as it always was at twilight. Above her grandfather’s house, pink was fading from the sky. She turned in at the sagging gate and walked up the path under the shadows.
At the porch she stopped to wink violently. She lingered, breaking off some withered lily stalks, and strolled around the side of the house.
“Now, I’m not going to be a cry baby,” she said.
But out of sight of any window, she dropped down on the cellar door, put her face into her hands, and cried.
8
The Slough of Despond
AFTER THE FIRST FEW DAYS things didn’t seem quite so bad. The blow had fallen. It was automatic to pick up courage and go on.
The apples on their gnarled apple trees were red.
“Let’s get those apples picked,” Emily suggested. “I’ll make some into apple butter—colored with elder berries like I did last year.”
“It was good,” Grandpa Webster remembered.
They raked and burned the fallen leaves, talking sociably.
“Hunting season must be on,” said Emily, hearing a shot in the slough.
“There didn’t use to be any hunting season,” her grandfather chuckled. “We used to take a dog and go out whenever we liked.”
“Aunt Sophie will be asking us over for dinner,” remarked Emily. Uncle Chester was a hunter, and a wild duck dinner was an annual family event.
Her grandfather brushed away a flying piece of soot and smiled at her across the fire.
“It’s certainly nice to have you home, Emmy. You’re not going to be lonesome, are you?”
“Of course not,” she lied.
They set the hard-coal heater up in the parlor. September was still golden sweet but the mornings and evenings were cool. The heater kept the downstairs stuffily warm. Her grandfather and Judge Hodges played chess there.
Emily saw children going past to school, carrying books, lagging and laughing, and she envied them. Oh, to be going back to school!
“But I’m not and that’s that!” she told herself sternly. “Grandpa, I’m going out and wash storm windows.”
“All right, Emmy. You’re certainly a go-ahead,” he said.
Letters and cards had begun to come back from the departed ones. Emily answered them the same day they arrived. Mabel wrote, describing the big college on the Hudson. A letter from Ellen told of Hunter’s opening achievements at Carleton. There were letters from Nell and Gladys and Annette. Annette was being rushed by several sororities.
“The fraternities are putting up a battle for Don, too,” she wrote. “He hasn’t decided which one he’s going to join.”
There was no letter from
Don. Somehow, after those summer calls, Emily had really expected one, and it hurt that he didn’t write.
She read in the paper that Woodrow Wilson, the scholarly Democratic nominee for the presidency, had addressed the university. Don knew how interested she would be in this event. But he didn’t write.
An attempt was made on the life of Theodore Roosevelt. The three-cornered campaign was putting on frantic speed. She longed to talk it over with someone, but her grandfather always branched off into a discussion of Abraham Lincoln.
“Don might write! He might!” she thought, holding back tears as she bundled the newspapers out of the way with furious energy.
Depression settled down upon her, and although she tried to brush it away it thickened like a fog.
“Why, the kids will be home for Thanksgiving! That will be here in no time. I mustn’t get this way,” she thought. But she felt lonely and deserted and futile.
“A mood like this has to be fought. It’s like an enemy with a gun,” she told herself. But she couldn’t seem to find a gun with which to fight.
One day at dinner her grandfather had a story about Kalil. He had been bitten by a snake.
“Just a harmless water snake. I was near by and saw the critter. But Kalil hit the sky. While I washed him off and put on iodine he was wagging his hands and describing the snake to Yusef. You’d have thought it was a prehistoric monster.” He chuckled, but Emily didn’t smile. She had stopped listening after he said the snake was harmless.
Her grandfather’s tone changed. “I believe you’re lonesome, Emmy.”
“Why, of course not!” she answered hastily. “How—how’s Kalil now?”
“Pretty well. But he runs into trouble in school. It’s his English, he thinks. The boys tease him.”
“It’s a good thing there’s a big group from Little Syria. They’re company for each other,” Emily answered listlessly.
Her grandfather studied her from under his bushy brows.
“Emmy,” he said. “Maybe you’d like to take music lessons again?” He loved music, and she hadn’t touched the piano since the crowd went away.
“Perhaps later,” she evaded. She wasn’t in a mood for music somehow. “I’m planning to do a lot of reading this winter.”