Maybeth was Maybeth. Silent and peaceful, she went off to church with Cousin Eunice on Sundays dressed in a frilly pink dress Cousin Eunice had bought her, wearing a little straw hat with flowers on the brim and white gloves. She even had a little white purse. Cousin Eunice had taken a great liking to Maybeth.
Dicey wondered if she was losing touch with her family.
Dicey had looked through Aunt Cilla’s photograph albums. She didn’t know what it was she was looking for, just something. There were only two pictures of Aunt Cilla’s childhood, before she met and married Mr. Logan and lived in Bridgeport.
The first picture was a posed photographer’s picture, badly yellowed, of a man with a long beard and a woman with long hair piled on top of her head. The woman held a baby on her lap. Beside her stood a girl with curling blonde hair and a silly smile. Underneath this picture Aunt Cilla had written in her lacy handwriting: Mother, Father, Abigail, and myself. Dicey thought Abigail must be the baby, since Cousin Eunice said Aunt Cilla was twelve years older than her sister.
The other picture must have been taken at a birthday party, because there was a cake with candles at the center of the picture. A pretty young woman in a white summer dress held a knife to cut the cake. Beside her, on one side, stood her parents, the man’s beard turning white and the woman grown fat. On the other side stood a girl with wildly curly dark hair and a sour expression. The three adults were looking at the photographer and smiling. The little girl scowled down at the cake. Her hands were behind her back. Dicey would have bet that her fists were clenched.
Dicey recognized the older daughter as Aunt Cilla. The younger girl was Abigail. The sour one. Her grandmother.
One afternoon Dicey went early to meet James. She went early on purpose and entered the school building rather than going around to the playground to where James usually waited for her. She found Father Joseph in a small office, sitting behind a wooden desk correcting papers.
“We’re very pleased with James,” he said to her. “Sit down.” He pulled out a chair. “How is everything going for you? You’ve been with your cousin for about two weeks now, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” Dicey said.
“Is something wrong?” he asked her. Then he seemed to recall something that had slipped his mind. “I’ve been wanting to talk with you anyway and haven’t gotten around to it. I’m glad you came in. Shall we deal with your business first, and then get on to mine?”
“But you said you were pleased with James,” Dicey said. She was alarmed. “He’s happy here. Awfully happy.”
“James is fine, fine,” Father Joseph said. He closed up his grade book, folded his hands and looked at her. “What brought you to see me?”
“I wondered if you had heard from your church in Crisfield,” Dicey said. Her mind was working furiously. Was something wrong about Maybeth? Or Sammy? Or both of them? She knew something was wrong with Sammy at camp, she’d known that all along.
“What do you know about your mother’s family?” Father Joseph asked.
“Nothing. Momma never talked about them, never at all. Except Aunt Cilla. And that wasn’t the truth—but Momma didn’t know that. I found a picture of my grandmother in Aunt Cilla’s albums, but she was only a girl, Maybeth’s age. Cousin Eunice doesn’t know anything. Did you find out something?”
“A little. The family is not Catholic, you know.”
Dicey nodded. He kept bringing that up.
“So they aren’t parishioners. If they were parishioners, then we would know a great deal about them. But—your grandmother. Her name is Abigail Tillerman.”
“I knew that. There were names under one of the pictures.”
“She lives alone on a small farm, outside of Crisfield. She lives absolutely alone there. Her husband died some years ago.”
So Dicey didn’t have a grandfather.
“They weren’t Catholics, but Crisfield is a small town, where everybody knows everybody else. So—the priest asked some questions of his older parishioners. They had known the Tillermans. None of them had been friends—the Tillermans didn’t seem to have friends—but they knew about them. He told me there were three children in the family. A boy, John, named after his father. People say he is in California. Nobody has heard from him for years, not his mother, nobody—twenty years or more. A second son died in Vietnam. Do you know about the war in Vietnam?”
Dicey nodded. Well, she had heard of it, and James would be able to tell her about it.
“Then the daughter, your mother. She ran off when she was twenty-one, they say, to join a merchant mariner she had somehow met, a man named Francis Verricker.”
“My father?” The man who had swung her to his shoulder and named her his little only.
Father Joseph rubbed his hand over his eyes. “Yes. At least, that is the name on the birth certificates from Provincetown. I have no reason to think he was not everyone’s father. The police are trying to trace him for me. They had searched for him some years ago. He seems to have disappeared.”
“I don’t mind,” Dicey said.
“I do.” Father Joseph’s voice was sharp and angry. That surprised Dicey, and, sensing his concern, she was grateful to him, for the first time in all the time in Bridgeport, truly grateful.
“Do you mind hearing unpleasant truths, Dicey?”
“Yes. But I’d rather know the truth than not, if that’s what you mean.”
“I thought so. The Tillerman home—it must have been unhappy. Do you know what that can mean?”
“I think so,” Dicey said. “I mean, we were happy. We were—whether you believe it or not . . . ”
“Oddly enough, I do believe it.”
Dicey smiled at him. “You see, there were kids at school—they hated their parents or they hated other people so much that you knew—it wasn’t just being angry, it was hating. I can’t explain what I mean, but I could feel the unhappiness.”
“I see that James doesn’t have all the brains in the family,” Father Joseph said.
Dicey was flattered. “He’s the smart one. I’m just—practical.”
“Well, the Tillermans seem to have had that kind of unhappiness. The priest—or his informants—seem to blame her parents, especially the father. Remember, this is conjecture, not fact. It may just be gossip, you know. This is just what someone told him and he told me. Your grandfather seems to have been a stern man. An unbending man. Over-righteous perhaps. Perhaps cruel. Nobody knows anything certain. Your grandmother always let him have his way. Nobody can say what she thought. She never spoke of it. He had his boys do a man’s work, from the time they were eight. He used a whip for disobedience, a real whip. He did not tolerate disobedience of any sort. He quarreled with his neighbors. He was angry—probably hate-filled too. She—your grandmother—was apparently the kind of woman who sticks faithfully to her husband’s rule. She may have thought he was right. Or something else.”
“It doesn’t really matter which, does it?”
“In effect, no. You are practical.”
“I haven’t had much choice.”
“Speaking practically then, your other uncle is dead, your mother has disappeared, and I don’t think your uncle John wants to be found. Which leaves your cousin Eunice.”
What was wrong with her grandmother? Dicey didn’t ask aloud. She sat silent for a while. “What a family,” she finally said.
“You shouldn’t judge unless you’ve been there and known what actually went on,” Father Joseph said.
“Come on,” Dicey protested. “And Momma’s—but she gave us a good home in Provincetown. She took good care of us, as good as she could.”
“Yes, I think so, in some ways. One wonders,” he said carefully, his light brown eyes resting on Dicey’s face, “if there isn’t a strain of—mental weakness.”
Was he reading her mind?
“Your grandmother’s isolation—she has no phone, so the priest drove out from Crisfield to talk with her. She wouldn’t let him into the h
ouse. She apparently screamed aloud so that she wouldn’t hear what he was saying.”
Dicey remembered Momma’s strangeness and James’s idea that craziness was inherited.
“I mention this to you because I want to tell you that, if it can be inherited, you have probably not inherited it. In my opinion,” Father Joseph said.
“Are you sure?”
“No, of course not. But remember, you’ve already been through more trials than most people endure in a lifetime. You and James, you two at least, seem to have the strength and resilience to go on. Isn’t that what sanity is?”
“I don’t know,” Dicey said. She rose to go, her mind filled with what he had said.
“But we are concerned about your sister. She is—so far behind her age group. She doesn’t speak. She can’t read or work with numbers.”
This again.
“She can,” Dicey sat down again. “She can do all that. She isn’t—she doesn’t in front of strangers. Her teachers always said she couldn’t do things, but at home, with me or James, she could. You don’t believe me.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You didn’t believe me about our father being the same,” Dicey reminded him.
“That’s true.”
“You just have to give Maybeth time.”
“How much time? There’s Sammy, too. The brothers report that he is not mixing in well. He is hostile to his peers and hard to direct and control. He plays alone, because the other boys avoid him.”
Dicey sighed. “It was hardest on Sammy when Momma left us. And before it was hardest because she paid so much attention to him. James told me on our way here that in Provincetown Sammy had it hardest of anyone. Because of coming after Maybeth. And the things people said about Momma.”
“How did you and James manage?” Father Joseph asked.
“James is smart. He’d think his own thoughts and ignore people. I guess I just fought back too hard for people to want to tease me. But Sammy wouldn’t. I mean, he’d fight, but he’s not as fierce as I am.” Father Joseph smiled. “When he was a baby, he was always happy and friendly. That’s the way he really is. He can still be that way. Sometimes, on the way here, you could see it, you could see him getting to be more like himself.”
“Sammy is a difficult child,” Father Joseph said. “But I suppose his hostility isn’t surprising when you think of causes. He needs a warm, loving home.”
So do we all, Dicey thought. She looked quickly at Father Joseph. “I love Sammy,” she said.
“Of course you do. You must consider, however, the effect of these burdens on your own life. I think you must. I think you must give some thought to adoption and foster homes. Sammy, despite his behavior, may prove the easiest to find a home for. It will be hard to place Maybeth. A retarded child—”
“She’s not!”
“She has the symptoms,” Father Joseph answered gently. “And you, an older child. You also would be hard to place. Your cousin—I don’t know what her plans are now.”
Dicey had no idea what he was talking about. She shrugged her shoulders.
“James also is old for adoption, but he would easily find a permanent home here at the school, or he might stay with one of our families. His academic promise makes him most desirable.”
Dicey could think of nothing to say.
“You should think of these things,” Father said, still gently. “I know you don’t want to, but you must think them through and be ready. Think of yourself also. You are still a child yourself.”
A child? Dicey felt a hundred years old. Or more.
“I’m not asking you to decide. Just to open your mind to other possibilities.”
Dicey nodded. She knew she should thank him, but she couldn’t. So she just walked out of the room, without a word.
* * *
That afternoon, in the mail, Dicey received a check from the Police Department of Peewauket, for fifty-seven dollars. The receipt with it said “Profits from the sale of one 1963 Chevrolet sedan, less costs.” Dicey looked at the check and smiled, for the first time in days, it felt. She could give it to Cousin Eunice and that would make her cousin feel better about taking the Tillermans in. Or she could buy some blue jeans for herself and Maybeth, which would make them feel better. Or she could hide the money away, for what purpose she didn’t know.
Dicey knew what she should do. She should give the money to Cousin Eunice. Instead, she cashed the check at the grocery store, where the man knew her, and put the money into the box Maybeth’s church shoes had come in.
Having money made a difference. It woke Dicey up. She began to think of how she could earn more during the day when everybody was gone. She could easily spend less time on housework if she pushed herself to be faster and more efficient. If she did that she could have some time for earning. Dicey felt like her old self again.
Because she was young, Dicey couldn’t get a regular job. Over the next few days, she thought hard about what she could do to earn money. She could wash windows, she knew how, she’d done it. She decided to try that. If that didn’t work, she would try something else.
The first place Dicey asked for work was the grocery store. The manager-owner, Mr. Platernis, liked her, so she figured she’d try him first.
Dicey suggested to Mr. Platernis that she wash his windows three times a week, for two dollars each time. He studied her.
“I’ve only got two windows,” he said.
“They’re plate glass, and big. I’d do them inside and out, and then I’d restack the canned goods and dog food,” Dicey countered.
“You’d need some special equipment,” he said. “A long-handled washer, a bucket, cleanser.”
“If I knew I’d be using them I’d buy them,” Dicey said.
He considered this. Dicey enjoyed the bargaining. He enjoyed it too. “I’d buy them here,” Dicey added. “I’d buy all my supplies here too.”
“You going into the business?”
“I might be.”
He thought some more. “Two dollars is a lot of money.”
“A store with clean windows is more attractive to customers. Especially a grocery store. More people would come to shop here.”
“I can do the windows myself.”
“Three times a week? They get pretty dirty.”
“I know, oh I know. How about a trial period of a week?”
“Two weeks,” Dicey said. “It’ll cost me that much to get the equipment.”
He laughed at her. “All right, two weeks. And I’ll call some other people who might be interested, some other store owners in this area. We’ll see if they would like to employ your services.”
“Would you, Mr. Platernis? You won’t be sorry.” Dicey grinned at him.
By bargaining this way, before she knew it, Dicey had six regular jobs, washing the city grime off the windows of neighborhood stores. She had two grocery stores, one hardware store, one shoe store, one pawn shop and one dress store. The dress store was her best job—they had four big windows they wanted washed three times a week, so she earned twelve dollars a week from there. That, added to the six dollars weekly from Mr. Platernis and four apiece from the other three stores, made a total income of thirty dollars a week. Her supplies, once she had made the original purchase of bucket and long-handled squeegee, cost her five dollars a week. Mr. Platernis let her store her equipment in the closet with his own cleaning equipment and supplies, just to keep an eye on her, he said. He didn’t need to worry—Dicey liked her work, she liked making money. The money in the shoebox began to mount up. Dicey’s spirits mounted with it.
She was working hard, but she seemed to have more energy than before. The July heat thickened and deepened, but Dicey wasn’t slowed down by that. Mr. Platernis couldn’t get over her high spirits. “You must have been raised in the tropics,” he said, mopping at his face with a cloth handkerchief. He often stood outside and talked with Dicey while she worked. He would help her replace the soup cans and bags of dog food
she had to move before she could wash the inside windows.
“I like having something to do,” Dicey said.
“I’d think you have enough to do keeping house for Miss Logan and your family. Since you arrived I haven’t seen her, except passing by. You’re doing all her shopping, and the rest of it too, I’m guessing.”
“That’s not the same,” Dicey said.
“You don’t like housework,” Mr. Platernis concluded.
Dicey didn’t contradict him, though she knew that wasn’t it. She didn’t mind housework. She’d always kept house in Provincetown, although Momma wasn’t nearly as fussy as Cousin Eunice. But it wasn’t the same when you always had to remember to feel grateful.
Dicey bought herself three maps: one of Connecticut, one of New York and New Jersey, one of Maryland and Delaware. She found Crisfield easily enough, way down at the end of Maryland, facing the Chesapeake Bay.
One night at dinner Dicey tried to find out something about her grandmother. “Did you ever visit your mother’s family?” she asked.
Cousin Eunice looked up in surprise. “Of course not. Mother said she didn’t want to go back, and she wouldn’t have me going near the place. Sammy! What are you doing? Sit up! Don’t lie on the table! Bring the fork to your face, not your face to the fork.” Her eyes, sulking behind the glasses, went back to Dicey. “I don’t know why you children can’t work on your manners yourselves, instead of worrying me with them. Don’t you think I have enough to do?”
Dicey cast a quick eye around the table. Maybeth put her left hand into her lap and straightened her back. Then she met Dicey’s glance with a silly smile, half worried, half apologetic.
“I have enough to do,” Cousin Eunice went on. “And added to—” She hesitated and seemed to remember something. “Sammy? Is that a cut on your hand?”
Sammy chewed and nodded.
“How did that happen?” Cousin Eunice asked.
Sammy stuck his jaw out. He did not answer.
“Answer me,” Cousin Eunice said.
“I don’t remember,” Sammy muttered.
“That is a lie.”
“How do you know?”