"Lordy," he said, with a woeful shake of his head, "hereabouts folks burned witches, isn't that so, Missus?"
"Indeed, yes, Jesse. Think of poor Mercy Higham." Mercy Higham was our local witch who'd been denounced as a demon-fancier because she could stick a needle in her finger without drawing blood. "But," Lady continued, "it's the part of the New England ethic which, even after centuries, still hangs on. Look at poor Elsie Thatcher -- you boys are too young to remember her -- she worked at River House, and was drummed out of town."
"Why?" Phil Harrelson asked.
"She was requested by some of the town ladies and gentlemen to depart elsewhere. The committee serving notice on Elsie was headed by P.J. and Spouse -- the Spragues."
What had Elsie Thatcher done? we wanted to know.
Elsie, to her sorrow, had borne a child out of wedlock. Elsie was a sinner. Elsie could no longer draw lager at River House. Elsie could no longer live in Pequot Landing.
"She ought to have gone to Holiday Lake," I said.
"What ever do you mean?" Lady asked in surprise.
"You know -- the roller coaster? Lily Marini?" I thought everybody knew. One of the Knobb Street Marinis hung out with the boys on the depot platform at night, and when she was going to have a baby she went to Holiday Lake and rode the roller coaster backward and she didn't have the baby. "But it took five rides," I added.
"Oh, Ignatz, you're making that up." Lady laughed and laughed. "But we're very Old Testament in our thinking," she continued. "From Abraham to Selectman Standish, we are guilt-ridden and fearful of impropriety. Narrow lives make for narrow minds. Or perhaps it's the other way around? But one day it may change."
"Change how?" Harry wanted to know.
"Well, today our population is around five thousand in the town. But it will grow, what with the new highway, and the factories being built There will be more houses -- little houses, you may be sure, but the people living in them won't necessarily be of English stock, or Protestant, or even white. They may have other ideas than the 5:10-ers have. Did you know there's only one Jewish family in town? The Rosens?"
We didn't know much about the Rosens, except that their son George was a good student, and his sister Anne was one of the prettiest girls around. But we did know that because they were Jewish, and went to temple in Hartford, like Catholics they were somehow "different"
"And," Lady continued, "one day, when the farms are gone, and the streets are laid out, and the little houses are built, these new people will be the ones Mr. Welles will want to sell his horseradish to. One day we may even have a mayor and a town council, and one of the Marinis could be on it"
A mayor and a town council! That was unthinkable; Pequot Landing had always been, and always would be, run by the public voting at Town Meeting. As for the Marinis, it was hard to think of any of them ever attaining a position of importance in the town.
The Marini farm was down at the end of the Green, almost across from Colonel Blatchley's house. Papa and Mama Marini were Tuscany peasants who'd come to America with little more than their clothes, steerage all the way from Genoa, and not speaking the language. Now Mr. Marini had a prosperous farm and owned land, and a large family -- there were Marinis all over the place, it seemed. His brothers had immigrated as well, one to the grape country near San Francisco, and another lived with his family up on Knobb Street -- they were considered poor relations, and two of the girls were often out back of the schoolyard, trading looks with the fellows. But our Marinis, the ones on the Green, were industrious, friendly people. Johnny, the oldest boy, worked hard for his father, and Teresa -- scrawny and shy, like Ag, only darker -- was always in the kitchen helping her mother. You couldn't walk by the house without getting a whiff of something good cooking. In addition to truck farming, Mr. Marini sold greenhouse plants, and his front yard was crowded with a display of stone birdbaths, brownies sitting on mushrooms, little animals, benches, and other garden ornaments.
But enterprising as they were, good, upstanding people, still the Marinis were only farmers, and Italians, and Catholics -- they wouldn't go far in Pequot Landing.
Continuing the conversation, Lady said, "Blue wants to fly, Woody wants to sail, how about the others?" Jack Harrelson said he wanted to go to Harvard and study law, as his father had. His brother Phil wanted to be an architect, and design buildings like they had in Radio City, or like the Empire State Building, or even bigger ones. Lew said he might like to be a basketball coach -- he didn't care at what school, as long as it was not in Pequot Landing. Harry wanted to go to MIT and study mechanical engineering. Well, Lady said, maybe he could team up with Phil. That left Rabbit, who'd played dumb most of the evening.
"How about you, Harold," Lady asked, "what do you want to be?" He blinked behind his glasses in his usual perplexity, scratched himself, and finally came up with the astounding information that he wanted to be a veterinarian. I suppressed a laugh, thinking it funny that he wanted to take care of animals, after how he'd treated Colonel Blatchley's prize hares. And, what was funnier, he wanted to set up business right here in Pequot.
"The way I figure it, this is about as nice a town as you could hope to find. It ain't city, but it's close enough. And Mrs. Harleigh's right -- it's going to grow, and people are going to do things. And they'll have families, and families ought to have dogs and cats and things, and I'd like to take care of them. You can always find a doctor if you have to, but when a dog gets runned over, who's around to put it back together?"
He said it so soberly and so earnestly, you couldn't doubt him, but of all of us who spoke that night, I think he was the only one who was content to stay in Pequot when he could as easily go elsewhere.
Then Lady, in her gently inquiring way, asked questions about Rabbit's mother and how she was getting on at Middlehaven. I could tell that he didn't like talking about it, but it didn't look as if she was ever going to get out of the reformatory. She couldn't keep her temper, and the matrons had a lot of difficulty with her. As for Dora, part of her trouble had something to do with her ear canals, and that was why she wasn't right in the head.
Lady seemed to be paying particular attention to the recital of these woes, and when she reached and tousled Rabbit's hair I felt the Green-Eyed Monster rising in me again. That dumb-silent Rabbit Hornaday, he knew how to get the attention all right. All you needed was a dippy sister, a mother in the hoosegow, and dreams of living on Knobb Street and having a pet shop.
But it was as this subject of getting away ended that we learned why Nonnie was singing again. Lady told us. In September our sister was going away to college, to the Norwich Normal School. I glanced at Lew and Harry, wondering where Ma had managed to come up with Nonnie's tuition, but however it was to be arranged, I was happy that Nonnie was finally going to realize her dream of becoming a teacher.
Lady sat up and hugged Honey to her, pointing her moist muzzle at the sky. "Look, Honey -- see how bright the moon is!" Honey cocked her head, seeming to agree with her mistress. It was a spectacular sight all right. Having risen high over the trees, the moon was making a path across the water, big silvery pieces floating in the black, and adding to the magical spirit of the night. "It looks like one of the gazing-globes Mr. Marini sells. Wouldn't one look pretty in the garden?"
"Mrs. Pierson has one," Harry pointed out.
"So she has," Lady agreed. "Well, I can't have Lilah Pierson thinking I'm keeping up with the Joneses, Papa Marini will have to find us something else. Jesse, Elthea's going to be wondering where we are if we don't start back." She smiled around the circle, then rose. "It's been a gorgeous night, boys. Thank you for letting us share it with you. Can someone put the hamper in the boat?"
While Lew took the hamper, I helped her into the skiff where she sat in the stern with Honey. Jesse put the oars in the locks, then struck out with a forceful stroke. The skiff seemed to hang in the darkness, with only the white of his shirt and of Lady's blouse and face briefly visible. Then they too became shadows, bec
ame only voices as they spoke.
"Thanks for the food," we shouted, and her merry laugh floated back to us as she said she had enjoyed it more than we.
Later, Blue left, the fire dwindled, we talked some more, then went to the huts and bedded down. Lying in my sleeping roll, I looked up at the moon at its zenith. It seemed there had never been so many stars in the sky as on that night, and they looked warm and close and comforting. I thought about Blue, wondering if he would ever really do what he wanted to do, if there would be a war and he would go to fight, or if he'd end up stuck in Pequot Landing, driving the Pilgrim Market truck, and stopping to swap jokes with the boys at the Noble Patriot. A hundred-horsepowered boy in a one-horsepowered town, trying to make an honest dollar in a day when, as Blue had pointed out, a dollar wasn't easy to come by.
Not that we were really aware of the Depression, and the fact that people elsewhere were suffering through hard times. At home there was always food enough on our table, and even if it was shepherd's pie or goulash or slumgullion, it was both filling and tasty, and to stretch the budget even further Ma could make the best cheese souffle. If we had roasts only on Sundays, with the leftovers curried on Mondays, no one complained. We knew of something called the NRA -- there were Blue Eagle stickers everywhere, in the barbershop, the drugstore, on people's windows, even at our front door, an emblem of the period -- and if the banks had closed in '32 they opened again soon enough, not that we had money in any of them. Since like almost everybody else in the whole town, we were Republicans, nobody in our house ever bothered to tune in to Mr. Roosevelt's fireside chats, but had we cared to, we could have listened to the radio blasting from next door at Gert Flagler's. She was a rabid Democrat. If we didn't have a surfeit of wardrobe, we had enough, though Aggie and I suffered from hand-me-downs.
We had no car, but there were others who didn't either, and they didn't have Lady Harleigh across the Green with her Minerva, and anyway the trolley ran right past. We received an allowance, which we earned by doing chores, but of soup kitchens and bread lines and alphabetized relief programs we were ignorant, except what we heard on the radio or read in the papers or saw in the movies. We all knew what we wanted to be when we grew up, which was to be better than our antecedents, to build taller and wider, to fly higher and faster, to make more money and be more famous, and at all costs to get out of Pequot Landing.
Lying there, looking up at the stars, I wondered if any of us would ever get to do what we thought we wanted to, and I was conscious of yearnings I couldn't define, vague yet distressing, and the realization of how hard it was to grow up, and what an unnatural process it seemed. I couldn't wait for it to happen, and I wished for a way to make it happen more quickly, to be grown and away, away from Ma and Nonnie and Ag, away from our house with its tan papered walls and katty-cornered furniture, away from Pequot Landing. What I didn't realize then, and perhaps never thought about until much later, until Blue Ferguson was dead, and my brother Lew, when all the war casualties were counted and we really were grown, was that we were living in a time of peace, and that that was a most valuable thing.
3
Then, after Hermitage Island, August came and went, September was here, summer had gone, and it was back to school again. I was in the sixth grade that fall, and Miss Grimes, the principal, was my teacher. Next year I would go on to junior high, and I would not be sorry to see the last of the Chester Welles Grammar School, a Gothic pile of dirty red brick, slate-roofed, with floors so heavily varnished you could skate on them; a hall of lower learning, with the constant clatter of shoes, the smell of damp woolens in the cloakrooms, the heavy cardboard reading charts, where knowledge came at the end of a pointer and punishment at the end of a razor strop.
Nor would I be sorry to leave Miss Grimes, the terror of any schoolboy. How often had I been sent to her office in disciplinary matters to be importantly adjudicated and then summarily dealt with. Oh, the rulers struck on the hand, my small one fiercely gripped by her large one, she grimly frowning as she whacked my palm with a worn, heavy ruler inscribed with an advertisement for the local hardware store. Oh, the wicked leather shaving strop she wielded with such mastery, for Miss Grimes knew full well that "This was what such a boy needed," and what Miss Grimes knew to be true was readily conveyed by the handiest and most thorough means.
Though her tenure at the Chester Welles Grammar School continued for many years after I left, and though I would occasionally see her about town, I do not recall ever seeing her smile, and if she saw me, it was with a dubious expression, as if to say, "There's that boy, thorn of my flesh." I have not missed Miss Grimes,
That fall, the Italians invaded Ethiopia, and I was given an assignment in Current Events dealing with this subject. At the library, I got from Miss Shedd (Lady had kept her promise, and we all saw the librarian often these days) everything she could find that pertained, and history-laden I made my way home one afternoon where I found Nancy in the kitchen.
That September, after Nonnie had gone away to normal school, Nancy came to us. Nancy was a Negro who had been at Meadowland, the institution where Rabbit Hornaday's mother was. Though we knew Nancy had been in some kind of trouble, we quickly accepted her as the person she came to be, a friend and helper. No one ever questioned the private facts of her previous difficulties, but it had been arranged for her to come to us so that Ma could continue at the Sunbeam Laundry, where she had been made a superintendent and did not have to work on the mangle anymore.
There were a number of these so-called "wayward" girls placed in homes around town. Having fallen foul of various petty charges of immorality or delinquency, they had been sent to Meadowland for rehabilitation, and were "paroled" to whatever kitchens required their services and could afford their nominal upkeep. They were all good-hearted girls, not overly bright, perhaps, but willing and honest. They lived in cramped, unattractive attic quarters, froze in the winter, roasted in the summer, shared the bathroom, and worked twelve hours or more a day. But if you gave a little love or affection to them they returned it in the fullest measure. Nancy did all the things Nonnie had done, and more, and faster, if more noisily, but within a week she had established proprietary rights over all our family and was a familiar sight around the Green.
"Woody, you boys haven't got such big feets, why you make so much noise with 'em?" she demanded as I came in the kitchen door with my library research.
"It's my boots -- they clump."
"Then unclump 'em."
"Okay."
"You take your Iradol-A? No, you didn't. You take your Iradol-A."
Nancy was a nonbeliever in castor oil, our most common winter household remedy, and had convinced Ma that Iradol-A, a thick, molasses-like syrup with a terrible taste, was a better tonic for us, and as we had quickly discovered, what Nancy said usually went. I took my Iradol-A, then made my usual peanut-butter and Marshmallow Fluff sandwich, and carried it with a glass of milk into the living room to get my French horn, since I was due at Mr. Auerbach's at four. Nancy followed -- she never missed an opportunity to talk with someone -- and as I ate my sandwich, sorting through my music for the Poet and Peasant Overture, she interrupted herself to peer out the window.
"Men's diggin'," she observed, watching the WPA men at their labors. Shortly after school had begun, an interesting form of activity had developed around the Green, as workers came with trucks and equipment to dig a trench for the new sewer line. Lady had made her influence felt at Town Meetings, and, the Spragues and No-Relation Welles notwithstanding, the town fathers had voted to replace the irksome septic tanks, thus defeating P.J. and Spouse, who had been, most people thought, properly squelched; and it was generally felt that poor old sleepy Pequot Landing was showing a little progressive spirit, at least in the matter of public sewage.
"Who's that one over there?" Nancy was still peering out the window, and I went to look.
"That's Dumb Dora. She's --" I tapped my head with a peanut-buttered finger. Dora Hornaday was lolly
gagging around in the Piersons' driveway, looking vacantly upward as if expecting to see a zeppelin go over.
"That's the one's mother's at Meadowland? She's a holy terror that one. Rambunctious. I seen her take after one of the girls with a butcher knife. That's her crazy kid, huh? And she's got another one -- stomped rabbits, I heard." Nancy went to see what mischief Kerney was into; I took my music and horn, and left by the front door. I heard a motor starting up, and as I came down the walk the Pilgrim Market truck pulled out from the Piersons' driveway. Blue waved, then turned his wheel quickly, and was only missed by the narrowest gauge as Gert Flagler's Chevy careened around the roadway and she slewed into her drive. In another moment there was a shattering crash. I raced to peek through a hole in the fence, to see the front end of the car sticking out the back end of the garage.
"God damn it -- that was the gas pedal!" Gert's exasperated voice boomed from inside. "I thought it was the brake." Miss Berry came to a window, then, commiserating, coaxed Gert into the house.
I crossed the Green, and next door to Lady's, Mrs. Pierson came out on her porch with a parrot cage and hung it on a hook to air. Mrs. Pierson was nice, but a little strange. Her husband traveled on business a good deal of the time, but she never went anywhere or did anything. Her face was forever pale under the heavy make-up she always painted on, and her hair, a variety of reddish hues, looked, Mrs. Sparrow declared, like an Italian sunset. She lounged around all day in a Japanese kimono, and Mr. Pierson complained that she was always forgetting her lighted cigarettes, which would sometimes roll onto a tabletop, scorching it, or making burns in the rug beside the davenport.