Mrs. Burton, turning to look at Mrs. Winning for confirmation, grimaced and said, “Good Lord, Helen!”
Mrs. Winning shrugged and then smiled and Mrs. Burton smiled and then Mrs. Winning said, “I do feel so sorry for the little boy, though.”
Mrs. Burton said, “Such a sweet little thing, too.”
Mrs. Winning had just said, “He and Billy are together all the time now,” when she looked up and saw Mrs. MacLane regarding her from the end of the aisle of shelves; it was impossible to tell whether she had heard them or not. For a minute Mrs. Winning looked steadily back at Mrs. MacLane, and then she said, with just the right note of cordiality, “Good morning, Mrs. MacLane. Where is your little boy this morning?”
“Good morning, Mrs. Winning,” Mrs. MacLane said, and moved on past the aisle of shelves, and Mrs. Burton caught Mrs. Winning’s arm and made a desperate gesture of hiding her face and, unable to help themselves, both she and Mrs. Winning began to laugh.
Soon after that, although the grass in the Winning yard under the maple trees stayed smooth and green, Mrs. Winning began to notice in her daily trips past the cottage that Mrs. MacLane’s garden was suffering from the heat. The flowers wilted under the morning sun, and no longer stood up fresh and bright; the grass was browning slightly and the rose bushes Mrs. MacLane had put in so optimistically were noticeably dying. Mr. Jones seemed always cool, working steadily; sometimes bent down with his hands in the earth, sometimes tall against the side of the house, setting up a trellis or pruning a tree, but the blue curtains hung lifelessly at the windows. Mrs. MacLane still smiled at Mrs. Winning in the store, and then one day they met at the gate of Mrs. MacLane’s garden and, after hesitating for a minute, Mrs. MacLane said, “Can you come in for a few minutes? I’d like to have a talk, if you have time.”
“Surely,” Mrs. Winning said courteously, and followed Mrs. MacLane up the walk, still luxuriously bordered with flowering bushes, but somehow disenchanted, as though the summer heat had baked away the vivacity from the ground. In the familiar living-room Mrs. Winning sat down on a straight chair, holding herself politely stiff, while Mrs. MacLane sat as usual in her armchair.
“How is Davey?” Mrs. Winning asked finally, since Mrs. MacLane did not seem disposed to start any conversation.
“He’s very well,” Mrs. MacLane said, and smiled as she always did when speaking of Davey. “He’s out back with Billy.”
There was a quiet minute, and then Mrs. MacLane said, staring at the blue bowl on the coffee table, “What I wanted to ask you is, what on earth is gone wrong?”
Mrs. Winning had been holding herself stiff in readiness for some such question, and when she said, “I don’t know what you mean,” she thought, I sound exactly like Mother Winning, and realized, I’m enjoying this, just as she would; and no matter what she thought of herself she was unable to keep from adding, “Is something wrong?”
“Of course,” Mrs. MacLane said. She stared at the blue bowl, and said slowly, “When I first came, everyone was so nice, and they seemed to like Davey and me and want to help us.”
That’s wrong, Mrs. Winning was thinking, you mustn’t ever talk about whether people like you, that’s bad taste.
“And the garden was going so well,” Mrs. MacLane said helplessly. “And now, no one ever does more than just speak to us—I used to say ‘Good morning’ over the fence to Mrs. Burton, and she’d come to the fence and we’d talk about the garden, and now she just says ‘Morning’ and goes in the house—and no one ever smiles, or anything.”
This is dreadful, Mrs. Winning thought, this is childish, this is complaining. People treat you as you treat them, she thought; she wanted desperately to go over and take Mrs. MacLane’s hand and ask her to come back and be one of the nice people again; but she only sat straighter in the chair and said, “I’m sure you must be mistaken. I’ve never heard anyone speak of it.”
“Are you sure?” Mrs. MacLane turned and looked at her. “Are you sure it isn’t because of Mr. Jones working here?”
Mrs. Winning lifted her chin a little higher and said, “Why on earth would anyone around here be rude to you because of Jones?”
Mrs. MacLane came with her to the door, both of them planning vigorously for the days some time next week, when they would all go swimming, when they would have a picnic, and Mrs. Winning went down the hill thinking, The nerve of her, trying to blame the colored folks.
Toward the end of the summer there was a bad thunderstorm, breaking up the prolonged hot spell. It raged with heavy wind and rain over the town all night, sweeping without pity through the trees, pulling up young bushes and flowers ruthlessly; a barn was struck on one side of town, the wires pulled down on another. In the morning Mrs. Winning opened the back door to find the Winning yard littered with small branches from the maples, the grass bent almost flat to the ground.
Her mother-in-law came to the door behind her. “Quite a storm,” she said, “did it wake you?”
“I woke up once and went to look at the children,” Mrs. Winning said. “It must have been about three o’clock.”
“I was up later,” her mother-in-law said. “I looked at the children too; they were both asleep.”
They turned together and went in to start breakfast.
Later in the day Mrs. Winning started down to the store; she had almost reached the MacLane cottage when she saw Mrs. MacLane standing in the front garden with Mr. Jones standing beside her and Billy Jones with Davey in the shadows of the front porch. They were all looking silently at a great branch from one of the Burtons’ trees that lay across the center of the garden, crushing most of the flowering bushes and pinning down what was to have been a glorious tulip bed. As Mrs. Winning stopped, watching, Mrs. Burton came out on to her front porch to survey the storm-damage, and Mrs. MacLane called to her, “Good morning, Mrs. Burton, it looks like we have part of your tree over here.”
“Looks so,” Mrs. Burton said, and she went back into her house and closed the door flatly.
Mrs. Winning watched while Mrs. MacLane stood quietly for a minute. Then she looked up at Mr. Jones almost hopefully and she and Mr. Jones looked at one another for a long time. Then Mrs. MacLane said, her clear voice carrying lightly across the air washed clean by the storm: “Do you think I ought to give it up, Mr. Jones? Go back to the city where I’ll never have to see another garden?”
Mr. Jones shook his head despondently, and Mrs. MacLane, her shoulders tired, went slowly over and sat on her front steps and Davey came and sat next to her. Mr. Jones took hold of the great branch angrily and tried to move it, shaking it and pulling until his shoulders tensed with the strength he was bringing to bear, but the branch only gave slightly and stayed, clinging to the garden.
“Leave it alone, Mr. Jones,” Mrs. MacLane said finally. “Leave it for the next people to move!”
But still Mr. Jones pulled against the branch, and then suddenly Davey stood up and cried out, “There’s Mrs. Winning! Hi, Mrs. Winning!”
Mrs. MacLane and Mr. Jones both turned, and Mrs. MacLane waved and called out, “Hello!”
Mrs. Winning swung around without speaking and started, with great dignity, back up the hill toward the old Winning house.
Dorothy And My Grandmother And The Sailors
THERE USED TO BE a time of year in San Francisco—in late March, I believe—when there was fine long windy weather, and the air all over the city had a touch of salt and the freshness of the sea. And then, some time after the wind first started, you could look around Market Street and Van Ness and Kearney, and the fleet was in. That, of course, was some time ago, but you could look out around the Golden Gate, unbridged at that time, and there would be the battleships. There may have been aircraft carriers and destroyers, and I believe I recall one submarine, but to Dot and me then they were battleships, all of them. They would be riding out there on the water, quiet and competently grey, and the streets would be full of sailors, walking with the roll of the sea and looking in shop windows.
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I never knew what the fleet came in for; my grandmother said positively that it was for refueling; but from the time the wind first started, Dot and I would become more aware, walking closer together, and dropping our voices when we talked. Although we were all of thirty miles from where the fleet lay, when we walked with our backs to the ocean we could feel the battleships riding somewhere behind and beyond us, and when we looked toward the ocean we narrowed our eyes, almost able to see across thirty miles and into a sailor’s face.
It was the sailors, of course. My mother told us about the kind of girls who followed sailors, and my grandmother told us about the kind of sailors who followed girls. When we told Dot’s mother the fleet was in, she would say earnestly, “Don’t go near any sailors, you two.” Once, when Dot and I were about twelve, and the fleet was in, my mother stood us up and looked at us intensely for a minute, and then she turned around to my grandmother and said, “I don’t approve of young girls going to the movies alone at night,” and my grandmother said, “Nonsense, they won’t come this far down the peninsula; I know sailors.”
Dot and I were permitted only one movie at night a week, anyway, and even then they sent my ten-year-old brother along with us. The first time the three of us started off to the movies together my mother looked at Dot and me again and then speculatively at my brother, who had red curly hair, and started to say something, and then looked at my grandmother and changed her mind.
We lived in Burlingame, which is far enough away from San Francisco to have palm trees in the gardens, but near enough so that Dot and I were taken into San Francisco, to the Emporium, to get our spring coats each year. Dot’s mother usually gave Dot her coat money, which Dot handed over to my mother, and then Dot and I got identical coats, with my mother officiating. This was because Dot’s mother was never well enough to go into San Francisco shopping, and particularly not with Dot and me. Consequently every year, some time after the wind started and the fleet came in, Dot and I, in service-weight silk stockings which we kept for that occasion, and each with a cardboard pocketbook containing a mirror, a dime for luck, and a chiffon handkerchief caught at one side and hanging down, got into the back seat of my mother’s car with my mother and grandmother in the front, and headed for San Francisco and the fleet.
We always got our coats in the morning, went to the Pig’n’-Whistle for lunch, and then, while Dot and I were finishing our chocolate ice cream with chocolate sauce and walnuts, my grandmother phoned my Uncle Oliver and arranged to meet him at the launch which took us out to the fleet.
My Uncle Oliver was taken along partly because he was a man and partly because in the previous war he had been a radio operator on a battleship and partly because another uncle of mine, an Uncle Paul, was still with the Navy (my grandmother thought he had something to do with a battleship named the Santa Volita, or Bonita, or possibly Carmelita) and my Uncle Oliver was handy for asking people who looked like they might know my Uncle Paul if they did know him. As soon as we got on a boat my grandmother would say, as though she had never thought of it before, “Look, that one over there seems to be an officer; Ollie, just go over casually and ask him if he knows old Paul.”
Oliver, having been one himself, didn’t think that sailors were particularly dangerous to Dot and me if we had my mother and my grandmother with us, but he loved ships, and so he went with us and left us the minute we were on board; while we stepped cautiously over the clean decks eyeing the lifeboats apprehensively, my Uncle Oliver would touch the grey paint affectionately and go off in search of the radio apparatus.
When we met my Uncle Oliver at the launch he would usually buy Dot and me an ice-cream cone each and on the launch he would point out various boats around and name them for us. He usually got into a conversation with the sailor running the launch, and sooner or later he managed to say modestly, “I was to sea, back in ’17,” and the sailor would nod respectfully. When it came time for us to leave the launch and go up a stairway on to the battleship, my mother whispered to Dot and me, “Keep your skirts down,” and Dot and I climbed the ladder, holding on with one hand and with the other wrapping our skirts tight around us into a bunch in front which we held on to. My grandmother always preceded us onto the battleship and my mother and Uncle Oliver followed us. When we got on board my mother took one of us by the arm and my grandmother took the other and we walked slowly around all of the ship they allowed us to see, excepting only the lowest levels, which alarmed my grandmother. We looked solemnly at cabins, decks which my grandmother said were aft, and lights which she said were port (both sides were port to my grandmother; she believed that starboard was up, in the sense that the highest mast always pointed at the north star.) Usually we saw cannon—all guns were cannon—which my Uncle Oliver, in what must have been harmless teasing, assured my grandmother were kept loaded all the time. “In case of mutiny,” he told my grandmother.
There were always a great many sight-seers on the battleships, and my Uncle Oliver was fond of gathering a little group of boys and young men around him to explain how the radio system worked. When he said he had been a radio operator back in ’17 someone was sure to ask him, “Did you ever send out an S.O.S.?” and my Uncle Oliver would nod heavily, and say, “But I’m still here to tell about it.”
Once, while my Uncle Oliver was telling about ’17 and my mother and my grandmother and Dot were looking over the rail at the ocean, I saw a dress that looked like my mother’s and followed it for quite a way down the battleship before the lady turned around and I realized that it was not my mother and I was lost. Remembering what my grandmother had told me, that I was always safe if I didn’t lose my head, I stood still and looked around until I isolated a tall man in a uniform with lots of braid. That will be a captain, I thought, and he will certainly take care of me. He was very polite. I told him I was lost and thought my mother and my grandmother and my friend Dot and my Uncle Oliver were down the boat a ways but I was afraid to go back alone. He said he would help me find them, and he took my arm and led me down the boat. Before very long we met my mother and my grandmother hurrying along looking for me with Dot coming along behind them as fast as she could. When my grandmother saw me she ran forward and seized my arm, pulling me away from the captain and shaking me. “You gave us the scare of our lives,” she said.
“She was just lost, that’s all,” the captain said.
“I’m glad we found her in time,” my grandmother said, walking backward with me to my mother.
The captain bowed and went away, and my mother took my other arm and shook me. “Aren’t you ashamed?” she said. Dot stared at me solemnly.
“But he was a captain—” I began.
“He might have said he was a captain,” my grandmother said, “but he was a marine.”
“A marine!” my mother said, looking over the side to see if the launch was there to take us back. “Get Oliver and tell him we’ve seen enough,” she said to my grandmother.
Because of what happened that evening, that was the last year we were allowed to see the fleet. We dropped Uncle Oliver off at home, as usual, and my mother and my grandmother took Dot and me to the Merry-Go-Round for dinner. We always had dinner in San Francisco after the fleet, and went to a movie and got home to Burlingame late in the evening. We always had dinner in the Merry-Go-Round, where the food came along on a moving platform and you grabbed it as it went by. We went there because Dot and I loved it, and next to the battleships it was the most dangerous place in San Francisco, because you had to pay fifteen cents for every dish you took and didn’t finish, and Dot and I were expected to pay for these mistakes out of our allowances. This last evening Dot and I lost forty-five cents, mainly because of a mocha cream dessert that Dot hadn’t known was full of coconut. The movie Dot and I chose was full, although the usher outside told my grandmother there were plenty of seats. My mother refused to wait in line to get our money back, so my grandmother said we had to go on in and take our chances on seats. As soon as two seats were
vacant my grandmother shoved Dot and me toward them, and we sat down. The picture was well under way when the two seats next to Dot emptied, and we were looking for my grandmother and my mother when Dot looked around suddenly and then grabbed my arm. “Look,” she said in a sort of groan, and there were two sailors coming along the row of seats toward the empty ones. They reached the seats just as my mother and grandmother got down to the other end of the row, and my grandmother had just time to say loudly, “You leave those girls alone,” when two seats a few aisles away were vacated and they had to go sit down.
Dot moved far over in her seat next to me and clung to my arm.
“What are they doing?” I whispered.
“They’re just sitting there,” Dot said. “What do you think I ought to do?”
I leaned cautiously around Dot and looked. “Don’t pay any attention,” I said. “Maybe they’ll go away.”
“You can talk,” Dot said tragically, “they’re not next to you.”
“I’m next to you,” I said reasonably, “that’s pretty close.”
“What are they doing now?” Dot asked.
I leaned forward again. “They’re looking at the picture,” I said.
“I can’t stand it,” Dot said. “I want to go home.”
Panic overwhelmed both of us at once, and fortunately my mother and my grandmother saw us running up the aisle and caught us outside.
“What did they say?” my grandmother demanded. “I’ll tell the usher.”
My mother said if Dot would calm down enough to talk she would take us into the tea room next door and get us each a hot chocolate. When we got inside and were sitting down we told my mother and my grandmother we were fine now and instead of a hot chocolate we would have a chocolate sundae apiece. Dot had even started to cheer up a little when the door of the tea room opened and two sailors walked in. With one wild bound Dot was in back of my grandmother’s chair, cowering and clutching my grandmother’s arm. “Don’t let them get me,” she wailed.