The Beggar Maid Page 6

  Presently Horse crawled out and said he was going into the house to find Del, not to enlighten him but to see how the joke was working, this being the most important part of the proceedings, as far as Horse was concerned. He found Del eating marshmallows in the pantry and saying Ruby Carruthers wasn’t fit to piss on, he could do better any day, and he was going home.

  Meanwhile Runt had crawled under the veranda and got to work on Ruby.

  “Jesus Murphy!” said Flo.

  Then Horse came out of the house and Runt and Ruby could hear him overhead, walking on the veranda. Said Ruby, who is that? And Runt said, oh, that’s only Horse Nicholson. Then who the hell are you? said Ruby.

  Jesus Murphy!

  Rose did not bother with the rest of the story, which was that Ruby got into a bad mood, sat on the veranda steps with the dirt from underneath all over her clothes and in her hair, refused to smoke a cigarette or share a package of cupcakes (now probably rather squashed) that Runt had swiped from the grocery store where he worked after school. They teased her to tell them what was the matter and at last she said, “I think I got a right to know who I’m doing it with.”

  “She’ll get what she deserves,” said Flo philosophically. Other people thought so too. It was the fashion, if you picked up any of Ruby’s things, by mistake, particularly her gym suit or running shoes, to go and wash your hands, so you wouldn’t risk getting V.D.

  Upstairs Rose’s father was having a coughing fit. These fits were desperate, but they had become used to them. Flo got up and went to the bottom of the stairs. She listened there until the fit was over.

  “That medicine doesn’t help him one iota,” she said. “That doctor couldn’t put a Band-Aid on straight.” To the end, she blamed all Rose’s father’s troubles on medicines, doctors.

  “If you ever got up to any of that with a boy it would be the end of you,” she said. “I mean it.”

  Rose flushed with rage and said she would die first.

  “I hope so,” Flo said.

  Here is the sort of story Flo told Rose:

  When her mother died, Flo was twelve, and her father gave her away. He gave her to a well-to-do farming family who were to work her for her board and send her to school. But most of the time they did not send her. There was too much work to be done. They were hard people.

  “If you were picking apples and there was one left on the tree you would have to go back and pick over every tree in the entire orchard. The same when you were out picking up stones in the field. Leave one and you had to do the whole field again.”

  The wife was the sister of a bishop. She was always careful of her skin, rubbing it with Hinds Honey and Almond. She took a high tone with everybody and was sarcastic and believed that she had married down.

  “But she was good-looking,” said Flo, “and she gave me one thing. It was a long pair of satin gloves, they were a light brown color. Fawn. They were lovely. I never meant to lose them but I did.”

  Flo had to take the men’s dinner to them in the far field. The husband opened it up and said, “Why is there no pie in this dinner?”

  “If you want any pie you can make it yourself,” said Flo, in the exact words and tone of her mistress when they were packing the dinner. It was not surprising that she could imitate that woman so well; she was always doing it, even practicing at the mirror. It was surprising she let it out then.

  The husband was amazed, but recognized the imitation. He marched Flo back to the house and demanded of his wife if that was what she had said. He was a big man, and very bad-tempered. No, it is not true, said the bishop’s sister, that girl is nothing but a troublemaker and a liar. She faced him down, and when she got Flo alone she hit her such a clout that Flo was knocked across the room into a cupboard. Her scalp was cut. It healed in time without stitches (the bishop’s sister didn’t get the doctor, she didn’t want talk), and Flo had the scar still.

  She never went back to school after that.

  Just before she was fourteen she ran away. She lied about her age and got a job in the glove factory, in Hanratty. But the bishop’s sister found out where she was, and every once in a while would come to see her. We forgive you, Flo. You ran away and left us but we still think of you as our Flo and our friend. You are welcome to come out and spend a day with us. Wouldn’t you like a day in the country? It’s not very healthy in the glove factory, for a young person. You need the air. Why don’t you come and see us? Why don’t you come today?

  And every time Flo accepted this invitation it would turn out that there was a big fruit preserving or chili sauce making in progress, or they were wallpapering or spring-cleaning, or the threshers were coming. All she ever got to see of the country was where she threw the dishwater over the fence. She never could understand why she went or why she stayed. It was a long way, to turn around and walk back to town. And they were such a helpless outfit on their own. The bishop’s sister put her preserving jars away dirty. When you brought them up from the cellar there would be bits of mold growing in them, clots of fuzzy rotten fruit on the bottom. How could you help but be sorry for people like that?

  When the bishop’s sister was in the hospital, dying, it happened that Flo was in there too. She was in for her gall bladder operation, which Rose could just remember. The bishop’s sister heard that Flo was there and wanted to see her. So Flo let herself be hoisted into a wheelchair and wheeled down the hall, and as soon as she laid eyes on the woman in the bed—the tall, smooth-skinned woman all bony and spotted now, drugged and cancerous—she began an overwhelming nosebleed, the first and last she ever suffered in her life. The red blood was whipping out of her, she said, like streamers.

  She had the nurses running for help up and down the hall. It seemed as if nothing could stop it. When she lifted her head it shot right on the sick woman’s bed, when she lowered her head it streamed down on the floor. They had to put her in ice packs, finally. She never got to say good-bye to the woman in the bed.

  “I never did say good-bye to her.”

  “Would you want to?”

  “Well yes,” said Flo. “Oh yes. I would.”

  Rose brought a pile of books home every night. Latin, Algebra, Ancient and Medieval History, French, Geography. The Merchant of Venice, A Tale of Two Cities, Shorter Poems, Macbeth. Flo expressed hostility to them as she did toward all books. The hostility seemed to increase with a book’s weight and size, the darkness and gloominess of its binding and the length and difficulty of the words in its title. Shorter Poems enraged her, because she opened it and found a poem that was five pages long.

  She made rubble out of the titles. Rose believed she deliberately mispronounced. Ode came out Odd and Ulysses had a long shh in it, as if the hero was drunk.

  Rose’s father had to come downstairs to go to the bathroom. He hung on to the banister and moved slowly but without halting. He wore a brown wool bathrobe with a tasseled tie. Rose avoided looking at his face. This was not particularly because of the alterations his sickness might have made, but because of the bad opinion of herself she was afraid she would find written there. It was for him she brought the books, no doubt about it, to show off to him. And he did look at them, he could not walk past any book in the world without picking it up and looking at its title. But all he said was, “Look out you don’t get too smart for your own good.”

  Rose believed he said that to please Flo, in case she might be listening. She was in the store at the time. But Rose imagined that no matter where Flo was, he would speak as if she might be listening. He was anxious to please Flo, to anticipate her objections. He had made a decision, it seemed. Safety lay with Flo.

  Rose never answered him back. When he spoke she automatically bowed her head, tightened her lips in an expression that was secretive, but carefully not disrespectful. She was circumspect. But all her need for flaunting, her high hopes for herself, her gaudy ambitions, were not hidden from him. He knew them all, and Rose was ashamed, just to be in the same room with him. She felt th
at she disgraced him, had disgraced him somehow from the time she was born, and would disgrace him still more thoroughly in the future. But she was not repenting. She knew her own stubbornness; she did not mean to change.

  Flo was his idea of what a woman ought to be. Rose knew that, and indeed he often said it. A woman ought to be energetic, practical, clever at making and saving; she ought to be shrewd, good at bargaining and bossing and seeing through people’s pretensions. At the same time she should be naive intellectually, childlike, contemptuous of maps and long words and anything in books, full of charming jumbled notions, superstitions, traditional beliefs.

  “Women’s minds are different,” he said to Rose during one of the calm, even friendly periods, when she was a bit younger. Perhaps he forgot that Rose was, or would be, a woman herself. “They believe what they have to believe. You can’t follow their thought.” He was saying this in connection with a belief of Flo’s, that wearing rubbers in the house would make you go blind. “But they can manage life some ways, that’s their talent, it’s not in their heads, there’s something they are smarter at than a man.”

  So part of Rose’s disgrace was that she was female but mistakenly so, would not turn out to be the right kind of woman. But there was more to it. The real problem was that she combined and carried on what he must have thought of as the worst qualities in himself. All the things he had beaten down, successfully submerged, in himself, had surfaced again in her, and she was showing no will to combat them. She mooned and daydreamed, she was vain and eager to show off; her whole life was in her head. She had not inherited the thing he took pride in, and counted on—his skill with his hands, his thoroughness and conscientiousness at any work; in fact she was unusually clumsy, slapdash, ready to cut corners. The sight of her slopping around with her hands in the dishpan, her thoughts a thousand miles away, her rump already bigger than Flo’s, her hair wild and bushy; the sight of the large and indolent and self-absorbed fact of her, seemed to fill him with irritation, with melancholy, almost with disgust.

  All of which Rose knew. Until he had passed through the room she was holding herself still, she was looking at herself through his eyes. She too could hate the space she occupied. But the minute he was gone she recovered. She went back into her thoughts or to the mirror, where she was often busy these days, piling all her hair up on top of her head, turning part way to see the line of her bust, or pulling the skin to see how she would look with a slant, a very slight, provocative slant, to her eyes.

  She knew perfectly well, too, that he had another set of feelings about her. She knew he felt pride in her as well as this nearly uncontrollable irritation and apprehension; the truth was, the final truth was, that he would not have her otherwise and willed her as she was. Or one part of him did. Naturally he had to keep denying this. Out of humility, he had to, and perversity. Perverse humility. And he had to seem to be in sufficient agreement with Flo.

  Rose did not really think this through, or want to. She was as uneasy as he was, about the way their chords struck together.

  When Rose came home from school Flo said to her, “Well, it’s a good thing you got here. You have to stay in the store.”

  Her father was going to London, to the Veterans’ Hospital.

  “Why?”

  “Don’t ask me. The doctor said.”

  “Is he worse?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. That do-nothing doctor doesn’t think so. He came this morning and looked him over and he says he’s going. We’re lucky, we got Billy Pope to run him down.”

  Billy Pope was a cousin of Flo’s who worked in the butcher shop. He used actually to live at the slaughterhouse, in two rooms with cement floors, smelling naturally of tripe and entrails and live pig. But he must have had a home-loving nature; he grew geraniums in old tobacco cans, on the thick cement windowsills. Now he had the little apartment over the shop, and had saved his money and bought a car, an Oldsmobile. This was shortly after the war, when new cars made a special sensation. When he came to visit he kept wandering to the window and taking a look at it, saying something to call attention, such as, “She’s light on the hay but you don’t get the fertilizer out of her.”

  Flo was proud of him and the car.

  “See, Billy Pope’s got a big back seat, if your father needs to lay down.”

  “Flo!”

  Rose’s father was calling her. When he was in bed at first he very seldom called her, and then discreetly, apologetically even. But he had got past that, called her often, made up reasons, she said, to get her upstairs.

  “How does he think he’ll get along without me down there?” she said. “He can’t let me alone five minutes.” She seemed proud of this, although often she would make him wait; sometimes she would go to the bottom of the stairs and force him to call down further details about why he needed her. She told people in the store that he wouldn’t let her alone for five minutes, and how she had to change his sheets twice a day. That was true. His sheets became soaked with sweat. Late at night she or Rose, or both of them, would be out at the washing machine in the woodshed. Sometimes, Rose saw, her father’s underwear was stained. She would not want to look, but Flo held it up, waved it almost under Rose’s nose, cried out, “Lookit that again!” and made clucking noises that were a burlesque of disapproval.

  Rose hated her at these times, hated her father as well; his sickness; the poverty or frugality that made it unthinkable for them to send things to the laundry; the way there was not a thing in their lives they were protected from. Flo was there to see to that.

  Rose stayed in the store. No one came in. It was a gritty, windy day, past the usual time for snow, though there hadn’t been any. She could hear Flo moving around upstairs, scolding and encouraging, getting her father dressed, probably, packing his suitcase, looking for things. Rose had her schoolbooks on the counter and to shut out the household noises she was reading a story in her English book. It was a story by Katherine Mansfield, called “The Garden Party.” There were poor people in that story. They lived along the lane at the bottom of the garden. They were viewed with compassion. All very well. But Rose was angry in a way that the story did not mean her to be. She could not really understand what she was angry about, but it had something to do with the fact that she was sure Katherine Mansfield was never obliged to look at stained underwear; her relatives might be cruel and frivolous but their accents would be agreeable; her compassion was floating on clouds of good fortune, deplored by herself, no doubt, but despised by Rose. Rose was getting to be a prig about poverty, and would stay that way for a long time.

  She heard Billy Pope come into the kitchen and shout out cheerfully, “Well, I guess yez wondered where I was.”

  Katherine Mansfield had no relatives who said yez.

  Rose had finished the story. She picked up Macbeth. She had memorized some speeches from it. She memorized things from Shakespeare, and poems, other than the things they had to memorize for school. She didn’t imagine herself as an actress, playing Lady Macbeth on a stage, when she said them. She imagined herself being her, being Lady Macbeth.

  “I come on foot,” Billy Pope was shouting up the stairs. “I had to take her in.” He assumed everyone would know he meant the car. “I don’t know what it is. I can’t idle her, she stalls on me. I didn’t want to go down to the city with anything running not right. Rose home?”

  Billy Pope had been fond of Rose ever since she was a little girl. He used to give her a dime, and say, “Save up and buy yourself some corsets.” That was when she was flat and thin. His joke.

  He came into the store.

  “Well Rose, you bein a good girl?”

  She barely spoke to him.

  “You goin at your schoolbooks? You want to be a schoolteacher?”

  “I might.” She had no intention of being a schoolteacher. But it was surprising how people would let you alone, once you admitted to that ambition.

  “This is a sad day for you folks here,” said B
illy Pope in a lower voice.

  Rose lifted her head and looked at him coldly.

  “I mean, your Dad goin down to the hospital. They’ll fix him up, though. They got all the equipment down there. They got the good doctors.”

  “I doubt it,” Rose said. She hated that too, the way people hinted at things and then withdrew, that slyness. Death and sex were what they did that about.

  “They’ll fix him and get him back by spring.”

  “Not if he has lung cancer,” Rose said firmly. She had never said that before and certainly Flo had not said it.

  Billy Pope looked as miserable and ashamed for her as if she had said something very dirty.

  “Now that isn’t no way for you to talk. You don’t talk that way. He’s going to be coming downstairs and he could of heard you.”

  There is no denying the situation gave Rose pleasure, at times. A severe pleasure, when she was not too mixed up in it, washing the sheets or listening to a coughing fit. She dramatized her own part in it, saw herself clear-eyed and unsurprised, refusing all deceptions, young in years but old in bitter experience of life. In such spirit she had said lung cancer.

  Billy Pope phoned the garage. It turned out that the car would not be fixed until suppertime. Rather than set out then, Billy Pope would stay overnight, sleeping on the kitchen couch. He and Rose’s father would go down to the hospital in the morning.

  “There don’t need to be any great hurry, I’m not going to jump for him,” said Flo, meaning the doctor. She had come into the store to get a can of salmon, to make a loaf. Although she was not going anywhere and had not planned to, she had put on stockings, and a clean blouse and skirt.

  She and Billy Pope kept up a loud conversation in the kitchen while she got supper. Rose sat on the high stool and recited in her head, looking out the front window at West Hanratty, the dust scudding along the street, the dry puddle holes.

  Come to my woman’s breasts,