Brooches and Toys for Your Delight
Jane Snyder
When she gave Mrs. Price her bed bath, Olive sang to her, holding her with one arm as she ran the cloth down her back with the other, Froggie would a wooing go, Little sack of sugar, I could eat you up. Mrs. Price laughed as Olive cleaned between her toes, Moses supposes his toeses are roses.
Terrible toes, the thick yellow nails sticking out from the pale flesh.
She’d laugh again as Olive punched her fist into the soft middle of her pillows, tell them to “step up and take your medicine” before shaking and fluffing them.
When Olive ran a wet comb through the crimp in Mrs. Price’s thin hair, she’d think you were someone’s curly-haired little darling once.
Mrs. Price was born in 1852. Her mother must have been a stiff figure, laced in tight.
But not around her daughter. Why, she was wild for the child. They’d play till the little girl sprawled against her mother’s lap, weak with laughter and her mother would tell herself it was wrong to set so much store on an imperfect human being, kiss the back of her baby’s plump neck, smile at her own sinfulness.
At night Mrs. Price was fretful. Her heart was failing and her lungs didn’t fully expand. She’d struggle for breath and Olive would sing something slow till Mrs. Price sunk back against the clean bed linen.
Dr. Gilbert praised her for the calming effect she had on the patient. “You’ve become a fine nurse, Olive,” he said solemnly. She bent her head, as if embarrassed, concealing her laughter.
Gene was the same, Olive thought, convinced he was the source of her happiness.
In spring he’d taken Olive to the lake. There was a place with dancing but they’d walked past the beach and docks to an abandoned farm so, Gene said, they could be alone.
In summer, when Mrs. Price’s symptoms sharpened, the Prices allowed Gene to visit Olive on Sunday evenings, set aside the back parlor for their use. Olive asked Retta to call her if Mrs. Price needed her.
“I daresay that won’t be necessary,” Gene said, telling her, after Retta left, she was exaggerating her own importance. “You’re not even a fully qualified nurse.”
He was sure he’d be considered for the principal’s position when Mr. Hughes retired next spring. “I’m a good disciplinarian, firm but fair, as is needed. And I’m well regarded as a teacher, known for my thorough preparation and strong command of the material.”
When Retta came with the lemonade, he didn’t stand to take the tray from her, say let me help you with that, as Mr. Price would have.
Olive’s bumptious young man, she’d heard young Mrs. Susan Price, her patient’s daughter-in-law, call him. This puzzled Olive. Mrs. Susan couldn’t have meant he was a country bumpkin. Gene, like Olive, had always lived in the town.
They sat in front of the fireplace. It wasn’t for use, Mrs. Susan told her. The smoke would ruin the blue and white tiles they’d had sent from Holland.
Flaunting their money, Gene said after Retta turned on the lamps and Olive admired the play of the lights on the tiles.
Tonight, as Gene talked, she set herself to memorizing the picture on each tile. Windmill, wooden shoe, tulip, willow tree.
Another two hundred dollars a year, he told her, and it could lead to his becoming a principal in a bigger town. He’d been in charge of training the new teachers this summer so, clearly, he was well thought of.
Twilight was pleasant in Mrs. Price’s room. When Olive first came and Mrs. Price could still speak they enjoyed seeing the glow of the last bit of pink light on each other’s face.
Nice, like settling down for the night with her little sister Gertie and their mother in their room behind the kitchen in her aunt and uncle’s house.
The bed took up most of the room and they’d spread their paper dolls out on the white counterpane.
“Oh, Marjory Daw, how ravishing you are in your blue velvet, your silver shoes, your ermine jacket, your diamond diadem,” her mother would say. Olive and Gertie only wanted to be lady dolls. When a man was needed, Lord Bellabelle or the Duke of Eagerville, their mother took the part. They thought it was funny, when she tried to sound gruff.
Sometimes they’d make so much noise Uncle Hiram would bang on the door, tell them to settle down.
They’d laugh and he’d laugh too. When Aunt Beryl asked what they were doing, he’d say he didn’t know and didn’t care to find out. Why, it was as much as a man’s life was worth, going in there.
You must be tired, Gene said, surprised, when she told him thank you for calling, good night. “You work too hard. You mean nothing to the Prices except what you do for them. But you know my thoughts on that and I’ve something nice to tell you.”
He looked pleased and Olive guessed she should express interest.
“I am able to call upon you on Wednesday, if you can get leave. I can come as soon as that.”
“I thank you, no.”
Olive and her patient sat for a long time in the near dark. Mrs. Susan had plans for the room, Olive knew. Soon the rosebud wallpaper and the dark, old-fashioned furniture would be gone but tonight the room was as it had always been.
In the morning the jewelry case atop the dresser would gleam in the early light, grow brighter as the day wore on.
The case was a dandy, big as a bread box, white porcelain, held up on gold metal legs in the shape of talons, sure to be cunning inside, full of secret compartments and mirrors.
Sometimes, when her patient slept, Olive imagined Mrs. Price, the old one or the young one, sitting with her at the foot of the bed, playing dress up.
She’d open the jewelry case and fasten necklace after necklace around Olive’s neck, pin brooches across her front. “Elegant,” she’d say. “You’re such an elegant lady,” both of them laughing at Olive’s bedizened appearance.
Olive would demur. “It’s not too much?”
“Why, it’s exactly right.”
Olive slept soundly that night, in the folding bed next to Mrs. Price’s four poster.
In the morning the felted wool pad she’d placed under her patient was dry. Mrs. Price had been embarrassed when the pad first became necessary and Olive would whisk it away, clean Mrs. Price and put her in a fresh nightgown. “Before she knew what I was about,” she imagined telling someone though she didn’t know who that would be.
Today Mrs. Price turned away when Olive held the glass to her lips.
Olive saw the new purple blotches on Mrs. Price’s lower extremities. Mottling.
“Livedo reticularis,” Dr. Gilbert said. He’d started coming earlier in the day, before Mr. Price left for work. “You showed good judgment in covering her.”
The dying patient becomes cold as the blood pressure lowers, the circulation slows, and the rate of respiration decreases.
He squared his shoulders, “I suppose I must tell them.”
Olive had heard Mrs. Susan and Retta talking about the reception. Retta said petit fours are good for serving a crowd and always look well. Yes, Mrs. Susan said, but we can’t have anything festive.
When Olive’s mother died people brought food to her aunt and uncle’s house. Angel food cake, fried chicken, divinity. She and Gertie left the distracted grownups in the front room, stuffed themselves in the kitchen. When they were found out, Aunt Beryl blamed herself, said she hadn’t been up to cooking, and little girls get hungry.
Eye movement is present, Olive wrote in the nursing journal, though of less frequency.
When you die, Olive had heard, you see your life in full as you lived it. Perhaps Mrs. Price was even now on a train to Chicago, with her husband and their two boys, Olive’s employer, and a younger one who’d died of scarlet fever when he was ten.
The boys, each on his own big plush seat, talking about what they’d do if the lion got loose when they were at the zoo.
“A lion would have no interest in tough cowpokes like yourselves,” their father told them. “You’re so stringy, you’d get stuck in his teeth. The real danger is the zookeeper will confuse you with monkeys, put you in the monkey house with the rest of your family.”
The younger boy would crawl into Mrs. Price’s lap, reach up to pat the soft puff of hair piled on top her head.
“That won’t really happen, will it, Mama?”
Olive imagined the look of reproach, humorous but serious too, Mrs. Price gave her husband. “Certainly not. I won’t let it.”
Olive touched her patient’s chilly fingertips, turned her thoughts to the child that was to come.
Mr. Price knocked, asked, with the solemn courtesy Olive admired, if he might be alone with his mother for a little while.
She went down to the kitchen, ate lunch with Retta.
“Have all you want,” Retta said of the gelatin salad, a favorite of Olive’s. “It’ll go watery by dinner.”
Mr. Price left for his own lunch when Olive came back to the sickroom. He’d returned when Mrs. Price died, just after two.
He stood over the bed for a moment, looked as if he was struggling to think of something to say.
“She was good to me. To Susan as well.”
Mrs. Price had bragged about his accomplishments, how he’d made Commercial Bank, the bank his father had founded, what it was today. Generous too, always doing for others, “He donated all the land for City Park. I’ll bet you didn’t know that.”
Talking about her son as a boy was what she really liked. A rascal, she said, full of mischief, but no harm in him. Goodhearted, popular with the other boys, honest as the day is long. There was a time when he couldn’t go to sleep without a good night kiss from her. Hard to believe now, isn’t it?
If it had been her place, Olive would have told Mr. Price he’d been a good son, had nothing with which to reproach himself.
“Well,” he said, “I’ve got calls to make.”
Mrs. Susan came in just as Olive finished clearing the sick room clutter, walked over to where her mother-in-law lay, atop the bed, laid a white tea rose across her folded hands.
She could, Olive thought, have opened one of the hands to receive the flower.
“You didn’t put her in her dress?”
“The funeral home does that.”
Mrs. Price’s body was soft and floppy, when Olive sponged it off, dressed it in the old-fashioned underclothes and gray silk wrapper.
She’d ironed the dress young Mrs. Price had chosen yesterday. It was packed now, in tissue paper, inside a long cardboard box.
“A pity the cool weather hasn’t started. She might have worn that wine colored marocain afternoon dress she liked. The other one is lovely but I’m afraid it’s too big for her, as much weight as she’s lost.”
The funeral home, Olive told her, will know how to make the dress look nice.
By pulling it in around her where it showed and shoving the excess cloth underneath her.
They heard the undertaker’s wagon then. Mrs. Price went to the window to look.
“They don’t come to the front door?”
“No.”
“I never noticed.”
Olive came to stand beside her and they looked across the back yard, and the fruit trees, to where the cart stood behind the Price’s empty stable.
The funeral home horses weren’t tethered. Mrs. Susan smiled at how quietly they stood, said those old plodders were good for nothing but the knackers.
She left the room when they heard the undertakers’ men on the back stairs.
Olive stayed, helped with the shroud and the stretcher, walked behind with the dress box, as they carried the body out.
Feet first, as was the old custom, to prevent the deceased from looking back and beckoning at someone still living, making them follow.
Olive stayed a few moments after the stretcher had been secured, talking with the undertaker’s men. She knew them, of course. Like her, they spent much of their work day in silence, were glad of company.
When she returned Mrs. Susan was back at the window. Olive hoped she didn’t think they’d been disrespectful.
Mrs. Price went to her mother-in-law’s dresser, lifted the lid on the jewelry case.
Olive remade the bed with fresh sheets, changed the coverlet, listened to Mrs. Price scrabbling behind her.
She heard the jewelry box close.
“We won’t expect you to stay, Olive. You’ve done so much already.”
Olive was paid till the end of the week so they had the right to keep her that long. Some families did, gave her chores to do. Others couldn’t get rid of her fast enough.
Mrs. Price said she must be looking forward to seeing her aunt and uncle and she hoped Olive could have a rest before taking another job. “Mr. Price will give you a ride when you’re ready.”
Olive would have liked to walk. Even in a house as generously proportioned as the Price’s you still had to turn around, retrace your steps.
Families, the Prices too, would tell her to make herself at home, but Olive didn’t bring more than was needed, never spread herself out. I might not have been here, she thought, as she looked around the room, the sewing room, given over to her use, to see if she’d left anything behind.
Mr. Price said, when she thanked him for the ride, he was glad to be out of the house. “There’s no hurry, if you’d like to stop at your bank, for instance.”
His little joke. Olive went to the other bank, First National, because that was where Uncle Hi went. Mr. Price had laughed when he heard, said he and Gus Wagner, the president at First National, were in Rotary together. Community minded, Gus was, very solid.
He handed her an envelope.
Showing off, Gene would say.
It didn’t seem right to open the envelope in front of Mr. Price. She waited till she was inside the bank, filling out the deposit slip. Twenty dollars, two weeks salary.
She passed Schuman’s dry goods store on her way back to the car, would have liked to stop to look at the display in the window. A bolt of clear blue flannel, and another, a print with a frieze of yellow ducks, caught her eye.
Mr. Price was already out of the car waiting to open the door for her.
Thank you, she told him. I never thought. Oh, thank you.
No thanks were necessary, he said. “You’re a good girl, Olive. You’re hardworking and you were kind to Mother, where another girl would not have been. Mrs. Price, Susan, and I wish you all success in the future. Off Chestnut, isn’t it?”
When Aunt Beryl and Uncle Hi too, just home from work, still in his uniform, came out of the house to greet him, Mr. Price politely refused their invitation to step in for a cup of coffee, perhaps a bite to eat, stood with them a little while, hat in hand, on the worn summer grass in the front yard, talking.
It’s going to hit him hard when he realizes it, Uncle Hi said when they went into the house. No matter how long it’s been it never feels right after your mother’s gone.
Gertie wasn’t home, Beryl said. She’d gone to a weinie roast at the lake with the young people from church. It was a full moon tonight, and there’d be a hayride later, down the shore road.
“So it’s just us for supper.” A scratch meal, she called it. From the garden, nothing special.
“I like your food best,” Olive said. “You always make what we like.”
“What I like,” Hi, said surveying the table. Devilled eggs, green beans with bacon, sliced tomatoes. “We’re having us a party, aren’t we, honey?”
Her mother had told her and Gertie, when they first came to live with Hi and Beryl, never to ask for anything. “Them that ask, don’t get.”
She meant if their aunt and uncle took them to the picture show, they should be grateful for that, should not say anything about how good the popcorn smelled.
Gertie was a saucebox. “How will you know what I want if I don’t tell you?”
Uncle Hi and Aunt Beryl had laughed.
Tonight there was blackberry cobbler. Uncle Hi took the cream pitcher last, asked Beryl and Olive if they’d gotten enough, before he poured his own. He couldn’t decide, he said, which was prettier, the bright purple juices before the cream was added or the cloudy pink they turned, after it was poured.
At Prices she’d imagined long afternoons with Aunt Beryl making things for the baby.
Now she remembered stories of girls dying from sepsis after illegal abortions, being beaten by their outraged father, of a baby being taken away as soon as it was born.
Just three months, she said. Hi and Beryl sat on the old haircloth settee. The cloth was thin from Olive and Gertie sliding on it when they were little. Aunt Beryl had covered it with a crazy quilt she’d made from bits of velvet and bright satin. Olive, across from them on one of the chairs from the old dining room set, might have been facing a prospective employee who’d want to know if she’d go down to the basement in the early morning to stoke the furnace, was she willing to give a hand with the housework as the needs of the patient allowed?
She hadn’t been to the doctor yet, she told them. She tired more easily, that was all.
Aunt Beryl cried, dabbed at her eyes angrily.
“Gene?”
Olive saw the look of distaste on her uncle’s face, remembered the musty barn, the swarms of gnats, Gene’s weight pinning her to the wall. “Don’t be silly, Olive,” he’d said, when she cried, “I’m not hurting you.”
Her aunt and uncle didn’t ask how she and Gene had contrived to be alone.
“Oh, honey. You should have some young fellow, someone who’d be crazy about you.” Hi pursed his lips in imitation of Gene’s precise manner: “‘How do you do. I am Mr. Sloper, come to call on Olive.’”
Beryl, still crying, said they should never have let Olive go out to work. There’d been a call for nurses because of a resurgence in Spanish flu the summer Olive had graduated from eighth grade and she’d persuaded her aunt and uncle to let her get the training at the hospital.
She liked the work, didn’t want to go back to school that September.
We should have made you, Beryl said now. Trafficking with the dead, doing what no hired girl would, when you ought to be at the high school with Gertie, playing basketball, going to dances. Gene should be your teacher, not your beau.
“Gertie says the scholars call him Sahara because his lessons are so dry,” Beryl said in a triumphant tone, as if clinching an argument.
Hi wanted to know where Gene was. “You shouldn’t have to do this alone.”
I’m not alone, Olive wanted to say. I have you. “He doesn’t know.”
They’d been on a walk in February, Gene setting a brisk pace, when he told her he wasn’t interested in marriage.
I’m not a prince of the realm, don’t need a son to carry on the line.
Gene lived at home with his mother and sisters.
Olive laid a hand on her abdomen, moved it away when she saw Beryl looking.
“I’ve got money saved and I’ll work, pay my own way. If I could stay with you and if Aunt Beryl could help with the baby when I’m working. You like babies.”
Beryl did not return her smile.
There was more she’d meant to say, about how much she wanted the baby, all she would do for him, that she was sorry. “But you’ve already done so much. I shouldn’t be asking.”
In third grade Gertie had demanded pink satin ballet slippers for her school shoes. The kind, regretful way her aunt and uncle said no; the choice was between the brown or the black Oxfords, reminded Olive of how they looked at her now.
She’d never been so childish.
“No, honey. It isn’t that. There isn’t anything I, we, wouldn’t do for you.”
It would be too hard, they said. For her, for the baby. The hospital doesn’t even hire married girls. What use would they have for you? And people will think you’re a bad girl, won’t want you in their house.
Beryl said she didn’t like to say so, but it could hurt Gertie’s chances.
“I could go someplace where no one knows me. I could say I had a husband but he died.”
“Babies need a father.”
“It hasn’t been so hard for Gertie and me.” She shouldn’t have said it, she thought. Beryl could tell her she only cared for herself, never thought of the sacrifices made for her, but her aunt and uncle continued to smile the same regretful smile, and she tried again.
“Gene doesn’t love me.”
“That makes no difference.” Hi said, in a tone Olive hadn’t heard before. “Two years he’s been coming around. Everyone will know it’s him. If he doesn’t marry you the school won’t keep him.”
“It’s for the baby,” Beryl said. “What you’re doing is for the baby.”
Olive stayed in bed, mostly, after she’d told them. “She’s tired,” Beryl said, when Gene came to the house. This was after Hi had talked to him.
Gene and Hi had gone to the courthouse for the license. Olive was a month short of her eighteenth birthday; her signature wasn’t required.
Beryl tried to interest her in the wedding. “Your yellow dotted Swiss is as good as new,” she said, “but why don’t we go downtown and buy you a pretty white hat?”
On Tuesday afternoon, late, after Gene and Hi finished work, Reverend Iler was coming to the house to marry them. Mrs. Iler was coming too.
The Ilers were staying for the wedding tea, as Gertie called it. Gene’s mother wouldn’t be there. “A confirmed invalid,” Gene said.
On Saturday Olive got up to go to Mrs. Price’s service, sat at the back of the church with Retta, remembered the happy dream she’d lived in during her last month at Price’s.
Like a swaddled baby, she thought, with no thought beyond the warm milk in his belly.
Stay as long as you like, she’d imagined the Prices saying. You’re a breath of fresh air, Olive. Stay forever.
When Mr. Price came home for lunch he’d run up the stairs to the nursery, scoop the gurgling baby in his arms. “And how are you, my fine fellow? How are you today?”
She’d already written her thank you note to the Prices, using the model the nurses’ manual provided: Though no other reward beyond the trust you placed in me in allowing me to care for your beloved mother is expected, I nonetheless deeply appreciate…
She didn’t intend to go back to the house afterwards, but Retta said she’d appreciate her company, said, when Olive tied on an apron, and went to work on the dishes, she hadn’t meant that, just talk to me. It was the kind of job Olive liked, requiring speed and precision, and it was satisfying, turning piles of dirty dishes into stacks of shining china.
She wondered if Retta would be hurt when she found out, think Olive should have told her.
Retta was pleased when Olive praised the little cream puffs filled with chicken salad.
“It was a deal of work, making so many but, once you get the hang of it, it goes quick.”
Gene came into the kitchen then, warm and pink in his worsted suit.
Retta picked up a tray of sandwiches. “They’ll be wanting these.”
“If you’re the one responsible for these dainty comestibles we enjoyed today, I’m in your debt,” Gene told her.
When he didn’t step forward to open the door, Retta pushed it out with her backside.
Gene was startled when it slammed. “I saw you at the church but you’d left before I could reach you.”
“I didn’t see you.”
“I sat near the front. I thought it best if someone from the school attended, the Prices being one of our first families. So I went to your house and your aunt thought you might be here.”
“You had a long walk.”
“Well, you see, I hope to escort you home. When you’re ready. But perhaps you’re fatigued, would prefer to ride the street car?”
“No.”
“We’ll walk slowly then.” Gene said. “I very much want to talk to you, Olive.”
She’d spoken to the Prices when she’d come to the house, Mrs. Price smiling and looking past her to whoever was next in the receiving line. She’d have gone out the back but Gene led her to the front parlor.
There weren’t as many people now.
Gene strode over to where the Prices were sitting behind the piano with another couple. He wished to say goodbye, he told them, to extend, again, his deepest condolences, and to thank them for their gracious welcome into their lovely home, the more gracious because of the sad circumstances.
Mr. Price set down his drink, rose to his feet, shook hands.
“Thank you, Mr. Sloper,” Mrs. Price said, leaning back in her chair. “I hope you got enough to eat.”
Gene took Olive’s arm when they were outside and they walked for a while in silence.
“You don’t suppose the Prices will say anything about me coming, do you? To Mr. Hughes or the superintendent? Or they may know someone on the school board. I certainly had no thought of intruding.”
If it had been Aunt Beryl whose feelings had been hurt Olive would tell her she wished she’d thrown all those dishes at the Price’s brand new five hundred dollar Monitor Top electric refrigerator, instead of washing and wiping them.
“I thought it was lovely, what you said. Anyone else would have appreciated it. Don’t worry, they won’t say anything. Mrs. Price doesn’t want people knowing how mean she is.”
“That’s fine then.”
Olive thought of how, on bad nights, the frantic look would fade from Mrs. Price’s face when she saw Olive.
They’d live with his mother at first, Gene said. Olive would be a great help to her. But they’d begin looking for their own home soon.
Gene said he wouldn’t hold what had happened against her.
I should hope to shout, Olive said to herself, then stopped listening, thought of the flying dreams she’d had as a little girl. She couldn’t remember how old she’d been when they stopped, just her disappointment when she realized they were done.
She hadn’t gone high, just skimmed a little above the ground, could still touch her mother and Gertie. No need to pump her legs or flap her arms, nothing to do but be carried along in the buoyant air, as it seemed to Olive, she was being carried now to the child she loved.
Jane Snyder
When she gave Mrs. Price her bed bath, Olive sang to her, holding her with one arm as she ran the cloth down her back with the other, Froggie would a wooing go, Little sack of sugar, I could eat you up. Mrs. Price laughed as Olive cleaned between her toes, Moses supposes his toeses are roses.
Terrible toes, the thick yellow nails sticking out from the pale flesh.
She’d laugh again as Olive punched her fist into the soft middle of her pillows, tell them to “step up and take your medicine” before shaking and fluffing them.
When Olive ran a wet comb through the crimp in Mrs. Price’s thin hair, she’d think you were someone’s curly-haired little darling once.
Mrs. Price was born in 1852. Her mother must have been a stiff figure, laced in tight.
But not around her daughter. Why, she was wild for the child. They’d play till the little girl sprawled against her mother’s lap, weak with laughter and her mother would tell herself it was wrong to set so much store on an imperfect human being, kiss the back of her baby’s plump neck, smile at her own sinfulness.
At night Mrs. Price was fretful. Her heart was failing and her lungs didn’t fully expand. She’d struggle for breath and Olive would sing something slow till Mrs. Price sunk back against the clean bed linen.
Dr. Gilbert praised her for the calming effect she had on the patient. “You’ve become a fine nurse, Olive,” he said solemnly. She bent her head, as if embarrassed, concealing her laughter.
Gene was the same, Olive thought, convinced he was the source of her happiness.
In spring he’d taken Olive to the lake. There was a place with dancing but they’d walked past the beach and docks to an abandoned farm so, Gene said, they could be alone.
In summer, when Mrs. Price’s symptoms sharpened, the Prices allowed Gene to visit Olive on Sunday evenings, set aside the back parlor for their use. Olive asked Retta to call her if Mrs. Price needed her.
“I daresay that won’t be necessary,” Gene said, telling her, after Retta left, she was exaggerating her own importance. “You’re not even a fully qualified nurse.”
He was sure he’d be considered for the principal’s position when Mr. Hughes retired next spring. “I’m a good disciplinarian, firm but fair, as is needed. And I’m well regarded as a teacher, known for my thorough preparation and strong command of the material.”
When Retta came with the lemonade, he didn’t stand to take the tray from her, say let me help you with that, as Mr. Price would have.
Olive’s bumptious young man, she’d heard young Mrs. Susan Price, her patient’s daughter-in-law, call him. This puzzled Olive. Mrs. Susan couldn’t have meant he was a country bumpkin. Gene, like Olive, had always lived in the town.
They sat in front of the fireplace. It wasn’t for use, Mrs. Susan told her. The smoke would ruin the blue and white tiles they’d had sent from Holland.
Flaunting their money, Gene said after Retta turned on the lamps and Olive admired the play of the lights on the tiles.
Tonight, as Gene talked, she set herself to memorizing the picture on each tile. Windmill, wooden shoe, tulip, willow tree.
Another two hundred dollars a year, he told her, and it could lead to his becoming a principal in a bigger town. He’d been in charge of training the new teachers this summer so, clearly, he was well thought of.
Twilight was pleasant in Mrs. Price’s room. When Olive first came and Mrs. Price could still speak they enjoyed seeing the glow of the last bit of pink light on each other’s face.
Nice, like settling down for the night with her little sister Gertie and their mother in their room behind the kitchen in her aunt and uncle’s house.
The bed took up most of the room and they’d spread their paper dolls out on the white counterpane.
“Oh, Marjory Daw, how ravishing you are in your blue velvet, your silver shoes, your ermine jacket, your diamond diadem,” her mother would say. Olive and Gertie only wanted to be lady dolls. When a man was needed, Lord Bellabelle or the Duke of Eagerville, their mother took the part. They thought it was funny, when she tried to sound gruff.
Sometimes they’d make so much noise Uncle Hiram would bang on the door, tell them to settle down.
They’d laugh and he’d laugh too. When Aunt Beryl asked what they were doing, he’d say he didn’t know and didn’t care to find out. Why, it was as much as a man’s life was worth, going in there.
You must be tired, Gene said, surprised, when she told him thank you for calling, good night. “You work too hard. You mean nothing to the Prices except what you do for them. But you know my thoughts on that and I’ve something nice to tell you.”
He looked pleased and Olive guessed she should express interest.
“I am able to call upon you on Wednesday, if you can get leave. I can come as soon as that.”
“I thank you, no.”
Olive and her patient sat for a long time in the near dark. Mrs. Susan had plans for the room, Olive knew. Soon the rosebud wallpaper and the dark, old-fashioned furniture would be gone but tonight the room was as it had always been.
In the morning the jewelry case atop the dresser would gleam in the early light, grow brighter as the day wore on.
The case was a dandy, big as a bread box, white porcelain, held up on gold metal legs in the shape of talons, sure to be cunning inside, full of secret compartments and mirrors.
Sometimes, when her patient slept, Olive imagined Mrs. Price, the old one or the young one, sitting with her at the foot of the bed, playing dress up.
She’d open the jewelry case and fasten necklace after necklace around Olive’s neck, pin brooches across her front. “Elegant,” she’d say. “You’re such an elegant lady,” both of them laughing at Olive’s bedizened appearance.
Olive would demur. “It’s not too much?”
“Why, it’s exactly right.”
Olive slept soundly that night, in the folding bed next to Mrs. Price’s four poster.
In the morning the felted wool pad she’d placed under her patient was dry. Mrs. Price had been embarrassed when the pad first became necessary and Olive would whisk it away, clean Mrs. Price and put her in a fresh nightgown. “Before she knew what I was about,” she imagined telling someone though she didn’t know who that would be.
Today Mrs. Price turned away when Olive held the glass to her lips.
Olive saw the new purple blotches on Mrs. Price’s lower extremities. Mottling.
“Livedo reticularis,” Dr. Gilbert said. He’d started coming earlier in the day, before Mr. Price left for work. “You showed good judgment in covering her.”
The dying patient becomes cold as the blood pressure lowers, the circulation slows, and the rate of respiration decreases.
He squared his shoulders, “I suppose I must tell them.”
Olive had heard Mrs. Susan and Retta talking about the reception. Retta said petit fours are good for serving a crowd and always look well. Yes, Mrs. Susan said, but we can’t have anything festive.
When Olive’s mother died people brought food to her aunt and uncle’s house. Angel food cake, fried chicken, divinity. She and Gertie left the distracted grownups in the front room, stuffed themselves in the kitchen. When they were found out, Aunt Beryl blamed herself, said she hadn’t been up to cooking, and little girls get hungry.
Eye movement is present, Olive wrote in the nursing journal, though of less frequency.
When you die, Olive had heard, you see your life in full as you lived it. Perhaps Mrs. Price was even now on a train to Chicago, with her husband and their two boys, Olive’s employer, and a younger one who’d died of scarlet fever when he was ten.
The boys, each on his own big plush seat, talking about what they’d do if the lion got loose when they were at the zoo.
“A lion would have no interest in tough cowpokes like yourselves,” their father told them. “You’re so stringy, you’d get stuck in his teeth. The real danger is the zookeeper will confuse you with monkeys, put you in the monkey house with the rest of your family.”
The younger boy would crawl into Mrs. Price’s lap, reach up to pat the soft puff of hair piled on top her head.
“That won’t really happen, will it, Mama?”
Olive imagined the look of reproach, humorous but serious too, Mrs. Price gave her husband. “Certainly not. I won’t let it.”
Olive touched her patient’s chilly fingertips, turned her thoughts to the child that was to come.
Mr. Price knocked, asked, with the solemn courtesy Olive admired, if he might be alone with his mother for a little while.
She went down to the kitchen, ate lunch with Retta.
“Have all you want,” Retta said of the gelatin salad, a favorite of Olive’s. “It’ll go watery by dinner.”
Mr. Price left for his own lunch when Olive came back to the sickroom. He’d returned when Mrs. Price died, just after two.
He stood over the bed for a moment, looked as if he was struggling to think of something to say.
“She was good to me. To Susan as well.”
Mrs. Price had bragged about his accomplishments, how he’d made Commercial Bank, the bank his father had founded, what it was today. Generous too, always doing for others, “He donated all the land for City Park. I’ll bet you didn’t know that.”
Talking about her son as a boy was what she really liked. A rascal, she said, full of mischief, but no harm in him. Goodhearted, popular with the other boys, honest as the day is long. There was a time when he couldn’t go to sleep without a good night kiss from her. Hard to believe now, isn’t it?
If it had been her place, Olive would have told Mr. Price he’d been a good son, had nothing with which to reproach himself.
“Well,” he said, “I’ve got calls to make.”
Mrs. Susan came in just as Olive finished clearing the sick room clutter, walked over to where her mother-in-law lay, atop the bed, laid a white tea rose across her folded hands.
She could, Olive thought, have opened one of the hands to receive the flower.
“You didn’t put her in her dress?”
“The funeral home does that.”
Mrs. Price’s body was soft and floppy, when Olive sponged it off, dressed it in the old-fashioned underclothes and gray silk wrapper.
She’d ironed the dress young Mrs. Price had chosen yesterday. It was packed now, in tissue paper, inside a long cardboard box.
“A pity the cool weather hasn’t started. She might have worn that wine colored marocain afternoon dress she liked. The other one is lovely but I’m afraid it’s too big for her, as much weight as she’s lost.”
The funeral home, Olive told her, will know how to make the dress look nice.
By pulling it in around her where it showed and shoving the excess cloth underneath her.
They heard the undertaker’s wagon then. Mrs. Price went to the window to look.
“They don’t come to the front door?”
“No.”
“I never noticed.”
Olive came to stand beside her and they looked across the back yard, and the fruit trees, to where the cart stood behind the Price’s empty stable.
The funeral home horses weren’t tethered. Mrs. Susan smiled at how quietly they stood, said those old plodders were good for nothing but the knackers.
She left the room when they heard the undertakers’ men on the back stairs.
Olive stayed, helped with the shroud and the stretcher, walked behind with the dress box, as they carried the body out.
Feet first, as was the old custom, to prevent the deceased from looking back and beckoning at someone still living, making them follow.
Olive stayed a few moments after the stretcher had been secured, talking with the undertaker’s men. She knew them, of course. Like her, they spent much of their work day in silence, were glad of company.
When she returned Mrs. Susan was back at the window. Olive hoped she didn’t think they’d been disrespectful.
Mrs. Price went to her mother-in-law’s dresser, lifted the lid on the jewelry case.
Olive remade the bed with fresh sheets, changed the coverlet, listened to Mrs. Price scrabbling behind her.
She heard the jewelry box close.
“We won’t expect you to stay, Olive. You’ve done so much already.”
Olive was paid till the end of the week so they had the right to keep her that long. Some families did, gave her chores to do. Others couldn’t get rid of her fast enough.
Mrs. Price said she must be looking forward to seeing her aunt and uncle and she hoped Olive could have a rest before taking another job. “Mr. Price will give you a ride when you’re ready.”
Olive would have liked to walk. Even in a house as generously proportioned as the Price’s you still had to turn around, retrace your steps.
Families, the Prices too, would tell her to make herself at home, but Olive didn’t bring more than was needed, never spread herself out. I might not have been here, she thought, as she looked around the room, the sewing room, given over to her use, to see if she’d left anything behind.
Mr. Price said, when she thanked him for the ride, he was glad to be out of the house. “There’s no hurry, if you’d like to stop at your bank, for instance.”
His little joke. Olive went to the other bank, First National, because that was where Uncle Hi went. Mr. Price had laughed when he heard, said he and Gus Wagner, the president at First National, were in Rotary together. Community minded, Gus was, very solid.
He handed her an envelope.
Showing off, Gene would say.
It didn’t seem right to open the envelope in front of Mr. Price. She waited till she was inside the bank, filling out the deposit slip. Twenty dollars, two weeks salary.
She passed Schuman’s dry goods store on her way back to the car, would have liked to stop to look at the display in the window. A bolt of clear blue flannel, and another, a print with a frieze of yellow ducks, caught her eye.
Mr. Price was already out of the car waiting to open the door for her.
Thank you, she told him. I never thought. Oh, thank you.
No thanks were necessary, he said. “You’re a good girl, Olive. You’re hardworking and you were kind to Mother, where another girl would not have been. Mrs. Price, Susan, and I wish you all success in the future. Off Chestnut, isn’t it?”
When Aunt Beryl and Uncle Hi too, just home from work, still in his uniform, came out of the house to greet him, Mr. Price politely refused their invitation to step in for a cup of coffee, perhaps a bite to eat, stood with them a little while, hat in hand, on the worn summer grass in the front yard, talking.
It’s going to hit him hard when he realizes it, Uncle Hi said when they went into the house. No matter how long it’s been it never feels right after your mother’s gone.
Gertie wasn’t home, Beryl said. She’d gone to a weinie roast at the lake with the young people from church. It was a full moon tonight, and there’d be a hayride later, down the shore road.
“So it’s just us for supper.” A scratch meal, she called it. From the garden, nothing special.
“I like your food best,” Olive said. “You always make what we like.”
“What I like,” Hi, said surveying the table. Devilled eggs, green beans with bacon, sliced tomatoes. “We’re having us a party, aren’t we, honey?”
Her mother had told her and Gertie, when they first came to live with Hi and Beryl, never to ask for anything. “Them that ask, don’t get.”
She meant if their aunt and uncle took them to the picture show, they should be grateful for that, should not say anything about how good the popcorn smelled.
Gertie was a saucebox. “How will you know what I want if I don’t tell you?”
Uncle Hi and Aunt Beryl had laughed.
Tonight there was blackberry cobbler. Uncle Hi took the cream pitcher last, asked Beryl and Olive if they’d gotten enough, before he poured his own. He couldn’t decide, he said, which was prettier, the bright purple juices before the cream was added or the cloudy pink they turned, after it was poured.
At Prices she’d imagined long afternoons with Aunt Beryl making things for the baby.
Now she remembered stories of girls dying from sepsis after illegal abortions, being beaten by their outraged father, of a baby being taken away as soon as it was born.
Just three months, she said. Hi and Beryl sat on the old haircloth settee. The cloth was thin from Olive and Gertie sliding on it when they were little. Aunt Beryl had covered it with a crazy quilt she’d made from bits of velvet and bright satin. Olive, across from them on one of the chairs from the old dining room set, might have been facing a prospective employee who’d want to know if she’d go down to the basement in the early morning to stoke the furnace, was she willing to give a hand with the housework as the needs of the patient allowed?
She hadn’t been to the doctor yet, she told them. She tired more easily, that was all.
Aunt Beryl cried, dabbed at her eyes angrily.
“Gene?”
Olive saw the look of distaste on her uncle’s face, remembered the musty barn, the swarms of gnats, Gene’s weight pinning her to the wall. “Don’t be silly, Olive,” he’d said, when she cried, “I’m not hurting you.”
Her aunt and uncle didn’t ask how she and Gene had contrived to be alone.
“Oh, honey. You should have some young fellow, someone who’d be crazy about you.” Hi pursed his lips in imitation of Gene’s precise manner: “‘How do you do. I am Mr. Sloper, come to call on Olive.’”
Beryl, still crying, said they should never have let Olive go out to work. There’d been a call for nurses because of a resurgence in Spanish flu the summer Olive had graduated from eighth grade and she’d persuaded her aunt and uncle to let her get the training at the hospital.
She liked the work, didn’t want to go back to school that September.
We should have made you, Beryl said now. Trafficking with the dead, doing what no hired girl would, when you ought to be at the high school with Gertie, playing basketball, going to dances. Gene should be your teacher, not your beau.
“Gertie says the scholars call him Sahara because his lessons are so dry,” Beryl said in a triumphant tone, as if clinching an argument.
Hi wanted to know where Gene was. “You shouldn’t have to do this alone.”
I’m not alone, Olive wanted to say. I have you. “He doesn’t know.”
They’d been on a walk in February, Gene setting a brisk pace, when he told her he wasn’t interested in marriage.
I’m not a prince of the realm, don’t need a son to carry on the line.
Gene lived at home with his mother and sisters.
Olive laid a hand on her abdomen, moved it away when she saw Beryl looking.
“I’ve got money saved and I’ll work, pay my own way. If I could stay with you and if Aunt Beryl could help with the baby when I’m working. You like babies.”
Beryl did not return her smile.
There was more she’d meant to say, about how much she wanted the baby, all she would do for him, that she was sorry. “But you’ve already done so much. I shouldn’t be asking.”
In third grade Gertie had demanded pink satin ballet slippers for her school shoes. The kind, regretful way her aunt and uncle said no; the choice was between the brown or the black Oxfords, reminded Olive of how they looked at her now.
She’d never been so childish.
“No, honey. It isn’t that. There isn’t anything I, we, wouldn’t do for you.”
It would be too hard, they said. For her, for the baby. The hospital doesn’t even hire married girls. What use would they have for you? And people will think you’re a bad girl, won’t want you in their house.
Beryl said she didn’t like to say so, but it could hurt Gertie’s chances.
“I could go someplace where no one knows me. I could say I had a husband but he died.”
“Babies need a father.”
“It hasn’t been so hard for Gertie and me.” She shouldn’t have said it, she thought. Beryl could tell her she only cared for herself, never thought of the sacrifices made for her, but her aunt and uncle continued to smile the same regretful smile, and she tried again.
“Gene doesn’t love me.”
“That makes no difference.” Hi said, in a tone Olive hadn’t heard before. “Two years he’s been coming around. Everyone will know it’s him. If he doesn’t marry you the school won’t keep him.”
“It’s for the baby,” Beryl said. “What you’re doing is for the baby.”
Olive stayed in bed, mostly, after she’d told them. “She’s tired,” Beryl said, when Gene came to the house. This was after Hi had talked to him.
Gene and Hi had gone to the courthouse for the license. Olive was a month short of her eighteenth birthday; her signature wasn’t required.
Beryl tried to interest her in the wedding. “Your yellow dotted Swiss is as good as new,” she said, “but why don’t we go downtown and buy you a pretty white hat?”
On Tuesday afternoon, late, after Gene and Hi finished work, Reverend Iler was coming to the house to marry them. Mrs. Iler was coming too.
The Ilers were staying for the wedding tea, as Gertie called it. Gene’s mother wouldn’t be there. “A confirmed invalid,” Gene said.
On Saturday Olive got up to go to Mrs. Price’s service, sat at the back of the church with Retta, remembered the happy dream she’d lived in during her last month at Price’s.
Like a swaddled baby, she thought, with no thought beyond the warm milk in his belly.
Stay as long as you like, she’d imagined the Prices saying. You’re a breath of fresh air, Olive. Stay forever.
When Mr. Price came home for lunch he’d run up the stairs to the nursery, scoop the gurgling baby in his arms. “And how are you, my fine fellow? How are you today?”
She’d already written her thank you note to the Prices, using the model the nurses’ manual provided: Though no other reward beyond the trust you placed in me in allowing me to care for your beloved mother is expected, I nonetheless deeply appreciate…
She didn’t intend to go back to the house afterwards, but Retta said she’d appreciate her company, said, when Olive tied on an apron, and went to work on the dishes, she hadn’t meant that, just talk to me. It was the kind of job Olive liked, requiring speed and precision, and it was satisfying, turning piles of dirty dishes into stacks of shining china.
She wondered if Retta would be hurt when she found out, think Olive should have told her.
Retta was pleased when Olive praised the little cream puffs filled with chicken salad.
“It was a deal of work, making so many but, once you get the hang of it, it goes quick.”
Gene came into the kitchen then, warm and pink in his worsted suit.
Retta picked up a tray of sandwiches. “They’ll be wanting these.”
“If you’re the one responsible for these dainty comestibles we enjoyed today, I’m in your debt,” Gene told her.
When he didn’t step forward to open the door, Retta pushed it out with her backside.
Gene was startled when it slammed. “I saw you at the church but you’d left before I could reach you.”
“I didn’t see you.”
“I sat near the front. I thought it best if someone from the school attended, the Prices being one of our first families. So I went to your house and your aunt thought you might be here.”
“You had a long walk.”
“Well, you see, I hope to escort you home. When you’re ready. But perhaps you’re fatigued, would prefer to ride the street car?”
“No.”
“We’ll walk slowly then.” Gene said. “I very much want to talk to you, Olive.”
She’d spoken to the Prices when she’d come to the house, Mrs. Price smiling and looking past her to whoever was next in the receiving line. She’d have gone out the back but Gene led her to the front parlor.
There weren’t as many people now.
Gene strode over to where the Prices were sitting behind the piano with another couple. He wished to say goodbye, he told them, to extend, again, his deepest condolences, and to thank them for their gracious welcome into their lovely home, the more gracious because of the sad circumstances.
Mr. Price set down his drink, rose to his feet, shook hands.
“Thank you, Mr. Sloper,” Mrs. Price said, leaning back in her chair. “I hope you got enough to eat.”
Gene took Olive’s arm when they were outside and they walked for a while in silence.
“You don’t suppose the Prices will say anything about me coming, do you? To Mr. Hughes or the superintendent? Or they may know someone on the school board. I certainly had no thought of intruding.”
If it had been Aunt Beryl whose feelings had been hurt Olive would tell her she wished she’d thrown all those dishes at the Price’s brand new five hundred dollar Monitor Top electric refrigerator, instead of washing and wiping them.
“I thought it was lovely, what you said. Anyone else would have appreciated it. Don’t worry, they won’t say anything. Mrs. Price doesn’t want people knowing how mean she is.”
“That’s fine then.”
Olive thought of how, on bad nights, the frantic look would fade from Mrs. Price’s face when she saw Olive.
They’d live with his mother at first, Gene said. Olive would be a great help to her. But they’d begin looking for their own home soon.
Gene said he wouldn’t hold what had happened against her.
I should hope to shout, Olive said to herself, then stopped listening, thought of the flying dreams she’d had as a little girl. She couldn’t remember how old she’d been when they stopped, just her disappointment when she realized they were done.
She hadn’t gone high, just skimmed a little above the ground, could still touch her mother and Gertie. No need to pump her legs or flap her arms, nothing to do but be carried along in the buoyant air, as it seemed to Olive, she was being carried now to the child she loved.