Part 16

"No. You can't. You don't. That's what frightens me so. You can't. Why even Bertha--that great, white peasant girl out there in your kitchen--why there--there is something about her comes nearer to understanding the frail, delicate, tremendous little trifles about life--than you, Mother--really."

"My two feet are on the ground."

"So terribly on the ground."

"Get out and interest yourself in things that matter. Suffrage. Social work, like your sister. What about that course in economics that I even agreed to take with you at Columbia?"

"I loathe economics...."

"Well, you expect your share of a big fortune some day, don't you? If you do, learn how to take care of it first. Learn the history of coffee before you inherit your coffee plantations, learn----"

"Coffee doesn't interest me, Mother, any more than----"

"It doesn't? Well then, trust that Whisk Broom fellow to take care of you in the manner to which you have been accustomed. If you two young people are really serious, stop mooning and go off and get married and start on your own."

"Mother, you know we can't do that for a little while, anyway. Dudley isn't a money maker. He wouldn't be himself if he were. Mother, you--you've so much. So enormously much. That is one of the sublime uses of money. To make it easy and possible for genius like Dudley's to grow and expand. Mother--if you would!"

"Would what?"

"Would--I--somehow, I--we girls--not one of us, Mother, has worked out her life very happily, yet. Olga is only insulating herself with her bizarre way of living. Poor--poor Paula--and----"

"Paula!"

"Oh I'm not saying that Harrison was the man for her in the worldly sense of the word any more than--than perhaps Dudley is for me---but since--but since it happened that way with Paula--I--sometimes I fear for Paula, Mother. Her eyes. They can look so big and glassy after she's been locked up there for days and days playing to herself. I--Mother, we are none of us happy girls. Wouldn't it be almost like a symbol of the turning of the tide for all of us if Dudley and I--well--it--Dudley's proud, Mother. We would have to do it so delicately. As if he were granting us the privilege. And that's what it is--isn't it--to make the creation of beauty possible? I--if Dudley had me--Mother--he doesn't quite realize me yet, but he would. He would. If Dudley had me--and leisure--if we could make him feel that in permitting us to give, it is he, not us, who would be conferring favor----"

"Oh I see," said Mrs. Oessetrich, her laughter like a burst string of dropping beads, "my dear, clever second-born, the idea being to prevail upon our whisk broom poet to overlook the crassness of the offer and agree to live upon the bounty of a mother-in-law, whose only excuse for being is that she apologetically may keep the poetic hearth-fire burning."

"No--no----"

"Surely, my offspring, a plan to warm any parent's heart! Do esoteric poets accept anything so crass in payment as coin of the realm, or is there a more subtle way to cast gold-dust before the whisk-broom suitor?"

Ermangarde let her head roll back as if she had been wounded.

"That's the trouble with mooning," said Mrs. Oessetrich. "It makes fools of the best of us," and went out, sidestepping Bertha, who was on her knees waxing the floor.

The woolen little polishing-pad made a soft, hurrying, whispering noise and the floor began to gleam in pools and you walked on your knees and squatted under the piano and stole in between the legs of chairs.

Suddenly Ermangarde, left in a heap on the couch, thrust out her hand, and Bertha, her own smelling of floor oil, took it and held it there until the black wing of a December twilight came in through the brocade window curtains and Ermangarde slept in such a tense little ball, that in order to unhook her fingers, Bertha had finally to lift them off one by one, like burrs.

***

In the center of Bertha's brow the hair ran down in a peak. One spring that peak began to whiten. Ashes of roses. It was curious and a little bit sickening, seeing the white push its way through the yellow. The dainty hoar of a first frost and yet, with the immemorial gesture of women, Bertha sat before her bit of mirror plucking the new white hairs and spreading them sadly along the back of her hand. It was many a day before the new pale tinge came really to be noticeable, but the lovely jonquil braids that she could wind three times around her head were Bertha's vanity and she wept at their passing.

Something new, too, and subtle, was letting down in Bertha. The slowing of the engine. New tirednesses. Strange flushed lassitudes. The plunge of her arm from the socket was no longer straight as the drive of a piston. It broke at the elbow. It was still easy enough to drag heavy objects with the hoist of a man, or tear at the entrails of fowls with the old fiery clutch, but sometimes in the eternal upstairs and downstairs the knees had a sense of giving way. An absurd, empty, tickled feeling, as if they had each gone off into little faints. There was nothing to do but wait then, holding on to the balustrade until the strength flowed back into them.

The old lunge that could drive a keg halfway up a hillside; that fling of the wrist that could squeeze a mop dry at one turn--something had gone with the imperceptible, the pussy-foot years. Jonquils. That plunging bison sense of excess strength.

And the din, the din of Mrs. Oessetrich. Sometimes the clatter of it made Bertha want to cry. That was because she tired more easily. The years were at her, but she called it neck-ache and bought a bottle of liniment.

It was impossible to spend the every-other-Thursday-afternoon-off, indoors. Mathilde Oessetrich was at you like a woodpecker.

"Bertha, since you are not going out this afternoon, I wish you would help me take an invoice of the flat-silver for the insurance company." Or: "Bertha, how can you sit there doing nothing even if it is your day off? Boil up some suds and wash the crystal chandelier in the drawing-room. And be careful, those pendants are the finest cut-crystal."

There was no lock on her door and the imminence of these invasions made her sit stiffly away from the back of her chair, fearing them. So willy, nilly, on her every-other-Thursday afternoon, Bertha went out.

There was no place much to go except that Thurn's Department Store on Fourteenth Street had a sheet music department, where they crashed out the popular selections of the day on an upright piano. There was always a little swirl of excitement around it and sometimes, if you lingered on the edge, through the din and the clatter something sweet came through.

And then one day, Mrs. Oessetrich sent her down to Arrow-maker's department store to match some curtain net. That was a place to know! You could walk all of every-other-Thursday afternoon in a tropics of satin brocades and little wisps of fugitive perfume, and at three o'clock an organ played out into the din and made it throb like a heart. Then you could walk upstairs, the great stairs that were as vain as the arch to the neck of a swan, and across an aerial bridge that led from a Doge's palace into the dim Persia of the Oriental room, where the rugs burned in strange, flameless fables across the floor and squatting gods sat drowsy with centuries. Sometimes the doors to the auditorium were open and no one cared if you slipped in and sat down while the melody smoked out of the organ pipes....

But then, gradually, Helga began to commandeer these afternoons. She waited for Bertha in a drug store on Madison Avenue. Sometimes they went to a motion picture theater or, if the weather was fine, walked in Central Park. Strangely enough, for Helga, who was loquacious, there was very little talk. So little that often they walked the wind-swept rectangle of the reservoir in silence, their faces thrust ahead for the slap of the gale and Helga's pretty fur scarf standing out stiffly behind. Hand in hand. Helga liked to worm her palm up into Bertha's as a child would, and then she had to take running little steps to keep up. Bertha's strides were so long. Sometimes, keeping up with her, Helga's breath began to come in gasps and tears of effort popped out in her eyes. Tears that she seemed to like to flagellate herself with, because she had to hurry with three steps to Bertha's calm, unconscious one, until the blur before her eyes and the pain in her side made the neat cinder path around the water a morass, through which she began to stagger. Then they would sit, still hand in hand, on a bench and watch the day wind down into dusk. No talk, chiefly because when Helga began and her lips started to shudder at what she had to say, she had not the strength, and had a constant, a neurotic fear of fainting out in public places; and so they sat silent or coaxed the squirrels or watched the children tear past on roller skates and sometimes Bertha had little drony bits to say of the Oessetrichs.

"Oessetrichs. Oessetrichs. I know why you are always rubbing it into me that there's a good opening for a second girl, there. I know!"

"I was yoost mentioning it, Helga."

"Ah no, you wasn't 'yoost mentioning it.' You're one of those workers in the dark. It's not what you say. God knows where you got the capacity for saying what you don't say. Well, lay off--don't you worry about me."

"I--won't----"

"Well don't! Save it for the second girl at the Oessetrichs if they are ever able to get one that's fool enough to stay."

But one Thursday evening long after, Helga sagged down so when they came to their parting of the ways at the Madison Avenue drug store, that Bertha had stiffly to hold her up by the arms for fear she was going to fall.

"Helga?"

"You got me, Bertha. I--can't go--back--there. McMurtry--the mouths--I can't go back. Take me, Bertha--do they still need me--second girl----"

"I bane promising Mrs. Oessetrich I would get her a second girl. You."

"I--I--never thought you would get me."

"Come, Helga."

And so the Oessetrichs acquired a second girl.

***

That was a winter to be remembered. Sometimes at night if Bertha so much as threw herself across the bed for an instant before mustering up the energy to undress, there she lay all night, prone, her heavy shoes riveted to her feet and her clothing lumped clumsily between her and complete rest.

To find the time and the strength somehow, so that it would seem as if Helga herself had done it, to scour the pantry sinks. They were of German silver and Mrs. Oessetrich was inordinately proud of them. To beat the rugs for Helga's general cleaning day and keep for her the enormous drawing-room pier glasses and the crystal chandeliers and the bathroom fixtures glitteringly bright. To scurry upstairs with the fire logs when Helga sank down crying with them on the cellar stairs, and pile them outside the library door, so that all there was left for Helga was to trip in and stack them in little pyramids beside the copper scuttle.

It sapped you, not only the work of that, but the strain of that, and then all the old querulousness was back in Helga. As the pretty sheen to her hair dulled and the tips of her fingers began to spread and the nails to break, her eyes sort of dimmed, as if two little lamps had been hurried out of them and evenings up in the room she shared with Bertha, the din of her talk beat down the sound of Paula's playing and the wall was never a fan bowing, but of ochre and green wallpaper, with one flap of it hanging down and showing the naked plaster.

"Well, now you have me here, what are you going to do with me?"

"No, Helga, I--didn't----"

"Oh yes you did. You had your heart set on getting me here two years before I give it a thought. Old Napoleon told me so herself. The first night you was working here you promised to get her your friend Helga for second girl. You got me here, you know you did!"

"Yes--Helga----"

"'Yes, Helga.' Well, I'm being a good girl. I'm back lugging the wood to toast somebody else's toes and eating off the kitchen table what's left off the dining room table. I'm back. I'm the servant problem again. The problem without a chance. You have a thick hide, you don't feel like I do."

"I feel----."

"Why, we ain't even got organization. The hodcarriers got that much. We can't tell the truth about the kitchen side of the door, because we ain't got the voice of organization. What's the answer? The women who hire us call us an ungrateful lot and who is there to answer back? Me? I got a fat chance getting listened to, ain't I? Ungrateful! Ungrateful for what? That's what I want to know...."

"Helga, shh-h-h--Miss Paula----"

"There's nobody to get up and explain for us. The men don't know. They get all their information from their women. That gives us a helluva chance, don't it? And who is to dispute it all? We can't. We ain't got the voice or the language. Nobody writes pieces or prints articles about us from our side of the fence. We're not interesting. Who wants to see a show about a servant? Who hears anything about us except from what the women who hire us have to say about us? God help a woman whose reputation depends entirely on what another woman has to say about her. Well, it's that way with the servant problem--every other kind of labor gets a hearing. We don't. The public is satisfied to take the word of the women who hire us. It's easier. Leave it to the public to take the easiest way!"

"Yah...."

"What kind of an angle on us do you think Mrs. Farley or Mrs. Oessetrich give when they get up and spout about the servant problem at one of their finger-roll-and-chicken-salad club meetings?"

"Helga, shh-h-h----"

"Yes, I said it. What do they know about us, except that we are fourteen-hour-a-day machines that mustn't balk or break down, or we get ungrateful? Ungrateful for what? Oh, God, tell me what? Ungrateful because my life is chained to a sink. What's Ermangarde Oessetrich done to make her so much better than I am that I got to make her bed and pick up her silk nightgown after her? What's she done that makes her the waited on and me the waiter on? Oh, you got me back. But deep down in my heart I know it ain't worth being good for. I'm like a kid sleeping on the floor. I can't fall outta bed because there is no place to fall. See? That's me. I lose if I win. There's a helluva lot of fun in a game like that. I lose if I win."

Words. Words. Words. They beat about the little room in imprisoned flutterings. Evenings of them. Weeks of them. Eternities of them. Sometimes Helga fell asleep almost in the midst of what she was saying, and had to be undressed and tucked in between the scrawny covers.

She loved that moment of bed. The evening was like a nest to her, into which she crawled drowsy with the sense of her safety. Sometimes she sighed out and closed her eyes and snuggled her palm very deeply up into Bertha's.

"I'm safe here with you, Bertha--never let anybody--get me. I'll work. I'll pick up her nightgown and clean her shoes--my side--that's what kills me--but keep me safe--Bertha--McMurtry--keep me safe, Bertha----"

Then it was easiest to get her to sleep. She was like a child. Relaxed.

***

About once a month the von Schlegels came to dine. He was president of the Turnverein National Bank and also had enormous coffee plantation holdings. She wore a diamond necklace entirely concealed by the fold of fat at her neck. Hans von Schlegel was one day to die at his desk of a stroke. He was already purpling.

One evening at a dinner to the von Schlegels, Ermangarde, who wore a light blue taffeta dress sown in pearl passementerie and her hair in two little round mats of braid over each ear, burst suddenly, and apparently apropos of nothing, into such a fit of weeping that between them, Paula and Bertha had literally to carry her upstairs.

The meal proceeded stiffly through, and Mrs. Oessetrich did not leave the table. For an hour she and von Schlegel computed compound interest, with Mrs. von Schlegel nodding and breathing down on her bosom so loudly that the lace swayed. But after dessert she went upstairs, holding her heavy green satin gown up about her as she bent over Ermangarde, all her folderols of bead and bugle trimmings dangling. The Oessetrichs dressed like that. Sharp hard colors. Laid-on trimmings. Zouave jackets of spangled net. Appliqués. Not even the girls dressed wisely. Olga, to be sure, had her somewhat mannish, modish manner, but her tweeds were thick and her expensive felt hats had a dowdy droop. Mrs. Oessetrich loved parrot green. It covered her like a shellac, and her chapped-looking arms and bosom rose out of it and made her as brilliant-looking as a cockatoo.

"What is this? Don't you feel well, Ermangarde? Bertha, go downstairs and send Helga into the drawing-room with the coffee and liqueurs."

By this time, Ermangarde, her storm of crying over, and lying wanly in the crumple of blue taffeta dress, opened her salt-bitten eyes.

"No, Bertha, don't you go. Stay here. I'm sorry, Mother, I must have been a little hysterical. I didn't mean to...."

"Does anything hurt you? Are you ill? No? Well then, bathe your eyes and come downstairs. The von Schlegels want a little bridge."

Paula, who had been sitting at her sister's head, looked up at this, her eyes the curious blue of flame burning along the top of cognac. Thin flame through which you could see the clear empty bottoms.

"Why, Mother! Ermangarde can't go downstairs any more this evening. She's had another nervous chill."

"Nonsense. A lovesick chill. A little self-control is the best kind of treatment. It makes it extremely awkward----"

"I'll go down, Mother, in Ermie's place."

"Very well. I suppose it will appear no more peculiar to have Ermangarde up here in a love trance, than it would be if you were to remain upstairs mooning with your music."

"Mother, I----"

"I suppose I may as well reconcile myself to a neurotic family of girls. Bertha, when Miss Ermangarde is finished having you hold her hand, I wish you would hasten downstairs. That girl Helga, for some reason, becomes a perfect moron when you are not about. If you need anything, Ermangarde, you can ring," said Mrs. Oessetrich, and bounced out, slamming the door.

But at two o'clock that morning, with Bertha still holding her hand, Ermangarde drifted off into such a gale of sobbing that Doctor Ehrenfest, the family physician, was finally called and the aroused household scurried through hallways in kimonos and soft slippers. Lights were blazing on all floors and Mrs. Oessetrich in a padded house gown, and her head in a fury of crimpers, was pale as china.

"Come now." said Dr. Ehrenfest, who had assisted the three Misses Oessetrich into the world, "we must get to the bottom of what is troubling this child. Love affair? Out with it, Ermie, you can't fool your Uncle Ehrenfest."

But the squirt of morphia into Ermangarde's left arm was already carrying her off down strange rivers, her closed lids quivering and her cheeks, down which the tears had stormed, lashed and blanched-looking. Paula, at the head of Ermangarde's bed, kept her head averted because she was crying.

A silent, eerie little group. Bertha, crouched there beside the bed, because Ermangarde's fingers were tight as wire around her wrist and would not let go. Paula with her queer-looking, blue-flame eyes. Mathilde Oessetrich, china-white and a little frightened, standing there at the footboard and gazing down on to the bed. The professional-looking face of the doctor beginning to pucker wisely.

"Mathilde, have you been up to your old tricks of taking captaincy of another daughter's soul?"

A long sob forced itself through Paula's clenched lips.

"Nonsense, I suppose it's her appendicitis pain again."

"No, the child's case doesn't diagnose that readily. This appendix seems to be up under her heart or in her brain. We can't cut to find this pain. We have to probe."

"That is mid-victorian. Girls don't do it any more. Swooning off at love affairs. Pish."

"Ah, now we are getting at it. Then there _is_----"

"Oh, Ehrenfest, you're an old granny. Always have been. Suppose there is. It just isn't done--it isn't nice--prostrating herself in this fashion. Dramatics, I call it."

"The child hasn't prostrated herself, Mathilde. She is in a state of nervous collapse. We must get at the source of this thing, and see what's to be done before she comes out from under the influence."

Paula turned her eyes upon her parent.

"Tell him, Mother."

"Tell him? Tell him what? This is abominable. Having my children talk to me and of me as if I were a criminal."

"Tell him, Mother."

"Tell him that the only normal strong and capable member of this family is myself?"

"Tell him about Dudley."

"Well, then, Ehrey, I suppose I am to confess to you, like a culprit parent, that Dudley Wells is the occasion of Ermangarde's brain storm."

"The author?"

"I thought the incident was closed and forgotten when he suddenly ceased coming here about a month ago. That is the sum total of it, so far as I know. But if that is the cause of Ermangarde's brain storm, I beg to be excused. I am going back to bed."

"Mother--that isn't the sum total----"

"It is a blessing I have a sense of humor to fall back upon. If ever a woman has tried to rear her daughters into self-sufficient, independent women, capable of swinging the great fortunes which will ultimately come into their hands, I have. I brought a great fortune into my marriage and, if I do say it I have managed and enlarged it with the clearsightedness of an entire corporation. I have tried to rear my girls toward that ideal of self-sufficiency. I have tried to inoculate them with a realization of their own social and economic integrity. I have----"

"But, my dear Mathilde, nature is----"

"Bah! Nature is a trickster. Let the weak succumb. If my girls must marry, let them use the same judgment and discrimination about it that I expect them to use in the management of affairs not so vital to their well-being. Nature tricks the weak. Gray matter, not passion, rules the strong. You've something of a sense of humor yourself, Ehrenfest. It should afford you a real laugh. Me of all women! Even Olga, I hear, is having herself psychoanalyzed in quest of her particular sex complex. Ermangarde here in hysterics because of a poet who wears a size fifteen collar, and Paula bemoaning her girlhood away because the man she fancied herself in love with had the good judgment to take himself down to Porto Rico and----"

"You drove him!"