oyster, Mrs. Jett sat quite unusually forward on her chair at one of
the afternoon congresses of the wives, convened in Mrs. Peopping's back
parlor, Jeanette Peopping, aged four, sweet and blond, whom the Jetts
loved to borrow Sunday mornings, while she was still in her little
nightdress, playing paper dolls in the background.
Her embroidery hoop, with a large shaded pink rose in the working, had,
contrary to her custom, fallen from idle hands, and instead of following
the dart of the infinitesimal needle, Mrs. Jett's eyes were burningly
upon Mrs. Peopping, following, with almost lip-reading intensity, that
worthy lady's somewhat voluptuous mouthings.
She was a large, light person with protuberant blue eyes that looked as
if at some time they had been two-thirds choked from their sockets and
a characteristic of opening every sentence with her mouth shaped to an
explosive O, which she filled with as much breath as it would hold.
It had been a long tale of obstetrical fact and fancy, told plushily,
of course, against the dangerous little ears of Jeanette, and at its
conclusion Mrs. Peopping's steel-bead bag, half finished, lay in a
huddle at her feet, her pink and flabby face turned reminiscently toward
the fire.
"--and for three days six doctors gave me up. Why, I didn't see Jeanette
until the fourteenth day, when most women are up and out. The crisis,
you know. My night nurse, an awful sweet girl--I send her a Christmas
present to this day--said if I had been six years younger it wouldn't
have gone so hard with me. I always say if the men knew what we women go
through--Maybe if some of them had to endure the real pain themselves
they would have something to do besides walk up and down the hall and
turn pale at the smell of ether coming through the keyhole. Ah me! I've
been a great sufferer in my day."
"Thu, thu, thu," and, "I could tell tales," and, "I've been through my
share"--from various points of vantage around the speaker.
It was then that Mrs. Jett sat forward on the edge of the straight
chair, and put her question.
There was a pause after it had fallen into the silence, as if an
intruder had poked her head in through the door, and it brought only the
most negligible answer from Mrs. Peopping.
"Forty-three."
Almost immediately Mrs. Dang caught at the pause for a case in point
that had been trembling on her lips all during Mrs. Peopping's recital.
"A doctor once told a second cousin of my sister-in-law's--" and so on
_ad infinitum, ad lib._, and _ad nauseaum_.
That night Mrs. Jett did an unprecedented thing. She crept into the
crevice of her husband's arm from behind as he stood in his waistcoat,
washing his hands in the carbolic solution at the bowl and washstand.
He turned, surprised, unconsciously placing himself between her and the
reeky water.
"Henry," she said, rubbing up against the alpaca back to his vest like
an ingratiating Maltese tabby, "Hen-ery."
"In a minute, Em," he said, rather puzzled and wishing she would wait.
Suddenly, swinging herself back from him by his waistcoat lapel, easily,
because of his tenseness to keep her clear of the bowl of water, she
directed her eyes straight into his.
"Hen-ery--Hen-ery," each pronouncement of his name surging higher in her
throat.
"Why, Em?"
"Hen-ery, I haven't words sweet enough to tell you."
"Em, tell what?" And stopped. He could see suddenly that her eyes were
full of new pins of light and his lightening intuition performed a
miracle of understanding.
"Emmy!" he cried, jerking her so that her breath jumped, and at the
sudden drench of tears down her face sat her down, supporting her
roundish back with his wet hands, although he himself felt weak.
"I--can't say--what I feel, Henry--only--God is good and--I'm not
afraid."
He held her to his shoulder and let her tears rain down into his watch
pocket, so shaken that he found himself mouthing silent words.
"God is good, Henry, isn't He?"
"Yes, Emmy, yes. Oh, my Emmy!"
"It must have been our prayers, Henry."
"Well," sheepishly, "not exactly mine, Emmy; you're the saint of this
family. But I--I've wished."
"Henry. I'm so happy--Mrs. Peopping had Jeanette at forty-three. Three
years older than me. I'm not afraid."
It was then he looked down at her graying head there, prone against his
chest, and a dart of fear smote him.
"Emmy," he cried, dragging her tear-happy face up to his, "if you're
afraid--not for anything in the world! You're _first_, Em."
She looked at him with her eyes two lamps.
"Afraid? That's the beautiful _part_, Henry. I'm not. Only happy. Why
afraid, Henry--if others dare it at--forty-three--You mean because it
was her second?"
He faced her with a scorch of embarrassment in his face.
"You--We--Well, we're not spring chickens any more, Em. If you are sure
it's not too--"
She hugged him, laughing her tears.
"I'm all right, Henry--we've been too happy not to--to--perpetuate--it."
This time he did not answer. His cheek was against the crochet of her
yoke and she could hear his sobs with her heart.
* * * * *
Miraculously, like an amoeba reaching out to inclose unto itself, the
circle opened with a gasp of astonishment that filled Mrs. Peopping's O
to its final stretch and took unto its innermost Emma Jett.
Nor did she wear her initiation lightly. There was a new tint out in her
long cheeks, and now her chair, a rocker, was but one removed from Mrs.
Peopping's.
Oh, the long, sweet afternoons over garments that made needlework
sublime. No longer the padded rose on the centerpiece or the futile
doily, but absurd little dresses with sleeves that she measured to the
length of her hand, and yokes cut out to the pattern of a playing card,
and all fretted over with feather-stitching that was frailer than
maidenhair fern and must have cost many an eye-ache, which, because of
its source, was easy to bear.
And there happened to Mrs. Jett that queer juvenescence that sometimes
comes to men and women in middle life. She who had enjoyed no particular
youth (her father had died in a ferryboat crash two weeks before her
birth, and her mother three years after) came suddenly to acquire
comeliness which her youth had never boasted.
The round-shouldered, long-cheeked girl had matured gingerly to rather
sparse womanhood that now at forty relented back to a fulsome thirty.
Perhaps it was the tint of light out in her face, perhaps the splendor
of the vision; but at any rate, in those precious months to come, Mrs.
Jett came to look herself as she should have looked ten years back.
They were timid and really very beautiful together, she and Henry Jett.
He came to regard her as a vase of porcelain, and, in his ignorance,
regarded the doctor's mandates harsh; would not permit her to walk, but
ordered a hansom cab every day from three to four, Mrs. Jett alternating
punctiliously with each of the boarding-house ladies for driving
companion.
Every noon, for her delectation at luncheon, he sent a boy from the
store with a carton of her special favorites--Blue Point oysters. She
suddenly liked them small because, as she put it, they went down easier,
and he thought that charming. Lynnhavens for mortals of tougher growth.
Long evenings they spent at names, exercising their pre-determination
as to sex. "Ann" was her choice, and he was all for canceling his
preference for "Elizabeth," until one morning she awakened to the white
light of inspiration.
"I have it! Why not Ann Elizabeth?"
"Great!" And whistled so through his shaving that his mouth was rayed
with a dark sunburst of beard where the razor had not found surface.
They talked of housekeeping, reluctantly, it is true, because Mrs. Plush
herself was fitting up, of hard-to-spare evenings, a basinette of pink
and white. They even talked of schools.
Then came the inevitable time when Mrs. Jett lost interest. Quite out of
a clear sky even the Blue Points were taboo, and instead of joining this
or that card or sewing circle, there were long afternoons of stitching
away alone, sometimes the smile out on her face, sometimes not.
"Em, is it all right with you?" Henry asked her once or twice,
anxiously.
"Of course it is! If I weren't this way--now--it wouldn't be natural.
You don't understand."
He didn't, so could only be vaguely and futilely sorry.
Then one day something quite horrible, in a small way, happened to Mrs.
Jett. Sitting sewing, suddenly it seemed to her that through the very
fluid of her eyeballs, as it were, floated a school of fish. Small
ones--young smelts, perhaps--with oval lips, fillips to their tails, and
sides that glisted.
She laid down her bit of linen lawn, fingers to her lids as if to
squeeze out their tiredness. She was trembling from the unpleasantness,
and for a frightened moment could not swallow. Then she rose, shook out
her skirts, and to be rid of the moment carried her sewing up to
Mrs. Dang's, where a euchre game was in session, and by a few adroit
questions in between deals gained the reassurance that a nervous state
in her "condition" was highly normal.
She felt easier, but there was the same horrid recurrence three times
that week. Once during an evening of lotto down in the front parlor she
pushed back from the table suddenly, hand flashing up to her throat.
"Em!" said Mr. Jett, who was calling the numbers.
"It's nothing," she faltered, and then, regaining herself more fully,
"nothing," she repeated, the roundness out in her voice this time.
The women exchanged knowing glances.
"She's all right," said Mrs. Peopping, omnipotently. "Those things
pass."
Going upstairs that evening, alone in the hallway, they flung an arm
each across the other's shoulder, crowding playfully up the narrow
flight.
"Emmy," he said, "poor Em, everything will be all right."
She restrained an impulse to cry. "Poor nothing," she said.
But neither the next evening, which was Friday, nor for Fridays
thereafter, would she venture down for fish dinner, dining cozily up
in her room off milk toast and a fluffy meringue dessert prepared
especially by Mrs. Plush. It was floating-island night downstairs.
Henry puzzled a bit over the Fridays. It was his heaviest day at the
business, and it was upsetting to come home tired and feel her place
beside him at the basement dinner table vacant.
But the women's nods were more knowing than ever, the reassuring
insinuations more and more delicate.
But one night, out of one of those stilly cisterns of darkness that
between two and four are deepest with sleep, Henry was awakened on the
crest of such a blow and yell that he swam up to consciousness in a
ready-made armor of high-napped gooseflesh.
A regrettable thing had happened. Awakened, too, on the high tide of
what must have been a disturbing dream, Mrs. Jett flung out her arm as
if to ward off something. That arm encountered Henry, snoring lightly in
his sleep at her side. But, unfortunately, to that frightened fling of
her arm Henry did not translate himself to her as Henry.
That was a fish lying there beside her! A man-sized fish with its mouth
jerked open to the shape of a gasp and the fillip still through its
enormous body, as if its flanks were uncomfortably dry. A fish!
With a shriek that tore a jagged rent through the darkness Mrs. Jett
began pounding at the slippery flanks, her hands sliding off its
shininess.
"Out! Out! Henry, where are you? Help me! O God, don't let him get me.
Take him away, Henry! Where are you? My hands--slippery! Where are
you--"
Stunned, feeling for her in the darkness, he wanted to take her
shuddering form into his arms and waken her out of this horror, but with
each groping move of his her hurtling shrieks came faster, and finally,
dragging the bedclothing with her, she was down on the floor at the
bedside, blobbering. That is the only word for it--blobbering.
He found a light, and by this time there were already other lights
flashing up in the startled household. When he saw her there in the ague
of a huddle on the floor beside the bed, a cold sweat broke out over him
so that he could almost feel each little explosion from the pores.
"Why, Emmy--Emmy--my Emmy--my Emmy--"
She saw him now and knew him, and tried in her poor and already
burningly ashamed way to force her chattering jaws together.
"Hen-ery--dream--bad--fish--Hen-ery--"
He drew her up to the side of the bed, covering her shivering knees as
she sat there, and throwing a blanket across her shoulders. Fortunately
he was aware that the soothing note in his voice helped, and so he sat
down beside her, stroking her hand, stroking, almost as if to hypnotize
her into quiet.
"Henry," she said, closing her fingers into his wrists, "I must have
dreamed--a horrible dream. Get back to bed, dear. I--I don't know what
ails me, waking up like that. That--fish! O God! Henry, hold me, hold
me."
He did, lulling her with a thousand repetitions of his limited store of
endearments, and he could feel the jerk of sobs in her breathing subside
and she seemed almost to doze, sitting there with her far hand across
her body and up against his cheek.
Then came knocks at the door, and hurried explanations through the slit
that he opened, and Mrs. Peopping's eye close to the crack.
"Everything is all right.... Just a little bad dream the missus had....
All right now.... To be expected, of course.... No, nothing anyone can
do.... Good night. Sorry.... No, thank you. Everything is all right."
The remainder of the night the Jetts kept a small light burning, after a
while Henry dropping off into exhausted and heavy sleep. For hours Mrs.
Jett lay staring at the small bud of light, no larger than a human eye.
It seemed to stare back at her, warning, Now don't you go dropping off
to sleep and misbehave again.
And holding herself tense against a growing drowsiness, she didn't--for
fear--
* * * * *
The morning broke clear, and for Mrs. Jett full of small reassurances.
It was good to hear the clatter of milk deliveries, and the first bar
of sunshine came in through the hand-embroidered window curtains like a
smile, and she could smile back. Later she ventured down shamefacedly
for the two cups of coffee, which she drank bravely, facing the
inevitable potpourri of comment from this one and that one.
"That was a fine scare you gave us last night, Mrs. Jett."
"I woke up stiff with fright. Didn't I, Will? Gracious! That first yell
was a curdler!"
"Just before Jeanette was born I used to have bad dreams, too, but
nothing like that. My!"
"My mother had a friend whose sister-in-law walked in her sleep right
out of a third-story window and was dashed to--"
"Shh-h-h!"
"It's natural, Mrs. Jett. Don't you worry."
She really tried not to, and after some subsequent and private
reassurance from Mrs. Peopping and Mrs. Keller, went for her hansom ride
with a pleasant anticipation of the Park in red leaf, Mrs. Plush, in a
brocade cape with ball fringe, sitting erect beside her.
One day, in the presence of Mrs. Peopping, Mrs. Jett jumped to her feet
with a violent shaking of her right hand, as if to dash off something
that had crawled across its back.
"Ugh!" she cried. "It flopped right on my hand. A minnow! Ugh!"
"A what?" cried Mrs. Peopping, jumping to her feet and her flesh seeming
to crawl up.
"A minnow. I mean a bug--a June bug. It was a bug, Mrs. Peopping."
There ensued a mock search for the thing, the two women, on all-fours,
peering beneath the chairs. In that position they met levelly, eye to
eye. Then without more ado rose, brushing their knees and reseating
themselves.
"Maybe if you would read books you would feel better," said Mrs.
Peopping, scooping up a needleful of steel beads. "I know a woman who
made it her business to read all the poetry books she could lay hands
on, and went to all the bandstand concerts in the Park the whole time,
and now her daughter sings in the choir out in Saginaw, Michigan."
"I know some believe in that," said Mrs. Jett, trying to force a smile
through her pallor. "I must try it."
But the infinitesimal stitching kept her so busy.
* * * * *
It was inevitable, though, that in time Henry should begin to shoulder
more than a normal share of unease.
One evening she leaned across the little lamplit table between them as
he sat reading in the Persian-design dressing gown and said, as rapidly
as her lips could form the dreadful repetition, "The fish, the fish, the
fish, the fish." And then, almost impudently for her, disclaimed having
said it.
He urged her to visit her doctor and she would not, and so, secretly, he
did, and came away better satisfied, and with directions for keeping her
diverted, which punctiliously he tried to observe.
He began by committing sly acts of discretion on his own accord. Was
careful not to handle the fish. Changed his suit now before coming
home, behind a screen in his office, and, feeling foolish, went out and
purchased a bottle of violet eau de Cologne, which he rubbed into his
palms and for some inexplicable reason on his half-bald spot.
Of course that was futile, because the indescribably and faintly rotten
smell of the sea came through, none the less, and to Henry he was
himself heinous with scent.
One Sunday morning, as was his wont, Mr. Jett climbed into his dressing
gown and padded downstairs for the loan of little Jeanette Peopping,
with whom he returned, the delicious nub of her goldilocks head showing
just above the blanket which enveloped her, eyes and all.
He deposited her in bed beside Mrs. Jett, the little pink feet peeping
out from her nightdress and her baby teeth showing in a smile that Mr.
Jett loved to pinch together with thumb and forefinger.
"Cover her up quick, Em, it's chilly this morning."
Quite without precedent, Jeanette puckered up to cry, holding herself
rigidly to Mr. Jett's dressing gown.
"Why, Jeanette baby, don't you want to go to Aunty Em?"
"No! No! No!" Trying to ingratiate herself back into Mr. Jett's arms.
"Baby, you'll take cold. Come under covers with Aunty Em?"
"No! No! No! Take me back."
"Oh, Jeanette, that isn't nice! What ails the child? She's always so
eager to come to me. Shame on Jeanette! Come, baby, to Aunty Em?"
"No! No! No! My mamma says you're crazy. Take me back--take me."
For a frozen moment Henry regarded his wife above the glittering fluff
of little-girl curls. It seemed to him he could almost see her face
become smaller, like a bit of ice under sun.
"Naughty little Jeanette," he said, shouldering her and carrying her
down the stairs; "naughty little girl."
When he returned his wife was sitting locked in the attitude in which he
had left her.
"Henry!" she whispered, reaching out and closing her hand over his so
that the nails bit in. "Not that, Henry! Tell me not that!"
"Why, Em," he said, sitting down and trembling, "I'm surprised at you,
listening to baby talk! Why, Em, I'm surprised at you!"
She leaned over, shaking him by the shoulder.
"I know. They're saying it about me. I'm not that, Henry. I swear I'm
not that! Always protect me against their saying that, Henry. Not
crazy--not that! It's natural for me to feel queer at times--now.
Every woman in this house who says--that--about me has had her nervous
feelings. It's not quite so easy for me, as if I were a bit younger.
That's all. The doctor said that. But nothing to worry about. Mrs.
Peopping had Jeanette--Oh, Henry promise me you'll always protect me
against their saying that! I'm not that--I swear to you, Henry--not
that!"
"I know you're not, Emmy. It's too horrible and too ridiculous to talk
about. Pshaw--pshaw!"
"You do know I'm not, don't you? Tell me again you do know."
"I do. Do."
"And you'll always protect me against anyone saying it? They'll believe
you, Henry, not me. Promise me to protect me against them, Henry.
Promise to protect me against our little Ann Elizabeth ever thinking
that of--of her mother."
"Why, Emmy!" he said. "Why, Emmy! I just promise a thousand times--" and
could not go on, working his mouth rather foolishly as if he had not
teeth and were rubbing empty gums together.
But through her hot gaze of tears she saw and understood and, satisfied,
rubbed her cheek against his arm.
The rest is cataclysmic.
Returning home one evening in a nice glow from a January out-of-doors,
his mustache glistening with little frozen drops and his hands (he never
wore gloves) unbending of cold, Mrs. Jett rose at her husband's entrance
from her low chair beside the lamp.
"Well, well!" he said, exhaling heartily, the scent of violet denying
the pungency of fish and the pungency of fish denying the scent of
violet. "How's the busy bee this evening?"
For answer Mrs. Jett met him with the crescendo yell of a gale sweeping
around a chimney.
"Ya-a-ah! Keep out--you! Fish! Fish!" she cried, springing toward him;
and in the struggle that ensued the tubing wrenched off the gas lamp and
plunged them into darkness. "Fish! I'll fix you! Ya-a-ah!"
"Emmy! For God's sake, it's Henry! Em!"
"Ya-a-ah! I'll fix you! Fish! Fish!"
* * * * *
Two days later Ann Elizabeth was born, beautiful, but premature by two
weeks.
Emma Jett died holding her tight against her newly rich breasts, for a
few of the most precious and most fleeting moments of her life.
All her absurd fears washed away, her free hand could lie without spasm
in Henry's, and it was as if she found in her last words a secret
euphony that delighted her.
"Ann-Elizabeth. Sweet-beautiful. Ann-Elizabeth. Sweet-beautiful."
Later in his bewildered and almost ludicrous widowerhood tears would
sometimes galumph down on his daughter's face as Henry rocked her of
evenings and Sunday mornings.
"Sweet-beautiful," came so absurdly from under his swiftly graying
mustache, but often, when sure he was quite alone, he would say it over
and over again.
"Sweet-beautiful. Ann-Elizabeth. Sweet-beautiful. Ann-Elizabeth."
* * * * *
Of course the years puttied in and healed and softened, until for Henry
almost a Turner haze hung between him and some of the stark facts of
Emma Jett's death, turping out horror, which is always the first to fade
from memory, and leaving a dear sepia outline of the woman who had been
his.
At seventeen, Ann Elizabeth was the sun, the sky, the west wind, and the
shimmer of spring--all gone into the making of her a rosebud off the
stock of his being.
His way of putting it was, "You're my all, Annie, closer to me than I am
to myself."
She hated the voweling of her name, and because she was so nimble with
youth could dance away from these moods of his rather than plumb them.
"I won't be 'Annie.' Please, daddy, I'm your Ann Elizabeth."
"Ann Elizabeth, then. My Ann Elizabeth," an inner rhythm in him echoing:
Sweet-Beautiful. Sweet-Beautiful.
There was actually something of the lark about her. She awoke with a
song, sometimes kneeling up in bed, with her pretty brown hair tousling
down over her shoulders and chirruping softly to herself into the little
bird's-eye-maple dressing-table mirror, before she flung her feet over
the side of the bed.
And then, innate little housekeeper that she was, it was to the
preparing of breakfast with a song, her early morning full of antics.
Tiptoeing in to awaken her father to the tickle of a broom straw.
Spreading his breakfast piping hot, and then concealing herself behind a
screen, that he might marvel at the magic of it. And once she put salt
in his coffee, a fresh cup concealed behind the toast rack, and knee to
knee they rocked in merriment at his grimace.
She loved thus to tease him, probably because he was so stolid that each
new adventure came to him with something of a shock. He was forever
being taken unawares, as if he could never become entirely accustomed to
the wonder of her, and that delighted her. Even the obviousness of his
slippers stuffed out with carrots could catch him napping. To her dance
of glee behind him, he kept poking and poking to get into them, only
the peck of her kiss upon his neck finally initiating him into the
absurdity.