Her name was Nellie. She came to us as cook thirty-eight years ago, the
year father and mother were married. She came out of the Canadian
backwoods, via three years in a German family, and four years in a
French one, wherein she accumulated the technique of making complicated
sauces and an impatience with alien (meaning non-Canadian-Irish)
viewpoints.
They said she was a handsome rosy-cheeked slim girl, but she had weighed
a hundred and eighty since I could remember. Four or five years after
her advent, a housemaid, also named Nellie was brought in to help her.
The two became known as Big Nellie and Little Nellie. They never got on.
Mother said that they would get used to each other, but they did
not—not in thirty-four years.
Little Nellie decided to retire (as father had written me some months
before) and go to live with a cousin in Braintree. Four days after her
retirement, she began dropping in for tea with Big Nellie, though there
had never been an hour’s civility wasted between them. She confided that
Braintree, a country town near Boston, was dull, and that the pastor of
the church was not like “our own Father at home.” After a week, Big
Nellie spoke to my father.
“Doctor,” she said, “I think you should ask the poor thing to come back.
She looks very bad, and I’m sure she’s not getting enough food.” He did
ask her back. She came forthwith; and, within six hours of her return,
was quarrelling with Big Nellie as to whether or not she wiped dishes
thoroughly.
Big Nellie’s public vocabulary, the one she used to father and guests,
was most proper. Her private speech, used occasionally with me, since I
postdated her arrival in the family by so many years, was more
picturesque.
I knocked on her door. After an instant of being touchingly pleased to
see me, she summed up the departure and return of Little Nellie.
“You know,” she said, “that devil I’m cursed with went away, but she
came back.”
She was in bed, a huge brass bed she begged from mother thirty years or
so ago, when brass beds went out of fashion. She had commanded supper,
just “something light and tasty,” brought up to her by Little Nellie. In
her large lap was a tray containing half a duckling, a pint or so of her
own applesauce (made with cinnamon and lemon peel) a generous amount of
oyster stuffing (tour de force of hers, stuffing duckling with oysters,
and making the result delectable). On the tray, besides, were a quarter
loaf of nut bread, two bottles of her home-brewed beer, and a large
slice of apple pie.
She began by saying that her rheumatism was bad, and “the doctor”
thought she should diet; but after all she had to keep her strength up
to look after him. Then she told me I was thin, and should come home and
have some proper cooking for a while. Afterwards, shyly, she asked about
Peter, and “whether he’d got over his foolishness, and showed any signs
of coming home to his own pretty wife, like a Christian.”
And I was carried back to years in my ’teens when she had probed to find
the facts behind any of my misdemeanours at school, that she might stand
staunchly between me and the anger of a maiden aunt who was determined I
should not be “spoilt.”
She thought she might have distressed me about Peter; so she changed the
subject. “You can have a cigarette in here, if you want to,” she said.
“I know smoking doesn’t mean you’re bad, it’s just foolishness you
picked up from that husband of yours.” She put her empty supper tray
aside.
I lighted a cigarette, and walked about and examined the photographs
that were the only decorations on her walls. Photographs and
daguerreotypes. One was her brother and her lover, who “took the
shilling” together some fifty years ago when times were hard in Canada.
They died in some forgotten British border war, in Her Majesty’s
colonies. The daguerreotype was a faded picture of two young men looking
solemn and uncomfortable in old-fashioned regimentals.
Nellie stayed “faithful to a memory” apparently. Father used to tell me
that, when she was young, he hoped she would marry because she was so
mad about children. But, every “First Friday,” through forty years she
had gone to communion for the repose of her brother’s and her “young
man’s” soul. She often told me when I was a child, that she was happy
looking forward to seeing them again in Heaven.
She had, besides their picture, photographs of mother, and of the babies
who died, and at least eight of me because I was the last child and was
“her” baby.
I walked about the room, regarding the photographs; and stopped,
suddenly, before one I had not seen.
It was a mother-and-child picture, of me, looking very overwhelmed, and
of that baby Patrick. I had forgotten about that.
When he was two months old, Nellie persuaded me to have his picture
taken. The proofs of those photographs came after he was dead. I had
never looked at them. I did not want to.
Her old voice was gentle. “You don’t mind my having that, do you, lamb?
I found the proofs, and had them finished up; he was such a beautiful
little boy.”
I threw my cigarette away, and hunted for my voice. “It’s all right,” I
said. “That was a pretty dress he had on.”
“He’d be two years and two months old,” she said.
He was a picture of a baby with fuzz on his head, and a smiling
toothless mouth, and unbelievably little square hands. His enormous
eyes, and the length of his lashes, showed in the photograph.
I looked at it. There had been a year when I looked at babies in
carriages in the street—most of them were fat and healthy but none of
them had eyelashes that really curled like his. I had stopped looking at
them, long ago.
“Nellie,” I said, “babies two years old can talk and walk, can’t they.
What do they talk about?”
“Indeed they can talk,” she said. “I remember I taught you a poem out of
a book, to tell your mother when she came back from a trip. You weren’t
much more than two. It was part of ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ and you
didn’t know what any of the words meant, but you said them off as
nice—”
I stared at the photograph. Young woman who had been me—need not have
been so bewildered, the baby was not a problem long. Baby in an absurd
full frock—with his toes showing under it, if one looked for them
carefully. His name had been Patrick. He used to feel warm to hold.