Nobody quite knew just what Baltic bloods flowed in sullen and alien
rivers through Bertha's veins--or cared, might be added. Bertha,
least of all.
She was five feet, nine and a half, of flat-breasted bigness and her
cheek-bones were pitched like Norn's. Little tents. There must have
been a good smattering of Scandinavian and even a wide streak of
western Teutonic. Slav, too. Because unaccountably she found
herself knowing the Polish national anthem. Recognized it with her
heart as it rattled out of a hurdy-gurdy.
In her carpetbag, an outlandish one with a steamship stamp on it,
were a bit of Bulgarian embroidery, a runic brooch, a concertina with
a punctured bellows and an ikon in imitation mosaic. Old world.
And yet Bertha had been born in a furiously dark sailors' lodging
house in Front Street, where New York harbor smells of spices and
city garbage rides by to the dump on barges. One of those
frightening emergency births of rusty instruments, midwifery and a
sinister room made more terrible by the travail of her coming. Of no
particular father (although the China seas could probably have
yielded up the secret of his rollicking lane), and of a dead mother.
She had died two minutes before Bertha was born. Annie Wennerberg,
landlady of the sailors' lodging house, who reared Bertha those first
dozen years of her life that were sopping wet with scrub-water and
soft-soap, knew. Horrid scuttling rat-like things that Annie
Wennerberg knew.
Born of a dead mother,
Secrets of the grave you'll utter.
That couplet could run down Bertha's spinal cord like a mouse.
"I don't know any secrets of the grave, Annie."
"You do. They're written on your face. You got a look in that wide
place between your eyes like the sound of a clump of dirt falling on
a coffin. You're as full of secrets as a cow's tail is of burrs."
***
Wildly, and with a coherence she could have torn open her throat for,
Bertha wanted to tell Annie that her secrets, if any she had, were of
life, not death. The knowledges that came to her in chimes from the
dark forests within her where the trees could somehow seem to stand
with folded arms regarding her and the air to be wisps of old sound.
Snacks of melodies out of eastern Europe. Secrets that shimmered.
But it seemed to Bertha that her tongue was merely the shallow pan
for those few words at her disposal which rattled off it so hollowly.
It was so hard to talk. Words. Frail beasts of burden that crashed
down to their knees under what she wanted to say.
How to convey to Annie Wennerberg that her mother had not dragged her
down to the clayey secrets of the grave but had endowed her with
lovely, bosky, dell-like secrets of life. Those were the meanings of
the wide silence of space between her eyes.
"I don't know nothing about the grave, Annie--"
"You do. For two minutes you was in the grave with your dead
mother--yah--yah--
Born of a dead mother,
Secrets of the grave you'll utter."
Bertha wondered. But not unduly. She thought so dimly, almost as if
she had breathed on a mirror and reflection could not come through.
For that matter she even felt dimly.
"Sometimes," she once said to Annie Wennerberg, "I feel like my skin
was a thick piece of flannel, between the inside of me and the
outside."
Annie's retort was a single vile word. They jumped off her lips
constantly, like hop-toads.
But somewhere in Bertha's mists were ecstasies. She would sit on the
stairs at night, and huddle over to the banister for the passing of a
drunken sailor, scarcely conscious that his enormous clod of a
mud-caked shoe was almost in her face.
She slept on a cot that crawled with vermin, with the beauty of
repose on that face of hers which was said to look like the sound of
a clump of dirt on a coffin.
***
Once, way back before she had gone to the Farleys, she had worked out
"by the day" as the saying goes. Odd jobs. Cleaning an old
rooming-house for new occupancy on very East Seventeenth Street.
Corners to be scraped out with a knife. Scrub water that became
livid. Stench. Two men had sickened at the job and quit. Yet
Bertha, with her lips held very tightly it is true, scraped and
scraped, until actually, standing there at the sink, poking webby
stuff through the drain hole, chimes came through to her from the
dark forest. The forest that was Baltic and western Teutonic.
Yet sometimes, because of these great inner reaches of her, even the
chimes arrived to her dimly. Muted melodies. Wanting-to-be-born
thoughts. Bertha's prisoners.
She liked, after her day's work was done, to sit with them. Little
bells in lovely headache against her brow. Words.
"Lyric" was a beautiful word. Rollo Farley had used it to a young
girl at dinner, who had listened to him with the nape of her neck
stretched and her lips scarlet. It had come through to Bertha
peering from behind the pantry door. "Lyric," a golden word shaped
like a harp.
She liked to say it and feel it race delicately around her lips as if
it were a high-strung little roulette ball in its bowl.
Sometimes she spat like a peasant, of slow reflection.
There was a sliver of kitchen porch and a pad of backyard with a
magnolia tree in it, behind the Farley house in Gramercy Park. She
had seen that magnolia heavy with bud six beautiful times. She had
cooked for the Farleys six years.
In spring, after the great dish pan with the gray cloth drying over
it was turned to the wall and the linoleum smelling wetly from her
mop, Bertha would sit out there on the sliver of porch waiting the
interim between dinner and light refreshments of sandwiches and fresh
fruit to be sent into the drawing room at eleven. Would sit
barefoot. They were strong feet, still warm and damp from shoes.
Great pale spuds with muscular toes that could spread separately like
a wine presser's, and were full of a predatory power to clutch.
She could almost breathe in with her feet. She liked to feel their
bareness pat at the old cheek of earth. All the big-footed and
barefooted women out of her Baltic and Teutonic hinterlands rebelled
against Bertha's shoes. They gave her bunions. Bulbs that projected
off her foot like a nose, giving the shoe, after one day's wearing,
the profile of a mean old man. So she padded around the kitchen
barefoot, when Mrs. Farley's invasions, or Helga's the housemaid,
were unlikely. There was a wininess in their bare contacts.
Breathers. Suckers in of the little vibratory messages that run
across floors. Toes. The prehensile curving of toes around the
branches of the dark forest....
Once Mrs. Farley, sweeping through the swinging door into the
kitchen, found her on her knees before the oven basting a
Thanksgiving turkey, the soles of her bare feet upright and staring
out from under her cotton skirts like lantern-jawed faces.
"Bertha, don't ever let me find you barefoot in the kitchen again.
It's disgusting."
"Yah'm."
Submission was so easy. Shoes. They were part of the day and the
day was like a garment fashioned by the employment agency; the lady
of the house; and for the last six years by Mrs. Farley.
There is not much of Mrs. Farley in this telling. She paid Bertha
twenty dollars a month (it was the day of the cable-car and there was
some talk of a Louisiana Purchase Exposition to be held in St.
Louis), clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth when she
told about it and said, "What's the world coming to?"
She was kind enough in a fusty way, wore invariable black velvet neck
bands, saved twine, and gave every other Monday afternoon to the
Tenement Hygienic Committee of the Human Welfare League.
Helga, whose back always ached and who kept twenty rooms swept and
dusted, was expected to sit up for Mrs. Farley until after theater
for the single process of massaging the wattles underneath the band
of black velvet.
Bertha scrubbed and cooked from the servants' breakfast hour at
six-thirty to family dinner at eight P.M. and often until eleven,
when there were the sandwiches and light refreshments to be prepared.
Helga spat on the Human Welfare League pamphlets and gritted her
teeth at them.
Mrs. Farley was also on the letterhead of an organization called The
Circle for Housing Relief.
Bertha's room cowed under the roof of the finely austere house in
Gramercy Park beneath a slant ceiling that was like a threatening
slap. No heat unless she left the door open and the warm breath of
downstairs came up. A bed with a short fourth leg and a spring that
sagged like a hammock to the considerable heft of Bertha's body. A
bureau rigged up out of a discarded desk of Rollo Farley's and a
pitcher and bowl on a soap box. For six years Bertha slept up there
with that slanting ceiling on her chest. But usually she was so very
tired that her sleep was like a death and the slant a clod of earth
on the grave of another day.
Bertha was a good cook. "A good plain cook," Mrs. Farley apologized
in her invitations to the more informal of her dinner parties. But
she could do curlicues in icing. Bone squab. Work with such
esoteric ingredients as marron glace, pickled walnuts, and capers,
illuminate carrots into rosettes, and stir a fish sauce with just the
tricky rightness of the tartar touch. Rollo Farley had a frail
digestion. Bertha had learned to broil and coddle for him and knew
just the turn of his chop.
"She's a great unresponsive hunky sort of girl," Mrs. Farley would
recite of her. "Swede, I imagine, or perhaps one of those blonde
Poles. But she's a good plain cook and knows Rollo's diet. Good as
one can do nowadays. Does not run about either, as so many of them
do. Too lazy I suppose. Justs sits and daydreams. But anything is
preferable to changing and having to start on the rounds of the
employment agencies."
Bertha had an equal horror of employment agencies. Shambles of
sullen stock awaiting inspection. The lorgnette fusillade. The
bitter shameless questionings, like an apple corer plunging down into
the heart.
"What is that on your face? I hope it isn't a rash. Do you expect
every Thursday out? You bathe regularly, of course? You understand
that my cook always helps with the housework on the maid's day out.
I've a half-grown daughter and cannot permit my help to entertain men
in the kitchen. Newspapers are full of such dreadful things. Would
you mind having your things fumigated before you bring them to the
house? Can't be too careful...."
So Bertha stayed on at the Farleys, and when she had been there six
years Mrs. Farley gave her a cast-off opera cloak of sea-green
chiffon. It was rather funny in a way. Bertha of strong sweat and
hands that could entrail fowl at one tear, in sea-green chiffon. She
never tried it on, it would have embarrassed her, but the green
seemed to fill her attic room like sea. Beautiful sea, that instead
of rolling and hurting like a prisoner in her heart, was here on the
outside where she could touch it. The delicate fabric clung to the
roughness of her hands. In its way that chiffon was like the Polish
national anthem which she could hear so poignantly with her heart, or
like the word "Lyric" which she could feel with her teeth when she
repeated it softly to herself.
After that she began to watch through the swinging door of the
pantry, the fabrics on the backs of women at dinner. Satin, Velvet
that was like a silence. Once she found a bit of torn-off spangled
trimming and put it in the drawer with her ocean. Stars. She had
only to jerk open that drawer and they lay there, lit and waiting.
One night at a formal dinner to sixteen, there was an ex-ambassador,
and she had two helpers from the employment agency, and so could sit
at the crack in the swinging door between courses. Candlelight
bending and bowing into crystal and silver. Calla lilies. Mrs.
Farley's harp, a curve of gold beside the buffet. Little hissing
pools of wine. Mrs. Farley's back was half bare, and it sloped down
into a valley at the spine. An old sunken back. Not nice. Nathan
Farley's bald head and face were very red, so that his white mustache
seen from the crack in the swinging door was almost like a frothing
at the mouth. His kiss might leave suds.
Locked up gargoyles of thoughts in Bertha for which she had no words,
except those feeble ones which fell to their knees like the frail
beasts of burden.
There was a very long and slender-necked girl at the table with cool
lips and a head the lovely shape of an egg, the hair revealing the
face like reluctantly parted portières. To Bertha, who felt but
could not say it, the lovely ellipsity of that head was like putting
an egg whole into your mouth and then feeling it slowly come out.
Rollo Farley was talking to her. Bertha had prepared an aspic jelly
for him, skilfully camouflaged to resemble the fish course that was
going its rounds on an enormous silver platter flaming with carrot
rosettes. Fish disagreed. He slid his fork into the aspic,
carefully anticipating the deception, but constantly face to face
with the lovely oval creature.
Rollo was about Bertha's age. But his flesh much tenderer. The
quality of breast-of-fowl. Fuzz of down on the back of his neck.
Nervous hands as if the fingers were dripping from them like icicles.
He wrote with them, using a softly whispering pencil all through the
forenoon and sometimes long after the household slept. Once Bertha,
dusting his small, book-lined study on Helga's day out, read from one
of the sheets on his desk. Short lines leaving much of the paper
white. Lines that rocked softly like a boat with a lateen sail.
Rhythm. "Love. Rove." "Pagan. Raven." "Lyre. Desire."
Flash. Flash. Flash. A plunging opal horse and a jade terrific
lion and a lapis lazuli centaur, riding round and round again into
alternate view on the merry-go-round.
She had dusted the wide-margined paper with the click of flame color
through the words. As if you opened and closed your eyes very
rapidly. Had dusted it dispassionately enough, but her throat felt
all rigid. Tight enough for tears....
She was dispassionate now through the crack in the door. Except that
the down on the back of Rollo's neck was so--so young. Heart hurting.
***
At ten o'clock the great dish pan was turned, the helpers gone, Helga
whispering at the service entrance with the night watchman, and
Bertha who had sweated, out on the back porch, barefooted and cooling
in the spring.
A night the color of a frosted grape. The hoar of an invisible moon.
The magnolia. Big silences standing still in Bertha. Silences that
to be told at all must be told silently....
The iceman had caught her that morning unawares, slapping his hand
down on her square hips. It was the first time a man had touched her.
"Hello, Bertha, got the Yonnie Yump Ups this morning?"
"Go away, you nervy!"
"Say 'Yonnie Yump Up.'"
"Yah--you--get--out--"
Bertha could not say J. It melted in her throat. She didn't know
the reason, but she looked the reason, Swedishly. The great broad
face. Pitched-tent cheek bones. The square teeth and flaring lips.
The nose with the flanges spread like the fat haunches of a squatting
idol. Eyes like globes of clear water against blue sky, but
occasional darts through. Goldfish flanks. Braids of yellow hair
strapped around her head in bandeaux.
In her body bigness lay beauty. Godiva's gleam. Light breasts, the
way the Greeks loved them, without sag. Long white line of femur.
Hip rhythm. The touch of the iceman's hands, hours old; hunky hands
that she had rejected, still lay on those hips, as if clay had
hardened there.
It was pleasant to sit on the sliver of porch with the feel of hands
through the cotton stuff and on to her flesh.
After a while Rollo Farley came out on the porch. He was dizzy.
Wine. Heat. And his mother had warned him against the croquilles.
The air was like a lady with a slow fan. Little stirs of it. Cool.
The smell of magnolia. Almost immediately the little beads on his
forehead went out like lights and his wrists dried.
"Hello, Bertha," he said.
She sat with her knees very wide apart in an enormous cradle and her
hands hanging in it.
"Hul," she said.
He leaned against the wall with his hand back between him and the
brick. Little noises under the silence. His shirt front, champing
at a pearl stud. He slid his hand into his pocket. She could hear
his nearness.
"Good God, what starlight," he said finally, looking up through the
moon hoar and doing a sort of calisthenics with his arms until the
cuffs shot.
She sat.
He said strange, beautiful things sometimes. Words. She treasured
them as a lapidary his stones. Occasionally he addressed her as she
dusted his books on Helga's day out, much as he might have a newel
post or the terra cotta Chloe on his desk.
"Sonnet" was another dear word. He had used it to himself more than
once as she tiptoed. A word to lay away in the heart. "Good God,
what starlight." Anyone might have said that--and yet--
"Bertha," he said finally, addressing her as if she were his
cigarette smoke, "keep close to life. Don't let them find your
nerves--or your soul."
"... or her soul!" Bertha whose being was a callous spot through
which the soul could not quite hurt through.
"Your problems are husky ones, Bertha. To-morrow's menu. It will
warm the stomach, but it leaves the heart alone. Keep close to life,
Bertha. Cabbages are beautiful and only a little tougher fibred than
roses."
Vaporings. He was twenty-five and a poet.
Close to life. What was that? Close to life. Her toes dug down
against the floor as if they would translate it for her.
He looked down at their white movement.
"Why, Bertha," he said, "your feet are like two big white magnolias
off our tree."