I
Millersville, Missouri, was the usual small town. It boasted, according
to the Millersville _Eagle_ and the annual leaflet of the Chamber of
Commerce, a population of twenty thousand souls. There were, perhaps,
ten thousand actual human beings in Millersville, including the farmers
within a radius of five miles, the few Italians and Slavs down near the
railroad tracks, and the negroes.
Millersville’s main street extended nearly the full length of the
town, footed by the Sulpulpa River and the Union Depot, and headed by
the Brick Church. On Hill Street were the Grand Hotel—five stories
high; the Bon Marché and the New York Store, whose buyers went to New
York—or anyhow Chicago—twice each year; the Busy Bee, candy fresh
every day, always two kinds of ice cream, with marble topped tables in
the back half of it for sodas and ice creams; an assortment of drug
stores and cigar stores; garages, still carrying the outward semblance
of the stables from which they had sprung; “gents’ furnishings,” with
clerks who copied, in their fashion, the styles in the men’s clothing
advertisements, always standing near the doors where they could most
easily ogle the feminine passerby; groceries displaying the season’s
best potatoes and onions, with sawdust floors and clerks in white
aprons and pencils behind their ears; and two furniture stores with
windows brimming with golden oak rockers.
On either side of Hill Street, the streets stretched out in a regular
checkerboard, the first blocks of them devoted to the lesser business
establishments that had overflowed Hill Street, and the remaining
blocks given over to residences. The majority of these streets, a few
blocks out, were full of neat houses—old houses with mansard roofs and
cupolas; new houses in atrocious, too-low bungalow effects, with awful,
protruding roofs; simple white cottages, each with its green lawn and
over half with a red swing in front and a small, one-car garage in
back. Then came a turning into tumbledown negro quarters or the homes
of the neighbourhood “white trash.”
There was a difference in streets, too. Up near the Brick Church the
streets were respectable for all their length, the houses were bigger,
and the lawns were better cared for. Maple Street, the last to enter
Hill, was the best of all, turning into Maple Road, later on, when it
became even more select until, when it reached Burton Addition—the old
Burton farm—it burst forth into a spasm of country homes, a dozen of
them, with pretentiously landscaped “grounds.”
Each house showed an attempt at grandeur in architecture. Some aped
Southern Colonial, with white clapboards or brick; others aimed at
English styles, with stucco or half-timber. Each house, too, had
a peculiar, inappropriate and ineffectual name: “The Elms,” “The
Lonesome Pine,” “Pleasure,” “Crestwood,” “Hilltop.” Miss Drewsy, of the
Millersville _Eagle_, whose rich cousins, the Horns, lived in Maple
Street, which gave her social standing, mentioned the names of these
houses in her society column, whenever possible.
On the other side of town, toward Union Station and the river, the
streets became gradually less pleasing and less important, until,
when one reached Gillen Row, the neat houses had given way to grey
ramshackle affairs, a bit tipsy as to roof or wall or chimney, with a
porch awry, a baluster missing and an occasional broken window patched
with papers or rags. These houses were surrounded by grey lawns tufted
with weeds, and around them were unpainted picket fences with half the
pickets missing.
Mamie Carpenter lived in Gillen Row, in the least pleasing block of it.
Her home was a one-story cottage which had, in its adolescence, showed
the spruce yellow and white of a poached egg, but in its senility one
could barely see the remains of this glory. The porch which ran across
the front sagged. One of the posts was missing. The bottom of the three
steps leading up to the porch was loose, the wood breaking into long
brown slivers under one’s foot. One went directly from the unevenly
floored porch, which held two once-green rockers and a bench of slatted
wood, into the living room, papered in what had formerly been gold and
green but was now a more fortunate, though dirty, tan.
The living room held a figured red rug, a table and half a dozen
unmatched chairs, mostly rockers, of uncertain wood and construction.
Back of this was the dining-room, with a table and four chairs and a
huge, golden oak, mirrored sideboard. Next came a narrow hallway,
leading on one side to a dark green kitchen, and on the other to the
small and incomplete bath. Beyond were the two bedrooms, one occupied
by Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter, who slept in a large bed of yellow wood,
with high head and foot board, new when they were married, twenty-two
years before, and the other, with its iron and brass bed and rickety
dresser of imitation mahogany, occupied by their daughter Mamie.