Gaslight Sonatas Part 41

"It took Martha and Eda and Gessler's hired girl to hold her in bed with the pain."

"Yes, yes," said Mrs. Scogin, sucking in her words and her eyes seeming to strain through the present; "once label a man with drinkin'."

Kittie Scogin Bevins entered then through a rain of bead portieres.

Insistently blond, her loosed-out hair newly dry and flowing down over a very spotted and very baby-blue kimono, there was something soft-fleshed about her, a not unappealing saddle of freckles across her nose, the eyes too light but set in with a certain feline arch to them.

"h.e.l.lo, Han!"

"h.e.l.lo, Kittie!"

"Snowing?"

"No."

"Been washing my hair to show it a good time. One month in this dump and they'd have to hire a hea.r.s.e to roll me back to Forty-second Street in."

"This ain't nothing. Wait till we begin to get snowed in!"

"I know. Say, you c'n tell me nothing about this tank I dunno already. I was buried twenty-two years in it. Move over, ma."

She fitted herself into the lower curl of the couch, crossing her hands at the back of her head, drawing up her feet so that, for lack of s.p.a.ce, her knees rose to a hump.

"What's new in Deadtown, Han?"

"'New'! This dump don't know we got a new war. They think it's the old Civil one left over."

"Burkhardt's been made a deacon, Kittie."

"O Lord! ma, forget it!" Mrs. Scogin Bevins threw out her hands to Mrs.

Burkhardt in a wide gesture, indicating her mother with a forefinger, then with it tapping her own brow. "Crazy as a loon! Bats!"

"If your father had--"

"Ma, for Gossakes--"

"You talk to Kittie, Hanna. My girls won't none of 'em listen to me no more. I tell 'em they're fightin' over my body before it's dead for this house and the one on Ludlow Street. It's precious little for 'em to be fightin' for before I'm dead, but if not for it, I'd never be gettin' these visits from a one of 'em."

"Ma!"

"I keep tellin' her, Kittie, to stay home. New York ain't no place for a divorced woman to set herself right with the Lord."

"Ma, if you don't quit raving and clear on up to bed, I'll pack myself out to-night yet, and then you'll have a few things to set right with the Lord.

Go on up, now."

"I--"

"Go on--you hear?"

Mrs. Scogin went then, tiredly and quite bent forward, toward a flight of stairs that rose directly from the parlor, opened a door leading up into them, the frozen breath of unheated regions coming down.

"Quick--close that door, ma!"

"Come to see a body, Hanna, when she ain't here. She won't stay at home, like a G.o.d-fearin' woman ought to."

"Light the gas-heater up there, if you expect me to come to bed. I'm used to steam-heated flats, not barns."

"She's a sa.s.sy girl, Hanna. Your John a deacon and hers lies molderin' in his grave, a sui--"

Mrs. Scogin Bevins flung herself up, then, a wave of red riding up her face.

"If you don't go up--if you--don't! Go--now! Honest, you're gettin' so luny you need a keeper. Go--you hear?"

The door shut slowly, inclosing the old figure. She relaxed to the couch, trying to laugh.

"Luny!" she said. "Bats! n.o.body home!"

"I like your hair like that, Kittie. It looks swell."

"It's easy. I'll fix it for you some time. It's the vampire swirl. All the girls are wearing it."

"Remember the night, Kit, we was singin' duets for the Second Street Presbyterian out at Grody's Grove and we got to hair-pullin' over whose curls was the longest?"

"Yeh. I had on a blue dress with white polka-dots."

"That was fifteen years ago. Remember Joe Claiborne promised us a real stage-job, and we opened a lemonade-stand on our front gate to pay his commission in advance?"

They laughed back into the years.

"O Lord! them was days! Seems to me like fifty years ago."

"Not to me, Kittie. You've done things with your life since then. I 'ain't."

"You know what I've always told you about yourself, Hanna. If ever there was a fool girl, that was Hanna Long. Lord! if I'm where I am on my voice, where would you be?"

"I was a fool."

"I could have told you that the night you came running over to tell me."

"There was no future in this town for me, Kit. Stenoggin' around from one office to another. He was the only real provider ever came my way."

"I always say if John Burkhardt had shown you the color of real money! But what's a man to-day on just a fair living? Not worth burying yourself in a dump like this for. No, sirree. When I married Ed, anyways I thought I smelled big money. I couldn't see ahead that his father'd carry out his bluff and cut him off. But what did you have to smell--a feed-yard in a hole of a town! What's the difference whether you live in ten rooms like yours or in four like this as long as you're buried alive? A girl can always do that well for herself after she's took big chances. You could be Lord knows where now if you'd 'a' took my advice four years ago and lit out when I did."

"I know it, Kit. G.o.d knows I've eat out my heart with knowin' it!

Only--only it was so hard--a man givin' me no more grounds than he does.

What court would listen to his stillness for grounds? I 'ain't got grounds."

"Say, you could 'a' left that to me. My little lawyer's got a factory where he manufactures them. He could 'a' found a case of incompatibility between the original turtle-doves."