But now for the first time in endless years, here was an upstart, a questioner, a laboratory scientist almost, speaking out where silence could have been a virtue.
“Yes, yes, but what did you put in this Thursday Special?”
“Why,” said Grandma evasively, “what does it taste like to you?”
Aunt Rose sniffed the morsel on the fork.
“Beef, or is it lamb? Ginger, or is it cinnamon? Ham sauce? Bilberries? Some biscuit thrown in? Chives? Almonds?”
“That’s it exactly,” said Grandma. “Second helpings, everyone?”
A great uproar ensued, a clashing of plates, a swarming of arms, a rush of voices which hoped to drown blasphemous inquiry forever, Douglas talking louder and making more motions than the rest. But in their faces you could see their world tottering, their happiness in danger. For they were the privileged members of a household which rushed from work or play when the first dinner bell was so much as clapped once in the hall. Their arrival in the dining room had been for countless years a sort of frantic musical chairs, as they shook out napkins in a white fluttering and seized up utensils as if recently starved in solitary confinement, waiting for the summons to fall downstairs in a mass of twitching elbows and overflow themselves at table. Now they clamored nervously, making obvious jokes, darting glances at Aunt Rose as if she concealed a bomb in that ample bosom that was ticking steadily on toward their doom.
Aunt Rose, sensing that silence was indeed a blessing devoted herself to three helpings of whatever it was on the plate and went upstairs to unlace her corset.
Grandma,” said Aunt Rose. down again. “Oh what a kitchen you keep. It’s really a mess, now, you must admit. Bottles and dishes and boxes all over, the labels off most everything, so how do you tell what you’re using? I’d feel guilty if you didn’t let me help you set things to rights while I’m visiting here. Let me roll up my sleeves.”
“No, thank you very much,” said Grandma.
Douglas heard them through the library walls and his heart thumped.
“It’s like a Turkish bath in here,” said Aunt Rose. “Let’s have some windows open, roll up those shades so we can see what we’re doing.”
“Light hurts my eyes,” said Grandma.
“I got the broom, I’ll wash the dishes and stack them away neat. I got to help, now don’t say a word.”
“Go sit down,” said Grandma.
“Why, Grandma, think how it’d help your cooking. You’re a wonderful cook, it’s true, but if you’re this good in all this chaos—pure chaos—why, think how fine you’d be, once things were put where you could lay hands on them.”
“I never thought of that . . .” said Grandma.
“Think on it, then. Say, for instance, modern kitchen methods helped you improve your cooking just ten or fifteen per cent. Your menfolk are already pure animal at the table. This time next week they’ll be dying like flies from overeating. Food so pretty and fine they won’t be able to stop the knife and fork.”
“You really think so?” said Grandma, beginning to be interested.
“Grandma, don’t give in!” whispered Douglas to the Library wall.
But to his horror he heard them sweeping and dusting, throwing out half-empty sacks, pasting new labels on cans, putting dishes and pots and pans in drawers that had stood empty for years. Even the knives, which had lain like a catch of silvery fish on the kitchen tables, were dumped into boxes.
Grandfather had been listening behind Douglas for a full five minutes. Somewhat uneasily he scratched his chin. “Now that I think of it, that kitchen’s been a mess right on down the line. Things need a little arrangement, no doubt. And if what Aunt Rose claims is true, Doug boy, it’ll be a rare experience at supper tomorrow night.”
“Yes, sir,” said Douglas. “A rare experience.”
“What’s that?” asked Grandma.
Aunt Rose took a wrapped gift from behind her back. Grandma opened it.
“A cookbook!” she cried. She let it drop on the table. “I don’t need one of those! A handful of this, a pinch of that, a thimbleful of something else is all I ever use—”
“I’ll help you market,” said Aunt Rose. “And while we’re at it, I been noticing your glasses, Grandma. You mean to say you been going around all these years peering through spectacles like those, with chipped lenses, all kind of bent? How do you see your way around without falling flat in the flour bin? We’re taking you right down for new glasses.”
And off they marched, Grandma bewildered, on Rose’s elbow, into the summer afternoon.
They returned with groceries, new glasses, and a hairdo for Grandma. Grandma looked as if she had been chased around town. She gasped as Rose helped her into the house.
“There you are, Grandma. Now you got everything where you can find it. Now you can see!”
“Come on, Doug,” said Grandfather. “Let’s take a walk around the block and work up an appetite. This is going to be a night in history. One of the best darned suppers ever served, or I’ll eat my vest.”
Suppertime.
Smiling people stopped smiling. Douglas chewed one bit of food for three minutes, and then, pretending to wipe his mouth, lumped it in his napkin. He saw Tom and Dad do the same. People swashed the food together, making roads and patterns, drawing pictures in the gravy, forming castles of the potatoes, secretly passing meat chunks to the dog.
Grandfather excused himself early. “I’m full,” he said.
All the boarders were pale and silent.
Grandma poked her own plate nervously.
“Isn’t it a fine meal?” Aunt Rose asked everyone. “Got it on the table half an hour early, too!”
But the others were thinking that Monday followed Sunday, and Tuesday followed Monday, and so on for an entire week of sad breakfasts, melancholy lunches, and funereal dinners. In a few minutes the dining room was empty. Upstairs the boarders brooded in their rooms.
Grandma moved slowly, stunned, into her kitchen.
“This,” said Grandfather, “has gone far enough!” He went to the foot of the stairs and called up into the dusty sunlight: “Come on down, everyone!”
The boarders murmured, all of them, locked in the dim, comfortable library. Grandfather quietly passed a derby hat. “For the kitty,” he said. Then he put his hand heavily on Douglas’s shoulder. “Douglas, we have a great mission for you, son. Now listen . . .” And he whispered his warm, friendly breath into the boy’s ear.
Douglas found Aunt Rose, alone, cutting flowers in the garden the next afternoon.
“Aunt Rose,” he said gravely, “why don’t we go for a walk right now? I’ll show you the butterfly ravine just down that way.”
They walked together all around town. Douglas talked swiftly, nervously, not looking at her, listening only to the courthouse clock strike the afternoon hours.
Strolling back under the warm summer elms toward the house, Aunt Rose suddenly gasped and put her hand to her throat.
There, on the bottom of the porch step, was her luggage, neatly packed. On top of one suitcase, fluttering in the summer breeze, was a pink railroad ticket.
The boarders, all ten of them, were seated on the porch stiffly. Grandfather, like a train conductor, a mayor, a good friend, came down the steps solemnly.
“Rose,” he said to her, taking her hand and shaking it up and down, “I have something to say to you”
“What is it?” said Aunt Rose.
“Aunt Rose,” he said. “Good-bye.”
They heard the train chant away into the late afternoon hours. The porch was empty, the luggage gone, Aunt Rose’s room unoccupied. Grandfather in the library, groped behind E. A. Poe for a small medicine bottle, smiling.
Grandma came home from a solitary shopping expedition to town.
“Where’s Aunt Rose?”
“We said good-bye to her at the station,” said Grandfather. “We all wept. She hated to go, but she sent her best love to you and said she would return again in twelve years.” Grandfather took out his solid gold watch. “And now I suggest we all repair to the library for a glass of sherry while waiting for Grandma to fix one of her amazing banquets.”
Grandma walked off to the back of the house.
Everyone talked and laughed and listened—the boarders, Grandfather, and Douglas, and they heard the quiet sounds in the kitchen. When Grandma rang the bell they herded to the dining room, elbowing their way.
Everyone took a huge bite.
Grandma watched the faces of her boarders. Silently they stared at their plates, their hands in their laps, the food cooling, unchewed, in their cheeks.
“I’ve lost it!” Grandma said. “I’ve lost my touch . . .”
And she began to cry.
She got up and wandered out into her neatly ordered, labeled kitchen, her hands moving futilely before her.
The boarders went to bed hungry.
Douglas heard the courthouse clock chime ten-thirty, eleven, then midnight, heard the boarders stirring in their beds, like a tide moving under the moonlit roof of the
