Dolly was scared to death: she hid in her room, and long after our guest had arrived I had to be sent to fetch her. She was lying in the pink bed with a wet washrag on her forehead, and Catherine was sitting beside her. Catherine was all sleeked up, rouge on her cheeks like lollipops and her jaws jammed with more cotton than ever; she said, “Honey, you ought to get up from there—you’re going to ruin that pretty dress.”
It was a calico dress Verena had brought from Chicago; Dolly sat up and smoothed it, then immediately lay down again: “If Verena knew how sorry I am,” she said helplessly, and so I went and told Verena that Dolly was sick. Verena said she’d see about that, and marched off leaving me alone in the hall with Dr. Morris Ritz.
Oh he was a hateful thing. “So you’re sixteen,” he said, winking first one, then the other of his sassy eyes. “And throwing it around, huh? Make the old lady take you next time she goes to Chicago.
Plenty of good stuff there to throw it at.” He snapped his fingers and jiggled his razzle-dazzle, dagger-sharp shoes as though keeping time to some vaudeville tune: he might have been a tapdancer or a soda-jerk, except that he was carrying a brief case, which suggested a more serious occupation. I wondered what kind of doctor he was supposed to be; indeed, was on the point of asking when Verena returned steering Dolly by the elbow.
The shadows of the hall, the tapestried furniture failed to absorb her; without raising her eyes she lifted her hand, and Dr. Ritz gripped it so ruggedly, pumped it so hard she went nearly off balance. “Gee, Miss Talbo; am I honored to meet you!” he said, and cranked his bow tie.
We sat down to dinner, and Catherine came around with the chicken. She served Verena, then Dolly, and when the doctor’s turn came he said, “Tell you the truth, the only piece of chicken I care about is the brain: don’t suppose you’d have that back in the kitchen, mammy?”
Catherine looked so far down her nose she got almost cross-eyed; and with her tongue all mixed up in the cotton wadding she told him that, “Dolly’s took those brains on her plate.”
“These southern accents, Jesus,” he said, genuinely dismayed.
“She says I have the brains on my plate,” said Dolly, her cheeks red as Catherine’s rouge. “But please let me pass them to you.”
“If you’re sure you don’t mind …”
“She doesn’t mind a bit,” said Verena. “She only eats sweet things anyway. Here, Dolly: have some banana pudding.”
Presently Dr. Ritz commenced a fit of sneezing. “The flowers, those roses, old allergy …”
“Oh dear,” said Dolly who, seeing an opportunity to escape into the kitchen, seized the bowl of roses: it slipped, crystal crashed, roses landed in gravy and gravy landed on us all. “You see,” she said, speaking to herself and with tears teetering in her eyes, “you see, it’s hopeless.”
“Nothing is hopeless, Dolly; sit down and finish your pudding,” Verena advised in a substantial, chin-up voice. “Besides, we have a nice little surprise for you. Morris, show Dolly those lovely labels.”
Murmuring “No harm done,” Dr. Ritz stopped rubbing gravy splotches off his sleeve, and went into the hall, returning with his brief case. His fingers buzzed through a sheaf of papers, then lighted on a large envelope which he passed down to Dolly.
There were gum-stickers in the envelope, triangular labels with orange lettering: Gipsy Queen Dropsy Cure: and a fuzzy picture of a woman wearing a bandana and gold earloops. “First class, huh?” said Dr. Ritz. “Made in Chicago. A friend of mine drew the picture: real artist, that guy,” Dolly shuffled the labels with a puzzled, apprehensive expression until Verena asked: “Aren’t you pleased?”
The labels twitched in Dolly’s hands. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“Of course you do,” said Verena, smiling thinly. “It’s obvious enough. I told Morris that old story of yours and he thought of this wonderful name.”
“Gipsy Queen Dropsy Cure: very catchy, that,” said the doctor. “Look great in ads.”
“My medicine?” said Dolly, her eyes still lowered. “But I don’t need any labels, Verena. I write my own.”
Dr. Ritz snapped his fingers. “Say, that’s good! We can have labels printed like her own handwriting: personal, see?”
“We’ve spent enough money already,” Verena told him briskly; and, turning to Dolly, said: “Morris and I are going up to Washington this week to get a copyright on these labels and register a patent for the medicine—naming you as the inventor, naturally. Now the point is, Dolly, you must sit down and write out a complete formula for us.”
Dolly’s face loosened; and the labels scattered on the floor, skimmed. Leaning her hands on the table she pushed herself upward; slowly her features came together again, she lifted her head and looked blinkingly at Dr. Ritz, at Verena. “It won’t do,” she said quietly. She moved to the door, put a hand on its handle. “It won’t do: because you haven’t any right, Verena. Nor you, sir.”
I HELPED CATHERINE CLEAR THE table: the ruined roses, the uncut cakes, the vegetables no one had touched. Verena and her guest had left the house together; from the kitchen window we watched them as they went toward town nodding and shaking their heads. Then we sliced the devil’s-food cake and took it into Dolly’s room.
Hush now! hush now! she said when Catherine began lighting into That One. But it was as though the rebellious inner whispering had become a raucous voice, an opponent she must outshout: Hush now! hush now! until Catherine had to put her arms around Dolly and say hush, too.
We got out a deck of Rook cards and spread them on the bed. Naturally Catherine had to go and remember it was Sunday; she said maybe we could risk another black mark in the Judgment Book, but there were too many beside her name already. After thinking it over, we told fortunes instead. Sometime around dusk Verena came home. We heard her footsteps in the hall; she opened the door without knocking, and Dolly, who was in the middle of my fortune, tightened her hold on my hand. Verena said: “Collin, Catherine, we will excuse you.”
Catherine wanted to follow me up the ladder into the attic, except she had on her fine clothes. So I went alone. There was a good knothole that looked straight down into the pink room; but Verena was standing directly under it, and all I could see was her hat, for she was still wearing the hat she’d put on when she left the house.
It was a straw skimmer decorated with a cluster of celluloid fruit. “Those are facts,” she was saying, and the fruit shivered, shimmered in the blue dimness. “Two thousand for the old factory, Bill Tatum and four carpenters working out there at eighty cents an hour, seven thousand dollars worth of machinery already ordered, not to mention what a specialist like Morris Ritz is costing.
And why? All for you!”
“All for me?” and Dolly sounded sad and failing as the dusk. I saw her shadow as she moved from one part of the room to another. “You are my own flesh, and I love you tenderly; in my heart I love you. I could prove it now by giving you the only thing that has ever been mine: then you would have it all. Please, Verena,” she said, faltering, “let this one thing belong to me.”
Verena switched on a light. “You speak of giving,” and her voice was hard as the sudden bitter glare. “All these years that I’ve worked like a fieldhand: what haven’t I given you? This house, that …”
“You’ve given everything to me,” Dolly interrupted softly. “And to Catherine and to Collin. Except, we’ve earned our way a bit: we’ve kept a nice home for you, haven’t we?”
“Oh a fine home,” said Verena, whipping off her hat. Her face was full of blood. “You and that gurgling fool. Has it not struck you that I never ask anyone into this house? And for a very simple reason: I’m ashamed to. Look what happened today.”
I could hear the breath go out of Dolly. “I’m sorry,” she said faintly. “I am truly. I’d always thought there was a place for us here, that you needed us somehow. But it’s going to be all right now, Verena. We’ll go away.”
Verena sighed. “Poor Dolly. Poor poor thing. Wherever would you go?”
The answer, a little while in coming, was fragile as the flight of a moth: “I know a place.”
LATER, I WAITED IN BED for Dolly to come and kiss me goodnight. My room, beyond the parlor in a faraway corner of the house, was the room where their father, Mr. Uriah Talbo, had lived.
In his mad old age, Verena had brought him here from the farm, and here he’d died, not knowing where he was. Though dead ten, fifteen years, the pee and tobacco old-man smell of him still saturated the mattress, the closet, and on a shelf in the closet was the one possession he’d carried away with him from the farm, a small yellow drum: as a lad my own age he’d marched in a Dixie regiment rattling this little yellow drum, and singing.
Dolly said that when she was a girl she’d liked to wake up winter mornings and hear her father singing as he went about the house building fires; after he was
