Ceremony of the Innocent Read online

  “Yes,” said the older man with admiration. “I wonder who she is. Never saw her before in this misbegotten town. Perhaps a newcomer. But a little too gaudy, isn’t she? Like a young actress.”

  The young man laughed. “Look at her clothes. Hardly an actress. I wonder how old she is.”

  The older man said with indulgence, “Now, now, Francis. Every pretty girl takes your eye; it’s your age. She’s probably a servant; maybe sixteen or fifteen years old. We can ask my dear brother, the Mayor, today. Look at her, indeed. What an elegant face; I wonder if that color on her mouth and cheeks is real. You can’t tell with servant girls these days. Their mistresses are too lenient with them. There was a time when servants had a half day off a month; now they have two whole days, and that can lead to—paint.”

  “That face is of neither a servant nor a girl of a brothel—if there is any brothel in this town.” The young man was inexplicably annoyed. The carriage rolled away. Ellen got to her feet, not knowing she had been thoroughly inspected and commented upon. Her face was alight; she felt that she had received a revelation from eternity and she no longer heard the hymns whining from the houses. She began to run again; the street was pervaded with the robust smells of roasting beef and pork, and the delicious effluvia of frying chicken. She experienced a pang of hunger, and only smiled. She had a secret: The world was infinitely beautiful, infinitely alive, infinitely moving. Winged with this knowledge, her running feet seemed to fly over the pavement, to dance on the cobbles of the road. She wanted to impart what she knew to someone, but there was no someone and she had no words. She had no real destination.

  She came to the end of the long street and there was an open place before her, unmarred by houses or people. Now she could see the distant Pocono Mountains, all mauve and gold with an opalescent mist floating over them against a sky the color of delphiniums. This was her favorite spot, wide, uncluttered, uninhabited except for high wild grass and trees, butterflies and birds and rabbits. She gazed at the far mountains and again that sensation of exalted joy came to her, the hidden joy with a hidden promise. Here she could pretend that there were no human beings about her but only peace and intimations of rapture, of poetry and music. When, as she sighed with bliss and her eyes fell on a sign which read, “Lots for Sale,” she felt a deep and nameless distress. Soon there would be imprisoning houses here, shutting off the mountains, walls and roofs and chimneys desecrating her little world.

  As she stood at the edge of the street gutter, her newly restless foot scraped against a page or two of a book. She looked down at the pages and eagerly bent to seize them. But they were stained brown by some disgusting liquid, and only a line here and there was visible. She read: ‘Tope.” There was but a fragment of a poem and she read it:

  “Where every prospect pleases

  And only man is vile.”

  A profound melancholy came to her, as usual wordless and charged only with emotion. “But, it is true,” she whispered to herself, and was startled at the new and disquieting thought. Again, she felt guilt, and shame, but why she did not know. She tucked the stained page down her neck, then ran on, though less exuberantly than before. She only vaguely understood that each day brought a new knowledge that made her briefly miserable. However, she was very young and soon she was skipping again. She remembered the daisies and their mysterious dream of hope, for herself alone.

  She entered a street of little crowded houses, all bleakly illuminated by the sun and showing unkempt lawns and broken picket fences and falling porches. Here there were more people than on the long street, howling and jumping children, screaming and frowzy adults, cracked pavements, decaying paint, and scruffy steps. Above all, here, the phonographs ground away with the latest obnoxious songs. Men in dirty overalls sat on wooden stairs and drank beer. Ellen ran swiftly, and was followed, as customarily, by hoots and whistles. A sense of shyness and degradation almost overwhelmed her and she felt dirty and exposed. A dusty tree, dying for lack of water, spiraled down a dry yellow leaf on her head and she brushed it away. She had begun to sweat; her face was reddened both by mortification and by heat. Then she thought, as always: It is because I am so ugly and so big and don’t look like other people, so I must forgive these men and children and women.

  She ran on more quickly, anxious to outrun the derision and hostility. Love and trust, the Reverend Beale had admonished. I am very wicked, she thought. It is all my fault—someway. I should love and trust; that is all there is.

  She came to the very smallest house on the street, which contained only four diminished rooms, with an outhouse in the rear. However, Aunt May kept it clean and neat, an anachronism among its neighbors. The windows were polished, though most of them had no curtains. The grass was scythed, the little yard bare of everything but yellowing turf. A careful sign hung in the one front window: “Dressmaking and Alterations. Household Help.” Ellen ran to the one door, on the side. Aunt May had painted it pink against the gray clapboard wall. Ellen opened the door and went into the dark little kitchen, which smelled of cabbage, boiling potatoes, and spareribs. Ellen was delighted again. Spareribs was her favorite dish, and one cooked only on Sundays or other holidays. Her foot caught on the seam of the torn linoleum, and an exasperated thin voice said, “Why don’t you pick up your feet, Ellen? You are so clumsy. And you’re late. You know I have to go to the Mayor’s house at two o’clock because he has company, his brother and nephew from Scranton. Go wash. Your face is all red and wet. Dear me, what a provoking girl you are. Your hair is all messed up, too.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Ellen in her resonant voice. She was always “so sorry,” so always, recently, overcome with guilt. She went to the pump and threw cold water over her face and tried to smooth down her rioting hair. She looked into the crackled mirror over the tin sink and her face and hair filled it with color and vitality, and she sighed. Why could she not look like Amelia Beale, the prettiest girl in town?

  “What did that fool of a Reverend talk about today?” asked the exasperated voice near the rusting wood stove.

  “He isn’t a fool, Aunt May,” said Ellen. She hesitated. “He talked about loving and trusting.”

  “Loving and trusting who?” asked May Watson, rattling a plate against the pump.

  “Why—everybody, I suppose, Auntie.”

  “More fool he. Never love or trust anybody, Ellen. I ought to know!” She fell into a short brooding. “Set out the plates, if it isn’t too much trouble.”

  Ellen set out two crocked ironware white plates on the table, and sniffed the boiling meal with anticipation. Again her exaltation came to her. “I guess there’s lot to love and trust in the world,” she said.

  “What?” Her aunt’s voice was now sullen and bitter. “Ellen, you are really not very bright, as I keep telling you.”

  The voice belonged to a little spare woman, flat as a shingle, with a tight thin face and hair the color of a gray squirrel. Her eyes were also that color, and disillusioned, her mouth a line in her colorless face, her nose beaked, and constantly wrinkling and twitching. Her calico dress, of gray and white, was fresh and ironed and she wore a white apron. She moved briskly; she was just forty and she was withered and wrinkled and dry as a dead weed. Her eyes sparkled only with anger and vexation, and they were sparkling now as she looked at her tall niece. Ellen could already sew carefully, and could keep house. Next year she would be put out to service, when she was fourteen, and no more nonsense about school. It was outrageous that “they” now kept young women in school until they were fourteen and would not permit them to work until they reached that age. Two or three dollars a month would come in very handy in that struggling household.

  “You’ll have to clean up the kitchen and wash the sheets and pillowcases, and sweep out the outhouse and scrub the floor in your bedroom, after I go,” said May Watson. “Mind you do it well. You are so careless.”

  “Yes, Auntie,” said Ellen. She looked through the minute window of the kitchen, and again the
melancholy came to her.

  “I am going to ask Mrs. Porter, the Mayor’s wife, if she can hire you next spring,” said May Watson. “She pays her cook eight dollars a month! A fortune. I heard she needs someone extra to wash. I hope to get the work, then you’ll have to take care of this house—after school,” she added with angry contempt.

  Muttering, she put a steaming yellow bowl on the table. “Spareribs. Eights cents a pound. Outrageous. I got two pounds. Don’t eat it all. We will have the rest for dinner tomorrow night. Ellen, why are you standing there like a gawk? You fill up the whole kitchen. You are too big—like your father.” Then she caught her breath, for this was the first time she had spoken to Ellen of her paternal parent.

  Ellen became alert. “My papa? What was he like, Auntie?”

  “Brown-faced and black-eyed, and big as a house, and with a loud voice like yours,” said May Watson, sitting down on one of the creaking kitchen chairs. “Never mind. He was no good. Never could see what your mother saw in him. Don’t take too much of the spareribs. You’re always so hungry, and that’s funny. You don’t work.” Then she was saddened, for she loved her niece. Maybe, she thought, I can bring some scraps home for the girl; they eat well at the Mayor’s, he with that rich farm and all. Perhaps a piece of meat or the heels of fresh bread, or a slice of cake or pie. Or a handful of strawberries. Mrs. Porter is very mean, though; watched every crumb of food, and her cook’s worse. May Watson touched her wide pocket. She could slip something in there, when no one was looking. So, it was stealing and maybe it was sinful, but Ellen was still growing and was always hungry. The bitterness in May Watson’s heart increased. She was to receive one dollar for an afternoon and evening’s work; the housemaid was ill. It was said the Mayor’s son had got her “into trouble.” At any rate, she had been sent off. Lucky for me, thought May Watson. She thought of little Alice, fifteen years old, an orphan. She had worked two years for Mrs. Porter, and had never had an afternoon off in all that time. She had labored from sunrise to midnight, every day. Don’t seem right to me, thought Mrs. Watson. But then, the girl had been brought up “wrong.” No decency. May looked at Ellen with sharp intensity. No need to worry there; the girl was too ugly to attract any man. But maybe some elderly farmer might want to marry her; she was big and strong and healthy and could work well, when prodded. It was the only hope May Watson had, for herself and her niece. Before she herself died she wanted to see Ellen “settled,” with enough to eat, a Sunday dress, and a sound roof over her head.

  “Loving and trusting,” said May Watson. “That’s the story of your mother’s life, Ellen. But she was always a fool. Nobody could tell her anything different. Dreaming. Everything wonderful for the future. She never learned that wasn’t no future for people like us. Only work.”

  “I don’t mind work,” said Ellen. The meat was a luxury, a joy, in her mouth, and the cabbage and potatoes were delicious. She looked longingly at another of the spareribs, but refrained. They were for supper tomorrow.

  “Well, that’s an improvement—over your mother,” said May Watson. She hesitated. “You can have another potato, if you want it.”

  “I’m filled up,” said Ellen, and turned her eyes away from the enticing bowl. “It was so good, Auntie May.”

  A pang in the chest struck May Watson. She spooned the potato onto Ellen’s plate. “I got two more I can boil up,” she said. Somewhere in her arid and horizonless mind there was the somber conviction that somehow, someway, “things were not right” for her kind. Something was awry in the world she knew. She would swallow down this rebellion with warnings that she was not thinking sensibly, that things were the way they were and there was no sense in questioning. Questioning and arguing only brought about the sort of punishment that had overtaken Mary, her sister. When May Watson prayed, which was rarely, she prayed that Ellen would understand that in this life the poor kept their heads down, their voices meek, and worked diligently and asked for nothing but the right to live—which was not often granted them. Mary had died of the “consumption.” She had reached beyond herself, and so probably her fate was “just.”

  “You can have another piece of cabbage, too,” said May Watson, but Ellen, smiling, her blue eyes shining with what could only be tears, shook her head. “I’m filled up,” she repeated. Her mouth was still watering. “Auntie, the clock says half past one. It’s a long walk. You’d better go, and I’ll clean up.”

  Were those really tears in Ellen’s eyes? thought May Watson. Why should she cry? She had just eaten a good meal, first meat in three weeks, and the bread had been only three days old. Ellen was a fanciful girl, though, like her mother. She, May Watson, had never known why Mary had wept or laughed or had sung. “I’m going,” said May Watson with abruptness. “While you are at it, Ellen, you can wash out the kitchen safe, too.”

  She stood up and folded her apron carefully, for she would wear it in the Mayor’s house. She suddenly paused and looked at her niece with mingled pity and warning. “This here is a wicked world, Ellen,” she said, and did not know why she said it. “You got to make your peace with it, and expect nothing.”

  “Yes, Auntie.”

  May Watson sighed. “You don’t understand a thing I say,” she said.

  Perhaps it is because I don’t believe it, thought Ellen, and once more the darkness of nameless guilt overflowed her. Her schoolteacher always told her class that one should be respectful of “superiors” and adults and those in authority, and she, Ellen, was always inwardly protesting. Hence her guilt. She stood up and kissed her aunt’s cheek. “Don’t work too hard,” she said, with shyness, for affection between them was almost never expressed.

  “What else is there?” May Watson said, and went to the bedroom for her battered hat and the gloves she kept for “respectability.” It wasn’t very clever to go to work looking like a drab with no self-respect. People paid you less then. The hat, black and bent and ten years old, was pinned to her thin hair. But the gloves were white and clean and she carried her purse haughtily. She would ask for an extra fifty cents today. The Mayor’s wife was notoriously “stingy.” Suddenly May Watson was uplifted and defiant. An extra fifty cents would buy almost a week’s supply of turnips and potatoes and perhaps a little meat for next Sunday, not to mention a pint of milk and a loaf of bread, and a bar of Ivory soap and maybe a towel. The three towels in the house were falling apart, frayed and tattered. It ain’t right, thought May Watson, but she did not know why she had come to this conclusion. It wasn’t “respectable.” She marched out of the little house, however, as at the call of a trumpet, her head high, her thin bleached face defiant. Fifty cents. She deserved it, for hours of work, besides the dollar she would be paid. She would also manage to conceal a tidbit for Ellen, too. The poor had to do something if they were not to starve, sin or no sin. God was awful hard on the poor. It looked like He hated them. I guess I’m no Christian, thought May Watson, moving rapidly along the street. Well, then, maybe that’s good, too. We got to look out for ourselves; no one else would. “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,” said the parsons. They forgot His anger. Maybe they was scared of His anger. Nothing’s right in this world, thought May Watson, and she was dismayed and confused. She thought of her sister, Mary, who had laughingly defied the world and had gone her way, to her death. My thinking’s not right today, she thought. She remembered the tears in Ellen’s eyes, those huge blue eyes so like—She sighed again. Better just to work, and accept. No use asking for things that weren’t “proper” and deserved. The Lord had it all worked out—the rich were rich and the poor were poor, and it was ordained. “Where’s your red-haired hussy?” a man shouted to her from the broken steps where he sprawled, and May Watson shuddered. Maybe God was right, hating the poor. Sometimes they deserved it. Guess most people get what they deserved, anyway, and she smiled wryly. I was born without much brains, she thought, and so’s my life what it is, and Ellen was born homely and that’s why she’ll have to work hard all the life that’s coming to he
r.

  May Watson reached the Porter house, the handsomest one on the long street, and walked down a path of flagstones bordered by shining laurel leaves. Shadows danced on the hot stones but it was cooler here and beyond the house she could see the many-colored gardens sloping down to a gazebo and green spruces. She passed windows heavy with intricate lace, the glass reflecting her weary features. She heard laughter on the veranda at the rear and the tinkle of lemonade and ice in crystal pitchers and she sighed. Maybe Mrs. Jardin, the cook, was in a good humor today and would save her, May, a glass to refresh herself. Not likely, though. Mrs. Jardin was very like her mistress and even surpassed her at times. May knocked on the kitchen door and then entered. The kitchen walls and floor were made of red brick, polished with wax so that they glimmered in the sunlight pouring through opened windows, and the sink was of “china” and had running water in it, both hot and cold, fit for a king’s kitchen. The wood stove exuded odors of burning fruitwood, and the fragrance from large iron pots was more than inciting. But the room sweltered with heat and for a moment May could not get her breath.

  Mrs. Jardin was a plump short woman with a jovial face and small black eyes like bits of coal, and her black hair was wound tightly in a knot on the top of her head. Her cheeks were crimson and wet; she wore a flowered dress which May had made for her, and a starched white apron which came down to her arches. She was always smiling, usually gay, and so she had the reputation of being a jolly woman. But behind the comfortable facade, as May knew, lived a soul of ice and granite, obsequious to “betters” and malicious and cruel to inferiors, and totally without mercy. She was also a gossip and invariably believed the worst of everybody and she was always dissatisfied with May Watson, who never had any luscious morsels to impart to her concerning the village. She looked at May now with her lively eyes. “Suppose you couldn’t have come before this,” she said. She had a voice like a very young girl, piping and immature, which she considered beguiling, especially to the male sex. She had had two husbands, who had thankfully died not long after they had married Florrie Jardin, and whom she called “them no-goods.” A widow and childless, she was not without prosperity. There were gold earrings in her thick pink ears.