Mrs. Brown might know more than she says. Today she looked up from the table, peering over her glasses to size up her wretched, captive chief, who stands at the door looking out. “They won’t bite,” she said. But it isn’t the girls in saddle oxfords. It is the things that have already begun, proceeding now toward their finish, the supplicant who should have been turned away, and was not. The man at the door with hat in hand and the pickax under his raincoat.
September 2
No word from Frida, still angry. Nor from Diego, not even a curse over his stolen codex, though that’s also to be expected. He couldn’t remember to write letters even as Chairman General of Lev’s Correspondence Committee. The world is a train moving forward, with people like Diego and Frida at the fore and all the rest of us standing back, shuddering at the roar.
Of all those gone away, Frida is the most missed. Not that she ever offered real affection. Only her version of it: a game of cat-and-mouse.
September 3
Well, here is a reason for missing Frida: writing letters. Who else loved my news the way she did? A neighbor named Romulus. Now a sister named Parthenia.
“Don’t trouble yourself over it, that’s my sister Parthenia Goins,” said Mrs. Brown today, hardly even looking up from the page she was typing. “Her husband Ottie is out there too, I see. And some of the nephews.”
I’d just told her a band of gypsies had come to the end of their rope on Montford Avenue and were camped on the front yard. Very chagrined, therefore, to learn it was Mrs. Brown’s family, come down into town from “the hells.” A twice-yearly event, at “Eastertide and the Laboring Day,” for the purchase of dry goods and a checkup on the moral progress of Sister Violet. The trip takes them the better part of a day, even though they live only a few miles up toward Mount Mitchell. But the road is “fearsome hateful.”
They showed up out there at noon, in a Model T that looked older than God and more likely to drop an axle. The man in the driving seat opened the door to stretch his legs, revealing a beard that reached his belt buckle. Clumped in the back, an old-looking woman and shifting herd of oxlike boys. They sat in the car for hours, until the heat drove them out into the shade of the maple in the front yard. They showed no sign of coming to the door. Mrs. Brown said they likely meant to fetch her back to Mrs. Bittle’s, and were waiting for her day’s work to end.
“Shouldn’t we ask them in?”
“They won’t come.”
“Well then, you should go.”
“I’m not done here. It won’t vex them any to wait.”
“For hours?” I peered out through the curtain. “Couldn’t they do some errands and come back, to save their time?”
“Mr. Shepherd, if they had any money or one precious thing, they’d be sure to save it. But time they have aplenty. They like to spend it where they be.”
Realizing they might have come to investigate Sister Violet’s situation, I did insist on asking them in. Elder Sister accepted, eventually, while the males remained outdoors, all of them smoking pipes. Mrs. Brown introduced us but begged a few minutes more to finish the week’s work. The sister, Parthenia! What a strange creature, peering about this living room like Columbus among the red men of Hispaniola. She sat in a parlor chair with feet together, hands folded, a black kerchief covering her hair, a lumpish dress covering everything else down to her boots. Not even Frida could have worked this particular peasant style to much advantage. She declined my offer of tea, fiercely, as if accustomed to being poisoned by strangers. We sat facing one another across the shocking silence.
Finally: “Who mought ye all be?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Who’s yer folks?”
“My parents both passed away. I don’t have any family.”
She took this in slowly, like a snake digesting its catch. Then: “How old be ye?”
“Thirty.”
Many other questions stood in line after these, each patiently waiting its turn, each one finally spitting, rubbing its hands, and stepping up to position.
“Violet says ye be from Mexee-co?”
“I lived there. But I was born outside Washington. My mother was Mexican, her father did business with the government here, so that’s how she and my father came to meet. She was too young, the family disowned her over the marriage.” Stop. Filling up a silence with blather, like a radio man. That cannot be what a Parthenia requires.
“Well.” A pause. “What brung ye up this air way off the branch?”
A good question. Trying to steer the conversation onto her family proved difficult, but ultimately yielded Parthenia’s fascinating diagnosis of Sister Violet’s yen for self-improvement: “Our mother read the books. We believe it made her tubercular.”
A long pause.
“Violet be the same.”
Another pause.
“We was all in our family borned with sense. But Violet be the only one to vex herself on wanting to be learn-ed.” Born-ed, learned, here was the raw version of Violet’s peculiar diction, without the gloss acquired from twenty years of office work. “We was afeared she would turn out like t’other one. The lady doctor that was born-ed here in the town.”
“Elizabeth Blackwell?”
“That one. Violet readen a book on her. Mother was afeared of her going away to be learned for the doctoring.”
“That would have been an interesting career for your sister.”
“Not hardly, sir. T’would of put her in a hazard of hell’s fire.”
“Medical school?”
“To be learn-ed for the science, yessir. Them men casting aspersion on our Lord’s hand in the Creation.”
In the dining room, visible through the archway, Sister Violet’s lip remained buttoned but her eyebrows nearly reached her widow’s peak by the time she finished filing the day’s mail. Parthenia took her away then, evidently satisfied the new employer would not threaten her sister’s virtue or encourage any interest in the sciences. It explains a good deal about Mrs. Brown: her aloneness in the world, as far from home in this town as any boy from Mexico. Probably farther, given the scalding disapproval of anything “learn-ed.” And yet she does carry her origins with her, revealed in the rhythms of speech, the talent for keeping counsel. The unusual respect for silence. Parthenia’s silences outlasted her sentences every time, and carried greater weight. How will their tongue survive in a modern world, where the talkers rush to trample every pause?