Donald Henderson Clarke - Lady Ann (Donald Henderson Clarke) (Literary Thoughts Edition)

“Do you ever wonder what’s going to happen in life to one of them?”

Miss Dolly said:

“No, Doctor, I don’t. I’m generally so busy looking after them that I don’t have much time for wondering about them.”

Dr. Benham crooked his right elbow, and fished with his right hand in his upper left-hand waistcoat pocket. He brought out a long, light-colored cigar, Connecticut tobacco, strong and harsh. He bit off the end and spit it out on the hall carpet. He crossed his left foot over his right knee, and moved rapidly across the sole of his left boot a sulphur match. He held it until the blue flame had changed to yellow and the suffocating odor of sulphur had dissipated. Then he touched the flame to the end of the cigar and puffed. Clear, blue, pungent smoke rose in clouds. Miss Dolly held out her hand:

“I’ll take the match,” she said.

He handed her the burnt match, took the cigar from his lips, looked at the ignited end, sighed, and said:

“You know what the poet said about the way an astronomer feels when he first sees a new planet? Well, that’s the way I feel when I first see a newborn baby. And I wonder, now, what the dickens is going to happen to this human mite?”

“Yes, Doctor,” Miss Dolly said. “And I’m to give the baby her second olive-oil bath. . . .”

“Tonight,” Dr. Benham said. “I’ll drop in again about ten.”

When Ann was eight weeks old she said:

“Ah!”

When she was eight weeks and three days old she said:

“Ah Goo!”

She tipped the scales at nine pounds that same night.

Elihu hitched his bay mare Nellie to the buggy on a warm Sunday in mid-May and he and Naomi took Ann for her first ride.

The following Wednesday, Ann rode for the first time on an electric car, making the trip to Paradise Park with Naomi.

When she was a year old Ann walked a few steps, but her favorite exercise was sitting in a rocking chair with a cane seat and back which Elihu had made for her, and swaying to and fro. Naomi tied her in so that she couldn’t fall out.

When she was a year and one-half old, Ann pressed her cheek against her mother’s cheek, and said:

“Mama.”

She pressed her cheek against her father’s cheek, and said:

“Papa.”

And she pressed her cheek against the face of a painted cow which hung over her crib, and said:

“Tow.”

She always said goodnight to her father and mother and the cow, and went to sleep with a colored rag doll, which Aunt Emma Mabie had christened Eunice, but which Ann called Oontis. Ann sat in her rocking chair holding Oontis, and rocked, while her mother sat in an adult rocking chair, and sewed. Ann liked to sit and rock and listen to the phonograph.

Ann had diphtheria, chicken-pox, measles, scarlet fever and mumps. When she was suffering of gas pains one night, she said:

“Can’t you hear the pain running around inside of me?”

Naomi said to Ann one day:

“What was that I just heard you say?”

Ann replied:

“I said, ‘My God’.”

Naomi said:

“You must never use the name of God except when you are praying, or except when you are mentioning him in a respectful and loving way.”

Ann said:

“My God! Oh, fudge!”

She said to Vina one day:

“Go way back and sit down.”

She helped her mother arrange some fruit on the dining room table and said:

“How do you like that, my dear Gaston?”

Naomi said to Elihu:

“Ann is picking up slang phrases. I think it must be from Vina and from other children. I don’t know what to do about it.”

Elihu grinned and kissed her. He said:

“I guess she’ll get over it.”

Ann called after her father:

“Papa.”

He turned and asked:

“What is it?”

She laughed, and said:

“Rubber neck.”

Elihu growled and crouched over and ran toward Ann. She screamed and ran across the lawn. He caught her and tossed her shrieking to his wide, solid shoulder, which raised her a dizzy height from the grass. She threw off his hat, and dug her hands in his hair. He pulled her down and kissed her neck, his mustache tickling her so that she was on the verge of hysterics.

Ann had a fever, and Dr. Benham was looking at her when Elihu said:

“Doc, I wish you’d look at Naomi. She’s got a bad tooth, but she won’t say anything about it. I don’t think she’s slept more than a wink these last three nights.”

Naomi opened her mouth, and the doctor peered in, his head trembling ever so slightly. He said:

“That ought to come out.”

“I don’t feel as if I could stand it much longer,” Naomi confessed. “Can’t you take it out now.”

“It’ll hurt,” Dr. Benham said.

“I don’t mind, Doctor,” Naomi replied.

Elihu held a lamp so that its light fell favorably into Naomi’s mouth, and Dr. Benham squeezed the tooth in a pair of bone forceps. He moved it back and forth, and drew it. Drops of perspiration sparkled on his forehead. He held up the tooth with its great roots, incarnadined, and said:

“That was a bad one.”

Naomi said nothing but bent over a hand basin, which Elihu held, and spat blood in it. Her cheeks were pale. Dr. Benham poured aromatic spirits of ammonia into a glass, added a little water, and put it to her lips.

“Drink this,” he directed.

She drank.

“Now sit with your head down.”

Naomi sat with her head down. Dr. Benham pressed it down further. Naomi said weakly:

“I feel like a fool to give way like this.”

“Most men wouldn’t have stood that as well as you have,” Dr. Benham said. “You’re a regular old settler—the kind Indians could burn but couldn’t make say ‘Uncle.’ ”

Ann walked up and pressed her check against her mother’s. She asked:

“Does it hurt, Mama?”

Naomi put her arm around Ann’s waist and hugged her and said:

“No, darling. It only hurt a little. I just felt funny for a second. I’m all right now.”

Ann never forgot that scene, or the lesson that her mother was the kind who could be hurt and not utter a sound and who was ashamed of even feeling faint. Naomi was wearing a puff-sleeved white waist, with a blue figure in it, and a blue skirt that day, and Ann always remembered that, as well as the red stockings.

Ann came home from school when she was in the first grade of the Eastham Grammar School, an unattractive building of yellow brick. She said she had a headache, and lay down on the couch in the sitting room. Naomi got cold water and washcloths and kept fresh, cold compresses on Ann’s forehead. Ann moaned, and Naomi said:

“If you groan, I’m going away, but if you are a brave little girl I’ll stay right here and love you and make you comfortable and your headache will go away.”

Ann stopped moaning, and her mother massaged her head with gentle fingers, and Ann forgot the headache and went to sleep.

Naomi used to lie down with Ann every night, and they hugged each other close. Naomi gave Ann butterfly kisses, which were delicate flickerings of long eyelashes against Ann’s soft cheeks.

Naomi kept a Baby’s Record for Ann. In this record she filled in details under such headings as “First Outing,” “Weight,” “First Gifts,” “The First Tooth,” “The First Laugh,” “First Creeping,” “The First Step,” “First Short Clothes,” “First Shoes,” “The First Christmas,” “The First Word,” “The First Birthday,” and so on, and also in it she wrote long letters to her daughter to be read when Ann was older. These letters were addressed, “My Dear Little Ann,” “My Dear Little Lamb,” “My Dear Little Blessing,” “My Dear Little Lambkin,” “My Dearest Little Girl.” The tenor of them was that Ann was going to grow up to be a fine, splendid Christian woman, with remarkable strength of character, and be a source of help and love in the world. Of course, she always was going to continue to be a source of comfort and delight to her father and mother.