Бетти Смит - Maggie-Now

"It was just that she had hard luck," said Robbie.

"No good from the beginning, even if she was my granddaughter," swatted Aunt Henrietta. "Took after her mother." (Swat!) "Aggie was no good."

"Let the dead rest in peace," said Mary.

"She was pretty, so pretty," said Robbie. "The youngest, the prettiest of all my daughters."

1~ sac] Maggie-Now was awake but she feigned sleep, knowing that the growm~ps would talk in a way she couldn't understand if they knew she was listening.

"The way she was pretty was the ruin of her," said Robbie. "The boys were after her like bees after a honey flower by the time she was twelve." lie sounded the way people sounded at funerals.

"She had a baby when she was fifteen," swatted Aunt Henrietta.

"She was married at the time," said Robbie with dignity.

"Seven months married," swatted back Aunt Henrietta.

"It was a premature baby."

"Like fun! Premature babies don't have fingernails. Rose did. Don't tell me!"

"In Brooklyn," said The Missus, "an awful lot of first babies are premature. The trolled cars shakes the houses and makes them nervous."

"Humpf!'' said Aunt I ienrietta.

"I remember," said Mary, "when Aggie brought Sheila to visit us in Brooklyn, once. I guess Sheila was six or seven.

And my, visas she pretty! Beautiful! I'd like to see her again."

"No, you wouldn't, Mary," said Robbie. "She looks bad and lives poor. Where her man is no one knows. He shows up from time to time, though. She dives in a slum. And believe me, a Boston slum is something. She takes in washing and Lord knows how many children she has."

"I'll go to see her before we leave Boston," said lYlary.

"Not while you're staying in my house," said Aunt Henrietta.

"It's half my house," said The Missus, "and don't tell Mary what not to do or she'll do it, the way she got married when her father told her not to."

"Maybe it would be a good idea if she did go," said Aunt Henrietta. "Yes, go, Mary, and take your daughter so she sees what happens to a girl when she lets the fellers chase her. Not that you got to worry about that, Mary, the way she's so plain."

"She is not plain," said 1\ lary. She put her arm around the child. "She's not pretty the way Sheila was with blond curls and dimples and pink cheeks. She's handsome! Look at those wide cheekbones and the way her chin comes to sort of a point. Why, she has a face like a heart."

~ Y7 1 Maggie-Now opened her eyes wide and stared hard into Aunt Henrietta's eyes, mutely daring her to contradict her mother.

"She's got tan eyes," said Aunt Henrietta.

"She has not!" said Mary. "She has golden eyes."

"Tan!" insisted the old woman.

"Now, Henrietta," said The Missus, "they're the same color y ours were when you w ere young."

"She has golden eyes," conceded the old woman.

"I promised I'd find cousins for you, Maggie-Now, and I will,' said Mary. "So be patient. Let me see." She consulted Robbie's directions on a slip of paper. "Turn right, go one block, no, three. ." She lifted her veil because the chenille dots before her eyes made threes out of twos. "That's better. Two more blocks. ."

They climbed up four flights of stairs. I\larv knocked quietly on the door. It was flung open with a bang.

"Come in! Come in!" said a big woman.

Her strong arms were bare to the shoulders. The front of her apron was wet. Her tousled hair was half blond, half brown. Her face shone with sweat.

The room seemed to be boiling with life. A whole mob of children ran for cover when the visitors entered. They hid behind bundles of dirty wash standing on the floor and the smallest one burrowed into a loose pile of soiled clothes, half sorted, on the floor.

The window shades ~ ere up and the sun, full of dusty motes which seemed to quiver with life, poured in through the open windows. A network of filled clotheslines obscured the sky outside the windows. A breeze was blowing and the drying clothes billowed and collapsed and writhed and gyrated. The clothes seemed alive. There were bundles of dirty wash on the floor. The chairs were filled with clothes waiting to be ironed. A clothesline strung across the kitchen had freshly ironed shirts on it, and a bubbling boiler stood on the gas stove with the dirtiest of the wash boiling in it.

"Mary! " cried the big woman. She threw her arms around Mary and lifted her off the floor and swung her around. "Oh, Mary, I recognized you right away. You didn't change. You still

! 9~1

look so sweet and so refined with your veil and gloves and all." Then she noticed Maggie-Now. "This yours?" she asked.

"Mine," said Mary. "We call her Maggie-Now."

"She's beautiful!" The big woman knelt down and put her arms around the child.

"This is your cousin Sheila," said Mary.

Sheila!

Maggie-Now quivered in the woman's arms. Words she had heard when half asleep cane back to her. "No good!"

"No good from the beginning!" "No good like her mother before her!" Maggie-Now was confused. How could someone who was "no good" be Sf, nice? Maybe this was another Sheila. But no. She heard her mother say: "This is Cousin Robbie's girl. Aunt Henrietta is her grandmother. The mother of Aunt Henrietta and of my mother is her great grandmother and yours, too. That makes you cousins. There! "

"Do I have little cousins, too?" asked Maggie-Now.

"You certainly do," said Sheila. She called gently: "Come out, come out, wherever you are!" No response. Then she hollered: "Come out or I'll give it to you! Good!"

They came out of the dirty wash. There were four of them all girls. The youngest was two, the next four, the third six and the oldest ten. Sheila lined them up, pulling a dirty sock out of the four-year-old's hair.

"Kids, this is your cousin Maggie-Now what came all the way from Brooklyn to see yoga."

The four girls and Maggie-Now stared solemnly at each other. The four-year-old was wearing a thumb guard. She pulled it off, took two good sucks on her thumb and replaced the guard.

All of the girls had tangled golden curls, heavenly blue eyes, dirty pink cheeks and dimples that went in and out like the first stars of night. They wore odds and ends of clothing which made them look like the illustrations of the children who had followed the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

"Oh, Sheila," said Mary, "they're pretty. So pretty the way you were…. I mean, there you stand, Sheila, four times over."

"Oh, go on, Mary, I v. as never as pretty as my kids.

Anyhow. this is Rose, the oldest, this one is Violet, the thumb sucker is 1 99 1 Daisy and Lily's the baby. She's two."

"What pretty names."

"I call them my bow-key," said Sheila.

"Why, they've all got fingernails," said Maggie-Now clearly.

"Oh, Maggie-Now," noaned Mary.

"Oh, my sainted grandmother," laughed Sheila. "Will she ever let up on me? She told my father. ."

To change the subject, Mary asked: "what are you going to call the next one?"

Sheila patted her rounding stomach. "Fern! To trim up my bow-key." She nodded at ~\~l~ggie-Nov.7. "This the only one you ot? "

b "The only one."

"What's the matter? Did you marry a night watchman or something?" She prodded Mary with her elbow and laughed. Mary looked a little apprehensively at Maggie-Now. Sheila understood the look. "Listen, kids,"

she said, "why don't you go play with your cousin from Brooklyn so Cousin Mary and I can talk?"