Бетти Смит - Maggie-Now

peach-basket hat. They shopped in the dime store for the wire frame and cards of strips of braided straw and buckram. Thev trimmed it with buncht s of tiny pink roses.

Maggie-Nov.T thought it was beautiful. Mary thought it was too mature for a child but she let her wear it to church just the same.

Lottie told her bit by bit about her father: his dancing days in County Kilkenny, his mother, his romance with l\laggie Rose and how Timmy had gone to Ireland and licked him.

"Papa licked me once," said Maggrie-Now. "Right on the street in front of everybody."

Lottie gave her a qt ick look but she was too good and too kind to question the gill. Then she told how the immigrant bov had been robbed. (All these things were new to Maggie-No`~. Her father and mother had never told her these things.)

"There he stood," said Lottie dramatically, "a young boy in a strange country, full of dreams of the grand new life where al] men is free and any poor man has the chancet of being a millionaire or president whichever he likes best. And he thought this man was his friend, see? And he trusted him and the man robbed him and all the time he thought he vitas his friend."

"That was awful," sari Magt,ie-Now. "Poor Papa!"

She told Maggie-Nov what a wonderful heritage she had.

She was not above exaggerating. To Lottie, the story was the thing not the facts.

1/ 41

"\'our grandmother was a great lady and she raised your mother to play the piano. And she played in concert halls and oh, my! How the people clapped!J "Mama never told me. ."

"She's not one to brag- your mother. And she painted things. Not like you paint a house, but pictures and on dishes. Yo?` know. And your grandfather: My, he was a man high up! He was the mayor of Bushwick Avenue or something like that. I forget. But he lost all his money and died."

"How did Mama meet Papa?" asked the girl, all agog.

"Now that's a story! NVell, it was this way." She settled herself more comfortably in her chair, preparing for a long story. "Bring your chair closer, Mama," she shouted across the room. "You can't hear good over there.

"In the first place, your father was a very handsome man. He lived in the stable in your grandfather's yard. He didn't have to be a stable boy, mind you, but in America, everyone must start at the bottom. So, Mr. Moriarity, your grandfather, put him in with the horses to test him out. So

. ."

So Maggie-Now got to know a lot about her father. As she grew up, she came into a realization of how things that had happened to him in his young days had made him the man he was now. It cannot be said that her growing knowledge made her love her father more, but it made her understand him better.

And sometimes understanding, is nearly as good as love because understanding makes forgiveness a more or less routine matter. Love makes forgiveness a great, tearing emotional thing.

Mary missed the child when she was away at Lottie's.

The girl was the sum and total of her life. She loved her so much that she sacrificed her precious time with her because MaggieNow was so happy with I,ottie.

Pat didn't like it at all. He thought Maggie-Now was spending too much time at the home that Big Red had set up. This Timothy Sharon, he thought. This Big Red:

wherever he is, he's still reaching out to manhandle me life.

He came home one Friday night from work to a quiet house. "Where's the girl>" he asked.

"Over to l_ottie's."

[127 1 "Again? I don't like the idear. Here I use meself up working to provide a home for her and she's never in it."

"It's hard for a man to understand, but a growing girl needs a woman friend. Maggie-Now's lucky to have Lottie."

"I don't see it. Why can't she be satisfied with her girl friends?"

"Maggie-Now has to know things," she said fumblingly.

"I suppose she talks to the other girls but they don't know what Maggie-Now wants to know needs to know. Now, Lottie is like a girl friend; she and Maggie-Now do things together like young girls. Yet, she c an talk to Lottie like one woman to another. Shell, I guess I'm not explaining it right."

"If you mean," he said bluntly, "that she's got to know where babies come from, you tell her. You're her mother."

She searched for words of explanation. Her thought was something about destruction of innocence. But she knew it would sound schoolteacherish She said: "Maybe I could.

Should. But the way 1 am. . the way I was brought up, the way I carried her for nine months before she was born

. . the way when she was a baby she'd grab my thumb and look up at me so seriously. . well, I guess I

wouldn't know how to tell her…."

"Well, does she have to live at Lottie's to find out what she would-a found out anyway in time?"

"That's not the only reason I like her to be friends with Lottie. Ike all have to die someday and. ."

"That's news to me," he said.

"I mean, I don't think of dying. But like all mothers, I

suppose, I worry, or did, about what would become of Maggie-Now if I died before she was grown up. Then I

think that she'd have Lottie and I don't worry any more."

He had a flash of tenderness. . or was it jealousy?

"Think of me a little," he said. "What would become of me if you died?"

"Oh, Patrick!" she said. She clasped her hands and her eyes filled with happy, loving tears. "Would you miss me?"

He didn't want to say yes. That would be too embarrassing for him. It would be ridiculous to say, no churlish to say, I've grown used to you. He was sorry he had brought up the matter.

1 id]

AFTER sixteen years, Mary was pregnant again. She had a feeling of awe about it. She was in her middle forties and had believed that the menopause had set in. She was quietly happy about it and a little frightened. She remembered the hard time she'd had when Maggie-Now was born; how the doctor had warned her afterward not to have another child. It would be dangerous, he had said.

Mary, however, reasoned that a lot of advances had been made in obstetrics in the sixteen years since she had had her first child. Also she'd heard countless stories of women who'd had a hard time with the first child and very easy times with the second and third birth. All in all, she was pleased about it.

The neighbors watched the progress of the pregnancy witl1 more concern than curiosity. They discussed it. It was a changeof-life baby, they admitted, and, yes, them kind what comes late in life is always the smartest ones.

Yeah, he might grow up to be a great man but she'd be too old to care. Anyhow, was the consensus of thought, please God nothing should happen to her.

Maggie-Now talked over the baby with 1 ottie. "I

thought Mama was you know. Too old?"

"Good heavens, no! Lizzie Moore, ',-our grandmother, was forty-five when she had your father. It runs in the family to have a baby in middle age." Maggie-Now couldn't follow the reasoning. Lizzie Moore was not related by blood to Mary How could Mary inherit the tendency to conceive in middle age from her? "And you, Maggie-Now: When you get married and if a baby don't come along right away, don't give up until you're fifty.,' "I want lots of children." said l\iaggie-Now. il.ots and lots of them."

Lottie looked at Maggie-Now's ripe figure. I he girl looked older than her sixteen years. She could pass for twenty and no one v.~ou]d challenge her age.