Бетти Смит - Maggie-Now

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you out in the cold of the night but the way me daughter. ."

"You have been shriven of all your worldly sins, my son.

Speak no more." When Pat would speak again, Father Flynn said: "Be at peace, my son."

He started packing his bag. "I will send the doctor," he said.

"No doctor," whispered Pat. "I am at peace."

"To sign the death certificate," said Father Flynn. "It is the law."

Father Flynn went cut to ~\laggie-Now and Denny and prayed with them and left, after speaking words of comfort.

Maggie-Now, trembling and with tears falling unchecked from her eyes, went in to her father.

She found him frantically getting into his pants.

"Papa!" she cried out, shocked. "What are you doing?"

"I'm getting out of here!" he yelled. "Between you and the priest and the doctor, youse'll have me buried before I'm dead! I'm going to the widder's house where I'm safe!"

Maggie-Now had a beautiful, beautiful winter with her Claude.

~ CHIC P T ER FOR TY-NI NE ~ CLAUDE had come home. While they sat in the kitchen waiting for the two chickens he had brought to roast, he asked her, as was his custom, to tell him everything she had done during his absence. She told him everything except that she had made an application to take in children from the home. When she actually had the children, it would be time enough to tell him, she thought.

Then there was always the hope that she'd become pregnant. She never gave up hope. Her mother hadn't given up hope and had had a child in her forties.

However, she had sounded Claude out, hoping to get his reaction to having the children from the home.

"Claude, wouldn't you like children in the house?"

He gave a typical Claudian answer. "Every man lilies children of his OWn about the house."

Unduly sensitive to his every reaction, she thought he stressed [344]

the "of his own" too much, and she didn't say anything more.

When he came home, he had brought her a dozen Dutch tulip bulbs. They were in a box marked Tulips fro7n Holland, Michigan, so she knew he had been there. For his last three returns he'd brought her gifts with labels. It was as though he wanted her to know where he'd been but didn't want to tell her in so many words.

He said he'd wait a week before going to look for a job because he wanted to plant the bulbs in the yard. First, he said, he had to whitewash the old board fence. The tulips were red and needed a white background, he said He was whitewashing the boards one Sunday morning

(he had one side of the fence done), when the tenant upstairs opened her window and called down to hin`..

"Mr. Bassett?"

He gave that quick turn of his l cad' which gave the woman a thrill, and looked up.

"That's going to look real nice. ' "Thank you," he said and gave her his charming smile.

She closed the window. "I had to be halfway nice to him,'' she told her husband, "so's they don't raise the rent on us saying they made improveme7`tsd' "Aw, you just wanted an exctisc to, talk to the bum," he said.

"He's not a bum. He's a pentlcman."

"A bum!" he said. As an afterthought, he added: "Shut up!"

The ground was not frozen under the snow but it was as hard and barren as cement. Claude had to chop it up with an ax. He planted the bulbs. All during the winter, he garnered MaggieNow's coffee grounds and tea leaves and potato peelings and the dottle from Pat's pipe and the ashes from the stove and other things and made a compost pile in the yard.

"In the spring," he said, 'we'll plant zinnia and marigold seeds. . things that come up the first year. . later, perennials. ."

He spoke as though he wasn't going away in the spring.

Her heart lifted; then fell. If he stayed, would he let her have the foster children?

For Christmas, he gave her a big, beautiful garden encyclopedia. It had hundreds of colored plates. (It must have cost ten dollars.) He and Maggie-Now pored over it and he made a garden on t347 1

paper and the list of seeds they'd need. He seemed obsessed by the garden. "This summer," he said, "we'll sit together in our garden in the evening-flowers smell better after dark, you know. . " Yes, it seemed that he wasn't going to wander any more.

But by January he had completely lost interest in the garden. Now when she got the book out, he frowned and said he guessed he'd go for a little walk. Once he asked her why she bothered. "Nothing will ever grow in that soil," he said. "It's hard as cement and just as barren." She didn't get the book out any more after that.

But it was a beautiful \vinter. He was a tender and loving husband, and, as always, it was as though they were newly married.

That l\larch day can e and that softly demanding faraway wind blew over Brooklyn again. And Claude listened and gave his silent promise to something that was not tangible, and went away again.

This time her grief tat his going was gentle and mixed with a tremulous inner excitement. She cried a little, but smiled as she cried and was stirred bv a great anticipation.

I'll wait until twelve, she thought, to see if hi comes back.

But she waited only until eleven o'clock. She ran around to the furniture store and told the man he could deliver right away the two cribs and high chair she had been making weekly payments on since the fall. She went to another store and bought two thick white china bowls and two little spoons.

The store sent the cribs over. There was a two-drawer chest in the room that Maggie-Now had bought in the fall and enameled white. From a drawer, she took crib sheets she'd made from the best parts of worn household sheets and clean, worn blankets that had, so far, warmed two generations of babies: Widdy and Widdy's twins. (Lottie had said: "I forgot I still had those blankets until Timmy reminded me.") Maggie-Now was in a kind of ecstasy as she made up the little beds.

When Denny came home at noon, she gave him a makeshift lunch of bologna sandwich, milk and a wedge of crumb cake. She herself was too excited to eat.

"Did Claude go away3" he asked.

"Why, yes." Then she was dumbfounded! Claude had left

[~ Is]

only two hours ago and she had all but forgotten that she wouldn't see him again until fall.

"The flowers he planted in the yard are up. Did he see them?"

"Are they?" She went to the window. Yes, there were a dozen inch-high clubby spikes showing. "No, I guess he didn't see them."

As soon as Denny went back to school, she rushed over to Father Flynn's house. "Now, Father?" she asked. "Now?

Please, now? "

He matched her tone. "Now!" he said.

"Honest, Father?"

"Honestly, Margaret. Mother Vincent de Paul has two little boys all ready for you."

"Honest, Father? Honestly?"

"One is four, I believe, and the other a babe in arms."

"When can I have them, Father? When?"

"I'll phone Mother and tell her you're on your way to the home."

She was out of the house and down the steps like a flash.

"Margaret!" he called. She paused in her flight.

"Remember! In two years, you'll have to give up the first one."

"Yes, Father."

"And when you are sixty, you will have to give them all back."

"It will be forever till I'm sixty," she called back.

I used to think so too, thought the priest.

Maggie-Now loved the beautiful ritual of getting breakfast for the children. Denny had gone off to school and her father was still sleeping. The sunshine poured in through the kitchen windows and the tulips were in bud in the yard and Timmy in his bamboo cage sang so lustily that the cage jiggled.