PAGE 5
The Eldest
by
* * * * *
When you clean closets and bureau drawers thoroughly you have to carry things out to the back porch and flap them, Rose was that sort of housekeeper. She leaned over the porch railing and flapped things, so that the dust motes spun and swirled in the sunshine. Rose’s arms worked up and down energetically, then less energetically, finally ceased their motion altogether. She leaned idle elbows on the porch railing and gazed down into the yard below with a look in her eyes such as no squalid Chicago back yard, with its dusty debris, could summon, even in spring-time.
The woman next door came out on her back porch that adjoined Rose’s. The day seemed to have her in its spell, too, for in her hand was something woolly and wintry, and she began to flap it about as Rose had done. She had lived next door since October, had that woman, but the two had never exchanged a word, true to the traditions of their city training. Rose had her doubts of the woman next door. She kept a toy dog which she aired afternoons, and her kimonos were florid and numerous. Now, as the eyes of the two women met, Rose found herself saying, “Looks like summer.”
The woman next door caught the scrap of conversation eagerly, hungrily. “It certainly does! Makes me feel like new clothes, and housecleaning.”
“I started to-day!” said Rose, triumphantly.
“Not already!” gasped the woman next door, with the chagrin that only a woman knows who has let May steal upon her unawares.
From far down the alley sounded a chant, drawing nearer and nearer, until there shambled into view a decrepit horse drawing a dilapidated huckster’s cart. Perched on the seat was a Greek who turned his dusky face up toward the two women leaning over the porch railings. “Rhubarb, leddy. Fresh rhubarb!”
“My folks don’t care for rhubarb sauce,” Rose told the woman next door.
“It makes the worst pie in the world,” the woman confided to Rose.
Whereupon each bought a bunch of the succulent green and red stalks. It was their offering at the season’s shrine.
Rose flung the rhubarb on the kitchen table, pulled her dust-cap more firmly about her ears, and hurried back to the disorder of Floss’s dim little bedroom. After that it was dust-cloth, and soapsuds, and scrub-brush in a race against recurrent water bags, insistent doorbells, and the inevitable dinner hour. It was mid-afternoon when Rose, standing a-tiptoe on a chair, came at last to the little box on the top shelf under the bedding in the hall closet. Her hand touched the box, and closed about it. A little electric thrill vibrated through her body. She stepped down from the chair, heavily, listened until her acute ear caught the sound of the sick woman’s slumbrous breathing; then, box in hand, walked down the dark hall to the kitchen. The rhubarb pie, still steaming in its pan, was cooling on the kitchen table. The dishes from the invalid’s lunch-tray littered the sink. But Rose, seated on the kitchen chair, her rumpled dust-cap pushed back from her flushed, perspiring face, untied the rude bit of string that bound the old candy box, removed the lid, slowly, and by that act was wafted magically out of the world of rhubarb pies, and kitchen chairs, and dirty dishes, into that place whose air is the breath of incense and myrrh, whose paths are rose-strewn, whose dwellings are temples dedicated to but one small god. The land is known as Love, and Rose travelled back to it on the magic rug of memory.
A family of five in a six-room Chicago flat must sacrifice sentiment to necessity. There is precious little space for those pressed flowers, time-yellowed gowns, and ribbon-bound packets that figured so prominently in the days of attics. Into the garbage can with yesterday’s roses! The janitor’s burlap sack yawns for this morning’s mail; last year’s gown has long ago met its end at the hands of the ol’-clo’es man or the wash-woman’s daughter. That they had survived these fourteen years, and the strictures of their owner’s dwelling, tells more about this boxful of letters than could be conveyed by a battalion of adjectives.