Lummox

Wildly, and with a coherence she could have torn open her throat for, Bertha wanted to tell Annie that her secrets, if any she had, were of life, not death. The knowledges that came to her in chimes from the dark forests within her where the trees could somehow seem to stand with folded arms regarding her and the air to be wisps of old sound. Snacks of melodies out of eastern Europe. Secrets that shimmered. But it seemed to Bertha that her tongue was merely the shallow pan for those few words at her disposal which rattled off it so hollowly.

It was so hard to talk. Words. Frail beasts of burden that crashed down to their knees under what she wanted to say.

How to convey to Annie Wennerberg that her mother had not dragged her down to the clayey secrets of the grave but had endowed her with lovely, bosky, dell-like secrets of life. Those were the meanings of the wide silence of space between her eyes.

"I don't know nothing about the grave, Annie--"

"You do. For two minutes you was in the grave with your dead mother--yah--yah--

Born of a dead mother, Secrets of the grave you'll utter."

Bertha wondered. But not unduly. She thought so dimly, almost as if she had breathed on a mirror and reflection could not come through. For that matter she even felt dimly.

"Sometimes," she once said to Annie Wennerberg, "I feel like my skin was a thick piece of flannel, between the inside of me and the outside."

Annie's retort was a single vile word. They jumped off her lips constantly, like hop-toads.

But somewhere in Bertha's mists were ecstasies. She would sit on the stairs at night, and huddle over to the banister for the passing of a drunken sailor, scarcely conscious that his enormous clod of a mud-caked shoe was almost in her face.

She slept on a cot that crawled with vermin, with the beauty of repose on that face of hers which was said to look like the sound of a clump of dirt on a coffin.

Once, way back before she had gone to the Farleys, she had worked out "by the day" as the saying goes. Odd jobs. Cleaning an old rooming-house for new occupancy on very East Seventeenth Street. Corners to be scraped out with a knife. Scrub water that became livid. Stench. Two men had sickened at the job and quit. Yet Bertha, with her lips held very tightly it is true, scraped and scraped, until actually, standing there at the sink, poking webby stuff through the drain hole, chimes came through to her from the dark forest. The forest that was Baltic and western Teutonic.

Yet sometimes, because of these great inner reaches of her, even the chimes arrived to her dimly. Muted melodies. Wanting-to-be-born thoughts. Bertha's prisoners.

She liked, after her day's work was done, to sit with them. Little bells in lovely headache against her brow. Words.

"Lyric" was a beautiful word. Rollo Farley had used it to a young girl at dinner, who had listened to him with the nape of her neck stretched and her lips scarlet. It had come through to Bertha peering from behind the pantry door. "Lyric," a golden word shaped like a harp.

She liked to say it and feel it race delicately around her lips as if it were a high-strung little roulette ball in its bowl.

Sometimes she spat like a peasant, of slow reflection.

There was a sliver of kitchen porch and a pad of backyard with a magnolia tree in it, behind the Farley house in Gramercy Park. She had seen that magnolia heavy with bud six beautiful times. She had cooked for the Farleys six years.

In spring, after the great dish pan with the gray cloth drying over it was turned to the wall and the linoleum smelling wetly from her mop, Bertha would sit out there on the sliver of porch waiting the interim between dinner and light refreshments of sandwiches and fresh fruit to be sent into the drawing room at eleven. Would sit barefoot. They were strong feet, still warm and damp from shoes. Great pale spuds with muscular toes that could spread separately like a wine presser's, and were full of a predatory power to clutch.

She could almost breathe in with her feet. She liked to feel their bareness pat at the old cheek of earth. All the big-footed and barefooted women out of her Baltic and Teutonic hinterlands rebelled against Bertha's shoes. They gave her bunions. Bulbs that projected off her foot like a nose, giving the shoe, after one day's wearing, the profile of a mean old man. So she padded around the kitchen barefoot, when Mrs. Farley's invasions, or Helga's the housemaid, were unlikely. There was a wininess in their bare contacts. Breathers. Suckers in of the little vibratory messages that run across floors. Toes. The prehensile curving of toes around the branches of the dark forest....

Once Mrs. Farley, sweeping through the swinging door into the kitchen, found her on her knees before the oven basting a Thanksgiving turkey, the soles of her bare feet upright and staring out from under her cotton skirts like lantern-jawed faces.

"Bertha, don't ever let me find you barefoot in the kitchen again. It's disgusting."

"Yah'm."

Submission was so easy. Shoes. They were part of the day and the day was like a garment fashioned by the employment agency; the lady of the house; and for the last six years by Mrs. Farley.

There is not much of Mrs. Farley in this telling. She paid Bertha twenty dollars a month (it was the day of the cable-car and there was some talk of a Louisiana Purchase Exposition to be held in St. Louis), clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth when she told about it and said, "What's the world coming to?"

She was kind enough in a fusty way, wore invariable black velvet neck bands, saved twine, and gave every other Monday afternoon to the Tenement Hygienic Committee of the Human Welfare League.

Helga, whose back always ached and who kept twenty rooms swept and dusted, was expected to sit up for Mrs. Farley until after theater for the single process of massaging the wattles underneath the band of black velvet.

Bertha scrubbed and cooked from the servants' breakfast hour at six-thirty to family dinner at eight P.M. and often until eleven, when there were the sandwiches and light refreshments to be prepared.

Helga spat on the Human Welfare League pamphlets and gritted her teeth at them.

Mrs. Farley was also on the letterhead of an organization called The Circle for Housing Relief.

Bertha's room cowed under the roof of the finely austere house in Gramercy Park beneath a slant ceiling that was like a threatening slap. No heat unless she left the door open and the warm breath of downstairs came up. A bed with a short fourth leg and a spring that sagged like a hammock to the considerable heft of Bertha's body. A bureau rigged up out of a discarded desk of Rollo Farley's and a pitcher and bowl on a soap box. For six years Bertha slept up there with that slanting ceiling on her chest. But usually she was so very tired that her sleep was like a death and the slant a clod of earth on the grave of another day.