His mother’s chin rose at this. “But you went to normal school there in your town?”
“Normal school?” Aldine asked, biting her lower lip in a way that made Clare’s own lips feel dry. Her hair, which hung straight down over her ears, was electrified by the dry air, and had been crimped slightly by the knit hat she took off for supper. The whole effect should have ruined her looks, but it didn’t. It just made her seem in need of protecting.
“Teacher-training school,” his father told Aldine, then turned to his mother. “It was in the letter she sent the school board. They call it something else over there.”
“Oh, yes!” Aldine said. “They do.”
“I see,” his mother said, making it seem somehow as if she saw a great deal. She was still annoyed about something, and there was plenty to choose from. Charlotte probably knew if it was something more than the usual too-much-dust, too-little-money, and too-many-wild-schemes. If there were secrets, Charlotte was always first to find them.
“I’ll help Lottie with the dishes,” he offered when his mother pushed her chair back and said she was going to make up Aldine’s bed in the attic.
Aldine looked abashed. “I can do that myself,” she said, but was told not to worry on her first night here, and Clare watched her bite her lip again and refold her napkin with her long white hands and set it on the table just where it had been so that it might seem unused.
Charlotte did not disappoint. As she handed Clare rinsed dishes, she told him she’d been with their father in the barn that morning when Mr. Josephson came by to tell him that there would be no money for teachers in the rural schools—“No book money, no salary, no funds at all.” They’d better write to that teacher they’d hired and tell her to stay in New York, Mr. Josephson said.
“But it was too late,” Charlotte told Clare in a hushed tone. “She was already on the train by then.” Charlotte dropped her voice still lower. “Mom doesn’t even know yet that there’s no money. She’s just mad because Aldine is here with us.”
“Do you think she’ll stay here then?” he asked. He tried to keep his voice absolutely neutral but it was no use. At once Charlotte said in a taunting tone, “Why? What does Clay-rence care?”
“I don’t,” he said. He rubbed at a sticky place on the pot in hand. Then, when enough time had passed, he said, “What’s Dad going to do, do you think?”
“What does His Highness usually do?”
Clare set the pot into the cupboard. There had been the time that everyone said no one would watch Shakespeare in Loam County, but then his father had found old copies of Othello in the school basement, directed rehearsals on Sunday afternoons, and put on a blackening face-cover for a performance before a full house at the Stony Bank schoolhouse and happily took his bows alongside Desdemona (Georgia Waterman, who was actually swell enough to make somebody jealous). And his mother had said they would not have a Christmas tree last year when there were no gifts to put under it, but his father said of course they would and they did—and a fat one at that—and he had made a wooden tractor and red-roofed barn to go to the winners of the checkers tournament they played through the afternoon.
“Make it work, I guess,” Clare said, glad to have a father who was resourceful, especially if it meant that Aldine would be staying in the room directly above his, washing her beautiful white body in a tub that he himself washed in, and eating across the table from him with her long, slender, upturned fingers.
“More specifically,” Charlotte said, “make women do whatever it is he wants.”
Which was a pot-calling-the-kettle-black circumstance if ever he’d heard one. Charlotte was two years older than Clare, had bossed him as long as he could remember, and didn’t care who knew it. She could kill with looks and words. Two neighboring farmers had courted her, Milt Sculler and Albert Flint, but she’d turned them down flat. He’d heard her talking to Albert Flint and she hadn’t spared his feelings. “Oh, I just couldn’t,” she’d told him, “not now or ever after.” She’d told Clare she wanted to go to normal school in Topeka, then move out to California and be a teacher, but there was no money now, and who knew when there would ever be again.
To get a rise from his sister, Clare said, “Isn’t it in the Bible that women should pretty much always do what men want?” and Charlotte snapped at him with her dish towel while he laughed and dodged.
After he went to bed, he listened to his parents’ murmuring voices, pressing his ear against the wall so he could hear first his father explaining, then his mother exclaiming in a slightly louder voice, then his father in his familiar manner proposing ways the shortfall could be ignored or somehow put off, certain that rain would fall and wheat prices would rise. His mother said it would have been easier to turn away a local man, just as she’d said all along, and now what were they going to do?
His father had begun to talk again, but his mother stopped him.
“You’ll just have to tell her to go back,” she said, and if his father replied, Clare didn’t hear it.
He tried to sleep. He went through all the presidents and vice presidents backward and forward. He did multiplication tables through fifteen. He silently recited Hiawatha through Nokomis, the old woman, pointing with her finger westward. He kept thinking of the girl.
13
In the night, with the cottonwood branch scratching at the bedroom wall and the moon throwing shadows into the room, with his wife snoring gently beside him and with the floor-creaking and water-tinkling sounds of the girl from Scotland using the chamber pot in the attic above him, Ansel Price decided that his wife was right. The girl would have to go back. He would have to tell her how things were with the school board and she would have to go back.