“A doctor rents the front house so I live in the back cottage. Convenient really for someone of my age. Oh, please come and visit me, Aldine. Better yet, take one of my rooms. Keep me company.”
But she didn’t go visit Mrs. Odekirk, or stay with her, because when her circumstances could no longer be hidden, she couldn’t bear the look that would come into Mrs. Odekirk’s eyes. So she said to Glynis, “It was wrong of course, and who could deny it? But it’s a wrong that’s made only if two make it, so enough about him.”
And it was enough about him, but only for the night.
The days passed and within her stockings her legs swelled and then one day a letter came from poor sweet Clarence and it ended with, I guess you always had your heart set on my dad, and as she stood in the post office reading these words, she felt suddenly as if all her clothes and disguises had been stripped away, and there was nothing left of her, nothing at all, not even her secrets.
Clarence knew? How could Clarence know? And if Clarence knew, who in all the world didn’t?
But then as she was serving luncheon she thought—and this, she would tell herself later, was how dauntless hope could be—well, probably Clarence had indistinctly sensed his father’s distant attention to her, as a spurned admirer will sense such things. Sensed and then, in his letter, guessed. And walking home that evening while Glynis chattered about lousy tippers and Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, she thought, Yes, it surely had to be that, a guess, and nothing more.
59
In good weather some of the Harvey Girls enjoyed going to the park by the Cottonwood River, or seeking the cool of the Carnegie library’s basement reading room on Sixth Street, or playing ball on Mrs. Gore’s teams, but as far as Aldine was concerned, there were just two things to look forward to, and going to the movies at the Granada was one of them. She loved the darkness and hush and smoky haze of the movie house, and she loved settling into the lives of the people on the screen. She liked love stories (she’d seen Today We Live twice) and some crime pictures, but she didn’t like cowboy movies. She’d gone to The Rustler’s Roundup just to see why Clarence worshipped Tom Mix, but had come home befuddled. The cowboy star was old and squeaky-voiced and stiff as plaster; that was her judgment, anyway. The pictures changed in the middle of the week, but Aldine learned to wait until Friday, when the blond-haired boy named Harry was in the booth. He and one of his friends would come once a week to the Harvey House for coconut cake and he would always sit at one of her tables. One day, when his friend was in the bathroom, he’d introduced himself and asked her if she liked the movies and she laughed and said that was a funny question wasn’t it, because who didn’t? He said he worked at the Granada every night but Wednesday and Thursday, and he gave a discount to adorable waitresses, and Aldine, who couldn’t deny his spunk, said, well, when she next saw an adorable waitress, she’d pass on the news, and he said he thought the only adorable waitress he’d seen had already gotten the news, meaning her. That Friday she ventured to the Granada and found him sitting illuminated in the glass booth. He grinned at her, gave her a ticket without taking her money, and that was the way it was whenever she went to the Granada ever after. It was no sin, not by her accounts. She was saving her money, so why wouldn’t she wait a day or two until a friendly face was in the booth? And when Harry and one of his friends sat at one of her tables, she always gave them a lovely piece of cake, and a pretty smile besides, but she had to charge them full price all the same. If she didn’t, Mrs. Gore would sack her in a second, and she needed the job.
One night she took Glynis along to the pictures on a Friday, and Harry smiled at Aldine, ignored their coins on the counter, and spooled out two tickets to pass to Aldine. Then, pushing their coins back toward them, he said, “Don’t forget your change,” and Glynis was such a little fool she went inside saying right out loud, “Wait a darned second, we didn’t even pay!” Aldine shushed her, and the Shirley Temple short wasn’t even over before Glynis got up and left. “I paid the boy and now I can watch in peace,” she hissed into Aldine’s ear when she got back, so that was it, she didn’t go to the pictures with Glynis again.
Aldine was saving her money but for what, she didn’t know exactly. She didn’t want to go back to living with Leenie, not like this, and she surely didn’t want to go all the way back to Bellevue Crescent. What would she say to Aunt Sedge? You were right. I shouldn’t have gone away. She didn’t feel ill, at least, not in any boaky kind of way, and she hadn’t begun to fatten and waddle, thank the good sweet Lord, but the day was coming, and then she’d be out of a job and would need all of her savings and more besides to tide her over.
The second thing Aldine looked forward to were her visits to the post office, and the guilty thrill she felt when the postman returned from the General Delivery bin with an envelope in his hand. She stopped by the post office every day and she always went alone. She told Glynis it was to see if anything had come from her sister, but that was only a sliver of the truth. Ansel had sent three letters and each one not only made fresh her feelings for him, but drove her further into her dreams of a world in which there was no Ellie, no guilt, just a far-off place she thought of as their Japan. When one of his letters came, she touched it there in her pocket as she worked, and back at the house she took it to the bog where she could read it again and again behind a locked door.
If I had not kissed you or declared how I felt.
It is terrible and wonderful the vividness of your face in my mind.
Please write back and tell me . . .
But she could not write back. She could have written mad, hothouse letters to the man who lived in her imagination, but she could not write back to Ellie’s husband. That did not, however, mean that she could be kept from reading and rereading his letters, touching her finger to the paper he had held, letting her finger follow the beautiful loops of the cursive he had written.
The darkness of the movies, the romantic figures on the screen, the pleasant haze of cigarette smoke. And the thrill when the postman returned from the General Delivery bin with an envelope in his hand. That was all there was to get her through the days.
The days passed. Scarface, As You Desire Me, Tarzan the Ape Man. She learned that sucking on ginger candy helped a little bit with the morning sickness, and she didn’t know what to do at all about the bulging veins in her legs and feet, and thanked her lucky stars for dark stockings. Grand Hotel, Horse Feathers, Shanghai Express. There were no letters for her in General Delivery until one day the postmaster handed her an envelope addressed in a childish cursive that could belong to no one in the world except Neva.
Dear Miss McKenna, it began.