My mother came to me with, “Emmy, where have you been?” and as she looked into my face, softly, “Saying goodbye?”
She understood the need to say good-bye. To the woods and the water. To some of summer memories. In some secret place you had marked as your own.
Another week and the end of August. Of summer. My mother and the children off for California and school days again. Long good-byes until Christmas. Behind the scenes it had been decided that I would enter Mount Academy this year, the school where the women of my father’s family had all attended to be finished. Katty had graduated there this spring. My mother approved though as a Californian she had been finished there. I would stay on with Aunt Priscilla until school started. Aunt George had assured me that with a diploma from Mount Academy I could attend any college of my choice. Such was its academic standing. Even Cambridge? Yes, even Cambridge. I doubted. Cambridge wasn’t exclusively female, and Aunt Georgie with all her modern ideas and bold businesss maneuvers did not hold with coeducation. It was all right for primary students. Although better for the girls to go to Miss Mastersons and the boys to Albany Cadet. No hanky-panky.
It was one of those last nights before Katty would depart for college. Aunt Pris, Katty, and I had had early supper and cleanup and were relaxing in the living room. Until Aunt Georgie came by. She was again all het up about Elektra. She’d been at some meeting and none of the women knew anything about the disappearance of Elektra. No one had seen her since she went to the lake with us. They seemed to think Aunt Priscilla and Aunt George were to blame.
Aunt Priscilla said, “Stop worrying your head about the five dollars. I was going to have to let her go anyway. She was beginning to show.”
They exchanged a few of their wise looks and dropped the subject.
Later when Katty and I went up to our room, I asked her. “What did Aunt Pris mean? Beginning to show.”
Katty just looked at me. Stared. Finally she said, “You know.”
“I don’t know. If I knew, why would I ask you? ‘Beginning to show’? Do you know?”
“Of course I do. Everybody knows. That she’s going to have a baby. That’s what it means.”
“She’s married!” I could not believe it. But if she and Voss were married…
“No. She’s not married,” Katty stated.
But if she’s not married, how can she-I didn’t ask that question out loud. Some people did. We just didn’t know people who did. I sighed to Katty. “How do you know all these things?”
“Emmy,” she told me, “you find out a lot living with the aunts. You keep quiet and listen and they forget you’re there. And you learn a lot.”
I figured for myself. In a small town you learned things that city girls didn’t know about. Small towns were evolved from farm country. Where life and death were the beginning and end, and in between were all manner of happenings.
Another week of flurry and then we drove with Katty to Albany to put her on the train for New York. Three of her friends were also going to the college on the Hudson. Linda, of course, and Willa and Maleen. The college proctors would meet the train with the school bus.
When we returned to the house late that afternoon, we collapsed into chairs, even Aunt Georgie. I would be the next to go. But only as far as Hudson, where I’d be met by the school bus.
I’d stopped listening to the aunts long before they were talked out. It became tiresome listening to all the memories of Aunt A and Uncle B and Cousins C, D, E, etc. When I didn’t know any of them. They were reminiscing to each other, remembering their own college days.
Finally Aunt Georgie gathered her gloves and string bag and high-stepped to the front door. She’d sent Fred and the car home; she’d be walking. Of course she carried her umbrella as always, to ward off sun or rain.
She said to me, “You be ready in the morning, Emmy. I’ll come by for you about ten o’clock.”
Aunt Priscilla showed mild surprise. “You’re taking Emmy along?”
“I certainly am.” Evidently I’d missed something in their long conversation. “She’s the last to see Elektra.”
“I saw her,” Aunt Pris corrected.
“You weren’t with her all evening. Or in the boat.”
I could have told them I knew no more than Aunt Pris. Elektra never talked. She spoke necessary words, but she never talked. Not even phrases like “Is my lipstick on straight?” “Docs my petticoat show?” Things all females say to each other.
Instead I asked, “Where are we going?”
“We’re going looking for Elektra. Find out where she is. Find out why she hasn’t been around for her five dollars. You think of some questions yourself, Emmy. We’ll both ask questions.”
I reacted in my veins. In my bones. I was to be a Miss Paul Pry. I could ask a dozen questions. I could ask Voss: “Where did she spend the night? How did she get back to Clarksvale? How did she break her strand of red glass beads?” But I wouldn’t. It was none of my business. Just the same, I carried the three red glass beads along in my party handkerchief deep in my little purse, where I had tucked them away while we were still at the cottage. While no one was looking at me. Before I got into the car and shared a jump seat with Katty.
I was ready for Aunt George when she arrived next morning. She had walked over. “No sense in taking the car. More trouble than it’s worth.” She was thinking out loud. “We have to prowl.”
We prowled along Town Street, which carried you into Main Street. But we stopped before then. We stopped at the big yellow boarding house where Elektra had lived. A flight of wooden steps led up to the porch. Aunt George didn’t ring or knock on the door, she opened it. She knew her way around here. I followed her. She walked past the staircase that mounted to a second floor, and strode down the uncarpeted corridor, all the way to a door near the back of the house. She knocked a ratatat on that door. And again, stronger. From within now came a voice shouting, “Who’s that come knocking at my door?” Aunt George shouted back, “Just Aunt George, Gammer, that’s who.” Everyone in town called her Aunt George or Georgie.
Came another shout: “George Fanshawe?”
“What other George do you know. Gammer?”
Sometime along the years I’d heard, just like an aside from someone in the family, that Aunt George had been married once on a time. Not for long. That’s why she wasn’t a Davenport like Aunt Priscilla and my father and his family.
“Well, don’t stand out there yammering, Georgie. Come on inside.”
My aunt opened the unlocked door and went in, me following behind her.
“Gammer,” she said, “this is my niece Emmy.”
I managed to stammer a “How d’you do” to the diminutive old woman in the big rocker with varnish peeling from it. This was Gammer Goodwife, supposed to be kin of Elektra. Half-toothless, a browned corncob pipe clutched by the few remaining teeth. A squawky voice like something was caught in her throat. The ironing woman. Hard to believe that those rheumatic cramped fingers could iron ruffles until they rippled. Could iron linen napkins down to the very edge of the hand hem. Could iron lace as delicately as if she’d spun it. She took one look at me out of her spiteful black eyes and dismissed me as without interest.