“Nora?”
“Yes, Mom. Not burglars and not the Fuller Brush man. Not the Realsilk Hosiery man or any other secret lover you were expecting.” The words sounded nasal. She came into the kitchen, saw her father. “Hi, Pop.”
“Nora, let me see your throat,” Beth said.
“I’m all right!”
“You sound as if you were catching cold.”
“I’m not.” Nora coughed defensively. “I feel fine.”
“Say ah-h-h-h-h.”
Nora stood under the center light, lifted her winter-rouged face, said the word.
“Look at this, Henry. She’s getting a very red throat.”
“It’s not a bit sore,” Nora asserted urgently.
Mrs. Conner suddenly sat down. “That’s about the last straw!”
“Oh, Mother. Just because I’ve got a little red in the throat.”
“It could be measles,” Mrs. Conner went on aggravatedly. “They’re going around.”
“I haven’t been exposed.”
“How do you know? Henry, I just can’t take her over to Ruth’s if she’s catching a cold.
The new baby—the other children—”
“I knew it!” Nora said in a low, dismal tone. “I knew it all along. Like a prophecy! This Christmas was going to be utterly totally wrecked for me.”
“It isn’t Christmas tomorrow; it’s the Saturday before,” Beth answered. “And it isn’t being wrecked at all. You’ll have to stay in tomorrow and not go to Aunt Ruth’s dinner, so as to be perfectly all right again by Christmas!”
“But we always go!”
“I mean you, Nora. The rest of us will go, of course. I’ll have to find somebody to look after you tomorrow.”
Nora threatened tears. “I’ll miss the dinner we always have. I’ll miss Santa Claus.”
“Charles, or your father, can take you Sunday.”
“Sure,” Henry said. He felt unhappy; he seemed to share Nora’s distress over the possibility of missing the yearly, pre-Christmas dinner at Ferndale; he appeared to feel that the matter of not exposing his nieces and nephews to a slight touch of sore throat, even a faint risk of measles, was being over-stressed. “Sure, Beth. I mean—if you really think Nora has to stay away…?”
“I definitely do! The baby’s delicate. Ruth was talking about it only the other day. And I know how mad I got when they came here, years ago, and left our Ted with mumps!”
Nora’s face contracted.
“You’re a big girl, now,” her mother admonished. “Don’t cry. I’ll phone the Crandons.”
“They’re having a family dinner, too—in River City.”
“Well, somebody. You can stay with Netta, I’m sure. She’s having a cleaning woman in.”
“She’s totally despicable! I abhor staying there!”
“She’s minded your brothers, often. She’s usually a pretty good neighbor when these problems come up.”
Nora said, “Phooie! Vixen. Shrew. Termignant.”
Henry snorted.
“Termagant,” Beth corrected, absently. “She is not. You can stay with her tomorrow if you’ve still got a raw throat. I’ll give you medicine. My, I hope it isn’t measles.” She moved toward the kitchen phone and presently began to make arrangements for the custody. ‘We’ll shop and hurry home, Netta, so you won’t have her on your hands later than, say, four….”
Nora was folding and unfolding a cloth pot holder. Queenie, the tomcat, at that moment decided to move from the kitchen to the front rooms. Nora flung the pot holder and hit the cat.
Queenie stopped, looked to see who had done him the dirty deed, shrugged and departed. Beth had hung up.
“Go gargle,” she said, and she added, “Mercy! The beans!”
Nora stood, regarded her parents balefully, and left the room. From upstairs, shortly, came a sound suggesting bad drains, excepting for the fact that, to an acute listener, it would have become evident that the burbling monody was trying to be a song. This was the case: Nora was gargling, “Aloha Ohe.”
The front door opened again and Chuck came to the kitchen, his arms heavy with packages. “Unload me, somebody,” he cried. “Boy! What a day! Downtown, it’s like a Cecil B. de Mille mob scene. So many people, you’d think they were giving everything away, not selling it.”
“Be worse, tomorrow,” Henry said, helping his son. “Shop early, they tell you. Serves me right.”
Unloaded, still coated, Chuck heard the sound from above. “What’s that?” He identified the theme and went to the foot of the stairs to add a falsetto alto.
The bathroom door slammed—all but shattered.
2
It was a beautiful morning—and that was the hell of it.
So Nora thought when she opened her eyes.
She dressed lugubriously. Lugubriously, she went downstairs for breakfast. Ted was there. Charles was still asleep. Her father was downtown doing a few “last-minute” things, Beth said.
Nora ate two eggs, three pieces of toast with apple jelly, some bacon, a bowl of Wheaties, a glass and a half of milk and a few prunes. She didn’t say a word but consumed the food with the glowering look of a condemned and unrepentant criminal. She watched with an aloof, almost disdainful eye, as her mother cleaned up, as Ted washed the dishes, as Charles came down in his blue suit and best tie and her father returned from town, merry as Santa Claus himself, laden with packages, and reporting the place “crowded as an oyster bed.”
It didn’t concern Nora.
She looked out the front window for a while. The Jarvis kids went by: Alf and Penny and Kate. All three pulled sleds. The runners squeaked on the dry, hard snow and rang when they bumped over the frozen slush in Walnut Street. They were evidently going over to slide down terraces and out onto the ice at Crystal Lake.
Nora, however, was sure she was going to have to help Mrs. Bailey houseclean.
Probably, she thought, old blood-eye Bailey would make her stand on a stepladder and dust chandeliers and poke at cobwebs all day. Probably the stepladder would fall and she’d break her back. Maybe she’d be told to scrub. Nora had read, once, of a farm woman who decided to clean out the gurry imbedded between some floorboards in an old house. She’d come down with diphtheria, the germs of which had survived in the dirt for twenty-six years. It had been the Black Diphtheria, and the woman had died.
Nora felt her mother and father might easily be damned good and sorry they’d deserted her that day.
In what seemed like no time at all, her mother stood there, in her pretty new gray suit and her fox fur saying, “We’re just about ready! Get your hat and coat and scarf, Nora.”
“Just to go next door?”
“And your arctics. You tell Netta I said you could play outdoors awhile, after lunch. And we’ll come right Lack from Ruth’s dinner, so expect us around three. Four, at the latest.”
“Can’t I go with you?”
“No, Nora, you can’t. And I want you to show Netta what a fine cleaning woman you are, too!”
Looking at the old, spotty, brown dress she’d been ordered to wear, Nora felt the Cinderella legend applied to her—backward. Her last hope died. Solemnly, thinking of the Williams home, of tables heaped with goodies, of the fun of riding all the way to Ferndale, of cousins to play with, Nora put on her scarf, her winter hat, her winter coat, her red galoshes.