Part 5

One night up in her room next to where the winter potatoes were stored, a thought smote Bertha that sent her bounding up from her cot and barefoot over the splintery floor to the window. Sure enough, there through the leaded pane, the spire to the Farley house in Gramercy Park was plainly visible. Pointing! There was no window shade, so she pinned her flannel petticoat across the glass. But all night through the flannel and her closed lids, the spire kept pointing. Pointing.

At dawn she laid the fires for the old ladies and left.

Raussman's again. Two weeks of sitting there through the sullen mornings of inspection. There were only coins left in her petticoat pocket, that rattled softly when she moved. Bertha hated hunger. She could sleep on the carpet sofa at Annie's and poke through drain pipes without much nausea, but hunger slashed through her bulk like the blades of a great machine. Foregoing the morning cup of five-cent coffee at Annie's was an economy, but it made the day wavy. It rose up on all sides of her and sometimes towards noon she dozed with its motion and old man Raussman had to yank at her cape.

"Wake up. We ain't got no calls for sleeping beauties."

But one day he handed out a Riverside Drive address to her on a dirty slip of paper. "Musliner. Two in family. Cook."

Mr. Musliner, a two-weeks-old bridegroom, interviewed her in the kitchen and engaged her without parley.

***

It was pleasant at the Musliners. A bride had furnished it. Creamy light of new woodwork and pale paneled walls. An oval drawing-room in the fragile mood of Fragonard. Dining room in marquetry and the panel above the mantelpiece another bow to Fragonard. A pair of solid gold Adam urns. Grapes in December. Crystal chandeliers tittering with light.

An entire corridor of little nonsense bedrooms in a hush of rose taffetas and Canet beds _bouffant_ with _point d'esprit_. Mrs. Musliner's was a shell that curved her to it as if she were a pearl. She awoke that way, a lovely pink one in its heart, with the laces creaming about her. Mr. Musliner's, next to, but not adjoining hers, was in the same mood _mousse_, except with certain sterner concessions. No frothings. His bed cover was a pale gold brocade with a large diamond-shaped monogram in the center. Chiffonier mirror adjusted to his shaving line. An old-fashioned leather collar box, which sometimes crept out of a top drawer of certain of his cherished bachelor possessions, along with a smelly old pipe that violated the pale brocade scarf.

Mrs. Musliner would tuck them out of sight, her lips shuddering slightly as if her teeth were on edge. They could lift back like that frequently on those very rare occasions when she permitted herself to be alone. They were very, very rare. Always guests. Luncheon. Tea. Dinner guests in candle-and-flower-lit circle around lace over pink. Week-end guests, who nested in the little frilled rooms off the corridors and, night after night, some girl friend or other to share the lovely lace mist of Mrs. Musliner's bed.

Even Bertha's room, directly off the kitchen and facing a court darkly, could look sunny with the strip of new chintz on her washstand and a blue cotton bed cover with fringe. The housemaid and the waitress, sisters, had their room at the top of the apartment house.

It was warm in Bertha's room and she liked to sit in it evenings, barefoot and wide-kneed in the dark, with the door leading to the kitchen left open, its fine white porcelain refrigerator like a dim smile across the silence.

But a dim unvibrant sort of silence now, as if she were seated in the vacuum of a closed bell. All the little jeweled sands had run away. Sometimes she looked at them in the little islands of words that were margined so wide; fingering the leaves of her hurt bird of a book, which she kept wrapped away in the green chiffon cloak.

And the wisps of old sound. She had seen them, too, but not in the book. Tranced in her baby's eyes like the candy stripe down the center of the crystal.

To the pain of that empty cove of her arm where the small head had lain she had done horrid, unmentionable things. Sunk her teeth into the yearning flesh of it, leaving an inflamed crescent the shape of her bite. Rubbed one bare foot up and down against the other leg until the skin came off like erased blotting paper. Prayed to an inchoate God which she scarcely knew, except as a curse word upon Annie's lips. A hurt, beautiful word that could smoke in her heart.

But now the silences had come back. Not the old singing ones that had been vibrant as a black cat's arched flank. The merer silence of the inside of a bell.

And in this silence she was like a wound healing, the little line of the scar shirring up.

The Musliners were kind.

He did the ordering and was more frequently in the kitchen than she, who danced in only upon the gay occasion of candy pullings and every so often for the excited unwrapping of belated and excelsior-bound wedding gifts.

Shortly after he left in the morning, deliveries began. Great T-bone beefsteaks. Braces of wild fowl packed in hampers. Grapes in December wadded in cotton. Foreign-looking tins of caviar. Marron glace. Chinese ginger. And especially for Mrs. Musliner, who loved littlenesses, plover eggs and palm-sized squabs with bones like toothpicks.

Once, that first winter of their marriage he brought her home, all cotton-wrapped in an enormous carton, an entire miniature farmyard made out of marzipan for the centerpiece that night at her birthday dinner.

She was like a child and bit off the head of a lamb with a squeak of delight. He tried to kiss her there at the unwrapping of it, because in her pink pearl kind of loveliness she was a phantom of delight to him. But she had a way of evading his wetted lips and their background of brown face, with a steely strength that the moment could seem to lend her.

Once when there had been only one week-end house guest and he had gone to his room, Bertha had seen Musliner softly knocking at his wife's door. Almost scratching like a dog.

"Erna." he whispered in the caressing way his brown lips had of saying her name, "Erna." As if the word were a puff of down. "Dearest. Please?" It was very quiet in the hall and her closed door like a tongue out at him.

Something like an ache for Musliner smote Bertha. He was so kind. Often in the fruit hampers was a bag of sweets tucked away for the servants and on Bertha's every other Thursday out, a dollar bill was left lying for her on the kitchen table. He was sensitive, too, in a way that hurt Bertha dimly. Once when she had inadvertently stumbled upon him, seated alone in the dining room with his head in his hands, he had jumped up redly, giving her a random order with a brusqueness not his....

He would have jumped redly, too, had he seen Bertha seeing him as he knocked and tried the door softly.

"Erna--dear. You asleep? It's Ben. Please. Dear? I want to come in."

Finally he went back to his room, closing the door.

Bertha somehow, knew.

Doors. The long corridors of her silence were all nicked up with the sounds of them, closing.

One day, when May like a shy pink parasol was beginning to open wide and wider over the city, a lovely thing happened to Bertha.

The Musliners gave a picnic. Thirty guests climbed gleefully into a moving van especially upholstered in gay cretonnes for the occasion and rode fifteen miles up the Hudson to a grove, recently acquired by Mr. Musliner as an anniversary gift to his wife.

There were hampers of food and freezers of cream and cases of drinks and dozens of lemons and all the flimsy paper napkin and wooden plate paraphernalia dear to picnickers. Hundreds of sandwiches. Pails of salad. Cakes of every turn known to Bertha's hand. For two days Bertha and Julie the waitress and Lulu the housemaid buttered and sliced and wrapped in oiled paper and packed.

A set of white enameled picnic dishes arrived which Mrs. Musliner rejected as "spoiling the fun." Apples were dipped into syrup and impaled upon sticks. Boxes of marshmallows for toasting. Potatoes for roasting. Hammocks were packed into the van and an old upholstered couch upon which Mrs. Musliner reclined, once they had reached the open road, her guests in mock homage about her.

Bertha and Julie rode in front with the driver. How they chattered! Julie was a dark, nervous girl. Rather pretty in her waitress uniform, but sagged and run-down-looking in street clothes. She had been married once and upon the slightest provocation would display a scar across her neck to indicate where a jealous husband had attempted to cut her throat. When the driver saw it he tried to kiss her there and she lurched against Bertha and Bertha lurched against the side of the van and the open road rang with laughter. Julie's. The driver's. And the rising merriment of the group behind. Bertha's laughter, too.

The day was so soft. Warmth ran up her legs. The driver reached around Julie's shoulder to pinch her and she reached across Julie's lap to slap him--plump in the stomach, so that he simulated pain, while really he was doubled up with guffawing.

From inside the van someone spied an organ grinder toiling up the road.

"An organ grinder! Come on in. Hey--you--stop. Come on in. Mucha mon! Comma to picnic. Mucha mon. See. Play for the queen on the dais. Come up--in."

And so the lifted, bewildered Italian dragged merrily into the van and the horse flecked onward with a whip that flashed into an S.

The river ran ahead to show them the road. Bertha had never seen a river. This one was quick and gay and on its way somewhere. Not full of lips like the harbor.

On its way to the grove. On its way to the grove.

"Looka," cried Julie, "all them rusty tin cans down by the water. Some tin can sports musta passed this way."

"Oh. Oh. Oh." Julie holding both her sides with laughter and the driver letting his lines slide to lean over and hold them for her, too.

"Look at that Bo over there in the field," he cried, cracking the S with his whip, "that ain't a nose on him--somebody fired a ripe tomater and it stuck."

"Oh la, la! Ripe tomater. Ain't he bloody? A ripe tomater. Go tell that to your rich uncle if his laughs don't come easy."

"Well, Square-head, it's your looka now. Looka now. Looka there. Looka quick, and tell us what you see--"

"He says, 'Looka quick, Bertha.' Come outta your trance and look! Whadda you see? Look about you. Looka here. Looka there."

"Looka, looka," cried Bertha half daft with the lush smell of grass and of warmth, "looka those clouds--white--white clouds--little children up there--see--falling outta bed--"

"Oh Lord, that's a good one! Giddy ap, you gol-darn plugs you--little children falling outta bed.

Oh lud, it's great to be crazy, It's great to be crazy, Oh lud, it's great, oh it's great to be nuts.

And then Julie taking up the refrain.

"Oh lud, it's great, oh it's great, to be nuts.

***

The Grove ran out in a point to the river and would not let it pass, so the water went around it with a soft hiss. One tree grew almost horizontal and laughed down at it.

Little Mrs. Musliner, with her blouse open at the throat and whortleberry leaves in her hair, jumped astride it and beat it as if it had been a horse.

"Giddy-app--my trusty steed--swim me across the Hellespont!"

Bertha, tilting the salt water out of the ice cream freezer, stood almost waiting for the plunge and the sound of foam and the arrowhead line of the water parting before the tree stump whose leaves were a flowing mane.

A Young Fellow who dined frequently at the house snatched up a fruit knife from one of the hampers, clamped the blade between his teeth, and flew on the tree trunk behind her, balancing her against the shock with his hands on her light young hips, and the guests stood back and cheered.

"If I was little Musliner, I'd wipe up the floor with that young customer," said Julie, who was squeezing lemons.

"What?" said Bertha.

"Aw--you--hunky--you don't know you're on earth unless somebody stages an earthquake under you."

Suddenly Musliner came running down the turf, straddling the tree trunk, too, his little legs waving and too short even to dangle loosely.

"We're off," he shouted and dug with his knees into the spongy bark.

"Three's a crowd," sang somebody. "Who has the grace to stay home from the Hellespont?"

"Why I have," cried the Young Fellow, bounding off, and the red scorching through his fine tan.

"Now," cried Mr. Musliner, wriggling forward with his short fat knees, his hands coming down on the curve of his wife's slim young hips--"Now--we're off--alone!"

But suddenly Mrs. Musliner was tired. She climbed down jerking back from his touch. The wind and the May had gone out of her face.

"Come on," she said, "let us eat."

***

The meal was already spread on long wooden planks set up on wooden braces, but someone found a natural table of dog violets set out beside a little orchestra of waterfall and with great ado and much merriment the feast was moved up the hillside.

Under her breath Julie bitterly demurred. The climb was rocky and the running back and forth, from the hampers in the van to the remote spot on the knoll, twisted her ankles and strained her back and once, scaling the top, she fell and barked her shin and passed sandwiches over gay shoulders with her eyelids stung with the heat of the held-back tears.

But Bertha! With one heft of her arm she carried a case of wine, running with it lightly over the knoll. The dance up and the dance down. Ice cream freezers to be rolled up hill. She shoved aside the assistance of the driver and spun them in an ecstasy along the dark, damp flesh of earth. Rocks bit in through her shoes and she wanted to kick them off, so that her freed toes might bite them back. Rivers of strength seemed pressing at the dam of her body. She wanted the knoll to be a mountain that she might stagger, slip, and sweat up its flank, and the hampers to be kegs with the weight to bend her double.

The old Slav song of the women far behind her, who had worn the runic brooch, was so close to her consciousness that she wanted to sing it as she mounted the hill. The muted old concertina in her carpetbag, from dear knows what ancestral squatter in a peasant hut---she could have played it then; squeezed some of the locked-up ecstasies through it. She wanted to run. Feet were not mute--they tasted the sap of earth and bounded back vibrant with it as if they had drunk wine. The hillside. It cut her. It skinned her shoes and on the inside her toes curled, pushed against her stockings, and wanted out.

The wine ran in little pools. The Young Fellow, with his fingers for Pan's pipes, did an oafish dance around the table that was spread with wood violets. Someone tossed a great platter of the sandwiches high up and let them rain down again, splattering and scattering. Mrs. Musliner sucked at a candied apple and shot out her little red bib of a tongue at everybody, but longest and reddest to the Young Fellow, who touched the top of it with his forefinger and then pressed that forefinger behind his ear.

The sun, hot and high and prodigal, made great stains of light and shade. After a while groups and pairs began to shy off. One dark youth in eyeglasses stretched himself solemnly down the length of the table of dog violets, an empty wine bottle very tight in his clutch, and almost immediately fell asleep. Mrs. Musliner, side-stepping him gingerly, stuck a lilac spray upright between his teeth, so that it waved there to the tipsy wind of his breath. Then she and the Young Fellow squealing delight at this danced off down a footpath that turned suddenly and wiggled teasingly through some underbrush.

Even Julie and the driver had gone off and the organ-grinder lay asleep in a tree hollow with his body all up in a coil.

It was pleasant tiptoeing over the violets and wadding all the paper napkins up in a ball, and poking them out of sight in a hamper and stacking the wooden plates and scattering the crumbs and running up and down the knoll and clearing the forest back into its woodland quiet, so that the tinkle of the waterfall came through again and, except for those caught under the sleeping figure with the lilac spray waving in his breath, all the little violets lifted themselves up again as if after a storm.

Once, rolling an empty freezer down a steeper side of the knoll, she came upon Musliner, seated at the head of the trail that wiggled so naughtily off through some underbrush, and chewing a blade of grass.

"Well, Bertha, we seem to be the sole survivers of the party."

"Oh, Mr. Musliner, it's grand."

"Grand." A word as lonesome as a mountain and she wanted to tell him warmly about the lovely, green-lace grove of his and of the Slav song that ran along her throat wanting out, just as her feet running over the warm earth in their bluchers wanted out. "Grand." She could have bitten her tongue for some of its blood to flow into and warm what she wanted to say, but all that she had was "grand" and so she stood saying it and smiling at him with the lips which she hated because they were mutes.

"You're a good girl, Bertha," he said, looking at her with eyes that were hurt as if they had spikes through them, "you don't run off and shirk the job like Julie. Here."

He handed her a silver dollar. She took it and should have gone on trundling her ice cream freezer down the hillside toward the van, but somehow she didn't. She stood there, looking and wetting at her lips.

"Well?" he said. He was half seated on a tree stump, one leg dangling, and chewing and chewing the blade of grass along his front teeth.

Her gaze kept darting from him to down the little snake of trail and her throat kept tightening. She knew. He had worked very hard over this day. Her day. It lay now in a ruin around him, as he sat there chewing the grass blade his brown lips twisted as if it were bitter. In the tree hollow the organ grinder slept in his tight little coil. Bertha trundling the ice cream freezer down the hill. Otherwise no one left back. Not even Julie and the driver. Little bells of laughter through the trees. Bertha somehow didn't matter. For the life of him he could not keep his eyes, as if they were wounded in his head, from rolling a little toward that trail.

"I'll bring you a candied apple," she said.

She wanted him to be surly. It would have been easier then, for her not to be sorry, but he smiled and nodded no, and all she could think of to say through the ache in her throat was:

"There is an ice cream rooster left over and some Burgundy. You would like a nice cool glass of Burgundy?"

"No, Bertha," he said, "thank you, now you run along and clear up and don't you bother about me." But his eyes were traveling down the trail with hers, and finally he rose and came over to her, looking up at her from his squatness and with the brownish whites to his eyes very prominent.

"She's very young, Bertha," he said. "We must help her."

"I--want to--"

"Help her, Bertha. Never let her do anything that will make her unhappy. She is too young to see clearly ahead--you are a home-body--watch over her, Bertha--mother her."

Mother, That was a word that could twist her and make her want to bite at the cove of her arm, and yet, standing there on the hillside, hurting with this man's pain, it was as if something within her were spreading to cover a huddler. Actually, Bertha was two months younger than Mrs. Musliner, but so strangely older in the locked-up lore of the dim procession that peopled her silences!

Back in that procession, a young fledgling who walked in beauty and whose Sonatas had not yet been born, but whose melodies were to wind down through the centuries, had pursued a girl with flax-colored braids like Bertha's, across a plushy field in south of Hungary, capturing her finally and kissing her. At first she beat him off and then, because his lips were rich and his young head defiant, like a child's, it was she who held him. Broodily and close to her heart in the harvest moonlight ... at dawn he was still singing softly to a great-great-grandmother of Bertha, troubled wisps of melodies that were not quite born to him yet--precious, groping old songs that were locked now in the heart of Bertha. Old Bertha, who was two months younger than Mrs. Musliner.

***

The sunlight bowed back out of the grove and the couples and groups came back tiredly and happily and hungrily out of the dusk. The driver built a bonfire and the Young Fellow unpacked the marshmallows and Bertha, with the water singing over her hands, washed the potatoes for roasting at the spring, and a full moon as dainty as an apricot came up between two trees.

Firelight on faces. Eager mouths with the teeth showing, hovering over just the right brownness of marshmallow. Low laughter. The grove crowding up around the circle of light. Mrs. Musliner, with her face in her palms and the reflected firelight leaping and falling in her eyes which had crybaby rims around them. The smell of darkness and the bleed of sap. Leaves, curling and burning to death with gestures of human pain. Over by the spring it was so dark that it seemed to Bertha that the evening was some great black cow standing there beside her panting softly, so that she could feel its sides breathe. Sweet-smelling darkness with a give to it like a cow's flank. The earth beside the spring was all wet with clear water and leaning over to rinse potatoes, she could feel the little sucks, greedily at her feet.

Warm, pulling, sucking earth that had teased her all day and over which her feet wanted to leap, free!

And then Bertha sat down, slyly, on a moss-tinged jut of rock, and picked up her skirts, and down came her great balbriggan stockings, wide-ribbed and the color of clay, and out sprang her legs. White urns in the gloom. The rip open of buttons. Little yawns of her empty shoes standing there on a dirt ledge. Squnch, into the slow pour of the good black mud that closed up around her ankles like a strong and hungry mouth.

Squnch. Squnch. Squirm of the pouring soil up between her churning, spatulate toes. She could feel it with the very pit of her. Warm. Black. Close. Her mysterious friend, the soil, whispering to her with those tight eager lips--it was difficult not to throw out her arms and shout--tear open her bulk of blouse where it cluttered her breast and shout--the curling, winding, whispering, kissing soil hugging her with its eager lips--she wanted to run--to run back barefoot along the plushy fields.

The organ grinder, dazed with good food and drink, began suddenly to grind out, in rapid spill from his hurdy gurdy, a folk song out of Ukrainia.

High cheek bones and velvet bodices that laced up in front. Red cotton skirts that twirled. Men in high boots and tight red sashes and fine mustachios that scratched! Sweat in hovels. Long low rafters, candlelight-scarred. Quivering hips. Waving mugs. Low of bulls and slow, hot smell of steaming dung heaps. Sweat and love and courage of solitary childbirth on wide moors. Strength of splayed Slav lips! Yeow, the ring of rafters! Yeow, the splayed Slav lips! Bertha with her arms outspread and a yeow that landed her squat on her heels out on a spot of turf that was stained with the firelight!

"Hurra! Look! Who is this? The cook! That's the girl. Give us a dance. Native heath, by Jove. Look at your Swede, Muzz, spinning a goulash fandangle. Bravo, go to it--Yuiop-- I say!"

***