Grandmother had never seen her daughter’s house. The maid who answered the door did not know her.
“I’m Mrs. Dolarhyde,” she said, barging past the servant. Her slip was showing three inches in the back. She led Francis into a big living room with a pleasant fire.
“Who is it, Viola?” A woman’s voice from upstairs.
Grandmother cupped Francis’s face in her hand. He could smell the cold leather glove. An urgent whisper. “Go see Mother, Francis. Go see Mother. Run!”
He shrank from her, twisting on the tines of her eyes.
“Go see Mother. Run!” She gripped his shoulders and marched him toward the stairs. He trotted up to the landing and looked back down at her. She motioned upward with her chin.
Up to the strange hallway toward the open bedroom door.
Mother was seated at her dressing table checking her makeup in a mirror framed with lights. She was getting ready for a political rally, and too much rouge wouldn’t do. Her back was to the door.
“Muhner,” Francis piped, as he had been taught. He tried hard to get it right. “Muhner.”
She saw him in the mirror then. “If you’re looking for Ned, he isn’t home from . . .”
“Muhner.” He came into the heartless light.
Marian heard her mother’s voice downstairs demanding tea. Her eyes widened and she sat very still. She did not turn around. She turned out the makeup lights and vanished from the mirror. In the darkened room she gave a single low keening that ended in a sob. It might have been for herself, or it might have been for him.
Grandmother took Francis to all the political rallies after that and explained who he was and where he came from. She had him say hello to everyone. They did not work on “hello” at home.
Mr. Vogt lost the election by eighteen hundred votes.
26
At Grandmother’s house, Francis Dolarhyde’s new world was a forest of blue-veined legs.
Grandmother Dolarhyde had been running her nursing home for three years when he came to live with her. Money had been a problem since her husband’s death in 1936; she had been brought up a lady and she had no marketable skills.
What she had was a big house and her late husband’s debts. Taking in boarders was out. The place was too isolated to be a successful boardinghouse. She was threatened with eviction.
The announcement in the newspaper of Marian’s marriage to the affluent Mr. Howard Vogt had seemed a godsend to Grandmother. She wrote to Marian repeatedly for help, but received no answer. Every time she telephoned, a servant told her Mrs. Vogt was out.
Finally, bitterly, Grandmother Dolarhyde made an arrangement with the county and began to take in elderly indigent persons. For each one she received a sum from the county and erratic payments from such relatives as the county could locate. It was hard until she began to get some private patients from middle-class families.
No help from Marian all this time—and Marian could have helped.
Now Francis Dolarhyde played on the floor in the forest of legs. He played cars with Grandmother’s Mah
-Jongg pieces, pushing them among feet twisted like gnarled roots.
Mrs. Dolarhyde could keep clean wash dresses on her residents, but she despaired at trying to make them keep on their shoes.
The old people sat all day in the living room listening to the radio. Mrs. Dolarhyde had put in a small aquarium for them to watch as well, and a private contributor had helped her cover her parquet floors with linoleum against the inevitable incontinence.
They sat in a row on the couches and in wheelchairs listening to the radio, their faded eyes fixed on the fish or on nothing or something they saw long ago.
Francis would always remember the shuffle of feet on linoleum in the hot and buzzing day, and the smell of stewed tomatoes and cabbage from the kitchen, the smell of the old people like meat wrappers dried in the sun, and always the radio.
Rinso white, Rinso bright
Happy little washday song.
Francis spent as much time as he could in the kitchen, because his friend was there. The cook, Queen Mother Bailey, had grown up in the service of the late Mr. Dolarhyde’s family. She sometimes brought Francis a plum in her apron pocket, and she called him “Little Possum, always dreamin’.” The kitchen was warm and safe. But Queen Mother Bailey went home at night. . . .