The address was a delicatessen. He thought that perhaps her mother, in somewhat reduced circumstances, might have taken an apartment above the store, but there was no apartment entrance and he looked into the delicatessen. There in the back, dressed in a hat and coat and surrounded by suitcases, sat Beatrice. She was crying and her eyes were red. “Oh, thank you for coming, Moses dear,” she said, as daintily as ever. “I’ll be ready to go in just a minute. I want to catch my breath.”
The room where she sat was the kitchen of the delicatessen. There were two other people there. Beatrice didn’t explain or introduce them but Moses recognized one as Beatrice’s mother. The resemblance was marked, although she was a very stout woman with a florid and handsome face. She wore an apron over her dress and her shoes were broken. The other woman was thin and old. This was Clancy. Here were the origins of Beatrice’s splendid and unhappy memories. Her governess was a delicatessen cook.
The two women were making sandwiches. Now and then they spoke to Beatrice, but she didn’t reply. They didn’t seem troubled by her tear-stained face or her silence and the atmosphere in the kitchen was of a spent and ancient misunderstanding. The contrast between the stories Beatrice had told him of her unhappy childhood—her elegant and callous mother—and the clear lights of the delicatessen made her dilemma as keen and touching as the troubles of a child.
It was a fine delicatessen. The acid smell of pickles in brine came from some barrels near the door. Fresh sawdust had been scattered on the floor by Clancy—a little of it still clung to her apron—and from the door to the rear of the place, from the floor to the ceiling, were stacked cans of vegetables and fruit, shrimps, stone crabs, lobster meat, soups and chickens. There were baked turkeys and fowl in the glass cases, hams, turban-shaped rolls in the bread bins, sliced cucumbers in vinegar, creamed cheese, rollmops, smoked salmon, whitefish and sturgeon, and from this abundance of acid and appetizing smells poor Beatrice had invented an unhappy childhood with a hardhearted mother and a stern governess.
A little sob came from Beatrice. She took a paper napkin from a container on the table and blew her nose into it. “If you could get a taxi and take my suitcases out, Moses dear,” she said. “I’m too weak.” He knew what her suitcases contained—that magpie wardrobe—and when he lifted them they felt like stone. He carried the bags out to the curb and got a cab and Clancy followed with a large paper bag full of sandwiches. “She’ll eat them on the train,” Clancy said to Moses. Beatrice said nothing to either her mother or the cook and in the taxi she sobbed some more and kept blowing her nose into the paper napkin.
Moses carried her bags through the station and put them on the Cleveland train and then Beatrice kissed him good-by daintily and began to cry in earnest. “Oh dear Moses, I’ve done something awful, and I have to tell you. You know how they always investigate people, I mean they ask everybody you know about you, and a man came to see me one afternoon and I told him this long story about how you took advantage of me and promised to marry me and took all my money but I had to tell them something because they would have thought I was immoral if I didn’t and I’m sorry and I hope nothing bad happens to you.” Then the conductor shouted all aboard and the train pulled out for Cleveland.
And now we come to the wreck of the
This happened on May 30—her first voyage of the year. For two weeks Leander and the hired hand—Bentley—had been getting her into shape. The lilac was in bloom and in St. Botolphs there were hedges of lilac—there were whole groves and forests of it blooming the length of River Street and growing wild around the cellar holes on the other side of the hill. Going to the wharf in the early mornings Leander saw that the children walking to school all carried branches of lilac. He wondered if they gave it to their teachers, who must have lilac trees themselves, or used it to decorate the classrooms. All that week he saw children carrying lilac branches to school. Early on the morning of the thirtieth he cut some lilac himself and took it to the cemetery and then he went down to the
