For lunch there was always potato soup and for supper there were bananas, bread and butter and jelly and tea. June didn’t like tea and she didn’t like jelly. And she didn’t like being sent after the bananas. “Get dead ripe ones,” her mother always said. “They ought to be only ten cents a dozen.” And Mother Grace told her if she couldn’t get them for ten cents in one place to go on to the next …
There was housework to do. Wiping dishes and sometimes washing. Wiping up the floor, and worst of all, dusting. After June and Adele read the story of Polly Pepper from the Sunday School library, there was more fascination in housework. June even polished the faucets of the kitchen sink.
Once there was a terrible scene. Mother Grace picked up dishes one by one and slammed them on the floor. Mr. Henreddy got behind her and tried to hold her and kept saying, “Grace, now Grace dear.”
June and Adele were making valentines—the next day they were going to get up early and distribute them to the other children around the porches—and they sat with gaudy bits of paper in their hands and whimpered as the smashing continued. Dan hustled them into the bedroom and made them go down on their knees and pray. Dave wouldn’t pray. He just sat with white lips and pretended to go on reading.
Afterwards when it was over and Mother Grace was weak and shaking on the bed, Mr. Henreddy sent out for ice cream for the children, but June refused to eat hers. It was too terrible an evening to think of eating ice cream. She sat and wept. Wept for her mother, and for her father because he was so pathetic in his efforts to comfort them. And because ice cream, generally considered a treat, made the tragedy more poignant.
The next day Mother Grace made a terse remark about losing her nerve and no more was said about it. June had a hideous feeling of shame and bitterness in her heart, but she did not blame her mother for a minute. Mother Grace was brave as a general rule. She had a sweet habit of “dressing up” in the afternoon. Not that she wasn’t neat and tidy in her pleasant house dresses in the morning. But on cleaning days when the floors had to be scrubbed or after a hard morning in the common laundry in the basement of the tenement, Mother Grace was exceptionally dainty.
June loved to watch and help; to prepare the hot bath with just a drop of cologne, for Mother Grace couldn’t afford bath salts; to lay out the towels and the treasured silk kimono with storks and flowers embroidered on it. And afterwards to keep Adele quietly amused on the back porch while Mother Grace napped for fifteen minutes. She seldom allowed herself more for there was always sewing and mending to do in the afternoon.
It was a special treat to be allowed to help at the dressing, to brush out the long twist of hair.
“Oh dear, oh dear, won’t it ever get all grey,” she often said. It was beautifully white around her face and she was proud of it, for she was only thirty. “I’ve heard say that you could have your hair whitened, but I doubt it. There—that’s enough for the brushing of it. Just see if I get all the little hairs tucked-in in back, dear. The hand-glass, please. If it won’t curl, it’s got to stay tucked. Women who let their hair straggle on the back of their necks, add ten years to their age—” this denunciation of the careless woman coming through several hairpins which Mother Grace kept in readiness in her mouth to tuck some more.
It was fun to powder her round neck and dimpled shoulder blades and still more fun to watch her with the pinkish, smelly powder for her face and the little dabs of rouge for cheeks and the lobes of her ears.
There was a deep sigh of pleasure for her improved appearance and always the emphatic statement that she felt a hundred times better already.
The toilet was completed when violet perfume was applied delicately to eyebrows and behind the ears, and as a reward for services rendered, to the flat bosom of June’s frock.
This afternoon’s toilet always brought back the smiley corners to Mother Grace’s lips and eyes.
But in times of unusual stress, when the rent had to be paid and there was no money to pay it, or when Mr. Henreddy had been hypercritical about the breakfast set before him and had stamped around and made the atmosphere blue, there was relief to be found in what Mother Grace termed “dissipation.”
June was sent down the street to spend fifteen cents on a bottle of ginger ale and the sewing that afternoon would be accompanied by sips of ginger ale highball.
“Will you have just a taste of ‘oh-be-joyful’ in your ginger ale?” Mother would say gayly, and June would have a thimbleful added, not because she liked the taste, but because she liked to feel grown-up and companionable. And the warm feeling produced was very pleasant, too.
Whenever Mother Grace referred to whiskey as “oh-be-joyful” she’d sigh, “dear old Uncle Charlie,” and there would follow stories about him and his whaling vessel and his iceboat on the Hudson and when Mother was a little girl. To which little June listened with absorbed attention—so absorbed, indeed, that she could not darn more than two holes in the afternoon.
One of the little girls whom
