But she took two towels nevertheless and in some miraculous way with cotton and clothespins and crayons and scraps, made dolls of fascinating character and expression. And for mouths there were buttonholed slits, very conveniently opened for “nippy bottles” which you could buy at the store for two cents. “Cathern” had nothing like them.
There were other things that Mother Grace did. When she noticed that “Cathern” and her sister “Gwadys” often had tea-parties in the afternoon (exclusive tea-parties to which no one was invited) she scrubbed the sooty back porch and put out a carpet and table and chairs and there suddenly appeared a surprise party of oatmeal cookies and cocoa molasses candy. And this was an exceptional party, for she invited not only Cathern and Gwadys (with intent to heap coals of fire perhaps) but six others beside.
And when Dave and Dan joined the choir and went away for a week’s vacation in a camp there was an evening treat for the girls every night. Sometimes it was ice cream and sometimes it was moving pictures and when it was ice cream, Mother Grace divided the pitcherful (it was now ten cents worth) into three equal parts, but somehow she could never finish hers.
“A little goes a long way,” she assured them, and then there was an extra portion to divide.
Mary was one of the porch children and the eldest of nine. She was a Catholic, and she told June of the mysteries of her religion and her saints one evening after the supper dishes were done, and before the smaller children had to be put to bed. The gleaming stars glimpsed through the network of porches, the soft warm night, and the dusky odorous alley made her disclosures all the more impressive. She also gave June the story of a saint to read, with the result that thereafter June prayed to Pelagia, her birthday saint, every time a whipping threatened. It didn’t avert the punishment, but her faith remained unshaken. Were the saints ever saved from the cauldrons of boiling oil by their prayers?
One hot night, when the hurdy-gurdies were playing in the street, and the call of the “hot tamale” man and the voices of the passersby kept the night alive, Adele stuck her elbow in June’s ribs.
“Tell me a story so’s I kin get to sleep,” she demanded.
“Won’t!” June replied. “I’m thinkin’.”
“All right for you. I’ll tell Mother how you went swimmin’ again with the boys after she told you not to.”
“All right, then, I’ll make an old witch’s face at you and scare you.”
“I’ll tell Mother on you for that too. Are y’gonna tell me a story?” she asked1 threateningly.
A whipping had lost its novelties and much of its terror for June. She was about to pull her sister’s hair when she thought of St. Pelagia and a new game they hadn’t played. Adele snuggled her hot face against her shoulder and breathed on her neck while June narrated the trials and struggles of the early saints.
“So you see,” she mumbled in conclusion, “if you ever expect to get to heaven, we’ve got to begin trying that stuff now. They all slept on the floor and hard boards and the stone floors of prison cells and ate nothing but bread and water. I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I’m going to sleep on the floor tonight.”
“You ain’t gonna be the only martyr. Me too.”
For weeks after that their bedroom at night was transformed into a bare cell, and to their glowing imaginations, visions of St. Pelagia and the Virgin with her little Christ child hovered around. And every night the smell of beer and whiskey came up in waves from the saloon below, and the Drunken Lady who lived in the flat above fell into bed and snorted and groaned with the heat all night.
And then they moved away from the tenement and for a time life lost its poignancy.
II
Life was becoming very difficult for June. There was nothing to do but read and go to school and help with the housework. Reading, in itself, might have been a pleasure, save for the fact that it was always interrupted to help prepare meals, to set tables, to make beds. Reading, moreover, seemed to make life even more of a problem.
For instance, there was the question of her soul and where she was before she was born and what would be come of her afterward. In reading Martin Eden, she came across references to Herbert Spencer, and she borrowed First Principles from the library and was unhappy that she could not understand it. In reading Edgar Allan Poe, she found references to metempsychosis which was easier to understand and believe, after consulting works of reference. The word led to research in ancient religion. She bumped into Kant and Spinoza afterwards and found them insurmountable. Coming across Darwin, she was slightly encouraged at finding him relatively understandable, and Darwin led her to Huxley and Huxley to Fabre.
She was learning a good deal, she reflected, not in the curriculum at the high school where she had to translate twenty lines each of French, Latin and Greek, write a theme, and read ten pages of dull history a day.
She was studying continually, but in her reading, she had not found any references to adolescence, nor anything to explain why life was so unreasonably difficult and why she was so unhappy.
In a sudden reaction from Zoroastrianism June became interested in the Episcopal church which her mother had attended as
