I didn’t think I could give it up. But I had to. Firmly I sat down on the sofa and opened the Comet I’d abstracted from the advertising file on my way out of the office.
There weren’t many Help Wanteds. They ran, mostly, “Girl wanting good home more than wages, help mother with 6 chil., $2 wk.” Or, “Sell on sight, knitted sports frocks.”
Nothing there.
I did the Unfurnished Apartments next, went on through Unfurnished Rooms, and started on Housekeeping Rooms.
There, on the third ad, my eyes stopped.
It seems queer, looking back, to think how casually I came across that ad. Queer, how inevitable that sequence of events was, that led from that lost job to Mrs. Garr’s house.
Clean, lt, airy dng rm and kit of old mansion, gas, lt, and ht furn. $4.50 wk, 593 Trent.
That was what the ad said. Words, I suppose, can’t carry an aura. What I thought was, Glory, that’s cheap. If I can’t get a job by November, I’ll go and be a mother’s help, wants home more than wages. What awful hooey—could anyone? About twenty dollars a month for rent, gas, light, and heat. Two hundred and seventy-eight dollars and thirty-two cents divided by—well, divided by eight. Eight into $278.32 is about thirty-five dollars. Thirty-five dollars a month. Thirty-five dollars minus twenty dollars leaves fifteen dollars a month to eat on. Baby, you’ll eat oatmeal and like it. But can you do it? Absolutely!
—
I KNEW JUST ABOUT where 593 Trent Street would be. Gilling City is the state capital; the capitol building is on the side of our biggest hill, and Trent Street runs along one side of the capitol. Five ninety-three should be pretty close to the top of Capitol Hill.
It was misting a little when I got off the streetcar at Sixteenth and Buller, to walk the three blocks up Sixteenth to Trent. Cold, too; just cold enough for the sleety mist to stick to the brown fuzz of my sports coat and make me look like a walking fog. My face prickled with the mist; when I stuck my tongue out at it, it bit like a hundred needles, and my ears were filled with the soft spit, spit it made everywhere it hit. Sixteenth is steep; the fourplexes lining it are all built on the bias, with one long side showing most of the basement wall, and one short side hitting the hill too soon.
As I walked the last block up Sixteenth I had, on my right, the old Elliott House that was built by one of the state’s early governors; it’s a huge square of red stone, boxlike except for the porte cochere on the Trent Street side, and with a red brick wall circling its grounds. Across Sixteenth was a pink ice-cream fourplex, brand new. Across Trent was a gray wooden monstrosity dripping wood lace. Kitty-corner, on the one remaining corner, was a big red brick shoebox broken by three-window bays. Even across the corner, I could see the scrolled gold numbers on the old-fashioned fanlight above the door.
Five ninety-three.
That, then, was my first look at 593 Trent Street. At Mrs. Garr’s house.
I crossed over. I often like old houses; this one was dignified, not too ornate, not bad at all if it hadn’t been so dirty.
Mist was sticking to its red-black brick, but instead of looking foggy and clean, it looked foggy and dirty, grimy with a dirt unbelievable in a city as young as ours. Against its sniffling background of air indistinguishable from sky, all one thick, damp, even gray, it was drenched but still dirty, with black soot washing in little runnels down the walls, runnels that were still red-black after the soot had washed.
I walked along Sixteenth Street, down the side of the house, until I got to the railing. Sixteenth Street ends there, not ten feet behind the house, because the hill there drops sixty feet, straight down, to the huddled gray houses on Water Street, below. The drop has been cemented, smooth and straight, the entire dizzy height.
Right then, standing there, I had a moment of doubt. I’d read Les Misérables once, and laughed at the frequency with which its characters hung on the brink of an abyss. But 593 Trent Street hovered too closely to an abyss for comfort. Who could say, if a wind should come, that its bricks wouldn’t waver like cards in a card house, clatter and rattle down that concrete cliff, shatter and stun and kill and heap in a gigantic trash pile on that huddle of houses below, so far below?
Mr. Gangan once said I had “too God damn much imagination.”
I shook myself, walked around to the front of the house, up the steps, and twisted the decorated iron triangle that stood out from the door casing.
A jangle sounded inside, but almost before it had begun the door opened.
—
I USED TO THINK, afterward, that I’d never depend on my judgment of people again.
Because my first impression of Mrs. Garr, as she stood there blocking her open door, was pleasant.
It was her hair.
Her hair was white, and the first time I saw her I saw nothing beyond it. It was beautiful hair. She talked, I answered, but instead of watching mouth and eyes as I usually do, I looked at her hair.
White.
If you’ve seen cleaned white goose feathers, sleek and shining, you know something of the color and the texture, too; it looked that soft. Her way of wearing it was old-fashioned: a curled pompadour in front, like a fluff of soap bubbles, and a soft knot of the back hair on top of her head.
“Didn’t I just see you walking around the house, miss?” was what she said.
I didn’t pick up on the suspicion, or the fact that she must have been watching me through a window. I was looking at her hair.
“Yes,” I said in my pleasantest voice. “I walked back to see the drop.
