Ladies In The Parlor Read online

  LADIES IN THE PARLOR

  by Jim Tully

  ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN1935 BY GREENBERG PUBLISHER

  DIGITAL VERSION 2012 RING eBOOKS

  ADDITIONAL TEXT BY SCOTT ALEXANDER © 2012

  www.ringebooks.com

  TO

  W. D. GREET

  GEORGE STAHLMAN

  AND

  WALTER WINCHELL

  COMPANIONS

  “Down the roadway in the dusk,

  Where the shapes of hunger wander

  And the fugitives of pain go by.”

  A philosophy undoubtedly perverse has induced me to believe that good and evil, pleasure and sorrow, beauty and ugliness, reason and folly, are blended, one into thy other, by shades as indiscernible as those on the neck of a dove.

  ERNEST RENAN

  Chapter 1

  Leora Blair was the oldest of nine brothers and sisters. Her home was on the Ohio River.

  Her mother had flat breasts and a tired expression. Her eyes were bleared, her voice whined. She always wore a calico dress buttoned down the front.

  Leora’s father was a shambling man with narrow, stooped shoulders, a coconut head, and a red, bulbous nose. One eye was smaller and lower than the other. His high cheek-bones seemed ready to break out of the skin.

  When he became angry at his wife, he would pull his tobacco-stained mustache, and scream, “God Almighty, every time I hang my pants on the bed, you git knocked up.” The mother, with nine bits of evidence all around her, would make no comment.

  Bill Blair worked from seven at night till seven each morning of the week in the round-house of a railroad.

  He would steal several hours’ sleep each night. This gave him many waking hours at home, over which he ruled with hate. His wages were seventy-five dollars a month and his duties were to clean the engines.

  His nine children dreaded his presence in the house. All were happier when he started for work each night.

  Leora Blair early learned to hate and avoid him.

  Her eyes were vivid and blue. Her hair was deep brown, wavy, and tinged with auburn.

  Beautiful early, it was hard to imagine her the child of such parents.

  One afternoon her brother was an hour late in returning from an errand for his father. The parent met the boy on the porch and whipped him severely. Rebelling at last, the boy turned suddenly, knocked his father down, and kicked him in the ribs, calling him a Goddamned, red-nosed son-of-a-bitch.

  Still in a rage, the boy left the home. Meeting Leora at the gate, he said quickly, “Good-bye, Sis—I’m on my way.”

  Leora watched him hurry in the direction of the river and for the first and only time in her childhood, she had a feeling of loneliness for him. She stepped onto the porch just as her father was crawling into the house. “Go call your mother,” he yelled at her.

  The girl looked at him.

  “You God-damned brat, call your mother,” her father shook his fist.

  The mother heard him yelling and dragged her feet from the back yard.

  “Leora, run and git some hot water for your father.” Leora stood still.

  The mother glanced at her defiant daughter and went for the water.

  The father was, by this time, in a pine rocking chair. He glared at his daughter.

  “God’ll punish you,” he said.

  Hate welled in her eyes.

  Her father clutched at his side; then rushed and grabbed Leora. She pounded at him and buried her teeth in his wrist. He released his grip with a moan, screaming, “You God-damn little spitfire.”

  Leora slammed the door and was gone.

  The mother went to her husband and asked plaintively, “What’ll we ever do with that child?”

  “We’ll send her to the reform school,” said the father, “She ain’t fit to live in a decent home.”

  The mother made no answer.

  A few weeks later, the father caught Leora lightly caressing a neighbor boy.

  After she had struggled until exhausted, he beat her unmercifully.

  “I’ll teach her she can’t disgrace the Blairs,” he shouted to his wife, who came running toward them.

  For a moment her scrawny hands opened and shut like angry talons, as she glared at her husband. “If you touch her agin, I’ll kill you—you, and your talk about disgracin’ the God-damned Blairs.”

  He stood, frightened before the rage of his wife.

  Leora went to her mother’s side. Her arm went round the child. Her hand patted its shoulder.

  “What’d you beat her for?”

  “For carryin’s on, that’s what,” he answered sullenly.

  “It’s too bad,” shouted the mother, “that Leora can’t put her arm around a neighbor boy.”

  “Don’t, Mother,” said Leora, “it’s the last time—he’ll never beat me no more.”

  With her arm still around the child, they walked to the house.

  That night the mother soothed her child’s body with witch-hazel. Stopping for a second in her rubbing, she gazed at the lovely body of her daughter, just beginning to bud.

  “Mother,” said the girl, “I hate every hair in his head, and I’ll run away, too.”

  “Please don’t,” pleaded the mother, “what’ll I do without both you an’ Buddy?” She sobbed, “Promise me you won’t leave.”

  It was some time before Leora said, “All right.”

  “Besides,” said the mother, “you mustn’t hate, Leora; it’ll get you nowheres.”

  “Well, love ain’t got you no place,” returned the child.

  After Leora was asleep, the mother lay by the child’s bed a long time and watched her body twitch.

  Finally, Leora sighed in deep slumber. The tired, flat-breasted mother rose, looked down at her, and said softly to herself, “Lord, she’s purty,” then knelt by the bedside and held the child’s hand.

  Doors slammed as the other children entered the house. Still the mother sat by the child.

  At last she pulled the quilt over the young breasts, just beginning to swell.

  Standing erect, she rubbed her own flat breasts and left the room. She dragged herself to the kitchen, cleared the dirty dishes from the oil-cloth covered table and piled them in a dishpan. Going to the well, she pumped a bucket of water, poured it over the dishes to “let ‘em soak till morning.” Then, without undressing, she fell, exhausted, across her unmade bed.

  Chapter 2

  Leora awoke early. Her aching body would not let her sleep. More distinctly than ever she heard the deep breathing of her brothers and sisters and the restless rolling of her mother.

  She could hear the whistle of a boat on the river. “Maybe the ‘River Queen’ coming from Cincinnati,” she thought.

  She went to the small window at the gabled end of the small pine house and gazed across the river. People were leaving a large well-lit boat. She sat very still for a long time.

  The most pleasant hours of her childhood had been spent in watching the boats go up and down the river.

  Several times each summer a showboat would stop at the foot of Fulton Street.

  She would often loiter about the boat with her cousin, Alice Tracy, who was three years older than herself.

  Her aunt would take Alice and herself to see the plays on the boat.

  Alice had later joined a company on a showboat, and was now in Chicago.

  In spite of her numerous brothers and sisters, Leora’s life had often been solitary in the town, which was laid out like a checker-board, the poorer people living in small pine houses “over the tracks.” All the houses were built alike on the street where Leora lived. A stranger was not able to tell them apart.

  The town was a railroad division point. It literally lived �
��on the railroad.” Engineers and conductors were at the top of the social scale. Dates were set by “pay days.” They came once a month. A picnic, for instance, would not be held too long after pay day. A young man, beginning as a railroader, and who joined a lodge, married on credit and settled down to a life of debt, was highly considered in the town.

  There was a woods to the rear of the Blair home, known as Hardy’s Grove. It was used as a picnic ground during the summer. A creek ran at one edge of it toward the river. Comprising ten acres, a wagon road and paths led to the center where a raised platform had been built. Here, for a period dating before the Civil War, the politicians of their little day had expounded. Large elms, beeches, and sycamores lined each side of the creek. Their branches intertwined overhead. Through them the sun dappled the water with shadow.

  Here Leora had played from childhood. Her brother had made a swing under a long sycamore branch, which she used frequently.

  Gypsies came regularly to the center of Hardy’s Grove and traded horses with the natives, while their women told fortunes.

  They would camp along the creek for several days, and travel on as mysteriously as they came. They never failed to fill Leora with wonder. Their vari-colored clothes and the freedom of their lives made her overlook the filth of which her aunt complained.

  Though the men cheated the natives when they traded horses, the women made friends with the children by telling them pleasant fortunes and only charging them twenty-five cents.

  One had held Leora’s hand and told her a fortune that a queen might envy. The children laughed, while her aunt wondered if it would “turn out true.”

  Her aunt lived across the grove. She was Leora’s father’s sister, and was known in the town as Red Moll because of her fondness for bright red dresses.

  Her house of seven rooms and one story was in the front of a hickory woods. Living with her were young women known as “boarders.” It was visited often by men, and, as a consequence, Red Moll was spurned in the town. Whether or not she cared, no one knew. She owned the house. It was out of the jurisdiction of the town.

  She did not like her brother, but was fond of his wife and children. If Mrs. Blair knew of her sister-in-law’s reputation, she accepted it’ with the resignation with which she had given birth to her children.

  While some of the women in the town wondered if part of their husbands’ money had not gone to the girls at Red Moll’s, she was unmolested in the town. The girls at her house came and went, and some preferred to “rest up” at Red Moll’s for months at a time.

  Red Moll had one gold tooth in the center of her mouth. Her lips were thin, her mouth small. The gold tooth marred an otherwise attractive smile. It was called a “Cincinnati tooth” and was rare in the town. Engineers and the more prosperous citizens went to Cincinnati to have dental work done.

  Red Moll was slender, with a quick step and graceful carriage. If any man other than her husband, long ago killed in a wreck, had been in her life, that also was a secret.

  As usual in such a town, the men talked about the public women they knew. Evidently no one had known Red Moll intimately. It was said once that she had gone away with a leading carriage manufacturer to Cincinnati, and that later he had paid the mortgage on her home, and died. Red Moll did not attend the funeral, and never mentioned his name.

  Leora had heard considerable about her aunt through indirect gossip. But, like her aunt, indifferent and silent by nature, it concerned her not at all.

  Each year Red Moll’s yard was full of red geraniums. Nasturtiums and morning-glories climbed over her paling fence, and grape-vines over a latticed pergola that half-filled the back yard, and covered the boardwalk that led to the hickory grove.

  Her home was gaudily furnished with red plush chairs and couches. Her own room was simple as a nun’s. In one corner was a plaster statue of the Blessed Virgin in a glass case.

  On the center table was a booklet showing scenes of the World’s Fair at St. Louis. Where it came from, Red Moll had forgotten. Near it was a small vase labeled NIAGARA FALLS. In the living-room was a crude painting advertising “Green River Whisky.” An old Negro leaned on a mule. To its saddle was strapped a jug of liquor. Beneath were the words, “THEY WERE BRED IN OLD KENTUCKY.”

  Four statues of nude women, done in plaster, were on the mantelpiece. Several scenes from the Passion Play hung on the wall near by.

  A large oil lamp, with a red-flowered shade, was on a yellow oak table. Black dots, supposed to be hummingbirds, flew among the flowers. It was really a kerosene lamp, but Red Moll had it wired for electricity. She would turn the light on at dusk and watch the birds sip at the flowers. Each year she bought cheap calendars and hung them on the walls of the different rooms. When merchants gave her a pictured calendar she liked, she would keep it for years, taking the months from a less pretty calendar and attaching them to it.

  She had an immense “grandfather’s clock.” It was one of the few in the town. It stood in the hallway, in a space far too small for it. It chimed the hours away in music. A drunken railroader had once broken the glass at the bottom. He offered to pay Red Moll for the damage. She refused to accept the money, but never allowed him to come to her house again. Later she had a bright brass rail placed in front of the clock.

  Whenever traveling salesmen “wanted a woman,” they were sent to Red Moll’s house. Often she would “furnish a girl” who would call at the hotel. Returning, she would give Red Moll half her earnings.

  While none of these dealings ever made her rich, they kept her from becoming too poor. Red Moll was a woman through whose hands money went like sand. She had but one fear, that of losing her home. That fear made her pay her taxes regularly and manipulate money in every manner possible to keep the home from being mortgaged.

  Red Moll never talked of this fear. But those who saw her place pots of geraniums in her “hot room” each fall knew how much she loved her home.

  Whenever a child was born in the Blair home, Red Moll would go and help, then leave quietly, without comment. The children learned to lean upon her.

  When Leora was eleven, she was allowed to stay all night with Alice. From then on, she came and went whenever in the mood.

  Leora spent many hours out-of-doors with Red Moll, who knew the name and nature of every tree in Hardy’s Grove.

  When Alice was gone, Leora remained longer with her aunt at each visit. Woman and girl would talk of Alice quietly.

  “She’ll get along—she’s that kind,” Alice’s mother once said to Leora.

  Alice wrote to them each week. They would read the letters together.

  In one letter, Alice begged her mother to visit Chicago.

  “You write to her, Leora,” said the mother, “and tell her I’m here whenever she wants to see me.”

  Chicago seemed far away to Leora. It was nearly four hundred miles.

  She had missed Alice and the picnics which they had together at Hardy’s Grove.

  For many minutes she thought of her aunt and Alice, while the lights became dim on the boat, and the dying moon turned the river into gold.

  A breeze stirred and chilled her body. She pulled her nightgown more closely about her, and wondered about her brother. Buddy had gone away so often. It might be this was the last time. Leora wished she were a boy. Her brother had said to her, “You ought to get out of this, Sis. I’m goin’ to.”

  But how to get out of it—and what to do? Sadly Leora remembered she had promised her mother to stay.

  The bed squeaked as her mother rolled over. The odor of nine bodies rushed by Leora, like ill-smelling ghosts, anxious to get out of the window. Fastidious about her body to the verge of mania, Leora had shuddered for years at the close proximity of all her family.

  Leora went to the bed for her clothes. Her body ached as she put them on. A fierce sense of loneliness came over her. Rebellion nearly choked her. Stealthily she went down the stairs and into the yard with the burnt brown grass.

  She wal
ked about the town, with only the echo of her footsteps for company.

  A light was still shining in one house a few blocks from her own. Leora stood in front of it for several moments. The curtains were far up. Moving about inside was Dr. Jonas Farway. He was about thirty-five, with heavy shoulders, a large head, and jaws so heavy they protruded at the sides.

  Of medium height, he looked more the athlete than the doctor, though he was popular with all the poorer families along the river.

  The girl had often seen him and had heard his name for at least five years. Some months before he had been in her house. Her mother had fallen down stairs and wrenched her ankle. At that time Leora had stood near the bed, by the doctor’s side. When leaving he put an arm about her and held her against him for a moment, so taut that it hurt her breasts. Though it was done playfully, Leora understood.

  Her body tingled now as she watched him.

  Suddenly the light went out. Leora walked slowly home and lay upon her bed without undressing. Unable to sleep, she stared upward in the dark until dawn. Restless, she rose and sat on the porch until the factory whistles blew at seven.

  A clatter arose in the house. The family was getting up.

  Her father would soon be home. She had avoided him before. Now she sat quite still. Seeing him coming, she went into the house and took a pair of sharp scissors from the sewing machine drawer and returned to her chair on the porch.

  When Blair entered the yard, rattling his tin dinner bucket, he looked in surprise at Leora and half sneered, “You here?”

  “Yes, I’m here; I couldn’t sleep from your beating.”

  He started toward her and stopped suddenly, seeing the scissors in her hand.

  “If you ever lay a dirty hand on me again,” she cried, “I’ll stab you—and if I don’t while you’re doin’ it, I’ll stab you while you sleep. You ain’t goin’ to run me away like you did my brother.”

  The startled father asked, “Ain’t he back yet?”

  “No, and I don’t think he’s coming back this time.”