Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/64

 five days beyond the date of the scheduled arrival. Each time an auto was heard women sailed to the front window, washtub-blued house dresses billowing, to see what they could see. Still the performers did not appear, housework became disorganized, and there were snippy conjectures over backyard fences. Ashamed to return probably. Shame was a constant on Twelfth Street. Shame for an undusted parlor, a showing petticoat, or tom kitchen curtains. Shame for a fallen cake, unscrubbed floor, uncut lawn. Ashamed of this, ashamed of that, ashamed of thoughts that filled the brain like a scourge of ants.

Then one morning Mrs. Bertrand from her kitchen window saw a slender young woman with short curly brown hair hanging up silk stockings and pink silk combinations, a foreign shameful sight on Twelfth Street, in Mabel Welland's yard.

The curve of the edge of the pink silk drawers was a giant peony petal. Mrs. Bertrand tugged at her slit-seat union suit sagging in her crotch. Her jaw receded into her scrawny neck as her eyes needle-pointed to place the stranger's identity. Though it was only nine in the morning, the young woman wore a navy blue dotted and draped silk dress with a white ruching around a V neck, and high-heeled black patent leather slippers! Mrs. Bertrand peered around a corner of the starched scrim curtain. For heaven's sake, she thought, I had no idea Mae's girl was so big.

She calculated. It was Mae Welland herself! All dolled up as usual. A desolating hatred enveloped Mrs. Bertrand. An old wheezing fox terrier yapped at her felt-slippered feet. "Quiet, Tina," she snapped.

This was a different Mae from the defeated penitent over whom she had been waiting to gloat. With that brazen bobbed hair Mae looked younger than when she left fourteen years ago. Mabel had said Mae and her child were starving and to Mrs. Betrand this meant a bedraggled cringing appearance, not shameless flaunting of bobbed hair and silk underwear.

Mrs. Bertrand felt she could not wait another minute to see what Mae looked like face to face. She knew now that her hope of an abject Mae greeting her first was unlikely. For the first time since marriage she thought of her own appearance. Not in terms of neatness but of looks. During her sudden and short engagement after Mae had left with Charles Claudel, on those evenings when Bert came to call, she had curled with an iron her short wiry hair. This had continued until the two-day honeymoon at Lake Ogasakee. Since then the flowered china dresser-set wedding present had been 52