Angels Unaware Read online

  As much work and bother as Old Sam turned out to be, I preferred him over the two-legged guests who came through our doors. I’d curse and spit as Jewel led our penniless guests through the lobby with the full measure of her grace and charm, just as if they were millionaires. I’d mutter loudly that we barely had enough food to feed ourselves, in the hope they’d overhear and be shamed into leaving. But Jewel would just shush me, telling our visitors that I was bad-tempered, and they mustn’t take it to heart.

  As I’ve said, but it bears repeating, I hated the hospitality profession with a passion and wished with all my heart and soul that a tornado would come and blow the inn right off the map. But it never happened. Every morning when I woke up, the decrepit building stood as it had the night before, demanding an endless number of increasingly wearisome tasks. On winter mornings, I’d get up early to bring coal up from the cellar to keep the stoves going, careful not to smother the embers. If the fire went out, I would have to start over, and the coal took forever to take the flame. I’d stand in the icy kitchen, freezing and cursing and wishing I’d catch pneumonia and die and be put out of my misery. Jolene was too little to do chores, and Caroline was of little help on account of her being prone to coughs and colds. Once the coal had caught, I’d start kneading the dough for breakfast bread. Jewel had a morbid fear of lighting ovens, ever since she’d singed her eyebrows trying to light a cigarette from one in fifth grade. She wasn’t one for chores either but preferred to descend the stairs just as coffee was being served and ask everyone if they had slept well. The hostess act—that, she did real well. After breakfast, there were dishes to be washed, rooms to be cleaned, wood to be carried, and always, always in winter, more coal to be shoveled in, so that—God forbid!—the fire didn’t die and I’d have to start all over again.

  After my morning tasks, I sometimes went to school, when I felt I could not escape the duty. I liked to read—Jewel had given me the complete works of Shakespeare one Christmas—and I never had time to read in school, what with the teacher always talking and distracting me. I didn’t much care for my classmates, and they didn’t like me any better—perhaps because when I turned fourteen, my hair started to go gray. Kids whispered stories of graveyard curses, witch’s spells, and other nonsense. Many an eye was blackened for making fun of me or Jewel, and I was feared, if not liked.

  When Caroline and Jolene started school, they fared better. Beauty covers a multitude of sins, and Caroline was so pretty that people were willing to forgive her for having Jewel for a mother and me for a sister. And Jolene had a winning way about her and could make people laugh, so they forgave her too. I always made sure that Caroline and Jolene attended school regular. I intended that they should both go to college someday, and as for me, when everybody was settled and everything was taken care of, then I’d leave Galen and live a fascinating life far, far away.

  Jewel often talked to me as if we were the same age—perhaps due to my lack of friends, and the secret we later shared. In mind, heart, and soul, I felt much older than my mother. I suppose that experience embitters some and educates others, but Jewel remained undaunted by life’s challenges; inside, she remained the naïve, innocent Margaret Mary Willickers, sixteen years old and fresh from Texas.

  Once I asked her why she hadn’t married the justice of the peace.

  “Because his name was Elwood,” she replied.

  “Well, if that isn’t the stupidest reason I ever heard!” I exclaimed impatiently. “You could’ve married him and called him anything you liked.”

  “No. No matter what I called him, Darcy, I’d still be thinking Elwood up here,” She proclaimed gravely, tapping her head.

  I wondered sometimes if she’d ever had “anything up there.” She had made up her mind against marrying Duncan—even if he’d had the notion of asking her—because she’d come upon him tweezing his nose hairs in the bathroom mirror. It proved to be an image she couldn’t shake, Jewel declared. No romance, she told me, could endure scrutiny. She seldom spoke in this manner to Caroline or Jolene, even when they were old enough to hear it. She was afraid to make them cynical, she confided. Even then, she knew it was too late for me.

  For all our differences, Jewel and I got along harmoniously enough, except when it came to the justice’s money. She was forever thinking up ways to spend it, and I was forever thinking up new ways to hide it. Finally, I suggested we save it for Jolene and Caroline’s college fund. If my sisters stayed in Galen after graduation, I told Jewel, they’d surely end up mothers married to miners, and Jewel—who was never able to settle upon anything for more than an hour or two, though she was always most sincere at the time—agreed. Then, however, we were free to argue about how to raise money going forward. My brilliant idea came to me one night as I lay in bed, just on the verge of sleep. I sat bolt upright, leapt from the bed, flung open the door, and raced down the hallway to Jewel’s room.

  “I’ve had a brilliant idea,” I told her excitedly. “We’ll take the train to Philadelphia and find Duncan.” At her perplexed expression, I reminded her. “The art student, remember? The father of your children? We’ll remind him of his responsibilities and, in exchange for a cash settlement, we’ll promise to keep quiet about his two illegitimate children.”

  “That’s blackmail, Darcy,” she said reprovingly.

  “No, Jewel, that’s raising funds.”

  “I would never, never, never in a million years—”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “It’s immoral, that’s why.”

  This, from a woman who’d born three illegitimate daughters. I went back to my room in a snit.

  We might have made a go of the inn if only we’d had more than one bathroom. But for another toilet, my life might have turned out completely different. As it was, we had just the one, and when the toilet got stopped up, and my plunging was of no use, we’d have to use the outhouse. The North Pole could scarcely be any colder than that outhouse on a February morning, when piss froze before it hit the bottom.

  If the one bathroom wasn’t problem enough, our lobby was dull and old and faded. The draperies were thin, the rugs were threadbare, and the sofa’s springs were sprung. Even the bell on the front desk failed to chime. Besides that, the roof leaked in spots, dripping brown water into metal buckets when it rained. Floors had rotted out in patches. Once Mr. Lillicrap fell from the second floor—the one Jewel liked to call “the mezzanine”—clear down to the lobby and busted his leg. Good thing he had no money to pay his bill in the first place, or he might’ve sued us.

  Lillicrap had his peculiarities, but he was by no means our most peculiar guest. That contest would have been too close to call. He was an old gentleman who owned one double-breasted white suit of which he was very proud. He wore it every day winter and summer, and it was always cleaned and pressed. Doubtless he must have cared for it in his room every night as if it were a firstborn son. It was a formal kind of suit, though he never went anywhere more formal than the whorehouse in the woods, and I don’t believe dressing up was required, since their clients were mostly miners. Lillicrap was a drunk, and even though he owned a white suit, and his speech never slurred, and his gait never staggered, he was a drunk just the same. We could always tell when he was drunk because he would take his pillow off his bed and sleep in the claw-foot bathtub. Jewel never cared much one way or the other where the guests slept, until one night when Miss Mahoney, a spinster with skin as white as her hair and razor-thin fuchsia-painted lips, went to use the toilet. She had just arranged herself on the seat when Mr. Lillicrap came out of his stupor. I’d never heard a woman scream so loud or so long. Miss Mahoney woke up all the other guests in clear defiance of the signs I’d tacked up in the hallway requesting absolute quiet after nine o’clock.

  My sympathies were entirely with Mr. Lillicrap, who was even more startled than Miss Mahoney, having taken the old maid for a ghostly apparition. After that night, I wan
ted them both evicted but Jewel wouldn’t let me.

  “I’m surprised you don’t want to wait for a blizzard so you can throw them out in the snow, Darcy,” she said. Evicting anybody, Jewel felt, would be tantamount to tampering with the workings of fate, and if there was one thing she would never do above all others, it was tamper with the workings of fate. There was no getting around it. Jewel was simply not cut out to be a landlord, and I would have to think of other ways to make money.

  It was then that I had the idea of taking in wash. “Nobody in Galen has money to throw away on having their laundry done!” Jewel protested, with a laugh. But I was thinking of cities and towns beyond our provincial little Galen. It seemed I was the only one in my family who realized that Galen didn’t reach to all horizons. I certainly never forgot it, and often, it was all that kept me going.

  In Parkville—the next town after Galen—people were a little better off, and I was determined to convince all those high-class hicks that they couldn’t do without my service. I went door to door, explaining that I was with the Willickers Laundry Association, located in the heart of Galen, Pennsylvania, in the business district. For a meager sum that would scarcely be missed from the household budget, they could say goodbye to chapped, red hands forever. My pitch would hardly have clinched the deal, but there was, I knew, nobody in the world more competitive and jealous of little things than a Parkville housewife. And I had had the foresight to wait for the mailman and commit to memory the names of women up and down the lane. And so it was that on my first call, when Mrs. Johnson attempted to close the door in my face, I managed to slip in that her neighbor across the way, Mrs. Kelly, had purchased my services because she thought washing clothes too menial and low class for words. Naturally, after that, Mrs. Johnson had to give me all her dirty clothes rather than admit to herself that she wasn’t as worthy of the luxury as Mrs. Kelly.

  Thereafter, every Monday, I would pedal my bicycle, with a succession of six wagons tied to the back, up and over the hill to Parkville, where I would pick up dirty laundry. The inn had an old washing machine with two rollers that wrung water from the clothes. Jewel helped for the first week, but it quickly became clear that she had little tolerance for other people’s dirty underwear. Two of my clients were new mothers, which meant mounds of dirty diapers, the washing of which convinced me at fourteen never to have children, and just to be on the safe side, never to have a husband either.

  Before long, Jewel found her own way of making money. She hung out a hand-printed sign that read: Sister Jewel, Mystic Reader and Advisor. The paint on the sign was still wet when Reverend Hamilton had her arrested for fortunetelling. Reverends had a way of popping up in Jewel’s life and ruining things. Having stayed overnight in jail before, Jewel wasn’t too put out. The sheriff let her out the next day with a warning.

  Two weeks later, I caught four of my fingers in the wringer of the washing machine, breaking them and putting an end to the Willickers Laundry Association.

  That was a tough winter. Jewel and the girls caught the grippe, and I had to nurse them with one bandaged hand. Jewel insisted on smoking her Camels and filling the sick room with smoke. Then, she’d cough her brains out, and I’d have to run out for whiskey and lemon. We’d have been able to renovate the whole Inn and travel round the world just on what Jewel could have saved on Camels. But as soon as her cough had calmed a little, she’d light one up again, claiming that tobacco would surely kill the infection. As for me, I never got sick. Whoever my father was, he must have been hardy if not good looking, because an illness never arrived that could lay me low. Not that I would have minded coming down with something so that I, for once, could be the patient instead of the nurse.

  While Jewel was sick in bed, she found an advertisement in a magazine for mail-order astrology books. She ordered and read a number of them, and then she hung out a new sign: Jewel Willickers, Astrological Consultant. When the reverend sent the police to arrest her, Jewel claimed that astrology was a science just like any other. It said so in the books she’d read. But they took her away just the same, and I had to pay a large part of the money I’d saved doing laundry to get her out.

  Having to give up the money I’d worked so hard to obtain—and for which I had broken four fingers!—left me with a burning hatred for the reverend. I’ve put off telling about Reverend Hamilton because I hate the thought of him, but I suppose I’ve got to confess it all sooner or later.

  The reverend and his wife had lived in Galen their entire lives. In fact, they were good friends with the justice, that is until Jewel came to live with the old man. At first the arrangement seemed to suit everything just fine. The reverend and his wife, Gale, used to visit with Jewel and the justice and play a friendly game of cards or two. You might expect Reverend Hamilton to be horrified at the notion of a young girl and an old man living together out of wedlock, but you’d be wrong. The reverend knew which side his bread was buttered on. The justice put a lot of money in the collection box every Sunday and even paid for the pews, so the reverend was reluctant to offend him.

  The strain on their friendship began when the justice told the reverend that he was intending to leave his house to Jewel after his death instead of the church. But the straw that broke the camel’s back was the night Reverend Hamilton tried to kiss Jewel and she slapped his face. Hamilton wasn’t bad looking, if you didn’t mind the persnickety type. Unfortunately, Jewel couldn’t stand the persnickety type, and she told the justice of his friend’s advances. The two men came to blows, and Hamilton was humiliated in front of his own wife when the justice, a man twice his age, kicked the daylights out of him.

  After that, Reverend Hamilton and his wife never spoke to the justice and Jewel again, and when the Justice died, Hamilton spitefully refused him burial in the small graveyard beside the church. But Jewel said that one bit of dirt was just as good as any other, and she had his body taken over to the cemetery in Parkville, where she visited him every year on his birthday. She even made me and the girls come with her to sing “Happy Birthday,” complete with candles and cake, which we ate by the graveside wearing party hats.

  Jewel never said anything, but I knew she was a little afraid of the reverend, not for herself, but for us. She predicted that when he got tired of tormenting her, he would turn his attention to Jolene, Caroline, and me, thinking us easier targets. As we got older, I saw that she was right.

  One Monday morning, in fifth grade, I found myself the target of twenty sneering classmates. They called Jewel names and made fun of my hand-me-down clothes. Then Maryann Gates declared that me and my family weren’t Christians, and we were going to burn in hell because the Reverend Hamilton had told them so. In fact, he’d devoted all of the previous day’s sermon to our family of blasphemers and heretics.

  Tough as I was, I was still only eleven, and a little put off at finding the odds so grievously stacked against me. I hoped Miss Blount would come to my defence, but she just looked at me doubtfully and clucked her tongue. For lack of a better idea, I spat at Maryann and landed a wad of spittle right on her forehead, (I was a regular marksman with saliva) which got me into trouble with Jewel who said spitting was a low thing to do.

  After school the next day, Miss Blount asked me to stay and have chocolate milk with her.

  “Would you like a cookie to go with that milk, Darcy?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I replied.

  From her bottom drawer, where she kept her “cough medicine,” she withdrew a paper sack and took out a wafer.

  “You must be wondering why I asked you to stay.”

  “Not especially, Miss Blount.”

  “No?”

  “No. I figure you’ll get around to telling in your own time. Besides, I got nothing to do till five o’clock. Then I got to get home and start supper.”

  “You cook supper in your house?”

  I nodded and burped. The cookie was stale. Probably M
iss Blount had been saving that cookie for years, just waiting for some dumb little child she could bribe.

  “Can’t your mother cook, Darcy?”

  “Sure she can,” I said.

  Miss Blount sighed, looking at me with elaborate patience, as she often did with her dullest students. “Then why doesn’t she?”

  “Because she’s afraid of ovens,” I answered honestly. In those days, I still had some candor left, just enough to get me in trouble.

  “Afraid?” She peered over her glasses. “Afraid of what? An oven can’t chase you all over the kitchen,” she remarked with a laugh.

  Miss Blount was making Jewel sound foolish, and I didn’t like anyone doing that but me. “She isn’t afraid of it chasing her around the kitchen,” I said patiently, as if Miss Blount, too, might be one of those dull students. “She’s afraid of lighting it and catching fire and being burned to death. Jewel had a dream once where she saw the inn in flames.”