The Whitaker Girl

Chapter 7: Help Wanted

She had June's stocking turned inside out over her fingers when the machine stopped.

Her mother held the seam up to the window. "Is that June's?"

"It's June's."

The machine started again.

It was a Singer from the year the money had still been money, and the shuttle caught on every fourth or fifth stitch no matter how much oil went into it. Clara ran the needle through the heel, drew it, ran it through again. The wool had gone thin as paper at the ball of the foot. There was a piece in the rag bag that would make two more heels, and after that June would put her thumb through one of them inside a week.

Twenty-six days to the first of July. She had worked the month out on the back of a church envelope and put the envelope under the sugar bowl, and the figures had not changed since she wrote them.

The hall clock had gone in March to a man who came with a cart. The hook was still in the wall. Above it the wallpaper had a clean pale shape where the clock had kept the soot off it for nine years.

Toby came in with his jacket on and his arms held out. "She said to ask you."

"Stand still."

The cuffs had been turned up twice since spring. There was an inch of tuck left. Clara picked the stitches out with the little scissors, pressed the old crease flat with her thumbnail, and the sleeve came down to the bone of his wrist.

"It's good," Toby said.

"It's good until October."

He got as far as the door and came back. "If I wanted to make money," he said, "what would I do?"

"Go to school."

"I do go."

"Then go to school, and ask me again when you're eleven."

He went out. The machine stopped. Her mother said, "Is that June's?"

"It's June's."

Her mother had not been off the porch since the party. She sewed for three houses on the street and one of them paid late, and she would not be told about the coal, and every morning she put on her shoes as though she meant to go somewhere in them.

On Tuesday Clara walked to Iron Harbor General and stood at the personnel window at a quarter to nine. The woman behind the grille had two people ahead of her and no hurry about either of them. Behind the woman's head there was a clock, and Clara counted the minute hand as far as forty and stopped counting.

"I want work," she said.

"Doing what?"

"Anything on the medical side."

"Nursing takes a certificate. The certificate takes the training school, and the school takes local girls that somebody knows." The woman had rimless glasses and a card index and a cardigan with one button that did not match the others.

"I have a degree. Economics. And two years of lectures at the medical college in London, on the surgical side. I stood at the back of the operating room for a winter and watched them close wounds."

"The state doesn't license a degree."

"Then something that isn't nursing."

The woman turned a card in the index. "There's a ward clerk leaving in August. Records, the telephone, the bed list."

"I'll take it."

"Mrs. Aldrich fills it. She does the hiring for the wards. She's back Monday."

"Nine?"

"Nine."

"What does it pay?"

"Mrs. Aldrich will tell you what it pays."

"What did the last girl get?"

The woman looked at her over the top of the grille instead of through it. "She got what Mrs. Aldrich gave her."

Clara went back out past the benches. Her back had started in on the walk over, the old thing low in the spine that came on with weather, and she stood a moment in the doorway with her hand against the frame until it eased.

The Ledger was on Water Street, and she stood out of the way of the men going in with rolls of paper under their arms until the man at the counter looked up. The room smelled of the presses and he had ink on his cuff, and the help-wanted column was pinned to the wall beside him in two halves, one for men and one for women. The women's half was three lines long. One was for a cook, one for a milliner's assistant, and the third had been up since April.

"One of the copy boys is leaving in September," he said. "Leave your name with the girl."

"What's the work?"

"Stairs. Copy up, proofs down, and the composing room's three flights up. You'd be on the stairs all day."

"I can be on the stairs all day."

"He'd have to be a boy."

"Why?"

"He goes in the pressroom."

She wrote her name on the slip anyway and he did not say anything about it, and when her hand was on the door he pushed a folded paper across the counter.

"Take one. It's yesterday's."

On Thursday she climbed the stairs over Bemis Brothers, grain and feed. The man behind the desk had known her father thirty years, and she understood before she sat down that he had liked him.

"Whitaker," he said. "You've got his chin." He turned a page of the ledger with two fingers. "I don't have anything."

"You said in the spring there'd be something."

"In the fall, maybe." He did not look up from the page. "For my wife's nephew, I think."

"I can keep books. I did my father's books for two years before he left, and there was more of it than you'd think."

At the bottom of the stairs the smell of burlap and feed came up cold out of the storehouse, and Frankie Mercer was on the sidewalk with her gloves in her hand.

"You look like something the tide left," Frankie said.

"It's been a long week."

"Did you hear about the lake house?"

"Which lake house?"

"Kessler's. The one on the lake." Frankie turned her gloves over twice. "The whole front of it is out. Every window down that street."

"Six days ago," Clara said.

"Six days." Frankie looked at her. "My father was out there till four in the morning. He came home and drank a glass of milk standing up at the icebox and wouldn't say one word to my mother."

Clara shifted her weight off the sore side.

"It was Eli," Frankie said. "Everybody down there knows it was Eli and nobody's going to put it on paper. My father's got it in a drawer at the station and he goes to work and takes his hat off in the lobby with the rest of them."

Clara said nothing.

"You're not going to say anything."

"There isn't anything to say. He doesn't tell me what he does."

"He blew the front off his own uncle's house."

"I heard you, Frankie."

Frankie stood there with her gloves. "My brother Wes still can't eat on the left side," she said. "He chews like an old man. He's twenty-six."

"Tell him to hold cold water on that side and keep his mouth shut for a week."

"That's what the dentist said."

"Then tell him twice."

The trolley came down Water Street and stopped and went on. Clara had two miles to walk and a nickel in her pocket, and she walked.

"Are you going to marry him?" Frankie said, falling in beside her.

"I don't know what his family means to do."

"That's not an answer."

"No." Clara moved the newspaper from under her arm to her other hand. "Does your father know anybody on the hospital board?"

Frankie stopped walking. "The hospital."

"The ward office."

"You're asking me that today."

"I'm asking you because you're standing here today."

"He knows them," Frankie said. "He won't call them. He won't call them for me, so he's sure as hell not going to call them for you."

"All right."

Frankie walked a little way. "Go to him anyway. He'd say no to your face and then he'd make the call out of shame."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I don't take what I can't pay back."

Frankie put her gloves on. She had good gloves and she had had them three winters. At the corner she said, "I'll ask him anyway," and went up toward the courthouse, and Clara walked the rest of it alone.

The house smelled of machine oil and of the pot of beans that had been on since morning.

Ruth was at the table with the finished mending folded square in front of her and the basket at her elbow. When Clara came in, Ruth dragged her chair back a hand's width and looked at the fold in the cloth, and Clara sat down at the far end and put the paper on the table.

June came down in her hat with her gloves already on and took the stocking off the pile.

"The heel's open on that one."

"It doesn't show."

"It will by nine o'clock."

June put it on anyway and was out the door before it shut behind her.

Ruth got up, and turned the lamp down, and took their mother by the elbow. Their mother said, "Is that June's?" and Clara said, "It's June's," and Ruth's jaw moved once, and she walked her mother out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

The hall light was on when Clara went through to fill the kettle, and when she came back it was off, and Ruth was going up with the empty basket.

Clara sat down at the table and took the envelope out from under the sugar bowl and turned it over. She wrote *Monday, nine* at the top of the back, and under it the hours she could give them in a week, and beside the hours she left a blank, because the woman at the window would not tell her and Mrs. Aldrich would.

Then she stood up and spread the newspaper on the table and read it standing, which was how she read anything she was not paying for. The county clerk's list was in the second column. Four marriage licenses that week, three of them people she had never heard of, and the fourth was a Prentiss.

Nothing had come from Halloway Road. No letter, no man at the door, nothing in the mail but the coal yard's card.

She folded the paper along its crease twice and slid it under the machine, where it would take the oil.