Jo Ellen

Contents

PART

ONE

i-xv.

PART ONE The Spouting Devil

i

AS for Jo Ellen, if you had been in search of her you might have missed her altogether. The JL JL. grass had been precocious that year. Where it squirmed in the hot wind, and especially where the clover and wild carrot spattered the slope, a slender figure was easily immersed.

The girl sprawled with her feet toward the river. She had been in the shade of the maple when she flung her¬ self backward. Now the sun had crept to her neck. Presently it would pry open her eyes. Her bare legs glistened in the light. One of them carried a pale red scratch running diagonally upward from the ankle.

Before that she had sat peering at the water and at the purple silhouette of the other side. A tugboat and a long string of barges had been cutting a line through the glittering space. A freight train droned by, showing only the roofs of the cars and the high windows of the caboose. The tracks would blister your feet if you had your shoes off. If you were further down the hill you could see the tracks shining like slits of river. Prob¬ ably the telegraph wires were just as hot. It was a wonder the sparrows could stand on them as they did.

l

The shadow of the Palisades looked cool. Very likely it wasn’t. When you got anywhere it only proved to be hot in another way. Even the water seemed to simmer. But the river was cool. It would be a great day to fall in.

Thought of falling in brought about a glance at the slip of a dress she wore and a meditative movement of one hand. The fingers advanced to a torn place in the hem, then reviewed the line of the scratch on the leg. Experimental wriggling of her toes resulted in the de¬ tachment of one canvas slipper. She pushed the slipper through the grass with her pink heel, stared again at the Palisades and pulled off her cap, the cap with the long peak which she liked to wear in the sun.

Hair was a nuisance in such weather. She plunged a hand into the mess of its coils. Sticky. If only it could be cropped—not merely bobbed, but cropped close like a boy’s. Shingled. A lot of red hair could be sold to somebody. You could buy something with the money.

When she tweaked the knot the mass leapt like a flame. Her shoulders winced at the hot tickle of it. In an airplane the whole thing would stand straight out. On some days it would be blown gorgeously if you stood on the very top of the Palisades, facing that other way, where you could jump off into the world. . . .

She dropped backward and the grass seemed to flow over her without dimming the ruddy flash. Against this daub of color the warm whiteness of her face and neck showed sharply. She looked into the leaves overhead with wide, clear eyes. The glint of green and mauve between the lashes might have been borrowed from the setting or might have belonged to them. When the lids came down, the lash lines were deeply curved. There was a moist glow in the hollow at her throat and in the prophecy of the breasts that rose and fell in a steady, participating tranquillity.

ii

Emma Traub, a bony, long-limbed woman, with a scuttling stride that never appeared to be affected by footway or weather, turned out of the lower road. She was whistling a wheezy note and folding the ends of a newspaper that wrapped a bundle she carried under an arm. Her wiry brown hair glistened at her temples. Having subdued the paper, she drew the back of her hand under her chin and glanced at the wet knuckles without losing the pucker of her lips. She rubbed the knuckles over her skirt at the hip and swung up the slope. When there was need to dodge an obstacle, she showed an extraordinary nimbleness. Something lankly girlish appeared in her movements.

It was a bare foot that caught her glance. . . . When she saw that it was Jo Ellen Rewer, she halted and faced the figure in the grass without suspending the breathy tune or seeming definitely to focus her look. Casually she noticed the detached slipper, the hat, the hair gleam¬ ing through the green, the creeping intensity of the sun. She became rather intent at last in watching the girl’s bosom rise and fall. The interest of this seemed to grow upon her. She ceased whistling and her inky eyes acquired a look of being fascinated, or of being held by some extraordinary thought. Now that she had ceased whistling, her lips had a loose plainness. They hung apart while she stood there, as still as one of the trees, staring at the sun-tinted throat and shoulders of the lithe young body, at the one spot in the sultry scene that moved. It was as if here the hillside breathed; and it was as if the hill woke up when Jo Ellen’s eyes opened wide.

Emma Traub blinked.

“Your uncle’s home,” she said.

Jo Ellen yawned, gathered herself into the shade, and began fussing with her hair.

“What of it?”

“Sick,” said Emma Traub.

Jo Ellen’s brows gave a perplexed twitch. “Sick?”

“He looks bad,” added Emma Traub. Thereafter she resumed her swinging stride. Over a shoulder she saw the girl flying like a blown leaf across the wedge of field, leaping. . . . There was some animal that leapt like that. Emma Traub always said that no¬ body between Tubby Hook and the Harlem could run so fast as Jo Ellen Hewer.

hi

Ben Bogert, lying abed in broad daylight, looked fantastic. His big head had the effect of being magnified. There was something of astonishment mixed with the knocked-down expression of his face.

“A damned shame,” he muttered to his sister, Joseph¬ ine Rewer. “Couldn’t hold myself up.”

“You’ll be all right,” said Mrs. Rewer from the closet where she was hanging the man’s trousers.

“Said to Oesterberg, ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me.’ ‘Maybe a sunstroke,’ he says. ‘You’re crazy,’ I told him. ‘Heat never bothered me in my life. I can stand any amount of it.’ ‘You ain’t a young man any longer, Bogert,’ he says. ‘Uncle to big children.’ ‘Big children?’ I told him. ‘What’s that got to do with it? Nothing at all.’ You’d think I was an old man. ‘Well, it’s something, ain’t it?’ he says. ‘You ought to-”

“You better be quiet,” said Mrs. Rewer, wavering at the door. “The doctor’ll be here. He’ll say what it is.”

“You’d think I was an old man,” persisted Rewer. “That fool Oesterberg-”

There was a footstep in the outer room.

“I thought it was Morris,” said Mrs. Rewer to Jo

Ellen. “Of course I couldn’t find Billy, and sent Morris for the doctor. Your uncle isn’t feeling well.”

Jo Ellen was about to dash into the bedroom.

“Lord’s sake!” cried Mrs. Rewer. “Why don’t you wear your stockings like a civilized human being? You look like a tenement house.”

“Like a house?” Jo Ellen found a place for her cap on the rack near the door.

“You know well enough what I mean. I’m ashamed.”

“O Ma! it’s summer. Nobody wears anything in summer. Who’s to see me?”

“7 see you.”

“But you don’t count, Ma!” Jo Ellen patted her mother’s tanned cheek, and made a leap toward the bedroom.

“You’re dripping,” remarked Mrs. Rewer, as her daughter receded.

IV

Ben Bogert had typhoid fever. In his delirium he repeated an endless story about a chicken incubator, a new and invincible kind. The story was made par¬ ticularly pitiful by the fact of the repeated failures follow¬ ing a chicken mania that came upon him two years be¬ fore. He used to rush home from the office to putter with the trays. He was always turning the eggs. Mrs. Rewer insisted that he turned the life out of them. But the incubator story was not the worst thing. The worst thing was the endless song. He roared “The Girl I Left Behind Me” whenever he was diverted from the incu¬ bator. In the middle of the night the raucous wail of his baritone, sliding into various keys and cracking at the joints, arose fearfully. They could hear it over at the S. P. C. C. It boomed with a weird, hysterical persist¬ ence into far recesses of Inwood Hill. Old Lot Mallin, huddled at the doorway of her shack, declared that it was the noisiest typhoid she ever heard.

In his most unmanageable moments Bogert could be subdued by Jo Ellen. If he bellowed, “Where’s that red head?” and Jo Ellen slipped into the room, there was silence. He did not look at her. He knew when she was there, and would lie with glittering eyes peering straight at the ceiling. At such times his face seemed quite amazing. With the growth of sandy stubble on his chin and the tufty wriggling eyebrows, there was a ferocity about him that filled Jo Ellen with awe. She suffered acutely while she sat there, doing nothing but watch him.

She had but a vague memory of the time when her father died, but the coming of Uncle Ben, though it w r as less than a year afterward, remained a vivid matter. Uncle Ben’s noisy bigness, the mystery of his relation to bathtubs somewhere on Seventh Avenue, his ingenuity in building things like hill steps—there were two long flights leading to the house porch—the thrilling stories of wdien he had been in Idaho, and his passionate interest in baseball, stood out strongly. There was a clearing near the house where you batted a little up hill, with a blighted elm for second base. Jo Ellen’s mother could bat better than anyone except Uncle Ben and Morris Meyer. There was a tradition that if Jo Ellen ever hit the ball she made a home run. “ She just streaks around,” said Uncle Ben. Jo Ellen’s proposal to do the running for her mother was never accepted. “There’d be nothing to it,” declared the biggest player after his shout of derision. “You get me rattled enough as it is.” Mrs. Rewer remarked that her daughter’s suggestion was a piece of impudence. “I’ll do my own running,” she said. In the course of a game there was likely to be vigorous controversy between Ben Bogert and his sister. When Bogert shouted, “I tell you that’s a strike! Used to be just a foul when you were young. Now it’s a strike—a strike 7” Jo Ellen’s mother would retort “O piffle! You make me tired with that new r rule talk. I guess I know what a strike is. Play ball!” At the bat Bogert was tremendous. The fearful violence of his swing predisposed the enemy to let him have his run. Moreover, the run was worth seeing. Panting in the grass thereafter, he would manage to roar, “Home run Bogert!” . . .

Whenever Dr. Parker appeared, Bogert, with a jerk of his big head, exclaimed, “Well, Doc, what can I do for you?” He had known a doctor in Boise City who looked like Parker. He announced this each time Parker appeared. “And he was a hell of a good doctor,” ejaculated Bogert, on one or two occasions in little better than a whisper.

“A trifle too energetic for his own good,” was the doctor’s way of putting it. “He’ll wear you all out.” Parker was speaking here of Mrs. Rewer, Jo Ellen and Mrs. Kling, who used to be a nurse, and came over from Dyckman Street for many of the night vigils.

On the day when Dr. Parker appeared twice, Jo Ellen noticed that her mother, as well as the man caller from her uncle’s office, looked very gloomy. Mrs. Kling, arriving after dark, shivered when she heard “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” and glanced toward Jo Ellen’s mother with a special grimace.

“Very likely,” said Jo Ellen to herself, “this is the night when Uncle Ben is supposed to die. But I don’t believe he will. ” She felt like staying up to watch him live, but crawled at last into her bed. In the morning she was awakened by “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” As it turned out, that was the last day on which he sang the dreadful thing. The incubator lasted almost a week longer.

In his convalescence Bogert was, if possible, more difficult than during the acute stage of his fever. He was not irritable. He was simply inexhaustible. De¬ prived of the privilege of doing anything himself, he was fertile in devices for the activity of others. Only Jo Ellen ventured flatly to oppose him.

“You’re not sick now,” she said, “and I don’t have to perform any more.”

Bogert groaned. “Think of that from my favorite niece!”

“Your only niece,” corrected Jo Ellen.

“Which is worse yet.” When it pleased him to do so, Bogert overlooked his fatherly relation.

“You know,” said Jo Ellen. 5 “You’ve been a fright* ful trouble.”

“The idea!” exclaimed her mother. “What do you think you’re saying? ”

“And who does she think she’s saying it to?” cried Bogert.

“It’s true,” claimed Jo Ellen.

“That’s just what it isn't,” Uncle Ben protested. “I was no trouble at all. Quite the other way. Why, Mrs. Kling told me only yesterday that I had been a real entertainment. I think that was it—a real enter¬ tainment. I suppose she w^as thinking of the day I sang, ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me.’”

“The day?” Jo Ellen hugged her laugh. “The day? You sang it for nine days—all the time. If you ever sing it again I’ll leave home.”

“You can’t,” said Uncle Ben. “Not at sixteen. Not for a year, anyway. Your mother”—this with a volu¬ minous wink—“will tell you that.”

“Ben!” Mrs. Rewer stood over her burly brother, huddled at the top of the steps he had built. “You must be getting pretty well. But it wouldn’t hurt you to show some sense. ”

“You always said I hadn’t any,” Bogert protested. “I’m only getting back to my usual.”

“Just about.”

“But you ought to be improved by suffering,” re¬ marked Jo Ellen, dodging a long reach by the heavy arm.

“If I could’ve caught that red head of yours, ” grunted Bogert, “one handful, I’d make you talk sweet. It only shows, Jo, that you made a mistake having a red¬ headed daughter. They’re always unmanageable. ”

“Not very respectful,” suggested Mrs. Rewer drily.

Jo Ellen cocked her head. “Uncle Ben, wouldn’t you hate to have me respect you?”

He grinned at his niece with a puzzled glint in his deep-set eyes. If he had been her father he might have been quite as much puzzled. He told himself this at times. Yet he was in the habit of ascribing much of his mystification to the fact that he was only her uncle. He thought he understood his sister. His sister’s daughter was naturally more complicated. Girls couldn’t be diagramed in a blue print. For one thing, they were so quick. And whatever you might figure, there was always something you didn’t know about. No use trying to get at that —whatever it was. Father or uncle would be in the same boat. As for any husband, poor devil, what chance would he have—beginning so late in the game? What blunders he would make, damn him! . . . Throughout all the gropings of his rudi¬ mentary analyses, Bogert’s affection retained a fanatical sensibility. She irritated and charmed him. He wanted her left alone, and he wanted to intrude. Once there had been a violent scene. ... He was always sorry about that. He had been foolish, but the head of the house had some rights. That she should blaze up and push him. ... It was ghastly. He might have clouted her one. What then? He had felt smashed. He had wanted to go and sit beside her bed until she fell asleep. . . .

v

Before Jo Ellen fell asleep that night, something out of the dark reminded her with a fresh sharpness that Uncle Ben’s illness should be taken as a warning. It was true that if Uncle Ben had died, everything would have been changed—extraordinarily changed.

Death was tremendously real. Nothing much else seemed to be at all like it. People were always getting excited, yet nothing very exciting ever seemed to happen; nothing real. Getting to work would be real, in a way; realer than school. School was mostly talk. When Marty Simms, before his family moved away, used to mention a book he had been reading, she used to say she was tired of reading. She wondered why she was tired; whether it was because the books didn’t seem real enough. Yet some books had been thrillingly real. She went about thinking of them for days. Marty’s way of mentioning a story never made her feel the real side of it. She felt that he became emotional about the wrong things. He was, she supposed, what you would call romantic, and this seemed to result in his wishing her to be romantic, and about the same things. It was possible to see that he was often much hurt by her failure to see a wonder as he saw it. It was true that to be with him was sometimes exciting. . . . But a lot of irritation was mixed up with her feeling.

She crept out of bed and dropped on her knees with her face close to the window screen. There was nothing to look at. . . . Trees in a black mass. Nothing else but the smoky gray of the closed-up house the Simms family used to live in, now vaguely revealed by some distant electric light, a flat-faced house with a fright¬ fully vacant expression. There were broken windows. For some reason no one had lived there since the Simmses went away. Neglect began to give it an accused look. ... A shadow flickered across the ground level of the visible corner . . . like a dark ghost. She was sure she saw a figure.

It was at night that she was most likely to feel shut in. This was why she so often wanted to go somewhere at night. Her mother called this gadding. At the moment she would have liked to be at a real dance. Not down at the Dyckman Street Academy. Not with a three-piece family jazz band such as the Tice’s had asked her to hear the following night. Somewhere quite different . . . huge and glittering, with a sweep of shining floor and a great orchestra that could gather you up like a passionate w r ind. There would be magical lights, constellations of them, gorgeous clothes . . . and some man who would understand everything. . . . Everything.

The black lacing of the trees hung like a curtain that would not lift. Locusts droned in a mesmeric rhythm. The deep sound from the floor below, so deep as to be felt rather than heard, was Uncle Ben snoring.

VI

The morning was humidly heavy, and seemed to carry over in a staring way the things Jo Ellen had been thinking darkly the night before.

Mrs. Hewer’s morning ritual had a lively movement. She said she liked to get things done and out of the way. When things were done and out of the way, she was not superior to any form of amusement. Just now her brother disturbed the ritual and must continue to do so until he was ready to go back to business. Bogert commented freely on all domestic functions. That anything should be done very early that might be done as well a little later, struck him as illogical, as femininely illogical.

“What I think, Jo,” he would say, “is that this isn’t energy. It’s only nervousness.”

“I’m not at all anxious about what you think, Ben,” Mrs. Rewer would answer cheerfully. “Move your big body out there on the porch until I get this place straightened up. ”

“A female Simon Legree,” growled Bogert.

Billy, aged twelve, was a slow boy who gave the impression of desiring to be obedient. But he had deep absorptions, sometimes in a magazine, sometimes in devices involving tools, often in hurried preparations to go out. When his mother issued a request, he said, “In a minute,” or “Right away, Ma.” The repetition of the request was likely to be sharper, and Billy would emerge with signs of knowing only from the tone that the request had been made before. Very often he would disappear without remembering his “in a minute” bargain. He was clever in explaining the omissions.

“You’re the greatest explainer that ever happened at twelve,” said his mother.

Billy’s notion of Jo Ellen was that she wouldn’t stick at anything. If his sister couldn’t do a thing quickly she wouldn’t do it at all. “It’s got to be bingl” he said, “or you won’t bother. ”

The king of the early morning’s housework rather suited Jo Ellen. She was full of intentions, as her mother well knew, and the after-breakfast hustle favored any subsequent personal plans. Getting things done and out of the way was particularly congenial when she felt restless. She could turn restlessly to the dress she was making. She always liked a dress when she was making it. When she was through with it she was not so sure. Of course, it had to be cheap. What an enormously delightful matter it would be to find yourself earning enough money to have all sorts of things you wanted—to do all sorts of things you wanted to do! Enough money. All the trouble came back to that. Enough money was supposed to spoil some people. Jo Ellen knew in detail all the w r ays in which it would not spoil her. Nothing was plainer than that she would be immensely improved. It would be noticeable from the very beginning. If she had enough money by night fall she would be improved before she could get to bed. Naturally this would mean that her mother would have enough money, too.

“Well,” said her mother presently, noticing a long pause in the figure at the shaded end of the porch, “what are you wishing now?”

Jo Ellen was not startled by the accuracy of this surmise. She knew her mother’s theory that one child was always explaining and the other always wishing.

“I was wishing,” said Jo Ellen, “that I had a job.”

“I see,” said her mother. “I thought maybe you might have a new wish.”

The sarcasm was to be expected. There was always a flare when this subject came up. Jo Ellen had learned that she was ungrateful. Huge sacrifices were made to give her an education. Uncle Ben, swinging his arms, had even talked about college. It was being ungrateful to ignore all these efforts for her good. “I don’t want to be sacrificed for!” she had cried out. “I’m not ungrate¬ ful. It doesn’t mean what you say it means.” There was no end to the argument.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Rewer had been shaken in her certainties by the typhoid. She had been reminded poign¬ antly, as her daughter had been reminded, that every¬ thing hinged upon the welfare of the burly man who had gone so close to the brink. Ben had theories he never could back up. He was a big talker. College, for instance. That was just funny. Yet he was returning to business, and there was no reason why Jo Ellen shouldn’t finish with high school. Another winter would do it. She was nearly seventeen. This was her last summer of being a girl. If a girl could only know. . . .

“I can’t stop wishing,” said Jo Ellen coldly.

“And spoiling your last good summer.”

There was the drag of everything that had been said over and over again.

Later in the morning Myrtle Fleck was on the porch, and Mrs. Rewer heard a lot of laughing and whispering gossip. Mrs. Rewer regarded Myrtle as particularly silly—as boycrazy and snaky in her ways, full of furtive tricks. Not to be trusted. Her giggle had something sensual in it.

When Jo Ellen disappeared in the afternoon Mrs. Rewer wondered whether Myrtle . . .

But Jo Ellen was quite alone after Billy had persuaded her to behold something in the cave at the head of the hollow. The cave was often a meeting place for the Clove Club, and was consecrated to piratical secrets. Jo Ellen wandered down into the hollow where, in summer, you seemed to touch the bottom of Nothing. A wilderness. Trees, bushes, bits of wild color, tangled places, spots of sunlit green. On the west the sheer rocks upon which, above the spring, the Indians had scratched the Spouting Devil. Over all, silence. The loneliest acres in New York.

Ye,s a great place in which to be miserable, if you wanted that. And not a bad place for thinking without interruption. But Jo Ellen found that she didn’t want to think there. The silence was like something pressing down on your head. Once she could be there, without resentment, for an hour, mooning around or simply doing nothing. Evidently this meant that she was older. Also it must mean that she was Through. The withered trunks, the ghosts of vines that had been, the broken bits of sapling, and the matted leaves of another day all seemed to be whispering, “Dead!” and this was quite horrible . . . enough to make you scream.

She swung about and began running . . . through the bushes and across a slope that reached away from the paths, which involved vaulting over a prostrate tree and crawling under a briary arch. Beyond was the grass-grown foundation of a house that had burned and a clearing that once had been a garden. Still higher was a dismantled shack and the scattered stones of an old wall. These obstacles were a real adventure when you took them at high speed. The end of the sprint came before the summer kitchen of the empty Simms house.

To be here at the back door of a house in which nobody lived might have seemed a culminating irony, if Jo Ellen had been a psychologist. In fact, it changed the current of her feeling for the moment. It did more; it seized her attention. She could not have been sure what this something was, whether a flicker in the corner of one of the smeared windows or an effect in the door. The door was in the shadow of a roofed space between the house and the summer kitchen, and she had a sense of an ended movement, as though it might have been slightly open and then fully closed again.

The boys had found a way of getting into the house, and Billy, for one, had been firmly forbidden to violate its integrity as a locked place. Jo Ellen knew that at this juncture Billy was in the pirates’ cave.

She went to the door and tried the handle.

That was a surprise, to have it swing freely. The winter kitchen, very dusty, and with the unaired smell, stared back at her. From the middle of the floor the dining room beyond repeated a like stare. When the shadow at her feet showed the slow closing of the door behind her, Jo Ellen turned sharply and saw the man.

He made a strange movement with his hand. She could get this much before being able very clearly to make him out.^

“What do you mean by that?” she demanded, ad¬ vancing meanwhile to reach the door knob.

He shifted his position until his back was against the door.

“Let me say something to you,” was his answer.

She could see him clearly now; a young man, tallish, with rather remarkable blue eyes, a jaw that would be remembered, and lips that seemed to wait. He was with¬ out hat or coat. One side of his soft collar was streaked with dust. There was rust on the cuffs of his shirt.

“We’ll open the door first,” said Jo Ellen, “if you don’t mind. ”

Her hand went forward in a determined way.

“But I do mind,” he said, without moving, “you needn’t be afraid of me. I-”

“Let me get this door open,’' commanded Jo Ellen. She tugged at the knob until the door bumped his heels.

“Look here, kid!” He caught her wrist with an un¬ equivocal grip. “Listen. Don’t be a little fool. I want-”

“We’ll see who’s the fool,” and Jo Ellen accomplished an astonishing wriggle, an utterly unbelievable wriggle, that brought her other hand close to the edge of the door.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he said, without changing his position, and Jo Ellen at once became aware of a fact that remained vividly w r ith her there¬ after, one that had a startling significance. This was the fact that he now held her wrist at an angle and with a firmness that left her quite helpless.

Nothing like this had ever happened to her. She had thrown Bud Blakely, who was half a head taller than herself; she had wrestled with Uncle Ben until he was gasping. O yes! she had performed prodigies of wrig¬ gling at one time or another. And here she was held out like a fish on a string by the left hand of a man who seemed to be taking no trouble at all.