Janey

When Janey was little she lived in an old flatface brick house a couple of doors up the hill from M Street in Georgetown. The front part of the house was always dark because Mommer kept the heavy lace curtains drawn to and the yellow linen shades with lace inset bands down. Sunday afternoons Janey and Joe and Ellen and Francie had to sit in the front room and look at pictures or read books. Janey and Joe read the funnypaper together because they were the oldest and the other two were just babies and not old enough to know what was funny anyway. They couldn’t laugh outloud because Popper sat with the rest of The Sunday Star on his lap and usually went to sleep after dinner with the editorial section crumpled in one big blueveined hand. Tiny curds of sunlight flickering through the lace insets in the window shade would lie on his bald head and on one big red flange of his nose and on the droop of one mustache and on his speckled sundayvest and on the white starched shirtsleeves with shiny cuffs, held up above the elbow by a rubber band. Janey and Joe would sit on the same chair feeling each other’s ribs jiggle when they laughed about the Katzenjammer kids setting off a cannon-cracker under the captain’s stool. The little ones would see them laughing and start laughing too, “Shut up, can’t you,” Joe would hiss at them out of the corner of his mouth. “You don’t know what we’re laughing at.” Once in a while, if there was no sound from Mommer who was taking her Sunday afternoon nap upstairs stretched out in the back bedroom in a faded lilac sack with frills on it, after they’d listened for a long time to the drawnout snort that ended in a little hiss of Popper’s snores, Joe would slip off his chair and Janey would follow him without breathing into the front hall and out the front door. Once they’d closed it very carefully so that the knocker wouldn’t bang, Joe would give her a slap, yell “You’re it” and run off down the hill towards M Street, and she’d have to run after him, her heart pounding, her hands cold for fear he’d run away and leave her.

Winters the brick sidewalks were icy and there were colored women out spreading cinders outside their doors when the children went to school mornings. Joe never would walk with the rest of them because they were girls, he lagged behind or ran ahead. Janey wished she could walk with him but she couldn’t leave her little sisters who held tight onto her hands. One winter they got in the habit of walking up the hill with a little yaller girl who lived directly across the street and whose name was Pearl. Afternoons Janey and Pearl walked home together. Pearl usually had a couple of pennies to buy bullseyes or candy bananas with at a little store on Wisconsin Avenue, and she always gave Janey half so Janey was very fond of her. One afternoon she asked Pearl to come in and they played dolls together under the big rose of sharon bush in the back yard. When Pearl had gone Mommer’s voice called from the kitchen. Mommer had her sleeves rolled up on her faded pale arms and a checked apron on and was rolling piecrust for supper so that her hands were covered with flour.

“Janey, come here,” she said. Janey knew from the cold quaver in her voice that something was wrong.

“Yes, Mommer.” Janey stood in front of her mother shaking her head about so that the two stiff sandy pigtails lashed from side to side. “Stand still, child, for gracious sake… Jane, I want to talk to you about something. That little colored girl you brought in this afternoon…” Janey’s heart was dropping. She had a sick feeling and felt herself blushing, she hardly knew why. “Now, don’t misunderstand me; I like and respect the colored people; some of them are fine self-respecting people in their place… But you mustn’t bring that little colored girl in the house again. Treating colored people kindly and with respect is one of the signs of good breeding… You mustn’t forget that your mother’s people were wellborn every inch of them… Georgetown was very different in those days. We lived in a big house with most lovely lawns… but you must never associate with colored people on an equal basis. Living in this neighborhood it’s all the more important to be careful about those things… Neither the whites nor the blacks respect those who do… That’s all, Janey, you understand; now run out and play, it’ll soon be time for your supper.” Janey tried to speak but she couldn’t. She stood stiff in the middle of the yard on the grating that covered the drainpipe, staring at the back fence. “Niggerlover,” yelled Joe in her ear. “Niggerlover ump-mya-mya… Niggerlover niggerlover ump-mya-mya.” Janey began to cry.

Joe was an untalkative sandyhaired boy who could pitch a mean outcurve when he was still little. He learned to swim and dive in Rock Creek and used to say he wanted to be motorman on a streetcar when he grew up. For several years his best friend was Alec McPherson whose father was a locomotive engineer on the B. and O. After that Joe wanted to be a locomotive engineer. Janey used to tag around after the two boys whenever they’d let her, to the carbarns at the head of Pennsylvania Avenue where they made friends with some of the conductors and motormen who used to let them ride on the platform a couple of blocks sometimes if there wasn’t any inspector around, down along the canal or up Rock Creek where they caught tadpoles and fell in the water and splashed each other with mud.

Summer evenings when the twilight was long after supper they played lions and tigers with other kids from the neighborhood in the long grass of some empty lots near Oak Hill Cemetery. There were long periods when there was measles or scarlet fever around and Mommer wouldn’t let them out. Then Alec would come down and they’d play three-o-cat in the back yard. Those were the times Janey liked best. Then the boys treated her as one of them. Summer dusk would come down on them sultry and full of lightningbugs. If Popper was feeling in a good mood he’d send them up the hill to the drugstore on N Street to buy icecream, there’d be young men in their shirtsleeves and straw hats strolling with girls who wore a stick of punk in their hair to keep off the mosquitoes, a rankness and a smell of cheap perfume from the colored families crowded on their doorsteps, laughing, talking softly with an occasional flash of teeth, rolling of a white eyeball. The dense sweaty night was scary, hummed, rumbled with distant thunder, with junebugs, with the clatter of traffic from M Street, the air of the street dense and breathless under the thick trees; but when she was with Alec and Joe she wasn’t scared, not even of drunks or big shamblefooted colored-men. When they got back Popper would smoke a cigar and they’d sit out in the back yard and the mosquitoes ’ud eat them up and Mommer and Aunt Francine and the kids ’ud eat the icecream and Popper would just smoke a cigar and tell them stories of when he’d been a towboat captain down on the Chesapeake in his younger days and he’d saved the barkentine Nancy Q in distress on the Kettlebottoms in a sou’west gale. Then it’d get time to go to bed and Alec ’ud be sent home and Janey’d have to go to bed in the stuffy little back room on the top floor with her two little sisters in their cribs against the opposite wall. Maybe a thunderstorm would come up and she’d lie awake staring up at the ceiling cold with fright, listening to her little sisters whimper as they slept until she heard the reassuring sound of Mommer scurrying about the house closing windows, the slam of a door, the whine of wind and rattle of rain and the thunder rolling terribly loud and near overhead like a thousand beer-trucks roaring over the bridge. Times like that she thought of going down to Joe’s room and crawling into bed with him, but for some reason she was afraid to, though sometimes she got as far as the landing. He’d laugh at her and call her a softie.

About once a week Joe would get spanked. Popper would come home from the Patent Office where he worked, angry and out of sorts, and the girls would be scared of him and go about the house quiet as mice; but Joe seemed to like to provoke him, he’d run whistling through the back hall or clatter up and down stairs making a tremendous racket with his stub-toed ironplated shoes. Then Popper would start scolding him and Joe would stand in front of him without saying a word glaring at the floor with bitter blue eyes. Janey’s insides knotted up and froze when Popper would start up the stairs to the bathroom pushing Joe in front of him. She knew what would happen. He’d take down the razorstrop from behind the door and put the boy’s head and shoulders under his arm and beat him. Joe would clench his teeth and flush and not say a word and when Popper was tired of beating him they’d look at each other and Joe would be sent up to his room and Popper would come down stairs trembling all over and pretend nothing had happened, and Janey would slip out into the yard with her fists clenched whispering to herself, “I hate him… I hate him… I hate him.”

Once a drizzly Saturday night she stood against the fence in the dark looking up at the lighted window. She could hear Popper’s voice and Joe’s in an argument. She thought maybe she’d fall down dead at the first thwack of the razorstrop. She couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then suddenly it came, the leather sound of blows and Joe stifling a gasp. She was eleven years old. Something broke loose. She rushed into the kitchen with her hair all wet from the rain, “Mommer, he’s killing Joe. Stop it.” Her mother turned up a withered helpless drooping face from a pan she was scouring. “Oh, you can’t do anything.” Janey ran upstairs and started beating on the bathroom door. “Stop it, stop it,” her voice kept yelling. She was scared but something stronger than she was had hold of her. The door opened; there was Joe looking sheepish and Popper with his face all flushed and the razorstrop in his hand.

“Beat me… it’s me that’s bad… I won’t have you beating Joe like that.” She was scared. She didn’t know what to do, tears stung in her eyes.

Popper’s voice was unexpectedly kind:

“You go straight up to bed without any supper and remember that you have enough to do to fight your own battles, Janey.” She ran up to her room and lay on the bed shaking. When she’d gone to sleep Joe’s voice woke her up with a start.

He was standing in his nightgown in the door. “Say, Janey,” he whispered. “Don’t you do that again, see. I can take care of myself, see. A girl can’t butt in between men like that. When I get a job and make enough dough I’ll get me a gun and if Popper tries to beat me up I’ll shoot him dead.” Janey began to sniffle. “What you wanna cry for; this ain’t no Johnstown flood.”

She could hear him tiptoe down the stairs again in his bare feet.

At highschool she took the commercial course and learned stenography and typewriting. She was a plain thinfaced sandyhaired girl, quiet and popular with the teachers. Her fingers were quick and she picked up typing and shorthand easily. She liked to read and used to get books like The Inside of the Cup, The Battle of the Strong, The Winning of Barbara Worth out of the library. Her mother kept telling her that she’d spoil her eyes if she read so much. When she read she used to imagine she was the heroine, that the weak brother who went to the bad but was a gentleman at core and capable of every sacrifice, like Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, was Joe and that the hero was Alec.

She thought Alec was the bestlooking boy in Georgetown and the strongest. He had black closecropped hair and a very white skin with a few freckles and a strong squareshouldered way of walking. After him Joe was the bestlooking and the strongest and the best baseball player anyway. Everybody said he ought to go on through highschool on account of being such a good baseball player, but at the end of his first year Popper said he had three girls to support and that Joe would have to get to work; so he got a job as a Western Union messenger. Janey was pretty proud of him in his uniform until the girls at highschool kidded her about it. Alec’s folks had promised to put him through college if he made good in highschool, so Alec worked hard. He wasn’t tough and dirty-talking like most of the boys Joe knew. He was always nice to Janey though he never seemed to want to be left alone with her. She pretty well admitted to herself that she had a terrible crush on Alec.

The best day of her life was the sweltering summer Sunday they all went canoeing up to Great Falls. She had put up the lunch the night before. In the morning she added a steak she found in the icebox. There was blue haze at the end of every street of brick houses and dark summergreen trees when before anybody else was awake she and Joe crept out of the house round seven that morning.

They met Alec at the corner in front of the depot. He stood waiting for them with his feet wide apart and a skillet in his hand.

They all ran and caught the car that was just leaving for Cabin John’s Bridge. They had the car all to themselves like it was a private car. The car hummed over the rails past whitewashed shanties and nigger cabins along the canal, skirting hillsides where the sixfoot tall waving corn marched in ranks like soldiers. The sunlight glanced in bluewhite glare on the wavingdrooping leaves of the tassling corn; glare, and a whirring and tinkling of grasshoppers and dryflies rose in hot smoke into the pale sky round the clattering shaking electric car. They ate sweet summerapples Joe had bought off a colored woman in the station and chased each other round the car and flopped down on top of each other in the cornerseats; and they laughed and giggled till they were weak. Then the car was running through woods; they could see the trestlework of the rollercoasters of Glen Echo through the trees and they piled off the car at Cabin John’s having more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

They ran down to the bridge to look up and down the river brown and dark in the white glary morning between foliage-sodden banks; then they found the canoe that belonged to a friend of Alec’s in a house by the canal, bought some cream soda and rootbeer and some packages of neccos and started out. Alec and Joe paddled and Janey sat in the bottom with her sweater rolled round a thwart for a pillow. Alec was paddling in the bow. It was sweltering hot. The sweat made the shirt cling to the hollow of his chunky back that curved with every stroke of the paddle. After a while the boys stripped to their bathingsuits that they wore under their clothes. It made Janey’s throat tremble to watch Alec’s back and the bulging muscles of his arm as he paddled, made her feel happy and scared. She sat there in her white dimity dress, trailing her hand in the weedy browngreen water. They stopped to pick waterlilies and the white flowers of arrowhead that glistened like ice and everything smelt wet rank of the muddy roots of waterlilies. The cream soda got warm and they drank it that way and kidded each other back and forth and Alec caught a crab and covered Janey’s dress with greenslimy splashes and Janey didn’t care a bit and they called Joe skipper and he loosened up and said he was going to join the navy and Alec said he’d be a civil engineer and build a motorboat and take them all cruising and Janey was happy because they included her when they talked just like she was a boy too. At a place below the Falls where there were locks in the canal they had a long portage down to the river. Janey carried the grub and the paddles and the frying pan and the boys sweated and cussed under the canoe. Then they paddled across to the Virginia side and made a fire in a little hollow among gray rusty bowlders. Joe cooked the steak and Janey unpacked the sandwiches and cookies she’d made and nursed some murphies baking in the ashes. They roasted ears of corn too that they had swiped out of a field beside the canal. Everything turned out fine except that they hadn’t brought enough butter. Afterwards they sat eating cookies and drinking rootbeer quietly talking round the embers. Alec and Joe brought out pipes and she felt pretty good sitting there at the Great Falls of the Potomac with two men smoking pipes.

“Geewhiz, Janey, Joe cooked that steak fine.”

“When we was kids we used to ketch frogs and broil ’em up in Rock Creek… Remember, Alec?”

“Damned if I don’t, and Janey she was along once; geewhiz, the fuss you kicked up then, Janey.”

“I don’t like seeing you skin them.”

“We thought we was regular wildwest hunters then. We had packs of fun then.”

“I like this better, Alec,” said Janey hesitatingly.

“So do I…” said Alec. “Dod gast it, I wisht we had a watermelon.”

“Maybe we’ll see some along the riverbank somewhere goin’ home.”

“Jiminy crickets, what I couldn’t do to a watermelon, Joe.” “Mommer had a watermelon on ice,” said Janey; “maybe there’ll be some yet when we get home.”

“I don’t never want to go home,” said Joe, suddenly bitter serious. “Joe, you oughtn’t to talk like that.” She felt girlish and frightened. “I’ll talk how I goddam please… Kerist, I hate the scrimpy dump.” “Joe, you oughtn’t to talk like that.” Janey felt she was going to cry. “Dod gast it,” said Alec. “It’s time we shoved… What you say, bo…? We’ll take one more dip and then make tracks for home.” When the boys were through swimming they all went up to look at the Falls and then they started off. They went along fast in the swift stream under the steep treehung bank. The afternoon was very sultry, they went through layers of hot steamy air. Big cloudheads were piling up in the north. It wasn’t fun any more for Janey. She was afraid it was going to rain. Inside she felt sick and drained out. She was afraid her period was coming on. She’d only had the curse a few times yet and the thought of it scared her and took all the strength out of her, made her want to crawl away out of sight like an old sick mangy cat. She didn’t want Joe and Alec to notice how she felt. She thought how would it be if she turned the canoe over. The boys could swim ashore all right, and she’d drown and they’d drag the river for her body and everybody’d cry and feel so sorry about it.

Purplegray murk rose steadily and drowned the white summits of the cloudheads. Everything got to be livid white and purple. The boys paddled as hard as they could. They could hear the advancing rumble of thunder. The bridge was well in sight when the wind hit them, a hot stormwind full of dust and dead leaves and bits of chaff and straw, churning the riverwater.

They made the shore just in time. “Dod gast it, this is goin’ to be some storm,” said Alec; “Janey, get under the boat.” They turned the canoe over on the pebbly shore in the lee of a big bowlder and huddled up under it. Janey sat in the middle with the waterlilies they had picked that morning all shriveled and clammy from the heat in her hand. The boys lay in their damp bathingsuits on either side of her. Alec’s towsled black hair was against her cheek. The other side of her Joe lay with his head in the end of the canoe and his lean brown feet and legs in their rolledup pants tucked under her dress. The smell of sweat and riverwater and the warm boysmell of Alec’s hair and shoulders made her dizzy. When the rain came drumming on the bottom of the canoe curtaining them in with lashing white spray, she slipped her arm round Alec’s neck and let her hand rest timidly on his bare shoulder. He didn’t move.

The rain passed after a while. “Gee, that wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be,” said Alec. They were pretty wet and chilly but they felt good in the fresh rainwashed air. They put the canoe back in the water and went on down as far as the bridge. Then they carried it back to the house they’d gotten it from, and went to the little shelter to wait for the electric car. They were tired and sunburned and sticky. The car was packed with a damp Sunday afternoon crowd, picnickers caught by the shower at Great Falls and Glen Echo. Janey thought she’d never stand it till she got home. Her belly was all knotted up with a cramp. When they got to Georgetown the boys still had fifty cents between them and wanted to go to a movie, but Janey ran off and left them. Her only thought was to get to bed so that she could put her face into the pillow and cry.

After that Janey never cried much; things upset her but she got a cold hard feeling all over instead. Highschool went by fast, with hot thunderstormy Washington summers in between terms, punctuated by an occasional picnic at Marshall Hall or a party at some house in the neighborhood. Joe got a job at the Adams Express. She didn’t see him much as he didn’t eat home any more. Alec had bought a motorcycle and although he was still in highschool Janey heard little about him. Sometimes she sat up to get a word with Joe when he came home at night. He smelt of tobacco and liquor though he never seemed to be drunk. He went to his job at seven and when he got out in the evenings he went out with the bunch hanging round poolrooms on 4½ Street or playing craps or bowling. Sundays he played baseball in Maryland. Janey would sit up for him, but when he came she’d ask him how things were going where he worked and he’d say “Fine” and he’d ask her how things were going at school and she’d say “Fine” and then they’d both go off to bed. Once in a while she’d ask if he’d seen Alec and he’d say “Yes” with a scrap of a smile and she’d ask how Alec was and he’d say “Fine.”

She had one friend, Alice Dick, a dark stubby girl with glasses who took all the same classes with her at highschool. Saturday afternoons they’d dress up in their best and go window-shopping down F Street way. They’d buy a few little things, stop in for a soda and come home on the streetcar feeling they’d had a busy afternoon. Once in a very long while they went to a matinee at Poli’s and Janey would take Alice Dick home to supper. Alice Dick liked the Williamses and they liked her. She said it made her feel freer to spend a few hours with broadminded people. Her own folks were Southern Methodists and very narrow. Her father was a clerk in the Government Printing Office and was in daily dread that his job would come under the civil service regulations. He was a stout shortwinded man, fond of playing practical jokes on his wife and daughter, and suffered from chronic dyspepsia.

Alice Dick and Janey planned that as soon as they got through highschool they’d get jobs and leave home. They even picked out the house where they’d board, a greenstone house near Thomas Circle, run by a Mrs. Jenks, widow of a naval officer, who was very refined and had southern cooking and charged moderately for tableboard.

One Sunday night during the spring of her last term in highschool Janey was in her room getting undressed. Francie and Ellen were still playing in the backyard. Their voices came in through the open window with a spicy waft of lilacs from the lilacbushes in the next yard. She had just let down her hair and was looking in the mirror imagining how she’d look if she was a peach and had auburn hair, when there was a knock at the door and Joe’s voice outside. There was something funny about his voice.

“Come in,” she called. “I’m just fixin’ my hair.”

She first saw his face in the mirror. It was very white and the skin was drawn back tight over the cheekbones and round the mouth.

“Why, what’s the matter, Joe?” She jumped up and faced him.

“It’s like this, Janey,” said Joe, drawling his words out painfully. “Alec was killed. He smashed up on his motorbike. I just come from the hospital. He’s dead, all right.”

Janey seemed to be writing the words on a white pad in her mind. She couldn’t say anything.

“He smashed up comin’ home from Chevy Chase… He’d gone out to the ballgame to see me pitch. You oughter seen him all smashed to hell.”

Janey kept trying to say something.

“He was your best…”

“He was the best guy I’ll ever know,” Joe went on gently. “Well, that’s that, Janey… But I wanted to tell you I don’t want to hang round this lousy dump now that Alec’s gone. I’m goin’ to enlist in the navy. You tell the folks, see… I don’t wanna talk to ’em. That’s it; I’ll join the navy and see the world.”

“But, Joe…”

“I’ll write you, Janey; honest, I will… I’ll write you a hell of a lot. You an’ me… Well, goodby, Janey.” He grabbed her by the shoulders and kissed her awkwardly on the nose and cheek. All she could do was whisper. “Do be careful, Joe,” and stand there in front of the bureau in the gust of lilacs and the yelling of the kids that came through the open window. She heard Joe’s steps light quick down the stairs and heard the frontdoor shut.

She turned out the light, took off her clothes in the dark, and got into bed. She lay there without crying.

Graduation came and commencement and she and Alice went out to parties and even once with a big crowd on one of the moonlight trips down the river to Indian Head on the steamboat Charles McAlister. The crowd was rougher than Janey and Alice liked. Some of the boys were drinking a good deal and there were couples kissing and hugging in every shadow; still the moonlight was beautiful rippling on the river and she and Janey put two chairs together and talked. There was a band and dancing, but they didn’t dance on account of the rough men who stood round the dancefloor making remarks. They talked and on the way home up the river, Janey, talking very low and standing by the rail very close to Alice, told her about Alec. Alice had read about it in the paper but hadn’t dreamed that Janey had known him so well or felt that way about him. She began to cry and Janey felt very strong comforting her and they felt that they’d be very close friends after that. Janey whispered that she’d never be able to love anybody else and Alice said she didn’t think she could ever love a man anyway, they all drank and smoked and talked dirty among themselves and had only one idea.

In July Alice and Janey got jobs in the office of Mrs. Robinson, public stenographer in the Riggs Building, to replace girls away on their vacations. Mrs. Robinson was a small grayhaired pigeonbreasted woman with a Kentucky shriek in her voice, that made Janey think of a parrot’s. She was very precise and all the proprieties were observed in her office. “Miss Williams,” she would chirp, leaning back from her desk, “that em ess of Judge Roberts’s has absolutely got to be finished today… My dear, we’ve given our word and we’ll deliver if we have to stay till midnight. Noblesse oblige, my dear,” and the typewriters would trill and jingle and all the girls’ fingers would go like mad typing briefs, manuscripts of undelivered speeches by lobbyists, occasional overflow from a newspaperman or a scientist, or prospectuses from realestate offices or patent promoters, dunning letters for dentists and doctors.

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