At Home on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [60]
As a child, Marilee had thought the amenities might be a flower, or a bird, that had something special to teach, which was why she was supposed to observe it. After all, Jesus had said, “Consider the lilies of the field . . .” and “His eye is on the sparrow . . .” Later, she reckoned it might be something you studied in Earth Science class, like those beautifully colored plants that lived beneath the sea. Now, as a mature young bride and mother-to-be, she understood exactly what the amenities were, and how important it was to observe them. The amenities were gestures of civility performed in this big, often very uncivilized world, small acts of kindness to let others know that their lives were noticed, and their presence valued.
That was why, as her last act before leaving Mrs. Blackwell’s Home for the Wives of Our Heroes Serving Abroad, Marilee sat down at the small, elegantly crafted writing table in her room to pen a note of thanks to her landlord of the past two years, and to attach it to a gift-wrapped box of rose-scented talcum that she had purchased on her last trip into town a week ago Saturday.
Emily Blackwell had sent two sons to fight in Europe. One would not be coming home. On the day that Mitch Crane—whom the girls in the house had nicknamed “the Grim Reaper” both because of his long, dour face, and because of the dreadful news he so often brought—stepped out of his black Hudson with the telegram in hand, Emily Blackwell had locked herself in her room and refused to come down to read it. She stayed there for two days. When she emerged, Mitch was still there, and he sat with her in comforting silence, until the pastor arrived. Observing the amenities.
It was then that Emily had decided to open her home to the military wives, many of whom had come from other parts of the state, who worked at the nearby textile mill while they waited for their husbands. The textile mill made the cloth that was used for uniforms. They worked to keep their husbands warm, and they liked to think they worked to bring them home sooner.
When Marilee first arrived at Blackwell House, there had been fifteen young women swarming through the upstairs rooms in their housecoats and slippers, their hair done up in papers, tossing laughter and shouts back and forth. Someone had broken a heel. Someone else had lost a button. Someone needed a bobby pin. And everyone stopped and turned with big welcoming smiles when Mrs. Blackwell brought Marilee up the stairs and introduced her as the “wife of Sergeant Jefferson T. Hodge,” and the newest member of their household.
There were three beds in most rooms, four in some, but there were six bathrooms and they never felt cramped. They took all their meals at the big noisy table downstairs and climbed onto the rattletrap old bus that the mill sent for them every morning. After work they all helped in the creamery, making butter and cheeses and buttermilk and thick cream, because what they didn’t need for their own table could be sold to help buy household necessities. In the evenings they would leave their doors open upstairs so that they could talk back and forth, sometimes passing around a bottle of nail polish or reading aloud from a magazine article, writing letters to the ones they loved or sharing the letters they had received, until Mrs. Blackwell called lights-out. Sunday afternoons they gathered around the radio in the big front parlor and rolled bandages for the Red Cross.
Suzie Todd had been the first to leave them, when her husband was wounded in a firefight in the French countryside. He was flown to the naval hospital in Norfolk, where Suzie would join him. The other women rushed to her aid, making travel arrangements, helping her pack, loaning or giving her little items they thought would be of use on her journey. Though their words and their faces were full of sympathy, inside they were secretly torn with jealousy, and ashamed of it. Her husband was coming home. For her, the war was over.
Twice Mitch Crane had come to their house in the big black Hudson and stood in