South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [44]
“We made all our own rugs, every one, out of rags. Flannel shirts and dungarees and bedsheets that were beyond mending. Those things’ll survive the next ice age. Lord, the work of it. Bang! that shuttle on the loom would go all evening long. My grandma could never sit without working. The loom’s in the shed out back of the hotel. Dismantled, but all there. And the kicksled, why, I Used to Use it myself.”
“What is it, anyway?”
“It’s for the winter, to get around in the ice and the snow, do your errands. See, look.” Gladys stopped on the sidewalk and demonstrated, grabbing at an invisible waist-high handle with both hands, making a kicking motion with one foot. “You pushed yourself along, carried your parcels on the seat. See?”
Madeline nodded. For a moment she saw it all—ice, snow, the wooden kicksled, a tiny, robust woman in warm woolen clothes out doing her errands. “Handy.”
“A man with an antique store offered Us a lot of money for it, but we said no.”
“Of course you did.”
“Now I don’t know what to do. I had made Up my mind to sell it, but maybe I oughtn’t. Maybe once the hotel’s sold I’ll wish I’d kept it. But once we’re dead and gone, where’ll it go?”
“You’ll find somewhere. A museum, maybe? Or even Randi.” In her sadness Madeline was feeling beneficent and unjudging.
“Not Randi. She’d probably just hock it for the cash. Or worse.”
Madeline blinked. “Well, you shouldn’t sell it, you’d never forgive yourself.”
“Probably not.” Gladys began walking again.
“The hotel is really wonderful,” Madeline said as they headed Up the street, the clatter of the tavern growing fainter. “It’s—I’ve—” She meant to confess to Gladys, both her Unlikely daydreams and her unauthorized prowls through the place, but somehow she couldn’t. The time wasn’t right.
“Hard to believe it’s come to this. But I don’t know what else to do.”
Their feet scuffed on the pavement. After a while Madeline said (not sure why she did, but led into it by their unaccustomed camaraderie, the dark, the quiet), “I went to Pine Street that day. You know, that day you told me where he—Joe—lived.”
Gladys nodded. “I supposed you did.”
“It was awful.”
“Lots of poor people down in Crosscut. Real poor. Joe sold that house.”
Madeline waited for Gladys to add more and when she didn’t, she said, “I don’t know how to ask you about him.”
There was only the sound of their shoes on the sidewalk Until at last Gladys said, “And I don’t know how to tell you. He wasn’t a bad man.”
Objection rose in Madeline, from her marrow. “But I was his granddaughter.” She felt so much about it still, after all this time, after all that Emmy had given her, and wished she didn’t. She couldn’t seem to stem the tide of protest, though. (And maybe the protest was in a way impersonal. It wasn’t so much that this abandonment had happened to her; it was that it had happened at all. It was a philosophical question. Maybe one she should ask Paul, who seemed to be posting each one of Nietzsche’s seemingly endless aphorisms on his chalkboard a day at a time. Today it had been, He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.) “I was only three. What kind of a person can do that, just—refuse someone? A child.”
Gladys kept her eyes on her shoes. “People do what they have to. It’s different Up here. Hard. People don’t know, out in the rest of the world, what it’s like.”
“But he didn’t even consider it.”
“He couldn’t consider it,” Gladys said softly. “He just didn’t have it in him.”
Unexpectedly, tears filled Madeline’s eyes. This was so final, so damning in one way but exonerating in another. Maybe it was the only real answer, and if so, then her search for meaning in the situation would be over. And then what?
Gladys went on. “I met him at the fiddle jamboree. Well, met—it’s not like we didn’t know each other. But we started