She may roam this wide world over
She’ll never find a sweet man like me
Mary French
Poor Daddy never did get tucked away in bed right after supper the way he liked with his readinglight over his left shoulder and his glasses on and the paper in his hand and a fresh cigar in his mouth that the phone didn’t ring, or else it would be a knocking at the back door and Mother would send little Mary to open it and she’d find a miner standing there whitefaced with his eyelashes and eyebrows very black from the coaldust saying, “Doc French, pliz… heem coma queek,” and poor Daddy would get up out of bed yawning in his pyjamas and bathrobe and push his untidy grey hair off his forehead and tell Mary to go get his instrumentcase out of the office for him, and be off tying his necktie as he went, and half the time he’d be gone all night.
Mealtimes it was worse. They never seemed to get settled at the table for a meal, the three of them, without that awful phone ringing. Daddy would go and Mary and Mother would sit there finishing the meal alone, sitting there without saying anything, little Mary with her legs wrapped around the chairlegs staring at the picture of two dead wild ducks in the middle of the gingercolored wallpaper above Mother’s trim black head. Then Mother would put away the dishes and clatter around the house muttering to herself that if poor Daddy ever took half the trouble with his paying patients that he did with those miserable foreigners and miners he would be a rich man today and she wouldn’t be killing herself with housework. Mary hated to hear Mother talk against Daddy the way she did.
Poor Daddy and Mother didn’t get along. Mary barely remembered a time when she was very very small when it had been different and they’d lived in Denver in a sunny house with flowering bushes in the yard. That was before Brother was taken and Daddy lost that money in the investment. Whenever anybody said Denver it made her think of sunny. Now they lived in Trinidad where everything was black like coal, the scrawny hills tall, darkening the valley full of rows of sooty shanties, the minetipples, the miners most of them greasers and hunkies and the awful saloons and the choky smeltersmoke and the little black trains. In Denver it was sunny, and white people lived there, real clean American children like Brother who was taken and Mother said if poor Daddy cared for his own flesh and blood the way he cared for those miserable foreigners and miners Brother’s life might have been saved. Mother had made her go into the parlor, she was so scared, but Mother held her hand so tight it hurt terribly but nobody paid any attention, they all thought it was on account of Brother she was crying, and Mother made her look at him in the coffin under the glass.
After the funeral Mother was very sick and had a night and a day nurse and they wouldn’t let Mary see her and Mary had to play by herself all alone in the yard. When Mother got well she and poor Daddy didn’t get along and always slept in separate rooms and Mary slept in the little hallroom between them. Poor Daddy got grey and worried and never laughed round the house any more after that and then it was all about the investment and they moved to Trinidad and Mother wouldn’t let her play with the minechildren and when she came back from school she had nits in her hair.
Mary had to wear glasses and was good at her studies and was ready to go to highschool at twelve. When she wasn’t studying she read all the books in the house. “The child will ruin her eyes,” Mother would say to poor Daddy across the breakfast table when he would come down with his eyes puffy from lack of sleep and would have to hurry through his breakfast to be off in time to make his calls. The spring Mary finished the eighth grade and won the prizes in French and American history and English, Miss Parsons came around specially to call on Mrs. French to tell her what a good student little Mary French was and such a comfort to the teachers after all the miserable ignorant foreigners she had to put up with. “My dear,” Mother said, “don’t think I don’t know how it is.” Then suddenly she said, “Miss Parsons, don’t tell anybody but we’re going to move to Colorado Springs next fall.”
Miss Parsons sighed. “Well, Mrs. French, we’ll hate to lose you but it certainly is best for the child. There’s a better element in the schools there.” Miss Parsons lifted her teacup with her little finger crooked and let it down again with a dry click in the saucer.
Mary sat watching them from the little tapestry stool by the fireplace. “I hate to admit it,” Miss Parsons went on, “because I was born and bred here, but Trinidad’s no place to bring up a sweet clean little American girl.”
Granpa Wilkins had died that spring in Denver and Mother was beneficiary of his life insurance so she carried off things with a high hand. Poor Daddy hated to leave Trinidad and they hardly even spoke without making Mary go and read in the library while they quarreled over the dirty dishes in the kitchen. Mary would sit with an old red embossedleather Ivanhoe in her hand and listen to their bitter wrangling voices coming through the board partition. “You’ve ruined my life and now I’m not going to let you ruin the child’s,” Mother would yell in that mean voice that made Mary feel so awful and Mary would sit there crying over the book until she got started reading again and after a couple of pages had forgotten everything except the yeomen in Lincoln green and the knights on horseback and the castles. That summer instead of going camping in Yellowstone like Daddy had planned they moved to Colorado Springs.
At Colorado Springs they stayed first in a boardinghouse and then when the furniture came they moved to the green shingled bungalow where they were going to live that was set way back from the red gravel road in a scrawny lawn among tall poplartrees.
In the long grass Mary found the scaled remains of a croquetset. While Daddy and Mother were fussing about the furnishings that the men were moving in from a wagon, she ran around with a broken mallet slamming at the old cracked balls that hardly had any paint left on their red and green and yellow and blue bands. When Daddy came out of the house looking tired and grey with his hair untidy over his forehead she ran up to him waving the mallet and wanted him to play croquet. “No time for games now,” he said.
Mary burst out crying and he lifted her on his shoulder and carriedher round the back porch and showed her how by climbing on the roof of the little toolhouse behind the kitchen door you could see the mesa and beyond, behind a tattered fringe of racing cheesecloth clouds, the blue sawtooth ranges piling up to the towering smooth mass of mountains where Pikes Peak was. “We’ll go up there someday on the cogwheel railroad,” he said in his warm cozy voice close to her ear. The mountains looked so far away and the speed of the clouds made her feel dizzy. “Just you and me,” he said, “but you mustn’t ever cry… it’ll make the children tease you in school, Mary.”
In September she had to go to highschool. It was awful going to a new school where she didn’t have any friends. The girls seemed so welldressed and stuck up in the firstyear high. Going through the corridors hearing the other girls talk about parties and the Country Club and sets of tennis and summer hotels and automobiles and friends in finishingschools in the East, Mary, with her glasses and the band to straighten her teeth Mother had had the dentist put on, that made her lisp a little, and her freckles and her hair that wasn’t red or blond but just sandy, felt a miserable foreigner like the smelly bawling miners’ kids back in Trinidad.
She liked the boys better. A redheaded boy grinned at her sometimes. At least they let her alone. She did well in her classes and thought the teachers were lovely. In English they read Ramona and one day Mary, scared to death all alone, went to the cemetery to see the grave of Helen Hunt Jackson. It was beautifully sad that spring afternoon in Evergreen Cemetery. When she grew up, she decided, she was going to be like Helen Hunt Jackson.