No memory of how she’d left the stone house. Maybe she’d run outside desperate and screaming. Maybe she’d run panicked as a wounded animal trailing blood, something soft and liquidy in her hair, on her face and arms. Maybe she’d fainted, and someone had lifted her. Onto a stretcher? Thinking that she, too, had been shot, wounded? A dying girl, looks like about thirteen.
In the startling intimacy of Miss Lutter’s kitchen. Where on a shelf with several pots of beautifully blooming African violets, in a tasteful oval mirror-frame, the handsome olive-skinned and dark-bearded likeness of Jesus Christ lifted His hand in a casual blessing as, at the Capitol Theater, in a movie poster Cary Grant, Henry Fonda, James Stewart might lift his hand in a casual smiling greeting to warm the heart.
There were two pieces of raisin bread toast, smeared with honey. Set before her.
“Rebecca, eat. You must.”
“Jesus, I will believe. Jesus, help me to believe in You.”
Personal possessions they were called. Brought to her from the old stone house in the cemetery.
Rebecca’s clothes, her shoes and boots. Such shabby items, Rebecca was shamed to see turn up in Miss Lutter’s tidy house, dumped out of cardboard boxes. Even her schoolbooks looked shabby! And there was the dictionary she’d won as a champion speller of 1946, now warped from the damp in the old stone house and smelling of mildew. Some of Anna’s clothing had been mixed with Rebecca’s, a wrinkled white cotton eyelet blouse far too large for Rebecca, box-shaped housedresses, cotton stockings twisted together like snakes, black suede gloves Rebecca hadn’t known her mother had owned, a much-laundered flannel nightgown big and shapeless as a tent…Seeing the frightened look in Rebecca’s face, Miss Lutter quickly folded up Anna Schwart’s things, and placed them back inside the box.
Here was a surprise: the Motorola console radio that had been shut away in the parlor for years, Jacob Schwart’s most prized possession. In the frayed cardboard box in which it was carried into Miss Lutter’s house it, too, appeared shabby, diminished like something hauled from the dump. Rebecca stared at the radio, unable to speak. Numbly she drew her fingers over the wooden cabinet: she fumbled to turn the dial on, though of course the radio wasn’t plugged in and hadn’t Pa told them with bitter satisfaction that the tubes were burnt out…
Politely Miss Lutter told the delivery men to please take it away. “I have my own radio, thank you.”
Most of the personal possessions were given to the Milburn Good Will shop, by Miss Lutter. So ever afterward so long as Rebecca lived in Milburn, and even after she moved away with Niles Tignor to live elsewhere, she instinctively shrank from glancing into the windows of such secondhand stores as Good Will or Salvation Army out of a dread of seeing her family’s despoiled things on display: old, ugly clothes, battered furniture, the pathetic Motorola console radio in its scuffed imitation-wood cabinet.
In the fall of 1949, the old stone house in the cemetery was razed.
No one had lived in it since the murder-suicide. No one had attempted to even clean it. The Township voted to replace it with another dwelling in which the new cemetery caretaker and his family could live.
By this time Rebecca had been living for nearly five months in Rose Lutter’s tidy beige-brick house at 114 Rush Street, in a residential neighborhood of similar small brick and shingle-board homes. A block away was the First Presbyterian Church, to which Miss Lutter avidly belonged. Her house had a small front stoop upon which, in appropriate seasons, Miss Lutter placed pots of geraniums, mums, and hydrangea. Inside, Miss Lutter’s house wasn’t really much larger than the stone house had been, and yet: how different!
The most startling difference was that Miss Lutter’s house contained no strong smells. Not a smell of kerosene, not woodsmoke, not old, rancid food, or rotting wood, or damp earth close beneath the floorboards. Not that smell of human bodies in cramped quarters.
Only just, in Rose Lutter’s house, most noticeable on Fridays, a smell of furniture polish. And, beneath, a faint sweet prevailing fragrance of what Miss Lutter called her potpourri.
Potpourri was a mix of wildflowers, herbs, and spices prepared by Miss Lutter herself and allowed to dry. Potpourri was placed in bowls through the house including the bathroom where its position was on the back of the gleaming-white porcelain toilet.
Miss Lutter’s mother, now deceased, had always had potpourri in her house. And Miss Lutter’s grandmother, long deceased.
Rebecca had never heard of potpourri and she had never smelled anything like it before. It made her feel almost dizzy sometimes. When she stepped into the house, and the fragrance struck her. Or when she wakened in the morning, and it awaited her.
Blinking her eyes uncertain of where she was, what this meant.
Another startling thing was, the walls of Miss Lutter’s house were so clean. Some of the walls were covered in floral-print wallpaper, and some had been painted white. And all of the ceilings were white. In all the rooms there were windows!-even the bathroom. And at each of these windows, even the tiny window on the back door, there were curtains.
Mornings when Rebecca opened her eyes in the room designated as hers, in the rear, left corner of Miss Lutter’s house, what she saw first was pale pink organdy curtains facing her bed.
Wished she was friends still with Katy Greb! God damn she’d have liked to show Katy this room. The curtains, and the pink-rosebud wallpaper, and the fluffy “throw” rug, and the step-in closet…Not boast but just to show her. For Katy would be impressed. And she would be sure to tell Leora.
Is Rebecca lucky now, Momma! You should see her room…
Another remarkable thing was, how few cobwebs you saw in Miss Lutter’s house. Even in the summer, not many flies. None of those crazed stinging flies that hung out in kitchens and privies and made your life miserable. Rebecca helped Miss Lutter with keeping the house clean, and it was rare for her to discover dust-balls beneath furniture, or a patina of grime on any surface. So this was how people lived, in real houses in Milburn! The world of those others that had eluded the Schwarts.
There was a procedure to life, Rebecca saw. It wasn’t meant to be haphazard and made up as you went along.
As Miss Lutter had been a scrupulous teacher at the Milburn grammar school, so she was a scrupulous housekeeper. She owned not only a carpet sweeper but a General Electric vacuum cleaner. A heavy upright mechanism with a roaring motor and a bag that swelled up like a balloon with dust and grit and roller-wheels to be pushed along the floor. Of all of the household tasks, Rebecca liked vacuuming most. The roaring motor filled her head and drove out all thoughts. The very weight of the vacuum cleaner, tugging at her arms, making her short of breath, was like wrestling with someone who was strong and stubborn but finally tractable, and became an ally. Soon Rebecca was entrusted with vacuuming all of the rooms of the beige-brick house at 114 Rush Street.
Always there is a way out. If you can make yourself small enough, like a worm.
For two and a half years Rebecca would live with Rose Lutter, and for two and a half years she would await Jesus.
She’d given up expecting her brothers to come for her. Not Herschel, not Gus. Herschel was still a fugitive from justice and Gus had simply disappeared. It seemed to Rebecca that they must know what had happened for in her dazed state she believed that all the world must know. When she left Miss Lutter’s house to walk to school, when she appeared with Miss Lutter at church services in the First Presbyterian Church, everyone who saw her knew, as if a glimmering halo of light surrounded her, like those halos of light surrounding figures in Bible pictures: Jesus stilling the storm, Jesus healing the leper, Jesus presiding over the miraculous draught of fishes, but also Daniel in the lions’ den, Solomon dedicating the temple, Moses and the brazen serpent, Mary visited by the angel. Some were singled out for attention, and could not hope to hide.