A Long-Distance Call From Jim
And how it shook up Centerville
By
Bess Streeter Aldrich
A Long-Distance Call From Jim
And how it shook up Centerville
By
Bess Streeter Aldrich
TO ELLA NORA ANDREWS, calm, unruffled, serenely humming a gay little tune, gathering her school things together–her “Teacher’s Manual of Primary Methods,” a box of water-colors, and a big bunch of scarlet-flamed sumac–came the sound of the telephone.
Ella Nora, in her crisp blue linen school suit, shifted her working paraphernalia and took down the receiver. Fate is a veritable chameleon for changing shape and color. This morning she had entered the fat, puffy person of asthmatic Mrs. Thomas Tuttle, and was saying:
“That you, Ella? Have you heard the news? Jim Sheldon is coming here the last of the week. He’ll be here on Number Eight, Friday afternoon. And get ready now for the climax–he’s bringing his bride. Wha’ say? Yes, his wife. He telephoned Pa from Chicago–imagine anybody telephoning clear from Chicago, Ella! He’s waited long enough to get married, I must say. He’s thirty-six, if he’s a day. I know, because my Eddie’s just two months older. Well, we must do something for them, and we’ll have to get busy right away. Wha’ say? All right; I’ll ask Addie Smith and Minnie Adams and Mis’ Meeker–she’s forever thinking of things to eat–” And on and on went the rasping, wheezing voice of Fate, while, through the window, Ella watched the red and yellow and orange zinnias in the back yard fade and run together into a smudge of prismatic coloring.
Ella hung up the receiver and leaned against the window. There was a pounding in her throat, and she couldn’t seem to concentrate her thoughts. The zinnias had brightened somewhat, but were still dancing diabolically with the cosmos behind them. From the chaotic jumble of her mind the naked, leering truth picked itself out: It had happened at last–Jim was married. By which statement one gathers, and rightfully, that Ella had in some indefinable way been prepared for the news she had just heard.
In truth, Ella had been preparing for it for years. She was thirty-one now, and from her twentieth year she had been working consistently on an elaborate defense system that surrounded her heart.
Patiently she had dug the trench of an apparent and complete absorption in her school work. She had piled around it countless sand bags of mere-friendliness toward Jim, put up an intricate entanglement of the barb wire of her sharp wit, and over it all painted the deceiving screen of her evident joy-in-her-freedom. But down under all this complicated protective system was The-Thing-in-Her-Heart, palpitating, vital, strong, held a prisoner for years by the stern edict of her mind, doing penance for having been unwise enough to go wandering out into No Man’s Land of Dreams.
ELLA waited while the zinnias separated themselves from their background. It had happened. Of course! Hadn’t she expected it? Predicted it? James Warren Sheldon, on the staff of an Eastern newspaper, war correspondent, nationally known this past year, was no more a part of land-locked Centerville now than the moon or the North Sea. It had been three years since he had last come breezing into town–tall, lean, brown, virile. Not a day of that short vacation had they missed being together–Ella caught her breath. So this was what Tennyson meant, was it, when he said a sorrow’s crown of sorrow was remembering happier days?
The first school-bell rang. When Duty takes Misery by the shoulder and says gruffly, “Oh, cut it! Come on!” so much the better for Misery.
Ella went quickly down the narrow brick walk, leaf strewn now with the red and gold of the Mid-West maple trees, and turned toward the schoolhouse where she had taught for, it seemed to her now, a half-century. Down the street a little girl disentangled her pipe-stem legs from the picket-fence and slipped a moist hand into Ella’s.
“Miss-Andrews, where do all the grasshoppers go?”
“I don’t know, dear.”
Back in the past was Ella’s mind, down Childhood Road. She was only eight when Jim Sheldon, a big thirteen-year-old boy, newly orphaned, had come to live across the alley with his aunt and uncle and their little baby, Grace. For years Jim had meant nothing to her but a dreadful scourge, to be borne with as much Christian fortitude as the boils of Job. One of his delicate marks of attention had been a way of dropping unexpectedly out of trees with a weird shriek just at dusk. Ella smiled involuntarily, and the little girl, seeing it, hugged her teacher’s hand to her cheek: