ARTICHOKES

By Jim Walker

When I was ten years of age, I met and was totally smitten with a red-haired girl named Barbara. It was midspring, and I had to spend almost a month at home because I had been exposed to measles and was thus quarantined. Happily, I could not go to school. Nowadays, everyone gets inoculated for measles, and good things like being quarantined no longer happen.

At the time, my father, mother, and I lived in part of a large rambling house, which had a number of apartments of varying sizes. We had four rooms. Downstairs, there was a small two-room apartment belonging to our friend, Mrs. Allen. Everyday, when my father came home for lunch, he would bring Mrs. Allen’s Boston newspaper, which I, home from school for lunch myself, would run down to deliver. I liked talking to Mrs. Allen. She often had cookies and would thank me for delivering her paper. She always seemed happy to see me.

That spring she was not there because she had gone all the way to California to visit her son. She was to be gone for almost three months, and, for two of these, her apartment had been sublet to Mademoiselle and Barbara of the red hair. Mademoiselle was Barbara’s governess, and the two of them, as Mademoiselle said, were “pigging it” together in Mrs. Allen’s two rooms until summer came. As for the measles, Barbara had already had them and thus did not need to be quarantined from me.


When summer came, Barbara’s parents would also arrive; they owned a very large summer hotel in nearby Bethlehem. During my quarantine, Mademoiselle and Barbara frequently invited me for lunch or to go on trips to nearby places for hiking, walking, or looking at birds. I was thought to be a suitable companion for the beautiful Barbara, and I would make a point of bringing both her and Mademoiselle small bouquets of wildflowers. I soon gave up on dandelions, which wilted too quickly and also stained ones hands.

Mademoiselle approved of me. I was polite and, in the way of kids who read a lot, was old for my years. I exhibited a kind of sophistication and knowledge that was mostly a sham. Underneath, I was often lonely, without purpose, and, most of all, I hated school. I really hated it when I had to go back to the classroom and could no longer spend my days with Barbara and Mademoiselle, who was skilled at taking a book or a leaf or a tree and making an absorbing lesson from it. But eventually quarantine ended, and I did go back to school. Barbara’s parents did come to the White Mountains. Mademoiselle and fair Barbara left Mrs. Allen’s two-room apartment, and our ways parted.

But whenever I conjured Barbara’s face in my mind, she remained the most beautiful girl I had ever known.

School dragged on, but at last it was June. I hadn’t thought about Barbara very much because it seemed hopeless. She was so completely gone from of my life. But then on one June day when I got home from school, my mother asked how I would feel about skipping school the next day.

“Depends on what for,” I said, thinking she might have scheduled another dentist appointment. I always had to go to the dentist.

“It’s that girl and her governess. They want us to come to lunch. Well, not exactly the governess—I don’t remember her name, do you?”

“Mademoiselle.”

“Yes, I know,” my mother said. “But what was her real name?”

“Don’t know.”

“It doesn’t matter. Anyhow, Barbara’s mother has invited us to lunch. You and me. Your father can’t take the time off from work, so it will just be the two of us.”

“Barbara will be there?”

“You betcha,” my mother said and winked at me.

“Moth-er!” I yelled. I knew she was teasing me.

I was surprised that my mother would consider going out to lunch for the day because she was so busy at the moment. My parents had bought an old house much closer to my father’s store and nearer to the middle of town. All of my mother’s waking moments seemed to be taken up with packing and making plans for the move. She had little time for anything else. But she often had speculated as to what Barbara’s parents might be like. Her comments about these unknown and unmet people were mostly uncomplimentary because, although she always listened with approval when I talked about how interesting Mademoiselle made learning, she still felt that a child belonged with her mother. I think she wanted to see what this mother and father were like.

Me, I just wanted to see Barbara.

And so the next day we drove to the Upland Terrace Hotel in Bethlehem, which was large and gray and had a big porch with rocking chairs running across its front.

“You know,” my mother said quietly as we came up to the hotel’s front door, “this place could use a good coat of paint. Makes me feel better about that house we’re moving to.” She sighed. “I wonder if I’ll ever be able to get your father into the mood for painting a house.”

At the front desk we were directed across the main dining room to a small private room with one table in the middle, set for five places.

Barbara’s mother, who also had red hair, greeted us. “You did say your husband would not be joining us, am I right?”

“He couldn’t get away from his store,” my mother said.

“Well, I am glad to meet you,” Barbara’s mother said. “By the way, I am also named Barbara, but Les—my husband—usually calls me Babsy so there is no confusion. So please call me that—you too, Jim. That way everyone will know who’s being talked to, if you see what I mean.”

“And my name is Dorothy,” my mother said.

“Such a charming name.” Babsy smiled winningly.

We were surprised when lunch was served, because as luck would have it, our waitress was Helen, who was a distant cousin of my father’s. I knew Helen pretty well because once when my mother was laid up with the flu, she had come to help out at the house for two or three days. I think of her as being about thirty-five at the time, a rather plain woman with a sad face. I believe she was surprised to see my mother and me and seemed uncertain as to whether or not she should acknowledge that she knew us.

I unwittingly solved that problem by greeting her loudly and with a big grin.

My mother followed suit, and Babsy looked perplexed. She did not seem to know how to handle this situation where the help and guests were familiar with one another.

However, to her credit, she smiled and said how nice it was that we all knew one another. Barbara now joined us, and she and I had a chance to talk a little bit. Les, Barbara’s father, came in to say hello, but he couldn’t stay for lunch because, like my father, he had to work.

Helen served lunch, very elegant in its presentation but which turned out to be chicken noodle soup (straight from the can, my mother told me later) and egg salad sandwiches with the crusts removed.

“I wanted to pick things I knew Barbara liked, since Jim is her guest,” Babsy said. It was funny because Barbara ate the soup but pushed the sandwiches aside. I had lunch several times with Mademoiselle and Barbara when they were living in the apartment downstairs, and there had always been a lot of salads and whole-grain breads, which also was the kind of food my mother pushed. It was funny being told that what Barbara—my beautiful red haired damsel—really liked was canned soup and egg salad sandwiches on decrusted white bread. It didn’t ring true.

For dessert, we had green Jell-O with fake whipped cream.

Conversation did not flow very easily. Barbara seemed glad to see me but was also very uptight. I couldn’t get much out of her. And all I could think of to tell her about myself was how much I hated school. Barbara told me how much she would like to go to school and how boring it was always to have Mademoiselle doing all the teaching.

Altogether, it was an awkward luncheon. There were just the four of us—Barbara and her mother and me and mine. I couldn’t get Barbara to really talk to me, and there seemed to be longer and longer silences between Babsy and my mom.

It was a terrible let down, and the moment the last mouthful of Jell-O was consumed, Mademoiselle came into the dining room to collect Barbara. “Time for your afternoon lessons,” she said briskly. There was none of the approach she’d had before, of “let’s go out for a walk and see what we can learn from what we see. “

I looked over at Barbara and noticed her hair was not the deep red I remembered it as being, but was more a carrot red, and she had freckles. She was also impatient. She was impatient with her mother and with Mademoiselle when she came in; she hardly talked to me at all.

Babsy now stood up. It was pretty certain that the luncheon was over, and that everyone was going on his or her way.

“It was so nice of you to come. I hope it was good for the two young people to see one another again. Mademoiselle was most affirmative about your son’s good manners and suitability as a friend for Barbara. We do appreciate your having brought him up so nicely.”

My mother smiled but said nothing until we were outside in the car.

“Wow, that was some compliment—that I know how to bring up a kid with good manners.” She thought a moment before turning the key in the ignition. “Come to think of it, I seem to have done a better job than she did. I didn’t think much of Barbara, did you?"

“Naw, she’s got too many freckles.”

“And that food! God, it was so awful they’d have to serve it in a private dining room. Slop for us peasants who don’t know how to live. Did I ever tell you that my father and mother had three maids—I never washed a dish the whole time I was growing up.”

“Aw, Mom. Don’t start that again. We know your daddy was a rich man.”

“He was. Lost it all in the crash of ’29!”

She started the car, and we pulled away from the front of the Upland Terrace. “It really could use a coat of paint,” my mother said again.

I didn’t say anything. I was still thinking about Barbara. I didn’t care if I ever saw her again, and this made me very sad. I had been looking forward so much to this visit.

“I mean,” my mother continued, “I didn’t really expect caviar although I’ve had plenty of that in my day, too. But canned chicken soup! They could have at least managed an artichoke.”   

 

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