Baker Towers Read Online Free PDF Page B

morning she would carry them to the Italian market, where the storekeeper paid a dime a dozen. She used the coins to buy Defense Stamps, which cost a quarter apiece. Ittook her months to collect enough stamps to buy a War Bond, an exercise in patience.
    She rarely had money of her own. At the end of each term, her friend Irene Jevic got a quarter for her report card. Joyce’s parents gave her nothing, even though she earned all A’s and Irene never got higher than a B. Once, timidly, Joyce had suggested to her father that her report card was worth a quarter. For a moment he’d considered this.
    “No money,” he said, kissing her forehead. “I give you credit.”
    Completely by accident, he had taught her to read. She was tiny then; every night after supper he’d sat between her and Dorothy, the newspaper spread out on the table. He had pointed at the headlines, waiting for Dorothy to sound out the words. His fingernails were black with mine dirt. He was gentle at first, but Dorothy read so slowly that he lost patience. Meanwhile Joyce—so tiny he barely noticed her—learned to read almost without effort.
    Only once had she made him angry. That fall she’d decided it was time the family got a telephone; knowing he’d object, she’d gone to the Bell Telephone office herself and ordered the service. When a letter came in the mail asking for a deposit, her father was furious.
    “How dare you?” he roared. He had a powerful voice, like a bear’s cry. “You humiliated me in front of those English people.” She had always been his favorite child; he never scolded her as he did Georgie and Dorothy. Even when he was angry, she knew how to make him laugh.
    But not that day. “Daddy,” she said. She could barely speak; she willed herself not to cry. “We need a telephone. Times are changing.”
    “This is my house,” he thundered. “The times change when I say.”
    For days he’d ignored her, refused even to look at her across the dinner table. “Daddy hates me,” she told her mother one night after supper. “He’ll never speak to me again.” Sure of this, she’d left her report card ontop of the radio, where he was sure to see it. In the evening he passed it around the table to Len Stusick and Ted Poblocki, who sat with him in the kitchen on Saturday nights, smoking cigars and listening to the radio. Joyce had laughed the next morning when her mother told her this. She appeared on the steps dressed for church and kissed her father’s cheek.
    “Good morning, Daddy,” she said sweetly, as though nothing at all had happened.
    Now she approached the casket. His face had changed, softened in a way that made him less handsome. Oh Daddy, she thought. Where did you go? It seemed impossible that he couldn’t hear her. That he was simply gone.
    His hands lay folded across his chest, holding a string of rosary beads. His skin looked smooth and waxy, but his fingernails were still black. Every morning after work, and every night before supper, he had scrubbed his hands with a stiff brush; but it never made any difference. His hands would never be clean.
     
    T HE CLOCK STRUCK MIDNIGHT , then twelve-thirty, then one. Rose lay curled on Stanley’s side of the bed. She had done this for years when he worked Hoot Owl, as if keeping it warm for his return.
    She lay awake, listening. Outside a dog barked. The baby breathed loudly in the cradle. Rose’s stomach twisted inside her, and she remembered she had not eaten.
    She crept downstairs in her bare feet, an old coat thrown over her nightgown. She needn’t have bothered. The men in the parlor were passed out cold.
    She turned on a kitchen light. Joyce or Dorothy had returned thecasseroles to the icebox. Rose considered heating some dumplings or sauerkraut, a plate of gray, heavy Polish food. Then she noticed the glass dome sitting on the counter: Madge Yurkovich’s hazelnut torte. She removed the cover. The cake was dusted with powdered sugar, the effect somehow