Frieda

I

THAT summer my husband and I were living in the cottage on Father’s place in the country. I was expecting my baby in the early fall, and the quiet air and sunshine were most grateful to me after a miserable spring in the city.

My housekeeping in the cottage was extremely light, since we took our meals with the family; breakfast I got myself in the tiny kitchen bright with early sun. The man of the house once off to his train, the washing of the few dishes, a little dusting and sweeping, and the making of the bed completed my duties. Then, leaving my house in order, I would gather up the dirty clothes and, with the laundry bag over my shoulder, go across the field to the big house.

Those early mornings! The wet grass shining, the birds shouting, the sea blue beyond the stretch of lawn! My heavy body, the earnest kickings of the latest aspirant to life, could not burden me in that air, that sun. Rather they added to the intensity of life, to the warmth of the earth, to the sweetness of the flowering of the flowers. My dog would start a cottontail from among the bushes, merely a bobbing flash of white across the grass; or I saw the horses on the hay wagon stand quietly while the sweet load was piled —from them came a good smell, mingling with the hay. Above, a gull curved, feet tucked straight beneath the shining breast, quick head turning. And I sang on my way.

To greet me with open arms at the big house came Frieda, a buxom figure in her blue maid’s uniform, neat and quick and bustling. ‘Ach, ein Geschenk!' she would cry, taking the laundry. ‘How are you? And der Bube?' She always spoke as though we were already two separate persons. ‘Fine, thank you,’ I would say, ‘and how are you? ’Ach, I am well. I am always well. A lovely day, hein?' And away she would go with the laundry bag, all around her upstairs a mêlée of mops and brushes and pails, smells of polish and soap, as though the place had never been cleaned before and might never be again. It looked like a hopeless confusion. But by eleven o’clock everything was as neat as a pin, the rooms that were her care bright with Teutonic order, herself as bright and quite unwearied.

I had known Frieda for four or five years; she had been with my family since my second year in college and was an absolutely essential part of the scheme of things. We were very good friends. When I was living at home she did everything for me that was in her power to do. And when I came back she made me feel as though I had returned to the lap of luxury. Nothing was too much trouble to do, or to be done with laughter and snatches of Viennese song. Busy always and cheerful in the city, she seemed to take on an added plumage of zest in the country; her round pink cheeks and shining eyes became her well against the background of flowering shrubs that surrounded the kitchen garden. One almost expected her to come bouncing out with a stein of beer.

II

We used to go swimming together that summer. Deprived of the joys of diving and strenuous swimming, I floated placidly in the shallow water near the beach. Frieda would emerge from the bathhouse in a voluminous black taffeta bathing suit that made her look larger than ever, and a very small red cap drawn down tight over her pretty hair. She would start screaming the minute she came out, little screams of excitement that increased in volume the deeper she got in the cold water. Cold water and crabs, with her own indefatigable exuberance, were ample reason for screaming. I lay rocking in the water, creating ripples of mirth.

It was the crabs that taught her to swim. Fat enough to float, but too timid to try, she had never been able to learn to swim. But the appearance of a family of horseshoe crabs — harmless and shy in actuality, but unattractive to look at — threw her into fits. Under my urging and scorn and assurances, she would venture into the water after the crabs had glided away; but her apprehensions drove her to lifting her feet continually from the bottom, with the result that she was soon swimming about with ease, and in a short time with confidence.

The amount of flattery she lavished on me would have been sickening if we had not been sincerely fond of one another. Her devotion extended to my dog, whom she addressed as ‘Shnookie’ out of some idea that it was the fondest of American endearments; and this his dignity accepted with affability and returned affection. When she brought my breakfast tray, upon it was always a small plate with three dog biscuits — this that Shnookie might have his breakfast in bed as well; to which he was no whit averse, though I spoke my mind to him on the matter of a supposedly rough-andtumble, outdoor dog accepting such pampering.

It had been a matter for sorrow to Frieda when I married and went to live elsewhere. And such return visits as I made that summer were received with great joy, though I think she was hurt that I should prefer to live in the cottage and do a little of my own work rather than reside in state in the big house with her to wait on me. But I could not do anything if she could prevent me. Sitting down one day in a moment of wifely devotion to mend socks, — though I hate to sew, I do not really mind darning, — I was discovered by Frieda, who snatched them from me with every appearance of rage and a torrent of German none of which I understood. I submitted, for it was useless to argue, and anyway I knew she would do them much better than I.

She never tired of talking of the baby. Every day of that summer she asked me whether I wanted a boy or a girl; and every day we discussed the relative merits of each. From that discussion, ended by the conclusion that we should be satisfied with either but that on the whole boys were better, we went on to the question of the color of its — his — eyes. Here we differed radically, for though I prefer blue, in contrast to my own, Frieda firmly held out for brown or black. I can hear her now exclaiming, ‘ Schwarzen Augen, ja, schwarzen — so it will be.’

She went into ecstasies over the presents I received, little dresses and sweaters and tiny knitted shoes. Her eyes would grow brighter and rounder, and you could tell she saw the baby inside them already. Indeed, never did this child — who, for all the commotion it caused, was still something to me distant and unreal — seem so present in actuality as when Frieda and I discussed its every aspect. All her youth and strength, denied its proper object, went into joy and hope and anticipation for this baby.

Frieda’s nervousness and excitement were a great sedative for me. Under the stimulus of her sympathy and admiration I could not help being calm and happy. She was a part of the invigorating air and sun there, which made me well and strong and ready — a diverting and inspiring factor in a pattern of life too largely made up of the tedium of waiting.

The summer proceeded very slowly through long days, drawing on toward the ripening of the fruit. The leaves, from the August blaze of green which seems the last defiance of the youth of the year, turned slowly to the colors of the west. I walked slower, planting my feet hard on the good ground, watching the apples and the grapes leave their dull green, turn warm and full. Life ran less exuberantly, but deeper. In the evening Frieda sang low songs, sitting on the sea wall, staring into the west. She was quieter, and watched me with solicitous eyes. To me the earth was at its most beautiful; toward it and toward the people I loved I experienced a warmth and depth of feeling such as never before. The faint — oh, very faint and distant in these days — possibility of leaving all this added a richness to my taste of things such as I had never before discovered. All this, without words, in a communion of feeling, Frieda understood.

III

My baby was expected at the end of September. In the second week of that month, wrapped though I was in the examination of my own feelings, I noticed a paleness, a subduedness, about Frieda that were very unusual. I asked her about herself. Of course she answered with a laugh and a joke, and not a word of truth. I let it go by. But it was not many days before it was obvious that she was ill. My mother investigated, was stern with her, sent her to a doctor. Poor Frieda! She, the young, the strong, the gay, was nothing but a frightened child, a stranger in a strange land, pitifully ignorant and terribly afraid. I was never more distressed in my life than to hear when she returned that there was trouble indeed — an immediate and serious operation necessitated by a condition of long standing which Frieda, with courage backed too well by fear and ignorance, had concealed.

From that moment ended our close relationship. Fearful for my welfare, my family did not allow me to see her again, after one last glimpse of a pale Frieda with a smile that mocked old gayety, and the eyes of a hurt and loving animal. She went to the city, and soon after to the hospital. I too was expecting that very journey before long, but for the time I stayed under the thinning shadow of the leaves, in wind that daily grew brisker on a sea less blue. I thought often of Frieda; the house was silent without her; my dog was disconsolate. But life was welling up within me, and under the pressure of the imminent effort the reality of the world around me faded. I became a machine for waiting — the servant, at attention, of the being within me; ready to offer it, upon its demand, life.

The reports I heard of Frieda were good. I do not know if they made them good for me. I sent her a lot of German magazines and illustrated papers. One day I found on my table a little book of German poems that I had had in school. I asked the maid who was attempting to do the things that Frieda had done how it came there. As I asked, I remembered I had lent it to Frieda some time before. ‘Frieda left it with me to give back to you. She cleaned up her room and picked up all her things before she left.’ She looked at me and I saw there were tears in her eyes. She blurted out, ‘ She did n’t think she was coming back from the hospital.’

The maid went quickly away. I turned the little book over and over in my hands. I remembered how, every Thursday before she went out, Frieda would tidy up her sewing room, her broom closet, her linen closet, so that all was in perfect order. ‘In case I do not come back,’ she would say. I used to tease her about it, and she would laugh; but she never failed to do it. ‘In case I do not come back.’ The little book fell open in my hands. I read: —

I flung it down and went out into the sun. A bed of zinnias near the door lifted their lusty colors up from sturdy stems. The sweetness of the day was warm and strong, the sun upon my hands was warm. Life stirred eagerly within me.

We heard that the operation was successful. Gladys, the other maid, went to see Frieda in the hospital. She reported that she looked well, that she was cheerful and said everyone was kind to her; the doctor and the nurses were all so kind, so good. And well they might be, I thought, to one so good herself, and so ignorant, and so afraid. I wanted to go to see her, but they would not let me.

IV

And then one morning we had bad news — a relapse, a hemorrhage, a dangerous condition. That day I went to the city, for my time was soon. With deep regret I left the fields, brown now with stubble, left the ripened apples lying on the ground, and the grapes hanging dark and full from their trellises. The year was coming to the equinox. In the evening they told me quietly, with care, that Frieda had died that afternoon. Every force within me, the conscious and the even stronger unconscious, rallied to my support. It was as though I heard, from a little room with thick walls, the report of a firing squad, and knew that death was there. But it was outside; it could not get within and hurt what I bore. I was protected from the shock of death by the necessity of life.

On the day Frieda was buried my child was born. In the tenseness, the anxiety, the agonizing impatience of the last waiting days, I had thought of nothing but myself, my object. When the day came, all the world was swept away in the terrible presence of the force that will bring, no matter what obstacles, the perfection and beauty of a human being out of a dark welter of struggle and pain. Then, in all the world and the universe of far-flung stars, there was no one but me, my pain, my effort, and, at last, my child.

Later, when the world came back, lying peacefully, quietly, for many days in the sterile cheerfulness of the great hospital, I thought of Frieda. I thought of her, not in the last days of distress, of pain and fear and premonition of death, but of Frieda singing, laughing, her hands on her hips; of Frieda bouncing in, on one occasion when she was serving as waitress, to announce ‘Supper is finished!’ — meaning, quite properly, that supper was finished and ready to eat; of Frieda taking my bundle, crying ‘ Ein Geschenk!'; of Frieda with her pretty eyes and pretty hair, and her gayety that will never be forgotten. I smiled, I laughed to myself at all my remembrance of her. It was only when, as I lay thinking thus, they brought my baby, who looked at me out of her great blue eyes, that I wept for Frieda.