“But why do you call her ‘aunt’?” asked Sahwah. “Why don’t you call her ‘mother’?”
“She never would have it,” replied Sylvia. “She always taught me to call her Aunt Aggie. I don’t know why.”
Sylvia moved restlessly in her chair, and from the folds of the loose dressing gown which she wore a picture tumbled out. Katherine picked it up and laid it back on her lap. It was a small colored poster sketch of a red haired girl in a golf cape, which had evidently been the cover design of a magazine some years ago.
“Why are you so fond of that poster, Sylvia?” asked Katherine curiously. “You brought it along with you when you came here, and you keep it with you all the time.”
Sylvia’s tone when she answered was half humorous and half wistful. “That’s my mother,” she said.
“Your mother!” exclaimed Katherine, incredulously.
“Oh, not my really real mother,” Sylvia continued quickly. “I never saw a picture of her. But Aunt Aggie said my mother had red hair and was most uncommonly good looking, so I found a picture of a beautiful lady with red hair and called it my mother. It’s better than nothing.” The Winnebagos nodded silently and no one spoke for a moment.
Then Katherine asked gently, “What else do you know about mother?”
Sylvia sat up and related the tale told her hundreds of times by Aunt Aggie, in answer to her eager questioning about her mother. Unconsciously she used Aunt Aggie’s expressions and gestures as she told it.
“‘Me an’ Joe was coming on the steam cars from Butler to Philadelphy, and in back of us sat a young couple with a baby about a month old. The girl—she wasn’t nothing but a girl even though she was a married woman—was most uncommon good looking. She had bright red hair and big grey eyes, and she wore a golf cape. Her husband was a big, red faced feller, homely but real honest lookin’. They weren’t either of them twenty years old. Farmers, I could tell from their talk, and as well as I could make out, the name on their bag was Mitchell. Well, well, along between Waterloo and Poland there suddenly come a terrible bump, and then a smash and a crash, and the next thing I was layin’ under the seat and Joe was trying to pull me out. When I did finally get out the car was a-layin’ over on its side all smashed to bits. Somehow or other when Joe dug me out from under the seat I had ahold of the little baby that had been in the seat in back of me. The young man and woman were under the wreck. They were both killed, but the baby never had a scratch.