Mary Cary: "Frequently Martha"

by Kate Langley Bosher

Once I asked her what made her do it, and she laughed and said because she wanted to, and that she was much obliged to me for having found her work for her. But I believe there's some other reason she won't tell.

And why I believe so is that sometimes, when she thinks I am asleep, I see her looking in the fire, and there's something in her face that's never there at any other time. It's a remembrance. I guess most hearts have them if they live long enough. But you'd never think Miss Katherine had one, she's so glad and cheerful and busy all the time. I wonder if it's a sweetheart remembrance? I know three of her beaux; one in Yorkburg and two from away, who have been to see her frequent times; but a beau is different from a sweetheart. I'm sure that look means something secret, and I bet it's a man. Who is he? I don't know. I wish he was dead. I do!

When I first came back from the hospital my little old sticks of legs wouldn't hold me up, and down I would go. But I didn't mind that. I just minded not going to sleep at night. But sleep wouldn't come, and I'd get so wide awake trying to make it that I began to have a teeny bit of fever again, and then it was Miss Katherine asked if she might take me in her room. I was nervous and still needed attention, she said, and—magnificent gloriousness!—I was sent to her room to stay until perfectly well, and I'm here yet. Perfectly well because I am here!

That first night when I got into the little white bed next to her bed, and knew she was going to be there beside me, I couldn't go to sleep right off. I kept wishing I was King David, so I could write a book of gratitudes and psalms and praises, and that was the first night I ever really prayed right. I didn't ask for a thing except for help to be worth it—the trouble she was taking for just little me, a charity child. Just me!

And oh, the difference in her room and the room I had left! She had had it painted and papered herself, for it hadn't been used since kingdom come, and the cobwebs in it would have filled a barrel. It had been a packing-room, and when Miss Katherine first saw it she just whistled soft and easy; but when she was through, it was just a dream.

It is a big room at the end of the wing, and it has three windows in it: one in the front and one in the back and one opposite the door you come in. And when the paper was put on you felt like you were in a great big garden of roses; pink roses, for they were running all over the walls, and they were so natural I could smell them. I really could.

Miss Katherine brought her own furniture and things, and she put a carpet on the floor, all over, not just strips. And the windows had muslin curtains at them with cretonne curtains just full of pink roses, looped back from the muslin ones; and the couch and the cushions and some chairs were all covered with the same kind of pink roses. And as for the bed, it was too sweet for anybody to lie on—that is, for anybody but Miss Katherine to lie on.

There was a big closet for her clothes, and a writing-desk which had been in the family a hundred years—maybe a thousand. I don't know. And one side of the room was filled with books in shelves which old Peter Sands made and painted white for her. She lets me look at them as much as I want, and says I can read as many as I choose when I am old enough to understand them. She didn't mention any time to begin trying to understand, and so I started at once, and I've read about forty already.

There aren't a great many pictures on Miss Katherine's walls. Just a few besides the portraits of her father and mother, oil paintings. And oh, dear children what are to be, I'm going to have my picture painted as soon as I marry your father, so you can know what I looked like in case I should die without warning. I want you to have it, knowing so well what it means to have nothing that belonged to your mother, I not having anything—not even a strand of hair or a message.

Sometimes I wonder if I ever really did have a Mother, or if the doctor just left me somewhere and nobody wanted me. I must have had one, for Betty Johnson says a baby's bound to. That a father isn't so specially necessary, but you've got to have a Mother. Mine died when I was born. I wonder how that happened when there wasn't anybody in all this great big earth to take care of me except my father, who didn't know how. He died, too, and then I was an Orphan.