Chapter 1B

The fact is, Martha Jane was an upright, well behaved, socially poised, and even classy young lady. She seldom displayed anger toward others, apparently never gossiped or had anything maliciously critical to say about anyone. As far as I can tell, she was just a conscientious, undeniably pretty teenaged girl. She did have an active and playful nature but for the most part she behaved with the kind of politeness so common among girls whose Southern moms brought them up as "proper" and "sociable".

But obviously Martha Jane had her other side. On rare occasions during that period when she first was sitting for me, I would now and then look up and find her staring at me. Not "at" me, I should say, but "toward" me as though thinking of something deep and ponderous. Or now and then she would, indeed, look right into me with a steady, serious gaze, but she'd say nothing. I would turn away and go back to whatever I was doing. I had no idea what she was thinking.

One of these incidents occurred in late 1948, just before or after Thanksgiving. I was six, Martha Jane was fifteen. She arrived at our place from next door at about 7 o'clock as my Mom was getting powdered and done up for a date. I was on the floor of the living room and had spread old newspapers around to work on the treasured but broken Underwood typewriter that I had retrieved from the trash only a few weeks earlier. Martha Jane said hello and hugged me and chatted with my mother. Mom said, "Just let him play down there and he shouldn't be any trouble." Martha Jane laughed and said, "Betty, Speedy never gives me any trouble," at which Mom grumbled, "Give him time."

Martha Jane stood over me and asked what I was doing. My Mom broke in and said, "He's making a mess with that old typewriter. I don't see why he doesn't throw it away, it's nothin' but a... hunk of junk."

Martha Jane bent way down to smile at me and survey the spread of springs and spare parts strewn over the newspaper. "Hey," she asked, "are you taking this apart or putting it together?"

"Both," I said, not looking up from my task. "I'm gonna make it work again."

"But what'll you to do with it, Speedy, after you get it to work?"

"I'll figure somethin' out," I said arrogantly.

"You certainly have enough parts there for inspiration."

My mother came into the room, screwing on an earring. "Don't you make a mess and drive Martha Jane crazy. She has to study tonight."

"Oh, Betty," Martha Jane said, "he'll be all right."

My mother continued, "I don't know what he wants that thing for, it must be twenty years old. His godmother buys him toy trains and toy this and toy that, but he has to fool around with THAT and make a mess!"

Mom left to finish dressing in the bedroom. I sat on my knees, hunched over, laboriously studying the puzzle before me. I was so deeply absorbed that I was startled to hear someone breathing behind me. I looked up at saw Martha Jane staring at me. I turned so quickly that she barely had time to change the studied expression with which she had apparently been watching me.

Quickly, she smiled and gave me a big wink. She playfully mouthed the words, "It's okay."

My Mom left a few minutes later. Martha Jane settled down to a pile of books on the sofa and studied silently while I knelt on the floor struggling with my project. Using pliers and a screwdriver, I managed to straighten most its typeset arms, but some of them were still getting stuck on certain letters. I worked on it until I became frustrated and threw the pliers on the floor and pouted.

"What's wrong?" Martha Jane asked, and she came to sit on the floor beside me.

I showed her how the keys for certain letters were still bent out of shape and that if I bent one properly, the keys next to it would snap out of alignment. Martha Jane said, "Speedy, why don't you take it to a repair shop?"

"It's too old," I said. "Nobody wants to fool with it."

"Tell you what, maybe your Aunt Frances would buy you a new one."

"She won't," I said.

"But she gets you everything you want."

"No!" I said, angrily. "She told me I'm too young to have a typewriter."

"Too young?" she said, surprised. "You probably know more about typewriters than she ever will, hon."

"Besides," I added, holding the black albatross by the ends of its heavy roller platen, "it's mine! I found it."

She pondered aloud, "And nobody wants it but you." She hunched down beside me and surveyed the damage. "Maybe I can help."

I sighed, "It's no use. It's just too old and banged up."

"Well, Speedy, let's be patient and see what we can do. I'm sure you can figure it out. Show me what's wrong with it."

I was reluctant and pessimistic at first, but Martha Jane put on her horn-rimmed glasses and made me show her what the problem was. She studied everything closely and showed me how to set up the keys so that the problem was always repeated exactly the same way every time. She told me how to work on one part at a time and not try to fix everything at once. Finally we had the machine in one piece again and I showed her how straightening one key would throw several others out of whack.

Martha Jane sat back and scratched her head. I stood up beside her. "Martha Jane," I said, "you don't have to do this. You have to study."

She said, "No... now you've got me as puzzled about this as you are."

Suddenly she snapped her fingers and ran into the kitchen. She came back with some popsicle sticks. We kept popsicle sticks around for making our own cheap popsicles out of soda or Kool-Aid poured into ice trays. She showed me how to hold the line of keys in place with parts made from popsicle sticks, and that would let me work on one key at a time while keeping the others in place.

"Hey," I exclaimed, "Neat! That's pretty smart for a girl."

"Hm... boys!" she huffed with a laugh, and she went back to the sofa and her books.

An hour passed while I worked feverishly. And finally the damn thing worked! I ran to the chest in the corner for paper and put a sheet into the roller, and used a piece of popsicle stick to replace a missing part that kept the wrinkled old ink ribbon aligned. Then I typed and typed and watched amazed as the page filled with perfectly straight rows of letters for the first time. I was so pleased, I filled the page from top to bottom with letters that soon were words instead of random characters. I watched as my thoughts magically unfolded in printed sentences before my eyes. I typed until there was no more room on the page, then I ripped it from the roller and ran to Martha Jane, who was startled by my sudden leap onto the sofa next to her.

"Look!" I said, shoving the paper under her face.

"Well!" she said, impressed. "That's very nice. See? I knew you could do it."

Embarrassed, I said, "Look at the last line."

Along the last line I had typed "Thank You Martha Jane Thank You Martha Jane", in dark gray letters with the old ribbon, all the way across the page.

"Oh, that's sweet!" she exclaimed. She gave me a hug. "Can I keep this?"

"Sure."

"Is it all right? It's yours, you made it all by yourself. You sure you don't want to keep it so you can show your Mama what you did?"

"She don't care."

"Now why would say something like that about your Mama?"

I shook my head. "She don't care. I didn't make it for me, I made it for you. You helped me make it work."

"But, hon, your Mama cares about what you do."

I shook my head no.

"She does!" Martha Jane insisted.

I shook my head again. "She tells me kid stuff like... she says babies come from storks, and the storks deliver the babies in diapers hangin' from their beaks. She's always tellin' me stuff like that."

"And I take it you didn't believe it."

I shook my head no. "That can't be where babies come from."

"Well," she said, "maybe you ought to talk to your Mama about that."

I shook my head no again.

"So, have you figured out where babies come from all by your self?"

"Not yet. But it ain't from storks."

"You're probably right," she murmured. She gazed at me inscrutably for a long moment, during which I squirmed and stood on the floor but bent down to prop my chin on an elbow that I leaned on the sofa cushion beside her. Then she looked down at the page I had given her and smiled. "This is so nice of you. I'll take it, but... you can have it back whenever you want it."

"Okay."

She held her hand on the back of my neck and drew me toward her so she could kiss me on the nose. "Thank you!"

"Thank you too!" I smiled and blushed and looked at her slender fingers and her auburn hair and the gentle shape of her face. She could not have ignored the way my eyes stayed glued on her. She smiled at me.

She said, pointing to her nose, "Okay, you can kiss me back."

I did and said, "I like your nose."

"Yeah?" she said. She winked at me. "I like yours too."

I feigned an overdramatized blush and a baby-like "Aw, shucks."

"Don't be silly," she laughed, and pointed at my project on the floor. "I hate to say it, hon, but it's nine o'clock. You have to clean that up, and I have to get you a bath."

I said okay and quickly straightened things up while she went into the bathroom and drew the bath. It was time for our bathtub ritual. The apartments had no showers, but they had new tubs in the small tiled bathrooms. Martha Jane would fill the tub to just the right warm temperature for the pink bubble-bath. The magic moment came when I was fidgeting nude by the tub while the water level slowly rose. Martha Jane would hold the packet of bubblebath powder high over the tub.

"Almost ready-y-y..." she'd chant, as I waited.

"Looks okay NOW!" I'd say.

"Nope," she'd say. "Almost... almost..." And finally, "There she blows!" And she'd upturn the packet until just enough of the pink powder fell out to make the right amount of bubbly stuff that I liked.

I would hop into the tub and splash and stir up the bubbles until they overflowed the tub. The bubble-baths were better with Martha Jane than with anyone else, because others insisted on fewer bubbles and less time in the tub. But Martha Jane was herself a bubble-bath lover and seemed to know just how much would be the most fun -- which in my case was enough bubbles to not only fill the tub to its rim but to cover most of my head as well, by the time I fluffed it up.

Martha Jane did not dry and dress me. That was up to me. I was a fidgety kid anyway who liked to dress under my own power. Usually she stayed in the living room and listened to the radio or studied, and I would bathe, dry and dress, and empty the tub myself. On those occasions when she did stay in the bathroom as "supervisor", she was there to make sure I cleaned up my bubbly mess. When this happened, Martha Jane removed her skirt and blouse and wore her bra and panties, or sometimes a delicate silk slip, if I were still in the bath; this was to keep her clothes from being splashed when we got playful and threw globs of bubble-bath at each other during our occasional bubble-fights (Martha Jane, neatnick that she was, insisted on cleaning up every single remnant of any mess we made).