“The doctor says you might catch it,” she protested.

“He don’t need to know I’m here,” Papa said. “What kind of a doctor is he, anyway, trying to separate married people? I’ve got to look after things here; you can’t manage all alone. Here, I brought you something. Just won it at the Kandy Kitchen raffle.”

It was a five-pound box of candy, and what the children minded most about having chicken pox was that even the thought of candy made them really sick. Marcia was even too sick to get up and peek through the portieres when Lena reported that Papa was wrapping Mama up in blankets in a chair by the stove, and was treating her as if she too was sick, and that in spite of the quarantine Mrs. Friend was there too, putting a hot water bottle on Mama’s stomach. Papa and Mrs. Friend tiptoed back and forth through the dining room, now the sickroom, from living room to kitchen all night, carrying things to Mama. It was not these odd activities that frightened the children into the conviction that their mother was sick; it was the fact that for the first time their father’s voice was lowered to a whisper.

After a while they got used to Mama’s sick spells, and there were compensations. Isobel would come over to look after them for a few weeks. Grandma, with wistful protests about her Cleveland plans being delayed, stayed with them for a while, and when Papa was home he did the cooking and nursing because he was the best cook and nurse Mama ever heard of. She said she was well just hearing his voice downstairs, and sure enough she stayed well quite a few months.

12

SING IT AGAIN,” their mother begged.

So Lena and Marcia sat on the edge of her bed and sang it.

“I’m an honest Irish lad, and my home is far away,

If pleasing you I’ll either sing or dance—”

Every afternoon after school they came to visit their mother, but the rest of the time they stayed with Aunt Lois during Mama’s sickness. They enjoyed a gloomy prestige at school by their mother having consumption, but Mary Evelyn tried to spoil it all by boasting of her father dying of double pneumonia. She pointed out that it ought to be double consumption then to equal her claim to distinction.

Grandma took care of her sick daughter most of the time, but presently the doctor said a trained nurse must be called in. Mr. Carson had permitted Papa to exchange routes with another salesman, which enabled him to get home every night to relieve Grandma. Each night he brought home new medicine that some of the fellows had recommended, and he tried them all out on Mama from the onion plaster on the chest to the mustard pack on her back. He was exasperated with everybody for the failure of these remedies, and annoyed that the doctor ordered a trained nurse, annoyed, too, that Mrs. Friend seemed to regard this as ominous.