38
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Poor dear Myrtle, she's such a pitiful little creature really and she
has so little....
But of course I can make it up to her." She smiled,
grabbed the dollar, and with a hidden ladylike gesture forced it into
the Padre's reluctant hand. "For the new altar cloths," she wfiispered.
"I have so little these days, but this much I
can
do for the com-
munity."
For almost half an hour Myrtle fought her way through the
wreckage inside the house, trying to reach the highboy in the down-
stairs guest-room. From ·time to time we could see her face in an up-
stairs window,. perspiration dropping from her hair, or her arm
through one of the cracks that were now widening on every wall.
"Hurry!" my mother shouted, with increasing anger as one by one
her treasures-a Russian ikon, the Dresden china coffee cups, the
Renaissance desk brought so tenderly from Florence-fell and were
crushed. "Hurry up, Myrtle! Hurry up! Hurry up!" And every time
a part of Myrtle came into view the school-teacher's eyes brightened
and he danced back and forth cracking the black cherry whip above
his head. "She's a good worker but terribly slow," the ladies agreed,
twisting their hankerchiefs and criticizing Myrtle's progress through
the house. Some of them, the old New England stock, filled the time
more usefully: dusted the grass and bushes where the books had fallen
and arranged those that had remained intact in neat piles along the
flagstone walk.
During this time the front of the house had been bellying more
and more out toward the lawn so that it was no longer possible to
see into the guest-room. "It's gone!" my mother cried. "Ah, Padre!"
and she leaned against the minister. But a moment later Myrtle ap-
peared again, this time on all fours, crawling up the circular staircase
with the highboy on her back. "Bring it down!
Down,
Myrtle!" All
the downstairs exits, however, were blocked: the lower half of the
staircase too was caving in, leaving Myrtle hanging by two fingers
while with the other hand she struggled to keep the massive piece of
furniture from slipping back into the pit. Now and then over the
sounds of falling timber we could hear her groaning and crying out,
I
"Oh Holy Virgin, help....
Oh blessed mother of God.... " Then
the whole front of the house squeezed down slowly, and we heard
nothing more but the breaking of beams and an underground com-
motion of water as heavy objects fell through to the cellar.
The next and last time that we saw Myrtle she was trying to
reach one of the attic windows, still struggling under what must have
been a part of the highboy, though it was bashed to a skeleton. Her
face was dreadfully distorted, as if she had been pinned under some
heavy weight and in freeing herself had pulled her features half off.
