In “Clean Curtains,” new neighbors move into a shabby corner house surrounded by factories and constant traffic. Their white curtains strike the speaker as almost holy, like the edge of a nun’s bonnet. He sees the woman of the house as a little mother fighting to keep that whiteness clean amid warehouse dust, wheels, and lawless wind. The curtains become prayers — fragile, bright, and out of place in the faded ramshackle street. The speaker feels admiration and tenderness, even kinship, as he passes by. But the ending is quietly sad: after five or six weeks, the dust and thundering trucks win. The neighbors give up and go, taking their “white prayers” with them. The mood is wistful and gritty, mixing affection for human decency with a sense that the grime of the world often overwhelms it.
Clean Curtains — Summary
New neighbors came to the corner house at Congress and Green streets. The look of their clean white curtains was the same as the rim of a nun's bonnet. One way was an oyster pail factory, one way they made candy, one way paper boxes, strawboard cartons. The warehouse trucks shook the dust of the ways loose and the wheels whirled dust — there was dust of hoof and wagon wheel and rubber tire — dust of police and fire wagons — dust of the winds that circled at midnights and noon listening to no prayers. " O mother, I know the heart of you," I sang passing the rim of a nun's bonnet — O white curtains — and people clean as the prayers of Jesus here in the faded ramshackle at Congress and Green. Dust and the thundering trucks won — the barrages of the street wheels and the lawless wind took their way — was it five weeks or six the little mother, the new neighbors, battled and then took away the white prayers in the windows?