by Anita Shreve
How is the house? How are you and Sexton? He is a fine man and will make you a good husband I think and Harold says the man has gumption. We are all right here. Except that Harold had a coughing fit and I worry for him, but at least it is summer. As you know, he does poorly in winter. I know that it is always warmer by the sea in winter, so I guess we will have to envy you this year.
The reason for my letter is that Harold and I have been wondering if you and Sexton will come to visit on Labor Day weekend. I know you have just left, but it is never too early to plan. Maybe you and Sexton could manage four or five days here in Taft. I am hoping I can persuade Charles and his wife and baby to come from Syracuse as we have never met Evelyn or Baby Emma. Charles says Emma is very pretty. So our little family grows again. One grandchild and another on the way. Though Phillip’s letter was very sad as May has discovered a lump on her breast and has to have it (the breast) removed. It is probably already gone. I didn’t want to mention this to you just before your wedding day even though I got the letter two weeks ago. It was some time before May told anyone and now the doctor says he can’t promise her a cure. Phillip begged me in the letter to go over to Estelle’s house to call him on the telephone. I won’t go into details about that conversation except to say that it has been some time since I have heard a man that upset. Anyway, I thought you should know, and I hope you don’t mind that I waited until after the wedding to tell you.
But enough of unhappy news. We want to hear that you are well and are settling in fine. There were some aspects of married life I might have discussed with you, and I have been feeling poorly I didn’t do that, but marriage is its own teacher I have always thought and I trust Sexton Beecher is a gentle man.
It was a lovely wedding and you looked very pretty. As soon as you mail the suit to me, I will take it back to Bette’s. You have another two weeks, so there is no hurry. Let me know if you decide to keep it after all. As I said, you might like it for sentimental reasons.
I just realized that I have never had occasion to write you a letter since you have never gone away from home, which explains why this feels a little strange.
Write and tell us about Labor Day as Harold and I would like something to look forward to.
Love,
Mother
McDermott
“You heard about Gastonia,” Ross says.
Ross’s voice is hard to hear in the din. McDermott watches his mouth. “I read about it,” he says.
The speak is crowded with the day shift — warp twisters and slasher tenders and mule spinners and carders — all drinking away their pay packets. Mahon makes the drink in Exeter, brings it over in a bread truck to the speak. The first whiskey always hurts McDermott’s stomach, and he’s pretty sure he has an ulcer. The noise in the mill has ruined his hearing, ruined his nerves. Lay off the drink, the mill doctor said, and gave him a bottle of white pills to take. Sometimes McDermott shits blood.
“They’re on trial now,” Ross says.
“So I hear.”
“They’ll get off.”
Ross has bad teeth, horrible to look at, but McDermott has to watch his mouth in order to understand him.
“The police chief was killed,” McDermott says.
“Lackey for the bosses,” Ross says, and spits on the floor.
“You think it’ll happen here?” McDermott asks.
“I know it will happen here,” Ross says.
Though McDermott is just twenty, already he is a loom fixer. He reports only to the second hand. He has been in the mills since he was twelve, since the day his father pissed off. Every day except Sundays, the din rises up around him and makes a hollow sucking sound in his ears, as if he had dived into the ocean and was trying to come up for air. He repairs broken looms and checks others to make sure the cloth is weaving properly. He is supposed to report weavers who aren’t doing their jobs, but he hardly ever does. In return, any weaver in McDermott’s section tries hard to keep up. McDermott is careful not to take advantage of this goodwill or to take credit for a job another has done. A boastful loom fixer, he has seen, never lasts too long.
Still, the work is difficult and McDermott, like almost everyone in the mill, hates his job. Especially since the speed-up. For three months now, the bosses have ordered the machines to go at a faster speed. If the machines produce more cloth for the same amount of wages, the argument goes, then the northern mills might be able to compete with the southern mills that are taking away all the business. Already the Hookset Mill has closed because of lost business. The Dracut Mill has announced a 10 percent pay cut.
All his life, McDermott has lived in company housing, eight kids in a two-bedroom apartment. The babies, when they came, slept in bureau drawers. When he was thirteen and got his growth, he slept on three chairs in the kitchen. When his father left the family without a note or a word, his mother moved into a cot in the kitchen to let the three older girls, who needed privacy then, have the double bed in her bedroom. Now his mother is gone — a stroke, the mill doctor said — and Eileen, who is nineteen, is in charge. McDermott moved into the men’s boardinghouse nearby, but he gives Eileen half his pay packet. He brings food when he can and eats with Eileen and his brothers and other sisters two or three times a week, mainly to keep the boys, who are a handful, in line.
McDermott, like everyone else in the mill, second hands and overseers alike, lives for the breaks. Even in December and January, when the weather is raw and freezing, McDermott likes to go outside during the ten minutes the workers are allowed in the afternoon. He once discovered a trapdoor that leads onto the roof, and as soon as the horn sounds, he pretends to head for the lavatory and instead takes a quick turn near the back stairs. On the roof he smokes a cigarette and looks over to the falls because he needs the quiet like some men need drink. He can see across the rooftops of the mill housing — every brick building precisely the same: four floors, one chimney, three dormers on each top floor — to the railroad bridge that crosses the river. On good days, he can see all the way to the ocean, a thin, hazy blue line on the horizon. When the weather is poor — when there is a blizzard or it is raining so hard he can’t open his eyes — McDermott stands in the shelter of the air shaft, shivering, just so he can see the sky.
* * *
There isn’t a day that goes by that McDermott doesn’t think of taking off like his father did. He imagines his father in Iowa or Saskatchewan, working a combine in an enormous field, stopping every now and then to watch the wind make waves in the wheat and the clouds point still farther west — not a building or a chimney stack or a rickety wooden fire escape in sight. But then, as if it were a daily ritual he needed to observe, McDermott will think about Eileen and about his younger brothers who are a handful. He is determined to keep Eamon and Michael out of the mills. It’s no place for a man, never mind for a boy. All you have to do is look at the faces around you when you go back in from the break — faces waxy with exhaustion or resignation or grim determination. The women’s faces are the worst. When the men get off work, they head for a meal or a drink. The women go home to hungry children and cramped apartments that need tending. Some of the women weavers have admitted to McDermott that they count to themselves on the looms to pass the time — to eight, say, repeatedly; or to four thousand and eighty. They swear it makes the clock move faster. McDermott thinks about entire lives spent counting simply to make the days go faster, and that fact, out of all the miserable facts he knows about mill life, seems to him the saddest one of all.
“There’s a meeting,” Ross says.
“What about?” McDermott asks.
“The speed-up.”
“What about it?”
“It’s killing the men,” Ross says. “No one can keep up. Everyone is getting docked. They can’t feed their families.”
Left unmentioned is the money the men in the speak are pissing away on whiskey. McDermott doesn’t want a family of his own. Since the speed-up, the men are taking their sons and daugh
ters out of school and putting them in the mills. What’s the point, McDermott wants to know, of having children at all?
“We want the elimination of piecework,” Ross says, ticking off the demands on his fingers. “We want the clock system out. We want a standard wage scale. Forty hours, five days a week, minimum of twenty dollars a week. We want decent housing. We want a reduction of rent and light charges.”
“You’ll never get it,” McDermott says.
“We won’t if we don’t demand it,” Ross says.
“Where’s the meeting?”
“Nadeau’s. Make sure you’re not followed. Last time, Hurd stood outside and made a list of everyone going in.”
“I don’t know,” McDermott says. He means he doesn’t know if he will go to the meeting. He means he doesn’t know if he wants to get involved. He sucks on one of the white tablets the mill quack gave him. The English girl is sitting on a stool.
“They’re starving in Gastonia,” McDermott says.
“You get relief,” Ross says. “There’s organizations that send relief.”
“Communists,” McDermott says.
“It’s the unions,” Ross insists. “It has nothing to do with Communists.”
“If we starve, it’ll be the Communists who’ll feed us. Tell me there weren’t Communists in Gastonia.”
Ross downs his shot, signals for another. “They’re sending someone named Mironson from the Trade Workers Union,” he says. “They want rolling strikes like they had in the south. Break the backs of the mills in New England.”
“Great,” McDermott says. “Then none of us will have jobs.”
Honora
Beside her, Sexton is snoring, his arms thrown up against his pillow as if he’d just been robbed. She slips out from under the blanket, pulling the sides of her blouse together. When she stands, Sexton, still sleeping, rolls away from her. The smell of his skin is on her neck and arms. She looks for blood and finds a smear on the sheet, random spots on her slip. Not as much as she’d been led to believe. A massacre, she remembers Ruth Shaw saying at McNiven’s, though Ruth was given to exaggeration. Her mother never mentioned it, never said a word.
She crosses the room, the floorboards cool on the soles of her feet. She snatches up the picnic basket and her suitcase and Sexton’s coat. The latch makes a soft click as she closes the bedroom door.
She finds a towel in her suitcase and washes herself at the sink in the bathroom. She puts on a nightgown, draping the blouse and slip and brassiere over the lip of the tub. She slides her arms into the brown overcoat, pushing the long sleeves up to free her hands. If she doesn’t eat something, she thinks, she will die. She walks into an empty room, sits on the floor, opens the picnic basket, and looks inside. She puts the heels of her hands to her eyes.
She is on the other side of something now, removed forever from who she was only yesterday. Removed from her mother’s home. She thinks of her mother rising that morning with only Harold in the house, Harold who wakes up every day coughing.
In the basket, carefully arranged, are bowls of potato salad and coleslaw, a wax packet of fried chicken, a loaf of wheat bread, a jar of wild strawberry preserves, two bottles of Moxie, and two small peach pies, individually wrapped. In a tissue packet, she finds a tablecloth, hand embroidered with her new initials, HWB, Honora Willard Beecher. She holds it to her face, then sets it down on top of the basket. She removes a pie with fluted edges.
As she eats, she walks through the house, taking huge ravenous bites, careful not to get any on Sexton’s coat. The sunlight pushes at the frosted windows and makes her want to be outside. She runs lightly down the center stairway, the coat skimming the broad steps. In the hallway, she is momentarily disoriented, but then she finds a passageway to the front of the house. She opens the door.
She has to put a hand up to ward off the light. It is diffuse but intense. The room is long, with floor-to-ceiling windows facing east. Six pairs, she counts, her eyes adjusting to the glare, the world beyond the salt-encrusted windows a temporary mystery. The room is empty save for one item, a grand piano in a corner. Honora stands at the keyboard and picks out a tune, the notes muffled, as if small puffs of air prevented the hammers from striking the strings. One key doesn’t sound at all. Her fingers are sticky from the pie, and she licks them.
She walks to a window, trying to see out the margins, but the view is slivered and unrewarding. She tries the front door and, surprisingly, it gives. She steps out onto the porch.
And, my God, there it is. The ocean. The sun seemingly rising from its surface even as she watches. The color of the water a splintery white, too painful to look at for any length of time. The dune grass is overgrown with sweet pea and beach roses and something else she cannot name. To the south is a long crescent of sand with intricate lacings of seaweed, and to the north a scarred bit of earth, dotted with new growth, a darkened slab in its center. She makes her way to the porch railing, its wood long weathered, rotted out in places. Beyond the front steps is a boardwalk that leads to a wooden deck overlooking the water.
She walks the length of the boardwalk, the wood weathered dove gray. All along the beach’s span, there are cottages and one hotel. She draws the coat around her for warmth, letting her hands slide up into the sleeves. She steps off the deck onto the sand.
“Honora.”
She turns. Sexton’s face is sideways in the slit of a second-floor window, stuck open from the damp.
“Come back to bed.”
His face leaves the window and then immediately reappears.
“And bring the picnic.”
The shout startles a flock of seagulls. They spread out in a fan pattern from the roof of the house and then swoop down low and skim the dune grass. In the wet sand by her foot, a bit of color catches her eye. She picks it up and studies it. The glass is green, pale and cloudy, the color of lime juice that has been squeezed into a glass. The edges of the shard are weathered and smooth and do not hurt at all. She brushes the sand off and presses the sea glass into her palm, keeping it for luck. She thinks that she and Sexton might need the luck.
Vivian
Razors of light flicker behind the shades at the windows. A stale metallic taste is in her mouth, and her temples are caught in a vise. Still the knocking continues.
“Go away,” Vivian calls faintly from the bed.
She lifts her head from the pillow and a wave of nausea ripples to the back of her throat. She has no memory of returning to her room last night, or was it actually this morning? She does remember seeing the ugly scissored scar on Dickie’s knee, and then, later, finding him in the bathroom, naked, dozing on the black and white tiles in a fetal position. And, oh God, did she really sleep with the man?
The images come with the jerking motions of a Movietone newsreel: emerging from Dickie’s room at eight o’clock in the evening and changing into the rose opaline while Dickie sat at the end of her bed, smoking and recounting a story about a woman who drowned in the Hotel Plaza rooftop pool in Havana; Sylvia crying at dinner, she was that drunk, and John saying to her, in his affected drawl, You’re stinking; walking barefoot into the hotel from the beach, her wet feet covered with sand, while the weasely Franco desk clerk pretended not to notice her. Under the covers, Vivian moves her legs and notes with dismay that her underwear is missing.
She sits up sideways from the bed, not straightening her neck until she is certain she won’t be sick. She will have to pretend it didn’t happen at all. Dickie will do that for her; he is good at dissembling. If she encounters him today, she will simply suggest she was elsewhere and see if he takes the hint and runs with it. Is it too much to hope that he has already moved into his new house?
She studies the skirt of the rose opaline with its hundreds of new small wrinkles, tributaries of streams surrounding the lake of a stain. When did she spill the highball? At dinner with John and Sylvia?
There is one shoe beside the bed. She has no idea where the other is. She thinks briefly
of packing, of leaving the hotel altogether, but where exactly would she go? Her head hurts terribly, and the sun threatens behind the shades.
Sexton
“I’m going to get supplies,” he says, and leaves the house as if he’s done it all his life.
His breath is high and tight inside his chest, and he wants, ridiculously, to shout. It isn’t the sudden east wind, against which he raises the collar of his coat. No, he feels like a kid again, a kid with a new bike, riding it hard over a bump, soaring, getting air under the wheels. He’s left Honora sleeping on the bed, her hair mussed all around her face, the flawless white skin of her back begging to be touched. Hard to walk away from.
He slides into the driver’s seat of the Buick, more gray than blue now with road dust. He will have to buy a bucket, give the car a wash, maybe Simoniz it afterward. He puts the clutch in and adjusts the power lever. He stabs the starter button on the floor with his foot and feels the familiar lurch and purr. He picks up a crumpled napkin and tosses it out the window. He likes to keep the Buick tidy.
The only stores he’s seen are in the mill town they drove through the day before. He remembers a five-and-dime where he could get cleaning supplies, a market where he could buy food. And he ought to get gas there as well, he thinks, at the Texaco station.
But first he wants to check out the coast road. An open road always tempting, promising surprises, the possibility of luck. It’s why he is a traveling salesman, why he chucked it all back home. Nothing better than to find an unfamiliar road on the map, see where it takes him. He got the Claremont Bank account that way, and the Mutual Life account in Andover. It’s how he found Honora, for that matter — that bit about the courthouse true only after he had met her.