by Anita Shreve
“Oh,” she says.
He looks at her and seems only then to notice the lavender wool dress she has on. “Walk me to the car,” he says.
Honora puts her coat on and follows Sexton to the Buick. It’s a filthy day, just filthy. The wind is whipping so hard that she has to hold on to the fence posts as she makes her way to the car.
Sexton slides into the Buick. Honora leans on the door. He rolls down the window and tucks the tips of his fingers inside the top of her dress.
“You look like a wild woman,” he says happily.
Vivian
Dickie goes sheet white on the telephone.
Vivian glances at the mantel clock, as if fixing the moment of disaster. Nine-fifteen in the morning. She was reading in the front room in her bed jacket and Dickie was about to leave the house for a lunch at a club in Rye when the phone rang. He spoke a phrase or two and then sat down hard at the telephone table. Dickie, a man who never sat for the phone, who couldn’t bear the phone, actually.
Vivian, who can see Dickie through the open doorway, puts down her book and unfolds her legs from the divan. Sandy perks up his head.
In his wool tweed suit, Dickie sits huddled over his lap. He throws his head back and his knees fall open. She has never seen Dickie, who is nothing if not elegant, in such an ungraceful position. His hat tumbles from his hand.
“Everything?” he asks in an incredulous voice.
Vivian sits forward.
“Oh, God,” Dickie says. He puts his hand to his forehead, as if shading his eyes. “For God’s sakes,” he says.
Vivian stands. The rain pings hard against the diamond-paned windows.
“I’m getting in the Packard,” Dickie says. “I’ll be there by tonight. Stay there. Don’t leave.”
Dickie puts the telephone back in its cradle.
“What is it?” Vivian asks from the doorway.
Dickie shakes his head back and forth. He seems oblivious to her presence. When he looks up at her, he blinks.
“Be a good girl, would you, and pack me a bag?”
Vivian sees Dickie out to the car and stands in the rain in her silk bed jacket. It seems the least she can do. Dickie tries to start the car, but his hands tremble so badly that he can’t get a grip on the shift. Vivian has never seen a man so shaken before. She reaches into the car and puts her own fingers around his hand. “Steady now,” she says, as one might to a horse.
She stands and wipes the rain out of her eyes. “It’ll be all right,” she says. “You’ll see.”
But she has no idea whether or not it will ever be all right, does she? She waves encouragingly as Dickie drives away. She walks back into the house and towels herself dry. She changes into her chartreuse-and-black-checked silk, as if she needed to be ready for the worst. As if she were awaiting news of a relative’s death. She telephones her father.
“You’re sure not?” she asks, in a voice equally as incredulous as Dickie’s was.
With guilty relief, she puts the telephone back in its cradle. Never more grateful for her father’s conservatism.
The rain stops late in the afternoon, and the sun makes a brief appearance. Vivian stands at the open doorway to the porch, aching to step out onto the beach and feel the sun on her face. But she doesn’t dare be out of earshot of the telephone in case Dickie calls. She has calculated as best she can that even if he shot down to Boston, he can’t have gotten there before four o’clock. Five o’clock if he hit traffic on Route 1.
The light is never the same, she thinks. Funny how she’s lived most of her life within a mile or two of the ocean in Boston and never paid a minute’s attention to the sea. Of course it’s there, and of course ships come and go — and sometimes even friends come and go on those same ships — but the water has held no interest for her. Now, it seems, she can’t get enough of it. As if she needed to make up for years of neglect.
When the telephone rings, Vivian braces herself, the image of Dickie in his Packard, his face white and his hands trembling, flitting across her vision. She leans against the wall by the telephone table and takes the phone off its cradle.
“Vivian,” he says.
“Dickie,” she says. “Darling, are you in Boston?”
“Vivian,” Dickie repeats, his voice oddly calm. Frighteningly calm, really.
“Oh, Dickie, what is it? Is it very bad?”
“It’s very, very bad,” he says. “Worse than I ever thought possible.”
“I’m so sorry,” she says.
“Have you talked to your broker?” Dickie asks.
“I did,” she says. “There’s some damage,” she lies. “But not too bad.”
“The reason I ask is that I need you to do something for me,” Dickie says.
“Anything,” Vivian says. “Anything,” she repeats with the guilt of the survivor. “I’ll come right now. I’ll get on the train. I can be there by noon tomorrow.”
“No, don’t come,” he says. “I need you to stay there.”
There’s a silence over the wire.
“Dickie?” she asks after a time.
“I need you to buy the house,” he says.
Vivian makes it onto the beach just before the sun is about to set. Sandy runs on ahead as if he too had been bursting to get outside. Vivian takes off her town welts and unrolls her stockings. She still has on the chartreuse-and-black-checked dress she put on in anticipation of some kind of bereavement. On the telephone, she was flustered and, for once in her life, speechless.
Think about it, Dickie said.
She turns to look back at the house, comfortably settled in its nest of dunes. Behind it, the sun is low on the horizon. The house has three gables, a screened porch in the central one. Behind the screen, there’s a bedroom. On fair days, Vivian takes her tea on the porch instead of in bed.
She doesn’t want to leave the house, and she can afford to buy it. There, she thinks. That’s settled.
She drifts north toward the lifesaving station, noticing that the storm has left more detritus on the beach than usual. She steps around the seaweed and the razor clams, the scallop shells and a piece of netting from a fishing boat, and she thinks of Dickie in Boston.
She will call him as soon as she gets back to the house. She will tell him that she will buy the house immediately, and then Dickie will come back up and they’ll live together again just as if this horrible stock market thing had never occurred. Though even as she imagines this scenario, she knows that it will never happen like that. Dickie’s pride would never allow him to live in the house if she owned it.
She tries to imagine what it would feel like to know that one had lost everything, that one had to sell all the dresses and the jewelry and the cars and the houses. That one could never go to Havana or throw a party at the Plaza Hotel. That one would have to get a job. She tries to picture what possible work she herself could find if it happened to her, and that thought frightens her. She had one year of finishing school at Mount Ida, near Boston, a year she used primarily to prepare for her coming out. She can’t think of a single practical skill she learned. She isn’t at all sure she could survive the sort of ruin Dickie is facing.
Vivian doesn’t have to walk very far before she finds what she is looking for. It lies pressed upon the beach, its slightly curved edges digging into the sand. When she picks it up, the glass has a satisfying heft. It’s a good-sized banana-colored chunk, not too unlike the shade of her Maggy Rouff. She runs her thumb around the edges, which are smooth. She puts the bit of sea glass into the pocket of her dress.
McDermott
McDermott edges his way toward the notice that’s tacked up on the wire fencing at the mill entrance. The men and women who have read the notice move away and stand with their hands in their pockets, as if uncertain about going through the gate.
McDermott shoulders his way toward the front. He can see that Ross, with a large wad of tobacco in his cheek, is standing by the notice board.
“What’s going
on?” McDermott asks when he reaches Ross’s side.
“Read it,” Ross says.
ANNOUNCEMENT
Operating costs at this mill have undergone such changes that we are confronted with a situation that is not only abnormal but extremely critical.
LOWER WAGES IN OTHER COMMUNITIES
In many of the cotton mills of New England, wage reductions have become effective. The operatives in the Ely Falls Mill now receive wages that are much higher than what is paid for the same class of work in competing mills elsewhere. Some of the mills can operate 54 hours a week.
ELY FALLS MILL HANDICAPPED
It should be obvious that the manufacturers of the Ely Falls Mill, paying by the old wage scale, and limited to a 48-hour week, must be doing business under a serious handicap.
RELUCTANT TO REDUCE WAGES
When, in other sections of New England, cotton manufacturers reduced wages, the Ely Falls Mill refrained from taking similar action. But owing to the competitive conditions which now exist, the Ely Falls Mill is forced to make a reduction in wages of 10 percent, effective Monday, November 24, and have posted notices accordingly. It is hoped this will relieve the situation sufficiently to enable the mill to take orders which would otherwise go to competitors.
“They’ve finally done it,” McDermott says.
“Fuckin’ owners,” Ross says.
“They expect us to feel sorry for them?” McDermott watches the men and women gather in groups. Still no one has gone through the gates. “What will happen now?” he asks.
“We’ll get the union.”
“We didn’t get the vote,” McDermott says.
“We will now.”
McDermott knows that the wage cut, on top of the speed-up, will change the minds of the loom fixers who’ve been reluctant to form a union. The wage rates are already below poverty level.
Ross spits on the ground. “It’s beautiful the way the bosses do the organizing for you, isn’t it?” he says.
Alphonse
All day and all night the men have been going in the front door of the apartment house and even milling around outside, and no one seems to be sneaking in the way they did the last time. Alphonse has counted nearly forty men who have gone through the door and he wonders how Arnaud Nadeau’s front room will hold them all. Alphonse knows that all the activity is because of the wage cut and the talk about unions. His mother and his aunt are in the bedroom speaking in low tones all about unions and strikes and whatnot, and Alphonse thinks that a strike would be just fine with him because he hasn’t had a day off except Sundays and Labor Day and Christmas since he started in the mill a year ago. He can’t imagine what everyone would do on a Monday in the middle of November if they didn’t go to work.
Sam Coyne, who moved up from New Bedford last year, told him all about what it’s like to be on strike and Sam says that after a while it’s no picnic and that everyone gets hungry but that it’s mostly all right for the kids because the charities put soup in their pails and give them hunks of bread, although it’s sometimes a bother to have to stand in line all morning just to get a meal. You have to eat the soup sitting on the sidewalk, he says, even if it’s snowing out, because if you go home you have to share it with your sisters and your brothers and maybe even your mother and your father, and by that time there won’t be anything left for you. Alphonse can’t imagine trying to eat his soup on the sidewalk if he knew his mother was hungry. If Marie-Thérèse was hungry, well, that’s another story.
Sam also told him about the scabs, who everybody hates. The strikers spit at the scabs and might even beat them up because the scabs go into the mills and work for the owners and take the strikers’ jobs and that just makes the strikes last longer. Alphonse prays that no one in his family will be a scab, though Marie-Thérèse would be a perfect scab, and he thinks he wouldn’t mind being allowed to spit at her one bit.
His mother would never be a scab. Tonight at dinner when they had the stew his mother said to eat up good because you never knew where your next meal was coming from.
Sam said that some of the grocery stores would let you run up really high bills and that a couple of the landlords would let you wait on the rent in case the strike was settled in a hurry, but if the strike went on for a long time the landlords would come and put your furniture outside, and if you didn’t have any relatives who would take you in, you were pretty much stuck out on the street. Which is what happened to Sam Coyne and his family, and after that his mother and Sam and his two sisters moved to Ely Falls. Sam doesn’t know where his father and his two older brothers are, and his mother said to stop asking her because she didn’t want to hear his father’s fucking name anymore. Alphonse sometimes says the word fuck in his head, especially when Marie-Thérèse is talking to him in that horrible taunting voice she has, and he says fuck fuck fuck in his mind just to make himself feel better. But Sam Coyne says the word aloud like he’s been doing it since the day he was born.
Holy Joseph, McDermott said.
His mother didn’t believe that Alphonse had caught the fish himself and he didn’t want to tell her about McDermott because then she would ask a million questions, so Alphonse kept talking about how good the fish would taste in butter and after a while she stopped asking him where he got the thing.
When they came back from fishing, McDermott said it was probably getting too cold to fish anymore, but they would see in the spring.
Alphonse watches the men come out of Nadeau’s apartment and light up cigarettes. Alphonse searches for McDermott and finds him standing off by himself under a streetlight. He has on his leather jacket and the same sweater he wore when he took Alphonse fishing. Alphonse wonders if anyone has fixed the hole.
A fine mist has started and Alphonse can see it slanting in gusts under the light of the street lamp. He wishes McDermott would look up at his window, but before McDermott even has his matches out two men go over to him and say something that must be pretty funny because McDermott throws his head back and laughs.
And that’s an odd thing, Alphonse thinks. Because nobody seems upset about the wage cut. Even though it’s raining harder now, the men just put up the collars of their jackets and stand around in groups, chatting and laughing and smoking.
Honora
For Thanksgiving dinner, Honora prepares a turkey with a breaded stuffing and bowls of squash and turnip and potatoes. She sets out a relish tray while she and Sexton drink glasses of S.S. Pierce sherry from a bottle given to him by the owner of a paper mill in Somersworth. Having practiced her crust for weeks, Honora decides that her pies are suitably flaky. Sexton, however, hardly eats a bite of the turkey or the turnip or the mincemeat. Honora asks him if he is sick and he says no, but he works at his dinner as if it were a chore, dividing the food into sections and then rearranging them until Honora can bear it no longer. She stands and runs the water in the sink, and Sexton, with obvious relief, puts down his fork.
That afternoon, before it grows dark, they drive in the Buick to a school yard with the idea that on this cold, but not unbearably cold, holiday they will do something frivolous, such as roller-skating on the school’s cement courtyard. They sit on a bench and bend to their skates, but Sexton cannot make his key work. After a time, he gives up and reaches into his pocket for a package of gumdrops. He hands them to his wife. She notices that he doesn’t keep any for himself.
Through October and November, Sexton has grown thinner.
He thought the debacle with the stock market only temporary, but now, he says, he isn’t so sure about that. Honora aches for his anxiety, for she has grown to love him despite the thing in his character that makes him tell small lies in order to make sales. And anxious, he isn’t quite as handsome as he was — the small flaws somehow magnified, the crooked teeth more apparent, the eyes seemingly having edged closer together. She is learning in a way she might not have for years what it is to love someone who is changing, and not necessarily for the better.
“Have one,”
she says, sliding the packet of gumdrops across the bench. His eyes seem blue today. They change color every day, depending on his skin tone or what he is wearing that day or the color of the sky. Mini chameleons in his face. Blue, gray, blue gray, gray green, hazel.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You hardly ate any dinner.”
“It was a good dinner.”
“Thank you.”
“I went to Manchester,” he says, pocketing the gumdrops. “I had an account at the Manchester Five Cents Savings Bank. They had an Eight I had sold them that had jammed. My plan was to pick up the machine, give them a replacement, and then sell them a new Copiograph machine as well.” He pauses. “That was the plan.”
“And what happened?”
“When I got to Manchester, I couldn’t find the bank. At first I thought I’d forgotten the correct street, so I drove around and around. Then I consulted my address book. I had the right address.” Sexton leans back against the bench. He opens his palms.
“There was nothing there,” he says. “Just a building. No sign. Nothing. I tried to find out if the bank had moved and had notified the head office instead of me. But no — the bank had simply failed.” Sexton puts his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. In the flat light of a late-November afternoon, Honora thinks he looks years older than he did just the week before.
“Overnight,” he says.
For suppers, Honora serves baked macaroni and stewed tomatoes, or codfish cakes and white sauce. She watches the pennies closely and consults her recipe book for meals that are both filling and cheap. Sexton reads the paper almost incessantly, as if the words there might rearrange themselves into more palatable stories. He sits at the table with one of his adding machines, calculating and recalculating the sums, but no matter how many times he reconfigures the numbers, the end result is always the same: Sexton Beecher has risked everything he owned on the eve of the single biggest economic disaster in American history.