Sea Glass

by Anita Shreve

  “Where’s Alphonse?” McDermott asks, looking around.

  “I sent him to get Honora,” Ross says.

  McDermott brings his hand to his forehead. “Jesus Christ,” he says. “You didn’t.”

  From the other room, Sexton Beecher roars his wife’s name.

  A bucket in the sink is full of red water. The sole of McDermott’s shoe is sticky on the wooden floor. He glances around at the yellowing paper on the walls, the small white stove with a crusty pot on top of it, the cupboards that have no doors. “I’ve got to go,” McDermott says, brushing against Ross. “They shouldn’t come here. It’s too risky.”

  But then a woman in a shimmery blue dress, her copper hair ablaze in a pool of sunlight, is standing on the porch behind the screen door. Alphonse sneaks around and under Vivian and opens the door. Honora, in her slippers, her blouse untucked from her skirt, her hair wild about her head, walks into the room.

  McDermott knows that he will never again want anyone or anything as much as he wants this woman.

  “Where is he?” she asks.

  Alphonse

  He wishes someone would shut Marie-Thérèse up, because she is being very annoying and is not helping the situation one little bit. His house is crowded with men looking sick and hot and wishing they were somewhere else. His mother is holding a bloody towel, and inside the other room Mrs. Beecher is with her husband, who is just howling like an animal with its leg caught in a trap. Alphonse is standing with Miss Burton in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, and Miss Burton is being very calm and speaking to Mrs. Beecher and McDermott, and you can just see that in this kind of a situation women are much better than men.

  Ross says, “Where’s Wing?” and Alphonse thinks maybe he should have been the one to go for the doctor instead of Gérard, and Mahon is telling Mironson, who looks as if he is going to throw up, to leave immediately, and it is then that Alphonse hears the cars in front of the house and the metal doors slamming, and the room goes absolutely quiet.

  Oh, Jesus, Ross says.

  Sexton

  Someone is pressing an iron against his leg and it is just searing his flesh, burning his flesh, and he is trying to buck it off, but there are hands on his arms and he hears his wife’s voice saying his name over and over, and he tries to sit up, but she pushes her hands against him, and for the sake of almighty God, will someone just get this fucking iron off his goddamn leg? He can hear his wife calling for someone to help her and then there are stronger hands on his, and when he looks up he can see a man’s face, what is his name? he can’t remember, he should be able to remember, and the iron is pressed against his skin again, and he screams his wife’s name. He can hear her saying, “I am here, I am here,” but it is hard to pay attention because the pain is so great, and then he looks up at her and tells her he is sorry, although he is not completely sure what he is sorry about. But he knows that he is and that he has hurt her, and that she didn’t deserve to be hurt, and then there is a pressure on his chest. The girl, Vivian, is saying does Honora know that he has been hit twice, and Honora is leaning over him and telling him something he should be paying attention to and he tries to hang on so that he can make sure he has heard her right, but he is being carried away by a river and he really, really wants to let go. And then he hears the big guy, what’s his name? the hulking beast from a fairy tale, say Oh, Jesus from the kitchen.

  Vivian

  “He’s been hit twice,” Vivian says to Honora, wondering if anyone has noticed that Sexton Beecher is bleeding from another wound just below the first one. It’s perfectly possible no one has discovered this because there is so much blood. She feels a small movement beside her, and Alphonse sneaks under her arm to take a peek into the living room.

  “I don’t think you want to look at this,” Vivian says, turning the boy toward her body and enveloping him. He is just a boy, after all, and he shouldn’t be a part of this. As best she can make out, Sexton fired a shot at a wall of policemen, which seems like an extraordinarily stupid thing to do, and the police fired back, as well they might have. It is all unnerving, and she has to admit that even she started to tremble a bit when they drove into Ely Falls and saw all the rioting over by the mills and the fires that seemed to be popping up everywhere. But Alphonse just kept telling her, in that small, polite voice of his, to turn here, miss, and to turn there, miss, and then they were on Rose Street and climbing the stairs to the kitchen.

  What a dreadful apartment, Vivian thinks.

  “Is he going to die?” Alphonse asks, looking up at her.

  “No, Alphonse, he is not,” Vivian says emphatically, knowing that this is what one should tell a boy of twelve years old, though of course one cannot possibly know if a man is going to die or not, and frankly, from where she stands, it doesn’t look very good for Sexton Beecher. Her minds leaps ahead in time and she sees that she will want to take Honora back to her own house and make her stay there until the woman is on her feet again, which could be quite a while.

  Vivian hears the footsteps on the wooden stairs outside and thinks, irrationally, that the police have come to solve their problem, to mop up the mess, as they do in gangster movies. But then she realizes, with some dismay, that this cannot possibly be the case, can it? Because in this particular movie, she and Louis and McDermott and Ross and Sexton (especially Sexton) and even Alphonse and Honora are the gangsters. And then she sees, through the screen at the kitchen door, the white hoods over the faces of the men and thinks, Something is very wrong here, because everyone knows that the Ku Klux Klan operates only in the south. Yet even then, and ever optimistic (for Vivian scarcely knows how to be anything else), she imagines that these men in their ridiculous white hoods with dark round circles for their eyes and noses will somehow explain themselves and restore order to this hideous and frightful situation.

  But then the first man enters the kitchen, and Vivian understands at once that it is not going to be like that. It is not going to be like that at all.

  Honora

  She bends over her husband and pins his arms. His face is mottled bright white and dark red, and this, even more than all the blood, frightens her. She calls out that she needs help. McDermott comes and then Alphonse’s mother, a small woman Honora has wanted to meet. She has wanted to tell this woman that Alphonse is a sweet boy, but of course his mother must already know this. Sexton is yelling Honora’s name and grabbing for his crotch, even though that is not exactly where he has been hit. He says I’m sorry over and over and over, and she keeps trying to shush him and calm him down. He grabs for his crotch again, and Alphonse’s mother looks over at her as if to say, Who knows what a man will get up to when he thinks he is dying?

  McDermott is standing behind her now, and Honora knows that he is seeing this thing that Sexton is doing and hearing him say I’m sorry over and over.

  “Sexton,” she says, putting her face close to his. “Don’t speak. Just rest. You’re going to be all right.”

  She glances up at McDermott and then back down at Sexton, and for the first time since she entered the room she thinks that her husband might actually die. She bends close to him and says, “Hang on, Sexton,” but she can see, in an ominous relaxation of his features, that he is drifting into unconsciousness. And then an urgent question rises within her, and she knows that she has only seconds to answer it.

  The life inside her body is as much Sexton’s as it is hers.

  She looks at McDermott again and wishes that she could tell him that she is sorry, that if she had to do it over again, she would not have been afraid under the tree that sounded like water. She would have had no fear and would have let him love her, and if that one night was all they had together, well then, so be it, because, really, what honor was there in denying love?

  Sexton jerks his body, as though, even semiconscious, he wanted her whole attention. She thinks, I have to do this now.

  She bends to her husband’s face. “Sexton, I’m pregnant,” she say
s.

  She can see him struggling to comprehend, as if he didn’t quite catch all the words. His fingers scrabble against the wooden floorboards. And so she has to say it again. “Sexton, I’m pregnant. We are going to have a baby.”

  With her hand on her husband’s leg, she turns to find McDermott’s face. And it is all there, she thinks; she has become as good at reading faces as he is. The shock of the news. The wave of comprehension. And then regret. Terrible regret.

  “I didn’t know,” she says, reaching for his hand.

  There are footsteps on the stairs. In the kitchen, Ross is saying, Oh, Jesus.

  Vivian, in the doorway, holds Alphonse to her breast. The men coming through the kitchen door have white hoods and guns.

  Vivian executes a graceful dance step and slips behind a sofa with the boy.

  In another life, McDermott says and turns.

  Honora yells the word no! but McDermott cannot hear her.

  Through the doorway, Honora watches Louis vault into the air in a way he could never do on his own. Ross, as if he had been pushed, sits heavily on a chair that tips over onto the floor.

  McDermott spins like a child’s top — already damaged, already broken.

  A man with a hood is standing in the doorway. He raises the long gun in his hands and says, “This must be the guy.”

  A second man, also in a white hood, pushes his way into the room. “He’s gone,” he says. “Let’s get out of here.”

  The first man, a faceless creature, holds his gun toward Honora for a long second, and then he lowers it to his side.

  In the kitchen, a young girl is bleating like a sheep.

  Honora moves on her knees to the place where McDermott has fallen. At first she cannot tell if he has been hit. He seems merely to be stunned, or even, oddly, to be sleeping. She puts her fingers to his face, calling his name. She cradles his head. And then she feels the blood, warm and sticky in his hair. She stares at her hand. The girl in the kitchen is making an inhuman sound.

  Honora stands, bewildered. Her own blood drains from her head, and her vision begins to narrow. Strong hands catch the sides of her shoulders.

  Wordlessly, Vivian leads her away from McDermott to a chair in the kitchen. Alphonse, white faced, appears in the doorway. Vivian shields his eyes from the carnage as she marches him through the kitchen to the porch. “Go for help,” she commands. “And don’t come back inside this room until I tell you to.”

  Honora gazes around her. Alphonse’s sister is holding her arm and crying in a way that is frightening to listen to. It is the sound of pure fear — the pealing of a bell long after it has been struck.

  Mironson is sitting on the floor, against a wall, a smear of blood behind him on the yellowing wallpaper.

  Ross, in death, has the posture of a clown midprank — his bulk against the back of the tipped chair, his feet in the air.

  Mahon seems no longer to have a face.

  Tsomides is cradling his head, but his eyes are open and unmoving.

  The worst, though — the very worst — is the unnatural way Alphonse’s mother is bent backward over the sink.

  Honora counts.

  Six dead.

  A massacre, she thinks.

  She stands and moves back into the living room, where McDermott is on the floor. In the corner, Sexton calls for her. Honora kneels over McDermott’s body and puts a hand on his chest. She minds that she cannot see the color of McDermott’s eyes — that lovely turquoise blue. She lifts her face to a God she does not know very well, and a wail begins to rise inside her.

  Honora

  Honora sets her suitcase on the slab of granite. Alphonse, returning from the beach wagon, picks it up, his shoulder hitched for balance.

  “It’s very heavy,” she says.

  “I’ve got it,” he says.

  His face has filled out some around his eyes, so that his features are no longer quite as comical as they used to be. And there is something sad in his mouth that will never go away. Vivian has taken Alphonse to her own hairdresser, a woman named Irma in Exeter, for a haircut, but still the boy’s hair grows forward and wants to spike.

  The year is 1930. A September day. Not quite an ordinary day.

  Vivian, in a milk blue wool dress, emerges from the hallway with a wooden caddy of flatware. She holds it aloft, a hostess with a plate of hors d’oeuvres. “I left the kettle and the teapot and two cups in the kitchen,” she says. “Thought you might want one last cup of tea. Or am I wrong? Do you want to go straightaway?”

  “No,” Honora says, “a cup of tea might be good. All the stuff is here in the hall. Alphonse can just keep making trips. The only thing that will be a problem for him is that rocker.”

  “What are you going to do about the piano?” Vivian asks.

  “I’m going to leave it,” Honora says. “It was here when I got here.”

  “Whose is it?”

  “I think it belongs to someone who used to live in the house,” she says. “I never felt that it was ours.”

  “Oh, and by the way,” Vivian says, turning, “I couldn’t find the letter from the school. Are you sure you left it by the sink?”

  “It was there this morning,” Honora says. “Maybe I put it in my pocketbook. I’ll check.”

  In four days, Alphonse will begin classes at the Ely Day School in Ely. It will mean a two-mile walk to school, but Alphonse doesn’t seem to think that this will be a problem. Honora isn’t so sure about how he will manage during the winter months, but they will just have to figure that out when the time comes.

  Vivian said that she had always wanted a house sitter, though it was perfectly apparent to Honora that the thought had never crossed Vivian’s mind until the very moment when she made the offer. The bank will take possession of Honora’s house on Friday. Honora doesn’t want to be here when it happens.

  “Come stay with me until I go back to New York,” Vivian pleaded, “and then stay on through the winter. When I come in June, you can type my plays.”

  A year ago, Honora would have refused Vivian’s offer. A year ago, Honora would have been unable to accept such overt charity. But not now. Not since that morning when McDermott spun in the middle of the floor and Vivian slipped with Alphonse to safety behind a sofa. It was the only way Honora could keep Alphonse with her, she realized at once, and so she said yes. Without a second thought.

  One morning in mid-August, Alphonse took the trolley to the end of the Ely Road and walked the rest of the way to the beach. His brothers and sisters had all been divided up among their relatives, he said when Honora opened the door. He himself was being sent to his uncle Augustin and his aunt Louise in Lowell. He wanted to live with Honora instead, he said, and would that be all right? The boy’s chin was trembling, and Honora knew how much it had cost him to have to ask her this. She hugged the boy, and the two of them wept like infants on the granite doorstep.

  Alphonse had lost his mother and McDermott — the two people he had loved most in the world. Sometimes it seems to Honora scarcely possible that the boy is still standing.

  Honora fills the kettle and sets it on the stove, remembering the first day she entered this kitchen and found her way to the window and opened the shutters and saw the glass coated with a year or two of salt. The filmy light, like that from frosted glass, lit up an iron stove, its surface dotted with animal droppings. The oven door opened with a screech and bang that startled her.

  She waits for the water to boil. She remembers how Sexton fixed the tap and how the faucet retched and spattered brown water into the sink.

  For ten days in late July and early August, Honora took the trolley to the Ely Falls Hospital. She said hello to the policeman who guarded Sexton’s door — a man named Henry. She sat beside Sexton’s bed and knit a pair of socks. Though his leg was healing, her husband never spoke a word. Honora, after two or three days of frantic questioning, finally gave up trying. Sexton’s eyes had moved so close together that it seemed that only a thin bridge
of bone separated them. He did not comb his hair. When his leg was healed, he would go to jail.

  On the morning of the eleventh day, before Honora had had a chance to leave the house, two policemen came to her door. She gasped when she saw them, thinking they had come to shoot her. They searched every inch of the house and wanted to know where her husband was. She told them she had no idea.

  Sexton Beecher had escaped from the hospital, they said. He had stolen a Ford.

  Don’t ever buy a Ford.

  He’s taken the open road, she thought but didn’t say.

  She pours the boiling water into the teapot. “Alphonse, do you want some milk?” she calls into the hallway, eyeing the half pint of milk that is left.

  “In a minute,” he says. “I’m almost finished.”

  “I’ll come for the trial,” Vivian says, leaning on the counter.

  “They don’t know when it will be,” Honora says.

  “Only the two men have been charged?”

  “They won’t give up the other names. They’re said to be protecting Jonathan Harding.”

  “The bank president.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not the Klan, then.”

  “No, not the Klan.”

  “Have you heard from Sexton?” Vivian asks lightly.

  Honora shakes her head. She does not believe she will ever hear from Sexton Beecher again. In her mind, she sees a map with threads of blue and pink roads, a small round dot moving along them.

  The two women stand in the kitchen — Vivian against the lip of the sink, Honora by the icebox. “I don’t know if I’ll get back for Thanksgiving,” Vivian says. “It’s likely that we’ll have rehearsals.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” Honora says. “I’m thinking that I might take Alphonse to Taft to see my mother.”

  “Will you be able to travel then?” Vivian asks.