By The Sea, Book Three: Laura

by Stockenberg, Antoinette

  "And where's your profits in that case?" he asked, the down-easter in him suddenly joining the conversation.

  "I can do it, then?" she cried, holding his hand tightly in both of hers. "Oh, Sam—you won't be sorry!"

  ****

  The Virginia was tied securely to the docks, spruced up and ready for a party. After a week of grueling work, her superstructure was a sparkling blend of polished brass, crisp white trim, and soothing pale-green decking. Almost at once word of Laura's project had made it around the docks. Some of the fishermen, usually a stand-offish lot, had came round to offer cast-off material, advice, or, joking, their "lazy, good-for-nothin'" wives. Late in the week one of the men, semi-retired and a self-appointed "wharf rat," had actually brought a plate of oatmeal cookies which he claimed his wife made. He wasn't married, everyone knew that; but Laura had smiled gratefully and stored his offering below.

  The dancing was to take place on the deck area between the masts; the deck forward of that, still shabby and unpainted, was roped off. Small old wood chairs, all of them newly acquired and many of them newly glued, lined the bulwarks port and starboard. A deal table covered in blue gingham and holding a large bowl of punch was tucked between the Virginia's two oak water barrels mounted just forward of the cabin house. The rigging was laced with pretty lanterns, which Laura had fashioned from empty gallon paint buckets she'd done up in bright colors and drilled holes through to let out pinpoints of candlelight. All of the material had been begged, borrowed, or possibly—Laura did not always inquire—stolen.

  Two anchor lamps, their fresnel lenses magnifying the small kerosene flames inside, hung on each side of the boarding steps which Billy had banged together from scraps of wood. In the August twilight the Virginia looked like what she wasn't: a young and pretty debutante decked out in diamonds, waiting breathlessly to see how popular she was.

  Laura was in her best dress, of peach-colored rayon with flowing bell-sleeves and a round-cut neckline which showed her slender neck and shoulders to advantage. She wore no jewelry but had tucked a white rose in her hair, filched from the garden of one of the colonial houses on the Point. Perhaps she was overdressed; she didn't know. Maybe no one would come, in which case what she wore would make no difference.

  The signs she had posted around the waterfront announced that the music would begin at eight o'clock sharp. Billy was at his station, ready with the concertina; Laura was ready to strike up the band. Neil was standing (not very still) at his post, ready to wash out glasses for reuse. Everyone was ready.

  Eight o'clock came and went; no one showed. Laura glanced repeatedly up the dock toward Thames Street. A strange quiet prevailed.

  "Play something nice, Billy," she said nervously. "Maybe they need a special invitation."

  Billy thought for a moment, then launched into his best nice song, "The Ballad of Dying Lily." The dirgeful wail of the concertina lifted and fell—Billy could make the thing cry—while Laura made a fuss of adjusting one of the paint-bucket lanterns.

  What an idiot idea this was, she thought. Sam will laugh me off the boat when he hears.

  "Evening, Mrs. Powers."

  Laura swung around. It was the wharf rat, Jake Patchers, standing at the newly constructed steps. Thin hair slicked down, Sunday vest, and—horrors!—a white rose, identical to the one in Laura's hair, stuck into his lapel. "Permission to come aboard?"

  He was, after all, a warm body. Laura resisted the urge to laugh out loud at the dimensions of her disaster, and welcomed him aboard. "Please do, Mr. Patchers. I'm so glad you could come."

  She led him to the refreshments and they chatted painfully about the weather as he munched freely on his own cookies.

  "Now, I don't know a whole lot about shipboard dances," he finally ventured timidly, covering his mouth with his hand as he cleared his throat, "but mightn't it be livelier all around if Billy played something, you know, danceable?"

  Shrugging, Laura went up to Billy, who was whispering the lyrics of poor dying Lily to himself as his eyes filled with tears, and said, "Play something sassy, Bill. Anything but Dying Lily."

  Billy looked offended—he was an artist, after all—but dutifully switched gears and launched into a rousing version of Fat Annie's Fat, Fat Fanny."

  Laura returned to Mr. Patchers, held up her arms, and said, "Will you dance with me, sir?"

  They joined company and it turned out that Mr. Patchers possessed a very respectable sense of rhythm. Laura began to enjoy herself as they whirled and twirled while Billy tapped his foot to the beat and Neil, amazed to see his mother in the arms of another man, watched wide-eyed. When the dance ended, Laura dropped into a deep, laughing curtsy which sent Mr. Patchers into a minor convulsion of blushing and stammering. She stood up, and there was applause. A small group of—customers?—stood eagerly on the dock, ready to dance, ready to pay. There were at least one two three four five six. Six! If no one else showed, she'd consider the evening a howling success.

  Chapter 4

  The boldest one among them, a woman dressed extravagantly in violet, stepped forward. "I was waiting table when I saw you tack your notice to the post outside, dearie. And I says, finally! Something for them of us as likes to be where the real men are." She dropped her coins into the contribution box with an overly large "35 cents" sign next to it, and climbed aboard. Clearly she'd been on boats before.

  The violet waitress was followed by two of her friends, dressed with similar intensity, and then by one sullen male and one roguish one. The sixth member of the party, if it was a party, was a very young man with bad skin and stringy hair who seemed to be at least partly in love with the woman who wore a black and magenta broad-diagonal-striped dress. He threw his money in the box and took up a position behind the mainmast from which to brood over his obviously unattainable desire.

  Poor Billy found himself in the center of the newly arrived demimondaines, who were fluttering around him like a covey of pigeons, urging him to strike up a tune. Laura was in a bit of a state herself—she had expected to be boarded, not overrun—but the sound of money was to her the sound of music. She gave Billy a signal to play, and so he did, a friendly, medium-fast number. Laura watched the proceedings warily; the women looked all too capable of becoming loud and unmanageable, and she didn't want to have to give the money back.

  But without alcohol it all seemed to go well, and the next guests who trickled aboard seemed decent enough types. Three or four tourists came on after that; by now Laura had actually lost count of how much money she'd taken in. She felt confident enough in the success of her shipboard dance to command Billy to take a short break, although in the next breath she ordered him to help little Neil wash out glasses, since the guests had all descended en masse on the refreshment table.

  "Oh well, these are things I'll have to work out," she confided happily to Billy as she dashed down below to make another batch of punch. She needed more refreshments, more help, more room, more everything. It was wonderful to be found wanting.

  When she returned back on deck the punch was completely gone and Billy had hastily resumed playing—"to avert," as he later said, "a terrible riot."

  To Laura the situation simply did not seem threatening. True, the women tended to get enthusiastic during some of the faster dances, and Laura did see one or two shadows forward of the mast in the forbidden zone, hopefully not drinking. And she'd overheard more than one unkind remark about the oatmeal cookies. But the money! It seemed to her a fabulous sum for very little wear and tear. She owned a dance floor with a harbor view. Why not use it?

  The evening was winding down—or at least, Billy was. The closing time had been clearly posted in Laura's advertisements, so she did not feel like a killjoy when she murmured to Billy to play something slow. He launched into a poignant version of "Good Night, Irene," and everyone moaned. There was no clearer tip-off that the ride was nearly over, and that the night had been a success.

  Laura turned to see yet another small group preparing to
board the Virginia, and she hurried over to dissuade them.

  "I knew it!" cried their ringleader, a pretty, vivacious woman in a rather daring crepe dress. She turned to her partner, equally well-dressed in white tie, and said, "You and your wretched billiards game!"

  It was perfectly obvious to Laura that the group was made up of condescending thrill-seekers. She resented being viewed as a sampling of how the other half lived. From her higher vantage point on the Virginia's decks she scanned the group: half a dozen socialites down from Bellevue Avenue, scouring the waterfront for local color.

  Her voice became ironic as she said, "It's too frightfully bad that you missed it. It really was a splendid 'do.'"

  She saw one of the men who had been hanging back in the shadows swing around sharply at that. Clearly she had given offense. Good.

  But the pretty socialite had chosen not to pick up on Laura's tone. "When will you have the next one?" the young woman demanded.

  Before Laura could answer, Mr. Patchers had her hand in his and was pumping it politely. "Don't know when I've had more fun. Must be shovin' off. Wife'll have a fit .... See you at the next one Saturday. Bill says at least twice as many cookies .... Good night, then."

  "Saturday?" Laura stared blankly at the little man's retreating form as a line of tired but satisfied customers straggled around her and off the Virginia. She saw the socialites fall in with them, murmuring among themselves; and then she heard lilting, private laughter, which she assumed was about her. In fifteen minutes the schooner was empty, and Laura was wondering why on earth she'd bothered to paint the scuffed-up decks.

  ****

  The next evening Sam stopped by after receiving a note from his wife. "I don't want to make a habit of this," he warned Laura, still ebullient. "The rest of the crew do without their women, and so should I. Well: How went the evening?"

  For an answer Laura dropped a ditty bag of her own, on which she'd stenciled the name "Virginia," on the cabin table; it landed with a clinking thud. "It went not too bad," she answered proudly.

  "The deck looks like you've hauled a load of granite," he complained, weighing the bag in his hands.

  "The paint hadn't cured enough," she answered without taking offense. "I'll paint it again—after high season."

  He frowned. "What the hell kind of season is a high one?"

  "Summer in Newport," she answered promptly. "When everything costs the most."

  "Beaches don't cost nothin'," he answered deliberately.

  "Oh, don't play dense, Sam!" she returned. "I'm talking about tourism. The Virginia doesn't pay her way anymore hauling freight. Times have changed, and we have to change with them: the Virginia will support herself as a tour boat, I learned that last night. We could hold dances aboard, or take out sailing parties in the evening, or even overnight to the Vineyard or Nantucket—"

  "And what do we do the other ten months of the year? Huddle below and count our money?"

  "We follow the sun and do the same thing somewhere south," she said, undaunted.

  "Not a chance. There's no money in it, no more than there is in hauling. I haul cargo to get away from the bullshit ashore. Cleaning up after some seasick biddy ain't my idea of a good time."

  He picked up her little bag of coins and tossed it across the table back to her. "You made a little money, and you made a little mess. I call it a wash."

  "Sam! There's much more money to be made! Think about it, please," she implored. "I love the water as well as you, and I've come up with a plan that will work."

  He narrowed his eyes skeptically. "Do you remember that newspaper bit you read to me about the beggars in New York City—that the best of 'em average eight dollars a day? That's about how much you made. But you need a thirty-ton schooner to do it with, and they only need a pair of crutches."

  "That's not fair! I'm just getting started—"

  "Another thing," he said, ignoring her plea. "One of the fellas told me last night that you need a license for what you did. Try it again, and you'll have someone from city hall all over the Virginia. I wouldn't like that," he continued in his phlegmatic way.

  "A license?" She sat down, fingering the drawstrings of her bag of coins. "I didn't know that," she said, embarrassed at her ignorance.

  "Ayuh. Well, even if you had one, the answer is no. As soon as I finish up on the Rainbow, we'll go back to making our money the way we always have—haulin'."

  Laura set her chin at a dangerous angle. "All right. We'll do it your way. But just remember: you said it, not I."

  ****

  The next day Laura resolved to find a contract to haul cargo, or die trying. With the earnings from her shipboard dance she placed an ad in the Newport Daily News, as well as in Boston and New York papers, offering cut-rate charges for delivery of nonperishable goods. She haunted the coal and construction companies, looked up old contacts, courted new ones. She was a woman doing a man's job, and that earned her an entry into every office, but that was all. Reactions ranged from outright laughter to not-so-subtle bartering for sexual favors.

  They were days of frustration for Laura, in dismal contrast to the days of exhilaration before her shipboard dance.

  "Don't be upset, Mama," said Neil to his mother as she stoked up a fire in the stove to make them supper. "It's only been a few days. Maybe someone will write from New York to give us work. Or Boston. I wish you wouldn't be upset," he repeated.

  Whether it was because he was an only child, or because they lived in such intimate proximity, Neil could never bear to see his mother in distress. Laura thought that perhaps he'd been spoiled when he was a baby, listening to the sound of her laughter all day long. Laura and Sam had rarely argued then. The last few years, the wretched Great Depression, had been very hard on them all.

  "I'm sure you're right, Neil," Laura said firmly, putting an optimistic note in her voice. "But you know how impatient I am; I want everything yesterday. No, I really do think you're right. The business will come."

  Satisfied with the shift in his mother's attitude, Neil said, "New York. The contract will be from New York," and went back to his penmanship lessons, kicking his feet abstractedly under the cabin table.

  After a supper of boiled cabbage and an end piece of corned beef, mother and son went up on deck. Billy was ashore somewhere. Neil decided to bottom-fish off the end of the dock, a few feet from the Virginia's berth. Laura had her tea. She kicked off her sandals and pinned her hair haphazardly on her head, grateful for the cool zephyr from the south that fanned the back of her neck. The sun was setting in a bed of scarlet behind Goat Island as a beat-up fishing boat cut a wake through the harbor, bound for the Grand Banks. It was very quiet, the time of day that hovers between dream and wakefulness. Laura sipped hot tea from a heavy white mug, watching her son and thinking about money. Neil would probably never amount to much without any. Laura did not notice the two women approach until they hailed her.

  "Yoo-hoo! Miss!"

  She swung her glance away from her son to them, then immediately dropped her feet and slipped them back into their sandals: two of last week's dance guests, dressed for a good time, stood on the dock fluttering a greeting.

  "What about the dance?" asked the one in the bright green evening dress, the one who had said that she waited on tables.

  "Where are the lanterns?" wondered the other, much younger girl.

  "But there isn't any dance. I never put up any notices," replied Laura, flattered and dismayed.

  "But Billy said!"

  "Billy isn't even here. I can't have a dance because I found out you need a license to sell tickets," she added.

  "Oh, swell! Now what, Nellie?" said the younger woman to her friend.

  "Quiet, Marie. Let me think," said Nellie. She did. "I know: don't sell tickets. We'll slip you something under the table, and you can let us and our friends aboard the boat for a 'party,' if anyone asks." She brushed her hands against one another, as if disposing of the Newport bureaucracy once and for all.


  Her sly grin made Laura hesitate, but only very briefly. "How much?" she demanded, burying Sam's objections under a ditty bag's worth of coins.

  The two women put their made-up heads together and conferred. Nellie looked up. "Seven-fifty."

  Laura's heart leaped up. Still, fair was fair: "Billy won't be here to play the concertina," she confessed.

  "Five bucks."

  "But I can play, though not so well as Billy."

  "Six-fifty."

  Newport wasn't New York. Laura agreed to their terms. A private party, with Nellie and Marie deciding who could come aboard; music; and no questions.

  The women went off to round up their friends, and Laura spent a frantic hour hanging lanterns and clearing the decks. Mr. Patchers wandered through; he was sent reluctantly away, as it was a "strictly private affair this time." She sent Neil off looking for Billy in his favorite haunts, meanwhile keeping a wary eye on the dock for husbands and city clerks. Neil came back without Billy, and Laura dumped him behind the refreshment table, just in time for their first arrivals.

  Within an hour most of them had come: half a dozen women, all of them overdressed in dreadful taste, and twice as many men, ranging from fidgety to overbearing. Perhaps to put as much distance between herself and the women as she could, Laura had deliberately underdressed in a simple cream- colored frock. No rose tonight, just a pale blue ribbon holding her thick brown hair away from her face. She looked like what she was: a wholesome, healthy Midwesterner willing to look at the bright side, wanting to please.

  She had picked up the concertina almost immediately, because her brother-in-law was still nowhere in sight. Her repertoire was only so-so for dancing, composed mostly of sea chanteys and bits and pieces of classical music that she was fond of. She varied the pace as best she could, announcing the composer and the name of the piece to incredulous looks. For nearly an hour she played gamely on, unable to help Neil with the refreshments, unable to keep people from wandering around at will, despite the fact that she'd cordoned off the bow area again.