by Joanna Scott
What a remarkable transformation Mr. Freddie accomplished in those few minutes. Up until then he’d cut a ridiculous figure; all the girls thought so—he fancied himself a bantam cock in the henhouse when in fact he was too scrawny to be of interest and too much of the dandy to be trusted. Everything about him was made up, and the girls enjoyed mocking this amateur trouper behind his back.
Ruth, however, didn’t laugh at Mr. Freddie that day. She couldn’t believe he hadn’t fired her, and she stared at him from beneath the smoky blue of her eyelids. Unexpectedly, she found herself growing interested in him. Maybe it was because she suspected that there was more to him than she’d thought. Or maybe she was just ready to believe that she’d finally met a man who would treat her fairly. Whatever the cause, Ruth was no longer simply one of the girls in Mr. Freddie’s eyes by the time he finished his pie.
“Call it favoritism, sweetheart, but I’m going to do something special for you,” he said with a wink, brushing crumbs from his mustache with his knuckles. “I can tell you’re deserving.”
How did Mr. Freddie know she was deserving? Ruth must have had neediness written all over her—a whole set of tattoos that only the manager could see. Clever man. The draw by the end of their conversation was his implied knowledge of her. As she watched him walk away from the counter she became aware of a new curiosity, the kind that once in a while would take her by surprise—when she was deep inside a tedious novel, say, and the plot abruptly thickened. She didn’t trust Mr. Freddie and because of this she wanted to be intimate with him, to circumvent his evasions and find out who he really was.
Life went on after that conversation, routine continued to dominate the days, and Ruth worked the register for an extra five cents an hour. But within the routine the challenge of Mr. Freddie grew. He learned her name. He’d wander out from the back office to chat with her about the weather. He’d join her at the counter during her lunch break. He’d tell his war stories, which all seemed contradictory versions of a single story about a U boat sunk off the coast of Ireland. Ruth would hardly listen, having long since concluded that all his testimonials were lies, or at least exaggerations. What she liked better than his puffery were those promises, those delicious representations of the future, about how she would get her promotion, and Mr. Freddie’s mysterious investment in an outfit on Long Island would begin to pay off. The accumulation of profit seemed a much more certain thing than the adventures of his past, and Ruth liked the man all the more because of his contagious optimism. So she hung with him, as the other girls noticed, and in doing so became the store outcast, having contracted, in their opinion, the disease that was the boss.
What began for Ruth as curiosity became, in part, defiance. She was Freddie’s girl, though how she made that leap to the possessive she’d never know for certain. It was one of the few hypotheticals in her life that ever came true. One morning she woke up in her room on Jane Street, and her first thought was of Freddie’s smooth-as-silk hands caressing her, even though at that point she had never met the manager outside the confines of the store.
Freddie’s girl she became—in her eyes and in the eyes of her coworkers. Yet as far as she could tell, Mr. Freddie had no opinion about the matter. Or at least that’s what he seemed to want her to believe. Yet as time went on she became convinced that the enigma of Freddie the Third would be irresistible once he let her know who he was.
He kept her believing that they were guaranteed a happy future together right through most of their first night out on the town, when Ruth in her boa and heels and Freddie in his Panama were a head-turning smash. She enjoyed the admiration of strangers. But even more than that, she enjoyed watching Freddie in action, handing out five-dollar tips and ordering oysters and rib eye and champagne. Somehow, after a series of taxis and nightclubs, they ended up in a back street south of Linden Boulevard, in a pleasure palace hideaway, where Ruth was willing to throw caution to the wind. Throw caution to the wind. A lovely phrase, she thought with a giggle as she stepped out of her dress, having already been assured by Freddie that there was nothing to fear.
“What’s so funny, precious?”
“You are, Freddie!”
Her opinion had been influenced by innumerable glasses of champagne, and right then Freddie the Third was about as amusing as they come, pretending to be Mr. Debonair when in fact he was an awkward dancer who didn’t know the next step. What fun Ruth had stripping for him, all the while thinking that she had finally found the true Freddie—a meek little understudy who preferred hiding in the wings.
She’d never known a man to be afraid of her. No sooner was she stark naked, her remaining stocking flung across the cracked lacquered bureau, than Freddie started stuttering about how he hoped she was having a good time. She assured him that the good time was just beginning, and she grabbed him by the collar and pulled him onto the bed.
They did have a good time together that night, though Ruth had to teach Freddie a thing or two. When they were done, she felt pleasantly sleepy, and she closed her eyes to better enjoy the tingling aftereffects inside her. She didn’t bother to open her eyes when she felt Freddie rise from the bed, so she didn’t see him gather his clothes. She kept her eyes closed all the while he was getting dressed, blinking only when she heard the clink of coins on the bureau.
“What are you doing, Freddie?”
He was peering at his reflection in the mirror above the washbasin, straightening his tie.
“I hope it’s more than your usual,” he said. He explained that he didn’t know the going rate, but if she expected more, she shouldn’t hesitate to ask. And she shouldn’t worry about getting home, since he’d included cab fare.
She stared at his back in amazement. He turned around and tipped his hat foolishly as he let himself out. And then he was gone, leaving Ruth behind to wish that he’d tried to kill her. If he’d come at her, slapped her and kicked her, then she could have returned the treatment and broken a glass against his head.
It took some time before she could catch her breath. With difficulty, she dressed herself and abandoned the room, leaving the money from Freddie on the bureau—she was halfway down the stairs when she realized that she had forgotten her stockings and that her dress underneath her shawl was on inside-out. But she had no inclination to improve her appearance. She only wanted to get out into the fresh air and collect the frenzied memory into some vaguely ordered whole, which she tried to do as she walked up the empty street between two warehouses.
She began her long journey back to her Jane Street apartment, an expedition that took her through the empty, unmarked lanes of Canarsie to the swamplands reeking of seaweed and mud and frying fat. It was a cool night, with a mist shrouding the half-moon, and in the gloomy light the shacks built on pilings seemed to have hollow eye sockets where there should have been windows and gaping dark mouths instead of doors. Ruth would have thought them all uninhabited if she hadn’t seen a kerosene lamp flickering on a back porch, hung there to warn away vagrants. Ruth was no better than a vagrant. Circumstances had turned her into the kind of woman that most of humanity reviles, and she couldn’t blame them, couldn’t in her dazed state figure out who was to blame, and couldn’t figure out how best to get home.
A single room with a bath and an electric burner: this was Ruth’s home and she wanted to be there so badly that she began to run. She crossed a gravel driveway, scrambled down and out of a drainage ditch, and began fighting her way through the wet salt hay, swamp tassels bobbing and nodding at her as she passed. She lost one of her high-heeled shoes when she crossed the mucky bed of a tidal creek. She threw the other shoe far into the swamp and kept stumbling over the soft hummocks as fast as she could toward the highway in the distance. She would wave down a driver, beg a ride into Manhattan, and be home in an hour.
An occasional truck rattled along the road, and in the intervals of silence she heard her own panting and the shush of the wet hay. There were fewer shacks in this area of the meadows, and t
he ground was soupier—Ruth fell twice, and by the time she reached the bottom of the highway’s steep embankment she was shivering and spattered head to foot with swamp mud. From her neck down she looked more like some monster from a picture show than the fancy gal she’d imagined herself to be earlier that same evening, and she clutched the corners of her shawl together to hide her body from herself.
She was about ten feet below the verge, scooting forward on hands and feet through the grass, when one hand landed on a soft, clammy, contoured something. She popped up, revulsion preceding comprehension. For a few seconds she couldn’t look down, wanting to believe that she had nothing to fear. When she did finally look, she saw not a fish but a bulging shape that resembled nothing more than a naked human torso tucked snugly in the grass. The broad, spongy surface, mottled by shadows, had a fleshy pallor to it, in fact was flesh, and belonged, she thought at first, to a person, the back hidden beneath coarse hair—hair that with a better look she recognized to be the fur of an animal, a dead opossum that Ruth could only imagine had been planted there to humiliate her.
She ran from the carcass, scrambled up the last part of the embankment, careened along the verge calling for help, but the wind washed away her voice and the truck approaching didn’t stop—fortunately for Ruth, she realized in the next instant, because if she was discovered covered with mud here on the edge of Jamaica Bay, she’d have a hard time convincing the world that she didn’t belong locked in the solitary confinement wing of The Tombs.
She tried to collect herself, folded her arms together, trudged forward. She was heading toward Brooklyn, she discovered at the first roadside sign, in the wrong direction, though now at least she knew where she was. Another truck rattled by without slowing. At Rockaway Boulevard she turned her nose toward Manhattan, walking more steadily, even automatically, along the sidewalk. Eventually she came to a bus station, where she splashed her face at the sink in the ladies’ room and bought a ticket from a dull-eyed vendor who didn’t glance twice at her. She waited nearly an hour for the bus. She rode it as far as the Flatbush Avenue station, then took the IRT into Manhattan. No one noticed or cared that she wore no shoes. Miraculously, she was back in her own bed, asleep, before sunrise.
She woke late the next day, the sound of her laughter echoing from her dreams. When she glanced at the clock and saw the time her first thought was that she’d be late for work. She even began to wash up before the embroidery of dried mud on her legs reminded her that she couldn’t go to work.
She bathed in deep, bubble-bath comfort for more than an hour. Later, after a bowl of canned chicken noodle soup, she lay back down on her bed and stared at the ceiling. She listened to the noises of life in the street. She made herself a cheese sandwich, which she couldn’t bring herself to eat. She went to bed shortly before eight.
She passed the next day, though she woke earlier, in much the same fashion. Out of this solitary existence she began to fall into a new routine for herself. A week later she left the Jane Street apartment and moved into a women’s boardinghouse on West Thirty-eighth Street. Someday soon she would have to find another job.
With so much time on her hands, she took to strolling through Paddy’s Market underneath the Ninth Avenue elevated. Initially the chaos of the place unnerved her, but eventually she grew used to it, and even to like it. She enjoyed taking in the scenery and imagining countless plots to explain the mysterious lives of strangers. Really, the market was better than any show she’d ever been in, funnier than vaudeville, with each gesture part of a routine and the overheard conversations verging on song. The funniest thing of all was that when a train passed, clanking overhead, the noise entirely drowned out the voices in the market, yet everyone kept right on talking.
She was at noisy Paddy’s Market on the day her brother spent a fortune to put a message in the newspaper: Ruth. Where are you? I would like to help if I can. Please get in touch with me for anything you need. Brother Frank. The appeal ran at the bottom of the front page of the New York Times. But Ruth didn’t bother to read the New York Times. Instead, she wandered around the market trying to envision a better life for herself, a life in which everything would fall perfectly into place and she’d put all her troubles so far behind her that she wouldn’t even be able to remember them. Even here—surrounded by heaps of luscious oranges and lemons to flavor iced tea; cages packed with terrified turkeys, chickens, pigeons, and ducks; carts full of wilting parsley and Bibb lettuce and Carolina tomatoes; stout, aproned women haggling in thick accents with the merchants; men shouting over dice in a corner—Ruth found it hard to recall that she’d ever felt alone. Sure, this was just the place for a girl to come if she was looking to start over. She’d better be ready, since her perfect new life might begin any time. Or maybe, she considered, it had already begun.
WORRY
Through the first decade of her marriage, Mrs. Helen Weech Owen didn’t have a worry in the world, unlike her husband, Dexter, whose responsibilities as vice president of a pharmaceutical company left him little time to spare for his family. And while another sort of wife might have wondered what her husband did, exactly, on those frequent business trips to Boston, Mrs. Owen wasn’t that sort. She knew her husband too well to fret about him acquiring a mistress. If he didn’t always adore his wife, he depended upon their attachment, clung to the idea of their alliance much as the creeping ivy attached itself to the stone wall bordering their backyard. Simply by agreeing to be his wife, Mrs. Owen had insured herself against betrayal. Dexter had risked love once—and won. He would never take such a risk again.
Redfield Doyle Pharmaceutical managed to flourish right from its inception, and the Owen family seemed to all a paragon of good fortune at a time when so many fortunes were being consigned to memory. Helen grew increasingly satisfied with “the lot of it,” as she liked to say. She grew in other ways as well: she didn’t resist when her already square figure began to expand, puffing at the wrists and ankles, pouching a bit on either side of her jaw. She was too confident a woman to worry about pounds and dimensions. As the years passed and her friends found themselves losing control of their lives, they turned to steady Helen Owen for consolation, finding in her a faithful listener who had no turmoil of her own to relate.
The women tended to confide in Helen over coffee during the blank hours of midmorning. While the babies napped, Helen’s friends told her of unpaid bills and second mortgages. They told her of heirloom jewelry that they’d been forced to pawn at a shop over in Great Neck. They told her of husbands who insulted them in public, slapped them in private, ignored them, berated them, even threatened to abandon them. Helen led the women through their monologues with a frown that conveyed her concern more fully than any words could have done. But it wasn’t enough for them to tell—and to be heard. Helen could do nothing to help them. She found herself privately predicting the mistakes they would make and wasn’t at all surprised when, once their children started school, her friends began taking lovers.
They were wrong to think that she would disapprove of their behavior, but apparently their shame was strong enough that they stopped visiting her, and Helen had to learn the details of their affairs through gossip at club luncheons. Though she’d expected to hear of such adventures in their lives, she couldn’t help but feel deserted. She guessed that nothing short of a serious illness would revive the old intimacies.
To ward off the loneliness of vacant mornings, she threw herself into charity work. She wanted to help those truly in need of help. With her characteristic determination, she set out to become the kind of community volunteer who would be recognized one day with a full-page obituary in the local paper.
As it turned out, the two people who needed her least were her own children. In their early years, Jackie and Gregory—or Gimp, as Jackie had named him when he was three—had been polite, mild children, perhaps more inclined to sob over little disappointments than others their age, though Helen attributed this to their intelligence and felt sure
that their weakness would develop into impressive strength of character. Indeed, by the time Jackie was twelve and Gimp ten, they were admired by other parents for their studiousness and self-control. Dexter, though he didn’t spend much time with the children, saw in them his own best traits and never found reason to punish them. His pride verged on happy foolishness, and the infrequent Saturdays he was at home he liked to sit in the garden watching his children play their make-believe games.
Everyone agreed that they were beauties, miraculously so given the plain generations preceding them. Helen liked to think of them as two angels sucked to earth by the vacuum of their mother’s love. For she’d loved each of them before they’d been conceived, had seen the children in her dreams dancing across the cotton-ball floor of heaven: a girl first—chestnut hair lit with strands of yellow; round, chocolate eyes—and then her son, blue-eyed, his blond hair streaked with brown. In life, as in heaven, they seemed perfect complements to each other, both of them insistently alive and, in some magical way, invulnerable. Helen had complete, unquestioning faith in their mutual safety. Without quite articulating it to herself, she considered them the necessary manifestations of existence itself, and for many years she wasted no anxious thoughts pondering the many dangers that threaten children. That her offspring would thrive was too solid a conviction to doubt.
Yet doubt did come to her. It came from within, remaining latent for months, perhaps for years. She first became vaguely aware of it at about the time her beautician took to plucking iron gray hairs from her head. She was thirty-nine years old, blessed with such reliable comforts that she considered it disgraceful to fret. She’d always known that a woman’s mind has a way of quietly damaging satisfaction, shaking one’s confidence in the situation at hand with phantom catastrophes so that experience begins to seem a quagmire of possibilities and change the only certainty. But she continued to believe in her happiness, and her anxiety betrayed itself only in trivialities, a chronic twitch in her right eyelid and a tendency to clear her throat every few minutes, symptoms that Helen shook off as inevitable, like her gray hair.