Biting their lips and staring at the floor, people tried hard not to laugh.
“Yes, well … here we go,” the woman said, wide-eyed, as the line moved up one.
“Next’ll be the diamond,” Jimmy said, turning his CLOSED sign around so that his name showed. “And then what will Mother do?” he asked. He looked at her, pursing his lips and batting his lashes.
With her son clinging fearfully to her pants, the mother moved stiffleggedly up to Jimmy’s window.
The man with the cigars took a lollipop from the Styrofoam cup and stepped away. Martha Horgan moved her bags up to the teller line and set her check on the counter, keeping her hand on it as if she feared someone might race by and grab it. “Cash, please. Eight one hundreds, five twenties, ten tens,” she rattled.
“You didn’t sign it,” Miss McDonald said, pushing back the check and a pen.
Muttering, Martha signed the check.
“Well?” Jimmy persisted as he waited for the woman’s account to come up on the screen. “Or will you just not mention that too?”
“That would be different. I mean, God, that would be SO different.” Imagine a fifty-dollar perm-and-frosting special changing your whole life like that, she thought, smiling at Martha, who glanced up at her. God, her eyes were intense. She had never realized what a pretty face Martha Horgan had behind those thick glasses. Scary, though. She had waited on the aunt before. Gorgeous lady; affected and cold as ice, but if she thought anything was wrong with her accounts, she’d start to shake.
“What are you waiting for?”
“Oh … your check … I didn’t realize you were done.”
Martha Horgan peered at her. “You don’t give very good service!”
At the end of the line, Wesley Mount scraped his feet and cleared his throat uneasily. Miss McDonald was so embarrassed. He was creepy, but, still, it flattered her the way he always stood off to the side and waited for her window to be free. Two years ago, he had sent her a poinsettia at Christmas, candy on Valentine’s Day, and then, on Saint Patrick’s Day, he brought her a pot of shamrocks and asked her to dinner. When she told him she couldn’t, his eyes brimmed with tears and he could barely speak.
“I’m sorry, Miss Horgan,” she said softly now, the color rising in her cheeks.
“She’s in love,” Jimmy told Martha with a toothy grin.
“Oh, don’t,” Miss McDonald said, head bowed, covering her eyes.
“See?” Jimmy laughed. “She’s enraptured.”
“Then she shouldn’t work here. Good service is prompt and attentive, and she’s not!” The counter trembled as she banged her fist on it.
“Oh,” Miss McDonald sighed miserably, unable to raise her eyes to the stricken gaze of the customers.
“Martha? What’s wrong?” Wesley Mount asked, bending to Martha Horgan.
“I lost my temper,” Martha said in a small voice. She hung her head and closed her eyes.
“Here,” Mount said, quickly stuffing her check into her open purse, then snapping it shut. “Let me just give you a hand here.” He picked up her bags while she looked on meekly.
He steered Martha down the street and through the door of the luncheonette, settling her in the first booth (better air, give her more of a sense of openness by the window, the feeling that, if she had to, she could get right outside), and now, at the counter—quickly, so as not to leave her alone too long—he asked the waitress for a glass of ice water—no, make that two. Empathy. Communion. You are not alone. Your suffering, my pain. His favorite was, My cheeks are wet with your tears. Wesley Mount was conversant with pain. Hysteria, Anger, Grief, Despair, these were the threads in the unique fabric of his calling; a hand on the shoulder, the ability to show people that, in their time of loss, they were not alone. It was happiness, the plodding sameness of normalcy, that left him tongue-tied and fearful.
The funeral parlor had always been his home, and so death had been natural and unmysterious to him. The body was a wondrous machine, but a machine all the same, and when it broke down, it was not so much that life seeped away as that death took over. Death was not a void, but a force, and, like his father and grandfather before him, Wesley Mount had mastered the ritual and protocol its presence required.
Martha drank the entire glass of water, then sat back, panting a little, her firm breasts rising and falling. He forced his eyes onto her lovely face. She burped softly into her hand.
“You were thirsty,” he said, noting with pleasure her perfect skin with its gentle glow, the narrow bridge of her nose, and her finely freckled prominent cheekbones. There seemed to be dust on her arms. There was a streak of dirt down the front of her dress. Where had she come from? What had she been doing? Just being near her excited him. Like his sister, she was a high-strung, unpredictable woman. Her mouth trembled, and it fascinated him that he couldn’t tell if she were about to smile or frown.
“I like water,” she said.
“Here, have mine.”
She drank half of that, and hiccupped.
“Are you hungry?” he asked, glancing at his watch. It was four-thirty. Tonight was old Will Delaney’s first viewing, at seven. The Delaneys were a family of talkers who would come early and leave late. There would be no chance of seeing Martha tonight.
“No, thank you,” she said, her chest heaving with silent hiccups.
“Would you like a cup of coffee? Or maybe you’re a tea drinker?” he asked hopefully, being one himself.
“No, thank you.” She covered her mouth.
The waitress came to the table, and Martha stared at her empty glass, her shoulders jerking up and down.
He had to order something if they were going to sit here. “Two turkey sandwiches, and two more waters, please.”
“I told you I don’t want anything!” Martha said.
The waitress looked at him.
“They’re both for me, thank you.” He smiled.
“I’m just not hungry,” she said when the waitress left.
“Of course. If you’re not hungry, you shouldn’t eat. That’s the trouble with a lot of people today. They eat just because it’s breakfast time or lunchtime or dinnertime. They eat and they’re not even hungry.”
She nodded. “Habit. I guess it’s habit. I do that.” She looked up with such a troubled expression that he had all he could do not to blanket her thin hands with his own. “I have a lot of bad habits.”
“I doubt that,” he said. When she didn’t reply, he asked if the bags meant she’d be moving back to town.
Yes. In fact, she was on her way to Mayo’s, she told him with a long gasping hiccup.
“That’s wonderful!” he said. “Well, certainly more convenient for you,” he added in a more somber tone. He ran his hand down his tie, surprised it lay so still over his clamorous heart.
The door opened on two young men, who sat down at the counter. They both ordered french fries and large root beers. They kept glancing back at Martha, whose loud hiccups racked her chest. At the counter, the waitress turned to see what was going on. The young men huddled over their drinks.
“Take a long deep breath,” Wesley advised, and, closing her eyes, Martha tried, but just keeping her head erect appeared to be an effort.
“Do you have a paper bag?” he called, and the waitress looked up quizzically. “To put over her face,” he explained, gesturing.
“She’s not that bad-looking,” one of the young men squealed, and the other buried his face in his arms, helpless with laughter.
Wesley barely heard them. After a lifetime of grim jokes at his own expense, such cruelties seemed as intrinsic to existence as seeds in watermelon.
“Shut up,” said the waitress as she rummaged under the counter for a bag, which she brought over quickly.
He told Martha to breathe deeply into it.
She opened the bag. “It smells like fish,” she gasped into it.
“You’re hyperventilating. Now, breathe deeply. That’s it. There … there now. G
et a hold of it, now. Control your breathing, in and out, in and out. Everything will start slowing down, your heart and your lungs. Everything’s getting right back in rhythm. There, there now,” he kept saying.
Suddenly there was a wrenching hiccup, and she threw the bag onto the table. “My check,” she gasped, opening her pocketbook. She tore through it, removing a book, a scarf, a balled pair of stockings, pens, a bag of seeds, gum, slamming them onto the table until she found her wallet.
Everything there charmed him, especially the seeds. She must have been gardening; that explained the dust on her arms and her sweaty, frazzled state.
“My check is gone!” she said, her stare so fierce that he wondered if she thought he had taken it.
“In that middle section,” he said, pointing.
“Oh,” she said, finding it. “I thought I left it at the bank,” she said, slapping her chest with relief.
He could tell by the watchful way she placed it in the billfold that she did, she probably thought he had had her cover her face so he could steal her check. As he watched her putting everything back into her bag, he began to feel sad and alone, as if she had already left him. She looked up and blinked, her mouth twitching so self-consciously that he longed to reach across the table and draw his fingertips over her soft lips and soothe those tremulous eyes. But this time he would be cautious. There would be none of the smothering attention, the nervous phone calls, the barrage of flowers and candy, the searches for greeting cards listing the qualities of friendship, his heart aching as he licked the envelope because what he really meant was love; every day of his life, thought of little else, as he dressed and manicured and perfumed himself in his quest. He had prepared the corpses of the poor, the sick, young and old. Beyond the effects of disease and injury, there was little the bodies ever revealed. He could not gauge greed, charity, patience, cruelty, kindness. But he could always tell a lifetime without love. There was a tearless distance to the eyes, and at the mouth an unripe tautness, the flesh so toneless its touch repelled him. It was, if such a thing were possible, a deathless death.
From the kitchen, Claire Mayo could hear the ladies setting the table in the dining room. They liked an early dinner on summer Wednesdays, because the band concert started at seven. Tonight Claire was running late. Sweat beaded the old woman’s upper lip as she kept trying to thicken the lamb stew. She could barely see into the tall pot. Lately it seemed that she was shrinking and the house was getting bigger, the steps steeper, the nights darker, the days longer, the gravy thinner.
The door swung open. “We’re short one salad bowl,” Mrs. Hess called in.
“There isn’t any salad,” Claire said with some pleasure.
Mrs. Hess looked at her. The door swung shut, and she knew by the buzz of their voices that they were complaining about starches again. They blamed their constipation on the rice. They could complain all they wanted, but she wasn’t about to stop serving rice, which came free from the old-age food surplus, along with long yellow bricks of American cheese, butter, and flour.
Next into the kitchen was Ann McNulty. She stood at the sink, sneezing, while she filled the pepper shakers through stiff paper funnels she had cut from notepaper. Cute, always so cute and so clever it made Claire sick to her stomach, seeing crocheted covers on every tissue box and wastebasket in the house. All the picture frames were covered with quilted tubes. Now she was knitting a banister cover for the front staircase, which Claire had already said she didn’t want, wouldn’t use, couldn’t stand the sight of, but didn’t she sit there night after night, working on the ugly thing that snaked down her lap and around her feet. Little by little she was taking over. They all were.
Ann McNulty came toward her now with the pepper can and said something.
“No,” Claire said. “The spices don’t need covers.”
“It’s empty,” Ann McNulty said, dropping the can into the trash. “Smells good,” she said, lifting the lid on the pot. “And no rice, I see.”
“There’s some in the stew,” Claire said, staring at her. “For filler.”
“And what’s in the oven?”
“Macaroni and cheese,” Claire said, just as insolently as she could.
Ann McNulty hurried out of the kitchen, obviously dying to report that Claire had done it again; even after their meeting last night, she had gone ahead and cooked what she pleased, when she knew how miserable they were all feeling.
“I don’t believe it!” Suzanne Griggs gasped from the other side of the door.
Claire opened the cupboard over the sink and took down the bottle of Metamucil, which she emptied into the stew, muttering as she stirred, “They want fiber, I’ll give them fiber. Sitting around here all day like princesses, complaining how bound up they are.”
It started after the first polite minutes of passing plates back from the tureen and “Bread, please,” “Butter, please,” “Salt, please.”
“Did you get the prunes stewed, Claire?” asked Ann McNulty, meaning the five boxes her niece had brought by this morning.
“Not yet.”
“I thought we’d agreed on prunes. More fruit and fiber, isn’t that what we said last night?”
“All those poisons just backing up and not being passed,” Suzanne Griggs said with her hand pressed to her stomach. She shuddered. “Every time I think of it, I feel sick.”
“Two and a half days.” Mrs. Hess rolled her eyes at Loiselle Evans. “This is the longest I’ve ever gone.”
“No, last Christmas,” Loiselle said. “I remember you weren’t going to eat the stuffing, but Martha had raisins and apples in it, so then you did, and I remember you said it worked.”
“She did make a wonderful stuffing, I’ll say that for Martha,” Suzanne Griggs said.
“And salads. Remember? Martha made salad every night,” Mrs. Hess said. She looked down the table at Claire. “I’m not getting enough roughage!” Her lip quivered and her eyes paled with tears. “Look,” she said, probing the stew with her fork. “Just rice, meat, and gravy … and these … What are these disgusting lumps?”
“Powder balls,” Ann McNulty said, examining a dripping forkful of the gravy-coated clots of laxative powder.
“Powder balls!” Claire scoffed. “Those are bran seeds, bran pods, they’re called.”
“Really?” Loiselle Evans asked, bringing a forkful to her mouth. “Does have kind of a nutty flavor,” she said with a discerning nibble. “Ummmh!”
“How’d you find out about bran pods?” Suzanne Griggs asked, tasting hers. “I never heard of bran pods.”
“The health-food store,” Claire lied, pleased to see them so eagerly cleaning their plates. Faster than stewed prunes, and a lot less work, she thought, already looking forward to tomorrow night’s rice pudding.
They were still eating when the doorbell rang. In the center of the table was the stewpot Claire had carried out so they could skim the Metamucil balls directly into their plates. The doorbell rang again, and Claire got up to answer it. It took her a minute to recognize the blurred face at the dusty screen. Seeing Martha’s hair so short, Claire’s first thought was that as either an inmate or patient, her head had been shaved.
“I need my room back,” Martha said. “I don’t have any place to stay.”
“But your room’s rented,” Claire said quickly. She had heard about Martha’s thievery at the Cleaners and how the women there lived in constant fear of her, especially poor Birdy Dusser, who had to get an unlisted number as well as all her door locks changed.
“I’ll sleep on the couch,” Martha said. “I don’t care.”
“Now, you know I’d never allow that, Martha!”
“What about the sewing room, then? Nobody uses it, and I’ll pay the same rent as before.”
“It’s not even big enough for a bed, and there’s no window!”
“But I need a place to stay!”
Martha tried to open the door, but, thank goodness, it was already latched. Across the str
eet, cars were starting to pull in around the park. Claire could hear the rustle of the women settling into the shadows behind her.
“Then go try Wilmer’s on Pond Street. They’ll take you, especially if your aunt’s still willing to pay the extra fifty a month.” Rudy Wilmer would rent to a dog if it paid.
“What extra fifty?” Martha asked.
“Never mind,” Claire said. Let her ask her aunt. She was tired. Like a giant lung in the shadows, the ladies breathed in and out, and she could feel them wanting Martha back.
“Tell me!” Martha insisted. “What do you mean, an extra fifty?” She hit the door, and Claire was afraid she’d push her fist right through the brittle screen.
She explained that, soon after Martha had moved in, her aunt had called to see how things were going. Frances Beecham had offered Claire the extra fifty herself, out of the blue, with no particular reason given.
“This time I’ll pay the extra fifty.” Martha snapped open a billfold. She pressed a check to the screen. “See! I have the money.”
“It’s not the money. I told you, the room’s rented.”
“But I don’t have any place to stay!” Martha cried. “I don’t know what to do! Please, Claire, please help me!” She hit the rickety door, and its warped bottom half banged in and out of the frame.
“My Lord!” gasped Mrs. Hess.
“The poor soul,” sighed Loiselle Evans.
“Call the police,” Ann McNulty said.
Claire closed the heavy inside door and made her way to the phone. So the stories were true. Martha had become a dangerous woman.
Dazed, Martha sat in one of the rocking chairs. She had to do something, but she didn’t know what. Birdy’s words kept zapping through her brain like an electrical charge. I DON’T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH YOU ANYMORE. Every emotion had been scoured out of her. Maybe she would just spend the night out here on the porch. She could put her head on one of her bags, and if it got cold, she could cover up with her clothes.
Across the street, all the parking spaces around the park had filled up with cars, and families were shaking open blankets to sit on. The hot-dog and popcorn vendors were setting up their carts.
A Dangerous Woman Page 29