Concrete Angel

by Patricia Abbott

  Daddy was probably remembering the German farm woman who cooked and served the dinner back in Bucks County, standing silently at Sophie Moran’s elbow until she was dismissed.

  Mother had only stayed at the Morans once or twice, but the vision of life there was clear. “Served—with the help of a cook! And you claim plain food is all you want. Look, I don’t want it to become a problem between us later. I can hear you already—complaining to your pals about my dull meals. I’ve heard some of the other fellows tell tales on their wives.”

  “I wouldn’t do such a thing.” He grabbed her by the waist and enfolded her in his arms.

  I imagine mother placing a hand on his thigh about then so he’d forgot about her cooking for a few hours. Still in her thrall, none of the rest seemed important to Daddy.

  “And remember, we’ve got a perfectly good cafeteria right out the door,” Eve said. “I could hardly prepare food for less than they charge.”

  But the cafeteria wasn’t the venue for dinner. It would’ve been ridiculous for her to dress like she did, look like she did, and go to eat in the mess hall. Carting her still-damp brown tray to a table without a linen cloth, eating on worn Formica with the crumbs from the men who ate there earlier stuck to her elbows. Hank’s good looks and precision haircut would be wasted among the proles.

  So they dined at the officer’s club most nights. Their food and bar bill continued to rise, and her clothing allowance was never enough.

  Hank’s parents subsidized their years on the base. The financial burden that living on military pay placed on the young couple made a lengthy career in the service unlikely.

  “I wasn’t about to spend the rest of my life on a godforsaken base,” Mother said once. “Those camps are always in two-bit towns where a Friday night movie in the mess hall was the only thing going on. They showed Bridge On the River Kwai for months at the local theater. Military service was one of those things you got out of the way early, quickly moving on.”

  When money grew tight, despite the Moran family’s largesse, Eve stole the things she had to have, and most often they were improbable items that nobody needed: a crystal ashtray, a doll with a face made to look like Vivian Leigh, a table lighter shaped like a cannon. Most of these items were brought home, quickly wrapped in tissue paper, and stored in the tiny basement army housing offered. Mother soon worked out a deal with the wife next door, using their basement for the overflow.

  “Their basement was empty, Christine. A laundry area, a ping-pong table, and some winter boots. Can you imagine people with so few things? It was homier once I put some of my stuff in there. After I took the ping-pong table down, I had loads of room for my junk.”

  Mother didn’t dare show Daddy the number of things she was accumulating, most of them stolen. “It was easy to pop ‘em in my bag. No one expected a woman like me to take things, and I seldom hit the same place twice. Plus, I always made sure to buy goods from their stores when I could afford it, making myself known as a loyal patron. probably spent more than I stole.”

  She told me this as if it meant she’d played fair—had done what she did only when pushed by circumstances.

  “The one or two times someone caught me at it, they were willing to overlook it. Nobody wanted legal problems with an officer’s wife. A good-looking military wife could steal the moon right out of the sky, and no one would say a word about the resulting darkness.”

  When I looked puzzled, she clarified it. “The base kept the town afloat—the soldiers and their families—the things they bought.” This arrangement evened things out for her; she would buy what she could afford and take the rest. What more could they expect?

  Daddy’s family disapproved of Eve Hobart from the start—though they had no specific knowledge of her acquisitive ways. Nouveau-riche country-club people, the Morans’ ran a printing business in Philadelphia, then eventually in Bucks County. Sporadic visits from the young couple to their spacious property in Lahaska seldom went well. It wasn’t merely a matter of using the right fork or proper grammar either.

  “They were always asking me what I was reading, what I thought about the famine in China or wherever it was going on that particular year. Who I voted for in the election, did I think Castro would govern better than Batista? One long test I was certain to fail.”

  Mother didn’t know these were the topics most people talked about—that serious discussions were the norm in some families. Being informed, witty, and quick-thinking was valued in certain sets. She assumed she was at the wrong end of a test, the only one being asked to perform.

  These were not the sort of skills passed on at the Hobart home. The dinner table was a place for chewing, swallowing, breathing, and little else. Both of Mother’s parents came from families poorer than they were, families less likely to have something interesting to say, even more religious. Silence at the dinner table was immutable. Any attempt on Mother’s part to introduce a discussion was met with…

  “Evelyn, don’t talk with your mouth full.”

  “There’s nothing in my mouth.”

  “Your food’s going to get cold.” Silence. “You’ll digest your dinner better if you save your chitchat.”

  She explained it to me later. “Oh, I know the Moran dinner table talk sounds normal to you, you’re used to their ways, used to them putting on a show, but it was a test they knew I’d fail. If I read a book, I wouldn’t tell them what it was. They turned up their noses at the kind of books I liked. Snooty bastards. They wanted me to read Steinbeck, Pearl Buck, or Michener, the books they read. Big intellectual doorstops. Nothing by Harold Robbins or Grace Metalious. I never heard them quizzing each other on the political situation. Only me.”

  Mother pushed a thumb into her chest and frowned, remembering. “They loved making me look bad in front of Hank. It got so I hardly came out of my room when we visited—which was probably what they wanted—to have their precious son to themselves. “Oh, is Eve ill again, Hank? Too bad. Not taking dinner tonight, we’ll send her a tray. Doesn’t want to go riding today? Tsk, tsk.”

  After two years on the base in South Carolina and some more time in Texas, Daddy’s commission ended, and my parents moved back to Pennsylvania. Daddy began the slow process of taking over the family business. His father, Big Dave Moran, had married and had children late in life and was already entering his sixties with medical conditions that made full-time work difficult. Sophie wanted to travel while they still could. Daddy’s sister, Linda, in her late twenties, lived at home, already a companion to both of them.

  “Once we moved north, they were in my face all the time. They found us a house about five miles from theirs in Doylestown, a pokey little burg. Not like now, Christine,” Mother said. “The whole area was Hicksville in the 1960s. The Morans’ and their friends hid out at the clubs, and you know how well I got along with that set, which left me to consort with the hoi-polloi.”

  “Couldn’t we at least live in the city,” Eve asked Hank, once she’d seen the 1870s house her mother-in-law had chosen for them—a house with irregular ceilings in every room, bulging walls, tiny windows placed in odd spots, a stove from the nineteen twenties. She stared menacingly at the clawed foot bathtub, the porch with the sagging floor, the water-marred wallpaper with its huge, predatory flowers.

  “Philadelphia, Hank,” she went on, insistently. “You grew up there. You’d be a lesser man today if you’d lived out here instead. My stuff—our stuff’s—not going to look good in this house. We like modern furniture, right, Hank? Not the kind of horse-haired sneeze factories that go well in this dump. Doilies, wicker birdcages, chandeliers with a million crystals to keep clean. Dusty old rugs they call antiques so you can’t pitch them.”

  “The business is located out here now,” Hank said. “You’ll have to make do with a more rural setting. Join a few clubs and get into the swing of country life. Take up golf or charity work. Horseback riding, tennis, the Ladies’ Auxiliary, one of the women’s circles at the church, a book gr
oup.” He was probably already beginning to get the pinched look he’d have for the rest of his life.

  It was hard for Mother to feed her need for shiny acquisitions in a place like Doylestown, where local merchants catered to farmers and townspeople, who seldom made the one-hour trek into the city. People who rarely demanded more than canned goods and Sears’ catalog merchandise. The rich ordered by phone from New York or made the monthly trip into Philadelphia.

  “Maybe you can help out in the office if you get bored,” Daddy suggested.

  “Can you imagine me answering the phone or typing bills? I didn’t go to college to be a secretary.”

  “What did you go to college for, Eve? How do you see yourself spending your days,” Daddy asked after several months of her idleness, a year of pleading with him to move. “Register for a few courses, get your teaching certificate. Or maybe learn real estate. The guy running against Joe Clark for the Senate could use your help.”

  There was no question, Hank’s tolerance for her indolence and acquisitiveness had waned. Eve could wear anyone out. She wouldn’t find her natural lieutenant till I was born.

  Eve puffed up with indignation. “I see myself taking care of your children,” she said, cagily. “A boy and a girl.” She lowered her eyes. “I already have their names picked out.”

  “If such a thing happens, you can pick out a house wherever you like.” He patted her head, probably assuming such an event was not in the cards since his wife guarded any unprotected entrée to her baby-making parts more carefully than Coca Cola guarded access to its secret formula.

  But he was wrong. Eventually.

  Two detours interrupted Mother’s path to reproduction, neither happy events. A few days after Hank asked Eve whether she had any plans for herself, when he was still flush with anticipation, if slight skepticism, at his approaching fatherhood, Eve traveled into the city to do some spring shopping. 1962. Shopping in downtown Philadelphia was still something special. A trip “downtown,” rather than to suburban main streets or the mushrooming malls, communicated a message about the seriousness and glamour of the task.

  Mother’s trip on that particular day was a story told to me many times: by Mother, Daddy, Aunt Linda, Grandmother Hobart, and other Moran family members. Perhaps all families have a story repeated often, but probably one with a less calamitous conclusion. A saga where something noble happened, where someone does a good turn, saves a life. Ours was a different sort of story.

  Since it’s mostly Mother’s story, this is her version and the one I loved to hear her tell. She had no compunctions about spilling the more salacious parts of it and I had none about listening.

  Eve put on her new pink linen suit, a pair of black, patent-leather heels, short pink gloves, and a perky Janet Leigh kind of hat. She ordered a taxi to the railroad station and took a train to 30th Street in Philadelphia, and then another train to Market Street, the principal shopping area. The length of the trip worked against it becoming a commonplace event, which may have been Hank Moran’s primary reason for choosing Doylestown for their home.

  But Eve got herself to center Philly without much fanfare, stepping off the train full of expectation for the day ahead. There were four elegant department stores in which to shop in 1962. Not playing favorites, Eve pocketed an item from each of the stores within an hour of arriving. The “rush” she experienced from impetuous forays into quasi-criminal activity was a feeling she’d subconsciously sought since their return to Pennsylvania. Her life in Doylestown played as flat, monotonous, gray. And yet, she hadn’t planned on spending the day like this. It simply overtook her more ordinary intentions.

  Lit Brothers, the most modestly appointed and priced department store, occupied a city block and appeared to be forged from cast-iron. Its place in the Philadelphia pantheon of stores—its very reputation—rested on being the affordable alternative to the remaining triumvirate. Affordable or not, Eve waltzed in through the Market Street door and stole a bottle of perfume from the first counter she came on. The clerk, busy with a large purchase from an imposing Main Line matron at the other end of the counter, missed both Eve’s fleeting appearance and the theft. This customer seemed to inhale all the air in the room with her voluminous baggage and personage. Eve stored this observation for later use.

  “It wasn’t the scent,” Mother admitted. “I’ve smelled nicer perfume at People’s Drugstore. It was the bottle—pink crystal and shaped like a swan. I’d have it still if those security men hadn’t seized it as evidence.”

  Eve exited Lit’s and made her way to Strawbridge and Clothier’s, across the street. The fourth-floor lingerie department was a quick jaunt up the escalator. In minutes, Eve found the rose, lace-trimmed negligee she’d been dreaming about. She folded it into a square the size of a table napkin, stuffed it in her purse, and moved on. Again, no one gave her a glance. Department stores in 1962 teemed with bored, rich women, especially on a mild spring day. It was nearly lunch hour now. Businessmen often dined here after choosing a necktie to match a shirt or purchasing a gift for the wife at home. Noon was a pleasant hour. It was the after-school and weekend crowd that made store management anxious.

  Eve took a ceramic candy dish from a window display near the back of the store at Gimbels. Little more than a prop, but its pattern was perfect for her new modernistic décor: small irregular squares of bright colors, looking like it’d been designed by Paul Klee. The dish would be perfect on the coffee table with a handful of Hershey’s silver kisses inside. She’d whip her hideous house into something elegant or else. Into her purse it went.

  Wannamaker’s: a bit of a walk, but the Queen Bee of Philadelphia stores was the emporium where dreams were made, boasting the largest organ in the world, which hovered over the Grand Court. Through some mysterious mechanics, floral scents wafted over the throngs of shoppers at Easter. Models stalked the floor in spring fashions that time of year, answering customer queries in a hushed tone. Eve ducked to avoid a collision with a model in tennis togs. Lilac was big—tiny checks, taffeta, cinched waists. Women mirrored Jackie Kennedy and Audrey Hepburn. The number of blondes had decreased since the presidential election two years ago. Suddenly brunettes, willowy thin, were in vogue.

  Eve was drawn to a bracelet with chunky gambling charms: dice, a roulette wheel, a horse, a racing form. She had to have that trinket and unobtrusively slid it off the disembodied plastic arm on the counter, admiring her own skill as she dropped it into her pocket.

  On her way to the door, a clerk handed her a shopping bag. “We don’t like to see our competition’s bag so prominently displayed,” the woman joked, motioning toward the Gimbel’s bag in Eve’s hand. The Gimbel’s bag held a soft pretzel and two wrapped chocolates purchased from Gimbel’s food counters.

  After the clerk moved on, Eve stepped into the passage to the restrooms, cleared her handbag of merchandise, popped a chocolate in her mouth and headed for the door. A man in a dark suit grabbed her arm as it reached for the door. It was a firm grip. No way to wiggle out of it.

  “Come along this way, Miss,” he said in a low tone. Like Paul Winchell, the ventriloquist on TV, his lips hardly moved at all. “Don’t want to make a fuss now, do we?”

  He swiveled his head, nodding toward the crowd of shoppers threatening to engulf them. Eve reviewed her options, found none, and went along.

  In the elevator, his hand continued to grip her elbow. The uniformed operator shot her a sympathetic glance while delivering them to the top floor. She’d probably seen this a hundred times, watched other women or children or men make this wretched trip. The man in control of Eve’s arm captured shoplifters and miscreants every day: women who couldn’t keep their hands off the merchandise; men who picked pockets; scoundrels of both sexes with stolen charge plates; boys who broke things then ran; girls who sneaked into dressing rooms and came out looking like polar bears, or ones ransacking the makeup counters, dropping tubes down their blouse or into their pockets. There were the new teams of boosters
too, who made a science out of it according to the newspapers. It was an epidemic and today Eve was part of it.

  This man was an expert in methods to defraud his store and felt no pity for her; she could sense it. She was certain to have bruises and a nasty wrinkle or two in her jacket. And this would be the least of her troubles.

  No one spoke to them as they passed along narrow hallways and climbed the final flight of uncarpeted steps. He showed her inside a gloomy office minutes later, silently holding the door open. She pushed by him, trying not to brush against his obvious disdain. But she was close enough to smell onions on his breath, garlic, power.

  It was more cell than office. Dark, almost windowless, small—a battered walnut table, two chairs, cheap paneled walls. It smelled of smoke, burnt coffee, Dentyne chewing gum, sweat. It was a serious office, not the sort of room where suburban women were coddled, pitied, or forgiven. Not a place where sympathetic gestures were made, not where men in off-the-rack suits overlooked transgressions if a pretty face stared back at them. My mother couldn’t think of how to turn this around—of how to make it go away. Her brief detentions with inexperienced clerks in backrooms of tiny shops in South Carolina or Texas were no preparation for the security staff at John D. Wannamaker’s. She’d no leverage to use here, no husband wearing bars or stars on his chest on a base a mile away to allude to obliquely.

  “I think you may’ve misunderstood what happened today.” It was important to establish herself as a person of character. “My husband runs a printing business…”

  “Not a day goes by when someone doesn’t say something like that to me,” he said, motioning to a chair. “Says they were gonna pay for it all in a minute.”

  “I’m sure I have the necessary receipts somewhere in my bag.” She began to reach for her handbag, but he didn’t hand it over.

  This man, this security guard looking like military police, had seen and heard it all before. She couldn’t think of anything to offer him. Any idea about how to charm him. He seemed far too tired to trade her release for a grope or a kiss. There was some relief in this information though, in knowing she’d been out-maneuvered and could wait for her sentence without discussion. A sort of calm descended.