Concrete Angel

by Patricia Abbott

  He gestured again to a wooden chair, and once she was seated, he proceeded to remove the items from her bag, one by one, shaking his head at the variety of store tags, and saying, with a hint of a chuckle, “Don’t play favorites, do you? Was it on a dare?” He tossed her hard-won booty on the table. “Half of this is junk, Lady. A dish probably selling for $2.99? Crissake, it has dust in it!” He held up his finger and she blushed. “And this. This,” he said, picking up the bracelet from downstairs, “this is something a twelve-year old girl buys. Not a woman like you.” He fingered the dice. “Kind of a sign, isn’t it? You like taking chances, right? Have to have your souvenirs, don’t you? Even though they’re worthless ones.”

  He asked to see her driver’s license, wrote a sentence or two on his pad, gathered the stolen goods, and headed for the door. “Part of the kick, huh? Seeing if you can get away with it? Guess what? You can’t.” He shut the door behind him.

  She hadn’t uttered another word about her innocence, not a sentence more of denial. No protests or grimaces at her rough handling. And his suggestion that seeing if she could get away with it was part of the kick, was ridiculous. She knew she’d get away with it. Dime-store psychologists were running loose. She sat for a long time wondering if they’d called the police yet. What the fine or punishment might be? Could she cover it herself? How would Hank react if she couldn’t? Would she have to tell him? She could already picture his red face, purple when she crossed swords with him. Maybe there’d be some way to avoid his involvement. How much money did she have with her? She hadn’t planned on needing more than enough for a quick sandwich at a counter. Money spent on food was wasted money. She reached for her purse.

  Something similar to this—an incident where things had spun out of control—had happened to her once before when she was fifteen. She’d taken a lipstick from Woolworth’s makeup counter. Well okay, a couple of tubes of lipstick and some eye shadow on the theory “in for a penny in for a pound.”

  The clerk caught her, grabbing her wrist as she reached for the third tube, making her sit on a stool while she called Herbert Hobart after going through her pocketbook to find his name. The clerk had dumped all the contents on the counter, attracting the attention of a number of shoppers as they rattled on the glass. Her cheap, worn-out possessions were ridiculous on display—a comb needing cleaning, used tissues, bus tokens, a torn makeup case. Shabby. The whole incident might’ve been forgotten if her purse’s interior hadn’t branded her as that.

  Her father came after her. Grim-faced, stoop-shouldered, scuffed-shoed Herbert Hobart, hat in hand. Leaving his cubicle at the Philadelphia Naval Yard, paying the dime store clerk with nickels and dimes and quarters for her theft as if he didn’t have a real bill in his pocket, as if the Hobarts were the poorest mice in the city. The clerk scooped Eve’s things from the counter, making a face, returning them to her pocketbook, her pocketbook to her.

  Her father didn’t speak once on the bus ride home, hadn’t said a word about it since. She didn’t know if he’d told her mother. She’d brought shame on him once again. He didn’t ask her why she’d done it. Didn’t remind her of the eighth commandment.

  Somehow there was nothing but a long line of dour-faced men in her life: fathers, husbands, school principals, security guards, cops. Each of them avoiding her eyes, disappointed with her in the end. The episode back in high school hadn’t changed her behavior, but it’d made her more careful. No one who counted had caught her—until today.

  And no one caught her with a pocketbook full of dross again. She became careful about many things—and one of them was the contents of that bag, which became clear that day was a reflection of herself. Never again would someone empty her purse on a counter and find used tissues, dirty combs, Tampax, worn lipsticks and other makeup, half-eaten boxes of Good & Plenty, stuff she’d taken from other girls’ lockers in school, snapshots of movie stars from Hollywood studios autographed by a machine.

  “Those little shops near the army base—the stores I was used to—none of them hired security guards, Christine.”

  The women in such stores, many the wives of GIs making a little pin money, were glad to let it go knowing she’d come back and spend double what she stole. But a store like Wanamaker’s…

  There was less than fifteen dollars in her purse. She counted it twice to be sure, checked the little pockets, unrolled the white hanky, dug around in her suit jacket pockets. Too little money to pay a fine or bribe the guard if it came to that.

  Looking at the spare change made Mother feel like the old Eve Hobart again, paying bills with nickels and dimes, walking across a college campus with no money in her pocket when everyone else had plenty, when the other girls had a new dress for the dance, money to go into Boston to see a play, money for a dinner in town.

  She hadn’t expected to need much cash today, had no expectations for the day at all. She’d come here in a fog. In fact, she seldom set out to do what she’d done. Some part of her brain must make the plan, lay out the geography of it, and only let her in on it incrementally.

  Could she tell this to whoever came into this room? Say she hadn’t known any of this would happen—that she didn’t mean to take those things, hadn’t exactly considered her heart’s desire till it was tucked inside her purse. Would they care she’d set out from Doylestown this morning in her pretty pink suit with nothing but a jaunt into the city in mind. Then suddenly—and it always came over her like this—she had to have one or two of the beautiful things she saw, things she’d always wanted—for practically her whole life. It was as if she was in a dream—maybe she was. She did these things like she was sleepwalking. There must be a name for it.

  It would be a long time before she heard it though.

  She rose, stretched, and glanced out the tiny window, down at the people on the street floors below, people free to walk around, to have lunch, to make a purchase. Only an hour ago, it’d been she who was free and walking these streets without a care. She paced the cell-like room, thinking about the injustice of it. Occasionally a secretary or a uniformed guard opened the door, never saying a word, probably checking on whether she’d disappeared. Making sure she hadn’t magically stuffed herself in some bag or box or drawer and found her way out of the office, out of the store, much like the stuff she’d tried to take. But there was no escape, only long, sinewy hallways lined with the offices of people who’d spot her should she try to run: her captors.

  She couldn’t make herself disappear or she’d have done it long ago. Certainly done it back at Woolworth’s. Or on that bus ride home with her father. The Hobart family always used public transportation for travel to work and school, and her theft was not deemed reason enough to change this. Cars were for church and shopping trips, where carrying so many packages was out of the question, where the trip was too long. Not for prosaic destinations like the dime store. She still remembered the tired faces of the people getting on and off the bus as her father’s nose pressed hard against the window, his breath fogging it up, his faint reflection in the dirty glass a rebuke.

  She’d waited years for him to bring the day up, to ask why she took those ridiculous things, to slap her, punish her, or banish her. Instead the incident festered between them, one more thing to hold against her.

  Hank suddenly stood in the doorway on Wanamaker’s top floor, looking more tired than angry. His face was ashen.

  “Come on,” he said, offering his hand. “Let’s get it over with.”

  Although the gesture implied some feeling for her— some pity—his voice was cold. Holding her hand firmly, he led her out of the room. No one stood in their way in the hallway; no one peeked from drawn blinds or through open doors. Mother was in a fog still, absolutely terrified at ending her days at Eastern State Penitentiary. Horrified at the thought of being in a room the size of the one she’d left, or a smaller one, for years perhaps. Would this be her fate? Get what over with? What had Hank meant by that phrase?

  Her husband led h
er to a larger, brighter office in the famous Wanamaker’s Department Store, the mother ship of emporiums in Philadelphia. It was too bad she hadn’t been caught at Lit’s, she thought, as she followed him. Lit Brothers, or even Strawbridges, or Gimbels didn’t have such an exalted notion of itself. She’d have been able to bluff her way out—their security wouldn’t have made so much of it.

  The room Hank led her to was carpeted with a richly-colored, thick rug. A slight odor of stale cigars—but better ones— also hung in the air. Maybe the odor of a fine whiskey and perfume perhaps? She wasn’t going to be put in the Eastern State Penitentiary, she realized. Hank had seen to it. People charged with a crime didn’t get ushered into offices like this one. Somewhere along the way, her fortune had changed. Someone realized her circumstances. Hank had probably given them a deal on their printing needs for the next fifty years. Men like him didn’t have wives incarcerated in the Eastern State Penitentiary. It was unthinkable—unallowable no matter what the cost.

  The store manager came in, Bill Something, a fellow St. Joseph’s graduate though ten years earlier. Hank abandoned his silence for loquaciousness. A rush of glad-handing followed; jocular remembrances of St. Joe’s; memories about which priests were still teaching in Hank’s day; talk of cafeteria food; of theatricals with all-male casts; the punishments dispensed by the principal; a few common friends. This took five minutes, during which my mother said she stood like a convicted felon awaiting sentence.

  “Those were the worst minutes in my life,” she said.

  The two men eventually ran out of high school remembrances, agreeing Eve would get professional help.

  “I’ve something in mind already,” Hank told the store manager. “A place for Eve. I’ve heard good things about this facility. Talked to the administrator today—right after your call.” (Mother didn’t get upset at these words, assuming it was a lie meant to extricate her.)

  “It’s a sickness,” the store manager said, nodding his approval at Daddy’s solution. “We see it all the time here—as you can imagine.” He looked obliquely at Mrs. Hank Moran and shook his head. “Can’t help herself, you know. And she’ll keep doing it until she gets some counseling. Or goes to jail.”

  My mother, with great effort, controlled the urge to whack him with her purse. Did he think she was deaf or mentally deficient? Speaking to Hank like she wasn’t in the room. And Hank had done it, too, not once glancing at her. Ashamed of her like her father was all those years ago but better at hiding it. Some boys’ school behavior he’d learned at his costly Catholic high school, where girls were seen only as suitable for childbearing or dance partners.

  The men talked over her head—literally. Why had no one spoken to her for the entire two hours she’d sat in that dark office? Why had her husband been brought here? Why must he speak for her, take care of her? If it’d made sense when she was fifteen, it didn’t now. There was a woman in the Senate, for god’s sake. It was the 1960s. Her gynecologist was a woman, the vet who tended the Morans’ horses too.

  “Won’t do you a bit of good to smack her around either,” the security manager added, snapping her out of her stupor. “It’s a compulsion she’s got.” A bead of sweat suddenly mustached his lip. “A disorder or something.” Hadn’t he said this minutes before? “You’ll have to ask the men in white coats what to call it. I see it all the time. Itchy fingers.”

  The store manager’s desire to both align himself with Hank and demonstrate his power over them was making him babble. The heat in the office rose. Hank must have seen the dangerous look in Eve’s eyes because he began edging her toward the door.

  “Well, thanks for giving—us—another chance,” he told Bill Something. “There won’t be another incident, I can assure you. She’ll stay away from Wanamaker’s in the future. Right, Eve?”

  He didn’t look at her. No one was looking at her. She nodded anyway.

  “Forget about it,” the man said, released from the need to dominate the room. “I know you’ll take care of the little lady. Make sure she gets the kind of help she needs.” He looked at my mother directly for the first time. “Our upbringing, you know. The Church. Made us responsible men. We take care of our women.”

  Eve didn’t hear his last name—this responsible man with good upbringing from fine schools, who now was a department store cop. He was still talking.

  “I’ve expunged the record, Hank. You can forget about it.”

  She felt something coming off this Bill. Some sort of stench at the thought of hitting her, hurting her, having her sexually probably. His eyes seemed unfocused in some insidious way. His hands clenched and unclenched at the sudden flood of power moving through them. If he hadn’t discovered Hank Moran was her husband, would he have come alone to that other dank office and done something foul to her?

  She’d stay away from downtown Wanamaker’s. Frequent one of their smaller, more anonymous stores.

  “To say I’d never cross their foyer again was too great of a promise,” Mother told me. “But not any time soon.”

  Not with the chance of this guy bringing her to his office without Hank’s protective arm—an arm she needed but resented. She wondered if he’d inform the other stores of her activity and decided no. He’d have to admit he let her go, that he was bought off.

  Like her father, ten years earlier, her husband didn’t speak on the ride home. It was a Buick LeSabre rather than a bus, but that was the only difference. The silence was the same: scorching and horrible. There were always grim-faced men in charge of her, she thought again. Men who guided her around by the elbow, steering her like an unwieldy ship into port. Men whose faces would crack if they tried to smile. Men who were ashamed of what she’d done—at their association with her.

  When they pulled up to the Moran family home, Hank turned to her and said, “I thought your thieving would stop once we left those army bases. Once we had enough money.”

  She was shocked. So he’d known of her thefts. Probably paid people off, did things like he’d done today to keep her out of jail. And she’d believed those women—those shopkeepers—had let it go. She believed she had conned them.

  Daddy deposited her in her old room at the Morans’ house, where she could be more easily watched, and went downstairs to do battle with his family. She listened at the heating grate—like she always did.

  If I had written Daddy’s version of the day, it’d be about shame, about meeting with a lummox he hadn’t known at all but been forced to bargain with. To play the beta male to an idiot’s alpha. Being humiliated again for his wife’s petty thefts, having a stranger assume he was surprised at his wife’s need to steal baubles he could easily pay for.

  The Terraces was a progressive sanitarium, created to satisfy the needs of the area’s wealthy. Less fortunate people in southeastern Pennsylvania needing a “rest” went to Norristown State Hospital. The Moran family voted to send Mother to Norristown, claiming The Terraces was more a gift than a punishment. But Daddy overruled them, coughing up the dough without their help for the campus-like feel of The Terraces: for the large, well-appointed single rooms, for the naturalized swimming pool, the game room, for the horses, three-hole golf course, and tennis courts. And, of course, it was chockfull of psychiatrists with progressive ideas.

  Hank had visited an aunt at Norristown State Hospital years ago and still remembered the pleas for deliverance coming from each door he passed. It’d been like a prison. It was a prison.

  “It’s not about gifts or punishments. We want Eve to get well,” he told the gathered Moran clan. “Which place has the better doctors?”

  “Isn’t prison what your wife deserves? Isn’t prison where she’d be if you hadn’t paid the fool off? It’s not like she’s weepy or talks to herself,” his mother said. “She’s hardly likely to throw herself out a window. She’s a troublemaker and a thief.”

  Hank stuck by Mother, despite the Morans’ machinations, although he didn’t tell his parents what she’d actually done—the en
tire scope of it at least.

  “Can you blame me?” he asked me when I was old enough to understand.

  He made it sound like she’d forgotten to pay for the bracelet, leaving out the other thefts entirely. The full story about Eve’s frontal assault on Philadelphia’s big four department stores would’ve become family legend (as it eventually did) had he spilled the entire sordid story, and Daddy wasn’t going to be the starting point for what would soon drift beyond the family circle and into Bucks County lore. It could easily turn up on the back page of the town paper—the rag listing local break-ins and car thefts.

  Hank loved Eve and still believed they could work things out. But he also wanted to impress his parents with his decisiveness, with his ability to handle a situation—especially his wife. It was important to act quickly to deal with Eve’s addiction, obsession, or whatever it was, to show he was on top of things, ready for the task of running the family business.

  “An observation period,” the doctors at The Terraces told him, “Forty-five days. Truthfully, Mr. Moran, a stunt like this is a cry for help.”

  The doctors at The Terraces expressed confidence in a quick and complete cure.

  The two doctors he spoke with acted self-assured in their starched white coats, the sort of men Daddy was used to dealing with in both the military and in business. He was immediately convinced by both their demeanor and words.

  “You think she might be well enough to return home after the forty-five days?”

  The doctors nodded without hesitation.

  “I’ll have her here tomorrow.”

  He hurried back to Doylestown, packed her bags, and escorted her to the car. The family doctor had given Mother a prescription for Valium to ease the move. At twice the usual dose, it produced an immediate torpor.