He’d slicked his hair with hair oil in honor of a company dinner. Irini held the plate for him and looked right down the glistening strands to the freckled scalp beneath.
Ada glanced at Miss Schaap, then took a single, compromised slice of lamb for herself. “Irini, go and tell Claire our guest doesn’t eat meat. See what she can do.”
“I don’t want to be any trouble. I can have the potatoes. I’ll just pick the ham out.”
Irini brought the potatoes. “Don’t they look delicious?” Miss Schaap said politely. They made a small pile on her otherwise empty plate. She separated the chunks of ham into a second pile, picking through the potatoes with her fork.
“Irini, go tell Claire,” said Ada.
"Please don’t. I don’t want anything special. I love potatoes."
“Starch is for shirts,” Henry observed. He turned to Ada. “This sauce is nothing like Mother’s. Hers had just the merest hint of thyme.”
“It tastes fine to me. Just slightly thymy. It’s delicious.” Ada took a big, showy, irritated bite. “Your taste buds have atrophied. That happens when a person hits your age. There’s thyme in there. Maybe your mother left something else out of the recipe. A certain kind of woman does that on purpose.” She turned to Miss Schaap and her tone brightened accordingly. “I thought it was just cows they didn’t eat in India.”
“I thought they ate whatever they could get,” said Henry jovially. “Irini, fetch me the carrots.”
“There are holy men in India who sweep the sidewalk ahead of them with every step so they don’t accidentally crush a bug. I’ve seen them.”
“Do tell,” said Ada. “Irini. Go and speak to Claire.”
“Nothing more for me, please. I’m getting rather full. They were the best potatoes. Anyway I never eat much. Mr. Gandhi fasts to achieve clarity of thought.”
“There must be a lot of clear thinkers in India,” said Henry. “Though in all seriousness, I must tell you none of my experiments would support Mr. Gandhi’s hypothesis. I am interested in vegetarianism, though. Apes are vegetarians. And, since we’re merely their descendants, it’s likely our nutritional needs are similar. It wouldn’t hurt us at all to eat less meat and more cereal. I once wrote a pamphlet entitled, Feeding the Ape Within You. Now this”—he indicated the salad—“this is cow food. We’re not so closely related to the cow.”
“I’ve been reading about satyagraha,” said Ada.
“Have you?” Miss Schaap’s voice expressed pleasure and definite surprise. She put down her fork and smiled. Her teeth were little and pointed. “Have you really? What have you read?”
“Well, Mr. Schweitzer, of course. And some of the campaigns.”
“Bombay?”
“The thirties. Satyagraha and taxation.”
“Please pass the salt,” said Henry.
“You must eat something else,” said Ada. “You must let me ask the cook.”
“Really, I’m fine. If you made something extra I wouldn’t eat it.” The two women looked at each other. “I’m saving room for dessert,” Miss Schaap insisted.
5
Irini’s father was supposed to pick her up around ten. Claire had already left, sometime between the salad and the dessert, having thoughtfully piled the pots into the sink to soak. It was a good thing Claire was not there to see the plates come back. She would have taken it badly, all that time spent over the stove, all that food left on the plates. She would have seen no excuse for not eating. Claire wasn’t interested in politics. “I can’t see that they have much to do with people,” she had once told Mrs. Ada.
“Wouldn’t you give just anything to live in a nicer world?” Mrs. Ada had asked back; this conversation had taken place during the war, before they knew about the concentration camps and the bomb, back when Irini had still hoped the world was a pretty nice place.
Ada already knew better. Ada was a political animal, as she was the first to admit. Maybe the only one they had in Magrit.
Irini scraped the leftovers off the lamb platter, uncovering a painted pattern of California poppies. She could give the leftovers to the dogs, unless Henry was still monitoring their food. If he made her weigh and log each helping, then she would forget the whole thing. The dogs could just have their Sweetwheats.
A line of ants led to the uncut pie. Irini fetched the sponge. Some of them had made it up onto the crust. Irini brushed the piecrust off with her hand. “We’re the Seabees of the navy,” she sang, the way an ant would sing it, like John Wayne on helium. “We can build or we can fight.”
She swept down the line with the sponge, but when she turned it over and she saw all those bodies, she felt guilty. And then the song had made them rather heroic. She shook them into the scrapings as compensation and filled the dishpan with soap and water. She didn’t mind doing dishes much. She thought of it as an activity faintly related to the bubble bath, which was, after all, the height of luxury. The water was just as warm and the smell of dish soap was as nice. Glasses first, of course. Pots and pans last.
Irini liked the sound the glasses made when they touched one another under water. She didn’t worry about her hands, although clearly she ought to have, you only had to read the ads in any magazine. Maggie recommended olive oil as a cheap way to deal with dish damage, but it made your hands so slippery you couldn’t turn doorknobs or fasten buttons for at least a half an hour. It’s surprisingly hard to find a half an hour when you don’t need to do one of those things.
By the time Irini got to the pots, and no amount of soap and water could make this part of the process pleasurable, it was ten after ten. Miss Schaap had left. Ada and Henry had gone upstairs. Fifteen minutes later, the dishes were back on the shelves, the counter was clean, the trash was trashed, the food was wrapped and stowed in the refrigerator. Irini had run the carpet sweeper over the dining-room rug and rubbed the tabletop with a special dust cloth treated with wax. She couldn’t think of anything else to be done.
She left the kitchen and went to sit on the top step of the stairs. She couldn’t actually see the road from there, even on a clear night, but the headlights from any passing car would reflect into the high mirror over the fireplace in the dining room, and she would see that. The clock over the fireplace chimed once for the half hour.
In a story we can make a half an hour go very quickly. Irini waited a long time. At about eleven, Ada reappeared. Ada was wearing a long satin nightgown, a chenille robe, and bed socks. The sheen of cold cream was on her face. She sat down next to Irini, smelling of powder and soap. It was chilly, but Irini wasn’t the sort of girl you put your arm around easily, and Ada wasn’t the sort of woman who would do this, even if Irini were.
Irini admired Ada, because she had held up so well compared to Henry, but in fact she was more than twenty years younger. Irini knew this, but didn’t entirely comprehend it; they were both so old.
Ada had spent her married life in a sort of public isolation. She was too young to socialize gracefully with her husband’s contemporaries. When people her own age came to the house, they generally came to visit Emily, Henry’s daughter, or Oscar, Henry’s son. Although Ada had once been a friend of Emily’s, there was no way to include the stepmother. It was too awkward all around.
The town didn’t know what to make of her. She was deaf to appeals from the church and the school, who felt that, as the mill owner’s wife, she had an example to set, a standard to maintain. At the wedding she had been so shy she hardly spoke, and in her sixties she was still a quiet woman, but this was probably not so much a function of shyness as it was of lack of practice. She was an avid reader, which is almost the same thing as having friends.
She’d enjoyed the war, although of course no one could admit to this. There’d been so many things to feel deeply about and be part of. She’d papered one wall of her studio with maps, positioned colored overlays to represent troop movements. Black for the Axis, blue for the Allies, red for Russia. Battles were shown by overlap. A lot of this inform
ation was classified, so she was only guessing.
Embarrassed by the bad faith of the Second Front negotiations, Ada had briefly converted to communism. Within Magrit she had constituted a cell of one. Too many people remembered or had been told how Leon Czolgosz, who used to live right over in Seney, went down to Cleveland in 1901 to hear Emma Goldman speak and then straight on to Buffalo, where he shot President McKinley dead.
Still, Ada’s communism surprised and upset no one. Ada was an artist, and Magrit was sophisticated enough to know that there is little distance between art and Marxism. Ada’s specialty was painting flowers on china.
On her latest serving set, the flowers were falling from their stems, burned into ashes. She’d been in a kind of depression ever since the bomb. Henry simply couldn’t understand it. He tried to cheer her up with tidbits of scientific prediction. The National Education Association was telling high school students that atomic energy would save them from cancer and heart disease as well as infectious diseases. “Most of the current generation can expect to live to be a hundred,” Henry read to Ada. This was good news!
But the bomb had turned Ada implacably against science and scientists. She was confusing the message with the messenger. She was misunderstanding the political neutrality of technology. She was starting to speak to Henry with less affection and more impatience. There was a tiny little fault line running through the marriage.
Ada had become an advocate of the World Government Movement. But this was large, abstract, and unlikely. She couldn’t put her heart into it.
“You don’t have to wait with me,” Irini said. “I’m sure it’ll only be a few minutes.”
“I don’t mind,” said Ada. She rubbed the cold cream deeper into her cheeks. “I don’t think I could sleep anyway. Miss Schaap has really set me thinking.”
“What would you think about getting an ape?” Henry asked. This was just the sort of thing Mr. Henry would ask. Exuberance, my mother called it. Joyousness. Money and a lively brain.
If it wasn’t heedlessness. Henry stepped out of the shadows of the landing, found a place to sit, one stair down. He was very elegant, in striped pajamas with navy piping. His ears were red from his bedtime ablutions and bloomed on either side of his head. “Not to keep, you understand. I’ve been thinking of borrowing an ape so that I can run some studies on it.”
“I have a kitchen full of ants,” said Ada. “What if they were apes?”
“Just one ape,” said Henry. “Of course, only one.”
“Ants I don’t want, but ants I don’t want to hurt,” said Ada. Ada recognized a bargaining chip when she saw one. “It puts me in a difficult position. I’m sure you can see that.”
“A female ape,” said Henry. “A docile ape with a pleasing personality. You would like her.”
During Ada’s communist period she had tried to get the girls at the mill unionized. Henry had been genuinely astonished. “I never exploited anyone in my life,” he’d said. He’d had some justification for the statement. He took a paternal interest in the workers at the mill, was a soft touch for hardship loans and helpful without being asked in cases of unexpected medical costs. He built his enormous house far away from the falls and the mill, but he hosted a Christmas party for the mill workers in it every year, complete with generous Christmas bonuses and free of alcoholic beverages. The Collins children and grandchildren attended the public school along with everyone else, at least until they turned twelve, and then they were sent back East to be finished.
The issue had lost its political urgency but remained in Ada’s mind as an irritating defeat. Or perhaps she wanted to do something for Irini, sitting on the steps with her arms around her knees, and her head on her arms, staring into the shadow made by her own legs so that no one could see her face. The fireplace clock chimed the half hour.
“I just can’t see my way clear to an ape,” Ada said. “The girls at the mill should be unionized.”
Thus opening negotiations. Mr. Henry caught on immediately. “I can’t see my way to a union,” he said. “I’m not antiunion, as you well know, but I honestly can’t see the need for our girls. They would benefit more from some activity that gave them fresh air and exercise.”
“They could picket,” said Ada.
“Or they could play baseball,” said Henry. “I could provide equipment. They could use the school field.”
Irini lifted her head.
“I could see a benefit to baseball.”
There was a long pause, while they all thought about this. The longer the pause went on, the more benefits Henry could see.
The first was exercise. This was obvious. This didn’t even need to be said.
The second was publicity. Henry Collins had always taken an active role in marketing decisions. He had been quick to see the possibilities of radio time, and wrote the Sweetwheats’ jingle himself, with input from the Kitchen staff:
Every mother’s day starts
With Sweetwheats for her sweethearts.
Mother really shows she’s smart
With Sweetwheats for her sweethearts.
But in the forties there was no doubt that the breakfast battle of the airwaves was being easily won by the Breakfast of Champions. A team of attractive girls eating Sweetwheats daily and exhibiting an innocent, healthy glow might be just the ticket.
Third, if there was a team, then the team could travel. This would give Margaret Mill girls a chance to meet prospective husbands. Marriage was less and less likely for girls in Magrit and they were all painfully aware of it. Magrit was suffering from a drastically reduced male population.
Only Jimmy Tarken and Mr. Floyd were actually lost and only Jimmy in the actual fighting. Geb Floyd died in a war-related incident, on VE Day while trying to set off a celebratory fireworks display. Geb had survived the First World War, but had developed a taste for gunpowder. He had mourned Pearl Harbor with the whirlybirds. He had solemnized the Normandy Invasion by sending up seven rockets containing seven hooded rats, all male, in parachute harnesses.
All seven floated back down, and were caught again, easy as could be, because of the parachutes. Then it was back to the daily grind of exercise wheels and mazes and nutritional studies. Eventually they came to look back on their wartime experiences with nostalgia. "Those were the days," they told their children. “Weren’t those the days.”
No one knew what Geb had planned for VE Day, but Geb had already entitled it “The Triumph of Law and Reason over the Forces of War and Chaos,” so it was obviously going to be big. Just before noon, Irini’s collie, Tweed, was suddenly strangely agitated, whining and following Irini about and trying to keep her from going outside. Then there was a lot of smoke and noise as if the Floyd place had taken a direct hit. The white noontime sky sparkled for five solid minutes with golden petals and silver flakes. Irini watched from her backyard. She was embarrassed later to remember how much she had enjoyed the display, troubled enough to confess it to her father.
“I’m sure Geb would have wanted that,” he told her. “You just think of that enjoyment as your final tribute to a great master.”
The sonic blast took out the back window of the Baldish’s truck and destroyed every bottle in the Törngren’s medicine cabinet. No body was ever found. It was a miracle that the kitchen, and Mrs. Floyd in it, were spared.
Today there is a monument to Jimmy out in front of the copy shop, one solemn stone with his name on it and the words: MAGRIT REMEMBERS, but the plain fact is that Magrit remembers Geb Floyd better. There is always the Fourth of July to remind them of both.
The rest of the Magrit men married Filipino or Italian girls, or went to college on the G.I. Bill and were never going to be mill workers or marry mill workers again. Even those too old or unfit to be drafted had gone to work in the Willow Run bomber factory or the Rouge Plant in Dearborn. The salaries were big there; they stayed on. Magrit had those tearful, joyful, awkward homecomings, just like the ones they saw in The Best Years of Our Lives, bu
t the boys flew into their mother’s arms and right back out again. The demographics in postwar Magrit resembled those in postwar Russia.
For those members of the baseball team who did not find husbands, travel was broadening and provided one with memories and photo albums. Memories and photo albums were good for everyone, but they were imperative for old and unmarried women.
Fourth and finally, Walter Collins, the male heir, could be enticed home to manage the team. Milling was not romantic enough to tempt the Collins children. They had been happy to take the money Margaret Mill provided and use it to live in London or purchase government positions or learn to fly airplanes. Tom Baldish was helping manage the mill now, but Henry refused to die until it was safely back in the family. And yet he had not produced a grandchild to whom the wheat laurel could be passed.
Among the grandchildren, Walter was his favorite. Walter’s dad was Henry’s youngest son, Oscar, a fitful entrepreneur who appeared on Henry’s doorstep from time to time requesting seed money. A fortune could be made by the man who had a product everyone wanted, he told Henry once. He had figured this out all by himself. And this was the beautiful part—you didn’t even have to invent this product. All you had to do was market it. The difficulty came in knowing what this product was. Oscar was looking for it everywhere, except at Margaret Mill. His last fantasy had been computer sales. Henry had to show him right there in black and white how the president of IBM had said there was an international market for maybe five computers, tops.
But Walter was the dividend that made it all worthwhile. Walter was a second lieutenant in the Army Air Force, specially trained at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California as a wave forecaster. He had just been ordered to Japan to forecast a landing there when the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings made the landing unnecessary. Because he had not gone overseas, his discharge was delayed a year. Perhaps he was disappointed not to see Japan. Perhaps he thought a wave forecaster could have little future in Magrit. Whatever the reason, he had not come home.
The Sweetheart Season Page 5