Bagombo Snuff Box (35 page)

“How did you know?”

“It was a guess,” he said. “We’ve been comparing notes here,
and as near as we can figure, Herb has managed to give a little piece of
remodeling business to every member of LA.”

“Coincidence,” I said.

“I’d say so, too,” said Will, “if I could find anybody who
wasn’t a member and who still got a piece of the job.”

Between us, we estimated Herb was going to put about six
thousand dollars into the ell. That was a lot of money for a man in his
circumstances to scratch up.

“The job wouldn’t have to run more than three thousand if
Herb didn’t want a kitchen and a bathroom in the thing,” said Will. “He’s
already got a kitchen and a bathroom ten feet from the door between the ell and
the house.”

Al Tedler, the carpenter, said, “According to the plans Herb
gave me this morning, there ain’t gonna be no door between the ell and the
house. There’s gonna be a double-studded wall with half-inch Sheetrock, packed
with rockwood batts.”

“How come double studding?” I asked.

“Herb wants it soundproof.”

“How’s a body supposed to get from the house to the ell?” I
said.

“The body has to go outside, cross about sixty feet of lawn,
and go in through the ell’s own front door,” said Al.

“Kind of a shivery trip on a cold winter’s night,” I said. “Not
many bodies would care to make it barefoot.”

And that was when Sheila Hinckley White walked in.

You often hear somebody say that So-and-So is a very well
preserved woman. Nine times out of ten So-and-So turns out to be a scrawny
woman with pink lipstick who looks as if she had been boiled in lanolin. But
Sheila really is well preserved. That day in the drugstore she could have
passed for twenty-two.

“By golly,” Al Tedler said, “if I had that to cook for me, I
wouldn’t be any two-kitchen man.”

Usually when Sheila came into a place where several members
of LA were sitting, we would make some kind of noise to attract her attention
and she would do something silly like wiggle her eyebrows or give us a wink. It
didn’t mean a thing.

But that day in the drugstore we didn’t try to catch her eye
and she didn’t try to catch ours. She was all business. She was carrying a big
red book about the size of a cinder block. She returned it to the lending
library in the store, paid up, and left.

“Wonder what the book’s about,” said Hay.

“It’s red,” I said. “Probably about the fire engine
industry.”

That was a joke that went a long way back—clear back to what
she’d put under her picture in the high school yearbook the year she graduated.
Everybody was supposed to predict what kind of work he or she would go into in
later life. Sheila put down that she would discover a new planet or be the
first woman justice of the Supreme Court or president of a company that
manufactured fire engines.

She was kidding, of course, but everybody—including Sheila,
I guess— had the idea that she could be anything she set her heart on being.

At her wedding to Herb, I remember, I asked her, “Well now,
what’s the fire engine industry going to do?”

And she laughed and said, “It’s going to have to limp along
without me. I’m taking on a job a thousand times as important—keeping a good
man healthy and happy, and raising his young.”

“What about the seat they’ve been saving for you on the Supreme
Court?”

“The happiest seat for me, and for any woman worthy of the
name of woman,” she said, “is a seat in a cozy kitchen, with children at my
feet.”

“You going to let somebody else discover that planet,
Sheila?”

“Planets are stones, stone-dead stones,” she said. “What I
want to discover are my husband, my children, and through them, myself. Let
somebody else learn what she can from stones.”

After Sheila left the drugstore I went to the lending
library to see what the red book was. It was written by the president of some
women’s college. The title of it was Woman, the Wasted Sex, or, The Swindle of
Housewifery.

I looked inside the book and found it was divided in these
five parts:

I. 5,000,000 B.C.-A.D. 1865, The Involuntary Slave Sex

II. 1866-1919, The Slave Sex Given Pedestals

III. 1920-1945, Sham Equality—Flapper to Rosie the Riveter

IV 1946-1963, Volunteer Slave Sex—Diaper Bucket to Sputnik

V Explosion and Utopia

Reva Owley, the woman who sells cosmetics and runs the library,
came up and asked if she could help me.

“You certainly can,” I said. “You can throw this piece of
filth down the nearest sewer.” “It’s a very popular book,” she said.

“That may be,” I said. “Whiskey and repeating firearms were
very popular with the redskins. And if this drugstore really wants to make
money, you might put in a hashish-and-heroin counter for the teenage crowd.”

“Have you read it?” she asked.

“I’ve read the table of contents,” I said.

“At least you’ve opened a book,” she said. “That’s more than
any other member of Lovers Anonymous has done in the past ten years.”

“I’ll have you know I read a great deal,” I said.

“I didn’t know that much had been written about storm windows.”
Reva is a very smart widow.

“You can sure be a snippy woman, on occasion,” I said.

“That comes from reading books about what a mess men have
made of the world,” she said. The upshot was, I read that book.

What a book it was! It took me a week and a half to get
through it, and the more I read, the more I felt as if I were wearing long
burlap underwear.

Herb White came into my showroom and caught me reading it. “Improving
your mind, I see,” he said. “If something’s improved,” I said, “I don’t know
what it is. You’ve read this, have you?”

“That pleasure and satisfaction was mine,” he said. “Where
are you now?”

“I’ve just been through the worst five million years I ever
expect to spend,” I said. ‘And some man has finally noticed that maybe things
aren’t quite as good as they could be for women.”

“Theodore Parker?” said Herb.

“Right,” I said. Parker was a preacher in Boston about the
time of the Civil War.

“Read what he says,” said Herb.

So I read out loud: “The domestic function of woman does not
exhaust her powers. To make one half the human race consume its energies in the
functions of housekeeper, wife and mother is a monstrous waste of the most
precious material God ever made.’”

Herb had closed his eyes while I read. He kept them closed. “Do
you realize how hard those words hit me, with the—with the wife I’ve got?”

“Well,” I said, “we all knew you’d been hit by something. Nobody
could figure out what it was.”

“That book was around the house for weeks,” he said. “Sheila
was reading it. I didn’t pay any attention to it at first. And then one night
we were watching Channel Two.” Channel Two is the educational television
station in Boston. “There was this discussion going on between some college professors
about the different theories of how the solar system had been born. Sheila all of
a sudden burst into tears, said her brains had turned to mush, said she didn’t
know anything about anything anymore.”

Herb opened his eyes. “There wasn’t anything I could say to
comfort her. She went off to bed. That book was on the table next to where she’d
been sitting. I picked it up and it fell open to the page you just read from.”

“Herb,” I said, “this isn’t any of my business, but—”

“It’s your business,” he said. ‘Aren’t you president of LA?”

“You don’t think there really is such a thing!” I said.

‘As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “Lovers Anonymous is as
real as the Veterans of Foreign Wars. How would you like it if there was a club
whose sole purpose was to make sure you treated your wife right?”

“Herb,” I said, “I give you my word of honor—”

He didn’t let me finish. “I realize now, ten years too late,”
he said, “that I’ve ruined that wonderful woman’s life, had her waste all her
intelligence and talent—on what?” He shrugged and spread his hands. “On keeping
house for a small-town bookkeeper who hardly even finished high school, who’s
never going to be anything he wasn’t on his wedding day.”

He hit the side of his head with the heel of his hand. I
guess he was punishing himself, or maybe trying to make his brains work better.
“Well,” he said, “I’m calling in all you anonymous lovers I can to help me put
things right—not that I can ever give her back her ten wasted years. When we
get the ell fixed up, at least I won’t be underfoot all the time, expecting her
to cook for me and sew for me and do all the other stupid things a husband
expects a housewife to do.

“I’ll have a little house all my own,” he said, “and I’ll be
my own little housewife. And anytime Sheila wants to, she can come knock on my
door and find out I still love her. She can start studying books again, and become
an oceanographer or whatever she wants. And any handyman jobs she needs done on
that big old house of hers, her handy neighbor—which is me—will be more than
glad to do.”

With a very heavy heart I went out to Herb’s house early
that afternoon to measure the windows of the ell. Herb was at his office. The
twin girls were off at school. Sheila didn’t seem to be at home, either. I
knocked on the kitchen door, and the only answer I got was from the automatic
washing machine.

“Whirr, gloop, rattle, ship,” it said.

As long as I was there, I decided to make sure the
Fleetwoods I’d already installed were working freely. That was how I happened
to look in through the living room window and see Sheila lying on the couch.
There were books on the floor around her. She was crying.

When I got around to the ell I could see that Herb had
certainly been playing house in there. He had a little kerosene range on top of
the woodpile, along with pots and pans and canned goods.

There was a Morris chair with a gasoline lantern hanging
over it, and a big chopping block next to the chair, and Herb had his pipes and
his magazines and his tobacco laid out there. His bed was on the floor, but it
was nicely made, with sheets and all. On the walls were photographs of Herb in
the Army, Herb on the high school baseball team, and a tremendous print in
color of Ouster’s Last Stand.

The door between the ell and the main house was closed, so I
felt free to climb in through a window without feeling I was intruding on
Sheila. What I wanted to see was the condition of the sash on the inside. I sat
down in the Morris chair and made some notes.

And then I leaned back and lit a cigarette. A Morris chair
is a. comfortable thing. Sheila came in without my even hearing her.

“Cozy, isn’t it?” she said. “I think every man your age
should have a hideaway. Herb’s ordered storm windows for his Shangri-la, has
he?”

“Fleetwoods,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “Heaven knows Fleetwoods are the best.”
She looked at the underside of the rotten roof. Pinpricks of sky showed
through. “I don’t suppose what’s happening to Herb and me is any secret,” she
said.

I didn’t know how to answer that.

“You might tell Lovers Anonymous and their Ladies’ Auxiliary
that Herb and I have never been this happy before,” she said.

I couldn’t think of any answer for that, either. It was my
understanding that Herb’s moving into the ell was a great tragedy of recent
times.

‘And you might tell them,” she said, “that it was Herb who
got happy first. We had a ridiculous argument about how my brains had turned to
mush. And then I went upstairs and waited for him to come to bed—and he didn’t.
The next morning I found he’d dragged a mattress out here and was sleeping like
an angel.

“I looked down on him, so happy out here, and I wept. I realized
that he’d been a slave all his life, doing things he hated in order to support
his mother, and then me, and then me and the girls. His first night out here
was probably the first night in his life that he went to sleep wondering who he
might be, what he might have become, what he still might be.”

“I guess the reason the world seems so upside down so often,”
I said, “is that everybody figures he’s doing things on account of somebody
else. Herb figures this whole ell business is a favor to you.”

“Anything that makes him happier is a favor to me,” she
said.

“I read that crazy red book—or I’m reading it,” I said.

“Housewifery z’s a swindle, if a woman can do more,” she
said.

“You going to do more, Sheila?”

“Yes,” she said. She had laid out a plan whereby she would
get her degree in two years, with a combination of correspondence courses,
extension courses, and a couple of summer sessions at Durham, where the state
university is. After that she was going to teach.

“I never would have made a plan like that,” she told me, “if
Herb hadn’t called my bluff to the extent he did. Women are awful bluffers
sometimes.

“I’ve started studying,” she went on. “I know you looked
through the window and saw me with all my books, crying on the couch.”

“I didn’t think you’d seen me,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to
mind somebody else’s business. Kennard Pelk and I both have to look through
windows from time to time in the line of duty.”

“I was crying because I was understanding what a bluffer I’d
been in school,” she said. “I was only pretending to care about the things I
was learning, back in those silly old days. Now I do care. That’s why I was crying.
I’ve been crying a lot lately, but it’s good crying. It’s about discovery, it’s
about grown-up joy.”

I had to admit it was an interesting adjustment Sheila and
Herb were making. One thing bothered me, though, and there wasn’t any polite
way I could ask about it. I wondered if they were going to quit sleeping with
each other forever.

Sheila answered the question without my having to ask it.

“Love laughs at locksmiths,” she said.