Sea Glass (20 page)

  Honora

Honora lets the letter fall onto the kitchen table and thinks of Harold. Harold, who stood in as best he could for her father in life as well as in the church. Harold, who has not felt like a man since Halifax. Harold, who has character, who can be trusted.

She puts her handkerchief back into her sleeve. She thinks for a moment about making the pie. She has already prepared the rhubarb; she has only to fix the strawberries and roll out the dough. She stands and removes the covered dish of rhubarb from the icebox, the fruit looking like a slimy sea creature in the shallow white bowl. But she is just too hungry and too tired to make a pie. She finds the box of Saltines in the cupboard, spreads some rhubarb between two crackers, and eats it. She chews experimentally and then with more enthusiasm. The stewed-fruit sandwich is delicious. She stands at the window, looking out at the pink beach roses, which have just come into bloom, and she has an idea. A very good idea, she thinks.

She finds the butter yellow wedding suit in a shallow closet in an empty room upstairs. She has the paper bag the dry goods came in from Jack Hess’s store. In her bedroom, she cuts the bag to make wrapping paper, puts the suit inside, and writes a note.

 

She ties the package with string and sets it on her night table.

There,
she thinks.
That’s done.

She turns and looks into the mirror. Her face is narrower, more hollow cheeked than it normally is, and her skin is still winter white despite several long walks along the beach. And there is something else, something that wasn’t there a year ago — a tension in the muscles, a niggling unease.

She will not meet her husband’s trolley tonight; indeed, she has probably already missed it. That might alarm him some, at least make him wonder. She doesn’t have a dinner planned either. Let him eat boiled rhubarb and Saltines like she just did.

She walks to the window, the one that overlooks the ocean. The sea is flat tonight, a blue suffused with pink. She watches a fisherman on a lobster boat drawing in his pots. Usually, she sees the lobstermen when she wakes at daybreak. She likes the way they are always intent upon their methodical work, and she wonders if they hate lobsters as much as she does.

Oh, it is just too bad, she decides, moving to the bed and sitting at its edge. She loves this house, she loves it, and now they will lose it, and who knows what the future will bring? What if the strike drags on for months and all the mills close as a result? She has heard of strikes that have exhausted, decimated, whole communities. She supposes she and Sexton could always go to Taft and live with her mother, find work there. No disgrace in that. Not really.

She hears a deep rumble and grind, as if from a truck changing gears, then a short screech of tires. Honora heads toward the hallway. She hears the slam of a metal door, voices through an open window. She realizes that there are men in her house, downstairs.

“Honora,” Sexton calls up to her, his voice more buoyant than she has heard in months. “Honora.”

Three syllables. A lilt.

She walks to the railing at the top of the stairs. She has an impression of dark coats and caps, a restless moving about in a confined space. She sees Sexton peering up at her, and for a moment, he seems not to remember what it is he wants to say. She thinks his face will lapse into its former shape, the shape that has greeted her since Christmas, and that she will see, as always, the evasive glance, the set jaw. But he holds her eyes, balancing on a tightrope somewhere between
fresh start
and perhaps despair.

“There are people here,” he says.

She descends the stairs, holding on to the railing. A figure steps out from behind Sexton. The word
you
is on her lips, and perhaps it is on his as well. It seems another life in which she met this man, gave him a ride into the city. Near the bottom of the steps, she notices the boy, who is looking at her with his mouth open.

“Honora, these are men from the mill. This is . . .” Sexton appears to have forgotten the man’s name already.

“McDermott,” the man says, stepping forward. “Quillen McDermott.”

“Hello,” Honora says, and looks to see if the boy will remind them that they have already met.

“And this here is Alphonse,” Sexton is saying. “And, well, everybody, this is my wife, Honora.”

Honora nods in the direction of the others, who have removed their caps and are looking down at the floor.

“They’re from an organizing committee,” Sexton says quickly. “There’s going to be a strike, and these men need to get out leaflets, and they’re interested in seeing the typewriter and the Copiograph machine.”

Typewriter?
she thinks.
Copiograph machine?

“In the attic,” he says, glancing away.

She finishes her descent so that she is in the hallway with the others.

“I’m going to take them up to the attic,” Sexton says. “To see the machines.” He seems like a boy with a treasure in his bedroom that he wants his new friends to admire. Shyly, a man steps forward with a box of chocolate cupcakes in his hands. “These are for you, ma’am,” he says.

And, oh God, what will she feed these men? she thinks, for surely they have not yet had their dinners.

Sexton reaches across the space between them and kisses her on the side of her mouth. “Happy anniversary,” he says.

McDermott stands to one side, holding his cap behind his back. The boy scuffles his feet against the wooden floor. And then, through the open door that nobody thought to close, the figure of a woman, impossibly sleek and shiny, emerges into the crowd of gray and brown men.

“Yoo-hoo,” Vivian calls brightly. “Anybody home?”

  McDermott

He sits in a wooden chair in the kitchen and smokes a cigarette. Over by the sink, the woman is peeling potatoes. She peels slowly and methodically with a small paring knife, leaving as little potato on the peel as possible. The kitchen has an icebox and shelves with oilcloth on them, and every surface, as far as he can tell, is clean. Through the window, the June air is darkening.

He can see only the back of the woman at the sink, the pink blouse tucked into a gray skirt that falls just below the knees. She has on ankle socks and brown pumps, and the skin between her socks and skirt is bare. Maybe he should offer to help, but he senses that she would say no. Just a minute earlier, Ross and the new fellow, whose name is Sexton, and the other woman, Vivian, were in the room, and the space seemed crowded and noisy. But then Sexton said he was going to oil up the Copiograph machine and the woman and Alphonse went to her house to get food and drink, and Ross, well, he has no idea where Ross is, but now the room is quiet and empty. Too quiet. Too empty. He wonders if he should leave, if he is making the woman uncomfortable.

“I guess you didn’t get your wish,” he says.

She turns, her hands still over the sink. “I’m sorry?”

He takes a quick pull on his cigarette and blows the smoke out the side of his mouth. It pauses at the window and then coils back into the room, as if with a life of its own. “At Christmas,” he says, flicking his ashes into a glass ashtray on the table. “You said you wanted a baby.”

She smiles. “Oh,” she says. “I guess not.”

She has the sleeves of her pink blouse pushed up to her elbows. The skin on her forearms has delicate dark hairs. “How about you?” she asks. “You wanted peace and quiet.”

He shrugs. “Still looking for it,” he says.

She has to turn back to the sink to finish her task, and he can see that carrying on a conversation is going to be impossible if he sits at the table. He crosses the room and leans against the wall near the sink, one hand in his trouser pocket, the other still holding the cigarette. “You’re a good sport,” he says. “All of us barging in on you like this.”

“It did take me by surprise,” she says. “I’m just worried I won’t have enough food.”

“That woman, what’s her name, Vivian, she’s gone back to her house to get some stuff.”

“Yes.”

“She’s a friend of yours?”

“Sort of. A new friend. She was there that day, at the airport.”

“Really?” He doesn’t remember her. He remembers the woman pilot in her flight suit, the boy looking pitiful but happy.

Honora rinses a potato. “I was kind of surprised when I saw you just now,” she says.

He nods, though actually he was more than surprised — he was stunned. He had just worked out minutes earlier where he’d seen the new guy who was riding with them in the bread truck: he’d had an image of the man downing the three shots in the speak, leaving with the English girl. He’d recalled the package the man had left on the floor — all of which had meant nothing to McDermott in the bread truck. He was just glad he’d managed to remember, because something like that could drive you nuts all day — a face you couldn’t place, a song you couldn’t quite get the name of. But then when they all stood in the hallway and the woman walked down the stairs — and he knew right away she was the woman in the airport; how could he ever forget that? — and the guy went over to the woman and kissed her on the mouth and said
Happy anniversary,
McDermott felt the word
no
shoot through him, right up from his feet.

“And the boy,” she says. “How is he?”

“He’s fine, I think,” he says. “I’ve got him working for me. Well, for us. I think he’s better off than in the mill. He’s happier, anyway.”

“Is it safe, what you’re doing?”

McDermott pauses. He stubs out his cigarette. He has a quick flash of the sledgehammer to Tsomides’s head. “More or less,” he says.

“Do you mind my asking you
what
you are doing?”

“No, I don’t mind,” he says. “You have every right, us using your house and all.” Though he cannot for the moment think of how to phrase exactly what they are doing. He watches her rinse her hands under the tap, give them a quick shake, and dry them on a dish towel. She takes a pan from a shelf and fills it with water. “You know about the strike on Monday,” he says.

“I do now,” she says, putting the potatoes into the water.

“We’re trying to get out leaflets and a newsletter. The unions have voted to strike, but they represent only ten percent of the mill workers in the city. We’re trying to form an industrial union of the unorganized workers. The Ely Falls Independent Textile Union, we’re calling it.”

“You’re striking because of the wage cut?”

He takes the heavy pot from her and carries it to the stove. “The wages in Ely Falls are the worst in New England. Well, you must know that.”

“I knew they were bad. I didn’t know they were the worst,” she says, lighting the burner with a match.

“How long has your husband been in the mill?”

“Since February.”

“He used to be a salesman, he said.”

“Yes.”

“Got laid off?”

“Something like that.” He watches her take lard and flour from the cabinet. She measures them and sifts the flour into a bowl and then drops a teaspoon of ice water into the mixture.

“What are you making?” he asks.

“A pie. Strawberry-rhubarb.”

“Sounds good.”

“What do you do at the mill?” she asks, mixing the dough.

“I’m a loom fixer,” he says, leaning against the lip of the sink so that he can see her face.

“What’s that?”

“I fix looms.”

She laughs, tilting her head back a bit. She has a long white neck, a squarish jaw.

“Can I help?” he asks.

She thinks a minute. “Would you mind cutting some strawberries?”

“Not at all.”

“They’re in the icebox,” she says. “Just slice them.”

He feels somewhat better having a task, though now it is more difficult to talk to the woman, and so for a while he just washes the strawberries and cuts them, and he feels all thumbs at this simple task. “You didn’t know about that Copiograph machine and the typewriter, did you?” he asks after a time.

For a moment, she doesn’t answer.

“No,” she says finally.

“I could see it on your face.” He puts the sliced strawberries back into their little wooden box.

“You must be good at reading faces,” she says.

“Have to be,” he says, looking at hers. He turns away and dries his hands on the dish towel.

“I think I’ll go give your husband a hand,” he says.