Sea Glass (25 page)

  McDermott

He shuts down the printing press and walks into the front room, and he can see in the relaxation of faces and shoulders that everyone is glad for the break from all the racket the press is making. Thibodeau has to set the second page, so McDermott is, for the moment, unoccupied. He wipes his hands on a handkerchief that could use a wash and puts it back in his pocket.

Honora has her back to him, her hands doing that liquid thing over the keys, Mironson speaking in his halting dictation beside her.
“A socialist society is only possible if capitalism breaks down completely and commits suicide,”
he says.
“When we come together we will be unstoppable,”
he says. She types without glancing at the machine, though she sometimes bends forward to peer at the paper in the cylinder. Her hair nearly covers her neck now, even when she rolls it. She has four dresses that he knows of, which she wears in a kind of rotation that is a mystery to him. His favorite is the pale blue with the man’s collar and the belted waist. She has, since the beginning of the summer, developed a faint tan, which is now the color of toast. Not like McDermott, who goes blotchy lobster pink if he even looks at the sun.
Luck of the Irish,
Ross said.
Fucking Irish,
McDermott said.

He stands on the threshold, not needing to go farther into the room, content merely to stand and watch Honora and smoke a cigarette. All the windows are open for a breeze, and he can feel the humid air that has just a touch of cool threading through it. She sits with her back straight, and occasionally she rubs a muscle at the top of her spine. He envies Mironson, who gets to sit so close to her, to smell her, possibly, when all McDermott can do is watch.

He can’t even think about how much he envies Sexton Beecher.

Once when Vivian and McDermott were alone on the porch, she said to him, “You look a bit like Honora,” as if they had been speaking of Honora just that minute, when, of course, they had not, and he couldn’t help but wonder if Vivian had seen something that he had meant to keep to himself.

He studies that bare spot, slightly damp, at the top of Honora’s spine, the spot she just rubbed, and thinks he would like to touch her there. He closes his eyes, imagining that touch, and then he pictures running his fingers up through her hair and watching the goose bumps rise on her skin. He imagines trailing his hand the length of her bare arm and maybe even following his hand with his mouth. He has imagined all of it, every single day since he first saw Honora coming down the stairs, and he has begun to wonder if there isn’t something wrong with him that he so desires something he can never have. Last week he told Mironson that he had an errand to do, then he walked over to St. André’s and went inside and sat with all the wayward Franco boys and old women and tried to pray for a miracle. But then he shortly realized that any miracle he wanted would have to mean the death or disappearance of Sexton Beecher, and obviously a man couldn’t ask for that from God. So he tried to pray instead to be released from the terrible fist of desire — a desire that he is almost never free of, that takes away his appetite and makes him sleepless in the night — but, of course, he couldn’t do that either, because in truth McDermott doesn’t want to be released. So he gave up altogether and went outside and smoked a cigarette on the church steps and thought he’d probably lost the habit of praying in a church anyway; it made him feel like a fake.

Honora pushes her chair back, stands up, and stretches her arms high over her head, raising her dress an inch above her knees. Mironson throws his shoulders back a couple of times to unkink them. Honora relaxes her arms and turns, one hand on the chair, and sees McDermott standing in the doorway. He can feel her smile all the way down to the soles of his feet.

“Taking a break?” McDermott asks.

“A short one,” Mironson says.

“Are you both hungry?” Honora asks.

“Sure,” McDermott says, though he can hardly get anything down these days.

“Want to help me make some sandwiches?”

“Sure,” he says again, reduced in her presence, it would seem, to one-word answers.

He moves out of the doorway to let her pass. Sometimes they speak for just a minute in a hallway, occasionally for a longer period when she is cooking in the kitchen or has moved out onto the porch. She is easy to talk to, and on good days he is able to convince himself that she is merely a friend, a colleague — a
comrade,
as Mironson would say. He has talked to her about Alphonse, about Eileen, and about the brothers who used to be a handful. About the farm in Ireland he’s never seen but about which his father spoke incessantly. About the way Ross more or less cornered him into helping to organize the union that now seems to be his life. He talks to Honora while she peels carrots or sets the table or puts away the groceries. Once, he went with her on her sea glass walk and they played a screwy game in which they color coded the people in the house to match the shards of glass. Honora was blue, hands down, McDermott said, and she said then that he was green for Irish. And McDermott said okay, he’d be the bottle green if Alphonse could be the light green, how was that? And Honora said that made sense even if Alphonse was Franco, and McDermott asked what color a Franco would be, and Honora said she had no idea, and McDermott said, “Honorary Irish, then.” But Mahon and Ross were definitely brown, they agreed, and Vivian — no question there — was lavender, and Mironson would be the opaque white, “for his prose,” Honora said, and McDermott laughed. The only man who didn’t get assigned a color was Sexton. “Oh gosh, I don’t know what color Sexton would be,” Honora said, and McDermott thought Sexton most resembled a slimy yellow with brown threads like those from a jellyfish running through it, a thought that made McDermott wince with the realization that he was as jealous as a schoolboy.

“How can I help?” he asks, following Honora into the kitchen.

“Talk to me,” she says as she unwraps a loaf of bread. He watches her walk to the icebox and remove a packet of bologna and another of cheese. “You stopped the press.”

McDermott situates himself so that he can see her mouth. It is, he thinks, the most beautiful mouth he has ever seen. Sometimes it visits him in his dreams — the upper lip that peaks in a plumpness that seems more French than Yankee. “Thibodeau had to set up the second page.”

“Where is Alphonse today?”

“Mironson has him distributing leaflets at social clubs in Portsmouth.”

“Will he come at all this weekend?”

“I think you can count on it,” McDermott says. “Even if he has to crawl. You said you would make him peach ice cream. He’s been talking about it all week.”

She laughs. “I’ve got all the ingredients.”

“And he wants another swimming lesson.”

“He’s doing well,” she says, spreading a dozen slices of bread with mayonnaise.

“When you get done with him, will you teach me?” McDermott asks, and immediately he regrets the question. It sounds like a line every sleazy guy he has ever known would give.

But Honora seems to treat the request as plausible. “Sure,” she says. “If you really want to learn.”

“I do,” he says, though truthfully if it weren’t for Honora he would never go near the water.

“You’ll need a suit.”

“I’ll get one.”

“Next week, then.”

“Good.”

He watches her layer the sandwiches — a slice of bologna, a slice of cheese, a leaf of lettuce, another smear of mayonnaise. He wishes he were hungry.

“Louis says the mood of the strikers is low,” she says.

“It is,” he says, relieved to be on more familiar ground. “Carnival’s over. Bill Ayers, who owns the Emporium Theater, said he had to run the projector day and night for the first week.”

She smiles. “And now?”

“And now everyone’s beat. They’re hungry and they’re tired. Some of the men have left their families to look for work elsewhere. You know about the evictions and the tent city. And the truth is, men don’t picket well. Women are much better at it.”

“Why?”

“More patience.” More than once McDermott has been thankful that he is on the strike committee. He isn’t sure he could stand the boredom of the picket line.

“You know,” she says. “I went in there to have a look for myself.”

“You did?” he asks, surprised.

“About ten days ago. On a Thursday. I wanted to see.”

“And what did you see?”

“I felt like I had had a blindfold on. I felt cut off from the action. So I took the trolley into Ely Falls. As soon as I saw a crowd, I got off. About two hundred picketers stood outside a mill. One man carried a sign that said ‘The Truth Is on Our Side.’ And there was a child with a sign that said ‘The Ten Percent Pay Cut Took Our Milk Away.’ “

McDermott nods.

“I saw the militia with their fixed bayonets. I didn’t understand why they felt they needed to do that. The women were in summer dresses and the men were in shirtsleeves and ties. The children were sitting on the curb. They had cloth shoes with holes where their big toes went. Someone had given the children eye-shades, which looked kind of funny.”

McDermott smiles.

“I saw another line of picketers and then discovered they weren’t picketers at all. They were all relatives waiting to get their kinfolk out of jail. One woman told me it cost two bucks to get your husband out, and another said that every day the police arrested so many picketers they had to hire trucks from other towns.”

“That’s right.”

“I didn’t actually see the tent city, but I could smell it. It smelled like raw sewerage. I walked for another hour or so, sort of thinking I might run into you and Sexton and Alphonse, but I didn’t see you. I stopped in at a lunch counter and had a milk shake and went home. What do you think will happen?” she asks.

He leans against the counter and crosses his arms. “I think the strike leadership will do just what it set out to do — break the backs of the mills in New England. But where I part ways with Mironson is that I think the mills will then go out of business or move south, and no one will have jobs.”

“I hope you’re wrong,” she says.

“Me too.”

“What would you do if the mills went south?” she asks. “Would you go with them?”

“Never,” he says. “A good Irish Catholic like me? Be a fish out of water.” He wishes he hadn’t smoked his last cigarette. “What about your husband?” McDermott asks, unable to say the man’s name, as if saying it aloud might cause him to appear, right here, now, in the room with them.

“I’m not sure,” she says. “It was hard enough just finding the job he has now. We could always move, I guess; go live with my family.”

“Where’s that?” McDermott asks.

“In Taft. It’s a small lake town north of here. Near Lake Winnipesaukee.”

“Your folks still alive?” he asks.

“My mother.”

McDermott watches Honora spread her fingers over the sandwich to hold it together, and then cut beneath her splayed hand. She has clean, precise movements in the kitchen, nothing extra, nothing wasted. He has never seen her flustered, even when there have been a dozen or more men in the house, a dozen or more mouths to feed.

“I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t be in there too,” she says. “On the picket line.”

“You’re doing your part,” he says. “More than your part, really.”

“Still, though.”

“Still, though,” he says, and he wonders if she will remember this particular exchange from Christmas.

Honora looks up quickly and smiles at him, and the smile moves through him like a warm rush of water. “That seems like so long ago,” she says.

He puts his hands in his pockets. “And to think this is where you came back to that night,” he says.

He walks over to the window and glances out at the lawn and the hedge and beyond the hedge at the narrow road that leads, he now knows, to a tiny village with a fish shack and a general store. One day, a couple of weeks ago, itching for a walk, he set out on foot along the coast road, not knowing where it might lead. He stopped in at the general store, had a Moxie and a chat with the owner.

“Seems like you must get a lot of peace and quiet here,” he says.

“Not lately,” she says, smiling.

“It can’t go on much longer,” McDermott says. “This strike, I mean. The city is a powder keg.”

“In your heart,” Honora says, speaking of an organ that seems to have a life of its own these days, that has lately led him to places he thought he would never go, “do you believe that capitalism is evil? I mean, we both listen to this all day. I was just wondering how you feel. Deep down.”

McDermott watches as she tears open another waxed packet of bread and cuts another dozen slices on the bread board. “There are basics I’d like to see everyone have,” he says. “People like Alphonse’s mother, for example. I’d like to see her have, minimum, hot water, indoor plumbing, food for the table, access to a doctor who isn’t a quack, some kind of assistance since she’s trying to raise a family without a husband — but I’m not convinced that overthrowing capitalism is the answer. Truthfully, I’m not very political. I like the job I’ve been given to do, but I hardly ever think about the stuff Mironson talks about.”