And then, just as I was becoming relaxed, while reading a poem by Robert Browning, something very unsettling happened.
The door to my room opened and old Baleen’s son, Roderick, came in. He did not speak to me, but nodded in my direction. Then he proceeded to undress himself in the middle of the room, heedless of Privacy, Modesty, or my Individual Rights, stripping himself to his naked hairy skin, and humming softly. He knelt at the side of the other bed and prayed aloud, “O Lord, most powerful and most cruel, forgive my miserable afflictions and sins, and make me humble and worthy. In Jesus’ name. Amen.” Then he got into the bed, curled up, and began almost immediately to snore.
I had nodded earlier in almost involuntary assent to the Baleens’ phrase “the sin of Privacy”; but this raw intrusion of another person in my bedroom was overwhelming. And I had been alone so long, on the empty beaches with only Biff.
I tried to continue reading, from “Caliban upon Setobos,” but the words, always difficult, made no sense at all, and I could not relax.
And yet, surprisingly, I fell asleep after a while and woke up in midmorning refreshed. Roderick was gone, and Biff was over in the corner of the room poking at a little ball of lint with her paw. The sun was coming through lace curtains. I could smell food from downstairs.
There was a big communal bathroom down the long hallway outside my room; old Edgar Baleen had shown it to me before putting me in the bedroom. The bathroom had an ancient, greenish metal plate on the door that said, in raised letters, MEN. There were six clean white lavatory bowls and six toilet stalls. I washed myself as best I could and combed my hair and beard. I needed a bath but had no idea of how to take one, and my clothes were worn and dirty. The new ones I had picked out had been left behind at Sears. Then I went down the big front stairway and into the kitchen.
There had been letters engraved in the stone arch over the doorway of the building: HALL OF JUSTICE: MAUGRE. The sign had made little impression on me the day before, but standing in the kitchen now, I imagined that the room, like the one I had done my Bible reading in, had been a courtroom in the ancient world; it was very large and high-ceilinged, with tall, thin, arched windows on each of the longer walls. The huge, now empty table in the center of the room looked as though it had been roughly made a long time before with a Sears chain saw; rough benches were placed around it.
Along one wall under the windows was a wide black institutional stove, with a pile of wood on each side of it, and wooden counters with tops that looked polished and scrubbed and worn. Over the stove were white enameled oven doors, and on each side of them hung a row of pots and pans, large ones, stretching half the length of the room. On the opposite wall were eight battery-powered white refrigerators; each said KENMORE on its front. Next to the refrigerators was a long and deep sink. At this were standing two women, in floor-length blue dresses, their backs toward me, washing dishes.
Everything seemed completely different from the way it had been the night before. There were glass bowls of freshly cut yellow tulips on the table, and the room was filled with daylight and smelled of bacon and coffee. The women did not look over at me, although I was sure they had heard my footsteps on the bare floor.
I walked over toward the sink and hesitated. Then I said, “Excuse me.”
One of them, a short, dumpy woman with white hair, turned and looked at me, but said nothing.
“I wonder if I could have something to eat.”
She looked at me a moment, then turned and reached up and got a yellow box from a shelf over the sink and handed it to me. There was writing on the box that said: SURVIVAL COFFEE, INSTANT TYPE. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: MAUGRE. IRRADIATED TO PREVENT SPOILAGE.
While I was reading that she had gotten me a large rough ceramic mug and a spoon from the dish drainer beside the sink. “Use the samovar,”, she said, and nodded toward the stove across the room.
I went over and made myself a mug of strong black coffee, seated myself at the table, and began to sip it.
The other woman opened a refrigerator and got something out and then turned and walked across the room to the stove. I saw that she was the woman whom I had stared at, and who had exhorted me to read, the night before. She did not look at me. She seemed shy.
She opened one of the ovens on the stove, took something from it, put it on a platter and brought it over to the table. Avoiding my eyes, she put it in front of me along with a dish of butter and a knife. The dishes were heavy and dark brown.
I looked up at her. “What is it?” I said.
She looked at me, surprised at my ignorance, I suppose. “It’s a coffee cake,” she said.
I had never seen such a thing and did not know how to deal with it. She took the knife and cut a piece from the cake. She spread butter on it and handed it to me.
I tasted it. It was sweet and hot and had nuts on it. It was completely delicious. When I finished it she handed me another piece, smiling shyly. She seemed flustered, and that was odd, since she had appeared quite bold the night before.
The cake and the coffee were so good, and her shyness was so much like what I had been trained to expect from people, that I felt emboldened and spoke to her in a friendly way. “Did you make this cake?” I said.
She nodded and said, “Would you like an omelette?”
“An omelette?” I said. I had heard the word, but had never seen one. It had something to do with eggs.
When I didn’t reply she went over to the refrigerator and came back with three large, real eggs. I had eaten real eggs only on rare occasions, such as my graduation from the dormitory. She took them to the stove and cracked them into a brown ceramic bowl, and then placed a small and shallow black pan on the stove, put butter in it and let it heat. She stirred up the eggs vigorously, poured them into the pan, and with a great deal of agility slid the pan rapidly back and forth on the stove while looping the eggs around with a fork. She was very beautiful, doing this. Then she took the pan by its handle, brought it over to the table, upended the handle, and neatly slid a yellow crescent of eggs onto my plate. “Eat it with a fork,” she said.
I took a bite. It was wonderful. I finished it silently. I believe, even now, that omelette and coffee cake were the best meal I had ever eaten in my life.
I felt even bolder after eating and I looked at her, still standing by me, and said, “Would you show me how to make an omelette?”
She looked shocked, and said nothing.
Then from the sink the other woman’s voice said, “Men don’t cook.”
The woman beside me hesitated a moment, and then said softly, “This man is different, Mary. He’s a Reader.”
Mary did not turn around. “The men are in the fields,” she said, “doing the Lord’s work.”
The woman by me was shy, but she knew her own mind. She ignored Mary and said to me, “Did you read the writing on the coffee box when she gave it to you?”
“Yes,” I said.
She went to the stove and got it from where I had left it. “Read it to me,” she said. And I did. She was very attentive to the words and when I was finished she said, “What’s ‘Maugre’?”
“The name of this town,” I said. “Or I think it is.”
She looked open-mouthed. “The town has a name?” she said.
“I think so.”
“The house has a name,” she said. “Baleena.” That is how I have chosen to spell it: It was not written anywhere until I wrote it, much later, for old Edgar.
“Well, Baleena is in the town of Maugre,” I said.
She nodded thoughtfully, and then went to the refrigerator and got a bowl of eggs. Then she began to show me how to make an omelette.