“We got all kinds of dishwater,” the waiter said. “We got greasy dishwater and we got dishwater with stuff floating around in it and we got moth balls and wet newspaper.”
“Well, give me a little wet newspaper with my sawdust,” the band leader said, “and a glass of greasy dishwater.” Then he turned to his wife. “You going home?”
“I believe that I will,” she said daintily.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “If the convention shows I’ll be late. Nice to have met you.” He nodded to Moses and went back to the bandstand, where the other players had begun to stray in from the alley.
“Can I take you home?” Moses asked.
“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “We just have a little apartment in the neighborhood and I usually walk but I don’t think there’d be any harm in you walking me home.”
“Go?”
She got a coat from the hat-check girl and talked with the hat-check girl about a four-year-old child who was lost in the woods of Wisconsin. The child’s name was Pamela and she had been gone four days. Extensive search parties had been organized and the two women speculated with deep anxiety on whether or not little Pamla had died of exposure and starvation. When this conversation ended, Beatrice—which was her name—started down the hall, but the hat-check girl called her back and gave her a paper bag. “It’s two lipsticks and some bobby pins,” she said. Beatrice explained that the hat-check girl kept an eye on the ladies’ room and gave Beatrice whatever was left there. She seemed ashamed of the arrangement, but she recuperated in a second and took Moses’ arm.
Their place was near the Marine Room—a second-story bedroom dominated by a large cardboard wardrobe that seemed on the verge or in the process of collapse. She struggled to open one of its warped doors and exposed a magpie wardrobe—maybe a hundred dresses of all kinds. She went into the bathroom and returned, wearing a kind of mandarin coat with a dragon embroidered up the back out of threads that felt thorny to Moses’ hands. She yielded easily but when it was over she sobbed a little in the dark and asked, “Oh dear, what have we done?” Her voice was as dainty as ever. “Nobody ever likes me except in this way,” she said, “but I think it’s because I was brought up so strictly. I was brought up by this governess. Her name was Clancy. Oh, she was so strict. I was never allowed to play with other children....” Moses dressed, kissed her good night and got out of the building without being seen.
Chapter Nineteen
Back at the farm Leander had banked the foundations of the old house with seaweed and had hired Mr. Pluzinski to clear the garden. His sons wrote him once or twice a month and he wrote them both weekly. He longed to see them and often thought, when he was drinking bourbon, of traveling to New York and Washington, but in the light of morning he couldn’t find it in himself to ever leave St. Botolphs again. After all, he had seen the world. He was alone a lot of the time, for Lulu was spending three days a week with her daughter in the village and Mrs. Wapshot was working three days a week as a clerk in the Anna Marie Louise Gift Shoppe in Travertine. It was made clear to everyone, by Sarah’s mien, that she was not doing this because the Wapshots needed money. She was doing it because she loved to, and this was the truth. All the energies that she possessed—and that she had used so well in improving the village—seemed to have centered at last in an interest in gift shops. She wanted to open a gift shop in the front parlor of the farmhouse. She even dreamed of this project, but it was something Leander wouldn’t discuss.
It was hard to say why the subject of gift shops should excite, on one hand, Sarah’s will to live, and on the other, Leander’s bitterest scorn. As Mrs. Wapshot stood by a table loaded with colored-glass vases and gave a churchly smile to her friends and neighbors when they came in to spend a little money and pass the time, her equilibrium seemed wonderfully secure. This love of gift shops—this taste for ornamentation—may have been developed by the colorless surface of that shinbone coast or it may have been a most natural longing for sensual trivia. When she exclaimed—about a hand-carved salad fork or a hand-painted glass—“Isn’t it lovely?” she was perfectly sincere. The gossip and the company of the customers let her be as gregarious as she had ever been in the Woman’s Club; and people had always sought her out. The pleasure of selling things and putting silver and bills into the old tin box that was used for this purpose pleased her immensely, for she had sold nothing before in her life but the furniture in the barn to Cousin Mildred. She liked talking with the salesmen and Anna Marie Louise asked her advice about buying glass swans, ash trays and cigarette boxes. With some money of her own she bought two dozen bud vases that Anna Marie Louise had not wanted to buy. When the bud vases came she unpacked the barrel herself, tearing her dress on a nail and getting excelsior all over the place. Then she washed the vases and, arranging a paper rose in one, put it into the window. (She had had a lifelong aversion to paper flowers, but what could you do after the frosts?) Ten minutes after the vase had been put in the window it was sold and in three days they were all gone. She was very excited, but she could not talk it over with Leander and could only tell Lulu in the kitchen.
To have his wife work at all raised for Leander the fine point of sexual prerogatives and having made one great mistake in going into debt to Honora he didn’t want to make another. When Sarah announced that she wanted to work for Anna Marie Louise he thought the matter over carefully and decided against it. “I don’t want you to work, Sarah,” he said. “You don’t have anything to say about it,” Sarah said. That was that. The question went beyond sexual prerogatives into tradition, for much of what Sarah sold was ornamented with ships at sea and was meant to stir romantic memories of the great days of St. Botolphs as a port. Now in his lifetime Leander had seen, raised on the ruins of that coast and port, a second coast and port of gift and antique shops, restaurants, tearooms and bars where people drank their gin by candlelight, surrounded sometimes by plows, fish nets, binnacle lights and other relics of an arduous and orderly way of life of which they knew nothing. Leander thought that an old dory planted with petunias was a pretty sight but when he stepped into a newly opened saloon in Travertine and found that the bar itself was made of a bifurcated dory he felt as if he had seen a ghost.
He spent much time in his pleasant room on the southwest corner of the house, with its view of the river and the roofs of the village, writing his journal. He meant to be honest and it seemed, in recording his past, that he was able to strike a level of candor that he had only known in his most lucky friendships. Young and old, he had always been quick to get out of his clothes, and now he was reminded of the mixed pleasures of nakedness.
Writer went to work day after confab about poor father (he wrote). Rose before dawn as usual. Got morning papers for delivery and looked at help-wanted ads. Vacancy at J. B. Whittier. Big shoe manufacturer. Finished newspaper route. Washed face. Put water on hair. Inked hole in sock. Ran all the way to Whittier’s office. They were on the second story of frame building. Center of town. First person there. Only little light in sky. Spring dawn. Two other boys joined me, looking for same job. Birds singing in trees of Common. Glorious hour. Clerk—Grimes—opened door at eight o’clock. Let in applicants. Took me to Whittier’s office. Half-past eight. Beard the lion. Heavy man, seated at desk with his back to door. He did not turn. Spoke over shoulder. “Can you write a letter? Go home and write a letter. Bring it in tomorrow morning. Same time.” End of interview. Waited in outer office and watched two applicants go in and out with same results. Watched other applicants go home. Asked clerk—slender-faced—for sheet of paper and use of pen. Obliged. Headed paper J. B. Whittier. Wrote imaginary creditor. Asked to see boss again. Clerk helpful. Bearded lion for second time. “I’ve written my letter, sir.” Reached for letter but did not turn. Read letter. Passed brown envelope over shoulder. Addressed to broker. Brewster, Bassett & Co. “Deliver this and wait for the receipted bill.” Ran all the way to broker’s. Caught breath while waiting for receipted bill. Ran all the way back. Gave bill to Whittier. “Sit down there in the corner,” he says. Sat there for two hours without being noticed. More despotism in business in those days. Merchants often erratic. Tyrannical. No unions. Finally spoke at end of two hours. “I want you in there.” Points to outer office. “Clean out the spittoons and then ask Grimes what to do. He’ll keep you busy.”