Sea Glass Read online

  Her uncle Harold, blind and papery, couldn’t walk the length of the aisle of the Methodist church and so he stood by the front pew with his niece for half a minute so as to give her away properly. She was the last child to leave the house, the boys gone to Arkansas and Syracuse and San Francisco. Her mother sat in her navy polka-dot silk with the lace collar, her comfortable weight caught primly within the dress’s folds. She wore real silk stockings for the occasion, Honora noticed, and not the tan stockings from Touraine’s. Her mother’s black shoes, serviceable rather than pretty, were the ones Harold always referred to as her Sunday-go-to-meeting shoes. Her mother wore a navy cloche, the silver roll of her hair caught beneath it with mother-of-pearl combs.

  Just before they’d left the house, her mother had polished her gold-rimmed glasses at the sink. She’d taken her time at it and had pretended not to cry.

  “You look very pretty,” she said to Honora when she had hooked the stems of her glasses behind her ears.

  “Thank you,” Honora said.

  “You let me know, won’t you,” her mother said. She took her hankie from inside the cuff of her dress. “About what you want me to do with the suit, I mean.”

  “I will.”

  “Some women, they like to keep the clothes they get married in. I had my wedding dress with me right up until Halifax.”

  Honora and her mother were silent a moment, remembering Halifax. “Your father would have been so proud,” her mother said.

  “I know.”

  “So you let me know about the suit. I’ll be happy to pay for it, you decide to keep it.”

  Honora took a step forward and kissed her mother’s cheek.

  “Now, now,” her mother said. “You don’t want to set me off again.”

  Sexton walks into the bedroom with the picnic basket in one hand, the suitcase in the other. He looks at Honora sitting on the mattress, her stockings and her shoes and her suit folded, her garters peeking out from beneath a girdle to one side of the bed. His face loosens, as if he’d come prepared to tell his new wife one thing but now wishes to say something else. Honora watches as he sets down the picnic basket and the cardboard suitcase. He removes his coat and lets it fall from his arms, snatching it before it hits the floor. He yanks the knot of his tie sideways.

  She slides backward and slips her bare legs under the cool sheet and blanket. She lays her cheek against the pillow and watches her husband with one eye. She has never seen a man undress before: the tug of the belt buckle, the pulling up of the shirttails, the shoes being kicked off, the shirt dropped to the floor, the trousers — the only garment removed with care — folded and set upon the suitcase. He unbuckles his watch and puts it on a windowsill. In the stingy light of the salted windows, she can see the broad knobs of his shoulders, the gentle muscles through the chest, the surprising gooseflesh of his buttocks, the red-gold hairs along the backs of his legs. Sexton kneels at the foot of the mattress and crawls up to his new bride. He puts his face close to hers. He slides under the sheet and draws her to him. Her head rests on the pad of his shoulder, and her right arm is tucked between them. His knee slips between her thighs, causing the skirt of her slip to ride up to her hips. He kisses her hair.

  “What makes it so shiny?” he asks.

  “Vinegar,” she says.

  “You’re shaking,” he says.

  “Am I?”

  He presses his mouth to her shoulder. “We’ll take our time,” he says.

  McDermott

  McDermott sits at the edge of the bed and smokes a cigarette. Behind him, near the window, the English girl is counting out the money. She counts slowly and moves her lips the way some people have to do when reading to themselves. The room has a sink and a chair and a window open to the street, silent now, everyone on his lunch break, thirty minutes, not enough time to eat a proper meal, never mind have a proper fuck.

  The girl counting the coins is framed by the window and in it, she is almost pretty. Maybe she has spoken and he hasn’t heard her. The looms have made McDermott deaf. Well, not deaf exactly, but they have changed sound, damaged sound, so that sometimes spoken words seem to come from the bottom of a well, and others have halos around them, gauzy halos that slur sound. The girl has thin hair and glasses, blue eyes and a long face. He once asked her why she did it, and she said simply that the money was better than in the mills and she didn’t have to work as hard. He thought it was the most honest answer to a difficult question he had ever heard.

  The air coming through the window is soft and cool. There are nine, maybe ten days a year like this, days that leak out between the tight cold of winter and the suffocating humidity of summer. Days that make him think of picnics as a boy, when his mother felt well enough to make the meat pies and the iced tea. Before Sean died. Before his father pissed off.

  McDermott can tell simply by his inner clock (never wrong) that there are eighteen minutes left in the lunch break. Eighteen minutes before the mill horn sounds and everyone comes out of all the doorways along the street below him, rolling shirtsleeves, slipping arms into jackets, still chewing their food. The bosses lock the gates at 12:45, and anyone who is out stays out and forfeits a day’s pay, if not the job itself.

  “I count only a dollar and forty-seven cents,” the girl says. Her voice floats up to him from the bottom of a jar.

  He bends and fishes through the pockets of his pants on the floor. She is nineteen, the same age as his sister Eileen. She has a thin cotton robe wrapped around her body. Her nipples are hard, but McDermott knows it has nothing to do with excitement. More to do with money. He lays the copper pennies on the chenille bedspread, hastily pulled up and lopsided. He wants silence and he wants to sleep, but the pain the start-up horn will cause him isn’t worth the exquisite pleasure of the stolen oblivion.

  He watches the girl squirrel the money away under the bed.

  “All right then,” she says.

  She takes her glasses off and lays them on the windowsill. She has a large eyetooth, just the one, and it makes her mouth crooked. The tooth sticks out a bit when she smiles, which isn’t often. She has on a vivid orange lipstick that he sometimes asks her to take off. She stands and lets her robe fall from her body. She tugs the blue spread from the bed with the dexterity of a housekeeper. If they are quick about it, he’ll have five, six minutes left of peace and quiet.

  Alphonse

  Every day Alphonse gets up and rolls off the galvanized bed and goes to the outhouse, and if he is lucky and there isn’t a line, he is in and done in no time and can get a head start on the lunch pails for his two brothers and three sisters. He especially wants a head start because if they see him making the lunches in the buckets they will complain and one will be sure to say I don’t want the potato, give it to Augustin, and then it will begin and he’ll have nothing but trouble.

  It is his job to make the lunches and to scrub the floor in the morning because he is only working bobbins and makes the least money, and besides, he is the fastest sprinter and can get to the gates inside of a minute, which leaves him five or six anyway to scrub the floor after the girls, who are the laggards, leave the house.

  His mother has the night shift and has to sleep in the mornings, so it is his job to get everybody off even though he is the youngest. Well, not the youngest, Camille is still in school, but the youngest of those who go to the mill.

  They live on the top floor of number 78 Rose Street and have only the back stairway in and out. Last winter his father slipped on the top step and went all the way down the three flights, and if it wasn’t for the ice he might not have broken his neck, but the mill doctor said the steps were brick hard because of the ice and that was the problem.

  After that, his mother, who hadn’t worked in the mill because of having six children, started on the night shift, and that was when Alphonse’s troubles started and the chores got worse.

  Marie-Thérèse should be doing the lunch pails, but she wouldn’t and then they wouldn’t have any lun
ch at all. You can’t make Marie-Thérèse do what she doesn’t want to do.

  It is forbidden to speak English in the house because his mother is afraid that America will swallow her children, but sometimes words slip out and she hits him if he says newspaper or milk or thirsty by mistake. But then when he is doing the bobbins, he isn’t allowed to answer in French because the second hand is American, or maybe he is Irish, and he pretends he doesn’t understand you even if you only say oui or non.

  On Sunday mornings they all go to mass at St. André, and once in a while he will see Sister Mary Patrick from a distance. She tried to keep him out of the mill and threatened (for his own good, she said) to tell the bosses that he was only eleven, which is illegal, but then she didn’t, probably because she forgot.

  On Sunday afternoons now that the weather is good Alphonse takes the trolley to Ely with one of the two dimes he keeps from his pay packet. He walks the rest of the way to the beach. He doesn’t have a proper bathing suit, but that is just as well because he’s afraid of the water. He likes to sit on the sand and search for shells and look at the ocean and feel the sun on his face and get burned and not come back until it is very late so that he doesn’t get asked to do one of the Sunday-night chores.

  He wears overalls and a shirt and a cloth cap, and his mother prides herself on keeping everyone in shoes, even though Alphonse is still wearing Gérard’s old ones and they are too small and lost their laces months ago. He doesn’t pack a pail for himself but instead puts a piece of bread and a hunk of cheese and a boiled egg in a sack that once had coffee in it. He can run better with a sack than a pail.

  He hears his mother stirring in the bedroom. He rinses the scrub brush and gets the rag out and tries to damp-mop the water away with the rag under his foot the way his mother taught him. He wants to go in and see her and say good-bye and he knows she won’t mind if he wakes her up — she says she loves to see his face — but he has only a minute left and if he goes into the bedroom he will find it hard to leave.

  When he gets off his shift and runs home, he has fifteen minutes to see his mother before she has to go to her own shift. Usually she just gives him instructions. Once in a while she calls him My Boy.

  Alphonse grabs his sack from the table. He lays the rag over the wooden railing on the back stoop and flies down the stairs, taking only three or four steps each flight. There is no one on the street, but he will make it to the gate before it closes. He always does.

  Vivian

  “I’m absolutely certain there has been a mistake,” Vivian says.

  The desk clerk, a weasely looking Franco, consults his pebbledleather register for the third time. “It says here that you are due to arrive on the twenty-fourth, madam.”

  “I can’t have been due on the twenty-fourth,” Vivian says patiently, “because I am here now.”

  She sets her train case on the mahogany desk and pulls off her gloves. She wants to shed her town clothes and slip into a lighter dress — the cowslip yellow might be good, she thinks. Over by the doorway, a porter waits with her eight glazed-linen trunks. She tucks a strand of hair under her cloche. She hates the humidity. Her hair is frizz now, just frizz.

  “I believe you are two days early,” the desk clerk says in his horrid accent. His suit is shiny and bears traces of dandruff all along the shoulders.

  “Impossible,” Vivian says.

  “I am sure we can arrange something, madam.”

  “Thank you,” she says. “But I want my usual corner room. And it’s miss, not madam.”

  “Which corner would that be?”

  Vivian suppresses a sigh. “The southeast corner, fourth floor,” she says.

  “Yes, of course,” the desk clerk says, catching her eye. And she is certain that he is smiling.

  The insolence. As if she’d just stepped off the street. As if she hadn’t been coming to the Highland for twenty years, ever since she was a girl. She turns, searching the lobby for a familiar face, and sees Asa Whitlock, who’s been summering at the hotel at least as long as Vivian has, huddled under a tartan blanket in a wicker wheelchair by the window. In the corner a woman in a frost green suit is standing next to a man in a panama hat and natty pants. The woman has smart town welts on her feet. The couple, like Vivian, seems to have just gotten off the train.

  Vivian takes in the old horsehair sofas, the oil portraits on the walls, the carved pillars around which velvet banquettes have been placed for the guests, and she thinks how tired and dowdy the lobby looks, which, she supposes, is the point. Upstairs in her rooms there will be the old iron bed with the lilac sateen coverlet, the bureau with thin slats at the bottoms of the drawers that loosen on dry days, the sage tin ceiling she’s been known to stare at for hours at a time. Over the bureau will be the spotted mirror in which she will be able to make out only a partial image of herself (just as well at twenty-eight, she thinks) and on a low table by the window will be a chamber set — for show, thank God, and not for use.

  Through the window over that low table, Vivian will be able to look at the ocean from her bed. Her favorite time of the day is shortly after her tea has been brought in the morning, when she props herself up against the pillows and the rattling iron head-board and gazes out to sea and empties her mind. Follies of the night before can be erased. The day to come not yet imagined.

  “Vivian.”

  A tall man bends and kisses her ear. “Dickie Peets,” she says.

  “You just got here?” he asks.

  “They’re being very rude about my room,” she says.

  An exotic combination of lime and coconut lifts from Dickie’s skin. He holds a skimmer like a plate under his arm. Beyond him, through large double doors, the dining room is already set for lunch. Starched linen, polished silver, white crockery. It hasn’t changed a whit in twenty years, Vivian thinks. Dickie draws a silver case from the pocket of his linen jacket and offers her a cigarette.

  “Who’s here?” she asks.

  “John Sevens,” he says. “And Sylvia.” Dickie thinks a minute. “That makes a tennis party. You on?”

  “I’ve got to unpack,” she says.

  “You’re looking very well,” he says.

  “Since when have you had specs?” she asks.

  “Got them around Christmas. Blind as a bat, actually. Smashed my car.”

  “Not the Freschetti.”

  “The Isotta Fraschini. ‘Fraid so.”

  “How awful,” Vivian says. “Were you hurt?”

  “A knee thing,” Dickie says with perfect nonchalance. “Spent most of the winter in Havana, recuperating. You should try it. Havana, I mean.”

  “I’m not very good on boats.”

  “Fly,” he says. “Only forty-three hours from Boston — train and plane.”

  “Really.”

  “Jai alai. The casino. Rooftop dancing. Just your thing, Viv.”

  She takes a long pull on her cigarette. Is he mocking her?

  “How long are you here for?” he asks.

  “The usual. Until September. How about you?”

  “Bought a house here,” he says.

  “You’re not serious,” Vivian says, aware of the desk clerk needing her attention. She deliberately ignores him. “Where?”

  “The coast road. The Cote place. Had to fix it up and so forth. They’re nearly finished, though. I’ve got rooms here in the meantime,” Dickie says, stubbing his cigarette out in the glass ashtray on the reception desk.

  “Miss Burton?” says the desk clerk.

  “Got the makings of a sidecar in my room if you want a cocktail before lunch,” Dickie says.

  Vivian thinks of icy drops of water sliding down the outside of an aluminum cocktail shaker.

  “Make it very, very cold,” she says.

  Vivian walks through pale azure hallways to her rooms. The porter opens the door and stands aside to let her pass, and as soon as Vivian enters her own suite, she feels the bristle leave her skin. Her duster slides from her shoulders,
and she tosses it over the back of a chair. She unpins her hat and pats her hair. She takes in the delicate white light through the gauzy curtains floating in an east window, the old walnut desk with the pigeonholes in which she will put her invitations and her writing papers, and the mauve settee with the rose silk throw. She peers into the mirror. Her penny-colored hair has risen up around her head like a copper nimbus. Her eyebrows need plucking, and her lipstick has worn off. Dickie looked both smug and happy. He must have a girl, she thinks.

  She tips the porter, and he leaves her suite. She walks into the bedroom, sits on the bed, and slips off her shoes. She lies back on the lilac sateen coverlet. The air and the light are worth the filthy train ride from Boston, she decides. She pictures the empty house she left this morning in Boston, the dark brick town house overlooking the Public Garden. Her father had sailed for Italy with his new wife just the day before, and Vivian, unable to stand the empty rooms, decided to travel up to the hotel early. There are friends she might have visited — Tilly Hatch in Lenox, Bobby Kellogg on Nantucket, Lester Simms in Banff — but she wasn’t in the mood to be a houseguest so early in the season.

  She stares at the pattern on the tin ceiling. Oh, I’m going to be so bored, she thinks.

  She gets off the bed and opens a suitcase. The porter has laid her luggage out on trunk stands all against the walls. She removes her perfumes and her atomizers and sets them on the bureau. She puts her silk stockings and her lingerie in the top drawer and hangs her Maggy Rouff evening gown in the closet. She glances at her watch. Dickie Peets said a sidecar. A sidecar might be just the ticket.

  Alice Willard

  Dear Honora,

  I still have the ironing to do, you know how Harold likes his sheets, but I will try to write a line or two so that you won’t think we have already forgotten you here at home. After you left today, I picked the first of the peas, it is so unusual to have peas before the Fourth of July, and I see that the beans are coming along nicely too. It looks as though this will be a good year for the garden.