Sea Glass (13 page)

  Alphonse

All day and all night the men have been going in the front door of the apartment house and even milling around outside, and no one seems to be sneaking in the way they did the last time. Alphonse has counted nearly forty men who have gone through the door and he wonders how Arnaud Nadeau’s front room will hold them all. Alphonse knows that all the activity is because of the wage cut and the talk about unions. His mother and his aunt are in the bedroom speaking in low tones all about unions and strikes and whatnot, and Alphonse thinks that a strike would be just fine with him because he hasn’t had a day off except Sundays and Labor Day and Christmas since he started in the mill a year ago. He can’t imagine what everyone would do on a Monday in the middle of November if they didn’t go to work.

Sam Coyne, who moved up from New Bedford last year, told him all about what it’s like to be on strike and Sam says that after a while it’s no picnic and that everyone gets hungry but that it’s mostly all right for the kids because the charities put soup in their pails and give them hunks of bread, although it’s sometimes a bother to have to stand in line all morning just to get a meal. You have to eat the soup sitting on the sidewalk, he says, even if it’s snowing out, because if you go home you have to share it with your sisters and your brothers and maybe even your mother and your father, and by that time there won’t be anything left for you. Alphonse can’t imagine trying to eat his soup on the sidewalk if he knew his mother was hungry. If Marie-Thérèse was hungry, well, that’s another story.

Sam also told him about the scabs, who everybody hates. The strikers spit at the scabs and might even beat them up because the scabs go into the mills and work for the owners and take the strikers’ jobs and that just makes the strikes last longer. Alphonse prays that no one in his family will be a scab, though Marie-Thérèse would be a perfect scab, and he thinks he wouldn’t mind being allowed to spit at her one bit.

His mother would never be a scab. Tonight at dinner when they had the stew his mother said to eat up good because you never knew where your next meal was coming from.

Sam said that some of the grocery stores would let you run up really high bills and that a couple of the landlords would let you wait on the rent in case the strike was settled in a hurry, but if the strike went on for a long time the landlords would come and put your furniture outside, and if you didn’t have any relatives who would take you in, you were pretty much stuck out on the street. Which is what happened to Sam Coyne and his family, and after that his mother and Sam and his two sisters moved to Ely Falls. Sam doesn’t know where his father and his two older brothers are, and his mother said to stop asking her because she didn’t want to hear his father’s fucking name anymore. Alphonse sometimes says the word
fuck
in his head, especially when Marie-Thérèse is talking to him in that horrible taunting voice she has, and he says
fuck fuck fuck
in his mind just to make himself feel better. But Sam Coyne says the word aloud like he’s been doing it since the day he was born.

Holy Joseph,
McDermott said.

His mother didn’t believe that Alphonse had caught the fish himself and he didn’t want to tell her about McDermott because then she would ask a million questions, so Alphonse kept talking about how good the fish would taste in butter and after a while she stopped asking him where he got the thing.

When they came back from fishing, McDermott said it was probably getting too cold to fish anymore, but they would see in the spring.

Alphonse watches the men come out of Nadeau’s apartment and light up cigarettes. Alphonse searches for McDermott and finds him standing off by himself under a streetlight. He has on his leather jacket and the same sweater he wore when he took Alphonse fishing. Alphonse wonders if anyone has fixed the hole.

A fine mist has started and Alphonse can see it slanting in gusts under the light of the street lamp. He wishes McDermott would look up at his window, but before McDermott even has his matches out two men go over to him and say something that must be pretty funny because McDermott throws his head back and laughs.

And that’s an odd thing, Alphonse thinks. Because nobody seems upset about the wage cut. Even though it’s raining harder now, the men just put up the collars of their jackets and stand around in groups, chatting and laughing and smoking.

  Honora

For Thanksgiving dinner, Honora prepares a turkey with a breaded stuffing and bowls of squash and turnip and potatoes. She sets out a relish tray while she and Sexton drink glasses of S.S. Pierce sherry from a bottle given to him by the owner of a paper mill in Somersworth. Having practiced her crust for weeks, Honora decides that her pies are suitably flaky. Sexton, however, hardly eats a bite of the turkey or the turnip or the mincemeat. Honora asks him if he is sick and he says no, but he works at his dinner as if it were a chore, dividing the food into sections and then rearranging them until Honora can bear it no longer. She stands and runs the water in the sink, and Sexton, with obvious relief, puts down his fork.

That afternoon, before it grows dark, they drive in the Buick to a school yard with the idea that on this cold, but not unbearably cold, holiday they will do something frivolous, such as roller-skating on the school’s cement courtyard. They sit on a bench and bend to their skates, but Sexton cannot make his key work. After a time, he gives up and reaches into his pocket for a package of gumdrops. He hands them to his wife. She notices that he doesn’t keep any for himself.

Through October and November, Sexton has grown thinner.

He thought the debacle with the stock market only temporary, but now, he says, he isn’t so sure about that. Honora aches for his anxiety, for she has grown to love him despite the thing in his character that makes him tell small lies in order to make sales. And anxious, he isn’t quite as handsome as he was — the small flaws somehow magnified, the crooked teeth more apparent, the eyes seemingly having edged closer together. She is learning in a way she might not have for years what it is to love someone who is changing, and not necessarily for the better.

“Have one,” she says, sliding the packet of gumdrops across the bench. His eyes seem blue today. They change color every day, depending on his skin tone or what he is wearing that day or the color of the sky. Mini chameleons in his face. Blue, gray, blue gray, gray green, hazel.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You hardly ate any dinner.”

“It was a good dinner.”

“Thank you.”

“I went to Manchester,” he says, pocketing the gumdrops. “I had an account at the Manchester Five Cents Savings Bank. They had an Eight I had sold them that had jammed. My plan was to pick up the machine, give them a replacement, and then sell them a new Copiograph machine as well.” He pauses. “That was the plan.”

“And what happened?”

“When I got to Manchester, I couldn’t find the bank. At first I thought I’d forgotten the correct street, so I drove around and around. Then I consulted my address book. I had the right address.” Sexton leans back against the bench. He opens his palms.

“There was nothing there,” he says. “Just a building. No sign. Nothing. I tried to find out if the bank had moved and had notified the head office instead of me. But no — the bank had simply failed.” Sexton puts his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. In the flat light of a late-November afternoon, Honora thinks he looks years older than he did just the week before.

“Overnight,” he says.

For suppers, Honora serves baked macaroni and stewed tomatoes, or codfish cakes and white sauce. She watches the pennies closely and consults her recipe book for meals that are both filling and cheap. Sexton reads the paper almost incessantly, as if the words there might rearrange themselves into more palatable stories. He sits at the table with one of his adding machines, calculating and recalculating the sums, but no matter how many times he reconfigures the numbers, the end result is always the same: Sexton Beecher has risked everything he owned on the eve of the single biggest economic disaster in American history.

Honora finds a large rectangle of lavender glass. She discovers, half buried in the sand, a nugget of such vivid blue that she thinks at first it is a piece of cloth. When she holds it up to the light, the shard takes on an inner glow of smooth teal, a color unlike anything she has ever seen before at the beach. She hesitates over a round starburst in the sand, thinking, despite the season, that it might be a jellyfish. But when she dares to poke it with her finger, she discovers that it is the bottom of a crystal goblet, the stem snapped off at the base, the crystal battered and misshapen, but a treasure nevertheless.

She tells herself that Sexton will pull through this difficult patch, that marriage is about surviving the bad times as well as enjoying the good. She has imaginary conversations with her mother in which Alice Willard gives advice about how to live with a preoccupied husband in the same way she might tell Honora that a woman can make her own cake flour by combining regular flour and cornstarch, and that vinegar is best for windows.

  Alice Willard