Sea Glass (21 page)

  Honora

The front room hums with the sort of activity it has not seen in years, not, perhaps, since the unwed mothers sat in lively groups, drinking tea (Honora imagines them knitting baby garments) and occasionally glancing out to sea.

Prevent Hunger in Ely Falls,
she types. Her fingers are a blur over the familiar keys, the enamel ovals in their silver rings. She has not lost her dexterity, not since the days when she was recording Sexton’s sales pitch in the paneled rooms of banks. In the corner, her husband’s arm is making repetitive round pumps at the Copiograph machine. As each copy is shunted out, he inspects the sheet and then sets it aside on a makeshift table fashioned the night before from a door he took off its hinges and laid over two sawhorses he found in the cellar. He has dressed in his best gabardine trousers (his Sunday-go-to-meeting trousers, Harold might have said) and a shirt kept for special occasions (though there have been precious few special occasions since Christmas). Honora, when she glances up, thinks that it has been some time since she has seen her husband with this much
snap.

Dread poverty threatens thousands of Ely Falls workers,
she types as the man named Mironson dictates the words from a sheet of paper in his hands. He brushes a long hank of hair from his forehead. He is a small, almost delicate man, his mouth, with its pronounced bow, nearly that of a woman, and so at odds, Honora thinks, with his professed calling as a union organizer — as if a priest had come calling in overalls, or an artist had on a clerical collar. At the opposite end of the room, Quillen McDermott, in blue shirtsleeves, is collating and stapling a newsletter. The boy, Alphonse, is bundling batches of leaflets together with string. Vivian, in crisp white linen pants and a blouse, is holding a copy of the newsletter and pacing.

“You can’t be serious,” Vivian says to no one in particular, exhaling a long plume of blue smoke. “You can’t print this drivel.”

McDermott and Mironson glance up at her.

“Listen to this,” she says, hooting to the room at large.
“In the industrial depression you did take a noble part / And ungrumbling shared the leanness of the floundering textile mart.”

McDermott gives a small chuckle, and even Mironson seems abashed. “It was a strike song in New Bedford,” he says.

“I can’t even say the words, never mind sing them,” Vivian says. “And
textile mart?
”

Mironson brushes his hair off his face again. “The idea is to print politically inspiring poetry or songs. It doesn’t really matter if they scan,” he says.

“I think it matters if one can actually say them without gagging,” she says, taking another delicate pull on her cigarette and holding the offensive doggerel away from her.

“Hear, hear,” says Ross from the corner.

“Do you think you can do better?” Mironson asks Vivian.

Vivian appraises him coolly, and Honora wonders if Mironson means this as a reprimand or a challenge.

“I could try,” Vivian says.

“It’s yours, then,” Mironson says — a leader used to delegating.

As if there were nothing at all out of the ordinary in the previous exchange, Vivian sits near the makeshift table with the newsletter on her lap. She searches in her purse and removes a golf pencil. “When was the industrial depression?” she asks innocently.

“The mills have been in a depression since twenty-four,” Mironson says.

“Oh,” Vivian says, pursing her lips. Honora watches her write a word on the piece of paper in her lap.

“Employment and sources of livelihood are as of today eliminated by the shutdown of eleven Ely Falls mills,”
Mironson dictates just behind Honora’s shoulder. Almost simultaneously she types the words, thinking as she does so that perhaps Vivian might want to take a look at this particular leaflet as well.
“It is no answer to say that this condition is a situation of their own making,”
Mironson dictates.

“Who is this going to?” Honora asks.

“It’s an appeal for funds. It will be distributed in mills, union halls, sporting events, and working-class neighborhoods in this and surrounding towns.”

“Wouldn’t you want an appeal for funds to go to people who have money?”

“Yes, of course,” Mironson says. “But this is more of an appeal for solidarity.”

“I see,” says Honora, though she is not entirely sure that she does see. If the objective is to relieve hunger, she thinks, leaflets directed at the owners of shops and grocery stores and churches and social clubs might make more sense. But she doesn’t quite have enough of Vivian’s gumption to object.

“It is a self-evident fact that a continuation of this lack of means of earning a living will reduce Ely Falls textile workers to a state of absolute destitution,”
Mironson reads.

“Suffering Jesus,” Ross says from the corner.

Seven men and the boy spent the night sleeping in bedrolls in the previously empty bedrooms upstairs. Shortly after Sexton arrived with the other men in the bread truck, and McDermott and the fellow named Ross saw the typewriter and the Fosdick Copiograph machine, and, more important, Honora guesses, the empty house far from town — a house at which no one would ever think to look for strike leaders — Ross and the man named Mahon went back to the city and returned with Mironson and three others. By then Vivian had come from her house with a beach wagon full of provisions: a leg of lamb, a roast chicken, vegetables, butter and bread, milk, several bottles of wine, and all the silver and glassware and china from her own house — real silver, real crystal, and delicate porcelain plates (“I never eat anyway,” Vivian said). Honora cooked the dinner and baked another pie. Sexton set up the sawhorses and the door in the front room, and Honora put her mother’s tablecloth over it to make a dining table. The meal seemed more like a feast than the simple feeding of mill workers and strike leaders, and the wine disappeared as if it were water. Sexton, who had by then already quickly bathed and changed his clothes, sat at the middle of the table and, with his salesman’s charm and affability dusted off, began to shed his aura of failure and despair — so much so that when Honora finally was alone with him in their bedroom after midnight (both of them exhausted and, for the first time in weeks, overfed), she found it impossible to summon the anger of earlier in the day. Chastising her husband for not having told her about the strike seemed absurd in the face of the astonishing arrival of the strike leaders themselves. Besides, having words with Sexton would have required whispering, since both were acutely aware of not being alone together in their own house for the first time since they had entered it. Sexton did not move to touch her, and she thought that he was perhaps too self-conscious about the other men. In any event, Honora was relieved.

The men had their own bedrolls, though Honora had had to find extra towels and soap. She worried for the boy, who was sleeping among so many men, but then she saw that McDermott was looking out for his young charge. As she lay in her bed, unable to sleep, she could hear the men snoring, even over the sound of the surf outside.

Vivian had gone back to her own house, and briefly Louis Mironson had gone with her, needing to use the telephone there. Honora, who found sleep impossible, slipped downstairs to cut the precious grapefruit that Vivian had brought, to get a head start on breakfast. She was in the kitchen when Mironson came back into the house through the porch, his feet still bearing traces of wet sand; and for a few moments they sat together in the kitchen, each with a glass of milk. He’d walked back along the beach, carrying his shoes but still in his coat and tie, guided by the moonlight, he said, adding that it had been some time since he had spent any length of time near the ocean. He was grateful to her, he said, for letting them use the house. She asked him if he was married, if he had a family, and he said no, that he’d been traveling up and down the east coast for several years now and that he hadn’t found anyone with whom to settle down. The work was too important and too urgent, he said, and she noted that he nearly added
too dangerous
but stopped himself. He looked away and thanked her and said that there might be more people coming from time to time and would that be all right, and Honora said it didn’t seem to be her decision to make. He would see to it, he said, that she and Sexton were given money as compensation. If she would help with the cooking, he said, he would be most grateful, but he would arrange for provisions. It did not escape Honora’s notice that it was she and not Sexton with whom Mironson seemed to be making the deal.

A woman named Sadie, a “comrade from New York,” might be joining them at some point, he said, assessing Honora’s response to the charged word.

“You’re a Communist,” Honora said.

“Yes,” Mironson said. “I am. The others are not, though.”

“Why are you and they working together?”

“This country has a long history of spontaneous strikes becoming interchangeable with the frankly revolutionary.”

“In other words,” Honora said, “you’re using each other.”

“In a nutshell, yes,” Mironson said.

He added that Honora shouldn’t expect much help from Sadie in the kitchen; she wasn’t that sort of woman. Honora stood and took the empty milk glasses to the sink and washed them.

“Well, good night,” he said, standing as well, and Honora was surprised to see how short he was. He unrolled his trousers, leaving a dusting of sand on the floorboards. He tried to pick the sand up with his fingers. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” she said. “I’ve got a broom.”

“This is important, you know,” he said.

“I can’t pretend to understand this,” she said.

“There’s not a lot to understand,” he said. “The workers and their families are living like dogs.”

And Honora thought that Louis Mironson might be surprised at how much she knew about living like a dog.

In the morning, Vivian returned early, looking polished and nearly luminous in a peach linen ensemble, while behind her a man named Ellis brought in carton after carton of food that challenged Honora’s organizational skills in the kitchen, though it was a lovely task to have to put it all away on her shelves and in her icebox. Vivian credited Jack Hess with supplying the food, though it was perfectly obvious that Vivian was funding the provisioning. In her dressing gown, Honora fixed a breakfast of eggs and bacon and ham and toast and coffee — along with the precious grapefruit — as one by one the men and the boy came downstairs, looking a bit shy and sleepy. They once again ate in the front room, the sun from the east bathing the incongruous scene in a light that made them all squint. The boy, Honora noted with satisfaction, had four eggs, a toast-and-bacon sandwich of his own making, and a delicate porcelain cupful of milky coffee. After the meal, McDermott sent Alphonse into the kitchen to help with the dishes, and though Honora intended to ask him only to dry them, she noted that he had finished washing them almost before she’d had time to put the food away.

“You’re good at this,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“You’ve had a lot of practice, then.”

“I have,” he said. “But . . .” He paused.

“But what?” she asked gently.

“Well, this is easy, isn’t it?” he blurted. “The water coming hot from the tap.”

“You don’t have hot water?” she said.

“No, ma’am.”

Honora nodded and thought maybe she didn’t know what it was to live like a dog after all.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to print this
workers of the world unite
guff,” Vivian is saying as she reads a fresh copy of the first pages of the newsletter.

“Miss Burton,” Mironson says quietly, turning in her direction, “though the immediate issue to hand is the wage cut and the appalling conditions of the workers in Ely Falls, the underlying problems are far graver.”

“Maybe so,” Vivian says, “but I don’t believe for one minute that the men and women who show up on your picket line on Monday give a toss about the . . .” Vivian checks the wording in the newsletter,
“the sharp struggle furnishing irrefutable proof of the process by which the inner contradictions of capitalism in the imperialist period bring on economic struggles which speedily take on a political character.”

“Jesus Christ,” Ross says from a corner of the room, where he is placing bound packets of leaflets into boxes. Mironson shoots him a quick look, as if to say,
Who asked you?

“What I imagine the workers will be concerned about on Monday,” Vivian says, “— this is going out on Monday, correct?”

Mironson nods.

“Is food for their families, how they’re going to pay the rent, why are they striking — that is to say, what’s the immediate reason for the strike — how long is it going to last, where are they supposed to go, and what are they supposed to do. And I imagine they’re going to want to know something about the consequences of what they’re doing as well. You know, will they lose their jobs ultimately, even if the bosses capitulate? That sort of thing.”