Sea Glass (32 page)

  Honora

Honora sets her suitcase on the slab of granite. Alphonse, returning from the beach wagon, picks it up, his shoulder hitched for balance.

“It’s very heavy,” she says.

“I’ve got it,” he says.

His face has filled out some around his eyes, so that his features are no longer quite as comical as they used to be. And there is something sad in his mouth that will never go away. Vivian has taken Alphonse to her own hairdresser, a woman named Irma in Exeter, for a haircut, but still the boy’s hair grows forward and wants to spike.

The year is 1930. A September day. Not quite an ordinary day.

Vivian, in a milk blue wool dress, emerges from the hallway with a wooden caddy of flatware. She holds it aloft, a hostess with a plate of hors d’oeuvres. “I left the kettle and the teapot and two cups in the kitchen,” she says. “Thought you might want one last cup of tea. Or am I wrong? Do you want to go straightaway?”

“No,” Honora says, “a cup of tea might be good. All the stuff is here in the hall. Alphonse can just keep making trips. The only thing that will be a problem for him is that rocker.”

“What are you going to do about the piano?” Vivian asks.

“I’m going to leave it,” Honora says. “It was here when I got here.”

“Whose is it?”

“I think it belongs to someone who used to live in the house,” she says. “I never felt that it was ours.”

“Oh, and by the way,” Vivian says, turning, “I couldn’t find the letter from the school. Are you sure you left it by the sink?”

“It was there this morning,” Honora says. “Maybe I put it in my pocketbook. I’ll check.”

In four days, Alphonse will begin classes at the Ely Day School in Ely. It will mean a two-mile walk to school, but Alphonse doesn’t seem to think that this will be a problem. Honora isn’t so sure about how he will manage during the winter months, but they will just have to figure that out when the time comes.

Vivian said that she had always wanted a house sitter, though it was perfectly apparent to Honora that the thought had never crossed Vivian’s mind until the very moment when she made the offer. The bank will take possession of Honora’s house on Friday. Honora doesn’t want to be here when it happens.

“Come stay with me until I go back to New York,” Vivian pleaded, “and then stay on through the winter. When I come in June, you can type my plays.”

A year ago, Honora would have refused Vivian’s offer. A year ago, Honora would have been unable to accept such overt charity. But not now. Not since that morning when McDermott spun in the middle of the floor and Vivian slipped with Alphonse to safety behind a sofa. It was the only way Honora could keep Alphonse with her, she realized at once, and so she said yes. Without a second thought.

One morning in mid-August, Alphonse took the trolley to the end of the Ely Road and walked the rest of the way to the beach. His brothers and sisters had all been divided up among their relatives, he said when Honora opened the door. He himself was being sent to his uncle Augustin and his aunt Louise in Lowell. He wanted to live with Honora instead, he said, and would that be all right? The boy’s chin was trembling, and Honora knew how much it had cost him to have to ask her this. She hugged the boy, and the two of them wept like infants on the granite doorstep.

Alphonse had lost his mother and McDermott — the two people he had loved most in the world. Sometimes it seems to Honora scarcely possible that the boy is still standing.

Honora fills the kettle and sets it on the stove, remembering the first day she entered this kitchen and found her way to the window and opened the shutters and saw the glass coated with a year or two of salt. The filmy light, like that from frosted glass, lit up an iron stove, its surface dotted with animal droppings. The oven door opened with a screech and bang that startled her.

She waits for the water to boil. She remembers how Sexton fixed the tap and how the faucet retched and spattered brown water into the sink.

For ten days in late July and early August, Honora took the trolley to the Ely Falls Hospital. She said hello to the policeman who guarded Sexton’s door — a man named Henry. She sat beside Sexton’s bed and knit a pair of socks. Though his leg was healing, her husband never spoke a word. Honora, after two or three days of frantic questioning, finally gave up trying. Sexton’s eyes had moved so close together that it seemed that only a thin bridge of bone separated them. He did not comb his hair. When his leg was healed, he would go to jail.

On the morning of the eleventh day, before Honora had had a chance to leave the house, two policemen came to her door. She gasped when she saw them, thinking they had come to shoot her. They searched every inch of the house and wanted to know where her husband was. She told them she had no idea.

Sexton Beecher had escaped from the hospital, they said. He had stolen a Ford.

He’s taken the open road, she thought but didn’t say.

She pours the boiling water into the teapot. “Alphonse, do you want some milk?” she calls into the hallway, eyeing the half pint of milk that is left.

“In a minute,” he says. “I’m almost finished.”

“I’ll come for the trial,” Vivian says, leaning on the counter.

“They don’t know when it will be,” Honora says.

“Only the two men have been charged?”

“They won’t give up the other names. They’re said to be protecting Jonathan Harding.”

“The bank president.”

“Yes.”

“Not the Klan, then.”

“No, not the Klan.”

“Have you heard from Sexton?” Vivian asks lightly.

Honora shakes her head. She does not believe she will ever hear from Sexton Beecher again. In her mind, she sees a map with threads of blue and pink roads, a small round dot moving along them.

The two women stand in the kitchen — Vivian against the lip of the sink, Honora by the icebox. “I don’t know if I’ll get back for Thanksgiving,” Vivian says. “It’s likely that we’ll have rehearsals.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Honora says. “I’m thinking that I might take Alphonse to Taft to see my mother.”

“Will you be able to travel then?” Vivian asks.

“I’ll be seven months along. I think it will be fine. If not, I won’t go.”

“I might come for Christmas, though.”

“Oh, would you?” Honora asks, brightening. “Alphonse would love that.”

“And your mother will come for the baby?” Vivian asks.

“I think so. She wants me to have it in a hospital.”

“Well, I should hope so,” Vivian says, slightly aghast.

Honora puts her cup in the sink. “You know,” she says, rinsing it, “there ought to be a word for when one’s most exciting — one’s most
joyful
— moments take place during a time that is grim and hard for others around you. I’ve been trying to think of such a word all week, but I haven’t found it yet.”

“You mean this summer?”

“Yes. Everyone in Ely Falls was suffering because of the strike, and we . . . well, we were having so much fun, weren’t we? And were living so well. Relatively.” She thinks a minute. “Well, not relatively at all. We were living well, period. Every weekend was a party.”

“War is like that,” Vivian says. “Men often speak about how they felt most alive — and most in love, for that matter — during wartime.”

“I loved McDermott,” Honora says.

“I know you did,” Vivian says.

“He was so good with Alphonse,” Honora says.

“Yes, he was.”

“He would be glad, wouldn’t he, that Alphonse is —”

Honora stops. She cannot go on. She takes Vivian’s cup and rinses it in the sink.

“I thought I would make an oyster chowder tonight,” Honora says. “Does that sound all right to you?”

“Sounds peachy.” Vivian lights a cigarette. “Want one?”

“No, thanks. I had to give them up.” She points to her stomach. “They make me nauseous.”

“Good,” Vivian says. “Filthy habit. I read in the paper today that the Ely Falls Mill is closing.”

“McDermott said that would happen.”

“Ironic, isn’t it?” Vivian says.

“The strikers win and then they have no jobs.”

“I can take Alphonse to school in the beach wagon for the first week,” Vivian says.

“That might be good. I think he’s very nervous about it.”

“As well he might be,” Vivian says. “We have to take him shopping. He needs clothes.”

“He certainly does,” Honora says.

“So do you, for that matter,” Vivian says.

“Actually,” Honora says, “I’d like to get some fabric and make maternity clothes. My mother is sending me patterns.”

“As long as I get to edit them,” Vivian says.

Honora smiles. “I don’t know what I’d have done if you hadn’t been here,” she says.

“Nonsense,” Vivian says. “You’re the strongest woman I know. That’s why Alphonse has come to you.”

“You know,” Honora says, “you read a word like
massacre
and you think, I know what that means. It means the slaughter of innocent people. And then you go on. You read another fact. You read the word
trial.
Or
conviction.
But then . . . when it happens to you, when you live the word, you realize that the word itself means nothing. It tells you nothing at all. It doesn’t begin to convey the horror, does it?”

“No,” Vivian says. “It doesn’t.”

“It was a bungle,” Honora says. “Just a terrible bungle.”

“Yes, it was.”

“There was nothing noble at all about what happened. About their deaths. No sacrifice. No honor. It was just a
bungle.
We should never have been there in the first place. It was a disastrous decision on Ross’s part. In that apartment, we were just sitting ducks.” Honora remembers the way the men in masks came through the door with their guns. The way Ross said
Oh, Jesus.

“You can’t do this,” Vivian says, crossing the room and taking Honora into her arms. “You have to stop. You simply have to stop.”

“I know,” she says.

“You can’t let Alphonse see you like this,” Vivian says.

Honora rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. “I know. I won’t.”

“Well,” Vivian says.

“Well,” Honora says. She looks around at the kitchen, nearly empty now. “Alphonse, come get your milk,” she calls into the hallway.

Alphonse enters the kitchen, swinging his arms to unkink them.

“We packed the glasses,” Honora says. “Just drink it from the bottle.”

Alphonse lifts the bottle of milk to his face. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve.

  Alphonse

He carries the last carton to the beach wagon, which is so full that you can’t even see out the back, and Alphonse thinks how strange it is that there is so much stuff when the house has always looked, well, kind of empty. But now he will have his own room at Miss Burton’s house, though she has said he will have to sleep in the cellar if he keeps calling her Miss Burton and so he is trying to remember to call her Vivian. But he will still call Mrs. Beecher Mrs. Beecher and he is relieved that she hasn’t asked him to call her Honora. Mrs. Beecher slides into the front seat, a carton of books on her lap. Alphonse crawls into the backseat and lies down over all the blankets and boxes with his head nearly touching the top of the car, and Miss Burton, Vivian, gets in and starts the beach wagon and then Mrs. Beecher says, “Wait, I nearly forgot,” and sets the carton on the front seat, gets out of the car again, leans in, and says to Vivian that she’ll be right back, she just left it on the landing. And then she is kind of running up the walkway and opening the front door, and Vivian turns to him and says, “Are you all right?” and he says he is just fine, though there is a sharp corner of a box sticking into his side, and then Mrs. Beecher is standing in the doorway with a white platter in her arms, and even from the beach wagon Alphonse can see how beautiful all the glass is in the sunlight.