Grace headed back to the kitchen. “Lint,” she said. “Marks on the walls. Fingerprints everywhere.” She walked sideways.
“A lovely day,” her husband agreed.
Then English was lost, and he wanted to go home. Not to his room with the unmade bed and the picture of John F. Kennedy on the wall, but to his family’s farmhouse in Prairie, Kansas, and to his childhood, and to his dead mother and father.
Grace stayed in the kitchen with the food, which turned out to be roast beef, while Sands and English talked, fairly easily, about things having to do with WPRD. They named names, recalled episodes, chuckled over the mistakes of others. Sands gave English all the beer he wanted, and English found he wanted a lot. English asked Sands about the complicated business of getting a radio station started in a small town. How happy he was when Sands decided to lay out all the details for him, applications, permits, licenses, appearances before boards of idiots and commissions of dunderheads, so that for his part he only had to nod and go, “Oh, really?” or “Wow, fascinating,” or “Oh, I had no idea.”
The hostess ran a race between the kitchen and her big dining table, faster and faster, moving a mountain of food one plateful at a time and continually talking to herself: “
That’s
not where you go. You go
here,
and
you
go
here,
and where do
you
supposed to go, where do
you
supposed to go?”
She was a mystery to English. Throughout the dinner—which was very good, he thought, and she evidently had no trouble concocting things among burners and timers and bells that jangled a person’s mind—Grace would fog over and leave the world around her, but then suddenly grow sharp and decisive about issues that just weren’t real. When she said something crazy, Sands was deaf. When she talked sense, he responded as if absolutely charmed.
“How is your place?” he asked English. “Your apartment.”
“Oh,” English said, “it’s very nice. It’s not an apartment, exactly, more like a room. Everybody’s very nice.”
“Who’s nice?” Grace said.
“I mean the people around me, the other roomers.”
“You get to know them?” She leaned forward with an interest that seemed quite false.
“Well, you know—they come and go, I guess. But there’s two or three who’ve been there as long as I have. We say hello, we sit in the foyer down there and talk sometimes.” This was a lie.
“You should get to know your neighbors,” Grace said. She was about to wipe her hands on her apron, and then, apparently just realizing that she was wearing it, she pushed her chair back, stood up, and reached around behind her back to untie it, clawing upward at the bow behind her neck with some small alarm. On the front of her apron was the slogan
When It’s Smokin’ It’s Cookin’ and When It’s Black It’s Done
.
Ray Sands dabbed at his lips with his napkin and then said, “Grace. Here. Here.” He stood up and loosened the bow for her. They both sat back down. Grace was still wearing her apron, and now she wiped her hands across the breast of it.
English said, “This is—
wonderful
stuff, Grace. Really. I didn’t expect to get a home-cooked meal any time soon.”
“Thank you very, very much,” she said.
“We knew you’d been on your own all month, so we thought we’d better have you over,” Sands told him. “I realize your schedule doesn’t give you much chance to get acquainted around town.”
“Well, I just have to thank you,” English said, suddenly actually feeling grateful. “It’s a really nice gesture.”
“Doesn’t Polly—what’s her name, now?”
“Polly—I can’t remember her last name,” English said. Polly was one of the receptionists at WPRD.
“Right, yes. Doesn’t she live in the same rooming house?”
“I’ve never seen her around there.”
“Maybe it’s another one,” Sands decided. He seemed unaware that his wife had stopped eating anything and was now staring at English with a kind of sinister, amused recognition—one thief to another.
“A nice lady,” Grace said. “I like to know her.”
“She’s really a very nice person,” Ray Sands agreed.
“Right,” English said. “I’m sure she’s a very nice person.”
“I mean take the time.” Grace was still looking at him with a smoky knowledge in her eyes. “I mean really know her,” she said. “Really.”
“Well,” Ray Sands said. “And isn’t there some dessert?”
This question pulled the rug right out from under her. “Des
sert
?” she said.
“I believe you’ve got some dessert for us?”
“Dessert.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I do,” she said. She seemed to be travelling through a long tunnel to reach this dinner conversation. “And I got something else!” She stood up and took off her apron without any trouble and went, taking the tiny steps of a bulky old woman, through the living room and out through the sliding doors. Her dress was gay and printed with flowers, like the upholstery she passed. English saw that she wore knee stockings rolled down to her ankles and huge black shoes that tied with laces. He heard her going up the stairs:
clump, clump; clump, clump,
getting both feet firmly on each stair step before trying the next one.
Outdoors, the sunlight was leaving the world. Ray Sands walked through the living room and dining room, turning on the lamps.
Now English had no more polite remarks to deliver. He watched the dregs of dinner grow cold while Sands went into the kitchen and came out with some ice cream in three tapered sundae dishes, and three long spoons, keeping pretty quiet himself.
By the clumping of Grace’s big black shoes, she was just overhead; now she was coming down the stairs again, and now she was back in the living room, carrying a green gift-wrapped package just about the right size—English was trying to guess —for a truly massive cigar, and in her other hand a color photograph in a gold frame. Grace set the picture on the table, right in front of a chair, as if its subject were joining them for dessert: a young man with a fat face, a mustache, and clear blue eyes. He wore a hunter’s red cap.
She put the gift before her husband.
“How wonderful!” Sands said. “And I’ve got something for you, Grace.”
Hidden behind the couch he had a fair-sized package wrapped in alabaster gift paper with shiny red stripes on it and a green bow tied by a professional. He set it before her and they both opened these gifts with a thunderstorm of paper and appropriate small cries of thanks. Grace’s was an espresso coffeepot. Mr. Sands got an engine for an electric train.
Now English was afraid he’d overlooked some custom of exchange. “I’m sorry I didn’t bring any presents for you guys. In Kansas we don’t give presents for New Year’s, not that I know of.”
“It’s not a Massachusetts custom, either. But it happens to be our forty-second anniversary.”
“Our son,” Grace said, pointing at the picture sitting across the table from English.
“We give thanks to God,” Sands said, “by giving gifts to each other.”
English couldn’t believe his ears.
“We can’t give anything to God,” Grace explained, “so we give gifts to each other.”
“That’s—really great,” he told them both, not sure to what the hell he himself was referring.
“Bud got a personal friendship with Bishop Andrew.” It seemed she was talking to the photograph. “The Bishop!”
“We’re not going to help you with the dishes,” Sands let her know. “I’m going to show Lenny my trains.”
Grace said, “He gonna show you the
trains.”
“Oh, good. Good,” English said.
“We’ll be back down in a minute.”
“Oh,” Grace said, “good.”
Sands didn’t give him a tour of the upstairs, which English didn’t want to see anyway. Instead, he took English directly to a tiny room filled with his electric train set and switched on a hooded lamp hanging, somewhat like an oppressive sun, over a landscape set on plywood and held up by sawhorses, with a little margin of space to walk around it in. The room smelled like wood.
As Sands put his new engine on the track and sent it whirling around the circuit, a figure eight with an S in the middle of each circle, English got the notion that WPRD was really just an extension of his employer’s zeal for such contraptions. Sands didn’t treat his train set like a toy. He was calm and scientific, making sure everything worked, track switches and so forth, before he hooked a few other cars to the engine.
“I’ve had this setup for twenty-five years,” Sands said.
Now Sands let him turn the dial up and down on the transformer, making the train go fast and slow.
“We’ve been in this house, I guess, oh, seven years,” Sands estimated for him.
Rather than feeling the mild interest or mild boredom he usually experienced when faced with other people’s stupid passions, English felt his heart rising in his throat. Now that they were alone, he wanted to ask Sands what he thought they were doing, spying on innocent citizens.
The only light in the room shone down on the train. The train hissed and clicked over the track past minuscule barnyards and brief main streets—church, post office, general store—bounded at either end by nothing. It went over a bridge where it was summer and through a blue-and-white mountain where it was winter. English found that if he kept his vision narrowed to clock nothing but this journey alongside little cows and tiny sheep and miniature frozen townspeople and farmers, it was almost as much fun as a ride on an actual train. The disappointing part was coming around again to find the figures always in the middle of the same drama, over and over. On the other hand, he saw how that might sometimes be a comfort to a person’s mind.
Sands took over the controls and showed him how to back the train into a siding and under a water tank without any water in it. Then Sands put some water from a dropper into the engine’s smokestack, and plopped in a white pill from a bottle he kept in a leather box beneath the table. As he sent the train on its way now, it gave out puffs of white smoke; also, he pushed a button that made it whistle.
Although English knew it was his sacred duty as Sands’s hireling to resent him, he saw that his boss was no monster. Just like his train, Sands checked through a set world, one circumscribed by the scratchy records of his radio station, and the dull shimmer of the backdrop curtain in his studio, and his demented wife’s dusting and polishing of totally false memories—“We don’t have any children,” he told English at one point. “That picture is one of my nephew. He lives in the Philippines”—and it was Sands’s job to step out of this zone now and then only to bear witness to adultery or to ascertain that missing persons were truly and forever lost. “Bishop Andrew,” he said, “has never visited me. I don’t know where she gets her ideas. I don’t know what’s wrong with her.”
This was too intimate for English. The threat of a sudden unmasking, of revelations so embarrassing he couldn’t stand them, got him onto the subject he’d been afraid to raise. “Mr. Sands. Don’t you ever wonder about what we do?”
Sands glanced at him and then was reabsorbed by his train.
“I mean—I heard you talking about God, and”—English was nervous, couldn’t get his thoughts straight—“how does that tie in with the nature of our work, is what I’m asking about.”
“It’s a tough job,” Sands said, turning off his train.
“I feel bad about spying around on Marla Baker,” English said.
“It’s a very difficult business.”
These sideways answers made English feel weak. “Do you have any idea what kind of information I’m gathering here? I mean, for what purpose? Is it legal stuff? Is it a divorce thing, or what?”
“Judgments as to the
kinds
of information are things we just don’t make. What use the client makes of it, whether these things are good or bad—well, your best bet is to stop following that line of thought. Stop thinking. Look at it this way. We deal in information. Any great involvement in what we’re passing along would be like the mailman opening your letters for his own amusement. Try and see yourself in a role like the mailman’s.”
“This woman’s sexual preference is going to be used against her.”
“That’s a fair assumption.”
“You want to be a part of that?”
“Things are occurring. You’re recording those things and listening to those things, and passing the information along.”
“Well, the information I’m passing along to you right now is, I think this woman’s sex life is going to be used against her.”
“I’ve already stated I’m cognizant of that.” To English he seemed so dry. He was like paper. His skin, everything.
But Sands wasn’t just a case of personal emptiness, English could see that. He had some inner power to be mild, it showed in the way he dealt with Grace. He accepted her blandly and totally. English saw how you could love somebody like that. After a number of years none of the usual things would matter. It was hard to come up with a judgment against one or two activities of an electric train enthusiast who knew how to love without hope.