Baker Towers (19 page)

The officer wouldn’t let her drive home afterward. Sandy took the wheel instead. When Joyce returned from failing her test, he was leaning against the registration counter joking with the clerk, a stout, matronly woman who’d held up the line to bring him a cream-filled doughnut.

“Weren’t you nervous?” she asked him later. “She could have asked to see your license.”

“Nah. I’m a good driver. I don’t need a stinking license.”

She watched him weave expertly through the Saturday traffic.
He’s probably right,
she thought. Her brother seemed to have an instinctive gift for steering around obstacles. Because of his charm or his looks, or simply because he expected them to, people liked him. And if military life had taught her anything, it was this: if the right people liked you, the rules often did not apply. The realization had stunned her—its unfairness, its cruelty. Joyce had never charmed anyone in her life. It had never occurred to her to try.

Sandy hit the gas and raced through a yellow light. If he weren’t her
brother, if she’d met him somewhere out in the world—at school or in the service—she’d have disliked him on sight: his slouching posture, the palpable male confidence that hummed around him like an electrical field. His laziness would have infuriated her; his contempt for authority would have seemed a personal affront. But he was not a stranger. Lazy or not, cocky or not, Sandy was hers. Even his charm was forgivable. In some way it, too, belonged to her.

L
ICENSE IN HAND
, Joyce faced other hurdles. The drive itself, for one, a nerve-shattering experience that left both her and Rose sweating and irritable. They were an hour late for Rose’s first appointment. Joyce had stopped twice to ask directions; she had taken a series of wrong turns and nearly collided with another car when she drove through a stoplight. The parking garage mystified her; she had parked illegally on the street and would almost certainly get a ticket. Still, they had made it.
We’re here,
she thought.

The treatments themselves were not painful. Rose sat for forty minutes in a tiny room, in what looked like a dentist’s chair, her lap draped in a lead apron. A nurse instructed her to keep her eyes closed as the room was bombarded with brilliant light. Afterward she had a slight headache, but felt much like herself. The misery came the following day, a violent nausea that left her trembling and soaked with perspiration, so weak she could barely stand. This lasted for several days. When the nausea left her, she was extraordinarily tired. By the time she felt better, it was time for another treatment. Joyce helped her into the car, which they had both come to view as an instrument of torture. Rose had lost much of her sight. She complained that everything looked fuzzy, even her hand in
front of her face. She had lost weight and was sick with dread of what lay ahead of her.
What am I doing?
Joyce thought.
What am I doing to my mother?

The appointments were mostly on Saturday afternoons, but twice Joyce had to miss a day of work. This attracted some attention at the factory. Finally she explained the situation to Alvin Blick.

“Well, now,” he said, scratching his head. “They
are
called sick days, but the idea is that you’re the one who’s sick. You can’t go taking them when other people are sick.” He smiled, showing his bad teeth. “Can’t your mother get to the hospital by herself?”

“No,” said Joyce. “She’s—” She had never said it aloud before. It seemed a terrible betrayal. “Going blind,” she finished.

Blick nodded, as though this were to be expected. “Mine’s hard of hearing. Old age is no picnic.” He rose. “I don’t know what to tell you, Joyce. You’re one of my best girls. I’d hate to lose you.”

She watched him go, thinking how she was already lost.

S
ALVATION CAME
in a phone call.

“Miss Novak?” said a deep male voice. “It’s Ed Hauser, at the high school.”

In the next room, Rose and Lucy were eating dinner. They’d set a place for Sandy, but he hadn’t come home from school. Joyce had no idea where he could be. She prepared herself for the worst.

“Is everything all right?” she asked, her voice small.

“Oh, yes. In fact, I’m hoping you’ll consider this good news. I have a proposition for you.” It took her a moment to absorb what he was saying. The school secretary
was in the hospital—her baby had arrived sooner than expected—and he needed a replacement immediately. He was offering her the job.

“Why me?” said Joyce.

“You come highly recommended. Viola Peale was in my office today singing your praises. She can’t say enough about you, which is fairly remarkable considering she hasn’t spoken a word to me in five years.” He paused. “I’m hoping you can start Monday. Are you interested?”

“Yes,” she said simply. “But don’t I have to have an interview, or something?”

Hauser laughed. “The school day begins at seven-thirty. Interview at seven-fifteen.”

And on Monday morning, Joyce Novak went back to school.

T
he Bakerton Volunteer Fire Company sat at the corner of Main Street and Susquehanna Avenue, the busiest corner in town. Across the street was Keener’s Diner, a bowling alley and a pool hall. Weekend evenings, after dances or football games, these places were crowded with teenagers. On warm nights the firemen set up folding chairs on the sidewalk and watched the girls go by, calling to the pretty ones who walked in pairs or threes down Main Street. Long shadows in the summer evening, a shimmery trail of female laughter.

The firemen were mostly single, mostly young. During the late forties and fifties they were all veterans, as if having once presented themselves for danger, they now did so routinely, without ceremony, as a matter of course. By day or night they worked in the mines; in their off-hours they congregated at the fire hall (
far hole
), playing pool or Ping-Pong, drinking coffee or Coca-Cola, sober always, just in case. They came from Little Italy, Polish Hill, the outlying farm country; from nearby towns like Kinport or Coalport, too small to support companies of their own. Even a volunteer
company had expenses: clothing, equipment, upkeep on the trucks. To raise money they held Saturday-night dances in the hall. Two weekends a month, the floor was cleared. A band set up in the corner. Teenagers waited in line at the door.

For several months in 1941 and ’42, George Novak’s band had played the fire-hall dances, until the drummer and the trumpeter and finally the whole combo was drafted. For a few years Bakerton made do with phonograph records. It seemed that every musician in the county had been taken away.

At eight o’clock the dancing began. First the steady couples. Then pairs of girls—giggling, spunky girls who refused to stand by and wait. For a long time the boys did not dance, just walked in a slow circle around the dance floor—boys like Sandy Novak, slouching a little, a plastic comb peeking out the back pocket of his dungarees. Week after week they walked the Bakerton Circle, eyeing the girls on the dance floor. The circle moved counterclockwise, an orderly parade, as though someone had planned it that way. In nearby towns people laughed at the Bakerton boys: could you beat it, paying a quarter to walk in circles all evening? Nobody knew how the custom had started. Some things would always be.

In the second week of August, Bakerton hosted the Firemen’s Festival—to the men, Holy Week in a year of Ordinary Time. For three days the firemen came, volunteer companies from across Saxon County, to drink and game at the booths set up along Baker Street. Friday night was the Battle of the Barrel. Men from two companies squared off, tug-of-war style. Above their heads was a rope tied between two telephone poles; hanging from the rope was a barrel filled with water. Each man was given a long wooden pole, to swat the barrel toward the other side, dousing his opponents with cold water. By the time the contest was over, both sides were soaked. The men wore their wet clothes proudly. For the rest of the
evening they were regarded as celebrities—greeted with laughter and slaps on the back, treated to cups of yellow beer at the booths all over town.

Saturday afternoon was the firemen’s parade. Up front, in a shining convertible, sat the Fire Queen: the prettiest girl from Bakerton High, handpicked by the firemen themselves. Next the pumpers came. Bleary, liquor-sick, wearing full equipment in the August heat, the men waved to the spectators from atop their trucks, hundreds of them, standing three deep along the parade route. Each truck stopped briefly at the judging stand, a platform of wooden risers stacked before the fire hall. Two or three men dropped down from the truck and opened all its doors. A voice over the loudspeaker gave its weight and dimensions and pumping capacity. For each engine, polite applause—for the fortieth truck, the fiftieth; to the untrained eye indistinguishable from the ones that came before. Shouts and whoops were reserved for the local boys, and in one unforgettable year, a standing ovation for Bakerton’s brand-new Mack ladder truck, a slick red monster with bulging wheel wells and gleaming chrome. The truck cost $2,500, what a miner earned in a year. A sum raised through five years of fire-hall dances, ten thousand teenage nights walking the Bakerton Circle.

I
n the spring of 1954, defying all predictions, Sandy Novak graduated high school. A photo was taken at his commencement: Sandy in cap and gown, his mortarboard slightly askew; Sandy surrounded, as always, by women. Joyce in a summer suit and pearls, her lips pursed; Rose stout and white-haired, clutching her pocketbook. Lucy round-faced, suntanned, her black hair in braids. Dorothy’s eyes closed, her hat askew. Only Sandy is smiling, showing beautiful teeth; the Hollywood version of a high school graduate.

The photo, like all photos, raises a question: Who took the picture? Who, in those days, even owned a camera? Georgie, Dorothy would later claim. Joyce disagreed: he hadn’t even attended the ceremony. Lucy suspected one of Sandy’s girlfriends. No one remembered that the photographer was Ed Hauser, the high school principal; that he and Joyce had started dating that spring. He was the sort of man whose actions are forgotten, a mild but capable man whose sins and virtues alike go unnoticed.

After graduation Sandy moved to Cleveland with his buddy Dick
Devlin, whose brother was a foreman at Fisher Body and got them jobs on the line, building chassis for Pontiacs and Chevies. For the first time since Dorothy was born, the house on Polish Hill had an empty bedroom. Joyce spent a Saturday painting the walls lavender, Lucy’s favorite color. She bought a matching rug and a flowered spread for the bed, and at the age of eleven, nearly twelve, Lucy moved into her own room. Her parochial school jumpers were hung in the closet. Under the bed she stacked her board games—Monopoly, Parcheesi and Candy Land, which she had outgrown but secretly played when she was alone. She went to bed every night at nine-thirty and lay awake for hours, waiting for the house to quiet. Then, when her sister was asleep, she tiptoed across the hall and climbed into bed with her mother.

I
n later years, a number of people would ask Dorothy why she’d left Washington. If she responded at all, she would answer vaguely, airily—
I can’t remember, exactly.
With a wave of the hand, an absent smile. Still a young woman, she had acquired a spinsterish charm.

Her mother and sister asked; her brother Georgie; a woman sitting beside her on the train back to Pennsylvania. Mag Spangler’s mother—in the late fifties, when Dorothy went into the shop to buy a hat for Rose’s funeral. Doctors, again and again, old men in dark suits, in white coats; men who wore spectacles or whiskers or vests and shirtsleeves. To all of them, but to the men especially, she would find the truth unspeakable: that she had left because of the bleeding.

If only it had come on schedule, the same time every month. Her sister’s cycle was as brisk and efficient as Joyce herself. Her periods had begun when Dorothy was in high school, and for a brief time, as if by magic, Dorothy’s bleeding became regular, too. The same thing happened while she lived with Patsy Sturgis. On its own, her body seemed uncertain
what to do; she needed another girl close by to show her the way. She needed someone to follow. It was a sensation she had felt all her life.

She had learned to sense it coming: pain in her breasts, a certain taste in her mouth. Agitated, perspiring, she lay awake waiting. A day, two days would pass. Then something inside her would uncoil, and out of her a deep peace would flow.

H
ER LAST WINTER IN
Washington she could not bleed. Months passed. A strange anxiety gnawed her stomach. She imagined a mass growing inside her, a soft cancer filled with blood.

It came furiously, as in her nightmares, a hot lick of blood trailing down her leg. It was a Monday afternoon in February, a crisp rain turning to sleet. She’d returned from lunch and was sitting at her desk. When she rose she felt wetness between her legs. She looked down and saw a dark pool on her chair. She sat down quickly, her mind racing, her face hot and full of blood.

Around her the office ticked away: thundering typewriters, a ringing telephone, a chirping voice answering
hello.
Finally she rose, taking her coat from the rack near her desk. She put it on quickly and hurried to the washroom.

She closed herself in a stall and sat there bleeding. Winter light grayed the frosted windowpanes. Women came in and out, and she thought about the stain on her chair. Someone would see it, perhaps already had. There was nothing she could do.

She listened to the hiss of the boiler, phones ringing in the office beyond. At last chairs scraped the linoleum; a hundred pairs of shoes shuffled down the hall. Behind the wall the elevators groaned. She counted
the trips up and down, up and down: the office emptying out, the workers carried to the street below. At last the building quieted.