Baker Towers (30 page)

Money was lost, money was won. It was a friendly game. If Angie lost more than he won, he figured that was the price of entertainment: movies, show tickets, nothing was free. If he wanted to win back some of his losings, Sandy pointed out, they could always pick up the game later, at the Vets.

And they did.

N
OTICES APPEARED
on church bulletin boards: available for babysitting, for housecleaning, to paint or repair or plow snow. Women peddled Tupperware and Avon cosmetics. The cold snap continued, and coal prices soared. Most of Bakerton had kept its coal stoves. They bought their house coal from Baker—they had to—at triple the usual cost.

“The bastards are gouging us blind,” Gene said, when Ev showed him the bill.

Ev kept her mouth shut. She was tired of hearing how the strike was almost over, how the cold weather would bring management to its knees. For two months she’d paid bills and bought groceries from Leonard’s college fund. He had skipped the eleventh grade and was now a senior in high school. Even if Gene went back to work tomorrow, there wouldn’t be time to recoup what she’d spent.

“Goddamn Baker,” said Gene. “They screwed us coming and going.”

No,
Ev wanted to say.
You did that to yourself.

A
T FIRST
Ed didn’t notice. After a few weeks it dawned on him: Dorothy spent every weekend at their house.

“What’s going on?” he asked Joyce. “What’s your brother up to?” Sandy had been in town for more than a month. What had brought him to Bakerton, Ed couldn’t imagine, but it certainly wasn’t Dorothy’s company.

Joyce hesitated. “They play cards,” she said. “Poker, I guess. He and Angelo.”

“Bernardi?” Ed howled. “Let me get this straight. Dorothy gets kicked out of her own house so the boys can play poker, and you haven’t raised hell about it? That’s not the Joyce I know. What gives?”

“It’s Sandy’s house, too,” she said meekly.

That, at least, made sense. Bernardi couldn’t take a breath without drawing Joyce’s fire. Her devotion to Sandy was equally blind.

“Let me go over there,” Ed said. “I’ll drive Dorothy home. Find out what’s going on.”

He came home that night reeking of cigar smoke. “A friendly game,” he explained. He was slightly drunk and had lost twenty dollars. He didn’t tell Joyce.

I
n late March, Baker Brothers came through with a new contract. The hourly raise was exactly what the union had asked.

“We did it!” Gene Stusick exclaimed from the podium. “We hung in there, and we got them by the short hairs.”

A vote was taken. Gene ordered a celebratory round of beers. But by now the men were sick of meeting, sick of drinking. They were sick to death of Gene Stusick.

The strike had lasted a hundred days, the longest in Bakerton’s history. Now the bowling alley resumed its regular hours. Women quit their jobs at the Quaker. Easter came and went. This year nobody cared much for celebrating. Everyone went back to work.

The snow melted. Sandy Novak wandered the town in his summer suits. There was no more Friday poker. The Bernardis and Poblockis were back on day shift. Dick Devlin worked Hoot Owl. Once or twice he and Sandy played pool, after Dick had slept off his shift.

One night the telephone rang. Dozing in front of the television, Sandy heard Dorothy’s soft “hello.”

A brief pause as she listened.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “There’s no one here by that name.”

When she woke the next morning, Sandy was gone.

F
orever after, when the story is told—in newspapers and on the radio, by public figures in commemorative addresses, by aged grandparents years later, when the world seems a safer place—the telling begins, rightly, with the weather. So: that December was the warmest on record. On Polish Hill, Evelyn Stusick’s crocuses bloomed. Hunters rushed their kills to basement freezers. Christmas trees cut too early lost their needles in the heat.

At the diamond behind the junior high, jackets and sweaters were piled on bleachers. Boys ran the bases in their undershirts. The Knights of Columbus held a car wash in the Quaker parking lot. Tinsel Santas looked garish in the bright sun.

“June is bustin’ out all over,” said the weekend weatherman on KBKR. The barometric pressure stood at thirty and a half inches. It was a piece of information nobody registered: thirty inches of what? A week later, a generation of schoolchildren would know what it meant.

The false summer lasted through the weekend. Then, on Sunday night, a cold wind blew down from Canada. Monday morning the windows were crusted with ice. Coats were dug out of closets; hats and mufflers, boots and gloves. Winter came overnight for everyone but the miners. For them there was only one season. It was always fifty degrees underground.

T
HEY SAT IN THEIR USUAL SPOTS
—Mrs. Hauser at her desk, Susan Jevic at her smaller one in the front row—eating the lunches they had brought from home. Outside the snow had begun to fall. Joyce was relieved at the change in the weather: the balmy afternoons had made her pupils squirrelly. The last hour of each day had seemed interminable. Only Susan seemed interested in discussing
The Red Pony,
taking notes in her careful hand.

Joyce had taught eighth grade for just more than a year, taking over the classroom Viola Peale had surrendered when she retired. A few changes had been made since then: new desks, a filmstrip projector on a wheeled cart at the back of the room. Above the chalkboard hung a color portrait of the young president, which Joyce had placed there herself. For weeks, now, she had avoided looking at it: the handsome face, the unbearable hopefulness of his intent blue gaze. Soon another photo would arrive, a framed portrait of President Johnson. Joyce would hide it in the bottom drawer of her desk.

She’d been married three years, the exact length of Kennedy’s presidency. Married life suited her: the quiet evenings alone with Ed, watching television or reading before the fire. Their small house was pleasant and
orderly, a silent sanctuary after the noisy corridors of the high school. To her relief, the marriage had produced no children, though Ed reached for her every Saturday night without fail. She did not tell him that childlessness suited her, that after years of caring for her mother, Sandy, Lucy and Dorothy, she felt entitled to this freedom. Her husband was a capable man, reasonable and self-sufficient. She had no one to worry about but herself.

The truth was that she had raised a child already. She had loved Lucy like her own daughter, admired and disciplined and protected her, even sent her away to college—a fact Joyce still found incredible. A good student, Lucy had won a small scholarship to the nursing program at the University of Pittsburgh, enough to pay her living expenses. Joyce’s savings—from her air-force pay, then the dress factory, then her school secretary’s job—had covered the rest. It was a moment she would never forget, writing the check to cover Lucy’s first-semester tuition: more memorable than her wedding, her own college graduation. It was the best thing she had ever done.

Susan finished her lunch, then rose to wipe the chalkboards. Afterward she would take the erasers outside to dust. She performed these tasks without being asked, a child used to doing what needed to be done. She was a serious, pretty girl, with a long straight nose and somber brown eyes, more at ease with adults than with children her own age. Watching her, Joyce wondered if her stillness was innate or acquired, a reaction to growing up in the chaos of the Jevic household. She spoke often of her brother and sister—the youngest Jevics, now in high school. Joyce had taught each of them in the eighth grade. Susan was as different from the chatty, effervescent Monica, the boisterous, high-spirited Billy, as a child could possibly be.

How’s your sister doing?
Joyce had asked her once.
Still working at the factory?

Susan seemed surprised.
You know Irene?

Of course,
Joyce said.
We were in school together. We were very good friends.

I didn’t know,
Susan said.
She never mentioned it to me.

T
he bus was nearly empty that evening. Two hours before, in Pittsburgh, Lucy had secured a seat up front. The bus had stopped a half-dozen times since then, in towns so small they had no stations: Temperance, Buckhorn, Salt Lick. Passengers debarked at churches and gas stations, at lunch counters with signs in their windows:
BUS TICKETS SOLD HERE
. By four-thirty night had fallen. The dark window reflected her face back at her.

She looked the same, or nearly so—a bit thinner, her hair cut shorter and teased into a flip. Her eyes were circled with black liner, a look Joyce detested. Lucy read the disapproval in her tight smile, but for reasons she didn’t understand, Joyce did not criticize. Her sister had changed. Never affectionate, she now embraced Lucy each time she saw her. Instead of giving orders, she asked a million questions about classes and professors, and listened intently to the answers. To her own surprise, Lucy didn’t mind the questions. She preferred Joyce’s tidy house to Dorothy’s messy one, her sincere interest to Dorothy’s moody silence. Her first night back
they would talk for hours at the kitchen table, long after Ed had gone to bed.

The bus climbed Saxon Mountain: lights in the valley, rooftops covered with snow. Lucy made the journey four times a year—Christmas and early summer, at midsemester breaks in spring and fall. Each time she rode into Bakerton one person—her confident adult self, fast moving and fast thinking—and rode out someone smaller and softer, crippled by tenderness. Her visits unfolded according to a pattern. Her first day in Bakerton she felt displaced and restless, preoccupied with the life she’d left behind: friends and classes, a boy who’d hurt or disappointed her, another who’d asked for her phone number, who seemed different from the rest. But in a few days the friends and classes, even the boys, would seem distant and imaginary. Exams and term papers, her job at the campus pub, walking back to her dorm at night, the dark, noisy streets—her entire college life would seem hopelessly beyond her, like something she’d dreamed. She’d begin to dread leaving Bakerton: the interminable good-byes, the long bus ride alone.

Leonard Stusick was waiting for her when she stepped off the bus.

“Hi there,” she said, surprised. “What are you doing here?” She hadn’t seen him since summertime: he’d started at Penn State that fall, and their midsemester breaks hadn’t coincided. Occasionally—late at night, after her shift—she considered writing him a letter, but rejected the idea as corny.

“Waiting for you.” He was taller than she remembered, his plaid hunting jacket too short in the sleeves.
He’s still growing,
she thought, amazed. He had started college a year early; he was only seventeen.

“Ed’s coming to pick me up,” she said.

“No, he’s not.” Leonard grinned. “I saw him uptown this morning. I
told him I’d come and get you.” He took the suitcase from her hand. “Come on.”

He led her to a pickup truck parked at the curb.

“Your dad has a new truck?”

“It’s mine,” he said proudly. “I got it secondhand, but it runs like new.”

Lucy blinked. At school she traveled on foot, or took the trolley. She had never considered owning a car, herself. It struck her as very adult.

They drove to Keener’s and ordered sandwiches. Lucy had eaten dozens of meals there—with Marcia Dickey, or Marcia and Davis—but never with Leonard. Cookies and milk at her house, or peanut-butter sandwiches made by his mother, that was more their speed. She watched him study the menu, the careful way he laid his napkin across his lap. She felt suddenly shy.

He talked about his classes—biology, organic chemistry, calculus and statistics—his part-time job at the student union, a second job he would start next term, working in a lab with his biology professor. They had taken a booth in the corner. Over his shoulder she stared out the plate-glass windows, watching the snow fall.

She’d spent many evenings like this, listening to a boy in a diner, her mind and eyes wandering. Boys she’d met on campus, at parties, in the pub; confident boys who joked and flirted, who smiled down at her as she served their drinks. Leonard did not joke. He was describing, now, the research being done by his professor, something to do with the Krebs cycle. A familiar feeling washed over her, an odd mix of irritation and tenderness.
Oh, Leonard,
she thought. So sweet and so hopeless. His sincerity was both touching and tedious.

“It sounds like you’re very busy,” she said politely. “What do you do for fun? You know—on the weekends.”

“Well, I come home,” he said, as though the answer were obvious. “That’s why I bought the truck.”

“You come back every weekend?”

“Sure.” He looked puzzled. “Wouldn’t you, if you had a car?”