Poorhouse Fair (3 page)

The tall space above, crossed with stained beams, catered to a kind of comfort not proper to executive and clerical work. Conner came from a world of low ceilings, onion-gray or egg-blue, made still lower by fluorescent structures. The space below made him uneasy, too. "Damn these people," he said, his lips an inch from the sharp blond edge of a subtly curved slat of the blinds. "Now down there's Hook, making his rounds like the mayor of the place, talking to everybody, stirring them up for some crusade."

To Buddy, watching, the profile of his superior was incisive against the luminous blinds: the little round nose above the long bulging lip of an Irishman, in saddened repose. In his rush of love Buddy had to speak, any words, and the first words came to him from what was bearing on his mind, "Don't you think we could dispense with Lucas? He learns more than he tells, and physically, you must admit, he's a monstrous error."

"AH, Mrs. Jamiesson," Hook said, "don't the apples shine in your cheeks this morning? That's what Ed Hertzog used to say, when greeting the women after church service."

She was tacking an oilcloth frill to the front edge of the bare table she had set in the grass, and he was standing in her way. "Could you hold that there with your fingers?" she asked him.

"De-lighted, posolutely delighted," he said, mimicking someone else, a normal school chum, forty years dead, named Horace Frye. His downward vision was so poor he set his fingers along the naked edge of wood, and when Mrs. Jamiesson went with her hands for the hammer and tacks, the scalloped strip fell, the unfastened end of it into the drenched grass. As if managing a baby and his spoon she laid her tools aside and gripped his hand and brought the cloth to it and pressed his fingers against the edge. He let her drive one tack and stood away, his eyes on the top of the silver maple by the west wing. "That sound," he announced, "is music to my ears; the carpenters in my day would drive a coarse nail with three swift strokes."

"Well I guess I'm not one of them," Mrs. Jamiesson said. She was a heavy woman whom homeliness had trained to a life of patience and affection. It was a wonder to her mother that this daughter, with the freakishly protuberant jaw, had married and held the man and raised a family. The waspish temper she had inherited from her beautiful mother Mary Jamiesson had repressed, a luxury she had to do without. Yet a lively tongue never quite dies. "It's a rare sight for me," she went on, "to see a man do any work; else I guess I'd learn something."

Hook did not miss the sense of her remark, only its application to him. "It's the administration," he confided. "To let a man choose idleness or labor, on the ground of whim: why in Mendelssohn's time such a thing would never be seen. Able-bodied men like Gregg and Lucas--it's a wonder they haven't grown too lazy to lift the food to their mouths at mealtimes."

"Lucas has the pigs, though." Mrs. Lucas was a companion of hers.

"What day's work is that, to carry the garbage from the kitchen to the trough?"

"Well it's more than some do," Mrs. Jamiesson observed.

Uneasiness crept over Hook. The woman's implication --that women did the work of the place--was disagreeable to him, like a scent which raises the fine hairs on an animal. "Isn't it strange now, the only muscle which never tires is the tongue," he said, and moved on, forgetting who had begun this train of remarks. The long-grass lawn, now that the sun had moved higher, turned toward yellowness; in the center of the main walk, two old men were slowly unravelling electric cords, cardboard boxes of colored bulbs behind their legs. A stepladder lay flat in the grass. One of the men fumbled at a snarl as if this were his sole task for all the time remaining in God's scheme. A robin scolded wheep wheep in the tree nearby. Beyond the south wall, the landscape extended itself generously; deliberate stands of trees were dotted like islands over the land; a few houses, outreaches of Andrews, intruded their colors on the left edge of his aimed vision. He coughed and stated, "Now I can remember," and noticed he was standing alone. He moved closer to the men on the walk. The one not fiddling with the snag was removing bulbs from their beds of tissue paper and laying them, so that no two of the same color touched, on the bench. "Now I can remember, as a boy, how you could go to the top of a hill and not see a house in any direction. "Now"--he coughed again, since the heads of neither had moved--"there can't be a foot of earth east of the Alleghenies where a body can stand and not be within hailing distance of a house. We have made the land very tame." Hook cocked his head inquisitively. He decided he had picked two deaf ones. Their names escaped him.

Turning away, he felt like a rise of unplowed land which approached from below swells unexpectedly and in a spattering of daisies makes a join with the sky. All the movements of preparation around him gladdened him. He was glad of Gregg's absence; the man had gone to the kitchen, to wheedle a second breakfast. There was one lack, one shallow pit in the surface of his pleasure: he had no cigar in his hand. He allowed himself four a day, and in the discussion over the tags had neglected to light his morning one; he did this now, a White Owl. The barn odor filled his mouth; he posed, cupping the elbow of his cigar arm in his other hand, the other arm braced gracefully against his abdomen.

The wooden tables--their eating tables before the dining hall was fitted with square tables of synthetic marble purchased from a renovated cafeteria--were arranged partly along the main walk, but principally in two alleys at right angles to the walk, straight across the grass. Because the old people did it the lines were not absolutely straight. Hook strolled down one of these alleys, angling the cigar this way and that in friendly fashion. By Amelia Morris's table he halted. She was a short old woman, in her eighties and thus not far from Hook himself, who wore an ancient stiff bonnet and had a goiter hanging around her neck. Each year she made from rags a few quilts, perhaps six in all, which she sold each August at the fan:. Last year a man from Trenton had bought four.

"Do you expect your sharper from Trenton again this year?"

"I hope to heaven not. It makes it so dull to have them sold so quick."

"That fella, dollars to doughnuts he was one of those antique dealers, and peddled them for thrice what he paid you."

"Last year it was so disappointing; he bought all I had left and there was nothing left for me but to go to bed and miss all the music." Her voice had a crooning quality, as if it originated deeper than most and rose through a screen; she had a tendency to let the ends of her sentences impatiently drop, which led Hook to bend toward her.

"I wager," he said, "he made a ver-y hand-some profit."

"I like to see the young couples have them, but you know how they care only for the new things. I was the same way myself."

One of her quilts, folded, rested on the table. The remainder were in two boxes labelled with the name of a dehydrated milk. At the end of a year of threading and biting and matching, she stretched the simple arrangement of them on the table into a full morning's job, refolding, patting, replacing them in the boxes, dawdling and turning until she felt quite dizzy and had to beg for a chair. Of the quilt displayed, one square was of a cloth on which a green hill had been printed, covered with uncommonly large flowers, and a river wound at its base, and on its crest had been planted a small open temple, the blue of the sky showing between the pillars. This figure had been repeated over the fabric. The square of cloth next to this one was evenly dark, the color of purple vetch. Next to this was a coarse plaid weave, many colors but sober, the largest stripe a green, making in the section a cross. The first square of the next row, beneath the temple and hill, seemed silk, a blue that appeared to retreat beyond the surface of the cloth, dotted with warm rectangles and crescents. The next patch was savage red; violently strewn across it strange golden forms like a carved alphabet or furniture molding. Another square showed children running carrying a pail. Another was brown corduroy, another green cotton. Another--here Hook disbelieved. The violet ground, the five yellow ovals around a blue five-point star, within a brown square, again and again, were too much like his childhood bedspread for belief--the very dusty grape tone, the nameless flowers seen so squarely from above. In the confused way of recollections from that time he saw himself as a child wandering among the rectilinear paths of the pattern, searching for the deeper-dyed thread that occasionally, in the old woven cloth, would arch above the others. In the rough-walled room lit by kerosene, the wick kept thriftily low, he saw the coverlet waiting for him; it was evening, he was a child. His parents were down below; his father's voice shook softly up the stairs. He felt no great resentment, for as a serious-minded child he feared the dark but knew that he must sleep, when the time came each day. Studying the cloth Hook felt the small condensed grief-- that the past was so far, the end so near--secreted safe within his system well up and fill his head so exactly the thin arcs of his eyes smarted with what they contained. He blinked rapidly, erasing the glow of that kerosene lamp.

"Now how Mendelssohn," he said, "would have stroked and patted this quilt."

"Wouldn't he though? He gave me such encouragement."

"It was his way."

"He was like McKinley," Mrs. Mortis exclaimed, invoking a girlhood idol of hers, "for dignity, yet he was never too busy to drop a kind word." Her face in the shadow of the bonnet was uplifted rhapsodically. "That's how you know them, John."

Her high tone, and his old debater's instinct, prompted him, above his fundamental agreement, to enter a qualification. "They say, you know," Hook said, "that in regards to admini-stration, he would let a few things slip. But in his day there wasn't such idleness as you see now."

"Ah, and often I can picture him in the mind's eye saying grace," she continued, her goiter bouncing like the breast of a clucking chicken, "with his eyes downcast so. gracious, and his voice booming out so even the deafest could hear; in his coffin, I remember saying to Mrs. Haines, he looks like he's come to the end of a prayer, his nostrils still full of its breath. My heart told me to stoop and kiss his hand, but the line was pushing."

"He had a natural faith--"

"You know them when you come across them, rare as that is. Oh, we've had our time, John."

Hook did not think it was a woman's obligation to tell him he had had his time. Amy Mortis was a woman of his own generation--she would have been marriageable to him--and along with the corresponding virtues she had the talkativeness, the presuming habit, the familiarity of such women; calling him "John." He enjoyed conversing with them, but not as much as they with him, nor for as long. Yet as with his late wife, he was too weak, too needful of her audience to break away, and instead lingered to lecture.

"Now, that McKinley was nothing but Mark Hanna's parade uniform; the man he beat was twenty times his greater, and he did it on the strength of New York and Boston money. Bryan."

"Yes, one of those wanting to steal everything from the rich and give it to the poor and now that they've done it, are we better off? Are the poorhouses empty? Why, no: they're building more and still they're crowded. I feel so sorry for the younger women, having to share those tiny rooms. Young Bessie Jamiesson lying down at night with Liz Gray, who hasn't washed herself in human memory. And the Lucases and that bird keeping for themselves a room that would do for four humans."

Having forgotten what he wanted to say, Hook shook his head negatively and thoughtfully pulled on the cigar. The metallic cloud, as good as any sensible masculine argument, hung in the air between them, then snapped away. Taking his time within the won advantage, he pronounced, "Were Mark Hanna still running the country, good lady, our kind would be dead long past."

"Yes and wouldn't it be an improvement," she said with great readiness, as if she had been impatiently watching the sentence take form in his head. "We hang on and hang on and spend our time on such foolishness"--a scrabbly motion indicated the quilts--"when if we had any sense we'd let the Lord take us and start us off fresh."

"You don't antici-pate, then, any difficulties, on the other side?"

The suggestion in his tone that there was crudeness in her religion irritated her. She said, "Well, if there are for me, few'll pass," showing that in asking her rights she could be as testy with the Lord as with any other man. "I've been as good as most."

"Ah, yes," he said, breathing admonitory smoke, before the comedy of her spunk occurred to him, and his mustache broadened, and he promised her that if, as was likely, he got there before her, he would certainly save her a place on the settee. Making this guarantee he bowed with cocky gallantry above the nearly dwarfish figure of the good lady. There vibrated between them something of the attraction he had of old exercised on members of the opposite sex.

THE ENTRY DOOR to the west wing whispered shut behind Lucas and he was frozen. There was white on both sides of him, extending like the repetition of a few beds in double mirrors, with increasing dimness, to the end beds by the Palladian windows, which shed on the linen a pearly, generalized light. The west wing did not get the sun directly until the latter part of the day. The figures beneath some of the sheets made faint movements; a skeletal arm lifted to gain attention, a pink scrubbed head turned listlessly to take in the new entrant. The sheets did not seem to have beneath them persons but a few cones, from the points of which the folds sloped apparently to the mattress, and Lucas thought of parts of bodies--feet, the pelvis, shoulders without arms--joined by tubes of pliable glass, transparent so the bubbling flow of blood and yellow body juices could be studied. The impression was upon him before he could avert his eyes. Incapable of any retreat he looked on the floor, fearful above all of accidentally finding among the composed faces of these ailing and doomed the face of an acquaintance, someone with whom he had shared a talk on the sunporch, or walked into Andrews with. On the floor his helpless eyes noticed the marks made by the soft wheels of the stretcher-wagon. Even more than black death he dreaded the gaudy gate: the mask of sweet red rubber, the violet overhead lights, the rattling ride through washed corridors, the steaming, breathing, percolating apparatus, basins of pink sterilizer, the firm straps binding every limb, the sacred pure garb of the surgeons, their eyes alone showing, the cute knives and angled scissors, the beat of your own heart pounding through the burnished machinery, the green color of the surgeon's enormous compassionate eyes, framed, his quick breath sucking and billowing the gauze of his mask as he carved. Carved. Surgeons bent over you like lions gnawing the bowels of a deer. Lucas had watched his father die of cancer of the bowel. It was the family death, for males.