Sea Glass (12 page)

  Honora

Honora makes Sexton’s favorite breakfast of tomatoes with cream and sugar. He has a trip and won’t be back for eight days. As she always does before he goes away, she has a bath and washes her hair and puts on lipstick, so that when he is gone, he will remember her in a pretty dress and not in her apron. She has on the marcasite-and-pearl earrings.

Sexton shakes out the newspaper, and from across the table, Honora reads the headlines.
BLACKEST DAY ON WALL STREET IN MANY YEARS. Selling Orders Swamp New York Market. Billions Quoted. Values Fade.

“Sexton?”

He cocks his head around the paper.

“What’s happening with the stock market?” she asks.

He frowns slightly, as if reminded of a dentist appointment later that day. “A panic,” he says. “It’s nothing. It will pass. The stock market goes down, everybody sells, but they’ll start trading today like crazy. You’ll see.”

“How much do we have in the bank?” she asks.

“About thirty-five dollars. I’m due to get my commission check tomorrow. It won’t be too much, though. Not after the mortgage payment.”

“Oh,” she says.

He looks at her and seems only then to notice the lavender wool dress she has on. “Walk me to the car,” he says.

Honora puts her coat on and follows Sexton to the Buick. It’s a filthy day, just filthy. The wind is whipping so hard that she has to hold on to the fence posts as she makes her way to the car.

Sexton slides into the Buick. Honora leans on the door. He rolls down the window and tucks the tips of his fingers inside the top of her dress.

“You look like a wild woman,” he says happily.

  Vivian

Dickie goes sheet white on the telephone.

Vivian glances at the mantel clock, as if fixing the moment of disaster. Nine-fifteen in the morning. She was reading in the front room in her bed jacket and Dickie was about to leave the house for a lunch at a club in Rye when the phone rang. He spoke a phrase or two and then sat down hard at the telephone table. Dickie, a man who never sat for the phone, who couldn’t bear the phone, actually.

Vivian, who can see Dickie through the open doorway, puts down her book and unfolds her legs from the divan. Sandy perks up his head.

In his wool tweed suit, Dickie sits huddled over his lap. He throws his head back and his knees fall open. She has never seen Dickie, who is nothing if not elegant, in such an ungraceful position. His hat tumbles from his hand.

“Everything?” he asks in an incredulous voice.

Vivian sits forward.

“Oh, God,” Dickie says. He puts his hand to his forehead, as if shading his eyes. “For God’s sakes,” he says.

Vivian stands. The rain pings hard against the diamond-paned windows.

“I’m getting in the Packard,” Dickie says. “I’ll be there by tonight. Stay there. Don’t leave.”

Dickie puts the telephone back in its cradle.

“What is it?” Vivian asks from the doorway.

Dickie shakes his head back and forth. He seems oblivious to her presence. When he looks up at her, he blinks.

“Be a good girl, would you, and pack me a bag?”

Vivian sees Dickie out to the car and stands in the rain in her silk bed jacket. It seems the least she can do. Dickie tries to start the car, but his hands tremble so badly that he can’t get a grip on the shift. Vivian has never seen a man so shaken before. She reaches into the car and puts her own fingers around his hand. “Steady now,” she says, as one might to a horse.

She stands and wipes the rain out of her eyes. “It’ll be all right,” she says. “You’ll see.”

But she has no idea whether or not it will ever be all right, does she? She waves encouragingly as Dickie drives away. She walks back into the house and towels herself dry. She changes into her chartreuse-and-black-checked silk, as if she needed to be ready for the worst. As if she were awaiting news of a relative’s death. She telephones her father.

“You’re sure not?” she asks, in a voice equally as incredulous as Dickie’s was.

With guilty relief, she puts the telephone back in its cradle. Never more grateful for her father’s conservatism.

The rain stops late in the afternoon, and the sun makes a brief appearance. Vivian stands at the open doorway to the porch, aching to step out onto the beach and feel the sun on her face. But she doesn’t dare be out of earshot of the telephone in case Dickie calls. She has calculated as best she can that even if he shot down to Boston, he can’t have gotten there before four o’clock. Five o’clock if he hit traffic on Route 1.

The light is never the same, she thinks. Funny how she’s lived most of her life within a mile or two of the ocean in Boston and never paid a minute’s attention to the sea. Of course it’s there, and of course ships come and go — and sometimes even friends come and go on those same ships — but the water has held no interest for her. Now, it seems, she can’t get enough of it. As if she needed to make up for years of neglect.

When the telephone rings, Vivian braces herself, the image of Dickie in his Packard, his face white and his hands trembling, flitting across her vision. She leans against the wall by the telephone table and takes the phone off its cradle.

“Vivian,” he says.

“Dickie,” she says. “Darling, are you in Boston?”

“Vivian,” Dickie repeats, his voice oddly calm. Frighteningly calm, really.

“Oh, Dickie, what is it? Is it very bad?”

“It’s very, very bad,” he says. “Worse than I ever thought possible.”

“I’m so sorry,” she says.

“Have you talked to your broker?” Dickie asks.

“I did,” she says. “There’s some damage,” she lies. “But not too bad.”

“The reason I ask is that I need you to do something for me,” Dickie says.

“Anything,” Vivian says. “Anything,” she repeats with the guilt of the survivor. “I’ll come right now. I’ll get on the train. I can be there by noon tomorrow.”

“No, don’t come,” he says. “I need you to stay there.”

There’s a silence over the wire.

“Dickie?” she asks after a time.

“I need you to buy the house,” he says.

Vivian makes it onto the beach just before the sun is about to set. Sandy runs on ahead as if he too had been bursting to get outside. Vivian takes off her town welts and unrolls her stockings. She still has on the chartreuse-and-black-checked dress she put on in anticipation of some kind of bereavement. On the telephone, she was flustered and, for once in her life, speechless.

Think about it,
Dickie said.

She turns to look back at the house, comfortably settled in its nest of dunes. Behind it, the sun is low on the horizon. The house has three gables, a screened porch in the central one. Behind the screen, there’s a bedroom. On fair days, Vivian takes her tea on the porch instead of in bed.

She doesn’t want to leave the house, and she can afford to buy it.
There,
she thinks.
That’s settled.

She drifts north toward the lifesaving station, noticing that the storm has left more detritus on the beach than usual. She steps around the seaweed and the razor clams, the scallop shells and a piece of netting from a fishing boat, and she thinks of Dickie in Boston.

She will call him as soon as she gets back to the house. She will tell him that she will buy the house immediately, and then Dickie will come back up and they’ll live together again just as if this horrible stock market thing had never occurred. Though even as she imagines this scenario, she knows that it will never happen like that. Dickie’s pride would never allow him to live in the house if she owned it.

She tries to imagine what it would feel like to know that one had lost everything, that one had to sell all the dresses and the jewelry and the cars and the houses. That one could never go to Havana or throw a party at the Plaza Hotel. That one would have to get a job. She tries to picture what possible work she herself could find if it happened to her, and that thought frightens her. She had one year of finishing school at Mount Ida, near Boston, a year she used primarily to prepare for her coming out. She can’t think of a single practical skill she learned. She isn’t at all sure she could survive the sort of ruin Dickie is facing.

Vivian doesn’t have to walk very far before she finds what she is looking for. It lies pressed upon the beach, its slightly curved edges digging into the sand. When she picks it up, the glass has a satisfying heft. It’s a good-sized banana-colored chunk, not too unlike the shade of her Maggy Rouff. She runs her thumb around the edges, which are smooth. She puts the bit of sea glass into the pocket of her dress.

  McDermott

McDermott edges his way toward the notice that’s tacked up on the wire fencing at the mill entrance. The men and women who have read the notice move away and stand with their hands in their pockets, as if uncertain about going through the gate.

McDermott shoulders his way toward the front. He can see that Ross, with a large wad of tobacco in his cheek, is standing by the notice board.

“What’s going on?” McDermott asks when he reaches Ross’s side.

“Read it,” Ross says.

 

“They’ve finally done it,” McDermott says.

“Fuckin’ owners,” Ross says.

“They expect us to feel sorry for them?” McDermott watches the men and women gather in groups. Still no one has gone through the gates. “What will happen now?” he asks.

“We’ll get the union.”

“We didn’t get the vote,” McDermott says.

“We will now.”

McDermott knows that the wage cut, on top of the speed-up, will change the minds of the loom fixers who’ve been reluctant to form a union. The wage rates are already below poverty level.

Ross spits on the ground. “It’s beautiful the way the bosses do the organizing for you, isn’t it?” he says.