Sea Glass (3 page)

  Vivian

“I’m absolutely certain there has been a mistake,” Vivian says.

The desk clerk, a weasely looking Franco, consults his pebbledleather register for the third time. “It says here that you are due to arrive on the twenty-fourth, madam.”

“I can’t have been due on the twenty-fourth,” Vivian says patiently, “because I am here now.”

She sets her train case on the mahogany desk and pulls off her gloves. She wants to shed her town clothes and slip into a lighter dress — the cowslip yellow might be good, she thinks. Over by the doorway, a porter waits with her eight glazed-linen trunks. She tucks a strand of hair under her cloche. She hates the humidity. Her hair is frizz now, just frizz.

“I believe you are two days early,” the desk clerk says in his horrid accent. His suit is shiny and bears traces of dandruff all along the shoulders.

“Impossible,” Vivian says.

“I am sure we can arrange something, madam.”

“Thank you,” she says. “But I want my usual corner room. And it’s miss, not madam.”

“Which corner would that be?”

Vivian suppresses a sigh. “The southeast corner, fourth floor,” she says.

“Yes, of course,” the desk clerk says, catching her eye. And she is certain that he is smiling.

The insolence. As if she’d just stepped off the street. As if she hadn’t been coming to the Highland for twenty years, ever since she was a girl. She turns, searching the lobby for a familiar face, and sees Asa Whitlock, who’s been summering at the hotel at least as long as Vivian has, huddled under a tartan blanket in a wicker wheelchair by the window. In the corner a woman in a frost green suit is standing next to a man in a panama hat and natty pants. The woman has smart town welts on her feet. The couple, like Vivian, seems to have just gotten off the train.

Vivian takes in the old horsehair sofas, the oil portraits on the walls, the carved pillars around which velvet banquettes have been placed for the guests, and she thinks how tired and dowdy the lobby looks, which, she supposes, is the point. Upstairs in her rooms there will be the old iron bed with the lilac sateen coverlet, the bureau with thin slats at the bottoms of the drawers that loosen on dry days, the sage tin ceiling she’s been known to stare at for hours at a time. Over the bureau will be the spotted mirror in which she will be able to make out only a partial image of herself (just as well at twenty-eight, she thinks) and on a low table by the window will be a chamber set — for show, thank God, and not for use.

Through the window over that low table, Vivian will be able to look at the ocean from her bed. Her favorite time of the day is shortly after her tea has been brought in the morning, when she props herself up against the pillows and the rattling iron head-board and gazes out to sea and empties her mind. Follies of the night before can be erased. The day to come not yet imagined.

“Vivian.”

A tall man bends and kisses her ear. “Dickie Peets,” she says.

“You just got here?” he asks.

“They’re being very rude about my room,” she says.

An exotic combination of lime and coconut lifts from Dickie’s skin. He holds a skimmer like a plate under his arm. Beyond him, through large double doors, the dining room is already set for lunch. Starched linen, polished silver, white crockery. It hasn’t changed a whit in twenty years, Vivian thinks. Dickie draws a silver case from the pocket of his linen jacket and offers her a cigarette.

“Who’s here?” she asks.

“John Sevens,” he says. “And Sylvia.” Dickie thinks a minute. “That makes a tennis party. You on?”

“I’ve got to unpack,” she says.

“You’re looking very well,” he says.

“Since when have you had specs?” she asks.

“Got them around Christmas. Blind as a bat, actually. Smashed my car.”

“Not the Freschetti.”

“The Isotta Fraschini. ‘Fraid so.”

“How awful,” Vivian says. “Were you hurt?”

“A knee thing,” Dickie says with perfect nonchalance. “Spent most of the winter in Havana, recuperating. You should try it. Havana, I mean.”

“I’m not very good on boats.”

“Fly,” he says. “Only forty-three hours from Boston — train and plane.”

“Really.”

“Jai alai. The casino. Rooftop dancing. Just your thing, Viv.”

She takes a long pull on her cigarette. Is he mocking her?

“How long are you here for?” he asks.

“The usual. Until September. How about you?”

“Bought a house here,” he says.

“You’re not serious,” Vivian says, aware of the desk clerk needing her attention. She deliberately ignores him. “Where?”

“The coast road. The Cote place. Had to fix it up and so forth. They’re nearly finished, though. I’ve got rooms here in the meantime,” Dickie says, stubbing his cigarette out in the glass ashtray on the reception desk.

“Miss Burton?” says the desk clerk.

“Got the makings of a sidecar in my room if you want a cocktail before lunch,” Dickie says.

Vivian thinks of icy drops of water sliding down the outside of an aluminum cocktail shaker.

“Make it very, very cold,” she says.

Vivian walks through pale azure hallways to her rooms. The porter opens the door and stands aside to let her pass, and as soon as Vivian enters her own suite, she feels the bristle leave her skin. Her duster slides from her shoulders, and she tosses it over the back of a chair. She unpins her hat and pats her hair. She takes in the delicate white light through the gauzy curtains floating in an east window, the old walnut desk with the pigeonholes in which she will put her invitations and her writing papers, and the mauve settee with the rose silk throw. She peers into the mirror. Her penny-colored hair has risen up around her head like a copper nimbus. Her eyebrows need plucking, and her lipstick has worn off. Dickie looked both smug and happy. He must have a girl, she thinks.

She tips the porter, and he leaves her suite. She walks into the bedroom, sits on the bed, and slips off her shoes. She lies back on the lilac sateen coverlet. The air and the light are worth the filthy train ride from Boston, she decides. She pictures the empty house she left this morning in Boston, the dark brick town house overlooking the Public Garden. Her father had sailed for Italy with his new wife just the day before, and Vivian, unable to stand the empty rooms, decided to travel up to the hotel early. There are friends she might have visited — Tilly Hatch in Lenox, Bobby Kellogg on Nantucket, Lester Simms in Banff — but she wasn’t in the mood to be a houseguest so early in the season.

She stares at the pattern on the tin ceiling.
Oh, I’m going to be so bored,
she thinks.

She gets off the bed and opens a suitcase. The porter has laid her luggage out on trunk stands all against the walls. She removes her perfumes and her atomizers and sets them on the bureau. She puts her silk stockings and her lingerie in the top drawer and hangs her Maggy Rouff evening gown in the closet. She glances at her watch. Dickie Peets said a sidecar. A sidecar might be just the ticket.

  Alice Willard

  McDermott

“You heard about Gastonia,” Ross says.

Ross’s voice is hard to hear in the din. McDermott watches his mouth. “I read about it,” he says.

The speak is crowded with the day shift — warp twisters and slasher tenders and mule spinners and carders — all drinking away their pay packets. Mahon makes the drink in Exeter, brings it over in a bread truck to the speak. The first whiskey always hurts McDermott’s stomach, and he’s pretty sure he has an ulcer. The noise in the mill has ruined his hearing, ruined his nerves. Lay off the drink, the mill doctor said, and gave him a bottle of white pills to take. Sometimes McDermott shits blood.

“They’re on trial now,” Ross says.

“So I hear.”

“They’ll get off.”

Ross has bad teeth, horrible to look at, but McDermott has to watch his mouth in order to understand him.

“The police chief was killed,” McDermott says.

“Lackey for the bosses,” Ross says, and spits on the floor.

“You think it’ll happen here?” McDermott asks.

“I know it will happen here,” Ross says.

Though McDermott is just twenty, already he is a loom fixer. He reports only to the second hand. He has been in the mills since he was twelve, since the day his father pissed off. Every day except Sundays, the din rises up around him and makes a hollow sucking sound in his ears, as if he had dived into the ocean and was trying to come up for air. He repairs broken looms and checks others to make sure the cloth is weaving properly. He is supposed to report weavers who aren’t doing their jobs, but he hardly ever does. In return, any weaver in McDermott’s section tries hard to keep up. McDermott is careful not to take advantage of this goodwill or to take credit for a job another has done. A boastful loom fixer, he has seen, never lasts too long.

Still, the work is difficult and McDermott, like almost everyone in the mill, hates his job. Especially since the speed-up. For three months now, the bosses have ordered the machines to go at a faster speed. If the machines produce more cloth for the same amount of wages, the argument goes, then the northern mills might be able to compete with the southern mills that are taking away all the business. Already the Hookset Mill has closed because of lost business. The Dracut Mill has announced a 10 percent pay cut.

All his life, McDermott has lived in company housing, eight kids in a two-bedroom apartment. The babies, when they came, slept in bureau drawers. When he was thirteen and got his growth, he slept on three chairs in the kitchen. When his father left the family without a note or a word, his mother moved into a cot in the kitchen to let the three older girls, who needed privacy then, have the double bed in her bedroom. Now his mother is gone — a stroke, the mill doctor said — and Eileen, who is nineteen, is in charge. McDermott moved into the men’s boardinghouse nearby, but he gives Eileen half his pay packet. He brings food when he can and eats with Eileen and his brothers and other sisters two or three times a week, mainly to keep the boys, who are a handful, in line.

McDermott, like everyone else in the mill, second hands and overseers alike, lives for the breaks. Even in December and January, when the weather is raw and freezing, McDermott likes to go outside during the ten minutes the workers are allowed in the afternoon. He once discovered a trapdoor that leads onto the roof, and as soon as the horn sounds, he pretends to head for the lavatory and instead takes a quick turn near the back stairs. On the roof he smokes a cigarette and looks over to the falls because he needs the quiet like some men need drink. He can see across the rooftops of the mill housing — every brick building precisely the same: four floors, one chimney, three dormers on each top floor — to the railroad bridge that crosses the river. On good days, he can see all the way to the ocean, a thin, hazy blue line on the horizon. When the weather is poor — when there is a blizzard or it is raining so hard he can’t open his eyes — McDermott stands in the shelter of the air shaft, shivering, just so he can see the sky.

* * *

There isn’t a day that goes by that McDermott doesn’t think of taking off like his father did. He imagines his father in Iowa or Saskatchewan, working a combine in an enormous field, stopping every now and then to watch the wind make waves in the wheat and the clouds point still farther west — not a building or a chimney stack or a rickety wooden fire escape in sight. But then, as if it were a daily ritual he needed to observe, McDermott will think about Eileen and about his younger brothers who are a handful. He is determined to keep Eamon and Michael out of the mills. It’s no place for a man, never mind for a boy. All you have to do is look at the faces around you when you go back in from the break — faces waxy with exhaustion or resignation or grim determination. The women’s faces are the worst. When the men get off work, they head for a meal or a drink. The women go home to hungry children and cramped apartments that need tending. Some of the women weavers have admitted to McDermott that they count to themselves on the looms to pass the time — to eight, say, repeatedly; or to four thousand and eighty. They swear it makes the clock move faster. McDermott thinks about entire lives spent counting simply to make the days go faster, and that fact, out of all the miserable facts he knows about mill life, seems to him the saddest one of all.

“There’s a meeting,” Ross says.

“What about?” McDermott asks.

“The speed-up.”

“What about it?”

“It’s killing the men,” Ross says. “No one can keep up. Everyone is getting docked. They can’t feed their families.”

Left unmentioned is the money the men in the speak are pissing away on whiskey. McDermott doesn’t want a family of his own. Since the speed-up, the men are taking their sons and daughters out of school and putting them in the mills. What’s the point, McDermott wants to know, of having children at all?

“We want the elimination of piecework,” Ross says, ticking off the demands on his fingers. “We want the clock system out. We want a standard wage scale. Forty hours, five days a week, minimum of twenty dollars a week. We want decent housing. We want a reduction of rent and light charges.”

“You’ll never get it,” McDermott says.

“We won’t if we don’t demand it,” Ross says.

“Where’s the meeting?”

“Nadeau’s. Make sure you’re not followed. Last time, Hurd stood outside and made a list of everyone going in.”

“I don’t know,” McDermott says. He means he doesn’t know if he will go to the meeting. He means he doesn’t know if he wants to get involved. He sucks on one of the white tablets the mill quack gave him. The English girl is sitting on a stool.

“They’re starving in Gastonia,” McDermott says.

“You get relief,” Ross says. “There’s organizations that send relief.”

“Communists,” McDermott says.

“It’s the unions,” Ross insists. “It has nothing to do with Communists.”

“If we starve, it’ll be the Communists who’ll feed us. Tell me there weren’t Communists in Gastonia.”

Ross downs his shot, signals for another. “They’re sending someone named Mironson from the Trade Workers Union,” he says. “They want rolling strikes like they had in the south. Break the backs of the mills in New England.”

“Great,” McDermott says. “Then none of us will have jobs.”