Sea Glass (7 page)

  Honora

In Portland, Honora and Sexton have a bathroom with hot water in the room. They flip a coin to see who will get the first bath. When steam clouds the mirror, Honora rubs a spot clear with the end of her fist. Her hair is matted to her head, and her skin is pink from the nearly scalding water. She cannot discern any physical differences between her married state and her single state — no obvious contentment or niggling unease. Her eyes are still wide and biscuit brown, and her eyebrows definitely need plucking. Possibly her mouth looks looser than it was, and she thinks, on balance, that this is a good sign. Unhappy women, she’s observed from her years spent behind the grille at the bank, often have pinched mouths with vertical lines shooting upward to the nose.

On the road, Honora washes the stains from the butter yellow suit and rinses out underwear, which she hangs discreetly from the bottom rungs of wooden chairs. Sexton likes to eat in diners or in cheap restaurants, explaining to Honora the mathematics of expense accounts and commissions. If a man is allowed fifty cents a day for food and spends more than that (or if he
and his wife
spend more than that), then the $5.20 he’s made in commissions that day might only be $4.70, correct?

If there’s a client who has direct ties to the home office, Sexton goes alone to the appointment. Honora stays behind in the cabin and reads, propped up against the quilt-thin pillows. The headboards sometimes jiggle, and the smell of mildew rises up from the woolen blankets. She reads magazines —
Woman’s Home Companion
and
The Saturday Evening Post
— and books she has bought on the road at filling stations or near the diners where they eat.
Dark Laughter. An American Tragedy. Point Counter Point.
If it is cold, she reads in her pink sweater; if it’s hot and the cabin doesn’t have a fan, she sits by a window. She imagines she can almost hear Sexton’s pitch several miles away, and she wonders how he is faring without her. Sometimes she stands at the window of the cabin, a semicircle of other cabins spreading out to either side of her, and watches for the Buick to turn down the drive.

If the weather is fine, Honora goes for a walk. She strolls through towns that seem little more than a school, a church, a town hall, and a bank, which she passes trying to catch a glimpse of Sexton. She has household money in her purse, and if the town has a fiveand-dime she buys a rubber-coated dish drainer or a juice glass with oranges and green leaves painted on it. Once she buys a recipe book and spends a day in a cabin composing menus on the back of one of Sexton’s triplicate forms. In the cities, she walks the streets until her feet hurt. She makes her way down to the harbor and climbs back up to a city square and rests on the benches in the parks with other women in hats and gloves. She walks faster in the cities than she does in the towns, a mantle of anxiety riding her shoulders, and it isn’t until she reaches New Bedford and is walking along a street that parallels the harbor that she realizes that cities remind her of Halifax. What she feels along her shoulders, she realizes, is a hunching against impending disaster.

Honora likes to walk the tracks. She puts her hands inside the pockets of her dress, sets her cloche on her head, and points herself north or south along the railroad tracks. She appreciates the way they stretch out seemingly forever — the ultimate open road. No stop signs, no traffic, seldom an encounter with any other person, though there is plenty of life. The backs of houses that no one ever sees. Wash on a line. An old Ford up on blocks. Summer tea in a jar on a picnic table next to a well. An open garage filled with rusted bits of machinery. Sometimes she passes another woman in an apron and a head scarf, hanging out her laundry, and she and the woman wave to each other. But if Honora sees a man on a back stoop smoking a cigarette, a man who is home in the middle of the day, she doesn’t wave. When a train passes, she steps back from the gravel bed and waits for the engineer to give her a quick salute.

“What did you do today?” Sexton asks, flushed from a recent sale and running his fingers through his well-oiled hair. Snapping his suspenders off his shoulders. Yanking the knot out of his tie.

“I went walking,” she says.

“It’s from my mother,” Honora says.

“What’s new?”

“May isn’t doing well.” Honora is holding her own breast through the cotton of her blouse. She puts her hand down.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Sexton says.

When they returned to the house, an air of reproach had permeated the rooms, like that of a once-favored dog who’d been left alone all day and hadn’t yet been walked. Honora moved from room to room, holding the letter that was waiting for her on the floor of the front hallway, and it wasn’t until she’d inspected the entire house that she had allowed herself to sit at the kitchen table and read it.

Sexton pours himself a drink from a bottle of illegal bourbon a client gave him to celebrate a deal. Six No. 7’s at a 4 percent discount to a textile manufacturing company in Dracut, Massachusetts.

“And Mother asks again if we can go there over Labor Day,” Honora says.

“You want a sip?”

She nods. He hands her his glass and pours liquor into a coffee cup for himself. They are silent, just drinking.

“I should do the laundry,” she says.

“I’m going to buy you a washing machine,” Sexton says.

“Really?”

He sets the bourbon down and bends to kiss the underside of her chin. “Forget the laundry,” he says.

The blouse rises above Honora’s arms as if it might fly away. Her clothes make a heap on the floor. Sexton likes to see her naked and has her stand a table length away. It is understood that he will tell her what to do, that she doesn’t have to think about or guess at his desires. As for her own, they are buried deep inside her, bulbs that might one day send up strong shoots through a dark soil.

  Vivian

“I’m so hot I can’t drink,” Vivian says.

The air is motionless, a phenomenon she has never observed so close to the water, not in all the years she’s been coming to Fortune’s Rocks. Beyond the beach, the Atlantic lies as flat as a wrinkled sheet. In each tiny wave, Vivian takes hope.

“Let’s get out of here,” Dickie says.

“Where would we go?”

“My house,” he says.

“Now?”

“You’ve never seen it,” he says. “There might be a breeze. Something of a breeze, anyway. Normally the place is crawling with workmen, but no one will be there now.”

“We should say good-bye,” Vivian says. “Whose house is this?”

She glances into the sitting room of the shingled cottage. Near the French doors, a Spud cigarette is burning a notch in a mahogany desk. Another butt is ground into the Persian rug. Ima Thurston is blotto, hanging over the arm of a silk settee as if she might be sick. Someone ought to put a bucket under her. In a corner, a sober quartet is playing a round of bridge. Laughter, melodious and feminine, returns her attention to the porch.

“Floyd Holmes, I think,” Dickie says.

“I don’t even know him.”

“No, of course you don’t.”

It is the eighteenth or twentieth party Vivian has been to since arriving at the Highland. Some of the parties have been at the hotel itself, and others, such as this one, have been held at the cottages along the beach and then have moved on to one of the grand houses around the point or to the country club nearer to the center of the village. The guest lists include nearly all of the same people. Cedric Nye and his wife, Natalie, up from Raleigh, North Carolina. The brothers Chadbourne, Nat and Hunt, who invented a ball bearing that has made them millions. Cyril Whittemore, a radio actor whose mid-Atlantic accent is so pitch perfect that it’s impossible to tell which side of the ocean he is from. Dorothy Trafton, whom Vivian knows from Boston, and whom she avoids as best she can because Dorothy was present at a tennis match at which Vivian, thoroughly fed up with Teddy Rice’s arrogance, threw a racquet across the court and dinged Teddy on the ankle. And there’s Harlan Quigley, from New York, and Joshua Cutts, who lives here year round, and Georgia Porter, from Washington (her father is a senator? a representative?), and Arthur Willet, who is said to have millions from a diamond mine in South Africa. His wife, Verna, wears sapphires as a statement of independence.

Honestly, if only they could all go naked, Vivian thinks. She has on the least amount of clothing she can possibly get away with — a meringue sundress with no back and made of such thin, gauzy material that it’s nearly indecent (only two beige grosgrain ribbons keep it up) — and still tiny rivulets of perspiration trickle from her neck to her breasts. She has already run through all her dresses and will have to start again. Dickie, after an enigmatic absence of two weeks, about which he has so far said little, showed up just the week before, announcing cheerfully that his engagement was broken. The announcement didn’t surprise Vivian, since she and Dickie have been together almost every day since that first morning on the beach, but
why
they are together remains a mystery to her. They certainly don’t love each other, and she isn’t sure they even like each other very much. They quarrel occasionally when drunk, and once they argued publicly at a dinner party at the Nyes’, an argument that ended when Vivian called him a lush and Dickie deliberately dropped his highball onto the tiles of the Nyes’ kitchen floor, Edinburgh crystal and all. Dickie was profusely apologetic within seconds of the stunt, but she sensed in both of them a certain pleasure in the event. And in that way, she thinks, they are similar types.

“I’m not sure I’ll like drinking as much when it’s legal,” Vivian says as they make their way around the back of the cottage to Dickie’s car.

“Oh, not at all,” Dickie says. “Not at all. Imagine being able to walk into a corner grocery store and buy a bottle of gin. It’ll have all the glamour of, I don’t know, Moxie.”

“It’ll never happen,” Vivian says.

Dickie starts the engine of his new car, a particularly low-slung Packard. Vivian lays her head back against the seat. The rush of air that the car produces is worth the trip. “Don’t stop,” Vivian says.

“We could drive to Montreal,” he says.

He is joking, but the idea appeals to her nevertheless. She imagines the drive north through the night, slipping through the mountains, the air growing cooler and cooler until finally they have to shut the windows. And then they will be in Quebec and no one will speak English and that in itself would be heaven.

Dickie rounds the point and pulls up to a house clearly in mid repair. It sits on a small bluff overlooking the ocean, just at the juncture between the beach and the rocky point. Even before she emerges from the Packard, Vivian can see the water straight through the house’s windows. Scaffolding makes it hard to discern the contours of the building, but she likes the absence of landscaping. The dunes run right to the foundation.

“I hope you’re not going to put in any lawn or anything,” Vivian says.

“Haven’t really got that far,” Dickie says.

“Leave it wild,” she says. “Plant shrub roses if you must.”

“Come see the inside,” he says.

When he opens the car door for her, she takes his arm. Already she can feel a slight breeze. Her dress is an inch too long, and she snags the hem when they step up to a boardwalk that runs across what might normally be a front lawn.

“When was it built?” she asks as she picks up her skirts. “I’m giving up dresses, by the way,” she says.

“You’ll look swell in pants,” Dickie says. “It was designed in eighteen ninety-nine for a doctor and his wife, but on the day

they moved into it, she discovered that he’d been having an affair with a fifteen-year-old girl. A whopping big scandal. Well, for then. Not sure anyone would care now.”

“Fifteen?” asks Vivian, interrupting. “Oh, people would care.”

“He was run out of town, and the wife and children moved up to York. A writer, a poet, I think, no one you’ve ever heard of, bought the house for a song. But then he went broke almost immediately and the house was abandoned for years. I’ve had heat put in.” He glances at her. “Thinking of staying on a bit after the summer is over,” he says.

“Really? Whatever for?”

“Take my hand,” Dickie says. “Dangerous around here with all the unfinished woodwork. Last week a plumber stepped backward off the upstairs landing. The railing hadn’t been installed yet.”

“What happened to the plumber?”

“Died, actually,” Dickie says. “Not right away, but after he’d got to the hospital. Internal injuries or something. Not sure I was ever told.”

“What happened to the girl?”

“The fifteen-year-old? I’ve no idea.”

“Sad,” Vivian says.

“Everything makes you sad,” Dickie says.

“You’re sounding kind of petulant tonight.”

“Really, Viv, I don’t think you give a toss about what happened to some ruined fifteen-year-old girl in eighteen ninety-nine. Or to the plumber, for that matter.”

She thinks a minute. “I like to know the ends of stories,” she says.

And suddenly Vivian realizes why she and Dickie are together. He’s the only person who makes her tell the truth. “I like the house empty,” Vivian says as they walk into what appears to be a front room. Sandy, the dog, greets Dickie with a series of back flips. Dickie, after advertising for Sandy’s owner and receiving no response, seems more or less to have inherited the pet. “It’s too bad you have to have furniture,” Vivian says. “The rooms are just right as they are.”

“Won’t put furniture in, then,” he says. “That’s settled. We’ll eat on the floor.”

Vivian hears the
we.
She watches Dickie feel in his jacket pocket for his cigarette case. He takes one out and tamps it down. “Not sure I’ve ever felt this way about anyone before,” Dickie says.

She turns away from him and walks to a window. She examines the view. “Don’t get mushy on me, Dickie,” she says lightly, crossing her arms over her chest. The tide is dead low, and the sun, setting behind them, lights up the sand flats with a tangerine light that reminds her of that horrid Tangee lipstick she sees advertised in all the magazines.

“You never take me seriously,” he says.

“Give me a cigarette, will you?” she asks. “You aren’t going to play the thwarted lover, I hope. Because it doesn’t suit you.”

“For God’s sake, Viv. Give it a rest.”

She sits on a window seat and traces the diamond pattern of the windowpanes with her fingers. “Your house has charm, Dickie. It’s magnificent, of course, with all the windows and the ocean outside and the surf roaring, but, truthfully, I’m a little sick of looking at water.”

Dickie walks to the window and holds out a lit cigarette.

“Of course I take you seriously,” Vivian says. “I take you dead serious, as a matter of fact.”

“Because I was wondering if when the house is finished you might want to move in with me,” he says. He pauses. “Till November, say? Then I thought you and I might go down to New York for a bit. Stay at the Plaza and so forth. Take a side trip to Havana.”

Vivian struggles not to show her considerable surprise. She takes a long pull on the cigarette and suppresses a cough. Dickie smokes Chesterfields, which are too strong for her. “Are you proposing?” she asks lightly.

“You need me to?” he asks.

She exhales and studies the skirt of her sundress. She can see her skin through the thin material. “Not really,” she says.

“Then it’s a deal?”

“What I like,” she says, looking up and gesturing to take in all of the house, “are all the windows open to the sky. It’s an aerie. It’s inspired. It makes me want to lie down and sleep.”

Dickie moves toward her, but she pushes him gently away with her fingers. “It’s too hot. Don’t come near me.”

Could she make a go of it with Dickie Peets? she wonders. She’s been dreading the return to Boston. She is simply too old to live with her father, and what future is in that? Far better to live with Dickie, even if it would cause a scandal. Perhaps she could go bohemian, she thinks. Espouse free love and all that. For a moment she contemplates that idea as she allows Dickie to kiss her neck. “What on earth would we do all day?” she asks.

“Look at the ocean,” Dickie says. “Don’t know. Got something I’ve been working on. Something I’ve been painting.”

“Not seriously,” Vivian says too quickly, and she can see that she has hurt him. She wraps his tie around her hand and pulls him closer to her. “I thought you were in stocks or something,” she says.

He is silent a moment. He takes her breast in his hand. “Stocks all the way,” he says.