The Whiskey Tide (23 page)

     
"And a whole library on a boat," said Arliss setting the iron back on the stove to heat. "I'll bet you liked that."

     
Her youngest woke in the crib in the corner and started to squall. Joe picked the baby up and rocked it gently while his cousin, hiding a sigh, covered herself with a towel and unbuttoned her blouse, preparing to nurse.

     
"You go sit yourself down in the front room and rest for a while," Irene ordered.

     
Arliss opened her mouth to argue, but looked grateful when Irene made a shooing motion.

     
"It's not good, having babies that close together," his aunt muttered through tight-set lips when they were alone. "If she's not careful her health's going to give out."

     
Irene had given birth to Sebastian barely eighteen months after having Arliss. Three years later she'd had Jimmy, who died in childhood. Three years after Jimmy, Rose had come along, and a year after that, Cecilia. The spaces between, Joe guessed, were a result of his aunt and uncle deliberately drawing away from each other. Arliss and her vanished husband apparently hadn't had that kind of discipline.

     
"Any word of Tom?" he asked.

     
Irene's sound of disgust matched the squish of the shirt she fished from the wash boiler and slapped into a pail.

     
"Probably dead somewhere — not that the Church will ever know about it," she said bitterly.

     
It was the only time he'd ever heard her speak against the Church.

     
"Here," he said catching her hands free as she prepared to wring out the shirt. "Get some shoes for her and the kids, or some ribbons for Rose and Cecilia. Whatever."

     
His aunt was reluctant in taking the ten dollar bill he held out. "That's a lot of money, Joe. More than your share of things. You might need it."

     
"I got good pay taking those folks to their summer place, and they say they'll want to hire me again a time or two before the weather gets bad."

     
She wiped her face with the back of her arm and tucked the money away. "If I get a ribbon for Rose, I'm liable to wrap it around her neck and strangle her with it."

     
"She been skipping school again?"

     
His aunt nodded, wringing the shirt so vigorously Joe guessed she was imagining Rose's neck.

     
"Talk to her, Joe. She'll listen to you. Me, I'm old-fashioned, but she thinks you're wonderful."

     
"I'll do what I can," Joe said, without the vaguest idea of how he could possibly make any difference.

     
He went into the front room and sat on the couch next to Arliss. "Need anything from uptown?" She shook her head. Joe slid a dollar bill into her lap. "Maybe next time you're out you'll want a new blouse or something."

     
"Joe, I can't take this."

     
"After all that mending you do for me?"

     
"If you'd stop getting knocked through windows you wouldn't need so much mending." She gave a small smile. "Thanks, then." She fingered the dollar. "I'll put it back in case one of the kids needs a doctor or something. I hate depending on Ma and Dad for everything. They have a hard enough time making ends meet without five extra mouths to feed."

     
"None of you eats very much," Joe teased.

     
Arliss was two years younger than he was and they'd played together as kids. Shared confidences sometimes. It seemed like a long time ago.

     
"Talk any with Mrs. Cuello about working for her?" he asked.

     
"She's giving me two hours a week on Wednesday while she's at Altar Guild. The rest of the time she says she's using the machine herself. She says I'm slow."

     
"Slow!" Arliss had learned to use a sewing machine in a class at the social hall when she was twelve or thirteen, was a good enough seamstress that she'd worked after school for a seamstress uptown before Tom Spaeth came along and swept her off her feet.

     
His cousin's eyes flashed with a spirit Joe thought had gone out in her. "She cuts corners. I don't."

     
He didn't know what to say. Life was harder for a woman alone than it was for a man, he'd seen that much. With four kids to raise, Arliss couldn't go out hunting regular work, and she couldn't take in sewing at home without a machine.

     
Well, he could see to it now that she had a machine. He'd have to think about how to approach it, though. Maybe wait until Christmas so she wouldn't object. Meanwhile she needed some cheering.

     
"You could stand around outside Finnegan's. See who else gets tossed through the window and needs good mending."

     
Arliss gave him a playful punch, the likes of which she hadn't ventured since she was Cecilia's age.

***

     
Joe was the only Santayna to have a bank account. The Irish aunties did, of course, and on his fourteenth birthday — before lunch at Stromberg's — they had marched him into the Five Cents Savings Bank branch where they kept their money and opened a savings account for him with a silver dollar. In the years since then Joe had made frequent, usually small additions, especially from his Army pay. Most of what he'd earned on his first trip to Canada had gone into that account, only to be drawn out subsequently for his investment in this latest trip.

     
Now, though, with better than nine hundred dollars, it seemed prudent to start a second account somewhere else. He'd be less likely to attract notice making large deposits if that was the size he'd always made. If anyone thought about it at all, they'd suppose he was some sort of business or warehouse owner putting receipts in and taking expense money out.

     
He went to the Naumkeag Trust, and found its lobby made him think of the house he'd been in last night. Poor old Mrs. Cole, all that money and so lonesome it was making her strange. Or maybe she'd always been strange. Nice, though, in her way. He smiled at the memory.

     
A bank official came out and ushered Joe around to a chair and was very glad Mr. Santayna wished to start an account with them. "You're in business, Mr. Santayna?" he asked when the papers were filled out and Joe's money duly recorded.

     
"Yes," Joe said briefly. "Boat engines." It had a thread of truth.

     
He was almost out of the bank when he heard his name called. There stood Bryan Connelly in his Coast Guard uniform. Wariness scuttled across Joe's skin at Bryan's approach, but there was nothing but friendliness in the other man's eyes.

     
"Haven't seen you in awhile," Bryan said falling into step with him.

     
"You've been making yourself pretty scarce at Finnegan's."

     
Bryan made a face. "I'm not exactly welcome. Everybody thinks I'm there to close the place down any time I come through the door."

     
He and Joe had known each other from church in the aunties' parish, and then from high school where they'd both played football. Bryan had been set on joining the Coast Guard from the time they were ten. He was a natural for it: smart, decisive, wore his uniform with pride but not swagger, as fair a man as Joe had ever known.

     
"Can't get it through their heads that, Number One, all I want's a drink myself, and Number Two, I've got no authority on shore," he complained shaking a sandy head that came a few inches above Joe's shoulder. "Damn Prohibition. We used to be heroes. Now we're the enemy. And they don't even give us boats enough to stop a tenth of the booze that's coming in."

     
"Guess this isn't a recruiting speech then," Joe kidded.

     
"Sure it is," Bryan said cheerfully. "You like a good scrap if you think you're in the right. The Guard would be good to you, Joe. You'd move up fast with your Army experience. Be making sixty a month before you could blink."

     
"I'll think about it."

     
"That's what you said last time."

     
"And I gave it some thought."

     
"You don't change, do you, Joe?"

Sixteen

     
The glorious autumn colors fluttering outside the window of Lindley Women's Academy jeered at Kate. Out of twenty-two applications she'd put in with schools, this one was her last hope.

     
"Your academic record is outstanding." The headmistress of the private girls' school folded her hands on the papers centered on the desk before her. Her stiff smile attempted to convey cordiality as well as the prestige of her institution, which although it was respectable was hardly distinguished. "Unfortunately, we hire only faculty members with a degree. A pity, since we need a good science teacher. The only thing I could offer you at the moment is tutoring."

     
Kate made an effort to swallow. "I understand."

     
She'd never wanted to teach, but what else was she going to do? The type of science she'd studied didn't lend itself to finding any sort of assistant's job in one of Salem's factories. In fact it was starting to look wildly impractical.

     
"Perhaps you might consider finishing your degree in Boston if finances are a consideration," suggested the headmistress. "We'll have a vacancy for a science mistress in the spring. The one we've had for the past two decades was forced to retire due to illness. We've already hired a capable young man for this year, but we would prefer a woman."

     
For a moment Kate's mind clutched wildly at the idea. She could take the train to Boston in the morning and come back at night; start spring semester. But how could she use the library... the laboratories? She certainly couldn't miss three or four days of class in a row to go rum running.

     
"About the tutoring...?" she said.

     
"I expect there'd be six or eight hours a week. Forty cents an hour."

     
Kate tried not to show her dismay. Three dollars a week. Her mother wouldn't know the terms, however. This provided an explanation for a trickle of money for day-to-day use. And there'd be too much ice to make the trip to Saint John in the winter.

     
By the time she got home she was choking on bitterness. What if Paul Garrison was right? What if they paid off the house and still couldn't survive. She couldn't remain a rum-runner for the rest of her life, yet her future otherwise had shriveled into a handful of dust. Tossing her hat and gray suit jacket into the car, she rolled the sleeves of her blouse and descended the beach stairs.

     
Near the bottom she halted abruptly at sight of someone aboard the
Folly
. Almost at once she recognized it was Joe Santayna. He was shirtless, and where the arms of Theo and other male acquaintances she'd seen in bathing suits were smooth, his were a landscape of ridges and muscle. They summarized the tough practicality of his world compared with the one in which she'd grown up.

     
Catching sight of her he straightened and wiped his hands on a rag. He jumped down, shrugging into his shirt.

     
"Came to check the engine," he said as he neared her. "Wanted to make sure the caulk was okay, and see if it needed oiling — which it did." The oil had left dark lines beneath his nails. "How's Mrs. Cole?" He nodded toward the house beyond Kate's.