Sea Glass

  “There are people here,” he says.

  She descends the stairs, holding on to the railing. A figure steps out from behind Sexton. The word you is on her lips, and perhaps it is on his as well. It seems another life in which she met this man, gave him a ride into the city. Near the bottom of the steps, she notices the boy, who is looking at her with his mouth open.

  “Honora, these are men from the mill. This is . . .” Sexton appears to have forgotten the man’s name already.

  “McDermott,” the man says, stepping forward. “Quillen McDermott.”

  “Hello,” Honora says, and looks to see if the boy will remind them that they have already met.

  “And this here is Alphonse,” Sexton is saying. “And, well, everybody, this is my wife, Honora.”

  Honora nods in the direction of the others, who have removed their caps and are looking down at the floor.

  “They’re from an organizing committee,” Sexton says quickly. “There’s going to be a strike, and these men need to get out leaflets, and they’re interested in seeing the typewriter and the Copiograph machine.”

  Typewriter? she thinks. Copiograph machine?

  “In the attic,” he says, glancing away.

  She finishes her descent so that she is in the hallway with the others.

  “I’m going to take them up to the attic,” Sexton says. “To see the machines.” He seems like a boy with a treasure in his bedroom that he wants his new friends to admire. Shyly, a man steps forward with a box of chocolate cupcakes in his hands. “These are for you, ma’am,” he says.

  And, oh God, what will she feed these men? she thinks, for surely they have not yet had their dinners.

  Sexton reaches across the space between them and kisses her on the side of her mouth. “Happy anniversary,” he says.

  McDermott stands to one side, holding his cap behind his back. The boy scuffles his feet against the wooden floor. And then, through the open door that nobody thought to close, the figure of a woman, impossibly sleek and shiny, emerges into the crowd of gray and brown men.

  “Yoo-hoo,” Vivian calls brightly. “Anybody home?”

  McDermott

  He sits in a wooden chair in the kitchen and smokes a cigarette. Over by the sink, the woman is peeling potatoes. She peels slowly and methodically with a small paring knife, leaving as little potato on the peel as possible. The kitchen has an icebox and shelves with oilcloth on them, and every surface, as far as he can tell, is clean. Through the window, the June air is darkening.

  He can see only the back of the woman at the sink, the pink blouse tucked into a gray skirt that falls just below the knees. She has on ankle socks and brown pumps, and the skin between her socks and skirt is bare. Maybe he should offer to help, but he senses that she would say no. Just a minute earlier, Ross and the new fellow, whose name is Sexton, and the other woman, Vivian, were in the room, and the space seemed crowded and noisy. But then Sexton said he was going to oil up the Copiograph machine and the woman and Alphonse went to her house to get food and drink, and Ross, well, he has no idea where Ross is, but now the room is quiet and empty. Too quiet. Too empty. He wonders if he should leave, if he is making the woman uncomfortable.

  “I guess you didn’t get your wish,” he says.

  She turns, her hands still over the sink. “I’m sorry?”

  He takes a quick pull on his cigarette and blows the smoke out the side of his mouth. It pauses at the window and then coils back into the room, as if with a life of its own. “At Christmas,” he says, flicking his ashes into a glass ashtray on the table. “You said you wanted a baby.”

  She smiles. “Oh,” she says. “I guess not.”

  She has the sleeves of her pink blouse pushed up to her elbows. The skin on her forearms has delicate dark hairs. “How about you?” she asks. “You wanted peace and quiet.”

  He shrugs. “Still looking for it,” he says.

  She has to turn back to the sink to finish her task, and he can see that carrying on a conversation is going to be impossible if he sits at the table. He crosses the room and leans against the wall near the sink, one hand in his trouser pocket, the other still holding the cigarette. “You’re a good sport,” he says. “All of us barging in on you like this.”

  “It did take me by surprise,” she says. “I’m just worried I won’t have enough food.”

  “That woman, what’s her name, Vivian, she’s gone back to her house to get some stuff.”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s a friend of yours?”

  “Sort of. A new friend. She was there that day, at the airport.”

  “Really?” He doesn’t remember her. He remembers the woman pilot in her flight suit, the boy looking pitiful but happy.

  Honora rinses a potato. “I was kind of surprised when I saw you just now,” she says.

  He nods, though actually he was more than surprised — he was stunned. He had just worked out minutes earlier where he’d seen the new guy who was riding with them in the bread truck: he’d had an image of the man downing the three shots in the speak, leaving with the English girl. He’d recalled the package the man had left on the floor — all of which had meant nothing to McDermott in the bread truck. He was just glad he’d managed to remember, because something like that could drive you nuts all day — a face you couldn’t place, a song you couldn’t quite get the name of. But then when they all stood in the hallway and the woman walked down the stairs — and he knew right away she was the woman in the airport; how could he ever forget that? — and the guy went over to the woman and kissed her on the mouth and said Happy anniversary, McDermott felt the word no shoot through him, right up from his feet.

  “And the boy,” she says. “How is he?”

  “He’s fine, I think,” he says. “I’ve got him working for me. Well, for us. I think he’s better off than in the mill. He’s happier, anyway.”

  “Is it safe, what you’re doing?”

  McDermott pauses. He stubs out his cigarette. He has a quick flash of the sledgehammer to Tsomides’s head. “More or less,” he says.

  “Do you mind my asking you what you are doing?”

  “No, I don’t mind,” he says. “You have every right, us using your house and all.” Though he cannot for the moment think of how to phrase exactly what they are doing. He watches her rinse her hands under the tap, give them a quick shake, and dry them on a dish towel. She takes a pan from a shelf and fills it with water. “You know about the strike on Monday,” he says.

  “I do now,” she says, putting the potatoes into the water.

  “We’re trying to get out leaflets and a newsletter. The unions have voted to strike, but they represent only ten percent of the mill workers in the city. We’re trying to form an industrial union of the unorganized workers. The Ely Falls Independent Textile Union, we’re calling it.”

  “You’re striking because of the wage cut?”

  He takes the heavy pot from her and carries it to the stove. “The wages in Ely Falls are the worst in New England. Well, you must know that.”

  “I knew they were bad. I didn’t know they were the worst,” she says, lighting the burner with a match.

  “How long has your husband been in the mill?”

  “Since February.”

  “He used to be a salesman, he said.”

  “Yes.”

  “Got laid off?”

  “Something like that.” He watches her take lard and flour from the cabinet. She measures them and sifts the flour into a bowl and then drops a teaspoon of ice water into the mixture.

  “What are you making?” he asks.

  “A pie. Strawberry-rhubarb.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “What do you do at the mill?” she asks, mixing the dough.

  “I’m a loom fixer,” he says, leaning against the lip of the sink so that he can see her face.

  “What’s that?”

  “I fix looms.”

  She laughs, tilting her head back a b
it. She has a long white neck, a squarish jaw.

  “Can I help?” he asks.

  She thinks a minute. “Would you mind cutting some strawberries?”

  “Not at all.”

  “They’re in the icebox,” she says. “Just slice them.”

  He feels somewhat better having a task, though now it is more difficult to talk to the woman, and so for a while he just washes the strawberries and cuts them, and he feels all thumbs at this simple task. “You didn’t know about that Copiograph machine and the typewriter, did you?” he asks after a time.

  For a moment, she doesn’t answer.

  “No,” she says finally.

  “I could see it on your face.” He puts the sliced strawberries back into their little wooden box.

  “You must be good at reading faces,” she says.

  “Have to be,” he says, looking at hers. He turns away and dries his hands on the dish towel.

  “I think I’ll go give your husband a hand,” he says.

  Honora

  The front room hums with the sort of activity it has not seen in years, not, perhaps, since the unwed mothers sat in lively groups, drinking tea (Honora imagines them knitting baby garments) and occasionally glancing out to sea.

  Prevent Hunger in Ely Falls, she types. Her fingers are a blur over the familiar keys, the enamel ovals in their silver rings. She has not lost her dexterity, not since the days when she was recording Sexton’s sales pitch in the paneled rooms of banks. In the corner, her husband’s arm is making repetitive round pumps at the Copiograph machine. As each copy is shunted out, he inspects the sheet and then sets it aside on a makeshift table fashioned the night before from a door he took off its hinges and laid over two sawhorses he found in the cellar. He has dressed in his best gabardine trousers (his Sunday-go-to-meeting trousers, Harold might have said) and a shirt kept for special occasions (though there have been precious few special occasions since Christmas). Honora, when she glances up, thinks that it has been some time since she has seen her husband with this much snap.

  Dread poverty threatens thousands of Ely Falls workers, she types as the man named Mironson dictates the words from a sheet of paper in his hands. He brushes a long hank of hair from his forehead. He is a small, almost delicate man, his mouth, with its pronounced bow, nearly that of a woman, and so at odds, Honora thinks, with his professed calling as a union organizer — as if a priest had come calling in overalls, or an artist had on a clerical collar. At the opposite end of the room, Quillen McDermott, in blue shirtsleeves, is collating and stapling a newsletter. The boy, Alphonse, is bundling batches of leaflets together with string. Vivian, in crisp white linen pants and a blouse, is holding a copy of the newsletter and pacing.

  “You can’t be serious,” Vivian says to no one in particular, exhaling a long plume of blue smoke. “You can’t print this drivel.”

  McDermott and Mironson glance up at her.

  “Listen to this,” she says, hooting to the room at large. “In the industrial depression you did take a noble part / And ungrumbling shared the leanness of the floundering textile mart.”

  McDermott gives a small chuckle, and even Mironson seems abashed. “It was a strike song in New Bedford,” he says.

  “I can’t even say the words, never mind sing them,” Vivian says. “And textile mart?”

  Mironson brushes his hair off his face again. “The idea is to print politically inspiring poetry or songs. It doesn’t really matter if they scan,” he says.

  “I think it matters if one can actually say them without gagging,” she says, taking another delicate pull on her cigarette and holding the offensive doggerel away from her.

  “Hear, hear,” says Ross from the corner.

  “Do you think you can do better?” Mironson asks Vivian.

  Vivian appraises him coolly, and Honora wonders if Mironson means this as a reprimand or a challenge.

  “I could try,” Vivian says.

  “It’s yours, then,” Mironson says — a leader used to delegating.

  As if there were nothing at all out of the ordinary in the previous exchange, Vivian sits near the makeshift table with the newsletter on her lap. She searches in her purse and removes a golf pencil. “When was the industrial depression?” she asks innocently.

  “The mills have been in a depression since twenty-four,” Mironson says.

  “Oh,” Vivian says, pursing her lips. Honora watches her write a word on the piece of paper in her lap.

  “Employment and sources of livelihood are as of today eliminated by the shutdown of eleven Ely Falls mills,” Mironson dictates just behind Honora’s shoulder. Almost simultaneously she types the words, thinking as she does so that perhaps Vivian might want to take a look at this particular leaflet as well. “It is no answer to say that this condition is a situation of their own making,” Mironson dictates.

  “Who is this going to?” Honora asks.

  “It’s an appeal for funds. It will be distributed in mills, union halls, sporting events, and working-class neighborhoods in this and surrounding towns.”

  “Wouldn’t you want an appeal for funds to go to people who have money?”

  “Yes, of course,” Mironson says. “But this is more of an appeal for solidarity.”

  “I see,” says Honora, though she is not entirely sure that she does see. If the objective is to relieve hunger, she thinks, leaflets directed at the owners of shops and grocery stores and churches and social clubs might make more sense. But she doesn’t quite have enough of Vivian’s gumption to object.

  “It is a self-evident fact that a continuation of this lack of means of earning a living will reduce Ely Falls textile workers to a state of absolute destitution,” Mironson reads.

  “Suffering Jesus,” Ross says from the corner.

  Seven men and the boy spent the night sleeping in bedrolls in the previously empty bedrooms upstairs. Shortly after Sexton arrived with the other men in the bread truck, and McDermott and the fellow named Ross saw the typewriter and the Fosdick Copiograph machine, and, more important, Honora guesses, the empty house far from town — a house at which no one would ever think to look for strike leaders — Ross and the man named Mahon went back to the city and returned with Mironson and three others. By then Vivian had come from her house with a beach wagon full of provisions: a leg of lamb, a roast chicken, vegetables, butter and bread, milk, several bottles of wine, and all the silver and glassware and china from her own house — real silver, real crystal, and delicate porcelain plates (“I never eat anyway,” Vivian said). Honora cooked the dinner and baked another pie. Sexton set up the sawhorses and the door in the front room, and Honora put her mother’s tablecloth over it to make a dining table. The meal seemed more like a feast than the simple feeding of mill workers and strike leaders, and the wine disappeared as if it were water. Sexton, who had by then already quickly bathed and changed his clothes, sat at the middle of the table and, with his salesman’s charm and affability dusted off, began to shed his aura of failure and despair — so much so that when Honora finally was alone with him in their bedroom after midnight (both of them exhausted and, for the first time in weeks, overfed), she found it impossible to summon the anger of earlier in the day. Chastising her husband for not having told her about the strike seemed absurd in the face of the astonishing arrival of the strike leaders themselves. Besides, having words with Sexton would have required whispering, since both were acutely aware of not being alone together in their own house for the first time since they had entered it. Sexton did not move to touch her, and she thought that he was perhaps too self-conscious about the other men. In any event, Honora was relieved.

  The men had their own bedrolls, though Honora had had to find extra towels and soap. She worried for the boy, who was sleeping among so many men, but then she saw that McDermott was looking out for his young charge. As she lay in her bed, unable to sleep, she could hear the men snoring, even over the sound of the surf outside.

  Vivian had gone
back to her own house, and briefly Louis Mironson had gone with her, needing to use the telephone there. Honora, who found sleep impossible, slipped downstairs to cut the precious grapefruit that Vivian had brought, to get a head start on breakfast. She was in the kitchen when Mironson came back into the house through the porch, his feet still bearing traces of wet sand; and for a few moments they sat together in the kitchen, each with a glass of milk. He’d walked back along the beach, carrying his shoes but still in his coat and tie, guided by the moonlight, he said, adding that it had been some time since he had spent any length of time near the ocean. He was grateful to her, he said, for letting them use the house. She asked him if he was married, if he had a family, and he said no, that he’d been traveling up and down the east coast for several years now and that he hadn’t found anyone with whom to settle down. The work was too important and too urgent, he said, and she noted that he nearly added too dangerous but stopped himself. He looked away and thanked her and said that there might be more people coming from time to time and would that be all right, and Honora said it didn’t seem to be her decision to make. He would see to it, he said, that she and Sexton were given money as compensation. If she would help with the cooking, he said, he would be most grateful, but he would arrange for provisions. It did not escape Honora’s notice that it was she and not Sexton with whom Mironson seemed to be making the deal.

  A woman named Sadie, a “comrade from New York,” might be joining them at some point, he said, assessing Honora’s response to the charged word.

  “You’re a Communist,” Honora said.

  “Yes,” Mironson said. “I am. The others are not, though.”

  “Why are you and they working together?”

  “This country has a long history of spontaneous strikes becoming interchangeable with the frankly revolutionary.”

  “In other words,” Honora said, “you’re using each other.”

  “In a nutshell, yes,” Mironson said.

  He added that Honora shouldn’t expect much help from Sadie in the kitchen; she wasn’t that sort of woman. Honora stood and took the empty milk glasses to the sink and washed them.