Baker Towers

by Jennifer Haigh

  Three

  They came back in the summer, weighed down with treasures. A scarf or a ring for one kind of girl; for the other kind, silk stockings and French perfume. The best loot went to fathers and little brothers: weapons picked from enemy corpses, the grisly mementos of war.

  They came home to girls who’d forgotten them and girls who hadn’t, parents aged and sickened, or like George Novak’s father, simply gone. The lucky ones found garage apartments, cramped quarters above shops downtown. Gene and Evelyn Stusick spent their wedding night on a roll-away cot in his parents’ attic, a cramped space redolent of mothballs, crowded with bicycles and Flexible Flyers, the junk of his youth.

  They came home to the mines: Baker Brothers, Concoal, Eastern Coal & Coke. After the surrender came a flurry of bidding, the operators scurrying to acquire new land. There were five Baker mines, then seven, then ten. In the summer of 1945, a huge parcel of land was purchased, thirty thousand acres just across the Susquehanna; and the son of Elias Baker broke ground on Baker Twelve.

  Crews were hired, equipment purchased. Coal was mined seven days a week. Paychecks in hand, the men turned their attention to other things. Tryouts were held, a team assembled. In April 1946, the Baker Bombers returned to the field. On Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, Bakerton played ball.

  THE TOWN DIDN’T wait for Georgie, for the navy boys still at sea. A month after V-E Day Bakerton held a parade. Chester Baker himself appeared—resurrected from the dead, some said—to welcome the soldiers home.

  “This town belongs to you,” the old man boomed from the dais. He had grown frail and leaned heavily on a cane; he wore long whiskers in the old style, a mane of silver hair. “We have done our best to keep it sound in your absence, and we hand it over to you with every confidence that you will make us proud.”

  Some, of course, did not come home. Polish Hill had its casualties. Two of the Wojicks had debarked at Normandy. James was killed at Omaha Beach; John landed at Utah and survived, not knowing his brother lay bleeding to death twenty miles away.

  Three of May Poblocki’s sons returned. One night, drinking and carousing at the Vets, the youngest suffered a strange seizure and died before the ambulance arrived. Epilepsy, some said; the family called it a heart attack. He was twenty-three years old.

  Across town in Little Italy, the four Bernardi boys—Angelo and Jerry, Victor and Sal—came back with stripes. The older cousins worked at Baker and played for the Bombers. Jerry returned to driving the hearse.

  George and his new bride drove into Bakerton in a 1948 Chevy Fleet-line sedan, a wedding gift from Marion’s father. They’d been driving for seven hours, the last two on a narrow country road that wound north, more or less, from the highway. “That’s impossible,” she’d protested when he told her how long it would take. But his estimate—allowing for dirt roads and rugged hills, farm equipment and sluggish coal trucks—turned out to be correct.

  “Almost there,” he said. “It’s just over this hill.” He accelerated and was rewarded by an exquisite sound, the mellifluous roar of the ten-cylinder engine.

  At the top of Saxon Mountain he slowed, looking down on the town: the bustling main street with its six traffic lights; the eight church steeples; the railroad tracks that cut the valley in half. A whiff of sulfur hung in the air. From this vantage point you could see all of Saxon Valley: Polish Hill, the old mine camp known as Swedetown, the Number Five tipple just beyond. Baker Towers loomed above the train tracks; behind them, rows of identical shingled roofs. If Marion had asked, George would have told her what they were: Bony piles. Company houses. But his wife, bless her, did not.

  He rolled down his window. It was a clear Saturday in late June; at every church in Bakerton, someone was getting married. A warm breeze blew up from the valley, carrying the sound of bells. A riot of bells, circling and discordant: the stately carillon at St. John’s Episcopal, the twelve tones of the Angelus, the soaring refrain of “Ave Maria.” George had heard the bells his whole life; each set was distinct, recognizable, its voice as familiar as a relative’s. Intermingled now: the chorus crazily beautiful, festive as a circus organ.

  Home, he thought.

  They drove through the town. Bridesmaids posed on the steps of St. Brigid’s, waiting to be photographed. A full parking lot at St. Casimir’s, Fords and Oldsmobiles decorated with tissue-paper flowers. A gasping Studebaker idled out front, a string of empty beer cans trailing from its bumper.

  “My goodness,” said Marion, removing her dark sunglasses. She was unaccustomed to early mornings; the skin beneath her eyes looked slightly blue. “What is that all about?”

  “They hang a lot of junk on the groom’s car. When the newlyweds drive away, it makes a real racket.”

  She smiled uncertainly. “Is that a—Polish tradition?”

  “A Bakerton tradition.” He grinned. “Aren’t you sorry we missed out on that?”

  He took the long way through town, imagined the sun glinting off the Chevy’s chrome bumpers. The car was baby blue; in four weeks he’d already waxed it twice. The interior was white leather, the backseat wide as a sofa.

  He stopped at the traffic light next to Bellavia’s Bakery. One of the Bernardi boys, Vic or Sal, stopped in the street to stare. George gave him a wave. They crossed the railroad tracks and climbed Polish Hill. A barefoot boy ran in the street. The Poblockis’ chickens pecked quietly at the front yard. Fingering her rosary, Mrs. Stusick rocked back and forth on her porch swing, a babushka tied under her chin.

  “The houses are all the same,” Marion observed.

  “Company houses,” he said matter-of-factly. There, he thought. That wasn’t so bad. He pulled in front of his mother’s house and engaged the brake. “Here we are.”

  “I hope they like me,” she said.

  “They’ll love you,” said George, who had loved her the moment he saw her. “How could they not?”

  THEY’D MET ON Thanksgiving at her parents’ house in Haverford, a wealthy suburb on Philadelphia’s Main Line. George had been invited by her brother, Kip Quigley, whom he knew from a chemistry class at Temple. Quigley had hired George as his tutor, which meant that he sat behind George during exams and copied with impunity from his paper. For this privilege he paid ten dollars a week, enough to keep George’s secondhand Ford in gas and lube. The car trailed oil all over Philadelphia; George had never managed to find the leak. When he could afford to, he simply added another quart.

  The two were friendly, but not friends; their lives were too different. Quigley was nineteen and lived with his parents; he took classes when he felt like it, in between hangovers and tennis. George worked in a hardware store to pay for textbooks, clothes and other necessities the GI Bill didn’t cover. He studied at night, early in the morning and in the student union between classes. He was pressed for time, for cash; most days his body felt hungry for sleep; yet when exam results were posted, he was always at the top of the class. A clerical error, he thought the first time it happened. Somebody had made a mistake.

  In high school he’d been an indifferent student; if not for his father’s constant prodding, he would never have opened a book. He worked one summer at the tiny music store in town and took his pay in merchandise: a beat-up saxophone, a secondhand clarinet. His band played the school dances; onstage, he imagined himself Woody Herman or Jimmy Dorsey, enthralling audiences with the silky sound of his clarinet. School was his buddy Gene Stusick’s department. His high marks had earned him the nickname Eugenius: a boy who could name all thirty-two presidents in their proper order, who’d dazzled their sixth-grade teacher by adding long columns of figures in his head. George was no Eugenius. A grown man now, he simply studied harder than anyone else—galvanized by his dread of the coal mines, a life spent slaving underground like his father.

  Mining had killed Stanley Novak. George didn’t know how, exactly, but he was sure that it had. A big man, he’d spent much of his life crammed into tight, damp spaces; from the way he walked you cou
ld tell he was in pain. His breathing was labored. As a boy George had fallen asleep to the sound of it. The jagged rasp was audible through the floorboards, louder than the Polish radio station in the parlor downstairs. His father had given his life to Baker Brothers. The mines had given him a heart attack at fifty-four.

  For six months after graduating high school, George had worked as a greaser in the machine shop at Baker One—a sweetheart job, by mine standards. Before the war, the shop had been staffed by Baker’s star ballplayers, to save their knees and backs and lungs for the playing field. The shop was cold and filthy, the noise deafening; but George didn’t mind. He was grateful to be working aboveground.

  His first day at work, he’d ridden the mantrip with a dozen other men and felt his heart race as they entered the shaft. The memory still haunted him: the echoing dampness, the sulfur smell. The dark shaft was narrow and airless, no wider than the beam of his headlamp. Here and there, a rat scuttled. A few times, water fell from the low roof like a thundershower, soaking his shoulders. The One was a wet mine, the foreman explained; but where the water came from, or what kept it from flooding the mine completely, no one seemed to know. That single day had been enough for George; at the end of his shift he handed in his helmet. Luckily the foreman took pity on him and got him the job lubing shuttle cars. He was almost relieved when his draft notice came.

  He would never go back. He’d made up his mind long ago, when he was still in the navy, and this resolution had guided his every decision. One of his navy buddies had grown up in Philly; after their discharge they’d shared an apartment on Broad Street. When the other fellow moved out to get married, George found a tiny studio in a rooming house downtown. He worked a series of jobs: deliveryman, butcher’s assistant, night janitor at a pet store, scrubbing down cages and shoveling dog shit. He worked and studied. His hair thinned. In the mirror he saw his father.

  Meanwhile letters came from home. His boyhood friends had returned to Bakerton like boomerangs, to hometown girls and good-paying jobs. No one else had even tried to leave. As a boy, George had idolized a local ballplayer, Ernie Tedesco, who was picked from the coal league and signed to the majors. He’d played six seasons with the St. Louis Cardinals—as far as George knew, the only guy ever to escape Bakerton. As examples went, it wasn’t much help. George was no athlete, never had been. His dream was to become a surgeon, to fix what was broken. In three years as a medic, he’d glimpsed what was possible. Time was the problem; time and money. The years of training stretched before him, rigorous and expensive. He was a twenty-five-year-old sophomore, keenly aware of the years he had lost.

  LATER, AFTER HE AND MARION were married, he was struck by the unlikelihood of their union, how incredible it was that he had won her, how easily they might never have met. He pictured the lackluster unfolding of his life without her, the ordinary girl he might have married—the first of many banal and pragmatic choices, all adding up to a life without distinction. By all rights it was the life he’d been born to, a fate he’d escaped through hard work and persistence and sheer stubborn will.

  He’d refused Quigley’s invitation at first. He had planned to drive to Bakerton to spend the day with his family; but on Thanksgiving morning the Ford wouldn’t start. He called Quigley at the last minute, unwilling to face the holiday alone in his rented room, his usual dinner of sandwiches and canned soup.

  He’d dressed carefully for dinner—pressed trousers, his only sport coat. He knew that Quigley came from money. Quigley’s department store was a Philadelphia institution. George had never bought anything there—the prices were too steep—but he passed the store each day on his way home from the bus stop, stepping around well-dressed matrons with their green-and-white shopping bags. He saw Quigley’s bags all over the city, miles away from the actual store. Merely carrying such a bag was a status symbol. That alone should have tipped him off.

  The opulence of the house astonished him. Seated between two elderly aunts, he tried to be sociable but was flummoxed by the many forks and glasses. The Quigleys had invited a crowd. George counted sixteen heads at the long table, not including the woman who appeared to serve each course. At the far end, Marion sat with her chin in her hand, leaning on her elbow, violating everything George had been taught about table manners. Beside her an old man railed loudly against Truman. Marion nodded occasionally, her eyes glazed with boredom. She seemed to feel George’s gaze; she looked directly at him and tipped one eyebrow, a skill he admired. Then she drained her wineglass in a single gulp.

  After dinner George took Kip aside. “Who’s that? In the blue.”

  “My sister. I’d introduce you, but I like you too much.”

  “Come on,” George said, laughing.

  “You’ll see. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  When the guests moved to the living room, George spotted Marion alone on a sofa and introduced himself.

  “Marion Baumgardner,” she said, offering her hand.

  He paused for a moment, confused. A sick feeling in his stomach: she was married. The intensity of his disappointment surprised him.

  “You’re a friend of my brother’s?” she asked.

  “We’re in a class together.”

  “I suppose I can’t hold that against you.”

  He laughed uncertainly. “Oh, Kip’s all right.”

  “I think he’s an ass.” She leaned forward and took a cigarette from a case on the table. Her hand was long and white, slender as a fish.

  “Where were you stationed?” she asked.

  He grinned. “How’d you know I was a vet?”

  She shrugged languidly, as if to ask what else he could be.

  “In the South Pacific,” he said. “I was a medic on a navy minesweeper.”

  “Good God.”

  For a moment he was dumbfounded. Most girls were impressed by this fact, or pretended to be. Marion looked utterly horrified.

  He leaned over to light her cigarette. When she raised her hand he saw that she wore no wedding ring.

  She seemed to read his mind. “I’m a widow,” she said. “My husband was a paratrooper. His glider was shot down over Sicily.” Her voice was flat, her face still as a mask.

  “Oh,” he said stupidly. And then, recovering: “I’m sorry.”

  “So tell me, George Novak: What brings you to this part of the world? You’re not from here.” It wasn’t a question.

  Is it that obvious? he wondered.

  “You’ve got to be somewhere,” he said.

  She seemed amused when he asked for her phone number, but gave it to him anyway. When he called her the very next night, she invited him to her apartment.

  She lived alone, on the top floor of a brick row house off Rittenhouse Square, a grand place with two fireplaces and twelve-foot ceilings. One room held a wide bed, the only furniture she owned. In the living room were an easel and several unfinished canvases: bright colors in jagged patterns that seemed perfectly random, like the scrawlings of an angry child. The place smelled of coffee and turpentine. The refrigerator held tonic water, vodka and gin.

  Their first date lasted the entire weekend. George emerged from her apartment on a Sunday afternoon, exhilarated and slightly dizzy. He hadn’t eaten, and his temples ached with hangover. Her paint-dappled rug had left a crisscross pattern on his back.

  Sexually, she was more experienced than he, a fact apparent to them both. She did things to him no girl had done, and she made it clear, with words and gestures, that he was to reciprocate. Her frankness shocked and thrilled him. Her movements were expert. He hadn’t expected a virgin; yet she had lived with her husband for only a month. She had been fitted for a diaphragm; when exactly, George didn’t ask. If she’d had other lovers, she never mentioned them. For this he was grateful.

  He proposed after three months. Her father took the news calmly. He gave up on me long ago, Marion had told George. When I ran off and married a Jew.

  “Novak,” said the old man. “What kind of name is
that?”

  “Polish, sir. My father came over from Poland.”

  Quigley raised his bushy eyebrows. “A lot of Jews came from Poland.”

  “My family is Catholic, sir.”

  George knew from Marion that this wasn’t welcome news either, but her father received it stoically. In the end he gave his blessing, and Marion Baumgardner became Marion Novak—one youthful indiscretion expunged by another, less egregious one.

  They were married that spring, in a quiet ceremony at the Quigleys’ church in Haverford. George’s family did not attend; he didn’t tell his mother until afterward. She would have insisted on a Catholic wedding, and that was a conversation George didn’t wish to have. Later it would seem a cowardly decision, but at the time he deemed it practical. To him one church was as good as another. Any sort of ceremony would suffice, as long as it made Marion his wife.

  HIS LITTLE SISTER greeted them as they climbed the porch steps. She wore a ruffled pink dress with a stiff petticoat, a ribbon tied in her hair.

  “Hi, Georgie,” she said shyly, peering through the screen door. She was four years old, timid with strangers. He hadn’t visited since Christmas and was amazed at how she’d grown.

  “Hi, honey.” He opened the door and lifted her into his arms. “Isn’t she a doll? My baby sister Lucy.”

  He was prepared to hand her over so Marion could hold her, but his wife only smiled. He put Lucy down and went inside.

  “Hello!” he called, heading for the kitchen.

  His mother stood at the sink rinsing dishes. He was relieved to see that she was wearing shoes. Not only that: she had put on lipstick. It was the first time in years he’d seen her without an apron.

  He embraced her. She was stouter than he remembered; her hair smelled of garlic. A wonderful aroma filled the kitchen, a strawberry pie cooling on the windowsill. “Mama, this is Marion.”