And the train finally hauls them out of Great Falls—Stanton and Major Lane and some of the other boys—away from the mess of the last few days: the shouts, the lost tempers, the drunken exhausted reporters floating between rooms, carrying messages, waiting for a yes, a no. Kearns holed up in his room—the brutal little prig—holding out. Not an inch, not an inch. I’ll take my fighter to Cleveland, to Montreal. We don’t have to fight here. We don’t have to guarantee anything. You come up with the money—the final $100,000—and then we guarantee he will fight.
Did Stanton and Lane think they had the money? Or did they only know they had to claim they did, true or not? Get it out in the newspapers—it’s on!—and the thousands would crank up their autos, step onto those waiting trains, and Kearns would feel them coming, forgive the deadline, and get his last pound of flesh at the gate.
For a day, today, it didn’t matter if the lifelong friends and their money existed or not. The idea was to celebrate the idea of their existence, to get those people coming to Shelby—and yes, the sun was out now and the weather would be dandy—get them moving, and then how could there be such a pressing need, even for Doc Kearns, to see the full amount up front. He had his $200,000. The rest was surely on the way.
Shelby was drying fast, the sky was blank and spanking, the fight was on again, and the kingpins were arriving to claim and celebrate the twenty ghostly friends of Montana.
A brass band met Lane and Stanton’s train. The big tuba caught the morning sun in its big bell and hurled it playfully into the eyes of the gathered crowd. Did they all believe Stanton had the pledges? Well, they acted as if they did. It was a day for the motions of believing.
So play Sousa. Welcome the new fight czar. Welcome the banker Stanton. Smile at the newsboys, strike a pose for the photographers, dust off the epaulets, and blow. Conjure those thousands of fans out of their lidded baskets.
The big glinting tuba, the old uniforms and sad shoes. The hammers again and a last round of real hope—it did feel real if you thought quickly about it and then about something else—and so people are walking the streets and honking their auto horns and horses are dashing around and there is a new energy, the sun helping because it is a sun that looks as though it will stay. Straw hats, boaters, everywhere. Reporters sending their stories beep-beeping across the wires, that, yes, the fight will happen in three days, the money is said to be there, Shelby seems to have pulled it off.
We didn’t doubt it for a minute, the local folks are trying to say as they hawk and yell and spread their souvenirs with a flourish. You boys are the doubters, they say, jabbing fingers at city vests. And if it was up to you, this fight would have been a fizzle weeks ago. But it’s not, is it? It’s a go, and how can you say the tens of thousands are not on their way?
The porter bends to place the metal stepping-off stool on the ground. The hatless band conductor stands poised, baton in the air, watching over his shoulder. A woman appears at the door and, behind her, vests and cigars, Major Lane and his entourage. The drop of the baton and “Hail to the Chief.” The porter ready to assist the disembarking. But they don’t move, because the woman doesn’t move and she is first.
She pauses on the step, glancing around. She has come all the way from New York and the trip shows itself in the lavender crescents under her eyes, but she is alertly turned out in a traveling suit and city shoes and a close-fitting hat with a feather that curves so that it seems to cup her jawline.
She has a heart-shaped face, a slim figure. She carries an old water-stained valise. Her skin has not wrinkled but seems only more fragile, more tissuey than the last time we saw her. Also, a new bob and a small red mouth, a little blurred.
She has the contained look of someone who always travels alone.
The band is exuberant and slightly out of tune and very brassy. She does not move from her step. Major Lane catches sight of someone out in the crowd and leans over her shoulder to slash a greeting in the air with his cigar.
She surveys the crowd helpfully. She casts a frantic smile over her shoulder, but the man there just gives her an encouraging nod. The porter extends his hand.
She takes it and steps onto the metal stool, where she stands again, unmoving, because the band sound has surged. They are looking at her, playing at her. She smiles again. A drummer smiles back. She looks around again for Jerry—there he is, trotting down a side street, late—and she decides for one wild pleased moment that this is all for her. That her brother has arranged this for her. It is what a person like Jerry could arrange, out here in the West, where everybody is everybody’s friend, comrades together in the hardship of building something from scratch.
And in that wild pleased moment she raises her hand high to the band—now a piccolo player has lowered his piccolo to smile at her too—and steps off the metal stool to the ground of Shelby and sinks into a wide curtsy, which makes more people smile and laugh, and a little boy on the edge of the band begins to clap wildly and that is the moment Jerry rounds the corner to meet his sister, here all the way from New York.
She had not aged in four years, Jerry thought. Only faded slightly. Everything about her seemed slightly blurred, though it could have been her pastel dress, its soft modern material, or her new short hair, or the indeterminate red mouth. She was city pale, but unwrinkled, except perhaps for the merest cobwebs at the corners of her mouth and eyes.
Yes, she looked like a woman who had made a phonograph record. There was some kind of assured mockery in her bow to the band, he thought. And her clothes had a lilt that had been absent four years earlier. She looked as if she would know slang; had tried cigarettes; had booked passage to Milan.
Up close, though, her eyes were slightly too wide and rapid. Her shoes were very old. Her valise was shabby. When she opened her purse to tip the porter who brought her belongings, she rustled her fingers past a small paper package, and Jerry smelled stale chicken.
They loaded everything into the Hupmobile and drove slowly up the long shallow hill to the little frame house. She chattered, of course. She craned her neck around and exclaimed. How wild and open it was! Like a mining camp! How beautiful the countryside. The lakes of water she had seen on the grass, stretching forever, covered with strange, long-legged birds! Such a rain there must have been.
She blew her nose vigorously and pushed the wadded handkerchief up her sleeve. Their mother’s habit.
She showed him the little towelette from the dining car that you got to keep.
She said she hadn’t wanted a berth anyway, because her artistic temperament made her one of those people who need very little sleep. It had gotten worse over time, but then that gave her more hours of the day, didn’t it?
The Hupmobile popped and roared and slithered up the road, still gumbo here and there, and she patted the doors and shouted her admiration for its color—so beautifully tawny—and its stalwart character.
At one point, her voice dropped out altogether, though her lips kept moving, and when Jerry looked harder at her, she smiled brightly at him with her little crooked mouth.
They made her a bed in the washroom and hung a flannel cloth across the door between it and the kitchen. In addition to the valise with the big watermark on it, she had a rather large trunk with frayed straps.
She began to unpack her things, the flannel cloth pulled back so she could talk to the family, gathered cautiously, curiously around the kitchen table. The children were unusually quiet. They watched her as if she had stepped out of the moving pictures.
Inside the valise were two dresses, sundries, another worn pair of shoes. Inside the trunk were several packages wrapped in brown paper and string. Most of the trunk was empty.
One of the brown packages held sheet music—two operas she must memorize. She pointed to July 20 on the big wall calendar, the date she must, sadly, return to New York. Her patroness, Mrs. Wexner, had booked her passage to Milan, where she would study with Professor Lino, who had launched any number of opera careers.
>
She carefully draped her meager clothes on three hangers and placed the hangers on a large wall hook. Seated around the table, they all watched her. She had refused help. She wanted to chatter and be busy, and there was something in that wanting, or perhaps simply in the fact that she moved in a room behind a drawn-back curtain, that made them feel they were watching a stage show.
She drew each package out of the trunk with a flourish, placed it on the cot, unwrapped it carefully. The first three held small gifts for each of the children—a tiny replica of a Sopwith Camel for Francis, a miniature tea set for Maudie, and a slate with colored chalk for Tip. Then a cookie jar fashioned like a crowing rooster for the house, for Vivian and Jerry. And, for all of them, a paper packet full of sugar cubes from the train.
She unwrapped several other packages and placed the contents carefully, side by side, on the covered wooden crate that served as a bedside stand. A stoppered blue bottle. A knotted piece of satin cord. The Wanderer of the Wasteland by Mr. Zane Grey. A book called The Hidden Words.
Mr. Zane Grey, she explained, was very religious and mystical, in addition to being an authority on the West.
She patted the two books and sat on the edge of the cot, finished, hands folded in her lap.
“Is she going to stay here always?” whispered Maudie, pointing to the articles by the bed.
“Oh, no! I will be gone”—whoosh, her hand arrowed away—“in less than a fortnight.”
“What’s a fortnight?” Maudie asked.
“And now,” her aunt said, “I must request something. My name henceforth is Amelia. That is the name I have chosen for the stage and for my life, and I must request that you use it.” She smiled brightly. “I don’t even hear the name Daisy Lou anymore. It’s uncanny!”
Vivian got up from the table. “A fortnight is two weeks,” she told Maudie.
The stoppered blue bottle. It had a label fixed around it with a piece of string. The glass was a beautiful blue, pale and clean as flax.
“It’s cheap,” Amelia told the children, who were now on the floor of her little room. “I bought it from a man for five cents. But the bottle doesn’t really count. What counts is what is in the bottle.” She read her own label as if she had forgotten. Her loopy extravagant handwriting.
“It says…” She squinted fervently. “Why, it says, Comet Dust!
“I caught this dust from Halley’s Comet, in nineteen and ten. I held this bottle aloft just as Halley’s Comet, the most important comet there is, passed directly over my head. This was in New York City, on the banks of a very important river.”
“What did the comet look like?” Francis asked. “Was it a fireball like the sun?”
“I believe it was,” Amelia said. “If I had seen it, I could tell you. As it happened, the sky that night was obscured by a dense layer of clouds. An extremely dense layer of clouds. We had hoped—my friend and I—that the comet would at least be visible as a kind of moving light behind the clouds. But no, it wasn’t. However, it was there. The scientists had performed their calculations, and they knew, to the minute, when that comet was passing over our heads. So we knew it was there. We simply couldn’t see it.” She shrugged cheerfully.
“One of those very scientists suggested that we trap the comet dust. I got the bottle from that scientist, in fact, and followed his instructions for dust trapping, to the last detail.”
She showed them how she had raised her arm high over her head. She froze her empty hand, the thumb and first two fingers grasping the air daintily, and she very slowly moved her wrist in the minutest of motions, making adjustments for the most efficient snaring of the dust. Her face took on a very solemn look, and her eyes were fixed on the drying rack across the room.
“Four minutes, exactly,” she said firmly. “That was the method.” She dropped her hand. “And then, quickly! the stopper.” She plunked the imaginary stopper into the imaginary bottle. “And there it is.” She gestured to the little blue bottle on the orange crate.
“What does it do?” Francis asked.
“Well, it is not supposed to do anything. It is just supposed to be. You see, it is the dust of an event that happens only once every seventy-six years. The comet comes around and then it moves far, far out into the heavens, farther than you can ever imagine, but then it comes back. It travels in a large circle. It takes seventy-six years to go around the circle, but at the end of seventy-six years, there it is again! The very same comet.
“The dust is saved, trapped, for good reasons.” Her voice was very firm and definite. “Let us say another comet just happened to appear in the same year Halley’s returned. If the dust from that comet proved to be different from the dust in this jar—different in kind—why, then we would know it was not the real Halley’s. It would be an impostor!”
“If it was a spectacular comet, I wouldn’t care,” Francis said.
“Why, silly, you would indeed! We all care. We want to know that there are constants in the universe. Also, there is this. The comet’s tail has magnetic properties, and it gathers up the very essence of the world it passes near; the things we can’t see. By analyzing the dust at a later time, we can apprehend what we couldn’t have apprehended at the time. Emanations. Celestial tunes.”
The satiny green cord with the knots in it? That was so she could move through her Coué chant. “Every day and in every way I am getting better and better,” she instructed the children.
This irritated Vivian, the Catholic. “Me, me, me,” she said in a low voice to Jerry in the kitchen. “Never us. Never Thy will. Just me. Give me.”
It was uncustomarily bitter, and Jerry felt called upon to defend his sister. “If not ‘me,’ who else?” he asked her. “Who is going to accomplish your life for you?” His tone was heavy. There was the weight of his early instruction in it.
After supper, Mr. Clemons came by in his automobile for the children. He took the children away to the farm until the fight was over, because Shelby had become no place for children. Francis balked and pleaded, to no effect, and he left with a furious face.
And so, yes, it is July 1 and Daisy Lou has arrived and now she is Amelia.
They sit at the table that night, the three of them. Three people, still young, though Vivian’s hair is beginning to gray at the temples. She has it smoothed back, still long, and she has a line between her eyes. Jerry has his strafed look still, and the brusqueness. But something about the hopes of the last four years have also left their mark on him. He seems more present, more avid, than he did.
In some odd way, the three of them feel themselves to be collaborators. There is something clandestine, maybe dangerous, in the air. Perhaps it is just that the children are gone. Perhaps it is the telegram that arrived that day from Carlton, a panicky order to Jerry to sell, get rid of, get something, for Carlton’s share in the new hotel. SHELBY A BUST, he said. TRIP CANCELLED.
He hadn’t seen the latest news stories, they decided. He hadn’t seen that the fight was on again. That it would go ahead as planned.
Yes, there was something about to begin. Vivian examined Amelia, fixed the name once and for all in her mind, noticed the details of her clothing, her hair, her mannerisms. Didn’t like her. Didn’t like her frivolity and shallowness and effusions. She always thought that when people made a huge to-do about their surfaces, they had little or nothing underneath.
Amelia. Where had she come up with that?
She watched her sister-in-law flutter her hands, talk at Jerry. He listened stalwartly. Vivian thought of flashing trolley cars on a city street, and the smell of roses, and the luxury of a quiet house. Of the way her brother George didn’t talk very much, and how comfortable that had been.
Waking in the night, Vivian hears Amelia padding back and forth across the floor of the washroom. She hears her murmuring. She listens to the faint horns from the Green Lite and the faint explosions of the autos that seem to crawl around now throughout the night.
She wakes later and there is
only deep, exhausted breathing from the washroom. A small sleeping whine like a child’s.
19
JULY 2, the deadline day, began with Jerry rushing out early, rushing down to the refreshment parlor in the damp-walled basement. To his ice cream and sunglasses. The room was very dim. He had to keep two kerosene lamps going, even with the rain gone and the day becoming hot and bright. He took a small can of red paint with him and painted over the black arrow on his sign, the arrow that pointed down the crude steps to the basement. Now it was harder to ignore.
It was chilly down there, chilly enough for a heavy sweater. He retrieved a few blocks of ice from sawdust in a far, cool room and packed his ice cream and waited.
Back at the house, Amelia embarked on her vocal exercises, using a tuning fork to gain her pitch. Vivian baked bread. The exercises—the earnest, trilling soprano voice—made her knead the dough more violently than she had to. Light sweat broke out on her arms like a surprise. Not because the voice was terrible—it was no worse than anyone you heard on the Victrola or on the radio programs, really—it was just…steady. There was drudgery and piety in it. The weight of labor; a weight that transferred itself to the listener. She washed a sinkful of towels and hung them on the line in the new sun. Inside the house, the voice marched dutifully up and down, avid and empty. The ping of the tuning fork. Up a third. The mannered upward march.
She punched the dough down, it gasped, and she made loaves and put them in the oven, the voice now repeating and repeating a short passage in Italian. She swept and washed the kitchen floor. She removed the loaves, washed her face and patted rose water on her neck and repinned her hair and changed her dress and pulled back the curtain.
“Amelia,” she said briskly. “It’s time to show you around.”
She wrapped a loaf of bread to take to Jerry for his lunch, cut a piece of cheese to go with it. Amelia put on her best dress and requested a cup of tea.
One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 22
