I can tell you there was a lesson in it all for me. Strategy, strategy, and a cool head. That is the ticket! Along those lines, I hope you and Vivian will take a few minutes to read through the enclosed policy. It is a draft of course and subject to amendment and refinement.
It is not pleasant to contemplate a future in which Vivian might be left a widow, but I believe some planning now can prevent heartache later. I’m sure you remember Father’s sermon about the Prophet Elijah who was sent by the Lord in a time of drought to ask sustenance from a poor widow. And how her generosity produced the miracle of an endless barrel of meal and an unfailing cruse of oil. I take this lesson to my book and say: “Life insurance ministers to widows and, thru life incomes, brings to them the cruse of oil that never fails, and the barrel of meal that never wastes. The greatest tool in the hands of life underwriters today is the monthly income for life. That is the barrel of meal. That is the cruse of oil that continues to flow so long as the widow has need.”
Please give that idea some thought and give the enclosed policy your fullest attention.
Ruth and I and the boys send you all our very warmest regards.
Carlton
The book was put out early in 1928 by an insurance publisher in Indiana. Two copies, taped together and apparently unopened, lay among the soggy letters and logbooks, the browning photos, that the firemen carried out of Amelia’s smoking shed. Monthly Income Insurance and How to Write It. That’s the title. Carlton’s name beneath. Inside, a dedication: “To the mother of my children, who stands out as the highest type of womanhood for whose protection the great institution of life insurance exists, this book is dedicated. Were it not for such women, there would be no life insurance.”
Odd that this is the only real letter there is from Carlton. The telegrams stuttered across the wires to Jerry during the oil fever, but no letters—not that survive. Just this single, aberrant version of a man steeped in temporary rectitude.
For two years, Carlton drank no spirits. He joined the Lions and Odd Fellows and moved back in with his first and only wife and children. He applied himself to the vocation of life insurance, a profession for which he felt sincerely talented.
CHAPTER X: PERSONALITY IN LIFE UNDERWRITING
There is probably no vocation where personality counts for more than it does in the field of life underwriting. What makes up personality? Many things go to make it up, and among the first of these is manner and charm. It might be said that good manners, a clean-looking well-groomed body and a happy disposition are the open sesame to any office, to any society…
Another quality of mind which makes a personality glow is vision. There is a great difference between vision and dream life. The man of vision is the man who makes his dreams come true, who doesn’t just live in a dream life. He is the man who is a worker, a builder, who can never rest content until the vision of his own or another’s has been worked out from the blue-print into the actuality of the building itself. There is a magic in vision that carries men on to great achievement…
Then, too, imagination helps an underwriter to draw a picture for his client of the estate he has created and what it will do for his family, of the lack of sufficient income to accomplish his life’s objectives; not in cold financial statements, but in a real human way that will make him see the need, expressed in terms he will understand, and therefore realize how vital a thing it would seem to him were he to be confronted with the fact that he was today to take the journey to that undiscovered country from which no traveler returns. And this is no faraway picture! To those who have spent only a short time in this great business there have come personal experiences showing the tragedies that occur so quickly in this modern day of rapid transportation. In spite of improvements in safety devices, in spite of preventive medicine, the human life is a frail thread that may be snapped in a moment.
She had left in the middle of the night while Carlton slept off a two-day drunk and another financial reverse. Fitzi—the tearoom hostess who took him away from Ruth in the first place and for almost six years ran with him through his booze, his money, his schemes that panned out and then didn’t pan out. And when the IOUs piled up high enough and the headwaiters began to feign ignorance and when Carlton began to make a single Havana last a few days—a puff here, a puff there—well, then Fitzi ran off with someone in exactly the same way she had run off from a husband with Carlton.
So many times Carlton had imagined the sucker who came before him, the husband ghost who enhanced his and Fitzi’s boozy recklessness. The mournful cuckolded presence that fueled them.
He couldn’t stand to think of himself as that person, as someone providing an enabling image of aloneness and sorrow-drowning, and that is probably the reason he created someone entirely new. A sober family man, a seller of life insurance policies. Someone who could never be abandoned by a calm and worldly woman with blonde hair and sequined shoes. He would be someone with prospects, with the ability to make himself anew.
He has lost some weight, five or ten pounds. He is, if not lean, certainly solid. Good color. High-colored as always. Still with a pinkie ring and a propensity for a good cigar. But, otherwise, he has the trussed-in look of someone trying, minute by minute, not to misbehave.
He earnestly types his book in a room off the kitchen. The teenagers do their homework on the dining room table. Ruth quietly places things in cupboards.
He wonders when he will stop hating the clarity, the bright tin feel of sobriety.
He thinks he has embarked on an unremarkable and patterned life at last. He decided to do it, and he did it. He has peddled a new self to an old self.
Ruth is a handsome woman and not as bitter as might be expected. He honestly appreciates her. But it is the other woman he summons in order to perform his doleful conjugal duty. He summons Fitzi with her extravagant laugh and lazy eyes, smoke winding from a crimson mouth.
There is a difference between vision and dream life. He knows that, but he can’t stop the dream life. He can’t stop the moving picture inside his head—the movie of himself, sober and wealthy and smooth, walking into a nightclub where a frayed Fitzi dispenses hat checks. Or his name on the financial page of the Chicago Tribune and Fitzi, hungover, smeary, dropping her forehead into her hands to weep. His photo in American magazine, in an expensive suit, above a respectful interview in which he explains his great success—a combination of cool strategy, a financial plan, hard work. A prudent accumulation of capital, which enables, finally, one last big risk. A calculated, sober, muscled risk.
And afterward, Fitzi, sequined and humbled and sardonic, accepting the little blue flame from a lighter with his initials tooled in the gold.
23
IT IS a small, low-ceilinged room off the kitchen. A kind of mudroom that T.T. built on. It is very dim, with only one small, smeary window. He has not run the electricity there, so even on a bright day you have to take an electric torch or the kerosene lantern in there to find anything. She doesn’t like to linger there. She’ll walk through it, out the back door to the clothesline, say, but she doesn’t like the tight cold feel of that place.
A workbench runs along one side; shelves and drawers along another. Hooks on the third for T.T.’s mackintosh, spare auto chains, an old high-cantled saddle. Nothing in the room is painted. Heavy iron tools hang above the workbench, grim mysteries. The floor is cement.
It is T.T.’s room, dark, low, smelling of iron and sawdust and motor oil. Every time Amelia enters it, even after four years, she feels like a prowler.
She needs something. She needs a hammer. She hung a pretty picture on the wall of the front room—a cheap print of a cottage in rose time, but it did brighten the room a little—and she has noticed that the nail is sagging. It seems urgent to replace it, anchor the picture. She doesn’t want to take it down and wait for T.T. to do it, because she doesn’t want the wall bare and disheartening all afternoon.
So she is looking in the mudroom for a hammer. A huge one wi
th a ball peen hangs on the wall with the other tools, but she is hoping to find a smaller, more manageable one in a drawer. Four years, and she has never opened any of those drawers.
They are heavy and a bit warped. Hard to move. The first is full of horseshoes and strands of barbed wire. Different kinds with different barbs, some innocent, some torturous.
The second drawer, a deep one, contains old cans of poison. For rodents, for moles, for grasshoppers. Some of it has trickled out of the corner of a cardboard package, the mice poison, and gives off a smell of chemical death. The drawer is low enough for a child to reach. Not that there are children in the house or ever will be. But a neighbor child could wander into the room, a visitor’s child could toddle into the mudroom while the adults are eating pie around the stove and dip fat little fingers into the stuff in the drawer, yes?
He must move those poisons, she thinks with a wave of vehemence and distaste. What a self-centered, witless thing to do! Stuff a drawer full of poison, an unlocked drawer the height of a very small child. Did T.T. Wilkins forget that he had once had children of his own? Did he think himself responsible only to himself? Did he never stop to consider that his own thoughtlessness, his solitary way of moving through the world—arranging his things to suit only his own convenience—that such an attitude could harm someone else, even kill someone?
She pushes the big warped drawer shut, struggling with it, hitting at it with the flat of her hand.
The next drawer slides easily. It seems to have been oiled. This one is a relief because it is an ordinary junk drawer, a drawer of odds and ends. A ball of string, tacks, oily receipts, a small box of pennies, a few rags.
She stretches her hand carefully toward its dim recesses, patting delicately for a shape like a hammer, and lands on something flat, cool, and smooth. She rests her fingers on it for a moment, moving them to feel its cool roundness and slide it forth.
It is a pocket watch. A pocket watch with Roman numerals on its face and scrollwork on the silver like figure eights on ice. The face is cracked. She traces the lines with a cool and terrified finger, lingering.
T.T. said he got the watch from Johnny Dempsey, not to be confused with Jack.
Johnny was the brother, a dandy in a bow tie with the curved slouch of a pretty boy. Johnny was also a dope addict. Everybody seemed to know it. And if you didn’t know it, you might have suspected some kind of monkey riding on the guy’s shoulder. He moved his eyes around too fast, as if a single slip would do him in.
Johnny came up to T.T., that day at the training camp on the Missouri, and offered to sell him a watch. A good one. Given to him by a friend and never lost more than a minute a year.
Jack Dempsey hung around with Hollywood swells after he finished off Carpentier. He lived the good life, and Brother Johnny came out to hang around and ride the champ’s gravy train, and some swell hooked him on dope. Everybody knew it. Everybody knew, too, that someone in the champion’s crew, his entourage, kept Johnny supplied. A trainer, a doctor, who knew?
Johnny. He’s why Dempsey lost to Tunney again this year. What finished him off. Two months before the fight, Johnny the junkie finally goes over Niagara headfirst, so to speak. Shoots his wife, who’s trying to leave him. Shoots himself.
They had a mountain lion with a jeweled collar at the Missouri camp. Johnny led it around. Twitchy little guy but likable enough. Came up to T.T. and struck up a conversation and, at the end of it, offered to sell the watch cheap. Pure silver. Never more than a minute.
Got dropped a few months later on the concrete floor of the mudroom. Stopped. Forgot about it.
She watches his mouth grind pot roast, watches him swallow.
She thinks about the girl at the movie theater who takes tickets. A girl infatuated with picture cowboys and derring-do. Four years ago, barely married to T.T., Amelia listened to the girl tell her, in full admiration and awe, that T.T. Wilkins once told one of those snake-waving preachers to get out of his way, and when the preacher didn’t, he pulled him off his wagon and throttled him until he was dead. Dragged him off to a coulee and dumped him for the crows. The bad summer of 1919. He and Skiff Norgaard.
Amelia hadn’t believed it for a minute. She laughed when she told the story to Jerry. The girl was notorious for her fantasies. She claimed she was a descendant of Pocahontas and wanted to give speeches about that fact to the Lions Club and the high school.
Jerry laughed too. He told her that the preacher had had it coming. That T.T. and Skiff knocked the loony out cold and laid him next to a water trough so he’d have a bit of rusty water when he woke up. Put his tall black hat over his eyes. That the preacher and his horse and sheep wagon left town at dark when the traveling was cool.
Jerry said T.T. should have beat up Skiff—probably would have, if he’d known that Skiff was going to do him in. Buy his land off him, then refuse to sell it back when T.T. finally saved the money from his town job. There you have grounds for a beating.
The watch in the drawer is some kind of explanation for what Amelia has come to grieve about T.T.—his flat taciturnity, his brusqueness and rough hands. His refusal of tenderness in any of its forms. His disdain for the amenities. These are not the qualities of a man leathered by great hardship, she decides. They are the qualities of a man without imagination.
That pocket watch had been through a struggle. It had been damaged.
She thought of its cracked face—that was the only face she could bear to see for the moment—and she put her own face in her hands, sitting right at the dinner table across from T.T., and she sobbed, one last time, for all that had receded from her.
It’s your eye, Daisy Lou. It’s your eye, Amelia. It is your eye that has caused you to panic.
Jerry is so reasonable these days. He has stopped by to see her on a night when he knows T.T. is bowling. They sit at T.T.’s old, gouged table—Amelia has arranged doilies over some of the marks—and have a cup of tea. Jerry wears a Boy Scout neckerchief because he’s scoutmaster and has just come from a meeting. A late-autumn thaw has turned the snow and ice into water that drips down the windows.
It is not my eye, she says. It is my illuminated sense of my mission on this earth. She actually says those words.
The eye, according to that young doctor in Great Falls, is gone for good. It has finally blinked out. Four years of infections and salves and compresses and potions. No surgery because Amelia wouldn’t allow it, hoping always for the next treatment to work. She has removed the last patch and the eye looks out onto the world now, blue and milky; cauled and blank.
It is not because of my eye, she repeats. Though, even as she says it, she remembers a night, a few days after she arrived in Shelby, when she and Jerry watched the silk train pound through. How they stood near the tracks with a few others and simply watched the train the way people will watch the ocean. It was the thing that moved fastest on the earth. That was the reason people watched it. That and the idea of the cargo encased by its black windowless body. Bolts of silk from the Orient, bound, roaring and unstopping, to the factories on the other side of the country.
They watched the light on the caboose get smaller and smaller. It was a warm night, and they watched until the light was a pinprick and then gone. That’s what the loss of her eye had felt like. A disappearing silk train.
She and two other married women from Shelby took the train to Great Falls and saw The Jazz Singer.
Sound on the screen. Voices coming out of their mouths. How paltry it all seemed to Amelia. What a disappointment! Amelia at the movie theater in Shelby, filling in for the piano player. She uses no music; couldn’t see it anyway in the dimness. Not with her eyesight. She wears her best dress and a small gray hat. Her dressy black shoes, the walking ones hidden, mud-clumped, behind the piano.
Since arriving in Shelby, she has learned to improvise. To some extent, at least. As the picture flickers huge and silent above her head, she keeps her fingers playing. Themes are her secret. She has memorized piano pas
sages for the seven themes she ever needs for a moving picture: love, sorrow, contentment, fire, apprehension, flight, and triumph. Plus an all-purpose transitional pattern that basically involves sustained chords in minor keys.
She glances quickly up at the screen, judges like lightning what is going on, and plays the theme until it seems that something else has begun to take place. Music, to her, conveys so much more than the tinny human voice, talking. Than words. Music tells you more than what is going on. It tells you how to feel about something.
She feels the same way about talking movies as she does about Lindbergh. A man now crawls into a plane and flies for thirty-three hours, alone, and he lands in France. The thought appalls her. It makes France so close and ordinary. Europe should never be anything so casual. It should be a place at the end of yearning and travail. Everything is too close now. She feels that.
These things happened: her eye, the talking movies, Lindbergh. They perhaps predisposed her to her decision. But it really was the pocket watch. The scrolled pocket watch of young Dr. Sheehan from Saint Paul. Or its twin.
It really was the pocket watch. When she found the disc of it, shining and battered in that dark drawer, she saw that she had taken a dire turn away from what was best in herself and the world. She had abandoned her ideals, her artistic solitude, for life with a man who was distant and ordinary.
And so, on the day of November 11, 1927, she did three things. She borrowed $500 from her brother Jerry and arranged to rent a newly empty house, just down the street from Jerry and Vivian’s house. She put an ad in the newspaper for voice and piano students, with an offer to teach the third child in a family free of charge.
Then she walked slowly, in a light snow, down to the courthouse, and there she filed a petition to have her name legally changed. The last name would revert to her maiden name. The first name would make legal and permanent her stage name. Daisy Lou became, forever, Amelia.
One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 26
