A hundred thousand dollars, more or less. That was what the factory and the various businesses were worth. It was also the exact sum, in Double Indemnity, that Fred MacMurray told Barbara Stanwyck she could get if they killed her husband, did him in “straight down the line.” In 1953, it might as well have been a million.
We passed through a heavy door and, with a creak and a slam of relief, the din was silenced, replaced by the cricketing of well-oiled Singers attended by women in kerchiefs and overalls. One woman’s station was set with gleaming metal slivers, like the table of a knife thrower; apparently she was adding boning to the corsets. I said: “Reminds me of the first job I had in the war.”
“And what was that?”
“Wrapping fighter jets in paper.”
He laughed aloud. “That’s not a real job! That’s a job from the funnies.”
“That was really my job,” I said, feeling slightly defensive. “That’s why they brought us from Kentucky, the colored women, to wrap jets in paper. They needed the labor and we needed … don’t laugh.”
“I’m sorry.”
“They shipped them out to the Pacific, you’d think they’d fly them out, but they didn’t, and they wanted them all shiny and new for the boys. Four of us would climb up ladders with huge sheets of brown paper and we’d tape them together. Some girls would leave notes inside for the men to read, phone numbers.” Now it was my turn to laugh. “It was absurd. But it was better than welding steel, better on your eyes. I remember the welding girls all had to drink milk to purge the poisons from their systems.”
“But why wrap planes?” he asked again, baffled. “They were headed to war. Who cares how shiny the planes are?”
I said that war is never what you expect it to be.
Buzz laughed at that, then looked down on his workers in their droning underworld. The woman picked up her little knives, one by one, and slipped them in the pockets of a corset. That was when I told him I hadn’t confronted Annabel. Buzz grimaced in the half-light, and when he did that, I knew he had not come to me, that dark night, so I would “remove” Annabel for him. He hoped it would work, but he knew me; he’d watched me; he must have guessed I had no magic touch with girls like her, sipping Suicides in segregated shops. There was something more. What did he really want? Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it is unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can’t touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep.
“We’ll find another way,” he said softly.
“I’m sorry. They were foolish gossips, those girls. Annabel and her friend.”
“It’s all right.”
I recited a line about those kind of girls, and it took Buzz a moment to realize I was quoting Holland’s favorite poet.
“You’re full of surprises, Pearlie Cook,” he told me.
“I hope I am.”
“Not too many, please.”
“She thinks we’re lovers, by the way,” I said suddenly. “You and me, it’s crazy. There’s some rumor going around the neighborhood—”
“I wouldn’t worry about that.”
“Well I don’t like being talked about.”
“They always talk about the wrong things, anyway. They never know what’s really going on.”
“I did overhear she’s promised to a young man.”
“Promised?”
“It’s what young people are doing. Before engagement, you’re promised.”
He seemed baffled, amused. “But engagement is the promise.”
“I can’t say I understand it. A vow, endlessly diluted.”
“Maybe it allows them to neck. People have some funny codes,” he shrugged. “Who’s the promised man?”
There was a clatter downstairs as a woman dropped her thread clippers and the floorwalker ran over to get her back in line. Buzz watched the women very carefully, then calmly asked me again.
I said the name. Bottles being set down on our front step every morning. That clear glass sound. A ring gleaming on her breastbone, and the wide smile on his face as she departed.
“William Platt, the Seltzer Boy,” he said. “How wholesome.” And I laughed. He took my arm and led me into a great loud room where they boxed up everything, and from there into a small, beautifully furnished parlor with a long mirror at one end and a folding screen at the other. Some soundproofing substance erased the screaming machines; you would never have known there was a factory outside that door. It felt like the house of a maiden aunt. From the center of the ceiling hung an incongruous lamp in the shape of a bird in flight. Buzz crossed the room and pressed a white porcelain button set into the wall.
“William Platt …” Buzz repeated. On the wall behind him hung the framed image of a Gibson Girl, her enhanced bustline (WE FIX FLATS!) attracting the attention of a cartoonish doughboy; characters from our parents’ bygone age. Then his forehead creased. “Why is he still here?”
“Well he’s got two jobs, seltzer delivery on Saturdays and—”
“No, I mean still around at all.” He smiled sadly and gestured to the doorway, beyond which older men sat cutting at their forms. “I don’t see a lot of young men around these days, do you?” He was right; the last figure I had heard was thirty thousand boys a month were going to fight in Korea. And this despite our president saying the war was over. “He’s not a college boy, is he just lucky?” He pressed the button again. “Miss Johnson isn’t answering. I wanted to find you a gift.” I said I didn’t need anything, I should be going.
“Tell me, Pearlie,” he said suddenly, those blue eyes flashing. “Tell me what you think I should do.”
What gave him the right to ask such a question? He did not want help with Annabel, not exactly; nor did he merely want me to move aside. What he wanted me to be, of all amazing things, was my husband’s procuress.
“You can’t ask me that,” I said.
He frowned and shook his head. “But you know him better than anyone,” he said, looking kindly up at me.
I was a girl again, before a powerful man. I stood in my father’s farmhouse back in Kentucky, in my plain dress, tormented by the past but flattered, listening to Mr. Pinker describe the wonders of California, the enormous planes that women like me were to wrap in paper, how America needed me, how I could do a favor for him. Such a small favor. The gold lapel pin gleaming in the humid light. To tell everybody’s secrets, even invented ones.
How do you make someone love you? For the very young, there can be nothing harder in the world. You may try as hard as you like: place yourself beside them, cook their favorite food, bring them wine or sing the love songs that you know will move them. They will not move them. Nothing will move them. You will waste days interpreting the simple banalities of a phone call; months staring at their soft lips as they talk; you will waste years watching a body sitting in a chair and willing every muscle to take you across the room and do a simple thing, say a simple word, make them love you, and you will not do it; you will waste long nights wondering how they cannot feel this—the urge to embrace, the snowmelt in the heart when you are near them—how they can sit in that chair, or speak with those lips, or make a call and mean nothing by it, hide nothing in their hearts. Or perhaps what they hide is not what you want to see. Because surely they love someone. It simply isn’t you.
But when you are older, there are ways. The young think better possibilities are everywhere, better lovers, better lives; by twenty-five or thirty, options have dwindled; life has shrunk. All you have to do is limit those options to one, just whittle life to a point.
And what is left at that point? You are, Buzz Drumer. You are left.
I can’t explain the strangeness of thinking of my husband in this way. I felt like a magician who has decided to retire, and one afternoon, over a drink, tells a younger man all of th
e secrets to his lifetime of tricks. It has a false bottom, a secret pane of glass; the smoke obscures the wires. Only the difference was that I had never thought of these as tricks; I had merely thought of it as a marriage, the secret panes and wires we use to keep up the pleasantest illusion on earth, and the ways in which I had won and kept him, though carefully done, had come to seem as artless as any romance. Perhaps they were. But like the magician, I balked at saying these things. Not because they were such great secrets but because, in telling them, I knew my role as a wife would be over. Yet I thought of that heart—beating on the wrong side of my husband’s chest—and I thought of my son.
I asked if Buzz had kept anything from their time together, perhaps as a gift, something to summon the past. He looked at me sadly.
“Of course I did,” he said. He must have had a drawerful of such mementos, a curated collection to first love. Of course he did.
There was a sound from the factory; a surge of electricity made the bird glow brightly and I could not explain why my eyes began to well with tears.
To give up a marriage—someone unmarried might imagine it’s like giving up a seat in a theater, or sacrificing a trick in bridge for the possibility of better, later. But it is harsher than anyone could realize: a hot invisible fire, burning pieces of hope and fantasy, and charred bits of the past. It had to go, however, if something were to be built in its place. So I stood there and gave Buzz advice, and all I could think of were the automatons we had seen at Playland, moving beautifully in the wind, and the children who were taken behind the scenes on a tour and shown, to their surprise, the vast tangle of wires and switches that would be so hard to undo, and even worse, once undone, to bring to life again.
When Holland’s birthday came at last, we had a little party and invited the aunts, who burst through the door full of excitement. “We’ve got good and bad news,” the eldest announced, shaking rain from her like a poodle. “But what horrible, horrible news!”
Alice turned to me, hand on my shoulder, in the polite semblance of inclusion. For some reason, only she wore an orchid on her breast: “Pearlie, you must have heard about it—”
“You can see from her face! Well it happened in Fresno, I think last night—”
“Oh hello Holland! Happy birthday, honey! And there’s baby Walter—”
“Oh kiss your aunt Bea, Walter, I ain’t contagious—”
The younger took advantage of her sister’s distraction: “A fourteen-year-old white girl murdered her twin sister!”
I smiled; this was the kind of news they had discouraged me from talking about in front of their nephew. Holland was removing their long alpaca coats, beaded with rain, to reveal similar Wrinkl-Shed dresses. Sonny was staring at me as each aunt caressed him in turn.
Beatrice continued, talking as if there had been no break: “Got her brother’s gun, in the dark, mind you, felt her way along the bed until she touched her sister’s hair and her right ear and she put the shotgun—”
“It was a rifle. It was a twenty-two.”
They glowed in the telling of the twins’ nightmare, narrating like actual witnesses, heedless of what a small boy might make of their gruesome details: a girl’s hand feeling its way along the sheets, inch by inch, touching the soft coils of her more-perfect sister’s hair, then her skull, then descending the springy rubber steps of her ear… it took me a few moments before I realized they were talking about a radio show.
“Now ladies—” Holland interrupted, winking at me.
“But it was based on a true story, dear! It really did happen in Fresno! And things like this happen all the time in Fresno!”
“Do they?” I asked.
“And do you know what? She did it because she never liked her.”
Alice: “Imagine that. Never liking your twin!”
Beatrice: “And to murder her!”
A burble of laughter as they degloved their soft hands.
We moved to the living room and the night was so cool and rainy that someone suggested a fire. Sonny was completely taken by how his father built it for him, Boy Scout–style, in the fireplace. The aunts hummed to each other as the fire rose to a crackle, watching as Holland opened each gift. They squeezed their faces in pleasure, identically, together, and looked right into each other’s smiling eyes. I wondered who wanted to murder the other the most.
Holland served us drinks, and they started telling us other minor gossip—it amazed me that they moved so smoothly from astonishment to chatter—and also something in the paper about a visiting Dutch psychologist who claimed “nations have souls.”
“Dr. Zeylmans van Emmichoven!” one aunt proclaimed in a flash of recall.
The other explained: “You see, psycho-logic-ally we’re a real young country. When Europeans visit us here, and Africans of course, they feel real old because their nations are so old. Psychologic-ally. Hundreds, hundreds of years older than us.”
“It’s because we’re young we do things in a big way,” said the first. “Like the A-bomb, and the H-bomb that’s coming. We have a youthful drive.” And, laughing, she added: “Well I certainly feel young!”
“Isn’t that interesting,” Holland said, but I just listened to them. Those girls mystified me. I had never felt young in that way. I had never felt American, either.
The older sister gave her a glance, then said, “And an inner kindness. He says America has an inner kindness.” She began to wad her napkin and nod, not looking at anybody. “It sure makes a lot of sense to me.”
“I’m too hot,” Sonny said quietly to me.
I told him to turn away from the fire, which he did with a smile of regret.
That was when Buzz appeared, soaked to the bone. Holland introduced him, and the twins paused for a chilling second. At the time, I thought the scene in the doorway meant the destruction of all their careful plans for their nephew, that place out in the Sunset, the advice to his new wife, their constant vigilance at our house. I have to admit: I felt a little sorry to have let them down.
They said of course they knew Buzz. He used to be Holland’s boss back before Pearlie. “Am I his boss now?” I asked. They stared at me quite hopelessly.
“It’s bad out!” Buzz said, grinning. “Real bad. Happy birthday, everyone. Holland, I’ve brought you a present.”
“I haven’t returned your first present to the store yet!”
Laughter. “Now you can return them together,” Buzz said.
He produced it from his rain-spangled coat and handed it to Holland: a small box, wrapped in the same bright turquoise as my bird-in-hand gloves.
Holland squinted as he took it.
“It’s nothing special. It’s just something I found around the old place,” Buzz said. “Open it.”
Sonny asked what old place? And the aunts, those nervous busybodies, said never you mind.
What did they know? What did they guess?
I found myself watching Holland’s face the entire time he undid the ribbon and wrapping and lifted off the lid. It was the expression I had caught that day Buzz arrived, when my husband came down the stairs and found his old lover drinking beer with his wife. It was the look of a man who feels the presence of a ghost.
He sat for a moment with the tissue hanging from the box. I looked at Buzz and saw his eyes widen in expectation. “Well will you look at that,” my husband said at last. He pulled out an ugly little wooden object. He laughed. “It’s the old pipe bird.”
“That’s right,” Buzz said, closing his eyes and turning away from Holland’s awkward smile, just as Sonny had turned from another fire.
My husband paused a moment, an archaeologist examining a treasure long since thought lost, before showing the bird to his son and, with a flick of his thumb, opening its head on a hinge to reveal the compartment where, neatly tucked inside, lay the bowl of a pipe. Another flick and the bowl was hidden, the pipe stem now camouflaged as a tail. Sonny was captivated and wanted to have it, but his father pocketed it and patte
d his head.
“You can play with it later,” he said.
“Can we play moody room?” his son asked.
“Not now.”
Sonny turned to me, the appeals court. It was a favorite game where my son stood in each corner of the room and we guessed the emotion he enacted. My little boy in his leg braces that made him march like a soldier around the room, telling Lyle to get out of the way as he prepared himself for each round, his face drawn close in concentration. Leaping before the wallpaper, body clenched, as we yelled “Anger!” or “Madness!” or “Passion!”
“Later on, after dinner,” I said, and his father handed him a toy soldier with a parachute. Up it went into the air: Yreka Bakery. I was startled once again by how Buzz had entered my husband’s heart. I wondered if my son felt the change. Children are so sensitive, like bees to the health of their queen who lose their purpose when she falls ill, wandering through the combs until the hive collapses. I watched my son focusing so hard on the floating soldier. Could he feel something at the center of our family dying?
It was after the birthday cake that the older aunt stood up and said, “I have a little announcement.”
Holland made a joke about his aunts and their announcements.
“No, this one’s quite serious,” she said. Her sister was acting very oddly, curling up in her seat and pressing the orchid to her nose and glancing all around the room with a faint smile. We’d had nothing but beer at dinner; I wondered if the aunts had taken something stronger before they arrived. “The good news I was telling you about.”
The Story of a Marriage Page 9
