by Joanna Scott
“Who’s Carol?” asked the maid after opening the bathroom door with her skeleton key. She addressed Tom with the frankness of a child half her age. He noticed that her brown eyes slipped off center as she stared. Her unkempt hair was more orange than red. There was a canker scab on her chin, and her cotton dress fell loosely over her hips.
She was too pretty to look so awful, Tom thought. And she was too forward with a strange man standing before her wrapped only in a white bath towel.
“You were calling for Carol,” she persisted. She squatted to take a better look at the lock.
“She was my wife,” Tom lied.
“Was?”
He answered with an impatient snort.
“Bless you,” she said, as though he’d sneezed. She turned the lever of the bolt back and forth until it jammed again. “Not a day goes by when something doesn’t go wrong,” she announced, without exasperation. “I need a screwdriver.” When she stood, her odd gaze alighted on one side of Tom’s face. Without thinking, he moved his hand through the air as if to bat away a mosquito. She started visibly, teetered as if she’d been struck in the face. For a moment Tom thought he had hit her inadvertently, and he was seized by terrible, feverish guilt. He wanted to fall down on his knees and apologize. But she smiled at him as if to indicate that an apology really wasn’t necessary, especially from a man dressed in a bath towel. Go on, she seemed to tell him, lifting her chin and looking toward the room where he’d left his suitcase. You’re free.
While he gathered his clothes, the girl warned him not to shut the bathroom door, and she set off to find a screwdriver. Tom scrambled into his suit, combed his mustache, snapped the buckle of his suitcase, and left in such a hurry that he forgot to pay his bill.
Out on the road in front of the inn, he waved down a dairy cart being pulled by a round-bellied mule. When the dairyman heard that Tom wanted to go to Hugo Martin’s estate at Madison Point, he said he’d take him there himself. Coincidentally, he had a wheel of cheddar in back to deliver to the wedding reception.
“Does that ol’ mule go any faster?” Tom asked.
The dairyman looked at him askance, not unlike the way the maid had looked at him.
“You want my Rascal to go faster?”
“Yes, please.”
“Real fast?”
“Sure.”
The dairyman tipped back his cap, revealing the youthfulness of his face. He couldn’t have been older than seventeen, Tom thought. Leaning toward the mule as though he meant to grab its tail between his teeth, the dairyman gave a short laugh, warned Tom to hold on, and cracked his whip in the air. The mule flattened its ears against its head and took off, trotting faster than Tom had ever known a mule to trot.
Tom Martin was somewhere between Tuckett Beach and Hugo’s estate when the wedding guests first noticed the bee rising from the bride’s bouquet. Their attention couldn’t have been any more intense at this point; what changed with the bee was the unity of their responses. One man coughed into his hand in warning. A woman whispered audibly enough for her husband to hear, “Oh no.” And the mother who had set her baby on the grass glanced down and noticed the shiny tip of an insect shell sticking out from between the baby’s grinning lips.
A mere few yards offshore from the narrow stretch of beach, the boy, submerged in the murky salt water, was holding his breath. Though he didn’t know how to swim, he’d taught himself to hold his breath during bath time. Once he’d even held his breath for as long as it had taken him to count in his head from one to twenty-five.
He began counting silently. As he counted, he wondered if it was possible to learn to breathe underwater. He tried to propel himself by pulling at the water in the same way that he’d pull himself up to the next branch when he was climbing a tree. Five, one thousand, six. When he relaxed his arms and legs, he felt himself turning a somersault, and when he stretched out again he couldn’t tell which direction was up. Nine, one thousand, ten. It was strange that he couldn’t see the sky. He was glad, though, to have the chance to feel brave. Feeling brave was the best feeling in the world, better even than the sleepy feeling when his mother kissed him good night on the tip of his nose. She would think him very brave when he told her what had happened, though she’d be angry that he’d gotten his clothes wet. Twelve, one thousand. Or had he reached thirteen? It was frustrating to forget how far he’d counted. He’d been hoping to make it past twenty-seven. If he’d been counting straight, he might have already reached twenty.
He felt his shirt suddenly tighten around his chest. In the next moment a tugging force caused him to turn on his back, and his face broke through the surface of the dark water. It was good to see the sky just where he’d left it. And it felt good to loosen his collar with two fingers and take a deep breath. He felt a little disappointed that he hadn’t been given the chance to count to thirty underwater, but he was glad to be floating on his back, with that big black friendly dog dragging him toward shore by his shirt as though he were one of the sticks thrown into the water for the dog to fetch.
In their chairs around the hillock, the guests couldn’t have said reliably how much time had passed since Father Gaffner had declared Gwen and Clive husband and wife. Some believed, in hindsight, that the kiss hadn’t lasted longer than a minute. Others were sure that at least half an hour had passed. But to Hugo Martin it was as long as he could have wished, for just as the bee dove through the narrow opening below the chins of the bride and groom, a mule pulling a dairy cart came trotting along the sandy track leading to the gazebo. Even before the cart stopped, Tom Martin jumped off.
“Was that fast enough?” the young dairyman asked.
“That was plenty fast,” Tom assured him as his gaze turned toward the mound where the bride and groom were standing and kissing. Despite his nearsightedness, Tom could see the couple clearly enough to tell that there was something willfully permanent about them as they kissed, as if they were trying to turn themselves into statues.
It took Father Gaffner to finally break the spell. Father Gaffner, who had once nearly died in an anaphylactic response to a sting, noticed the bee for the first time when it passed to his side of the bride and groom.
In the seventh row of guests, the mother pulled what was left of the cicada shell from her baby’s mouth. Down at the beach, the boy climbed up on the Newfoundland’s back and rode the dog through the few remaining yards of shallow water. At the base of the gazebo, Tom suddenly remembered that the name of his daughter’s husband was Clive. And since Hugo had swiveled around to watch Tom, he didn’t see Father Gaffner frantically shake a hand to wave away the bee, his gesture causing the bride and groom to separate with a sucking sound that one man would later describe as like water going down a drain—evidence that tongues were involved, he would insist in a conversation similar to others that would go on through the banquet. What actually happened? How long had the kiss really lasted? The guests weren’t sure, and their uncertainty would only increase, every new exchange adding details that confused them more until there was nothing left to do but drink too much champagne and dance.
STUMBLE
Frank’s sister Ruth wasn’t exactly beautiful, nor was she ever deliberately coy. She wasn’t stupid or desperate or even naturally sweet. She was simply the one girl in town mysteriously identified as easy. And if she gave up trying to keep her willingness from bluntly announcing itself, it was only because curiosity got the better of her. She wanted to understand why the value of her affection was considered necessary and why necessity was always only temporary. Week by week, with every new invitation, she understood a little more.
It was only a matter of time before she understood enough to know that she’d gone too far. Her mother had been right to warn her that a reputation couldn’t be washed away with soap and water. By the age of sixteen she’d become the kind of girl nice girls avoided, and though she felt that her ruin was a mean trick played on her while she’d been having fun, she decided she had no option
left but to make a clean break.
It was late summer in 1927 when, with her parents’ blessing, she moved to Brooklyn to claim space on the floor of her brother’s cold-water flat. This was her first mistake—not asking dear Frank to take her in but timing her arrival to coincide with his departure. She managed to show up at his door just as he was leaving for the weekend. Frank was sorry, but he had to go to his friend’s wedding in New Haven—which left Ruth alone with Frank’s roommate, Boylston Simms.
Ruth should have known he’d be a problem. After plying her all day long with highballs, he kissed her. She let him kiss her. And then she remembered who she was trying not to be and pulled away, smoothed her skirt, tucked her hair behind her ears, and looked around for diversion. She asked about the birds in the cage across the room—a pair of finches, Boylston said, and explained that they belonged to his grandmother, who was in the hospital. Ruth asked if she could pet their pretty feathers. He shrugged. She sashayed in her usual inadvertently lusty fashion across the room, unlatched the cage door, and poked a finger at one of the birds, trying to scratch its soft throat as she liked to do with her cat at home. The bird hopped away from her and then fluttered forward onto her finger. Unprepared for the shock of rough talons against her skin, Ruth jerked back her hand, carrying the bird with her. The second bird darted out and veered as though ricocheting across the room. The bird on Ruth’s finger flew in pursuit of its mate. One after the other, the finches escaped through the open window and disappeared into the dusky Brooklyn sky.
Although Boylston Simms didn’t come right out and ask her to leave, Ruth figured she’d better find somewhere else to stay. She made her way to the station and boarded the train for Manhattan. It was dark by the time she arrived on the Upper West Side, where a friend of her cousin’s was supposed to be residing. But the friend had long since moved from the address. With nine dollars and sixty cents in her purse and her suitcase in hand, Ruth walked around the neighborhood until she found a vacancy in a boardinghouse on 103rd Street. She slept that night for a solid fourteen hours. She dreamed she ordered a pancake breakfast in a fancy hotel dining room and was served a platter of fried birds. She dreamed she had a newborn baby girl with a marvelous crop of silver hair.
THE NEXT DAY, she walked along the mall in Central Park. A man who introduced himself as Fitz Greene Halleck sat down beside her on a bench by the esplanade and offered to row her around in a party boat. She refused. He bought her an ice cream, which she accepted. After a long conversation he told her that he worked as a stage manager, and he asked her to audition for a musical. He wrote down the Lower East Side address where the auditions would be held the following Monday and then politely bade good-bye. She wondered if a man as easy to be rid of as Fitz Greene Halleck was really as untrustworthy as he seemed. She decided not to audition for Fitz Greene Halleck’s play but instead to investigate other theaters.
On Monday she went through the Variety ads. On Tuesday she auditioned at the Princess Theater for a small show called Nobody’s Perfect. In this show, announced the director to the group of auditioners, imperfection would be a virtue. Ruth danced with a strong partner who led her easily through unfamiliar steps. Still, she must have distinguished herself as adequately imperfect, for she was given a chorus part in the show and was on salary by the following week.
She lasted all the way to the first dress rehearsal, two months later. In the final weeks she became friendly with Sam Amwit, a song plugger from Harms Music who was helping the actors learn the tunes. He played his own tunes on the piano during a take-five, and everyone in the chorus thought his music was better than the music in the show. When the cast returned to continue rehearsing, Sam Amwit’s last song was still playing in Ruth’s mind, and when the chorus moved to the right, she moved to the left and tripped over another actress’s foot.
Apparently, her stumble was only the most noticeable of many awkward moves—Ruth’s imperfection was of a different nature from the imperfections of the other cast members. The director let her continue with the rehearsal, but afterward he told her not to return. In a note she hastily scribbled, Ruth asked Sam to come see her soon and gave him her address. A few days later she received an apologetic letter from Sam explaining that he was engaged to a woman from Virginia.
Nobody’s Perfect flopped, Ruth was pleased to hear. She went to other auditions and eventually landed a part in a girl-and-music show at Margot’s, a cabaret on East Fifty-second Street. She danced in a chorus line for an entire month there. Certain male customers returned night after night to see certain dancers; claims were implicit, though relationships were usually limited to postperformance lap-sitting and a few shared drinks. Ruth sat on the lap of an older man named Wallace. She drank gin spritzes and taught him the songs Sam Amwit had taught her.
Her brother Frank came to see one of her shows and waited around afterward to talk to her. Luckily, Wallace wasn’t in the audience that day. But Frank didn’t approve of either the show or the establishment. He told her to quit, insisting that if their parents found out what she was doing they’d drag her back to New Jersey. She refused to quit without another job lined up, and Frank promised to find something for her.
She asked about Boylston Simms. Frank said that he had fallen in love with an upstate girl and was working for a newspaper in Albany. What about the finches? Boylston Simms had bought two new finches for his grandmother, who believed them to be the same birds she’d left in his care.
Frank returned to the cabaret three days later to inform his sister that he’d found her a place at the Biltmore as a receptionist, a classy job with an unclassy salary. She worked there straight through Christmas and New Year’s, worked ten, sometimes twelve hours a day in order to earn enough money to buy silk stockings and silk blouses to wear to work. On her breaks she smoked Chesterfield cigarettes and chewed Wrigley’s Spearmint, often at the same time. She had the use of a stove in the boardinghouse and liked to prepare simple dinners of sandwiches and canned soup with some of the other girls. Once every two months she went home to New Jersey for the weekend.
SHE MET PLENTY OF MEN in her job—fancy young men who would lay it on thick and windy old men who would yammer at her while she was trying to add up a bill. One middle-aged Greek man invited her to lunch in the Biltmore’s restaurant. She ate roast beef and mashed potatoes and then with a giggle declined his offer to see his penthouse room. A retired jeweler who lived in the hotel gave her a tip of five dollars one day, and she went out and got herself a puffy Nestle wave. At work the next day the reception manager told her to brush her hair properly or else to leave and not come back. So she left. That was that. It was a cold, drizzly March morning and she was out on the street.
She spent the next couple of hours at the nearest el station, standing close to the potbellied stove and trying to figure out where to go next. She decided to go to her brother’s apartment. That same day he helped her find a job at the Roxy theater, a movie palace where Frank was an usher and wore a uniform with polished buttons. Ruth worked as a ticket taker for three months and saw The Crowd seventeen times.
She left the Roxy for better pay at the Rivoli, the Rivoli for the Rialto. She grew older and more confident. She wrote to Vitagraph for autographed pictures of Mae Marsh and Norma Talmadge. She dated a man who looked just like Buddy Rogers and after she’d spent the night with him a couple of times she asked him to marry her, but he confessed that he was already engaged.
Why were all the men she’d ever known always already engaged? A month passed, and then another month. One day Ruth thought anything was possible, and the next day she realized her fate had been sealed when she wasn’t looking. All the men in the world were always and already engaged.
She slept with any man who would have her. A medical student, a policeman, and her boss at the Rialto, who had no patience for contemporary picture shows and quoted Mary Pickford as evidence: “Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo.” She wondered w
hen she’d fall in love. She told her boss she loved him, just to try out the sentence, and he told her he was—
“Not already engaged!” she interrupted.
“No. Already married.”
She quit her job at the Rialto. She worked as a secretary for a stockbroker. She worked as a waitress. One by one her friends in the rooming house on 103rd Street moved away, so Ruth decided to move too. She rented a studio apartment for herself on Jane Street. She quit her waitressing job and found a ten-dollar-a week position at Woolworth’s, which is where she met Mr. Freddie Harvey the Third.
SITTING ON THE SODA-FOUNTAIN COUNTER one day after work, she was arguing with another Woolworth girl, Mary Beth, about the virtue of tattoos, though really she was arguing with herself, trying to persuade her more practical side that she might benefit from a tattoo and with it attract the kind of man who, for every why not? that can’t be answered, goes ahead and takes a risk. She settled upon her right buttock as a prime location and was idly considering the possibility of a pink rose when she heard Mr. Freddie’s voice.
“Pour me a cup of coffee,” he ordered, adding, “pumpkin,” not out of affection but because after a full month he still didn’t know Ruth’s name, though they’d had plenty of brief exchanges, mostly concerning the topic of the cash register and Ruth’s tendency to come out a few pennies short at the end of the day.
So that was the first time Mr. Freddie showed up where he wasn’t supposed to be. Ruth waited for him to fire her for sitting on the counter. But he simply eased himself onto a stool and spun to the left while he waited for his coffee. Coffee? Mr. Freddie had asked for coffee—and how about a piece of pie? Mary Beth crept off to finish restocking shelves, and Ruth cut a piece of pie for her boss, stale cherry pie stiff with tapioca, the crust streaked with hard-baked lard. She stepped back from the counter and watched him eat.
