When Al was done telling her what the book price was on a 1955 Volkswagen in perfect condition, she said, “How much can I get, Al?”
He stepped back and gave the car a long look. One of those understanding looks that car dealers give cars, as if to say “Come on, you can tell me. What’s the state of things?” and then listens as the car sobs, “I got higher mileage than my gauge reads. I stall and my brakes are about to go. It’s been hell. They’ve really abused me.”
Al walked slowly around the Volkswagen. Finally, he came back to her window, leaned down, and said, “We’re talking one hundred bucks.” Violet looked calmly at the Chiclets.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” she said.
The Chiclets came closer.
“If you’ve got an hour to spare we’re talking a hundred and fifty. A few little extras and you might even get old Al to say two hundred.”
Violet stared straight ahead, her knuckles white on the steering wheel. She would not say anything. She would leave this town and go somewhere to start over. And to leave town she had no choice but to take Al up on the offer. She needed the money.
“It’s yours for a hundred bucks,” she said.
“I always took you to be a good businesswoman. Knew a good deal when you heard of one,” Al said. He felt pressured. He had always assumed—hoped—he’d get Violet into bed someday. It was his only chance of an affair, even for one night. Watertown had no other women as morally loose as Violet La Forge. At least none that still looked as good as she did. With his physical deficits, sex wasn’t something he could wallow in. Violet went inside his office and he followed her. Sitting behind a desk was a small woman with clipped gray hair layered like feathers.
“Mother, write the lady a check for a hundred dollars,” Al said. “Violet La Forge.”
“Your mother, Al?” asked Violet. “How very, very nice to meet you, Mrs. Hersey,” she said, shaking the old lady’s wrinkled hand until the ancient arm threatened to leave its socket. “But, Al, you did say that for those little extras the car had, it was worth at least two hundred, didn’t you?” A moment passed before the Chiclets disappeared for good.
Outside, Violet gave Al the title and gathered her personal belongings from the car: a comb, a mirror, some letters, chewing gum.
“I’m cashing the check when the bank opens in the morning, Al. If it’s been stopped, I’m taking your mother to lunch.”
“You whore,” Al said. “What difference does it make to you how you get the two hundred bucks? How can you be so uppity? I know where most of your money comes from. Everyone knows.” Violet was several feet away. She stopped and turned around. She looked at Al slowly from head to foot, letting him know what she thought of his appearance.
“Al,” said Violet softly, “I don’t charge. I may have lost a million bucks, but I don’t charge. Besides, you got what you wanted. You wanted to get screwed, and in the office a minute ago, I screwed you.” She waved the check at him and crossed the street to the drugstore to ask about the bus schedule. Al went back into his office and watched her go.
“Who was that loud woman?” asked Mrs. Hersey, licking a stamp for an envelope.
Violet boarded the bus and settled down in the backseat as Watertown came to life around her. A few passengers got on. At nine fifteen the vehicle was almost full and the driver had taken his seat. Violet caught his eye in the mirror. “A bus length away, over all these heads, and he still manages it,” she thought.
A young soldier took the seat in front of hers and kept his nose pressed against the window like a sad puppy dog. Violet looked out her own window to see what interested him so and saw a young girl standing by the drugstore, holding a baby in her arms. Violet noticed the round swell of her stomach.
The bus pulled out and Violet opened the Watertown Weekly. One letter to the editor was titled angry at paper! It seems a woman who had shot a moose was upset that the paper hadn’t printed the picture of her sitting on her prey. Another man wrote that he was angry that only seven hundred moose were to be shot that particular season in an attempt to keep the population down. “There’s that many on my lawn each morning!” he wrote. It seemed only the moose weren’t angry. “These people are really serious,” thought Violet, and wondered why she had lingered so long in this land of pulp and guns. But she knew why. It was getting harder and harder to find a job. She had dropped her agent, who was booking her at bottom-of-the-barrel places and his young strippers at upscale ones. Now she was trying to phone club owners herself and the phone bill was topping her agent’s fee.
But the real reason she had spent more than a month in Watertown was Edward Lawler, and the glimmer of hope that he might be the end of a long bumpy ride. She had dreamed of Ed the night before, of the last time she saw him. She dreamed she was stepping out of a huge clamshell, like the dancer named Aphrodite had done, and Ed stood up in the crowd with his arms outstretched and she went to him. But his flesh was icy cold and the men in the club began to jeer and taunt her. She woke up, said “Ed?” as though the name was a tiny pain wrapped up in one syllable, a sad song, and then she went back to sleep.
Violet threw the newspaper aside and eased her head back on the seat. The bus stopped in several little towns. An hour away from Bangor, Violet thought about what she would do. She would get a room in Bangor. Dye her hair as close to its natural color as possible until it grew back to dark brown. She would buy a couple of nice dresses. A cotton one, maybe. Or even a nice skirt and sweater. Then she would call her mother over in Kingsman, Maine, on the New Hampshire border. Her father had died five years before. Violet found out on Christmas day of 1956, when in a moment of holiday loneliness, she broke her vow never to call again and dialed the familiar old number. Her brother, who must have been up from Portland for the holidays, answered. When Violet said, “Bobby? It’s Beth. I called to wish Mama and Daddy a Merry Christmas,” he had screamed at her into the phone. Had called her names. “Bitch!” he had shouted. “The old man’s been dead for two years. Don’t you ever call here again!” She heard her mother crying in the background, asking for the phone. Her mother loved her, she was sure, in spite of it all. It had been the old man, a self-styled Calvinist, who had banned her from the house when Bobby told them what Violet’s real profession was. He had turned up one night at a club where she was dancing and was as embarrassed for her to see him there as he was at seeing her dance. “Poor Bobby,” thought Violet. “The first time he told on me I was four and I’d pulled up Mama’s tulips. Then he told on me for skipping school and going to the circus when I was ten. For smoking when I was thirteen. For dating Freddy Walstrop when I was sixteen. I guess he was just in the habit of telling on me. On seeing Daddy whip me. You can get used to things like that. One day it just becomes a habit.” Her mother loved her. Now maybe they could start over. “With Daddy gone, we’ll be good for each other. We’ll get a big tree at Christmas and put up strings of colored lights and bake cookies. We’ll do all the things we wanted to do but Daddy wouldn’t let us.”
Violet reached inside her purse for her wallet. She pulled out the battered paper that told the story of the man and the butterfly. It had a phone number written on it. Walter Frontenac had written it there himself in 1955. It was his number. He was a butcher from a little town north of Bangor and had seen her dance at Vic’s Playpen. She left with him that night, after the show was over, and all he did was take her for coffee and then walk her back to her room. He was a very quiet man. Even dull, Violet had thought at first. He had two fingers missing on his left hand, a hazard of his trade. Violet didn’t want to see him again but he kept coming in to watch her dance. When she had no other offers, a cup of coffee with Walter Frontenac was better than going back to a cold motel room alone.
They would sit across from each other in the Bluebird Café, which stayed open twenty-four hours for truckers, and they would talk quietly. Once, Walter had reached over and squeezed h
er hand and Violet had noticed the stain beneath his fingernails, dark as blood. The hand with the missing fingers he kept hidden as much as possible, afraid it would offend her.
On her last night at Vic’s Playpen, she made plans to go to an after-hours club with a trucker who had driven up from Boston the night before. Dancing, she could see Walter’s face in the crowd. The trucker started shouting, “Keep something on for me to take off later, honey!” By the end of the night he was so drunk that he had passed out, head down, at his table. Violet was thankful. He had embarrassed her in front of Walter. But at the back door she found Walter waiting for her.
“Wally, you’re as faithful as an old sheepdog,” Violet said and linked her arm in his. They went a final time to the Bluebird Café and sat among the noises of the night people, the coffee cups rattling on their saucers as yawning waitresses served their customers. The sounds of grill orders being called out, of truck drivers swilling coffee and boys playing the jukebox. It was not a romantic place, but in Walter’s eyes, Violet sat in candlelight with rare wine. She put her hand under the table and touched his.
“You’re a good man, Walter,” she told him. “The only good man I know.” And he smiled, revealing the beginning of a cavity on his front tooth.
“Call me any time you’re ready to give up this traveling life,” Walter told her, and she reached into her wallet for something for him to write his phone number on. Walter took the paper, but before he wrote on it, he opened it and read what was written there. Then he folded it and carefully formed each number so that there could be no doubt what they were, no mistaking them in the future. He gave the paper back to Violet over the table in the Bluebird Café. “You’re a butterfly,” he said.
***
When the bus stopped in Bangor, Violet put on her coat and shouldered the strap of her purse. The soldier had chatted with her some on the way down, told her he was sorry to be in the army at a time when there was no war. Now he was asleep in his seat, going on to Portland. Violet smiled when she passed his seat. “He’ll have his war to fight when he gets back home,” she thought, remembering the straggly haired young wife back at the drugstore, a child in her arms and another growing in her stomach.
Several people were getting off in front of her so she waited for the aisle to empty. Then she left her suitcases and the cardboard box in a corner of the bus station and went to look for a pay phone. Digging a handful of change up from the bottom of her purse, she piled nickels and quarters and dimes on the shelf beneath the phone and lifted the receiver.
“I’ll be back at exactly two fifteen tomorrow. Maybe we could have a drink or two.”
Violet jumped to hear the voice so close. She turned. It was the bus driver.
“Please leave me alone,” she said. The flirtatious look on his face turned quickly to a sneer. She watched as he went back out to his bus. Then she gave the operator her mother’s number. The old woman answered after two rings. She sounded younger in spirit than Violet had ever known her to be. “It must have been living under Daddy’s thumb,” she thought. She would be home in a few days, she told her mother. She had some things to do first. Shopping. Tying up some loose ends.
“It’s all over, Mama,” she said, and the old woman began to cry.
“Come on home, Bethie,” she told her daughter.
Violet hung up the phone just in time to see the bus driver pulling away from the station. He waved to her and she pretended not to see. Digging again in her wallet, she brought out Walter Frontenac’s phone number and took a deep breath.
“If he can teach me to clean up my act,” Violet thought, “I can teach him to clean his fingernails. All eight of them.”
CASTLE FOR SALE: THE MCKINNONS LOSE THE HIGH GROUND
“MacKinnons…are of royal descent, being a branch of the great clan Alpin. About the year 1400, the MacKinnons fell into misunderstanding with other clans, who were jealous of their rising influence…”
“The McKinnon Coat-of-Arms: quarterly, (1) a boar’s head holding the shank bone of a deer in its mouth, (2) a castle, triple-towered and embattled, (3) ship with oars saltirewise, (4) a hand couped fesswise holding a cross crosslet.”
“The Badge is pinus sylvestris, a slip of pine tree.”
—from R. R. McIan, The Clans
of the Scottish Highlands
There’s not much left to say when lives are over. Like a record that’s been played and then put away, a man or woman’s life is recorded in the grooves left in the living. Some replay it. Others forget to. Some speak well of the dead, once they are dead. Others remain true to themselves. A Gifford, for instance, never says a praiseful thing about a corpse if he didn’t say the same things when the corpse was living. Not even if the dead is another Gifford. And that’s to be commended.
There’s no end to the stories in small towns. Story endings are inherited by the next generations, and just when you tire of one about some man or woman, they have a child who picks up the plot and carries it to new heights. Modernization can always be counted on for new twists. Once plant food was accepted at Lyman’s store as a scientific way to produce healthier plants, it could only be expected that folklore would meld with science to provide an enduring myth for the townspeople. And it did. Ginnie Craft was accused of delivering an illegitimate baby and burying it beneath the lilac trees in her Mama’s backyard, resulting in the bushiest, lilaciest one in town. Ginnie really miscarried at four months, was attended by a doctor, and came home from a visit to her Aunt Louisa’s in Watertown as a slim girl given a second chance. There’s always some truth in folklore. And some truisms in small towns:
Willie O’Brian could stop blood but he couldn’t stop drinking.
Sarah Pinkham could hold her breath but not her husband.
Marge McKinnon needed a man like she kneaded bread.
Chester Lee Gifford was as hung as Nathan Hale.
Bert Fogarty skimmed the truth like he skimmed milk. And a child of Amy Joy’s will come home from school one day and ask, “What did Mike Fennelson mean when he said we need more homework like Ed Lawler needed more bullets?” And people will be hurt anew, generations of them wounded by one bullet.
But that’s how it is in small towns. Even in cities. It’s all a matter of deism. Our ancestors came in with their bold dreams and vague visions and, godlike, they laid down examples they themselves couldn’t follow. Then they died and went off somewhere. Forgot about us. Took no further part in our functioning. And we’ve been spitting into the wind ever since. We’re limping into the computer age while dragging behind us the rotting rituals of the Middle Ages.
In 1842, during the dispute with Great Britain over the Maine–Canada boundary, a fort was built in Watertown, in case soldiers marched that far north. One man died during the war, of pneumonia. He was not considered a hero for having done this. But neither was he considered a coward. He was locked somewhere in the middle in a kind of humorous limbo that allowed schoolchildren to laugh out loud at his misfortune. Edward Elbert Lawler, on the other hand, a lone soldier in his own kind of boundary war, was considered a coward. Just why suicide was deemed less than noble never occurred to anyone in Mattagash. Unless you were one of the romantic heroes who did it for love, or for country, or for honor, you were weakhearted. Why it would be more valiant to pursue one dull, predictable day after the next until death came upon you unawares than to plunge willingly into the black uncertainty never surfaced in their minds. It was gritless. To kill yourself for no reason other than a little depression was an act of cowardice. It was an ignoble way out, an ideology no doubt planted in the minds of peasants by their kings who envisioned an empty kingdom if suicide became an expedient among the disgruntled, miserable masses. By priests who liked full churches. By pharaohs who needed the living, antlike bodies of slaves to build their tombs. Ed Lawler, by placing a gun to his head and planting a bullet in his brain, had earned himself a place i
n Mattagash history, more certain but less tasteful than the pneumonic soldier whose battle against the bleak winter of northern Maine was harder to fight than the enemy.
Three deaths in Mattagash in a matter of twenty-four hours were something to buzz about. The elderly could drop like flies and no one would be surprised. No one would get that rush of hot blood flushing through their veins in appreciation of the life still in their own bodies. They would be surprised at the first sounds of the siren but, after the ambulance pulled into the yard of some elderly man or woman and the telephones rang around town and people listened in on party lines, they would be satisfied that the grim reaper had claimed no undue morsels and the women would go back to their ironing boards and wringer washers and children would leave their stands around the telephone to go outside and roll their hula hoops about the backyard.
Marge McKinnon’s death came as no surprise to anyone, but Ed’s and Chester Lee’s measured among those choice occurrences that caused blood to pump through veins that had nearly clogged with boredom. Theirs were the deaths that myths are made of, but there was a general feeling in the town of having been cheated out of a ritual. The Gifford funeral was a social event that only Giffords and their relatives, either legitimate or of the same blood, cared to attend. There was a closed casket at Chester Lee’s funeral. It was said in Mattagash that this was because they feared someone from among the mourners would steal the silk pillow out from under Chester’s head. It was also said that the pallbearers had to push the casket up to the grave because Bert Gifford had stolen the handles. But the one story that will most likely outlast all others, true or not, was of Chester Lee propped up in the backseat of Bert’s old Ford and accompanied by Bert and his brothers, who had been released from the state pen for the occasion, being driven around Mattagash for one last frolicking family get-together. Bert Gifford told that one himself, saying that they stopped at Lyman’s store and everyone went in and stole a pack of cigarettes while Lyman was out gassing up the old Ford. Even Chester Lee. Bert said a little thing like rigor mortis couldn’t keep Chester Lee from a free pack of Lucky Strikes.
The Funeral Makers Page 25
