The Social Climber of Davenport Heights

by Pamela Morsi

  As unexpected as the arrival of such a thought was the truth in it. I had grown accustomed to talking this man out of his inventory. Getting a better deal than I deserved. But changing prices was not a negotiation—it was a fraud or shoplifting or…well, it was something and it wasn’t something good. I had promised to “do good.”

  Right there, in my favorite store, in the middle of the afternoon, I had an acute attack of conscience.

  “Okay,” the owner said, rising from his little desk behind the counter. He didn’t bother with his cane. His gait was awkward, the right leg was scraggly somehow, he moved it keeping his knee stiff, and it was not as well muscled as the left. “Did you want to buy these?”

  The question was mostly rhetorical as he picked up the casters. He glanced at the price on the masking tape and reached over to punch it in on the ancient cash register.

  “I don’t want to buy them,” I blurted out.

  He looked up, surprised.

  I don’t think I’d ever looked at him eye to eye before. His were a surprising vivid blue. I’d always thought the man to be about my age, but the depths behind his gaze were like aeons of time. He’d seen a lot. Maybe he’d seen too much.

  “I don’t want to buy them,” I repeated. “I…I brought them up because I think they are mismarked. These are eighteenth-century silver. I don’t recognize the mark, but they are obviously American. You’ve got them priced here as if they were ordinary silver plate.”

  “Really?”

  He examined the three little containers more closely.

  I told him what I thought a reasonable price would be for the set. The amount I suggested was a little higher than the one that had been on the original masking tape, but it was what I thought he could get.

  “I’d pay that much for them myself,” I said, “but I’m just looking today.”

  His eyes narrowed and he glared at me intently. Slowly he nodded as if he understood.

  “So,” he said, “you don’t want to buy anything. You’re just coming up here to point out what an idiot I am.”

  “Ah…no, of course not,” I stammered.

  “I’m really busy today,” he told me, his words rife with deliberate patience. “If you want these you can have them at the price marked on them.”

  “No, I don’t want them,” I assured him. “I just wanted you to know that the price is wrong.”

  “Okay,” he said, though he continued to look at me unpleasantly.

  “I’m just trying to help you,” I told him.

  “Right.”

  “You could say thank you.”

  “Look,” he snarled firmly, “I don’t have time for this little song-and-dance number you always do. I’m not sure what you’re up to, but I’m not haggling over this crap today.”

  “I’m not haggling,” I assured him a little sharply. “And this is excellent artisan silverwork not crap.”

  His mouth thinned into one disapproving line. “What ever,” he said as if it were two distinct words. He laid the casters in my hands. “Take them.”

  “What?”

  “They’re all yours.”

  He turned away as if that was the end of it.

  “Wait! No, I couldn’t do that.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “Then I have to pay you.”

  “That would involve coming to an agreement on a price,” he said. “And I just don’t have the stomach for it.”

  I stood there staring at him, speechless, dumbfounded.

  He relented slightly, his tone more conciliatory. “Just accept them as a gift, Janey,” he said. “They’re yours.”

  The sound of my name on his lips was a surprise.

  “You know me?”

  The man folded his arms across his chest, and in a singsong voice, like a brattish pubescent, said, “Janey Domschke is no dumb-ski, she’s the smartest girl in school. If you don’t believe it, ask her.”

  The little taunt was so far in my past, yet so familiar.

  “Lofton,” I corrected. “Janey…Jane Lofton.” But…

  “Jane Lofton,” he said. “Just take the silver. Think of it as a gift from someone from the old neighborhood.”

  “We knew each other in Sunnyside?”

  “Middle school,” he answered. “I’m Scott. Your project partner in seventh-grade science. Sedimentary-rock strata.”

  I’m sure my jaw dropped open. I stood there looking at his face, remembering him from another lifetime.

  “Scott? The junkman’s son?”

  That designation would have been an insult back in Sunnyside. Scott held out his arms, indicating our surroundings.

  “Of course, we don’t call it junk anymore, Janey,” he told me with more than a hint of condescension in his tone. “Now we say ‘antiques and collectibles.’”

  I was too disconcerted to even comment. Fortunately, it wasn’t necessary.

  “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’m very busy. Take your gift and run along. Next week, I promise to bargain like a fishwife.”

  He turned back to his grimy typewriter and I walked out, reluctantly carrying the silver casters.

  All the time I’d been getting bargains off the junkman’s son from Sunnyside. I shook my head with disbelief.

  Sunnyside was an area of town that now existed only in the memories of those who had lived there. The final leg of the interstates that brought suburban dwellers into downtown had its three-level interchange built right over the neighborhood. The junior high, directly underneath one of the massive cloverleafs, was the first thing to go. Our class of impressionable thirteen-year-olds had been scattered by buses to distant schools. I’d gotten a scholarship to St. Agnes. When the house we lived in was slated for demolition, my mother moved us to an apartment closer to the hospital. I never saw any of my fellow classmates again.

  As far as I was concerned, that was just as well. The last thing in the world that I would ever want to do is to wax nostalgic about my working-class origins.

  My mother was a smart, attractive, ambitious young woman. I think perhaps she only made one mistake in her life. That was marrying my dad. Leon Domschke had been suave and handsome, a German Frank Sinatra, my mother had said. A difficult type to imagine. And imagine was all I could ever do. Mom left him when I was just a toddler and there was not a photograph of him in her possession. As a teenager I conjured up the idea that he was like Allison MacKenzie’s father in Peyton Place, just a name made up to hide my out-of-wedlock birth. But after Mom died, I found her divorce decree among her papers. There had, indeed, been a Leon Wilbur Domschke. Where he came from or went to, I never knew.

  I put the silver casters, still wrapped together in the wrong masking tape, in the cup holder of the Z3.

  I should have gone ahead and cheated him, I thought to myself. The junkman’s son at least would have gotten half the money he deserved and I wouldn’t feel as though I owed the man anything. But no, I had to try doing something good, get my motives questioned and end up with an unwelcome obligation.

  Annoyed, I started up the car, slipped it into gear and laid rubber as I drove away. Back at the office, I’d just walked in the door when Kelli, the receptionist, said I had a call. It was from the Shelter for Displaced Wild Creatures asking for a donation. It was the first ripple in what turned out to be a tidal wave.

  The next few weeks were some of the strangest I had ever lived.

  The response to my night of check writing was immediate and overwhelming. Never underestimate the scope and range of a donors list. It was as if my phone number had appeared out of thin air on the speed dial of every solicitation organization in the world. There were reputable, well-known philanthropic organizations, obscure, esoteric charities, and there were scams of every form and function.

  I became very adept at saying no. I’d given what I had given and that was all I intended to give. I was forceful and certain. Disabusing any and all about my willingness to make further contributions.

 
David was more irate than I was. Not as much at the unwelcome callers as at me for the chaos that had been brought into our lives. The charities, solicitors and con artists were just doing what they do, but I had brought this on us. And I had never really been able to explain my motives to him. Now we had strangers, often unpleasant strangers, intruding on our privacy day and night.

  With his parents beside him, David finally confronted me. We were having a cocktail together beside their pool before going for an evening at the club.

  “This whole business is some kind of craziness,” he said. “You are just not acting like yourself.”

  “I am myself,” I insisted. “I just feel differently about some things.”

  The three original members of the Lofton family shared a look confirming my suspicion that I had already been the subject of a long and involved discussion.

  “I think you ought to see a therapist,” Edith said. “Oprah is always telling us not to be afraid to reach out for help.”

  David and W.D. nodded in agreement.

  “That’s a great idea,” David said. “It will give you an opportunity to talk about what happened.”

  “I’m surprised that you don’t have a psychiatrist already,” W.D. said. “Edith, don’t most of those women friends of yours go to shrinks?”

  “They are artists,” she answered. “Of course they’re in therapy.”

  “Jane, do you know someone who you can make an appointment with?” David asked.

  “What about that doctor of Brynn’s you liked so well?” Edith asked.

  David was shaking his head. “He turned out to be way too obsequious and permissive.”

  “That won’t be a problem for Jane,” W.D. pointed out. “It’s not as if she’s easily influenced.”

  “Wait a minute!” I interrupted them finally. “I haven’t said that I will see a therapist. I haven’t even thought about it.”

  “Well you certainly should think about it,” Edith said.

  “Really, Jane,” David agreed. “We just want you to get back to being yourself. We want our lives to be the way they always were.”

  I didn’t know anymore if that was even possible.

  My thoughts eventually drove me to the library. The library had always been my rescue, my haven, my source. It was at the library that I first realized that there was a life beyond the tacky ordinariness of Sunnyside. And it was the library that showed me how to purchase my ticket out. Whenever I’d faced something unfamiliar, whether it was the Graduate Record Exam or the flatware layout at the Junior League Tea, it was there that I’d found my answers.

  Truthfully, I don’t believe I would have been able to manage motherhood otherwise. Not only had the library furnished every possible type of reading material on child rearing, it was the clearinghouse for hundreds of short courses, workshops and children’s activities that had filled Brynn’s early years.

  So, with my thoughts in a whirl and my curiosity as strong as my determination, I made my way through the flocks of noisy children and chairs full of homeless people toward the reference desk at the public library. And before you could say altruism, I was up to my eyeballs in Comte and Aquinas, Locke and Hegel. Is there such a thing as a truly altruistic act? Is it the nature of man to do good or to be self-serving?

  I read and read and read some more, but the answers just didn’t come. The more knowledge I accumulated the less clear my understanding. The whole thing just gave me a headache. I’m not a philosopher, I’m a Realtor. I just needed to sell someone a great house that would keep their family safe and comfortable for a decade, that’s all the good I knew how to do.

  I threw myself into my work. I had made some contributions. I had done some good. That was all I had promised. I’d delivered. Anyone in town could tell you, Jane Lofton doesn’t make deals that she can’t deliver. If the nagging thought that I could still do even more lingered, I didn’t pay it much attention.

  The fall afternoons at the library had me missing Brynn and the time we used to spend together. It’s one of those crazy truths about parent bonding that you can love your child desperately, totally. Understand her only superficially. And get along with her abysmally.

  I had just finished examining an Excel spreadsheet on last quarter’s sale prices and checked my watch. On the East Coast it was late afternoon already and she’d be out of class. I picked up the phone and pressed her name on my speed dial.

  She answered on the second ring.

  “Hello, Mother.”

  Her words were punctuated with a sigh, but she’d obviously checked the caller ID before answering. If she knew it was me and picked up anyway, it was a good sign.

  “Hi, sweetie,” I said. “How was your day?”

  There was a long moment of silence before her reply. “Fine.”

  She didn’t return the inquiry, but I filled her in on my life anyway.

  “I was at the public library today and I was thinking about you and all the hours we spent there,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “They were actually having a Bookworms meeting,” I said. “Do you remember Bookworms?”

  “No,” she answered.

  “Oh sure you do,” I coaxed. “It’s a third-and fourth-grade reading group.”

  “Fourth and fifth,” Brynn corrected.

  “Was it?” I asked, pleased that she did recall those days even if she wouldn’t admit it. “They all look so young. Carrying their Louisa May Alcotts and Judy Blumes.”

  “Were they all skinny, gangly girls with braces?” she asked.

  Of course they hadn’t been. Some were all pretty and precious, nymphlike perfection. Everything that Brynn had not been at that age. She got her looks from the Loftons—patrician lean, long-necked and graceful. But age nine to eleven, she was not at her best. I had wanted to help her, to give her confidence. But everything I did and said made it worse. Even now I tried lying to protect her.

  “It’s an awkward age for every girl,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Brynn agreed. “But I guess some of us just never get past it.”

  In a way, she was right about that. That was the beginning of Brynn’s years in counseling. She’d suddenly been so unhappy. And her timing couldn’t have been worse. I’d just gotten to the place where I wanted to go on with my own life, pursue my own goals. I wanted her to need me less. It seemed as if she deliberately needed me more.

  A child psychologist was a perfect solution. Why not delegate unfathomable teenage crises to someone with the knowledge and experience to deal with them? And it was certainly easier to pay for therapy than to figure out what was going on in my daughter’s head.

  Now, eight years later, she was still in twice-weekly sessions with no end in sight. The therapist knew her hopes, her dreams, her ambitions. I knew what the therapist wrote about her in one-paragraph reports.

  Deliberately I changed the subject.

  “You know that lady with the braids rolled up on either side of her head,” I told her. “She is still at the circulation desk.”

  “I don’t remember any lady at the circulation desk,” Brynn replied.

  “Of course you do,” I insisted. “You were always fascinated by her. You asked me if she was wearing hair earmuffs.”

  “You make this stuff up, Mother,” she answered. “Anyway, nobody goes to libraries anymore. You’re supposed to do your research on the Internet.”

  “Not everything is on the Internet,” I said.

  “Everything that matters is,” she answered.

  “Well, maybe I just like going there,” I said. “And I’m sure there are plenty of people who go to the library on your campus.”

  “Sure, plenty,” Brynn replied. “They go there to make dope deals, though, not to study.”

  The last was said for the specific purpose of unnerving me. It was my greatest dread that Brynn would get involved in drugs or alcohol. There was so much recreational use of marijuana and cocaine around her. And getting drunk was considered an i
nnocent fixture of college life, like football games and panty raids. For a young woman with the insecurities and self-image problems of Brynn, getting high might be a leaven that would keep her from ever fixing what was actually wrong in her life.

  “Well, if there were any dope deals done in front of me today, I didn’t see them,” I said, deliberately making light of my fears. “Do you think the lady with the hair earmuffs is in a smuggling ring?”

  She giggled then. It was the same giggle that she’d had at age five, and I let the sound wash over me wonderfully for a moment. She had not been a carefree child, but she’d been happy.

  “Or maybe she’s a cop,” I suggested. “Working under hair-muff cover.”

  We had never had that closeness I envied among mothers and daughters. She had never told me her secrets. I had never offered words of wisdom. But we had shared some fun times in our rocky parent-child relationship.

  “You’re making me laugh, Mom,” she said. “That must mean you are softening me up for something.”

  I loved it when she called me Mom.

  “No,” I assured her. “I’m not softening you up.”

  “If you’re thinking I’ll attend that disgusting Christmas gala at the club,” she said, “I won’t.”

  “Your father doesn’t like going either,” I said. “Maybe we’ll just skip it.”

  “As if!” Brynn said facetiously. “Anyway, I’m not coming home.”

  “You’re not coming home for Christmas?”

  “That’s what I just said.” Her tone was defensive. “I’m a grown woman. I can make my own decisions. Dr. Reiser said I don’t have to go home if I don’t want to.”

  I felt bereft, as if she’d punched me in the stomach. I tried not to reveal it in my words or tone.

  “No, no, of course you don’t have to come home,” I said.

  “I’d rather be with my friends,” she said. “You understand that. I’m sure you feel the same way.”

  I didn’t, but I did understand how it felt to be young. I had never wanted to spend time with my own mother.

  “Brynn, we’ll really miss you,” I said.

  “Sorry.” She threw the word out with a casualness that belied its meaning. “So why did you call?” she asked.