The tower room, the desk clerk informed him, was the honeymoon suite. It had a four-poster bed and canopy and a private bath, and it cost nineteen dollars a night. The evening is on me.
“I’ll take it for one night,” said Willie. “Mr. Jackson will be picking up the bill.”
At the mention of Mr. Jackson, the clerk’s calm demeanor dissolved.
“One moment, sir.”
He vanished, and Willie could hear him dialing and then talking in low tones. Presently he returned.
“Everything’s arranged, sir. Here are your keys.”
The soup had arrived. Marsha looked at him sternly.
“You were gone a long time.”
“Sometimes it takes a long time to get what you want,” said Willie.
“What did you want?” she asked.
“You wanted to spend the night in this hotel. You have the tower room for one night. Or for the evening, if you prefer.”
Long afterward he wondered if Mr. Jackson had known this would all come to pass when he said “The evening’s on me.” Nothing Willie had thought or done had prepared him for Marsha—certainly not that girl from business school who asked him to carry her groceries to her apartment and then to stay the night, scared of losing him and too eager to please. For a month he stopped by her place a couple of evenings a week, but she had no finesse. At the slightest suggestion from him, she’d throw off her clothes as if they were on fire. The straps of her bra were dirty and dug into her shoulders, and her flesh bored him. She grew more and more afraid that she was losing him and found reasons to call him at work until he lied to her and said he was seeing someone else.
Now it seemed to Willie that he had mistaken the light of a small fire for the sun itself. When Marsha stepped out of her dress, he touched her breasts through the silky slip that did not look like a slip, and she said, “It’s called a teddy,” and he wanted to ask how you got out of it but didn’t dare, and she said, “To take off a teddy, you have to take off everything,” and pushed the thin straps from her shoulders and stepped free, naked before him in the twilight of the pulled blinds, pushing her hair back from her eyes. (It was that gesture of pushing her hair back from her eyes that he would never forget; long after he stopped seeing her, that gesture, made by a stranger, could stop his heart.)
“They have bubble bath in the john,” she said and drew the tub full of water and waited for him to join her. “They do it this way in Japan,” she called. “Everybody bathes together.”
Afterward, whenever he heard or read of Japan’s treachery, he thought of Marsha, her smooth back, her shoulder blades shifting under her rosy skin like budding wings, her face as young as a child’s and as wise as an old woman’s at the moment she pulled him down and was his for the taking.
28
Salvage for Victory
THEY HAD GIVEN UP play reading for the duration and used their Thursday afternoons to pack boxes for soldiers and collect scrap. Mrs. Lieberman called the Salvage Committee and was delighted at the girl’s suggestions.
“Scrap is vital,” said the girl. “Fifty percent of the steel used in arms is scrap. One-third of the rubber our government needs can be reclaimed from scrap. Waste paper furnishes one-third of the material for new paper. You can have scrap parties. Ask everybody to bring something.”
Mrs. Lieberman thanked her and called Mrs. Clackett.
It would be a costume party, they decided, and everyone would come dressed in scrap. There would be a scrap tease; of course you would be wearing your real clothes underneath. When Mrs. Clackett complained to Henrietta Bacco that all she had to cast away was her old girdle, Henrietta told her to come by the Fix-It shop and help herself; her husband had enough odds and ends to outfit a regiment, and her sister-in-law could practically spin straw into gold. Teresa worked for Bundles for America at the Salvage Sewing workroom, and she’d learned to make peek-a-boo blouses from torn curtains, bathing suits from tablecloths, bathrobes from auto upholstery, and leather jackets from pocketbooks. She’d won a prize for turning one torn bedsheet into seventeen pairs of children’s underpants.
Henrietta was large, good-natured, and faintly mustached in spite of her best efforts. Teresa was small, sunken, washed-out, and widowed, and she consulted Henrietta about everything, never forgetting that she and her two sons lived on the charity of her brother-in-law, and the sewing she took in added very little to the family income.
The day after Marie Clackett stopped by Fix-It Land to appraise its bounty, she returned with Helen and Nell and Debbie Lieberman. Debbie brought along Kitty LaMont, whose husband owned the oldest funeral parlor in Ann Arbor and went to St. Joseph’s Episcopal “for business reasons” instead of Sacred Heart with the rest of the family. Her friends had learned to tolerate the malty smell that clung to her red hair, which she washed in beer to keep the highlights.
They descended on Bacco’s Fix-It Land full of plans and possibilities. They tried on water pipes, electric fans, and the finer parts of washing machines. They upset two bottles of Fix-All. They put plungers to their breasts and washtubs on their stomachs, causing Mr. Bacco to announce he’d rather fight the Japs than outfit these women, and only his responsibility to Henrietta and Teresa and the boys prevented him from enlisting. Henrietta almost remarked that the boys were overseas and didn’t need much care but thought better of it.
Then Kitty LaMont decided to clean her attic and invited everyone over to choose parts for costumes. Her scrap, she assured them, was very classy stuff, things she hated to give away. She hated to give anything away when business was so bad. People were dying, God knows, but there was no more metal for coffins, and if the army started drafting men with one glass eye, she’d have to run the whole business herself. On the dark star in the front window, she had written her son’s name: Charley. She wished on it every night.
When the women arrived, all her scrap was neatly arranged in the front yard. Helen was relieved to see that she had the usual things: fences, curtain rods, pots and pans, overshoes—nothing that might have been used to embalm people. Alberta Schoonmaker had donated a plow and an antique scythe. Kitty and Alberta had both graduated from Sacred Heart Academy, and Alberta had passed up a four-year scholarship at Beaver to marry a farmer. None of the other women knew Alberta, but they praised her generosity. The party broke up early when Nell cut herself on the plow and had to be driven to the hospital for a tetanus shot.
In the evening Helen and Clare pinned together half a dozen girdles to make a skirt, tasseled with shaving-cream tubes.
Nell searched the attic for possibilities and found half a dozen rubber sheets that she’d put away after Davy quit wetting the bed and a bust developer she’d sent away for years ago. It had developed nothing, but the motor still worked, and if you took off the hose and the cups, it could surely be used for something.
The next day, two hours before the party, Nell called Debbie and said she couldn’t go.
“I can’t leave Davy,” she said. “Suddenly he’s getting all these strange fears. He takes my defense stamps to bed with him.”
“They won’t hurt him.”
“And he says the Japs are coming through the walls with bayonets.”
“So move his bed away from the wall.”
Nell wept into the hard heart of the telephone and hung up. Ten minutes later Debbie called back, with joyful tidings.
“I’ll send Ernestina over,” she promised.
“But I don’t need a cleaning lady,” said Nell.
“She won’t clean. I’ll tell her to play with Davy.”
She was, Debbie went on to say, a find. Honest, pious, and she always saw the silver lining. If you fell out of a tree, she’d tell you why things could be a lot worse. “Now if it was a fig tree, you’d never get well.” If you broke your right arm, she’d say, “Praise the Lord, you’ll get money. Now if it was your left arm, you’d get nothing but a heap of bad luck.”
Furthermore, she had a son named Stilts who used
to play baseball with Ben Harkissian.
The first time Davy saw Ernestina, she was boiling water for tea and talking to Aunt Helen’s teakettle. She was polite and persuasive. She told it the advantages of boiling; she told it about the other pots waiting to take its place. She put her hands on her hips and said, “Pot, what is your determination in this matter?” and the pot boiled.
Then she poured the water into Aunt Helen’s flowered china teapot and added a tiny cheesecloth bag that did not smell like Lipton’s and carried the tea out to the screened-in porch.
She sat down in the rocker and opened her purse, which was chock-full of khaki yarn. She was small, like his mother, but older, and her skin had the color of chestnuts fresh from the burr with the shine still on them, and her faded blue dress smelled clean and friendly as newly shelled peas. Davy drew his little stool near her chair and admired her. She did not appear to notice him, and he was much surprised when she said, “Loose tooth?”
He nodded—how did she know? He could wiggle that tooth without opening his mouth just by pushing his tongue against it.
“If you keep your tongue out of the hole, you’ll get a gold tooth.”
The blue jays screamed in the arborvitae; Cinnamon Monkeyshines lolled in the myrtle bed below, waiting for one false move. Davy breathed deeply the strong, sweet smell of the tea. Aunt Helen never let him sit near the teapot for fear he would knock it over and scald himself; and because she had forbidden him to touch it, he longed for nothing so much as a taste of tea from that pot. He gathered his courage and blurted out, “Can I have some tea?”
“Hoo! Not this tea,” replied Ernestina. (Oh, would she let him try a different tea?) “This here is hog’s hoof tea for my bad leg. You could bring me a cup. I don’t know where your aunt keeps her cups.”
Eager to please, he brought her a flowered cup from the cabinet that held Helen’s best china. Ernestina thanked him gravely, as if he were a grown-up, and poured herself a cup and sipped it. Then she unlaced her shoes—black, with thick heels—and eased her feet out of them and wiggled her toes in their coarse black stockings. And what was that shining in her left shoe? A white stone?
“You have a stone in your shoe,” said Davy, pointing it out to her, for she seemed not to notice.
Ernestina nodded. “The root doctor give me that when my leg got conjured. You can hold it if you want.”
He picked up the stone and rubbed it between his fingers and thought he had never felt anything so old and gentle. And the rude doctor had put it into her shoe. That was a queer thing for a doctor to do.
“Can I keep it?”
“Nope. It come from the root doctor. My leg swole right up, and she dug under the doorstep and sure ’nough there was a conjure bag. Bones and hair and graveyard dirt.”
Davy stole a glance at her afflicted leg, and she saw him; he could hide nothing from her.
“It do look fine, don’t it?” she said. “The root doctor is a powerful healer.”
Clackety clack, sang her needles, gathering the khaki yarn, arranging it to suit them. She held up for his inspection the front of a sweater for her oldest son. She had four sons in the army and one daughter away at college studying to be a teacher. Ernestina sent the money to keep her there, and it took a lot of money, she told him—it took practically all she earned. Her husband hadn’t worked for a year; his liver was acting up. Before he got sick he wanted to join the Air Corps and be a pilot, but the Air Corps had no use for him, so he’d built a little plane of his own out of junk: broken radiators and old tires and rusty bedsprings, good scrap that the government wanted and would pay him for. He didn’t tell anyone about the plane except a few kids in the neighborhood who came for rides. He had real pilot goggles for them to wear, just like his.
“Where do they go?” asked Davy.
“The Lord knows,” said Ernestina. “The plane got no motor. But Henry keep a log book inside, with all the places.”
Except for the lack of a motor, the plane was very well equipped, she assured him. She herself had never been inside to see where it went or how it got there because she was deathly afraid of flying. But she had seen the log and the names of the places. And she had seen the snapshots he took of the kids in those places. The backgrounds were always blurred, or common—a wall, a field—which convinced her that travel did nothing to improve your mind and folks might just as well stay home. Now her pictures were sharp; you could always tell what you were looking at. Did he want to see some of her pictures?
Davy was delighted.
She showed him four pictures of her sons in uniform and then a picture of her husband, radiant and cocky in goggles and pilot’s cap, leaning out of a cockpit, and a creased snapshot of a young man posing under a palm tree. The young man was her brother who had died in Bataan and come back a week later and asked his girl friend for a pack of Lucky Strikes he’d left in a bureau drawer.
“He came back when he was dead?” exclaimed Davy.
“His ghost come back.”
“Did you ever see a ghost?”
“Nope. But I hear ’em when the trees murmur. They ’round all the time, crowds of ’em, the bad with the bad, the good with the good. They don’t mix theirselves up like living folks. And the good ones is always flying. If you feel the air from their bodies, you get well. Anything that bothers you won’t bother you no more.”
But though she had not seen spirits herself, she knew lots of folks who had. The good spirits looked like children, or birds. But they could be any shape they wanted to. Why, she knew the brother of a man whose wife took a drink from the spring at night and drank up the spring keeper. It took the shape of a snake, and that snake used to pop its head out of her mouth and whistle.
She set down her cup, and Davy crawled into her lap. He could hardly wait to tell Clare about the ghosts and the spring keeper.
“Spirits is very fond of whistling,” she remarked. “They do it to get your notice. If you ask ’em what in the Lord’s name they want, they go away.”
“If I ask one of the good spirits to bring me some springy shoes, will it bring them?”
And he showed her the picture in the magazine and told her about the birthday cake and the trick candle and the lost wish.
“Maybe,” said Ernestina. “Maybe not.”
A week later, when Aunt Helen and his mom were at the movies and Ernestina came over “to be in the house,” as his mother put it, she woke him up and carried him to the window. The tops of the pear trees were blossoming hills of light.
“Full moon,” said Ernestina. “You can wish on it. Show it what you want.”
He opened the magazine to the page, and the moonlight fell on the springy shoes, a bargain at two dollars and ninety-nine cents. Directly below them he heard a familiar thud: Clare had let her book slide to the floor and fallen asleep with the lamp on.
“Is the moon watching us?” he asked. He loved the moon’s dirty face.
Not the moon, Ernestina told him. The moon was just a lamp. But the Moon Regulator, who lit the moon every night—he would see the page. And he would send Davy those springy shoes. Not tomorrow, or the next day, perhaps. But he would send them. You never could tell which day he would choose.
She did not put Davy back to bed right away but let him stay up to see the stars. With the shortages, he was surprised to see so many.
“Hoo! They’s just as many as they was ’fore the war,” said Ernestina.
“Can they see us?”
“I ’spect they can. You never know who’s watching.”
From the solemnity of her voice, he knew these were grave matters, and he must not speak of them to anyone. Not even Grandpa. Not even Clare. And because no one had ever entrusted him with a secret before, he greatly looked forward to Ernestina’s coming, and every morning he asked, “Is Ernestina coming today?” and mostly Aunt Helen would say no, but sometimes she would say yes, and then Ernestina would sip her tea (which she drank with ice in the hot weather) on the back porc
h, and he would sit in her lap, content to watch her hands twinkle the yarn off the needles. He had noticed that she never talked about herself to anyone but him. If Clare or Helen or Nell came into the room, the real Ernestina seemed to disappear, leaving behind a polite shell of herself. Only to him would she tell her troubles, and he listened politely, waiting for the squawk of blue jays, when he could turn the talk to his own liking.
“Tell about the jays taking sand to the devil.”
“What’s today?”
“Wednesday.”
“They ain’t doing it.”
“Tell it anyway, please.”
“Why you want to hear the same story over and over?”
“Tell about the jays.”
“Well—they take a grain of sand a day till all the sand from the top of the earth is in Hell. They gonna ransom the folks down there.”
The jays screeched.
“Tell about Hell,” whispered Davy.
“Never been there.”
“Tell about the coffins, then.”
“Don’t know why you want to hear the same story over and over.”
“Tell.”
“Well, there’s Main Hell and there’s West Hell. Bad folks’ souls turn to rubber coffins and bounce through reg’lar Hell to West Hell. That’s the hottest part.”
She was fanning herself with a church program she’d found in her purse.
“I wish I were freezing, don’t you, Ernestina?”
Ernestina shook her head no.
“I b’lieve I’d rather be too hot than too cold. I can’t stand the cold.”
And Davy, wanting to please her, said, “I can’t stand it either,” though just now he thought he would like it very much.
Mostly she talked about hot weather and cold weather, and how in the summer the iceman overcharged her, and how in the winter the furnace broke and once all her clothes froze solid in the washtub and Henry said, “I’ll get ’em out,” and he chopped them free with the ax.
Things Invisible to See Page 20
