Black Tickets

by Jayne Anne Phillips

  “Now, Frank. Mr. Southern will arrive here approximately noon. I want you to go down by the river and oversee the cutting. I’ll keep him busy here until the wood is stacked.”

  Southern was a big New England account he’d lost before the mill dissolved. J.T. was once a rich man, owned the biggest lumber operation in the state. He had a whole town of look-alike workers’ shacks down by the river in Hampton, ten miles from town. Now they were empty, all the blind cracked glass broken out. My mother eloped with him when he had four grown kids older than she, the finest house in Bellington (historical societies offered to buy us out every year), and lumber operations in six towns. When they came into the station on the train after the wedding trip, his workers lined the tracks and cheered.

  “Tail chaser,” Jocasta sneered at him. “Out chasing tail every spare minute. No wonder you lost everything. Credit to Gypsies!” she snorted.

  “Mother,” said Lacey. “What’s done is done.”

  “Yes, and it’s done to us. You ought to put him away. He’s nothing but a cross.”

  She and J.T. had fights. Sometimes he’d sneak up and pretend to pick lice off her clothes. I liked that. He would nip at her hair with his fingers until her combs fell out, Jocasta’s silver hair falling down all around her. She screamed in fury. Her erotic hair was dangerous; loosened only late at night in her room, thick, blue-silver halfway to her knees. She stayed alone, combing, behind the locked door. Brushing, she watched her circular mirror; sang her high wheedling hum that floated up to my third-floor bed. Across the hall in his room my father listened too. He seemed never to sleep; all night his dim light burned. I saw Jocasta’s hair hanging to the rungs of her chair. Yes, I believed I saw it. I wanted to touch her hair. I wanted to wrap myself up in her secretive hair. Ten years later when Jocasta died, I helped Lacey comb out the long and menacing hair. It felt like the mane of a horse.

  J.T. used his full charmed strength against Jocasta. She threw every pot in the kitchen at him. Occasionally he threw them back. Lacey and I stood and watched, she yelling “Mother! Not the breakables!” Jocasta picked up something to throw every time he came near her. When she churned, he came up behind her. She’d grab one of the heavy butter molds.

  “J.T., you’d look well if I hit you between the eyes with this.” She stood facing him, brandishing the mold and holding to her glasses with one hand.

  Lacey’s father, Jocasta’s husband, Herbert, owned a hotel where J.T. used to stay the night on business trips. The first time Lacey saw J.T. she was sixteen, night clerk at the check-in desk. J.T. was thirty-eight, a powerful full-chested man with jet-black hair, a boutonniere and gold-tipped cane. He gave Lacey a diamond wrapped in a handkerchief and said she would marry him. For a year Jocasta kept it from happening, then Herbert died of cirrhosis and Lacey eloped. Jocasta raved on about cursed women and bad choice.

  “God knows your father was a wretch. You should have done a sight better in picking one for this child.”

  Lacey had brown eyes of a depth and shine that always looked welled with tears. “Mother,” she said, “You know they were both so charming and fine.”

  “And what does charm get you? A lunatic or a drunkard. If you’d had a decent father yourself you’d never have tried to marry one, an old man.”

  “Mother, he wasn’t old. He’s still not old.”

  “To a girl of sixteen a man near forty is old, or should be. I tried to tell you that too, a dog that’ll carry a bone will bring one. You were a child. He was six years younger than your own father.”

  “That’s just because you robbed the cradle.”

  “It’s best for a woman to marry a younger man. Women outlast men, we’re both proof. They don’t have our stamina. Marry a young one and you can count on him to bury you.”

  “Mother, Herbert died long before you will.”

  “Only because he drank.” She sniffed and lifted her chin.

  Jocasta kept a locked iron box under her bed. She kept all the baubles J.T. had lavished on Lacey during their courtship. She maintained that those jewels were our security. She even bought back necklaces and watches J.T. had given his mistresses. Wrote letters all over the state offering to buy or trade for them. Then she wrapped them in clean rags and put them in the box. Kept her door locked, carried a long skeleton key on a thin gold chain fastened to her belt.

  Jocasta was obsessed with money. All her life she’d barely held on to it, managing the hotel while Herbert drank away the profits. Over and over, she tried to talk Lacey into selling J.T.’s old car, a 1928 Ford locked in the garage. J.T. had it polished until light glanced off like a knife, but he kept driving it top speed down the sidewalks and the town council got out an injunction. Sometimes he walked out at night, looked in the round garage window at the car shining in old smells and dark.

  “That car sits out there for six years while we struggle to feed ourselves. That money could roof the barn and buy us another cow. Francine’s getting old enough to milk, she can assume her share of the load—”

  “Assume her share? She’s seven years old and she’s seen to J.T. this past year, something you nor I can manage.”

  “Well, I mean with the economy of the household. If we don’t sell that car soon, there won’t be a soul left in town with money to buy it.”

  “There isn’t a soul now.”

  “Yes there is. John Simpson asked me about the car yesterday. I was down at the bank and—”

  “Simpson! Just the one J.T. would hate to have it. That man profits on trouble, he’s a sniveling crook. I still think there was something shady about the Trust.”

  The Trust was a fairy tale of which I often heard. When I was born, my father set up a trust to be awarded me when I was ten. Simpson said that when J.T. got so deep in debt that the mill was at stake, he revoked the trust to cover deficits. He lost the mill anyway. Simpson had papers J.T. had supposedly signed, but Lacey thought he’d signed them himself and embezzled the money, covered it somehow with his shifty lawyer mind. She called in other lawyers.

  “Gentlemen,” Simpson told them. “A shame J.T., a man of stature surely, lost his reason, but the facts speak for themselves. Fifty thousand dollars for a child of ten? Isn’t that in itself a little illogical? I tended J.T.’s business as long as possible. We were friends for years, but you can’t save a man who’s drowning.”

  Lacey told how he sat there in his big chair looking sorrowful. Simpson weighed three hundred pounds. His limpid blue eyes slanted almost Asian at the corners; he moved his big body with a feline ease. His lips had a swollen look. He pursed them, touched my neck when I delivered milk on Main Street. He stroked me, lightly, with his manicured hand. Lacey looked stiffly away. Once he leaned into the cart, got close to her over my head and talked to her low and breathy.

  “You needn’t be so high and mighty,” he said. “I could do things for you in this town.”

  I kicked him hard in the center of his fleshy chest. My boot left a black print that pointed at his throat as he cursed and we drove off “Damn you! She’s the seed of her father! They’ll both end in the asylum! To hell with you!”

  Bottles bounced and clinked in the cart. I asked if it was true I’d go crazy.

  “Of course not. You’re like the women in the family, sound as a dollar.”

  “But Grandmother says I’m like him.”

  “Don’t pay mind to that. She’s just jealous because she didn’t love her father like you love yours.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he was an invalid who smelled of camphor and never got out of bed. He used to make her tie her wrist to the arm of her chair and do needlepoint while he took his naps. He lectured her on demons. He was an evil old man.”

  “Lacey,” I said. “I don’t know if I love my father. He doesn’t even know I’m a girl. Sometimes I hate him.”

  “I know, Francie, sometimes I do too.”

  My father’s secrets chased us all. At fifty he was still a big man with power
ful arms. His grayed hair curled thick and long over his collar before he’d let Lacey cut it. Every few weeks he’d get to drinking. Be docile, childish, speak to Lacey as though she were his mother. She’d tie a bib around his neck, sit him down, shave him and cut his hair.

  After he was spruced up he’d grow thoughtful. Walk slowly upstairs in his bare feet, shower, put on aftershave and his green silk vest. He’d put on his straw boater, still almost new because he seldom wore it, and walk to the drugstore after candy.

  “Oh, Lord,” groaned Jocasta as he came down the steps.

  Lacey hushed her, said, “Francie, go after him.”

  And I’d walk him downtown. “Frank, my boy,” he’d say, and put his arm around me. He’d tip his hat to all the women. He was a very handsome man, my father. He’d fairly swagger with happiness, and everyone on the street spoke to him. They’d nod and shake hands eagerly, the men anxious to talk. At the dry goods store, he’d ask Mrs. Carvey about her children.

  “How’s Bill doing in the sand lots? That boy has a genuine pitcher’s arm, Miranda, he should have training, it’s a fact.”

  Bill had grown and gone before my father married my mother, but Mrs. Carvey went on just like he was nine years old. Her husband was dead; she was lonely. She’d get feeling so good she’d pile me up with remnants to take home. That was how Lacey made my clothes.

  Then we’d go down to Farmer’s Drug. Cy gave J.T. a box of candy and put it on the imaginary bill. Cy loved J.T. He even slipped Lacey sleeping powders to sedate him in the bad times. J.T. had staked Cy in pharmacy school and again when he started his store. Cy gave me sodas so J.T. would stay and talk to him. Pop always thought it was Sunday when he was in the drugstore and he’d ask for a paper.

  “Nope, not in yet this morning, J.T. Come back this afternoon.”

  “Well, I’ll do that, Cy.”

  They’d shake hands and clap each other’s shoulders. Once Cy started tearing up.

  “Now, boy, none of that,” said J.T. “Times are getting better, you’ll see. And if you have trouble with the store, you know I’m right here with whatever you need.”

  Out front we’d sit down to discuss the stock market with the men.

  “I tell you, boys, the market won’t go down. It may waver, but it stands firm.”

  Of course everyone but he was painfully aware the market had crashed in ’29, but they sat discussing the possibility very seriously. They took sides, argued loudly. J.T. and his supporters usually won. They all sat believing in futures.

  Finally J.T. got up and stretched, winked, said someone waited for him. He’d whistle all the way home and seem to forget me. He knew the way, he owned the street, I walked behind him. He’d begin to smooth his now-cropped hair and clear his throat.

  We could smell our kitchen from down the block. Butterfried chicken, new potatoes, Jocasta’s buttermilk biscuits. Flowers on the swept porch. J.T. made his entrance, swept off his hat grandly, flourished the box. When he spoke to Lacey, white in her muslin dress, J.T. stuttered; something tugged in his brain but he got past it. He took Lacey’s hand and folded it to his mouth.

  Through dinner she glanced at him, small penetrating glances, as he argued quietly to Jocasta about Galsworthy, whose collected green-bound volumes he read alone in his room at night. Lacey watched them both, twisting her dress beneath the table.

  I cleared the plates and she turned on the phonograph, handled heavy waxen records until the old waltzes tinkled out at the right speed. J.T.’s eyes were bright; he whirled her around the room while Jocasta sat downcast. Finally they’d go upstairs as soon as it was decently dark, Lacey’s hair falling from the dancing. The record finished and kept scratching, needle bouncing back and forth.

  The wind blew the curtains in billowed forms. The glories closed on their vines. We could hear the old brass bed upstairs beginning, rocking very gently. Sometimes Jocasta turned the music on again. Sometimes we just sat, looking at each other, while the rocking went on; small swooning cries, sharp jabs of the bed against the wall.

  During a summer storm, lightning struck the barn. Out the back window a rosy flame burned its petaled center, a cauliflower of fire and smoke. We ran outside, the neighbors came, we passed buckets for twenty minutes. J.T. supervised in his pajamas, lined up the men and women, pumped water at the trough. Stark-faced in the jumping light, his voice booming, he yelled directions.

  “Get the lions and tigers out!” he kept shouting. “Don’t let the big cats burn!”

  But the hay caught, the rain slacked. Everything burned except a few chickens and one cow Lacey saved at the risk of her skin.

  At the end of it, she stood transfixed by the trough as all the people dispersed. Our neighbor Johannes went to her in the dark and took hold of her. He held her and rubbed her back. “There now, there.” She clung to him, grabbed one of his hands behind her and held it. His ashed face nearly shone with some power. He said to come, let him give her some coffee and whiskey. But she said no, she only wanted to stand here for a while. Johannes touched her face, stroked her hair. Picked me up and carried me to his house, and his wife gave me a bath.

  Johannes’s wife was a wispy woman considerably older than he. She was actually his cousin once removed. They had left Sweden together, she thirty-one and he seventeen, both unmarried virgins. It was a long hard trip, and lonely. When they got to New York he married her. She thought she carried a child but she was wrong. Johannes’s wife was barren; she had female problems. Some weeks she stayed in bed.

  But that night she bathed me. She smelled of lavender. She lit the bathroom with candles, she sprinkled potpourri and spearmint in the steaming water. She made it bubble with bath salts. Rubbed me with a sponge as big as two hands and I was drunk with flowers. All the time she sang and muttered in her broken English, “Fire no good, poor fire.”

  She lifted me out of the tub, swaddled me in towels and carried me, though she was frail, into a room where she kept her dolls from Sweden. More lamps, she lit them all, on the floor and the windowsills. Tall globes threw tangled shadows about the walls. Shadows of the dolls’ limbs loomed huge across the floor. Dolls, twenty or thirty, in big gossamer hats or bonnets with feathered parakeets, long tulle dresses, buttoned shoes. Their rose faces were perfect in a shadow of curled lashes. They posed sitting, standing, walking, running, holding dishes, bouquets, smaller dolls. One wore roller skates, another walked a stuffed Scottish terrier on a leash. That night was my first hallucination. The dolls began moving around the room, rolling hoops with sticks and talking in their whispery, breathless voices. Johannes’s wife was talking too. Her Swedish got faster and faster. She went walking around with the dolls, their glass eyes glazed. They kicked their feet out straight in front. I saw it, the goose-stepping dolls, naked and seven in that room.

  “Gerta!” Johannes’s voice. He switched on the electric light. Spoke to her with harsh resignation and came to me on the rotating carpet. He pressed my face to his blond beard. The dolls’ faces still moved, secretly.

  Lacey’s face was drawn and tight. She came to get me at Johannes’s house the next morning, my best white dress folded on her arm. She stood in the doorway, her hair pulled back severely and her muslin dress freshly ironed.

  “Francie,” she said. “We’re going to the bank.”

  We turned, walking. Wet grass spattered her stockings. At the garage she stopped, opened the old locks and let the creaking doors swing wide. The earthen floor rose its buried scent around our heads. When Lacey closed us inside, a powdered light sifted through the dirty window. I saw the board walls grown with chartreuse moss, old sleigh bells hung on leather straps, and something massive glinting in the middle of the room. It seemed to palpitate and breathe, then I saw the movement was only a casting of light on its hard black sides. Chrome and patent black. My eyes grew accustomed to shadows and the car emerged glimmering its saucered headlights. Smells of wax and leather mingled in the dark. Lacey knelt and stripped me. She fastened the dress,
nails of her cool fingers scratching my skin. She stood then and walked around the car, touching it with one extended finger.

  In the bank we waited, Lacey staring straight ahead. Simpson’s secretary, Bedelia, sucked her pencil. Two bright red spots in her cheeks jumped out. She watched Lacey and hated her. Bedelia wore long chains of fake pearls like the women in New York City, but in truth Simpson had found her not twenty miles from town when he foreclosed the mortgage on her father’s gritty farm. Bedelia kept a magazine picture of the Eiffel Tower on her desk. She looked at the Eiffel Tower. She looked at Lacey. When Simpson told her to send us in, she nodded at the door and a nerve jumped in her jaw.

  Simpson sat in his fat like something cooked.

  “My dear Lacey, some brandy, perhaps a sweet liqueur. And Francie needs a sarsaparilla.”

  “Francine needs nothing. Mr. Simpson, I’ve come about the car.”

  “Oh yes, I heard about the fire. Such a misfortune. I’m sure I can be of some help.”

  Simpson twisted his moustache. Topaz and diamonds choked his little finger. Lacey was impassive; she clutched my hand and left a pale bruise on my wrist. Simpson went on in his honeyed voice.

  “J.T. and I were very close, you know. Once I looked after his interests very well. I can do so again.”

  Lacey was silent. Simpson smiled and watched her. His long black lashes brushed his cheeks, slowly. He blinked once, then again. Opened a drawer in his vast mahogany desk and pulled out a roll of bills. He tossed it in the air, caught it in his fist.

  “And there’s the matter of that shack property down by the river. Surely you have no illusions that J.T. will ever work the mill again. I know you ran his business those last years; you have the know-how, I have the means. Perhaps we may arrive at a workable situation …”