By The Sea, Book Three: Laura (6 page)

For an answer Laura dropped a ditty bag of
her own, on which she'd stenciled the name "Virginia," on the cabin
table; it landed with a clinking thud. "It went not too bad," she
answered proudly.

"The deck looks like you've hauled a load of
granite," he complained, weighing the bag in his hands.

"The paint hadn't cured enough," she
answered without taking offense. "I'll paint it again—after high
season."

He frowned. "What the hell kind of season is
a high one?"

"Summer in Newport," she answered promptly.
"When everything costs the most."

"Beaches don't cost nothin'," he answered
deliberately.

"Oh, don't play dense, Sam!" she returned.
"I'm talking about
tourism.
The
Virginia
doesn't pay
her way anymore hauling freight. Times have changed, and we have to
change with them: the
Virginia
will support herself as a
tour boat, I learned that last night. We could hold dances aboard,
or take out sailing parties in the evening, or even overnight to
the Vineyard or Nantucket—"

"And what do we do the other ten months of
the year? Huddle below and count our money?"

"We follow the sun and do the same thing
somewhere south," she said, undaunted.

"Not a chance. There's no money in it, no
more than there is in hauling. I haul cargo to get away from the
bullshit ashore. Cleaning up after some seasick biddy ain't my idea
of a good time."

He picked up her little bag of coins and
tossed it across the table back to her. "You made a little money,
and you made a little mess. I call it a wash."

"Sam! There's much more money to be made!
Think about it,
please,"
she implored. "I love the water as
well as you, and I've come up with a plan that will
work."

He narrowed his eyes skeptically. "Do you
remember that newspaper bit you read to me about the beggars in New
York City—that the best of 'em average eight dollars a day? That's
about how much you made. But you need a thirty-ton schooner to do
it with, and they only need a pair of crutches."

"That's not fair! I'm just getting
started—"

"Another thing," he said, ignoring her plea.
"One of the fellas told me last night that you need a license for
what you did. Try it again, and you'll have someone from city hall
all over the
Virginia. I
wouldn't like that," he continued
in his phlegmatic way.

"A license?" She sat down, fingering the
drawstrings of her bag of coins. "I didn't know that," she said,
embarrassed at her ignorance.

"Ayuh. Well, even if you had one, the answer
is no. As soon as I finish up on the
Rainbow,
we'll go back
to making our money the way we always have—haulin'."

Laura set her chin at a dangerous angle.
"All right. We'll do it your way. But just remember: you said it,
not I."

****

The next day Laura resolved to find a
contract to haul cargo, or die trying. With the earnings from her
shipboard dance she placed an ad in the
Newport Daily News,
as well as in Boston and New York papers, offering cut-rate charges
for delivery of nonperishable goods. She haunted the coal and
construction companies, looked up old contacts, courted new ones.
She was a woman doing a man's job, and that earned her an entry
into every office, but that was all. Reactions ranged from outright
laughter to not-so-subtle bartering for sexual favors.

They were days of frustration for Laura, in
dismal contrast to the days of exhilaration before her shipboard
dance.

"Don't be upset, Mama," said Neil to his
mother as she stoked up a fire in the stove to make them supper.
"It's only been a few days. Maybe someone will write from New York
to give us work. Or Boston. I wish you wouldn't be upset," he
repeated.

Whether it was because he was an only child,
or because they lived in such intimate proximity, Neil could never
bear to see his mother in distress. Laura thought that perhaps he'd
been spoiled when he was a baby, listening to the sound of her
laughter all day long. Laura and Sam had rarely argued then. The
last few years, the wretched Great Depression, had been very hard
on them all.

"I'm sure you're right, Neil," Laura said
firmly, putting an optimistic note in her voice. "But you know how
impatient I am; I want everything yesterday. No, I really do think
you're right. The business will come."

Satisfied with the shift in his mother's
attitude, Neil said, "New York. The contract will be from New
York," and went back to his penmanship lessons, kicking his feet
abstractedly under the cabin table.

After a supper of boiled cabbage and an end
piece of corned beef, mother and son went up on deck. Billy was
ashore somewhere. Neil decided to bottom-fish off the end of the
dock, a few feet from the
Virginia's
berth. Laura had her
tea. She kicked off her sandals and pinned her hair haphazardly on
her head, grateful for the cool zephyr from the south that fanned
the back of her neck. The sun was setting in a bed of scarlet
behind Goat Island as a beat-up fishing boat cut a wake through the
harbor, bound for the Grand Banks. It was very quiet, the time of
day that hovers between dream and wakefulness. Laura sipped hot tea
from a heavy white mug, watching her son and thinking about money.
Neil would probably never amount to much without any. Laura did not
notice the two women approach until they hailed her.

"Yoo-hoo! Miss!"

She swung her glance away from her son to
them, then immediately dropped her feet and slipped them back into
their sandals: two of last week's dance guests, dressed for a good
time, stood on the dock fluttering a greeting.

"What about the dance?" asked the one in the
bright green evening dress, the one who had said that she waited on
tables.

"Where are the lanterns?" wondered the
other, much younger girl.

"But there isn't any dance. I never put up
any notices," replied Laura, flattered and dismayed.

"But Billy said!"

"Billy isn't even here. I can't have a dance
because I found out you need a license to sell tickets," she
added.

"Oh, swell! Now what, Nellie?" said the
younger woman to her friend.

"Quiet, Marie. Let me think," said Nellie.
She did. "I know: don't sell tickets. We'll slip you something
under the table, and you can let us and our friends aboard the boat
for a 'party,' if anyone asks." She brushed her hands against one
another, as if disposing of the Newport bureaucracy once and for
all.

Her sly grin made Laura hesitate, but only
very briefly. "How much?" she demanded, burying Sam's objections
under a ditty bag's worth of coins.

The two women put their made-up heads
together and conferred. Nellie looked up. "Seven-fifty."

Laura's heart leaped up. Still, fair was
fair: "Billy won't be here to play the concertina," she
confessed.

"Five bucks."

"But I can play, though not so well as
Billy."

"Six-fifty."

Newport wasn't New York. Laura agreed to
their terms. A private party, with Nellie and Marie deciding who
could come aboard; music; and no questions.

The women went off to round up their
friends, and Laura spent a frantic hour hanging lanterns and
clearing the decks. Mr. Patchers wandered through; he was sent
reluctantly away, as it was a "strictly private affair this time."
She sent Neil off looking for Billy in his favorite haunts,
meanwhile keeping a wary eye on the dock for husbands and city
clerks. Neil came back without Billy, and Laura dumped him behind
the refreshment table, just in time for their first arrivals.

Within an hour most of them had come: half a
dozen women, all of them overdressed in dreadful taste, and twice
as many men, ranging from fidgety to overbearing. Perhaps to put as
much distance between herself and the women as she could, Laura had
deliberately underdressed in a simple cream- colored frock. No rose
tonight, just a pale blue ribbon holding her thick brown hair away
from her face. She looked like what she was: a wholesome, healthy
Midwesterner willing to look at the bright side, wanting to
please.

She had picked up the concertina almost
immediately, because her brother-in-law was still nowhere in sight.
Her repertoire was only so-so for dancing, composed mostly of sea
chanteys and bits and pieces of classical music that she was fond
of. She varied the pace as best she could, announcing the composer
and the name of the piece to incredulous looks. For nearly an hour
she played gamely on, unable to help Neil with the refreshments,
unable to keep people from wandering around at will, despite the
fact that she'd cordoned off the bow area again.

After a while it began to bother her that a
steady string of men were slipping forward, one at a time, and
coming back aft a little while later. It was customary for a man to
relieve himself over the side of a boat, but surely not everyone's
bladder was in the same sorry state. She noticed, too, that the men
around her were not the same group who had come aboard earlier.
Apparently she'd been too intent on her playing to notice. And
where were Nellie and Marie?

When Billy finally showed up she fairly
threw the concertina at him and went forward to investigate. It was
very dark, a moonless night. Laura was able to find her way on the
Virginia's
decks blindfolded, but the man she fell in behind
was not. She heard him stumble—no doubt over the massive iron
windlass—and swear, and she heard glass breaking and a woman's low,
drunk laugh. A cloud of whiskey fumes enveloped her as she stalked
angrily toward the couple.

"What is going
on
here?" she
demanded, her eyes opening wide to adjust to the shadows.

"What ... ever ... do you think?" came the
blurred, ironic response.

Laura had found Nellie, at least: sitting on
one of the reglued dance chairs, besotted with alcohol, her dress
unbuttoned in the front down to her waist, exposing two very white,
very large, very bare breasts. There was not enough black night in
the universe to mask her nakedness.

Dumbfounded, Laura stared blankly for a
moment and then said in a voice low with fury, "The
Virginia
is not a whorehouse, you slut!"

Nellie swung drunkenly at the air, as if she
were shooing a fly, and said, "It has been ... for a while, dearie.
Go back to your ... Bach, and let us play." She paused, then
giggled, impressed with herself.

Laura turned quickly around to look back at
her son, standing alone and weary under the lights in the dance
area forward of the mainmast, all caught up with his glass-washing
for the moment. Neil—her baby—shy and at an impressionable age,
forced to serve punch to Newport's most flamboyant hookers.
Inconceivable. She swung back around to Nellie and her obviously
unhappy customer.

"Button up and get off. Now."

"The hell I will. I paid for this boat,"
returned Nellie, a dangerous edge sharpening her blurred voice.

Laura reached down into the flap-pocket of
her dress, pulled out the crumpled dollar bills, and flung them in
Nellie's lap. "Here's a refund. Now—now beat it," she cried, unsure
how hard she could push this particular element of society.

Surprisingly, Nellie backed down, too
befuddled to really put up a fight. "Yahr, who gives a shit? Sorry,
Harry," she said with a tired sigh, fumbling with the buttons of
her dress. "Let's go back to our usual spot."

But Harry, hot and unsatisfied, was a little
more impatient than that. He turned on Laura. "And who made
you
the chief of police, you little …?"

In the dark his bulk loomed over her, his
voice shot through her, terrifying her. Unlike Nellie, Harry was
just drunk enough to be vicious. Suddenly the immense stupidity of
Laura's behavior so far hit her, like a blow to the face. She was
totally vulnerable, a babe wandered into a forest of wolves.

Nellie's disgruntled customer grabbed Laura
roughly by her arm. She froze. Partly she was panicking; partly she
was too mortified to cry out for help she knew would not be coming;
partly she feared to have Neil come anywhere near the bow.
Billy—too slight and young to be any help—was leading a sing-along
with his concertina, drowning out any hope that she'd be heard in
any case. The bawdy lyrics of "Fat, Fat Annie" mixed with the
reeking fumes of the spilled whiskey; Laura's sense of corruption
was profound.

And yet she was not part of this scene—she
was not, any more than she was part of the Bellevue Avenue scene,
or the lower Thames Street scene. She would not be drawn into it,
not even by force. Her spirit pulled out of its swoon; she yanked
her arm angrily away from the drunken guest. "Get away from me,"
she hissed.

Surprised, he hesitated a moment, then
laughed a low, dangerous laugh. "Sez who? A little schoolmarm like
you?" In two steps he had her again, this time firmly by both her
shoulders.

Nellie lolled stupidly in her chair,
cackling drunkenly at the scene before her. "That's it, Harry. Give
it to her. She needs a good pokin' … that's what," she said,
hiccuping. "Husband's … away, says she. Jes' look at her ... she
misses it ... waiting for it, says I. You show her."

Reeling from the man's stench of sweat and
whiskey, Laura struggled in his arms, terrified, defiant, but not
nearly strong enough to resist him. Her crazy Midwestern morality
took the occasion to scream at her:
This is what you get! If you
hadn't tried to flaunt the law, this never would've
happened.

"All right, friend. Let her go. You're
getting on everyone's nerves."

There was a scuffle and suddenly Harry was
being hoisted over the bulwarks and dropped into the harbor. A
splash, a howl, and the sound of panicky swim-strokes: that's how
fast it all happened. Laura peered through the darkness at the
rescuer who'd come from nowhere, then spied Marie coming up behind
him.