In the Beauty of the Lilies (20 page)

“I don’t want to work indoors,” Teddy said, trying to help them now, since they were trying to help him.

Young Esther laughed. “That’s where the jobs all are, except
the brute work you’re too swell to do. What a brat, if I may say so. I won’t do this, I won’t do that. Living off a batch of women.”

“Now, now,” his mother intervened. “He just needs time to feel his way. Clarence hasn’t been dead a year, and we’re all still mending.”

“No law says you can’t work and mend at the same time,” remarked Aunt Esther, pushing herself up from the table with her two long hands, which were dotted with little freckles and red sunspots like Father’s but without blond hair on the backs. “I hear the cap factory’s putting on a second shift. These are boom times, now the Republicans have restored normalcy. Young Theodore, there’s no excuse not to find a bit of work somewhere, and better for the spirit too. Maybe,” she said, darting her nephew a glance from those cool-blue Wilmot eyes, a shade less milky than Father’s, “up at the bottle-cap plant you’d meet a nice Basingstoke girl.”

He kept to himself his impression that Basingstoke people were all rubes.

“Oh, Teddy isn’t ready for
that
,” Mother said.

“I’d like to know what he
is
ready for,” his sister said. She asked him, “Where’s your old-fashioned Christian gumption? Don’t you have any wish to serve your fellow men?”

“I do,” he said, surprising himself. “But I’m only eighteen, what’s everybody’s hurry? Does everybody have to do something all the time? Isn’t it enough, sometimes, if you just don’t make things any worse?”

“Oh,” his mother exclaimed in delight, “I can hear Clarence saying that!”

But Teddy was shamed into enterprise, and in the fall did offer himself at the bottle-cap factory, where they gave him a place on the line, toward the end, watching the machine that
applied, with a grid of hollow copper tongues fed from above, water-resistant adhesive to the discs of cork that were inserted, by a host of nimble female hands next down the line, into the river of inverted caps that incessantly spilled onto a broad canvas belt from the machines that printed and stamped and crimped. The glue tended to thicken and harden in the tubes and it was part of his job, at the end of his shift, in the half-hour when the line shut down, to clean the machine with a solvent that would burn his hands if he didn’t wear rubber gloves and that in any case scorched his nasal passages and made him dizzy. The noise and monotony and messiness seemed a deliberate attempt, by the forces that had slain his father, to drive him mad. He felt his spiritual being was itself a thin tube filling up with a kind of hardening adhesive. The girls—fat and pasty, most of them—who inserted the cork discs giggled at his clumsiness and the miserable daze he moved through, and disliked his lack of responsiveness during the workday’s two fifteen-minute breaks, with their precious opportunities for flirtation. One winter day Teddy was just too sick to get up in time for his shift, and Aunt Esther’s doctor when he came—Doc Hedger, who in fair weather still used a horse and buggy to make his calls—could find no name or exact location for the boy’s incapacity except a horror of his daily job. To save his health, then, Ted quit.

Always, in that uncertain period, Teddy felt the three women, Mother and the two Esthers, whisperingly conferring about him, seeking with an almost inaudible rustling readjustment of feathers and a steady warmth of daily attendance to make him grow. His sister Esther protected him by persuading the two older women that her brother was too intelligent and sensitive to be cooped up in the bottle-cap factory or indeed any local drudgery. With her own crisp success in
the secretarial profession an everyday satisfaction for her, she suggested that, though a liberal-arts college was out of the question, he should be put in possession of enough business skills to find work in an office. He had always done well in school, and his ability to sit an evening through with a book, or contemplating and rearranging one of his collections, when other boys his age were out playing pool or hooting at girls, showed an orderly temperament. He could become an accountant. So, after another summer spent in the asparagus bed, and hiring out as an extra hand with the farmers around Basingstoke when there was a haying to do or berries to pick, Teddy began to go up to Wilmington three times a week by electric streetcar, with a transfer at New Castle, to take courses at O’Connell’s School of Practical Business. The institution had been founded so recently that red-faced Mr. O’Connell was still actively in charge. He would walk into a typing class and start bellowing, in synchrony with the teacher but drowning her out, “F, J, G, H; F, J, G, H!” Nothing made him madder than to see discarded paper balled up to be tossed away; it wasted space in the wastepaper baskets and indicated a frivolous attitude. “Rip the paper in half,
once
, once and only once,” he would insist in his apoplectic voice, “and
deposit
it so it lies flat in the container.” He would demonstrate, tearing a piece of yellow practice paper with a ferocious transfixed expression on his face, and then, in a sudden swoop that made the girls behind the rows of black Remingtons titter, laid the pieces softly to rest in the wire basket. If he could spot the girl who had tittered he came and lowered his red round face close to her. “Business is not basketball,” he would tell her, grinding his large square teeth, which reminded Teddy of the teeth of Mr. Dearholt back in Paterson. “Business is not baseball. Business is not
fun
. Business is not”—he
would stand erect to deliver this truth to the primarily female class—“a chance to gather and giggle about boys. Business is—and I know you young ladies are all dying to hear this—it is scrupulous method and faithful repetition. Scrupulous method. Faithful repetition! F, J, G, H! D, K, S, L! Fingers curled, wrists flat, back straight! D, K, S, L! L, S, F, J! Aha! Tricked you, didn’t I? Pay attention!
Pay attention!
” He seemed for a second to forget what it was they were to pay attention to, and then said, “Anyone I ever see crumpling wastepaper into a little ball, it’s out on the street, where they have lots of games! Out on the
streeeet
, and no certificate!”

The school awarded a diploma but also certificates, for individual courses passed. It offered typing, stenography in both Gregg and Pitman systems of shorthand, machine shorthand on the stenotype, filing techniques, and a number of accounting courses, of which double-entry bookkeeping was the basic. Debits on the left, credits on the right, like hot and cold water. A – L = P, for proprietorship or equity. Revenue minus expenses equals profit. One side of a balance sheet must equal the other. It was all tediously, soothingly obvious, until they got to bonds payable, which are long-term liabilities, and in the maze of borrowing and hidden assets and leveraged debt which is the digestive guts of capitalism Teddy began to feel confined and squeezed again, and a little panicky. He began to take the trolley up to Wilmington and not always go to the class; instead he would wander the streets of this tidy city, a kind of daintier Paterson, with more colored citizens, and more colonial buildings of fieldstone and white-painted woodwork, with everything tuned to a slightly smaller scale, or so it appeared to his larger, adult body. As in Paterson, the movie theatres were grouped on a street called Market. There was the Grand, originally the city’s opera
house, with a ten-thousand-dollar Wurlitzer organ; the Garrick, where Keith vaudeville acts also played; the Rialto, once the Lyric; the Majestic, with its massive marble marquee and Grecian decorations; the Playhouse; the New Arcadia, whose decor included caged canaries and goldfish swimming in a fountain on the way to the balcony; and most sumptuous of all, the Queen, housed within the renovated shell of an old hotel, Clayton House, which had been put out of business by the Hotel du Pont. Seated inside the Queen, Teddy marvelled at the towering proscenium arch, the murals representing Science and Music and Beauty and Sculpture, the Japanese garden forming a backdrop for the stage, and the great gold dome whose concealed electric fixtures illumined walls of bluish gray and ivory and old rose—tints meant, a handout explained, to take you back to the time of the French kings. He had never seen anything in Paterson, even the scrolling Flemish façade of the Post Office, like the vast ethereal sweep of the balcony rail, between the relief-encrusted boxes. There was also, in downtown Wilmington, a theatre for the colored people, called The National, to which whites were admitted, though Teddy never went.

He was not quite the betranced moviegoer his father had been. The speckled and jerky but effulgent flickering that had lifted Clarence Wilmot up from the dark pit into which his life had fallen seemed to his son a bit menacing, an alarming and garish profusion. The motion pictures, all made now in California or Europe, three thousand miles away in one direction or another, embraced the chaos that sensible men and women in their ordinary lives plotted to avoid. Sickeningly, while the audiences around Teddy shrieked with perverse pleasure, and the piano player’s fortissimos whipped their frenzy even higher, the figures on the silent screen
hurtled to the rim of destruction and beyond. Men in top hats drank and gambled away their fortunes; women in pearls and shimmering dresses threw away their marriages and lives for a moment of white-limbed ecstasy eclipsed by a falling bed curtain; reconstructions of the recent war tossed helmeted actors into the muds of exploding trenches; the misery of an Eskimo in the barren snows of the north was exposed to the camera’s stare. Always these films were trying to get you to look over the edge, at something you would rather not see—poverty, war, murder, that thing men and women did when they were alone together. Even the comedies—Teddy sat through them wincing at the brutal slaps and tumbles, the terrifying teetering on the skyscraper ledge by the nice man in the straw hat and big glasses. There was something sinister about these constant clowns—the college boy with the straw hat; the man whose expression never changed however wildly his legs were churning; the little tramp with the white face, unreal square mustache, dusty bowler hat, and big floppy shoes. When Chaplin smiled, it was a nervous worried smile. No wonder, when his film life was a constant barrage of miscues and misunderstandings, pennilessness, police harassment, frantic chases, and failures to get the girl. It was all more depressing than funny, except for the rapidity with which one peril and misapprehension succeeded another, giving these sad-eyed men no rest, subjecting them to fresh bouts of abuse and punishment and frustration while the audience around Teddy incomprehensibly howled with laughter. Well, comprehensibly—these apparitions in their baggy clothes and flattened hats acted out our nightmares, and in burlesquing them momentarily banished them. But the nightmares were accurate enough: we are like a swarm of mosquitoes, crazy with thirst and
doomed to be swatted. Life was endlessly cruel, and there was nobody above to grieve—Father had proved that. And life’s central event, propelling men and women through their days and nights, was an unthinkable collision of slimy, hairy parts that should be kept forever hidden. The cinema wished to leave nothing hidden, to throw nakedness up on the screen, and grief, and fistfights and explosions and violence, and even corpses and monsters, played by Lon Chaney. Terror would attack Teddy even in the middle of hilarious and romantic sequences, as he realized that these bright projections were trying to distract him from the leaden reality beneath his seat, underneath the theatre floor. Death and oblivion were down there, waiting for the movie to be over. Not so, these movies tried to say. Life was not serious; it was an illusion, a story, distracting and disturbing but at bottom painless and merciful. These familiar stars, who suffered and died on the screen yet returned a month or two later differently costumed but unchanged—the man with round pleased-with-himself cheeks who was always leaping off parapets and sliding down banisters and slashing Z’s in men’s chests with a rapier; the woman with curly hair who was always playing children, even a boy child and his mother at the same time; the stern-faced thin-lipped man with slicked hair who dressed up as a sheik and matador and gigolo (evidently a man whom women paid to make love to them, you didn’t see too many of those in Paterson or Wilmington); the bald German with the monocle that the audience hissed when he appeared on the screen in his uniform or tuxedo—these stars led up there a life that was always renewed, movie to movie, without permanent harm, whereas Teddy knew that harm was permanent. The reel of your real life unwound only once. And now the sordidness of illusion was leaking out of
Hollywood itself, with the Fatty Arbuckle murder trials, and the murder of the director William Desmond Taylor, an unsolved mystery which touched on Mary Pickford’s rival Mary Miles Minter and even on Pickford herself. “America’s Sweetheart” was no angel, as the public had learned with Pickford’s cynical Nevada divorce and her unseemly rapid marriage to Douglas Fairbanks. Behind the screen’s glowing, preachy outpour were orgies of sin like none seen since Nero’s Rome.

“How many more certificates you want, for cry-eye?” his sister asked impatiently one day, in Aunt Esther’s seldom-used living room, the September after President Harding died on his way back from Alaska, amid disclosures that his friend Mr. Fall had been cheating on the sale of public oil lands. The diagnosis given was cerebral apoplexy but Teddy knew Harding had really died of a broken heart, as President Wilson had done, and Father. His sister’s blue squint had lately grown narrower and had a kind of cutting brightness, there under the bangs of her close-cropped red-tinged hair. It had been bobbed and rinsed with henna. She smoked right in the house now, and wore a lot of bangle bracelets that rattled on her skinny freckled arms. There had been some disturbance or scandal, of which he had heard only whispering and tears in this women’s house, concerning an attachment she had formed with Mr. Bundy, of Pulsifer, McReady, and Bundy. He was married and, it seemed, after some indecision, intended to remain so. Esther would probably have to quit her job, to avoid a scandal, and there was talk of her going back to Paterson, or to New York, or Philadelphia, or even out west. She was fed up, and seemed to be tackling Teddy as a piece of unfinished business she should clean up before she went away.