In the Beauty of the Lilies (22 page)

There was a tranced rhythm to the day that ate up the years. Mornings in Addison’s were a rushed time, with the papers from Wilmington and Baltimore having arrived and working people of Basingstoke settling at all the stools for a hurried coffee and fresh doughnut or raisin bun from Mrs. Brindley’s Bakery down the street, and then there was a slackening off, the customers mostly female shoppers doing their rounds of the downtown, and then a lunch flurry, when the schoolkids stoked up on candy bars and ice-cream cones, and then, until school let out, a long lull, in which Teddy sometimes felt his entire life draining from him, without any raise or change of prospect. The ice slowly melting in the cold chests that kept the ice cream firm audibly dripped away into the pans underneath, next to the canisters of pressurized carbon dioxide for the sodas and nitrous oxide for the whipped cream.

When Charlie Wainwright went off to be the head druggist for a new Rexall’s in Dover, Mr. Addison asked Teddy if he had ever thought of going to pharmaceutical school, but Teddy couldn’t face another spell of riding the interurban electric cars up to Wilmington, or of begging the tuition from the women he lived with. Aunt Esther had been having some problems with her health—nervous complaints, Doc Hedger called them, though they kept her up all night, going to the bathroom. Mother could only do so much sewing without blinding herself, and her attempts to train an assistant ended when the girl got pregnant or proved hopelessly unable to absorb the meticulous ethics of dressmaking—“I declare,” she once said, “they just don’t make girls as conscientious as they used to; all they want is to get off work and dance and drink and ride in roadsters. Whatever happened to old-fashioned right”—
raaaht
—“from wrong?” In turning Mr. Addison down, Teddy had forever diminished, he knew, his value in his eyes, just as he had with the baseball coach at Paterson High. Teddy wondered if his entire life was to consist of guarded refusals. In America opportunity doesn’t keep knocking. His sister, who never did leave Pulsifer, McReady, and Bundy, since her quitting would have seemed to confirm the rumors about her and Mr. Bundy, pulled a surprise in 1925, the summer when everybody was interested in the Scopes trial down in Tennessee. She and Peter Pulsifer—not Bundy, who hadn’t been ready, or McReady—were going to get married, as soon as he could divorce his wife. In the meantime, to get away from the scandal, she was moving to New York, to stay with Jared and
his
wife, Lucille, the pert slim platinum-blonde daughter of the man he used to collect rents for, who was now very big in the realty
and
investment businesses. She had come down to Basingstoke to meet the family
but the newlyweds hadn’t been able to stay the night. “Blonde with black-Irish roots,” had been Aunt Esther’s dry remark after they had left.

“How do you know,” Teddy asked Sister Esther, “Pulsifer’ll hold to his promise and go through with the divorce?” Always, he felt how dangerous adult life was, how fraught with gambles that could go sour.

“Well,” she said, and squinted through a plume of smoke from her new brand, Chesterfields, “if he doesn’t, I’ll have some new information. I can’t stay another day in that office; Frank Bundy keeps looking daggers at me, as if I’m the one who weaseled out. The sap. He had his chance.”

“But what will you
do
in New York?”

“I don’t know—go to shows and museums. Sit in Washington Square and write po-ems. Jared says they’ll take me to all their favorite dives. He and Lucille have an apartment right on Fifth Avenue with four bedrooms—I can stay as long as I like. I need a dose of them bright white lights, Tedsy. Hey—I never said I’d stay down here forever. You’re pretty well settled in, isn’t that so? I got you through the transition, right?”

“Right,” he said bravely. “It’s just—Mother and Aunt Esther are getting
old
. You were the only live wire around here. You were the only one I could talk to.”

“Find someone else, then. It’s not so hard. Hell, you’re twenty-two going on eighty-two—what’s happened to your glands?”

She had a way of making him blush. “Nothing’s happened, but to the proper girls around here, I’m just the soda jerk. And if I got a serious girl, wouldn’t it upset Mom?”

“
Au contraire
, kid. What do you think, everybody in Missouri was an immaculate conception? She wants
fam
ily. Loosen up. Start going to church socials, or something.”

“Church doesn’t agree with me. You know that.”

She hesitated a second, without a ready answer for once. “Church is where the action is, in a one-horse burg like this. Lick ’em or join ’em’s the way I see it.” She shrugged. “Suit yourself. I got enough mess living my own life. Maybe you’re right—sit tight and wait for the undertaker.” And with these breezy words she leaned forward, there in Aunt Esther’s gloomy kitchen, with its ceiling of brown-painted pressed tin, and gave her younger brother a hard little kiss on his broad forehead, with her thin painted lips.

It did seem the world was turning sexier. In the movies, the Mack Sennett girls showed more and more leg in their bathing suits, and there were “vamps” played by foreign actresses with names like Pola Negri. In the real world the young women were called “flappers” wearing just little slips for dresses and doing a wild dance called the Charleston. Some guys in the drug store the other day had gone up to Philadelphia to see a burlesque star called Carrie Finnel, who twirled tassels from her breasts and buttocks. Only they didn’t call them breasts and buttocks. The country’s tough, “fast” currents were picked up by the young set around Basingstoke—the girls in their tubular little dresses and rolled stockings, the guys in their white wide-bottomed ducks. Teddy marvelled that even the children of people working at the bottle-cap factory were able to buy the clothes that imitated the rich youth of Long Island and Chicago and Grosse Pointe. Hung-over on bathtub gin, Basingstoke’s young blades would come in in the morning for bicarbs and Pepto-Bismol at the counter, and the young women, desperately conferring with Mrs. Addison over by the perfumes, looking to erase the possibility of a pregnancy contracted in a drunken daze. Working in the drug store was like standing on the corner of
Rodney and Elm watching the town’s woes go by. Tremulous and breathing hard and blue around the edges, the old came in and took away digitalis for their hearts. The young mothers came in and purchased milk of magnesia to speed up their kids’ bowels and paregoric to slow them down. The middle-aged bought iron and liver extract for pep and bromides and barbiturates to settle their nerves. Morphine and aspirin eased pain. Cough syrup loosened catarrh and soothed sore throat. Ipecac got you to vomit. Colchicum cured or at least discouraged gout, iodine goiter, insulin diabetes, quinine malaria, Salvarsan syphilis, and vitamin C scurvy. But the last three were rare in Basingstoke. Belladonna, sassafras bark, sarsaparilla root, cascara, mentholatum, antiphlogistene, Seidlitz powders, Rochelle salts, vegetable simples by the dozen—it was hard to say if any of it really worked. The purpose was to make people feel attention was being paid and something was being tried. Aunt Esther’s Doc Hedger had a standard prescription he had made a rubber stamp for—Elixir of I, Q, and S, which consisted of minute amounts of iron, quinine, and strychnine dissolved in an alcohol solution about as strong as bourbon whiskey. It was the alcohol that probably did the good. Life basically had to be endured. Nature fought for you until it turned against you.

Among the chronic customers Teddy began to notice, in the damp, late-arriving spring of 1926, a newcomer to town, a lame girl who generally appeared in the drug store under her father’s protection. He was a tobacco farmer who had sold his acres near Lewes and moved to Basingstoke to buy the old Culver greenhouse two blocks along on Fishery Way, with half its windows broken from all the years when Jake Culver was drinking himself to death after his boys declined to come back to Delaware after serving in the Army overseas.
Teddy had lived in Basingstoke five years now and knew most of what happened in town, from conversations at the post office or at the soda-fountain counter. It was a pretty sight to see the new panes of glass filling in the greenhouse’s rusty iron ribs, though everybody agreed the town never could and never would support a flower business. The answer to that was that Daniel Sifford didn’t need the money; he had made a killing selling to a real-estate speculator seeing a great future, comparable to the southern-Jersey resorts, for the area around Rehoboth Beach. Sifford wanted the greenhouse, and the two acres and 1880 farmhouse that went with it, as a hobby, to keep his hand in the dirt. He was a big-boned shambling man whose clothes hung on him like bib overalls; his face was so creased it looked to be in overlapping pieces, as in some breeds of dog. There was a wife, but she never came into the drug store, and was hardly seen out of the house at all—just sometimes hanging out wash in the yard and scuttering away if anybody looked like they might try to talk to her. For children there were only the lame girl, and a much older boy who had gone west somewhere, Indiana or Nebraska, where the farmland was sold six hundred forty acres at a time.

The girl dressed in a slightly off-key way, by Basingstoke standards—a little too fancily for everyday some days, her hair done up behind in an old-fashioned ribbon, and then on other days too plain, with potting soil besmirching her gingham dress and her stockings speckled with bits of mulching hay. She had to order a new leg brace and orthopedic shoe, a high-top with built-up sole, through the drug store, and it had to be sent back to an address in Camden several times before it fit well enough to satisfy Doc Hedger. She had fallen into his hands, and the prescriptions of his that she brought
in—APC, morphine sulfate, rubbing alcohol, pain-easing liniments—told a sad story of discomfort that her lovely clear eyes and cheerful factual manner concealed. Her eyes had bigger whites than those of ordinary girls: they were like the eyes of the movie stars Gloria Swanson or Lillian Gish on posters outside the Roxie, an every-day-but-Sunday, specially built movie theatre, with long blank brick sides and a triangular marquee, that had replaced the Bijou upstairs at the Oddfellows’ Hall. Her figure was countryish and plump but her skin had an unblemished satin luster, as if all the suffering and embarrassment of her deformed right foot had made her spirit glow just as preachers say suffering does. Having studied the exact measurements of her brace and special shoe on their way back and forth to Camden gave Teddy a curious intimacy with her that he was surprised she didn’t feel reciprocally. He knew her name, from the drug-store records: Emily Jeanette Sifford. She was very shy but had a soft spot for ice-cream sodas with a scoop of butter-pecan ice cream. When she was sitting at the counter with her plump white forearms and pink elbows dimly reflected in the veined green marble, one of her hard-working little hands, the fingernails outlined in dark dirt from helping her father in the greenhouse, would brush back a strand of her fine brown hair—hair so fine the individual hairs straying from her ribbon seemed colorless—away from her face as her puckered lips pushed forward around the straw, slightly greedy, sucking with a subdued gurgle the last bit of soda before digging at the ice cream with the long silver spoon. She wore no makeup. She had pretty well discounted herself as a courtable female. Her manner was short on airs and graces. When she finished the soda she would wipe her knuckle across her lips and stare out with a blank, almost burpy look of satisfaction
and he would see that indeed, compared with the shimmery hard women dancing across the movie screen and the Wilmington society pages, she was plain and bland. A high forehead, and a bit of a double chin, young as she was. But then her eyes might light on him, sensing his staring; their blue was not milky or icy like that of Wilmot eyes but velvety, a somehow flowering, layered blue, taking green from the countertop and sparkle from the scintillating fixtures and products and advertisements that cluttered the soda fountain. There was a mirror behind him which reflected the customers, wherein she could see herself and the back of his head. “That was right good,” she said one day, when there was no one else at the counter.

“What was?” he responded, startled, though he had overheard her slow, careful, down-home voice before, in conference with Mr. Addison and her father. It might have been the slowness that made everything she said sound musical.

“The soda. You cook up a good ice-cream soda.”

“Well, I been at it a while,” he said, feeling clumsy, in his soiled white jacket imitating that of a real druggist. Mr. Addison wanted him to wear it because the white outfit made people feel they were in a clean, germ-free place; but then he was too cheap to get it laundered often enough, so it looked toward the end of the week like Teddy was wearing a wiping rag. “There’s no big trick to it,” he said. More seemed required. “The banana split, now, that takes something, and even a chocolate sundae, so it looks like the pictures they give you.” With a jerk of his head he indicated the stand-up cardboard advertisements behind him, propped up in front of the mirror, supplied by the ice-cream company, in full and tempting color, of the structures—boats, mock-mountains, snowman-shapes—that could be made with ice cream and whipped cream and
crushed nuts and chocolate and caramel syrups. “You should try a banana split sometime,” Teddy said, beginning to blush as he felt his topic dwindle under him.

She felt it too, and reverted to his first statement. “How long a while?”

This was 1926. The year he quit going up to Wilmington to business school, President Harding died; then the next summer President Coolidge’s sixteen-year-old, Calvin Coolidge, Jr., died, so the whole nation was supposed to mourn; and the third summer Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution and fined a hundred dollars but the famous witness and speechifier against him, William Jennings Bryan, right away upped and died. So much for defending the Lord’s Word. “Three years,” Teddy admitted. She was looking at him so curiously that he joked nervously, “It beats making bottle caps.” This was a local saying, invoked whenever any dubious activity was questioned.