Quite a Year for Plums (12 page)

A
great fan,” said Jim Wade, “sixteen-inch, sidewinder oscillator.” He slid the lever to High, and the fan wearily lumbered into action. It took a while, but by the time it got going, Christmas cards were flying across the room, and Ethel could feel tears blowing out of the corners of her eyes. “Now what do you think,” Jim Wade said, “is that the world's greatest fan, or what?”

It was a 1919 General Electric, three speeds, with copper blades that showed up as a golden glow at the root of the gale. One of the blades had a jagged chipped edge that threw the fan a little off-balance and set up a vibration that caused the whole store to rattle and shake. A pair of Mr. and Mrs. Santa salt and pepper shakers marched with wobbly steps to the edge of their shelf. Ethel caught Mrs. Santa (salt) just as she began to tip.

“Let her go,” said Jim Wade. “Tacky consignment junk. Let her hit that concrete floor and smash into a
thousand pieces. People bring this stuff in here, expect me to sell it. And you know the saddest thing, Ethel? I do sell it.” He slid the switch to Medium, then Low, and stood by the fan with his eyes closed.

“I can see this fan in your house, Ethel, on Low, a summer night. I see a tomato sandwich, a jar of capers; the doors are open to the evening breeze, nothing but the sound of crickets.”

But it was December, Ethel was looking for a woodstove, not an electric fan, and in the background chipmunks were singing “Silent Night.”

“Jim Wade,” said Ethel, sliding the switch back to Off. “It was fifteen degrees last night. No one wants to hear about the evening breeze.”

“It's a habit of mine,” said Jim Wade wistfully, “daydreaming in other seasons. Do you daydream in other seasons, Ethel?” But in a far corner of the store Ethel had found a beautiful woodstove, with a nickel-plated fender and a gleaming finial.

“Oh no!” Jim Wade said, swooping in on her, “Oh no!” He stood in front of the stove and held Ethel off with one hand. “A great old stove from the 1890s, you're thinking to yourself? Maybe Birmingham Iron Works, you're thinking to yourself? You
think”
—he paused dramatically—“made in Taiwan, early eighties—NINETEEN-eighties. See this? Phillips-head screws. Junk! An imitation of nothing that ever existed, designed by tricksters to bring back memories that nobody ever had. Three hundred and fifty dollars, a ridiculous price for a fake stove. And you know what, Ethel? Some woman will come in here wearing a green dirndl
skirt and a shirt with red piping on the collar and buy the thing! She'll put an arrangement of artificial flowers on the lid. Flowers on top of a woodstove, Ethel just think about it! Country charm!”

“Oh, Jim Wade” said Ethel. “ ‘Tis the season to be jolly.”

“Ethel,” said Jim Wade, “one thing and one thing only would make me jolly.”

“Don't start, Jim Wade,” said Ethel. “Help me find a woodstove. I want to heat my house with boat scraps.”

“The stove you want isn't here,” said Jim Wade, and he flipped the sign on the Antique Mall to
closed
and locked the door. “The stove you want is a Columbus Stove and Range model—a Little Bungalow—out at Paramore Surplus.”

Jim Wade turned on the heat in his van and they roared through town, past the Christmas tree on the courthouse lawn, past the Salvation Army woman in her short red skirt prancing up and down in the cold on the corner of Jackson and Broad, past the ten-thousand-dollar display of lights at Flowers Industries, and out onto Highway 84.

“Marry me, Ethel!” cried Jim Wade, turning loose of the steering wheel and slapping the dashboard with both hands. “This spring, in St. Louis, the fan-manufacturing capital of the U.S., marry me!”

“You missed it,” said Ethel. “You should have turned on 111.”

“Got a nice fan out back,” said Mrs. Paramore, glaring up at Jim Wade. “Old Emerson model.” Her stringy,
blue-veined feet, in silver lame slippers, were propped up on a little gas space heater, and a pair of Santa Claus earrings swung violently from her weary ear-lobes. Ethel found the woodstove under a pile of tin bathtubs half full of rusty ice water and frozen mosquito wigglers, and bloodied her knuckles untangling it from a pile of copper and iron weather vanes— roosters and trotting horses and a cow and a pig pointing north, south, east, and west.

“Twenty-five for the stove, fifty-five dollars for the fan, firm,” said Mrs. Paramore, clamping her thin lips onto her cigarette and crossing her arms over the skinny blue iron-on Victorian Santa Claus on her sweatshirt. “That's an Emerson.”

“But look at this oil cup!” wailed Jim Wade. “Look at this cheap motor! This is not the fine hollow-core Emerson motor of the twenties and thirties! This is a wartime Emerson!”

Ethel left her money on the counter, and in the parking lot she made a ramp out of two two-by-sixes and heaved and shoved the stove into the back of Jim Wade's van.

“Look at this wrinkle finish!” Jim Wade's voice rang out across the grim fields of scrap metal, car parts, and pieces of houses. “Look at this cross guard!”

“It's an Emerson fan. My prices is firm,” smacked Mrs. Paramore. The Santa Claus earrings snatched and bobbed emphatically, stretching the holes in her earlobes to vicious little slits. “I don't dicker.”

“I swear, Ethel,” said Jim Wade, roaring back down Highway 84, “I should be under the care of a psycho
analyst, or at the very least I should be spending six hours a day under a 200-watt bulb reading the short stories of Somerset Maugham.”

“Seasonal affect disorder, that's what they call it,” said Ethel, nursing her scraped knuckles.

“Instead I'm eking my life away down in that store,” said Jim Wade, “selling male-end-only strings of Christmas lights to overweight women dressed in clothes that blink. I'm a danger to myself and others, Ethel. So watch out.”

At Ethel's house they struggled with the stove up the stairs to the strains of “Joy to the World” wafting across the park from the loudspeakers downtown. Ethel began snapping sections of stovepipe together while Jim Wade unscrewed the oil cup on her little Emerson Seabreeze.

“Who but you, Ethel, would know to use Royal Purple?” he sighed. “Look at this”—and he spread his arms and made a slow spin. The elegant little sailboat hung in a sling from the ceiling, and one corner of the room was filled with wood scraps in neat stacks, but the Portsmouth boatbuilder had taken his tools back to New Hampshire early in the fall and Ethel had swept up the shavings and sawdust and put the furniture back. “No garlands of greenery, no stockings hung by the chimney with care, no band-sawed plywood reindeer prancing across the wall,” said Jim Wade, “just the simple, functional home of a capable woman who knows how to take care of an Emerson desk fan.”

“Get your side,” said Ethel, snapping in the last section of pipe, and together they lifted the stove up
and settled it into place. Ethel jammed the elbow into the ceramic thimble and stood back.

“Wooo!” she said, crumpling up newspapers and stuffing scraps of poplar and pine into the little front door of the stove. “Give me a match, Jim Wade, turn off that fan!”

Behind the little isinglass window of the stove door the flames flickered and danced. It was cold outside, another freezing night. Ethel had brought her plants in, and the warmth from the stove spread the rich loamy smell all through the room. Jim Wade started water boiling for tea while Ethel checked the tightness of the stovepipe joints with gloved hands.

“I will never understand the mystique of boats,” said Jim Wade. “All that business about the lonely sea and the sky and a star to steer her by. To me it just seems damp and cold, with an enormous potential for danger. Was that it, Ethel, that heady feeling that is said to come over us right before a violent death? Because I never could figure it out, to me he just seemed like a bandy-legged little man with a funny-looking saw, he never said anything, and he always smelled like glue every time I saw him. What I want to know, Ethel, is, why did it have to be boats in particular, instead of, say, electric desk fans?”

“It doesn't have anything to do with boats or fans, Jim Wade,” said Ethel. “Stop trying to figure it out.”

The wood scraps were very dry, and the fire had gotten so hot that the stove had begun making rhythmic sucking gulps: whomp whomp whomp.

“Here we are, two lonely people huddled around a
pitiful spark” Jim Wade said. “ ‘Earth as hard as iron, water like a stone.’ ”

“I am not lonely, Jim Wade,” said Ethel, closing the vent down hard and snapping the damper shut. “And this is not a pitiful spark. We may see flashover any second now.”

“ ‘In the bleak midwinter,’” said Jim Wade.

“The bleak midwinter has its benefits,” said Ethel. “Just think of the fleas that might have tormented dogs and cats next July, now being killed by this cold snap.”

The roaring in the stove settled down to a low rustling murmur. Ethel and Jim Wade sat drinking their tea and listening to the little clicks and taps and rumbles as the stove adjusted to its heat and the firewood slumped into the ashes.

Then, inspired perhaps by the gleaming blades of the well-oiled Emerson Seabreeze, or the summery smells of green plants, or the flickering glow through the little window in the door of the stove—the last remnants of the Portsmouth boatwright going up in smoke, Jim Wade leaned over and gave Ethel a kiss. But it was an ill-placed kiss that landed on the angle of her jaw, and Jim Wade was left with the impression of a hard, sharp edge against his lips.

His van didn't have time to warm up on the short drive to his house, and he sat at the stoplight, feeling the cold wrap around his legs, and tried to imagine himself heading west on 84, away from all the glitter and sparkle of Christmas, through the narrow winter days, and right out the other side to summertime in some vast midwestern state where the blades of elec
trie fans would spin and the air would be filled with the hum of their hollow-shaft motors—Zephair, Northwind, Seabreeze, Vortalex, Star Rite. But it was cold and dark—the bleak midwinter—and as he drove past the tiny white lights twinkling so cheerily on the azalea bushes in the park, he found that he couldn't think about anything but the deaths of fleas.

W
ho is Betty Sheffield?” asked Delia. “ ‘Betty Sheffield’ is a variety of camellia with semidouble blossoms, white with red and pink splotches on the petals. It's a nice camellia, but it's most famous for producing many fine mutations, called ‘sports,’” said Roger.

“Oh,” said Delia, looking out the car window for a wood stork. Sometimes when she thought about seeing a certain bird she could develop such a longing for it that her eyes would smart and the spit would change texture at the back of her tongue. All day she had been wanting to see a wood stork against this gray sky, but there she had been since the morning, at a camellia show, shut up in that long room with rows and rows of flowers in glass jars and hundreds of men and women stooping over each one, clutching sweaters around themselves and saying strange-sounding words: ‘Alba Plena,’ ‘Mathotiana Rubra,’
‘Betty Sheffield/ and ‘Betty Sheffield Supreme. Deep rose pink, ruby red, glowing crimson, pink stripes, red splotches, pink shading into white and white shading into rose, frilled petals and scalloped petals, and petals with elaborate ragged edges; all that richness, thought Delia, when what I need is so very simple, just black and white and gray, that sharp clean shape against the sky. Sometimes in her painting she would get the same feeling, an anxious longing for something to come out right—the primary and secondary feathers sharp, but not overdone with outlining, the drop of water on a lily pad fat and round and shiny, but not detracting from the eye of the nearby moor hen, also round and shiny, and as she came at the paper with the brush, she would have to stop for a second and blink and swallow. It was a desperate, helpless feeling, as if in spite of her skill she had no more control over those feathers or that drop of water than she had over the wood storks in north Florida on a winter day.

She leaned up against the car window and watched the telephone wires swoop and lift and swoop and lift. If I see a wood stork before we get to the store, then I will be able to finish the upper right-hand section, she thought. It was a difficult tangle of pickerelweed, with sunlight shining through the leaves. But the store came and went, with a flashing sign, “Christmas Sausage on Sale 2-Day,” and there were only a few doves and a kingfisher on the telephone wire. It was almost dark and Delia leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes through Panacea with its crab houses and the laboratories of the Marine
Institute, and then, just on the other side of town where the marsh starts up again, Roger stopped the car and said, “Look!” Delia gulped and scrambled for her binoculars, peering through the windshield into the last light. There on a stump in the ditch was a bald eagle, so fat and complacent it looked almost stuffed. “Oh,” said Delia, and she slumped back in the seat, trapped by a longing for birds.

“Why in the world did you take her to a camellia show on such a dreary day?” said Meade. “What could be worse for depression than a room full of little old ladies all fussing over the ‘Betty Sheffield Blush’ and the ‘Betty Sheffield Supreme’?”

“For the flowers,” said Roger. “It always worked with Mrs. Maxwell. You should have seen her face brighten up every time I set those roses down on the railing at Shady Rest.”

“Mrs. Maxwell was ninety-eight years old, Roger,” said Meade. “She was dying. Her needs were simple.”

“I miss Mrs. Maxwell,” said Roger.

“Of course Delia didn't enjoy the flower show,” said Hilma. “So claustrophobic with all the people and that gray thick fog outside.” She sat still and thought for a minute. “I know what; Meade and I will take her to Maclay Gardens on a high, bright, windy day and walk around among those ancient camellias.”

And so they had fought the after-Christmas traffic to walk Delia down the wide brick paths of this old camellia garden. Some of the bushes were over a hundred years old and formed a towering canopy
overhead, casting a dense, cold shade. The bricks were slippery with damp.