Stern Men (24 page)

Miss Vera clenched her gloves in her left hand and said, “Go!”

Cal drove slowly through the intersection and continued to the highway. Miss Vera giggled again. “An exploit!” she said.

They drove into the center of Concord, and Mary directed Cal Cooley to park in front of a ladies’ dress shop. The name, Blaire’s, was painted in gold on the window in elegant cursive.

“I won’t go in,” Miss Vera said. “It is too much effort. But tell Mr. Blaire to come here. I shall tell him what we need.”

Mary went into the shop and soon reappeared with a young man. She looked apprehensive. The young man walked to the passenger side of the car and tapped on the window. Miss Vera frowned. He grinned and gestured for her to roll down her window. Ruth’s mother stood behind him in a posture of overriding anxiety.

“Who the
devil?
” Miss Vera said.

“Maybe you should roll down your window and see what he wants,” Cal suggested.

“I’ll do no such thing!” She glared at the young man. His face shone in the morning sun, and he smiled at her, again making the window-rolling gesture. Ruth slid over in the back seat and rolled down her window.

“Ruth!” Miss Vera exclaimed.

“Can I help you?” Ruth asked the man.

“I’m Mr. Blaire,” the young man said. He reached his hand through the window to shake Ruth’s.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Blaire,” she said. “I’m Ruth Thomas.”

“He is not!” Miss Vera declared. She spun in her seat with a sudden and shocking agility and glared fiercely at the young man. “You are not Mr. Blaire. Mr. Blaire has a silver mustache!”

“That’s my father, ma’am. He’s retired, and I run the store.”

“Tell your father that Miss Vera Ellis wishes to speak to him.”

“I’d be happy to tell him, ma’am, but he’s not here. My father lives in Miami, ma’am.”

“Mary!”

Ruth’s mother rushed over to the Buick and stuck her head in Ruth’s window.

“Mary! When did this happen?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it.”

“I don’t need any clothes,” Ruth said. “I don’t need anything. Let’s go home.”

“When did your father retire?” Ruth’s mother asked the young Mr. Blaire. She was pale.

“Seven years ago, ma’am.”

“Impossible! He would have informed me!” Miss Vera said.

“Can we go someplace else?” Ruth asked. “Isn’t there another shop in Concord?”

“There is no shop in Concord but Blaire’s,” Miss Vera said.

“Well, we’re happy to hear that you think so,” said Mr. Blaire. “And I’m sure we can help you, ma’am.”

Miss Vera did not reply.

“My father taught me everything he knew, ma’am. All his customers are now my customers. As satisfied as ever!”

“Take your head out of my car.”

“Ma’am?”

“Remove your damn head from my car.”

Ruth started laughing. The young man pulled his head from the Buick and walked stiffly and quickly back into his shop. Mary followed, trying to touch his arm, trying to mollify him, but he shook her off.

“Young lady, this is not amusing.” Miss Vera turned again in her seat and leveled an evil glare at Ruth.

“Sorry.”

“Imagine!”

“Shall we head back home, Miss Vera?” Cal asked.

“We shall wait for Mary!” she snapped.

“Naturally. That’s what I meant.”

“That is not, however, what you said.”

“Pardon me.”

“Oh, the
nitwits!
” Miss Vera exclaimed. “Everywhere!”

Mary came back and sat silently beside her daughter. Cal pulled away from the curb, and Miss Vera said, with exasperation, “Careful! Careful, careful, careful.”

Nobody spoke on the drive home until they pulled up to the house. There, Miss Vera turned and smiled yellowly at Ruth. She giggled once again. She had composed herself. “We have a nice time, your mother and I,” she said. “After all those years of living with men, we are at last alone together. We don’t have husbands to tend to or brothers or fathers looking over us. Two independent ladies, and we do as we choose. Isn’t that right, Mary?”

“Yes.”

“I missed your mother when she ran off and married your father, Ruth. Did you know that?”

Ruth said nothing. Her mother looked at her nervously and said, in a low voice, “I’m sure Ruth knows that.”

“I remember her walking out of the house after she told me she was marrying a fisherman. I watched her walk away. I was upstairs in my bedroom. You know that room, Ruth? How it looks out over the front walk? Oh, my little Mary looked so small and brave. Oh, Mary. Your little shoulders were so square, as if to say,
I can do anything!
You dear girl, Mary. You poor, dear, sweet girl. You were so brave.”

Mary closed her eyes. Ruth felt an appalling, bilious anger rising in her throat.

“Yes, I watched your mother walk away, Ruth, and it made me cry. I sat in my room and shed tears. My brother came in and put his arm around me. You know how kind my brother Lanford is. Yes?”

Ruth could not speak. Her jaw was clenched so fiercely, she could not imagine releasing it to issue a single word. Certainly not a civil word. She might have let out a greased string of curses. She might have been able to do that for this wicked bitch.

“And my wonderful brother said to me, ‘Vera, everything will be fine.’ Do you know what I replied? I said, ‘Now I know how poor Mrs. Lindbergh felt!’ ”

They sat in silence for what seemed a year, letting that sentence hang over them. Ruth’s mind roiled. Could she hit this woman? Could she step out of this ancient car and walk back to Fort Niles?

“But now she is with me, where she belongs,” Miss Vera said. “And we do as we please. No husbands to tell us what to do. No children to look after. Except Ricky, of course. Poor Ricky. But he doesn’t ask much, heaven knows. Your mother and I are independent women, Ruth, and we have a good time together. We enjoy our independence, Ruth. We like it very much.”

 

Ruth stayed with her mother for a week. She wore the same clothes every day, and no one said another word about it. There were no more shopping trips. She slept in her clothes and put them on again every morning after her bath. She did not complain.

What did she care?

This was her survival strategy: Fuck it.

Fuck all of it. Whatever they asked of her, she would do. Whatever outrageous act of exploitation she saw Miss Vera commit against her mother, she would ignore. Ruth was doing time in Concord. Getting it over with. Trying to stay sane. Because if she’d reacted to everything that galled her, she’d have been in a constant state of disgust and rage, which would have made her mother more nervous and Miss Vera more predatory and Cal Cooley more smug. So she sat on it.
Fuck it.

Every night before she went to bed she kissed her mother on the cheek. Miss Vera would ask coyly, “Where’s my kiss?” and Ruth would cross the room on steel legs, bend, and kiss that lavender cheek. She did this for her mother’s sake. She did this because it was less trouble than throwing an ashtray across the room. She could see the relief it brought her mother. Good. Whatever she could do to help, fine.
Fuck it.

“Where’s
my
kiss?” Cal would ask every night.

And every night Ruth would mutter something like “Goodnight, Cal. Try to remember not to murder us in our sleep.”

And Miss Vera would say, “Such hateful words for a child your age.”

Yeah, Ruth thought.
Yeah, whatever.
She knew she should keep her mouth shut entirely, but she enjoyed getting a stab or two into Cal Cooley now and again. Made her feel like herself. Familiar, somehow. Comforting. She would carry the satisfaction to bed with her and curl up against it, as if it were a teddy bear. Her nightly poke at Cal would help Ruth Thomas go to sleep without stewing for hours over the eternal, nagging question:
What fate had shoved her into the lives of the Ellis family? And why?

In every batch of segmenting lobster eggs, one is sure to meet with irregular forms, and in some cases, the greater number appear to be abnormal.

—
The American Lobster: A Study of Its Habits and Development
Francis Hobart Herrick, Ph.D. 1895

 

 

 

 

AT THE END of the week, Cal Cooley and Ruth drove back to Rockland, Maine. It rained the whole time. She sat in the front seat of the Buick with Cal, and he did not shut up. He teased her about her one set of clothes and about the shopping trip to Blaire’s, and he did grotesque imitations of her mother’s servile attendance on Miss Vera.

“Shut up, Cal,” Ruth said.

“Oh, Miss Vera, shall I wash your hair now? Oh, Miss Vera, shall I file your corns now? Oh, Miss Vera, shall I wipe your butt now?”

“Leave my mother alone,” Ruth said. “She does what she has to do.”

“Oh, Miss Vera, shall I lie down in traffic now?”

“You’re worse, Cal. You kiss more Ellis ass than anyone. You play that old man for every penny, and you suck up like crazy to Miss Vera.”

“Oh, I don’t think so, sweetheart. I think your mother wins the prize.”

“Up yours, Cal.”

“So articulate, Ruth!”

“Up yours, you sycophant.”

Cal burst out laughing. “That’s better! Let’s eat.”

Ruth’s mother had sent them off with a basket of bread and cheese and chocolates, and Ruth now opened it. The cheese was a small wheel, soft and wax-covered, and when Ruth cut into it, it released a deadly odor, like something rotting at the bottom of a damp hole. Specifically, it smelled like vomit at the bottom of that hole.

“Jesus fuck!” Cal shouted.

“Oh, my God!” Ruth said, and she stuffed the cheese back into the basket, slamming down the wicker cover. She pulled the top of her sweatshirt up over her nose. Two useless measures.

“Throw it out!” Cal shouted. “Get that out of here.”

Ruth opened the basket, rolled down the window, and flung out the cheese. It bounced and spun on the highway behind them. She hung her head out of the window, taking deep breaths.

“What was that?” Cal demanded. “What
was
that?”

“My mom said it was sheep’s milk cheese,” Ruth said, when she caught her breath. “It’s homemade. Somebody gave it to Miss Vera for Christmas.”

“To murder her!”

“Apparently it’s a delicacy.”

“A delicacy? She said it was a delicacy?”

“Leave her alone.”

“She wanted us to eat that?”

“It was a gift. She didn’t know.”

“Now I know where the expression ‘cut the cheese’ comes from.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“I never knew why they said that before, but now I know,” Cal said. “
Cut the cheese.
Never thought about it.”

Ruth said, “That’s enough, Cal. Do me a favor and don’t talk to me for the rest of the trip.”

After a long silence, Cal Cooley said thoughtfully, “Where does the expression ‘blow a fart’ come from, I wonder?”

Ruth said, “Leave me alone, Cal. Please, for the love of God, just leave me alone.”

 

When they arrived at the dock in Rockland, Pastor Wishnell and his nephew were already there. Ruth could see the
New Hope,
sitting on flat gray sea speckled with rain. There were no greetings.

Pastor Wishnell said, “Drive me to the store, Cal. I need oil, groceries, and stationery.”

“Sure,” Cal said. “No problem.”

“Stay here,” Pastor Wishnell said to Owney, and Cal, imitating the pastor’s inflection, pointed at Ruth and said, “Stay here.”

The two men drove off, leaving Ruth and Owney on the dock, in the rain. Just like that. The young man was wearing a brand-new yellow slicker, a yellow rain hat, and yellow boots. He stood still and broad, looking out to sea, his big hands clasped behind his back. Ruth liked the size of him. His body was dense and full of gravity. She liked his blond eyelashes.

“Did you have a good week?” Ruth asked Owney Wishnell.

He nodded.

“What did you do?”

He sighed. He grimaced, as if he were trying hard to think. “Not much,” he finally said. His voice was low and quiet.

“Oh,” Ruth said. “I went to see my mother in Concord, New Hampshire.”

Owney nodded, frowned, and took a deep breath. He seemed about to say something, but, instead, he clasped his hands behind his back again and was silent, his face blank.
He’s incredibly shy,
Ruth thought. She found it charming.
So big and so shy!

“To tell you the truth,” Ruth said, “it makes me sad to see her. I don’t like it on the mainland; I want to get back to Fort Niles. What about you? Would you rather be out there? Or here?”

Owney Wishnell’s face turned pink, bright cherry, pink again, then back to normal. Ruth, fascinated, watched this extraordinary display and asked, “Am I bothering you?”

“No.” He colored again.

“My mother always presses me to get away from Fort Niles. Not really presses, but she made me go to school in Delaware, and now she wants me to move to Concord. Or go to college. But I like it out there.” Ruth pointed at the ocean. “I don’t want to live with the Ellis family. I want them to leave me alone.” She didn’t understand why she was rambling on to this huge, quiet, shy young man in the clean yellow slicker; it occurred to her that she sounded like a child or a fool. But when she looked at Owney, she saw that he was listening. He wasn’t looking at her as if she were a child or a fool. “You’re sure I’m not bothering you?”

Owney Wishnell coughed into his fist and stared at Ruth, his pale blue eyes flickering with his effort. “Um,” he said and coughed again. “Ruth.”

“Yes?” It thrilled her to hear him say her name. She hadn’t known that he was aware of it. “Yes, Owney?”

“Do you want to see something?” he asked. He blurted out this line as if it were a confession. He said it most urgently, as if he were about to reveal a cache of stolen money.