After the Fire (2 page)

Milly Forbes, exhausted from her sandwich-making of the night before, was still asleep when Red knocked on her kitchen door. Milly saw no one, not even a maid, before she had done her face.

“Come in,” she called, and, when she heard the door open and then close, “Put on the coffee, will you, Red? I’m just dressing.”

But the ten minutes she took were devoted to her make-up. Even in that time Milly could take ten years off her carefully tended face. But looking thirty-five rather than forty-five was still over-the-hill, as her late husband (he wasn’t dead; she only liked to think him so) had pointed out to her some years ago.

Still in a pale blue robe the color of her eyes, Milly felt dressed enough to go to the kitchen for coffee, whose fragrance told her it was just ready.

Red was getting the vacuum cleaner out of the back closet, her buttocks Milly’s only view of her, surprisingly broad for a girl so thin, with no breasts at all, shaped like one of those fertility symbols, except that she had a head, which now rose up and turned to Milly.

“Good morning,” Milly said.

“Good morning,” Red replied.

“Better have a cup of coffee before you start,” Milly suggested.

“Later.”

“Now,” Milly decided, pouring two cups. “Have you heard about the fire?”

“Fire?”

“Dickie John’s place, burned to the ground with him in it.”

“Dickie?”

“They said he must have been dead drunk.”

Red sat down abruptly and reached out for her cup of coffee. Milly tried to read her always unsatisfactorily passive face, dark bangs obscuring her forehead, eyelids that dropped like shades over dark eyes which told nothing, a mouth natural in repose. It was Red’s mouth, soft as a child’s, which made Milly suspect she was younger than she let on.

“Wasn’t he, for a while, somebody you …”

Red shrugged. “He drank too much.”

“Was he … unhappy?”

“No. Mad when he didn’t get his way is all,” Red said.

“Good-looking men get spoiled,” Milly said.

“Do you think he’s good-looking?” Red asked.

“Oh, very. Dickie’s always been good-looking. I can remember him as just a tot when Forbes and I used to come over for weekends. That gorgeous curly-hair! He had bedroom eyes as a four-year-old.”

“Bedroom eyes?”

“It’s just an expression,” Milly said.

“He was starting to get fat.”

“His father was a big man,” Milly said. “Died in an accident, too, in a boat. He wasn’t many years older than Dickie.”

“Who’s told his mother?” Red asked.

“Hen went to Sadie. She’ll take it hard, poor woman.” Milly’s tears rose again, a practiced pity for herself and her own losses easy to extend to all the others hurt, deserted, dead.

“Excuse me,” Red said, and she moved off quickly to the bathroom.

Milly could hear her retching and felt satisfaction at getting a clear reaction. Red wasn’t heartless after all.

“Are you all right?” she asked when Red came back even paler than usual.

“Fine now,” Red said. “Sometimes I just can’t drink coffee.”

“That Jap girl with the blue eyes …” Milly began.

“Karen,” Red said firmly.

“She was so pale she was white last night. You know she goes out with the fire crew?”

“I heard that.”

“Well, she’s learned her lesson. I don’t know what’s wrong with girls these days, thinking they can do anything a man does.”

“Some of us have to,” Red said, by now busying herself with the vacuum cleaner.

“You don’t. She doesn’t,” Milly said. “There’s nothing wrong with either one of you a little make-up and some attention to what you wear wouldn’t cure.”

“Cure seems to me worse than the problem,” Red said.

“Well, you’re all a mystery to me,” Milly said, a comment addressed to an empty room because Red had left it.

It was the longest conversation Milly had ever had with Red in the three years Red had worked for her. Milly didn’t approve of women who made confidantes of their help. She didn’t have to pay for someone to talk to. But she’d sometimes felt that Red was a real miser with gossip; she must hear something occasionally, cleaning for people.

Even Hen, who had trained Red herself, knew nothing about her.

“All I know, Milly,” Henrietta had said, “is that she came to me after I put up a notice on the board for someone to help me when Hart was so sick and I didn’t want to have to put him in hospital any sooner than necessary. She said she didn’t know the first thing about keeping house, but, if I’d teach her, she wouldn’t ask for money until I thought she was worth it. When I asked her how old she was, she said, if I asked her questions like that, she’d have to lie to me, and she didn’t want to lie to me. So I just didn’t ask her about herself.”

Red hadn’t been so forthright with Milly, but she’d learned how to be evasive as well as how to clean by the time she came to Milly.

Nobody could fault Red’s work. If she hadn’t been so dark, you could think she must have Dutch blood, the way she was willing to clean outside as well as in. And though her clothes came out of the thrift shop, she kept them clean. Henrietta let Red do her own laundry while she cleaned.

“She was boiling her clothes on her old wood stove,” Henrietta had said. “‘Surest way to scald yourself to death,’ I told her. ‘You just bring your things over here. Our well’s got five gallons a minute.’”

Though Henrietta and Hart had started out as summer and weekend people just as Millie and her husband had, Hart was the sort of man who wouldn’t buy a place without a good supply of water, without good insulation. Milly’s house had never been intended for winter living. She had to keep the drapes pulled over her single-pane windows looking east over the channel to the mountains on the mainland, and the wind played tag with itself all over the house, which had more cracks than nails in it. It cost a fortune to heat. In summer, when the water table was low, she didn’t flush the toilet more than once a day unless she had company coming. Talk about being put out to pasture!

The sudden roar of the vacuum cleaner reminded Milly that she should be dressed and out of the bedroom before Red wanted to clean it. Milly hated the sound of that machine. It reminded her of her mother, who had used it as a weapon to get Milly out of bed on a weekend morning. All her life she had hated to go to bed and hated to get up in the morning. Here on the island, people with not a thing to do behaved as if they had a herd of cows waiting for them. Unless there was a fire, people called nine o’clock island midnight and went off home. Even Henrietta, though she didn’t go to bed early, liked her time to read. At least she didn’t mind being phoned anytime before midnight if the silence of Milly’s house got too much for her.

Milly stood by her closet, trying to decide what to wear. She usually put out her things the night before; but it had been five in the morning before she’d got home. She chose a plaid wool skirt, a dark blue blouse and a red sweater. Unlike most of the women who had retired to the island, Milly hadn’t exchanged her city clothes for men’s trousers and sweat shirts. The only concession she had made was her choice of shoes, not boots of course, but her shoes were sensible.

As she finished dressing, the phone rang. She had to close the door before she answered it to shut out the noise of the vacuum cleaner.

“I hope it’s not too early,” Henrietta said.

“Red woke me an hour ago,” Milly said.

“Of course, it’s Wednesday,” Henrietta said. “I haven’t managed to get myself to bed yet. I’m just home from Sadie’s. I waited until her sister came on the morning boat. She needed someone with her.”

“How is she?” Milly asked.

“She’s not a woman with many resources,” Henrietta said. “Dickie was her life.”

“Why do these things have to happen?” Milly wailed.

“I always try to think the young are spared, but it isn’t easy. Sadie isn’t going to be able to manage anything about the funeral. I suggested we might have it here, and I wondered if you would call people about the food.”

“Of course,” Milly said.

There was nothing Milly enjoyed more than an excuse to tie up her party line. It suited the other parties as well who seemed to have more interest in listening to Milly’s conversations than in making any of their own. Sometimes that windy open sound of someone else listening annoyed her, but more often she felt obligated to live up to their attention.

Her daughter Bonnie had said to her one night, “Mother, have you forgotten who you’re talking to?”

“Well, I’ve nearly forgotten what you look like,” Milly snapped back, her attention newly and unkindly focused.

Her “late” husband shelled out plane tickets home to their children only after extracting promises that they wouldn’t also visit their mother on his money.

“Can I get into the bedroom now, Mrs. Forbes?” Red called.

“Do you have a mother?” Milly demanded as she wrenched open her bedroom door.

“Only way I know to get into a fix like this,” Red said.

“Has there ever been such a thing as a grateful child?”

“Were you?” Red asked quietly.

“Me? Of course I was.”

“There you are then,” Red said, disappearing into the bedroom.

After speaking to Milly, Henrietta Hawkins deliberated for a moment before reaching down to unplug her phone. When Hart was still at home, she routinely had done it to protect his rest, but, since he’d had to be moved into extended care on the mainland, she’d rarely indulged in that protection for herself. She had always thought, “But what if he needs me?” It was by now a futile hope. Hart no longer recognized her except as the woman who brought him ice cream. The only phone call concerning him now would be a hospital official to tell her he was dead. The dead could wait.

Henrietta had to sleep now, or at least rest, if she was to get over to see Hart tomorrow and also make arrangements to have Dickie’s funeral here on Friday. She would have to leave in the morning before Red arrived.

She put a pad of paper on the night table by her side of the bed so that she could scribble down the jumble of details she would otherwise worry about forgetting. Red ought to polish Hart’s grandmother’s tea service, a silly thing to hang onto in this day and age when it was only appropriate for weddings and funerals, but Henrietta couldn’t, when they had decided to retire here, give it up, orphan it without knowing what might become of it. Hart Jr. would simply be more lumbered with it than she was. Things!

Henrietta reached for the pad and wrote,
“Red
1. Polish the tea service.”

Writing the name made her for the first time since the fire actually think of Red and wonder what her own private grief in this matter of Dickie might be. Where had she heard Red’s and Dickie’s names paired recently? Certainly not from Red. That information had surprised Henrietta. Red had shown so little interest in any companions her own age that Henrietta had once asked her if she wasn’t lonely, so much by herself there in that little cabin.

“Sometimes,” Red had said, “but the only kind of company I could get along with I’d have to make up.”

Henrietta understood that. Though she often even physically ached for Hart’s presence, she wanted no distracting substitutes, which even he himself would be now, getting in the way of her memory of who he had been before his strokes.

Then why had Red suddenly exchanged her solitude for the likes of Dickie John? Was it simply a succumbing to her own biology? Henrietta didn’t know how old Red was, but, when she had first arrived on their doorstep, Hart had said, “That child can’t be more than fourteen!”

Henrietta had struggled with her conscience about Red, wondering what parents or parent might be anguished about her. But once she’d been with them a few weeks, learning the most basic skills with such a hunger for survival, Henrietta had decided that whoever that parent had been had grossly neglected if not actually abused Red. If Henrietta could teach her to look out for herself, that was probably the best thing for Red.

But now, as Henrietta thought about Red and Dickie, she was aware of how little she had ever talked with Red about … life. Red had certainly never invited discussion. All the questions she asked were practical ones. Henrietta had let herself assume that Red knew more than she needed to about the seamier side of experience. Dickie was, in Henrietta’s view, seamy. Poor, poor Dickie.

Why did so many beautiful children simply coarsen into adulthood? Was it in their genes? Would Red now, her childhood fallen away from her, harden into cynicism?

Henrietta hadn’t had a daughter, and part of her pleasure in Red was finally being able to hand on those womanly skills that stay invisible to most men even when they’re done before their eyes. But teaching her to clean and cook and take care of things didn’t go far enough in teaching her how to take care of herself, to have pride of heart, to be hopeful. The young had a right to be hopeful.

Henrietta turned over and fixed her eyes on the great cedar tree which had grown by now too close to the house so that on a windy night it banged on the bedroom window as if demanding to be let inside. Hart would have had it cut down, and she would have accepted his decision as part of his need to keep her from harm though she knew harm had to come in any case.

Whoever it was up there who measured the lengths of lives had one blind eye and was all thumbs. No depth perception, none at all.

A
BRISK SOUTHEASTERLY WAS
blowing as Karen Tasuki parked her car near the ferry toll booth. She was early as she liked to be. There was time to be patient with her cold hands unlocking the door, leisurely in arranging the cash drawer and tickets. It was still dark, and her first customer approached in a blaze of headlights.

“One thing I’ll say for you,” said Riley, one of her firefighting companions. “You’re here.”

Even such parsimonious praise was encouraging. For the younger, unmarried men, working for the ferries was too tame a job, but even so they were reluctant to see a woman doing it.

“Thanks,” Karen said, handing him his ticket and change. “Lane one …”

“Don’t tell me to have a good day,” Riley said. “It’s going to be a bitch.”