Concrete Angel (7 page)

D
addy was assigned to a base in South Carolina, and the young couple moved into their first home. Mother spent her days traipsing around the new indoor mall and in the shops on Main Street, spending the allowance her husband gave her. Occasionally she dragged a dust cloth across the tables or made some instant coffee or toast. Once in a while, she did a load of wash or put a plant on the window sill where it withered in days.

She always put on a show for Hank’s return home at night and especially outdid herself at the officers’ parties. Hank liked having men eye her, and as a result, him, with envy.

“You gonna wear the orange number tonight?” he’d ask her, hovering in the hallway outside their room. “I can’t believe you found such a dress at the church rummage sale. Who would’ve tossed such a thing out? Looks brand spanking new.”

“I can’t imagine,” Eve said. She was in the bedroom with the door closed, biting the tags off. “And it’s apricot, not orange. For Pete’s sake, who wears orange?” A minute later, she threw open the door and stepped out, saying. “You can dress pretty well if you’re clever.”

“Someone should tell my mother. You wouldn’t believe what she spends on clothes.”

Hank was years away from the truth. He liked glittery things too, and in some fundamental way, Eve wasn’t so different from the other army wives, marking time till their days on a base in a backwater town were over. It wasn’t considered decadent in 1960 to be a homemaker. Not that Eve made much of a home. Her sole inspiration had been to splatter paste on the wall behind the couch and throw gold glitter on it.

“You sure we can get it off the wall when we move on,” her husband asked her, eyeing the blobs of dried paste nervously. “They don’t even like us to make nail holes.”

“We can take sandpaper to it,” she said, improvising—but certain it would work. He liked the effect a bit more when she turned the lights low and they danced under their own stars. She never held back in such matters. That was the thing with her—she convinced you that you were something special, you were the one.

“I was probably as much in love as I’d ever be,” she told me.

They dined at the officer’s club nearly every night. Eve hadn’t learned to cook, but this habit tightened their belts considerably.

“How about signing up for a cooking class?” Hank suggested when he saw one offered in an adult education program nearby. “If nothing else, you’ll make some friends. Learn a few recipes.”

“If my mother couldn’t teach me to cook, who can?” Eve shot back, trying for humor. She shrugged. “I’ve never cared much about food. Don’t you like skinny girls?” It didn’t occur to her that her husband might have an interest in eating since she didn’t share it.

“I don’t need anything fancy. Meat and potatoes— the sort of meals my mother served. Open a cookbook. We’d have more money for the clothes you like so much if we dined at home once in a while.”

Daddy was probably remembering the German farm woman who cooked and served the dinner back in Bucks County, standing silently at Sophie Moran’s elbow until she was dismissed.

Mother had only stayed at the Morans once or twice, but the vision of life there was clear. “Served—with the help of a cook! And you claim plain food is all you want. Look, I don’t want it to become a problem between us later. I can hear you already—complaining to your pals about my dull meals. I’ve heard some of the other fellows tell tales on their wives.”

“I wouldn’t do such a thing.” He grabbed her by the waist and enfolded her in his arms.

I imagine mother placing a hand on his thigh about then so he’d forgot about her cooking for a few hours. Still in her thrall, none of the rest seemed important to Daddy.

“And remember, we’ve got a perfectly good cafeteria right out the door,” Eve said. “I could hardly prepare food for less than they charge.”

But the cafeteria wasn’t the venue for dinner. It would’ve been ridiculous for her to dress like she did, look like she did, and go to eat in the mess hall. Carting her still-damp brown tray to a table without a linen cloth, eating on worn Formica with the crumbs from the men who ate there earlier stuck to her elbows. Hank’s good looks and precision haircut would be wasted among the proles.

So they dined at the officer’s club most nights. Their food and bar bill continued to rise, and her clothing allowance was never enough.

Hank’s parents subsidized their years on the base. The financial burden that living on military pay placed on the young couple made a lengthy career in the service unlikely.

“I wasn’t about to spend the rest of my life on a godforsaken base,” Mother said once. “Those camps are always in two-bit towns where a Friday night movie in the mess hall was the only thing going on. They showed
Bridge On the River Kwai
for months at the local theater. Military service was one of those things you got out of the way early, quickly moving on.”

When money grew tight, despite the Moran family’s largesse, Eve stole the things she had to have, and most often they were improbable items that nobody needed: a crystal ashtray, a doll with a face made to look like Vivian Leigh, a table lighter shaped like a cannon. Most of these items were brought home, quickly wrapped in tissue paper, and stored in the tiny basement army housing offered. Mother soon worked out a deal with the wife next door, using their basement for the overflow
.

“Their basement was empty, Christine. A laundry area, a ping-pong table, and some winter boots. Can you imagine people with so few things? It was homier once I put some of my stuff in there. After I took the ping-pong table down, I had loads of room for my junk.”

Mother didn’t dare show Daddy the number of things she was accumulating, most of them stolen. “It was easy to pop ‘em in my bag. No one expected a woman like me to take things, and I seldom hit the same place twice. Plus, I always made sure to buy goods from their stores when I could afford it, making myself known as a loyal patron. probably spent more than I stole.”

She told me this as if it meant she’d played fair—had done what she did only when pushed by circumstances.

“The one or two times someone caught me at it, they were willing to overlook it. Nobody wanted legal problems with an officer’s wife. A good-looking military wife could steal the moon right out of the sky, and no one would say a word about the resulting darkness.”

When I looked puzzled, she clarified it. “The base kept the town afloat—the soldiers and their families—the things they bought.” This arrangement evened things out for her; she would buy what she could afford and take the rest. What more could they expect?

Daddy’s family disapproved of Eve Hobart from the start—though they had no specific knowledge of her acquisitive ways. Nouveau-riche country-club people, the Morans’ ran a printing business in Philadelphia, then eventually in Bucks County. Sporadic visits from the young couple to their spacious property in Lahaska seldom went well. It wasn’t merely a matter of using the right fork or proper grammar either.

“They were always asking me what I was reading, what I thought about the famine in China or wherever it was going on that particular year. Who I voted for in the election, did I think Castro would govern better than Batista? One long test I was certain to fail.”

Mother didn’t know these were the topics most people talked about—that serious discussions were the norm in some families. Being informed, witty, and quick-thinking was valued in certain sets. She assumed she was at the wrong end of a test, the only one being asked to perform.

These were not the sort of skills passed on at the Hobart home. The dinner table was a place for chewing, swallowing, breathing, and little else. Both of Mother’s parents came from families poorer than they were, families less likely to have something interesting to say, even more religious. Silence at the dinner table was immutable. Any attempt on Mother’s part to introduce a discussion was met with…

“Evelyn, don’t talk with your mouth full.”

“There’s nothing in my mouth.”

“Your food’s going to get cold.” Silence. “You’ll digest your dinner better if you save your chitchat.”

She explained it to me later. “Oh, I know the Moran dinner table talk sounds normal to you, you’re used to their ways, used to them putting on a show, but it was a test they knew I’d fail. If I read a book, I wouldn’t tell them what it was. They turned up their noses at the kind of books I liked. Snooty bastards. They wanted me to read Steinbeck, Pearl Buck, or Michener, the books they read. Big intellectual doorstops. Nothing by Harold Robbins or Grace Metalious. I never heard them quizzing each other on the political situation. Only me.”

Mother pushed a thumb into her chest and frowned, remembering. “They loved making me look bad in front of Hank. It got so I hardly came out of my room when we visited—which was probably what they wanted—to have their precious son to themselves. “Oh, is Eve ill again, Hank? Too bad. Not taking dinner tonight, we’ll send her a tray. Doesn’t want to go riding today? Tsk, tsk.”

After two years on the base in South Carolina and some more time in Texas, Daddy’s commission ended, and my parents moved back to Pennsylvania. Daddy began the slow process of taking over the family business. His father, Big Dave Moran, had married and had children late in life and was already entering his sixties with medical conditions that made full-time work difficult. Sophie wanted to travel while they still could. Daddy’s sister, Linda, in her late twenties, lived at home, already a companion to both of them.

“Once we moved north, they were in my face all the time. They found us a house about five miles from theirs in Doylestown, a pokey little burg. Not like now, Christine,” Mother said. “The whole area was Hicksville in the 1960s. The Morans’ and their friends hid out at the clubs, and you know how well I got along with that set, which left me to consort with the hoi-polloi.”

“C
ouldn’t we at least live in the city,” Eve asked Hank, once she’d seen the 1870s house her mother-in-law had chosen for them—a house with irregular ceilings in every room, bulging walls, tiny windows placed in odd spots, a stove from the nineteen twenties. She stared menacingly at the clawed foot bathtub, the porch with the sagging floor, the water-marred wallpaper with its huge, predatory flowers.

“Philadelphia, Hank,” she went on, insistently. “You grew up there. You’d be a lesser man today if you’d lived out here instead. My stuff—our stuff’s—not going to look good in this house. We like modern furniture, right, Hank? Not the kind of horse-haired sneeze factories that go well in this dump. Doilies, wicker birdcages, chandeliers with a million crystals to keep clean. Dusty old rugs they call antiques so you can’t pitch them.”

“The business is located out here now,” Hank said. “You’ll have to make do with a more rural setting. Join a few clubs and get into the swing of country life. Take up golf or charity work. Horseback riding, tennis, the Ladies’ Auxiliary, one of the women’s circles at the church, a book group.” He was probably already beginning to get the pinched look he’d have for the rest of his life.

I
t was hard for Mother to feed her need for shiny acquisitions in a place like Doylestown, where local merchants catered to farmers and townspeople, who seldom made the one-hour trek into the city. People who rarely demanded more than canned goods and Sears’ catalog merchandise. The rich ordered by phone from New York or made the monthly trip into Philadelphia.

“Maybe you can help out in the office if you get bored,” Daddy suggested.

“Can you imagine me answering the phone or typing bills? I didn’t go to college to be a secretary.”

“What did you go to college for, Eve? How
do
you see yourself spending your days,” Daddy asked after several months of her idleness, a year of pleading with him to move. “Register for a few courses, get your teaching certificate. Or maybe learn real estate. The guy running against Joe Clark for the Senate could use your help.”

There was no question, Hank’s tolerance for her indolence and acquisitiveness had waned. Eve could wear anyone out. She wouldn’t find her natural lieutenant till I was born.

Eve puffed up with indignation. “I see myself taking care of your children,” she said, cagily. “A boy and a girl.” She lowered her eyes. “I already have their names picked out.”

“If such a thing happens, you can pick out a house wherever you like.” He patted her head, probably assuming such an event was not in the cards since his wife guarded any unprotected entrée to her baby-making parts more carefully than Coca Cola guarded access to its secret formula.

But he was wrong. Eventually.