Machine Dreams (2 page)

Dad brought her home through Hampton to impress her. Now it’s just shacks bought out by the mines and fallen to ruin, but then it was a town of forty frame saltboxes he’d built by the river to house his workers. The mill hands lined the tracks and cheered as the train pulled in.

They lived there near the mill in the master house for the first couple of years. She was a help to him in the business, though he never admitted as much and pretended not to take her advice. Soon he moved her to the big house in town and was home every other night; he was accustomed to doing just as he liked and had a succession of “secretaries” out at the mill. My sister told me she remembered a big row between them when she was thirteen or so. I was just a baby. He’d hired a manager that summer and was going to be in town most of the time; he said there was a lot of work to do and he was going to move his secretary into one of the spare rooms down the hall from his. Mother said she’d sooner march down the street naked than take one of his women under her own roof. He said by God it was his roof, he’d paid for every inch of it. He did move the girl in for a few weeks—daughter of one of the mill workers. She wasn’t very bright and Mother ended up being nice to her, but my sister hated Dad from that time on and never spoke to him again except when threatened. But what toys she had as a child! China dolls and a dollhouse with a circular staircase. I think of those times as grand because they had no money worries, but Dad was always hard to live with. Still, he was
a shiny figure, dapper, and gone from home enough that they were often left in peace.

By the time I was seven the mill was lost and he was a terror, sentimental or raging. He’d always been a drinker but he drank more; he’d extended credit to Easterners and what we called Gypsies—Italians from the upstate river towns. He liked being owed and flattered, begged for more time. He thought he was doing good works by letting his buyers go further and further into debt, and the Depression finished him.

We got along, but just barely. Mother had kept every stitch my elder sister hadn’t worn out, and she made those clothes over to fit me. My dresses were always mismatched affairs of good fabrics, twelve years out of style. I liked them and thought I looked grown-up. We kept a big garden and canned for weeks—she had a full pantry and those cloudy jars fed us through the winter. Any money we had came from the sale of milk or cream or butter—we had four cows in the barn, up the hill back of the house. Mother did the work year-round but I remember the cows especially in summer. We seemed to spend the long days in attendance to them while Dad sat on the porch or disappeared into the unused room on the stifling third floor of the house. He was totally unpredictable and talked to himself. Sometimes he fed the cows or walked out in the evening to inspect the barn, to knock on the falling boards with his fist and listen as though testing the wood. But he did chores as a whim. Usually I fed the cows and chickens. It used to occur to me at the age of seven and eight how stupid those cows were—like big warm rocks. Though we came to the barn every day at regular times, they didn’t recognize us except as they’d recognize rain or snow. They didn’t even have the nervousness and greed of the chickens, but ate placidly, like machines. The only time they seemed at all human was at calving, and that was terrible to watch. They bawled in pain and seemed bewildered, as though they didn’t know what hurt them. Then the calf was out on the straw, blinking.

Mother milked into a quart cup and dumped the milk in a can. When the can was full she pulled it to the house in a hand wagon. We had the coolest cellar, like a still tomb, with stone walls and a stone floor. Rough shelves along the side were lined with mason
jars sealed full of tomatoes and beans and beets. The jars were just jars but you were always aware of them in the dimness, dense and weighted. The milk crocks were on the floor, white earthen urns. Mother wore a long man’s apron over her dress and skimmed the cream off the milk with a wooden spoon shaped like a small flat spade. We dipped the milk back into cans with a gourd dipper and carried them up the stone steps, across the yard into the kitchen. The bottles had to be boiled and the milk strained through a sterile cloth. She set some of it aside and let it curdle to frothy clumps the size of popcorn, then poured that heavy yellow cream over it and ground fresh pepper on top. Her cheese was famous but I wouldn’t touch it, and they had to beg me to drink milk. I guess I didn’t like it because we were always fooling with it, from dawn to dusk, the cows and the milk and the bottles.

Mr. Hardesty delivered for us and I helped him in the summer. I could see him driving the cart along from way down the street. He had an old barrel-chested workhorse named Gus, and that horse knew every stop by heart. Gus was well known around town. Mr. Hardesty did landscaping and plowing as well—Gus wore blinders then and pulled a big double rake by harness; they graded yards for seeding or turned gardens. When we delivered milk, I met them at the top of the hill and handed up our four metal racks of four bottles each. Then I rode beside Hardesty and jumped down to take the orders to the doorsteps. The horse always waited just long enough. There was one customer who’d died a couple of years before I’d ever started helping, but Gus stopped at that house anyway. We sat waiting the time it would have taken me to run to the door and back.

My father got worse as time went on. When my friends stayed with me, he used to stride into the room, pull the sheets off us, and tell them to get dressed—he didn’t want strangers in his house at night. One autumn we were burning trash on the hill. He picked up a pitchfork of blazing leaves and chased Mother around the fire. After that we had to have him put away. A couple of weeks later, a guard knocked him down and that was all. I was fourteen. My mother and I turned on every light in the house that evening and sat on the porch, looking at the street. October, a
clean moisture in the air. We both felt such relief. We’d been ashamed to send him there, but we’d gotten afraid of him and had no money for anything better. I didn’t know until he was gone what a shadow he’d cast. Partly because we were free of him, the next few years were good. We took in roomers, students from the college. I had a part-time job and lots of friends; I was eager to know people. You may not like me to say so, but high school was the best time of my life.

On Sundays in the spring, the kids in my crowd got all dressed up and walked downtown to the drugstore for sodas—that was our big thrill. But Tomblyn’s was beautiful then—as grand, everyone said, as any soda fountain in Washington or New York. The big mirror was beveled glass, and the fountains themselves were brass. The floor was marble tiles with a black border, and the deep booths, mahogany. Only the high carved ceiling and bar wall are left now, and the store is half as large as it was.

We girls took pains and were high style, but really, all the young women then dressed like matrons—silk shoulder pads in our dresses and those big hats. We got the shoulder pads from our mothers, and silk lingerie at rummage sales; you couldn’t buy silk during the war. The war influenced everything. We were the Class of ’43, and all the boys worried the fighting would stop before they could get overseas. Rummage and church sales were War Benefits; all the women’s clubs rolled bandages and collected tin. High school girls wrote to boys who’d graduated five and six years before, boys who’d driven their cars past them as they stood on the sidewalk playing hopscotch. Three letters a week to Europe on blue onionskin stationery; letters to boys who’d been our heros, and boys who hadn’t. We tacked Kodak snapshots on our walls—small black and white pictures the size of six postage stamps. A soldier in a graveyard and on the back:
All these Germans are dead ones.
You’ve seen your father’s war album—airstrips, everyone in khaki; how it was. Easy to tell good from evil.

There was one boy I went with off and on through high school. He wanted to go to medical school instead of to war, and be a doctor like his father and two of his older brothers. The Harwins: they were a family of four brothers and one sister, grew
up in one of the fine old turn-of-the-century houses, and were well-off. But Dr. Harwin had died when Tom was fourteen, and his mother died two years later, both of heart attacks. Tom was the youngest and Peggy, the sister, was in her twenties and taught phys. ed. at the college. One of the brothers—the oldest, I believe—was a sort of ne’er-do-well; he had a traveling job and then joined the navy. The other two were studying at Duke. They sent what they could, but the mother’s death took the last of the family money. Tom and Peggy had to sell the house his senior year, and the college bought it, just as they’d bought several of the other old homes. Shinner Black was Tom’s best friend and Shinner’s mother ran a rooming house, so Tom moved in for the summer. He didn’t really want to, but Peggy said he’d spend half his time there with Shinner anyway, and they couldn’t take a chance on losing the offer. Peggy was very practical and steady. She used to go along as chaperone when the high school kids went on picnics out by the river. Yes, we had chaperones, can you believe it? But Peggy was like one of us. I remember her lying on the rocks at Sago, wearing a black one-piece with a pleated bodice, and smoking cigarettes.…

Sago was lush before mine drainage ruined it; the river so quiet, isolated. We went to Blue Hole—clear water circled with massive flat boulders, like a stone beach. We walked a long train trestle to reach it, a shaky old trestle high over the gorge, then down a trail by old tracks and over a wooded bank. Once we broke through the trees and a colony of butterflies, big yellow monarchs, were dipping their wings at clear puddles collected on the rocks. Forty or fifty of them, so silent. And the water was cool and clean then, twenty feet deep at Blue Hole. We swam and got lazy on beer, ate dinner, and went home. Peggy always took a wristwatch and hung it on a bush; we left at seven, before dusk. She’d tell us to wake up, children, and she yelled some hide-and-seek chant into the woods for the ones who’d gone off together. We walked back in a warm exhaustion, watching our feet on the trestle ties; trash, broken toys, trickle of stream in the weeds far down. Peggy said not to look—if you stared straight ahead you could be sure of every step and run to meet the train. She was a beautiful girl, fair, with honey-colored
hair. She and Tom resembled each other; the other brothers were dark.

Tom’s father died before I really knew him, but I’d seen his mother. She dressed her gray hair in a chignon and always wore gloves in the summer. I have a photograph that must have been taken the summer after the father died: Mrs. Harwin in the garden with her children, wearing a long black-lace dress, a gold brooch, three strands of pearls. The sons flank her, all in black suits, and Peggy is directly behind her mother, peering between black shoulders. Must have been an occasion, a wedding, the men wearing boutonnieres, morning coats, cravats. The wide trellis is behind them, and the shaggy trees. Tom is fifteen and pleased with himself, the kid brother dressed in his first tuxedo. Considering what happened, it’s a scary picture. Only Peggy is still living—all the rest died of heart. And Tom was the youngest; we were seventeen, had just graduated from high school. Now it seems to me he died as a child, before anything touched him. But that’s not really true. He’d already lived through the deaths of his parents, not easy at any age. He was one of the boys, popular, but he had such a presence, a gravity. Everyone respected his family and he grew into that same respect. Sure, he fooled around sometimes—once he and Shinner Black dressed in drag on Class Day. Bobby sox, sweaters over C-cup bras stuffed with apples, head scarves, and lipstick. Pretty Peasants, they called themselves, and played it up all during the ceremonies. Another time they somehow got a bull into the chemistry lab. It must have been difficult to lead that animal up three flights of steps; it was nearly impossible to lead him down.

Tom was different because he was mannish and independent, but not afraid to be attentive the way a woman would be. He never forgot anything I told him, and he was proud of me. Sometimes when we were at a dance or out with the crowd, he’d nod in my direction and say, “Look at her. Isn’t she the prettiest thing you ever saw?” Probably sounds silly to you, but it wasn’t really about being pretty. He wanted everyone to know he loved me.

I’d gotten a job at the telephone office that spring. “Number please” a few hundred times a day, plugging and unplugging the
connections. The operators knew everything that went on in the town—if you weren’t rushed, you could listen in by leaving the key open. But you didn’t need to, there was plenty of information in who called whom and what they said to the operators. We could always count on Mr. Lee, who owned the dry goods store, to be tight drunk by noon and curse us out for answering too slowly or for getting him a busy signal. A lot of the girls knew which married men were seeing whom by the calls they made at odd hours. I never worried about all that and was glad to be getting a paycheck. I only minded our supervisor, a red-headed spinster named Lindstrom. She watched our work shifts to the minute and called us her chickens, as if the clicks and scratchings of the board were
our
sounds. She thought we were brainless, trying to take advantage. And I was so scrupulous, the perfect employee. Like a dumb kid, I was glad to work long shifts and have a lunch hour like a grown-up.

Tom wasn’t working yet. He and Shinner Black had decided to paint houses for the summer and were looking to buy a cheap truck. But they were in no hurry, and it was around then that Tom started getting sick. He would walk me home every night from the telephone office, and we’d have to stop twice on the way up the hill for him to rest. He had chest pains and shortness of breath. After a few days he went to Doc Jonas at my insistence and was told he had gas on his stomach, to take some antacid pills and exercise. But he couldn’t; he had no stamina. He’d played sports all his life and suddenly he couldn’t run up the hill. I think he knew all along, though he may not have thought it actually possible—at seventeen. The last week, he stayed in bed most of the time. I would go by after work and make supper for him in Mrs. Black’s kitchen. One night he lay in bed sweating and would barely talk to me. I went home crying to Mother that he was going to lie over there and die if nothing was done. So she called Mrs. Black and told her to phone Tom’s brother Nate in Chapel Hill. Nate, who was a fifth-year med student, recognized the symptoms right away, and drove all night to get to Tom by morning. He examined him and hired an ambulance, made arrangements for surgery down south. Tom said he would only go if I went with him, and Nate agreed. Mother had my bag packed and they were to pick me up from work.… Tom got out
of bed to comb his hair and dropped dead by the bathroom sink. That quickly. I put the call through from Black’s house, recognized Nate’s voice, and kept the key pressed down. He was calling Peggy, told her to come at once, that they were all too late, and why hadn’t she known Tom was so sick? Then he hung up and called the undertaker. I put that call through too, then left the board and went into the bathroom. I sat there dry-eyed and stared at the brooms and mops propped against the wall.