Songs in Ordinary Time (46 page)

“It’s a word-of-mouth product,” the mailman continued, his arms on the table as he spoke past Omar. “Now you take your Fabs, your Tides, your Ivorys, your Joys. Those’re all Madison Avenue products. But Presto’s a different product. It’s different marketing. It needs a hands-on sell. And that’s just the way it is, Cal. No two ways about it!”

’Hey, all I know is I got shelf space and now I got product!” The grocer chuckled, with a sly nod at Omar. “And with a seventy-five-percent markup, it don’t take no genius to appreciate my situation.”

Voices dwindled and spoons clinked as one by one the men began to eat.

The maid was still ladling out the broth. His hands folded on the edge of the table, Omar waited for everyone to be served. At the end of the long table, almost obscured by the ornate candelabra, Roy Gold also waited. He was a small man, with glowing sculpted cheeks and even features. His blond hair was closely trimmed, his hazel eyes clear, his gaze direct, his nails buffed, his navy blazer a perfect fit. In Gold’s presence Omar always felt sloppy and sprawling. He would start tucking in his shirt and hitching up his pants and buffing the toes of his shoes on the back of his pant leg. Gold was in charge of every fiber of his being. Omar still couldn’t believe his good fortune in linking up with Gold. The man was a marketing genius with more dynamism, more compassion than anyone he’d ever met before.

Uniquely, Gold’s goal wasn’t just to make money, but to share that opportunity with men like himself, bright ambitious visionaries.

As the maid steered the tureen into the kitchen, Gold took up his spoon, and then so did Omar. He noted how erectly Gold sat, never hunching over his bowl or slurping like the others. He noted how Gold ate from the side of his spoon, always refilling it away from himself, and so he did the same.

Imagine. There were even rules for eating soup. In this complicated universe it was the ordinary things he found most exciting. Conversations rose and fell around him. His breast swelled with joy, with exuberance. There was no task he could not master. Nothing seemed past his grasp. Beyond this moment, a finger’s reach away, like jewels in a glass case, glimmered a life of privilege and honor. He had come this far. Yes, he had; alert even in the depths of fear and the pain of betrayal, he had not despaired, instead had chosen another path, breaking off a lilac branch as he fled, stooping to retrieve an empty matchbook cover from the dust. Yes. Yes, he had come this far, and most surely for a reason. All at once the voices surged, and he looked around to see Cal pick up his bowl and drink the rest of his broth.

Poor, poor fellow, he thought, such a minor man.

SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 223

When everyone was done, Gold stood. With a knife blade he tapped his water goblet, and it tinkled like a crystal bell. “Gentlemen,” he called in a pleasant voice. “May I have your attention, please.”

Omar saw how his smile radiated genuine affection.

“For just a few moments, I assure you.”

“Hey it’s your place, Roy, so you go take all the time you want!” called Johnny Biggs with a hearty laugh. Biggs was a carpet installer from Detroit whose bad knees had ordained a new line of work. His life’s savings as well his mother’s had been invested in Presto. “Hear that?” he’d asked Omar during the cocktail hour, raising each leg up and down. “That’s cartilage crunching.”

“Well, I appreciate your patience, Johnny,” said Gold, “and your forth-rightness, which is a trait every one of you men possess. And it’s why you’re here tonight, why you’ve come this far. Why you’ve been chosen over countless others to be executive trainees in what has become
the
fastest-growing company on the face of the earth.” He looked up and down the table.

“Quite a statement to make, isn’t it, about a company that’s only four years old, but it’s the truth, no matter what you’ll hear to the contrary, no matter what the cynics say—and believe me, there are a lot of those. Oh my Lord, are there ever! A cynic on every corner. You’ll meet them every day, everywhere you go. It doesn’t work, they’ll tell you. It can’t work, they’ll tell you. It defies logic, they’ll tell you. It’s an unbalanced system, they’ll tell you. It’s malarkey, they’ll say. Out-and-out hokey.”

Roy Gold paced the length of the table, stopping now at the other end.

“Is this malarkey?” he asked, gesturing from the coffee service on the mahogany buffet to the dramatic mural, the sweep of his hand stirring the chandelier’s crystal pendants to a tremble of fiery flashes. “Is it hokey? You see it. I earned it. Does it defy logic that a man who’s willing to sell an excellent product at a fair price can have all this? Does it defy logic that a man can love success so much that he wants—no! I take that back,
needs—must
share it with others.”

He came down the other side of the table now, trailing a fragrance that reminded Omar of Marie’s freshly hung laundry, warm in the morning sun.

“Of course it doesn’t!” Gold said, turning abruptly. “But it shocks people because they don’t know how to take me. I speak a plain language, gentlemen. There’s an easy way and a hard way, a right way and a wrong way, and shame on me, but I don’t know any other way to play except fair.

“You see, I grew up real poor. It was just me and my father and my mother. But you see, being poor didn’t bother me. Going to bed with my stomach growling some nights didn’t bother me. Wearing a grown man’s clothes cut down to boy’s size didn’t bother me. No, what really really bothered me was not having any brothers and sisters. What really hurt was that my father never spoke to me and my mother unless he had to. And then what nearly tore me apart was losing my mother when I was just fifteen years old. That, that was the worst improverishment! All my life the thing 224 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

I’ve wanted more than anything else is a family. For me that’s all there is.”

He gestured around the room, which was so still not a man blinked or seemed to breathe. Johnny Biggs still held the roll he had taken one bite from.

“That’s what this is all about. I can’t stand being alone. I have this yearning, not for power, not for money, but for the strength and the support of a family. For community. Comm—
Unity
! That’s what this company is.

That’s what I’m all about.
That’s
what the cynics can’t understand. And gentlemen, that’s the way it’s got to be for you, too. You’ve got to develop this need, this unquenchable thirst for the interrelationship and love and trust and comfort of a family. Support one another. Reach out, bring others in. Share your knowledge, your expertise, your market. Build an executive network every bit as strong, as durable, as caring as a family. Because, let me tell you, gentlemen, that’s where the future of this nation is. That’s where my future is. In you, my family.”

Roy Gold returned to his chair and sat down. He smoothed his napkin in his lap as every man leaped up, clapping and cheering. Johnny Biggs put down his roll and whistled.

Once again, Omar felt this expansion in his chest, in his throat, behind his eyes. And now for the first time he not only knew its source, but could give it a name, this hunger, this limitless hunger.

Omar Duvall’s first stop was at Bernadette’s. The day had been long and mean with heat and, he supposed, the constant whining of her rashy-faced shirtless children. They clung to her legs as she spoke over the chain of the lock. She wouldn’t let him in. She refused to come down and see his new car.

“What’s wrong, baby?” he pleaded. “Please, please tell me.” He reached in to run his finger down her nose, but she jerked back with a hissed demand for her money. Little bitch. He gripped the tacky doorframe and clenched his teeth. All the way back from Connecticut he’d fantasized their lovemaking after almost two weeks apart. In his jacket pocket were the black lace garter belt and bra he’d bought her in Hartford. And here he stood, horny as hell, pockets bulging, and she wouldn’t even let him in. He should have called first, he thought, realizing now that her bedroom door was closed.

She had some other guy in there, probably some kid. Remembering what she’d said about Norm sent a chill up his spine, and he stepped back, gesturing to let her know he understood, that it was okay. It wasn’t her fault.

He had no right to be angry or possessive. After all, who understood human weakness and need better than he did? “When’s a good time to come back?”

he whispered.

“Never!” she snapped. “And I’m telling you if I don’t get my money back I’m going straight to the cops.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

She released the chain and stepped into the hallway, dragging the little girls attached to her, one on each leg. She closed the door quietly and told SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 225

him about the U.S. government “syphilis guy” coming to warn her about him. Jabbing her finger in his face, she said she didn’t want him near her or her kids ever again. “Do you understand? Do you?” she spat. That creep talking like that about her private life like she was just some piece of trash was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. “Do you understand, not just the worst, but the most humiliating, the most disgusting…”

“Listen to me!” He grabbed her arm to calm her down. “What are you talking about? What man? What did he look like? Was he a Negro?”

He was white, she said, pulling away. He was a big guy, young, with a purplish birthmark under his nose. He had a U.S. government badge and his ID said he was a VD investigator for the Department of Public Health.

“You lying little…” He grabbed her again, wrenching her close.

“Get your fucking hand off me!” Chin out, eyes narrowed, she held his stare. “Now!”

He let her go. Luther and the old man. He could feel them in this. His eyes darted up and down the corridor, which seemed darker with their nearness and the dull tenacity of their mission. An itchy sweat trickled down his neck.

Whining to go back inside, the little girls tugged at their mother.

“I want my money back, every penny of it,” she demanded.

He touched her face and tried to smile. “That’s impossible, little Miz Mansaw.” He told her that he had already purchased her distributorship and her product line.

“You can go to hell, you and your goddamn soap,” she said, batting away his hand.

“I imagine I will. Someday,” he said, grinning. “But first I expect to be delivering your product to you in approximately two to three weeks, Miz Mansaw.”

“I want my money!” she called down the hallway after him. “I don’t want any of your fucking product, your fucking soap!”

His next stop was the boardinghouse, where he would go through the Judge’s files and compile a list of potential customers. He would personally call on everyone he could find and sell them a franchise. It was amazing how quickly people could be disarmed with just a few vital facts: your cousin Lena in Detroit; the stone house at the lake that your aunt left you, and your brother took you to court for. People were just dying to find someone they could trust, an intimate, someone who not only understood, but knew things without having to be told. And he didn’t regard it in any way as taking advantage or preying on their troubles, because the truth was, he cared about people. He really did. Even when they turned on him.

It pained him to see anyone hurt. There were still nights when he could not close his eyes, but what images of Earlie came to mind, that most headstrong, stubborn, and selfish young man who in a very real sense had been the instrument of his own harm. And of this he had no doubt. None whatsoever.

He patted his temples and neck dry, then knocked on the screen door.

226 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

May Mayo held her finger to her lips as she gestured him into the parlor away from her sister. In the kitchen Claire sat at the table, shelling peas as polka music blared from the radio.

“Sister doesn’t want you here,” May whispered. “She thinks all the things we’ve been missing are your fault.”

“Things?”

“The shower hose and the bath mat and the white urn lamp and her Wedgwood plates.”

“Well, why on earth would I take those?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But then those women started calling.”

“What women?” he asked, knowing it must have been Bernadette and Marie.

“They never give their names. They just say it’s about business. I didn’t tell them a thing,” May assured him. “But Sister wants to call the police.”

“The police?” He coughed against his prickly throat. “The police?”

“Yes,” May Mayo whispered, glancing past him to make sure Claire was still in the kitchen. “She thinks you’re a flimflam man.”

“A what?” he whispered back.

“A flimflam man.”

“What’s a flimflam man?”

“A sharpie, a crook, like a Gypsy.”

The noon news broadcast began to play loudly on the kitchen radio now, and the announcer’s deep voice steadied him. There were higher powers here that would protect him. He had suffered enough failure and disappointment, so now must be the time of his good fortune and triumph. Surely it was due him. Surely he had earned it. He reminded himself that it was not happenstance that had delivered him here, but some magnetizing force.

“But now Sister says you can’t stay. I feel just terrible, Mr. Duvall, what with your government connections and all, but there’s nothing I can do.”

“Well, there’s one thing you can keep on doing, Miss Mayo, and that’s don’t tell people anything at all.” He looked over both shoulders. “There are spies around, Miss Mayo.”

Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh I was afraid of something like that!

Spies! A fine kettle of fish! Especially now! Ever since the Judge passed on, Sister’s had me walking a very tight rope here.” The delicate little woman gestured him down so she could whisper at his ear. “Nursing home! The least little thing and she starts dialing them. So I’ve got to be careful, Mr.

Duvall. Very, very careful!”

“Of course,” Omar said, heading for the front door with May at his heels in a tremulous flutter. In the front hall, he stopped suddenly and looked down at her. “Have you ever been in business for yourself, Miss Mayo?”