The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride (21 page)

But in the third thing (which was Lottie’s epitaph no matter how much might be said of her later) surely there was also a hesitance in the way Emily spoke, as if some of the verdict—in the way character is apportioned among families, or among women—must surely cling to herself.

The three were sitting in the bay window, out at Pardees’ Coffee was on the table, tea for the mate. In the nearer depths of the house, the baby had been put down; its next bottle was ready on the stove. The stove was Bismarck. On the lake in front of the house it was late August again, one of its lizard-gray days, scaly with mist, from which autumn bursts like a pumpkin, a fruit. All three couldn’t help but be thinking how far, from Bismarck to baby, they had come. Outside, on the railless water, the fogline now and then parted a few feet above it in porcelain flushes of vision to which each pair of eyes would put a personal shape. Over her own, Emily’s brows almost met, but it was she who first broke the long pause, though silently, flinging her baby-tired arms wide. She could do that—it was one of the things that made her seem tall, yet contrarily could bring her fingertips in again to hold an eyelash; she had stretched her legs wide and closed them again, and in the nutcracker between them brought herself a man. She looked at him now, at Jim watching the water, loving his vagueness, never scolding, perhaps tending it—for both their ends. But today was the mate’s day; anything about Lottie belonged to him.

“Jim—” she said. The two men always knew which Jim she meant. She spread her hands—like a sister’s—then clasped them. “The sugar-people. That’s the way they are.”

Each nodded at her, needing no further explanation. Jim, her husband, smiled. It wasn’t his day, life hadn’t marked him outwardly yet, as it had the mate, but until his inner arguments settled themselves, until he could point to the mark on himself perhaps, his clever girl would always have a word for what the risks were, and the responsibilities. He, meanwhile, was waiting. And there was no shame in it.

It could have been only a few minutes later when she got up, walked over to the great stove, cold as armor these many months in favor of the smaller summer one, and put her hand on it. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. Her clear eyes shone with a forward-backward light. “There’s not a decent baking company in town.”

The genius of it was that from the first she had said “company.” A mere bakery, even if its owners keep in the basement a staff of two floured German madmen—do you know bakers?—is still only a shop. Nevertheless, that’s the way they began of course, but with that other word always leavening the conversation and at last rising from it, written neater than Nebuchadnezzar’s—on the wall. The name “Aswami” came from a secondhand truck which glimmered at them from a car-lot when they were on holiday up near the Canadian border—“The Aswami Baking Company”—the name of its past owner and locale conveniently obliterated, but an Indian version after all. In the early years, toward her thirties, Emily, selling at the shop’s counter—did she ever think of her sister?—or downstairs, scarf-headed, checking over the staff in the large basement of the second establishment, or at Jim’s side at an evening party, looked ever younger, almost a child-wife—you’ll remember there was almost a decade between them. As for the parties, the two of them, if by choice not in the forefront, were always on the list now, having long since moved to the middle of town and got over their trouble.

In later years, in the business office of the factory they built on a razed property—yes, in Oriskany—as Jim grew more portly, Emily, though no plumper herself, kept matronly pace with him somehow. The children, when they came, were never vulgarly underfoot in the shop, a distaste for this being part of what her livery-stable heritage had taught her, so that by the time the company had been achieved, the children, now parents themselves, could laughingly tell their own, home from prep and boarding schools with perhaps a schoolmate, that
they
had never even had as many cakes and cookies as children normally did, when young. All of
them
called their parents Jim and Emily, oddly modern for them, unless one suspected that in this way the mate’s child wouldn’t have been shunted away from “Mother” to “Aunt Emily.” For which reason—far back in those browndark days of childhood which precede the light-blazed ones on which young men’s planes go down (their last letters to dear Emily arriving later)—it had been done. As for the baking products on which this small, decent empire has been built, these have kept pace with modernity too; the company has one of the best bread to doughnut lines in the upstate area, all properly packed with no more than 10 per cent preservatives—and there isn’t a fritter in the lot. But what with automobiles and trucking, and the trackless wastes between towns and appetites, always needing to be covered, it has done very well. Dear Emily—as much more than old letters still say. If we don’t count that young man, the father of some of you (and how does one count death out of one’s generation, when it is not among the natural and daily?), then Emily was the first of us to die. She is the first to fall, of that young constellation, and never will there be a better reason for you all to gather here. As might be expected of such a woman, she went from one of the commoner diseases, which was gotten to, as the doctors like to say, in time. When Jim took the mate with him to help order the stone, and they stood in the stonecutter’s office, studying that grim manual of texts and design cuts, looking out the window at his samples, it was the mate who suddenly slammed the book closed and said “What do I do in my
business,
when I buy anything! Let’s go to an
expert!
” So they hopped in that other car of his, the Bentley he’d got from England—the two men when they go out together always use his cars—and drove to the church.

Time being what it is, the rector was now a young seminarian. And no worse for it, said the mate, to whom it was smart business for the old to deal with the young—who as he said would have everything at their fingertips. Since it was Jim’s wife who had died, the young minister deferred to him, and couldn’t have been kinder or taken longer to help search out what Jim thought suitable for a wife like that, and a stone. Neither of the two old men walked over to look at old Civil War names, wars being too new again, but if Jim’s search took the long, trembling time it did, this was because he remembered what he had once said in this place.

“‘I can wait,’” he said to the mate. “Do you remember?” And it seemed to him that now, now if ever must be the time to express all that he had been gathering for a lifetime and had never expressed properly, about our place in the world here and his modest place also; now if ever was the time to say it all. But though dozens of texts were brought forth, there was none that satisfied him. It came time for evensong, but the mate didn’t press him. The young man, though nobody had come for the service, was going round quietly, turning on lights and so forth, being his own sexton. And suddenly he was stopped in his sweeping. “What’s behind that curtain?” the mate said. “I wondered, at the time.”

That young man almost fell over his broom, he was so eager; he had seen the Bentley. It must have been hard on him to accept a church so hopelessly faded in congregation as that one, and as you may have noted at today’s dedication, though he very kindly returned for it, he has since been called elsewhere. But he had everything at his fingertips that day. “There were to have been two,” he said, pointing to the high memorial window opposite the curtained one. “But something happened.” Then he pulled back the curtain. The day was one of the short, winter ones, no anniversary of an autumn one and no sunset, but between the darkness outside and the light within, the blank pane perhaps showed up best. So that is how come, two years later almost to the day, which the stained-glass people told us was optimum—Emily’s window. The mate wanted to pay for it, but of course that couldn’t be, even though he was the one to persuade Jim to have it.

“She wouldn’t have wanted such a thing,” said Jim.

“In some ways, Jim,” said the other old man, “I—other people—knew her better than you did!”

Then the young man put his hand between them. It was the nearest they had ever come to an out-and-out difference of opinion, not to say quarrel.

“She was a
common
woman, a
homely one,
” said Jim. “Words change, but when I was a boy, that’s what the mourners used to say at barge funerals, of any woman who had the human touch to her, and had brought with her all the home comforts, during a lifetime that wasn’t never nothing but daily.” He looked ashamed then, either at his grammar or his eloquence, but with him who can tell? “She was an ordinary woman,” he said. “She was a nonpareil.”

“I know what you mean, Jim,” said the mate. “Even without going to one of your dictionaries. I know what you mean.” How he could remember! “You mean—she was like everyone else.”

So, between them, that was her epitaph—though when it came to the window, they finally left it to the rector, after all. He chose “Many Waters”; I suppose you know it. Of course you do, with the window, how could you not? “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods”—and so forth. Maybe the mate did help suggest it because of all the water in it, knowing Jim’s tastes or thinking he still did—remember that sloop! And it is a beautiful verse.

“So it is, mate,” said Jim. “So it is, Jim.” Calling the mate by name was meant to repair the sharp words. “But you know something?” He stared through the blank pane at the dark land outside it. “This is a mixed region, around here. I see it more and more.”

Later, when he saw first the window itself, back at the glassmakers’ of course, not at the unveiling, he both nodded his head and shook it, even though the figure rising from the water in all its blood-reds and milky whites was an angel, not Emily. “Funny thing,” he said. “I always see her …
from
the water.
On
the land.”

And now Jim. He was fond of saying that if there was something he wanted to know about himself he could always go to the mate for it. The mate, if he was there to hear him, always remarked, “Same here. Only,
he
won’t tell.” For forty years or more their lives had been twined together, but in such a way that if one showed himself ready to drown, the other didn’t go down with him but held him; they weren’t twins, unless twins can be of totally different temperament. The mate had his Floridas, and did or didn’t speak of them. In the early years, the three sometimes had had to speak among them of Lottie, though never of the mate’s long undivorcement itself; during the years when Emily did get a letter or two, these were spoken of, but curiously, only in twosome, either of the men to Emily or to each other, but never in threesome; after Emily’s death, the other sister was not spoken of at all. In money matters, the town had at various periods thought it remarkable that the pair never minded who was the richer, but the friends themselves knew that too much teetering had gone on in that direction, ever for them to feel constraint. During the stunned years when the mate clung to his job like a man who has forgotten what his hands are holding, then it was Jim, the ever solider townsman, who lent him money for unspecified needs, and it was only during the Second War—at a time when the limits of a small business, if these don’t soar, are likely to be fixed—that the mate began to stumble forward, to climb as if he knew there was a top, and finally to claw to it. Until then, Jim, with his strong figure, hair faded and thinned but not balded, and his busy little cockerel of a wife beside him, had looked the younger of the two; now it was the mate, with the powder-white hair which had once been raven, and the kind of tycoon charm which can demonstrate in a handshake that it has known what it is to be shy. Jim, by now, had a particular kind of townsman’s face, relaxed but puzzled in repose, the quality which in a younger man is called willing-to-learn. But—as you may have noticed—we haven’t yet got solely and wholly to Jim.

For the curious thing about Jim was that one always got to him best through others, which may be why he persisted in claiming that he never quite knew himself. He wasn’t an enigma, any more than any of us, but he had thought it his duty to face the world’s enigma and study it—or he had always meant to; this meant that if he could wait, others must watch. Why was it otherwise that though he and Emily stood all their lives in handfast, Jim, as against the mate, seemed the more divided? He never minded being in business with a wife, even such a competent one, and never consented to lose dignity for it—though a town will try. The town could do nothing with him or to him, while he studied it. He had his hobbies then, not too cranky ones for a self-styled reflective; about the time he married, for instance, he seemed to give up books at large—or the timid taste which had been tending that way—only to replace them with a collection of dictionaries which, all along unknown to himself, may have been what he had been going to the libraries for. For a while it would seem as if he never read these either, for it was at this period that he took to collecting the names of towns on matchboxes, merely for the way they pleased or teased the something within him which he couldn’t explain otherwise; when he drove the highways on a trip to Yellowstone for instance, passing through a state he would chant some such refrain to the children: South Bend, Plymouth, Mishawaka, Peru. But that was only when the children were small, and he could think he was teaching them America. After one particular Christmas, he and the mate tried to tinker over a hobby together; do you ever remember your parents telling you of a year when both Jim and the mate came back from separate trips to New York City—with toy trains? But it didn’t last long, and here they did share a likeness; if, like most, as they got older, they wanted only the more to see the world and to grasp it, then this wasn’t their style of miniature.

Curiously enough, as their teeter-totter went now up, now down, it was the mate who had begun to educate himself with books—real books. He would do it on his own terms of course, when and if he felt he could get to them, and in his own character—which he so well knew. In just the same way, before a certain trip abroad, he had gone to a language school and demanded they teach him French in ten minutes—which they did, if poorly, and to a dancing school where, in somewhere double the time, he did well. Why he had been moved to do this for a trip with Jim on which they never got to do either of those things, did stay a mystery to him, until Jim told him.