The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride (9 page)

The second occasion he went there, he told his mate, he sat in the window at the table, there being no other customers except a neighbor child and baby brother she was taking care of, this being a choice house to hang around, of a Saturday afternoon. It struck him as a bad sign for business that nobody else was thinking of it as lively enough for their Saturdays, but he said nothing of this, though this time he and the sisters did get to talk. Lottie was the older by four and a half years, and just as clearly the baby; not that she was whiny, just that she hung back waiting to be told whatever, meanwhile nipping from the trays. It might have been thought that she was waiting for a man; some women eat like that when they are. But from what came out later, it would seem that, round and soft as she was, and always waiting to be told, and pretty in the face as a kewpie doll, she was one of those women who aren’t made for sex but for sugar, whole igloos of it, plus all the tender emotions—crabmeat patties to curd-cream—of a richly wooing diet; it wasn’t her fault if some man mistook the pink deepness at her neckline for something more than a roastbeef flame. Emily was quiet, but in a livelier way, and skinnier, from taking the lead. She had a small face, with two furry black eyebrows she was lucky didn’t meet in the middle, and large eyes that were either farsighted or near, but so vague they kept you from seeing how neatly her hands were going. From what the town said when it bothered, he knew she was lucky all round—she was the sort of girl who no sooner does she declare her intentions to go for a nurse, then her parents come down with bargain-rate last illnesses she can learn from, right at home.

So there he was, sitting up in the window, all asses’ ears and beer etiquette, not knowing whether he could look into the back kitchen, where the sun was still shining in from that side of the house, it being not yet one o’clock, or whether he ought to stare out at the lake. The two Pardees were enclosed in high aprons that tied at the back and dropped from neck almost to ankle, a kind that must have been bought at bazaars before their time and used to be worn by ladies when they served at such bazaars or went into the kitchen to oversee the maid. Here in the shop, these signaled that the Pardees were at your service, but ladies still. The kitchen, despite its moment of sunshine, was full of that kind of doubletalk; was this an outright shop or just an amateur operation; was this all just a pretty moment of fancywork for two healthy girls who didn’t have the nerve or the need to get work in town—or were the Pardees poor? And was this Sand Spring 1920, or Sand Spring 1898?

The sun dazzled a dishcloth, then moved ahead dead center over the roof, casting the pupils of all below into temporary shadow, and the whole sweep of the house, from bay to kitchen, into the nice gloom which came of knowing that in a short while the glare would strike the lake. Everything was live and fresh enough here, nothing dead or eerie or shut-in; not a yard from his nose, on a rack near the special stove which had been set in the window, other dishcloths and towels smelled of the outdoor ozone they’d been dried in—it wasn’t that. And if he wanted surety that he and the Pardees were alive and ticking, there, in a big iron pot as big as a cannonball, there were the minutes bubbling—it wasn’t that. Lottie was making the dough and Emily for the moment was feeding the sweet scraps to the two children as if they were puppies, though her job was to tend the pot, lifting and lowering the wire strainer, putting in the raw and taking out the finished, then a whisk of sugar and onto a plate, and all in a rhythm that knew beforehand how fast he would swallow; four minutes from now she would be once again at his side. If he ate five dozen of those things, he would still have eaten nothing but an hour.

He watched everything, nevertheless. For the life of him, he couldn’t have told later which sister had informed him that the proper word for what he was swallowing was baynays (from the French of a recipe come down from a Canuck in the family) but more commonly called bennies—or which had told him that the stove, a tall affair of many intricate drafts, warming ledges and ovenwells, grandly crowned by helmet-and-spike, and painted aluminum, was called “Bismarck.” Like many a couple who lived together, speak up as the sisters might separately, the effect was of unison. And why not, if then-experience of living was to be as unison as the Pardees’? Why else was it that if he asked some of the foolish questions in his head—which he wouldn’t, being already stretched enough by asking himself—or even if they answered willingly enough, which they couldn’t, they would still tell him nothing he and they didn’t both already know? For the doubletalk that was in the house wasn’t theirs or his; it was the town’s—and the fact that they all knew this already was what, past or present, made it a town. Otherwise, as he asked his mate later, why would it be that a man could come back from such a Flanders of a war, plus two years of schooling the war had gifted him with after, and still wouldn’t know his way in life any better than the town’s way,
once he had plumped for the town?
Out in the world back there, as back as far as Europe, for instance, he had known his way about with women, at least to the point of sleeping with some of them—and even before. Right now, as the mate well knew, back East, not four hundred miles away on the coastline of this same state, the world was full of flappers whose dresses wouldn’t reach Sand Spring until Sears, Roebuck chose to send them maybe two years from now—and whose manners would take a lot longer. Or was it that, back there, he and Jim had only passed through? But once Jim himself had got here, no matter what he might do—and he wasn’t fool enough to think that a lot
didn’t
get done here—the town would still make his conversation for him. By his taste for a freedom outside it and his stubborn wish to be of it, it had neatly returned him almost to the state in which he had left it, a watery young’un, Sunday scholar in its visitors’ pews, or at its back-row desks. Coming back to it was like coming to court must have been, in the old days; the gossip here was like a sieve. Yet the current was bouncy enough, returning him up down like a fountain, or a woman, for his help and his chastisement too.

He closed vainly on another bennie fritter. And found that Emily and another dozen were at his side.

This time, though she moved off almost at once, like a good waitress or a thoughtful lady-of-the-house, they held a silently monitored conversation. The town said (in him and for him) that her father, in his eagerness to make ladies of the daughters of a father in the horse trade, had kept her from all the things that even ladies were now doing. And in her and for her (no matter what Jim himself might say to her) the town would pretty well have taken care that she address him in one or other of the characters it held proper to him; whether it would be as a war-buddy, or as a fellow with his gypsy life not yet lived down, he’d soon see. Though surely, some pioneers in conversation broke out of the preordained.

He was to do it, too, though not then and there. By the time he’d swallowed up eight of those things, he’d remembered the vague kinship which had walked him over here. However, the decline and rise of transportation, and people with it, was too wide a subject for the soda-pop chair he was sitting on, so instead he put his fork in fritter number nine. He’d been using a fork all that time, finger freedom not having been offered. Then, at number ten, the sun, just as if it hadn’t been inching along all that time, reared over the house in a leap like a horse and struck the lake to white, and splashed all five of them inside there glare-blind. It was over in a second. Outside the bay window, a line of red cannas he hadn’t noticed before started up like an audience, all tongues. On number twelve, he spoke. “How you folks get to town from here?” he said.

He got several answers, this time slow enough so he could assign them to their dealers. To his surprise, Lottie spoke up first; he was to learn that she could speak up smartly enough when it was a case of what she couldn’t do, though the full extent of that wasn’t known even to her, until the end. “Never could get the hang of a bike,” she said, looking modestly down at what would someday be piano legs and hams, but right now, though bursting, were still young peony fat; he judged her to be about twenty-four.

Then Emily spoke, in a thoughtful way. “Shanks’ mare … might be … the best.” He wasn’t sure whether or not this was a statement, but it was the “might be” which got him, moving away his idea of her away from “one of the Pardees” almost to Emily—the idea of her being a woman, squeezing in between. He judged her to be old for her age, about nineteen, one year younger than the century, he being nine years behind her. The century line was still much in people’s ways of reckoning when he was a boy; you watch how it’ll be as the next one hoves to.

Just then, one of the next-door kids who were still underfoot, the girl one, spoke up, first giving a swipe to her baby brother for dribbling his sweater on the floor. She had one of the fritters between her small thumb and finger, and staring at Jim, she popped it in and ate it, even chewing as she spoke. He watched, fascinated, it being probably the only time human teeth ever got one of those things. So, her words came to him delayed. “Neighbors,” she said. “Ne-
eigh
bors take them.” She drew down her long little jaw, making a face she must have seen somewhere. “Us.”

When he got out of there, after quickly paying his fifty cents for all you could eat, which was the arrangement, he stopped at a bend in the road to look back. There were obligations neighbors paid by right, or even goodness of heart, and still made faces over, which their children could copy. This still didn’t mean that the sisters were poor. The town said they weren’t. They might just have to be careful—which meant he needn’t grow a sympathy the pair hadn’t asked for, though as their only customer of the afternoon he felt a certain right at least to judge their enterprise. Why it should be a place where he heard the doubletalk so keenly, he couldn’t imagine; though in any town there were bound to be such places, he had always imagined them as more private. The afternoon was bordering on rain now, with the swift changes that came to these hilled waters. The stall in the bay window, dark as if it had given up hope of further trade now that the sun had all but gone underwater, seemed itself full of passing clouds. Of a sudden, as if the sun down under there had turned over, and the lake given up an aproned woman, her arm dripping, there flashed into his mind the simple reason for the stall’s presence. Those girls knew what the town’s verdict on them was, just as he and every soul around each knew of his own. “Nicer girls you’d never want to talk to—when you’re talking to them.” Some women wore flashy garters to keep people looking at them, or took lessons in coloratura. Those two had done it homestyle, dime a dozen or fifty cents an hour. It was their bid to stay in the eyes and minds and thoughts of people, not to be winked out.

When he got home, he tried to tell something of this to his mate, who listened willingly enough, and was moreover a man who never really forgot anything he was told, not anything—four and a half months later he would look up from his plate and say, “What’s about this Lottie, you once said.”

And what about people—aren’t the tags and loose ends and final catchings-up enough to break anyone’s heart? But at that moment the mate was just in from a trip which had taken in Cazenovia and Skaneateles, bully towns for auto setups or any other, both of them, and he was already wild on tomorrow’s trip over to Chenango and Wampsville; if it was left to him there was a real question whether those two wouldn’t have a chain of dream garages before they had a real one of them—and a homemade New York State atlas into the bargain. As for the other topic; once they had got the map, they lost it there. Maps take in people like that all the time.

And on the occasion of the third visit, Jim’s mate having gone down the Genesee to two towns just outside of Cattaraugus which he was sure to be in love with, their names being Almond and Angelica—see the map for yourself if you don’t believe me—Jim again went to the Pardees alone. But this time people, and gossip too, had got there before him. It was a Spanish War Veterans picnic, with the families of course, some of the granddaddies being from the Civil. The Spanish ones mostly weren’t even fair into middle age yet, some of them not much more than ten years older than Jim. It wasn’t the kind of continuity he was interested in, but it was the kind a man can’t avoid, even though his own war is hardly in the Legion clubhouse yet, except on the plaque to the dead.

Before he plunged in, his eye, which these days was seeing business thoughts everywhere, saw the place as a picnic grove with tables and docks and beaches, and even a place for boats-to-hire. Second thought told him it couldn’t be done—except by a stranger maybe—for it was not yet the town’s way to hire these things out, instead of just leaving them to be called on, or borrowed (though twenty-five years later, that shoreline was all cottaged and concessioned and pounded down like a beachhead; as for the woods in back, the jack-in-the-pulpits had long since taken their sermons elsewhere). He saw that the veterans had very kindly brought their own tables and chairs, and even more generously their own food, including the usual chocolate cake, which no doubt could be chewed. White pitchers stood on many of the tables. Though a few children were straggling untended in and out the side of the house, there was no trade going on from house to picnic; nobody except Bismarck was in the bay.

On his way there, two of the veterans who worked in his factory greeted him. At the door, a woman smearing a child’s happy mouth with a hard cloth nodded at him, turning out to be the night librarian where he sometimes went to read. Inside the kitchen, he saw only Lottie, peeping out, not cooking, though there were signs she had been—maybe a batch or two she’d been feeding the children for free. His mind made up at once what had happened to Emily; she had gone to be a nurse. He was neither disappointed nor pleased, recording merely the idea that Lottie was a woman too—and that either sister was more interesting when alone. Together, they were merely a situation. What he might intend to do, he addressed to that—it made no difference to him to which of them, as long as it was only one at a time, this being how his previous experience with women ran. He didn’t mind having an experience, in between the maps and the building-sites, even if it risked being a serious one, which in this town it sure would be—maybe it was time. But this day and age, a grown woman ought at least be alone for it. So he smiled at Lottie’s neckline, strode over to the table in the window and sat down—lucky he’d had no lunch. After four or five dozen of those things, he wouldn’t want any, though from the novelty of it and the rhythm of the girl at his side he might be left with richer appetites, like a love potion in reverse. Had the sisters thought of this too?