In the Beauty of the Lilies (18 page)

“I don’t
want
to go way down there into the middle of nowhere,” he complained to his sister one night when he had still been awake, working in his room on a balsa-wood model of a Sopwith Camel—the struts and wires between the two wings were the fussiest part, and the machine guns that fired out right through the spinning propeller. Esther had come in from a night out with a man she knew from the Weidmann office, a sales representative who went to cities all over the Eastern U.S. Teddy came down to the kitchen, where he heard her getting a glass of lemonade from the icebox. She looked a little mussed and exasperated, there in the stark light of the kitchen, in a shimmering green dress that set off the gleams in her strawberry-blond hair, done up in a thick roll all around like Mother’s dark hair, though she talked of having her hair cut short—“bobbed.” Her dress had a tasselled belt low on her hips but slipped on over her head, he knew from having watched her when her door was ajar one time. It was a November
night and she had worn a beaver-trimmed raglan coat she tossed with an impatient grimace onto a kitchen chair. Teddy could see in the hard light that she wasn’t exactly beautiful—too wiry, and too flat in front and behind, and her lips too thin and clever and impatient—but with her white skin and quick decisive gestures she was alive in a competent, hard, unapologetic way that dazzled him. He and his parents had this in common: they were all soft. The world pushed them around. “Why the dickens not?” she asked. “What’s in Paterson for you?”

“My friends.”

“Some friends. You never bring them back to the house.”

“There’s nothin’ to do here.”

She laughed, her quick laugh, surprisingly deep, a kind of bark. “As much as in most other houses, I expect. If there’s so much nothin’ to do here, what’ve you got to lose going down to Basingstoke? You need a change. We all do. Paterson has nothing left for the Wilmots. Basingstoke’s a lazy little town that’ll give us a chance to get our bearings.”

“Us? You coming with us?”

At his sudden intensity, her painted lips stretched in a thin smile, and she asked, “You want me to?” She moved closer to the kitchen door and opened it, so the smoke from the cigarette she lit would drift out through the screen door.

“Well, sure,” he said. “I don’t want to be stuck with two old ladies down there.”

“You’ll make friends.”

“They’re all rubes—don’t pull my leg.”

“Tedsy hon, I got a good job here. I got my gentlemen friends.”

“Yeah, I guess you do. Any you’re real sweet on? How do you like the guy you were with tonight? I saw him when you were heading out. He was too slick by half, if you ask me.”

“Slick is good, in his line of work. He could charm the skirt off a dressing table, like they say.” She held out her pack of cigarettes—Lucky Strikes, in that green bull’s-eye pack, and shook it. “Want one?”

As with Jared sometimes, he was being led out into deep grown-up waters. He took the Lucky, though, and lit up, and crowded closer to the screen door, so Mother didn’t get a whiff and come down. Maybe she wouldn’t come down. Maybe she cared less than he thought. Dad used to smoke not just his pipe in his study but sometimes a Sweet Caporal—“for medicinal purposes,” he once told Teddy with a wink. The inhaling felt like poking something rough down his throat. His head went light, as when he used to swing too high on the swings at the Sandy Hill Park playground.

Esther was saying, “
Too
slick, it could be. He makes a girl feel like she’s being sold a bill of goods. On the one hand you want to buy it, and on the other you don’t, you know?”

It wasn’t really a question; she was talking half to herself. Teddy nodded anyway, as if he did know. He smelled the perfume she had put on to go out and a little sweat, he supposed from dancing, and the smoke she exhaled, which was mixed with a sickly semi-rotten scent that he associated with empty squarish bottles you found on the cinder paths along the river, among the tall weeds. Hooch. Spirits. Illegal but that didn’t stop people. Esther lately wore a kind of squint, from typing all the time or smoking so much or just because she couldn’t look at the world wide-eyed any more. Father’s quitting his job had hit her just at the point when she might have gone to normal school and become a teacher. “Men,” she said, squinting over his head. “They’re all duds, in a way. I guess they can’t help it. But, Lordy, they’re a boring lot. It’s all ‘I did this, I’ll do that, me, me,
me.’ Don’t grow up to be a man, Tedsy; you’ll be as boring as the rest.”

“Where did he take you tonight? To a speakeasy?”

“What do you know about speakeasies, big boy?”

“There’re a lot of them now, all up in Riverside, tucked away in basements and so on. A couple of the Italian kids at school, they have brothers and fathers in the bootlegging business.”

“They shouldn’t make laws people have to break,” Esther said. She reminded him of Dad, saying that. They both knew things without even trying hard, and it made them vulnerable, like animals with feelers that stick way out.

He pleaded, “Won’t you be coming if we have to move? Please. Just for a year or two. You don’t want to stay here getting dragged to smelly speakeasies.”

“Don’t I?” she asked, squinting and exhaling upward, so her face was half-hidden, and cruel with that carelessness grownups have. They don’t care about you as much as it seems when you’re a baby; they care first of all about themselves, just like the baby does. Teddy felt his own face cloud, tears welling up somehow out of the giddy strangeness of smoking a sinful cigarette here in his own house, and being awake and talking at this late hour, and his sister acting so tough, like a tramp. The model of the Sopwith Camel he had left in his room with its cozy fumes of fresh glue was a piece of the innocence they were making him lose. She asked him teasingly, “What’s down there for me in Basingstoke?”

“Maybe you’d meet a nice man. A man who wouldn’t be so slick.”

“That’s pretty slick of you to say, little brother. You want to link me up with some crab fisherman or nice old tanner.” The town had an old tannery in its center, on the little river that
managed a six-foot waterfall before it meandered out through the marshes to the sea. “Now that we’ve got the vote, you know, and collitch eddycations, we girls are supposed to have more on our minds than just catching some critter who wears a pair of pants.” When Esther dragged on her cigarette, her thin lips became even thinner—narrow sharp lines of incongruous red. She was talking to him now as if he was one of her man friends, clowning in that angular way she had, and that reminded him a little bit of Father, before he got so sad and when he was still jaunty. When Teddy thought of his father—visualized him in even the most glancing way—he ached inside, with a sluggish rubbing that tasted of shame. Esther was studying his attempt to hide his tears and said, “Seventeen, huh? And you still need to have your big sister hold your hand?”

It all had to do with what she had said earlier: growing up to be a man. He was soft now, he hadn’t grown his shell, and if he was left alone in a strange town with his mother and Aunt Esther he wouldn’t, or it would grow warped, in a way he couldn’t picture but could feel. He knew from school that he was cautious and underdeveloped: all around him in the halls and on the asphalt were the click and flash of real knives, real loves, boys and girls who really did it, kids equipped to play the real game, this game of manhood and womanhood and grabbing your piece of the world. He wasn’t equipped, he was still curled inward, collecting innocent things—stamps from foreign countries that gave pieces of paper the power to fly around the globe. The few friends he had at school would give him or sell him for a penny the stamps from their relatives in Europe, even Turkey and Syria, and new countries like Czechoslovakia and Lebanon. The passion of those tiny stamps in the intensity of their colors and engraving and
words of unknown languages fascinated him, drew him in, to a safe small cave. Such papery fascinations had descended to him from Father. To become a man, whatever that was, he needed a little more time, a little more space, and his wised-up strawberry-blonde sister’s being with them in Aunt Esther’s spooky house down there in nowheresville would give it to him. Then she could come back to Paterson and catch a man who was slick but not too, a nice man in sales or management. He had never asked anything from a woman except his mother but now he was; he had matured more than he knew, for like those flashy swarthy boys at school who asked dirty things of their girls he was discovering that females like to say yes, and the more of a risk to themselves the yes involves the mysteriously greater is their wish to oblige. Esther stubbed out her Lucky Strike on the sole of her high-heeled slipper of green leather and cupped her hand waiting for him to stub out his so she could toss the two butts out the screen door over the fence of the Levis’ yard. Teddy could tell from the watchful gleam in Esther’s squint that he had amused her. “I’ll think about it. We’ll see what Mom has in mind. My job at Weidmann isn’t so great I have to cling to it like it was life or death. As to the guys around here—who wants to spend their whole life in Paterson? All the men talk and think about is when the next strike is coming and if the next turn of fashion from over in Paris will hurt silk sales and whether or not they should move the whole works over to the coal regions where the dopes are too scared to strike. Phooey to ’em, Tedsy. You’re my best buddy.”

She moved a step toward him and he flinched until he realized she was giving him a quick hug. Upstairs, though they tiptoed, Mother appeared on the landing with her wonderful mass of gray-threaded chestnut hair spilled down across the
shoulders of her voluminous cotton nightie. “Heavens above, why do you two keep slamming the screen door?” she asked, in a voice louder and more humorous than any she would have used when Father was alive, lying on his side staring blue-eyed at nothingness.

Basingstoke was named after a town in Hampshire, England, by homesick colonists who had set sail from Southampton in 1690. The Swedes and Dutch had already been displaced from rule of the New Castle region and the Duke of York had conveyed to William Penn his vast territories, including the three lower counties on the Delaware, their awkward apartness from the rest of Pennsylvania a strain even then. The colonists preferred to profess allegiance directly to the king rather than the aristocratic Quaker whose pacifism left them vulnerable to seaborne attacks by pirates and the French. The entire snippet of a state, with difficulty severed from the great domains of Penn and Lord Calvert, was saturated in English nostalgia, an emotion embodied, it seemed, in the picturesque mists that on many mornings arose from the river and its nearly level, humid, tree-filled valley. The river was named the Avon, though an old Nanticoke name, the Manito, had been recorded.

Teddy was eighteen his first summer here; awakened early by the unaccustomed quiet, marred by cries of roosters from their neighbor’s little poultry-yards, he would watch these mists burn off under a golden sun, or as it were sink back into the marshy, verdant terrain that surrounded the seven hundred houses—many wooden but more of brick, with some laid up in courses of alternating headers and stretchers in a style characteristic of old Delaware—that were home to Basingstoke’s
more than three thousand residents. The town had been built densely, since the local farmland was rich and precious. Two grist mills had been turned by the Avon’s gentle current, less powerfully and prosperously than the flour and gunpowder mills drawing power from the swift-running Brandywine to the hilly north, and had yielded in the late eighteenth century to a tannery. In less than a century this industry had drained the local forests of oak bark and ceased to pour its acids and chromium salts and dyes into the Avon, which gradually recovered its clear color and its fish, its trout and perch and those bright little spiny, vicious catfish called madtoms. Now the only sizable mill in town made a newish thing, metal “crown” bottle caps, replacing the clumsy old stoppers of wired porcelain with rubber gaskets. The mill accepted thin sheets of enamelled low-carbon steel from Pittsburgh at one end of its loading platform and after a clacking, banging, hissing maze of procedures inside set out on the other end of the platform neat wooden cases, which made a musical metallic sloshing noise when moved, full of crimped discs imprinted with the florid scripted logos of manufacturers of root beer, birch beer, sarsaparilla, and other beverages concocted of carbonated sugar water. The bottling plants were at other sites, some as far distant as Atlanta; there the stacked caps were fed downward and jerkily popped, many per minute, over round glass lips by an automatic vertical hammer to which the tensile strength and elasticity of the crown caps were precisely adjusted against the eventual day when a consumer would lever one free, releasing a fizzy hiss of long-captive carbon dioxide. The plant producing this innocent product, and a few back-alley gun shops and automobile garages, and a single large but porous shed in which the last of a once-flourishing tribe of shipbuilders hammered and
planed away at about one gaff-rigged oyster boat a year, constituted the visible local industry. Otherwise, the citizens of Basingstoke seemed to survive by supplying each other’s needs, and those of the farmers of the land around it, whose peach orchards and chicken houses and produce gardens and cornfields helped feed Wilmington and Philadelphia. The prosperity propelled by the Du Pont Company’s war profits on the sale of explosives and its post-war expansion into all aspects of the chemical industry reached far enough south to create, in Basingstoke, an economic sufficiency. Little changed; few new buildings went up, and those that existed were occupied and maintained. Picket fences were now and then repainted white; the most doddering widow contrived with the help of a neighbor child or colored boy to keep her bushes from overflowing her yard. The stores along Rodney Street—the main street, shaped like an elongated S to fit the river and named after Caesar Rodney, whose midnight ride to vote in Philadelphia for independence was Delaware’s most famous historical episode—sold their groceries and farm tools and clothes and watch fobs and birdseed and ice-cream sodas and patent medicines in steady quantities. It was a far cry from the economic violence of Paterson—its peril and passion, its laboring masses pitted against unseen, implacable proprietors. In Delaware, the situation was so different that T. Coleman du Pont out of his own pocket was building a highway for everybody, right down the middle of the state.