In the Beauty of the Lilies (23 page)

Surprisingly, this lame girl from below the canal stiffened a bit on her stool and pronounced in a voice faintly pugnacious, “Well, it’s not for me to say, but I would think a nice clever good-looking man like you could find something more challenging to your talents than making banana splits that look like the pictures on cardboard.”

Clever? Good-looking? Man? But all he said, stung, was, “Oh, yeah?” He went on, “That may be right, but who says it’s for you to say? I don’t see you doing much, except poking in your old man’s greenhouse dirt.”

As if conjured up, her father in his saggy gray clothes appeared at the entry door between the magazines and the cigar case; she slid from the stool with an offended face and tried to glide, suppressing her limp, out the door, leaving two dimes behind on the green-marble counter.

That was probably that. She didn’t come in for days, but he didn’t see how she could escape seeing him forever, the town being so small, and the greenhouse just two blocks away. Several times he walked home to Willow Street by way of the greenhouse, and failed to see her. As casually as possible he asked his mother at supper, “You know that man Sifford, who bought the Culver greenhouse?”

“Why, no, Teddy dear, I don’t believe I do. My steps don’t often take me up Fishery Way.”

“I thought maybe from church, or something.…”

“He hasn’t shown his face in the Presbyterian church, of that I am sure. What is it you were wanting to know, darling?”

“Oh, nothing.”

There was a pause while she tapped out, without asking, another spoonful of mashed sweet potatoes onto his plate. “Perhaps your Aunt Esther would know what you want to know. When you take her chocolate pudding up, you can ask her.”

Aunt Esther spent much of her day in bed. Doc Hedger couldn’t put a name to her illness, but its stubbornness made his bald head shake to itself as he would come down the stairs. His cheeks wobbled, his watch chain swung across the belly-swag of his dark-blue vest, and the shiny black shoes on his feet seemed to have more creases than anyone else’s shoes. Aunt Esther’s room was getting to smell like the back shelves of the drug store, of camphor and crystallizing old syrups, mixed with a sorrowful musty human scent that was her body. But she had recently installed an upstairs telephone, in the most modern black Bakelite style, and there it sat on her bedside table, next to her boxes of Blaud’s Pills and Eskay’s Neurophosphates for Nerves, like a thick flower, a black daffodil,
its bell to talk into facing her thin yellow head, which was propped up close by on three pillows. “Methodists,” she said. “Those Siffords go over to the Methodist church. He goes alone, never brings his wife. The older boy headed west, and then there’s the unfortunate girl. They’re not what you’d call jolly people.”

He asked her his question, and like his mother she looked sharp and asked him, “Now why would you want to know?”

“No reason. I see her hobbling into the store with her dad, getting her medicine and braces. I guess I feel sorry for her.”

“Don’t feel too sorry. Her dad got a pretty penny for his land, nobody knows just how much.” The invalid thinned her lips and answered his question: “Some say it happened in the womb, but others say the mother is a tippler and dropped her as an infant. The mother is certainly strange, keeping to her yard and staying upstairs when anybody comes to the door. Whatever happened to the girl, it happened a while ago, and I suppose she’s resigned.”

When Emily came into the drug store next, she didn’t look so resigned. She sat up to the counter and without a word of hello said, “In response to your rude remark, about digging in my father’s dirt, our cases are not parallel. You’re a man, I’m a woman. A man has to go out into the world. A woman doesn’t have to do anything, except what men tell her to do.”

A woman. Innocent and unkempt as she looked, she had men and women on the mind. He perceived that one way she had developed to cope with her lame leg was to say provoking things that showed she didn’t care for your opinion. He was not as taken aback as he might have been with somebody else, figuring this was her style. He said, “Being a woman is that bad, huh? Anyway, I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. You poke around in whatever dirt you want.”

“That’s rude, too.”

“Well, Jeez. You’re not so easy to talk to, it turns out.”

This made her smile—a quick dimpling in the softness next to the corner of her mouth, a slight pinching shut of her lids over her eyes with their vivid whites. “Did you think I would be?”

“I guess I did. Foolish me. I must have been dreaming.” Another customer sat down at the counter, taking his attention, and then a third, and by the time he returned to her the tulip dish that had held her pistachio ice cream held nothing but a pale-green stain at the bottom and she was gone. A dime on the counter dismissed him. After a week of her not appearing he wondered if the Siffords were using the other drug store in town, the Liggett’s across the street and one block up toward the tannery ruin. Liggett’s shaved a penny or two off most items but the floorspace was half that Addison’s had, with nothing like the selection of cigars and magazines. Addison’s stocked the newest magazines—
Time
and
Reader’s Digest
and even
The American Mercury
, which was said to be radical and God-mocking. People were always sneakily turning it in the rack so you couldn’t see the cover, but Teddy would turn the copies right side out. He liked Mencken, as the closest thing America had to Shaw and Wells.

One of the days when he got off work at five-thirty he walked home to Willow Street by way of Fishery Way, along the alley past its garages built of concrete blocks imitating real stone with the same rock-rough shape out of a mold, over and over, and its gun shop emitting the sound of grinding and the smell of hot metal. It was fall in Delaware, with a harder drier sparkle on the blue tidal stretches of the Avon and the marsh grass turning the color of an orange tomcat and the trees overhead yielding up chlorophyll. Parched
leaves littered the lawns, which except where watered by a fanatic householder or directly over a septic tank had given up growing, becoming as flat and dry as dusty carpet—a matted look that merged in Ted’s mind with the chirring of cicadas, a song that crept upon the later summer as the sound of peepers crept upon the spring. All the panes of glass in the rusty greenhouse frames had been replaced, and spattered inside with a kind of whitewash, so it was not easy to look in. Hanging across the alley by one of those fake-stone garages, near an oil drum that had been punctured to be somebody’s burning barrel, Teddy studied the flickers of activity behind the spattered panes, and decided that the dark flickers were the father and two hired Negro helpers. The pale pieces of cloth that came and went with surprising nimbleness were Emily. Emily Jeanette. Her name in his mouth, even when he didn’t speak it, was like one of those mentholated cough-drop lozenges that fill your mouth with an almost painful fullness of taste. Yet she was two unfortunate things: she was a cripple and a rube.

He began to worry that Mother and Aunt Esther would be anxious about him. They liked to eat dinner earlier and earlier, and had their radio programs they listened to without fail, beginning with something called dinner music, with featured musicale singers, at six o’clock from WEAF in New York, followed by baseball scores at 6:55, which only he cared about. This year Babe Ruth was obeying doctor’s orders and the Yankees looked like a shoo-in for the pennant, except that Tris Speaker’s Indians were closing in; in the National League, Rogers Hornsby’s Cardinals looked likely to beat out the Cincinnati Reds. Teddy cared but not as much as he used to. As he was about to turn and run home Emily came out of the greenhouse door, which was so low she ducked her head.
Her hair was covered in a checked blue bandana. The oval of her face turned right away to his, as if by some electricity-carrying ether in the air she had sensed his gaze. She took a halt step or two toward him but to spare her walking he swiftly—too swiftly?—trotted across the alley to face her, there on a white path that had been refreshed with new crushed oyster shells. “Who are
you
spying on?” she asked him, with her defensive edge of pugnacity, which he knew she didn’t mean; it was just her way to compensate. In the softening light of a September six o’clock, her face, wrapped in the bandana, was plain, perhaps, but each feature had its electricity—her rounded eyes with their wet gleam, the inquisitively lifted brows, her small nose with her bump at the bridge and pink nostrils smudged where she had wiped one with a dirty hand, and her rather full lips, all their curves nestled into one another with a complacent, challenging precision.

“Nobody,” he lied. “Just walking home at six o’clock, minding my own business.”

“Walking home the long way.”

“Maybe. Maybe I have some business up there”—he gestured toward the end of Fishery Way, which in a quarter-mile gave out in the weeds along the river, where a few tarred shreds of a long-abandoned dock were rotting among goldenrod and blue mussel shells that gulls had broken.

“You want to see the greenhouse?” she asked, seeing him at a loss for further words.

“Oh sure. Sure.”

“Be careful. You step down a step.” Inside, the spattering on the glass smoothed the light to an even gloom, in which Mr. Sifford—his bulk magnified amid so many tiny potted seedlings, under this tilted artificial sky—moved with a silent watchfulness, having given Teddy a brief, suspicious greeting.
One colored boy was lugging flats of potted seedlings around, and the other was painting white the wood of the newly built raised beds, which were crude tables. Everything was painted white that could be. “It reflects light,” Emily explained. “Plants need four things to grow—light, warmth, water, and carbon dioxide.”

“I know about carbon dioxide,” he said, thinking not just of making sodas but of biology class back in Paterson.

“You breathe it out,” Emily said, “and plants breathe it in. That’s why greenhouses like to have people in them.” Her voice quickening, she explained what they were setting out, poinsettias in time for the Christmas trade, and gladiolas and chrysanthemums and long-stemmed roses. She showed him a big icebox where the harvested flowers would wait for their buyers, and the steam pipes running all along the walls and under the tables, fitted to a new coal furnace at the far end. There were fans to move the air around, and levers and chains to open sections of the glass overhead, but he was hardly listening, thinking of the awkward position this unplanned visit placed him in. He had been host of a sort to her at the drug store, and now she was playing hostess to him in her place of business; then it would be his turn to do something. What? Awareness that his mother and Aunt Esther were impatiently waiting supper for him tugged at his stomach; he made several nervous motions toward leaving while she was still talking on, excited and fluent, in her element. The sheltered bright stillness brought to an animated focus the life in her; the heavy fragrant atmosphere within the glass walls dragged at his limbs.

At the end, back outdoors, sorry in a way he had come, he said impulsively, to put an end to the encounter, “You ever go to the movies?”

Her satiny face, with its touch of a double chin, took on a tension, as of an oval raindrop about to break and run. He felt he was frightening her. Her voice had turned careful and slow. “Why, no, I don’t, not often,” she said. “Father doesn’t believe in such things. We’re Methodists, did you know that? But once years ago when we were visiting over in Cambridge, Maryland, a girl cousin and I peeked into this dark lobby and could see people doing things on the screen until an usher came and told us to pay up or get out.” She trailed off and, Teddy failing to speak up in the opportunity she had given him, went on more brightly, “But I
can
, now. Our branch of Methodism has lifted the ban on theatre-going and dancing—going with the times, I suppose. Now it’s just smoking and cardplaying and of course drinking we can’t do.” She added, when he again failed to speak, “But, then, it’s all rather silly, isn’t it? All these prohibitions old people think up. I think people should be free to do what they want unless it’s hurting someone else.”

He cleared his stuck throat and said, “Well, let me look and see what’s coming to the Roxie the next couple of weeks.” And he discovered himself, with a little glide into the receptive, glowing presence opposite him, able to tease: “Some of these foreign pictures are pretty strong stuff, we wouldn’t want anything shocking for a nice Methodist girl.”

He ran home to Willow Street; his mother said, “My goodness, child, where have you been? The pork chops are so overdone it will be like chewing shoe leather, and the mashed potatoes are cold as mud.”

“Sorry—he kept me a little late.”

“Well, that is strange, because your Aunt Esther telephoned the drug store and Charlie Wainwright said you had left an hour ago.”

“Say, don’t I get any freedom around here? Holy smokes, I’m twenty-three years old.”

“Don’t tell me, dear, I was there the day you were born. You can be any age and it doesn’t absolve you from common courtesy to those you live with. Now, you let us know henceforth if you’re going to be delayed by these mysterious person or persons.”

“It wasn’t persons, it’s just a—”

“Don’t tell me,” she said, rather girlishly, clapping her hands over her ears so a wooden serving spoon between her fingers became a tall horn sticking out of one side of her head. “You said it, you’re twenty-three, Heaven forbid your mother be guilty of intruding! Now you sit down and chew slowly while I bolt my food in five minutes to catch what’s left of this lovely contralto, Roxanna Erb. I’ve already served your aunt in her room, up and down the stairs. And to think I went to the trouble to make your favorite, peach pie all crusty with sugar on top. You’ll have to do without your baseball scores.”

As he hurriedly sat down to the meal, its heavy sweet smell rose around him possessively; but compared to the spicier, more uniform fragrance of the greenhouse, it seemed faintly disgusting—dead cooked plants as opposed to plants living and growing.