“What town was it?”
Aldine didn’t want to say, but Glynis would know if she made up a town.
“Dorland,” she said.
“That how you met Ansel?” she asked. She looked up from the pages of her Hollywood magazine, and Aldine pressed her palms against the radiator. She nodded.
Glynis studied a gauzy photo and turned the page. “I guess you were living with his family.”
Aldine nodded again, and Glynis kept looking at her. Aldine’s fingers were red at the tips, and she curled them into her palms.
“You ought to write your sister,” Glynis said.
“Yes”—Aldine stubbed out her cigarette on a cracked saucer—“I ought.” She closed the window and left the radiator for the coolness of her bed. She turned her face to the pink plaster wall and pulled up the covers. She would write Leenie just as soon as she was sure she wasn’t pregnant. She felt an approaching freight train before she heard it. From the east, heading west. She’d grown to like the trains passing slowly and heavily through the night, liked to think where they might carry her. Finally this one was gone and the room was still lit.
“Are you going to moon over Clark Gable all night then?” she asked Glynis, “or can we get to sleep now?”
“Clark Gable is okay,” Glynis said. She’d had her story from Aldine and evidently didn’t like it. Her voice was sullen.
“Except Mr. Clark Gable is Catholic,” Aldine said—she didn’t know why—and she soon wished she hadn’t.
“He’s not,” Glynis said. And then, lower but not so low that Aldine couldn’t hear it: “And he’s not a family man, either.”
54
Initially Charlotte didn’t think much about the man. He was a little mysterious, that was all—a tall, brown-headed figure (all bone and tanned skin, like a man from the Far East) wearing funny metal-rimmed spectacles. He owned the packinghouse and was a town big shot of some sort and sometimes came Sunday afternoons to stand under a tree and discuss who knew what with Uncle Hurd before departing in his black Packard.
After dinner on one such Sunday, Charlotte was at the dining room table laying out pattern pieces for a new dress. Charlotte liked every part of sewing: unfolding the tissue paper and smoothing it out over the fabric, the heavy snip of the scissors as she cut through layers, the gnawing sound the Singer made as she stitched one strange geometric shape to another, the burned-soap smell of the iron as she pressed the seams open. The more complicated the pattern was, the better she liked it: she had made lined jackets, covered buttons, handkerchief hems, and pleated sleeves. The dress she was doing now would have a huge collar that lay open to display not one but six inset buttonholes. She was pinning the tissue to pink pongee when she heard Artemis barking, then someone opening the screen door. That was when the man stepped in and removed his hat from his brown head.
“This is my niece Charlotte,” Ida said, sweeping in behind him, her big arms draped with pearl bracelets and a gold chain that held, in each link, a different charm shaped like the birds of California. “Just arrived from Kansas. Charlotte, this is Mr. McNamara, who owns the packinghouse.”
Charlotte nodded. Mr. McNamara held his hat in his hands, and she noticed that his hands, like the rest of him, were long and bony. There was something distinctive about him, something more than his double-breasted suit and red tie, which she was almost certain was silk. It had to do with the way he regarded her, but in what way he regarded her, she wasn’t exactly sure.
“That’s a striking color,” he said, touching the thin, soft fabric on the table in a way unexpected from a man. He looked over the complex arrangement of material, pins, and pongee; then he unhinged his gold spectacles from his face, took out a soft cloth, and began to clean the lenses. “You don’t by chance have a teaching certificate, do you?”
Ida said, “Mr. McNamara’s on the school board. President, in fact.”
Mr. McNamara held his spectacles up to the light to inspect the lenses he’d just cleaned. The lenses and their thin frames were shaped like octagons, which was a new one for Charlotte.
“I’m afraid not,” she said. “I was planning to go to normal school in Topeka, but things didn’t work out.”
He nodded, tucked away his cleaning cloth, and carefully hooked his spectacles behind his ears. “And is your sister doing better here?”
Charlotte wondered how he knew about her sister. “Yes,” she said. “A little better, anyway.”
She didn’t know what else to say, and she was a little alarmed when Ida said he should sit down while she cut him a piece of pie. She hoped he would go out into the living room, or maybe even follow Ida into the kitchen, but he simply sat down on one of the high-backed chairs Ida kept on either side of the buffet and said, “The domestic arts are becoming the lost arts. Or so I fear. Did you learn to sew at school?”
“No,” she said. “At school we didn’t do any home stuff. I liked mythology. We had a sort of appreciation club for it.”
“A mythology appreciation club?”
There was something in his voice, amusement or disbelief, she wasn’t sure which. “Yes,” she said. “That’s what it was. We started with six members but it didn’t take us long to boil down to three.”
She meant this as funny, and he smiled, and fell silent.
“We had a photography club, too,” she said. “We had a darkroom at the school and everything.” She realized with irritation that she’d lost track of where she was on the pattern.
“So you have a camera?”
“Sort of. My grandfather gave one to my mother, who didn’t like it, so I guess I inherited it.”
“What kind?”
“Zeiss Ikon box camera,” she said and he let out a low whistle of respect and said, “That cost your grandpa a pretty penny.”
Charlotte felt a strange flush of pride. She decided not to mention that she’d stopped taking pictures because they couldn’t afford the chemicals for developing.
He stroked the brim of his felt hat and was looking at her in that way again, the way she not only didn’t understand, but wasn’t even sure whether she disliked or liked. “Have you seen our high school?” he asked.
“Yes,” Charlotte said, not looking up. “Uncle Hurd showed us all around. It’s swell.” She slipped a pin through the tissue. She was sorry to have said swell to the president of the school board or whatever he was.