The handsome sailor, p.13
The Handsome Sailor, page 13
“I must apologize,” he says. “I have left you standing. Please take my chair.”
She has misunderstood him. Before he can manage to stand up and give her the table, she has sat down and joined him at it. Herman cannot verbalize a response to this; he merely waves her into the seat she is already occupying.
“Unless you disapprove?” she now says. So perhaps she has not misunderstood him.
“I prefer to believe I am the target of disapproval—never the source, mademoiselle.”
She sighs. “I should not have spoken. I am always told I am too direct, and I am always apologizing for it.”
“No need to apologize here. I do not mind directness.”
“Still, I am sure you find it unusual.”
“I do not mind that, either. Indeed, I have found almost everything of value in this life to be unusual.”
Her smile widens less tentatively, under that same winning tilt of the head, and Herman smiles back. But it may be that their talk is ended. The exchange has flowed steadily and easily; nothing about it is more remarkable than that, once beyond the initial provenance of its taking shape at all. But now they must undertake a more respectable silence.
Herman sips coffee and abides the silence, without endorsing it. He liked the directness better. He cannot help but like her anomalous presence; nothing has tickled him so in years. But what can her presence mean? It is as if she wandered in through the wrong door, or wandered off a nearby stage set.
It could be the case. The explanation. Theatre women are so much freer in the world, and she could easily be in the theatre. Why not be direct, and ask her? Or at least politely introduce himself, and pursue the story piecemeal. So this he does, with the added proviso that she may prefer the silence.
“Sometimes I do,” she says, pressing her brown hair back under her hat on one side. “I am Mrs. Andrew Stevenson, born Cora Jackson.”
Name, plus maiden name. A deal of information to grant a strange man on an unfashionable backstreet. Herman does in fact find this unusual—not that he disapproves—and he covers his surprise with humor, always his first line of diversion.
“You were Jack’s son and he, your husband, was Steven’s. So your son is Steven’s son, once removed.”
“You are ready with a joke, for someone usually so solemn of expression. But the boy you saw is not my son—”
Direct indeed. Apparently this woman will say anything. Despite an air of perfect respectability, she places no limits upon her utterance.
And she makes no bones. Herman is plainly presumed to have noticed her on the earlier occasions and presumed to have noticed the boy, whereas he had been speaking only in jest, and generically, about sons, wishing to be altogether unpresumptuous. No flim-flam-flummery from this one!
“—he is my nephew,” she elaborates, without hesitation. “My sister’s son, Patrick.”
“A handsome boy,” says Herman, though he cannot recall the boy’s appearance. “You are not afraid to bring him here?”
“Afraid?”
“I do not mind it, understand. I very well like it, as a matter of fact. But I do suppose that most ladies would be afraid, yes.”
She shrugs. “I have no fear of thieves, since I have no money. And no fear of murder in broad daylight, when even the stevedores appear more or less sober.”
“And no fear for Mr. Stevenson’s peace of mind, when you roam forth into raffish ports of call? Not that I mind it, understand.”
“You very well like it, as a matter of fact.”
“You are a well-soldered ship, ain’t you, Mrs. Stevenson!”
Another shrug, and a little smile. What does the little smile mean? That her directness (and now her satirical streak) come to her so naturally that they are beyond conventional judgment, for better or worse? But there is more.
“My late husband Andrew was never averse to my breathing God’s air. So I breathe it conscience free.”
“And duty free as well!” Herman bursts out. “We at the Port of New York can surely see to that. We shall pass along the air to you, without the ad valorem.”
Can he call a halt to this remarkable conversation? His bumper is still half full—he has been so busy talking—but he stands. The reference to the District has alerted him to the time. Even the reprobates have gone back to their stations.
“I believe with you, Mrs. Stevenson—believe it strongly at this moment—and I have said so many times, that men are jailors of themselves. And women, of course, even moreso.”
“I hope you do not think ill of me. I know that I am too outspoken.”
“Au contraire, I guarantee you. But my fish-eyed friends, who generally make a religion of tardiness, have already gone back to work. You will be all right here on your own?”
“Thank you, yes.”
“Then I bequeath the table,” he bows, lifting a pantomime hat with his right hand, just enough flustered not to know that his actual hat is in his left hand at the moment. “But do not be trusting of every man,” he cautions. “Only the vintaged few.”
This was a most amusing encounter, and not one pin-shrimp less so for all Will Barclay’s teasing. Herman is perfectly aware of his reputation. He knows what they think, though they may not say it. And he knows what they say, though he may not hear it.
It is a mixed reputation, in fact. On the credit side, he is accounted a good enough fellow: witty, sturdy, and no teetotaller. On the debit side, however, he does tend to be capable, punctual, and absurdly incorrupt. It is only because he imposes none of these three weaknesses on his colleagues (and will never rat them out) that Herman survives their critical gaze.
Mister Do Right. That was his undivulged nickname at the Gansevoort District, bestowed by that fine young serpent Highgas. He feigned ignorance of the joke until the very day of his transfer uptown. “Be sure and watch your back now, Mister Do Wrong,” he bade farewell to Highgas, and watched the fellow’s face drop to the floor and bounce three times.
“What was she after, Herman?” says Beasley Crouch, for by now the whole battalion has come in for a piece. “That is the question: what’s she want?”
“Love and money, like them all,” says Parkinson. The youngest man in the office at twenty-four, he is perfectly comfortable airing out his cynical surmises.
“If that’s the case, then what’s she want with Herman!”
“Ignore these chowderheads,” says Barclay, though he is the one who has brought them back the story. “But go careful. She does hang about like a buzzard, this one. I’ve seen her more than once.”
“Fear not, William. I am old, but not yet carrion.”
This edgy ribbing, kept within bounds, only adds to the day’s amusement. It provides some comic relief from the heat, and there is something youthful in it today that makes Herman feel as far from carrion as can be.
Later on, when the hearties of the Custom House scatter south and west, Herman’s thoughts return to the widow. Was she in the theatre? He had forgotten to ask. Might she have taken some drink? That might account for it, too—a wide flask of pisco to put her poor widowed head in a loose consoling spin. Who can say she won’t reappear on Fenton’s battered bricks and stand off sober, with her nostrils in the wind like a proud thoroughbred racehorse?
What you must always remember to expect of life, Herman reminds himself over a glass on Madison Square, is the unexpected. He shares this pearl with Robert, who is on duty at Aiken’s Garden at this hour. Like all New York waiters, Robert has a quick firm grasp. “So do you think we will awake to frost on the windows?” he grins, as he sets down a second glass.
“Three feet of snow upon your stoop, Robert—unless, of course, you expect it.”
The house is worse than empty. Nothing wrong with empty. But to help him out in her absence, Lizzie has engaged a silent old woman to “straighten up” twice a week.
What this translates to, in practice, is everything lost, misplaced, or casually tossed out with the trash. The matches are hidden somewhere, the morning newspaper (half read) has been used to wash the windows, and the brandy is fully decanted—for cleaning fluid, no doubt! This inexhaustible agent of disorder even hides the coffee beans. But where? A nice month-long treasure hunt she makes us, in all meridians.
Upstairs, the desk! The harridan has had particular instructions not to lay a hand, not to lay a strip of breath on it. Do we conclude the desk was wracked by high winds, which blew these papers from under the paperweight? Blew a dozen pagemarked volumes back onto the shelves, in random order? The old dear is thorough, by God.
Dear Lizzie, in her wisdom. Here I am, over-warm and overworked, and ever over-tilted toward despond in her iconography, and so she makes me this little game. You never smile, she says. She will say it when I’m jolly as a beachcomber in his cups, and smiling Mississippi-wide. I can place on display more teeth than you find in a cannibal’s necklace, and still she will find me sombre.
But wait, so did Mrs. Stevenson (née Jackson) say it this morning at the Best & Freshest. You are a joker, she said, for someone more generally sombre. Or solemn. Sombre or solemn? Well, they are only a little different. Hark ye, though, that she makes a “generally” (or was it a “usually”?) upon our first acquaintance. She has got me out in cameo, with caption and description.
Is my smile invisible at home and abroad? I launch it yet it does not sail? Or perhaps the case is more akin to the problem of portrait photography, that odd confrontation with oneself wherein appears the visage of a stranger grimacing in pain, two fists whiteknuckled on the antimacassar. And where went the gay and frolicsome fellow who so recently sat to make his charmful pose?
Can it be she? Yes, without a doubt it is she; and why should it not be? Mrs. Stevenson raking through a crate of onions on 72nd Street, at First Avenue. (Gleaming in coruscant skins—incandescent in their bins . . .) Herman stops and observes her quest for the perfect specimen.
The costermonger observes her too. Suspiciously? No, familiarly, for it seems they are old friends, on a names basis. He is quick to congratulate her now on her prizewinning bulb. It is the very one to have, and surely she will also want some Maine potatoes, down on the morning train from Aroostook County, or a quart of his new strawberries?
Mrs. Stevenson seems content with the onion. It stands alone, it is supreme. “Strawberries tomorrow,” she says, with a sudden unguarded smile, as she accepts her penny change. Her smile is pretty and so is she; prettier by far from a distance. Graceful and slim in a forest green dress, a small black bonnet with forest green trim. Her hair is the color of tung-rubbed oak and her cheeks, brightened by the heat, set off the hazel eyes. She must be a bright picture indeed if Herman, with his eyesight, can take her in detail from forty feet.
Questions occur to him, as she turns, her small purse and string bag in hand. Has he passed her in the street a dozen times (as would now seem likely) but never noticed her in her anonymity? Or might their vectors be intersecting for the very first time, making this an occasion of fate, or at least benign coincidence?
What to do, is the real question. Should he race to catch up with her and create an accidental hello, or should he turn away, to avoid an awkward moment? But she has seen him. He fiddles with his tobacco pouch, while quickly considering the social parameters. She cannot hail and wave—not even Mrs. Stevenson will take that liberty—so the burden of acknowledgement falls to Herman.
He offers an exaggerated bow, his reflexive jest on polite formalities, in keeping with their banter. And now she is free to wave, and fix her head briefly to that characteristic angle. Such a charming gesture, if indefinably so. Something is achieved by it that could never be contrived.
The impasse has been managed. Mrs. Stevenson starts across the avenue and Herman resumes his southerly course. (Aiken’s for sure, he is thinking now.)
When they spoke at length, the week before last, it had been such a nice diversion that Herman had revisited it more than once in his aftermusings. Then Sam Shaw had passed through town, and Abe and Kate Lansing came down for two dinners, and the widow’s gay soprano voice receded, her striking face faded a little from his recollection.
This time, though, on the strength of a brief and speechless encounter, he has her firmly imprinted. Perhaps it was the green dress in concert with the light brown hair; perhaps it was distance that enhanced the image. But she is ineradicable now, her features burned onto the innermost film.
In the District, and at Fenton’s, he has taken to looking for her. Not in any significant way; not with any purpose in mind. But since the day they waved hello, he has consciously allowed for the possibility they might wave (or talk) again.
Put it another way. When the unexpected Mrs. Stevenson does appear at Fenton’s Best & Freshest several days later, she is not so unexpected. Herman heads straight for her table, and mimics his 72nd Street salaam.
“Once more you materialize, from the heavens.”
“Only from 69th Street, I am afraid.”
“If you do not find it overly direct, I will apply for that empty chair—being fully vintaged as I am, and harmless.”
“Please.” She watches him settle in before delivering a line she has rehearsed: “I should confess that I know who you are.”
“Even as I know who you are, recalling our introductions of some weeks past.”
“I meant that I recognized your name. I am a reader.”
“I have seen you be a reader,” he says. “It was a small volume—pale cow, with a red and white diamondback spine. Not Tennyson’s poems, by any chance?”
“By no chance,” she laughs.
“Oh? Do you dislike Tennyson?”
“Only his poems. Tennyson himself I have never met. But how interesting that you notice these details, while appearing to be so oblivious.”
“I do notice books,” he says, after a short pause. He is getting used to her, and to her candor. “Some say it is a disease I have. Now you, Mrs. Stevenson, are such a noticer of things that it seems you have noticed me not noticing them.”
“Appearing not to notice, is what I said. That is the interesting part of it.”
One summer evening on the Square, years ago, Herman chanced to take a bench facing two ladies and at once a miraculous freshet of talk had opened. At first he had them for nuns—or witches, in their black cloaks and cowls—but they proved a pair of cheery spinsters, and under no vow of silence. The talk went effortlessly back and forth for two jolly hours that night; there was a compatibility at conversation among them. Such natural connections do occur, and another such has apparently occurred between Herman and Mrs. Stevenson. But the spinsters came two by two to a public square, not solo to the rugged heights.
“Your friends—”
“Colleagues,” he says.
“Your colleagues, then. They are also skillful at pretending not to notice. But I imagine they make judgments.”
“They are hardly worth your worry, mademoiselle.”
“My interest, though. I wonder, do they say I am—”
“What?”
“You know . . .”
“I assure you, they do not. Even my addled colleagues can observe that you are educated.”
“No more so than thousands of idle women, who have no way to earn a dollar. Were it not for my dear sister, and her husband Jack, I would be very hard pressed and quite alone in the world.”
“Your being alone is a tragic accident. But I do congratulate you on any idleness you may have procured. To be at leisure is to be free.”
“I am not so much at leisure, or idle, as I am unpaid. Unpaid in dollars, I should say, since I am amply rewarded. I help with my sister’s household, and I have helped Jack with his figures at the shop. I have also given some lessons.”
“Sounds well worth a dollar to me. Not penmanship lessons, by chance?”
“Sums,” she shrugs. “I am good with numbers.”
“I have done a round of penmanship lessons, with a tutor considerably less extroverted than yourself. Until he gave me his bill, I thought the man might be altogether mute.”
“Then how does he impart the lessons?”
“By example, and through repetition. You do it wrong, he rips it from your hand and does it right—then you try again. And the page goes back and forth between us until my fists are ink. Not his, however. They remain as white as hotel linen. But oh my tails and loops, Mrs. Stevenson, the man will press his point on you by suppertime.”
“It is impressive that you sign on for lessons. All of your accomplishments aside, you are older than most of those who go to school.”
“Oh, I am older than most of those who are dead.”
“You seem so young. So playful when you are not so solemn.”
“That is nice to say. It may be that you bring out the youthful side of a person, Mrs. Stevenson. Truly, you leave little room for any other sides.”
She laughs, a quiet inward laughter, and reaches for her coffee cup, momentarily arresting the rush of their repartee. Their sallies have such a breathless quality that it seems any slight cessation might risk the continuum. But no, as Herman now unfurls what is for him a virtual stump speech, not another mere sally:
“Do you know, Mrs. Stevenson, I have come to Fenton’s Best & Freshest most every working day for five years. Sometimes I sit with my infamous colleagues and sometimes I sit alone—wearing a face that I gather must appear solemn, and neglecting to notice all movement and color around me—and think the least utilitarian thoughts I can manage, I assure you, while sipping my best and freshest. And now you come along to tell me that this behavior has met with your approval. I can only say, by way of closing out this overwinded description of improbability, that I am left speechless.”
“All evidence to the contrary!”
Herman can only bow once more: bested, and happily so. “You are one of a kind, mademoiselle.”
