Red Room Where the Writers Are

 Allow me to tempt you away from Halloween candy and the looming specter of NaNoWriMo to relax with an excerpt from my novel HIGHWAY TO OBLIVION.  I promise an easy read, nothing painful, nothing controversial.  THE PLAN ---                                                

Lily Buchanan had grown up in a little nameless town “in the South.”  Whenever pressed, she would bat her eyes and insist, “We’d go into Atlanta all the time.”  In fact, any city was a goodly clip and Clay and Alicia Buchanan, like much of America, lacked private transportation during the Depression, those latter years when Lily came of age.  She was a petite beauty, an only child spoiled beyond measure and while beauty and its recognition often creates a sense of personal security resulting in generosity towards others less fortunate, in Lily’s case no amount of attention was ever enough.  No dress had enough lace.  No gem enough sparkle.  No leather enough luster.  Her pillows were lumpy, her mashed potatoes lumpier still.  She out-Scarletted that famous heroine, delighting in the comparison.  Well into later life her speech patterns owed a great debt to the cadence of Vivian Leigh’s  “Well, fiddle-de-dee.”  Her always-glossy lips perfected their petulant pout at an early age and even as an elderly lady her special secret shade of lipstick was imported directly from New York City.  She had never washed her own hair.  It was her mother who brushed it the requisite hundred strokes and Auntie Mabrey “down the road” washed it, cut it, styled it and generally fussed over it because, Lily said, “The coloreds have such a lovely skill with hair.”  She wasn’t racist.  She treated everyone like servants regardless of color or station and always would.

Things moved slower in the south and the Depression was no exception.  When Lily blossomed right before the war, at graduation the best she could manage was a ho-hum job as a factory payroll clerk, barely enough to keep her in the size two frocks selected especially for her by the elder Mr. Gabriel of Gabriel Bros Fine Fashions, reported to be the most exclusive women’s shop in The County.  Mr. Gabriel was a gay and a happy couturier, bustling over her like the fairy godmother in Cinderella, tweaking a seam here, lifting a hem there.  Lily had never so much as sewn a button and might have suffered a chipped nail had she tried.

Despite her beauty Lily lacked for suitors.  Local lads escorted her to all the dances and parties, but none were sufficiently worthy to be seriously considered.  Years came and went and her wardrobe and her beauty and her impatience increased but her opportunities lessened.  As with Scarlett before her, all her escorts had marched off to war and all the men left behind were either old or infirm in some way.  Lily could never tolerate the infirm.  Or the old.  Or, dear God, the ugly.

Alicia made room for boarders and cooked ten-cent meals for transients and any working men left in the area, and Clay earned a few dollars tinkering on The County’s road equipment to supplement the meager produce from his wife’s hardscrabble garden.  Alicia was a magician at stretching simple food staples into bleak but satisfying meals.  Lily ate sparingly of this peasant food and her mother saved the leanest tidbits and the freshest greens for her beloved daughter, and brewed her tempting pitchers of iced tea presented in her own special crystal goblet.  Alicia pumped every drop of water from the well herself and her work-worn hands chipped the ice from the block that was delivered weekly and kept insulated in sawdust.  Lily did so hate to sweat.  Dress shields were such a bother to come by in wartime.

                                                                       *

Hank Fredericks was what used to be referred to as a “man’s man.”  Stood six feet four when he hit fourteen.  Never slumped in his life.  Hunted and fished and told a good story with the best of ‘em,  worked with his hands and was embarrassed to blushing by anything remotely feminine.  Eight years in a one-room schoolhouse in Lubec Maine passed for education until he joined his father and older brother on their lobster boat, heading out every day before dawn and building traps and mending hoods until their fingers were numb late into the evening.  Sunday was the Lord’s Day and the boats remained in the harbor and it was then that young Hank took solitary walks with his dog and dreamed of seeing a world beyond the small fishing village where the sun first rose on America.

When Hank was seventeen, he suffered a strong case of the flu and remained ashore while the two other Fredericks men went out into that rising sun.  They never returned, and although the whole village took to the sea to search for their own, no trace was ever found.  Hank rowed the dory out daily for a month, calling forlornly to an empty horizon.

Sister Janey found work on Campobello Island, serving as a maid for the Roosevelts and sending as much of her pay as she could across the bay to her mother and younger brother.  Janey was fiercely tall and auburn-haired and striking in her crisp uniform and had secrets and dreams of her own that drowned with her family.  Hank never forgave himself for surviving and became devoted to the care of his grief-stricken mother.  No job was too small to bring in a few cents.  He fished from the remaining dory, he dug clams, he cut wood, but in Lubec before The War, money was a rare commodity and if a body couldn’t afford it, a body didn’t need it.

After that fateful day of December Seventh 1941, young Hank Fredericks left the only home he had ever known, put his seafaring skills to the ultimate test, and joined the Navy to sail half a world away where the rising sun adorned the enemy’s flag.  Meanwhile, Janey had married a gardener from the grand estate, who shortly became one of the first Marine casualties in the Pacific.  There was a small death benefit and Janey took that, along with the posthumous Purple Heart and her maid’s uniform and went back to the little shingled house on the bluff to care for her mother and wait.

It was a time of waiting.

                                                                       *

Lily had never been good at waiting.  The USO needed hostesses to chat and dance with the troops, to give them some respite from what they had seen or were fated soon to experience.  Charm was Lily’s middle name and she poured on the honey until the young recruits left for war dreaming not of the round-faced good-natured farm girls they had left behind, but of the gorgeous Southern belle who made them feel that each one was her chosen beau.  It was a gift, enriched by constant practice and honed to Olympian proportions.  It wasn’t sex or mere flirtatiousness, but the skill of a true courtesan that sent these young men off to battle with a sense of purpose for God, Country and Lily.  Finally she commanded the attention she had always craved.  She had pledged her vocation as surely as any nun.  Despite herself, she developed a reserved compassion for the misery of those who adored her and shed any number of carefully-controlled Maybellined tears as she visited the wounded.  She saw herself as a helpful angel, gracefully flitting from bed to bed.  A shallow conceit, yet the effect on the men was genuine.

She was in such demand locally --- surely her talents would serve a wider audience in a big city.  Where better than New York, the source of much of her wardrobe and where she might meet (please God) ultimately a husband, perhaps a businessman to treasure her and keep her away from the hot, dusty County where she had bravely suffered all her life.

Lily ended up under the Third Avenue Ell, sharing an apartment and subsequent adventures with a revolving-door selection of young women --- widows, war brides, Broadway hopefuls, other hostesses, and a few whose professions remained a mystery.  She managed to charm some of them into doing her hair, her mending, her share of the chores, but often she was forced into the bitter reality that if she didn’t do it herself, it would stay undone.  Such trials were forgotten as her silver lame heels fox-trotted their way into hearts and memories, a beautiful young woman who glowed in the most glamorous city ever.  She laughed, she flirted, she tossed her lustrous hair, pouted her Revlon lips and was a caricature of Southern charm and grace.  She was never more herself, and never would be so much so again.

                                                                       *

The routine of the Navy agreed with Hank Fredericks.  Machinist’s Mate First Class.  His experience won the respect of the other men, many landlocked teenagers from the Midwest, most of whom had never been on any boat outside an amusement park.  Life on the minesweeper was relatively calm and she saw action largely from afar, generating a swath of safety in the sea lanes for the destroyers and hospital ships and then pushing on.  Yet on the sea there was danger all around and it was Hank who dove into the waters of the Straits of Iowa Jima to rescue a young clown who had tumbled overboard.  The boy was retrieved unharmed and sheepish from his carelessness.  Hank rode the bosun’s chair up from the water until the cable snapped, slamming him against the side of the ship.  Cervical damage permanently stiffened his neck, thereafter creating the impression he was even taller when he walked with his head canted up.  People grew to think he was aloof.

In later years he and his daughter would huddle next to the little black and white RCA and watch Victory At Sea and occasionally there would be a glimpse of the 401.  “Is that it, Dad?  That’s it, isn’t it.  The old 401.  What a boat!”  The child was reverent in her appreciation;  however the half-hour stints of Victory At Sea were the extent of Hank’s war remembrances.  His uniform was forever in mothballs.  He never joined the American Legion or the VFW.  After the war, Hank Fredericks never set foot on a boat of any kind again.

On V-J Day he found himself in New York City along with thousands of other returning servicemen.  He had no idea what his future would hold.  He only wanted to get back to Maine.

                                                                       *

August made Manhattan almost as hot and humid as her home in the South and Lily was in a bad humor.  The war was over, and the screaming people in the streets paid no attention to her once carefully-starched but now wilted blue pique sundress and even less to her new I Miller slingbacks that matched to perfection.  Only another pretty girl among the celebrating hordes.  Frankly, she had nothing personal to celebrate.  No returning hubby or fiancé.  Her job would be ending soon and she had no clue where to turn next.  She was relieved that no more boys would be coming home in flag-draped coffins and she had shared enough widows’ tears to last a lifetime.  Grudgingly she surrendered to the crowd and the day and followed along to Times Square.

There were bands and streamers and flags and everywhere men in uniform.  Happy men.  Crazed men.  Glad to be alive.  Thankful to be freed from killing.  Old people did the Charleston and young people jitterbugged their hearts out.  Strangers hugged and strangers kissed and in nine months proofs of other activities would surface.  Lily laughed in spite of what the humidity had done to her hair and joined a conga-line of dancers.  Then, waves of more and more people pressed in and she was literally swept aloft, her light body hustled along by the crowd.  Suddenly it was frightening, and no matter how much she screamed, the mob screamed louder.  She beat her little fists on the chest of one Marine who merely picked her up, swung her around, planted a sloppy kiss on her nose, and she was again a rag doll propelled by a force much larger than herself.  Tears streamed rivulets through the street dust on her face.  Her arms flailed wildly and she was afraid if she fell, she would surely be trampled.  She was lifted again, but this time secure arms scooped her up and carried her away from the crowd.  “Let’s get you to where you can set a spell.”

Lily Buchanan found herself perched on an upturned trash can in the alcove of the Horn & Hardart entrance at Forty-First and Broadway, craning her neck up at the tall form of Hank Fredericks, silhouetted by the glare outside.  He was sooo tall.  Those shoulders seemed to block the sun.  And he wasn’t bending down to her, but rather seemed to cant his head even farther back.  Lily was tiny and men always bent down to her rather than pulling away and, despite herself, she was intrigued.

“You look plumb tuckered out.  Did you lose someone?”  Hank noted the tearstains and the nervousness and felt sorry for this pretty little girl who had probably received bad news about her sweetheart.

Lily looked down at her dangling feet and started to sob anew.  “My shoes.  I’ve lost my shoes.  I….I….I just don’t know….”  She turned a pitiful, helpless, but beautiful face up to his and he felt his heart lurch, just like in the songs.

“Well, I just guess I’ll have to carry you around until we find you some new ones.”

                                                                    

      They were married four days later.

                                                                       *

After Hank went off to war, his mother and sister scraped by as well as they could for awhile in Lubec, but when Janey inherited her great aunt’s farm, they never hesitated, boarded up the little shingled house, loaded the most treasured family possessions into a borrowed Chevy pickup, and headed west to Kennebec County.  Although the farmhouse itself sorely needed attention, the land remained fertile and hard work soon produced enough vegetables and eggs to sustain the two women with a little left over to sell at Mason’s General Store where Janey earned a few dollars more sweeping up at night. 

She was still striking, but the years of labor and deprivation had permeated to her very core.  Her hands were so weathered and work-weary that they looked like feet, flattened and calloused and gnarled.  No manicures here.  No Revlon-polished nails.  Their skill and their strength were their eloquence.  Her auburn hair was prematurely streaked with gray.  She seldom smiled and rather than giving her face a melancholy expression that might have provoked sympathy, her sadness had translated into a hard mask that sent children to hide behind their mothers’ skirts and won her no friends.  She and her mother kept to the land and she began painting the wildflowers in the fields and the antique roses that twined around the mossy stonewalls.  Her watercolors were truly inspired, rivaling the delicate details of Redoute and the finest botanicals.  Her primal intensity missed nothing and all her disappointed passion, denied a human outlet, became focused on form and color.  Janey never displayed her work, not even to cheer up the faded walls of her own sparse room.  She kept her paintings in a trunk in the attic.  When that one was full, she started filling another.

Lily Buchanan Fredericks recognized her fatal error the minute she spied the house.  It reeked of genteel poverty, a condition to which she was no stranger.  Her tall new husband with his aristocratic aloof bearing had whisked her away not to an elegant estate, not to a northern Tara, merely to a Maine white-washed clapboard farmhouse surrounded by evergreens and fields.  The climbing roses and the window boxes jammed with bright petunias hid numerous cracked panes and the roof was covered with obvious and mismatched patches.  Not at all the life she had signed on for. 

“It’s just like I remembered it, honey.  My auntie’s old farm.  My, my, what a place!  Isn’t it swell?”  Hank puffed up with the double pride of reuniting with his beloved family home and sharing it with his pretty new bride.

      “Swell,” came the solemn, lackluster answer from Lily.

Mother Fredericks’ trembling hands hugged loving flour-prints across Hank’s navy blue wool shoulders and Janey turned her head to hide her tears of relief, gathering up the newlyweds’ luggage with a choked “ ‘lo.”  For the briefest of moments Lily was ignored as what remained of her husband’s family claimed him once again as their own.  This would never do, so Lily cleared her throat (in the most ladylike way possible, of course) and they finally noticed her and stepped back in righteous awe of her chic Best & Co ecru traveling suit that had New York City written all over it.  Lily smiled in recognition at the accustomed attention.  This might be workable after all.

 “Oh, Hank!  She’s the most delicate and precious little thing ever!”  Those same flour-dusted hands stopped short of embracing her new daughter-in-law.  Ah, the lessons in “the proper treatment of Lily” had begun!  “Darling, you must be some parched after your long trip.  Can I fetch you some tea?  How about a nibble?  Draw you a bath?”  Both country women waited on her from that first day as the servants she made them, spoiling her as much as Hank did, making the situation at least temporarily tolerable, but Lily already was forming more ambitious plans for their future.

Hank quickly found a job as a machinist at the paper mill in Augusta, commuting into town for double shifts, sharing rides with Vern Peaslee from down the road, bucking along in a rusty Buick held together with baling wire and a prayer.  At the end of the day, after their meager harvest was finally in, he devoted long hours to the neglected house and once the weather turned cold, he spent every spare moment repairing furniture in the ramshackle barn.  Hank found peace working with his hands.  Often until it was time to leave for the mill, alone in the lamplight with barely enough of a fire in an old oil barrel to keep from freezing, he would glue and sand and shellac those pieces long abandoned by his ancestors.  Today, his restorations would provoke horror on Antiques Roadshow, but in the forties, people were more practical and wanted all that old grungy finish taken right off so that the piece looked new and prosperous and was easy to keep clean.  He turned a new leg for a Hepplewhite drop-leaf table and rubbed a professional French polish on the mahogany that delighted even Lily.  He stripped down the pressed-back oak kitchen chairs and tacked fresh leather on the seats.  He rewired all the lamps and rewove the wicker settee fresh for summer.

Once all the furniture in the Fredericks’ barn was fixed, Hank started visiting the neighbors.  Most had a few pieces that sorely needed repair, but lacking money, could only pay him back in more furniture.  Thus within a couple years, Hank hung out a little sign on the barn and began a sideline in “Used Furniture Bought, Sold and Repaired.”

                                                         *

Meanwhile Lily’s patience at playing the role of doting country wife had long since fizzled.  She may have wanted to be Marie Antoinette, but this was no Petit Trianon.  However much Janey and her mother fussed, the effect was never satisfying enough for Lily’s critical eye.  Janey had hoped for the sister she had always wanted and instead got the big-eyed doll she had never even dreamed of.   She worshiped Lily shyly from a distance, direly afraid of this tiny woman whom she could easily have lifted with one tanned work-hardened arm.  Occasionally, out of boredom, Lily tried to help with the chores and pulled out young pea shoots instead of weeds, broke half the eggs she gathered, decapitated the tomatoes, and jammed the old treadle Singer so badly that a new belt had to be ordered from Sears Roebuck.  When the lure of the city called (any city!) she suffered the teeth-jarring drive into Augusta with her husband and Vern, wedged in the musty back seat of the Buick with the lunch pails and the tool boxes.

                                                            *

Ever since arriving in that God-forsaken state --- and during all the subsequent long years of her life there --- Lily refused to acknowledge the Maine climate.  While those around her donned longjohns and flannel and sturdy sensible boots, she braved the cold in lightweight gabardine suits brightened by blouses of genuine silk, accessorized by smart berets, Trifari jewelry, and her ever-dwindling supply of previously-rationed Hanes nylons, the luxurious kind with the fully-clocked seams.  She consented to wear the custom-tailored deerskin gloves Hank gave her for Christmas since they flattered her tiny hands, and she finally acquiesced to pulling zippered rubber galoshes (their tops trimmed with real rabbit) over her beloved I Miller pumps.  Her herringbone wool coat from Altman’s, no matter how smartly-tailored and city-wise, was no match for the sub-zero temperatures of the Maine countryside, and to put it bluntly, she froze her petite ass off.  She staunchly refused to borrow anything warmer from either Mother Fredericks or Janey with a shudder of fashion disgust that they mistook for a shiver of cold.                                                                                                                                                                

Hank couldn’t bear to see his beloved new wife suffer, so he cashed in the war bonds he had squirreled away for their children’s future and for their first New Years Eve presented Lily with a sheared beaver coat from Frost’s in Bangor.  She squealed with delight and her eyes were luminous with tears of joy.  “Oh, Hank.  Oh, my goodness.  It’s exactly perfect!  Ooooh, Hank.”  She slid into the fur and melted into his arms with a sigh that seemed too intimate for other ears.  Lily taught him the valuable lesson she intended --- nothing could ever be too expensive or too luxurious for the mysterious fragile creature he had married.

Throughout their years together, The Coat was religiously escorted to Bangor for cold vault storage in the summer, routinely inspected and reglazed in the autumn, and relined every five years with a more au courant sateen.  The gift that keeps on taking.  The Coat was a bona fide family member.

                                                          *

So it was that Lily, wearing The Coat and consenting to protect her alligator slingback pumps with the horrid rubbers, journeyed to Augusta that January day.  She had a mission.  An advertisement in the daily paper for Madame Gregoire Foundations and Couture Hats had piqued her interest.  A simple beret or toque was no adequate chapeau for such A Coat as hers.  The Coat deserved, no demanded, a worthy hat, and although she had told Hank she only wanted to go into town to “look around some,” she had that very specific destination in mind.  Even the most ardent hatter doesn’t open before nine (Madame Gregoire being no exception) and Lily was forced to nurse a rather muddy cup of coffee at Foster’s Luncheonette while she waited the two hours between the mill’s opening and the beginning of her fashion adventure in the said Madame’s second-floor emporium.                                                

     Lily was self-indulgent and spoiled and manipulating, yet despite her formal education culminating with Miss Ada’s Secretarial School, she was far from stupid or lazy and could flaunt a stubbornly-flawless recall of that which she deemed of personal interest. Whole sections of Gone With the Wind’s one-thousand-plus pages were committed to the memory bank that formed her character. 

She loathed being bored and to wile away the time in the red vinyl and chrome booth, she seized the slightly egg-stained morning newspaper (familiarly referred to as The KJ and abandoned by the booth’s previous occupant) and devoured it page by page.  Another ad for Madame Gregoire’s provoked a smile of anticipation.  Plans for a new sewer system brought a yawn.  Several articles relating to accidents caused by the slippery roads --- ah well.  A brief smattering of national news that directly affected the state (but not her) and more “Items Of Local Interest” than she would have dreamed possible.  Her Revloned nails beat an irritated tattoo on the weary formica.

Although it was the capital and boasted a magnificent granite building testifying to that fact, Augusta was far from a cosmopolitan hub.  Settled as a trading post on the Kennebec River, counting Benedict Arnold as an infamous guest on his march to Quebec, it evolved until with statehood in 1820 it was selected as the capital.  With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, numerous dams harnessed the Kennebec and from Augusta on north, the age of the mill towns was born.  Logs floated down and blocked the river for miles and nimble men of French Canadian or Indian heritage risked life and limb leaping from log to log, freeing jams and controlling the flow to the giant brick paper mills.  The river was the source of power and transportation, and cotton mills and shoe factories exploited the cheap labor and the mill towns grew and flourished. 

Now, in the post-war years with the men back home, rationing ended and consumption at a premium, the huge turbines turned full throttle again.  America was on the move, Saturday Evening Post style.  Family life and a steady paycheck were the ultimate goals.  Housing developments were springing up even in semi-rural Augusta.  It was a time of promises for those who yearned to be a part of the mainstream.

     The white columns of Tara were forever etched in Lily’s mind as part of her dowry uncollected and her mental hope chest was filled with Country Club luncheons and Garden Club teas, finger sandwiches of the id.  Browsing The KJ’s real estate pages showcasing ranch homes (basement rumpus rooms optional!) filled her with genuine dread and she shuddered to be trapped by the ordinary fate of the cul-de-sac.  Suddenly she clutched her throat and gasped at a grainy photo of a huge antique house.  Lily was innocent of the real estate business and so location, location, location, even in small-town Augusta, was lost on her, but she knew what she loved and this picture seemed her dream incarnate.  A porch colonnaded by Doric pilasters sheltered the front of a hip-roofed Federal of impressive size.  Tara-on-the-Kennebec.  Her heart beat faster and her always-fastidious palms grew slightly moist.  Without a second thought, she tore out the photo (disguising the ripping sound of her indiscretion with a demure ladylike cough), anteed up the nickel for her coffee, wrapped herself in The Coat, and scurried off the find The House.

She didn’t have far to go.  The luncheonette lolled on Water Street, impersonating a business district along the river bracketed by the cotton mill at one end and the railroad station at the other.  All the stores crowded in between, jostling for prominence --- the typical American Main Street of that time parading Sears Roebucks, Woolworth’s, the venerable First Granite Bank, Rexall Drugs, the Odd Fellows Hall, and numerous independent clothing, jewelry and specialty shops.  Well beyond, up Winthrop Hill past the library and the courthouse, lived the doctors, lawyers and families of affluence.  Sand Hill, rising above the cotton mill and crowned with the Gothic glory of St. Augustine’s Catholic church, housed the French Canadian blue-collar community in duplexes and triplexes of stunning neatness and sometimes amazing décor.  The other side of the river was more suburban and it was there, along with the high school and the hospital and “The Insane” that the housing developments (“Newlands”) were already sprouting in earnest.  Winthrop Hill was Lily’s lifetime fantasy but failing to realize it, that pesky location caveat, critically unheeded, misled her to this empty house looming on the wrong side of the tracks.

Originally the estate of a sea captain whose ships entered Merrymeeting Bay at Bath and previous to the dams ran up the river inland, the elegant mansion had deteriorated to  an architectural white elephant amid the freight yards and the factories, where the river served as conduit for raw sewage and parts from the chicken processing plant and the tannery.

Blind as a lovesick schoolgirl, Lily saw none of this.  Despite years of neglect, the columns gleamed white in the January light and her size five rubber galoshes made tiny excited footprints in the snow as she peeked in the windows, examined the detailing and fell in love.  “Make an offer” the ad had said, and she would have offered up her virginity or her first born child on a pagan altar.

Lacking both attributes, she schemed.

                                                            *

On her very first trip to Augusta, Lily had discovered the Lithgow Library, its gracious granite bulk perched halfway up Winthrop Hill.  The building’s windows were stained glass, its floor mosaic and parquet, and its oak paneling surrounded a fireplace of green Lowe art tile, the whole forming a temple befitting the knowledge stored therein.  The elaborate gold-leafed Rococo décor of the Reading Room with its soaring coffered ceiling, crystal chandelier, and carved marble fireplace reinforced her self-crowned regal status whenever she settled into a brocade-covered wing chair.  In those days before early retirement and the rise of the leisure class, most people were too busy working to linger, preferring to read at home after a long hard day, and children were forbidden from the sanctity of the Reading Room. Thus it became a private retreat for Lily and she fantasized that it was her home and that soon the maid would curtsey with the silver service for tea and her wealthy neighbors would drop by and marvel at her good taste.  Ah, some sweet day it would all happen.  It must.  She wanted it so badly.  Her eyes glittered with the wanting, like a feral animal who senses a ready meal.

When Hank first began restoring furniture and had started up his modest business largely for his own pleasure, Lily had arched an eyebrow with an inkling of unfulfilled potential and on her trips to the Reading Room (after a disappointing morning of what passed for shopping in downtown Augusta) she devoured the Lithgow’s stacks of books on antiques.  There were then no price guides to collectables, no E-Bay for Idiots, no coffee table books displaying whimsical photos of country decorating --- simply The Good Stuff.  The glossy pages of Antiques Magazine spilled over with dealers advertising Hepplewhite and Chippendale, Meissen and Wedgwood, and she would recognize a few characteristics as something Hank had just sold.  Surely that little splay-legged Shaker end table was similar to the one her husband had recently refinished.  And weren’t the brasses on that chest much like those on the larger piece still in the barn?  Occasionally she would gasp aloud at the prices quoted on the back cover by Shreve, Crump & Lowe.  My God!  This was Real Money!

A cache of auction catalogues from Parke Bernet in New York and from Sotheby’s and Christie’s in London showcased beautiful things, all formerly belonging to the wealthy and the noble, often listed as “property of a lady.”  Oh, how dearly she wished to be that lady, to have so many fabulous possessions that she was forced to part with a few to make room for more. 

From these magazines and catalogues and the few hardcover volumes (Wallace Nutting, Ruth Webb Lee, and various monographs) Lily learned and planned.  Why couldn’t Hank become a Real Dealer, like Israel Sack in New York or Phil Bradley in Philadelphia and associate with the wealthy and the privileged who would appreciate his innate elegance and the charm of his lovely and stylish wife?

                                                           *

Now that Lily had located The House, she had a valid reason for setting The Plan into motion.  She would start by selling that Hepplewhite drop leaf table (so much like the one in the third chapter of Nutting’s American Furniture) to a dealer named Hugh Windsor who maintained an exclusive coastal shop in Camden.  Windsor usually flaunted a whole page in Antiques Magazine, so he must be some sort of big shot --- she had blanched at the magazine’s advertising rates.

She trudged up Winthrop Hill to the library, breathless from excitement rather than from the steep and slippery sidewalks.  It was not only the January air that flushed her cheeks.  Her fingers shook not from cold but from anticipation as she copied Mr. Windsor’s number from the magazine.  Confident he would sell the table for close to a thousand, she reasoned she could ask for five hundred.  A solid downpayment on The House.

That same day, she squandered her lunch money on phone calls to the realtor and to Windsor and she was faint from hunger and excitement by three o’clock when she arrived at the mill for the ride back to the farm.  Her offer of three thousand for The House was gratefully accepted by the astonished realtor.  Hugh Windsor’s well-modulated British accent assured her that he was most interested in the table and “perhaps some other things?” and would “be charmed to visit on the morrow,” and now all she had to do was to convince her trusting new husband.  Ex post facto.

                                                          *

      For their Manhattan wedding, Lily shone resplendent in a simple white linen suit.  Unlike other wartime brides, hers was embroidered with pastel butterflies at the collar and cuffs and the jabot of her shantung blouse flaunted a sparkling pin of Eisenberg Ice.  But she reserved a surprise for later --- for their one honeymoon night at The Statler she indulged herself and her dazed new husband in the mysteries of The Negligee.  Life has any number of necessities and Lily Buchanan had always staunchly believed fine lingerie to regally head the list.  At times she had gone without food but never without imported real silk panties with matching lace-trimmed brassieres.  Working quite a stint bussing those disagreeable tables at the Automat paid the extravagant cost of the couture negligee and peignoir set she had coveted, her pert inquisitive nose pressed longingly against Saks’ window.  She couldn’t resist the lacy elegance and for the better part of a year her treasure hung in tissue-draped splendor in the closet of the apartment under the Ell until it made the trip to a seventh-floor room in The New York Statler so soon after V-J Day.

     This was no tawdry prostitute’s getup.  Crafted of the thinnest gossamer silk tissue, fragile as glass and just as transparent, this set was tailored so beautifully that the effect was breathtaking, not merely sexual.  Handmade hairpin lace formed spider webs of utmost delicacy overlaying the yoke and bodice.  The long full sleeves of the peignoir were of the same lace and tiny seed pearls winked like dewdrops casually scattered along their length.  The pale silk flowed and floated around Lily’s petite white form like sea foam in a Botticelli painting, fully revealing her flawless body in all its size two glory.  When Hank beheld this vision on his wedding night, he was convinced he was unworthy of such exquisite perfection.  Still wearing his white duck bellbottoms, barefoot and shirtless, he was a sailor tossed up by the sea on a forbidden uncharted tropical isle and he sank to his knees at her feet, worshipping at The Altar of Lily, a position he assumed for the remainder of his days.

                                                          *

Now to convince him of the necessity of The Plan in order to have The House, she armed herself with the heavy artillery of The Negligee.  Hank never knew what hit him.  Lily stood high on that sculptured marble pedestal of her own manufacture, carried through life like a pilgrim toting the true cross in case she ever discovered someone to genuflect at its base.  This strong far-from-stupid ex-fisherman was so thoroughly honest in every inch of his considerable frame that, curled in the nook of his arm with her dainty treacherous fingers tracing lies on his unsuspecting chest with The Negligee puddled on the carpet like an angel’s discarded wing, after she had allowed him a reasonable time to satisfy his libido at her altar, when Lily whispered about her overwhelming need to start The Family, he crawled into the trap like the crustaceans he himself used to bait.  How beautiful their children would be.  How right it would be to extend their love in this manifestation.  How there should be a son to carry on his legacy.  Words he had long dreamed of but never expected to hear from the pouty lips of this fragile goddess for whom any sexual activity must always be gentle and restrained because she herself was so delicate and refined.

Truthfully, in recent months at the mill Hank had begun lusting rather healthily after Simone LaCroix, a saucy, flirty-eyed secretary with a hearty laugh and an equally hearty backside that filled out a cheap J C Penney’s sheath skirt tight as the casing on a red hot.  His guilt from those imaginary indiscretions further stoked his desire to please Lily in every possible and impossible fashion, and, after all, this was his own dream as well that she was finally sharing, so he was overcome with joy as he agreed.

“Yes.  Oh, my darlin’, yes.  A thousand times.  I love you so.  I want that too.  So very much.”

Lily smiled in the darkness and continued her tracing.  The trap was baited with her first born and now it was time to set it.

“You know, Hank, we both grew up in rural areas, without much schoolin’, and my guess is, we’ve done all right, but it’s different now.  When our children grow up, they should have the best.  Don’t you think?”

      “Oh, Lily.  They’ll have everythin’.  Never want for anythin’.”

     “Well, of course they won’t.  I know that, dear.  But, I’ve been thinkin’…  The little country school here is soooo limited.  Don’t you want them to do better?  Have Hank Junior make you proud?”

His heart fluttered at the name.  “Course I do,” he breathed huskily.  “Course I do.”

“Well…. I’ve been thinkin’ that Augusta has some wonderful schools.”

“Yeeessss.  I guess so.  Hadn’t much considered.”  A son.  Junior.  Hunting and fishing and Little League.

“And then there’s the hospital.  We’re soooo far from it now.  If there were any complications with the, you know,” she hesitated gracefully at the common word, “pregnancy, I don’t know if I could stand it.”  Here a little catch in her soft southern voice.  “I just don’t know.”

“Ayuh, you need that hospital, all right.  Oh, yes you do.  I’ve known many a woman who had trouble with the birthin’.  Maybe we should think about gettin’ some sort of place nearuh town.”

“It’s funny you should mention that,” cooed Lily.

Thus The Plan begat The House, begat The Business, begat The Family.

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