“I’ll be seven months along. I think it will be fine. If not, I won’t go.”
“I might come for Christmas, though.”
“Oh, would you?” Honora asks, brightening. “Alphonse would love that.”
“And your mother will come for the baby?” Vivian asks.
“I think so. She wants me to have it in a hospital.”
“Well, I should hope so,” Vivian says, slightly aghast.
Honora puts her cup in the sink. “You know,” she says, rinsing it, “there ought to be a word for when one’s most exciting — one’s most joyful — moments take place during a time that is grim and hard for others around you. I’ve been trying to think of such a word all week, but I haven’t found it yet.”
“You mean this summer?”
“Yes. Everyone in Ely Falls was suffering because of the strike, and we . . . well, we were having so much fun, weren’t we? And were living so well. Relatively.” She thinks a minute. “Well, not relatively at all. We were living well, period. Every weekend was a party.”
“War is like that,” Vivian says. “Men often speak about how they felt most alive — and most in love, for that matter — during wartime.”
“I loved McDermott,” Honora says.
“I know you did,” Vivian says.
“He was so good with Alphonse,” Honora says.
“Yes, he was.”
“He would be glad, wouldn’t he, that Alphonse is —”
Honora stops. She cannot go on. She takes Vivian’s cup and rinses it in the sink.
“I thought I would make an oyster chowder tonight,” Honora says. “Does that sound all right to you?”
“Sounds peachy.” Vivian lights a cigarette. “Want one?”
“No, thanks. I had to give them up.” She points to her stomach. “They make me nauseous.”
“Good,” Vivian says. “Filthy habit. I read in the paper today that the Ely Falls Mill is closing.”
“McDermott said that would happen.”
“Ironic, isn’t it?” Vivian says.
“The strikers win and then they have no jobs.”
“I can take Alphonse to school in the beach wagon for the first week,” Vivian says.
“That might be good. I think he’s very nervous about it.”
“As well he might be,” Vivian says. “We have to take him shopping. He needs clothes.”
“He certainly does,” Honora says.
“So do you, for that matter,” Vivian says.
“Actually,” Honora says, “I’d like to get some fabric and make maternity clothes. My mother is sending me patterns.”
“As long as I get to edit them,” Vivian says.
Honora smiles. “I don’t know what I’d have done if you hadn’t been here,” she says.
“Nonsense,” Vivian says. “You’re the strongest woman I know. That’s why Alphonse has come to you.”
“You know,” Honora says, “you read a word like massacre and you think, I know what that means. It means the slaughter of innocent people. And then you go on. You read another fact. You read the word trial. Or conviction. But then . . . when it happens to you, when you live the word, you realize that the word itself means nothing. It tells you nothing at all. It doesn’t begin to convey the horror, does it?”
“No,” Vivian says. “It doesn’t.”
“It was a bungle,” Honora says. “Just a terrible bungle.”
“Yes, it was.”
“There was nothing noble at all about what happened. About their deaths. No sacrifice. No honor. It was just a bungle. We should never have been there in the first place. It was a disastrous decision on Ross’s part. In that apartment, we were just sitting ducks.” Honora remembers the way the men in masks came through the door with their guns. The way Ross said Oh, Jesus.
“You can’t do this,” Vivian says, crossing the room and taking Honora into her arms. “You have to stop. You simply have to stop.”
“I know,” she says.
“You can’t let Alphonse see you like this,” Vivian says.
Honora rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. “I know. I won’t.”
“Well,” Vivian says.
“Well,” Honora says. She looks around at the kitchen, nearly empty now. “Alphonse, come get your milk,” she calls into the hallway.
Alphonse enters the kitchen, swinging his arms to unkink them.
“We packed the glasses,” Honora says. “Just drink it from the bottle.”
Alphonse lifts the bottle of milk to his face. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve.
Alphonse
He carries the last carton to the beach wagon, which is so full that you can’t even see out the back, and Alphonse thinks how strange it is that there is so much stuff when the house has always looked, well, kind of empty. But now he will have his own room at Miss Burton’s house, though she has said he will have to sleep in the cellar if he keeps calling her Miss Burton and so he is trying to remember to call her Vivian. But he will still call Mrs. Beecher Mrs. Beecher and he is relieved that she hasn’t asked him to call her Honora. Mrs. Beecher slides into the front seat, a carton of books on her lap. Alphonse crawls into the backseat and lies down over all the blankets and boxes with his head nearly touching the top of the car, and Miss Burton, Vivian, gets in and starts the beach wagon and then Mrs. Beecher says, “Wait, I nearly forgot,” and sets the carton on the front seat, gets out of the car again, leans in, and says to Vivian that she’ll be right back, she just left it on the landing. And then she is kind of running up the walkway and opening the front door, and Vivian turns to him and says, “Are you all right?” and he says he is just fine, though there is a sharp corner of a box sticking into his side, and then Mrs. Beecher is standing in the doorway with a white platter in her arms, and even from the beach wagon Alphonse can see how beautiful all the glass is in the sunlight.
Author’s Note
The city of Ely Falls is fictional. The details of violent labor unrest, however, are culled from numerous incidents in New England and elsewhere during the late 1920s and the early 1930s in which hundreds of striking mill workers and their children were killed or seriously injured by state militias or vigilantes hired by mill owners. As an interesting footnote, the Ku Klux Klan did indeed flourish in northern New England during the late 1920s. Its victims were Catholics, Jews, and ethnic minorities.
The following works were consulted while writing this book: The Strike of ‘28 by Daniel Georgianna and Roberta Hazen Aaronson; The Great Depression by Robert S. McElvaine; Working People of Holyoke by William Hartford; Ordinary People Extraordinary Lives by Debra Bernhardt and Rachel Bernstein; La Foi, La Langue, La Culture by Michael Guignard; Working-Class Americanism by Gary Gerstle; A World Within a World by Gary Samson; Ethnic Survival in a New England Mill Town: The Franco-Americans of Biddeford, Maine by Michael Guignard; The Great Depression and The Hungry Years by T. H. Watkins; The Town That Died by Michael Bird; The Parrish and the Hill by Mary Doyle Curran; Down and Out in the Great Depression: Stories and Recipes of the Great Depression of the 1930s by Janet Van Amber Paske; Amoskeag by Tamara Harveven and Randolph Langenbach; Gastonia 1929 by John A. Salmond; Hard Times by Studs Terkel; The Last Generation by Mary H. Blewett; Saco Then and Now by Peter N. Scontras; and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans.
I would like to thank Jewel Reed and Bill Newell for supplying details of life during 1929 and 1930. I would also like to thank my agent, Ginger Barber; my editor, Michael Pietsch; and my husband, John Osborn, for their support and guidance.
Anita Shreve, Sea Glass
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