Wives and Lovers

5

“Ruby? Let me think a minute.” Mrs. Freeman paused, searching for Ruby amid the tissue of fact and fiction that enveloped her mind.

“Ruby MacCormick,” George said.

“Oh, that’s our new girl, yes. We get so many here. They come and go. I hardly have time to catch their names.”

“I’d like to speak to her.”

“Now let me think, is she in or out? Wait a minute and I’ll go see. Sit down on the porch and make yourself easy.”

“Thank you.”

George sat down on a redwood bench beside the sign that identified the house: “Mrs. Freeman’s Tourist Home, Ladies Only, Reasonable Rates, Ocean View.” The bench creaked under his weight and he got up again, brushing off the seat of his trousers. He didn’t actually want to sit down anyway. He wanted to do something violent, to run away as fast as he could. But at the same time he wanted to have Ruby running along beside him, just as violent as he. He gazed blindly at Mrs. Freeman’s Ocean View — nineteen blocks down the highway a tiny strip of sea was visible — and wondered what he could say to Ruby to make everything all right.

On the highway in front of the house, cars hurried north to San Luis Obispo and San Francisco, and south to Los Angeles and San Diego. George wished that he were in one of them. He felt split in two. Half of him was headed for San Francisco, but the real half stood on Mrs. Freeman’s soot-covered porch, nervous and scared like a gangling adolescent.

Mrs. Freeman reappeared. She had taken off her apron, out of deference to George’s Buick, silk shirt, and masculinity in general.

“She’s in. She’ll be right down. What did you say your name was?”

“Anderson.”

“Any relation to the Anderson that makes that frozen split-pea soup?”

“No.”

“I just wondered.” Mrs. Freeman was disappointed. She had made a habit of asking people if they were connected with well-known names ever since she had met, down at the beach, a lady who claimed to be a second cousin of Joan Blondell, the movie actress. Mrs. Freeman had relayed this news to all of her pen pals back east, changing second cousin to first cousin because it was practically the same thing anyway and sounded more interesting.

“All these frozen things they make nowadays, it’s a miracle of science,” Mrs. Freeman said thoughtfully. “In my opinion, science is making great strides.”

George agreed.

“Some people think science is going too far, like this hydrogen bomb for instance. Myself personally, I’m not worried, though the other day something funny certainly happened. I’d bought this fish down at Marchetti’s, and when I opened the package it just seemed to fairly glow. I thought it might be one of those Bikini fish that got bombed. Do you think that’s likely?”

“No.”

“I guess not. I ate it and I feel the same. Here’s Ruby now.”

Mrs. Freeman moved aside with reluctance and Ruby took her place at the screen door. Beside Mrs. Freeman she looked extraordinarily slight and pallid. Her eyes were glowing like Mrs. Freeman’s fish, and George had to stifle a wild impulse to laugh.

“Ruby, I just came to — the fact is, you ran off without collecting your pay.”

Ruby bent her head and the white skin of her forehead pressed against the screen.

“I thought you might need the money so I looked you up. I had a hard time finding you. You didn’t leave an address.”

“I’m not so anxious for people to find me that I go around leaving my address,” Ruby said with soft scorn. “As for the pay, that’s perfectly all right. I broke some dishes anyway.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“It does to me. You can take the money and buy some new dishes.”

“Don’t be silly,” George said, scowling. “It’s your money. You earned it.”

“Well, I don’t want it. Keep it yourself.”

In the background Mrs. Freeman’s bosom heaved with pride. This was the kind of tourist home she kept, yes-sirree. Her girls might be poor but they had a nice noble attitude towards money. Still, if Ruby had actually earned the money, she would be a fool not to take it.

“If you earned the money, my dear,” Mrs. Freeman said, “you’ll only be accepting your just deserts.”

Ruby uttered a sharp little laugh. “Everybody is very concerned about me all of a sudden, I must say. It’s certainly funny.”

“All right, forget the money,” George said. “What I came for was to apologize. I was — I lost my temper and I’m sorry, see? I’m sorry. Damn it” — he turned his scowl on Mrs. Freeman — “isn’t there any place we can talk?”

“Talk?” Mrs. Freeman’s eyebrows shot up. All her suspicions of men, some born and bred in her and the others picked up along the way of a life with the truant Mr. Freeman, were apparent in the look she gave George. Talk? Talk, indeed. I know men.

“You can talk in the parlor,” she said, firmly enough to indicate to George that she would be right outside in the hall while the talking was going on.

George opened the screen door and stepped inside. As the door closed his coat sleeve brushed Ruby’s bare arm. She shrank away from him, as if the contact had pained her, and ducked into the parlor. She bumped her shin against a leatherette hassock and almost fell, but when George put out his hand to help her regain her balance, she jerked her elbow and its sharp point caught him on a vein in the back of his hand. It stung for a moment like an insect bite.

“Oh.” She put her hand up and covered her mouth. “I’m sorry — I didn’t mean—”

“Didn’t you?”

“No. No.”

“All right,” George said heavily. “I take your word for it, Ruby.”

Mrs. Freeman coughed subtly and closed the parlor door. She was convinced of one thing — that Mr. Anderson was a fool to take Ruby’s word for anything. Ruby was a liar. During her fifteen years as a landlady, Mrs. Freeman had become a fairly accurate judge of character and she could invariably spot a liar, all the more readily because she was such a plausible liar herself.

Mrs. Freeman’s lies were nearly always written down in letters and were nearly always attempts to conceal her position in life or to justify it. She was a prodigious letter writer. She kept in touch with all her relatives back east, second cousins and nieces by marriage and even the new wives and husbands of divorced or defunct members of the tribe. She also had six pen pals, acquired through a pulp magazine: Middle-aged woman with cultural interests, fond of good music and literature, would appreciate hearing from women of similar interests, eastern background. How about a letter? California Caroline.

Caroline Freeman had become a letter-writer for a number of reasons. She was lonely. She could tolerate her life more easily if she glamorized it on paper, and she could even sometimes force herself into believing some of her own highly idealized versions of the truth: “I honestly felt, Mildred, that it would be a sin and a shame not to open my beautiful home to some of these poor unfortunate girls who have no place to lay their heads.”

Occasionally she mentioned Mr. Freeman’s spasmodic disappearances: “Poor Robert had not been feeling himself lately and has gone down to Palm Springs for the dry desert air. With the sea practically at our front door we naturally get a good deal of humidity!” When Mr. Freeman returned, in need of funds, badly under the weather, and with his face cherry red from overindulgence, Mrs. Freeman recorded the fact that Robert had come back from Palm Springs with a bad sunburn and the desert air hadn’t done him much good after all.

The ink that flowed from Mrs. Freeman’s pen was an unguent pouring over reality. It was true that she lived a few yards from the main north-south highway and had to listen all night to the purr and splutter of engines, the squeaking of brakes and the roaring of trucks. But it was also true that this highway had a beautiful and glamorous name, El Camino del Mar, and it was always a great satisfaction to Mrs. Freeman to write her address in the upper right-hand corner of her notepaper: 1906 El Camino del Mar. No one would ever suspect that it was a road lined with wooden shacks, filled eternally with the smoke of diesel engines and the soot from the Southern Pacific Railroad whose tracks lay parallel to the highway.

At times Mrs. Freeman was afraid that some of her correspondents might come to see her and find out about the neighborhood she lived in, and the highway and the tracks. She guarded against this possibility as well as she could by writing to no one further west than Chicago. This allowed a decent mileage between reality and fiction. She was, moreover, fairly certain that none of her correspondents had sufficient money for a long trip west, in spite of the claim of her pen pal, Flossie from Florida, that she owned a huge orange grove. Mrs. Freeman had the same percentage of belief in Flossie’s orange grove as she had in Mr. Freeman’s sojourns in Palm Springs or the Sierras.

No matter how many letters she wrote, Mrs. Freeman never suffered from lack of material because she had a keen eye, and she was an avid newspaper reader and an enthusiastic walker. She would walk for miles, especially after dinner in the summertime, consciously and deliberately seeing things that most other people would miss. She examined each flower and shrub, every car parked at the curb, the children playing on the sidewalks, the evening strollers like herself. She watched the mountains turn from blue to gray and disappear. She looked into the windows of houses and saw the people inside, eating or reading the paper, listening to the radio, quarreling, washing dishes, and she had a friendly curiosity about all these people.

Afterwards, Mrs. Freeman described her walks in detail, always managing to bring in the exotic street names that she dearly loved. “I strolled up Alameda Padre Serra and over to Plaza Rubio, and finally ended up on Salsipuedes!”

The weather was a constant source of material. Mrs. Freeman, however, did not content herself with mere temperature reports. She injected drama into a cloudy day by describing the fog rolling in from the sea, and into a windy day by stating that “the small craft warnings are up, all up and down the coast!” Calm, sunny days were provided with an element of terror by Mrs. Freeman’s favorite phrase, “earthquake weather.” The more beautiful the day, the more sinister the growl of the earth beneath it. Thus, Mrs. Freeman’s correspondents got the impression that she lived in the crater of a volcano with the earth forever teetering under her house. This impression served two purposes. It made Mrs. Freeman feel that she did indeed live dangerously, and it discouraged her pen pals from planning a visit to this perilous spot. Flossie of Florida had even gone so far as to remark that she wouldn’t live in California for all the money in the world — hurricanes Florida might have, yes, but an earthquake practically every day would upset her nervous system. This statement stimulated Mrs. Freeman’s imagination, and she replied by return mail, describing how only that morning the whole house had shuddered, the windows rattled, and the chandelier in the parlor swung like a pendulum. She neglected to add that this was a regular occurrence, caused not by an earthquake, but by an S. P. freight train.

Any seed, however small, could grow in Mrs. Freeman’s fertile brain. She returned now to her interrupted letter to a third cousin in Michigan. The ink flowed over George and he became a close relative of the Andersons who made that celebrated split-pea soup.

From where she sat, at the round walnut dining-room table, Mrs. Freeman could hear the angry rise and the defensive fall of George’s voice. The combination of attack and appeasement in his tone reminded Mrs. Freeman of her husband, Robert. Robert had been gone for nearly three weeks now and she was beginning to worry and to wonder whether she’d better go to the police. This harsh practical thought of going to the police annihilated Mrs. Freeman’s writing mood. She put down her pen. She had hoped to finish her letter before making herself a bite to eat, but now she couldn’t concentrate on it and for this she blamed George. He had no right to come forcing himself into the house (Mrs. Freeman had no recollection of opening the door for him), using profane language (she couldn’t actually distinguish his words but his tone was profane), and browbeating defenseless little women (making them accept money, probably tainted). For the moment, Mrs. Freeman was on Ruby’s side. Ruby might be sly, evasive, she might even be a downright liar, but she was a woman, and women should stick together.

In union is strength, thought Mrs. Freeman, who liked an aphorism as well as the next one.

She heard the thud of the evening paper as it struck the porch, and she rose to fetch it. When she passed through the hall she made her step good and loud, a cunning device that didn’t escape notice.

“You’d better go,” Ruby said. “She’s doing that on purpose.”

“All right.” George got up from Mrs. Freeman’s mohair sofa, aware that he had made a fool of himself. He had done what he set out to do, he had apologized for firing Ruby and losing his temper. But the apology had gone wrong. There had been nothing contrite or apologetic about it. He had forced it on her, he had apologized at the top of his lungs.

The apology had a curious effect on Ruby. She lost her air of frightened timidity. She looked composed, even a little ironic.

“She doesn’t like men callers to stay too long,” Ruby said.

“Do you have other men callers?”

“I can’t see that it’s any of your business.”

“It isn’t. I just want to know.”

“Well then, sure. Sure I have.”

“I don’t believe it,” George said.

Ruby put her hands on her hips in an exasperated manner. “Well, I like that! I certainly like that, Mr. Anderson! You, you just get out of here and don’t come back!”

George smiled painfully. “You’re not such a bunny after all.”

“I certainly don’t have to stand here and be insulted.”

Thump, thump, thump, Mrs. Freeman’s implying feet went down the hall again.

“Why did you leave the other place and move over here all of a sudden?” George said.

“That’s my affair.”

“Was it the rent? Do you need money?”

“Now I suppose you’re thinking that I skipped out without paying my rent! Well, let me tell you one thing, Mr. Anderson. If I were broke I could always go home. You seem to have gotten the wrong idea about me. I’m no orphan. I’m not alone in the world. I can go back to San Francisco any time. My mother and father have a beautiful home there and they’re always begging me to come back. But I told my dad, I’m tired of this sheltered life, I want to earn my own way.”

“Why?”

“Because. Because I do, that’s all. In the modern world a girl has to be able to look out for herself.”

“You’re not thinking of going home, then?”

“I haven’t made up my mind. It all depends.”

“I wouldn’t like you to leave town.”

“That’s funny. Someone else told me today that I’d be better off if I did. There are more jobs down south.”

“There are jobs here, too. If you don’t want to come back to the Beachcomber, maybe I can find something else for you. I’ve got some connections around town.”

Ruby’s face lit up. “That would be wonderful. Do you really think you could?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“A receptionist, maybe. I’ve always thought I’d like to be a receptionist.”

“I don’t know about that,” George said cautiously. “There’s not much call for receptionists in a town this size.”

“Still, it’s possible, isn’t it? — with your connections?”

“Yes.”

“Gosh, it’d be nice, sitting instead of standing all the time, and wearing pretty clothes and keeping my nails decent.” Her eyes were soft and her cheeks seemed to have already fattened on this dream of pretty clothes and half-inch nails. “I’d have to get a new permanent, though. My hair is a mess.”

“It looks fine to me.”

“No, it’s a mess.” She twisted a strand of it between her fingers. “Why should you do me a favor, Mr. Anderson?”

“Because I want to. There’s nothing, well, personal in it. I know you need a job, and you’re just a kid. In fact — well, to tell you the truth, I’m old enough to be your father.”

“You are?” Ruby giggled nervously. “My goodness, you certainly don’t look it. You don’t look a day over forty.”

George, who was forty, thanked her and pulled in his stomach. He knew by her expression that she had meant the remark as a compliment and that she probably thought he was at least fifty.

He felt a little sick, but he smiled and said, “I’ll do the best I can for you.”

“Oh, I know you will.”

“I don’t suppose you’d like to come out and have some dinner with me.”

“I’d love to, but I can’t.”

“Oh.”

“I really can’t. I’m so tired. All this excitement, getting fired first and then having you appear out of the blue with a wonderful new job—”

“I haven’t found you one yet.”

“But you will, with all your connections and everything.”

“I hope so... Meanwhile, you’d better come back to the Beachcomber. At least it’s a living.”

“All right, if you say so, Mr. Anderson.”

“Tomorrow, then.”

“All right.”

They shook hands, in a friendly way, and George opened the parlor door. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mrs. Freeman descending on him from the dining room. He walked rapidly in the opposite direction to avoid a meeting.

“In a hurry, isn’t he?” Mrs. Freeman commented.

“He’s a very important businessman,” Ruby said. “He’s got things to do.”

“I knew it the minute I looked at him. A businessman, I said to myself. What business?”

“He owns the Beachcomber.”

“All by himself?”

Ruby nodded. Though she knew that George had only a quarter interest in the Beachcomber she didn’t think it worthwhile to mention this to Mrs. Freeman. It was a small point, and Ruby believed that it was ridiculous to keep to the strict facts when a few variations served a better purpose. In this respect she was a true spiritual daughter of the house.

“He’s got an eye for you,” Mrs. Freeman said, with a satisfied nod. “I could tell it the minute I saw him.”

“Oh, that’s silly, I never heard anything so silly.”

“Mark my words, he’s a goner.”

Ruby colored. “Well, I certainly didn’t encourage him.”

“Why, I bet you could have him in a minute if you just snapped your fingers. Mark my words, I know men and he’s got that look.” It occurred to Mrs. Freeman at this point that possibly George was a married man and that she had gone too far in encouraging Ruby. She added, “If he’s married, well, that’s a horse of another color. I believe in the sanctity of the home and I think that any woman who comes between a man and his wife ought to be horsewhipped.”

Mrs. Freeman’s eyes hardened, applying the horsewhip to the guilty Ruby. But instead of cringing, Ruby said coldly, “He’s divorced, you don’t have to worry.”

“Not that I was actually worried. I knew as soon as I laid eyes on you that you were a girl that came from a respectable family. There’s a lady, I said to myself.”

Ruby was unable to resist this blandishment. Over a cup of Mrs. Freeman’s hot, bitter coffee she described her parents and their beautiful home atop Nob Hill whence they could see San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate. Her father, a retired gentleman of the old school, spent all his time now on his collection of rare stamps and coins. Her mother, who had been a beauty in her youth, was now silver-haired but she still rode every day. She was a brilliant horsewoman.

“I know that horsy set,” Mrs. Freeman contributed.

“I was terribly spoiled. Then one day I guess I just suddenly grew up. I wanted to live my own life and earn my own way. Daddy nearly had a fit and Mummy cried and cried, but it was no use, they couldn’t keep me home. When I make up my mind to do a thing, it’s as good as done. Naturally I’ll go back someday, but not until I’ve proved I can stand on my own feet. And now that Mr. Anderson’s getting me a job as a receptionist, I feel I’m finally getting some place. I suppose I should really sit down right now and write and tell Mummy and Daddy the good news, but I’ve got to dress and meet someone.”

When Ruby had gone back to her room, Mrs. Freeman poured herself another cup of coffee and sat down at the dining-room table to finish the newspaper.

“What a liar,” she said aloud, yet she felt genuinely sorry for Ruby, who was a victim of circumstance like herself. To a lesser degree she felt sorry for George too, because he had what Mrs. Freeman called a “nice open face” and a shrewd eye. From this shrewd eye Mrs. Freeman deduced that George knew quite a lot about women, and it was her opinion that men who understood women could be more easily duped by any individual woman than one who didn’t. Take her husband, Robert, for instance. Robert had never understood women, never wanted to, never pretended to, yet he’d had a wife as faithful as the day was long.

As faithful as the day is long, Mrs. Freeman thought, sighing. She turned for comfort to the City News Briefs. Here, in blunt paragraphs, were recorded the mistakes and sorrows, and the petty complaints and transgressions of that large but neglected and anonymous section of the community to which Mrs. Freeman unwittingly belonged. Names were seldom mentioned in the News Briefs. More tactful devices were used for identification: “A woman in the 500 block of W. Los Olivos complained to police of a dog barking in the neighborhood.” “An intoxicated middle-aged man was found sleeping in an alley and was given lodging by the police overnight.” “A rancher from the Arroyo Burro district reports that two sorrel mares have strayed or been stolen from his premises.” “Several juveniles were warned by police when they were found aiming rocks at a boulevard sign near the swimming pool.” “Two Mexican nationals were arrested in a local café after becoming involved in an argument with the proprietor.”

These items were cunningly spaced between advertisements, so that to make sure of not missing anything Mrs. Freeman read all the advertisements too: slenderizing salons, used cars, potato chips, lost dogs, apartments, lending libraries, Swedish Massage and Hawaiian chocolates.

While she read Mrs. Freeman talked half-aloud to herself. “Seems a lot of money for a 1939 Ford... I wonder what café they were arrested in, seems silly not to mention the name... that friend of Mrs. Lambert’s lives on Los Olivos, but that’s east not west, but it could easily be her anyway, newspapers are always making mistakes like that... trying to stop a dog barking. Might as well stop the wind blowing, what are dogs for, I’d like to know... sorrel mares, never heard of sorrel, but mark my words they were stolen, human nature can get very low.”

She heard one of the girls coming downstairs and she stopped talking abruptly. She didn’t want any of them to think she was balmy, talking to herself like that, and she was certain that none of them had enough sense to realize that if you have no one else to talk to, you talk to yourself.

It was Ruby.

“Dressed already?” Mrs. Freeman said cheerfully. “That’s a pretty suit. It goes with your eyes.”

Ruby blushed with pleasure and averted her eyes, afraid, breathlessly afraid that if she let Mrs. Freeman look at her eyes again Mrs. Freeman might change her mind and say, no, the suit didn’t go with her eyes.

She went down the hall, hugging the thin compliment to her heart, letting it nestle there, warm and protected, until it grew fat: she said I have nice eyes. She said, what a pretty suit, it goes with your beautiful eyes. Like stars, she said.

She pictured herself telling Gordon about it tonight, if he could get away from the house to meet her. She would say to him, “Oh, she’s a funny old bird, Gordon. You know what she said to me as I was leaving tonight? She said I was beautiful. Me, beautiful! Gosh, you could have knocked me over with a feather! She said, with eyes like that, you ought to be in the movies, Ruby.”