Part 11 (1/2)

The funny old brick street narrowed as it began to ascend to a high, humpbacked bridge so narrow vehicles could pa.s.s over it but one at a time. Clara's heart began to thump.

”Jesus! I'm scared we're gonna fall in....”

Lowry just laughed at her and continued across the bridge that made a nervous whirring noise beneath the tires of his car, not slackening and not increasing his speed. Clara tasted panic: you could see the water through the grid of the bridge's floor! If she'd been driving, she would have maybe fainted, the d.a.m.n car would crash through the railing- Lowry pointed out buildings along the river, most of them shutdown and boarded-up. Railroad yards, granaries. A tomato-canning factory that was still in operation part of the year. ”The Depression hit Tintern pretty hard. Lots of people I knew left, but not me.” Yet he spoke regretfully as if he'd wanted to leave, and somehow hadn't been able. Clara listened closely to these rare words of Lowry's, for he'd never answered questions she put to him about himself, in all those hours of intimacy in the car; as if now, seeing this town, that was run-down and jumbled but somehow beautiful he was shaken in some way, and moved to speak.

On the north side of the river, as Lowry spoke of it, there was a Main Street; there was a River Street, and there was a Bridge Street; there was a railroad depot where trains only stopped a few times a week now; along the downtown streets were threeand four-story buildings, made mostly of dark brick, with false fronts Clara was curious to see: from the front the building looked sort of impressive, but from the side and back it was some old run-down thing. Clara's eye lit onto taverns, a restaurant, a movie house, clothes stores and a shoe store and a Woolworth's Five & Dime. She hoped they would be living downtown: she hoped they would be living somewhere above a ground floor.

”This road continues all the way to Port Oriskany, on Lake Erie,” Lowry said. ”North of town, the road leads to Lake Ontario.” As if Clara knew, or, staring so hard at what lay before her, gave a d.a.m.n for these places. Erie? Ontario?

Lowry pulled his car to a stop. Clara was practically leaning out the window, staring so hard. They were at the edge of the downtown on the crest of a hill; here you could see some of Main Street, and you could look back to that scary bridge and buildings on the other side of the river. Lowry was saying in a voice that sounded different, somber and almost-scolding, ”Clara, there's a place for you in Tintern, I made some calls. But you need to keep quiet about yourself and don't make any trouble. Like if somebody asks where are your folks, you say politely, 'I don't live with my folks right now. I've been on my own since sixteen.' Whatever h.e.l.l age you are, sweetheart, say you're sixteen.”

Clara laughed, biting her lip. ”G.o.dd.a.m.n, I am sixteen.”

”Anyway, say it. If the wrong people catch on to you, you'll be charged with 'runaway.' You'll be placed in some juvenile facility. They'll try to contact your family back in-wherever. Or put you in an orphanage. That's the law.”

”Well, I'm not goin back. I'll kill myself first.”

”That kind of talk, you keep to yourself. That's the first thing that'd get you taken into custody, talk like that.”

Clara tried to make her face serious. ” 'I don't live with my folks right now. Been on my own since sixteen.' ” G.o.dd.a.m.n, she kept wanting to laugh she was so nervous, or excited.

Lowry said, ”I've made some calls like I said. There's maybe a job for you if you can make change. Learn to use a cash register.”

” 'Make change'-?”

”Like, changing a dollar bill. Five-dollar bill.”

”Sure! Sure I can do that.”

Clara had done this for Pearl lots of times. Even before Pearl got dreamy and dopey. Nancy, too. Buying things in a store, they hadn't wanted to figure out the coins, themselves. And knowing what kind of change you were going to get back, so you wouldn't be cheated.

Eagerly Clara said, ”It's easy: you think of a dollar as being one hundred pennies. Then you-” but Lowry cut her off.

He turned the key in the ignition, to start the car motor again. Going to take her somewhere now, she guessed. He had never spoken to her like this before and Clara was fearful of him now and fearful he was saying goodbye to her. ”Lowry, I could-do things for you. Like women do. I could-”

”No. I told you, Clara. I don't stay in one place long. And n.o.body comes with me. I don't marry any of them, either. Erase me from your head because you're just not the one, kid. Not just you're too young which you are, but what I want is a-voice. A way a woman talks to me, says things to me I don't know and am astonished to hear and I'll know her as soon as I hear her. Or maybe I never will hear her, and that's all right, too. Because my father was poison to women, and d.a.m.ned if I will be, too. And some things, the worst things, run in your blood.”

Clara nodded numbly. Not wanting to think this could be so.

Saying desperately, like a pleading dog if such could speak, ”Lowry, why'd you ever bother with me?”

Lowry, driving his car, pulled to a traffic light and didn't answer at once. Didn't look at her, either.

”It wasn't 'bother,' Clara. Don't think that.”

”You helped me. Saved me. You-”

”Maybe I always wanted a little sister. Maybe that's it.”

2.

”I have a job. I'm on my own now.”

Astonis.h.i.+ng to Clara who had expected to be working out in the fields, or scrubbing some rich ladies' toilets, she had a job in the Woolworth's Five & Dime right on Main Street. Somehow, Lowry had arranged for her to be interviewed by the fattish middle-aged manager Mr. Mulch, and she'd been hired right off. A store! In town! Clara couldn't believe her good luck. She smiled to think how Rosalie would envy her. Clara Walpole, a salesclerk in a store. store.

It was like the world had been broken into pieces and tossed into the air and come down again in a nicer arrangement. Yet an arrangement Clara could not believe had anything to do with her- what she deserved, what she'd earned. Sharing a long counter with another girl, who'd quit school in ninth grade a few years back and was pa.s.sing time till her fiance could afford to marry her; selling sewing supplies-scissors, threads of all colors, ready-made ruffled curtains, cloth of all colors and prints. On a slow day, if the manager wasn't around, you could drift over to visit Joanie at the candy counter who'd give away broken-off bits of peanut brittle, ribbon candy, stale old bonbons and marshmallows about to be removed from the display case and tossed into the garbage. And there was the magazine and pocket book rack, where you could leaf through Silver Screen, True Romance, Collier's Silver Screen, True Romance, Collier's and and Life. Life. There were paperback novels Clara stole away for overnight reading- There were paperback novels Clara stole away for overnight reading-Lamb in His Bosom, So Big, Honey in the Horn. Lowry was impressed, Clara spoke of such books. She meant to demonstrate to him how mature she was, and independent. Lowry was impressed, Clara spoke of such books. She meant to demonstrate to him how mature she was, and independent.

G.o.dd.a.m.n, though: she wished she'd learned to read better. It took her an hour sometimes to read a dozen pages, pus.h.i.+ng her finger beneath the words and mouthing them like a first grader.

Being a salesgirl at the five-and-dime was glamorous-seeming, and Clara was proud of her position, but it was harder work than you'd have guessed. Waiting on customers was the easy part. Also you had to unpack merchandise at the back of the store and carry it to the front; you had to repack old merchandise, back into grimy old cartons. You had to help sweep up. You had to help wash the big fly-specked windows. The five-and-dime was in a block-long row of brick buildings infested with roaches and rodents, and under Mr. Mulch's disgusted direction you had to deal with these: nasty-smelling poisons set out for the roaches, and traps with wicked steel springs for the mice and rats. The tricky thing was, the rats could devour the mice's cheese bait and if the trap sprung it didn't hurt them one d.a.m.n bit.

Clara had to laugh, she'd used to think a store in town was so special. Now she knew better, but it was a kind of secret you kept so people outside the store didn't know. So funny! Joanie made them all laugh complaining of rodents breaking into her candy display case in the night, that was supposed to be rodent-proof, eating just parts of some candies and leaving the rest, and tracking G.o.dd.a.m.n t.u.r.ds she had to brush off by hand. Mr. Mulch's byword was What the customer don't know don't hurt 'em. What the customer don't know don't hurt 'em.

Lowry asked Clara how she liked her job at Woolworth's, and Clara said she'd never had a job she loved so much. And Lowry seemed pleased, and maybe proud of her.

”Mulch says you're learning fast. 'Sharpest-eyed girl in the store.' ”

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So happy! Lowry had found a furnished room for Clara, with its own tiny bathroom, and had paid her first three months' rent. This he'd done without telling her, exactly-that was Lowry's way. The room was on Mohigan Street around the corner from Main, above a hardware store. Through her rear window Clara could see, slant- wise, that high old nightmare bridge and a slice of the Eden River. For a long time she sat dreamy-eyed in her windows gazing out. She imagined herself telling Rosalie I live by myself now. On a second floor. I live by myself now. On a second floor.

Mostly, she'd ceased thinking of the past. She did not wish to think of Carleton, Pearl, her brothers. Her sister Sharleen she had not seen in years and would never see again. She did not wish to think of her spindly limbed child-self she'd rapidly outgrown.

From the five-and-dime discards Clara acquired old melted lipsticks, broken packages of face powder, bent tweezers. Eyebrow pencils. Plucking and arching her eyebrows in the style of Joan Crawford, or Katharine Hepburn, or Bette Davis whose movies she saw for ten cents, in the movie house on Main Street. Clara loved best those movies where a man and a woman met, and fell in love; and the man went away; and the woman missed him, and waited for him; and the man returned. Emerging into the evening air, Clara wiped at her eyes.

So happy! This was her new life, and there was a man she was waiting for. There was a man her hopes could fasten upon, always.

Yet: sad sometimes. Lonely sometimes. As she'd never been sad and lonely in her old, lost life she had believed she despised.

For now, suddenly, there were two times in Clara's life, and disproportionate times they were. When Lowry was in Tintern, and would take time to see her; and when Lowry was away.

He'd warned her not to speak of him to anyone, and so she had not. Seeming to know that if she boasted of him, or complained of him, he would disappear from her life as abruptly as he'd appeared; and she would be left alone in Tintern, under the eye of Mr. Mulch.

Lowry was beginning to take notice of her, Clara thought. For she was older now, living alone and spending so much time in her own thoughts. Tilting her head like Katharine Hepburn, fixing her eyes upon a man's face like Claudette Colbert. And her hair, she'd begun to trim and curl with bobby pins, parted neatly on the left side of her head in the way of Joan Fontaine, whose hair was ashy-blond like Clara's. Lowry took her driving in his car, along the river; rarely did he take her to a restaurant or tavern in Tintern, only elsewhere. He was ashamed of her, she guessed. She understood, and did not blame him.

As a dime-store girl, Clara was able to buy things at a reduced price. Sweaters, blouses, skirts, sometimes even dresses. In those towns in the Eden Valley to which Lowry drove her she appeared older than fifteen in her gaudy, tight-fitting clothes and high-heeled shoes. Lowry, in public, seemed always in a hurry and walking with his face slightly averted, as if he were both with her, yet not with her. Sometimes he was in good spirits, playful; at other times he behaved like an older and remote relative of hers, a cousin or uncle entrusted with her for the evening. If Clara dared to take his hand, and stroke his fingers, as she'd seen women do in movies, Lowry stiffened but didn't always draw away at once.

Sometimes, as if unconsciously, his fingers closed about hers.

”My little girl's getting growed up. Happens fast, sometimes.”

Clara smiled, in that way she'd perfected of not showing any more teeth than she needed to show. Her heart was suffused with happiness. My little girl. My little girl.

One Sat.u.r.day night Lowry drove her to Lake Shaheen, which must have been about twenty miles to the north. The Anchor Inn was on the lake and overlooked a boatyard. Clara had never been inside so nice a place: it excited her that Lowry seemed to be known here. The main room, with a timber ceiling, was crowded and romantically dim-lit, and people were dancing. Some of the women were young, nearly as young as Clara. ”I want to dance. Oh, let's dance!” Clara begged.

But Lowry left her in a booth by herself, drinking a Cola and eating pretzels. He'd told her he had friends to see, to catch up on, and Clara had smiled and said that was all right; she was happy sitting by herself in such a nice place, and listening to music. Her eyes followed the dancers, eagerly. Just watching, she was learning: it was like the movies. It was like ringing up sales at the five-and-dime, you learned by doing. In fact she'd learned to smoke, from Lowry. She'd needed something to do with her hands.