The Flames of Hell Are A Pale Shade of Pink
The bell clanged on the shop door as Thomas Riddle, traveling salesman extraordinaire of ladies stockings and men's razors (this week), finagled his large portmanteau inside hoping to make a last sale before heading back home to Cincinnati. Sales in Chillicothe that week had been a bust due to a rival salesman with cheaper merchandise beating him to the punch.
He was greeted there by a clever-looking young woman of about his age, a few years more or less, who smiled courteously, though she knew well his type and was leary of him the way one is leary of a copperhead snake. She dealt with salesmen on a regular basis and usually had a quick way of dismissing them, but she didn't employ such means with Mr. Riddle, because he had a pleasing smile and she liked him something about him instantly.
It was an odd thing. The smile never seemed to leave his face, seemed genuine to it, even though his suitcase opened and was disembowled there on the shop floor due to "faulty hinges," he excused, and though he was drenched from the downpour, water cascading down the shop's picture window to tell his tale. Despite those things, he smiled and took off his hat and greeted her respectfully and pleasantly.
"Hello. I am Thomas Riddle, ma'am. You are miss..."
"Delores Cory. Misses — Delores Cory. Have you come to sell us a dozen doohickeys that the shop doesn't need?"
"No, ma'am. I only sell the things people do need. Those are those other guys that sell those. No accounts."
She grinned at his joke.
"In honesty, I've crossed the threshold and transformed myself from seller to buyer. I am looking for a dress for my wife. I like to bring her gifts home from the road."
"In that case, you are in luck, sir."
"Sir? Hmm. I'm rarely afforded such dignity."
Delores smiled and showed Thomas the latest fashions and said she could alter anything to fit his wife's size and stature. Thomas smiled, saying his wife was just her size and weight, so whatever it was, if it fit her, it would certainly fit his wife. Delores looked down at his wedding ring for reassurance that he was in truth married, and there she found it. A modest silver band. She was a bit relieved, yet disappointed all the same, though that was a secret she would keep to herself, married as she was.
Her perceptions of him flared wildly. He was a handsome man. But not as handsome as he was kind. He possessed a gentle quality of one who could do no harm to someone else, not even to an animal. He probably shooed flies out the window. A Christian man who probably had a church where he was of regular attendance. Who probably played some sort of instrument, or read, or wrote. One who probably told his wife funny jokes just to hear her laughter, or to see her smile because such a thing would please him so. One who would do dishes and cook and clean with his wife or for her when she was ill or fatigued. One who might favor gardening. And certainly wildflowers to roses. Trees to city lights. The perspicacious dressmaker saw into him as though his skin were made of glass. His heart was two sizes too large and goodness abounded him as though he wore a halo and was incapable of any other manner.
Thomas stared at her and smiled, not as deeply. She didn't hear what he asked her for she was profoundly beguiled there gazing at him. She was lost in the woods of his soul and she felt ashamed and discourteous for it. She apologized profusely, to which Thomas smiled and told her not to worry upon it. He often daydreams as well and get similarly lost in his thoughts. Then he repeated his question, kindly.
"Will you show me the dress you would wear if you were to wear one from your shop?"
"Well, honestly, it isn't my shop. I'm not the owner by no means. I only — work here."
"Oh, but you don't 'only' do anything."
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"If you pardon me, a beautiful woman such as yourself, 'only' is no way to describe you or anything that you do. You do it well. Everything — you do well. I can tell. After the war, I used to read palms in the traveling circus. Black my face and called myself 'Sasmo the Serious.' From the jungles of Africa, I was. I wore no shirt or shoes. Just these Arabian-style gaudy purple pants and a heavy gold turban. I never smiled, either. I would read palms in a little tent for ten cents a palm and tell people things so seriously that they would believe me. And all these things were true because I was imbued with a great gift while I was in the war and that was to see the future. I've seen it all. I can see it all. I can see it in your eyes like your eyes are two crystal balls."
"Nonsense!" Delores scoffed with a chuckle.
"You are going to force me to have to prove myself to you, aren't you?"
"Oh, I don't have time for games, Mister."
"Please, call me Thomas."
"Well, Thomas, I have a thousand alterations to do. And other things to finish before I close shop and go home to my — husband."
"You don't want to go home to your husband. Do you?"
"Excuse me?"
Thomas stared at her for a long moment, his face expressionless and empty like a gorilla's. Yet his eyes were intense and focused upon her so much so that she began to feel uncomfortable and looked away. Her body, it seemed, began to tremor as though she were cold.
Then Thomas, as though in a trance, spoke to her in a steady monotone voice, not once breaking or showing any semblance of emotion.
"You don't want to go home to your husband because he is a cruel man. He hurts you. He doesn't love you and you do not love him, but you are married, and he is someone who will not ever let you go. You fear he might murder you someday, but you can't do anything about it because you don't have family here to help you. Or they wouldn't listen. He is a — judge. Or a lawyer. Or a jailer. No. No. He is a police officer. A very tall and strong police officer with heavy hands. He wasn't in the war because of something to do with his ears, or so he says. You will not leave him, but you've tried once. You ran away, but he caught you. You worried that God would judge you because of that which is written in — Leviticus. You're worried you'll go to hell."
Delores became visibly upset and upon seeing this through his trance, Thomas relented with apologies, wearily rubbing his face.
"I'm sorry. Ever since the war I —"
"It's of no matter," Delores excused brusquely. "No matter at all." She took a deep breath and gathered herself. "Would you like to see the dress, or will you be leaving now? It appears the rain has let up and you will not get as wet leaving."
"But I am already wet. And once one is wet, how can one get wetter?"
"There are varying degrees of wetness," she returned happily, relieved to be off the subject of his prior prognostication.
"Perhaps," he smiled. "About that dress."
Delores showed Thomas her favorite dress in the shop. She would never own it or wear it because it was too much for her, she felt. Her husband would hate it and accuse her of being a temptress. It was a Sunday social dress. There was a hat that went along with it, but Thomas insisted he wouldn't be needing the hat.
"You're wife would appreciate it, I assure you. Take it from a lady. It is a style that has not gone out of fashion — despite what they are doing to women in New York."
"No. She wouldn't appreciate it at all. I am afraid she doesn't have a head."
Delores laughed, assuming Thomas was joking, but he remained stoic in his position until finally relenting, about to burst.
"Sasmo the Serious!" he joked with a dramtically stern face, void of the hint of any emotion until he cracked into a boyish grin.
He insisted on the dress without the hat and Delores boxed it up as ordered. She wrapped it free of charge and as she did he stood there in the shop drumming his fingers over the giant suitcase he had laboriously lugged in with him. He could fit a body in that suitcase, the grim side of her thought.
"So what do you sell?" she asked if only to interrupt the silence.
"Well, I thought you'd never ask!" he exclaimed, snapping open the case. "The finest silk stockings, directly from Paris. And men's shavers, too — from Kenosha, Wisconsin."
"Well, I suppose, Mr. Dickenson might be interested in the stockings, if you wanted to come back tomorrow."
"I'm afraid I live too far away for that. Perhaps, I might stay in a hotel for the night. Is there one you might recommend?"
"Well, there is only one motel and I wouldn't recommend it. People of ill-repute gather there. Transients. That sort."
"I'm a sort of transient, I do suppose."
"No, you have a purpose. They, frankly, do not. They are the riff-raff sort. The fellas who hop railcars and eat beans from cans. Who holler and hoot at women and do other lurid things if only in their mind."
"Then I plead the fifth!"
"You're incorrigible!"
"War does strange things to a man. I imagine many of those men were probably chewed up by that same beast. Same as I was."
"You don't appear to be so affected."
"Appearances don't always paint the truest of pictures."
"Well, there is a boarding house. Just up the street from me. I would recommend you stay there. Mabel is a nice elderly lady. A friend of mine. She has four vacant rooms and she is the best cook in town."
"Well, I am sold," Thomas replied with a grin.
"I'll write the address on a slip of paper. But it's not hard to find. Two blocks past the courthouse and a right on Magnolia. Beautiful brick Victorian with yellow daylilies. There's a sign. The Comer House. Mabel Comer is her name. Tell her that Delores sent you."
"I could wait until you close and drive you home on my way."
"I'm afraid —"
"I know. I know. But I will not accept no for an answer. It is only a ride. I have a brand-new 1922 Buick Roadster. Fire engine red."
"You drive a red automobile?
"Yes. Red. It's not an unusual color, is it?"
"I don't suppose. A little flamboyant, though, for an automobile, isn't it?"
"Flamboyance is my specialty. I had it custom-painted in fact. Life's too short to long for what you want, and to settle for that you don't want. The war taught me that much."
"That is trifle hedonisitic, isn't it? You're a right strange individual, Mr. Riddle. Are you a Christian God-fearing man?"
"Of course. But I'm not sure my God is the same as other people's who've never been to war. I'd like to talk it over with you. Let me give you a ride."
"Sir, your kindness is appreciated, but I'm going to walk home. Thank you for the order, and the offer. We close in an hour. You're welcome to peddle your —doohickeys to whomever may come in until then. I can turn on the radio."
Much to Delores' surprise and disappointment, the salesman didn't accept the offer, rather, he kindly smiled and said that he appreciated her kindness and time before snapping shut his case and abruptly leaving with a curt goodbye. But he didn't go far once he left. He labored the unwieldly green suitcase back out the door and to his car which waited where he parked. A few curious onlookers were standing around it like mollusks on a docked boat. They scattered when they realized the ostentatious car was his, but the gossiping that it birthed continued to grow and the handsomeness of the stranger only augmented it.
Delores ran out for he had forgotten the dress he bought. "Mr. Riddle! Mr. Riddle! Your package! For your wife."
Thomas smiled and thanked her and the loitering gossiping mollusks seemed to lose interest when Delores gave them an indignant glower for she knew what sorts of things they were likely saying.
"Chatterboxes," she groused under her breath as she stomped back into the dress shop.
Thomas gave her a look as he pulled away that she understood quite well. It was a look that said he would see her again and that what was between them wasn't finished. It wasn't exactly possible that a look could say as much as it did, but surely that look did. And he shifted the car into gear with that serious look upon his face that left a burning impression deep within her. One that she would think of as she ate dinner, and brushed her hair, and lied in bed next to her snoring husband. Sasmo the Serious.
Delores didn't hear anything from the stranger for a few days. But she heard he had checked in at Mabel Comers' Boarding House. He never came back the following morning to speak to Mr. Dickenson as she had advised him. But the stories that swirled through that little dress shop about the strange new border at Mabel's ranged from that he was a federal agent incognito in town to bust up a notorious still, to he was an alien from Mars, to he was an employee of an automobile manufacturer canvassing the area for a potential new automobile plant that would produce all red cars.
"Bunkum!" Delores dismissed. She was the only person who had spoken to him, other than Mabel, so she felt a personal connection, as though he was hers in a way. Some very personal way that cannot be explained, nor would she explain it as she was a married woman and speaking of another man was not proper. It was a marriage she never spoke of, unless it could not be otherwise avoided. There was a dead child to be considered, if the marriage was spoken of because such things are misfortunatley entwined. But maybe, she considered, she had misunderstood the stranger's intentions and he was simply advantageously flirtatious as salesmen often are to make a buck.
The stranger, as he came to be known, shut himself in his room at Mabel Comers' Boarding House and hadn't been seen in four days and with every day came new and more extravagant rumors, wilder as the days passed. Even children got in on the act and stories that he was a bodysnatcher floated about. Or that he ate dogs. Mabel said that she sent food to his room and though he didn't open the door to ever accept it, it was eaten and returned to the hallway in the privacy of night with letters of gratitude.
But then on a Sunday, about a week later, he emerged. He came to church and sat in the back of the sanctuary as though to go unnoticed, but it was such a small church, and congregation, any change was immediatley obvious. Any wrinkle in the norm. Delores turned and saw him and smiled at him before realizing she was smiling. Sunlight from a large stained glass window streamed between them and they saw each other through a prism of brilliant harlequin light. She then quickly turned around and kept her attention upon the dour-faced preacher, who courteously welcomed the stranger, and fanned herself with her fan as all the other ladies did properly around her. Thomas left before the parishioners convened in the parlor afterwards, but his generous donation did not go unnoticed by the elderly usher who passed around and collected the offering plates, and who made conversation of it in the parlor.
The next night while Delores was on a walk, Thomas found her in the night a block from her home where her drunk husband was in his own misery, capsized like a sunken ship. Thomas startled her as he approached, but when she realized he was who he was, so it settled in her and so she smiled and let go of herself in the fleeting moment before she was again arrested by properness and etiquette. Shaken back to form. But for a brief moment, she was not a married woman. She was not a dressmaker. She was simply her most natural self free of any sort of defect or ailment or duty and obligation. It was as though life had rolled itself back and she was who she was before life had encumbered her from being who she was intended to be.
"Consider me a firefly," he whispered to her. "What to do in Washington Court House on a Tuesday night?"
"There's nothing," she whispered as though someone might hear her, an abysmal sort of longing in her voice scratching at her throat. As though the crickets have ears. "This is — highly improper."
"I must inform you that I've never been proper. And I have been too close to death to be concerned of such."
"My husband —"
"I don't know him. And I don't care to know him. Nor do I care to speak of him. He is irrelevant," Thomas spoke in a near whisper as he walked behind Delores, who pretended as though he weren't there at all. She did not acknowledge his presence physically in the least, only with begrudging words meant to shoo him away as though he were an unwelcomed stray animal. But it was as if he were her shadow, in his persistence.
"And your wife?"
"Nor should we speak of her. She, too, is irrelevant."
Delores shuddered, still looking forward. Walking though the dark by the houses whose windows were lit appropriately. Little yellow boxes of light. Gold flickering candles. It was early summer and the lawns were speckled with fireflies as the skies were with stars. She didn't want him there, but she didn't want him to leave. She wanted to ask him why he stayed in town for so long and why he didn't come back to see Mr. Dickenson, but she didn't want to encourage him. The sound of his footsteps behind her soothed her yet made her anxious. She was coming apart at the seams, an appropriate metaphor for a seamstress. She prayed then to herself as she often did, and above her, amidst the stillness of a universe that seemed perpetually in brutal order, a shooting star passed overhead and she made a wish. A wish of which she was most ashamed, yet that she longed for so intensely she could not simply pocket it.
"I find comfort and peace in my nightly constitution. A peace you're distubring with your unwelcomed intrusion," she complained to Thomas, who the rest of the town referred to as "The Stranger." Maybe he was a space alien, she considered. Maybe he was a bodysnatcher or ate dogs, as the children alleged. An out-of-this-world celestial monstrous being.
She could tell that he smiled, though she didn't see his face. She wondered if his eyes were as blue as they were in the dress shop. She wondered what would happen if she turned around. Then she recalled she had made a previous wish, some time ago, and it was delivered to her in the form of this handsome stranger, she knew. She didn't believe in coincidence. She had wished for true love to find her, and maybe so it did, but now there was the problem of her husband who was drunk at home and who would kill her if he knew this man walked so near to her person, and even nearer to her heart that he was picking as though it were a pregnable lock.
"If one person happens to peer out their window and see you and I in such a state, I will be disgraced. Ruined. I cannot —"
"I am wearing black, dear lady. I am invisible to their sad but prying eyes. And no gossiper can ruin anyone who doesn't allow it."
"You're not familiar with the witch trials of Salem? Or Hawthorne's 'Scarlett Letter'?"
"I am quite. Of both. I am well a literate man."
"Shhh! Don't speak speak so loudly."
"Would you like for me to leave?"
"Yes," she lied. "At once. This is entirely improper."
"Forgive me then, Delores."
He turned and walked the other way and she heard his footsteps trail off into the distance and her heart sank with every receding step. She wanted to turn to stop him, but she bit her lip and carried on. How absurd, she felt of herself, to wish for something, and when it arrives to reject it so ungratefully. Or to be someone who pretends to not want what they want. To worry so adamantly about etiquette and morality and what others might think if they knew. Of Leviticus that was written before Jesus died and absolved the world of their sins. To conceal the fact that he was right about the abuse. The beatings she concealed with makeup and powder. But even when someone noticed and it was clear that she had been beaten, that look upon their face when they pretended not to see the scar or bruise. Was it for her sake they pretended, to save her the embarassment, or for their own, so not to have to confront Officer Joseph Cory? Peanut Joe, they called him affectionately, for his grandfather had called him that because of his love of peanuts as a child. Or did they ignore it so not to have to do something they ought to do if they cared anything about her at all? Was it so obvious that everyone knew? And she was so meaningless that everyone pretended they didn't? That they were gossiping in their little houses and in bed about it, yet did nothing because they liked Peanut Joe more than they liked her. Because maybe she had brought it upon herself. Maybe Delores, the dressmaker, meek as she was, fair and modest, and as active as she was in church, had a sinister side that a man's fist sought to remedy. Perhaps they think, the beatings were a necessary discipline and would subside once the beaten woman submitted as a wife ought to submit. The ugly way people think was not lost upon Delores Cory — rather, Mrs. Joseph Cory. Mrs. Peanut.
What would her death be ruled? Some justifiable homicide due to a pretend or supposed unfaithfulness that Officer Joe conjures up every time he is wickedly sauced. The unspoken defect of the town's most decorated officer. How she loathed him. After only 8 years of marriage, how she loathed him and thought of how she might kill him, later asking the Lord for forgiveness for her thoughts. How she fantasized about poisoning his food or stabbing him as he slept, so not to suffer at his hands again. There was a torrent of evil that ran through the blackest part of her heart that she knew not to possess and that she desperately wished to cleanse herself of, but that she couldn't when she lied in bed wailing into a pillow so the neighbors couldn't hear her. The pain arrested her. But after a while, it was all done in a thrifty and cold calculated silence. She was accustomed to it, almost. Took it like medicine. And instead of wailing into a pillow she walked the neighborhood as she was tonight, hoping that when she got home, he might be unconscious. And then she would level his revolver to his head or a butcher knife to his throat that would never realize the purpose of its intent.
Divorce was out of the question because of God and Leviticus. It was to be the child's name. Leviticus. The stillborn child who was born to silence without breath. The shame of divorce was a burden she'd never purposefully bear. The shameful life of a divorced wife, having still to carry his name. There was no escape unless he chose it. Unless he drank himself to death or was killed in duty, or unless God had mercy upon her and shuddered up his cold black heart, seized it, or choked him to death with his invisible hand.
Delores hoped that Thomas wouldn't leave, now that she had brushed him aside so rudely. The next morning at work, Mabel Comer came in for some alterations and Delores couldn't be happier to see her. She prodded her for information as furtively as possible, but Mabel was unforthcoming as though she had some instinctive duty to protect her borders' privacy, which was contrary to any other way she had ever been about her guests. But then she relented and spoke of Thomas like he was her son and said she hoped he would stay longer than he intends.
"How long is that?" Delores shot quickly. "That he intends?"
"Oh, he said he might finish the week here and head home to Cincinnati. A pleasant young man. Was in the same regiment as my son, Harry, in The Great War. God rest his soul. Having Thomas here is like having Harry back. Like he came home to me as he promised he would. I told him as much as we had tea yesterday. I half think he stayed the week just to bring me such comfort. I think he comes from his room now just to delight me so."
"Townsfolk are sure taken by him. Heard some strange stories," Delores mentioned as bait.
"Oh," Mabel scoffed. "People just ain't got nothing better to do than to gossip. Now do they?"
Delores chuckled because Mabel was usually the source of all the latest salacious bavardage. But in this one instance, she was playing mother hen to the stranger, so she was exempt from the latest that was probably contrived by Vernon Rife, town barber. The barber chair was a hot seat of bitterness and disdain, mostly, but men don't call the words they sling scuttlebutt, though it is all the same.
Delores took her nightly constitution that night and each and every subsequent night whether she had been hit or she hadn't. And though her husband objected, she went anyway, saying it was doctor's orders and exercise she was entitled to by virtue of women's suffrage, which made her husband laugh at her sudden audacity in utter half-drunk disbelief. She needed the air. It was a particularly hot that week, she went on. But she left and every night, Thomas found her and walked behind her like he was her shadow.
"Would you like to see a movie picture with me? Mrs. Comer was telling me the town theater is nice and there is a picture playing I'd like to see. A Rudolph Valentino film."
"I couldn't possibly! Lester Holcomb owns the theater and his obnoxious son, Wallace, is the ticket taker. I went to school with Wallace, and surely he would tell everyone he saw the very married Mrs. Peanut Joe Cory and the very dashing stranger going to a movie together. I would be tarred and feathered, if only, in caustic words. But no less damning."
.
"You can buy a ticket, and I will buy a ticket later. Better yet, I will sneak into the theater and no one will even know. It is dark. I'll sit directly behind you, just as we walk."
"You're incorrigible. I couldn't."
"Please. I am leaving soon. I have to. There is so much I want to say to you and I'd love to see your face aglow with the lights of a motion picture. There is a feature here — in an hour. They say Rudolph Valentino is the most dashing man in the world. "
"I doubt that. And what does that matter to me? Besides, what will I tell my husband?"
"You're going to a movie. Ask him to come. If he goes, then I will sit away from you. He'll never know I'm there."
Delores reluctantly agreed and went home and asked her husband, who predictably said no, but who had no problem with her going, which Delores knew was due to the fact that he was having an affair with a widow named Helen Mounts who worked at the post office. Her husband was killed in The War, most courageously, in the same regiment as Mabel's son, Harry, and Thomas, and after her mandatory time of mourning, Helen became the very first flapper in the area and was known to drink bootleg hooch and dance on tables at the local stag bar for dollar bills, among other things. There was nothing too attractive about Helen, other than her rampant promiscuity, her willingness to debase herself, but Delores understood that her husband, for better or worse, was fond of the harlots and miscreant women whose personals were as accommodating as busy banquet halls, and equally as indifferent to their guests. She had found a risque photograph of Helen in her husband's sock drawer some months ago, but she simply regarded it with an air of disgust and interred it back to where it was crudely hidden. There was something corpse-like about Helen. Delores only wished she could give the widow that malignant part of her she so apparently desired, but such a thing couldn't be so easily gifted.
The theater was nearly empty. As predicted, Wallace Holcomb, ticket taker and theater janitor, who had the biggest ears of anyone Delores had ever seen, took note that she came alone and asked her, a little dumbly, where Peanut Joe was. And the audacity fired in her when she angrily replied, "Why don't you go ask Helen Mounts."
Wallace's jaw dropped and he apologized, bungling his words as he did, his tongue sort of flopping there. He was inartful and in no way or sort a gifted conversationalist. He gave Delores a complimentary popcorn and said something about motion pictures staving off loneliness. He said he has seen them all and sometimes watches them with no one else in the theater.
There were only a half dozen people in the audience that evening and Delores didn't recognize any of them from what she could tell. She scrutinized their faces as best she could, but there wasn't a familiar one among them. They were mostly older folks because it was a Wednesday night. The theater was sufficiently dark and it felt as though it was the mouth of some giant whale to Delores, and that she was on the cusp of being swallowed. She had only been to the theater once before around the time it opened in early 1920 and she never appreciated the enormity of it. Nor had she known that feeling. Perhaps that is because it was crowded then and now it was nearly empty.
She looked around nervously for Thomas, who promised to come in after the show started and sit behind her. How silly it felt to her to have to hide in such a childlike way. Because little towns have more eyes and mouths than they have people. But big cities are blind as bats. She remembered from when she went to Chicago and felt invisible the one time she ran from her husband, all those years ago. But then he found her and beat her on the train ride home in such a way that it seemed he didn't hit her body as much as he hit her soul. Physically hurting wasn't his motive. Breaking her spirit was, the way men break animals for obeyance and docility.
She kept looking, wondering if he would come, wondering if she was sitting in the best place to see him and to not be seen by others. There was no one behind her. Everyone else was closer to the front. She nervously ate some of the popcorn in the paper sack that Wallace had given her. She tried not to think, but her mind was in fits. It was consuming itself. Her thoughts were wild and a conflagration of desire consumed her soul. The same soul that was in tatters not long ago, was now completely and perfectly restored, albeit in flames. Try not to think what will come of it, she coached herself. God will see you through.
The movie started and he wasn't anywhere to be found. Maybe he changed his mind, her mind raced. What was the name of the movie? Blood and Sand. She'd have to remember in case anyone asked her. Her husband surely was with that harlot right now. Over there in her apartment above the hardware. Or maybe he brought her home. She didn't care. The theater grew darker as the screen lit up brighter and she was a little deeper in that whale's mouth, but she felt safe and anonymous and if there was a way to stay here, surely she would. There is a sort of neutrality in a movie theater, a peace, not known in many other places. Maybe in a museum. In a library.
Then she heard the seat behind her groan gently as someone sat in it. She could smell his cologne and she felt his presence that inate way one does when two people are connected in such a profound and unspoken way.
"Hello, darling," he whispered, the piano music of the movie drowning him out.
She said hello, faintly. Again feigning a lack of interest, but then chastising herself for doing so as she knew he was the answered wish and for that she ought to be grateful. Never before had a wish been granted to her, yet here he was. She knew it, she could say, the moment she saw him. The moment just after that bell clamored on the shop door as it had a thousand times before, to see him lug that green cumbersome case. He spilled into her life the way one tragically and emphatically does. Be careful for those who creep into your life like tourists, for those that are meant for you will pour deeply into you so that they cannot be mistaken as accidental, she recalled reading somewhere. Some romance novel she hid from her husband.
Delores relaxed in her seat and decided to give way to her emotion. To allow herself to be swept up and washed out in the way she had always dreamed. To be swallowed by that whale of the theater to the paradise of its stomach. She invited him to move up and he hopped over the seat, a bit surprised by the impetuousness of her invitation. The beautiful imagery that played all over the silver screen reflected in the deep green pools of her eyes, and her lips slightly parted as she exhaled her old life then inhaled a newer and more hopeful one. She didn't feel tired and worn suddenly, rather an infatigable feeling shot through her with the chill of the air conditioning in the theater that gave her gooseflesh. Or was it the excitement of being so near to her dream in full realization of it. Not that her dream was solely a man, but he was the deliverer of the thaumaturgy. The cupid. That of real love, at last. Death comes for others wearing a black cloak and bearing a sickle with which to reap, but love came to her as a traveling salesman with blue-eyes and slicked-over hair.
He took her hand daringly and she didn't resist. It was the tender way he held it that excited her. It was dainty and gloved, but he removed the glove so that it was naked and drew his fingers slowly over her palm. Then he held it delicately in his own. Not desperately or possessively. In a way that it could withdraw at any moment, though it did not want to withdraw. They were just two hands in a darkened theater, but they were conduits of something greater than themselves. Of an energy and passion that was of love, and of love uncommon.
The movie was a suitable backdrop for their date, but nothing of it was more exciting than that seat in the theater and she could hardly keep up with the reading for her attention was held captive by him. The feel of him near her and the smell of his cologne possessed her thoughts. Thomas watched intently, patiently, but Delores peaked over through sideways glances to be sure he was real and this was happening because it seemed as if it were all a dream. Maybe she was hallucinating and she would wake up to realize it was some sort of defect from brain damage caused by her husband's recurrent and relentless blows.
The bullfight on the screen didn't interest her. The blood and sand. Rudolph Valentino didn't interest her. The minstrel music, the cool theater, the popcorn and the darkness of that mouth which held them in abeyance, none of it interested her as he did. It was all just a scene and a setting. Just a place made special because it was shared with him. And she wondered if it were the same for him, or if she was delusional in the thought that this was so great a moment that it would never be forgotten.
But reality returned to her, and before the movie ended she asked how they planned to part.
"Never," he whispered into her ear defiantly as though she had asked him to surrender.
She shivered. He gave her his suitcoat and invited her to follow him before the movie ended, which daringly she did without hesitation. They left through a side door and out to his automobile that was parked beneath an elm tree in the shadows of a neighboring street. No one, so far as she could tell, saw them drive off.
There was a lake nearby and Thomas drove to it. He knew the lake because Mabel Comer had told him about the lake and how she used to take her Harry there when he was a boy for picnics, and how he used to swim before the world changed forever, and not in their favor. Before the world tried to consume itself — one of the despairing ways she referred to The War. Thomas parked by a large boulder nearby which was flanked by cattails. It was a common spot for the "neckers," wild teenagers who would hike out and picnic or borrow their parents' automobiles and park. Delores' husband knew it well and many of the cigarette butts scattered on the ground surely belonged to Joe Cory.
There were no other cars in sight. There was no sound, other than the crickets and frogs and an occasional breeze that howled through the gangling pines whose needles looked like long thin fingers. It was cool and the redolent pines blessed the spot with a sweet sappy aroma which reminded her of campfires and a youth she spent with her father who died years too soon because the black lung. He was a miner and he called Delores his little golden canary. She could still feel him pattting her on the head at times and smell the coal dust on his rough denim jacket.
Thomas made no advances. He looked up at the openair and was thankful he owned a convertible to be able to see the moon swathed in wispy purplish clouds that were like the rivulets of the sum of all his desirous dreams. He could have sat there and looked at them all night if Delores wasn't there with him, thankful peace had usurped war in the monarchy of his life. But there she was and he reached over and took her hand again the gentle way he had in the theater so that it would not leave. There was a sense of reassurance in his touch that she hadn't known since her father patted her head all those years ago, years that were lost to winds and moons and the sun and all the seasons that came and went, that had either been surrendered or fled. It was all buried deeply in her mind, but it was otherwise gone.
"Before The War I used to watch the sunset nearly every night over a pond in a park in my hometown. In the pond there was a fountain and there were always swans and ducks that glided through the water so effortlessly. Graceful, I suppose, is the better word for it. No one bothered them. Children fed them. Even the most ardent of hunters would let those swans and ducks alone because it could be agreed upon that they were beautiful and the park was prettier because of them. The sunset was magnificent over that pond and where it touched the green of the water through a part in these ancient white sycamores that must have been there for all of time, it seemed, the sunset was painted varying shades of red and orange, and every so often, a brilliant pale shade of pink. I can never forget that color. Just to see it brought me peace and made me love life for all that it was, all that it isn't, and that it can be.
"During The War, I didn't see that color. All I saw were a thousand shades of gray. Flesh that was turned to gristle. It was as though color didn't exist until someone was shot and for a moment that red rose of life would bloom on their skin or their uniform, but after it burst for a moment, the red would fade from it and it went black as death. While I was at war, I longed for those sunsets in that park again. It was like they were a promise. But none would come. When I returned home, I didn't go back to the park again. I don't know why. I just didn't go back. I didn't see that color until I saw you. It is the color of your lips. Forgive me, for I must have stared."
There was a long moment of silence. Just breath, but hardly even that. "You needn't ask for my forgiveness, Thomas. Not from me. But from your wife, I —"
"I am not married. I've never had a wife. I've dreamed of having a wife. I pretended while I was at war that I did have someone to come home to. Someone to live for. I wrote letters to some imaginary woman who I could never really see in my mind, but who I was sure existed somewhere. And when I came home, though she wasn't there at the train station to greet me, I imagined she was. And when I travel, I buy her dresses and gifts, flowers I put in a vase on the table. The gifts are all in a room at my house. The wildflowers I've planted in my yard for her, bloom every year, even without her. This wedding ring I acquired at a pawn and wear — in expectation of her.
"But you are a married woman and I'm passing through this town like I am passing through your life. But I didn't have the courage to leave it. Or the will. Or to come back and see Mr. Dickenson as you offered for that seemed so very final to me. I knew from the moment that I saw you that you are the woman I have inagined all these years. Regardless of your unfortunate marriage. At home there is a room full of things that have never been opened, all for you. This ring, I wear for you."
Delores took a deep breath and leaned back in her seat to open herself up to him as Thomas inhaled deeply and exhaled a world of anguish he had previously thought to have passed. She was a salve that he had never before felt. A comfort he hadn't known. And he breathed her in and all that was broken mended itself in such an uncomplicated way that he knew she was more than just that person. If he could be honest with himself, he loved her more than he had loved anyone for she was the one he had always known to exist somewhere in this world.
He was greeted there by a clever-looking young woman of about his age, a few years more or less, who smiled courteously, though she knew well his type and was leary of him the way one is leary of a copperhead snake. She dealt with salesmen on a regular basis and usually had a quick way of dismissing them, but she didn't employ such means with Mr. Riddle, because he had a pleasing smile and she liked him something about him instantly.
It was an odd thing. The smile never seemed to leave his face, seemed genuine to it, even though his suitcase opened and was disembowled there on the shop floor due to "faulty hinges," he excused, and though he was drenched from the downpour, water cascading down the shop's picture window to tell his tale. Despite those things, he smiled and took off his hat and greeted her respectfully and pleasantly.
"Hello. I am Thomas Riddle, ma'am. You are miss..."
"Delores Cory. Misses — Delores Cory. Have you come to sell us a dozen doohickeys that the shop doesn't need?"
"No, ma'am. I only sell the things people do need. Those are those other guys that sell those. No accounts."
She grinned at his joke.
"In honesty, I've crossed the threshold and transformed myself from seller to buyer. I am looking for a dress for my wife. I like to bring her gifts home from the road."
"In that case, you are in luck, sir."
"Sir? Hmm. I'm rarely afforded such dignity."
Delores smiled and showed Thomas the latest fashions and said she could alter anything to fit his wife's size and stature. Thomas smiled, saying his wife was just her size and weight, so whatever it was, if it fit her, it would certainly fit his wife. Delores looked down at his wedding ring for reassurance that he was in truth married, and there she found it. A modest silver band. She was a bit relieved, yet disappointed all the same, though that was a secret she would keep to herself, married as she was.
Her perceptions of him flared wildly. He was a handsome man. But not as handsome as he was kind. He possessed a gentle quality of one who could do no harm to someone else, not even to an animal. He probably shooed flies out the window. A Christian man who probably had a church where he was of regular attendance. Who probably played some sort of instrument, or read, or wrote. One who probably told his wife funny jokes just to hear her laughter, or to see her smile because such a thing would please him so. One who would do dishes and cook and clean with his wife or for her when she was ill or fatigued. One who might favor gardening. And certainly wildflowers to roses. Trees to city lights. The perspicacious dressmaker saw into him as though his skin were made of glass. His heart was two sizes too large and goodness abounded him as though he wore a halo and was incapable of any other manner.
Thomas stared at her and smiled, not as deeply. She didn't hear what he asked her for she was profoundly beguiled there gazing at him. She was lost in the woods of his soul and she felt ashamed and discourteous for it. She apologized profusely, to which Thomas smiled and told her not to worry upon it. He often daydreams as well and get similarly lost in his thoughts. Then he repeated his question, kindly.
"Will you show me the dress you would wear if you were to wear one from your shop?"
"Well, honestly, it isn't my shop. I'm not the owner by no means. I only — work here."
"Oh, but you don't 'only' do anything."
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"If you pardon me, a beautiful woman such as yourself, 'only' is no way to describe you or anything that you do. You do it well. Everything — you do well. I can tell. After the war, I used to read palms in the traveling circus. Black my face and called myself 'Sasmo the Serious.' From the jungles of Africa, I was. I wore no shirt or shoes. Just these Arabian-style gaudy purple pants and a heavy gold turban. I never smiled, either. I would read palms in a little tent for ten cents a palm and tell people things so seriously that they would believe me. And all these things were true because I was imbued with a great gift while I was in the war and that was to see the future. I've seen it all. I can see it all. I can see it in your eyes like your eyes are two crystal balls."
"Nonsense!" Delores scoffed with a chuckle.
"You are going to force me to have to prove myself to you, aren't you?"
"Oh, I don't have time for games, Mister."
"Please, call me Thomas."
"Well, Thomas, I have a thousand alterations to do. And other things to finish before I close shop and go home to my — husband."
"You don't want to go home to your husband. Do you?"
"Excuse me?"
Thomas stared at her for a long moment, his face expressionless and empty like a gorilla's. Yet his eyes were intense and focused upon her so much so that she began to feel uncomfortable and looked away. Her body, it seemed, began to tremor as though she were cold.
Then Thomas, as though in a trance, spoke to her in a steady monotone voice, not once breaking or showing any semblance of emotion.
"You don't want to go home to your husband because he is a cruel man. He hurts you. He doesn't love you and you do not love him, but you are married, and he is someone who will not ever let you go. You fear he might murder you someday, but you can't do anything about it because you don't have family here to help you. Or they wouldn't listen. He is a — judge. Or a lawyer. Or a jailer. No. No. He is a police officer. A very tall and strong police officer with heavy hands. He wasn't in the war because of something to do with his ears, or so he says. You will not leave him, but you've tried once. You ran away, but he caught you. You worried that God would judge you because of that which is written in — Leviticus. You're worried you'll go to hell."
Delores became visibly upset and upon seeing this through his trance, Thomas relented with apologies, wearily rubbing his face.
"I'm sorry. Ever since the war I —"
"It's of no matter," Delores excused brusquely. "No matter at all." She took a deep breath and gathered herself. "Would you like to see the dress, or will you be leaving now? It appears the rain has let up and you will not get as wet leaving."
"But I am already wet. And once one is wet, how can one get wetter?"
"There are varying degrees of wetness," she returned happily, relieved to be off the subject of his prior prognostication.
"Perhaps," he smiled. "About that dress."
Delores showed Thomas her favorite dress in the shop. She would never own it or wear it because it was too much for her, she felt. Her husband would hate it and accuse her of being a temptress. It was a Sunday social dress. There was a hat that went along with it, but Thomas insisted he wouldn't be needing the hat.
"You're wife would appreciate it, I assure you. Take it from a lady. It is a style that has not gone out of fashion — despite what they are doing to women in New York."
"No. She wouldn't appreciate it at all. I am afraid she doesn't have a head."
Delores laughed, assuming Thomas was joking, but he remained stoic in his position until finally relenting, about to burst.
"Sasmo the Serious!" he joked with a dramtically stern face, void of the hint of any emotion until he cracked into a boyish grin.
He insisted on the dress without the hat and Delores boxed it up as ordered. She wrapped it free of charge and as she did he stood there in the shop drumming his fingers over the giant suitcase he had laboriously lugged in with him. He could fit a body in that suitcase, the grim side of her thought.
"So what do you sell?" she asked if only to interrupt the silence.
"Well, I thought you'd never ask!" he exclaimed, snapping open the case. "The finest silk stockings, directly from Paris. And men's shavers, too — from Kenosha, Wisconsin."
"Well, I suppose, Mr. Dickenson might be interested in the stockings, if you wanted to come back tomorrow."
"I'm afraid I live too far away for that. Perhaps, I might stay in a hotel for the night. Is there one you might recommend?"
"Well, there is only one motel and I wouldn't recommend it. People of ill-repute gather there. Transients. That sort."
"I'm a sort of transient, I do suppose."
"No, you have a purpose. They, frankly, do not. They are the riff-raff sort. The fellas who hop railcars and eat beans from cans. Who holler and hoot at women and do other lurid things if only in their mind."
"Then I plead the fifth!"
"You're incorrigible!"
"War does strange things to a man. I imagine many of those men were probably chewed up by that same beast. Same as I was."
"You don't appear to be so affected."
"Appearances don't always paint the truest of pictures."
"Well, there is a boarding house. Just up the street from me. I would recommend you stay there. Mabel is a nice elderly lady. A friend of mine. She has four vacant rooms and she is the best cook in town."
"Well, I am sold," Thomas replied with a grin.
"I'll write the address on a slip of paper. But it's not hard to find. Two blocks past the courthouse and a right on Magnolia. Beautiful brick Victorian with yellow daylilies. There's a sign. The Comer House. Mabel Comer is her name. Tell her that Delores sent you."
"I could wait until you close and drive you home on my way."
"I'm afraid —"
"I know. I know. But I will not accept no for an answer. It is only a ride. I have a brand-new 1922 Buick Roadster. Fire engine red."
"You drive a red automobile?
"Yes. Red. It's not an unusual color, is it?"
"I don't suppose. A little flamboyant, though, for an automobile, isn't it?"
"Flamboyance is my specialty. I had it custom-painted in fact. Life's too short to long for what you want, and to settle for that you don't want. The war taught me that much."
"That is trifle hedonisitic, isn't it? You're a right strange individual, Mr. Riddle. Are you a Christian God-fearing man?"
"Of course. But I'm not sure my God is the same as other people's who've never been to war. I'd like to talk it over with you. Let me give you a ride."
"Sir, your kindness is appreciated, but I'm going to walk home. Thank you for the order, and the offer. We close in an hour. You're welcome to peddle your —doohickeys to whomever may come in until then. I can turn on the radio."
Much to Delores' surprise and disappointment, the salesman didn't accept the offer, rather, he kindly smiled and said that he appreciated her kindness and time before snapping shut his case and abruptly leaving with a curt goodbye. But he didn't go far once he left. He labored the unwieldly green suitcase back out the door and to his car which waited where he parked. A few curious onlookers were standing around it like mollusks on a docked boat. They scattered when they realized the ostentatious car was his, but the gossiping that it birthed continued to grow and the handsomeness of the stranger only augmented it.
Delores ran out for he had forgotten the dress he bought. "Mr. Riddle! Mr. Riddle! Your package! For your wife."
Thomas smiled and thanked her and the loitering gossiping mollusks seemed to lose interest when Delores gave them an indignant glower for she knew what sorts of things they were likely saying.
"Chatterboxes," she groused under her breath as she stomped back into the dress shop.
Thomas gave her a look as he pulled away that she understood quite well. It was a look that said he would see her again and that what was between them wasn't finished. It wasn't exactly possible that a look could say as much as it did, but surely that look did. And he shifted the car into gear with that serious look upon his face that left a burning impression deep within her. One that she would think of as she ate dinner, and brushed her hair, and lied in bed next to her snoring husband. Sasmo the Serious.
Delores didn't hear anything from the stranger for a few days. But she heard he had checked in at Mabel Comers' Boarding House. He never came back the following morning to speak to Mr. Dickenson as she had advised him. But the stories that swirled through that little dress shop about the strange new border at Mabel's ranged from that he was a federal agent incognito in town to bust up a notorious still, to he was an alien from Mars, to he was an employee of an automobile manufacturer canvassing the area for a potential new automobile plant that would produce all red cars.
"Bunkum!" Delores dismissed. She was the only person who had spoken to him, other than Mabel, so she felt a personal connection, as though he was hers in a way. Some very personal way that cannot be explained, nor would she explain it as she was a married woman and speaking of another man was not proper. It was a marriage she never spoke of, unless it could not be otherwise avoided. There was a dead child to be considered, if the marriage was spoken of because such things are misfortunatley entwined. But maybe, she considered, she had misunderstood the stranger's intentions and he was simply advantageously flirtatious as salesmen often are to make a buck.
The stranger, as he came to be known, shut himself in his room at Mabel Comers' Boarding House and hadn't been seen in four days and with every day came new and more extravagant rumors, wilder as the days passed. Even children got in on the act and stories that he was a bodysnatcher floated about. Or that he ate dogs. Mabel said that she sent food to his room and though he didn't open the door to ever accept it, it was eaten and returned to the hallway in the privacy of night with letters of gratitude.
But then on a Sunday, about a week later, he emerged. He came to church and sat in the back of the sanctuary as though to go unnoticed, but it was such a small church, and congregation, any change was immediatley obvious. Any wrinkle in the norm. Delores turned and saw him and smiled at him before realizing she was smiling. Sunlight from a large stained glass window streamed between them and they saw each other through a prism of brilliant harlequin light. She then quickly turned around and kept her attention upon the dour-faced preacher, who courteously welcomed the stranger, and fanned herself with her fan as all the other ladies did properly around her. Thomas left before the parishioners convened in the parlor afterwards, but his generous donation did not go unnoticed by the elderly usher who passed around and collected the offering plates, and who made conversation of it in the parlor.
The next night while Delores was on a walk, Thomas found her in the night a block from her home where her drunk husband was in his own misery, capsized like a sunken ship. Thomas startled her as he approached, but when she realized he was who he was, so it settled in her and so she smiled and let go of herself in the fleeting moment before she was again arrested by properness and etiquette. Shaken back to form. But for a brief moment, she was not a married woman. She was not a dressmaker. She was simply her most natural self free of any sort of defect or ailment or duty and obligation. It was as though life had rolled itself back and she was who she was before life had encumbered her from being who she was intended to be.
"Consider me a firefly," he whispered to her. "What to do in Washington Court House on a Tuesday night?"
"There's nothing," she whispered as though someone might hear her, an abysmal sort of longing in her voice scratching at her throat. As though the crickets have ears. "This is — highly improper."
"I must inform you that I've never been proper. And I have been too close to death to be concerned of such."
"My husband —"
"I don't know him. And I don't care to know him. Nor do I care to speak of him. He is irrelevant," Thomas spoke in a near whisper as he walked behind Delores, who pretended as though he weren't there at all. She did not acknowledge his presence physically in the least, only with begrudging words meant to shoo him away as though he were an unwelcomed stray animal. But it was as if he were her shadow, in his persistence.
"And your wife?"
"Nor should we speak of her. She, too, is irrelevant."
Delores shuddered, still looking forward. Walking though the dark by the houses whose windows were lit appropriately. Little yellow boxes of light. Gold flickering candles. It was early summer and the lawns were speckled with fireflies as the skies were with stars. She didn't want him there, but she didn't want him to leave. She wanted to ask him why he stayed in town for so long and why he didn't come back to see Mr. Dickenson, but she didn't want to encourage him. The sound of his footsteps behind her soothed her yet made her anxious. She was coming apart at the seams, an appropriate metaphor for a seamstress. She prayed then to herself as she often did, and above her, amidst the stillness of a universe that seemed perpetually in brutal order, a shooting star passed overhead and she made a wish. A wish of which she was most ashamed, yet that she longed for so intensely she could not simply pocket it.
"I find comfort and peace in my nightly constitution. A peace you're distubring with your unwelcomed intrusion," she complained to Thomas, who the rest of the town referred to as "The Stranger." Maybe he was a space alien, she considered. Maybe he was a bodysnatcher or ate dogs, as the children alleged. An out-of-this-world celestial monstrous being.
She could tell that he smiled, though she didn't see his face. She wondered if his eyes were as blue as they were in the dress shop. She wondered what would happen if she turned around. Then she recalled she had made a previous wish, some time ago, and it was delivered to her in the form of this handsome stranger, she knew. She didn't believe in coincidence. She had wished for true love to find her, and maybe so it did, but now there was the problem of her husband who was drunk at home and who would kill her if he knew this man walked so near to her person, and even nearer to her heart that he was picking as though it were a pregnable lock.
"If one person happens to peer out their window and see you and I in such a state, I will be disgraced. Ruined. I cannot —"
"I am wearing black, dear lady. I am invisible to their sad but prying eyes. And no gossiper can ruin anyone who doesn't allow it."
"You're not familiar with the witch trials of Salem? Or Hawthorne's 'Scarlett Letter'?"
"I am quite. Of both. I am well a literate man."
"Shhh! Don't speak speak so loudly."
"Would you like for me to leave?"
"Yes," she lied. "At once. This is entirely improper."
"Forgive me then, Delores."
He turned and walked the other way and she heard his footsteps trail off into the distance and her heart sank with every receding step. She wanted to turn to stop him, but she bit her lip and carried on. How absurd, she felt of herself, to wish for something, and when it arrives to reject it so ungratefully. Or to be someone who pretends to not want what they want. To worry so adamantly about etiquette and morality and what others might think if they knew. Of Leviticus that was written before Jesus died and absolved the world of their sins. To conceal the fact that he was right about the abuse. The beatings she concealed with makeup and powder. But even when someone noticed and it was clear that she had been beaten, that look upon their face when they pretended not to see the scar or bruise. Was it for her sake they pretended, to save her the embarassment, or for their own, so not to have to confront Officer Joseph Cory? Peanut Joe, they called him affectionately, for his grandfather had called him that because of his love of peanuts as a child. Or did they ignore it so not to have to do something they ought to do if they cared anything about her at all? Was it so obvious that everyone knew? And she was so meaningless that everyone pretended they didn't? That they were gossiping in their little houses and in bed about it, yet did nothing because they liked Peanut Joe more than they liked her. Because maybe she had brought it upon herself. Maybe Delores, the dressmaker, meek as she was, fair and modest, and as active as she was in church, had a sinister side that a man's fist sought to remedy. Perhaps they think, the beatings were a necessary discipline and would subside once the beaten woman submitted as a wife ought to submit. The ugly way people think was not lost upon Delores Cory — rather, Mrs. Joseph Cory. Mrs. Peanut.
What would her death be ruled? Some justifiable homicide due to a pretend or supposed unfaithfulness that Officer Joe conjures up every time he is wickedly sauced. The unspoken defect of the town's most decorated officer. How she loathed him. After only 8 years of marriage, how she loathed him and thought of how she might kill him, later asking the Lord for forgiveness for her thoughts. How she fantasized about poisoning his food or stabbing him as he slept, so not to suffer at his hands again. There was a torrent of evil that ran through the blackest part of her heart that she knew not to possess and that she desperately wished to cleanse herself of, but that she couldn't when she lied in bed wailing into a pillow so the neighbors couldn't hear her. The pain arrested her. But after a while, it was all done in a thrifty and cold calculated silence. She was accustomed to it, almost. Took it like medicine. And instead of wailing into a pillow she walked the neighborhood as she was tonight, hoping that when she got home, he might be unconscious. And then she would level his revolver to his head or a butcher knife to his throat that would never realize the purpose of its intent.
Divorce was out of the question because of God and Leviticus. It was to be the child's name. Leviticus. The stillborn child who was born to silence without breath. The shame of divorce was a burden she'd never purposefully bear. The shameful life of a divorced wife, having still to carry his name. There was no escape unless he chose it. Unless he drank himself to death or was killed in duty, or unless God had mercy upon her and shuddered up his cold black heart, seized it, or choked him to death with his invisible hand.
Delores hoped that Thomas wouldn't leave, now that she had brushed him aside so rudely. The next morning at work, Mabel Comer came in for some alterations and Delores couldn't be happier to see her. She prodded her for information as furtively as possible, but Mabel was unforthcoming as though she had some instinctive duty to protect her borders' privacy, which was contrary to any other way she had ever been about her guests. But then she relented and spoke of Thomas like he was her son and said she hoped he would stay longer than he intends.
"How long is that?" Delores shot quickly. "That he intends?"
"Oh, he said he might finish the week here and head home to Cincinnati. A pleasant young man. Was in the same regiment as my son, Harry, in The Great War. God rest his soul. Having Thomas here is like having Harry back. Like he came home to me as he promised he would. I told him as much as we had tea yesterday. I half think he stayed the week just to bring me such comfort. I think he comes from his room now just to delight me so."
"Townsfolk are sure taken by him. Heard some strange stories," Delores mentioned as bait.
"Oh," Mabel scoffed. "People just ain't got nothing better to do than to gossip. Now do they?"
Delores chuckled because Mabel was usually the source of all the latest salacious bavardage. But in this one instance, she was playing mother hen to the stranger, so she was exempt from the latest that was probably contrived by Vernon Rife, town barber. The barber chair was a hot seat of bitterness and disdain, mostly, but men don't call the words they sling scuttlebutt, though it is all the same.
Delores took her nightly constitution that night and each and every subsequent night whether she had been hit or she hadn't. And though her husband objected, she went anyway, saying it was doctor's orders and exercise she was entitled to by virtue of women's suffrage, which made her husband laugh at her sudden audacity in utter half-drunk disbelief. She needed the air. It was a particularly hot that week, she went on. But she left and every night, Thomas found her and walked behind her like he was her shadow.
"Would you like to see a movie picture with me? Mrs. Comer was telling me the town theater is nice and there is a picture playing I'd like to see. A Rudolph Valentino film."
"I couldn't possibly! Lester Holcomb owns the theater and his obnoxious son, Wallace, is the ticket taker. I went to school with Wallace, and surely he would tell everyone he saw the very married Mrs. Peanut Joe Cory and the very dashing stranger going to a movie together. I would be tarred and feathered, if only, in caustic words. But no less damning."
.
"You can buy a ticket, and I will buy a ticket later. Better yet, I will sneak into the theater and no one will even know. It is dark. I'll sit directly behind you, just as we walk."
"You're incorrigible. I couldn't."
"Please. I am leaving soon. I have to. There is so much I want to say to you and I'd love to see your face aglow with the lights of a motion picture. There is a feature here — in an hour. They say Rudolph Valentino is the most dashing man in the world. "
"I doubt that. And what does that matter to me? Besides, what will I tell my husband?"
"You're going to a movie. Ask him to come. If he goes, then I will sit away from you. He'll never know I'm there."
Delores reluctantly agreed and went home and asked her husband, who predictably said no, but who had no problem with her going, which Delores knew was due to the fact that he was having an affair with a widow named Helen Mounts who worked at the post office. Her husband was killed in The War, most courageously, in the same regiment as Mabel's son, Harry, and Thomas, and after her mandatory time of mourning, Helen became the very first flapper in the area and was known to drink bootleg hooch and dance on tables at the local stag bar for dollar bills, among other things. There was nothing too attractive about Helen, other than her rampant promiscuity, her willingness to debase herself, but Delores understood that her husband, for better or worse, was fond of the harlots and miscreant women whose personals were as accommodating as busy banquet halls, and equally as indifferent to their guests. She had found a risque photograph of Helen in her husband's sock drawer some months ago, but she simply regarded it with an air of disgust and interred it back to where it was crudely hidden. There was something corpse-like about Helen. Delores only wished she could give the widow that malignant part of her she so apparently desired, but such a thing couldn't be so easily gifted.
The theater was nearly empty. As predicted, Wallace Holcomb, ticket taker and theater janitor, who had the biggest ears of anyone Delores had ever seen, took note that she came alone and asked her, a little dumbly, where Peanut Joe was. And the audacity fired in her when she angrily replied, "Why don't you go ask Helen Mounts."
Wallace's jaw dropped and he apologized, bungling his words as he did, his tongue sort of flopping there. He was inartful and in no way or sort a gifted conversationalist. He gave Delores a complimentary popcorn and said something about motion pictures staving off loneliness. He said he has seen them all and sometimes watches them with no one else in the theater.
There were only a half dozen people in the audience that evening and Delores didn't recognize any of them from what she could tell. She scrutinized their faces as best she could, but there wasn't a familiar one among them. They were mostly older folks because it was a Wednesday night. The theater was sufficiently dark and it felt as though it was the mouth of some giant whale to Delores, and that she was on the cusp of being swallowed. She had only been to the theater once before around the time it opened in early 1920 and she never appreciated the enormity of it. Nor had she known that feeling. Perhaps that is because it was crowded then and now it was nearly empty.
She looked around nervously for Thomas, who promised to come in after the show started and sit behind her. How silly it felt to her to have to hide in such a childlike way. Because little towns have more eyes and mouths than they have people. But big cities are blind as bats. She remembered from when she went to Chicago and felt invisible the one time she ran from her husband, all those years ago. But then he found her and beat her on the train ride home in such a way that it seemed he didn't hit her body as much as he hit her soul. Physically hurting wasn't his motive. Breaking her spirit was, the way men break animals for obeyance and docility.
She kept looking, wondering if he would come, wondering if she was sitting in the best place to see him and to not be seen by others. There was no one behind her. Everyone else was closer to the front. She nervously ate some of the popcorn in the paper sack that Wallace had given her. She tried not to think, but her mind was in fits. It was consuming itself. Her thoughts were wild and a conflagration of desire consumed her soul. The same soul that was in tatters not long ago, was now completely and perfectly restored, albeit in flames. Try not to think what will come of it, she coached herself. God will see you through.
The movie started and he wasn't anywhere to be found. Maybe he changed his mind, her mind raced. What was the name of the movie? Blood and Sand. She'd have to remember in case anyone asked her. Her husband surely was with that harlot right now. Over there in her apartment above the hardware. Or maybe he brought her home. She didn't care. The theater grew darker as the screen lit up brighter and she was a little deeper in that whale's mouth, but she felt safe and anonymous and if there was a way to stay here, surely she would. There is a sort of neutrality in a movie theater, a peace, not known in many other places. Maybe in a museum. In a library.
Then she heard the seat behind her groan gently as someone sat in it. She could smell his cologne and she felt his presence that inate way one does when two people are connected in such a profound and unspoken way.
"Hello, darling," he whispered, the piano music of the movie drowning him out.
She said hello, faintly. Again feigning a lack of interest, but then chastising herself for doing so as she knew he was the answered wish and for that she ought to be grateful. Never before had a wish been granted to her, yet here he was. She knew it, she could say, the moment she saw him. The moment just after that bell clamored on the shop door as it had a thousand times before, to see him lug that green cumbersome case. He spilled into her life the way one tragically and emphatically does. Be careful for those who creep into your life like tourists, for those that are meant for you will pour deeply into you so that they cannot be mistaken as accidental, she recalled reading somewhere. Some romance novel she hid from her husband.
Delores relaxed in her seat and decided to give way to her emotion. To allow herself to be swept up and washed out in the way she had always dreamed. To be swallowed by that whale of the theater to the paradise of its stomach. She invited him to move up and he hopped over the seat, a bit surprised by the impetuousness of her invitation. The beautiful imagery that played all over the silver screen reflected in the deep green pools of her eyes, and her lips slightly parted as she exhaled her old life then inhaled a newer and more hopeful one. She didn't feel tired and worn suddenly, rather an infatigable feeling shot through her with the chill of the air conditioning in the theater that gave her gooseflesh. Or was it the excitement of being so near to her dream in full realization of it. Not that her dream was solely a man, but he was the deliverer of the thaumaturgy. The cupid. That of real love, at last. Death comes for others wearing a black cloak and bearing a sickle with which to reap, but love came to her as a traveling salesman with blue-eyes and slicked-over hair.
He took her hand daringly and she didn't resist. It was the tender way he held it that excited her. It was dainty and gloved, but he removed the glove so that it was naked and drew his fingers slowly over her palm. Then he held it delicately in his own. Not desperately or possessively. In a way that it could withdraw at any moment, though it did not want to withdraw. They were just two hands in a darkened theater, but they were conduits of something greater than themselves. Of an energy and passion that was of love, and of love uncommon.
The movie was a suitable backdrop for their date, but nothing of it was more exciting than that seat in the theater and she could hardly keep up with the reading for her attention was held captive by him. The feel of him near her and the smell of his cologne possessed her thoughts. Thomas watched intently, patiently, but Delores peaked over through sideways glances to be sure he was real and this was happening because it seemed as if it were all a dream. Maybe she was hallucinating and she would wake up to realize it was some sort of defect from brain damage caused by her husband's recurrent and relentless blows.
The bullfight on the screen didn't interest her. The blood and sand. Rudolph Valentino didn't interest her. The minstrel music, the cool theater, the popcorn and the darkness of that mouth which held them in abeyance, none of it interested her as he did. It was all just a scene and a setting. Just a place made special because it was shared with him. And she wondered if it were the same for him, or if she was delusional in the thought that this was so great a moment that it would never be forgotten.
But reality returned to her, and before the movie ended she asked how they planned to part.
"Never," he whispered into her ear defiantly as though she had asked him to surrender.
She shivered. He gave her his suitcoat and invited her to follow him before the movie ended, which daringly she did without hesitation. They left through a side door and out to his automobile that was parked beneath an elm tree in the shadows of a neighboring street. No one, so far as she could tell, saw them drive off.
There was a lake nearby and Thomas drove to it. He knew the lake because Mabel Comer had told him about the lake and how she used to take her Harry there when he was a boy for picnics, and how he used to swim before the world changed forever, and not in their favor. Before the world tried to consume itself — one of the despairing ways she referred to The War. Thomas parked by a large boulder nearby which was flanked by cattails. It was a common spot for the "neckers," wild teenagers who would hike out and picnic or borrow their parents' automobiles and park. Delores' husband knew it well and many of the cigarette butts scattered on the ground surely belonged to Joe Cory.
There were no other cars in sight. There was no sound, other than the crickets and frogs and an occasional breeze that howled through the gangling pines whose needles looked like long thin fingers. It was cool and the redolent pines blessed the spot with a sweet sappy aroma which reminded her of campfires and a youth she spent with her father who died years too soon because the black lung. He was a miner and he called Delores his little golden canary. She could still feel him pattting her on the head at times and smell the coal dust on his rough denim jacket.
Thomas made no advances. He looked up at the openair and was thankful he owned a convertible to be able to see the moon swathed in wispy purplish clouds that were like the rivulets of the sum of all his desirous dreams. He could have sat there and looked at them all night if Delores wasn't there with him, thankful peace had usurped war in the monarchy of his life. But there she was and he reached over and took her hand again the gentle way he had in the theater so that it would not leave. There was a sense of reassurance in his touch that she hadn't known since her father patted her head all those years ago, years that were lost to winds and moons and the sun and all the seasons that came and went, that had either been surrendered or fled. It was all buried deeply in her mind, but it was otherwise gone.
"Before The War I used to watch the sunset nearly every night over a pond in a park in my hometown. In the pond there was a fountain and there were always swans and ducks that glided through the water so effortlessly. Graceful, I suppose, is the better word for it. No one bothered them. Children fed them. Even the most ardent of hunters would let those swans and ducks alone because it could be agreed upon that they were beautiful and the park was prettier because of them. The sunset was magnificent over that pond and where it touched the green of the water through a part in these ancient white sycamores that must have been there for all of time, it seemed, the sunset was painted varying shades of red and orange, and every so often, a brilliant pale shade of pink. I can never forget that color. Just to see it brought me peace and made me love life for all that it was, all that it isn't, and that it can be.
"During The War, I didn't see that color. All I saw were a thousand shades of gray. Flesh that was turned to gristle. It was as though color didn't exist until someone was shot and for a moment that red rose of life would bloom on their skin or their uniform, but after it burst for a moment, the red would fade from it and it went black as death. While I was at war, I longed for those sunsets in that park again. It was like they were a promise. But none would come. When I returned home, I didn't go back to the park again. I don't know why. I just didn't go back. I didn't see that color until I saw you. It is the color of your lips. Forgive me, for I must have stared."
There was a long moment of silence. Just breath, but hardly even that. "You needn't ask for my forgiveness, Thomas. Not from me. But from your wife, I —"
"I am not married. I've never had a wife. I've dreamed of having a wife. I pretended while I was at war that I did have someone to come home to. Someone to live for. I wrote letters to some imaginary woman who I could never really see in my mind, but who I was sure existed somewhere. And when I came home, though she wasn't there at the train station to greet me, I imagined she was. And when I travel, I buy her dresses and gifts, flowers I put in a vase on the table. The gifts are all in a room at my house. The wildflowers I've planted in my yard for her, bloom every year, even without her. This wedding ring I acquired at a pawn and wear — in expectation of her.
"But you are a married woman and I'm passing through this town like I am passing through your life. But I didn't have the courage to leave it. Or the will. Or to come back and see Mr. Dickenson as you offered for that seemed so very final to me. I knew from the moment that I saw you that you are the woman I have inagined all these years. Regardless of your unfortunate marriage. At home there is a room full of things that have never been opened, all for you. This ring, I wear for you."
Delores took a deep breath and leaned back in her seat to open herself up to him as Thomas inhaled deeply and exhaled a world of anguish he had previously thought to have passed. She was a salve that he had never before felt. A comfort he hadn't known. And he breathed her in and all that was broken mended itself in such an uncomplicated way that he knew she was more than just that person. If he could be honest with himself, he loved her more than he had loved anyone for she was the one he had always known to exist somewhere in this world.
They might have made love there in the automobile as others have done. On the groaning leather seat cushions, springs working in unison. It was an inviting prospect for both, and Delores was ready as something had snapped inside of her. What dam there was of moral resistance had collapsed now that she knew he wasn't married, and all her doubt washed away. But Thomas, as much as he longed for her, and as much as he avowed that patience was not a worthy virtue, never made a move, instead he talked to her and made her laugh which no one had done for a very long time. They sat there in his car, looking at the stars, making love with words, with breath, and even in the silence between. Then she confessed to him that she longed to be a writer, but didn't know the first place to start. He suggested that she ought to start here.
It could have lasted all night, but it was late and Delores knew her husband waited at home for her. Surely, he had finished with that bawd by now. There was likely a line if married men out her door holding tickets. He likely waited and now he had something to accuse her of, that which he hadn't before, never a thought, even. How would it be then? Would he kill her, she asked herself. Was this the last night of her life? The very perfect last night that she would't trade for anything in the world, even for her life. She wouldn't be able to lie. If he asked her, she would admit the truth and out it would come, falling all over itself the way truth often does. But she could say he never kissed her. He barely even touched her, but what was felt in that slightest of caresses of his hand was more than she ever felt in any way.
Delores and Thomas were both much different people now than they were when they had sat down to the movie. They were connected now. Their souls entwined. One would never fully be apart from the other, they both knew, from this night forward. Thomas drove her to town and dropped her off on a corner near her house. Then he parked his car at the boarding house and reluctantly went inside, wondering when he would see her again and how it would be when he did.
To Delores' relief, her husband was passed out in bed. There was an empy bottle of whisky on the end table and he was still wearing his clothes. His tie hung like a severed noose around his neck. He was harmless in that state, and by the time he woke up he would be too hung over and tired to do anything. He never beat her sober or hungover. He hardly spoke to her then, as though he were ashamed of himself for however he was the night before. Especially when Delores had a black eye or a busted lip and sat across the breakfast table, confronting him with it by merely her presence. He never apologized in words, rather, he did so with a lack of words. By saying nothing at all. By being still or mawkish.
As Delores lied in bed the thought that she could have stolen the night with Thomas consumed her. Or at least they could have spent several more hours together. She could hardly sleep at first, but when she did she was carried away to a perfect chorus of illusory dreams. Those of her father and of Kentucky where she was born. Of fireflies in the yard that she caught in pickle jars and of Thomas making love to her in a hayfield back home. The thought and feeling was so entirely real and intense that she orgasmed in her sleep as her debauched husband snored next to her.
The next day came and went. And the next. She didn't hear from Thomas until three days later when he came into the shop and requested another dress. Mr. Dickenson was in the shop and asked him about his stockings. He sold the lot to him, but none of the men's razors. Harry the barber might be interested in those, Mr. Dickenson suggested with a slight gobble in his voice. He was an older and frail-looking man who resembled a turkey more so than any other person Thomas had ever seen before.
"A suitable wedding dress," Thomas instructed Delores. "Something casual, but not too casual. Something lovely," he added staring at her as Mr. Dickenson counted money from a black lock box. His ear was enormous and he listened very carefully to what the stranger was asking for, hoping it would sound more expensive with every word.
Delores looked confused, but she listened, cautious of Mr. Dickenson hovering around the register as she wrote down Thomas' instructions. She had told Mr. Dickenson and everyone she knew for that matter that Thomas was a happily married man, if only just to cover herself. She even said she saw a picture of his wife and she was a lovely woman that she hoped to meet someday. So she couldn't understand why he was ordering a wedding dress, nor how she would explain it to anyone until he let her off easy.
"It's for my sister, Irene. She is getting married in a week near Cincinnati and I am afraid she hasn't the money to afford her something nice. It's more of a casual wedding. There's a small country chapel there abound with wildflowers. Not a lot of people there. Just those who matter."
"What size would you say your sister is?" Delores asked.
"She is — about your size. If the dress fits you, surely it shall fit her."
Delores grinned standing there in her threadbare dress. In all the time Thomas had seen her, she never wore anything besides for modest colorless dresses which certainly didn't suit her at all. Though she needn't wear anything to excite the senses, nor did anything take away from her beauty, how he dreamed of seeing her in color. In yellow. Or blue. Or pink. And certainly, someday, in ivory white, and hopefully never in black.
Delores went to the backroom and retrieved the dress she had in mind. Mr. Dickenson smiled and nodded in approval as she came back out with it slacked over her arms like a boneless body.
"Can you try it on for me?" Thomas asked boldly. It was certainly not an unusual request to ask for a dress to be modeled, but under the circumstances, it was. When Delores hesitated, Mr. Dickenson cleared his throat and waved her on to comply with the customer's request and she disappeared again to the back where she got undressed and put on the dress.
Mr. Dickenson apologized to Thomas softly and said the girl was modest to a fault. Thomas smiled as though he were disinterested when all the while he was enamored and his heart was in his throat. It was an act he had to play until he got her out of town, which he knew was what he must do. His face grew serious and he stared at the calendar on the wall — June 1922. Someone had crossed the days off as the month progressed so that on the calendar there was a happy image of some wildflowers on top and a bunch of X's below. Time was running out.
Mr. Dickenson caught a glimpse of Thomas staring so sternly off into the distance and he wondered if something displeased him, so he tried to make a joke about something, but Thomas didn't hear him and so the joke faltered. He heard nothing at all. For a moment he was back in The War and there was a horse screaming as she was caught in barbedwire, the flesh being tore from her bones as she tried to break free. On the other side of the field, enveloped in smoke and a haze of death that stunk of burning flesh and powder, a Hun waited to shoot the man who tried to help free the horse so the merciful thing to do was to shoot the horse, but Thomas could not. He shot more men then he could remember, but he couldn't shoot the horse as much as it suffered. But someone else did. Then there was the ringing of an ear-piercing silence.
"Mr. Riddle? Mr. Riddle?" Mr. Dickenson gobbled. It was his bald head and the loose fat on his throat just beneath the chin which made him resemble a turkey, Thomas considered. Then there was the intrusion of the front door bell which clanged and in walked Delores' husband, Officer Cory. And the turkey man made a fuss over him and the officer guffawed like a schoolboy would when an old man tells him a joke and gives him candy. Officer Cory was carrying a boquet of flowers for his wife. Dreadful red carnations. A surprise. He had not given her flowers in a long time, but there he stood like an ox, awkwardly holding the boquet that was wrapped in wax paper and crinkled as he held it.
Delores walked out, wearing the wedding dress, and her husband smiled, but Thomas was dismayed by his presence and the gift he bore as though her husband was intentionally intruding on a dream he was dreaming. As though he was trying to steal something from him when the opposite was truth, in reality. It just didn't feel that way. And for a moment, standing there, Thomas regretted not making love to Delores the night of the movie when he had the opportunity because something had changed. A window had closed, he felt. A door had shut. And the husband was there to lock it until the next time he got drunk and beat her half to death. It was an apology boquet. Maybe he found Jesus somewhere.
Delores was startled by her husband who looked handsome in his uniform and with a new haircut. He said Vern did him up right. He was always handsome when he was being kind and when he smiled rather than when he grimaced. He remarked how beautiful she appeared and made mention of their wedding some 8 years ago and how she was even lovelier now than she was then, especially in that dress. Thomas just stood there and took it. Delores quickly explained that she was modeling the dress for Mr. Riddle's sister in Cincinnati, who was to be married soon. Officer Cory gave Thomas a grin of approval and offered his congratulations then gave his wife the boquet and a pleasant kiss. He shook Thomas' hand and said good to meet you and to place a face to a name before saying his goodbyes.
The moment was devastating for Thomas, who stood there as though all life had drained from him as it had when he watched that horse die an excruciating death in the barbedwire.
Thomas couldn't imagine that the same man who brought his wife flowers, mercifully beat her as she had confessed, but he had seen the bruises veiled in makeup when he first arrived. But the fact that she kissed him, accepted the flowers there in front of him, was the matter most he abhorred. She didn't seem to express any hesitancy or doubt, and she smiled at her husband as though she were happily married and pleased that he thought of her in such a way.
But Delores was simply hoping to conceal her affair with Thomas that, though not physical, was a reality she couldn't otherwise deny besides in such a charade. And though she knew not to what end it would lead, she knew she was to follow for the path ran through her heart from which she was the most vulnerable.
"Are you pleased with the dress?" Mr. Dickenson asked Thomas, who gave it only a glance.
"I am. But I'm not quite ready to make such a purchase at this time. I am leaving town soon, so I will think it over and stop in before I depart."
"I can give you a good deal —"
"It isn't the price," Thomas said leaving. "I need to phone my sister and find out if the wedding is going to happen or not. Marriage isn't the institution it once was, it seems. I am baffled at times by the propensity of cupid to shoot so inaccurately with his bow."
"Truer words have never been spoken!" Mr. Dickenson affirmed. Delores silently demurred. She raged inside and had much to say to Thomas, but wasn't sure she would have the chance. There was a bitterness in his tone and she knew he must have been dismayed by the presence of her husband, who had been making a stange effort to make up to her over the past few days.
Thomas left without saying goodbye and Delores knew he would be gone if she didn't do something. So after Mr. Dickenson went home at 3, she closed up the shop two hours early and went to the boarding house, though she knew it would give her away and raise a suspicion she wouldn't be able to deny. Mabel greeted her at the door, a chubby-old hen in a proper blue dress.
"Delores! Well, what do I owe the pleasure?"
"I'm here to see Mr. Riddle. It's about a dress her ordered for his sister," she lied. Lies were part of her armory, suddenly. She carried the box as an accomplice. It was all she could think up to excuse her presence and her business with the stranger, Mr. Riddle.
"Oh, well, I can go get him. I believe he is packing his things to leave us. The dear boy. I begged him to stay a while or so longer as he does remind me of my dearest departed Harry, but —"
"What room?"
"My dear?"
"What room is he in? I will go. It is a surprise, but it will only take a minute."
Mabel looked at Delores and perhaps she recognized something desperate in her eyes, something she sympathized with, but whatever it was she told her, quietly, which room it was and Delores properly but quickly made her way up the stairs to the gentleman's room, something she could say she had never done before, nor ever could have imagined herself doing.
She knocked once, but then entered without waiting. Thomas was on the bed looking at a postcard he bought and never sent. His bags were packed and waited patiently on the carpet of the floor near the door. The room was green in color. The softer shade of green that isn't so bright, yet not so dark that it looks like a forest at twilight. Rather, it looked like the pools of Delores' sad eyes. Surely, somehwere there is a name for it. In a paint store or on the lips of an artist that does landscapes. In a dictionary that is closed upon a shelf somewhere. But the things one cannot rightly label and define are those that are the most interesting and romantic. The walls were one such thing. As was the painting above the brass bed which was of a field of flowers that Delores had never seen the likes of before, nor likely ever would. Purple flowers, a million of them, growing wild and free, unencumbered, uninhibited and blessed with the right amount of rainfall and sun, perpetually in their youth. Living, yet lifeless. Dying, yet alive. And in the distance, behind that field of flowers was a canoe on a lake with a daub of color for a man that sat in it.
Words get in the way often. So they didn't speak. Harry's gramophone was on, as it was once Harry's room, and the record that played promised things that the singer could never, or did not intend to, deliver. Eternal love and happiness. Money and bliss. All just for a kiss. And Delores shut the door and kissed Thomas there in front of the bed and dropped the box. There was a painting of Christ's face on an opposing wall who looked up to Heaven in agony. Blood fell down his cheeks in soft crimson streams like tears. But she had no time to consider Him. Nor anything else. For she was consumed fully, and they made love on the bed, the telltale springs of which wailed with every thrust and motion, but not to their consideration, for their ears were deaf in passion. The brass rails rocked and beat against the thin wallpapered wall and the legs of the bed stomped in protest, or was it in celebration for this long-overdue and most natural saturnalia? Sex is the only time the human mind thinks nothing, nothing of consequences, good or otherwise, or of entanglements. Nothing of perceptions or the aftermath of what is emotionally due to the other. Thus, why babies find it easy to be made and born. A child is not born to this world unless two people pretend at least to love one another, and engage in the official ceremony of the ritual, for better or worse.
A breeze blew through the white lace curtains of the open window. The curtain danced there where it hung, the window like a mouth inhaling and exhaling. Wind the cooled
their sweaty bodies. There was no other way now. There was no going back and after it ended, Delores lied there in bed with him, exhausted and gratefully sore, content and blissfully lethargic. The euphoria of the act still holding her in its grasp as he caressed her head. The golden canary she was once more. A perfect being loved by someone. Thomas immediately plead with her to come with him, but she was unable to think properly in the moment. And slowly, Leviticus and all other things like eternal damnation, crept into her mind.
"You can go with me to Cincinnati. Start a new life. Take a new name. Or you can stay here. He will abuse you again when he gets drunk and I will kill him and get the electric chair. Or he will kill us both. This story is written one of those three ways to end. There's no other way, Delores."
"Will God forgive me?"
"Ask Him."
"Have you seen it?" she asked naked. Her leg caressing his body as she curled up next to him.
"Have I seen what?"
"Sasmo the Serious. Have you seen our fate?"
"Do you have ten cents?" Thomas laughed taking her into his arms. She burrowed her head softly into his armpit as though to hide. As though to stay hidden. She was safe there. Her
hand explored his body as she kissed him again. Jesus wailed on the wall, in prepetual Catholic agony. His face looked like that horse's, Thomas considered for a second before extinguishing the thought by burying his face in Delores' hair. Delores thought of the old ladies at church who told her to bear it. Some of them had been cheated and beaten, too. Men don't beat their wives forever, they promised her. The cheating doesn't last. They sow their wild oats and become men. But divorce is the Devil's hand. Then she wrapped her arm around Thomas as though to hold on to him forever. As though he could keep her from going to hell, or from dying first.
"How far is it to Cincinnati?"
They got up and got dressed as the record player played a slow repetitive static, the record expiring long before their lovemaking did. Delores now considered how loud she must have been. It was as though she were speaking in tongues and if there were any borders in their rooms, they must have heard. Mabel certainly would have heard unless she was outside tending her garden, which is what Delores hoped. Yet, she knew Mabel knew, regardless of what she heard or didn't hear of the bouncing bed frame, or the floor, or Delores' wailing. Maybe she so eagerly agreed to go to Cincinnati so not to face Mabel again. So not to be at Mabel's mercy, hoping every minute of every day that she could keep this secret. And she knew she couldn't see him just this once. She had never made love like this and she would not be able to make love any other way with anyone else.
Thomas grabbed his bags and Delores followed him out the door. Suddenly, she was his shadow, contrary to how they were before. He had left a kind note for Mabel, he said. Delores hoped to be invisible behind him, but they didn't see anyone as they left. Mabel must have indeed been out in her garden pruning her rosebushes for the enormous house was quiet as a nunnery. And for that, Delores was grateful to God.
As they puttered away in the flashy red Buick, Delores insisted she had to go home to get some personal things that belonged to her father. That he left her and she couldn't possibly leave without. She never knew her mother, she admitted. Her mother died when Delores was only 2 of cholera. Thomas tried to talk her out of going, or to let him go instead, and she finally agreed that he could go and she would wait at the diner that sat on the highway. He would pick her up there and they'd leave together as soon as he returned. There was a book of photos in her dresser. Photos of her mother and of her father. Their wedding. It was in the first drawer. And her father's Civil War medals. He won the Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. There was a revolver in there he carried with him in battle.
"I was born in 1892. My daddy was 46 when he had me. My mother was only 19. He hadn't been with anyone other than her, nor she of him. He said that he was waiting for the right person to come along and he would know her when he saw her, and, well, finally she came along." Delores grinned recalling her daddy's stories.
"I know the feeling. I, too, have waited. Everyone else had the same problem."
"What is that?" she asked.
"They weren't you."
Delores smiled. "I am happy that you did. My momma died in 1894 so their romance was short lived in person, but the way he spoke of her, it was quite evident to me that it carried on much after she was gone. To the end of his time."
Thomas grinned over at her as they drove to the diner. "Of all the stories to write, perhaps you should write theirs so that they live on forever."
"Oh, they do in my heart," she smiled. Thunder cracked and the gray sky opened up to an ominous downpour.
"I will meet you here," Thomas promised her in the parking lot of the diner. They both glanced up at the highway out of town that was rippled with rain drops and for a moment they had the same thought. That was the road to their happily ever after and it was just right there in front of them. How long exciting it was for them both to dream that dream.
"What if Joe is there? I know he ought to be working, but he comes home sometimes. Randomly he goes home to eat or to have a drink." Delores panicked. "What if he is home?"
"I'll be quick. If he is parked outside, I'll know. He drives a marked car, right?"
"Yes," she frantically replied. "A squad car. Like any other."
Thomas nodded and smiled hoping to assuage her fear. He gave her a newspaper to hold over her head for the rain which she did as she scurried into the diner. She waved goodbye as he puttered away, sloshing through sudden puddles that seemed to swallow the pavement. His wipers dilligently wiping. The rain cascading down the windshield like a foreboding warning if ever one was to be had. No one saw her get out of the car, she was sure. No one could know, she resolved. But then she considered, what does it matter now what they think of me when soon I'll be gone?
Nervously, she waited at the diner at a table by the window. She looked out onto the parking lot that was full of black Fords, not much else. All black automobiles. There wasn't one colored car in the lot since Thomas had left. She never realized before how lifeless and dull people are. Even herself. They almost pride themselves in it as though austerity and plainness are some sort of grace. She caught glimpses of herself in the large window and she looked drab. She was wearing the same gray dress she wore three times a week. Another was a lifeless blue one and another one that she hardly wore because it was also her funeral dress, was black. She didn't want it to fade and have to dye it because the other two times she did, it left her hands black for a month. If she prided herself on anything, she prided herself on her cleanliness and her hands.
She knew everyone at the diner. Almost everyone knew everyone in Washington Court House, a town of only a few thousand people. The waitress was picking her ear about a dress she needed mended and Delores told her to bring it in, though she knew she wouldn't be there whenever she did. She would be gone. She would be in Cincinnati with Thomas, and she began to fantasize about what that would be like. She had only been there once and she wondered if it was anything like Chicago. She wondered if they could get on one of those boats and paddle down the Ohio River and have dinner in a fancy restaurant and go to the theater. If they could go to a baseball game. It was only a few years since the Reds won the penant. She wondered and saw things in her coffee cup, in that omnipotent black steaming orb. That magic 8 ball porcelain gypsy eye. There she could see everything, even a child. But then, perhaps portentously so, just like that it was all gone.
Suddenly, and much to her relief, that red Buick Roadmaster reappeared in the distance and it splashed into the parking lot. Thomas pulled up and lapped the building without honking or making a scene and Delores left a quarter on the table for the coffee and premonition she drank and hurried out the door trying not to be so obvious. He parked a ways away from the building and where they wouldn't be seen. He smiled at her as she got into the car, but his eye was swollen and blood trickled down the side of his face from a cut on his head. Delores covered her mouth and shrieked.
"You can't go with me. I'm sorry, Delores."
"What?! What happened?!"
"Joe came in, as you warned me he might. It was just horrible timing. He drew his gun and I got to him before he could pull the trigger. We fought. Broke up the place real good. He got some good licks in and I got some good licks in. He wouldn't leave it at that, though. He went for the gun again and I stabbed him with a kitchen knife. It couldn't have been avoided. I swear to you. He lies dead on your living room rug as I speak. It is only a matter of time before they all know it. You got to go home and call the police and tell them you found him there in that state! They will investigate and, eventually, I'll be arrested. There is no doubt in my mind. There is some clue I left behind. Fingerprints on the knife that is still in his chest. A footprint. Something. A man don't get away with killing a police man. Not around here. Never."
"Thomas, wait! Wait! Let me go with you. We can live on the run. Live in a boxcar for all I care. I haven't known — this — before I knew you. Not this kind of love, anyway. We can get on a train for California and do anything we want to do. Maybe Mexico. I got twenty dollars saved up in a shoebox in top of the closet. Canada, if you'd prefer. Some out of the way town. A cabin in the deep woods somewhere. Live off the land. Nothing but nature and the birds and those sunsets you told me about. The ones with that pale shade of pink."
"Delores," Thomas returned calmly. "If you run with me then you're guilty, too. We both will die in the electric chair. I can't have you ruin your life. Not for me. Not for anything."
"But you ruined your life for me! It was self defense. I believe you. You just said so. You can explain it to the judge."
"Delores. I killed a police man, honey. It ain't like killing a Hun, or a dog, or some hobo on the street. No one is going to believe anything other than I was caught in the act of burglarizing your house and killed the man in cold blood. If I claim self defense, then you will have to tell them about us. You'll have to tell everyone about our affair and I can't let you do that. They will consider us to be accomplices and I can't let you do it, honey."
Delores slumped in her seat, crestfallen for a moment. "I wished for it. I did. There was a star. I wished for him to die and to know real love. I just couldn't take the beatings anymore. I couldn't take the fear of syphilis or disease he would one day give me. He raped me, but they say a man can't rape his wife so there is no justice to be had for it. It was as though he liked it that way. He wanted me to be afraid of him. He wanted me to resist him. He was a monster. Joe Cory was the devil incarnated and I had the misfortune to play the role of his wife for 8 horrible years."
The rain picked up again and thunder cracked. It was a reprieve from the oppressive summer heat. Blood trickled into Thomas' eye and it stung. He winced in pain. Delores took out a handkerchief and tried to mend his wounds, but he gently pushed her arms aside and looked at her with love in his eyes. He was trying to get a look to remember her by. The downpour gave them some shortlived privacy in the car, but Thomas started it up and drove back to where he parked before so to let her out. So to let her go home and find her dead husband on the living room rug. He would never hit her again. He would never rape her. He was powerless as he was. At least, her war was over and she could live in peace.
Delores wasn't fearful to see him dead as she walked in. Ashamedly, she had fantasized about it. About life without him. But now, she knew, she must be an actress. She must scream and call the police. The coroner would come out. The neighbors would all line the sidewalk with hopes to get a glimpse of the stretcher with the body of Officer Peanut Joe Cory on it. Under a sheet. There would be a funeral to attend and his family to talk to. Condolences to gather and stow away and a month of wearing black for a man who didn't deserve to be mourned. She looked at her hands and knew they'd be stained soon with black dye, or maybe she'd just buy another dress. Maybe she would allow herself that.
She stood there and looked at him lying there, that knife like a broken gear shift in his chest. She looked at him for a long time without saying a word. Without moving. Without hardly breathing. Then she screamed. And then she called the police. She wanted to give Thomas time to get away. Time to get to Cincinnati and hide wherever he intended to hide. She cried, but not for her dead husband. But because she wasn't going to see Thomas again unless they captured him and sent him to the electric chair. Then she collapsed in the living room next to her dead husband as sirens wailed in the distance.
A month later, Thomas had yet to be arrested. He expected that it would come at anytime. That he would hear news of it. He avoided the papers and the radio for just that reason. He didn't want to know when it would come, or when it was about to come. Just as he didn't want to know in The War that he swore he would die in when death would come for him. He just wanted it to be swift. It might be too much to ask for it to be painless, so he didn't ask that.
He went back to Cincinnati and lived a normal life. Sold French hosiery and men's razors from Kenosha one week, then pocket watches and hair brushes the next. He sold encyclopedias for a while, but no one was as interested in books as they were in radios or magazines. Magazines were the easiest sell. Everyone wanted to look at pictures. Everyone wants to hear about crime and to watch pornography, subtle or explicit. They want to be entertained. Then he gave up his traveling sales job and became the manager of a busy hardware store. He was good at his job, but every time the bell rang when someone came in, he looked up to see if it was a law man.
A few years later he went back to watch those swans and ducks in the park where he used to go to look at those sunsets. There he dreamed of Delores and wondered if ever he could go back. Wondering if ever she moved on. But any day, still he figured, they'd come. He wouldn't be hard to find. He was, after all, listed in the public telephone directory. His house wasn't the least bit inauspicious since he painted it a pale shade of pink.
He was just about finished with it when a car hurriedly pulled up to the curb. He was on the ladder and heard the brakes squeal in protest. He didn't look back, he just stared at the color and was lost somewhere inside of it the way a man must be lost when he drowns. When panic gives way to the calmness of acceptance. The door shut forcefully, and then another door shut.
It was the footsteps on the sidewalk that first betrayed his assumptions as to the identity of his visitor. Instead of the angry boot steps he expected, he heard the clip-clop of heels. The distinct sound of women's shoes. He turned to look to see Delores standing there in a dress that was the very color of the house. The color of her lips.
"Color looks good on you," he smiled as though he was not in panic.
"I wanted to match the house."
"You knew it was pink?"
"I assumed it was pink."
He could have fallen off the ladder and into the rosebushes for his surprise. Or died of a heart attack right there as shocked as he was to see her. It had been two long years and there she stood on the sidewalk on the other side of the white picket fence smiling at him. The taxi driver scurried to drop her bags and hurriedly got back into the cab and puttered away.
"I hope it is not too presumptious of me to be dropped here? I'm not familiar with the city and am in desperate need of an honest guide."
"No," Thomas smiled. "Not presumptuous at all. And you are not in the least bit desperate. Actually, it is quite perfect. I need someone to help me plant wildflowers for the season."
"Where do I apply?" she grinned.
"I think you already did. And you're hired."
"Well, before you hire me you must know that I am a felon. I plead guilty to killing my husband. I served two years in the state reformatory for women. I claimed self-defense, but the prosecutor was relentless. I was given a ten year sentence, despite the abuse and thought I would have to serve it. But then I wrote a letter to the governor's wife who proved to be as sympathetic as she was influential. I wrote her a story, really. In the story, as you might imagine, I killed him. I never mentioned you, at all, for fear they'd arrest you. That was the reason I confessed. I heard rumors that you were a person of interest. The governor's wife and I become penpals and she convinced her husband to commute my sentence."
"Delores — I didn't know."
"And I am thankful you didn't. I know you would have confessed, if you had. I worried that you would, but I was prepared for that. I wiped your prints off the knife and I pressed mine to it. I wiped up a bloody footprint you left by the back door. I had you a sworn alibi."
"Mabel Comer?"
"Yes. Mabel Comer," she smiled.
"Two years!" Thomas exclaimed.
"Two years," she repeated. "It is very little time to do for love. It wasn't all that terrible. I actually felt good saying that I did it. It was as though I got my dignity back. I wanted to do it. And two years in prison gave me time to write and to become someone I never was."
"Who is that?" he asked.
"Myself."
Thomas smiled at her. He loved her even more now than he had ever before. He grabbed her bags and carried them inside. Delores was home, she knew, the moment she stepped inside that picket fence and the redolence of the flowers greeted her soft delicate nose.
He bought her an Underwood typewriter and several reams of paper the next day as a surprise gift. He joked with her about knowing how it all would work out, being that he was "Sasmo the Serious." They made love with the window open and a view of the garden below. Some days later, Delores wrote the governorness once again, one last time, expressing her dearest gratitude and inviting her to Cincinnati for tea, telling her that she had found true love and that the flames of Hell, she learned, are a pale shade of pink. Signed — Delores, the Murderess — as all the paper's conspired to describe her.
Comments
Post a Comment