Читать книгу: «Everything Must Go», страница 2

And this is one of those days.

The sun, amber through the plastic window covering, spotlights dust particles suspended in the stale air. Baxter’s has bad circulation and on particularly humid days there is an unpleasant and inexplicable smell of camphor mixed in with the old fabric. Intellectually, Henry knows inanimate objects cannot breathe but occasionally finds himself thinking the clothing has sucked up all the oxygen, leaving him with only mustiness.

It does not help matters that the store is packed with merchandise, sparing only narrow aisles that snake to the fitting rooms located in the back. The maze is so cramped that large-size customers are forced, in some cases, to turn sideways while making their way through the store. Every inch of floor space is crammed with some display or another. Upon entering, a customer will encounter the first of seven round racks, this one announcing new arrivals. It is understood that new is a loose term at Baxter’s for many of the sport coats on this particular rack have been nestled there for several seasons. The new arrivals are flanked by two more circular displays, one set aside for sport coats in the smaller sizes, the other a bit taller, for heavier overcoats. So one must turn either right or left and pass in between these round obstacles just to make it halfway through the store to the square command center that is the register setting atop a glass case featuring cuff links, tuxedo studs, some ties, handkerchiefs—various and sundry items to complete a man’s wardrobe. If all the floor displays were magically lifted up and carried away, the old, worn industrial gray carpet would show exactly where they should be re-deposited, thanks to these trails beaten down by years of customers’ feet.

All four walls of the store are lined with racks that stretch length-wise, the upper level so tall Henry is called upon to reach the larger sizes of suits or coats. If left alone Mr. Beardsley is forced to use a pole with a hook on the end of it. Pants are hanging lower and therefore require less attention.

In the beginning, when store owners were called purveyors, roads were only recently paved with tar and President Roosevelt’s New Deal restored good fortune to many, Albert and Christian Baxter opened Baxter’s to great fanfare. Red, white and blue bunting outlined the roof, the glass storefront squeaky clean and sparkling in the sun and nearly everyone in town turned out in fine clothing. Albert and Charles opened the doors wearing paper armbands on top of their high-collared dress shirts. Visors cast green tints on their spectacles and mustaches. Back then, in 1939, Henry’s hometown had a population of 6,053 and was considered quite bustling. Fancy. On the rise. And Baxter’s exemplified its wealth and promise. Breeding was what most of the townspeople took the greatest pride in. One third of the population could trace their roots back to at least one family member of great national significance. The remaining two-thirds, while not scruffy exactly, were left to cater to the needs of the wealthy. As the town grew, so did Baxter’s importance, and shops bloomed on either side of it.

It is hard to pinpoint the moment when Baxter’s went from fancy to frayed, but most likely it came after the war, after the nation had perfected frugality. The town (by then population 21,367) felt a collective sense of shame at its preening. Or guilt perhaps. Either way, it was as if a notice had been posted that from that point forward anything that hinted at opulence, anything that drew attention to one’s fortune, was tasteless.

Albert and Christian Baxter quickly and sensibly sold the property to a self-made millionaire who kept the name but lowered the standards. The nearby metropolis offered plenty of jobs— careers—but became too expensive and crowded and so Henry’s became a town of commuters. The population swelled to forty thousand. The town originals sniffed at the newcomers, thinking them ordinary: the workhorses of society who did not know the old Baxter’s. They inevitably overlooked the plain and traditional Northeastern wear and flocked instead to whatever was the style of the day. Thankfully, though, some of the quality merchandise remained, so stalwarts continued to shop there.

Strange that the swell of occupants did not translate into town growth. Henry’s was mostly a town of ones. One stationery store. One hardware store. One supermarket. One dry cleaner. And for many years a car dealership that by the 1980s had gone the way of the Woolworth’s—both moving like moths to the light that was and is Westtown, a growing community three miles away. Baxter’s was soon left hanging on to its spot on Main Street by its leather-tabbed, buttonholed suspenders.

Still, the town has a shabby elegance that Westtown cannot duplicate. Try though it might, Westtown has an altogether nouveau sheen to it that is distasteful to all in Henry’s community. If there were a town motto it would be quality not quantity. The families here take pride in the fact that the previous generation also had house accounts at the hardware store or the stationery store and, yes, for a time, even at Baxter’s.

Henry’s is a town where honking endures as a form of greeting, not an expression of anger. Where everyone in a certain circle knows their friends’ old cars and knows, therefore, all their friends’ movements.

It is a place in which thank-you notes are written immediately following dinner parties. Bloody Marys with celery stalks served every Sunday even without company. Cotillions co-exist with salad dressing from packets that promise—with the addition of oil—to produce genuine Italian dressing.

This, a town where children make eye contact and call their parents’ friends mister and missus and are taught to shake hands at very young ages.

“Do you know,” Henry’s mother once said to his father across the dinner table, after a bridge game at a friend’s Westtown home, “do you know I had to introduce myself to her children? She didn’t even blink. Not a word. They were little savages, those children. I’m so glad you all have manners. My children have manners.”

Henry, a boy then, sat up straighter at the compliment. He noticed Brad did, too. Even little David seemed to Henry to be politely sleeping upstairs.

From then on Henry thought of Westtown as inferior.

Henry imagines Blackie’s at ten. Blackie’s is one of the few bars in town (an exception to the rule of ones). But unlike the surly man at Mike’s tavern, the bartender at Blackie’s ignores the fact that some of his clientele are grossly underage. Most weekend nights his patrons are boys whose voices had only recently dropped a register and girls whose baby fat had yet to redistribute itself. Blackie’s is one step above sticky floors, two steps below the brass-and-fern decor slowly springing up in most bars in towns with eyes pointed optimistically to the future.

For a moment Henry is sure the door opened. Positively certain. He whips around to find it just as closed as it was three seconds ago. Maybe it jammed closed when that woman left, he thinks. He gets up and opens it and tries it from the outside. It is, in fact, just fine. No jamming after all.

Satisfied, he takes his seat again and sifts through the receipts in front of him, putting them in numerical order. He arranges himself over the papers so he looks studious. In case someone did come in, he would look engrossed. As if having a customer would be somewhat annoying, actually. You could come back later and I wouldn’t mind at all, he imagines his attitude to be.

He checks his watch again and pushes the receipts together, tapping them into alignment, and tries not to think of the sheer waste his existence is turning out to be. His movements feel clunky and self-conscious. As if he is being watched closely, the subject of a science experiment. An experiment some cosmic deity had cooked up, he thinks, to see just how deep a human being can sink into waking oblivion.

Or maybe it is a movie, he thinks. The Life Story of Henry Powell, starring (drumroll, please) Henry Powell, ladies and gentlemen. His heart sinks deeper into his chest, an imaginary screenwriter scribbles. He sifts through the shoe box under the counter marked Miscellaneous. Stage notes indicate the box is gray. The screenwriter uses words like pathetic and desolate in his description of the scene. Henry’s shoulders are slumped. The screenwriter in his sunny California office, so remote from Henry’s Northeastern existence. A gray existence. Like the shoe box. The screenwriter tilts back in the ergonomic desk chair all Californians seem to sit in and steeples his fingers together in supreme satisfaction at the metaphor.

Henry can envision Peterson in a pink T-shirt under his blazer (sleeves up) leaning against the bar at Blackie’s, swigging his beer—for if anyone swigs a beer it’s Peterson, he thinks. With, say, Bob Seger playing on the radio he’ll fling non sequiturs like pizza dough. Hoping to catch the interest of his audience: “Figger” Newton, Gaynor Mills and Chris “Smithereen” Smith, so called because in tenth grade he took a hammer and smashed the box he’d received a D on in Shop. Though his classmates were admiring of the gesture, deep down Chris Smith knew he’d exploded not because of the grade but because the night before his parents had told him of their plans to separate. They never did end up getting back together, as they’d promised him that night. And Smithereen never quite got over it. Henry knows that at some point “Against the Wind” will give way to something by the Eagles. Serpentine conversation will slither from junk bonds and Drexel Burnham and, inevitably, back in time to Bunsen burners and football games won and lost. Bored heads will be fixed on the game scores scrolling along the bottom of the TV hanging in the corner of the bar. Braves lose. Mets up by two. Henry decides then and there he will not be going to Blackie’s tonight.

The magnetic pull of his new answering machine is too much to resist. Not many people have these tape-recording devices attached to home phones. But Henry had his friend, the manager of Radio Shack, order one for him after reading about them in Esquire.

He picks up the phone and dials his own number. “This is Henry Powell,” his own voice greets him, “please leave a message when you hear the beep.” Though he knows what awaits him, he enters his code: 22849. He mouths the words as the robotic voice delivers the news: “You have—slight pause—no—slight pause—messages.”

He knew she wouldn’t call him. He’d met her in the birthday card section at the stationery store that morning. Janine. She had moved closer to him at the precise moment he had unknowingly reached for a card with a pornographic cartoon image. Horrified, Henry had held on to the one he had chosen, hoping she had not seen it, and then, to hide the front, he pulled the matching envelope. But she had seen the slot the envelope came from and there was no denying the fact that Henry appeared to be a complete and total pervert.

Henry, beet-red but thinking “the best defense is a good offense,” said, “Hi. I’m Henry Powell.”

Janine stretched her upper lip out first in disgust but then, minding her manners, forced it into a smile, said, “I’m Janine.”

Henry hoped a conversation would distract her long enough so he could back up against the opposing card rack and tuck the dirty card into a section, any section, from behind his back. “Do you work up the street?”

“No. I’m in town visiting my college roommate.”

Henry, successful in relieving himself of the card, smiled. “Huh. Who’s your roommate? Maybe I went to school with her.”

It appears to Henry that Janine might be warming up and even perhaps—please God—forgetting about the card she thinks he chose on purpose. “Sloan Phillips? Do you know her?”

Henry once carried a very bombed Sloan Phillips up her front walk after a party they’d gone to together junior year but felt this was not the time to bring it up to Janine.

“Yeah, I know Sloan. Wow. You’re her college roommate?”

The conversation went on from there and culminated in Henry saying, “If you guys are going out later, give me a call,” after she’d mentioned wanting to go to Blackie’s since she’d heard so much about it. But he had known she wouldn’t call.

The door chime sounds as Henry replaces the phone onto its receiver. A work fantasy blitzkriegs his brain: the buxom and ponytailed St. Paulie girl blowing in through the front doors with outstretched arms finally free of the frothy mugs she’s gripped ever since he discovered her in ninth grade and lovingly attached her image to the ceiling over his twin bed with circles of Scotch tape. But no. It is Mr. Beardsley, grinning hard underneath the single section of hair carefully directed from the left ear across the top of his head to just above the right ear.

“Henry, my boy, life is good,” he says, breezing past him, all Old Spice and mentholated cough drops. “Life. Is. Good.”

“How’s it going?” Henry asks, defying his boss’s admonitions to steer clear of colloquialism.

“I’ll tell you how it’s going, my boy,” his exaggerated enunciation a friendly but firm correction. “We’re going big time.” His arms stretch out, his face clownlike with wide-eyed enthusiasm. “Big time.”

Henry winces at the “we.”

It was not supposed to be we. This was to be an interim job, one that supplied just enough income to keep afloat until something better came along. The classified section had conspired, though, to keep Henry here. Work From Home, one ad would announce. That hadn’t sounded too bad until he called the number at the bottom of the square and found it had been disconnected. On Your Way to the Top, another read, but when Henry called he’d learned getting to the top required a significant amount of seed money. “To make money you have to spend money,” the man on the phone had explained. When Henry told him he had little to nothing to give, the man abruptly terminated their conversation, which, until then, had been super friendly. Each week produced more discouragement until finally Henry decided to postpone his job search. Just for a while, he told himself.

“Big time?” His indifference was a way to keep Mr. Beardsley from confusing interest with shared enthusiasm.

Beardsley swings around to face Henry. “I just came from lunch with Arnie Schmidt and Bill Logan.” He pauses to bask in admiration he’s certain will follow. It appears, though, that this announcement will not have the impact he had counted on.

“Arnie Schmidt and Bill Logan?” Beardsley repeats himself, annoyed that he must now suffer the indignity of explaining the significance of the meal, diminishing its triumph. “Arnie Schmidt and Bill Logan are legends in boutique men’s clothing. Legends. I know it’s hard to believe but you know Clarke’s over in Westtown? Well, it wasn’t always the big draw it is now. Used to be you wouldn’t be caught dead in Clarke’s—all Sansabelt pants and white vinyl. You wouldn’t take your grandfather in there, much less find anything for yourself, God forbid. Schmidt and Logan went in, cleaned house, turned it into a multimillion-dollar cash cow.”

Beardsley’s remaining shred of excitement finally dissipates, deflated by Henry’s blank stare. “You young people, “he says, “you think everything magically works. Everything’s all taken care of. You don’t have to do a thing, businesses just run themselves. Bills just magically get paid.…”

Henry watches his boss’s lips move. Their ugly stretchy movements remind him of the eel listlessly snaking back and forth in its tank in the Chinese restaurant near Route 3.

“… but you and me, we’re the workers. We’re the ones behind the scenes, making sure when people come down Main Street they’ve got choices, a nice string of shops to go in and out of, family places.…”

Carefully, so carefully, Henry reaches his right hand over to his left wrist and pretends to scratch a spot just beside his watch. Twisting it so the face angles up and he can check the time without the giveaway wrist roll, he nods in agreement to Mr. Beardsley’s mouth, opening and shutting around the words pouring out his sales philosophy. When Beardsley glances at the front door midsentence, Henry sees his chance and successfully negotiates a quick glance-down.

It is three-fifteen.

It’s warm enough to take off the top of the Jeep. It’s been smelling like mildew lately but then again it could rain so maybe I should just keep it on.

“Hel-lo? Anybody in there?” The rapping at his skull rattles him out of his head and back to Mr. Beardsley, who is holding up the bundle that is Peterson’s pants. “I suppose I’m expected to psychically divine what I am to do with these pants balled up here behind the desk?”

“Oh, yeah,” Henry says. “I was going to do that after—”

“After what? After your daydream?” Mr. Beardsley jabbers on as he folds Neal Peterson’s pants around the tailor ticket. “Honestly, Powell, I can’t keep following you around reminding you about how the system works. You never used to need that, as I recall. What happened to those days? What happened to that energetic young man I hired not so long ago? Yes, Mr. Beardsley. No, Mr. Beardsley. Anything I can do, Mr. Beardsley? Now all I get is ‘how’s it going’ if I’m lucky.”

He shriveled up and died of boredom, Henry thinks. Rest in Peace. RIP.

Chapter three

1977

Henry parks his bicycle in front of the shoe repair shop, one store over from Baxter’s, so he can readjust his tie and run a hand through his hair. He checks over his shoulder to make sure no one is around before he studies his reflection in the window. But the shoe repairman has not washed the window so Henry does not notice the piece of tissue paper still glued by a dot of blood to his freshly shaved face. The Help Wanted sign is still propped in the corner of Baxter’s window so he knows he still has a shot. Supplemental Help, Mr. Beardsley said on the phone when he called to inquire the day before. Henry assumed “supplemental help” would be explained and so did not ask what that meant for fear of sounding ignorant.

“Ah, the young Mr. Powell.” Mr. Beardsley takes off his glasses and walks to Henry, arm extended for what ends up being a surprisingly hearty handshake for such a delicate-looking man. “How are you, son?”

“Fine, sir,” Henry says. “Thank you.”

“Right on time—” Mr. Beardsley taps the face of his watch “—I like that. How’s the season going so far? Let’s go sit over here. Take your pick.” He motions for Henry to take one of the two armchairs situated outside the dressing rooms.

“Good, we’re just practicing right now actually,” Henry says. He pulls his trousers up in front and settles into the chair, mirroring Mr. Beardsley’s erect posture. His legs are already sore from the squats and suicide drills they ran that morning.

“Good old FRCP,” Mr. Beardsley says. “You’re a lucky young man. You’ve got the world at your feet.”

Fox Run College Preparatory is uniforms, leafy walkways between old stone buildings, dowdy teachers, a mutli-million-dollar endowment, a competitive student body in love with Weejuns and bent on trying to appear indifferent. It is a private school as rich in tradition as it is in collective student body wealth, counting a U.S. president, fourteen senators and countless CEOs as alumni. Friendships forged in the dining hall were lifelong and tangled in well connectedness. Its hallways reeked of the carelessness that comes from knowing money will never be far out of reach. Few in Henry’s class knew that the bloat of money filling up the pockets of, say, the Sandersons or the Childers offset the relative obscurity of funds in the Powell family. But Henry knew. He felt it when Kevin Douglas drove his sixteenth birthday present to school. Or when tags appeared on zippers after winter break. Tags reading Aspen, Stratton, Snowbird. Or when January sunburns started to peel. His academic scholarship was, he felt, a form of parole. Should some felony be committed, Henry sensed he would be the first one called up for a police lineup. When the headmaster called an assembly to lecture the upperclassmen about pranks and threatened to keep all the seniors from graduating if those responsible for the burning effigies meant to represent himself and his deputy did not step forward, Henry was sure the remarks were directed at him. The scholarship felt creaky, impermanent.

“You understand this is a temporary job,” Mr. Beardsley says. His porkchop sideburns impress Henry.

Henry wore his hair long, below his ears—an unspoken uniform at Fox Run. But he made a mental note to aspire to Mr. Beardsley’s choice of sideburn design. Henry was conscious of his looks but not sorry for them. In other towns, in faraway regions, the Powell nose, for instance, would be attached to adjectives like huge. But in their Northeastern town Henry’s facial centerpiece might be referred to as patrician. Befitting his angular, oversize features. Gangly. His limbs long, all muscle and sinew. He had seen pictures of his father in his teens and knew this was just a phase: someday he, too, would grow into his face and body. The cheekbones that jutted out, the chin that pointed from his neck and, yes, the nose, they would all make sense someday. He told himself the girls would be sorry and until then he tried to look at people head-on, postponing the profile view as long as possible.

“We’ll see how well you do but I can’t promise anything past the winter sale. This fall you’ll get a lay of the land and then it’s trial by fire. But after the sale I can’t promise anything,” Mr. Beardsley is saying.

“No, no, that’s totally fine,” Henry says.

“You make good eye contact,” he says, scribbling something on his clipboard. “I like that.”

“Thanks,” Henry says. The mumbling, though, appears to dent Mr. Beardsley’s smile. Another mark goes onto the clipboard.

“You’d be available for overtime work during sale week, right?” Mr. Beardsley peers up at him. Suspicious. The look of a man who has been the brunt of one too many crank phone calls, Henry thinks. A bolt of imaginary lightning illuminates Mr. Beardsley: “I think my refrigerator is running …”

“Yes, sir,” Henry says. “Absolutely.”

The Baxter’s sale, heavily advertised in the County Register, begins every year on New Year’s Day and lasts one week. The towns that circle this one like a skirt invade the store during the weeklong event—an event as much about acquiring new clothes as it is a hibernation hiatus. A chance to compare Christmas gifts and vacations. Henry and his brothers had gone with their mother every year when they were little. They would run through aisles with friends while their mothers chatted and picked through bins marked by sizes.

Between working the stockroom in the fall, on the floor during the holiday season and then during the sale, Henry hopes to save enough money for the used Jeep he has his eye on. A CJ-7.

“Those suck,” Brad said to Henry just before he left home for good. Henry, ripping out a picture from Car and Driver, said, “No, they don’t,” and regretted it because it had made him sound like a baby.

Sure enough: “No, they don’t,” Brad whined back at him.

“The thing is, it pays well,” Henry says to his father a few hours later. “And Mr. Beardsley says I could make a schedule work around football practice and all. So I could work Thursdays when he stays open later anyway—after practice till close—and Saturdays. And days we don’t have practice. Yeah, I’m pretty sure about that.”

Henry has not quite thought it all through, this job at Baxter’s. He pauses to check his father’s reaction and to figure a way to spackle up the holes in his speech. His father’s tie in muted diagonal stripes of pale yellow and brown is barely back in fashion after two decades off. In the dim light Henry can hardly see the frayed flecks of pulled silk.

“The away-game days, though, I know Mr. Beardsley won’t mind,” he says as much to himself as to his father. “He said so, actually. Oh yeah, I remember he said he wouldn’t mind if it was different week to week. So then it’s fine with the away games. And it pays well.”

Henry stops there as he notices his father’s spoon has stopped circulating in his coffee mug. He has made a bad choice in ending with the pay factor. He knows that now and knows his father knows. But it is too late to rectify so Henry remains quiet, watching his father’s wrist resume the trips around the perimeter of the chipped mug they had picked up on a family road trip to Vermont in the summer.

It is the great unspoken understanding in the Powell house that any discussion that points to their lack of fortune would be in bad form. In theory the Powells came from money. In theory. Their name a good, solid-sounding name sure to be connected somehow to English nobility somewhere deep in the rings of the trunk of the family tree. But in actuality Henry Powell’s parents were Brontë penniless. A small trickle of money from a family trust fund kept them above the below, but the fact of the matter was they were below the above. Still, his mother’s grandfather had had a lot of money that was to be stingily disbursed “in perpetuity” and that enabled them to continue the illusion—with manners and bearing—that they came from old money. They surrounded themselves with wealthy friends. They wore shabbily preppy clothing. But most of all, they wore their lack of great fortune proudly. And so they were accepted into society.

It was just not done in the Powell circle, the speaking of money. A previous mention had ended badly, with Edgar Powell crying a single, solitary Native-American-looking-out-at-a-now-littered-land tear. Henry had only heard about the heartbreaking spectacle from his cousin, Tommy. Henry Powell had never seen his father cry. But he suspected seeing someone perpetually on the brink of crying is worse. The way nausea makes its victims pray for vomit. To be rid of the sickness. “How come your father cried?” Tommy had asked, unaware that he would now be eternally disliked for his Holy Grail sighting. From that point forward Henry refused to allow Tom into his fort. Henry sometimes imagined it was he who had seen his father show such emotion. He even concocted a scenario that entailed him offering his father a tissue, a kind pat on the head thanks for the thoughtfulness of the gesture. All fantasies ending with Henry and his father in a loving embrace, Henry inhaling the wet-dog tweed of his father’s clothes, his father—eyes closed in reverie—inhaling his son’s smell, the smell of childhood.

“So? Can I tell him yes?” Henry asks.

The spoon resumes clinking against the rough-hewn pottery, its surface purposely uneven in that craft-fair style.

“You can tell him yes,” his father answers after a moment. Henry has no way of knowing that these would be five of only a dozen or so words ever spoken by his father about his job at Baxter’s.

“Thanks, Dad,” Henry says, already backing out of the room. He is eager to get out of his father’s dark, tiny study, to get back out into the sunshine of the day. He would not know that his father will continue stirring and stirring his coffee until it grows cold and undrinkable. Obsolete.

In the two weeks that follow, Henry and his father do not see much of each other as his summer vacation gives way to football practices twice a day. In fact, there are many days in which the only signs that other people live in the house at all are the plastic-wrapped plates of food in the refrigerator. Henry leaves the house at first light to go to morning football practice and by the time he returns his father is gone for work. The afternoon practices stretch into the twilight, the heat mercifully lifting off the grass, which finally cools in the summer air. Once home Henry, bad posture and tired limbs, hunches over a plate shoveling his cold dinner into his mouth in silence, his parents having eaten long before he returns from the playing field.

One afternoon, Henry finds his mother in the kitchen.

“Your father wants to talk to you,” she says. Henry’s mother does not watch her hands when she is cutting. Cooking-school cutting. She is gazing out the window at the house across the street.

“Why?”

“I don’t know, talk to your father about it,” she says. Henry pictures a huge invisible watch dangling in front of his mother’s eyes, hypnotizing her. Tick-tick-tick. Henry looks to see what has her so entranced and is not surprised to find it is the geranium-filled wooden-duck planter at the edge of the driveway.

“Mom,” he says.

Tick-tick-tick. His mother’s stare never wavers. She has finished cutting, but still she holds the knife in place on the cutting board.

“Mom.”

The head turns, eyes tearing away from the driveway duck at the very last minute. It is a smooth turn that suggests the hypnosis is still in effect.

“Yes?”

“Why … does Dad … want … to talk … to … me?”

But slowed speech is not enough to hold her. Tick-tick-tick. The knife resumes its tempo on the cutting board. Over and over again, an even rhythm so familiar it has become the white noise of every dialogue.

Henry makes a show of leaving the kitchen but knows his mother probably will not notice he is no longer there. Though her knife is moving, nothing is under it to slice.

As he leaves the kitchen he glances up the stairs and, in Henry’s mind, the soap opera Vaseline-on-the-lens effect kicks in.

The carpet runner, like a Slinky attached to each stair, is no longer beaten down and Henry’s mother is bounding down the stairs, toward her boys, her tennis skirt flouncing with each step. Tretorns. Socks with little pink pom-poms at each heel. Her white Lacoste shirt tucked in. A pink headband to match the socks.