Part 14 (1/2)

That had been true before the war. It was, as the bishop had said, likely to be even more true now, with Quebec so closely involved with the USA. That didn't mean Lucien had to like it worth a d.a.m.n, though, and he didn't.

Sylvia Enos lit a cigarette. She sucked smoke down into her lungs, held it there, and blew it out again. Then she took another drag. She didn't feel nearly the exhilaration she had when she'd started the habit, but she did enjoy it. When she couldn't smoke, as on the line at the galoshes factory, she got tense, even jittery. Like so many of the other women working there, she'd taken to sneaking smokes in the restroom. The place always smelled like a saloon.

Then she had to return to the line. Into the can of paint went her brush. She painted a red ring around the top of one of the black rubber overshoes sitting there in front of her, then around the other, working fast so the endless belts of the factory line would not carry them away before she could finish.

Another pair of galoshes, still warm from the mold, appeared before her. She put rings on them, too. Down the line they went. The next girl, armed with knives and shears, trimmed excess rubber from the galoshes. She threw the sc.r.a.ps into a bin under her foot. When the bin filled, the sc.r.a.ps would go back into the hopper along with fresh rubber, to be made into new overshoes. The factory wasted nothing and did everything as cheaply as possible. That was why Sylvia still had a job. Had a man taken it, they would have had to lay out a little more money every week.

After a while, the stink of rubber started to give her a headache. That happened every morning by ten o'clock. It also gave her another reason to wish for a cigarette, or maybe a whole pack. What she'd discovered the first day she lit up got truer the more she smoked: tobacco did blunt her sense of smell.

Frank Best headed her way. She groaned silently; the foreman was carrying an overshoe where she'd missed part of the red line around the top. She knew what he'd say before he said it. That didn't stop him: ”Thought you were going to slip this one by, didn't you?”

”I'm sorry, Mr. Best,” Sylvia said. She didn't want him to have any kind of hold on her. ”Here, give it to me. I'll fix it.”

He held on to it. ”You know, Sylvia, it really is too bad I have to take one out of a pair like this. It holds up the line and delays everybody. I hope I won't have to do it very often from now on.”

He was holding up the line, too, by lecturing her. She didn't say so; she knew a lost cause when she saw one. ”I'll do my best not to let it happen again,” she said. ”Please let me fix it.”

At last, Best did. As if she were Leonardo working on the Mona Lisa Mona Lisa, Sylvia completed the red ring. She handed the rubber overshoe back to Best. Please, Please, she thought. she thought. Take it back to wherever you spotted it and leave me alone. Take it back to wherever you spotted it and leave me alone. Lectures were one thing, and bad enough. The rest of his routine was worse. Lectures were one thing, and bad enough. The rest of his routine was worse.

That didn't keep him from trotting it out. ”You really should pay more attention to what you're doing,” he said. ”I would be disappointed, and I know you would be, too, if you made mistakes like this very often. Work is sometimes hard to find these days.”

”Mr. Best, I don't don't make mistakes like this very often,” Sylvia answered. ”You've said so yourself.” make mistakes like this very often,” Sylvia answered. ”You've said so yourself.”

He went on as if she hadn't spoken: ”If the people above you are happy with you, though, things are liable to go a lot better for you.”

She knew how he wanted to be above her: on a bed in some cheap hotel room. She found the idea more appalling than appealing. Now that George was gone, she did have times when she missed a man, sometimes very much. Frank Best, though, was emphatically not the man she missed.

Not understanding him seemed the safest course here. ”I'll be extra careful from now on, Mr. Best. I promise I will.”

He gave her a sour look. She wondered if he would make himself plainer. If he said, Sleep with me or lose your job, Sleep with me or lose your job, what would she do? She'd get up and quit, that was what. Maybe her expression said as much, for he turned and walked away, muttering under his breath. what would she do? She'd get up and quit, that was what. Maybe her expression said as much, for he turned and walked away, muttering under his breath.

Sylvia got back to work. She took extra care with the rings all morning long. If Best wanted an excuse to bother her, he'd have to invent one; she didn't want to give him any. She felt his eye on her more than once, but pretended not to notice. At last, the lunch whistle blew.

”Was Frank singing his little be-nice-or-else song at you?” Sarah Wyckoff asked, gnawing on a chicken leg probably left over from supper the night before.

”He sure was.” Sylvia took a fierce bite of her own sandwich, which was made from day-old bread and sausage that tasted as if it were about half sawdust. For all Sylvia knew, it was. It cost half as much as a better brand. That mattered.

”He has no shame,” May Cavendish said. ”None.”

”He's a foreman,” Sarah said. ”Of course he has no shame.”

”A foreman at the canning plant where I used to work got one of the girls there in a family way,” Sylvia said. Her friends made sad clucking noises and nodded knowingly. ”I never found out if he married her afterwards or not-I got fired because I had to take care of my kids when they caught the chicken pox.”

She thought Isabella Antonelli would have come and let her know if everything had turned out all right. She hadn't seen the other woman from the canning plant in a long time. That might have meant Isabella was deliriously happy and didn't need her any more. It was more likely to mean the foreman from the canning plant had left her in the lurch. Sylvia wondered if she'd ever find out what had happened. Life didn't tie up every loose end with a neat bow, the way novels did.

”That's just like a man.” Sarah Wyckoff studied her own brawny forearm. ”n.o.body's going to trifle with me, not and keep his teeth he won't.”

May sighed. ”Men make it so you don't want to live with them, and they make it so you can't hardly make a living by yourself. You don't make as much as a man would doing the same job, and they don't let you do half the jobs anyhow. You tell me what's fair about that.”

”If they didn't pay us less than they would a man, we wouldn't have these jobs we've got here,” Sylvia said. The other two women nodded.

”And they won't let us vote here in Ma.s.sachusetts, either,” May said bitterly. ”They've got to pa.s.s a law that says we can, and who's got to pa.s.s it? Men, that's who. You think more than half the men over at the New State House are going to vote for women? Hasn't happened yet, and I'm not going to hold my breath, either.”

”There are a lot of states where it did happen.” Sylvia's voice was wistful. ”The world didn't end, either.”

”You'd figure it did, the way some men carry on,” Sarah said. ”May's right. They aren't worth the paper they're printed on.”

May ate an apple down to a very skinny core, then took out a pack of cigarettes. She lit one, then blew an elegant smoke ring. ”I like a smoke after I eat,” she said. ”Sort of settles what's in there, if you know what I mean.”

”I sure do.” Sylvia got out her own cigarettes. The front of the pack showed soldiers in green-gray marching to victory. n.o.body ever showed the mangled corpses of soldiers in green-gray and sailors in Navy blue who didn't live to see victory. Sylvia never would have thought that way if she hadn't lost George. Now, deliberately, she turned the pack over so she wouldn't have to see those pink-cheeked soldiers. ”Thanks for giving me a cigarette that time, May. I like 'em now.”

”Good.” May Cavendish had been about to put her cigarettes back into her handbag. She stopped and aimed the pack at Sarah. ”Want to try 'em?”

”No, thanks.” Sarah shook her head. ”I've smoked a couple of times. Never liked it enough to keep up with it. Don't expect I would now, either.”

”Have it your own way,” May said with a shrug. She did put away the pack.

Sylvia smoked her cigarette with determination. She coughed only once. Her chest was getting used to tobacco smoke, too. And May was right: even without the buzz she'd got when first starting the habit, a smoke after dinner or supper was more enjoyable than just about any other time.

George had liked to smoke after they made love. Sylvia's ears heated as she remembered that. She wondered what taking a deep drag while lazy in the afterglow would be like. Probably pretty nice, Probably pretty nice, she thought. Would she ever have the chance to find out? she thought. Would she ever have the chance to find out?

”There have to be some decent men out there somewhere,” she said suddenly.

”A lot of them are dead,” Sarah said. ”My Martin is.” She sighed and looked down at the grimy wood of the floor. ”I still can't think about him without wanting to puddle up. I don't even know if I'd ever want to be with anybody else.”

”I would, if I could find somebody,” May said. ”But a lot of the men who are decent are settled down with their wives, on account of that's what decent men do, and a lot of men, whether they're decent or not, don't want anything to do with you if you've got children.”

”Oh, there's one thing they want to do with you,” Sylvia said. Both her friends laughed at the obvious truth in that. Sylvia went on, ”But those aren't the decent ones. Maybe I ought to go to church more often, but Sunday's the only chance I have to rest even a little, not that I can get much with two kids in the house.”

”Plenty of men who go to church every livelong Sunday aren't what you'd call decent, either,” May said, sounding as if she was speaking with the voice of experience. ”They don't go there to pray or to listen to the sermon-they go on account of they're on the prowl.”

”That's disgraceful,” Sylvia said.

”Sweetheart, there's a whole lot of disgraceful things that go on in this world,” Sarah Wyckoff said with authority. ”You don't have to look no further than Frank Best if you want to see some.”

”Well, heaven knows that's true,” Sylvia said with a sigh. ”Now that I've told him no, I only hope he leaves me alone and doesn't take it out on me like he said he was liable to.”

”All depends,” said May, who'd been at the galoshes factory longer than Sylvia. ”If he finds somebody who goes along with him before too long, he'll forget about you. If he doesn't, you may not have such a good time for a while.”

Sylvia wondered how she ought to feel about hoping some other young woman succ.u.mbed to what Best thought of as his fatal charm. It would make her own life easier, no doubt about that. But would she wish the foreman on anyone else? She couldn't imagine disliking anyone enough to hope she suffered such a fate.

When the whistle announcing the end of the lunch hour blew, she headed without enthusiasm back to her position just behind the galoshes molds. She reminded herself to do the best job she could painting rings on the rubber overshoes, to give Frank Best no reason to bother her.

But would he need an excuse? Here he came. That wasn't blood in his eye. Sylvia recognized the expression. George had often worn it when he'd been away at sea for a long time. Frank Best hadn't been, though she would cheerfully have dropped him off a pier. He wore the expression anyhow. Sylvia sighed. The end of the day seemed years away.

Sometimes, Roger Kimball still wished he'd gone to South America. Every so often, the Charleston papers gave tantalizing bits of news about the fighting that continued down there even though the Great War was over everywhere else. The local enmities had started long before the war, and weren't about to disappear because it did. Everybody but Paraguay and Bolivia needed submarine skippers, and they would have if only they'd had coastlines.