Vermilion Wanted to Go to the Movies, Page 3

Peter left the office early Friday. Not as early as he wanted to. Though he announced first thing in the morning that he would leave at noon, when a Doctor Haden dropped by to explain why he needed his advertisement for Haden’s Muscle Relaxer printed that very day, Peter agreed and handed him a stack of flyers shortly after one o’clock. By the time he got his coat on and made it to the sidewalk, two had passed. Still, he would be home by two-thirty, before Jake and the fresh chicken arrived.

  While Vermilion changed clothes twice and combed her hair, Peter moved furniture around and chilled wine in the refrigerator, new the year before. Later, after their guests arrived, Peter sat in a hard-backed kitchen chair and watched.

  “All I can say is,” Jake said, commanding the floor. “All I can say is, I’m glad I got a farm boy’s education. Otherwise, I’d starve these days.”

  His audience laughed at the thought of Jake out back of his ramshackle apartment wringing a chicken’s neck.

  “I admire your attitude,” said Nancy, a short woman with dark hair and an Italian accent. “Some men would be bitter.”

  “I don’t have a choice. Anyway, this thing can’t last forever. I’ll get back on my feet, along with everyone else when Roosevelt pushes his ideas through.” He surveyed the room while he talked, his eyes flitting from one face to the other until they came to rest on the back of Vermilion’s dress, blue with a gold sash around her waist. “How’re the biscuits?” he asked, lunging across the room into the kitchen to the table where she flipped dough and pressed it flat into the flour.

  “Doughy,” Vermilion shot back, smiling. “And since you’re over here, country boy, flip that chicken for me.”

  Jake sidled past her and pulled out a drawer by the wall. Peter could hear him rummaging as metal clanked against metal while Vermilion pushed her hair out of her eyes with the back of a floured hand and said, “What’re you doing? The fork is right by the pan.”

  “Sorry,” Jake said and squeezed by her again. He picked up the fork and began to turn chicken fried a deep golden brown on one side.

  Peter filled his glass, then watched Vermilion cut a biscuit before he leaned against the wall, away from Dan and Nancy, who huddled next to each other on the couch.

  “Room for you here, Peter, if you want some heat,” said Dan, waving Peter over with the long, slim fingers of a musician.

  “I’ve got enough here, thanks.”

  When Vermilion had filled the pan and slid it into the oven, she shoved Jake with her shoulder. “Outta my way. I hafta wash this mess off my hands.”

  “I’ll hold the towel for you,” he said and reached out his hand, but before he could lift the towel, Peter stepped forward and snatched it up.

  “I’ll help Vermilion, Jake. You’ve done enough by bringing the chicken. You go on in and enjoy the conversation.”

  “Thanks,” said Jake, cocking his head to one side. “I’ll do that.”

  The meal finished, they squeezed around the small wooden table sitting in the middle of the living room with one wing pulled out, talking only long enough to say, “Please pass the gravy,” or “More potatoes anyone?”

  Peter looked at Vermilion in the dim light of a single bulb and thought about the first time he had met her, looking at her in the crowded apartment that smelled of the Hudson River and knowing, because of her accent, that she had moved to the city to get away from something, like everyone else Peter knew.

  “I’m old to be a run-a-way,” she said to him later that first night, “but that’s what I am. I’ve run away and I’ll keep running away until I run out of breath. Till I can’t run anymore or maybe till I find something worth stopping for.”

  “Like what?” he had asked, thinking that she wanted the fame or wealth of a city that had once hosted F. Scott and Zelda, was home to the Rockefellers and Times Square. He wanted to remind her that Zelda had gone crazy from too many swims in the fountain. The famous writer and his Southern beauty had burned out and burned up until F. Scott got a job in Hollywood to keep Zelda in an institution somewhere in Baltimore.

  Vermilion turned her head and stared out over the river, at the waves lapping endlessly at the shore. “I want a place where nobody has any secrets.”

  “Everyone has secrets,” he said. “Don’t you?”

  “Course I do.” She turned and looked at him. “That’s why I want to live someplace where other people don’t have any.”

  They had walked along Barrow Street until they got to the corner of Barrow and West that night, watching a ferry and a couple of small boats rock gently back and forth with the yellow glow of a quarter moon lighting the water. He hadn’t said anything else. He didn’t know what to say. They walked and chatted about the water or who they knew at the party. He couldn’t remember what they had talked about, really.

  He didn’t see her for a week. Then he ran into her when he went into a Village pharmacy near his place, stopped short when he looked up to see her standing behind the counter.

  “You work here?” he asked.

  “Yes, I do.” She looked around and lowered her voice. “And I know everything about everyone. Who has a cold. Who doesn’t. Who’s expecting. Who’s relieved she’s not.”

  His eyebrows shot up.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, lowering her eyes so that dark lashes swept down like shades. “You’d be surprised how much I know.” She lowered her voice to an almost inaudible whisper. “No one keeps secrets from the drugstore lady.”

  He asked her out the next day, and she said only if they ate at a café by the water. She couldn’t get enough of the swoosh and slap of the ocean hitting the shore. “It reminds me of vacations in Charleston,” she said.

  He borrowed Jake’s car, the Packard, and drove them across the Brooklyn Bridge to a restaurant owned by a friend’s father. “We won’t hear the ocean exactly. The place is on Buttermilk Channel. Elton’s father and brother take the boat out each morning and catch fish and crab. Whatever they get is what they serve that night.”

  “Sounds mah-ve-lous,” she drawled, throwing her head back so that the wind loosened the pins in her hair, strands falling softly around her flushed face by the time they sat in candlelight on the patio.

  When they had ordered, she leaned towards him, her eyes luminous. “Tell me your secrets,” she said.

  “Secrets?” he asked, feeling as if she had discovered in him some inability to articulate simple sentences. He wondered when he had regressed to adolescence.

  “I don’t think I have any.”

  She laughed softly, then said with an edge to her voice, “Everybody’s got secrets. You said so yourself. We might know about the dish and the spoon, but the man in the moon could surely tell us a thing or two about that cow.”

  He laughed, realizing how clever she was, and how cynical.

  “I really don’t think I have any secrets. Or, if I do, they’re not important enough for me to realize they’re secrets. No, I’m pretty boring, an open book.”

  “Tell me everything.” She lifted a glass of wine and reached across the table with it. “A toast: to Buttermilk Channel and dinner with the best company in the world.”

  Peter lifted his glass. “To the best company in the world.” Then he told her everything—about his childhood in Chicago, his father’s death one afternoon, how his friend had run around the building and stopped at the sight of Peter and the other boys playing in the street. “Pete, it’s your old man. The machine got him. They’s taken him to the hospital.”

  Peter had run home, not to the hospital, where his mother had already taken his two siblings. When he saw the empty apartment, he turned and ran as fast as he could, and at twelve he could run fast, only to find that he was too late and would have been too late even if he had not gone home.

  “Managed to stay in school for a few more years, thanks to my uncle. Worked in the mills after school.” he said, smiling with no bitterness.

  “So young to work in the mills.”

  “As much as I would h
ate seeing a child of mine work the mills, I don’t know what we would have done if I hadn’t. My mother couldn’t support three kids on a mill worker’s pay. She worked even when my father was alive. Took ‘em both.”

  “How’d you become a printer?”

  “Now that’s a story,” he had said and leaned back, a smile coming to his thin, stern face as he began telling her about the day his uncle took him aside to explain how he could get Peter into the Chicago printer’s union, a necessity for anyone who wanted one of the well-paying artisan jobs.

  The evening had lingered, her arm bare in the moonlight, covered with a tasseled shawl on the ride home. After that he saw her once every couple of weeks, taking her to the Sheridan Loew’s or a Village café. Then it was every week, to Broadway or a Sunday drive if he could get Jake’s car.

  He never asked her to tell him what secrets she kept hidden behind blue eyes that shut like a door when he asked if her father planned on visiting the city, though he knew her father was still alive because they had walked to the post office to pick up a package from him one afternoon. But he learned not to pry.

  Until one warm day when they had walked along the water’s edge and watched people line up at the ferry rail. “Hot today,” he had said, taking off his jacket and throwing it over his shoulder.

  “Hot? This ain’t hot. Georgia’s hot,” she said with a murmur. “That’s why we have porches wrapping around our houses and rocking chairs scattered across ‘em where people sit all summer, trying to catch a hint of breeze—anything to make ‘em feel alive.” She stopped walking and watched the ferrymen, large round stains on the backs of their shirts and under their arms. “Except us. After Mama got too crazy to stay still for more than five minutes, even Daddy gave up sitting on the porch. We used to like waving to neighbors strolling by while there was still light to see and the heat didn’t feel so much like a furnace. The sidewalk got a lot emptier after we moved our show into the house.”

  Even then, he refused to ask questions about her family, yet it seemed to him as if a dam had burst so that, as each day passed, she painted pictures of the Victorian mansion with its cupolas and lace curtains, the darkened interior, the hushed tones. The father who left for the bank each morning with a smile and a wave, pretending for the sake of propriety. The daughter whose girlhood passed in a kind of twilight, shadows permeating every room as she watched her mother pace the floors, back and forth, back and forth, talking apparently to herself since Vermilion could not understand what she said.

  “We had help,” she said, when he asked if she was alone all day with her mother. “A maid who took care of the house and a cook. They did the best they could. For them, Mama was a bona fide matriarch. Even when it was obvious to everyone but Daddy, they couldn’t say anything. When they got scared she’d hurt herself and Daddy would blame them, they tied her to a chair so they could get their work done.”

  “And you?”

  Vermilion had looked away from him when she answered. “Watched. You know how long it takes somebody to go crazy?”

  “No. How long?”

  “Eight years. They start out muttering to themselves, pretty easy to ignore. Then they shuffle when they walk and laugh or burst into tears at a dinner party, so you stop going to dinner parties. Stop inviting people over. At some point, you start waiting. For what? You don’t know. Then one day, after eight years of dimmed rooms, loud wails, tying her into chairs, letting her thick hair grow into a bird’s nest because she won’t let you comb it, you find out what you were waiting for.”

  The silence lingered. He waited.

  At last, she said, still not looking at him, “Death. She jumped off the balcony onto the foyer floor and broke her neck. And we all pretended she died of pneumonia. Because good families don’t go crazy and jump off balconies.”

  The next month, he asked her to marry him, and a week after that, they went to a Justice of the Peace.

  So now they sat with Dan and Nancy—and Jake—eating while Jake regaled them with another story, this one of a client who had gotten caught standing in someone else’s apartment with someone else’s bag of silver. “And I swear this is the truth, the absolute truth as recorded by New York City’s finest. My client, whose name I will not reveal, looked at the couple as they walked in the door, the woman with her mouth open, ready to scream, the man with his fists balled up and stuck out like Dempsey, and says, apparently in answer to some question about what he was doing with their stuff, ‘Oh, is this yours? I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize.’ And he handed them the bag and left, would have gotten away except—now picture this—he walks coolly out of the apartment, gets halfway down the stairs, and trips! Over his own feet. And he’s not even running, just walking calmly down the stairs. The landlord steps out of his apartment, hears the couple screaming and sits on my client until the cops arrive.”

  Everyone laughed, even Peter.

  In the silence that followed, Peter folded his napkin and laid it under the edge of his plate before he cocked his head to one side and said, “You must have a million stories, Jake.”

  “You bet I do. Though not all of ‘em as funny as that one.”

  “So what do you do when you know the guy’s guilty? Work out the best deal?”

  Vermilion looked up from putting jelly on her biscuit, first at Peter and then at Jake.

  When he didn’t answer, she asked, “Do you?”

  “Well, no,” Jake said, throwing his arms up. “I have to defend the defendant.” He emphasized the word defendant. “It’s the law, you know, part of being a lawyer.”

  Peter took another bite of chicken and ate it before he commented. “What if you know the guy’s guilty of something worse than trying to take a bit of cash? What if he murdered someone?”

  “Don’t look too casually on cash these days.” Dan stabbed the air with his knife to make his point. “Could be life or death. Couple could have gotten kicked to the sidewalk if your client had gotten away.”

  “But he has the right to a fair trial,” said Nancy, her voice rising in pitch and tone.

  “Honey, I’m not saying he doesn’t have a right to a fair trail. Still, if he got caught with the money in his hand.”

  Peter leaned back in his chair and glanced up at Jake in the brief pause left by Dan’s reply. “So Jake. What do you do with the information you get about clients?”

  Setting his glass on the table with a slap, Jake frowned, the amused glint in his eyes gone. “I do my job and keep my mouth shut.”

  “You keep records?”

  “Only in my head. I’m sworn by law to keep clients’ secrets. As you know,” he said with a quizzical glace at Peter.

  They all looked at Jake, their faces blank except Vermilion’s, whose pink-tinged splotches crept up her neck into her cheeks.

  “Have you helped murderers walk away scot-free?” she asked, holding her knife and fork mid-air, like weapons.

  Jake took another bite of buttered bread.

  “That, Vermilion, is my secret. And I never tell my secrets.”

  The evening seemed to pass slowly after they moved to the chairs and talked in quiet tones, jazz from the radio creating a backdrop to the murmur of voices. “Well,” Dan said at last, “we’d better go.”

  Peter gathered everyone’s coats and hats, handing them out at the door amid the good-byes and thank you’s. He shut the door at last and leaned against it, watching Vermilion curl up on a pillow by the fire.

  He walked over and sat beside her. “Thanks for being so wonderful,” he said. “You made the evening for us all. And Jake told me he’s never eaten so well.”

  She shuddered and pulled Peter down beside her.

  The End

  Coming in late 2013

  The first novel of The Jefferson Street Chronicles

  By Karen Schwind

  Follow Peter, Vermilion, and Jake through 1932 as they struggle to keep love and friendship alive during the worst year of the Great Depression

&
nbsp; Karen Schwind is the former editor of and writer for The Conspirator, a literary magazine that first published authors Julie L. Cannon and Augusta Trobaugh, among others. Ms. Schwind has written essays for GA public radio and taught English at the University of Georgia and Truett-McConnell College. She presented sections of Her Life as She Knew It and the as-yet-untitled first novel in the Jefferson Street Chronicles series at the Southern Women’s Literary Conference. She also has a story in Christmas Stories in Georgia, published by the University of Mississippi Press.