Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [118]
“No,” Vivian says. “It doesn’t.”
“It was a bungle,” Honora says. “Just a terrible bungle.”
“Yes, it was.”
“There was nothing noble at all about what happened. About their deaths. No sacrifice. No honor. It was just a bungle. We should never have been there in the first place. It was a disastrous decision on Ross’s part. In that apartment, we were just sitting ducks.” Honora remembers the way the men in masks came through the door with their guns. The way Ross said Oh, Jesus.
“You can’t do this,” Vivian says, crossing the room and taking Honora into her arms. “You have to stop. You simply have to stop.”
“I know,” she says.
“You can’t let Alphonse see you like this,” Vivian says.
Honora rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. “I know. I won’t.”
“Well,” Vivian says.
“Well,” Honora says. She looks around at the kitchen, nearly empty now. “Alphonse, come get your milk,” she calls into the hallway.
Alphonse enters the kitchen, swinging his arms to unkink them.
“We packed the glasses,” Honora says. “Just drink it from the bottle.”
Alphonse lifts the bottle of milk to his face. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve.
Alphonse
He carries the last carton to the beach wagon, which is so full that you can’t even see out the back, and Alphonse thinks how strange it is that there is so much stuff when the house has always looked, well, kind of empty. But now he will have his own room at Miss Burton’s house, though she has said he will have to sleep in the cellar if he keeps calling her Miss Burton and so he is trying to remember to call her Vivian. But he will still call Mrs. Beecher Mrs. Beecher and he is relieved that she hasn’t asked him to call her Honora. Mrs. Beecher slides into the front seat, a carton of books on her lap. Alphonse crawls into the backseat and lies down over all the blankets and boxes with his head nearly touching the top of the car, and Miss Burton, Vivian, gets in and starts the beach wagon and then Mrs. Beecher says, “Wait, I nearly forgot,” and sets the carton on the front seat, gets out of the car again, leans in, and says to Vivian that she’ll be right back, she just left it on the landing. And then she is kind of running up the walkway and opening the front door, and Vivian turns to him and says, “Are you all right?” and he says he is just fine, though there is a sharp corner of a box sticking into his side, and then Mrs. Beecher is standing in the doorway with a white platter in her arms, and even from the beach wagon Alphonse can see how beautiful all the glass is in the sunlight.
Author’s Note
The city of Ely Falls is fictional. The details of violent labor unrest, however, are culled from numerous incidents in New England and elsewhere during the late 1920s and the early 1930s in which hundreds of striking mill workers and their children were killed or seriously injured by state militias or vigilantes hired by mill owners. As an interesting footnote, the Ku Klux Klan did indeed flourish in northern New England during the late 1920s. Its victims were Catholics, Jews, and ethnic minorities.
The following works were consulted while writing this book: The Strike of ‘28 by Daniel Georgianna and Roberta Hazen Aaronson; The Great Depression by Robert S. McElvaine; Working People of Holyoke by William Hartford; Ordinary People Extraordinary Lives by Debra Bernhardt and Rachel Bernstein; La Foi, La Langue, La Culture by Michael Guignard; Working-Class Americanism by Gary Gerstle; A World Within a World by Gary Samson; Ethnic Survival in a New England Mill Town: The Franco-Americans of Biddeford, Maine by Michael Guignard; The Great Depression and The Hungry Years by T. H. Watkins; The Town That Died by Michael Bird; The Parrish and the Hill by Mary Doyle Curran; Down and Out in the Great Depression: Stories