Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [64]
For weeks afterward, Sexton and Honora scarcely spoke, he lost in a kind of stunned reverie, as if he could not believe in his own disaster, Honora so frayed and raw that she could not bear to be touched, nor could she summon the wherewithal to converse, even about the mundane. Each day Sexton left the house in search of work — first seeking a job in sales, and then, when it became apparent no one was hiring, a position in one of the offices of the eleven mills in the city. Finally, desperately, he took a job as a ring spinner in the Ely Falls Mill. Every day he sees to it that two strands of slightly twisted roving are transformed into one strand of tightly spun yarn that is wound onto a bobbin. Honora doesn’t know much more than this because Sexton never talks about his job. He works from 6:30 in the morning until noon, and then from 12:30 until 5:15. For this work, he is paid twenty-two dollars a week, eight of which go for room and meals at a boardinghouse entirely inhabited by other men who work in the mills as well.
After Sexton lost the one job and finally found another (far lesser) one, Honora tried to tell her husband to let the house go. It drained them of every extra cent, she said. There was precious little left over for food — often nothing at all for clothes. She could move into Ely Falls and share an apartment with him. It wouldn’t be so bad, she said (though privately she knew that she would hate that outcome), but Sexton wouldn’t hear of giving up the house. He worked, he said, so that they could have a proper place to live, far from the filth of the city. He worked, he said, to hold on to the one thing that hadn’t yet been taken from him. And Honora understood finally, in a way she had not at first, that Sexton’s manhood was more wedded to the house than it was to her. That something inside him would be irretrievably lost if he failed to keep the house that he had ruined himself to buy.
When Honora meets Sexton’s trolley on Friday evenings, he kisses her as he alights. He is the last passenger at the last stop, and for a time, Honora imagines that his descending the steps and kissing his wife will erase the past or make it inconsequential, so that whatever happens from that moment on will be the true marriage, will be the thing they were meant to have. Husband and wife will walk home, and though Sexton is covered with bits of lint — in his hair and on his neck and even in his nostrils — so that she cannot entirely forget where he has come from, and though they are so guarded in their conversation as to be almost mute, she keeps alive the notion of a fresh start. When they arrive home, Sexton bathes in the tub, and sometimes Honora is just shocked at the filth that is left behind. She scrubs the grime from his neck and his face and his hair and his ears, and he enters a kind of trance as she does this. In the early weeks, when he first went into the mill, he could not raise his right arm to wash himself. He couldn’t reach his back or lift his hand to hold a pitcher of water.
But at some point between the bath and the meal, perhaps even during the meal itself, Honora will catch the first evasive glance on her husband’s face, the first glimpse of the set jaw. Resentment will begin to well up inside of her so that when she washes the dishes, her nerves will already have begun to sound a taut note just below the silence. And then she and Sexton will meet in the bedroom, her husband undressed and waiting for her between the sheets (ironed just that day, because two days in the sea air puts the wrinkles back in), and the notion of a fresh start will have vanished like a song. Honora’s limbs will be stiff as she undresses, her own sliding into the sheets more hurried than she has intended. And though her husband will appear to come alive, she knows that it is lust — too