Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [69]
McDermott washes his hands and finds a place at the table with men not shy about showing their appetites. They eat as if they might not eat tomorrow, and it seldom matters how bad the food is, how mysterious the ingredients in the stews that fill their bowls. Today it is fish, and McDermott doesn’t want to think about what kind. Madame Derocher has an impenetrable face, one that doesn’t invite conversation or questions. If sufficiently annoyed, she will answer in a French patois that McDermott thinks a Parisian wouldn’t understand. She has been known to snatch a bowl of stew from a complaining boarder’s hands, leaving the man with nothing to eat at all. A boarder usually makes that mistake only once.
Sometimes the lunch break is strangely silent, the men too focused on their food to talk, too quickly sated and then stunned at meal’s end to think coherently. Talk requires energy, and the men are careful, McDermott has observed, not to squander too much of that. There are still four and a half hours at the mill to go that day.
But today the talk is brisk, though McDermott can make out only some of the words, men with full mouths being difficult to understand under the best of circumstances. The boardinghouses are transient places, the men always coming and going, constantly shifting lodging when one or another of the houses changes ownership or loses its lease or is foreclosed upon; and lately there has been more turnover than usual. McDermott has spoken personally to only a handful of the twenty or so men at the long table. Still, though, he likes to listen and strains to follow what is being said. He needs to know the mood of the men, the way they speak and what’s important to them.
He puts a pill in his mouth and takes a bite of stew, his ulcer worse now than it’s been in weeks. Sometimes he can’t eat Madame Derocher’s food at all and has to go to Eileen’s for a meal. She makes him a bowl of bread soaked in milk to keep him from starving. There has been talk of an operation, but McDermott can’t afford either the time or the money for such a drastic step right now.
It is strangely quiet when he visits Eileen these days. Eamon has gone off to Texas, and McDermott doesn’t know where Michael is. His sister Mary is married, which leaves only Rosie and Patricia and Bridget, all of whom seem too tired at night to make much of a fuss. McDermott feels sorry for Eileen and gives her the same amount of money he did when all the kids were in the house. He encourages her to buy pretty things for herself, and sometimes he brings her gifts: bonbons from Harley’s chocolate factory, an Italian Morain brooch he found in a thrift shop, once a Toastmaster from Simmons.
Last winter McDermott had a girl of his own — Evangeline, a weaver on his floor. She had violent red hair and the clearest skin he has ever seen. He met her when he had to repair her drawing frame. A week later, the frame was broken again, and he suspects now that she probably did it deliberately so that they could meet a second time. He didn’t guess in all the time he knew her that she was the scheming type. Their relationship was innocent enough, and he thought about asking her to marry him. On Saturday nights, they went dancing or to the movies. In April he bought her a watch he’d seen in a jeweler’s window. But on Easter Sunday, when he went to her house to give it to her, she cried and told him that she was pregnant. She was leaving Ely Falls to marry the father, a bricklayer from Exeter. McDermott can still remember the shock