Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [77]
“I think it matters if one can actually say them without gagging,” she says, taking another delicate pull on her cigarette and holding the offensive doggerel away from her.
“Hear, hear,” says Ross from the corner.
“Do you think you can do better?” Mironson asks Vivian.
Vivian appraises him coolly, and Honora wonders if Mironson means this as a reprimand or a challenge.
“I could try,” Vivian says.
“It’s yours, then,” Mironson says — a leader used to delegating.
As if there were nothing at all out of the ordinary in the previous exchange, Vivian sits near the makeshift table with the newsletter on her lap. She searches in her purse and removes a golf pencil. “When was the industrial depression?” she asks innocently.
“The mills have been in a depression since twenty-four,” Mironson says.
“Oh,” Vivian says, pursing her lips. Honora watches her write a word on the piece of paper in her lap.
“Employment and sources of livelihood are as of today eliminated by the shutdown of eleven Ely Falls mills,” Mironson dictates just behind Honora’s shoulder. Almost simultaneously she types the words, thinking as she does so that perhaps Vivian might want to take a look at this particular leaflet as well. “It is no answer to say that this condition is a situation of their own making,” Mironson dictates.
“Who is this going to?” Honora asks.
“It’s an appeal for funds. It will be distributed in mills, union halls, sporting events, and working-class neighborhoods in this and surrounding towns.”
“Wouldn’t you want an appeal for funds to go to people who have money?”
“Yes, of course,” Mironson says. “But this is more of an appeal for solidarity.”
“I see,” says Honora, though she is not entirely sure that she does see. If the objective is to relieve hunger, she thinks, leaflets directed at the owners of shops and grocery stores and churches and social clubs might make more sense. But she doesn’t quite have enough of Vivian’s gumption to object.
“It is a self-evident fact that a continuation of this lack of means of earning a living will reduce Ely Falls textile workers to a state of absolute destitution,” Mironson reads.
“Suffering Jesus,” Ross says from the corner.
Seven men and the boy spent the night sleeping in bedrolls in the previously empty bedrooms upstairs. Shortly after Sexton arrived with the other men in the bread truck, and McDermott and the fellow named Ross saw the typewriter and the Fosdick Copiograph machine, and, more important, Honora guesses, the empty house far from town — a house at which no one would ever think to look for strike leaders — Ross and the man named Mahon went back to the city and returned with Mironson and three others. By then Vivian had come from her house with a beach wagon full of provisions: a leg of lamb, a roast chicken, vegetables, butter and bread, milk, several bottles of wine, and all the silver and glassware and china from her own house — real silver, real crystal, and delicate porcelain plates (“I never eat anyway,” Vivian said). Honora cooked the dinner and baked another pie. Sexton set up the sawhorses and the door in the front room, and Honora put her mother’s tablecloth over it to make a dining table. The meal seemed more like a feast than the simple feeding of mill workers and strike leaders, and the wine disappeared as if it were water. Sexton, who had by then already quickly bathed and changed his clothes, sat at the middle of the table and, with his salesman’s charm and affability dusted off, began to shed his aura of failure and despair — so much so that when Honora finally was alone with him in their bedroom after midnight (both of them exhausted and, for the first time in weeks, overfed), she found it impossible to summon the anger of earlier in the day. Chastising her husband for not having told her about the strike seemed absurd in the face of the astonishing arrival of the strike leaders themselves. Besides, having words with Sexton would have required whispering, since