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She smiled. “My man,” she said. She fingered her wedding ring absently. “Don’t take long. The food is hot.”
He went into the bathroom and dressed and went on down to the kitchen.
There were flowers on the kitchen table, between the two places laid out there. Phlox. Deep blue. She did the gardening, too. She had a knowing hand with flowers. “She’s a pearl, my Clothilde,” he had heard Tante Elsa say. “The roses’re twice as big this year.”
“You should have your own garden,” Tom said as he sat before his place. What he could not give her in reality he offered in intention. He was barefooted and the linoleum felt cool and smooth against his soles. His hair, still damp, was neatly combed, the blond, tight curls glistening darkly. She liked everything neat and shining clean, pots and pans, mahogany, front halls, boys. It was the least he could do for her.
She put a bowl of fish chowder in front of him.
“I said you should have your own garden,” he repeated.
“Drink your soup,” she said, and sat down at her own place across from him.
A leg of lamb, small, tender and rare, came next, served with parsleyed new potatoes, roasted in the same pan with the lamb. There was a heaped bowl of buttered young string beans and a salad of crisp romaine and tomatoes. A plate of fresh, hot biscuits stood to one side, and a big slab of sweet butter, next to a frosted pitcher of milk.
Gravely, she watched him eat, smiled when he offered his plate again. During the family’s holiday, she got on the bus every morning to go to the next town to do her shopping, using her own money. The shopkeepers of Elysium would have been sure to report back to Mrs. Jordache about the fine meats and carefully chosen first fruits for the feasts prepared in her kitchen in her absence.
For dessert there was vanilla ice cream that Clothilde had made that morning, and hot chocolate sauce. She knew her lover’s appetites. She had a
“Clothilde,” Tom said, “why do you work here?”
“Where should I work?” She was surprised. She spoke in a low voice, always without inflection. There was a hint of French Canada in her speech. She almost said v for w.
“Anyplace. In a store. In a factory. Not as a servant.”
“I like being in a house. Cooking meals,” she said. “It is not so bad. Your aunt is proper with me. She appreciates me. It was kind of her to take me in. I came here, two years ago, I didn’t know a soul, I didn’t have a pe
“Somebody else’s house,” Tom said. It was intolerable that those two fat slobs could order Clothilde around.
“This week,” she said, touching his hand on the table, “it is our house.”
“We can never go out with each other.”
“So?” She shrugged. “What are we missing?”
“We have to sneak around,” he cried. He was growing angry with her.
“So?” She shrugged again. “There are many things worth sneaking around for. Not everything good is out in the open. Maybe I like secrets.” Her face gleamed with one of her rare soft smiles.
“This afternoon …” he said stubbornly, trying to plant the seed of revolt, arouse that placid peasant docility. “After a … a banquet like this …” He waved his hand over the table. “It’s not right. We should go out, do something, not just sit around.”
“What is there to do?” she asked seriously.
“There’s a band concert in the park,” he said. “A baseball game.”
“I get enough music from Tante Elsa’s phonograph,” she said. “You go to the baseball game for me and tell me who won. I will be very happy here, cleaning up and waiting for you to come home. As long as you come home, I do not want anything else, Tommy.”
“I’m not going anywhere without you today,” he said, giving up. He stood up. “I’ll wipe the dishes.”
“There’s no need,” she said.
“I’ll wipe the dishes,” he said, with great authority.
“My man,” she said. She smiled again, beyond ambition, confident in her simplicities.
The next evening after work, on his way home from the garage on his wobbly Iver Johnson he was passing the town library. On a sudden impulse, he stopped, leaned the bike against a railing, and went in. He hardly read anything at all, not even the sports pages of the newspapers, and he was not a frequenter of libraries. Perhaps in reaction to his brother and his sister, always with their noses in books, and full of fancy sneering ideas.
The hush of the library and the unwelcoming examination of his grease-stained clothes by the lady librarian made him ill at ease, and he wandered around among the shelves, not knowing which book of all these thousands held the information he was looking for. Finally, he had to go to the desk and ask the lady.
“Excuse me,” he said. She was stamping cards, making out prison sentences for books with a little mean snapping motion of her wrist.
“Yes?” She looked up, unfriendly. She could tell a non-book-lover at a glance.
“I want to find out something about Saint Sebastian, ma’am,” he said.
“What do you want to find out about him?”
“Just anything,” he said, sorry he had come in now.
“Try the Encyclopaedia Brita
“Thank you very much, ma’am.” He decided that from now on he would change his clothes at the garage and use Coyne’s sandsoap to get out the top layer of grease from his skin, at least. Clothilde would like that better, too. No use being treated like a dog when you could avoid it.
It took him ten minutes to find the Encyclopaedia Brita
There it was, “SEBASTIAN, ST., a Christian martyr whose festival is celebrated on Jan. 20.” Just one paragraph. He couldn’t have been so damned important.
“After the archers had left him for dead,” Tom read, “a devout woman, Irene, came by night to take his body away for burial, but finding him still alive, carried him to her house, where his wounds were dressed. No sooner had he wholly recovered than he hastened to confront the emperor, who ordered him to be instantly carried off and beaten to death with rods.”
Twice, for Christ’s sake, Tom thought. Catholics were nuts. But he still didn’t know why Clothilde had said Saint Sebastian when she had looked at him naked in the bathtub.
He read on. “St. Sebastian is specially invoked against the plague. As a young and beautiful soldlier, he is a favorite subject of sacred art, being most generally represented undraped, and severely though not mortally wounded with arrows.”
Tom closed the book thoughtfully. “A young and beautiful soldier, being most generally represented undraped …” Now he knew. Clothilde. Wonderful Clothilde. Loving him without words, but saying it with her religion, with her food, her body, everything.
Until today he had thought he was kind of fu
He got up and put the book away. He was about to leave the reference room when it occurred to him that Clothilde was a Saint’s name, too. He searched through the volumes and took out CASTIR to COLE.