Бетти Смит: Maggie-Now

"We got bedbugs again," said his wife conversationally.

"Where'd the buggers come from?"

"From the people upstairs. I hey always come from the people upstairs. Where the cockroaches come from."

"Ah, well, they got bedbugs at Buckingham Palace, too,"

he said. He sniffed the air. "What are we got for supper tonight?"

"We got boiled dinner for supper tonight, being's today was vashday."

"If there's anything what I like," he said, "it's a boiled dinner like NyOU make it."

1 [Y 1 "Want to eat now, them'' "Let's see." He lifted a foot out of the dishpan and watched it drip. "Not yet. Me feet lin't done yet."

He was content. He looked fondly at IZjS wife. She was teasing a lock of hair; making it frizzy by holding one hair and pushing the others up on it in a tangled ball.

He was proud of her. >Jo matter how hard she worked in the house or taking care of their son, she always dressed up for his homecoming. She got into her corsets and tied on a bustle pad (not that she needed one) and pinned the lace ruffles to her corset cover (not that she needed them either). The bustle and ruffles filled her out more and Big Red liked a well-filled-out woman.

Her dusty blond hair was in dips and waves and the rat made her pompadour stand up high. That was the way she had worn it when he first met her and she hadn't changed her hair style a bit in ten ~years.

Come to think of it, few women changed their hair style after they married. You could tell how long a woman had been married by looking at her hair style. He recalled when he was a rookie cop keeping company with Lottie.

He and three other rookies had been a quartet going around to different precincts and singing: And may there be no motlrning of the bar, When I put our to sea.

Over the biers of dead pol cement By coincidence, all four of the rookies had married in the same year and had been each other's groomsmen and ushers. And all of their wives still wore their hair the same way.

Why is this? he pondered. Is it because they try out differentt styles to attract a feller acid when they land him they hold 07Z to the old hair style because i, worked in the first place? Or is it that they don't care no more after they got a feller hooked? He realized he was thinking too much and he shuddered. I mustn't think so deep, he advised himself. Nothing good comes 071t of deep thinking.

Il~he~` a man thinks deep, he ain't contented MO more.

And he was a contented man. He loved his wife and his SOn 1 9 1

and his job and his home and his fellow cops. He didn't love his mother-in-law. A man wasn't supposed to love his mother-in-law. That was the tradition. But he loved everything else about his work and home. He even loved washdays. Their weekly recurrence assured him that life was a mighty sure and safe proposition.

Washday was a weekly ritual. Before Big Red left for duty on Monday mornings, Lottie had him lift the water-filled, copperhottom washboiler up onto the stove for her. Of course she could have put the empty boiler on herself and filled it from the teakettle, but she loved little attentions like that from her husband. As she wrote to an older sister in Weehawken: It keeps HIS sweethearts.

She shaved half a bar of I;irkman's yellow soap over the soaking clothes, put the cover on, let it come to a boil, throttled it down to simmer and then set up the boiled dinner for supper.

She filled her iron cook pot half full of water, threw in a hunk of corned beef, a whole head of cabbage and six unpared potatoes. When that came to a boil, she put on a tight cover and got it down to simmering. It cooked all day long.

At noon, the boiled dinner smelled like boiling black socks and the laundry smelled like overcooked cabbage.

At supper, Big Red's plate would be filled with shreds of boiled beef that got between his teeth. (That's whv the shot glass on the table always held toothpicks.) Next the beef would be limp black cabbage and water-logged potatoes.

That was exactly the way Big Red liked it!

He wouldn't eat that particular dinner cooked any other way. Once when Lottie's mother was sick and Lottie had to be with her, Big Red had had to eat out. He had ordered a corned-beefand-cabbage dinner. The beef came in a smooth unshredded slice, the cabbage was in tender and still-green leaves and the potatoes mealy. Big Red told the waiter to take it all back; that it wasn't fit for a clog to eat.

At half-hour intervals, Lottie turned the cooking boiled dinner upside down in the pot with a wooden spoon and stirred the clothes around in the boiler with a sawed-off broomstick.

Lottie was funny for broomsticks sawed off. She must have 1 101

had a dozen in the closet. Why, a broom was no more than half used when she had Big Red saw it down for a wasUstick. As she wrote to another sister who lived in Flatbush: Jimmy likes to make wasksticks for 7;7le. Things like that keep us sweethearts.

She sang lustily as she stirred the simmering socks and shirts and food.

l lIe ice Illan 1 a nice man….

At noon, Widdy, the son, came home from school for lunch. They shared a pick-up lunch of ham bologna, potato salad, coffee, hard poppyseed rolls and charlotte 7~u.sse from the baker's. It was hardly a pick-up lunch but Lottie called it that because, like the boiled dinner, a pic17~-up lunch was traditional for washdays.

About Widdy: He was the pride of his father's heart.

Big Red was sure they broke the mold when Widdy fell out of it.

"My kid," he'd brag to his fellow cops, "is a plain, ordinary, everyday kid. Nothing fancy. No A's on his report card. No sir! He makes straight C's. Oh, maybe a D once in a while in deportment," said Big Red modestly, not liking to brag. "That's the way he is and I wouldn't want him no different."

If it were possible for Big Red to have a fly in his ointment, his son's name would be it. The kid's full name was De Witt Xavier Shawn. He had been named for a ferryboat.

It was the time Lottie and Tirn had been going steady for a couple of years. One summer's day, he took her on a policemen's picnic up the Hudson. They drifted away from the other couples and stood alone on the bank. She wore a floppy leghorn hat with a big pink rose on it and black velvet streamers.

"Somebody looks mighty pretty today," he said.

"Oh, go on," she said. "I bet you say that to all the girls."

"That I do. So why shouldn't I say it to me best girl?"

"Timmy," she said out of the blue, "the time is come when we got to get married."

His eyes rolled wildly It the suddenness of it. He was crazy about her and had always s intended to marry her but he felt trapped all the same.

~ 711 "I been intending to ask you meself someday. Now you spoiled the surprise."

"When was you going to ask me, Timmy?"

"Oh, when I got to be a sergeant or a lieutenant on the force." (He was a rookie at the time.)

"Well, I went and asked you. Now what do you say?"

"I accept you," he said in a deep voice.

He felt relief. Now it was done. Now they would be married and he wouldn't have to go through the Purgatory of making up his mind.

"Oh, Timmy," she said, her eyes full of happy tears.

He took her in his arms and gave her a kiss that knocked the leghorn hat off her head. A steamboat came by. The captain, seeing the couple in a locked embrace, blew the whistle in salute. The passengers waved, and hollered and whistled and yelled things like: "Does your mother know you're out?" and, "Oh, you kid!" Big Red released Lottie and turned away, embarrassed. Lottie picked up her hat and waved it at the steamboat, screaming: "We're gonna get married!"

"AI1 your troubles should be little ones," yelled the captain through his megaphone.

As the boat steamed out of sight, or before, Lottie caught the name painted on the side: The De Witt Clinton.