fancy stuff for me. I shop on Union Square. So what?”
“With that beautiful Macedonian body,” said Zet, “Klein’s is just as good as haute couture. Blessings on your bust, your belly, and your bottom.”
“If your fever goes down by the weekend, we’ll go to the country, to Giddings and Gertrude.”
“Pa will be upset when he hears I’ve dropped out of Columbia.”
“So what? I know you love him, but he’s such a grudger, you can’t please him anyway. Well, screw him, too.”
They moved downtown in 1940 and lived on Bleecker Street for a dozen years. They were soon prominent in Greenwich Village. In Chicago they had been bohemians without knowing it. In the Village Zet was identified with the avant-garde in literature and with radical politics. When the Russians invaded Finland, radical politics became absurd. Marxists debated whether the workers’ state could be imperialistic. This was too nonsensical for Zetland. Then there was the Nazi-Soviet pact, there was the war. Constantine was born during the war—Lottie wanted him to have a Balkan name. Zetland wanted to enter the service. When he behaved with spirit, Lottie was always for him, and she supported him against his father, who of course disapproved.
Leaving the Yellow House
THE NEIGHBORS—there were in all six white people who lived at Sego Desert Lake—told one another that old Hattie could no longer make it alone. The desert life, even with a forced-air furnace in the house and butane gas brought from town in a truck, was still too difficult for her. There were women even older than Hattie in the county. Twenty miles away was Amy Walters, the gold miner’s widow. She was a hardy old girl, more wiry and tough than Hattie. Every day of the year she took a bath in the icy lake. And Amy was crazy about money and knew how to manage it, as Hattie did not. Hattie was not exactly a drunkard, but she hit the bottle pretty hard, and now she was in trouble and there was a limit to the help she could expect from even the best of neighbors.
They were fond of her, though. You couldn’t help being fond of Hattie. She was big and cheerful, puffy, comic, boastful, with a big round back and stiff, rather long legs. Before the century began she had graduated from finishing school and studied the organ in Paris. But now she didn’t know a note from a skillet. She had tantrums when she played canasta. And all that remained of her fine fair hair was frizzled along her forehead in small gray curls. Her forehead was not much wrinkled, but the skin was bluish, the color of skim milk. She walked with long strides in spite of the heaviness of her hips. With her shoulders, she pushed on, round-backed, showing the flat rubber bottoms of her shoes.
Once a week, in the same cheerful, plugging but absent way, she took off her short skirt and the dirty aviator’s jacket with the wool collar and put on a girdle, a dress, and high-heeled shoes. When she stood on these heels her fat old body trembled. She wore a big brown Rembrandt-like tarn with a tencent-store brooch, eyelike, carefully centered. She drew a straight line with lipstick on her mouth, leaving part of the upper lip pale. At the wheel of her old turret-shaped car, she drove, seemingly methodical but speeding dangerously, across forty miles of mountainous desert to buy frozen meat pies and whiskey. She went to the Laundromat and the hairdresser, and then had lunch with two martinis at the Arlington. Afterward she would often visit Marian Nabot’s Silvermine Hotel at Miller Street near skid row and pass the rest of the day gossiping and drinking with her cronies, old divorcees like herself who had settled in the West. Hattie never gambled anymore and she didn’t care for the movies. And at five o’clock she drove back at the same speed, calmly, partly blinded by the smoke of her cigarette. The fixed cigarette gave her a watering eye.
The Rolfes and the Paces were her only white neighbors at Sego Desert Lake. There was Sam Jervis too, but he was only an old gandy walker who did odd jobs in her garden, and she did not count him. Nor did she count among her neighbors Darly, the dudes’ cowboy who worked for the Paces, nor Swede, the telegrapher. Pace had a guest ranch, and Rolfe and his wife were rich and had retired. Thus there were three good houses at the lake, Hattie’s yellow house, Pace’s, and the Rolfes’. All the rest of the population—Sam, Swede, Watchtah the section foreman, and the Mexicans and Indians and Negroes—lived in shacks and boxcars. There were very few trees, cottonwoods and box elders. Everything else, down to the shores, was sagebrush and juniper. The lake was what remained of an old sea that had covered the volcanic mountains. To the north there were some tungsten mines; to the south, fifteen miles, was an Indian village—shacks built of plywood or railroad ties.
In this barren place Hattie had lived for more than twenty years. Her first summer was spent not in a house but in an Indian wickiup on the shore. She used to say that she had watched the stars from this almost roofless shelter. After her divorce she took up with a cowboy named Wicks. Neither of them had any money—it was the Depression—and they had lived on the range, trapping coyotes for a living. Once a month they would come into town and rent a room and go on a bender. Hattie told this sadly, but also gloatingly, and with many trimmings. A thing no sooner happened to her than it was transformed into something else. “We were caught in a storm,” she said, “and we rode hard, down to the lake, and knocked on the door of the yellow house”—now her house. “Alice Parmenter took us in and let us sleep on the floor.” What had actually happened was that the wind was blowing— there had been no storm—and they were not far from the house anyway; and Alice Parmenter, who knew that Hattie and Wicks were not married, offered them separate beds; but Hattie, swaggering, had said in a loud voice, “Why get two sets of sheets dirty?” And she and her cowboy had slept in Alice’s bed while Alice had taken the sofa.
Then Wicks went away. There was never anybody like him in the sack; he was brought up in a whorehouse and the girls had taught him everything, said Hattie. She didn’t really understand what she was saying but believed that she was being Western. More than anything else she wanted to be thought of as a rough, experienced woman of the West. Still, she was a lady, too. She had good silver and good china and engraved stationery, but she kept canned beans and A-1 sauce and tuna fish and bottles of catsup and fruit salad on the library shelves of her living room. On her night table was the Bible her pious brother Angus—the other brother was a heller—had given her; but behind the little door of the commode was a bottle of bourbon. When she awoke in the night she tippled herself back to sleep. In the glove compartment of her old car she kept little sample bottles for emergencies on the road. Old Darly found them after her accident.
The accident did not happen far out in the desert as she had always feared, but very near home. She had had a few martinis with the Rolfes one evening, and as she was driving home over the railroad crossing she lost control of the car and veered off the crossing onto the tracks. The explanation she gave was that she had sneezed, and the sneeze had blinded her and made her twist the wheel. The motor was killed and all four wheels of the car sat smack on the rails. Hattie crept down from the door, high off the roadbed. A great fear took hold of her—for the car, for the future, and not only for the future but spreading back into the past—and she began to hurry on stiff legs through the sagebrush to Pace’s ranch.
Now the Paces were away on a hunting trip and had left Darly in charge; he was tending bar in the old cabin that went back to the days of the pony express, when Hattie burst in. There were two customers, a tungsten miner and his girl.
“Darly, I’m in trouble. Help me. I’ve had an accident,” said Hattie.
How the face of a man will alter when a woman has bad news to tell him! It happened now to lean old Darly; his eyes went flat and looked unwilling, his jaw moved in and out, his wrinkled cheeks began to flush, and he said, “What’s the matter—what’s happened to you now?”
“I’m stuck on the tracks. I sneezed. I lost control of the car. Tow me off, Darly. With the pickup. Before the train comes.”
Darly threw down his towel and stamped his high-heeled boots. “Now what have you gone and done?” he said. “I told you to stay home after dark.”
“Where’s Pace? Ring the fire bell and fetch Pace.”
There’s nobody on the property except me,” said the lean old man. “And I m not supposed to close the bar and you know it as well as I do.”
“Please, Darly. I can’t leave my car on the tracks.”
“Too bad!” he said. Nevertheless he moved from behind the bar. “How did you say it happened?”
“I told you, I sneezed,” said Hattie.
