VERMILION WANTED TO
Go to the Movies
By Karen Schwind
Vermilion Wanted to Go to the Movies
Published by Skoob Press at Smashwords
Copyright © 2011 Karen Schwind
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, except for obvious historical references. Any references to persons or incidents, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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Cover design by Josh Billings http://www.jbillingsdesign.com/
Vermilion Wanted to Go to the Movies
Vermilion wanted to go to the movies. Vermilion always wanted to go to the movies.
“We don’t need to pay fifty cents to know what happens,” argued Peter. “I can tell you what happens. They get together in the end,” he said, tapping his fingernails against the kitchen table, where they sat across from each other.
“We certainly do not know that,” Vermilion said, her accent stretching know into a long cat-like meow. “Clark Gable might not want Carole Lombard this week.” She leaned towards him and laughed, her hair falling over one eye as if she herself were Lana Turner.
But Peter would not be swayed. “We can’t afford movies every week.” His frown made the words sound harsher than they were, harsher than he meant them to be. Peter liked going to the movies.
Maybe not as much as Vermilion.
Actually, he didn’t like movies as much as he liked going to them. Walking down the sidewalks of New York, seeing men striding by in suits with fedoras or slouch caps pulled low over their eyes, women wrapped in scarves and gloves. Their eyes glanced over him, glazed with unconcern, and then jerked to a stop at the sight of Vermilion.
She strolled languidly along the busy streets, never tiring of watching cars and people rush by, always saying “How do you do?” to anyone who caught her eye. Two years in the city, and she still never met a stranger. Even native New Yorkers smiled at her, men often tipping their hats and blurting, “Fine, and you?”
Peter was used to the effect his wife had on others. Though he habitually wore one of two gray suits, a light wool for summer and a heavy wool for winter, and though something in his appearance—the slight movement of his body when he walked or the inexpressive face—suggested a man who had made up his mind to be invisible to the strangers of the world, he loved the way Vermilion shone against the pallor of the city.
“Why don’t we walk down to the drugstore and share a Coca-Cola?”
“No,” she pouted, then brightened. “We could have a Coca-Cola after the movie.” She reached out and touched his hand, her fingers warm against his skin.
He hesitated. “We can’t, Vermilion. This would be the third week in a row. We can’t spend almost a dollar a week on the movies.”
“It won’t cost a dollar for the movie. We don’t need Coca-Colas or popcorn.” Her voice grew softer and lower.
He looked at her while he thought about the small clip with two one-dollar bills in it.
“No,” he said. “We can’t.”
The next day at work, Peter stared out the window. A gray mist fell—not rain, which he thought might have been better. A stream of humanity surging down the sidewalk shrank inside their coats, faces invisible.
Vermilion had brought up the movie again that morning as she made oatmeal for Peter’s breakfast. She made oatmeal for him every morning because, as she said, it was hot, it was cheap, and he liked it.
Holding a cup of coffee with steam drifting off the top, she waited until they sat at the table. As soon as Peter took his first bite, she said, “I think I’ll stop at Loew’s and see what time the movie starts.”
Before he could speak, she added, “I know you think we shouldn’t go this Saturday, but it never hurts to see what’s on. That way, we won’t be late if we do decide to go.”
He walked to work feeling defeated, pushing his hands into his pockets after turning up the collar of an old gray trench coat Vermilion had found for him at the second-hand store. They had laughed when he tried it on. “You look like Dick Tracy,” she told him and kissed his lips with abandon, the way she did when she was happy.
The week flew by, as they all seemed to do, so that Peter had to work late Wednesday night editing articles for Thursday’s paper. Though The Commoner was only a weekly, his heartbeat quickened at the sight of the slightly damp paper sitting on his desk, and he picked it up, staring at it as a loving father stares at his newborn son. The late-night work, the tension between him and writers when copy wasn’t perfect, the cheap black coffee—all in the end had seemed worth the sacrifice as he stared at line after line of words that ran after each other until page after page filled with news that people all over the neighborhood would read. The paper’s small readership never bothered Peter. The work itself, the finished product, sustained him so that he hurried home whistling Maple Leaf Rag, an old tune, he would have said if anyone had asked, but a good one.
He stopped whistling when he walked in the door, early this time, and hung his coat on the coat stand, stepping across the room in two large strides and slipping one arm around his beautiful wife, dangling the paper in front of her with the other.
“Oh,” Vermilion gasped, pushing the paper aside so she could flip two sizzling pieces of bratwurst. “I’ll read it after dinner.” She laughed and put her free hand over the one he kept around her waist.
“Meat during the week?” Peter leaned over her shoulder and sniffed.
“We’re having sauerkraut, too,” she said.
“Reminds me of Chicago, the smell of pork and cabbage. How’d you manage this on our budget?”
She didn’t answer until she had pushed him back and carried the pan to the table. While they pulled their chairs in and unfolded their napkins, she said, “Jake dropped by and said he’d bring a fresh chicken tomorrow, so I thought we might as well go ahead and eat this tonight. It won’t last till Saturday.”
“Jake dropped by?” Peter stopped smoothing out the napkin in his lap and looked up.
“Why, yes,” she said, her hands hovering over her fork and knife as if waiting for permission to pick them up. “Yes, he came by this afternoon.”
“What for?” Peter asked, looking directly at Vermilion rather than at his food.
She shifted slightly and looked down at her hands before picking up her fork and knife to spear a bite of bratwurst.
“Well?” he asked when she didn’t answer.
“Well what?” She stared across the table at him.
“What did Jake drop by for? He knew I wouldn’t be home.”
“He wants a chicken someone gave him to be Southern fried with buttermilk biscuits and gravy. I told him I’d fry the chicken if he supplied what I needed,” said Vermilion, raising her eyebrows as she popped the bratwurst into her mouth.
The thought of Jake’s having to wring a chicken’s neck reminded Peter of 1921. Coming straight to the city from an apprenticeship in a second-rate law office in the mid-west, Jake had set up shop in an office above a bakery around the corner from Columbia. His willingness to take any case and an aggressiveness that caught a couple of white shoe firms off guard had propelled him to the top of the middle, and in six years he owned a Packard and a three-bedroom apartment in Manhattan.
Peter met him before the Packard on a day when Peter had slipped into the bakery and ordered coffee and Danish. Balancing a cup and plate in one hand with the Times under his arm, Peter heard a chair scrape and glanced down at a man no older than himself. “Have a seat. Always room for two.”
After hesitating only a second, Peter extended his free hand. “Peter. Peter Boyle.”
Because they had become friends before Jake won his first big case, Peter had been happy to ride in the Packard and was happy still to share Jake’s cheap wine now that he had started taking his wages however he could get them, the heady days of $5.00 an hour wages gone, along with the car and Manhattan address. Hence the fresh chicken, Peter decided.
“Will you need help?”
“You know I will.” Vermilion held up her hands so he could see her pink nails. “To scrub pots and pans.”
“I used to be the best pot scrubber in west Chicago, did I ever tell you that?”
Peter left the office early Friday. Not as early as he wanted to. He announced first thing in the morning that he would leave at noon, but a paper vendor dropped by to complain about late payments. By the time Peter handed him a check, one o’clock had passed and by the time Peter got his coat on and made it to the sidewalk, two had passed. Still, he would be home by two-thirty, before Jake and the fresh chicken arrived.
While Vermilion changed clothes twice and combed her hair, Peter moved furniture around and chilled wine in the ice box, cold with a fresh block of ice. Later, after their guests arrived, Peter sat in a hard-backed kitchen chair and watched.
“All I can say is,” Jake said, commanding the floor. “All I can say is, I’m glad I got a farm boy’s education. Otherwise, I’d starve these days.”
His audience laughed at the thought of Jake out back of his ramshackle apartment wringing a chicken’s neck.
“I admire your attitude,” said Pam, a short woman with a gap in her front teeth. “Some men would be bitter.”
“I don’t have a choice. Anyway, this thing can’t last forever. I’ll get back on my feet, along with everyone else when Roosevelt pushes his ideas through.” He surveyed the room while he talked, his eyes flitting from one face to the other until they came to rest on the back of Vermilion’s dress, blue with a gold sash around her waist. “How’re the biscuits?” he asked, lunging across the room into the kitchen to the table where she flipped dough and pressed it flat into the flour.
“Doughy,” Vermilion shot back, smiling. “And since you’re over here, country boy, flip that chicken for me.”
Jake sidled past her and pulled out the drawer by the wall. Peter could hear him rummaging as metal clanked against metal while Vermilion pushed her hair out of her eyes with the back of a floured hand and said, “What’re you doing? The fork is right by the pan.”
“Sorry,” Jake said and squeezed by her again. He picked up the fork and began to turn chicken fried a deep golden brown on one side.
Peter filled his glass, then watched Vermilion cut a biscuit before he leaned against the wall, away from David and Pam, who huddled next to each other on the couch.
“Room for you here, Peter, if you want some heat,” said David, waving Peter over with the long, slim fingers of a musician.
“I’ve got enough here, thanks.”
When Vermilion had filled the pan and slid it into the oven, she shoved Jake with her shoulder. “Outta my way. I hafta wash this mess off my hands.”
“I’ll hold the towel for you,” he said and reached out his hand, but before he could lift the towel, Peter stepped forward and snatched it up.
“I’ll help Vermilion, Jake. You’ve done enough by bringing the chicken. You go on in and enjoy the conversation.”
“Thanks,” said Jake, cocking his head to one side. “I’ll do that.”
The meal finished, they squeezed around the small wooden table sitting in the middle of the living room with one wing pulled out, talking only long enough to say, “Please pass the gravy,” or “More potatoes anyone?”
Peter looked at Vermilion in the dim light of a single bulb and thought about the first time he had met her, looking at her in the crowded apartment that smelled of the Hudson River and knowing, because of her accent, that she had moved to the city to get away from something, like everyone else Peter knew.
“I’m old to be a run-a-way,” she told him later that first night, “but that’s what I am. I’ve run away and I’ll keep running away until I run out of breath. Till I can’t run anymore or maybe till I find something worth stopping for.”
“Like what?” he had asked, thinking that she wanted the fame or wealth of a city that had once hosted F. Scott and Zelda, was home to the Rockefellers and Times Square. He wanted to remind her that Zelda had gone crazy from too many swims in the fountain. The famous writer and his Southern beauty had burned out and burned up until F. Scott got a job in Hollywood to keep Zelda in an institution somewhere in Baltimore.
Vermilion turned her head and stared out over the river, at the waves lapping endlessly at the shore. “I want a place where nobody has any secrets.”
“Everyone has secrets,” he said. “Don’t you?”
“Course I do.” She turned and looked at him. “That’s why I want to live someplace where other people don’t have any.”
They had walked along Barrow Street until they got to the corner of Barrow and West that night, watching a ferry and a couple of small boats rock gently back and forth with the yellow glow of a quarter moon lighting the water. He hadn’t said anything else. He didn’t know what to say. They walked and chatted about the water or who they knew at the party. He couldn’t remember what they had talked about, really.
He didn’t see her for a week. Then he ran into her when he went into the drugstore near his office. She stood behind the counter.
“You work here?” he asked.
“Yes, I do.” She looked around and lowered her voice. “And I know everything about everyone. Who has a cold. Who doesn’t. Who’s expecting. Who’s relieved she’s not.”
His eyebrows shot up.
“Oh, yes,” she said, lowering her eyes so that dark lashes swept down like shades. “You’d be surprised how much I know.” She lowered her voice to an almost inaudible whisper. “No one keeps secrets from the drugstore lady.”
He asked her out the next day, and she said only if they ate at a café by the water. She couldn’t get enough of the swoosh and slap of the ocean hitting the shore. “It reminds me of vacations in Charleston,” she told him.
He borrowed Jake’s car, the Packard, and drove them across the Brooklyn Bridge to a restaurant owned by a friend’s father. “We won’t hear the ocean exactly. The place is on Buttermilk Channel. Elton’s father and brother take the boat out each morning and catch fish and crab. Whatever they get is what they serve that night.”
“Sounds mah-ve-lous,” she drawled, throwing her head back so that the wind loosened the pins in her hair, strands falling softly around her flushed face by the time they sat in candlelight on the patio.
When they had ordered, she leaned towards him, her eyes luminous. “Tell me your secrets,” she said.
“Secrets?” he asked, feeling as if she had discovered in him some inability to articulate simple sentences. He wondered when he had regressed to adolescence.
“I don’t think I have any.”
She laughed softly, then said with an edge to her voice, “Everybody’s got secrets. You said so yourself. We might know about the dish and the spoon, but the man in the moon could surely tell us a thing or two about that cow.”
He laughed, realizing how clever she was, and how cynical.
“I really don’t think I have any secrets. Or, if I do, they’re not important enough for me to realize they’re secrets. No, I’m pretty boring, an open book.”
“Tell me everything.” She lifted a glass of wine and reached across the table with it. “A toast: to Buttermilk Channel and dinner with the best company in the world.”
Peter lifted his glass. “To the best company in the world.” Then he told her everything—about his childhood in Chicago, his father’s death one afternoon, how his friend had run around the building and stopped at the sight of Peter and the other boys playing in the street. “Pete, it’s your old man. The machine got him. They’s taken him to the hospital.”
Peter had run home, not to the hospital, where his mother had already taken his two siblings. When he saw the empty apartment, he turned and ran as fast as he could, and at twelve he could run fast, only to find that he was too late and would have been too late even if he had not gone home.
“No more school,” he told Vermilion. “Only the mill after that, at least until Elly and Mike graduated.”
“So young?” she had asked.
“As much as I would hate seeing a child of mine work the mills, I don’t know what we would have done if I hadn’t worked. My mother couldn’t support three kids on a mill worker’s pay. She worked even when my father was alive. Took ‘em both.”
“How’d you get in the newspaper business?”
“Now that’s a story,” he had said and leaned back, a smile coming to his thin, stern face as he began telling her about the day he got the job selling papers. “Best day of my life . . .”
The evening had lingered, her arm bare in the moonlight, covered with a tasseled shawl on the ride home. After that he saw her once every couple of weeks, when he could get Jake’s car or afford a dinner and movie. Then it was every week even when he only had a dime for Coca-Colas at the drugstore when she got off work.
He never asked her to tell him what secrets she kept hidden behind blue eyes that shut like a door when he asked if her father planned on visiting the city, though he knew her father was still alive because they had walked to the post office to pick up a package from him one afternoon. But he learned not to pry.
Until one warm day when they had walked along the water’s edge and watched people line up at the ferry rail. “Hot today,” he had said, taking off his jacket and throwing it over his shoulder.
“Hot? This ain’t hot. Georgia’s hot,” she murmured. “That’s why we have porches wrapping around our houses and rocking chairs scattered across ‘em where people sit all summer, trying to catch a hint of breeze—anything to make ‘em feel alive.” She stopped walking and watched the ferrymen, large round stains on the backs of their shirts and under their arms. “Except us. After Mama got too crazy to stay still for more than five minutes, even Daddy gave up sitting on the porch. We used to like waving to neighbors strolling by while there was still light to see and the heat didn’t feel so much like a furnace. The sidewalk got a lot emptier after we moved our show into the house.”
Even then, he refused to ask questions about her family, yet it seemed to him as if a dam had burst so that, as each day passed, she painted pictures of the Victorian mansion with its cupolas and lace curtains, the darkened interior, the hushed tones. The father who left for the bank each morning with a smile and a wave, pretending for the sake of propriety. The daughter whose girlhood passed in a kind of twilight, shadows permeating every room as she watched her mother pace the floors, back and forth, back and forth, talking apparently to herself since Vermilion could not understand what she said.
“We had help,” she said, when he asked if she was alone all day with her mother. “A maid who took care of the house and a cook. They did the best they could. For them, Mama was a bona fide matriarch. Even when it was obvious to everyone but Daddy, they couldn’t say anything. When they got scared she’d hurt herself and Daddy would blame them, they tied her to a chair so they could get their work done.”
“And you?” Peter had asked.
Vermilion had looked away from him when she answered. “Watched. You know how long it takes somebody to go crazy?”
“No. How long?”
“Eight years. They start out muttering to themselves, pretty easy to ignore. Then they shuffle when they walk and laugh or burst into tears at a dinner party, so you stop going to dinner parties. Stop inviting people over. At some point, you start waiting. For what? You don’t know. Then one day, after eight years of dimmed rooms, loud wails, tying her into chairs, letting her thick hair grow into a bird’s nest because she won’t let you comb it, you find out what you were waiting for.”
The silence lingered. He waited.
At last, she had said, still not looking at him, “She jumped off the balcony onto the foyer floor and broke her neck. And we all pretended she died of pneumonia. Because good families don’t go crazy and jump off balconies.”
The next month, he asked her to marry him, and a week after that, they went to a Justice of the Peace.
So now they sat with David and Pam—and Jake—eating while Jake regaled them with another story, this one of a client who had gotten caught standing in someone else’s apartment with someone else’s bag of silver. “And I swear this is the truth, the absolute truth as recorded by New York City’s finest. My client, whose name I will not reveal, looked at the couple as they walked in the door, the woman with her mouth open, ready to scream, the man with his fists balled up and stuck out like Dempsey, and says, apparently in answer to some question about what he was doing with their stuff, ‘Oh, is this yours? I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize. . .’ And he handed them the bag and left, would have gotten away except—now picture this—he walks coolly out of the apartment, gets halfway down the stairs, and trips! Over his own feet. And he’s not even running, just walking calmly down the stairs. The landlord steps out of his apartment, hears the couple screaming and sits on my client until the cops arrive.”
Everyone laughed, even Peter.
In the silence that followed, Peter folded his napkin and laid it under the edge of his plate before he cocked his head to one side and said, “You must have a million stories, Jake.”
“You bet I do. Though not all of ‘em as funny as that one.”
“So what do you do when you know the guy’s guilty? Work out the best deal?”
Vermilion looked up from putting jelly on her biscuit, first at Peter and then at Jake.
When he didn’t answer, she asked, “Do you?”
“Well, no,” Jake said, throwing his arms up. “I have to defend the defendant.” He emphasized the word defendant. “It’s the law, you know, part of being a lawyer.”
Peter took another bite of chicken and ate it before he commented. “What if you know the guy’s guilty of something worse than trying to take a bit of cash? What if he murdered someone?”
“Don’t look too casually on cash these days.” David stabbed the air with his knife to make his point. “Could be life or death. Couple could have gotten kicked to the sidewalk if your client had gotten away.”
“But he has the right to a fair trial,” said Pam, her voice rising in pitch and tone.
“Honey, I’m not saying he doesn’t have a right to a fair trail. Still, if he got caught with the money in his hand . . .”
Peter leaned back in his chair and glanced up at Jake in the brief pause left by David’s reply. “So Jake. What do you do with the information you get about clients?”
Setting his glass on the table with a slap, Jake frowned, the amused glint in his eyes gone. “I do my job and keep my mouth shut.”
“You keep records?”
“Only in my head. I’m sworn by law to keep clients’ secrets. As you know,” he added with a quizzical glace at Peter.
They all looked at Jake, their faces blank except Vermilion’s, whose pink-tinged splotches crept up her neck into her cheeks.
“Have you helped murderers walk away scot-free?” she asked, holding her knife and fork mid-air, like weapons.
Jake took another bite of buttered bread.
“That, Vermilion, is my secret. And I never tell my secrets.”
The evening seemed to pass slowly after they moved to the chairs and talked in quiet tones, jazz from the radio creating a backdrop to the murmur of voices. “Well,” David said at last, “we’d better go.”
Peter gathered everyone’s coats and hats, handing them out at the door amid the good-byes and thank you’s. He shut the door at last and leaned against it, watching Vermilion curl up on a pillow by the fire.
He walked over and sat beside her. “Thanks for being so wonderful,” he said. “You made the evening for us all. And Jake told me he’s never eaten so well.”
She shuddered and pulled Peter down beside her.