Actually, he had gone, but he hadn’t quite done it. That didn’t make things any better. How was she supposed to trust him now? (That he wouldn’t have been worth trusting if he hadn’t told her about going to the whore never occurred to her.) When he wasn’t in her sight but was ashore, what would he be doing? “Men,” she said again.
She was so lost in her angry reverie, she almost missed the stop in front of the canning plant. The trolley was about to start up again before she leapt from her seat and hurried out the door. The driver gave her a reproachful look. She glared at him. He was a man, too, even if he had a white mustache.
She punched in and hurried toward her machine. Isabella Antonelli was already at hers. “Good morning, Sylvia,” she said with a smile that did not match the mourning she still wore.
“Hello, Isabella,” Sylvia answered as she made sure the machine had plenty of labels in the feeder and the paste reservoir was full. That done, she really noticed the smile she had seen, and smiled back at her friend. “You’re looking cheerful this morning.” Her own smile was mischievous. “Did you put a little brandy in your coffee before you came to work?”
The capitalists who ran the canning plant hadn’t spent any more than the bare minimum on lamps. The ceiling was high, the bulbs dim. And Isabella Antonelli was as swarthy as any other Italian, which made her seem very dark indeed to fair-skinned Sylvia. Nevertheless, she blushed. It was unmistakable.
Sylvia waggled a finger at her. “You did put some brandy in your coffee.”
“No such thing,” Isabella said. Maybe she hadn’t. Sniffing, Sylvia couldn’t smell any brandy, but they weren’t standing face to face with each other, either, and the whole plant reeked of fish anyhow. But Isabella Antonelli had done something or other. What? How to find out without embarrassing her further?
Before Sylvia could come up with answers to either of those questions, the production line, which had shut down for shift changeover, started up again. Here came the cans. They came fast enough, nothing else mattered. Sylvia began pulling the three levers that carried them through her machine, gave each one a couple of girdling squirts of paste, and put on the label bearing a fish that looked much more like a fancy tuna than the mackerel the cans contained.
Pull, step, pull, step, pull, back to the beginning, pull, step…It was going to be a good day. Sylvia could feel that already. A good day was a day she got through barely noticing she’d been at the plant at all. On bad days, her shift seemed to last for years.
Here came Mr. Winter, limping up the line, a cigar clamped between upper and lower teeth. “Good morning, Mrs. Enos,” the foreman said, almost without opening his mouth. “How are you today?”
“Fine, thank you,” she answered, politely adding, “And you?”
“Couldn’t be better,” Mr. Winter said. His mouth still didn’t open wide, but its corners moved upwards. He was happier than she’d seen him in a good long while. After a moment, he returned to business: “Machine behaving?”
“Yes-see for yourself.” Sylvia hadn’t missed a lever while talking with the foreman. “The action feels smoother than it has.”
“They oiled it last night. About time,” he said. After a brief pause, he went on, “Hope your husband’s all right.”
“So do I,” Sylvia answered, despite everything more truthfully than not.
“God’s own miracle he was saved off the Punishment,” Mr. Winter said.
“I suppose that’s true.” Sylvia had all she could do not to laugh in the aging veteran’s face. George had gone up on the riverbank to get drunk and commit adultery. The God she worshiped wasn’t in the habit of manufacturing miracles of that shape.
“God’s own miracle,” the foreman repeated. He, of course, didn’t know all the details. Sylvia wished she didn’t know all the details, either.
Nodding to her once more, Mr. Winter went on up the line to see how Isabella Antonelli and her machine were. Over the noise of the line and of her own machine, Sylvia couldn’t hear much of what the two of them said to each other. She could see, though: could see the foreman’s hand rest lightly upon Isabella’s for a moment, could see the way the widow’s body bent toward his as a flower bends toward the sun.
Sylvia automatically worked her machine. She stared at her friend, stared and stared. She was not a blind woman. When things went on around her, she noticed them. If Mr. Winter and Isabella Antonelli weren’t lovers, she would have forfeited a week’s pay.
I should have known what kind of smile that was, she thought, annoyed at herself for not recognizing it on Isabella’s face. She’d worn it often enough herself, when things with George had been good. Mr. Winter’s smile wasn’t quite the usual large male leer, but the cigar would have fallen out of his mouth if it had been.
Pull, step, pull, step…She wanted to see if Isabella would say anything at lunch. All of a sudden, the day that had been moving swiftly ceased to move at all. At half past twelve, the line finally stopped. The weather was too raw for Sylvia and Isabella to eat outside, as they had earlier in the year. They sat down together on a bench not too far from one of the handful of steam radiators the factory boasted.
Isabella solved Sylvia’s problem for her by speaking first. She blushed again as she said, “I saw you watching me.”
Sylvia’s face heated, but she nodded. “Er-well, yes.”
“He is not a bad man. I have said this since he and I were only friends.” Isabella Antonelli tossed her head, as if defying Sylvia to make something of that. Sylvia only nodded again. That seemed to mollify her friend, who went on, “He has been lonely for years now, since his wife died. I know what being lonely means-Dio mio, how I know. Believe me when I tell you not being lonely is better.”
Sylvia imagined lame old Mr. Winter touching her, caressing her. She didn’t know whether to be revolted or burst out laughing. But she was lonely herself a good deal of the time these days, with George aboard the Ericsson…and when he had been home, had she been anything more than a piece of meat for him, a more convenient piece of meat at the moment than a Negro harlot? Did she want him to love her, or to leave her alone? For the life of her, she didn’t know.
And so, very slowly, she nodded. “You may be right after all, Isabella,” she said. “You may be right.”
Jonathan Moss had reached that pleasant stage of intoxication where his nose and the top part of his cheeks were going numb, but he was still thinking clearly-or pretty clearly, anyhow. As he generally did at such times, he stared into his whiskey glass with bemused respect, astonished the amber fluid could work such magic on the way he felt.
Dud Dudley stared around the officers’ lounge. “What we need here,” he declared, “are some women.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Moss said, and did. “They ought to bring some up from the States, as a matter of fact. All the Canuck gals treat us like we’re poisonous.” That wasn’t strictly true; every now and then a pilot would find a complaisant young woman in Ontario. Moss never had, though.
His flight leader nodded vigorously. “There’s an idea!” Dudley said. “They can call them something that sounds as if it’s military supplies, so the bluenoses won’t have conniptions. ‘Tool mufflers,’ maybe. Yeah, tool mufflers. How do you like them apples?”
It seemed funny and then some to Moss. “We ought to give Hardshell a requisition for ’em, start it going through the Quartermaster Corps. ‘Yeah, Fred, we need another couple dozen tool mufflers on the Toronto front.’” He spoke into an imaginary telephone. “‘Split ’em even between blondes, brunettes, and redheads.’”