A heavily pregnant woman sat in front of Stanley’s desk, balancing an S&H Green Stamps catalog on her stomach. Other than an occasional “ooh” or “aah,” she silently thumbed through the baby goods section, folding down pages that seemed to catch her eye. Diamond-shaped gussets, sewn into the side seams of a plaid housedress, accommodated her growing belly.
Stanley sat at his desk, mindlessly staring at the mirror image of his name and profession on the plate-glass transom over the front door of his office. From the street it read:
Stanley Adamski
Attorney-at-Law
Adamski. He’d kept the name for the sake of his father who’d died on the same day Stanley had lost his hand. Same coal mine too. What were the odds? Better than good, Stanley concluded. And because his mother had passed years earlier from rheumatic fever, the widow Lankowski stepped in and gave the orphaned ten-year-old a home. When the courts finally made the adoption legal, the widow encouraged Stanley to keep his last name. “It’s all he had to give you,” she’d said of his father, a generous sentiment considering the guy’s quick temper and his taste for liquor. But that was Babcia—Stanley’s nickname for the widow, Polish for Grandmother. She always looked beyond the sins of a man to see his worth.
“I don’t know how we’ll ever thank you,” the pregnant woman said as she folded down another page in the catalog. “He’s been out of work eight months already.”
“He never should’ve been fired.” Stanley stopped himself from reciting precedent on the matter. He’d save that for his meeting with the husband.
“The timing couldn’t have been worse.” The woman shifted in her seat, trying for a more comfortable position. “I held onto my secretarial job as long as I could, but they let me go as soon as I started showing.” She blushed.
“He had the legal right to unionize his fellow garment workers.” Stanley’s face reddened. “Guess they forgot about a little something called the National Labor Relations Act.” He pounded the desk. “This is America, for God’s sake.”
The woman began crying for the third time in the half hour since Stanley had returned from the Globe Store. “This can’t be good for the baby,” she said, but the tears continued to flow.
“Tell you what, Mrs. Hinkley. I’ll worry about the case, and you worry about the nursery.” He glanced at the catalog. “Find anything of use?”
The woman wiped her eyes and pulled her chair sideways toward the desk, so she could lay the catalog out between them. “They have it all!” She flipped through to find the folded pages. “Here.” She pointed to an aluminum-framed baby carriage in navy. “It can double as a bassinet.” She beamed at her thrift while thumbing another page. “Bottles, diapers, receiving blankets, layettes …” Her finger hovered over an enamel sterilizer, then dropped. “I think we can boil the bottles in my mother’s corn pot,” she said, moving on to another item. “How many books?”
“One hundred and seventeen.”
“How on earth did you save that many?”
“I’m a sucker for sweets. The Acme has the best gumdrops around.” Stanley pushed out his stomach and patted it with his handless arm. When the front of his pinkish stump peaked out through his sleeve, the woman went pale. Stanley immediately dropped his arm and asked, “Can I get you some water?”
“This happens,” Mrs. Hinkley said, holding a hanky to her mouth. “It’ll pass.” A moment later her color started coming back. “Everything sets me off these days. You should see me cleaning chicken. Don’t know what’s worse, the sight or smell of it.”
“I have an idea.” Stanley closed the catalog and handed it to the woman. “Take this home. Go through it good and make your list.” He stood up, walked around the desk, and helped her up from her seat. “Your husband can pick these up,” he said, holding an Acme bag full of Green Stamp books.
“I’d like to save him the trip.”
“You’re carrying enough.” He gestured toward her pregnant belly. “Howard can grab them on his way to the S&H store. It’ll give me a chance to go over his case with him.”
After a silence long enough to make them both uncomfortable, she said, “He’s a proud man, my Howie.”
“No reason not to be.”
“He doesn’t believe in taking charity.”
“It’s a helping hand,” Stanley said, “for the baby.”
“Exactly. That’s how I talked him into letting me come down here after you called about the stamps. But he doesn’t want to face you. Not for this.”
“Understood.” Stanley escorted her to the door and handed her the bag. “Are you sure you can manage?”
The tears came back, but so did her smile. “You’re a good man, Mr. Adamski.”
Stanley opened the door, setting off a cowbell hanging over the frame. “I hope so,” he said, walking outside with her. He contemplated the matter as she disappeared around the corner. A competent lawyer could make a case in Stanley’s favor. Drunk or sober, he’d spent his career fighting for the rights of the downtrodden. That had to count for something. Then again, a priest could offer a different argument, given Stanley’s penchant for loose women. Pride and shame had always been his faithful companions. A jury could be swayed in either direction.
“Am I late?” A man wearing a United Mine Workers pin on the lapel of his Sunday suit trudged up to the office door. “Legs don’t move as fast as they used to.” He covered his mouth to suppress a barking cough.
Stanley waited for him to catch his breath. “Right on time,” he said, leading the man inside.
* * *
The sun blinked through half-open blinds. A quarter after three, Stanley guessed, before checking his desk clock. On the nose again. For someone with lousy timing, he sure had a knack for time. “May 10,” he said aloud as he opened his appointment book and ran a finger down the page. He’d seen three more clients after Mrs. Hinkley, the miner with black lung and a couple of prostitutes out on bail, but they looked to be the last. “Guess I’ll call it a day.”
Stanley opened a door behind him, and took the stairs up to his apartment. He briefly considered going over to the Methodist church for their four o’clock AA meeting, but he’d already gone twice this week, and it was only Tuesday. Instead, he decided he’d go up to Providence, do a few chores for Babcia, and have an early supper with her. That would give Arlene time to get to the Polish Club for a couple of drinks after her shift at the Lace Works. He hadn’t seen her in over a week, and he was hoping to go home with her at the end of the night. Of course, it all depended on whether or not that sister of hers was still at the house. She’d shown up on Arlene’s doorstep out of the blue. Something about her husband making a rude comment after she’d burned his supper. According to Arlene, their spats never lasted more than a week, and Stanley hoped this visit was no exception. While he wouldn’t say he missed Arlene, when she wasn’t around he remembered he was lonely.
A beer would taste good about now, he thought as he grabbed a Crystal Club Cola out of the fridge. He’d been off the sauce almost three years already, and still, he missed that first beer at the end of the workday. He positioned the neck of the bottle between a set of cast-iron teeth mounted on the wall and pried off the cap, releasing a quick spray of soda. “Every time,” he said, wiping his cheek with his sleeve.
The bottle opener had been left behind by a previous tenant. Stanley studied the place. Almost everything in his apartment had come to him secondhand. His kitchen table. The davenport sofa. Even his bed frame in the next room. Stanley didn’t mind. Waste not, want not, as Babcia always said. She’d been a young widow, so she’d learned how to make do.
Stanley spied his leather Barcalounger, the only new piece of furniture he’d ever purchased for himself. He slept in it when his sciatica acted up. Old age doesn’t come alone. Something his father had always said in spite of the fact that he died at thirty-two. Strange to think that at fifty-one, Stanley was almost twenty years older than his father would ever be. Most men in Scranton couldn’t count on longevity, leastways not the ones who worked in the mines. If the accidents didn’t get you, the black lung would.
Stanley had started out in the mines. Like father like son. He became a breaker boy at the age of nine, picking coal from slate twelve hours a day, six days a week. Soon enough, he was promoted to nipper, opening and closing the heavy airtight doors whenever mine cars full of coal passed through. One day, as he watched a mule pull her two-ton load up an incline, her leather harness snapped, sending the coal car hurtling toward a group of miners. Stanley jammed a wooden sprag into a wheel, stopping the car and saving the men, but he got too close and lost his hand in the spokes.
Babcia refused to let that hold him back. Find the blessings, she used to say whenever anyone referred the loss of his hand as a tragedy. And Stanley could count his education as one of those blessings. After he recovered, he went to school on a regular basis for the first time in his life. With a little prodding, he buckled down and earned a scholarship at graduation.
He looked around his apartment. This may not be the Taj Mahal, but it’s a decent life. Better than I had a right to expect, all thanks to Babcia. Still, Stanley wondered what would have happened to him if his father hadn’t died so young.
He downed his cola like he would a beer and settled into his Barcalounger. Babcia wouldn’t be expecting him this early. No reason he shouldn’t take a quick nap. As soon as he closed his eyes, the wall behind him began to pulsate with the drum of a distant stampede. He opened an eye and cocked his head. Sounds like the Roosey’s showing a Western. Stanley shared a wall with the Roosevelt Theatre in Green Ridge, and while they took great pains to contain the noise, the movies still reverberated in his apartment, Westerns in particular. “Go get ’em, cowboy,” he said, and started to drift off.
Inconvenience aside, Green Ridge made sense for Stanley. He could go to the movies anytime. The neighborhood also had heavy foot traffic, so business was good. And, since it butted up against Providence, he was three minutes away from the widow by car or fifteen on foot. All uphill, as Arlene liked to remind him. She hated Green Ridge, and refused to spend the night “all the way down there.” In truth, Stanley preferred having a little elbow room between them. He and Arlene liked each other well enough, but that’s as far as it went. That’s as far as it ever went with Stanley. He’d keep time with a woman for a while. He’d miss them when they weren’t around, but after a couple of hours together, he was always ready to be on his own again.
It hadn’t been that way with Violet. He couldn’t get enough of her back then. Best friends who fall in love. That’s how the story’s supposed to go, and it did, until that day.
He’d wanted to surprise her, so he lied and said he’d be home from law school a week late. That way he’d be back in Scranton in plenty of time to meet her at the train station. She and her sister Lily had gone to visit an aunt up in Buffalo for a few months, or so he’d been told, but as soon as Violet stepped off the train with a baby in her arms, he knew the score. Or thought he knew, so he didn’t give her a chance to explain. It didn’t help that he’d been drinking that day. She didn’t know. He could still hide it back then.
They both got their hackles up. The pride of youth. Words, hurled like hand grenades, leveled them where they stood. Fool, liar, coward, whore. Over the next few months he’d tried to make amends, and so had she, just never at the same time.
Years later, after she’d married Tommy, Violet paid Stanley a visit. Time hadn’t assuaged their anger, or their love. They spent the first hour defending their actions and the second one apologizing for them. Eventually, they made their way to a place so honest, it couldn’t be sustained. The kind of honest that forces people to turn away rather than see their own truth in someone else’s eyes. So she went back to Tommy and never spoke of it to Stanley again.
But God, how he had loved her. You get a love like that once in your life if you’re lucky, and he’d been lucky. Or not.
“Whew.” He shook his head to chase away the ghosts. A beer would do the trick, like father like son, but he’d made a promise to Tommy Davies, and he intended to keep it. “Quit the drink,” Tommy had urged a couple of months before he died. Stanley and Tommy hadn’t been close for years, but mortality has a way of diminishing old jealousies. “I need you to watch after my girls.”
And Stanley had, from making Violet think the government paid those monthly stipends, to buying the family a television. He opened one eye and noticed the jars of mustard pickle and jam on his shelf. She’d be furious if she knew what was going on behind her back, and maybe she’d be right. Stanley didn’t intend to find out. He’d keep his distance and rely on Babcia to tell him when and how to help.
Stanley needed to clear his mind. He reached over to the table beside him, turned on an old jade-green Bakelite Motorola radio, and tuned it to WARM 590 on the dial. “Up next,” the disc jockey announced, “‘I’ll See You in My Dreams,’ sung by every boy’s girl next door, Doris Day.”
What were the odds? Better than good, Stanley thought for the second time that hour. Of course, when he and Violet used to dance to that song all those years ago, Isham Jones was singing it. Since then, everybody took their turn, including Ella Fitzgerald, Stanley’s favorite. But he had to hand it to Doris, she knew how to croon.
Although Stanley had a terrible voice, he used to sing the song to Violet on the last night before returning to school in Philadelphia. At least, he’d sing the parts that mattered.
I’ll see you in my dreams,
Hold you in my dreams.
He’d hum through a few lines and pick up at the end:
Tender eyes that shine,
They will light my way tonight,
I’ll see you in my dreams.
“I think you missed something,” she’d always say.
“Only you,” he’d answer, “when you’re not in my arms.”
“Only you would turn a torch song into a love song.” She’d tease and sing the missing lines:
Someone took you out of my arms,
Still I feel the thrill of your charms,
Lips that once were mine …
And that’s when he’d kiss her. Stanley remembered them dancing to it once, over at the Robert Morris canteen. He closed his eyes and imagined Violet in his arms. That may have been the absolute best day of my life.
Doris Day circled back to the chorus. This time the words sounded keen and sharp, more torment than song. It’s too much. It’s all too much. Ever since he’d quit drinking, life came at Stanley a little louder, a little brighter, for better and for worse. Like the forty-foot weeping willow at the corner in Green Ridge. Stanley had passed that tree hundreds of times, maybe thousands, but one day, a couple of months into his sobriety, he stood before it marveling at the blade-shaped leaves. Veined and serrated, they hung from ropes of bark, mimicking the patterns of fish bones arranged head to toe. He’d felt gratitude at the sight of such beauty, and sorrow for having missed it all these years.
Lips that once were mine,
Tender eyes that shine …
Stanley reached behind him and yanked the radio cord, ripping the plug out of the socket. In his drinking days, this song would bump him up against the memory of Violet, but now it gutted the thing, laying bare his insides. Maybe he needed a meeting after all.
A loud knock roused Stanley from his ruminations.
“It’s me.” Arlene pushed through the door, past the kitchen, and dropped onto the davenport. “I’m never getting rid of her!” she screamed into a pillow.
Stanley kicked down the leg rest. “I wasn’t expecting …” He shifted in place to shake off his sour mood.
“I wanted to surprise you.” Arlene lowered the pillow, tossed her long dark hair, and waited for a reaction.
“You succeeded.” He forced a smile and joined her on the couch.
“I can go,” she said, not making a move.
“This is new.” He fingered her short fringe of bang.
“You like?” She scooted around to face him. “The beautician said I look like that pinup girl, Bettie Page.” Arlene put a hand behind her head and aimed her breasts at Stanley.
He sat back to take in the whole picture. “I like.” He smiled for real this time as he lifted her bangs and kissed her brow.
Now that she had his attention, she turned the conversation back: “Seriously, what am I going to do about Doreen?”
“Doreen?” Stanley’s lips trailed down her neck and lingered in the hollow of her throat.
“My sister.” Arlene pushed him an arm’s length away. “Are you listening to anything I’m saying?”
“Your sister,” he whispered. “Doreen.”
“She wants that husband of hers to stew a little longer, but hand to God,” she raised her arm, “I can’t take much more of it. Look at me. I had to come all the way to Green Ridge to get away from her.”
Stanley tried to be sympathetic, but his earlier mood reared up again. “Put your foot down,” he said. “You’re not her keeper.”
“I’d never hear the end of it.” Arlene ignored his irritation. “And besides, she’s family.” Her tone softened. “Maybe you can think of a way to distract me.” She struck her pinup pose again.
Stanley drank in the sight of her. A man could lose himself in that figure. He leaned forward, lips parted, eyes closed.
I’ll see you in my dreams …
The lyrics filled the space between the pair, knocking Stanley back. His eyes broke open and settled on Arlene. He wanted to want her. He willed himself to want her, but it did no good. That damn song had him rattled. “I can’t do this …” He’d meant to end with “now,” but the word “anymore” finished first. “I’m sorry.”
“Then more’s the pity,” Arlene lamented, her chin quivering with disappointment.