The Tight White Collar Read online

  “Christopher Pappas made a mistake on the job at West Farrington,” said Arthur. “He was younger then and he was an idealist and he couldn’t take interference in his work. Besides, Pappas isn’t a foreigner. He was born right here in this state. Right next door to Cooper Station.”

  “Where were your parents born, Mrs. Palmer?” asked Jim Sheppard.

  Doris Palmer’s whole body trembled. “Mr. Sheppard,” she said, “you forget yourself.”

  “The hell with all this,” said Nate rudely. “Let’s hear the rest of it, Arthur.”

  “Well, it was a culmination of a lot of things with Pappas,” said Arthur. “For one thing, there’s a fellow down there on the school board. Name of Hammond. Hammond had a daughter, a senior, the year Pappas started down there. The girl was failing American History and Pappas sent a warning home to her parents. Old Hammond blew his top. Went down to the school to see Pappas and told him he’d better pass his daughter or else. Like I said, Pappas was young. He asked Hammond or else what. To make a long story short, the girl failed the next exam and Pappas gave her a fifty for the quarter. Mrs. Palmer was mistaken when she said that Pappas taught for less than a month. It was just short of three months that he was there. There were a few other things, too,” Arthur went on, this time openly nervous.

  “Like what?” insisted Nate.

  “Ridiculous things,” said Jim Sheppard, sorry for Arthur Everett. “There were a few pinheads in West Farrington who claimed that Chris Pappas was a Communist because he told the kids that some of the greatest writers in the world were Russians.”

  “They were,” said Nate.

  “And Pappas also said things such as the Puritans had run away from intolerance only to become intolerant themselves.”

  Nate smiled. “Pappas,” he said. “God’s Angry Man. Might do this town good to have someone like that around. I vote that we hire this fellow.”

  “I’m with you,” said Jim Sheppard.

  “Thank you, gentlemen,” said Arthur Everett gratefully.

  “Just a minute!” cried Doris. “I won’t stand for this!”

  “You’ve been outvoted, Mrs. Palmer,” said Arthur as gently as he could. No matter what else you could say about Doris Palmer, she was a fighter. He only hoped that she was a good loser.

  Doris Delaney Palmer grabbed her gloves and handbag from the desk in front of her.

  “I don’t care,” she said. “You haven’t heard the end of this. Maybe none of you cares what happens to our schoolchildren, but I do. And I’m sure that the citizens of this town will agree with me.”

  “Mrs. Palmer,” said Nate, at the end of his patience, “you have been outvoted. At the close of this meeting, Mr. Sheppard and I will sign our names to a contract hiring Christopher Pappas. You may join us or not, as you like, but Christopher Pappas will teach in the Cooper Station high school next fall.”

  Later that night, Arthur telephoned Christopher Pappas.

  “Well, Pappas,” he said, “the Guardians approved you, but you’re going to have a time of it. Mrs. Palmer is dead set against you. She wouldn’t sign your contract along with Jim and Nate Cooper.”

  “I’ll make it, Mr. Everett,” said Chris Pappas. “I’ll do such a good job that she won’t be able to stay set against me.”

  “That’s the spirit,” said Arthur. “Good night, Chris. Good luck.”

  The school superintendent hung up slowly. Poor bastard, he thought, poor, stupid bastard to break his heart for three thousand dollars a year.

  Chapter IV

  Lisa Pappas lay on her back in the bed next to her husband. She was naked and Chris’s hands traveled over her in a pattern that had not deviated in almost ten years.

  Now that it’s over, thought Lisa, I wonder why I wanted Chris to get this job so badly. Three thousand a year isn’t going to do much for us with the kids and all the bills.

  Sometimes Lisa could pretend that Chris was not touching her at all. Then it was as if she were someone very tiny, hiding in an undiscovered corner of herself while a stranger performed a ritual over a body she did not know. When she could do this, it wasn’t so bad. She could think her own thoughts with most of her mind, leaving just enough of her brain free to dictate the right moments to moan and the proper time to make her body writhe and undulate.

  Now Chris had finished handling her and she felt the grind of his teeth against her left nipple so she gasped and moaned loudly enough to please him but not loudly enough to wake the children who slept in the next room.

  He’d damn well better do a good teaching job this time, thought Lisa, after the way I begged Ed Bailey to recommend him and the year I spent working on Polly Sheppard. If he louses up this job he might just as well plan on going back to a job in the mills.

  With this thought, something in Lisa stopped functioning so that she could no longer pretend that she was not being touched. With something like a thud, she felt herself back in bed with the broken spring in the mattress that always poked into her back and with Chris, who hadn’t taken a shower that day.

  He put his hands under her hips and pressed himself inside her.

  “Are you ready, baby?” he gasped.

  “Yes,” she said, and made herself sound as breathless as he.

  In the next few seconds she felt his wet stickiness and then he went limp and heavy on top of her.

  “Did you, baby?” he asked softly.

  “Yes,” she lied.

  He sighed and rolled away from her and within five minutes he was sound asleep.

  Lisa got up and felt her way to the bathroom in the dark.

  Lisa Pappas was born Melissa Anne St. George in the town of Cooper’s Mills and the first sentence she could remember hearing as a child was, “For heaven’s sake, Lisa, remember who you are!” To everyone but her mother, Irene, it was obvious who Lisa was. She was the only daughter of a Canuck named Wilfred St. George who, until the time he had run off with a waitress from a beer saloon when Lisa was five, had been employed as a loom fixer in the factories. As for Irene, who worked as a secretary in the main office of the mills, the town regarded her as just another Cooper’s Mills girl who had gone away for a few years and had returned with a lot of fancy ideas, the main one being that she thought herself a cut above everyone else in town. But, Cooper’s Mills opinion notwithstanding, there was something different about Irene. Her father, Alcide Chaput, had not been a millhand. He had been a gardener, and a good one. When Irene was twelve years old, Alcide had packed up his family and left Cooper’s Mills to take a job as caretaker and gardener on the estate of a family named Durand who lived in the southern part of the state. Sometimes Irene looked back on the years she had spent with the Durands as the happiest in her life, but at other times she wondered if perhaps she would not be more content with her lot now if she had not had a five-year taste of luxury and gentility.

  The Durands provided Alcide and his family with an attractive, well-furnished cottage which stood just inside the spike-topped iron gate that barred the entrance of the main driveway leading to what Irene’s mother, Marie, called the Big House. Marie thanked God on her knees every morning and every night for the good fortune He had chosen to bestow on her. Her cottage was finer than the houses of the well-to-do in her village in Canada, and Alcide had vast acres of grass and shrubs and flowers to care for so that he was always busy and, therefore, always happy. And Marie herself was entrusted with the care of all the dainty clothing of Mrs. Durand and her twin daughters, Felice and Marianne. A regular laundress came to the Big House twice a week to do the ordinary washing but Marie did all the pretty, lacy underwear and pressed the ornate party dresses and sewed tiny buttons on the cuffs of expensive white gloves. But best of all were the advantages for Irene, advantages beyond belief to Alcide and Marie.

  The Durands hired a tutor for their twin girls and since Mrs. Durand thriftily believed that it was
just as easy for a man to teach three children as two, Irene was admitted to the classroom.

  Also, Mrs. Durand, perhaps remembering a rather wretched childhood of her own, did not believe in any child around her wearing hand-me-down clothing, so whenever she bought dresses for her own children, she bought exactly the same thing for Irene. The Durands treated Irene Chaput almost like a member of the family. Almost, because of course there were areas where Irene could not go. One of these was the huge blue, white and gold bedroom of Mr. and Mrs. Durand. Sometimes Irene would come to the Big House early, ready and waiting for lessons to begin, and she would stand in the upstairs hall listening to the sounds from the Durand bedroom. She would hear the deep voice of Mr. Durand, the voice that always, no matter what he said, had laughter running just beneath its surface. Then would come the excited shrieks of talk and laughter from the girls and the gentle, smiling voice of Mrs. Durand. In the morning there was always the delicate clink of china coffee cups under the talk and Irene wondered if the family drank coffee late in the afternoon, too, because she knew that Mrs. Durand and the girls always had a sort of party when Mr. Durand came home. Irene had never seen nor overheard what went on at one of these afternoon get-togethers but she knew they happened because every day, at four o’clock, Mrs. Durand came into the classroom and said, “That will be enough for today, Mr. Chatterton. Come girls, you must bathe and change. Father will be here in less than an hour.”

  The girls always left in a swirl of color and chatter, each of them with an arm around Mrs. Durand, and then Irene and Mr. Chatterton would pick up the papers and notebooks and put them away. One afternoon, after Felice and Marianne had left the classroom with Mrs. Durand, Mr. Chatterton smiled at Irene and said, “My dear, has it ever occurred to you that you and I spend a great deal of our time living in the middle of a very French eighteenth-century household?”

  In three years Irene had never heard Mr. Chatterton make a joke or say anything except in the utmost seriousness. She did not think of Mr. Chatterton as a human being, like her father for instance. He was a teacher, and, therefore, above all things that might appeal to lesser mortals such as jokes and laughter.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Come now, Irene. I spent all last week discussing the eighteenth century with you and the girls. Don’t tell me that you’ve already forgotten all about Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette and the Revolution.”

  “But what does all that have to do with us and the Durands?” she asked stupidly, unable to reconcile this smiling stranger with the familiar disciplinarian who turned to ice daily at every misspelled word.

  Mr. Chatterton sighed and put his fountain pen back in his pocket.

  “I was just wondering when and upon whom the guillotine will fall this time.”

  “What a terrible thing to say!” cried Irene, and was immediately and thoroughly frightened. One did not, after all, contradict a teacher.

  But Mr. Chatterton did not reprimand her. He merely smiled his tired smile and smoothed back his hair with his hands.

  “Good afternoon, Irene,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Yes, Mr. Chatterton,” she said.

  When Irene was sixteen years old it had become fashionable for people with money to see to it that their daughters learned something practical, so a woman named Miss Comstock was brought into the Durand household to teach the girls the intricacies of shorthand and typewriting. There was a great deal of laughter about the new lessons in the blue, white and gold bedroom. Sometimes Felice and Marianne were allowed to call on Mr. Durand at his office and the three of them would make jokes about the girls taking Mr. Durand’s dictation and answering the telephone. But Marie and Alcide Chaput did not make jokes about Irene’s education. To them it was unbelievable that Irene would someday be equipped to actually work in an office somewhere.

  “The Durands are more than good to us,” said Alcide.

  “The Durands are going to be saints in heaven one day,” said Marie. “You mark my words.”

  The world came to an end for everyone on the Durand estate three days after Irene turned seventeen. On that day the police went to Mr. Durand’s office and arrested him and the sheriff came to the Big House with papers of attachment. Mrs. Durand was found in her rose-colored bathrobe with her life flowing out of her wrists in red ribbons and the twins sat on the edge of the bed in the blue, white and gold bedroom and screamed.

  Irene sat in the classroom and tore strips of paper from the pages of her notebook and Mr. Chatterton smiled and said, “The guillotine has fallen on all of us.”

  Much later, Irene wondered at her lack of curiosity. Nobody had ever really told her what business Mr. Durand was in but somehow she had thought that it had something to do with stocks and bonds. She had gone to his office one day with the twins and she had seen the lettering on the door: DURAND ENTERPRISES.

  “What’s enterprises, Mr. Chatterton?” she had asked the next day.

  “You know better than to ask me that, Irene,” replied Mr. Chatterton sternly. “If you want to know the meaning of a word, and know it so that you’ll never forget it, you must go to the dictionary and look it up.”

  The dictionary said that an enterprise was any projected task or work; an undertaking. Irene could never remember where she had got the idea that Mr. Durand’s undertaking had to do with stocks and bonds because it turned out that Mr. Durand was the biggest bookmaker in northern New England. He was also the owner of several floating crap games and the proprietor of the most aristocratic whorehouse in Boston.

  Alcide and Marie and Irene went back to Cooper’s Mills and Alcide got a job in the factories as a sweeper. They bought a small house on the outskirts of town where Alcide could have a garden, but life and hope and trust had gone out of the lives of Irene’s mother and father. Within a year of Mr. Durand’s arrest Alcide was dead and Marie followed four months later. Irene was left alone in the little house and the only thing she was grateful for was that the Durands had made her learn shorthand and typewriting. She got a job in the main office of the mills and two years later she married Wilfred St. George. She married him because she was lonely and because he was a loom fixer and, as everyone in Cooper’s Mills knew, loom fixers were the highest paid factory workers of all.

  What fascinated Wilfred St. George about Irene was that she was always so clean. Her clothes, her hair, her fingernails were always spotless. She wore little white gloves every time she stepped a foot out of her house and they always looked as if she never touched anything. But most of all Wilfred was intrigued because Irene would not sleep with him. He pleaded, got angry, threatened her and finally stopped courting her altogether, but still Irene would not budge from her pedestal of chastity.

  “She is made of steel, that woman,” Wilfred complained to his fellow workers. “Her virginity is attached to her with chains of cast iron, and every goddamned chain is labeled marriage!”

  In the end Irene won, as she had known she would, and she and Wilfred were married in church, by a priest, and Irene wore her white gown proudly, as a symbol of purity, which was more than she could say for most brides in Cooper’s Mills.

  It did not take Wilfred long to discover that while it might be fun to escort a lady in white gloves to the rather limited social functions of Cooper’s Mills and show her off as a prize to his friends, it was quite another matter to be married and have to live with one.

  Irene was a nag. She complained about the rim of dirt under Wilfred’s fingernails and who, asked Wilfred plaintively, could help having dirty fingernails when he sweated his ass off fixing machinery all day long? Tell him that, he demanded. And by God, when a man finished his day’s work he wanted to go home and have a good supper waiting for him but if he were married to a lady, God help him, he could just wait around until seven thirty to eat what his wife called dinner and then, mind you, only if he had taken a complete bath i
n a tub of hot water. And not only that, but while it was one thing for a man to stop for a few beers after work it was quite something else again to have to wait for a drink until after the goddamned bath and then to have to sit down in the parlor and drink gin out of a thin-stemmed glass.

  “I tell all of you, my friends,” said Wilfred to his fellow workers, “don’t ever marry a lady who works in the main office.”

  Now, Corinne, who waited on table at the Happy Hour Café, there was something else again. Corinne had a smile almost as big as her rump, and her rump was something a man could put his hand on without feeling a corset beneath his fingertips. She had a pair of knockers on her that could choke any man, even big-mouthed Wilfred St. George, and if a man like Wilfred St. George with money in his pockets said, “Wanna go for a ride, honey?” Corinne always had a smile and a “Sure, honey,” to give right back. It made a man feel big to be around a woman like Corinne. It made him feel especially big if all he had at home was a pale, thin wife and a pale, thin daughter who threw up after every feeding. It was a relief to be able to go to the Happy Hour and swing Corinne up off her feet when, if a man did the same thing at home to his little girl, the child’s mother said, “Stop that, Wilfred! You’ll upset her stomach!”

  Wilfred stood it all until Lisa was five and then one Friday, payday, he took Corinne and his old Ford and left his job, his wife and Cooper’s Mills. He finally settled in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and got a job in a factory there but he never let Irene know where he was and he never saw his daughter, Lisa, again.

  For a little while after Wilfred left, Irene was the town martyr and she played the part to the hilt. She was the woman wronged, deserted, abandoned and left with a small child to bring up alone. A woman who worked hard every day and kept her house and her child neat and clean. Everybody in Cooper’s Mills marveled at Lisa, so sweet and well brought up, a regular little lady, the town said. But after a year or so the tragedy of Irene and Lisa became part of the town’s everyday life and nobody exclaimed or sympathized any more. Lisa grew up, alone for the most part, because her mother was so busy all the time with her job at the mill office. It was only if Lisa did anything the least little bit wrong that Cooper’s Mills remembered. If Lisa’s white gloves were dirty or if she forgot and said “ain’t,” then Irene would get that frozen look on her face and her lips would tighten and she would say, “For heaven’s sake, Lisa, remember who you are!”