Free Live Free

Ms., In The Pickwickian Sense

“The lights came on” as one newspaper was later to describe it, “and everybody went home except the firemen.”

Electric clocks showed five minutes till six, watches seven thirty-five. Dr. Makee, who had waited it out in the physician’s lounge, went home to bed. Alexandra Duck, who had found Sergeant Proudy in the dark and spent the rest of the blackout talking with him, let herself into the offices of Hidden Science/Natural Supernaturalism and looked up the address of The Flying Carpet, a supper club, in the telephone directory before switching on her word processor and starting work on an article on possession. Francisco Fuentes, who had spent the blackout guiding guests up the Consort’s fire stairs with a flashlight, sat on a step and wiped his forehead while he listened to the cheering; in the past hour and forty minutes, the temperature of the stairwell had dropped to thirty-eight degrees, but Francisco was sweating anyhow. On the thirteenth floor, Monstro, the computer who was the Consort’s actual manager (“your innkeeper”), went off emergency power with an electronic sigh.

Mrs. Baker, who had been possessed for years by a small addiction to scented candles cast in the shapes of religious figures and animals, had gone through the blackout easily and with a good deal of pleasure, scurrying about the house (while Puff repeatedly hunted and dispatched her heels) lighting and tending various members of her collection in an ecstasy of justification. Now, quite suddenly, the lights were back, and the little silver-plated snuffer that had gathered dust for twenty years had its hour. A picture bloomed on the TV. Mrs. Baker decided to leave one candle—the bayberry Santa she had never quite been able to bring herself to light at Christmas—burning in case the lights went off again.

“If you’re seeing me now,” the announcer announced rapidly, “and you know you haven’t been seeing me for an hour plus, you also know that we’ve been experiencing the worst mid-winter power outage to hit a major U.S. city. There’s been a certain amount of rioting and looting, and several fires, including a four-alarmer at Forty-fourth and Dennis. We switch to Renee Falcone with the mini-cam.”

Flames roared up the screen. Mrs. Baker, reflecting that Forty-fourth and Dennis was not terribly far, belted her robe and stepped out the front door. Sure enough, there was reddish light in the sky in that direction. “Lady bug, fly always home,” Mrs. Baker muttered. “Your house’s on fire, and your children in the barn.”

When she stepped back inside, a sincere-looking black man was standing before a small restaurant with a broken window. He said, “Phil, as you know there are a thousand stories around the city tonight as a result of the blackout, but this is one of the most heartening I’ve come across. Mrs. Benjamin Potash was just taken from here in an ambulance. Mrs. Potash is a widow, and she owns this place. When the lights went out, she and her daughter left their apartment about six blocks away hoping to protect this little diner. They were attacked, and Mrs. Potash was struck on the head, but her daughter found an off-duty nurse who treated Mrs. Potash and helped carry her here. When they got here, they found two men, one of them one of Mrs. Potash’s regular customers, prepared to defend it if the looters came. Well, the looters did come, and the customers tried to scare them off by telling them they had a machine gun. That didn’t work, and the looters smashed this window to get in. The customers didn’t really have a machine gun, but they had a garden hose, the one Mrs. Potash uses to wash down the kitchen floor. They turned the hose on the looters, and in this subzero weather, it can’t have been very pleasant. Now I have with me Mr. Murray Potash, who has just arrived.”

The sincere-looking black man thrust his microphone toward a plump and pimply white youth. “Mr. Potash, were you able to speak to your mother before they took her away?”

“Huh, uh.” The youth shook his head. “I got here just when they were pulling out.”

“Is your sister here?”

“Sister-in-law. I think she rode in the ambulance with Mom.”

Mrs. Baker changed the channel.

Outside, a car door slammed. Mrs. Baker paid no heed to it, but a few seconds later there was a knock at her door. She had not bothered to put the chain back on after she had looked at the fire; she did so now, opened the door a crack, then shut it and took off the chain again. When she opened it the second time, a statuesque brunette stepped inside.

“My,” Mrs. Baker said. “How nice you look! That’s real leopard, isn’t it?”

The brunette pirouetted. In her fur-trimmed boots she was over six feet tall. “I’ve got a date tonight, and this outfit’s my pride and joy. Do you like it?’

“You’re a regular gelded lily, I declare. But if you have yourself a social engagement, shouldn’t you be at home waiting for your young man?”

“I’m picking him up, Mrs. Baker. It’s only a few blocks from here, and I’m early anyway, so I thought I’d stop by and see you. Have you remembered anything more since we were here?”

“Well, that’s delightful. Won’t you take a cup of tea? Tea gladdeneth the heart of man is what the Bible says, but I think it works better for women. On the TV now they’re always talking about women’s Liptonation. Are you a Lipper, Miz, Miz … ?”

“Valor, Mrs. Baker. I’m Robin Valor. Please don’t be embarrassed. At your age, you’ve met so many people. It’s no wonder you can’t always keep them straight.”

Mrs. Baker shook her head. “Perhaps I oughtn’t to say this, Miz Valor, but the truth is I couldn’t keep them straight before I met them.”

The brunette smiled. “It’s Miss, Mrs. Baker, not Ms. I’m an old-fashioned girl just like you, and they say Ms. means a divorced woman working in an office.”

“I’m an old-fashioned girl too,” the old woman said, setting a little tray, with a flowery teapot and matching cups, on a small table. “That’s why I say Miz. Why, we always said Miz when I was a girl. Miz Ledbetter, Miz Carpenter; why I remember Mama talking about them a million times. Excuse me for a moment while I get the water. Kettle’s on.”

She toddled out, and the brunette took a pair of wireframed glasses from her purse, then rose and strode across the room to examine the television. It was still on (though Mrs. Baker had turned the volume all the way down) and showed a gaggle of solemn and rather stupid-looking men in yellow hardhats inspecting an electrical substation. But the brunette paid more attention to the knobs and the back than to the picture on the screen.

“Here we are,” Mrs. Baker announced, returning with the tea kettle. “Good thing I’ve got a gas cook-stove. Stayed on all the time. House didn’t even get cold, even if the furnace fan wouldn’t blow. I’ve got that fireplace, but there’s nothing to put in but paper these days, and I need the paper for Puff’s kitty box.”

“I’ll bet you were brought up in a small town,” the brunette said. “Am I right?”

“Oh, yes.” Mrs. Baker nodded, pouring steaming water from the tarnished kettle.

“Where was that, Mrs. Baker?”

“The town? Oh, here. Right here, except this was a small town then. Mr. Baker and me, we bought this house ten years after we were married. We’d been living in rent. It seemed like such a long time then, ten years. Almost sixty years I lived right here in this house, walking from this parlor to that kitchen.”

“I see.”

“It’s all changed, of course. This was a real nice town. The boys that played in the street, they was full of hell, they’d do anything, but they weren’t mean. They didn’t want to hurt anybody, not really. Just play tricks and have fun. And men used to come selling with a hearse and wagon. Not just milk. Ice and vegetables, and fish when it wasn’t too hot. They don’t do that any more.”

“I don’t suppose anyone does, anywhere.”

“I saw them on the TV, in some other country. But do you know, all those American companies are coming in there too? All the ones that stopped everything here. I saw it, and the TV said the people liked it, and I suppose they were just telling the truth, they really do, or they wouldn’t buy those things. I wanted to yell at them not to do it, don’t you do it, only of course they couldn’t hear me. I would have wrote them a letter, but they couldn’t have read it. Lots of times when I watch the TV, I feel like some kind of ghost.” She retreated to the kitchen with the kettle, leaving a wisp of steam hanging in the air.

The brunette looked speculatively around the room, then shrugged. This time she remained seated and did not take her glasses from her purse.

“They’re all just the same as we were, except slower,” Mrs. Baker continued, coming in again. “Sometimes I think if only the ordinary people here could sit down and talk to the ordinary people there, those people would never let things go the way they are. But look at the way we do here. We don’t try to change the way things are. If one of those boys down the street steals a car, why he goes to prison for years. But if some rich man that’s had everything a person could want all his life steals a million dollars, the only thing that happens is he doesn’t get elected again unless he’s pretty lucky. The comics in the paper have all these men that fight against crime. If they were real, they’d go and find that man and shoot him. Maybe if we were real, we’d do the same thing.”

“I was just wondering,” the brunette said. “You’ve lived here so many yars, Mrs. Baker. Was Mr. Free your neighbor when you moved in?”

“Let me think,” Mrs. Baker said, sitting down. “Goodness, how time fleas, just jumps away whenever you try to catch at it.” She dabbed at one eye with a corner of her robe. “You’ll have to excuse me, Miz Valor. I always cry when I think too much about back then.”

“I don’t care if you cry.”

“It was a lady,” Mrs. Baker said, still blotting her eyes, “that used to give me cookies. Or anyhow one time she did. You know what they say, ‘Let them beat cake.’ Well, they did. Or it did. Maybe it was only once. It was a great bigsugar cookie with a great big raisin in the middle. Except that wasn’t here at all. That was Miz Carpenter down on Oak Street when I was a little girl.”

The brunette glanced at her wrist. “I have to go soon, Mrs. Baker, but before I do, I’d like you to tell me anything you can recall about those four people who used to live with Mr. Free. Perhaps you won’t find that so traumatic.”

“There was nothing foreign about it, it’s just that it makes me sad to think about all those old times. Pretty soon I’ll be dead, and then I won’t feel sad any more, so I figure I’d better get it done now. People always complain if a child laughs or an old person cries, but pretty soon they’re quiet, and that’s for a long time. A lot of children have started to die young again, have you noticed?”

The brunette shook her head impatiently.

“Why, pretty soon people will be saying, ‘Farewell to this vile of tears,’ just like they used to. I don’t suppose you ever read Dickens, Miz Valor?”

“No. Is he a newspaperman? Someone Mr. Free knew?”

Mrs. Baker nodded. “Isn’t it strange that you should mention that! Yes, Mr. Free knew his Dickens well, I think. We used to read him too before we got the TV, and one time I said to Mr. Free—he helped me carry some groceries home—‘Why, thank you, Mr. Free. You’ve been a wonderful help,’ and he said back, ‘What we’ve got to do is keep up our spirits and be neighborly. We’ll come all right in the end, never fear!’ Which wasn’t exactly apres poor, because what I had was potatoes and canned goods and things, and not any kind of spirits. But it was Dickens, and I knew it. I said right away, ‘Why that’s Dickens, Mr. Free, isn’t it?’ and then I explained about not having any liquor in the bags, but I invited him for a little sherry if he would like some. I always keep a bottle in the house because it benefits me so when I have the cold. And he said he had used the word—the word spirits was what he meant—in the Pickwickian sense.”

“I had understood that Mr. Free was a rather uneducated man.”

“Why, I don’t think—bless me, Miz Valor, here I’ve been sitting and jabbering and not giving you any tea. It’ll be stewed to prunes.” She picked up the flowery teapot and decanted pale brown liquid into the brunette’s cup.

“Would you say that Mr. Barnes, for example, was well educated? More so than Mr. Free?”

“Why he would be bound to be, wouldn’t he?” Mrs. Baker asked. “They go to school so much longer than what we did. We never learned but readin’, writin’, and ’rithmetic. That was the way we used to say them. Nowadays you young people don’t even bother with those.”

“Are you teasing me, Mrs. Baker?” the brunette asked.

“Me?” Mrs. Baker shook her head. “Course not! Why I’m innocent as a limb. I suppose Mr. Barnes is very well educated, in the modern manor.”