On Monday morning Sam Ryan was in a tizzy. Matthias Boon was out with la grippe, so he asked me to stop at Mrs. Zeller’s rooming house to pick up some copy Boon had written and taken home with him on Friday.
“Now,” he stressed. “The man is sick in bed, and I gotta newspaper to get out.”
Mrs. Zeller’s rooming house on Fisk Street in the Second Ward was a respectable home. I knew that because Mrs. Zeller announced the fact over and over. A weekly shopper at My Store, she’d linger over a simple cast-iron pot, according to my mother, as though she were “contemplating the brush strokes on the Mona Lisa.” Worse, she chattered incessantly in a high, needle-thin voice, words rushing over one another as though trying to escape that annoying mouth. You saw an old woman, in her eighties perhaps, dumpy as a sack of winter apples, always dressed in misshapen kitchen dresses with one or more stays loose or threatening to give way. When her husband of a half-century died-one of the Appleton pioneers, she’d tell you, read about it in the papers, if you didn’t believe her, her family was real history-and the last of her eight children either died or left town and didn’t look back, she converted her twelve-room monstrosity of a home into a boarding house.
A “respectable place,” for as a “Christian lady of the German Lutheran persuasion,” she’d abide no dalliance or misbehavior in her blessed walls. A fussy, opinionated woman, she mothered the men she harbored, those bachelors and widowers who came to Appleton to work. Hers was a household of men and three women-herself, a housemaid, and a cook. “Ladies do too much laundry and want to go into my kitchen,” she said. So the men came and went and most were harmless souls. You had news types like Matthias Boon, transplanted from Milwaukee; Homer Timm, seeking shelter after his wife took ill; railroad men, laborers from the paper mills; wandering disaffected war veterans, always on the move. But despite her loud announcement that she screened and interviewed, there’d been late night knocks on the door by the chief of police. Deadbeat wanderers shuffled out of the back window, one step ahead of the law.
Mrs. Zeller, of course, romanticized all the gentlemen as models of civil conduct and charitable spirit-her “boys.” The likes of Matthias Boon and Homer Timm…more like troglodytes than feckless lads, surely.
I introduced myself to Mrs. Zeller’s housekeeper, a sullen looking Bohemian girl with braided hair and a boil on her neck the size of a harvest apple, a girl flustered at seeing a woman at the door. She rushed off to find Mrs. Zeller, who was haranguing the cook in the back of the house. The old woman came rushing into the front parlor, wiping her hands on an apron, and eyed me suspiciously.
“I’ve come for Mr. Boon’s-ah, copy.” I spoke slowly. Mrs. Zeller, I’d been told, was also hard of hearing.
“A fraulein? The telephone said they would send a reporter.”
“I am a reporter.”
“You’re not.” Flat out.
“Indeed, I am.” I wasn’t going to argue with this old crone. “Mr. Ryan sent me. If I might speak to Mr. Boon, please.”
Hands to the cheeks, eyes suspicious. “No.”
“Is Mr. Boon able to come to the parlor?” I knew that no women were allowed onto the upper floors or into the back rooms, male provinces unsullied by cloying perfume and tatters of lace.
“Is very sick, is throw up much. Such fine figures of mens, he is, ja. Crushed like a boy with la grippe.”
Good God. I entertained an image of Matthias Boon heaving into a chamber pot. The stumpy Boon, blustery as March wind, confined to a sick bed, fed nourishing, though lardy, soups and biscuits by a smothering Mrs. Zeller.
In the hallway the telephone rang and Mrs. Zeller actually jumped. She shook her head. “Is work of devil, but the mens they need it, is businessmens and professions, they are.” She pronounced the words-beezynezmenz and profezzunz, and at first I didn’t have a clue. Mrs. Zeller hurried out of the room, answered the phone, hung up, and looked back in. “I go to knock on his door.” I then heard her heavy footfall on the stairs. I relaxed. Boon was probably listening to her approach with dread.
I waited. The upright piano in a far corner was covered with old-country daguerreotypes in gold-gilt frames, perhaps twenty of them in various sizes. I saw resemblances to the withered Mrs. Zeller in some of the old photographs, ancient relatives in starched Sunday-best dress, severe German women with rigid, fierce faces, staring as though at war with the newfangled camera.
Voices drifted from a back room, raised voices, an argument. Bits and pieces of conversation filtered through the wall, and I recognized the pitched voice of Homer Timm, his words sharp and furious. He was countered by another voice, lower in pitch, but oddly familiar. Gustave Timm’s voice, the younger brother sounding defensive and apologetic. I could make out only random snatches of talk, though there was mostly silence, eerie patches of space between the spat-out words. I glanced toward the open archway that led to the hallway and expected Mrs. Zeller to come trudging down, reams of uninspired copy flowing from her hands. I pushed my ear against the wall and closed my eyes. Frankly, I liked eavesdropping on a good sibling spat.
What I heard: I’m a little tired of…you think that Mother would condone…you’ve never believed…is this good idea…you’re a bastard…you think…I don’t care…no, you’re the fool…I’m trying to advise you…On and on, and sometimes I couldn’t tell which brother-Homer, the Cotton Mather of the high school, or Gustave, the bon vivant-was speaking, so overlapped were their words. They seemed to be saying the same things back and forth at each other.
But at one point the voices emerged clear and identifiable.
Gustave: “You think this is a good idea? Well, I don’t.”
Homer: “My business. I have no choice.”
Gustave: “True to form, a man who…”
Homer: “I can’t keep on…”
Gustave: “She’s…the children…”
Homer: “…none of…business.”
I learned-or had confirmed-a couple of things about the brothers Timm. Yes, there was a keen dislike for each other, but, perversely, some filial bond kept them together. The exchange of hot words also told me something else: Homer Timm, the severe educator, displayed more passion than I’d thought possible, emotion lacing his fiery words, even a note of hysteria seeping in. Gustave, the smiling, genial brother, so cocksure, came off as pliant and servile; the younger brother as docile pleader. The little boy in the shadow of a decade-older brother.
Homer Timm had decided to leave his position at the high school and head back East to woo his freshly recuperated but persistently distant wife-to be a father to his children. Gustave, new to town, thought it a bad move. He’d taken the job at the theater to be near his brother. Gustave kept saying how much he adored Appleton, a town he felt at home in. “What home had I before Appleton?” Homer would not be there for Gustave’s September wedding, and that rankled.
Homer spoke matter-of-factly. “Why? Mildred has made a point of telling me how little I matter to her.”
Gustave responded, “If you weren’t so cold to her.”
Homer, simply, “I don’t like her.”
I heard footsteps, so I backed away and found myself staring into the face of Mr. McCaslin, who’d obviously entered from the kitchen. He stood there, his index finger marking a place in an English primer; and the look on his face was slack-jawed, stunned. I yelped, startled, but the teacher simply wagged his finger at me. “Miss Ferber, really now. A snoop, no less.”
I stammered something about the photographs on the upright piano, and he glanced at them. I could still hear a hum of voices from the backroom, the Timm brothers at war; but Mr. McCaslin shook his head.
“You live here, too?” I blurted out.
For a second he didn’t answer. Finally, cradling the book to his bony chest, he snarled, “I didn’t realize I had to provide you with my home address.” He coughed, mumbled something about returning to his bed since he was under the weather, turned on his heels and headed to the staircase. But he twisted his head back and sneered, “You know, my dear Miss Ferber, when I directed you in A Scrap of Paper at the high school, I observed your tendency to self-importance. A booming voice does not make a Bernhardt.” He smiled at his own observation, doubled over with a hacking cough, and began climbing the stairs.
He crossed paths with Mrs. Zeller, descending with heavy thud and waving an envelope in the air.
“Is at death’s door, the poor boy.”
Frankly, I wasn’t that lucky.
I stumbled out, still reeling from my overheard conversation, but more from the verbal attack by the foppish Mr. McCaslin, unfortunately home sick from his classes.
I stepped out onto the porch and screamed.
For I nearly collided with Mac, that odd creature who inhabited the pressroom. In that instant I remembered that he, too, rented a room at Mrs. Zeller’s, proving that Mrs. Zeller rented to anyone with a dirty sawbuck and a cardboard suitcase. Cassie Mac, Homer Timm, Matthias Boon, even Mac. The men’s asylum, surely. But I also realized it was midday, and Mac should not be standing on that porch. He should be setting type, hovering over the hot trays, wrestling with the linotype machines, his fingertips splattered and stained with printer’s ink. He should not be loitering on this noontime porch, and he certainly shouldn’t be colliding with me.
“Miss Ferber.” A gruff, unfriendly voice.
Standing inches from him, I sputtered, “Mr.…” I paused. Everyone called him Mac. I didn’t know his surname, and I couldn’t address an older man by his nickname.
He grunted. “Mac.”
“I had to pick up copy from…” I stopped.
“Nice June day.” When he smiled, he showed missing teeth, broken teeth, black teeth. What I didn’t see was white enamel. And that sickly grin, coupled with his fetid tobacco breath and the stink of unwashed linen, made me recoil.
“It is.” My head was swimming.
“A real nice day.” He was uncomfortable.
“It is.” I agreed again.
He leaned forward, and I moved back against the peeling balustrade. My Lord, the man behaved as though he’d rarely spoken to a young woman before. Well, perhaps he hadn’t. Awkward and gangly as a fifteen-year-old boy caught up in a forbidden apple tree, Mac shifted from one foot to another, unable to move. Cornered, I looked back at the house, but there was no escaping. He loomed before me, more giant-like, more-I hated the word but it had to do-primitive. Removed from the city room, Mac was a panicked animal.
The front door opened and the brothers Timm emerged, both startled by the sight of Mac and me facing each other on the front porch. The men were red faced from their brotherly spat, though Homer found his schoolmaster intonation. “Miss Ferber, my, my, you’re a visitor to Mrs. Zeller’s establishment? Are we newsworthy?”
“That remains to be seen.”
Gustave laughed at that.
But the appearance of the two snapped me from my inertia, and I took a few steps away from Mac, though he turned to follow my movements. “I was just leaving, have to get back to the office.” Wildly, I waved Boon’s copy as though displaying proof.
“Well, good day.” Gustave tipped his hat and walked by me down the steps. Homer stayed on the porch frowning at his retreating back. Mac followed the movements of both brothers, but then his eyes landed on me with that same penetrating stare. I fled the porch. As I rushed to the sidewalk, Homer Timm walked briskly by me. He said nothing as he turned onto the street. I was trembling, bothered by the collision with Mac. Nothing had happened, an accidental meeting with the mysterious man-towering, grim, so very close-but it seemed premeditated. Foolish, I told myself; nonsense. But I couldn’t get Mac’s horrible face out of my mind.
Crossing onto College Avenue, a little out of breath, I nodded to Gurdon Tanner, a lawyer whose business seemed to be drowsing all day in a swivel chair in front of his office and chatting with passersby; and then I paused to gaze at some framed lithographs in Mayes’ Emporium-sentimental scenes of the Italian countryside. I reminded myself to buy my father some cuff links I’d seen in town, the ones with the ivory cameos. He’d be able to feel the intricate carving…
Turning suddenly, I caught a fleeing shot of a hulking figure in the shadow of the Voight building, a few doorways away. I froze. I knew in that moment, even though the specter did not reappear, that I’d glimpsed Mac. He was following me.