301: The apartment.
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 8 continues
THE APARTMENT. Well, the apartment might not have seemed much better than the job. Herb found it while he was walking along Bolotomy Road, on his way to the area in the southernmost part of Babbington, along the bay, where, he had learned, most of the messier work was done. He intended to wander through the area and see what the businesses looked like, see whether there were any jobs to be had. He had already fixed his mind on the notion of demonstrating to Babbington a rise from obscurity by dint of labor, so that he would be admired and trusted, and he had decided to take any small, mean job at the scruffiest of the plants.
Bolotomy Road began at the heart of Babbington, the only intersection lit by streetlamps on the dark night when Lorna and Herb arrived in town: the intersection that Babbingtonians of long standing always referred to as “Bolotomy and Main,” though in fact only the northerly reach of the road that intersected Main Street there was officially called Bolotomy Road. The part of it that ran to the south, toward the bay, had been renamed Bella Vista Boulevard, a name that the progressive faction of the town council had advocated as a step toward attracting touring motorists to Babbington. Bella Vista Boulevard was one of the shibboleths that identified newcomers; it was ignored by all Babbingtonians whose residence in Babbington predated the change or who wished to appear to have been living in Babbington before the change. Old-timers always referred to Bella Vista Boulevard as Lower Bolotomy and Bolotomy Road as Upper Bolotomy, or simply as Lower and Upper.
Along Lower, as he walked south from Bolotomy and Main, Herb passed a couple of blocks of shops, shops that didn’t require the visibility of Main Street locations (or didn’t desire that visibility — it was in this stretch, about twenty-five years after Lorna and Herb came to Babbington, that Head Cheese, Babbington’s first psyche-delicatessen, opened, displacing a candy-and-tobacco store called Maxie’s). Farther along, he passed large, handsome frame houses, most of them painted white, many the homes of professional people — doctors, lawyers, accountants — some of whom had offices in their homes and hung their shingles on metal brackets that projected from the sides of their front porches. He continued walking, past blocks of smaller houses, into a stretch where the houses were very small, not much larger than cabins, and tumbled together, like sugar cubes spilled from a box. The little houses were separated by narrow strips of sand in which, here and there, hardy patches of crabgrass grew, and in odd corners there was the happy surprise of a wild rose.
In the window of one of these houses was a sign:
APT TO LET
Herb couldn’t imagine where the apartment could be. The house presented such a tiny, pinched face to the street that it seemed too small to house the landlord, let alone a tenant. Curious, he knocked.
In a moment, the door opened a few inches. A gaunt, bent man with sunken eyes looked out.
“Hello,” said Herb. “I saw the sign. ‘Apt to let.’ ” He smiled.
The eyes looked Herb up and down. The man’s tongue popped out one side of his mouth, as if acting on its own initiative, and waggled. The man’s mouth moved as if in speech, but no sound came from it other than something like “Dut, dut, dut.” The man’s head nodded, and the door closed. Herb wasn’t sure whether he’d been told to wait or to go away. He waited. In a moment the door opened again, fully this time. Standing in the doorway was a short, scrawny woman. She had wild hair; it looked as if she’d given each of the phrenological regions of her scalp a hairdo of its own. She looked at Herb for a moment without saying anything or altering her blank expression. Then, suddenly, she burst into a frenzy of welcome.
“Come in! Come in!” she cried. She reached out and grabbed Herb’s sleeve and began tugging at him. She bared her few teeth in a smile. “I’d be happy to show you the apartment. Happy.” Herb let himself be drawn inside, and she closed the door behind him at once.
Herb followed her down a narrow hallway that ran along one side of the boxy little house. On his left was an outer wall. It was covered with wallpaper that must once have been bright and pretty, a pattern of wild roses, but was now so darkened and stained that the roses barely showed. On his right were curtains, improvised from old bedspreads, worn and soiled, that provided the only separation between the hallway and the living quarters beyond. These bedspreads didn’t quite meet. Through the spaces between them, Herb saw a dark sitting room and a dingy kitchen. In the kitchen, seated at a small table, was the man who had come to the door when he first knocked, now bent over a copy of the Babbington Reporter, straining to read in the dim light, rocking slightly while he read and repeating to himself, “Dut, dut, dut.”
At the end of the makeshift hallway was a door, and beyond the door was another very narrow hallway, without any light at all, and at the end of that was another door. The shrunken woman opened the second door, and the effect was as if she had opened a door to the sun. Herb stepped inside a small room, almost a perfect cube, a box of yellow light. It was a tiny room, but it had been scrubbed and polished and whitewashed, and there were windows all around it. In one corner was a rudimentary kitchen; in another was a living room (two upholstered chairs arranged on either side of a wobbly table); in the third was a bed — crudely built, the honey color of old pine, enormous and inviting; in the fourth corner was a bathtub on ball-and-claw feet.
“Is there — uh — ?” asked Herb.
“Uhh?” asked the white-haired woman.
“Uhh — ” said Herb.
“Uhh?” she asked again.
“Uh, that is — ”
“Ahhh!” said the woman. “Ohhh, yes, yes, right out here.” She opened a door beside the tub, and, to Herb’s relief, disclosed a flush toilet.
[to be continued on Monday, July 25, 2022]
In Topical Guide 301, Mark Dorset considers Shibboleths from this episode.
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