thank you,” she says. He showily counts out the eleven dollars and twenty-seven cents change so she knows it is exact.
She, he notes, pulls the door open.
Henry returns to the register area and reaches under the counter for the newspaper. He lifts out the classified section, folds it in half, to be transferred to his locker later. The rest of the paper does not interest him.
A little later—minutes? hours?—Henry becomes aware he has been staring at the wall for some time.
The store is empty. Vacant. The air stagnant. Sometimes, on the slowest of slow days, Henry is certain he can feel the atmospheric pressure bearing down and he fears he might choke.
And this is one of those days.
The sun, amber through the plastic window covering, spotlights dust particles suspended in the stale air. Baxter’s has bad circulation and on particularly humid days there is an unpleasant and inexplicable smell of camphor mixed in with the old fabric. Intellectually, Henry knows inanimate objects cannot breathe but occasionally finds himself thinking the clothing has sucked up all the oxygen, leaving him with only mustiness.
It does not help matters that the store is packed with merchandise, sparing only narrow aisles that snake to the fitting rooms located in the back. The maze is so cramped that large-size customers are forced, in some cases, to turn sideways while making their way through the store. Every inch of floor space is crammed with some display or another. Upon entering, a customer will encounter the first of seven round racks, this one announcing new arrivals. It is understood that new is a loose term at Baxter’s for many of the sport coats on this particular rack have been nestled there for several seasons. The new arrivals are flanked by two more circular displays, one set aside for sport coats in the smaller sizes, the other a bit taller, for heavier overcoats. So one must turn either right or left and pass in between these round obstacles just to make it halfway through the store to the square command center that is the register setting atop a glass case featuring cuff links, tuxedo studs, some ties, handkerchiefs—various and sundry items to complete a man’s wardrobe. If all the floor displays were magically lifted up and carried away, the old, worn industrial gray carpet would show exactly where they should be re-deposited, thanks to these trails beaten down by years of customers’ feet.
All four walls of the store are lined with racks that stretch length-wise, the upper level so tall Henry is called upon to reach the larger sizes of suits or coats. If left alone Mr. Beardsley is forced to use a pole with a hook on the end of it. Pants are hanging lower and therefore require less attention.
In the beginning, when store owners were called purveyors, roads were only recently paved with tar and President Roosevelt’s New Deal restored good fortune to many, Albert and Christian Baxter opened Baxter’s to great fanfare. Red, white and blue bunting outlined the roof, the glass storefront squeaky clean and sparkling in the sun and nearly everyone in town turned out in fine clothing. Albert and Charles opened the doors wearing paper armbands on top of their high-collared dress shirts. Visors cast green tints on their spectacles and mustaches. Back then, in 1939, Henry’s hometown had a population of 6,053 and was considered quite bustling. Fancy. On the rise. And Baxter’s exemplified its wealth and promise. Breeding was what most of the townspeople took the greatest pride in. One third of the population could trace their roots back to at least one family member of great national significance. The remaining two-thirds, while not scruffy exactly, were left to cater to the needs of the wealthy. As the town grew, so did Baxter’s importance, and shops bloomed on either side of it.
It is hard to pinpoint the moment when Baxter’s went from fancy to frayed, but most likely it came after the war, after the nation had perfected frugality. The town (by then population 21,367) felt a collective sense of shame at its preening. Or guilt perhaps. Either way, it was as if a notice had been posted that from that point forward anything that hinted at opulence, anything that drew attention to one’s fortune, was tasteless.
Albert and Christian Baxter quickly and sensibly sold the property to a self-made millionaire who kept the name but lowered the standards. The nearby metropolis offered plenty of jobs— careers—but became too expensive and crowded and so Henry’s became a town of commuters. The population swelled to forty thousand. The town originals sniffed at the newcomers, thinking them ordinary: the workhorses of society who did not know the old Baxter’s. They inevitably overlooked the plain and traditional Northeastern wear and flocked instead to whatever was the style of the day. Thankfully, though, some of the quality merchandise remained, so stalwarts continued to shop there.
Strange that the swell of occupants did not translate into town growth. Henry’s was mostly a town of ones. One stationery store. One hardware store. One supermarket. One dry cleaner. And for many years a car dealership that by the 1980s had gone the way of the Woolworth’s—both moving like moths to the light that was and is Westtown, a growing community three miles away. Baxter’s was soon left hanging on to its spot on Main Street by its leather-tabbed, buttonholed suspenders.
Still, the town has a shabby elegance that Westtown cannot duplicate. Try though it might, Westtown has an altogether nouveau sheen to it that is distasteful to all in Henry’s community. If there were a town motto it would be quality not quantity. The families here take pride in the fact that the previous generation also had house accounts at the hardware store or the stationery store and, yes, for a time, even at Baxter’s.
Henry’s is a town where honking endures as a form of greeting, not an expression of anger. Where everyone in a certain circle knows their friends’ old cars and knows, therefore, all their friends’ movements.
It is a place in which thank-you notes are written immediately following dinner parties. Bloody Marys with celery stalks served every Sunday even without company. Cotillions co-exist with salad dressing from packets that promise—with the addition of oil—to produce genuine Italian dressing.
This, a town where children make eye contact and call their parents’ friends mister and missus and are taught to shake hands at very young ages.
“Do you know,” Henry’s mother once said to his father across the dinner table, after a bridge game at a friend’s Westtown home, “do you know I had to introduce myself to her children? She didn’t even blink. Not a word. They were little savages, those children. I’m so glad you all have manners. My children have manners.”
Henry, a boy then, sat up straighter at the compliment. He noticed Brad did, too. Even little David seemed to Henry to be politely sleeping upstairs.
From then on Henry thought of Westtown as inferior.
Henry imagines Blackie’s at ten. Blackie’s is one of the few bars in town (an exception to the rule of ones). But unlike the surly man at Mike’s tavern, the bartender at Blackie’s ignores the fact that some of his clientele are grossly underage. Most weekend nights his patrons are boys whose voices had only recently dropped a register and girls whose baby fat had yet to redistribute itself. Blackie’s is one step above sticky floors, two steps below the brass-and-fern decor slowly springing up in most bars in towns with eyes pointed optimistically to the future.
For a moment Henry is sure the door opened. Positively certain. He whips around to find it just as closed as it was three seconds ago. Maybe it jammed closed when that woman left, he thinks. He gets up and opens it and tries it from the outside. It is, in fact, just fine. No jamming after all.
Satisfied, he takes his seat again and sifts through the receipts in front of him, putting them in numerical order. He arranges himself over the papers so he looks studious. In case someone did come in, he would look engrossed. As if having a customer would be somewhat annoying, actually.
