Beauty: A Novel by Frederick Dillen

hallway that handled everyday town business. Departments were painted on the pebbled glass windows of wooden doorways. Taxes, Clerk, Permits, and then it was too dark to read more. Carol wished it was daytime and she had an everyday reason to go into the hallway, even if only to pay off her parking tickets. She wished she knew the girls in the clerk’s office. She wished she lived in a town, in this town. By the time she turned and started up the stairs, she was alone.
    And the stairwell was bright and wide enough that she was startled by the height opening above her.
    More surprising, the walls of the stairwell, from the first step, were covered with lists of names.
    Painted in small gold letters, the names, men’s names, came in tight yearly bunches, chronologically. The most recent years were at the lowest step, with only a couple of names each year and not every year. Earlier and earlier years climbed the rest of the two full floors up the stairwell. Back fifteen and twenty years, there were consistently five or ten names. Back fifty years, as Carol went up the stairs, every year had twenty or thirty names. They couldn’t be war dead, not every year. By the second-floor landing, every year, year after year, from the nineteen twenties back up into the mid–eighteen hundreds, the names numbered a hundred, even as many as three hundred, a year. The lists at the bottom of the stairs, the most recent years, had been full of Portuguese and Italian names. Carol saw Taormina more than once. Up higher and earlier, into the late eighteen hundreds, it was a big proportion of Italian names. Highest up the walls were the earliest years, and the names were Carpenters and Wheelwrights, Parsonses.
    They had to be the names of fishermen from this harbor who had died at sea. Carol was amazed there could be so many. She was more amazed that the ones left could find the courage to keep going out year after year. She wondered what became of the wives and children.
    Then, for the second time in a day, she looked into a large room and over the heads of a crowd on folding chairs. There was a balcony around three sides of the room, and above the balcony, the ceiling was as high as the gym had been but with the remains of ornate molding from which fluorescent lights hung. The windows along the sides of the room were wide and tall and elegant. The walls and balcony and ceiling were white, with some of the molding still gilt.
    At the far end of the room, the town council sat at their line of brown, mismatched tables, and one of the councillors announced the sorts of procedural formalities that drive the public away so the persistent can have what they want. But the public was certainly here, and this time it included women. Would Mathews and the fat boys be here? No. They’d keep a good distance between themselves and their zoning bonanza.
    Up behind the council was a stage and a large mural of Pilgrims and Indians, of an abundance of fish and the fishing industry rampant, of a town hall like this one surrounded by steeples on its hill above the harbor.
    Someone behind Carol said, “Is it you? Of course it is you.”
    Carol turned around to a short woman, round with fat, who stood legs apart and hands on hips. The woman was older than Carol, and she looked at Carol and then down at herself, smiling at what a pair they made for, short and tall, fat and skinny. Her hair had gone to white, but she had black eyebrows. She wore black pants and a black smock, and she looked tough enough to mother a town like Elizabeth. Carol towered over the woman and yet, for the strangest instant, wanted to climb into her arms and be cradled.
    The woman said, “Ezekiel Parsons wants everybody to call you Beauty, but I call people by real names. You are Carol, which Ignacio told me, along with the fact you have big hands. Big hands are useful hands. You are very welcome here, Carol.”
    Carol put her hands in her pockets.
    Through the doors, one of the council was