Where Moth and Rust

by GERTRUDE FRIEDBERG

1

IN RECENT years there have been many precautions one has had to take against disaster. The disaster that menaced Mrs. Fortrey was not the obvious one that frightened all others. It was the destruction and ruin that would engulf her home were she to fail in her performance of the many small tasks of protection and repair that custom, direction leaflets, and her vigilant sister prescribed.

No sooner was a new acquisition, whether a furnishing, an ornament, or merely a child, brought proudly into the home than it began to succumb to a thousand effects of use, age, and chemistry, which might be held in unwilling abeyance only by the indicated rituals. So seductively did the written prescriptions belittle the amount of time needed for each particular care that Mrs. Fortrey for a long time failed to feel deprived as she raced in a treadmill of small palliative measures which produced nothing, improved nothing, but merely retarded the processes of inevitable decay or returned things to a state that was surely not as good as new.

So every Monday morning Mrs. Fortrey started out bravely with it pitcher of water and a can of 3-in-1 oil to perform eight measures of prophylaxis in one grand round from kitchen to front room. The electric fan, the vacuum cleaner, and the sewing machine needed a paltry libation of only three drops of oil (after every ten hours of use) to keep their motors from burning out or worse. It took but a few minutes more to oil the wall can opener, the knife sharpener, the children’s roller skates, the flute keys, and the drapery pulley tracks.

On the return trip from front room to kitchen Mrs. Fortrey poured a little water into the philodendron plants, moistened the rubber plant and the ivy, put a bit in the parakeet’s cup, poured some into the radiator pan to keep the air from drying the furniture, and put a little in a pan under the broiler to keep the stove from smoking up the white kitchen. Then she usually stopped to empty the pencil sharpener. She once told her sister that she oiled all the way from the back of the apartment to the front and watered from the front to the back.

Mrs. Fortrey knew of four kinds of rot and how to avoid them. The chrome fixtures, if not shined with a special cream, would succumb to green rot; the mahogany tables, if not rubbed with polish, would yield to dry rot; clothes left too long in a hamper would get wet rot; dead batteries left in a flashlight produced chemical rot. And a leaflet that the children brought home from school cautioned Mrs. Fortrey that if the frayed electric cords were not taped up, her family would be electrocuted.

Every month or so a bit of Vaseline had to be spread on the washing machine spindle to keep the agitator from sticking, and a bit of black stuff had to be rubbed on Mr. Fortrey’s electric razor to sharpen it while the electricity hummed and Mrs. Fortrey counted to sixty in a loud voice as bidden. She rubbed ashes on the glass rings left on table tops, leather conditioner on the desk top, and, almost with a sense of wanton mischief, soap on the edges of all the doors.

When the carpets were brand-new, Mrs. Fortrey’s sister made the family take their shoes off as soon as they entered the house. This zeal did not survive one week, for as small unavoidable spots gathered despite their care, their hearts hardened and their feet stepped more boldly. At last only Mrs. Fortrey frowned at the dark patches before each door. To avoid increasing dirt and wear on the most traveled paths of the carpet, she took to sidling close against the walls and leaping from a point about two feet before each threshold to a point two feet within the room. She took great pleasure in the thought that in this way the carpet was spared perhaps hundreds of extra scuffs. Once Mr. Fortrey, coming back for a moment for an umbrella, saw her sidling and leaping about the apartment. He thought it best to say nothing, but quietly let himself out again.

Finally she contented herself with brushing a glamorizing powder into dark patches twice a month. This usually reminded her to sprinkle talcum powder on the slide rule where it customarily slid, and fuller’s earth on the food spots on the dining-room chairs.

2

MRS. FORTREY’S sister always had many useful suggestions for the preservation of things. It was she who pointed out that all the ash trays, lamps, and bric-a-brac which stood on the fine tables would leave dreadful scratches each time they were moved if Mrs. Fortrey did not line their bases with some gentle stuff. Looking for scraps of felt for this purpose, Mrs. Fortrey was happy to find in the children’s room a great pile of round felt pieces of exactly the right conformation. They were camp awards which, accumulated for six years or more of earnest athletic endeavor, presented at last a grave problem of storage. It was therefore doubly satisfying to Mrs. Fortrey when each morning, for many mornings (work divided into time in this way gave her the illusion of being somehow diminished), she pasted to the base of a lamp or vase a bright yellow patch. Only the truly curious would ever lift them to read “Camp Katchewan — For Proficiency in Intermediate Archery.”

Shoes had to be reheeled and resoled. Hems fell and needed to be raised. Trouser cuffs drooped and were retacked. Elbows wore out and were patched, and everybody in the family dropped buttons and stood still while Mrs. Fortrey sewed them on again. She sewed the little ribbon tape back on the umbrella, the fringe back on the chaise longue, and the hanger tape back on Mr. Fortrey’s overcoat, and restitched three brief cases with a handy little leather stitcher.

It seemed quite clear from the start that a bright new upholstered chair ought not to be sat on. When Mr. Fortrey, who sometimes forgot the rules, plunked down in the beige chair, she ran at him with a lace doily to put under his head.

“Darling, nobody uses such things any more,” her sister said. “You have your upholsterer make false covers for the backs and arms out of the leftover pieces of material.”

Soon every chair, and even the couch, had extra pieces of matching material over the original coverings. They were merely tacked in place and were not too noticeable. Mr. Fortrey never got the knack of sitting properly in the living room. He managed to sit on each piece in turn and always disarranged the protective disguise pieces, so that after an evening the carpet would be littered with pages of newspaper and pieces of backs or arms.

When summer came, all the true coverings and false coverings had to be covered with covers which were neither true nor false but just slip. You slipped the chairs and cushions into them much as you slipped a heavy woman into a girdle, and zipped. They were very attractive and her sister thought it a pity that they should be ruined so quickly by the dust which rained in through the windows all day. “I’d just put a plastic covering over the very tops,” she said, and Mrs. Fortrey added, “And maybe just where your hands rest.”

Every night a plastic cover had to be put over the parakeet cage, and every winter a plastic cover had to be put over the air conditioner, and every summer plastic covers were put on all the lamp shades. Mrs. Fortrey once considered making a plastic cover for Mr. Fortrey, who habitually spilled soup on his tie and sloshed his cuffs around in the gravy, but she ended by rubbing him down instead with Renuzit.

The stapling machine and the ball-point pens had to be reloaded, the filters replaced in the air conditioner, a fresh throwaway bag inserted into the vacuum cleaner, a fresh ribbon put into the typewriter, and fresh fuel oil dripped into the cigarette lighters.

Every summer the drapes had to be taken down, cleaned, folded away, and in the fall put up again. This large familiar effort each year stung the wound of passing time.

“Why couldn’t I just let them hang?” Mrs. Fortrey asked her sister.

“You’ll have to throw them out in the fall,”said her sister. “It’s not only the dust. It’s the sun too.”

She took them down.

Her coat needed periodic reglazing, the rubbertile foyer needed periodic rewaxing, her graying hair needed periodic retinting, the springs of the couch needed retying, the mirrors needed resilvering, the silver pieces needed reglazing to protect their resilvering, the bathroom wallpaper needed repasting, the kitchen needed repainting, the library steps needed revarnishing, the dictionary needed rebinding, and one of the children, changing schools, needed extensive readjusting.

Moths were a constant threat. Mr. Fortrey had once told her very firmly that it unnerved him if during an evening in which they had been quietly reading, leaning with only half their weight on the false backs of their living-room chairs and dangling their hands unsupported three inches above the chair arms, she would suddenly leap up with a loud cry and clap her hands together directly above his head.

“It’s too noticeable,” he complained.

After that Mrs. Fortrey tried to be more discreet in her pursuit, but she continued to feel that to be mothproof was to achieve virtue. She sprayed every woolen suit, coat, and dress, put them in clothes bags, hung moth gas containers in all the closets, and put the children’s mittens in the little cellophane bags which she saved from bunches of carrots.

She used Easy-off on the stove, Soil-off on the walls. Dust-off — full of static electricity —on the coffee table, Slipit on the window tracks, Weldit on the loose tile in the kitchen wall, Kaukit on the spot under the hot-water pipe where the plaster had come off, and Exit under the sinks. She used Jubilee on the enamels. Pride on the kitchen linoleum, Cheer in the clothes washer, Joy in the sink, and had death in her heart.

One winter the handle came off the door of the refrigerator, the drawers stuck, a piano key broke, a radio knob cracked, the screws fell out of the stove, the ironing board collapsed, the plates chipped, the magnetic can holder let the cans drop, the hair drier smoked, the wire recorder raveled a whole spool of wire, all the tubes on the horizontal circuit of the television set burned out, and one of Mrs. Fortrey’s own tubes was a bit inflamed.

When she got back from the hospital, she found that the agitator in the washing machine was wobbly, there were moth holes in the suit that Mr. Fortrey had been saving until he got thinner, and the children had spots. There were cracks in the window shades, feathers were coming out of the pillows, the eight-day clock went only three and a half days, there was a steady hum on the record player, and the ceiling drier had fallen.

It was not long after this that Mrs. Fortrey stopped. She told Mr. Fortrey while he was having breakfast.

“I’m not going to do anything any more,”she said. “It’s all too much trouble for me.”

“Name me one thing,” said Mr. Fortrey, “that’s too much for you to do.”

Mrs. Fortrey thought a moment. “I don’t want to reload the stapling machine,”she said.

Reloading the stapling machine was really a small thing, but Mrs. Fortrey didn’t want to mention all the other things to Mr. Fortrey while he was having his breakfast. Actually she stopped everything that very day.

At first nobody noticed, and Mrs. Fortrey didn’t say any more. She started to play the piano, learn Spanish, and practice tumbling tricks. As she walked through the apartment she stepped boldly on the middle of the carpet and wiped her feet on the dark spot at the threshold.

The calendar leaves weren’t torn off, and since nobody knew when October was over, the library books were overdue. As if despoiled by an autumn trapped unexpectedly indoors with all its colors ready to flow, her furnishings started to turn color. The silver turned brown. The chrome fixtures turned green. The copper casserole turned pink. The blue chair turned gray. The white bedroom drapes turned yellow.

One day Mr. Fortrey pushed back his dining chair, took off his plastic cuffs, and told Mrs. Fortrey that he was leaving her.

“I refuse to be seen in public with a woman in an unglazed mink coat,”he said firmly. He would have left that day, but the zipper on his valise got stuck midway and he had to wait two weeks to have the zipper teeth realigned by a woman whose business it was to realign zipper teeth. When he left, Mrs. Fortrey turned off the air conditioners.

The parakeet was the next to leave. His cage had no carpet to darken at the threshold, but the gravel paper which served him instead had not been changed for three weeks and was piled high with empty seed shells. He found an open window and headed toward Park and 56th Street, where he felt he might find a tidier home.

The children put up with her for a few months longer, but relations broke down al last when they found that Mrs. Fortrey had given up using the pliers on the rings of their loose-leaf notebooks to ply them into light embrace, and had neglected to Scotch-tape the edges of the music books, which were now beginning to rain bits of dried yellow paper all over the piano, the carpet, and their hands as they practiced. This was too much and both children went to join their father, taking the Erector set with them.

Mrs. Fortrey moved into one room and lived, on the small allowance she received, not at all as she should. She found out how umbrellas started, did lots of geometry, and learned Speedwriting, which she wrote slowly, embellishing each capital letter with extraordinary flourishes and tiny clever pictures. She set up a basketball net over her front door, looked up how to pronounce disheveled, and practiced bad posture.

She ate only foods that came ready-baked in heat-and-throw-away containers. Rather than wash each item of her no-iron dip-and-hang clothing separately, she bathed with her clothes on and sat on the radiator, reading, while she dried. Late at night when the city was quiet she could hear the moths feeding in the closet. From time to time she opened the closet door and threw them a sweater.

When Mrs. Fortrey died, it was after a period of six months during which nobody had seen or spoken to her. Two men broke down her door and took a good two hours to cart away rubbish piled ceiling high before they reached her bed.

She had died of what is still called a natural cause. A small valve in her heart, diseased from a childhood illness, had become rigid, its sides had fused, and the closure had provoked a gradual deterioration of her circulatory system and finally death. A surgeon, with the gentlest pressure of his index finger, might have split the fused valve open and restored her to a state almost as good as new. It was the sort of small mechanical repair that Mrs. Fortrey had once performed on a stenosed perfume atomizer in the days of her greatest zeal.