A Cast of Killers (3 page)

T.S. tasted the chili and gasped for air.
"He'd better make it quick. I think I'm going down." He grabbed his
throat and staggered back against a sink already filled with an
enormous pile of dirty dishes. Auntie Lil was incapable of entering
a kitchen without leaving behind conditions that could qualify for
federal disaster aid.

"I suppose you think you're amusing." She
handed him a glass of water and stared intently at the pot.
"Perhaps I should cut it with a few more kidney beans."

He shook his head vigorously. "Why bother?
This could solve the mayor's homeless problem in a single
afternoon."

"Really, Theodore, I asked you down here to
help, not gloat." Auntie Lil handed him another potholder and
directed him to move one of the enormous pots to a back burner. He
paused in his task to allow the ever-suffering Fran to scrape in
her load of massacred onions. Despite himself, his stomach started
to rumble. It did smell good, in a kind of diabolic and dangerous
way.

Auntie Lil then ordered him to retrieve a
huge container of cooked rice that was stored in a large walk-in
freezer at the rear of the kitchen. "Mr. Chang donated it," she
explained. "He's got a small takeout joint on the corner."

That was Auntie Lil. Put her in a new
neighborhood and she instantly picked up the local slang. T.S.
expected her to start talking about a "fast score" at any
moment.

For nearly thirty minutes, she dogged him,
sending him here and there in search of loaves of bread, pots of
beans, more rice and a mountain of grated cheese. "You're looking
well, Aunt Lil," T.S. told her when she finally allowed him to stop
for breath. "All this ordering me around certainly seems to agree
with you."

"Of course I'm looking well. I keep active.
You don't see me wasting any of my time in front of a television
set." She marched across the room and corrected the placement of
forks on a nearby table while the other volunteers watched in
amusement.

The hungry hordes did not stampede in. They
shuffled in slowly, almost shyly, the obvious regulars taking the
time to show newcomers where to go. The line snaked obediently
toward the cafeteria railing while the volunteers took their places
behind the counter with practiced competence. T.S. wandered past
them, searching for Auntie Lil but, as usual, she managed to
outflank him. She gripped his elbow and steered him to a spot
behind a huge pot of chili, abandoning him before he could protest.
Naturally, it was the hottest spot in the room and it both smelled
and felt like his imagined version of the darkest depths of Hell.
The odor of fiery chili peppers tickled his nose and made his eyes
water as he stepped into place. Fragrant steam instantly assaulted
him, fogging up the reading glasses he wore. The very last thing he
saw before his temporary blindness was Auntie Lil taking a place at
the front of the line.

How typical. While he sweated in Hell, he
could listen to her greeting each person as if this were an
afternoon tea party and she were the proud hostess. He wiped his
glasses with the edge of a potholder and they instantly steamed up
again. Only this time— unnoticed by T.S.—a lone kidney bean clung
to the exact center of his right lens like a dark and deformed
eyeball.

"How nice of you to come today," he heard
Auntie Lil tell an unseen person. "Please feel free to eat well. We
have plenty." There was a murmuring and she began again with
someone new, demonstrating that she had the unerring instincts of a
successful dictator—stick to the public relations and let the
others do the dirty work.

T.S. could feel his hair begin to curl from
the dampness and his stomach took a peculiar dip in response to the
spicy aroma. He kept waiting for his glasses to clear but the chili
seemed to have taken on a life of its own, spewing up steamy cloud
after cloud like an angry volcano about to erupt.

"Excuse me, sir, but I am hungry. Do I get to
eat or do I simply stand here and smell it?" The new voice was
seductively female, full of hidden meaning and ringing with
inflection. The enunciation was perfect. Clearly, it was a voice
trained for the theater.

T.S. picked the useless glasses from his
face, sending the kidney bean flying onto his shoe. He kicked it
off with as much dignity as he could muster and folded the glasses
into his back pocket, assuring himself that he did not really need
them. At least not much. In fact, he'd been hoping to keep their
recent existence a secret from Aunt Lil anyway (who hid her own
behind a cushion on her couch).

His vision cleared. He had expected a young
woman, perhaps a beautiful actress down on her luck. He found a
frail old lady instead. She was so thin and pale that she gave the
impression of being translucent, at first. Blue veins glowed behind
parchment-like skin and only her face seemed to be successfully
holding back the pulsating emergence of inner organs and blood
vessels. And this was only because she wore what looked to be a
full pound of makeup, expertly applied but in far too heavy
proportions for the daytime. Not to mention the current decade. Her
eyebrows had been plucked and were heavily outlined into startling
dark thin arches. Her lips were drawn too wide for her frail face
and were filled in with a deep scarlet that made her mouth look
more like a wound than a feature. Dark eyeliner outlined both the
upper and lower lids of small black eyes, and her rouge was applied
in tiny crab apples on either side of a patrician nose.

He blinked. She was a vision from a 1940s
movie, with the barely contained, too desperate animation of a
background extra hoping to catch the audience's eye. Even her
seemingly calm waiting was imbued with an overly dramatic
patience.

"They each get a ladleful for starters," the
young woman serving rice beside him said helpfully. She was holding
out a plate of rice and he took it automatically, plopping chili on
top before handing it, in turn, to the waiting woman.

"Thank you" the old lady murmured. "So sorry
to have disturbed you." She took her plate and sailed regally down
the line toward the basket of corn bread, leaving T.S. to wonder
just what her hidden meaning might have been. Sarcasm, he
suspected.

"That's Adelle," the rice volunteer informed
T.S. "She's sort of the head of the regulars here."

She was also the hungriest, T.S. decided,
when he spotted her for what must have been the fourth time in the
line. How could she be eating all that chili? My God, the thought
was frightening. Until he realized he wasn't seeing Adelle again at
all—he was seeing different versions of Adelle. There was an entire
team of old ladies, it seemed, who wore heavy, stagelike makeup and
dresses that had not been fashionable since the days of Eisenhower.
They all spoke in cultured, trained voices and held themselves as
tragically erect as queens on their way to the gallows. What in the
world was going on?

Two such women stood in line staring at T.S.
with blatant curiosity. They looked like seductive grandmothers
dressed to kill for a social occasion scheduled many decades
ago.

"He looks a bit like John
Barrymore in
My Dear Children,
don't you think?" the first one asked her
companion.

The companion snorted skeptically and
surveyed T.S. "You think everyone looks like John Barrymore," she
finally said. "It's time you got over that little fling, my
dear."

"But he does look like him," the first woman
replied stubbornly. "Look at that chin."

The companion was still clearly unconvinced.
"Let's hope he knows his role a little bit better than our dear Mr.
Barrymore," she said archly.

"How dare you say that?" The first woman
turned to her friend, blocking all traffic and apparently not
giving a hoot. "He was charming in that show. Marvelous, in
fact."

"Marvelous?" The second old woman shook her
head firmly and looked behind her at a grime-coated bag lady for
support, receiving a crazed glare in reply. "The man didn't even
know his lines," she finally countered. "Only God knew what was
going to come out of his mouth each night. He thought he was in a
different play every night of the week."

"I am not one of the Barrymores," T.S.
interrupted firmly, before the argument escalated into hair
pulling. "And my role is to serve you lunch." He plopped the chili
on their plates and they took his hint with ill-disguised
irritation at being rushed in such an unseemly manner.

"You're right," the first old lady sniffed to
her friend. "He hasn't got John's dash at all." They moved primly
down the line.

T.S. didn't have much time to ponder the
insult. Too many people were waiting to eat. He soon got the hang
of ladling out chili and, although a few people mentioned that it
certainly smelled spicy, there was no one who complained about
either its taste or its peculiar dark brown texture. He was just
getting into the swing of things— accept plate, plop on chili, turn
quickly, hand it over—when his rhythm was interrupted.

"That's Franklin," the rice volunteer told
him, pointing out the next person in line. "He gets two big scoops
of chili. He needs it."

Franklin certainly did. He was an enormous
black man. Not enormous as in big for a human being, but enormous
as in big for a bear. He was well over six feet tall, broad faced
and broad shouldered, with deep brown skin that exactly matched the
mysterious tint of Auntie Lil's chili. He was dressed in overalls
that seemed at least as large as a double-bed quilt and he wore a
baseball hat turned backwards over a crop of gray-peppered hair.
His hands were massive and the size and texture of baseball gloves,
but he waited patiently as T.S. piled on the chili, accepting the
plate with shy politeness.

"Thank you, sir," he said, nodding his head
before rumbling on down the line. The use of "sir," not to mention
its second syllable, confirmed Franklin's Southern upbringing. What
was he doing in New York City? If not for his size, he'd be eaten
alive.

The hungry faces soon stretched back into one
long blur of worried brows, tightly knit mouths and murmured
automatic thanks. Just as T.S. was scraping the bottom of the vat
of chili, Father Stebbins appeared toting another one. T.S. was
assaulted by a fresh explosion of steam and received, much to his
amusement, one of Father Stebbins' paternal pats on the back.

"You're doing fine, son. Bless you for
helping. God loves a cheerful giver," the priest murmured before
moving on to other, more important tasks.

Meanwhile, Auntie Lil was still there at the
juncture of the line, handing out trays and welcoming all to what
she implied was some sort of marvelously exclusive street soiree.
T.S. had to admit she was good at it, she didn't miss a beat. Not
even when it came to grasping those hands that were coated with a
thick, oily paste of city grime, accumulated through months—and
maybe even years—of not bathing. The befuddled and mentally ill
bearers of those hands clearly were in no shape to take care of
themselves. And yet they wandered the streets. T.S. wondered how
they survived.

At last, the final hungry person had been
served, and several reserved with what remained. Auntie Lil
wandered over to help T.S. dish out the final portions.

"I think my chili was a rousing success,
don't you?" she asked T.S. proudly, as usual not shy about fishing
for compliments.

"You've found the perfect audience for your
culinary talents," T.S. admitted. "Starving, hungry people who
haven't had enough to eat to know any better."

He had only been teasing but she looked so
disappointed that he immediately amended his remark. "Actually,
Aunt Lil, your chili was a rousing success. They all look happy and
satisfied."

They stared together at the tables crammed
with the hungry and the homeless. Heads were bent low over their
meals, spoons and bread clutched in hands, bodies protecting the
small plate that was theirs. Most people had chosen the nearest
seat that they could find and there were many unlikely combinations
of table companions. But one table hosted no one but Adelle and the
rest of the perfectly dressed little old ladies that T.S. had
noticed coming through the line. They argued loudly among
themselves in vigorous debate, their well-trained voices projecting
across the entire room so that all could hear the conversation.

"Leslie Howard brought more vulnerability to
the role," one voice proclaimed.

"How can you say that?" another disagreed.
"Gielgud was clearly superior."

"You just say that because he complimented
you on your hair that one time."

"That is not true. Everyone knows that Leslie
Howard did not possess the animal magnetism required to play a
proper Hamlet."

"Leslie Howard had plenty of animal
magnetism," a third voice interjected hotly. "And I should know. He
was a better Hamlet than John Gielgud could ever be. And we all
know why."

"What are you implying? Not even you could
have missed the undertones of Hamlet for seventy-five years.
Gielgud was the perfect man for the part."

A chorus of voices then entered the debate,
providing an unlikely backdrop to the dispirited eating going on in
the rest of the room.

"I hesitate to ask this," T.S. admitted,
hating to let his curiosity get the better of him. "But who are
they?” He pointed out the table of chattering old ladies with a
chili-smeared finger.

"That's Adelle and her crowd," Auntie Lil
explained. "They're old actresses who still live in this
neighborhood. Most of them have been here for sixty or more years.
A few live in tiny rent-controlled apartments nearby. And some live
in shelters, I suspect. They meet here every day for lunch. Their
government checks barely cover their rent. This may be the only
meal they get. They're all quite charming. I recognized a few of
their names from when I was a girl and your grandfather would take
me to the theater."