Runny03 - Loose Lips (24 page)

“Senior, are you okay?” Harper, ever ready to practice his life-saving techniques, noticed.

“Sure, sure,” the dark-haired man mumbled.

When they left Cadwalder’s, Louise leaned toward her sister. “Did you see the way Senior stared at Trudy? Mmm, mmm.”

Juts nodded. “You can hide the fire but what are you going to do about the smoke?”

B
uster circled three times and dropped at the foot of the bed. Yoyo had already secreted herself under the covers so that when Juts jumped into bed, her feet icy from the cold floor, a healthy set of fangs lightly nibbled her toes.

“Yoyo, I hate it when you do that.”

Chessy called from the bathroom, “Can’t you see the lump under the covers?”

“I’m not looking for groundhogs in my bed.” Juts shivered. “Yoyo, you come up here.”

This request was met with a defiant meow. Juts pulled the covers over her head and crawled down to the cat. She didn’t want to throw the covers off because it was too cold. A howling wind had brought the winter chill into every crack in the old house.

Chester emerged to behold a mountain under the covers. “Juts, what have you been feeding the cat?”

Yoyo didn’t think this was funny. The bottom of the bed pleased her not only because it was warm but also because Buster couldn’t crawl under the covers. His whine as she disappeared under the sheets was music to her ears.

“She won’t come out of here. She wiggles away when I get close, the sneak.”

Chessy opened the top drawer of the dresser, a stash for catnip, keychains, loose pennies, and tie clips on his side; bobby pins, hankies, and fancy barrettes on Juts’s. He opened the lid of a small horn box. He rattled the lid off the box. Yoyo stopped moving; she considered her options, which were to endure Juts’s clumsy attempts to extricate her or to leave voluntarily and enjoy catnip. She chose the latter, squirting out from under the covers.

“There you are, you rascal.”

Buster opened one eye, jaundiced with jealousy, and sighed.

Chessy crumpled a few pungent catnip leaves on the end of the bed while Yoyo watched, whiskers twitching in anticipation. When the last leaf hit the bedspread she launched herself into the intoxicating treasure.

Chessy slipped under the covers to watch Yoyo’s antics. Exhausted by her ecstasies, Yoyo flopped on her side, tail slightly flicking, and exhaled with a pure, intense pleasure before closing her eyes.

“It must be wonderful to be a cat,” Chester said.

“That cat, anyway.” Juts snuggled up to his big warmth. “Honey, who is on duty tonight?”

“Lillian and Caesura, I think.” He glanced out the window, opaque with frost. “It’s colder than a witch’s tit out there.”

“Wheezer and I about froze last night and tonight’s even worse … not that I don’t wish some small suffering on Caesura, but maybe not an entire night of it … after all, she’s no spring chicken.”

Chester got out of bed and slid his feet into his worn leather slippers. “Pearlie is on duty at the firehouse. I’ll give him a call.”

When he returned to bed she asked, “What’s the scoop?”

“He’ll go out and check on the girls every hour. I know we’ve got that heater up there …”

Juts interrupted. “You have to sit right on top of it to feel anything. I hate those kerosene fumes.”

“Me, too, but it’s the best we’ve got.”

“I was okay until my hands and feet finally turned blue. We were so cold we couldn’t even fight.”

His eyes twinkled. “A cold day in hell…”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. Hon, there’s just not much I can do about the weather. I don’t remember winter being this damned cold. Maybe I’m getting old.”

“No you’re not. You’re six months younger than I am.”

“I don’t know what we are. We aren’t young anymore. We aren’t middle-aged, exactly, and we sure aren’t old.”

“It is strange, isn’t it?” She waited a moment, then swallowed and cleared her throat. “Chess, I want a baby.”

He stayed quiet a moment. “I do, too, but it just hasn’t worked out like we’d planned.”

“Well … I went to Doc Horning. He said my organs are healthy. I want you to go.”

“I hate doctors.”

“We’re running out of time. I’m thirty-six.”

“Yeah …” His voice trailed off.

“Do this for me. You don’t have to tell anyone … like your mother. Anything she produced is perfect, which means you. But there’s got to be something not quite lined up, you know what I mean? Honey?”

“Uh.”

“You put things off. Just go, Chester. Even if the news is bad, we’ll know what to do.”

“What can we do?”

“Adopt.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“I want a baby and I don’t care how I get one.”

“I care.”

“Then go to the doctor.”

“I wish your sister would shut up,” he mumbled.

“The last thing to die on Louise will be her mouth. But she has nothing to do with this.”

“Sure she does. She rubs your face in it every chance she gets. Even I’m getting sick of her real-mother routine.”

“Anyway, I need a baby so Louise doesn’t get the farm all to herself,” Juts only half joked.

Chessy rubbed his chin. “Your mother would never give Bumblebee Hill to Louise alone. Don’t worry.”

“What if Hansford went along with the idea? His name’s on the deed.”

“He won’t. He doesn’t much like Louise. Her special pleading about passing it on to their grandchildren cuts no ice.”

Juts giggled. “She is pretty awful to him. Yesterday she said his beard looked like an old bird’s nest. Right in front of everyone, too.”

“Where was that?”

“Shop. He came by.”

“It’s a good thing your sister lives in a town where everybody knows everybody and their peculiarities.”

Juts shook her head. “I’m not peculiar. Louise is. I’m normal.” He laughed. Then she asked again in a soft voice, “Chester, give me your word that you’ll see Doc Horning before the month is out.”

He sighed. “I promise.”

M
other Smith allowed herself to be driven down to Runnymede Square. She was born in an age when coachmen wearing livery hung on to the backs of carriages. She had heard once that ladies, daring ladies, drove their own carriages in London’s Hyde Park, but she certainly wasn’t going to do it.

Mother Smith conceived of herself as a duchess condemned to live in a democracy, and a convalescent democracy at that. FDR, serving his third term, put paid to Washington’s admonition that two terms was enough for any president. Her illusion coalesced over the years until it gained the consistency of concrete, which often seemed the consistency of her intellectual capabilities as well. Her family, the Holtzapples, had neither great wealth, great talent, nor great land. A few proved agreeable fellows and ladies but by no stretch of the imagination were they a distinguished family. Nor were the Smiths, a plain-living Dunkard
family into which she married in 1889, although they had contributed an undersecretary to Millard Fillmore. Rupert, a handsome man, as were his sons, had a good contracting business but he wasn’t wealthy. Mother Smith believed when she married Rupert that over time she could change him, lead him up to her standard of living. The years disabused her of this notion as well as her love for Rupert.

People her own age remembered that Josephine Holtzapple had always had a high opinion of herself, and it gained further altitude as she aged. She had no friends, appearing not to notice. She lived for her family, which meant her sons were prisoners to her tyrannies; two escaped and Chester stayed home, a glutton for punishment. Although he let her barbs and bullying roll off his back, there were times when, caught between the iron will of his mother and the lopsided unpredictability of his wife, he felt like a hot horseshoe flat on an anvil.

Today was one of those times.

Staring up at the watchtower behind St. Paul’s, her muskrat coat wrapped tightly around her, she scowled. “Why subject yourself to this hardship? Even if the Germans attacked us they wouldn’t bother with Runnymede.”

“The
Hindenburg
flew over.” He reminded her of the last, fatal flight of the giant zeppelin, which cruised over Runnymede as it waited for winds to abate in New Jersey, where it was to be moored.

“Chester, don’t argue with me.” Feeling the cold, she walked back toward the car, taking short steps.

“If we had better lookout stations in the Pacific we might have had warning of the Japanese attack. We might have had time to get our ships out of Pearl Harbor.”

“Might have, could have, should have, would have … I still say there is no earthly reason for you or anyone else to climb up that tower and sit in the cold waiting for what—bombers?” She stamped her foot as she waited before the passenger door.

Chester opened the door, helped her in, then walked around and slid behind the wheel. “How about if I leave you off at Aunt Dimps’s? I have an appointment. I could pick you up, say, three-thirty.”

“Where are you going?”

“Dr. Horning.”

“Are you sick?” Alarm crept into her voice.

“No. It’s time for a checkup.”

“You look healthy to me.”

“I am, but I guess I’m at an age where I shouldn’t take anything for granted.”

“Fiddlesticks, you aren’t even forty.”

“Where do you want me to drop you, Mother?”

“Not at Aunt Dimps’s. Just because we attended school together doesn’t mean I want to hear Bach on her piano. I suppose I could visit your father. He’s come down with a cold but insists on going to work.”

“Juts had a cold for the longest time.”

She ignored this, folding her arms across her chest. “Start the car, Chester.”

“Okay.” He turned the key, then pulled out into the hard-packed road, his chains singing as they bit into the snow.

“Is something wrong? I watched Johnny die. If something’s wrong I want to know.” Chester’s older brother had died when Chester was six. John had been Josephine’s favorite. She rarely mentioned him, but his photograph was next to her bed.

“I’m not dying. I’m going for a checkup.”

“Juts is behind this. I know it.” When he didn’t reply, she shifted to the offensive. “Tainted blood. It comes down the Zepp line, I can tell you—and the Buckinghams had a wild streak, too, as everyone knows. Of course, that incident with Otto Tangerman…” Dropping her voice, she paused. “I mean Otto’s father, Gunther, well, that was unforgivable.” She stared ahead as though Chessy would remember something that had happened before he was born.

“Uh … which one, Mother, there have been so many incidents.”

“That’s my point, the tainted blood.”

“But what happened to Gunther Tangerman?”

“Cora’s father, Hans, stole the body from Gassner’s Funeral Parlor, put him in his Union uniform, and hauled him up on George Gordon Meade’s statue. I told you this,” she grumbled, then continued. “Had him riding behind Meade with his arms around the general’s waist. It gave everyone a startle the next morning. Old Priscilla McGrail fainted dead away at the sight. Hans never got over the Cause, as he put it, even though he and Gunther were friends.”

She referred to Gunther’s having fought for the Federals while Hans fought for the Confederacy.

“What did Major Chalfonte say?”

“That Gunther sat a horse better dead than alive. Oh, it was a terrible shock.” She folded her gloved hands. “Where are you taking me?”

“To Dad’s, unless you have a better idea?”

“Did I tell you to bring me here?” Puzzled, her eyebrows shot upward.

“No, you mentioned he had a cold.”

“Oh …” She pondered this. “I guess I did, didn’t I? Chester, I don’t want to see Rupert. He’s out of sorts. Maybe you’d better take me home.”

“How about if we go to the Bon-Ton? I bet one of those white sales Julia talks about is on.”

“I don’t need any sheets.”

“Maybe the clothes are on sale, too.”

“I have no time for modern fripperies that show everything. When I see women with a few threads pulled over their bodies I wonder what’s left for their husbands to look at, I really do. Young people today have no sense of decorum.”