Runny03 - Loose Lips (52 page)

While Chester and Senior pulled apart their wives, Louise wiggled free. She ran across the street, her sandals flapping with each step. She pushed through the crowd to yank a dizzy Nicky out of her winning car.

“If your mother won’t teach you how to be a lady, I will!” She swatted her hand on Nicky’s bottom.

“Mom!” Maizie grabbed her hand.

“It’s Nicky. I’m telling you this isn’t Jackson Frost, it’s Nicky.” Louise grabbed Nicky’s goggles. The child jerked her head away, and the goggles snapped back on her face. “It
is
Nicky.” Maizie’s jaw dropped. Nicky removed her goggles. “I won!”

Billy, Vaughn, Doak, and their friends laughed, and Billy put Nicky up on his shoulders.

The announcer, apprised of the mess, droned, “We have a disqualification in the third heat. That winner is Roger Davis.”

“I won!” Nicky screamed, now standing on Billy’s shoulders. “I won!”

Juts, dragged across the road by Chester and Pearlie, was cussing a blue streak. At the sight of Nicky she clapped her hands. “I knew you could do it.”

“They’ve taken the race from her.” Louise spat out the words.

“I don’t care. She won and everyone saw her win. That’s what matters.”

“You’re going to spoil that child. She can’t go about thinking she can do whatever she wants.”

“Ah, Mrs. Trumbull.” Extra Billy always called his mother-in-law Mrs. Trumbull. “Give the kid credit for guts.”

“And breaking the rules!” Louise’s face was mottled.

“Who cares?” Juts, really happy that Nicky had won and satisfied that she had finally laid into that goddamned Trudy Epstein, felt expansive.

“She’s made a fool of herself,” Louise said.

“Better she do it than someone does it for her,” Juts replied.

“This child has enough to contend with in life without you egging her on. You don’t have any more sense than God gave a goose.”

A little wire snapped in Juts’s mind on that one. “As I recall, Louise, you are the last person who should be talking about geese.”

Fear washed over Louise, who shouted, “Loose lips!” but Juts rolled on. “Hey, everyone, hey, remember the air raid? It was Canadian geese. Louise blew the siren on Canadian geese and swore me to secrecy. So how about that, Sister, for breaking the rules? You do it, too!”

Louise’s goose was cooked.

The riot after that disclosure exceeded the fracas at the finish line. Not only did the story make the
Clarion
, but so did a photo of the battling Hunsenmeirs. Popeye struck again!

E
ver the drama queen, Louise wore a black veil for two weeks following the Fourth of July revelation. Everyone knew who she was.

Caesura Frothingham, ancient now, declared the veil was a big improvement. Noe Mojo suggested Louise was in mourning.

Juts, thinking at first that blame would bypass her, discovered it was so delicious a taste in the mouth that people were thrilled to give her some, too.

Orrie Tadia Mojo shook her finger in Juts’s face and said she had betrayed her sister. Juts snapped right back at her that since Orrie was Louise’s best friend, she didn’t expect Orrie to give her a fair shake.

Ev Most, back from yet another of her trips, stuck up for Juts although she told her husband that being Julia’s friend could be exhausting.

Mother Smith wrote a letter to the editor of the
Trumpet
criticizing public officials who cry wolf. She cited the county commissioner for York County, on the Pennsylvania side, but all of Runnymede knew she meant Louise and Juts.

This stung Cora, who dictated a letter written by Juts to the editor of the
Clarion.
She said, “Josephine Smith is full of shit.”

Walter Falkenroth called Cora and suggested she reword her
letter. Ramelle, with a cooler head, helped her so that the letter appeared the day following Josephine’s attack.

It read, “Louise Trumbull and Julia Ellen Smith made a mistake. We’re glad those weren’t German planes.”

The next day a letter appeared from Juts in which she said, “Louise screwed up. I covered up. At least we had some excitement.”

Louise then pitched a major hissy in print. The Maryland residents sent their responses to the Maryland paper, which bumped up circulation. Louise’s detailed reply had to be cut to two paragraphs. The last line read, “I would die for my country.”

Wags at the barbershop commented she might have to.

The Curl ‘n’ Twirl nearly combusted from the gossip concerning the sisters plus the latest on the arson: O.B. had denied setting fire to the warehouse and had hired expensive Edgar Frost to defend him. People figured the money came from old Julius Rife.

Vaughn asked Maizie to marry him, but in the volcanic atmosphere they decided to wait before announcing it publicly. Even Louise didn’t know.

Cora quietly told her children that if they didn’t hang together they would hang separately. So both sisters, tied at the ankles by Cora, sat down at her kitchen table and wrote yet another letter to the
Clarion.
This time they apologized for any inconvenience they might have caused the citizens of Runnymede.

After they signed the document, Cora released them.

Sullenly they sat at the table.

“Girls, you try the patience of all the living saints.”

“I would have gone to my grave with our secret.” Louise touched the small gold cross hanging around her neck.

“By the time you get ready to die, Wheezie, you’ll be so old you’ll have forgotten everything. Only the good die young.”

Louise entreated her mother, standing over both of them. “See, she’s so smart. Always a comeback. I hate her.”

“You started it.”

“I did not.”

“Louise, you are fifty-one years old—”

“Mother!” Louise wailed.

“Julia, you’re forty-seven yourself now. This is no way to behave.”

“I told her not to put Nicky in the Soap Box Derby. You try and talk to her. She won’t listen,” Louise wailed.

“It’s not fair. If Nicky wants to race she can race. We didn’t commit a crime, Louise.”

“Well, you shoved Trudy Epstein. As if letting that child pretend to be a boy wasn’t bad enough, you had to publicly attack that woman.”

“She said he only stayed with me out of duty. That he really loved her. Dumb bitch.”

“Did she really say that?” Louise leaned forward.

“If you hadn’t been Our Lady of the Veils I would have told you everything, but you haven’t talked to me since the Fourth of July. There’s a lot you don’t know,” Julia said cryptically, knowing that was the way to ignite Louise’s curiosity.

“But why would she say that in front of everyone? She takes such pains to be good, poor thing.” Louise was no fan of Trudy’s.

“How the hell should I know? Probably thought she could get away with it. No one would hear her but me.”

“Did anyone hear her?”

“Well, not the first part, but after I clocked her, sure, everyone heard, because she was shouting right along with you, Wheezie.”

“I was merely trying to head off an embarrassing situation.”

“That’s why you ran into the middle of the road? To head off an embarrassing situation? Subtle,” Juts dryly replied.

“You weren’t going to do anything about Nickel.”

“No, because I didn’t think we were wrong.”

“Boys do what boys do and girls do what girls do.”

“Bullshit.”

“Next she’ll want to play for the Orioles. Actually, she might
as well. Why you bother with that bottom-of-the-barrel minor-league team I will never know.”

“You just wait, Louise, someday the majors will come back to Baltimore. Just like before World War One. We’ll have a real team and then we can beat the Yankees.”

“Dream on, sister mine.”

“Are you two going to make a united stand? I don’t care about who wins what in Baltimore. I want this settled now. No getting off the track.” Cora brought them back.

“What’s to settle? We wrote the letter.” Juts sat sideways in her chair.

“You blew the whistle. That’s what’s to settle. We wouldn’t be in this mess. Julia, it’s in other papers, too. People are laughing at us!”

“Let them laugh. At least they’re laughing—not crying. I’m performing a public service.”

“At my expense.” Louise pouted.

“I didn’t say geese were German airplanes.”

Louise’s eyes bulged; the cords on her neck stood out. “You went along with it! That’s as bad as making the wrong call.”

“Shut up, both of you. Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

“Yeah, but why should I pay because she was stupid?”

“Julia Ellen, that’s not the way to bind this wound.”

Louise smacked the table with her open palm. “Wound? Wound? I’ll tell you what it is, it’s a stab in the back from my own sister in front of the world! Where’s your Christian charity? Oh, I don’t expect you to be a loving sister. No, I know better than that. You first, everyone else last, but for the sake of sheer Christian charity, you might have spared me this humiliation.”

“The last Christian died on the cross.” Juts quoted Nietzsche, although she didn’t realize it. She just liked the line.

“Julia—” Cora’s tone was stern.

“She accused me of being a bad mother!” Juts stood up from her seat. “On her front lawn with eleventy million people around.
I’m not putting up with that shit another minute. She’s lucky I didn’t kill her.”

“I didn’t say you were a bad mother.”

“The hell you didn’t.”

“I said you encouraged Nicky to break the rules. And”—she held up her hand for silence—“that she was enough to juggle without adding that.”

“Well, aren’t you Sissy Tolerance? That’s the same as saying I’m a bad mother, which you do behind my back anyway. It all comes back to me, you know. Everything you say comes back to me. This is Runnymede, after all. The last thing to die on people around here is their mouths. For all I know, the stiffs at the undertaker’s are still talking.”

“I have never said you were a bad mother.”

“Excuse me? I guess I’ve got a hearing problem.”

“I have not said that! I have said”—and her voice sounded like a lawyer’s in the courtroom—“that you have extra burdens because Nicky isn’t yours.”

“You told me to have a baby. I did.”

“But she’s not yours.”

“I am still a mother!”

“Kind of.”

“Louise, that’s just foolishness,” Cora interjected.

“Yeah, especially since she was the one who kept telling me I’d never know what happiness was until I had a child. Well, I’ve got one. Now what do I do with it?”

“See”—Louise pointed at her sister while looking to her mother—“a real mother doesn’t talk like that.”

“Plenty’s the time you came crying to me about your girls. You are getting forgetful.” Cora’s feet hurt. She sat down. This wasn’t going to be over soon.

“I’m a mother. I don’t see what’s so damned great about it. It’s a lot of work. And you conned me into it.”

“I did no such thing. You carried on about having a baby
since the day you married. And didn’t I tell you not to marry him? He’ll never set the world on fire.”

“He set me on fire.”

“Oh, that.” Louise pursed her lips.

“He’s a good man. He’s made his mistake, but he’s a good man.” Cora loved Chester.

“You married him to spite his mother,” Louise retorted. “I did not. I don’t care one bit about that douche bag.”

“I’m going home,” Louise announced.

“Not until you two make up.”

“How can I make up with her? She’s impossible. She wrote in the paper that it was my fault. Bad enough she blew off her big mouth when she did, she didn’t have to put it in writing.”

“That’s not what I said. I said you screwed up and I covered up. One’s as bad as the other.”

“Oh, sure.” Louise crossed her arms over her chest.

“Well—it is. And I wouldn’t have done any of it if you hadn’t made an ass of yourself over Nicky.”

“I’m right about that. Tell her, Momma, tell her that you can’t let children do what they want. The derby is for boys.”

“I thought it was funny.”

“Momma!”

“Oh, Louise, what girls and boys do is like fashions. They change. In my day no woman would show her ankles, much less her calf. People are running around half-naked today. Women go out without hats.” Cora shrugged.

Louise interrupted. “Some things never change.”

“Name one,” Juts challenged.

“Death.”

“Okay, name another.”

“Women bear children and men don’t.”

“That’s two.”

“Taxes.”

“They change. When I was young there were no taxes. And it
ought to be that way again.” Cora thought of the government as a sanctimonious thief.

“Any more things that never change?” Julia prodded with her finger.

“Don’t touch me. The sun rises in the east.”

“That doesn’t count. People things.”

Louise thought, then threw up her hands. “I can’t think of anything else. But I still think you were wrong.”

“I don’t.”

“It’s not such a big thing. Shake hands and stick together.”

“I’m not shaking her hand until she lays off telling me how to raise my kid.”

“You ask for advice and then you criticize me for giving it to you.”