The Age of Miracles (26 page)

“Do what you want to then.”

“I might go and then I might not.”

I hung up and went back to my reading. I had finished the twelfth century and started in on
Little House on the Prairie
, which my book club is reviewing. I read it straight through without stopping and went to sleep and dreamed of pioneers and men fording rivers with Christmas presents for little girls on their heads.

At nine the next night Ginger called me in a rage. “You sound terrible,” I said. “What happened? What's going on?”

“He bought them a dog,” she screamed. “He delivered them home with a half-grown collie he bought from some white trash in Shawneetown. He dropped them off outside the house in the rain with this dog. I don't even have a fenced-in yard. The gate's been gone for years.”

“That's brilliant,” I couldn't help saying. “A dog. My God, that's a move by a master. I didn't know Bobby Lee had that in him.”

“It isn't funny, Letitia. I'm going to call my lawyer in the morning and have him cited. This wet dog in my kitchen. What will I do with it?”

“Find out where he got it and take it back.”

“But Roberta loves it. She's been hugging it ever since she got home. I've never seen her so happy. She loves this dog.”

“Then keep the dog.”

“I haven't told you what he did to me at the dance, have I?”

“You went to the dance?”

“I had to go. I couldn't let Ginger down.”

“Where was Roberta while you were all at the dance?”

“With the dog. It's Roberta's dog. When I got to the dance he was standing there in his tuxedo with a video camera. He videotaped me. Every time I looked his way he had this camera turned on me. I don't know what to do. Do you think I should call my lawyer now or wait until the morning?”

“It's clear he doesn't want this divorce.”

“Well, he's going to get it. I'm not going to put up with his jealous rages. I'll never forget that night.”

I hung up. I couldn't help thinking that maybe all of this was lost on Ginger. Maybe she didn't have a high enough IQ to understand what was being lavished on her. Didn't she know she was going to start wanting to see that videotape?

On Wednesday of the following week she filed formal charges and a date was set for the divorce proceedings. On that same day an ad appeared in the
Harrisburg Sentinel
. Opening November 1st. ONLY THE LONELY CAFE. Modeled on the famous coffee shops of San Francisco. We will feature Cappuccino, Espresso, Latte, Café Au Lait and cakes of many kinds. Homemade cakes, cookies, muffins, scones, and Southern sweet rolls. Bookstore and Art Gallery opening soon. Dance Floor and Band to follow. Twelve Seventy-Five Maple Street. BOBBY LEE FINLEY welcomes you to a New Highlight in Harrisburg History. Free Refills.

I should stop a minute and describe our town to you. It's a sweet-smelling town, situated in the bootheel of Illinois, thirty miles west of the Ohio River and twenty-five miles north of the Shawnee National Forest, home of Mammoth Cave. It is the county seat of Saline County, a clean, simple city of maple trees and sycamores, brick buildings and neat lawns. We boast a Carnegie Library that looks like a temple. We are twenty thousand souls, give or take a hundred. Our streets meander up gentle hills. Glaciers crossed this country. There are limestone formations outside town and abandoned strip mines. There are pastures with neat fences and houses where the James gang holed up one winter. Our high school has a thousand students. We are law-abiding church-going people who like hobbies and hard work and minding our own business. I used to mind mine. Until I got sucked into the vortex of Bobby Lee and Ginger's divorce.

You probably wouldn't think a town like the one I have described would be a good place to open a San Francisco–style coffee shop, but you would be wrong. From the first day it was packed and it stayed packed. Bobby had torn out the insides of his grandfather's old law office beside the Quorum Court Building off the square and completely rebuilt it. It looked like something from old Vienna, with wrought-iron tables and chairs he ordered from California and a curved wooden counter he salvaged from an old hotel in Eldorado. The inside was painted white and green. There were green and white tiles on the floor and a baker's rack holding copies of exotic newspapers and magazines. (He had a friend in Chicago who sent them down.)
Harper's
magazine, the
Atlantic Monthly, The Economist
, the
Village Voice
, the
Prairie Schooner
, the
New York Times
. Every week a bundle arrived from Chicago with new magazines and newspapers you can't get in Harrisburg. A certain segment of his clientele was coming in just to read the papers. That was my excuse when Ginger cornered me and suggested it was disloyal of me to spend so much time at the Lonely, as it was being called in Harrisburg. Of course, she couldn't keep her kids away. Little Ginger and Roberta were there every day after school, helping out their father and eating cake.

It was a complete success from the word go. In the first place the food was good, always an important consideration in southern Illinois, where people make no bones about their appetites. At first Bobby Lee had Mrs. Saxocorn baking for him, but the demand outgrew the supply and he began to spend his evenings baking.

He bought a copy of the Garden Club cookbook and called up the contributors for tips. Pretty soon the glass windows of the stand by the cash register were filled with pieces of Mrs. Hancock's Poppy Seed Cake and Mrs. Kalicha's Pecan and Marble Delight. He was selling slices of cake for one dollar and fifty cents apiece, and the young people of Harrisburg were forking over their allowances with abandon. Bobby Lee stood behind the counter in an apron, serving Cafe Au Lait and Hawaiian Mocha Dreams and Sports Tea and Cappuccino. He soon had two or three of the young people working for him. He spent from eight to two in the insurance office and the afternoon in the cafe and the evenings baking. He wasn't sleeping much, I heard.

“He drives by our house every morning and puts the paper on the porch,” Ginger told me. “Eugene said I could cite him for contempt if I wanted to but it probably isn't worth the trouble. At least he hasn't gotten them any more animals.”

“What happened to the dog?”

“Oh, we still have it. Roberta is so attached to it. It isn't a bad dog. I don't let it in the house, of course, but I let her keep it in the yard. They're building it a doghouse.”

“Who is?”

“Bobby and the girls. They work on it in his backyard when they go over for the weekend.”

“Where is the dog sleeping now?”

“In the kitchen. Just until the doghouse is finished. It's still cold at night, Letitia. I can't let it stay outside and freeze.”

The next thing Bobby started were poetry readings. He started paying people to come down on Wednesday afternoons and read their poetry. He brought in a poet from the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale to start things off. After that they were mostly local people. Even old Mr. Aaron, who is eighty years old and used to be in a group of poets in Chicago, came down. No one has seen him in years. We all thought he was dead and all of a sudden he shows up at the coffee shop wearing a tweed suit and a lovely new tie and reading his poetry out loud. Most of the poems were about when he was overseas during the Second World War. Several were about going to Italy after the war and falling in love with a beautiful young girl he couldn't marry.

I had a talk with Bobby Lee around that time that surprised me. I ran into him in the post office a few days after the poetry readings got started. We were waiting in line to get our packages mailed. He had three manila folders in his hands. I was holding a large package containing a pocketbook I was mailing to St. Louis to have restored.

“Let me hold that for you,” he said.

“It's not heavy. It's a frivolous mailing, to tell the truth. I'd hate for anyone to know how I was wasting time.”

“I'm sending poems to a magazine.” He laughed and smiled a truly childlike smile, charming, unashamed. His hair had grown so long he was tying it back with a leather thong. I have to admit he has pretty hair for a man, soft and brown and wavy. His mother was a pretty girl, rest her soul, dead in an automobile accident about the time Bobby finished high school.

“Good for you,” I said. “I used to write some poems now and again. I heard the young people read last Wednesday, Bobby. That's a fine thing you have going down there. Keeping them out of bars and pool halls.” I lowered my eyes. I didn't want to imply I was thinking about the Krazy Cat in Marion.

“Oh, that isn't why I'm doing it.” He laughed again. “I have darker designs than that.” The man in front of me finished his business at the window and I stepped up to mail my pocketbook. Darker designs? Was Ginger right? Was all this just to get her back? Is everything we do on earth about love and only love? I have hit on this idea before and pondered it. Not the electric light, I always tell myself. Benjamin Franklin didn't go out in the backyard and attach himself to lightning by a kite string just to get some woman to like him better, did he? I think not. I am of the school of thought that says we are more complicated than that.

 

As soon as the poetry readings were established, Bobby started his jazz band. Remember I told you he played a saxophone in high school? Well, it turned out he had never forgotten how. He had kept that old saxophone all those years while he worked to make a living for his family. Now he got it out and polished it up and started practicing. In a month's time he had a band together, two electric guitars, a bass player, a drummer, a keyboard player, and himself. On Friday and Saturday afternoons they started having Happy Hour at the coffee shop and playing music. When spring arrived Bobby closed the shop for three days and built a patio in the empty lot behind the building. As soon as the concrete was poured he drove to the Wal-Mart in Carbondale and brought back six large white canvas umbrellas and set them up on tables around the dance floor. Mr. Aaron was advising him by now and you could see the Italian influence. That Friday afternoon, with the concrete barely dry, they started the outdoor concerts. Fifty people came the first afternoon. By the next afternoon two hundred were there. It had snowballed. The height of the weekend here in Harrisburg became going to the Lonely to hear music.

They named the band Father Bobby's Raiders and they had these outfits that looked like the undershirts of priests and nuns. Oh, yes, there was a woman in the band. A woman dentist who moved here from St. Louis. A beautiful unmarried girl who plays bass guitar.

Nothing this sacrilegious had ever been done in Harrisburg before, but no one complained. Bobby Lee's refusal to take his divorce lying down had caught the imagination of the people. The men liked it, of course, but why did the women like it? Well, to begin with, Ginger. A new divorcee in a town this small is always a danger. Plus, the children start goofing up. It makes extra work for teachers, work for school counselors, the bills don't get paid. There are reasons society is on the side of order.

The Raiders also played concerts in the park. They played for the Half-Centennial in June, they played at the high school for the Halloween dance. They played old favorites at first, “My Girl,” “Earth Angel,” “All You Want to Do Is Ride Around, Sally,” “The Tracks of My Tears,” “Harrisburg Fight Song.”

Then they moved on to real jazz, with Bobby Lee doing solos on “The Old Rugged Cross,” “If I Loved You,” and “The Entertainer.” We had never had music like this in Harrisburg and the
Harrisburg Sentinel
did a special section on the cafe, calling it a Renaissance and Bobby Lee a Renaissance man.

Shortly after the band began, Little Ginger and Roberta started to show an interest in music. Instead of goofing them up, this divorce had opened new horizons for them. Little Ginger started playing the piano and clarinet and Roberta turned out to be some sort of undiscovered instant genius on the trumpet. By the time the second spring arrived and the outdoor bandstand reopened, Bobby Lee was letting them play with the band anytime they wanted to. Little Ginger only played with them occasionally. She was sticking to classical music, but you couldn't keep Roberta off the stage. Bobby bought her a pair of cowboy boots and a fringed and beaded skirt and blouse and she would get up on that stage and play her little heart out. You would never believe she had been a sickly child to hear the power her twelve-year-old lungs could muster. She took the band to new levels. She could play “How High the Moon” or “Chase the Clouds Away” to break your heart, holding the high notes until the crowd would scream for mercy.

The woman dentist began to take an interest in Roberta. You could see the two of them with their heads together before performances, planning new assaults on our senses.

What was going on with the divorce at this point, you well might ask. Well, Ginger kept changing lawyers. Finally she settled on a lawyer in Marion who was said to be the meanest man around. Not that he was having much success. Bobby Lee was into delaying tactics. He wanted his home back. Even though he was creating a perfectly grand new life, he still wanted the one Ginger had taken from him. Of course, she was in a bad mood all the time now. In the first place she had no one to talk to on coffee breaks. Everyone in our building went to the Lonely.

I tried once or twice to get her to go with us. “You ought to at least go look at it and see what he's done,” I said.

“Absolutely not.”

“Ginger, what is this divorce about? It's been two years since you started this. Do you remember what you were mad about?”

“It's about him being jealous of me. Dragging me out of the Krazy Cat. Don't you remember? It's because he's crazy. He's crazy as a loon. Have you seen his hair?”

“Ginger.” It was her boss, Eugene, calling her. “Ginger, come on in. I need you right away.”