Virgin With Butterflies (9 page)

“Mystery Woman Flies with Indian Prince. Is Mystery Blonde to be Bride of Rookh? Ash-Blond Beauty Flies South with Prince,” and that kind of thing.

Poor Pop, was I glad Jeff had said he'd go to Mattoon.

Well, the prince gentleman kept frowning and shaking his head, and looking up at me with big, worried eyes, like brown velvet buttons, and then he talked to Aunt Mary and Mr. Wens in French.

They all stopped and looked at me, and I stopped reading the papers. They didn't know anything, anyway, but were just guessing who I could be. You would have thought I was Veronica Lake the way they said I looked—not that that could make anybody conceited because when the little McComber girl was dead, all the Chicago papers said she was a beautiful girl. And she wasn't really, not like some other girls Uncle Ulrich and Willie got mixed up with.

But every paper has got to say a girl is beautiful. So I knew not to think I was a glamour girl just because the paper said I was.

Finally Mr. Wens took a deep breath and spoke to me.

“Well, babe,” he says, “looks like you've kind of stumbled into the news.”

“Nobody wouldn't ever recognize me from the description,” I says.

“Your modesty becomes you,” he says, “but unfortunately there's the pictures those Texas boys took to prove you wrong and them right,” he says.

“Thank you,” I says. “Do you think Mr. Pimples and his pals will believe I knew what I was trading them blues for?” I says.

“They won't miss, baby,” he says, “and I thought it my simple duty as a Boy Scout to fly down here and whisper to you that even the war won't keep you from your little hour of fame, if you was to come back right now,” he says.

“I can see that,” I says, “and even this much fame, as you call it, don't please me none when I think of them rowdies reading about it. I sure am a little troubled, but more than that I sure hope Jeff went to Mattoon to explain to my Pop before he sees this layout.”

“I just put him on the train,” he says.

“Jeff don't drink,” I says.

“Correction,” he says. “I accompanied him to the station, procured him a ticket—roundtrip—ushered him to the gate and waved until he was out of sight around the water tank.”

“That's better,” I says. “There's so few taxi drivers that don't that you hadn't ought to sound like he did, when he don't.”

“I apologize,” he says.

“Listen,” I says, “where'll I go?”

“Well,” he says, “the prince is just ready to take off for a town not so far from here.”

“What town?” I says.

“It's called Rio,” he says, “and I gather he'd be pleased to have you and your aunt Mary tag along,” he says.

“But he's going right now,” I whispered, “and I'm worried what Mr. Hoover will say if we was just to run off now, even over to that other town, with only two little bags that we got in the car, and leave behind us somewhere a lot of clothes we paid a lot too much of his money for,” I says.

“Well, it just happens,” he says, “that your aunt Mary sent 'em all to the airport here,” he says, “thinking you and she would have to start out, after the prince leaves, to look for another hotel where they won't take a picture
for the papers of every spoonful you put in your pretty little mouth. But now if you agree,” he says, “we would just load 'em all into this plane, press the starting button and do a style show for the folks in Rio,” he says.

It all sounded too easy to me.

I looked at Aunt Mary and she was telling directions to our Mexican chauffeur that had driven us ever since we got here, and the two boys helped him open the back of the car. Out came not only our two little bags, but all the boxes of everything we had bought with Mr. Hoover's money.

I looked at Aunt Mary and she looked at me very serious, and then she winked slow at me.

So, “What can I lose?” I says, and that's how I went to Rio, which is a big city with Jesus blessing it from a mountain top.

I didn't know Mexico was so big, because it took us quite a long time to get to Rio. But I guess we took some side trips maybe, because we seemed to stop a good deal.

Well, before we started, Mr. Wens said goodbye and told the prince he better get going as some cars full of flashbulbs and reporters to go with 'em was driving up.

Just as the steps were pulled away and the copilot was shutting the door, Mr. Wens waved a letter at me from the ground, and I punched the copilot in the back. I pointed to Mr. Wens and he reached down and got the letter for me. It was from Jeff, so I don't remember leaving Mexico City, or even remember seeing the boys change the plane from a sitting room plane into a bedroom plane, because I was reading Jeff's letter and then thinking about it. And while I did go to bed and get
up and do all the things like brushing my hair in the small ladies' place, which I may as well say was the gentlemen's place for the same things also, I hardly knew what I was doing till I got to Rio, and hardly then.

The letter didn't have a beginning, like we was taught to write 'em in school. It just started. I'd still have it, only it's somewhere on the bottom of the Indian ocean, I guess. But I remember every word of it and why wouldn't I, as it's the first love letter I ever got, if you can call it that.

“If you can't start more stuff,” that's how it started, and it went on:

T
RAVELING IS JUST ALIKE
,
whether you are in a boxcar with Pop and Willie when you're a little girl going to Springfield, or a big girl riding to Champagne with a fly drummer you never saw before.

Traveling is waiting to get there—that is if you know where you're going. Or traveling can be getting on a train by yourself to go to Chicago, with a ticket that you've just bought and one dollar and sixty-five cents left, after making Pop take what you had, and both of you determined not to cry, because you can't stay in the house now with Uncle Ulrich. Pop can because he don't know like you do, and it's all over anyway—nothing will bring Willie back now.

Anyway, traveling is pretty much the same, even when you don't know where you're going. You just sit there until you stop, eating nice lunches and breakfasts with flowers on 'em. And not worrying about getting there, because Aunt Mary seems comfortable and the places you stop in are all foreign anyway.

In school my geography book was just too big to carry, so I used to hide it in the Girls' washroom, back of the john. Maybe that's where I got the idea for a
place to hide the cigarette tray and the cash box at Butch's. I often wondered whether it would be there when I got back, and if somebody found it, whether Butch would think I'd stolen the cash box. But he wouldn't think that, not after what happened last Thanksgiving night—or rather the next night when the mother of the drunk society girl came in to ask if she couldn't maybe pay for any damage that her daughter might have done. I took her aside into the Ladies' and gave her back the big fat wad of bills her daughter had given to me just before she passed out. But Butch listened at the door so he knew I had had it since last night and hadn't said a word to anybody. And Butch said he thought I was sure nuts. But I noticed, after that, whenever there was trouble and the lights were snapped off, I'd feel Butch's roll pressed into my hand.

Traveling is fun, too, when you come to see that people that sure looked strange at first, because they maybe was a different color from other people, are just like the other people, only of a different color maybe, or of a different religion.

I learned that traveling. Like that time I was laughing with one of the boys (that I called Bill) at the other boy (that I called Coo) because Coo slipped on something slippery and fell right down on his fanny holding a big bowl of soup in both of his hands that he couldn't let go of. So Bill couldn't help laughing, which he does in a kind of a squeal. Through silly little things like that, we all seemed to get to be better friends than before.

Traveling to Rio was nice, even if I couldn't be sure whether this was where I got out and wave goodbye, or
whether I go on to wherever the prince and his sweet and Bill and Coo were going to.

But Aunt Mary was with me, and Aunt Mary is somebody I just love because somehow she makes me feel safe and comfortable. And when I say I wish I knew about a lot of things that I don't know, she says they are not as important as being “pure in heart.” Even though I didn't know exactly what Aunt Mary meant, it made me feel good.

Aunt Mary was always saying things like, “No, I don't believe I'd wear that suit to dinner in the Panama Hotel because it will maybe be a big party and maybe it's a good time to wear the ivory satin dinner dress.” And I knew she thought they'd all be in their formals for dinner, and they were, so I was glad I wore my formals because I sure wouldn't have if Aunt Mary hadn't given me the courage to dress up quite so much.

And Aunt Mary was always somewhere else, or just starting to go somewhere or do something else if the prince wanted to sit down and talk. She nearly always had some shopping to do, mostly for me, when it was time to start out for a drive in the two-horse carriage that we had all planned to take together. So he and I went alone, and he bought white flowers for me and the whole sweet began to treat me with respect.

The prince talked quite a lot to me now about his pop and his brother, and I talked quite a lot about mine—that's how you get to be friends. He told me something about why he was flying around the world like this; it was to sell a lot of stuff that had been laying around in their cellar, under his papa's house. He had sold a lot of
this stuff in America and was going to sell the biggest one of all to a kind of king in a place that he called the Soodan. Then he was going home to take the money to his brother and to settle something between them. A blood brotherhood was the best he could say it, and he showed me a little scar on his wrist. He said the little lotus button was a sign of it, too.

I laughed and said, “Well, I guess I'm pretty near a sister to the two of you,” and he said “Why?” and I said, “Because when I was getting you out of Butch's place—draggin' you with my hands around you, under the arms—I scratched my wrist on that little lotus button, just where your wrist is cut. “And it bled a little, too, so I guess I kind of belong to this blood brotherhood, along with you and him.” I showed him the place on my wrist.

Well, you would have thought I had told him that my grandpop was the king of India. He kissed the place to make it well, and he looked at me till I had to look somewhere else.

“Now you understand,” he said. “What my brother do, I must do.”

“Why?” I says. “I don't see that.”

“The bond,” he says, “the oath. You must not be bound as we are bound, you must be free. As I am not free. But the English will never understand these things.”

“Listen,” I says, “you don't have to do anything you don't think is right. If you've made a bargain with your brother, you can get out of it the same way you got in. If you made an oath or a prayer about it you just go to the same place with your brother and unmake it,” I says. “Will you promise?” I says.

“I will never make another promise,” he says. “I made one with my brother and that one will break my father's heart.”

He didn't ever ask me not to, but somehow I felt like maybe he would rather I didn't tell anybody about things he said when we talked like this, and as Aunt Mary was all I had, I didn't, not a word.

I asked him about Rio, and he said we was going to stop there for a minute to pick up a friend. This was on our way back from wherever we'd been, as we drove slow in the sunset with the ocean on the other side from where it was on the way out. What he had told me about picking up a friend seemed like more or less a confidence, but anyway for some reason I never told Aunt Mary.

The next place we stopped Aunt Mary went with us to see some old ruins of a place as big as the Stevens Hotel, but it wasn't there anymore. It was all mostly nothing but stones that had fallen down off of each other and got run over by a lot of vines and stuff. But there was one place like a church with stone seats around the sides and Aunt Mary said she wanted to draw a picture of a kind of an idol or a statue of a very ugly woman that sure needed a brassiere, so she sat down and drew it. I didn't know she could but she could, and she didn't leave anything out.

Me and the prince went up some steps that wasn't going anywhere anymore. We sat down in the sun and he smoked a cigarette.

I didn't ask questions and only talked when he wanted to talk about things, but now he did again, so we did.

I felt sorry for him, having to go all over the world
selling stuff to get him and his brother out of trouble. I told him that I hoped he wouldn't go haywire just because they was in trouble and sell this Soodan king anything his pop wouldn't want to part with.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“I mean, I hope you ain't figuring to get rid of Hankah,” I says, “because your father wouldn't think that was right, and neither would I…Listen,” I says, “jumping around over the face of the earth selling second-hand jewelry is all right—and collecting the money must be fun—but suppose we was to crash down into some of these jungles, then what would happen? I mean with us and all the money dead and lost, wouldn't your brother have to take the rap for whatever it is you and him have been doing together? That ought to make you scared to collect all of this and go all over Mexico just to pick up friends.”

He laughed louder than I thought he could. Then he told me there was a little old lady that lives on a funny sounding street in England, and he said she kept the money by telegraph, and when I asked him if she might not get bombed out, he laughed again and he said she was a pretty strong old lady. And he said something I couldn't understand about her being a bank, or maybe he said she had a bank.

I asked Aunt Mary where she learned to draw and she said in the map school, but I didn't know where that was at.

We talked like that a lot of times, at places we got to, him and me. But then finally we got to a place in the sky, up over a beautiful harbor that Aunt Mary said was
the most beautiful harbor in the world, and there was Christ on a mountain, and we were in Rio.

By this time I was use to living with the sweet and shopping on Mr. Hoover's money—as I thought it was at the time, but when I found out whose it really was, was pretty peculiar.

So, in Rio, Aunt Mary said why didn't I buy some presents for Bill and Coo, for by this time they even called themselves that. So I did. I also got a nice fat book for myself to write down things I didn't want my mind to forget but to remember—and I was so glad I did for if I hadn't of I wouldn't of.

I thought that Rio was a Mexican city where everybody spoke like they did in Mexico City, except the tune is different. But then I learned we were in a different country—they sure seemed to pinch and pat more than they did in Mexico, but it didn't mean anything more than whistling at a girl does in Chicago. The people in Rio wear wide black hats and they are called Brazilians.

We hardly stayed in Rio at all, just long enough for Aunt Mary and me to buy some funny hats and leather things with silver nails on 'em for Bill and Coo. They sure looked funny when they put the hats on top of their white head things, which do come off, I suppose, not that I ever saw 'em off, but of course they do.

Like everywhere else we'd been, men swarmed over the plane and did things to it—but not enough, apparently, or we wouldn't have hit the water like we did when half of the engines quit being engines somewhere between Natal and Africa, but of course we didn't know it then.

Well, they had got us all ready and just as we were about to start, I was telling Aunt Mary how black-and-blue I was from all that patting and pinching, when the prince's sweet came up in a big dark blue car. He always seemed to get something like it to come to meet him wherever we got to.

Well, up they came in the big blue car—the sweet, then two motorcycle cops and then another big car with the prince and his friend, and then two more motorcycle cops with brown faces. And we watched 'em as they got out, and when I saw 'em I sure took in my breath and so did Aunt Mary. I don't know much about people that are foreigners to us, but when I saw the friend of the prince I saw he was a friend from Japan—the country we were at war with.