by Chip Jacobs
Only he, Jules, and select insiders were aware that Busch Gardens, the supposed “Eighth Wonder of the World,” could well fold if Adolphus died soon. Lilly was mortally opposed, adamant the grounds remain open at least for disenfranchised children and traumatized war veterans. Still, the park was costly to run, and the logistics of maintaining acres of exotic plants, animals, and serpentine paths without its goateed champion would be daunting. “You might as well amputate one of Pasadena’s limbs if that happens,” Nick told Jules when she’d confided this. “It’s our special green.”
But he bottled up his angst in his preparation to say goodbye to Lilly, an un-wundebar prospect, indeed. He also wished he were mildly deaf.
Directly in front of him, two of her peripheral acquaintances were dishing out vile commentary in casual clucks. He’d already overheard one woman—the still-ham-faced Constance Prunell—snipe that she planned to give her Pomeranian a flea dip tonight. “I don’t mean to sound heartless. Adolphus is going to pass on knowing the Prohibition movement he battled could prevail, and that his wife will be in charge of his empire when she’d rather be coddling this rabble.”
“You’re wicked, you know that?” her knock-kneed friend replied. “Wickedly entertaining. Don’t you breathe a word of negativity to her; they say Adolphus needs assistance just to stand up.”
“Well, that’s what butlers are for—and for lighting those heinous cigars he’ll be puffing until the Grim Reaper snuffs them out,” Constance said. “For someone who preached moderation, he assuredly didn’t practice it.”
That’s it. After Lilly bid another woman adieu, Nick zipped ahead of them to butt in. “Unpardonable manners,” Constance said at him, not recognizing Nick from their tiff on the Red Car, when Royo saved the day for that Chinese dry-cleaner lady.
The way Lilly looked at Nick was the way his father looked at him boarding a train out of Pasadena for Indiana: with a melancholy smile surrendering to circumstance. “Oh, dear boy, bold to the end,” she said after Nick kissed her on the cheek. “I’m going to miss your antics terribly.”
Nick swayed on his heels, trying to pack everything he needed to say into three minutes, each invitee’s allotted time. His words sprayed out in a geyser of appreciation. She was the reason he’d gotten hired on a historic job utilizing his gadgetry. She was the reason he’d met an enigmatic girl who loved social justice, dogs, and him.
Lilly, her gray-blue eyes full of caring for him (and dejection for this moment), returned serve, praising him for his ostrich shows, for his chivalry the night Harry Collins and C. J. Johnson were buried in wreckage. She encouraged him to start a company to “give Mr. Edison a challenge,” and said that when he wed Jules, Ivy Wall would host the ceremony, whether she’d returned from Germany or not.
Nick craved to hear her every last syllable, one last sweetly misstated aphorism. He didn’t anticipate philosophy. “Never forget,” the First Lady of Budweiser counseled him, “an endeavor is only as worthy as the intent built into it.”
“I don’t understand,” he said, close to tears, while Constance stink-eyed him for taking too long.
“All das Glitzern ist nicht Gold,” she said. “Auf Wiedersehen, dear boy. Take these.”
Nick then hurried away from another searing goodbye, turning his back on the festivities. As he did, Royo loped in a wide circle around Lilly, with half the dogs and seven children trotting behind him in an impromptu game of the follow-the-mutt.
He entered Ivy Wall through a side door and unclenched his hand. Into it Lilly had placed a small bag of, yep, marzipan, which Nick suspected some anti-sugar crusader concocted to punish sweet tooths like him. In the foyer were five steamer trunks and associated cases. Lilly’s chief butler, Gilbert Olmstead, a sprightly seventy-five-year-old, pantomimed an aching spine to try to pry a laugh out of Nick. It pried nothing.
A frazzled-looking Jules opened the front door a moment later, saying, “I know I’m late. How is she?”
“Stiff upper lip. Grace. The usual. So, where were you?” he asked, still raw.
Without responding, Jules went to the ground-floor bathroom. Nick, to her consternation, was outside it when she exited.
“Really?” he said, hands on hips. “You couldn’t have picked another day to be gone?”
Jules said nothing, striding toward the parlor with Nick on her heels. But she stopped abruptly in front of a cleaning-supplies closet. In brisk movements, she whipped open the door, flicked on the light, and yanked him in, shutting a door she acted like she wanted to slam.
“Need I remind you again,” she said in an acid whisper, “I have a second job that necessitates erratic hours. Lilly has supported it wholeheartedly without once cross-examining me. Do you know why? Though I may speak infrequently during daylight, my work production speaks for itself. And she trusts me. Provide me space.”
Nick, surrounded by enough mops, dustpans, and floor wax to beautify Buckingham Palace, wasn’t in the space-giving mood. “Eventually, you’re going to have to fill in the pieces of your puzzle. Furthermore, she needs you today.”
Jules’s tightening features made her sharp chin sharper. “This self-righteous side of you is unbecoming, Nick. And curb lecturing me what Lilly requires. I’ve spent hundreds, no, thousands more hours with her than you.”
“Nobody would dispute that,” he said. “Nor would anyone begrudge me for inquiring about your disappearances. I love you. Plus, I devised this idea for your benefit I’m keen to bounce off you.”
Jules brushed past him out of the closet. “Next time,” she said “try loving me in a less obnoxious manner.”
She closed the door, leaving Nick to ruminate with the whiskbrooms.
—
Two days after Pasadena’s pearls-swishing bleeding heart embarked for Europe, the couple still wasn’t speaking. This was their first meaty tiff, and Nick found himself pining for Jules, neither able to sleep nor focus, knowing that he’d misread the situation. Retrieving his dog from Ivy Wall Wednesday, he opted to take the temperature on her anger. Happily, Royo’s doggy-care was continuing here out of Lilly’s generosity—and because Maty still needed company; the pampered schnauzer, whose constitution was too fragile for a choppy voyage, was staying in California.
Yet when Nick waved at Jules outside the parlor window, not only wouldn’t she reciprocate, she reverted to one of her old tricks: sinking low to camouflage herself behind committee documents teetering on Lilly’s Queen Anne desk. Around her, Nick viewed a space already being transformed from gilded manner to museum, as with everything at Ivy Wall. A dust cover now swallowed a coach. Valuable bric-a-brac was being transferred to the Busches’s fireproof vault.
Nick didn’t relent attempting to make amends, tapping a fingernail against the window; Jules’s blonde tresses remained hidden. So he thwacked his forehead against the glass to a doo-do-doo-do-doo-do-do cadence. Ignored. This was one tough parlor. Hoping she was furtively watching him, he pressed his nose against the window, smearing it as he slid face-first onto the patio.
“Go away,” she finally yelled. “I’m busy.”
Nick held up a finger, and returned minutes later with Royo, who’d been mind reading him all day. By brainwave, he messaged his win-her-back plan; Royo’s head jerk signaled assent.
Back in front of the window again, Nick and Royo bowed their necks in unison. When they lifted them, they were both mashing Wrigley Spearmint in Nick’s exact, side-check chewing style. Nick then began strumming an air guitar as Royo bopped up on hind legs. Soon the butterscotch wolf was dancing, not just walking, in what you might call a pre-Hokey Pokey. As Royo shimmied toward Nick, jaws working that gum, Nick backpedaled to give him space—and then tripped backward over a bucket.
The racket—a tinny, rolling sound and the smack of Nick’s torso hitting the patio deck—drew Jules from her lair. He was on the ground, massaging his knee, when she cracke
d open the French door. “You’re hopeless,” she said, trying not to snicker. “Are you injured?”
“I don’t know. Does the apothecary sell liniment for idiocy?”
Nick picked himself up, as he’d been doing repeatedly the last year and self-consciously patted his cowlick. “Can we please pretend I never said what I did? You cautioned me about being nosey, and I trespassed. I was beside myself about Lilly’s departure. Let’s make up.”
Jules folded her arms. A canyon breeze ruffled her daffodil sundress. “I suppose,” she said. “It pains me being away from you and your miscreant. But Nick, you mustn’t push me to disclose that to which I am not ready. It only shoves the answers you seek deeper.”
“I won’t. Lord knows I’ve stuffed things down about me.” Like having a semi-clairvoyant dog. Or why Chester provoked me before I elbowed him that day. “We all guard secret maps of ourselves.”
“That we do,” she said.
“At the risk of re-infuriating you after you’ve completely forgiven me—”
“Who said anything about completely?” she said, smile lines rippling.
“All right, mostly forgiven me. I had another rationale for inquiring about your whereabouts that day.” Jules’s chin aimed its tip at him; he was tap-dancing in a minefield here. “I hatched this scheme for your cause that I was dying to share.”
“My cause?”
“Yes, the woman’s right to vote. What better occasion, I figured, to round up all those moneyed women so you could pitch them about joining a suffragette drive? Your eloquence would’ve had them lining up, checkbooks in hand. Anyone displeased couldn’t exactly grouse to Lilly, either, not with her about to leave town to reach a sick husband. If the ladies of Los Angeles are marching, they should be marching in Pasadena, too!”
“Wait. That’s why you were flustered I was tardy? To rally Lilly’s girlfriends before she set off?”
“That was one reason. Dumb idea, huh?”
Jules’s tone betrayed no emotion as she said, “I need to show you something. Go stick Royo back in his pen.”
Nick did, and Jules took charge. Grabbing him by the hand, she led him down the hill into upper Busch Gardens. Was she going there to break up with him? Wag her finger in his face about intruding on her suffragette-ism? He jabbered when he was nervous, and all he could think to jabber about was something far afield of romantic complexities.
“Here’s something you probably don’t know,” he said, as she dragged him deeper in. “Leonardo da Vinci and Sir Isaac Newton were fixated by the sun’s potential in their eras. The French were later, too, but you know about their flamboyance. They’d blow up obsolete ships using mirrors and solar beams in front of audiences to demonstrate its potential.”
“I don’t suppose they ever used them to disrupt vocal cords going a mile a minute?” she said. They now were in front of the Gingerbread Hut, whose door handle contributed to Nick’s firing at Cawston when he entangled his trousers on it.
He thought this was where she’d guillotine their courtship. “Go ahead,” Nick said. “Put me out of my misery.”
“Misery?” she said with a wry expression. “Why would I commit such an action to somebody with such klutzy fealty to me? Not one other person in my life has ever appreciated what equality of the sexes means in my depths.”
Nick felt a helium bubble arising. “Honestly?”
“Honestly. I’m touched, profoundly so, that you were thinking about how to secure me a captive audience for what I hold so dear.”
“You are?”
“Yes. And don’t despair. Lilly slipped me a copy of her guest list, with phone numbers, before she left. Just worry about getting in there.”
“Does this indicate you’ve completely forgiven me?”
He’d find out. Under the Gingerbread Hut’s thatched roof, Nick and Jules enjoyed relations for the fourth time. This sex was different than before, devoid of Royo-interruptus or backstory intrigue. This was animal-lust on, against, and around a miniature table, whose bolted legs would waver forever after. For twenty-three minutes, it was the fulfillment of the limericks that Nick and Fleet were reprimanded for when a teacher discovered they carved them, graffiti-like, on the underside of a desk.
The Pasadenan and Chicagoan grounded the corn. Danced the Barnaby. Joined the giblets. The Brothers Grimm, in their wildest pornographic dreams, never could’ve have imagined such make-up sex transpiring in anything their books inspired.
She was outside the fairy-tale hut afterward while Nick stood inside buttoning his shirt on a dopamine high. To the north, the late afternoon sun glinted off the majestic, gray curve of the mostly done bridge.
“I should’ve blindfolded her,” Jules said, referring to the kindly ceramic grandmother bearing cookies by the door when Nick emerged. “A Victorian like her never would’ve approved of a liberated woman’s carnal initiative.”
“Is it my elation,” Nick said, “or is she blushing?”
“Both.”
Mysteries of the Gingerbread Hut
His feet scarcely touched the sidewalk passing Colorado Street newsboys weeks later. One October day: two monumental events. He floated. They shouted themselves hoarse.
Extra! President Woodrow Wilson, foreshadowing the new push-button generation, earlier tapped a telegraph key in the White House. Then kablooey. Forty-two hundred miles away, dynamite blew up the last formidable barrier between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The Panama Canal would open next summer.
Extra! Adolphus Busch was gone at seventy-four. The creator of “everyman champagne,” who’d loved being outdoors, died an invalid as one of the planet’s wealthiest men, worth tens of millions of dollars. Fluid in his lungs killed him, though, truth be told, the anti-booze Woman’s Christian Temperance Union could’ve been listed on his death certificate.
Nick had met the city’s first “wintering mogul” once by sheer accident, capering in his gardens as a high schooler. By the time he befriended his wife, Adolphus was in failing health at his “Villa Lilly” compound in Germany.
Gliding down the sidewalk, Nick didn’t stop for a paper now. He’d already purchased one that afternoon from the newsstand in front of Vroman’s, where he’d gone to collect the photograph that AC snapped for this special moment. Jules and everybody else at Ivy Wall, he presumed, already received word about their patriarch.
And not to be callous toward Lilly, whom Nick could picture swampy in grief, comforted by family, tranquilizers, and, he hoped, a backup schnauzer, but he had a glittery future to chart tonight.
Everything was ready. He’d booked reservations with the balloon operator next to the Raymond Hotel and dropped off his solar projector and AC’s photo with the pilot. He’d filled his flask with Budweiser to toast this milestone (and, now, wish the original King of the Beers Godspeed). In Nick’s pocket was the silver ring that’d creamed most of his savings. Its filigreed style reminded him of the accents of the bridge, which, after all, had paired them months back through Lilly.
Swaying outside Jules’s Delacey Street cottage in his best collarless shirt, he visualized her saying “yes” from eight hundred, tethered-feet up. Saying yes after he beamed the image of him on Mrs. Grover Cleveland’s mane holding a sign asking her to marry him.
Jules roommate, Stella Webster, a mousy secretary at the city’s gasworks, answered the door. Typically peppy, her features drooped.
“Evening, Stella,” Nick said. “Balmy night. You should amble out. Jules back there, putting on her face?”
Stella looked surprised by the question. “No, Nick,” she answered in her squeaky voice. “She’s not. I thought you would’ve known by now.”
“Know what: she running late from work again? Or,” he said with a self-laugh, “her second job? That woman needs a watch.”
“I wish that was it.” Stella thrust her hands into her dress poc
kets. As if it wasn’t balmy out at all. “The police. They showed up this morning and arrested her. Jules is in the hoosegow.”
Nick could hear himself say, “For what?”
“Burglary charges,” Stella said.
—
He walked into the Pasadena Police Department’s drab headquarters convinced his fiancée-to-be was wrongly implicated. He’d spring Jules from this cut-slab carryover from last century, and they’d have a farcical anecdote for their future children. Jail was no place for a woman so honest she’d return a lost penny to a Rockefeller.
A young, acne-splotched cop named Jep escorted Nick down a flight of steps, where six cellblocks lined a wall opposite a scuffed desk and wooden file cabinets. All the cells were vacant save for the two on the far ends. He nearly choked on his spit passing the cubicle nearest the stairs.
In there was a man that Nick hadn’t seen for months, a man he’d hoped never to eyeball again. The grizzled coot that’d flung his Bowie knife at him, after Mrs. Grover Cleveland unintentionally freed his black-market parrots, was passed out drunk on the bench, drool running into his scruffy beard. The last thing Nick needed was for him to wake up and start raving.
Jules was in the basement jail’s other side, pacing in a blue, taffeta dress. Seeing him, she rushed up to the iron bars, squishing her cheeks between them. “Nick, Nick,” she blurted. “They wouldn’t let me contact anyone, the Neanderthals.”
He kissed her and clutched her hands. Her lake-deep eyes were coiled with worry. “We can still make our date,” he said. “Tell me this is a mistake. A mix-up.”
Jules looked around to ensure the pimpled cop was gone. He was. “I can’t,” she said, sniffling. “Just know that I’m not the serial bandit they contend. They may be trying to scapegoat me.”
Nick longed to be inside her cell, to be her Sir Galahad. His brain reeled him back. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but what class of bandit are you?”