by Lynn Shurr
Bobby chortled and patted George on the shoulder as if the remark were a private joke between them, although George had not smiled when he made it. In a twinkling, Bobby went off to greet another customer.
“Wasn’t that a little rude?” Suzanne asked, as insulted about the cooking comment as she was embarrassed for Bobby. She’d never cooked anything for George St. Julien—and now she never would, even if he had two broken arms and begged and pleaded.
“It’s okay. I went to school with Bobby. He’d be the first to admit the food in this place is mediocre, but it’s the only decent place in town to take a woman. Bobby is so very gay. He got his father to buy out Hippo Huval so he could do a little interior decorating with his boyfriend, Randy Royal.”
“So Bobby and this Randy Royal are a couple? What do you know?” She stored that information away. “Well, the place is beautifully done. I think someone who has been to college should have a little more tolerance for people who are different.”
“I’m sorry. I suffer from jealousy. Jeff Sonnier, Doc Sonny, is Bobby’s father. I always wanted a father like that. Instead, I got mine, and Doc got Bobby.”
“And are you jealous of Randy Royal, too?”
“No. I think he’s a blood sucking leech.” George raised his over-sized menu and hid behind it, conversation over.
He was right. The food turned out to be mediocre. The entire menu consisted of various fried seafood platters served with a tomato and shredded lettuce salad and a choice of French fries or baked potatoes. A glass of barely cool jug wine came with the meal. George ordered an additional carafe. They both decided on the shrimp. The entree came greasy and heavily breaded to the table.
Polishing off the wine, which Suzanne barely touched, George ended his meal with coffee. She ordered the bread pudding for dessert and bounced her spoon off the rubbery surface while delaying the inevitable. They had discussed nothing but the food and the weather for an hour. She summoned her courage to tell him that he was right about Randy Royal, when George let loose with another outburst. “I should have taken you into the city. This evening is a disaster. I knew it would be!”
His frustration made her pity rise to the surface. Another brief delay in getting the bad news would hardly matter.
“Look, we can salvage the evening. The night is young. Let’s go dancing at Joe’s Lounge!”
Suzanne couldn’t tell if it was the light of the candle on the table or disbelief shining through George’s lenses. “That’s not a place you take a lady.”
“Evelyn Patout goes there with her husband. Let’s break with old-fashioned traditions. I’ll take you. Come on!”
She barely gave George the time to pay the bill and tip the waitress, who looked like a perky high school cheerleader stuffed into eighteenth century garb. A new plan formed in her mind. She would show him a good time, get him a little drunk, and then tell him about the silver.
Suzanne fairly dragged George down the unpaved section of Front Street. The bar sat close enough to the Roadhouse to leave the car parked on Main. Even before they passed through the red door of Joe’s Lounge, they could hear the clink of bottles, the throb of the music, and the thump of heavy-footed dancing. Joe’s came alive on Saturday night.
Crammed on an impossibly small platform bristling with mikes and fortified by amps, the musicians performed: an elderly man sawing at a fiddle; two middle-aged men, one banging a triangle, the other squeezing an accordion; and a bearded youth wailing out a song in the Cajun patois. All of them wore blue jeans and checked shirts. A banner swinging over their heads read “Octave Dugas and His Boys,” obviously, a family act.
Not a single table stood empty. They wove their way through the chairs and the cigarette smoke to the bar. Their drinks arrived served up by a secondary bartender since Mr. Hippo was engaged in tapping another keg. The set of dances ended, and a flood of thirsty patrons swamped the bar. Suzanne found herself next to Evelyn Patout who seemed to have come alive, too, once out of her guide costume and the Port Jefferson Museum.
She’d shoved her skinny shanks into tight, tight jeans. Her western shirt bore large red roses embroidered on each breast pocket. She teetered on heels higher than Suzanne’s, though that hardly seemed possible. If she had been slightly overdressed for the Roadhouse, Suzanne was entirely out of place in Joe’s Lounge. How she wished she had a large western shirt to cover what her push-up bra exposed. Evelyn did not appear to notice the wardrobe discrepancy.
“Say, you found yourself a date. Good girl! Ain’t he a long one though? Would you look at the size of his thumbs? You know what they say!” Evelyn cracked Suzanne in the ribs with a sharp elbow while George cringed behind his drink.
“This here’s my husband, Billy.” She pulled on the hairy arm of a chunky man who wore his western shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows and his jeans slung below his gut.
“We’ve met.” George nodded and nursed his drink.
“Suzanne Hudson.” She put out her hand, and Billy grabbed it as the band cranked up again.
“Come on, honey. Laissez les bon temps rouler! I do like a woman in a fancy dress.”
“George!” Suzanne appealed.
Evelyn held up her arms in George’s direction. “How about you and me, you tall drink of water.”
“I don’t dance. Have a good time,” George said and finished the last of his first Jack Daniels on the rocks. He gave Suzanne a glance that said she was getting what she deserved for dragging him here.
“Well pardon me!” Evelyn claimed another man who looked like Billy’s twin in a different shirt and with a larger belly.
Soon, Suzanne danced in a style she’d never danced before, the two-step and the Cotton-eyed Joe, slow dances with a funny beat and fast dances with complex steps, all to the tinky-tink accompaniment of a triangle. Overheated when she got back to the bar, she seized her diluted gin and tonic. George sipped his fourth Jack Daniels and half way dozed over the row of glasses. Billy Patout chugged an entire beer and pounded George on the back.
“How did an ole four-eyes like you get a girl like this, hey, Georgie? She’s too much woman for you. I think my brother Rod would like to have her now I’m an old married man again. Hey, Rodney!”
Suzanne leaned away as the burly man with his arm around Evelyn came over to the bar. Billy offered a crude introduction. “This is my brother, Rod. Hippo says you got to come with a man, but nothing says you got to go home with the same one. Rodney shows a woman a good time. Don’t you, Rod?”
Baring more tobacco-stained teeth than Suzanne cared to see in a human mouth at one time, Rodney grinned at her. He put a brawny hand on her wrist. Suzanne tried to shake him off. George, evidently, was not going to ride to her rescue, and she’d have to handle the unwanted attention herself. Mentally, she ran through a few self-defense techniques to use on strong but overweight men. Raising her hand sharply, she broke free and prepared to stomp on Rod’s instep. She never got the chance.
“What do you say, Four-eyes? Rod will see your girl home sometime tomorrow,” Billy prodded.
George woke up with the suddenness of an animal that had been poked once too often and unwound from the bar stool. He towered over Billy and Rod. Still hunched, he stood in the way a man does when he is guarding his vitals from attack.
“Don’t call me that.”
“What, Four-eyes?”
Evelyn heaved at Billy’s arm trying to draw her husband away. Her high voice squeaked, “Now, Billy, now Billy, we was having such a nice time.”
“You know what, Four-eyes? Your daddy hustled you off to that fancy-dancy school before I could return the black eye you give me in grade school. And I got the strap, too, for fighting with Jacques St. Julien’s kid. Daddy beat the shit out of me over you, Four-eyes. Son of the Capitaine and afraid to show his face in Joe’s Lounge up ’til now, eh, candy-ass.”
George did not reply. One of his long arms shot out at waist level and cut off Billy’s air with a blow to the stomach.
> “No, no, no! No fighting in Joe’s Lounge! What for you want to break up my place?” Hippolyte Huval shimmied around the bar. “Your drinks are free, George. Now take your jolie blonde back up da hill. Your daddies would be mad over dis, yeah.”
Rodney stepped up to George while Billy vomited on a table. George’s arm swung up this time, and Rodney caught it square on the chin.
“Dere’s more Patouts in dis room den you can take, Georgie. Come on now.”
“Don’t call me that, Hippo.” George swayed and glowered over the fat man.
“Sure, George. Sure t’ing, Mr. St. Julien. Come now,” implored Hippolyte, but he was too late.
Suzanne pointed frantically to a man, a slimmer, younger version of Billy and Rod, who had climbed up on the bar. He lowered a beer bottle toward George’s skull, but George jerked back at the last second and caught the blow on the rim of his glasses. The bridge broke, and the two halves dangled. Blindly, George cleared the bar of his opponent and quite a bit of glassware, but at least he backed up as Suzanne dragged on one arm and Hippo dragged on the other. They rushed out the side door before any more Patouts could make their way over the fallen bodies and broken glass.
“Where’s your car, cher?” Hippo turned a key in the exit door.
“Down on Main.”
“Dis here’s a fire door. I got to open it soon. Can you get him dere fast?”
“Sure. Thanks, Mr. Hippo. Come on, George. Want to run with me, George?”
Suzanne held out her hand. It took a minute for her to grasp that George could not see the help she offered. She led the way holding on to his arm, forcing him to a staggering jog down the alley running parallel to Front Street. Should have worn the low heels, should have worn the low heels, her shoes tapped out in the gravel. They reached the car, and she desperately searched George’s pockets for the keys. He grinned stupidly at the body contact as if she were feeling him up instead of trying to escape an angry mob. Keys finally in hand, Suzanne opened the door and sort of folded George into the passenger seat. She exceeded the speed limit all the way home.
George’s height presented another problem when they got back to the Hill, but with him doubled over like an old man leaning on a short crutch, she did manage to get up the stairs. Suzanne let George fall face up on his bed. He grinned at her foolishly again.
“Well, I’m not undressing you, George St. Julien. You were very bad!”
“Bad,” he echoed with some satisfaction. “Haven’t had so much fun since I punched out that dumb shit in the second grade. Maybe it will all work out. Maybe.”
He still grinned as Suzanne turned out the light and shut his door.
Chapter Seven
Suzanne’s story
On Sunday morning, determined not to nursemaid George, Suzanne purposely fried bacon, knowing how nauseating that smell could be to a person with a hangover. Later though, when she heard him blundering blindly into the furniture in his room, she had pity on him and filled a cup with black coffee and a palm with aspirin. She went into his room without knocking, partly because her hands were full and partly because she doubted if George could find the door.
He stopped groping in the pine dresser where men’s white briefs and balls of matched socks escaped over the edge.
“Coffee and aspirin, though you don’t deserve them,” she stated, setting the cup on the night table.
George blinked at her with his pale gray, bloodshot eyes. Without his dark-framed glasses, his face possessed a terribly vulnerable look despite an impressive dark stubble on his chin. The bridge of his nose had purpled and swollen, and he kept brushing his hair out of his eyes. For the first time, she noticed he’d abandoned the greasy hair cream, but had not quite mastered gel and hairspray. In fact, he must have had his hair styled in the city prior to their date. The cut looked fresh and far less dorky than his usual old-fashioned do. With too much on her mind last night to notice, she could hardly admire the remains of the styling now.
“Would you help me find my spare glasses?” he asked, his voice gravelly.
“Sure. Where are they?”
“In the top drawer somewhere.”
She found them in a plastic case under a pile of neatly folded, white v-neck T-shirts. Athletic glasses in safety frames, they did nothing for George’s looks. If anything, they were uglier than the black-rimmed ones he usually wore.
As he slipped them on, he said completely deadpan, “May I tell everyone you’ve been in my drawers?”
By the time she realized the always-serious George Washington St. Julien had been joking and reformed her appalled stare turned to a smile, he’d turned to the coffee and aspirin.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Suzanne replied lamely.
George shrugged with his back toward her. “I think I’ll take a cold bath,” he mumbled. Taking the hint, she left.
****
The first Sunday in February turned out to be a lovely day, more spring than winter. Suzanne missed the flock of robins that had moved farther north when nature gave them this little nudge in the right direction. No one had brought in Saturday’s mail or Sunday’s newspaper. Savoring the day, she walked slowly down the long drive and back even more slowly as she sorted through the envelopes. Most were for George or Occupant, naturally.
Her mother had written a long letter full of questions about the antiques. Mom hinted that just maybe, Dad could be persuaded to make a short trip to Louisiana when the azaleas bloomed. Dad did love a beautiful garden.
Dr. Dumont sent a timetable concerning her project and a scribbled note saying, “C’est la vie. Perhaps, Port Jefferson has other entertainment to offer.” Tempting, very tempting to send her advisor an e-mail about the Patout boys and Joe’s Lounge. Maybe she would do that this afternoon. She found nothing from Paul, thank God. When she returned to the kitchen, George sat eating dry toast and hunched over another cup of black brew.
“You make good coffee. Birdie’s is always really strong because my father preferred it that way.”
“Despite what you said last night, I make great bacon and eggs, too.”
He turned a little green when she pointed to the bacon. “No, thanks. Not today.”
“The mail.” Suzanne placed his letters on the table.
He rummaged through the flyers. A business envelope addressed in dark lead pencil and bearing no return address fell out of the folds. “This is for you.”
She drew her fingers back as if he handed her a red-hot poker. “Trash that, please.”
Obediently, George put it in the waste can with the rest of the junk mail. They drank coffee and shared the Sunday paper in a very relaxed and domestic way. George’s color improved as the double dose of aspirin took effect. Good a time as any to break bad news.
“George,” she began, very seriously.
“Suzanne,” he said with a hint of passion. This time she could tell he jested.
“This is serious, Mr. St. Julien,” she snapped.
George put his hands over his ears.
“About your mother’s silver. Most of it is, well, not as described.”
“Not as described?” He gave her a blank stare.
“It’s plated, not sterling, which considerably reduces its value, and some of it isn’t even Victorian.”
George took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes as if he did not want to look at the facts.
“I believe your mother was conned.”
“No one ever conned my mother except my father when she married him!” He hit the table with his fist, and coffee sloshed from the cups onto the newspaper.
“George.” Suzanne covered his fist with her hand, and his fingers relaxed. “Your mother was very ill, probably taking drug therapy, when all the switches occurred. It’s very possible her judgment was impaired, or she might have been outright swindled. Perhaps, the dealer borrowed a piece and switched it without her knowledge.”
“Randy Royal.” His fist clenched again. “Always coming he
re when I was gone, always bothering her when the only person she should have been seeing was Doc Sonny.”
Pale gray eyes could look fairly murderous, she thought. “George, George.” Suzanne stroked his arm, and the glare in his eyes changed to a gleam.
“You still have Magnolia Hill. At first, I thought your mother had assembled all the antiques, but the documentation tells me most of it belonged to the Jeffersons and is original to the house. Even the gothic bedroom set was purchased by the first St. Juliens to live here. Your mother seems to have done the Eastlake parlor, your room and her own. Her major contribution came in creating the setting, the wallpapers and light fixtures, bringing it all together. Tourists love original furnishings. I’m going to write a fabulous history of the Hill that will bring them in droves.”
“What about the silver? What about Randy Royal?”
“I’m not sure we can do anything without dragging your mother’s reputation through the dirt, too. She isn’t here to defend herself, and Royal could claim collusion. It won’t help the tourist trade any if the work ‘fake’ is mentioned. I’ll have to consult with Dr. Dumont about how to handle this. Meanwhile, you should confess that a ‘mistake’ has been made to your insurance company and lower your coverage.”
“Goddamn. I always believed if things got rough enough, I could sell some of the silver. I wouldn’t touch it while Mother was alive, and all those medical bills rolled in. Suzanne, it’s all I can do to meet the mortgages, pay the heating and cooling, and put something toward the hospital debt. If Doc Sonny had taken what was due to him, I’d have gone under before she died.”
Suzanne had never witnessed such personal despair before, not even in her own face when Barry Cashman left her for Beth Ann. Compared to this, all her problems seemed petty. And that’s why she agreed so easily to the next thing George said.
“Could you delay telling anyone about this for a week or two, just until I get my act together?”
“Of course,” she said and squeezed his hand. “Of course.” She had no idea then what an act that would be.