by Donis Casey
Blanche had to think fast. She volunteered to spend a month helping the first grade teacher, Mrs. Trompler, ready her classroom and prepare lessons in the mornings before school started. After all, she told her mother, it was so much easier to get to school from Alice’s house in town, rather than have to make that two-mile hike so early in the morning.
She didn’t know how long she would be able to get away with her ruse before her mother smelled a rat. Her parents had reared ten children and Blanche was the eighth, which put her at quite a disadvantage. Her mother had already heard every lie and figured out every sneaky trick an adolescent could devise.
Blanche had never known she was capable of feeling such desperate, wild longing. Was it love? What else could it be? Surely not simple lust for adventure. No, she had never met anyone as sophisticated as Graham Peyton, and she was never likely to again. It was love for sure.
They made their plan. Another of Blanche’s married sisters, Ruth, lived with her husband and their elderly benefactor in an enormous confection of a house on the northern outskirts of town. Blanche knew it wouldn’t be much longer before her mother saw through her, so she and Graham had to put their plan into action quickly. She told her mother that Alice didn’t need her anymore and she didn’t care to outstay her welcome, so could she please spend a few nights at Ruth’s place, at least until she finished off her job as Mrs. Trompler’s aide? Just till the end of the week. Ruth was fine with it since her husband had pulled a month’s night duty as a policeman in the neighboring town of Muskogee.
Her mother agreed. It would have been the perfect plan but for one snag. Blanche’s younger sister Sophronia wanted to join her at Ruth’s, and Blanche could not come up with one convincing argument as to why she should not. Their mother thought it was a great idea.
Blanche managed to get away long enough to tell Graham the bad news. She was practically in tears, but Graham thought it was funny. “That just makes your getaway more exciting, toots. Now, listen. Here’s what we’re going to do.”
~Determined to embark on a life of excitement
and adventure, Blanche does a midnight flit.~
Fourteen-year-old Sophronia Tucker was as straightforward and open as Blanche was secretive. But Sophronia knew her older sister better than anyone in the world. There was only a year’s difference in their ages, after all. As soon as the two girls settled into the ground floor bedroom in Ruth’s big house, Sophronia knew something was up. In the first place, they were only going to be at Ruth’s house on the edge of town for a few nights, but Blanche had brought enough clothes for a month. Sophronia asked Blanche about it, but Blanche snorted and icily informed her that you never knew when an occasion might arise, and it was best to be prepared.
Sophronia grudgingly bought it. Blanche had always been something of a clotheshorse. Still…she couldn’t put her finger on it. There was something furtive about Blanche at supper that evening, and after they went to bed, Sophronia could have sworn that Blanche was just pretending to have fallen asleep a mere ten minutes after lights out.
But sleep overtook Sophronia before she could wonder about it for long.
~As Mark Twain said, “Everyone is a moon, and has
a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”~
Sophronia woke with a start. The moon was shining through the open window, two hands above the horizon. Sophronia figured she had been asleep for about an hour.
It was cold. She flopped over onto her back and realized that she was alone in the double bed. Where was Blanche? The window was open and her bedmate was gone. No wonder she was cold. Sophronia forced a disgusted breath and sat up. She was not going to be able to go back to sleep until she located Blanche. She climbed out of bed, slid her feet into her knitted booties, and threw a shawl over her shoulders before slipping out of the room and down the hall to the bathroom. She could tell before she had traversed ten feet that Blanche was not there. The door was standing open and the light bulb hanging from the ceiling was unlit. Sophronia went back to her room to ponder her next move. She stood beside the bedroom door for a moment, thinking, until it slowly dawned on her that she was not seeing Blanche’s carpetbag in its accustomed place on top of the bureau.
Sophronia’s heart leaped into her mouth. She pulled open the bureau drawer where Blanche had stored the magazines she had brought with her. Empty.
Sophronia rushed to the window and looked out onto the night. Not that she expected to see anything, but her feet seemed to move of their own accord. Far across the long front yard, Blanche’s thin, dark-haired figure stood with the carpetbag in her hand and her back to the house, facing the road that led out of town. Before it quite registered on Sophronia what was happening, a convertible roadster pulled up beside Blanche. It was too dark to see the driver clearly, just that he was a man in a white straw hat staring determinedly at the road before him. Blanche tossed her bag into the back.
“Blanche,” Sophronia cried, and Blanche started and looked behind her. She lifted a finger to her lips, then climbed into the roadster. The driver pushed the car into gear and took off down the road. He never turned his head.
~The devil comes disguised
as everything you ever wanted.~
“She saw us, she saw us, Graham! My sister Ruth will call the sheriff! They’ll be after us!”
“Don’t worry, angel. We’ll be long gone before they can figure out what happened.” He stepped on the gas. The roadster roared forward into the night, and Blanche squealed with delight.
Graham’s giant seven-passenger Pierce-Arrow roadster was unstoppable, even over the rutted dirt roads that Oklahomans euphemistically called “highways.” It took them a mere seven hours to traverse the 140 miles between Boynton and Oklahoma City, and they never had to stop once for a flat tire. Graham had roused the proprietor of a Pure Oil station in Shawnee from his bed in the middle of the night in order to fill the gasoline tank, but they didn’t stop for long. They wanted to put as much distance between themselves and Boynton as they could. Dawn was just breaking over the prairie when Graham finally stopped in Oklahoma City long enough for them to refill the tank and get a bite to eat at a little diner on Twenty-third Street, across from the state capitol building.
The waitress asked Graham what she could get for his daughter. Blanche was mortally offended, but Graham laughed and ordered bacon and eggs and a big stack of pancakes for both of them. When they had made their escape from Boynton, Blanche had been so excited that she thought she would never need to sleep again, but after they left Oklahoma City she slept for a few hours in the Pierce-Arrow’s spacious back seat.
West of Oklahoma City, the aspect of the country changed. There were few rolling hills and little forest land here, mostly flat, featureless grassland as far as the eye could see, broken only by an occasional farm outlined by a windbreak of scrubby trees. The road was dusty and difficult and the only easy going came when they drove through one small backwater town or another. Paved streets were rare, but at least most towns could afford to grade their roads every once in a while.
Blanche slept through much of the endless trip through western Oklahoma, but perked up considerably when they reached New Mexico and the country changed again, turning into a strange, arid landscape without grass, but covered with small, spiky plants and miles of barbed-wire fence that stretched endlessly until it disappeared over the horizon. Sometimes she caught a glimpse of a herd of beautiful deerlike animals that Graham called “pronghorns,” but before she had time to admire their graceful forms, they would bound away from the road and the roar of the automobile.
In order to put distance between Blanche’s old life and her new, Graham stopped only for meals and to let Blanche out of the auto long enough to relieve herself behind a scrubby mesquite or yucca. They would drive into the night, either stopping in some forlorn little New Mexico town with a boardinghouse, or if no town presented itself, pull
off the road and camp in the car. Blanche never minded sleeping under the stars, talking with Graham for hours, making plans for their life together.
Albuquerque was as foreign to her as China. The pueblo-style buildings around the town square were flat-roofed, with long portales stretching along the facades, and adobe benches called bancos built into the walls. Graham drove directly through the central square and pulled up at the grand entrance to the Alvarado Hotel, a sprawling red-and-white Fred Harvey hotel located next the railroad station. He helped her out of the auto and she followed him into the lobby, trying not to stare like a rube. She had never seen such a fancy hotel, even the time she had gone with her parents to a Grange convention in Tulsa. The large lobby was beautifully decorated in a Spanish and Indian style, with a beamed ceiling, carved wooden furniture, huge potted desert plants. Colorful Indian rugs lay on the saltillo tile floors and hung from the walls.
Graham led her to the carved cedar registration desk, where a tall, black-haired clerk in a red vest and black bow tie looked up and broke into a grin.
“Hello, Mr. Peyton. Welcome back. Your regular room is made up and ready for you.” The clerk didn’t spare a glance for Blanche. Graham didn’t introduce her, or ask for a second room, either. She had been traveling with Graham for more than a week. When they weren’t camping out, Graham had paid for separate rooms in the various inns and boardinghouses where they had stayed. Until now. Blanche felt her heart quicken. She said nothing.
Graham accepted a key from the clerk. “Our luggage is in the trunk, Bernardo.”
“Allow me to escort you.” Bernardo snapped his fingers at a liveried bellhop, who scurried out the front door.
Blanche was impressed.
Graham took her arm as Bernardo led them through the lobby and down a long, carpeted hallway to a door at the end. Blanche whispered as they walked, “You have a regular room? You must come here a lot.”
“This is my regular stop when I make the drive between New York and Los Angeles. I spend a lot of cabbage here and send a lot of business their way, so it’s in their interest to treat me right.”
Bernardo stopped in front of a door at the end of the hall. He stood aside as Graham gestured for her to enter first.
She half expected a suite, but it was just one large room with a door that led to a private patio in the back. One large room, one large bed.
Once Bernardo had made his exit, his palm well-greased, Blanche turned and raised an eyebrow at Graham.
Question unasked, but question answered. “Darling,” Graham said, “this week that I have spent traveling with you has been the happiest of my life. By this time next week we’ll be married, but I don’t want to wait another day to begin the rest of my life with you. I think of us as married already. But I won’t force you to do anything you don’t want.”
“Oh, Graham, I feel exactly the same way. I love you so much. I know we’re already married in the eyes of God.”
He chuckled. “You know it, honey. I’d take you to the courthouse right this minute, but California is going to be our home. I think it would be better to do the deed there, among all our friends. Well, my friends. But believe me, they’ll be your friends too.”
~It is the dawn of the morning after…
and the point of no return.~
Blanche had spent her entire life on a farm, so the ways of males and females were not a mystery to her. Her older sisters had seemed so pleased with their husbands that Blanche had been looking forward to the glories of the bedroom for a long time. But all in all, it was a disappointment. To begin with, it hurt. Still, it was all over very quickly, and it was entirely wonderful to stay in fancy hotels and be waited on hand and foot. Graham only went first class. She was going to be the wife of a very wealthy and important man.
The next morning Graham ordered room service and she lay in bed and ate fresh peaches with clotted cream and flaky little biscuits called “scones” off of china plates. Then he took her to the square and bought her a turquoise-and-silver necklace before they took off down the road, toward California.
When they reached Flagstaff, Graham turned south and they wound through steep mountain roads to Prescott, where he rented another fancy room in the Hotel Vendome on Cortez Street, just off the tree-shaded town square. The hotel was smaller than the Alvarado but just as classy, a two-story red brick building with wraparound porches on both stories.
The man at the desk didn’t know Graham, but that didn’t matter after Graham asked for the best room they had and paid cash in advance. Then he took Blanche shopping at J. Goldwater and Bros. General Merchandise.
He showered her with gifts. She had never in her life owned such luscious clothing and jewelry. When she looked at herself in the full-length mirror, rouged and painted, dressed in a gray serge tunic embroidered with intricate Russian designs, and saw a wildly beautiful, grown-up woman looking back at her, it wasn’t hard for her to decide that in order to spend her life with this man she could put up with a few minutes of discomfort every night.
When they got back to the room late in the afternoon, Graham left her while he conducted some business, giving her time to unwrap her gifts and take a nap before supper. When he returned, it was heading toward evening. She had just gotten back to the room after a long, luxurious bath in the big tiled bathroom down the hall.
She was combing out her freshly washed hair in front of the mirror. He came up behind her and studied her reflection with approval.
“Now, honey, I want you to don your ritziest duds tonight. I just met up with a friend of mine from Hollywood who’s here to scout out a location for a William S. Hart oater. I told him I’m traveling with a future star and he wants to meet you. This one-horse town ain’t exactly the Big Apple but there’s an eatery downtown that won’t put us to shame. We’re going to meet him there at eight o’clock.”
Blanche wasn’t completely sure what he just said, but she got the gist. Dress up, go out to eat at a nice restaurant, meet someone important in the motion picture industry who just happened to be in Arizona at the same time they were.
She picked out a simple black silk jersey dress that had been stenciled with Cubist designs around the bodice and scalloped hem.
“You look swell, honey. Really hotsy-totsy! You’ll have old Schilling eating out of your hand.” He ran his hands down her back and gave her a lingering kiss. He was breathing heavily when he pushed away. “No time for that right now. But we’ll have us a time tonight.”
Blanche was not as happy about that pronouncement as she was about a fancy dinner with a movie mogul.
~Prey to his avaricious nature,
Graham seeks out an old crony.~
Darkness had fallen by the time they left the hotel on foot. They walked around the square to South Montezuma Street, which was bustling with noisy life. Unfortunately, it was not the kind of high-class activity Blanche was expecting. In spite of the fact that the entire street was lined with restaurants and ice cream parlors, the sidewalk was bristling with disreputable-looking cowboys and miners for whom the newly enacted Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting the production, transport, and sale of intoxicating liquors, seemed to be no more than a suggestion.
“Are all these people drunk?” Blanche was incredulous. “Where did so many people get moonshine and why ain’t they all arrested?”
“Honey, Arizona has had Prohibition for the last five years, long before the whole country decided to go dry. These folks have had plenty of time to get over the idea.” He made a sweeping gesture that encompassed the entire street. “Most of these ‘soda fountains’ sell liquor out of the back room, and most of the time the sheriff pretty much looks the other way. For a regular monetary consideration, that is.”
She didn’t comment. Over the past weeks on the road, she had seen too many things that were unheard of in her previous life to be much shocked by a li
ttle lawless behavior.
Graham took her into an establishment in the middle of the block called the Palace Restaurant, located on the bottom floor of a two-story gray granite building decorated with ironwork and ornamental bricks. A round medallion bearing the image of a man leaning against a shovel, posed between a bear and a lion, had been impressed into the pediment beside the front door. The dining room was dark, long, and narrow, graced on one side by an ornate mahogany bar which was a remnant, Blanche supposed, of Prescott’s bawdier, pre-Prohibition past. Round tables covered with white tablecloths took up most of the floor. Graham seated her at a table toward the back of the room and Blanche relaxed. The diners were quite respectable-looking. Waiters in long linen aprons bustled back and forth between the tables and the kitchen.
“We’re waiting for a friend,” Graham told the hawk-nosed waiter who appeared with pad in hand to take their order. “We’ll start with some of your special lemonade.”
The lemonade tasted funny, Blanche thought, but Graham assured her that the more she drank, the more she’d like it. She had to admit that was oddly true, even though the taste didn’t improve with longer acquaintance. By the time they were joined by a fat man in a three-piece suit with a gold watch chain stretched across his stomach, Blanche had finished her first glass and started on another and was feeling inexplicably mellow.
Graham introduced the man as Mr. Schilling. Blanche took an instant dislike to him. He had piggy little eyes that narrowed hungrily when he looked at her, as well as a swollen red nose and jowls that jiggled when he talked. When he wasn’t smacking disgustingly over his bloody rare steak, he was paying her far too much attention of a kind she didn’t appreciate. He reached across the corner of the table to touch her when he spoke to her, even though she didn’t try to hide her distaste. She moved her chair closer to Graham.