The Wedding Tree

by Robin Wells

  “You think anything happens in this town that Gertie don’t find out about?”

  “Pshaw.”

  I pulled up a chair for Hope, then sat down beside Buster.

  Willard raised his hand. “Myrtle, darlin’, would you bring me a piece of that pie? And don’ you go lecturin’ me or lettin’ on to Gertie.”

  “I won’t play no part in you killin’ yourself. I’ve got some nonfat yogurt in the back if you want somethin’ sweet.”

  “Hell,” he grumbled. “Can’t get away with nothin’. My wife has spies all over town.”

  After the waitress brought the yogurt, a Danish for Buster (who apparently had no wife watching his diet), and coffee for Hope and me, I started in again. “Were you all around during the late forties?”

  “Hell, we’ve been here all our lives.” Buster took a swig of coffee. “Both of us have.”

  “Any idea who Edsel Wortner was?”

  Both men nodded. “He was a older German guy,” Willard said. “Some folks thought he was a spy during the war. Rumor had it he was sent to an internment camp.”

  “What happened to his house?” I asked. “The records at the courthouse show he still owned it in 1948.”

  “His daughter rented it out,” Willard said. “It was always run-down and trashy-looking.”

  “Do you remember who lived there in September of 1948?”

  “Ha! I can’t even remember where I lived in September 1948.” Buster laughed loudly at his own joke.

  “Why do you want to know?” asked Willard. He spit a mouthful of tobacco into a coffee can sitting on the table, wiped his mouth with the back of his red-splotched hand, then spooned a huge scoop of yogurt into his mouth.

  “My great-uncle had a job that involved a lot of travel, and he had a lady friend here,” Hope said. We’d discussed this on the trip from the courthouse; I’d advised Hope that older folks in Mississippi were so intrinsically polite they might be reluctant to talk about the scandalous behavior of a young woman’s direct ancestor, so she might get better results framing the story around a more distant relative. She pulled out a picture of her grandfather—one of the few she’d found that fully showed his face. It showed a young man gazing at the camera with a tender expression—no doubt because he was in love with the photographer. “He was a drinker and a rounder. The lady ended up having his baby.”

  “My, my, my—a real soap opera of a situation,” Willard said.

  Hope nodded. “We’re trying to find out what happened to the baby. The problem is, we don’t know the mother’s name. When we found the dog tag with the address, well, we thought it might be a clue.”

  Buster squinted at the photo. “I don’t recognize him.”

  Willard took the photo, looked at it, and shook his head. “I’ll tell you who might—Darlene Lynch. She’s in the nursing home on Elm Street.”

  “Yeah.” Buster nodded. “Darlene might know.”

  “She was the hostess at the Red Lantern honky-tonk out on the highway,” Willard said.

  “What’s the connection to the Wortner place?” I asked.

  “It was kind of a flop house within walking distance of the bar,” Buster explained. “When customers were too drunk to go home or needed a private place to hoochy-cooch . . .” He cast Hope an apologetic look. “Pardon my French, ma’am. Anyway, the Red Lantern put ’em up there. For a fee, of course.”

  “Is Darlene still in her right mind?” I asked.

  “Don’t rightly know. Probably as right as it ever was.” Willard looked at Buster, who let out a loud guffaw. “Just know she’ll be easy to spot. She’s always had a tower of flame-red hair.”

  Hope’s face lit up. “Thank you. Thank you very much!”

  It worried me, how optimistic Hope looked. She seemed to think this was all going to work out.

  I had a bad feeling that even if we got the information we wanted, She would end up disappointed or heartbroken.

  A separate, self-protective part of my brain sent up a warning flare. Maybe I should be worrying about just how much I was worrying about Hope.

  • • •

  The nursing home smelled like canned peas, urine, and floral air freshener. We were told that Darlene was in the middle of playing spades in the activity room. An aide went to ask her if she wanted to see visitors, and came back with word that we were to wait until the game was over. Hope and I cooled our heels in the lobby for twenty minutes.

  Finally an aide wheeled in an elderly woman with a heavily sprayed beehive of bright red hair. She wore a boldly flowered, muumuu-looking thing that showed a disconcerting amount of crepey décolletage.

  I introduced Hope and myself. “How do you do,” she said, extending her hand to me with the palm down, as if she expected me to kiss it. Not sure what to do, I took it and bent over it. Hope extended her hand, too, but Darlene ignored it.

  “We were wondering if you knew this man.” Hope handed her the photo of her grandfather.

  She looked at it for a long moment, like a poker player regarding her cards. “Who is this to you?”

  “He’s my great-uncle,” Hope said. “We understand he got a girl pregnant, and we were wondering what happened to the baby.”

  “Ah.” She handed the photo back to her. “And why do you want to know?”

  Hope briefly explained, substituting “great-aunt” for “grandmother” and leaving out the part about the suitcase. “So . . . can you help us?”

  “With what, dear?”

  Hope glanced at me, her optimism visibly dimmed. “With what really happened to the baby.”

  She cut her eyes away in a cagey manner. “Well, now, I don’t want to betray any confidences.”

  I leaned forward. “Please, Miss Darlene. It would mean a great deal to her aunt. She’s very elderly, and she says she can’t die in peace until she knows what happened to her late husband’s baby.”

  She cocked her head to the side. A loose piece of skin under her chin wagged like a turkey’s wattle. “Elderly, huh? I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for the elderly.”

  I suppressed a smile. She was probably in her late eighties, but apparently didn’t think she herself fell into the category.

  She narrowed her already narrow eyes. “You say your uncle is dead?”

  Hope nodded.

  “Well, in that case, I suppose I might be persuaded to tell you what I know.” She gave me a long look, the kind that had subtext. “Let’s go outside so I can have a smoke.”

  It took a few moments to get an aide to punch in the code that allowed us to exit. I pushed Miss Darlene’s wheelchair out to an ash can beside a concrete bench by the parking lot. She drew a Virginia Slim out of a jeweled cigarette case hidden in a pocket of her muumuu. I took the lighter from her and lit her cigarette.

  “Thank you,” she said, batting her eyes at me and drawing a deep drag.

  “Can you tell us about the woman and the baby?” Hope prompted.

  “I’m not sure I can exactly remember.” Miss Darlene cast me another sidelong glance.

  I pulled out my wallet and took out two twenties. “Perhaps this will jog your memory.”

  She gave me a sly smile. “It might be starting to come back to me.”

  I peeled off another bill. Miss Darlene took all three, snaked them into her wrinkled décolletage, and blew out a mouthful of smoke. “First of all, the baby wasn’t his.”

  Hope’s eyes flew wide.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah. Real sure. Joan was pregnant before she ever met the man in your photo.”

  “Joan—that’s the name of the mother?”

  She nodded. “Joan Johnson. She was a waitress at the Red Lantern. She’d had an affair with a smooth-talking huckster a month earlier. He said he sold oil field equipment, and he scammed Tommy Joe Har
mon out of nearly four thousand dollars—which was a lot of money back then, let me tell you—and then he up and left town.” She took another drag from her cigarette. “A month later, Joan finds out she’s in a motherly way.”

  She shook her head and blew out a smoke ring. “That Joan—’bout as gullible a girl as you could find. That shyster promised to take her to Paris. Paris! Can you imagine fallin’ for a line like that? She’d even asked me if I’d watch her dog while she was gone. She had this scraggly little mutt she loved more than life itself.”

  She shook her head. “Anyway, Joan was in a mell of a hess, as we used to say, when she found out she was pregnant. She didn’t have people.”

  Hope’s forehead wrinkled. “People?”

  “Family. Her people had all moved away or died off. She was a sweet girl—she had a real soft heart. Little soft in the head, too, I think. If you saw the way she carried on about her mutt, you’d know for sure she was a mite pixilated.” She pointed to her head.

  “Anyway. This man—name was Charlie; I called him Charlie Horse, because he always wore such a long face—starts comin’ to the bar pretty regular, every couple of weeks or so. He’s a woebegone-lookin’ fella. Don’t know as I ever saw such a hangdog face in my life.”

  I pictured the man in the photo with his heart in his eyes. I could just imagine how he’d look if that heart had been broken.

  “You remembered his name,” Hope said, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “Honey, I remember everything that happened. He and Joan had one of the strangest stories you ever heard.” She took another pull on her cigarette.

  “Anyway, Joan hated to see folks lookin’ sad. We all did. Customers down in the dumps never left good tips, and they have a way of dragging down the mood of the whole place. But that wasn’t why Joan chatted him up. Like I said, she had a soft heart. It was her downfall, really, being that soft. She said he seemed lonely. So they started talking, and before you know it, she’s told him her situation.

  “Well, Charlie offered to help her out. He said he’d take care of her when she started to show and couldn’t work—that he’d pay her rent and buy her groceries and pay for the doctor.”

  “So they had an affair?” I asked.

  “No. That’s the weird part. He just wanted the baby. Said he was gonna tell his wife he’d had an affair and gotten a girl pregnant, and he wanted to bring the baby home and have his wife raise it as some kind of punishment or payback or some such. He had this wild scheme about his wife padding her stomach and tricking everyone into thinking she was pregnant herself.”

  A mellow musical gong sounded, like the recorded dinner announcement on a cruise ship.

  “That’s lunch,” Miss Darlene said. “I’ve gotta go in if I don’t want to miss out.”

  “We won’t keep you but another moment,” I said. “So what finally happened?”

  “Well, Joan worked at the bar until the beginning of the sixth month, and then Hank—he was the owner; kind of a gorilla, but not as bad as some I’ve known—told her she had to quit. Said she was bad for business, too much a reminder of the wages of sin. The boardinghouse she lived in kicked her out, too. Life was hard on unmarried pregnant girls back then.” She took another toke of her Virginia Slim.

  “Hank had this dive of a house he rented for special customers to use, if you get my drift, and Charlie sublet it for Joan.”

  “He treated her well?” Hope asked.

  “Oh yeah. He was real good to her—paid for her food, maternity clothes, and everything else. Took her dog to the vet and bought it a collar with her new address on the tag because that mutt was always gettin’ lost. He even bought her a new set of luggage so she could move somewhere else after everything was all over. Toward the end of her pregnancy, he even paid a woman to cook and clean and take care of her after she had the baby. Beulah was her name.”

  Darlene paused as a woman in blue scrubs came out the door. “Charlie would visit Joan every Friday. He’d drink and caterwaul about how his wife was cold and mean to him. Joan realized he didn’t really want the baby. He only wanted to make his wife jealous, and the wife wasn’t actin’ jealous; she just acted as if she despised him. He’d talk about his wife and cry. He was a weepy drunk.”

  She took another pull off her cigarette. “Well, as Joan’s belly got bigger and bigger, the baby started to seem more an’ more real. Joan started thinkin’ about the poor little thing, an’ she decided she didn’t want a sad-sack crazy man and a woman who didn’t want his baby to be raisin’ it. But she needed financing, to make it through the pregnancy, so she led Charlie on—and on the side, she started makin’ adoption arrangements with a local doctor. He found a couple in Alabama willing to pay good money for the baby. She’d get a lump sum and the doctor would get a nice fat finder’s fee.”

  Darlene inhaled a deep lungful of smoke. “By then, Charlie had moved to Jackson with his wife, and he was comin’ by every Tuesday and Thursday evening. Joan delivered the baby at home on a Wednesday night, and the doctor whisked the baby out of state. Joan didn’t call Charlie like she’d promised she would when the baby came. Instead, the next night when he was due to visit, she made sure she had another waitress, Sarah, and her husband, Ben, with her, as well as Beulah. She was worried what Charlie would do when he found out the baby was gone.”

  “Oh, wow,” Hope whispered.

  “It’s a good thing she had people with her, because when Joan broke the news, well, Charlie went crazy. Not violent crazy, just crazy crazy. They say he let out a loud yowl, fell to his knees, and rolled around on the floor, then got up and paced and cried, cried and paced. Sarah’s husband poured him glass after glass of bourbon until Charlie was in a stupor.

  “Finally, around three in the morning, he left the house. He wasn’t drivin’ too good. Sarah and Ben left shortly thereafter. They found Charlie standin’ on the side of the road, a pistol in his hand.”

  “Oh no!” Hope murmured.

  “Apparently he’d accidentally run over Joan’s dog. The poor thing wasn’t dead, but he was in bad shape, so Charlie had gotten his pistol out of the car and shot it to put it out of its misery. Ben grabbed the gun and put it in his own car. He said he was afraid Charlie might try to kill himself.

  “Sarah and Ben drove on home, but Charlie wrapped that dog in a baby blanket—apparently he had one in the trunk for takin’ the baby home—then turned around an’ carried it up to Joan’s front door. Well, Joan was hysterical. She thought he’d killed her dog out of spite, to get even with her. She was scared he’d come back to kill her. Charlie tried to explain that he was sorry as sorry could be, an’ that he’d come back just to apologize, an’ he figured she’d want to bury her dog, but he was drunk an’ not makin’ all that much sense, an’ Joan was terrified.

  “To make him go away, Beulah hauled out one of the brand-new suitcases Charlie had bought for Joan. She gave it to him an’ said, ‘Bury the dog in this.’ Charlie left, an’ Joan hightailed it out of state the next mornin’, despite just birthin’ a baby two days afore. Never saw nor heard of either one again.”

  The musical gong sounded again.

  “That’s last call.” Darlene pulled her cigarette from the holder, snuffed it out in the sand on the concrete ash can, then put the holder in a pocket hidden in the side of her muumuu. “I gotta go on in or I’ll miss a meal. The food’s not that great, but I won’ be cheated out of anything I’m due.”

  I had a feeling she’d had a life of being cheated—and the person who’d probably cheated her the most was herself.

  “Thank you for talking to us.” I pulled out another twenty and handed it to her.

  “My pleasure. Thank you kindly.” She took the bill and stuffed it in her bosom. “My goodness, it’s been a while since I’ve been around a real gentleman!” She gave me a coquettish little wink, and for half a second, I could see her as she must
have been back in the day—all womanly wiles and compliments and southern charm, parting men from their money easy as a comb parts hair.

  45

  adelaide

  I sat there, my hands limp in my lap, as Matt and Hope finished telling me all that they’d learned in Mississippi. Relief flowed through me like some kind of intravenous painkiller. Charlie hadn’t killed that baby after all! He’d never even seen it. It wasn’t even his! And that blood on his clothes—it had belonged to the woman’s dog. And the pistol was missing because that man Ben had taken it.

  I’d no sooner tasted the sweetness of relief than regret shoved its ugly snout in my face. Oh, heavens. I’d been so unfair to Charlie. So hideously, horribly unfair!

  Charlie had tried to tell me, hadn’t he? He’d tried to tell me afterward, but I was too angry—angry and disgusted and revolted. I’d just turned away.

  Oh, I should have known he couldn’t do such a thing! I should have been more sensitive! But I’d been too wrapped up in my own heartache to think about his. I must have spoken out loud, because Hope tried to console me, but the memories were crowding in, and I couldn’t hear anything except my own thoughts.

  1948

  I’d hated lying and pretending to be pregnant, but by the time the baby was due, I felt like I was having a baby. I was looking forward to having a new little life to nurture. I’d been hopeful that it could be a new beginning for Charlie and me.

  But when there was no baby, it all boiled up inside me again, worse than ever. All that Charlie had put me through, forcing me to deceive my friends and family like that! I felt like such a wretchful fraud.

  Of course, he must have felt that way, too, when he married me and pretended Becky was his—but that had been a good thing, a happy thing. He’d gained a child.

  I had no one to talk to about it but Charlie—and I hated him. I deplore having to admit it—hate is the worst sin, isn’t it?—but I did. It churned in my belly like battery acid. And I’m so sorry for it! But for months there, I just hated him.