Mum's the Word

by Dorothy Cannell

  Stepping onto the enclosed staircase, I was sure I had lost my mind, never to be found again. Miss Rumpson slid the door shut and we began our descent. The railing was a slackened rope strung between posts standing top and bottom. The steps were so narrow I didn’t look beyond the one immediately below until suddenly I was in a subterranean room.

  “Great balls of fire,” Miss Rumpson said.

  My sentiments exactly. The place was a combination of the Old Curiosity Shop and Alice’s Wonderland. As far as the candle could see were hand-painted leather trunks and marble columns and statues and clocks and silk screens and stone garden seats and feather fans …

  But no Mangé Meeting.

  “Well, m’dear, if that doesn’t beat all!” Miss Rumpson’s voice bounced off gilded mirrors, over stenciled chests, and under japanned tables. “There’s a coffin down here.”

  Had I not gained so much weight I would have leaped into her arms. “Wh … Where?” No sooner were the words out than I could have kicked myself for my gullibility. She had to be pulling my leg.

  Wrong. Following the trail of her finger I saw a coffin, snuggled into a space between a Victorian love seat and a tallboy.

  The bow on Miss Rumpson’s hat was all of a tremble but she avowed stoutly that we owed it to the health department to investigate.

  “Certainly!” I matched my teeny weeny steps to hers. Had I been right about Divonne? Did she never travel without her coffin? Had six phantom horses dragged this piece of furniture across the river, or had she sat inside and rowed? Surely I wasn’t putting Our Baby in supreme jeopardy by investigating? “Want to do the honours?” I whispered to Miss Rumpson.

  “Not on your Nellie, m’dear.” Ducking behind me, she re-thought cowardice. “Shall we make it a team effort?”

  Certainly not one of my favourite ways to end a day. But musn’t show cowardice while the little one was in its formative months. Setting the candle down on a table, I said, “On our marks, get set, lift!”

  I didn’t expect any body to be inside, truly. It had come to me in a flash that the collecto-maniac responsible for loading up this room must have bought the coffin from an undertaker having a going-out-of-business sale. The lid groaned—or was it Miss Rumpson? We would surely find the space used for storage of a different kind. Sheets was my guess. Those won’t-wear-out ones that have to be ironed.

  Wrong! I couldn’t breathe—partly because Miss Rumpson was clutching my throat. Someone lay against the white satin pillow. Someone I recognized.

  Miss Rumpson screamed loud enough to waken the dead, and the corpse sat up. Whereupon the woman who had braved the skies and waters of the deep to keep her date with destiny dropped her hands from my throat. Picking up the candle, I mustered my voice.

  “Ms. Mary Faith, as you live and breathe!”

  Silence, giving me pause. Was this the woman I had seen on Talk Time with Harvard Smith? Same brown hair beehived in front and folded into a French twist at back. Same wing-tipped glasses. Up close, observation was less kind than the camera. Her complexion looked as though it had been vaccinated and her mouth owed more to lipstick than nature. The woman had an unfortunate fondness for makeup. But how does one ask, without appearing vulgarly curious, what she was doing in a coffin?

  “Oh, my life, I can’t take this!” Hand pressed to her brow, the shoulders of her mouse-coloured angora sweater shaking. “Why me? What sins did I commit other than to be born? Is there to be no peace in my own home, no lid that can ever be closed without reporters hounding me!”

  Her spiraling voice caused the candle flame to waver. The furniture and objects d’art shifted, as if creeping up close to listen; the rest of the room remained cloaked in darkness. We could only see what was under our noses. And strong as the smell of concrete and dust was the smell of time put on hold.

  “We’re not news scavengers! We’re part of the Mangé contingent,” I floundered.

  “Heaven forbid we intrude!” Miss Rumpson, having seemed to shrink, once more filled out my dressing gown and Ernestine’s jacket to the fullest. “No one is a greater believer in the right to die than Marjorie Rumpson!” Her cheeks were going like bellows. “The moment my dear old Mum tells me she’s ready to snuff it, out will come my packets of Mrs. Belcher’s Old Fashioned Sleeping Powders. I’ll stir some in her hot milk, sprinkle the rest on her cinnamon toast and tuck the sweet love in for a last good night!”

  “You fiend!” Mary Faith sat rigid, hands gripping the coffin sides as though they were the rails of a junior bed, her glasses flashing. “You … you parent abuser!”

  No longer did Miss Rumpson look like Nanny, the dear old doggie who took care of the children in Peter Pan. Her cheeks shook as she spoke. “If I were a man, I would call you out, madam.”

  “And I’ll have you know this is not a suicide attempt!” Ms. Faith crushed the satin pillow to her chest and burst into great, wrenching sobs. “I was attempting to lay some ghosts. Mother kept a coffin at every one of her homes. She always said there was nowhere better to make love. When I was little and did something—breathing was enough—to send her into a tornado fit she would lock me in a cupboard. But one time, when she was suffering delusions of royalty and insisting I curtsy every time I came into her presence, I tripped and she shoved me inside the coffin and put a chest on top of the lid, and didn’t let me out until I turned blue.”

  “Awful!” Nothing like this was touched upon in Raising Babies From Seeds. Could any woman turn into a Monster Mommy if the ground were fertile? “Poor Ms. Faith!” I, who carry diffidence to the point of knocking on my own wardrobe door before opening it, knelt on the stone floor and touched her hair. Thickly coated with spray it felt like nylon. I was afraid I might have left a dent as in an underdone cake.

  “My husband Ben would empathize with you. He suffers from claustrophobia. Your mother might have killed you.”

  Ms. Faith let the pillow fall. Her tormented eyes, so like those of her beautiful mother, rested on mine. “I kept imagining I heard her footsteps. I started counting them to stay awake and finally she came. This coffin and the other junk”—she gestured with a ringless hand—“was used in the filming of Melancholy Mansion. Afterward the director Richard Greenburgh indulged Theola’s whim by leaving all the props here. He had purchased this awful house for pennies.”

  “And after the film, he presented it to your mother?” Swept along by the tawdry romance of it all, Miss Rumpson seemed to have forgotten her difference of opinion with Mary Faith.

  “You think the great Richie tied a red bow around Mendenhall and gave it to her as a token of their undying lust?” Mary’s voice emerged in such a shriek I jumped up from the floor. My knees had been killing me anyway. “That’s what Theola claimed! But more of her lies! He intended the house for me, as a birthday present. Begita said so. Now at long last I have accumulated the courage to shake off the ropes of my mother’s domination and claim my heritage. Last week I walked in and took up residence at Mendenhall.”

  “Good for you, m’hearty!” cried Marjorie Rumpson.

  I was remembering my assumption that Jeffries was speaking of Valicia X, when she had said, “Pepys hates that woman.” Maybe the hated woman was Mary Faith.

  “About the Mangés,” Marjorie prodded.

  “An odd group.” Mary stood up in the coffin as gingerly as I had stepped into the orange boat. “I’d met an editor who specialized in cookery books and talked with her about writing a sequel to Monster Mommy: Foods Your Mother Made You Eat.” She held out a hand for me to help her aground, in the manner of Queen Elizabeth stepping off the Britannia.

  “The editor was a Mangé?” I could feel Marjorie’s concern that the meeting would be over before we found the secret room.

  “I don’t know, but shortly afterward I was contacted by the Society—taking me up on my offer to allow the use of Mendenhall for one of the Candidate Investigatures. What cinched the matter was their mention of Pepys and Jeffries.”

  “You
mean …?” I faltered.

  “Mangés, the both. They had always hated me as a child, but, what the heck! I decided to begin anew. Years of servitude to my mother might have brought them to their senses, although they hardly ever see her. They clean up each of her homes before a visit and move on to the next pad. I prayed we could make peace! I have spent the last several weeks trying to learn their language!”

  Mary’s features threatened to break through the heavy pancake makeup. “I tried! By heaven, I tried to bury the past! Those two helped keep me a prisoner when I was a child. Theola only had to say jump and they hopped like rabbits.” Bang went the coffin lid! Her shoulder blades poked through the mouse-coloured sweater. Her glasses slid down her nose and got rammed back into place. “I know!” Mary Faith’s chin lifted and her eyes glinted with fury. “I shall write a book about them!”

  “Excellent!” At Marjorie’s nudging, I explained her plight and asked Mary if she knew in which room the Mangé Meeting was being held.

  “Here is a woman”—I rested my hand on my friend’s shoulder—“who put her mother ahead of her own wants and needs. Heroes don’t come one a penny anymore. We can’t allow them to be downtrodden by mediocrity.”

  Humble yet worthy stood Marjorie Rumpson, candidate for Mangéhood.

  Mary looked at her, conflicting expressions waging war on her face. “Your mother must be a real human being.”

  “She’s the best.” Marjorie stood taller, enclosed in an aura of candlelight. But had she removed herself beyond the range of Ms. Faith’s understanding?

  A pause which threatened to run the duration of my pregnancy. The coffin began to look rather inviting, but finally she said, “I’ll help you.”

  Her uplifted hand silenced our thanks and picked up the candle. “Come!” Mary wended her way through the byways of furniture and other artifacts, her voice flowing over us as we mounted the shadowy stairs. “I’m a person who makes up her mind very quickly. And I’ve decided you two—Ellie and Marjorie, is that right?—were led to the coffin … to this house.”

  I really should repay her kindness by trying to like her. Pity is no basis for any relationship, as I knew well from my fat past.

  Blowing out the flame she stepped into the darkened hall. In silence, we traversed the maroon-and-cream tiles. No creak of doors opening. No one watching other than Dame Gloom from her portrait. Mary sped up the stairs, Marjorie Rumpson and myself trailing after her, as I had trailed after Ben down museum corridors in Boston. “I don’t know what it is about you both—a feeling of sympatique perhaps, but I want you to be my friends. Close friends. You’ll stay on after the others leave and we’ll do things together. Go sightseeing in Peoria, or just scruff around Mud Creek. Do either of you bowl?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “All my life I’ve ached to belong and now it’s all coming true. You don’t just like me because of the book, do you?”

  “Oh, no!” I cried. Marjorie could only pant.

  “You do see how terribly important it is that I am liked for myself, not for printed words on a page? I resent the reality of being fawned over because I’ve written not only a bestseller, but the mega major bestseller. Monster Mommy speaks to what I am, but is not who I am—if you understand me.”

  I was a panting echo of Marjorie. My legs raced on ahead of me—the real me, as I kept my eyes glued to Mary’s head. The red carpeted floor, encircling the staircase well like a race track, had more doors than I had breaths.

  “A reviewer for Panhandle Postscripts wrote of the book that it ‘lifts the veil of human frailty and offers up new insights into the spectrum of elitist depravity, while slicing to the core of …’ ”

  I lost the next word because my shoe came off. Marjorie tripped on it, I got it back on—backwards—while hopping in pursuit of Mary Faith’s offers of friendship.

  “The Daily Dispatch declared it a serious book on a serious subject.”

  Crossing my toes, I said I hadn’t been able to put the book down. True enough considering I hadn’t picked it up; I broke into a lathering sweat for fear of being asked to quote chapter and verse.

  Happily, my panic was put on hold when Mary opened a door standing in plain view. Could this be the secret meeting room? Would Ben be endearingly cross at my barging in on the holy of holies without respect for password or privacy?

  But it was a bathroom—possessed of enough dark oak to have destroyed a forest, a W.C. requiring you stand on the seat to pull the chain, and a bath enclosed like a bed for the dying. Did the Mangé candidates and their luscious leader lurk behind its white sheet? Or were they squeezed into the cupboard under the basin with its brass taps? Hold those horses! Mary Faith was opening the medicine cabinet. Oh, come on now!

  Beckoning Marjorie and me to gather close, she emptied the glass shelves of a bottle of antacid tablets, a gooky tube of toothpaste and assorted deodorants, then pressed a tiny button not much bigger than a screw above the middle shelf. Presto, the back of the cabinet changed from smoked glass to clear; the shelves creating a Venetian blind effect.

  “These modern advances!” Marjorie said.

  Mary shook her beehive head. “Installed for the filming of Melancholy Mansion.”

  We were looking into a windowless room lined with bookshelves. Furniture was limited to a cart, holding a jumbo coffee pot and paper cups, and a table, around which sat the Mangé party. Ben was facing us. His hair was rumpled, his tie over to one side and a pencil dangled cigarette style from his lips. Foolishly I lifted a hand and mouthed “I love you.” Next to him sat Bingo Hoffman, spectacles sliding down his snub eleven-year-old nose, expression one of unmitigated smugness, his Hawaiian shirt a hodgepodge of colour in this room that resembled the inside of a cardboard box. Her back to us, Lois Brown sat, the set of her broad shoulders, her weekly wash-and-set hair marking her as the salt of the earth. A woman who would be baking brownies for the fourth grade, even when she hadn’t had a child in school for years. Next to her was Comte Vincent LeTrompe; there went his hands stacking paper cups and covering them with his serviette.

  “Behold the competition!” I put an arm round Marjorie.

  “What about Pepys and Jeffries?” she said.

  “They told me they weren’t going to sit in on all meetings,” informed Mary. “The woman at the head of the table is the Mangé in charge.”

  No longer could I squint the other way every time Valicia X turned her face our way. Studying her with complete detachment, I conceded her profile was perfection, her figure stunning and her hair marvelous. A pity the woman lacked flaws.

  Rising, she distributed sheets of paper. Ben glanced up only briefly on being handed his. Splendid! Whatever her initial lure, it was over, burned out in the seasoned tenure of misplaced hopes. Was that a line from Monster Mommy, read aloud by Ernestine? Surprising how much I missed her and the Comtesse Solange, after so short an acquaintance.

  Thought screeched to a halt. Mary pressed a second tiny button in the medicine chest and suddenly we could hear what was being said within the inner sanctum. My heart pounded like fists on a door.

  Ben was speaking. “Ms. X, don’t you consider this rule—forbidding any cooking until preparation of the final meal—cruel and unusual punishment?” Elbow on the back of his chair, he raised an inquiring eyebrow.

  Poor darling, the sophisticated Ms. X was bound to be repelled by his ingratiating manner. If only I could break the glass barrier, protect him from himself …

  “Mr. Haskell,” she began. Her voice was like lemonade—a little tart, but refreshing. “I assure you I intend to make all as painless for you as possible.”

  The comte’s hands whipped the serviette away from the paper cups and they were gone. Lois Brown asked a question about a pop quiz.

  “My genius has to be nurtured,” Bingo growled. “I therefore move that we order a king-sized pizza with everything on it. And immediately following I want my mommy to tuck me up in bed and read me a story about Vitamin E.”

  The chil
dish innocence of his words returned me to my senses. “Ms. Faith,” I said, pushing back a wayward strand of hair. “Should we be eavesdropping like this?”

  “Wise words, m’dear!” Marjorie strove to make the edges of her pumpkin jacket meet across her Dunlop pillow bosom. “What say I get in there before Madam Mangé calls it a night. Oh, woe! The longer I wait, the more I don’t believe my excuses for being late.” The ribbon on her hat was a trusty weathervane of her motions. Better get her out of here before she camped on the privy, begging Calgon to take her away from here.

  “Come on, ladies.” Mary’s thin lips broke into a smile. “Remember my immortal words in Chapter Seven?”

  I struggled not to look blank. “Ms. Faith, I won’t presume to paraphrase.”

  Mary would seem to have inadvertently inherited some of her mother’s famed flair for theatrics. Crossing her hands on her angora chest, she lifted her face heavenward and proclaimed, “Truth is an enemy to be embraced.”

  “Well said!” Marjorie dabbed at her eyes.

  Turning off the medicine cabinet, Mary restored it to the natural order and suddenly embraced Marjorie and me. “How good it is to have you both as my dear, dearest friends! As a child, the only arms ever wrapped around me were my own. Now I believe I will never be alone again!”

  The responsibility was awesome. Would I be morally obliged upon leaving here to pack her in a suitcase and take her home? Certainly we had room for her at Merlin’s Court. Under the gruff influence of Dorcas and Jonas she might even blossom into a woman who no longer felt the need to stab with the pen. Who could doubt she was already a woman of courage? She was offering to escort Marjorie to the meeting room and inform Ms. X that should Marjorie Rumpson not be permitted to attend the sessions as a viable candidate, the investigature would have to continue elsewhere.