"Of course. What name did your parents give you? Did it begin with an 'M'?"
Maria nodded. "Marvin."
Hyacinth looked at Frankie. "Did you know when you first met?"
He grinned. "You bet. From the first moment."
"How did you meet?" I asked.
"Bumped into each other at the Roseland Ballroom. July of '39." He sighed and looked down at Maria, who was gazing up at him. "Harry James and Frank Sinatra? Remember?"
She nodded and rested her head on his knee. "How could I forget?"
"She was there with some other gals. But she was the one who stood out."
Maria laughed and put her hand on her bare throat. "I'd forgotten to wear my scarf."
"Scarf?" asked Johnny.
"To cover my Adam's apple. Usually I wear a scarf to hide it but it was warm that night and I just forgot."
Frankie nodded. "And, boy, was I glad. I'd met a few other gals like Maria but we'd never clicked, if you get my point." He puffed on his cigar. "It was like somethin' out of a dream."
She nodded and said, "At first, I wasn't sure he knew but he danced me over to the side of the ballroom and we began to neck. Of course, I was a little nervous. When he kissed my Adam's apple, I knew it was all going to be fine."
I smiled and sighed.
Carter said, "Y'all are making Nick real happy right now." He'd pulled his chair over next to mine and put his hand on my arm.
I nodded. "It's true. I love stories about when couples met."
Maria smiled up at me. "How did you two meet?"
Carter grinned and looked at Johnny. "Across a crowded room, just like in the song. I was standing at the bar at La Vie Parisian, a bar that's long gone, and Nick opened the door. We locked eyes and I nearly fell over. First, he looks a lot like Henry—"
I interrupted. "Henry is Carter's first love. They grew up together in Georgia. And drove to San Francisco in the summer of '39 in some beat-up old Ford."
"It wasn't beat-up. It was only a few years old when I bought it."
"Well, I nearly fell over, too. I walked up and he couldn't speak."
Carter laughed. "I'll admit it. I was in love."
I nodded, lifted his hand, and kissed the back of it. "So was I. It was like being hit by a lightning bolt."
Johnny sighed and put his head in his hands. "Maybe I don't wanna go to San Francisco, after all."
"What's this, young man?" That was Grace.
"I drove them over here from Lebanon in exchange for a plane ride to San Francisco."
Maria added, "But George, his boyfriend, lives in Boston."
Carter said, "There's no reason we can't stop in Boston first."
Johnny looked up. "Really?"
I nodded. "Sure."
Maria looked at Grace and asked, "How did you two meet?"
Grace laughed. "At a rent party. In 1922." She looked over at me. "That was the year you were born, my dear, wasn't it?"
I nodded. I was surprised at how much she seemed to remember and how much she didn't.
She continued, "I was there with my date, a charming girl named Sadie."
Hyacinth harrumphed and rolled her eyes. "Charming, my fanny." Looking at Maria, she said, "Sadie was a snake in the grass."
Grace smiled. "She was nice to me. And that was only our second date. Or was it the third? I seem to remember some trip over to New Jersey to meet a friend of hers." She put her finger to her lips. "No, it was the second. The New Jersey trip was with Gloria. Yes. That was Gloria. Now, Gloria—"
"No one wants to hear about Gloria."
"Hush, Hyacinth. Gloria was a perfectly lovely girl." Turning to me, she asked, "Would you believe it? She was six feet tall in her stockings." She giggled. "Oh my. We did have some fun in her little rooftop apartment on 135th Street. Oh my, we did."
Hyacinth harrumphed again. "Well, Gracie, you've once again gone down that long road to nowhere."
Grace shrugged, smiled, and winked at me.
I smiled back and asked, "So you were at a rent party. Was it in Harlem?"
Hyacinth nodded. "128th and Amsterdam or somewhere near there. I was with my own date—"
Grace waved her off. "No stories about Penny. If I've told you once, dear Hyacinth—"
"If you can talk about Gloria, I can talk about Penny."
I looked over at Maria whose eyes were dancing with glee.
Carter asked, "Do you always fight like this?"
Hyacinth drew up. "You may be tall and built like Adonis, young man, but I'll be happy to take you outside and teach you some manners. We are not fighting."
Grace shook her head. "No, my dear, this is just our banter. It's the secret to our long relationship. I will say this about Penny, she was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. Had beautiful dark mocha skin, a very sweet smile, and the longest eyelashes I've ever seen on anyone."
Hyacinth sighed. "She was pretty. But then I saw Grace. Even Penny noticed it. She's the one who pushed me into introducing myself."
"Really?" asked Maria.
Hyacinth nodded. "Penny and I were in that phase when you give it one more try and hope for the best."
Frankie said, "I thought that rent parties were for Negroes only."
Hyacinth nodded. "That was generally true. You never just showed up to a rent party. You only went if someone handed you a card—"
Grace smiled. "I have my card at home. Kept it with me all these years—"
"It was Penny's brother who gave her the card we used to get in—"
"My roommate at the time was a Negro. She was a cousin to the man whose apartment we were at. And, truth be told, she didn't much care for Sadie either—"
"No one liked Sadie. She went both ways. I've never trusted that in a gal, to be honest. Met a few of those at Radcliffe. They just wanted to find out about the life and then they met their beaus over at Harvard or wherever and, well, I just never trusted that."
No one said anything for a while. Carter stood and walked over to the fireplace to add a couple of logs.
Maria stood, kissed Frankie, and turned to the rest of us. "More coffee, anyone?"
Grace stood and said, "Let me help you, my dear."
. . .
"How did you meet my mother?" I asked.
Hyacinth put her coffee cup down and said, "Now, it may be hard to believe but for most of my life I was a dress designer and seamstress."
Johnny said, "You're right. I'd have never guessed."
She smiled and said, "I went to Radcliffe on a scholarship. I grew up in The Bronx in a neighborhood now known as Spuyten Duyvil, or Spouting Devil. Back then we called it Riverdale, but the two are now different, or so I'm told. In any event, we lived in a house overlooking the Hudson and my father did well but not that well. He also didn't believe in women's education so I had to get myself to Radcliffe and pay for it all myself. My mother had made sure I knew how to sew so I put that to use while I was in school and made my own dresses and blouses and undergarments as well as for my classmates."
In a stage whisper, Grace said, "She really wanted to see all the girls in their bloomers."
We all laughed as Hyacinth harrumphed and rolled her eyes. "Once I left school, I moved to Harlem. And kept on sewing. After a while, I opened a little shop on Broadway. Then I opened a bigger shop just off Park Avenue on East 50th. Your mother came in one day and liked what she saw. She became a client and then she became a friend."
Grace looked at me. "And she was also just so very matter of fact about the nature of our relationship. I never once had that feeling that one so often got back before the war of being a monkey at the zoo."
"Monkey at the zoo?" asked Carter.
"Yes, my dear. Before the war, whenever the straights would come across one of us of the third sex, if they weren't outright hostile, then they would often treat us as is if we were curios." She paused for a moment. "Is that the right word? Or do I mean curiosities?" She nodded. "Yes, curiosities. As if we were at the zoo behind
a cage and just living our odd little lives for their enjoyment. That's part of the reason we left New York."
I asked, "When did you move up here?"
Hyacinth replied, "In June of 1942. We spent a few weeks in this very house in the summers of '40 and '41 and both fell in love with the town. It's not much. And certainly not as much as it once was. But it's home and we love it." She took Grace's hand as the two of them nodded.
"Did my mother ever date anyone?"
Grace looked over at Hyacinth who pursed her lips.
"What?" asked Carter.
Grace stood a little unsteadily. "Oh dear, will you excuse me?"
Maria was on her feet and offered her arm to the older woman. "I know you know the way, but let me take you back there."
Grace patted Maria's hand. "You're such a darling. Your husband is quite a lucky man."
Frankie nodded and said, "You got that right, Miss Grace."
Once the two of them were gone, Hyacinth slid across the sofa and looked at me. "Are you sure you want to know about this, Nicholas?"
I nodded, not really sure at all.
"Your mother was not quite married to the sheriff."
"What sheriff?"
"Sheriff Richardson. Edmond Richardson."
I frowned. "The sheriff here in town?"
She nodded.
"But he has two sons who live in Boston."
She nodded again. "Yes. From his first wife, Marilyn. She died in the 30s. I don't know all the details, but I think it involved a car going off the road. The boys are about your age, I imagine. Let's see." She glanced up at the ceiling. "Kenneth is 32 or 33 and Robert is two years younger." She looked at me. "They considered Alexandra their second mother. Sheriff Richardson is the man who supervised the rebuild of this house back during the winter of 1939 and '40. He began to court her while we were here that first summer. She finally moved here for good in the spring of 1942. They never married because she wasn't sure whether she was divorced or not. But he spent many nights here, I can tell you." She laughed. "Anyone in this town can tell you that."
I asked, "Why did she leave?"
Hyacinth put her long hand on my face. "Believe me, my dear, none of us knows why. We knew she was going to Boston. I know she had dinner with the two boys and their wives. Kenneth had been married for a year and Robert had married earlier that spring. That was the last any of us heard from her."
"Did the sheriff do any investigating?" I asked.
"As much as he could. He'd only started working for the county the year earlier. He talked to the Boston police but that didn't go far. I know he hired a private investigator. But he's not a rich man. We offered to help. I have a nice nest-egg from the sale of my shop. He wouldn't take our money. Pride, I think." She sighed.
Chapter 5
Townshend Road
Grafton, Vt.
Tuesday, March 8, 1955
Early evening
Grace insisted on cooking dinner. Maria insisted on helping. I tried to do my part but was shooed away and instructed by Grace. "Go find clues, young man. Isn't that what you normally do?"
I laughed and followed her instructions. I walked into my mother's bedroom. The mattress was rolled up and covered with a white sheet. Everything smelled vaguely musty and the room was about twenty degrees cooler than the rest of the house.
The first thing I looked at was the dust. I leaned over to get an eye-level view to make sure it was all uniform. There was plenty of it and some areas were more dusty than others but it looked like nothing had been touched in a while. I found some dead insects but nothing living, which was nice.
I opened and searched the drawers of her bureau and a small desk. I dug through the large wardrobe that stood to the right of the fireplace. I searched the small bookshelf that also served as a bedside table.
After looking through just about everything, including under the bed, I was surprised at what I didn't find. There were no letters, no financial records, not even a checkbook. Of course, if she had been planning on going to London, she would have taken some of those things with her. But I found the complete absence of any trace of her life on paper to be strange.
The other thing I'd noticed was the lack of undergarments. There were no brassieres, no corsets, no girdles, no underwear or stockings. Nothing like that at all. That made me wonder whether she'd cleared out the essentials because she wasn't planning on returning.
As I stood in the middle of the room, and tried not to pay too much attention to the smell of mothballs, I had a feeling there was something crucial that I wasn't seeing. I walked out into the living room and found Hyacinth dusting a large bookshelf.
"Miss Hyacinth?"
"Yes, Nicholas?" She didn't turn. She was pulling out one book at a time, dusting it, and then replacing it.
"Can you look at something for me?"
I glanced over at Carter who was watching me from the kitchen. His arms were deep in a basin of sudsy water but he'd craned his head around so he could see what I was up to.
Hyacinth nodded and followed me into the bedroom.
"What is it?" She was obviously a woman on a mission and I was getting in the way.
"Could you go through the bureau and the wardrobe and tell me what you see?"
"What I see?"
I nodded. "Outside of the sheriff and Mrs. Hollingsworth, Lady Eldredge, that is, you probably knew my mother better than anyone."
She harrumphed but did as I asked. I watched as she opened each drawer and looked through everything. When she opened the fifth of the six drawers, she suddenly stood up and looked at the top two again.
I didn't say anything. I waited to hear what she had to say.
"All her undergarments are gone."
"Anything else?"
She walked over to the wardrobe and made a grunting noise as soon as she opened the door. She briskly looked through the hanging clothes. She made another grunting sound and then left the room for a moment.
I followed her into the other bedroom.
Frankie was in there, dusting the furniture in the fading daylight, as much of it as there was under the snowy sky.
She opened the smaller wardrobe in that room. The scent of mothballs wafted out as she looked through the clothes hanging in there. She then opened the bureau drawers. After a moment, she stood and looked at me. She blinked twice and then walked back into my mother's bedroom.
I followed.
She stood, looking at the wardrobe. Finally, she pulled out a pea green dress and showed it to me. "See this?"
I nodded.
"I made this for her in 1939. This is the newest dress in the house." She turned and put it back in the wardrobe.
"Maybe she packed all of her newer clothes for her trip?"
"My dear boy, most of these dresses in here were once jam packed in the other wardrobe. This one was also packed full of the clothes I made for her after the war, once we could get cotton and wool again."
"But rationing only ended in 1946."
She shook her head. "Wool and cotton were scarce but never rationed. My point is that dresses from 1940 were very much out of style by 1947. Your mother was very fashion-conscious. She wouldn't have worn them. However, I made..." She paused for a moment and frowned.
I waited.
"I made a lot of clothes for her over the winter of 1946 and '47. I was busy morning to night for almost a month. And, if you don't mind me saying, she paid me quite a lot for it all. I wonder..." She put a long hand on her chin and looked down at the floor. After a moment, she walked over to the desk and opened the drawers. Once she'd looked through everything, she took in a deep breath. "Where are all her receipts?"
"What receipts?"
"Your mother had a system. She tracked every dollar she spent to the penny. I'm sure you're the same. Most rich men are." She looked around the room again while I tried not to laugh. I'd never budgeted a dime in my life.
She walked back to the bureau and then turned to face me. "
She once told me the story of why she left San Francisco. She thought she was dying. But then, when she arrived in Mexico, it all went away. She said it was a cure." She narrowed her eyes at me. "I never believed that. I figured someone was poisoning her, and with arsenic. I once asked her about her hair and fingernails and she said they'd never been as pretty as when she'd been on death's door. You know as well as I do that's a sign of slow poisoning by arsenic."
I nodded. "The woman who did it already admitted to it. She either couldn't or wouldn't remember what she used but I figured it was arsenic. Back then, it could have easily been mistaken for stomach cancer."
Hyacinth nodded. "Maybe she found out that she had cancer in 1946. She had the flu for most of October that year. She took the train to Boston for a couple of weeks in November. I know she went to see Kenneth, who'd married his wife the summer before. And Robert, so she could meet his girlfriend. I believe they married the next summer. In fact, she kept going back and forth all during the fall and into the spring. Little trips of just two or three days." She walked back over to the desk and looked down at the open drawers. "She must have gone to see Dr. Farber." She shook her head. "Why did I not think of that?"
"Who's Dr. Farber?"
She turned. "Have you heard of The Jimmy Fund?" That was a campaign that raised money for childhood cancer research by showing short films at movie houses.
I nodded. "Sure. Our foundation contributes to it."
She raised an eyebrow at me. "You're just like your mother."
I shrugged.
"You are. The Jimmy Fund was started by Dr. Farber." With her left hand on her chin and her right hand on her hip, she looked down at the desk one more time and then back up at me. "Dr. Sidney Farber is one of the best cancer doctors in the country. I've never met him but..." She closed her eyes for a moment as if she was trying to remember something. "I believe it was in the summer of 1946 that she asked me who I knew that she could refer a friend to. A friend who had cancer. I immediately mentioned Dr. Farber. She asked if he was in New York and I replied that, no, he was in Boston. That seemed to relieve her for some reason."
The Paradoxical Parent (A Nick Williams Mystery Book 13) Page 6