The Baby Blue Rip-Off m-2

by Max Allan Collins

The bad thing, I thought, about my getting involved in the Hot Supper Service was the flock of old people I’d be serving. Four of them; four old ladies. God forbid I’d be asked in to chat with one of the tottering old relics. Who in hell wanted to watch the decaying creatures gumming their food, saliva and masticated glop dribbling all over their hairy-warted chins? Yuck. I accepted the Hot Supper Service as a good thing, theoretically, being a humanitarian at heart; but, like so many humanitarians, I harbored a secret dislike for humanity. Old people, particularly.

  For example: I’d see some old guy driving in a car in front of me, going thirty in a sixty-five zone, and I’d say, “Why don’t they get those senile old bastards off the road?”

  For example: I’d be in a hurry to get some money out of my bank account, and some old bag’d be ahead of me at the window, cashing her social security check and having the teller divide up the money and place it into envelopes marked “rent,” “groceries,” and so on, and I’d think, “Just pass away in your sleep, why don’t you, and save yourself the trouble.”

  But I was signed on for the duration. So there I was in my blue Dodge van, setting out to feed the elderly multitudes, with four self-lidded Styrofoam plates of hot food sitting on the floor in back. I hadn’t got around yet to carpeting and fixing the thing up, so my Styrofoam passengers got a rough ride.

  The hour or so a week I had to spend delivering the meals took me all over Port City. As a rule, Hot Supper volunteers had a single neighborhood to service, but no such luck for me. Apparently I’d been saddled with a grab-bag list of leftovers from the other routes, giving me the Port City grand tour, starting with Mrs. Fox on West Hill.

  West Hill is steep, rising out of the downtown business district, looking out over the bend of the Mississippi along which Port City nestles like a rhinestone in the navel of the land. The hill’s view has been spoiled somewhat by the factories that crowd the river, cluttering the scenery and dirtying the water. None of that had particularly bothered the factory owners who built the luxurious gothic homes of West Hill, as they’d found that from their perch things looked sufficiently rosy, the distance blurring out unpleasantness the way a soft-focus camera does wonders for an aging movie queen. And many of those founders of local industry died before factories were considered eyesores, before the word pollution crept thoughtlessly into the national vocabulary; and these good city fathers left both wealth and a wealth of problems to their children. Those children, being from solid stock, rose to the challenge of the changing view from West Hill by moving into high-priced housing additions and condominiums, some of them in Port City.

  Mrs. Fox, like the gray two-story nineteenth-century home she lived in, was a survivor of another time. The house had been a showplace once; now it was a paint-peeling, oversize embarrassment in a neighborhood still clinging to the vestiges of class.

  The first night I delivered a meal to her, I had climbed the walk up the slanted, surprisingly well-kept lawn, feeling somewhat nervous. I half-expected to be met by an apparition, a West Hill version of Gloria Swanson in a Port City Community Playhouse production of Sunset Boulevard.

  But the door opened to reveal a petite woman with a smooth, wise, quite pretty face. Her cheekbones were strong and high, her hair white and pulled back in a discreet bun; only the looseness of the flesh under those strong cheekbones gave a hint of her age, which had to be seventy at the very least. She wore a simple blue cotton dress, with a white cameo brooch at the neck. She walked with a cane-because of arthritis, I found out later.

  “Mrs. Fox?”

  “Young man?”

  “I’m here with your food. From the hospital?”

  “Oh! The Hot Supper man! Come in, come in. What happened to that nice couple that was bringing the meals around?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am.”

  “No matter. Follow me, please.”

  She led me from the entryway into a large living room, where an oriental rug of oranges and yellows and reds, a baby grand piano, a fireplace, and assorted obviously antique Louis XVI furniture were dominated by a light wood ceiling carved in wonderfully graceful rococo detail.

  “A German fellow did that,” she said. “Many years ago. No one carves that way anymore.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t suppose so.”

  Still awestruck by the room, I somehow managed to hand her the Styrofoam plate of food and watched with some surprise as she pulled a TV tray from somewhere, set it up in front of an expensive-looking old lounge chair, and put the plate on the tray. The tray was out of place in that room, like a man arriving at a costume ball a week early.

  “Unlike most living rooms,” she explained, smiling, “this one is lived in. The upstairs of the house is entirely closed off-has been for years-as is most of the downstairs; I only use the living room, kitchen, bedroom, and bath. Can I get you a lemonade, young man?”

  I refused, and she went on to say, “Oh, I had so hoped I could connive some company out of you. This is a beautiful old house, but it’s a bit lonely for one.”

  I explained to Mrs. Fox that I had three more stops to make on my route, but promised to make her last on my list the following week so I could stay and visit for a while. I kept my promise, and that next week she treated me to a memorable evening of reminiscences about earlier days in Port City. Seems her husband had been one of the men involved in initiating local pearl button manufacturing, which helped earn Port City the unofficial title “Pearl Button Capital of the World”; but in the days of plastic buttons, that came to mean little, and Mr. Fox had stubbornly clung to pearl when other Port City plants were converting to plastic. He had died bitter, and broken if not broke. Mrs. Fox felt lucky to still have the old house, one tangible memory of a more prosperous time.

  “Our boy George, our only child George,” she said, “runs the Allstate insurance office here in town. And George has tried to get me to let go of this old house, but I won’t do it.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “Oh, he’s been good about it, considering. Comes over and does the lawn for me, and once a week his wife helps me clean the old place. That son of mine is why you’re here tonight, young man, because he’s the one who got me into this Hot Supper business. Said he was afraid I wasn’t eating proper. And you know something? He was right. Kind of lonely cooking for one in that big drafty kitchen.”

  The thoughtful son was something of a running refrain along the old Hot Supper trail. Only in the case of the Cooper sisters, it was a thoughtful nephew.

  The Cooper sisters were twins; whether they were identical twins or not, I couldn’t tell you. They were similarly built, being graceful, willowy old gals who must’ve been lookers in their day. I tend to think they were identical twins, though, as they both looked much the same. But then so do most eighty-year-old women.

  They lived on the bottom floor of a two-story house; the upper floor they rented out to some college students, who played very loud rock music up there. Neither sister seemed to mind. Or hear, for that matter. The house was a pleasant old yellow clapboard, hardly a match for Mrs. Fox’s mansion on West Hill; just a sturdy, well-kept house in a neighborhood of similar houses. The neighborhood shared the valley between East and West Hills with the downtown area, a belt of churches and schools separating the business and residential districts.

  The Cooper sisters had been living together for a long time-all their lives, I supposed-and probably in this same house; only in fairly recent years had they decided, for practical reasons (both monetary and physical), to rent out the upper floor, and to move all their furniture onto the lower floor. For that reason their living quarters tended to be cluttered; there were chairs enough to seat a meeting of the DAR, old photos of relatives and old paintings by relatives, tall cabinets brimming with china and bric-a-brac, and all the doilies and knickknacks in the world.

  These sisters fit my stereotypical idea of old folks like round pegs in round holes; if I’d thought the intelligent and gracious Mrs. Fo
x was evidence of the fallacy of my downbeat thinking about the elderly, here was ample rebuttal.

  Or so you might think.

  Because the Cooper sisters proved me wrong. Just seeing the Cooper sisters showed me the error of my ways. Stay with me and you’ll see what I mean.

  Miss Gladys Cooper opened the door, with sister Miss Viola Cooper right behind.

  “Why, Mr. Mallory,” Miss Gladys Cooper said, “we haven’t seen you for years, tell me…”

  “… what have you been doing since last we saw you?” Miss Viola Cooper said, picking up her sister’s train.

  I might as well come out and tell you that the Cooper sisters had been living together so long that they had become a single person, in a manner of speaking. Now I mean just that-in their manner of speaking, they were a single person. They thought so much alike, and each knew her sister’s mind so well, that either could complete a sentence for the other, with neither noticing.

  “Hello, Miss Cooper,” I said. “Hello, Miss Cooper.”

  “Well, good evening, Mr. Mallory, and to what…”

  “… do we owe this unexpected, and rather overdue, visit?”

  “I’m the Hot Supper delivery boy. See?” And I displayed the lidded plates in my hands.

  “What happened to the Petersens?” Miss Gladys Cooper said. “They were such a nice young couple. But of course that doesn’t mean…”

  “… we aren’t delighted to see you again, after so long a time. Come in, come in.”

  I came in.

  Miss Viola Cooper took the dinners into the adjacent dining room (most of the brimming china cabinets were in there) and readied the long table, while her sister questioned me.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m finishing up my four-year degree at the college, slowly but surely, on the GI Bill. I’ve traveled around some, and I’m trying to write freelance full-time now. I sold a mystery novel last year….”

  “Yes,” Miss Gladys Cooper said, “we’ve been following your career with interest-”

  “And surprise,” chimed in her sister from the dinner room. “You didn’t show any particular literary bent when we first encountered you, you know.”

  “Not that you weren’t one of our favorite students just the same,” the other sister assured me.

  That’s right; the Cooper sisters had been teachers of mine. My second- and third-grade teachers, to be precise, and I loved them. Then and now.

  But I hadn’t seen them for a lot of years; in fact, the Cooper name on the Hot Supper list had rung no bells. Face to face, though, it was impossible not to know them.

  They insisted I stay and have a glass of wine with them while they had their supper, and I stayed long enough for one glass (homemade dandelion wine, very nice) and begged off, promising them that two weeks from that night, I’d make them last on the route so I could visit all evening with them.

  Which I did, and that was when they told me about their nephew David, who had enrolled them in the Hot Supper Service because he suspected that their nightly meal with occasional wine had lapsed into nightly wine with occasional meal.

  My preconceptions about old people were changing fast.

  That first night, when I’d been able to stay for just a few minutes, the sisters had left their meals midway to see me to the door.

  “You were in my last group of students,” Miss Gladys Cooper said, somewhat wistfully, “that final year before our retirement.”

  “You were in my second-to-last group of students,” Miss Viola Cooper said, equally wistfully, “the year prior.”

  (I’ll give you a moment to figure out which one taught second, and which one third.)

  “You young people are wonderful,” Miss Gladys Cooper said. “I don’t know why so many older folks think so poorly of you.”

  “Like those lovely boys upstairs,” Miss Viola Cooper said. “So sweet and so thoughtful, and why they’re…”

  “… quiet as mice,” her sister finished.

  From the racket going on up there, the mice had to be wearing combat boots and into the Clash. But no matter.

  “You know, Mr. Mallory,” Miss Gladys Cooper said, “a lot of people-older people, I mean-have a stereotyped view of your age group.”

  Her sister nodded. “Just because some of you wear your hair a bit extreme and dress in unorthodox apparel at times, many of these elderly people think there’s something wrong with you, the silly old fools.”

  “Silly old ignorant fools,” Miss Gladys Cooper added. “And if you can remember back to our class, Mr. Mallory, ‘the seeds of ignorance….”

  “… bear the fruit of prejudice,’ ” I finished.

  “You remembered,” Miss Viola Cooper said, smiling.

  “Sort of,” I said.

  4

  I reserved Mrs. Jonsen for last because her place was out on East Hill, not too far from where I live. East Hill is the grab bag of Port City. Older middle-class homes dominate, sedate two-story houses of brick and/or wood, with rundown areas stuck in this corner and that, with an occasional higher-class neighborhood sitting aloof to one side. And, too, you can find certain East Hill streets that seem designed to display the multitude of American life-styles like an exhibit at a World’s Fair: a split-level home, relatively lavish, sits side by side with a cheap prefab; a handsome, well-preserved two-story gothic, dating back to when Mrs. Fox’s digs were dug, shares the same side of the street with a tumbledown shack occupied by some wino.

  Mrs. Jonsen lived on the outer edge of East Hill, just outside the city limits, on the corner where Grand Street turns into one highway intersecting another. Once upon a time, Mrs. Jonsen must’ve felt relatively safe from the madhouse that is East Hill. But we’ve crept in on her, largely due to the shopping center, car dealerships, discount department stores, chain restaurants, gas stations and such, which have come to line that edge of the city like so many plastic-and-glass tombstones.

  Not that Mrs. Jonsen complained about the encroaching city-at least not in my presence, anyway. She wasn’t a complainer, Mrs. Jonsen.

  Matter of fact, if my negative feelings about the elderly hadn’t been dispelled by the rest of my Hot Supper charges, Mrs. Jonsen would’ve done the trick all by her lonesome. Even if the other names on the list had belonged to gnarled, senile old coots, Mrs. Jonsen alone would’ve turned me around.

  Because if my image of old people as grotesque, barely living artifacts was a stereotype, then Mrs. Jonsen provided the necessary counter-stereotype. She was the universal grandmother; a kind, apple-cheeked old lady with (God help me) twinkling blue eyes and warm, winning smile.

  On the other hand, she turned out to be far less spry than the other oldies-but-goodies I’d met thus far in my campaign. Like Mrs. Fox, she had arthritis, only much worse; she was pretty badly crippled, both hands and feet, and used a steel walker to get around her small house.

  The house was a modest, single-story gray affair that had once been used as quarters for the hired hand and his family on the Jonsen farm. Mrs. Jonsen’s late husband had been a basically kind man (she said) but somewhat bigoted (she didn’t say that; I just gathered it). He had known that the cheapest labor he could find for his farm would be “coloreds” and therefore chose to situate the hired hand’s quarters on the far end of the farm, rather than the customary side-by-side arrangement.

  This was only one of many interesting things Mrs. Jonsen told me that first night. She had been last on my list, and when she invited me to stay, I didn’t refuse.

  “I have some oatmeal cookies, fresh-baked,” she said. “Would you care for a plate, young Mallory?”

  Before Young Mallory could say don’t go to any bother, she was going to bother. She struggled out to the kitchen on the metal walker, and I took the plate of cookies she brought me after her equally slow and awkward return trip. The cookies were, of course, very good. Grandmotherly good.

  “You’re wondering,” she said, letting go of the walker and flopping down into a soft armchair, “wh
y I’d bake cookies and yet have my meals delivered.”

  I admitted that that had occurred to me.

  “Like to keep my hand in,” she said. “Wouldn’t mind cooking for myself, but Edward-that’s my son-says cooking’s too hard for me, what with my arthritis and all. D’you know Edward?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Edward’s a good boy, but I wish he’d get married, like his sister. But he’s forty-eight now, so I doubt that he will. He’s a nice-looking boy, but a bit plump. I guess I fed him too well as a child…. Well, my word, I forgot to bring you a glass of milk. What’s wrong with this old woman.”

  “That’s okay, I’m fine….”

  “No, I insist.”

  She started to rise, clutching onto the walker, and I got up myself, saying, “I can find it,” and went after the glass of milk.

  Her kitchen was spacious-considering the size of the house-as big as her living room and remodeled fairly recently. Though the walls and ceiling were cream-colored, as were the counters and cabinets and appliances, the dominant color was blue. Two walls were completely covered with mounted blue plates, decorative plates that upon closer observation revealed Christmas scenes: sleighs, decorated trees, reindeer, candlelit churches, lots of snow-all the standard concepts dressed up somewhat differently on each plate in shades from dark to baby blue. There were eighty-some plates, and each was dated, starting back at 1895. The designs were simple but striking, and it was an impressive display. Christmas seemed to radiate out of the wall, even if it was late June.

  “Oh, the Christmas plates,” she said, when I returned milk-in-hand and mentioned them. “Our one extravagance.” She laughed. “From what you’ve heard me say about my husband Elwood, you may have guessed that he was… somewhat tight with a dollar?”

  I nodded. I had indeed guessed that Elwood was tight with a dollar. He made Silas Marner look like Hugh Hefner. The only thing that might tie him to those Christmas plates was a kinship to Scrooge.

  “Once a year… at Christmastime, as you might guess… Elwood would have one of his relatives in Denmark send over one of the plates, and that would be his special gift to me-special because it was not the practical sort of gift he’d usually give. Those plates aren’t cheap, you know. About twenty-two dollars apiece they’re up to now, if you send to Denmark-twice that in a store-and every year they break the mold, never make that particular plate again. Wouldn’t be surprised if that collection of mine’s valuable, as those things go. At least I know it means a lot to me, enough so’s I kept it up since Elwood’s passed on.”