by Richard Peck
Lucille banged through the screen door, all in pale pink, carrying a bouquet of rosebuds with streamers. She was very low-necked and the top part of her outfit moved up and down with her breathing.
Mother told her she looked just like the duchess of York, but younger. Lucille returned the compliment by remarking that Mother looked just like Queen Alexandra, but younger. And Dad wondered aloud what was wrong with good American people.
“You look right miserable, Dad,” I told him.
“So do you, Alexander, but younger,” he replied.
The first person up the lane was Cousin Elvera Schumate. You could see her at quite a distance. There was a glass-eyed bird on her hat ready to take flight. She carried a walking stick with a tassle, though she is in no way lame.
When she drew nigh the porch, she looked up and said, “Well, if you four aren’t a fine-looking group of people suitable to receive anybody!”
Mother told her to join us on the porch before she had to ladle punch because she was family too.
At the stroke of three an automobile turned out of Pine Street and came up the lane at a stately pace.
“Dear Lord,” said Mother, “That is the Van Deeters’ limousine. Lucille, you have arrived.”
Lucille was interested, but her mind was more on the Hacketts, on account of Tom. But getting the Van Deeters was icing on the cake.
So it was a bad moment when the limousine drew up to the porch steps with no Van Deeters in the back seat. The chauffeur, who wore gaiters, hopped out and darted up the steps to Mother, tipped his cap, and said, “Mrs. Van Deeter sends her compliments and a note.” He was back in the driver’s seat before Mother could get her fingers to work open the envelope:
Inside was a letter from Mrs. Van Deeter regretting that she had a previous engagement and wishing Lucille well. That was the only time I ever heard my Mother blaspheme, though it was only a small oath at that. And it was directed against Uncle Miles, not any of the Van Deeters.
By then, though, people were beginning to straggle up the lane, some horsedrawn and some by automobile. The younger ones of Lucille’s crowd came on foot. Lucille waved her bouquet at them until Mother told her not to.
It seemed like the lawn just filled up with people all of a sudden. As they mounted the porch steps and passed along us, Mother would say, “You know our daughter, Lucille, of course.” And everybody agreed.
Mother had to look at Lucille severely pretty often because she kept craning her neck trying to catch sight of the Hacketts. Lucille even took to whispering to me, though she is not in the habit of confiding in my direction.
“I know Tom’s coming,” she muttered, “because he gave me his word on it. But if his folks come too, then that’s a sign they know he and I are—serious and they put their stamp of approval on it.”
I was not sure I followed Lucille’s reasoning, since people have been known to attend a party out of nothing but curiosity. But I supposed she had it all worked out in her own mind.
Mother was surveying the crowd pretty sharp too and would occasionally poke Dad and say things like, “Here come the Breckenridges and there are the Hochhuths behind them, so be on your best behavior.” But Dad is pretty much on the same kind of behavior regardless of the company he’s in.
Mother gave me the nod to start around the crowd with the iced cakes. I was just heading down off the porch when a big white and gold automobile turned into the lane. When it got closer, Dad said, “Why that’s a new six-cylinder Coey Flyer touring barouche.” When it got closer still Mother said, “Dear Lord, it’s the Hacketts.” When it rolled to a stop, Lucille sagged. In it was Mr. and Mrs. Hackett, but not Tom.
“Hey there, Joe!” Mr. Hackett called out to Dad from the lane.
And Dad said, “Hey there, Walter,” back to him. But when Mrs. Hackett climbed down out of the Coey Flyer, she kept her head over on one side and seemed not to take too much notice of anything. She wasn’t dressed quite like the other women. She had on a big hat, though it was plain, and she carried a little tiny pocketbook on a chain.
“Oh, I guess that dress came from Chicago. It’s very smart,” Mother whispered sadly. And she made a gesture like she was trying to flatten out some of her ruffles.
Dad and Mr. Hackett go back a long way together as they pointed out to each other. But Mrs. Hackett was quite cool and passed off the porch with record speed, just glancing into Lucille’s bouquet and smiling a small amount. Mother told me to conduct her personally down to the pavilion and Cousin Elvera. Mrs. Hackett took my arm and nodded a bit to people we passed. She asked me if I thought this was an amusing party, to which I didn’t know how to reply. It was about to get amusing, but I did not foresee that.
Dad and Mr. Hackett were old friends together. It wasn’t long before they had their coats off and their cuffs turned back to poke around under the hood of the Hacketts’ new Coey Flyer.
I was in front of the snowball bushes by the porch trying hard to rid myself of the rest of the cakes. I heard a rustling down near the ground. The thought of Trixie came to me, so I set the cake platter on the grass and parted the branches.
There was a quaint face looking out at me from under the porch, but it wasn’t Trixie’s. It was Blossom’s. She was hunkered down out of sight, having a view of people’s feet.
“You are everywhere at once, aren’t you, Blossom?” I said to her. We were both down on our knees and nose to nose.
“I just wanted to have a look at what was going on,” said Blossom, “and kindly don’t tell my mama.” Then she darted a look past me at the platter of cakes.
“How would I have the chance to do that?”
“Well,” she said, “she’s working out in your kitchen this afternoon, piling the cakes on the trays.” So then I knew who the woman was with the gold crosses in her ears who looked at me with the same black eyes as Blossom’s. And that was the same woman who said I was receptive to the Spirit World. It worried me somewhat. I offered Blossom the tray and she helped herself to three cakes, which cleaned me out.
She commenced to nibble around one of the sugar roses and before I could back out of the bushes darted her face forward and gave me a thank-you kiss on the mouth. It took me by surprise and had a strawberry flavor.
My luck being what it is, Lucille was mounting the porch steps just then and had a clear view of this business behind the bushes. Looking down, she said very haughty, “Alexander! How disgusting and at my party too!”
So I told her that what I was doing under the porch was not a patch on what she did on the porch with Tom Hackett. Which set her face to crumpling, since Tom had not yet shown up.
As I was exiting from the snowball bushes, I saw a young fellow approaching the house on foot, but it wasn’t Tom. This fellow was dressed like the rest in a stiff straw hat and a whip-cord suit. But he was tending to drag his feet along the lane, and I could not place him.
Since I was free of my cakes and Blossom, I walked down to make him welcome. He said his name was Seaforth and that he’d been sent out by the Pantagraph newspaper to cover the party because the society editor was elsewhere covering a dog and pony show at Wood River.
He said he had rather cover prize fights and other events with some action to them. But as a cub reporter he had to take such assignments as he was given. I asked him if he was from around these parts, and he said no, he was fresh from two years at the new journalism school over at the University of Missouri. And if I would fill him in and put him wise to the local scene, he’d be obliged.
I thought this was a step up from passing cakes, and this Seaforth was a good fellow who talked to you man to man. Besides, I thought I’d better do my talking then because when Mother found out the paper was writing up our party, she’d be all over him.
“This is your sister’s coming-out party, as I understand it,” said Seaforth, whose first name is Lowell. “Is she good-looking?”
“That is a matter of opinion,” I told him, remembering that Blossom said
girls of Lucille’s type were going out of style. “But Tom Hackett seems to think highly of her.”
“That’s Hackett’s Laxatives?”
“The same,” I told him.
“Then I take it that everybody who is anybody is here today,” Lowell observed.
“Very nearly,” I said. “The Breckenridges and the Hochhuths and the Hacketts senior to name but a few.”
“Well, I guess the upper crust of one town is very like another.”
I said nothing to that, not knowing.
Lowell remarked that everyone there seemed to be fairly pleased with themselves. And then he said,
A town that boasts inhabitants like me
Can have no lack of good society.
I saw that was a verse and thought it was clever. But he said it’d been written before him by the poet Longfellow.
Lowell looked up at the house and strolled around a bit, viewing it from various angles. “They don’t build like this anymore,” he mentioned. “This is the old place where the sea captain or whoever hanged himself, isn’t it?”
I admitted that but said Mother didn’t like it commented on.
“Well, I guess it’d be easier to die in than live in, what with the upkeep,” Lowell said, “no offense meant. I see you have kept on the barn. But I suppose your father will be thinking of pulling that down in favor of one of these new garages they’re building now.”
I told Lowell that was the best idea I’d heard all day and showed him to the punch pavilion.
It was right then that Lucille’s party took a turn for the worse. Tom Hackett’s own auto, a brown and buff colored Crane-Simplex open model roared up the lane at an immoderate speed, swerved onto the lawn, and came to rest in one of Mother’s flower beds, narrowly missing four girls from the high school. Tom Hackett stood up in the seat and then toppled out over the door, drunk as a skunk.
Chapter Nine
The day just seemed to go downhill after that and continued to do so long after dark. Mother shrieked out that she’d have the law on whoever had torn up her flowers, before she saw it was Tom. He was face down among the begonias for a time and not identifiable.
His mother recognized his car, though, and left at high speed, taking Mr. Hackett senior with her. Others stayed on, interested to know what would happen next.
Tom was shortly on his feet and weaving toward the pavilion. He got there just as Cousin Elvera was telling Mrs. Hochhuth she had not seen so many well-dressed people in one place since the St. Louis World’s Fair. Then Tom was before her, flush-faced, with loose earth caking his lapels.
“Say, listen, Mrs. Schumate,” he bawled at her, “it’s my opinion that whatever pink punch you’re serving would profit by a little sparking up!” While he spoke, he was unscrewing the lid off a silver hip flask and pouring whiskey into the punchbowl with an unsteady hand.
There for a minute you could have made a photograph because nobody moved. Then Cousin Elvera screamed out, “You have poisoned my punch, and I don’t care if you are Tom Hackett, I will not have it adulterated!” Or words to that effect.
She grasped the bowl in both hands and tipped it forward, and the punch cascaded right down Tom Hackett from his vest to his shoetops. Then Cousin Elvera fell back, and the bird on her hat took a dip.
“Things are picking up,” Lowell said to me. “Is that the Hackett dude?”
“Where is my sweet—my sweet—has anybody seen Lucille?” Tom yelled out, stumbling in a circle with his wet trousers clinging to his legs.
Lucille was up on the porch with her Mother’s arms wrapped tight around her, and both were weeping copiously. Lucille had abandoned her bouquet on the porch rail, and it toppled into the snowball bushes, no doubt catching Blossom square on the head.
When Tom could focus on Lucille, he started in her direction. The crowd made way for him. It was then that Lowell Seaforth went into action. He strode up to Tom and took him by the arm. “Say, listen,” said Tom. “You are asking for a flat nose or worse—do you know who I am?”
“Yes,” said Lowell, “a common drunk,” which brought forth a general gasp.
“Turn loose of me,” Tom bellowed, “because I am going to my belov—my belov—I’m going up to greet Lucille.”
“You won’t be insulting any more ladies today,” Lowell said in a voice that carried right up to the porch. Then he put a hammerlock on Tom’s arm and marched him over to the Crane-Simplex which was axle-deep in the flowerbed. The crowd followed. He pushed Tom into the back seat where he seemed to pass out at once, though I think personally that he was playing possum. “Tell me where this boozer lives, and I’ll drive him home,” said Lowell. And after considerable maneuvering, Lowell got the Crane-Simplex out of its burial ground and spun off down the lane.
He had not turned into Pine Street, though, before Mother was asking who he was. When she learned he was a reporter sent to write up the story of the party, she forgot herself completely, shouting out, “We are publicly shamed and finished in Bluff City!”
Dispatching Tom Hackett so stylishly was enough to make anybody an admirer of Lowell Seaforth. But what he wrote up for the next day’s newspaper was another star in his crown. Though a good deal happened before the next day’s Pantagraph even went to press, I’ll put in Lowell’s article right here where it fits best:
MISS ARMSWORTH BOWS TO SOCIETY
Mr. and Mrs. Joe Armsworth and son Alexander were at home to their numerous friends yesterday afternoon. The lawn party began under sunny skies promising a bright future for Miss Lucille Armsworth, who takes her rightful place as an ornament of Bluff City social circles.
The commodious grounds of the Armsworth mansion on Pine Street were the scene of a gathering drawn from the community’s oldest families and enlivened by members of the younger set. All were handsome or beautiful in their attire.
A sudden dampness spelled a premature end to one of this season’s most select occasions. Mrs. Elvera Schumate poured.
Chapter Ten
They say history repeats itself, which can be nervewracking. Though in this case it was a good thing it did. I’m talking about candlelight in the barn.
We were a good while settling Lucille and Mother down after the party that night. Gladys took a supper tray upstairs to Mother, who said she could not face anybody anymore that night or maybe ever. Lucille was a worse case. She stalked through all the rooms staring up at the ceilings like she was planning to take her cue from Captain Campbell and hang herself from a light fixture.
She had pulled all the combs out of her back hair, which flowed freely. She was on a rampage for sure.
“How could Tom Hackett do such a thing to me?” she wailed numerous times.
And finally Dad said, “Tom Hackett was never my idea.”
Which only set Lucille off again. “To arrive liquored-up at my party just when I thought—oh, I am ruined and it is too awful.”
What Lucille thought was that she had Tom in her sights—and with witnesses. She had no doubt been planning an engagement party to follow her coming out. But Lucille was still thinking even in the midst of her rage. She has a practical side to her nature that comes out at odd moments.
Pretty soon she flopped in a chair and reasoned it out with herself. “Tom Hackett is crazy about me and has made it plain. But it was having to face up to the formalities of our families’ meeting that made him—shy. So he just naturally had a little too much to drink so he wouldn’t have to go through a—meaningless social ritual.”
“A what—which cost me seventy-five dollars not counting the damage to the yard?” asked Dad.
“Never mind, Dad,” said Lucille. “I am feeling better about it now.”
“That is the first good news I have had these many months,” Dad said. “Let’s all call it a day.”
“But I have some bad news, Dad,” I had to say to him.
“Oh never say so, Alexander,” he moaned. “What is it?”
“Bub Timmons was by this morning
and said his pa was in a bad way and running out of control and not to look for him at work for a while.”
“Alexander,” Dad said, “that is a shame, but with what we have been through today, I’m not going to take it to heart.” Then he led the way upstairs and I followed. Lucille, though, headed through the house in the other direction toward the back hall where we have installed the telephone.
I was in my bed, reviewing the day, which took quite a time. What was foremost in my mind was the way Lowell Seaforth had taken Tom over. You couldn’t help but marvel at a fellow who would step up and take charge like that.
I listened to three, maybe four streetcars rattle by out back and was beginning to feel drowsy when I heard something else. It was way off at the front of the property, but I knew the sound of Tom Hackett’s Crane-Simplex. All I could make out was the engine purring along, which must have meant he was driving on the grass to avoid the gravel. I was reminded then that I never had heard Lucille come upstairs.
She is going to make it up with him pretty quick, is what I thought to myself, before he has time to realize what fools he has made of them both. So, bye and bye, quite a while after I heard the car stop, I slipped out of my room and up to the spare bedroom right over the piazza. I like to listen in to other people’s business, which is probably why I was not too sanctimonious with Blossom when I caught her under the porch watching our party.
The view out over the front lawn was not encouraging. It looked like a team of Clydesdales had dragged a road-grader across the grass, and paper roses were blowing everywhere. Tom and Lucille were in the settee directly below. No sound came from them at first except for the rustle of Lucille’s dress and small sighs.