Better Luck Next Time

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  “Oh!” Emily said, and then was overtaken with a fit of sneezing. “I’m glad to hear that. Mary Louise is closer to your age and very pretty, but she’s really nothing special.” She sneezed again.

  I was both appalled and relieved that our misbegotten kisses were what Emily had wanted to discuss. Sure, if Margaret had caught us necking like a pair of teenagers on prom night I would have been let go, but with my parents dead, getting fired was the least of my worries. “Let’s get you out of here,” I said. “Your boyfriend Wally’s hair is all over everything.”

  “I almost forgot,” Emily said when I handed her down from the coach. She went around to open the Pierce-Arrow’s trunk and reappeared with the papier-mâché donkey’s head. “I feel ridiculous asking you to carry this in. It isn’t heavy.”

  “Why are you taking this inside? Are you that lonesome up in Scorpion?”

  “I told Margaret I needed you to carry something in from the car for me. It was this or the fairy wings.”

  I noticed then that she still had Big Howard’s wedding band on her thumb. “While you’re handing things over I should probably take that ring,” I said.

  “Oh. Of course,” she said. She pulled it off and put it in my free hand. Both of us looked at it lying in my palm until she closed my fingers around it. “That was your father’s,” she said, and touched the one lodged on my pinkie. “And this was your mother’s.”

  I nodded. As long as I didn’t acknowledge their passing out loud it was like they weren’t dead. “Please don’t tell anybody,” I said.

  “I’m so sorry, Ward. Do you have brothers? Sisters?”

  I shook my head. “I have nobody. Not a soul.”

  “What about your uncle?” she asked.

  What about my uncle, indeed. Daniel Horn, my mother’s brother. He’d always been so quick to clap me on the back and go on and on about how alike he and I were. Cut from the same cloth. Two peas in a pod. Like twins. Always to my horror.

  My father, you see, had made the mistake of allowing his brother-in-law, a recent graduate of a business college over in Nashville, to take over the books Miss Pam once kept at Big Howard’s cotton brokerage. My mother had been the best bookkeeper he’d ever had—it’s how they’d met—and he’d assumed, naïvely, that Daniel would be just as good. My no-count uncle then proceeded to skim proceeds and cook the books to cover his malfeasance. In the best of times it might not have been enough to run the business into the ground, but the Crash came along and finished off the job. By rights my uncle should have gone to prison for embezzlement, but Miss Pam and my father refused to press charges. Big Howard said it was his own damned fault for not exercising more fiscal vigilance, and my mother about ate herself up over the whole squalid affair. I’ve always believed the pain of Daniel’s betrayal is what did her in before her time.

  If my mother were still alive, she’d be approaching a hundred years old now. Miss Pam was under half that when she died. Lay down for a nap, never got up. Forty-six years old. A stroke? A heart attack? I wasn’t there when it happened, so I’ll never know for sure. What I do know is that losing my mother was one loss too many for my old man. First his business, then the house he’d built for Miss Pam, then Miss Pam. He was so deranged by the pile-on of grief that he decided it would be best for everybody if he went with her. It doesn’t matter how he did it. What matters is that it happened. Maybe it wouldn’t have, if I’d been there. We’ll never know.

  By the time I found out they were gone they’d both been in the ground two weeks.

  I will say this for Daniel. He wrote me regularly, both at the dam and at the ranch. I have no idea what his letters said as I always tore them up, except for that one.

  After that grabby opening sentence, Ward, both your parents are deceased, followed by the bald facts of their demise, my uncle’s letter continued, When I didn’t hear back after repeated attempts to reach you, I was forced to liquidate your parents’ remaining worldly goods to pay their funeral expenses and cover my travel costs. Alas, this sad enterprise did not yield near enough. I was reduced to negotiating with the funeral director, old Mr. Schaefer, who eventually agreed to front a portion of the remaining amount. I convinced him you’d be good for it. Took some doing!

  Your parents’ rings wouldn’t have brought enough $$ to cover lunch at the train depot in Memphis when I took a last few bits and bobs into the city to pawn. Diamonds have some worth as they can be reset, the gentleman behind the counter told me, but wedding bands are a hard sell as the typical pawnshop customer is superstitious and doesn’t want to invite a curse on a new union. So I enclose them here for you.

  I’m headed now to New Orleans to look for employment in the cotton industry. Wish me luck! I hope once I am settled you will come visit. You are the closest kin I have left in this world now. Your devoted uncle, Daniel Horn.

  I have wondered more than once whatever became of Miss Pam’s engagement ring. For many years I searched the window of every pawnshop in Memphis and, later, New Orleans for it. I don’t suppose I would have recognized her diamond even if I’d seen it. More than likely the stone had been reset, as Daniel mentioned. Still, I looked.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It surprises me how entirely forgotten the phenomenon of the Reno divorce seems to be. Heck, it was on the cover of Life magazine just the summer before the one I’ve been telling you about. Just goes to show that divorce isn’t such a big deal anymore. And honestly, who even remembers Life magazine?

  It’s nice to see you again. I was worried I’d run you off with my endless gabbing. It’s a real pleasure for me to have the opportunity to talk about all this stuff, you know. When you get to be my age, things that happened fifty years ago start seeming more real to you than what happened yesterday. And yes, I’ve had all this tucked away for a good long while. Well, now that the dam’s busted, watch out. Raise your hand when you need to come up for air.

  Give me a minute, will you, and let me turn this television set off. I’ll just do it the old-fashioned way, with the knob here. I can never find that danged remote, so what’s the point of having it in the first place? That’s correct, that was The Thin Man. Yes, it is a good one. You know, when the 1960s rolled around, I was thunderstruck by how much Jack Kennedy’s wife, Jackie, favored Emily. But to be honest, Myrna Loy reminds me of her even more. Jackie always seemed so serious, and when she talked, that whispery voice of hers wrecked the illusion. Myrna didn’t sound like Emily, either, but she had her sense of fun. Her lightness.

  I met her once. How about that? Myrna Loy, I mean. At one of those Hollywood canteens the USO set up during the war. Cinema stars would volunteer at these doughboy social clubs, I guess you could call them, to give a thrill to all us men in uniform. They’d dance with us, serve us food, chat us up, and so forth. Yes, good point. Very much the way we pretend cowboys were called on to entertain the troops of divorcées who marched through Reno. Anyway, there I was, hanging out with my buddies from Fort Ord at the edge of the dance floor, and I felt this tap on my shoulder. I turned around and said, “Oh. You’re Myrna Loy.” Myrna Loy, asking me to dance.

  “I am,” she said. “Want to dance, soldier?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “Please don’t call me ma’am,” she said. “It makes me feel like I’m your grandma.”

  That turn of phrase, so like Emily’s, made me trip over her feet as well as mine. I’m sure I wasn’t the first soldier dumbstruck at having the flesh-and-blood Myrna Loy in his arms after so many years of seeing her likeness projected onto a screen. She was kind enough to ignore my clumsiness and did her best to draw me out. “So where are you from?” she asked.

  For some reason, I said, “Reno.”

  “Oh, I know Reno,” she said.

  “Why’s that?” I asked. “Did you get divorced there?”

  “Just did, as a matter of fact,” she said. “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “Not everybody,” I said.

  The night aft
er I found out my parents were dead and buried was another scorcher. I lay on top of my sheets again, naked as the day I was born, twisting Miss Pam’s ring on my pinkie finger and Big Howard’s on the one next to it. When I’d said goodbye to them years earlier on the platform at the Memphis depot, I never imagined that would be the last time I’d lay eyes on them.

  I was finally, finally pushing off to sea in that beautiful pea-green boat when I heard a quiet little tap on my window frame. I sat up, and there was Emily. “May I come in?” she whispered.

  This time I wrapped the sheet tight around myself before I went to the window. “Sure,” I said.

  Emily looked up at me, in her boy pajamas and a pair of moccasins she must have bought when she got the varmint boots. “If I’m going to come in, you’re going to have to give me a hand.”

  “Oh, you mean come in come in.”

  “Yes.”

  I had nothing to lose anymore, so when she put a moccasined foot on the wall I grabbed her wrists and pulled. Over the course of the last few weeks Nina had turned Emily into a good little climber. Once she was inside, she said, “I hoped you’d still be up. Were your ears burning? Nina and I were just talking about you.”

  “Oh? What were you talking about?” I asked, tightening my sheet around my waist.

  “Nina’s revolver. Where did you hide it?”

  “Why?”

  “Nina asked me, and I said I didn’t know. Which was true. But after she went to bed, I started wondering where it was. Then I couldn’t stop wondering. Maybe if you tell me where it is my brain will stop chasing its tail and let me fall asleep.”

  “It’s under my bed,” I said.

  “Under your bed?” she asked. “Is that safe?”

  “It’s still in the pillowcase.”

  “Shouldn’t it be under lock and key?”

  “I don’t have anything that locks with a key. I think it’s safe enough under my bed. It’s unloaded.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I remember.”

  The two of us stood there in the moonlight, looking at each other. Finally I asked, “Is that all you wanted?” Somehow I managed to stop short of saying, “ma’am.”

  “I have one more question you might be able to answer,” she said.

  “I’ll do my best,” I said.

  She cleared her throat. “Nina told me I shouldn’t base my opinion of all men on Archer. That I’m selling half of humanity short by assuming all of men are bad bets in one way or another. She says I deserve better than him, but I said I couldn’t imagine who that better man would be, or whether he’d want me now, if in fact he existed.”

  I figured she was fishing for an answer, but what answer I didn’t know. Eventually I volunteered, “I don’t think you’re damaged goods, if that’s what you mean. I think any man on earth would be lucky to be with somebody like you.”

  “Someone like me?” she asked. “Or me in particular?”

  “You in particular. Of course you. All sorts of men are going to fall in love with you. You’ll see.”

  “How about you?” she asked. “Could you imagine falling in love with me?” She stared at me pointedly, then started fumbling with the buttons on her pajama top.

  I realized then that hadn’t been so much a question as an invitation. Once I got over my surprise, I said, “Where are my manners? Let me help you with those buttons.”

  Of course it was a bad idea. But I was heartbroken and lonely and a woman who was also hurting, whose company I enjoyed, was taking her shirt off, right in front of me, with intent. We might not have been in love, but it seemed like as good a way as any for us to cheer each other up.

  From that night forward Emily and I got together every chance we got. Day or night, indoors and out. It didn’t matter. Whenever we saw an opportunity we jumped right on it and each other. You may wonder how we managed not getting caught with our pants down, but as the weather grew very hot our guests tended to lose interest in excursions. Everyone who could spent the afternoon hunkered down under a fan, napping.

  I will admit that the danger of what we were up to was a welcome distraction, too. The illicit delight of a quick and dirty coupling in the kittens’ stall, for example, after Emily asked at lunch if I’d be willing to take her to visit the furry little varmints. Or a session in the stagecoach, which squeaked and rocked so alarmingly that I transferred us midway to the back seat of the Pierce-Arrow. Also on a saddle blanket I spread out of sight of the house in the no-man’s-land of the gopher field, below the rim of a dry wash that turned into a raging creek during the rainy season.

  Somehow in the midst of all that fornication I fell in love with Emily. Fell hard. That’s the danger but also the wonder of that sort of thing, isn’t it? First bodies entwine, then hearts. Does it ever really happen any other way? I’m not so sure.

  You can’t exactly blame me for believing she’d fallen for me, too. Not after the morning I woke her up to send her back to Scorpion before the sun came up. Emily opened her eyes, smiled sleepily, and said, “Oh, Ward. I’d be lost without you.”

  One night as Emily climbed back into her pajamas in the bunkhouse before lighting out, she heard the sound of a toilet flushing on the other side of a wall and froze. “What’s that?” she whispered.

  I held up a finger until we heard a door click shut. “Sam,” I whispered back. “We have sinks in our rooms but we share the rest of the facilities. The bathroom is between my room and his.”

  “Oh. Do you think Sam can hear us?”

  I said, “When he’s in his bedroom? I don’t think so. Which reminds me. How in the heck are you getting in and out of the house without anybody hearing you? That staircase creaks and grumbles like Zep’s stomach once she gets a whiff of lunch. It’s not like you can climb down the trellis in and out of Coyote anymore.”

  “Oh, you have our friend Nina to thank for that,” Emily explained. “When she was here for her first divorce, years ago, she figured out how to sneak down to the kitchen for food after everyone was supposed to be in bed. When we were first roommates and I was too upset to fall asleep, Nina taught me how to navigate the stairs. Memorizing all those moves was sort of like learning to play chess.”

  That explained the way Emily had ricocheted silently up the stairs the first time we kissed. “Those chess lessons have certainly come in handy,” I said. “Good thing you asked Margaret to let Nina be your roommate.”

  “I asked Margaret to let Nina be my roommate? What do you mean?”

  “I overheard Nina tell Margaret that it was your idea to share Coyote.”

  Emily shook her head. “You must have misunderstood. It wasn’t my idea. However it happened, though, I’m glad it did. Nina’s the best friend I’ve ever had. I love her. So does Portia. So does everybody. She’s sort of irresistible, don’t you think?”

  “Not as irresistible as you are,” I said.

  “That’s the right answer,” she said.

  I wonder if Emily would have loved Nina quite as much if she’d realized what Nina and Portia were up to while the two of us were busy with other things. On the other hand, I don’t think Emily and I could have gotten away with as much as we did if those two hadn’t been involved in forbidden business of their own.

  I can’t remember exactly how long Emily and I had been going at it when I came down to help Sam saddle up for the late-afternoon trail ride and found him in the breezeway of the barn, holding Dumpling’s tack and looking flummoxed.

  “What’s wrong, Sam?” I asked.

  “I got Dumpling’s gear here, but no Dumpling.”

  “What do you mean, ‘no Dumpling’?”

  “Have a look,” Sam said. “His stall is as empty as Jesus’s tomb the day after Easter. I wonder if the coyotes got at him somehow.”

  As it turned out, the coyotes had. The capital “C” Coyotes, Nina and her new roommate, Portia.

  Since we were a horse short and our ladies were confident in Sam’s ability to keep them safe, I stayed behind whil
e they rode. Emily was upstairs, asleep in her little bed in Scorpion, I supposed. I hoped so, since she wasn’t getting a lot of sleep when she was in my little bed. As for me, there was no rest for the weary. It would hardly do for me to disappear to sleep the afternoon away. So I kept myself awake and visible practicing rope tricks Sam had been trying to teach me. The guests ate that kind of drugstore cowboy hotdoggery right up, but I was never any good at it.

  I was out in the barnyard, giving it my inept all, when the Coyotes guilty of making off with Dumpling trotted up the ranch drive, riding bareback and without a bridle, in the company of a handsome and willowy young gentleman in a light cotton suit, a bow tie, spectacles, and a straw boater. On a bicycle. Hugh.

  I gathered up the rope in coiled loops and hung it from the post I’d been casting at.

  “Before you start scolding, Ward,” Nina said, “there was an emergency. The three of us had to be somewhere, and we couldn’t all fit on Hugh’s bicycle.”

  Hugh propped his bike against the corral fence, tipped his boater, and shook my hand. “I’m Hugh,” he said.

  “I guessed,” I said. “I’m Ward.”

  “Ward! I’ve heard a lot about you. A pleasure.”

  “I’ve heard a lot about you, too,” I said.

  “You have?” Hugh asked.

  “About your bicycle, anyway,” I said. “Sam told me all about it. He always wanted to ride one when he was a kid. Never got the chance.”

  “Ah. Well, we can’t have that, can we? I’ll have to show our friend Sam the ins and outs of mine when next we meet.”

  “Where’s my mother, Ward?” Portia asked.

  “Why are you asking me?”

  Portia gave me such a sour look that I worried she might be on to us. “I don’t see anybody else to ask. You win by default.”