by M. E. Kerr
Once she even said that herself, actually implying that I was better for her than Eddie. “It’s good to get to know someone, isn’t it, Fell?” She’d spoken up one afternoon. “I never really got to know a male except Dad, not really. I was always too nervous and self-conscious. God! After Eddie and I were together, I’d go over and over what we said, how I looked, play by play, like my whole life depended on some dumb little interlude with him. But this is just us: easy, relaxed. It’s good like this. It’s better.”
She’d even stopped saying “really” in every sentence.
We rode in silence for a while, following the Delaware River, which had chunks of ice floating in it, and Nina leaned over and snapped on the radio. She pushed the button to find music that suited her. She was sort of jumping around in the seat, taking her cap off to shake her hair free, putting it back on. She seemed to be acting out everything I was feeling: It was a great day, good to be away from Cottersville, pretty out there with the sun inching over to sink down in the sky, neat that the radio was playing old Elvis stuff.
When we got to the coffee shop where the Friday-afternoon poetry readings were held, there was a sign on the door:
CLOSED FEBRUARY AND MARCH.
“Didn’t you call, Nina?”
“Would we be here if I had? Don’t get mad at me. How do you think I feel?”
“Sorry,” I said. “What’ll we do now? Is anything open?”
We stood there hugging ourselves and stamping our feet in the cold, and Nina said unless I wanted to look at sleigh beds or weather vanes circa 1800, we were out of luck.
“I’m not hungry, either,” she added.
“I guess we’ll just drive back. No movies?”
“No movies.” She was heading toward the car. “It’s too cold to walk around.”
“Didn’t you know they closed in winter?”
“Fell, quit nagging me. Let’s try to look at the doughnut and not at the hole.”
I opened the car door for her and said I wouldn’t mind looking at a doughnut, either — I hadn’t eaten since lunch.
When I got back behind the wheel, she said to drive up near Point Pleasant. She thought there was a hamburger place that way.
She directed me while I tried to get myself back in a good mood. I knew the reason I was sounding cranky was that I was disappointed. I rated poetry readings about the same as guided tours through flower gardens, but at least it would have been special to Nina, something she’d remember us doing together … It’d been a long time since I’d cared about pleasing a girl. I wasn’t sure how much of it had to do with my wanting her to get her bearings again, or how much it had to do with me being ready to crank up my own broken motor. Something was in the wind … and it was a relief from thoughts of a body falling, a voice shrieking, and unanswered questions that had caused a rift between Dib and me.
We listened to the radio for a while: golden oldies — The Beatles and Steppenwolf, Jimi Hendrix and Buffalo Springfield.
Finally she glanced my way and said she had an idea.
“What?”
“You’re still mad, aren’t you, Fell?”
“I’m over that. I wasn’t really mad…. What’s your idea?”
“I want to see something.”
“What?”
“Something up ahead here.”
“Food, I hope.”
“Not food…. He’s got a shop somewhere right near here,” she said. “His sister runs it. He won’t be there, so don’t worry.”
She waited for it to sink in.
It hit my stomach first, then traveled around in my gut for a while and settled in my windpipe.
When my voice returned, it said, “You planned this all along, didn’t you, Nina?”
“And don’t say my name in there,” she said. “I promised him I’d never come here.” She touched my leg with her hand. “Oh, Fell, this won’t hurt anything. I’m just curious. Aren’t you ever curious?”
I was staring straight ahead, mad as hell, when I saw it come into view.
A gigantic black dragon with gold wings and green eyes, breathing out fake fire.
Chapter 14
Dragonland was an old, gray, cold, musty-smelling barn at the bottom of a hill. It was one of those hodgepodge places that sold everything from Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs to leather coats with fringe on the sleeves. They specialized in twenty-four-hour film service, “Award-Winning Wedding and Graduation Photography,” “Furniture: Bought and Sold,” and rental tools.
The giant dragon perched on the roof wasn’t the only one. Dragons were everywhere, in every color, made of rubber, iron, tin, wood, and papier-mâché. There were dragonflies, too. If Eddie Dragon didn’t run the place himself, his spirit certainly dominated the decor.
At one end of the barn there was a mural of a waterfall, an old mill, and a willow tree, an iron bench in front of it. A sign to the left saying:
DRESS UP IN OLD CLOTHES
TAKE HOME A SOUVENIR.
I’d seen the scenery before, in the photograph of Eddie Dragon that Schwartz had given me.
To the right there was a rack with assorted clothes, feather boas and hats with veils, canes, top hats, derbies, old furs, and mustaches and wigs.
There was a woman behind the counter with the kind of great, warm smile that could make you forget anything, including the fact you shouldn’t have stopped the car to go inside that place with Nina.
She didn’t look like someone who belonged in a Pennsylvania winter. I could see her out under the sun in some Kansas field with a piece of straw stuck playfully between her teeth and the wind blowing back her thick, curly, brown hair. She had magnificent white teeth; big everything: hands, feet, bosoms, the gypsy type loaded with beads and bracelets jangling on her wrists. She had on a long, red dress with a full skirt and some kind of Mexican-looking red-and-white shawl over her shoulders. You’d imagine her stirring pots of fabulous-tasting stews, or tending a garden, or mending something. She might as well have had one of those cartoon balloons over her head with “I’ll take care of you” inside.
It was hard for me to guess women’s ages. All the while I was with Delia, I thought she was maybe nineteen — she’d never tell me. She was really twenty-five. This woman looked older. I figured she was Dragon’s big sister.
“You lost?” she said. “You look lost.” She was laughing, picking up a Siamese cat who’d run to her with his ruff up the moment the bell jingled to announce our arrival.
I’d seen the cat before, too. I let Nina do the talking.
“We were really looking for someplace to get a hamburger.”
“Not around here, I’m afraid. Try New Hope down the road. Or Doylestown up the road.”
“You have a lot of interesting things.”
“We try…. Are you visiting?”
“We came from New Jersey,” Nina said. She wasn’t one to worry that there was a Pennsylvania license plate on the BMW.
The cat was hanging on to the woman like we were going to bag it and toss it in the river. She got its claws out of her shawl and put it down on the floor. “Go find your mousie,” she said to it, as though the thing would answer Okay! Good idea! and the dark-brown tail disappeared into a room behind her. No door, just a curtain of beads.
“Would you like me to show you anything?”
“I just love this place!” Nina sounded naive and girlish, instead of dark-hearted and possessed.
The woman gave us that great big white smile again and said, “I’m Ann.”
Nina jumped right in. “I’m Lauren,” she said, “and that’s John Fell.”
“Lauren, John,” Ann said. “If you want to know the price of anything, there’s a tag on the bottom.”
“Fell, let’s have our picture taken!” Nina said.
Ann said, “Just pick out your costumes. Anything over on the rack.”
Nina headed that way, babbling about how we’d have a souvenir of the day, and soon she’d found herself a little green
hat with an orange feather on it, a black velvet cape, and a white silk parasol.
“Ready!” she said.
I walked over, put on the top hat and a long black coat with a fur collar, grabbed a black cane to complete the costume.
Ann was standing there with her hand on her hip, laughing and ohing and ahing. As soon as we moved toward the iron bench in front of the mural with the mill, and the waterfall and the willow tree, she picked up a camera.
“I’m doing all the hard work now,” she said, “while the boss is on assignment.”
“Who’s the dragon collector?” Nina asked.
“My husband. Eddie,” Ann said. “That’s our last name. Dragon.”
I gave Nina a long, long look she refused to return, so I figured she was handling it Nina style: no show of the punch that must have just landed hard to her insides.
She was busy acting as though this was one of the best times she’d ever had, twirling her parasol, and affecting a haughty expression. “Let’s try and look très, très superior,” she said to me, something I would have expected from Lauren Lasher, never Nina.
I tried my best: tilting my top hat over my eye, resting my weight on the cane, my arm around Nina.
“That’s jaunty, not superior,” said Nina.
Ann just kept laughing.
Nina fixed the top hat so it sat squarely on my head, and she told me to stare straight ahead and hook the cane over my free arm.
“Good, Lauren!” Ann said. “That’s fun!”
“Now don’t smile and don’t put your arm around me. I’ll hook mine in yours,” Nina directed me.
“Perfect!” Ann said. “It’ll be ready in no time.”
The cross-eyed Siamese was watching us behind the beads in the doorway.
Nina walked around looking at things I didn’t want to look at, like rugs made out of animal skin and carvings made from elephant tusks.
I said, “You’ve really got a lot of variety.”
“My husband’s a pack rat. I never know what he’ll walk in with, but it’s always different.” She laughed again. She was a hard laugher, tossing back her head, showing her love of life … and of Eddie Dragon, too, I thought.
I asked her what we owed her, and as soon as she’d given me five dollars change from a twenty, the picture was ready. It came in a small metal frame, with REMEMBER POINT PLEASANT written in gold at the top.
It wasn’t good of me. I looked the way I’d begun to feel: like someone getting used to a bad smell.
Nina was a better actress. She came off looking haughty, superficial, insane.
“This has been fun!” Nina said, but the air was seeping out of the balloon: I could see it in her tired little smile, the kind that began to hurt the corners of your mouth because of all the effort that was going into it.
While Ann walked us to the door, she said, “Good-bye, Lauren, John. Thanks for stopping by. It gets lonely here this time of year.”
Chapter 15
We were driving along the river’s edge. I put the fog lights on.
“He told me not to go there,” she said softly.
“I can see why.”
“Fell? I never, ever want to see him again!”
It was easy to ignore that one.
I snapped, “What’s this crap about him being on assignment? She made him sound like a foreign correspondent or something.”
“He takes pictures. Weddings and stuff.”
“How come you knew he wouldn’t be there today?” She didn’t answer for a minute. Then she said, “I called there yesterday. I pretended I wanted him to take some baby pictures, and she said he was on assignment until next Monday.”
“You’ve been calling him all along, then?”
“No. I never dared call him there. I wouldn’t have known about that place, except when he got framed the address was in the newspaper.”
“When he got framed. Sure.”
“He got framed, Fell.”
“And his sister runs the place. Sure.”
“How do you think I feel, Fell? Believe me, I am finished with Edward Gilbert Dragon!”
“Believe you,” I laughed.
“Don’t you have any feelings for me?”
“Yeah. I have the feeling you’ve just forced me to become an informer.”
“You’re not going to tell Dad?”
“I’m not? Why aren’t I? Dad’s paying me.”
“I didn’t try to see Eddie, Fell. I didn’t even want to see him. I just wanted to see Dragonland … He’d never take me there.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Fell, please don’t tell Dad! I can promise you I’ll never have anything to do with Eddie Dragon again!” She turned to face me, pulling her knees up under her, slinging an arm across the seat. “Listen to me, Fell! I feel horrible! She’s so … earnest.”
“She’s a lot more than earnest!”
“Do you think she’s pretty?”
“Yes, I think she’s pretty, and if the next question is do I think she’s prettier than you, yes! And smarter, too!”
She touched my shoulder with her hand. “Oh, Fell, don’t be mad. I’m trying to handle this thing, and I can’t deal with it when you’re mad at me.”
“Tough!” I said. “Damn! Everything was going so well, I thought, and all the while you’ve got these snakes in your head!”
“That’s a good name for them, snakes. Dr. Inge calls them compulsions, but they’re snakes all right. They were, anyway.”
She touched the bare skin at my neck with her finger. “Fell? Please? I’m sorry.”
“And don’t try stuff like that!” I said.
“I’m just touching you, friend to friend.”
“Don’t!” I said. I leaned over and pushed on the radio. “I don’t want to talk, okay?”
• • •
When we got to Cottersville, the black Lincoln was in the drive. The porch light was on. The downstairs lights, and a light where David Deem had his study.
I locked the BMW and handed the key to Nina. She gave me the souvenir photograph. “I don’t want this thing — do you?”
I stuffed it inside my jacket.
We were standing in the driveway. Meatloaf was barking. She pulled off her stocking cap and shook her hair loose so the moon caught its shine.
“It was really good that we went there, Fell. Now I know the truth … Can’t you at least think about not telling Dad? Sleep on it or something? I’m in little pieces right now.”
“I’m not going to tell him tonight,” I said. “I’m too hungry.’“
“You’re always hungry.” She was starting to cry.
“Nina,” I began, not knowing where it would end, not having to worry because the front door opened and her father stepped out on the porch. “Come in, Fell! Mrs. Whipple made you both corned beef sandwiches.”
“Please don’t tell him, Fell,” Nina said.
• • •
I said I couldn’t stay, I’d take my sandwich with me, and David Deem picked up Meatloaf and told me what he had to say wouldn’t take long.
“You go into the kitchen and wrap Fell’s sandwich, honey,” he told Nina. “Fell? Come in and sit down for a minute.”
Then he said, “Do those boots come off?”
• • •
I was in my smelly stockinged feet again, my jacket over my lap, sitting forward on the couch.
“You’ve never told me how you like being a Sevens,” said Mr. Deem, straightening his tie, leaning back in an armchair he was sharing with Meatloaf.
“Who wouldn’t like it?” I said.
“Take me. I was this raw-eared kid from Pennsylvania Dutch country, father a farmer. I went to The Hill on a scholarship. I’d always made my own bed, didn’t know what a soup spoon was, never, never had anyone wait on me … and suddenly …” He spread his arms out.
“That was all changed by mere chance,” I said.
He laughed hard at that. “Yes … yes … it changed
my life, Fell. It gave me my first taste of being somebody.”
I let him talk. I didn’t think it was the right time to tell him “somebody’s” daughter was still sneaking around after a pusher who suddenly had a wife in the bargain.
“I feel badly about what happened at The Tower.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “The suicide. I haven’t told Nina. It just so happens that was her psychiatrist’s son.”
“Nina knows, Mr. Deem. Dr. Lasher told her.”
He thought that one over. He said, “Nina’s so interior. She calls me secretive because I lock my study. But look at her. You think she’d have told me she knew.”
I resisted saying No, I wouldn’t think that. I would think Nina wouldn’t tell anything … and here’s why, Mr. Deem.
“Her doctor overdoes the confidentiality rule, if you ask me. Here I’ve been so careful about keeping all that business to myself. Is Nina taking it all right?”
“Your daughter seems to handle things,” I said.
“Yes. That’s her mother’s independent streak … Well, then, this clears the way for what I’m about to suggest. I’d like Nina to meet some nice young men now that the dragon’s been slain.” A pleased little haw-haw for punctuation.
I bit my lip. I’d hear him out first. I was thinking of the corned beef sandwich, too. I was hoping Mrs. Whipple knew enough to smear the bread with lots of Dijon mustard.
“The best young men are on The Hill, no doubt of that. And from what I see of you, Fell, Sevens is still instilling in its members the idea that you live up to privilege, and become more because of it.”
How was I going to tell him I’d become less the second I saw Dragonland? I’d become Silly Putty in Nina’s hands.
“One of the most amusing and memorable traditions of Sevens, of course, is The Charles Dance. What fun I had at those things!” He was stretching his legs out, letting Meatloaf wiggle onto his lap. “Do you know that at the first Charles Dance there were twelve boys dressed the same as me? Never go as Charlie Chaplin, Fell. You’ll see yourself all over the place!”
“I was thinking of going as Damon Charles.”
“Uh-oh, the founder himself, hmmm? That takes nerve…. I like that, Fell. I wonder if anyone’s ever done that?”