“Honey, I can’t dance. I’ve got two left feet.”
Tears welled up in her hazel eyes. “Nobody likes me.”
He put his huge arm around her small shoulders. “That’s not true. I like you. I think you’re the prettiest girl here. You’re still young and there aren’t many boys here your age. In fact, I don’t see a one.”
“I’m fourteen.”
She had turned fourteen on April 1.
“You’re getting bigger every day.” He noticed the rounded face, the once-chubby limbs that were becoming angular. Maizie was set for another growth spurt. He wondered what his children would have looked like if he’d had them.
“Uncle Chessy, I wish you would learn to dance.”
He laughed. “You and my wife.” He nodded in the direction of Juts out on the wooden dance floor. Japanese lanterns swayed overhead. A swarm of men buzzed around Juts. She possessed terrific rhythm and a beautiful feminine body. Men couldn’t take their eyes off Juts dancing.
Maizie cried in earnest now. “I’ll never have a boyfriend. I’ll never have admirers like Aunt Juts.”
“Honey, yes, you will. Now you buck up. The prettiest girl at the dance can’t be crying. People will worry.”
She sniffled, “And you know what? Mary is dancing with everyone.” She boo-hooed loudly. “She says Mom told her she had to dance with more boys than just Extra Billy so she is, and she’s not bringing any back to me.”
He kissed the top of her head and rocked her a little with his arm around her shoulders because he had no idea what to do or say.
A lovely young woman approached the table. She leaned over and addressed Maizie.
“I couldn’t help but overhear you. Come on the dance floor with me. I’ll teach you some new steps.”
Chester stood up. “Hello, I’m Chester Smith and this is my niece, Maizie Trumbull.”
“Trudy Archer. I just moved here from Baltimore.” She smiled a dazzling smile. He guessed she was twenty or maybe twenty-two.
“Welcome to Runnymede. We’re no bigger than a sigh”—he smiled—“but we pack a lot of life into this place.”
“I can see that. Do you mind if I take Maizie out on the dance floor?” She paused a moment. “I’m opening a dance studio on Hanover Street. I trained in Baltimore with the Fred Astaire studio.”
Maizie was already on her feet. Chester nodded that it was fine, and Trudy walked the girl over to the side, showed her a few basic steps, then twirled her around. Maizie was thrilled. Extra Billy strolled by. He kept his eye on Mary valiantly dancing with everyone to please her mother. Chester motioned for him to come over.
“Sir?” Extra Billy squared his broad shoulders.
“I’ll help you if you’ll help me.”
“Yes, sir.” Billy respected Chester. Most men did, and not just because of Chester’s heavy musculature but because, as the boys said, he never lost his shit.
“I’ll help you with the Meade statue if you and your friends will dance with Maizie. She’s at that awkward age and she’s been crying her eyes out.” He stopped a moment. “And you know, Bill, it might help you put a foot right with Louise Trumbull. In fact, let the night wear on a bit and then you really ought to ask Louise to dance and tell her she looks like Mary’s sister.”
Extra Billy smiled. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
As Trudy led Maizie back to the table, Extra Billy offered her his arm. “Maizie.”
“Oh, wow.” She squealed.
Trudy smiled as Chester again stood up. “Please join me. My wife won’t come back to the table until the party’s over. I always thought she could dance with Fred Astaire.” He indicated Julia Ellen.
“A real natural.” Trudy appreciated Julia’s untrained talent. “You don’t dance?”
“Not me.”
“You look like an athlete to me.”
“I can throw a ball, I guess, or hit one, but Miss Archer, I’m pretty clumsy otherwise.”
“If you come to the studio I’ll give you a free lesson.” He hesitated, so she pressed. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to sweep your wife into your arms and surprise her? I bet she’d love it.”
Chester stared back into those intent, disquietingly green eyes and found himself saying, “Uh—I couldn’t take advantage of you like that, miss, but I think I would like to dance. I’m afraid everyone will laugh at me.”
“One free lesson. And I promise, I promise, or you get your money back, that no one will laugh.”
“All right.”
“Tuesday at six-thirty?”
“See you then, Miss Archer.”
“Oh, please, call me Trudy. Miss Archer makes me sound like I’m going to target practice.” She rose and he stood again. She tossed him a radiant smile over her shoulder. He sat down, wondering why in the hell he had made a fool promise like that.
Maizie came back when the dance was finished, but before she could sit down, Billy’s best buddy, Ray Parker, reached for her. “Come on, Maizie, I need a girlfriend.”
“Oh, gee, Uncle Chessy, this is swell,” she gushed, then twirled off.
As he was instructed to do, Extra Billy asked Louise to dance. Stiff at first, she didn’t refuse. That would have violated the S.C.C.—Southern Conduct Code. Paul, weary from dancing, joined Chester at the table.
“Cold beer.” Chester shoved a fresh beer at a parched Paul.
Paul gratefully knocked back the beer. “Celeste Chalfonte may be in her sixties, but she wore me out.”
“She’s something.”
Pearlie noticed Louise in the arms of Extra Billy. “Will you look at that? That boy’s got guts.”
“That boy is probably going to be your son-in-law, so we’d better figure out how to get along with him.”
A shadow crossed Pearlie’s face. “I think you’re right. What would you do?”
“Well, he’s young, rebellious, but he’s not mean-spirited, he’s not lazy. I’d teach him the business if he married my daughter. Course, it’s easy for me to offer advice, Pearlie, I don’t have a daughter.”
“You will,” Pearlie reassured his brother-in-law, whom he had learned to love. He knew this was a sensitive subject. “There’s something to what you say. If I take him in the business, assuming they do get married, I can keep an eye on him. I don’t think anyone paid much attention to the boy.”
“Guess not.”
The Bitters family bred like rabbits and then left their kids to fend for themselves.
The dance ended and Extra Billy squired Louise back to the table. A secret smile played across her face. He bowed to her and left.
“That was something,” Pearlie commented.
Wheezie, trying to sound proper and put out, said, “I had to dance with him.”
“I’m glad you did, honey.” Pearlie supported her decision, slyly noticing she seemed decidedly youthful.
Walter Falkenroth walked over. “Paul, I want your wife,” he joked.
“She is popular.” Pearlie smiled as Louise took a quick sip of soda and followed Walter onto the dance floor.
Paul returned to Chessy. “Extra Billy had the sense to ask my wife for a dance. He may be smarter than I thought.”
“Yep.” Chessy smiled.
17
A cool, heavy mist clung to her cheeks. The headlight of the train glowed, diffuse in the silver moisture, then passed as the streamlined Pullman cars, painted dark green, stopped at the station siding.
Doak Garten, the young porter, waited off to the side, his cart filled with Ramelle’s expensive luggage. This train would take her to Washington, D.C., where she would transfer to another train, which would snake through the South, giving her a few hours to disembark at New Orleans for coffee and jazz. The lushness of the South would give way to the browns, mustard-yellows, and brick-reds of the Southwest. Finally the journey would end in Los Angeles, languidly reposing between the San Gabriel Mountains and the Pacific Ocean.
“I’ll write you every day.” Ramelle kissed Celeste.
“You can be the Marquise de Sévigné of Los Angeles.” Celeste returned her kiss.
“All aboard!”
Although the steps were high, Ramelle gracefully hopped up, then leaned down for one more kiss. Doak handed her luggage up to the conductor, his square kepi askew.
Finding her compartment, she sat by the window, her gloved hand raised in a farewell. As the steps were lifted onto the train and the conductor waved down to the engineer, she pressed her lips to the windowpane, one last kiss.
Celeste waved back and then the train pulled out. She stood there watching the red taillights disappear into the thickening silver until one long mournful whistle blast bid the final good-bye.
At seven in the morning the temperature hung in the forties. Shuddering, she put her gloved hands into the pockets of the Norfolk jacket.
She walked into the scrubbed station. “Doak, I nearly forgot my manners.” She found him behind the office window. “Where’s Nestor?” She inquired about the ticket dispenser, station manager, janitor, and general all-around man.
“Doughnut run. Yost’s would go out of business without that man.”
She discreetly pushed a folded twenty-dollar bill under the window. “Another cool day.”
“Makes spring last longer.” He pushed the bill back under the window. “Miz Chalfonte, that’s too much.”
“It will make up for all the times I forget to pay you.”
“You never forget to pay me, Miz Chalfonte. You never forget anybody that ever done you a favor.”
“Put it in the bank, then. Keep the tellers busy.”
He knew there was no sense arguing with her. “Yes, ma’am, and I thank you kindly.”
Walter Falkenroth hurried in. Celeste stepped aside after exchanging hasty pleasantries. “Doak, I’ll see you.”
She walked outside. Old Patience Horney, feebleminded and two years older than God, squatted at the front door with her hot soft pretzels and a little mustard jar.
Celeste bought a pretzel for the same reason everyone did: to give Patience money and because they were good, although at this early hour Celeste wasn’t in the mood.
“Celeste, dearie, I tell you that Brutus Rife is still in love with you. He’ll never get over you.” Patience turned her good eye to Celeste; her bad one was milky.
She referred to a man dead for twenty-one years.
“He’ll just have to.” Celeste smiled.
“You’re the most beautiful woman ever walked through Runnymede. Plenty says you’re the most beautiful woman ever walked through Maryland.”
“You’re very kind, Patience.” Celeste hadn’t the heart to tell Patience that she was in her early sixties and Patience herself had to be pushing eighty.
“Wish I’d been born beautiful.” Her toothless mouth collapsed into a concave smile.
“You are beautiful, Patience.” Celeste pressed money into the gloved hand. “Now you have a good day.”
“Yes, ma’am, yes, ma’am. You give the Major my regards, now.” She remembered Celeste’s father.
“I will, Patience.”
Celeste walked out to the small parking lot. In her youth she had read constantly. She had wanted answers. She never did find the answer to one of her questions: why Patience sat at the train station.
For a searing moment she thought she would sob. The anguish of the world washed over her, or was it Ramelle’s departing? She didn’t know. Was it the thought that Doak and the other young men would eventually be sucked into this monstrous evil across the Atlantic, or was there evil enough at home? Were Al Capone and Pretty Boy Floyd small-fry versions of Hitler and Mussolini?
She sniffed. The first delicate fragrance of lilac haunted the air. The buds remained closed, yet that unmistakable sweetness lingered.
She felt young. She felt no sense of her age except for the decades of memories. This anguish would have felt the same at twenty. Emotions have no history.
She wondered if she needed a romance, one last fling, one discreet pursuit. One last quest. A quest is a pursuit, she thought, her hand reaching for the chrome door handle. What is to pursue, for what could be worth having that would flee you? Whatever is worth having is within, and if you find it, others will come to you. Pursuit is antithetical to gain. She opened the Packard’s door and slid in the seat, put her hands on the wheel, and stared at the tracks. Well—what’s inside of me? She smelled the fresh hot pretzel, snatched it off the seat, the thin wax paper crinkling as she picked it up.
She bit into it, chewed, then announced, “A hot pretzel,” and burst out laughing.
18
Long golden shadows rolled over Runnymede Square. On the south side of the square, the flickering light on the faces of the statue of the three Confederate soldiers gave them expression. One fired his rifle, one carried the standard, and the third was falling to his knees, wounded. The standard-bearer reached down, his hand under the stricken man’s armpit, trying to keep him on his feet. Behind them the cannon loomed, its barrel pointing at the Bon-Ton department store on the corner of Hanover Street, the Yankee side of the square.
The extra sunlight on the summer side of the spring equinox stretched the days, adding a languor punctuated by laughter as more people stayed outside. The dogwood, mint-green buds soon to open in a rash of white or pink, speckled the beautiful square, laid out and planted before the American Revolution.
The Corinthian columns of Runnymede Bank and Trust, situated on the southwest corner of the square, loomed an imposing, glossy blue-white. Houses of money, redolent with dignity and the old Latin word gravitas, rivaled churches in holiness.
As Chessy walked across the square accompanied by a jaunty Buster, the people he had known nearly all his life were closing up their shops, winding up colorful awnings, locking doors. The greengrocer always left aging oranges, apples, and pears outside on the stands for the poor each Tuesday night. A fresh shipment would arrive Wednesday morning.
A steady stream of people filed into Cadwalder’s for a hamburger or a soda. Some would linger for the first showing of the movie just down the street. Young men, a blush of peach fuzz on their cheeks, would ask to carry home girls’ books.
He had lived in this area his entire life, nearly thirty-six years. The web of interconnecting lives and generations glistened golden in the sunset. The more he had lived, the more he felt those connecting strands between people.
Chester Rupert Smith thought much and said little. This was a habit acquired early in a house where Josephine Smith pontificated hourly. His middle brother, Joseph, looked and acted like their mother, domineering and talkative. The youngest brother, Sanford, had some ambition but was easygoing.
All his life, Chessy had bent under the weight of the accusation that he lacked ambition and that he should have put his intelligence to better use. Getting and grabbing held no appeal for him. He felt his life was in a constant state of richness. He wasn’t unwilling to share that richness, but he didn’t believe anyone else wanted to hear about it.
Not a day dawned that he didn’t have some new idea or insight. The fact that not one of them was commercial seemed no great sin to him. He’d grown accustomed to disappointing his mother and his wife; Juts possessed enough drive for both of them. But he didn’t disappoint himself. He was content to let life unfold in all its squalor and grandeur.
Junior McGrail, resembling a sloth in good shoes, stood at the base of George Gordon Meade’s statue with her friend Caesura Frothingham.
“Good evening, ladies.” Chessy tipped his hat.
“Good evening, Chester,” they replied.
“George looks much improved, don’t you think?” He smiled.
“We saw you, Harmon, Extra Billy, and those riffraff friends of his over here last night pulling General Meade upright. What really did happen to our glorious hero?” Caesura thought anything in a Union uniform glorious. This created problems.
“Perhaps he drank too much.”
Caesura pinched her lip
s. “Not General Meade.”
“Ah, well, too late for the old boy now.”
“You know what happened,” Junior said, her tiny Yorkshire terrier tugging on her pink leash toward Buster, who wagged his docked tail.
“As soon as this corner of the base is repaired, all will be well, so it doesn’t matter what happened.”
“You ought to talk to the Trumbulls, Chester. No good will come of Extra Billy keeping company with Mary.”
“Now, Junior, that’s none of my business.” He put his hands in his pockets, jingling the change. “Ladies, you all enjoy this soft evening. I’ve an appointment.” He again tipped his hat.
As he walked away, Caesura whispered, “What do you expect of Mary Trumbull? She lives in a house with painted statuary of an explicit anatomical nature!”
Junior concurred. “Mmm. Something’s not right there. Why, it’s akin to living in a den of vice. Pearlie’s artistry calls attention to women’s bosoms in such a disquieting manner.”
The twosome shrieked with laughter.
Chessy threaded through the shop clerks pouring out of the Bon-Ton. Small as the town was, the Bon-Ton enjoyed good business because Baltimore was an hour away to the southeast on bumpy roads, Hagerstown was an hour to the west, and York was forty-five minutes to the northeast. Gettysburg, only twenty minutes away, was all battlefield—no shopping there except for a brisk market in used ammunition.
Four doors down from the Bon-Ton, on the west side of Hanover Street, was the Rogers Building, erected in 1872. The second floor housed the new dance studio, and a top hat and cane were painted on one of the windows facing the street. He opened the door and climbed the maroon-painted stairs, Buster bounding ahead of him.
Trudy Archer stood at the top of the stairs. “Mr. Smith, I’m glad to see you. Come on in. Who’s this?”
“Buster.”
“Well, I’ll give Buster a free lesson too.”
When Chessy stepped through the open door, the first thing he noticed was the beautiful maple floor. “I had no idea this was up here.”
“Me neither, until I got all the paint off. I assumed it would be oak.” She dropped the phonograph needle on the shiny black record. A Cole Porter song floated across the room. “Ready?”
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