Orrie held up until she embraced her husband, then she cried like a baby.
“All our hard work,” she sobbed.
He whispered in her ear, “It’s all right, baby. We’re still young. We’ll build back up after this war is over.”
Extra Billy, his arm around Mary, kissed her cheek.
“Billy, do you know anything about this?” Mary asked her source of wisdom.
“I don’t, but I’d sure like to find out.”
A mist covered her eyes. “I can’t believe you’re going to leave me.”
“I’ll be back.” He kissed her again.
Zeb Vance pushed his way up to the front. “Noe, I want you to know Julius and Pole Rife are working with me. We’ll get this sorted out. Don’t worry.”
“Thanks, Zeb.”
“I’m shipping out in six weeks. If we don’t have the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed, Priscilla Donaldson in my office will take over the case. She’ll do a good job.” He shook Noe’s hand and joked, “Guess you girls will have to get along without us.”
Mary’s loud crying pierced the silence. Then other women started crying, too.
Father O’Reilly raised his hand in a benediction. “Friends, let’s pray together.”
And so they did, each one knowing it would be the last time they would all be together.
30
Wearing her ankle boots with the fur lining had helped keep out the cold at first, but Juts had been on her feet shopping all day. By now her toes were blue.
Louise, Toots, and Juts each took one day off work to do their Christmas shopping. Juts thought she’d taken care of everyone—she’d bought Yoyo a big catnip mouse and Buster and Doodlebug chews—then she realized Hansford needed a present. She hadn’t warmed to the sick man, but she couldn’t ignore him—not at Christmas.
As for her customers, she gave each one a free manicure. That way no one could say she played favorites.
She knew that as she fell asleep tonight she’d remember somebody she’d forgotten.
As she passed Senior Epstein’s jewelry store she spied Chester. She scrunched down, peeking around the doorjamb. He was buying gold shell earrings. She loved earrings!
A few desultory snowflakes circled down from a leaden sky. The packages were getting heavy. Chilled to the bone, Juts sat down on a bench in the square, wishing she could be a pigeon sitting high up in a branch, watching the people below.
A huge wreath was laid at the statue of the three Confederate soldiers. The snow in their eye sockets made them look blind. An even bigger wreath, compliments of Caesura Frothingham, adorned George Gordon Meade. The snow fell harder. The lights of the shops twinkled through the deepening gray and white.
She felt for one fleeting moment how precious this place was to her, and she knew that across the Atlantic Ocean an Englishwoman she would never meet loved her own little town just as much. But Juts was safe and sound. The Englishwoman was not. She felt as though her heart would burst with sorrow for all the women in the world. They had yet to wage one war but they sure suffered and died in them.
Small halos of red, yellow, green, and blue surrounded the colored Christmas lights in the shop windows. She stood up, shaking off the snow, and headed for the Bon-Ton, her last stop.
All the swirling snow, the colors, the sharp cold, the sound of tires with chains on snow, the occasional honk of a horn, the bark of a dog tired of waiting for its master outside a shop … such sounds made up her Christmas.
Juts wasn’t a philosophical woman. She took life as it came. She didn’t know where her life was heading, only that it was getting there faster than she had anticipated.
She thought of her life as bumper cars on overdrive, a pinwheel with naked ladies on it, candy bars and crapshoots, Longhorn steers and red-hot poker games, cartwheels at sunrise and a hint of sadness at sunset. She recalled the smell of Buster’s fur when he came in from the rain and Yoyo’s funny little habit of retrieving crinkled-up paper. She thought of Chester’s laugh, the smell of gasoline and new-mown hay, and now the moist scent of falling snow.
For the first time she wondered what her mother’s memories were. If this was what made a life—impressions—then what were Cora’s?
She pushed open the revolving door at the Bon-Ton and stepped inside, looking in childlike wonderment at all the big support columns wrapped in red-and-gold paper. Each wooden counter was decorated with red-and-gold streamers with a Santa on the top center, except the different Santas were dressed in the uniforms of the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Coast Guard. The mannequins wore the uniforms of the Allies.
Someone bumped into her from behind.
“I’m sorry,” Juts said and stepped out of the way.
Aunt Dimps, also laden with packages, replied, “Julia Ellen, why don’t you bring Yoyo in here and see what she can do with the decorations?”
Juts laughed, then thought how lucky she was to live in Runnymede … even if she did have to share it with the likes of Josephine Smith.
31
Mary folded in half a sheet of medium blue paper and carefully slid it into the airmail envelope. Her mother would wail at the extravagance of airmail. That would lead to recounting Mary’s other foolish expenditures. She took the precaution of tucking her letters into her book bag and dashing to the post office before school.
A light rap on the door made her quickly place her chemistry book over the envelope.
“Come in.”
“It’s snowing again. Want to go down to the pond? We could ice skate.”
Mary glanced out the window into the darkness. “Mmm, I don’t know.”
“Oh, come on, Mar, the fire department set up big torches so we can see. Everyone’s going. Isn’t that swell?”
“You go on.”
“Bet you were writing Billy again. Say, if you come skating with me you can tell him all about it. He’s a good skater.”
Needing to be begged, Mary weakened a little. “Well…”
“You can tell him who was there, what they wore, who fell, and how much you miss him.”
“I can’t live without him. I think about him every minute of every day.”
Blankly Maizie nodded.
“You don’t understand,” Mary said crossly.
“Uh—gee, Mary, that’s not fair.” Maizie pulled open a drawer.
“Hey, those are my socks.”
“If you’re not going I need them.”
“Use your own damn socks.”
“I’m telling Momma that you’re using foul language. If you skated you’d be in a better mood and you wouldn’t need to curse.” She removed her ankle socks as she dropped on the corner of the bed.
“Put those back!” Mary bounced out of her chair to grab the socks.
Maizie put them behind her. “Uh-uh.”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t going. You jumped to conclusions.”
Maizie sat on the long socks. “Read me your letter and I’ll give you back your socks—only if you’re really going to skate.”
“Ha.” Mary snorted. “I’m not reading you anything.”
“How am I ever gonna know what it’s like to be in love?”
Mary, dying to share her newly discovered emotions, surreptitiously picked up her chemistry book. “Only parts of it. I’m not reading all of it.”
“Okay.”
“‘Dear Bill’”—she cleared her throat—“‘Everything is gray without you …’”
Maizie interrupted. “It’s always gray in wintertime.”
With a superior air, Mary shrugged. “You have no sense of—poetry.” Mary folded her letter. “I’m not reading any more to you.”
“Oh, come on. I’ll sharpen your blades.”
Mary flipped open the page, the paper making a light rattling sound. “‘I think about you when I see the sky. I think about you when I see mistletoe. I think about you when Doodlebug barks—all the time. I think …’”
Fifteen minutes later Mary finish
ed reading her torrid epistle.
“How romantic.” Maizie dreamily fell back on the bed.
Mary swiftly leapt from the chair and snatched one of the socks exposed underneath Maizie’s buttock. “Gotcha.”
“Here.” Maizie threw the other one after, sitting up. “What does Billy write?”
Mary pulled out one letter from Parris Island, South Carolina. The handwriting was an oversized scrawl. “‘Dear Mary, the D.I. chews my ass. The chiggers is awful. I hate this place. Love, Bill.’”
Waiting a moment, Maizie swung her feet to the floor. “That’s it?”
“Men aren’t good at writing letters.” Mary defended her laconic husband.
Showing surprising maturity, Maizie said, “At least you know he’s thinking of you. Come on, let’s go to the pond.”
32
Tobacco flecks dotted Hansford Hunsenmeir’s bluish lips. Despite his breathing difficulties, he craved that soothing nicotine. If he was going to die he might as well die on his own terms.
He sucked on his cigar, and a gray-blue line lazed up to the ceiling in Celeste’s kitchen. Hansford, a small mountain of tack in front of him on the big wooden table, possessed nimble fingers. O.B. Huffstetler, Celeste’s stableman, had fallen behind on his chores, this being one of them. The young man was exhausted by his six-month-old infant, a boy they had named Kirk but called Peepbean. Peepbean, born with leather lungs, put them to good use throughout the night. No one had warned O.B. or his wife that infants are hazardous to your health as well as your personality.
Neatly laid out to his left were the leather-repair tools, while on Hansford’s right were pieces of rich English leather in Havana brown. Nobody made better tack leather or better steel for bits than the English.
“Julia, do you remember the time you saved up pennies and nickels?” her father asked. “You couldn’t have been three yet but you knew money was something special, so you saved and saved every time someone gave you a penny for ice cream. Then you marched right across the square to the Bon-Ton and bought yourself a little iron elephant bank with an upraised trunk. Louise laughed at you because you spent all your money on the bank and had none left to put into it. You cried and cried. I gave you a penny to put in your bank and you stopped crying. Then Louise cried because she said I loved you more than I loved her. So I gave her a penny and she shut up. You offered your bank for her penny’s safekeeping.” He rested his cigar in a big ashtray as he set to work on a torn throatlatch. “She refused because she said how could she tell her penny from your penny.”
“I don’t remember about Louise’s penny.” Juts reached for a laced rein where one of the laces had broken. She, too, was good with her hands. “I still have the bank, though, and it has that first penny in it—for luck.”
“The damnedest things pop into my mind.” He reached for waxed thread. “Maizie wants a dress for a Christmas party. Louise won’t buy it for her. How about I give you the money and you buy the kid the dress. Louise won’t like it, though.”
“Louise will get over it.” Julia noticed a flame-red cardinal darting in a holly bush by the garden. Celeste’s kitchen was her favorite room in the entire grand house. “I feel sorry for the kid. She’s playing second fiddle to Mary forever. She’s asked to her first big party. She and Mary are so differently shaped she can’t wear Mary’s old clothes.” She exhaled through her nose.
He punched the thread through a hole he’d made with an awl.
Cora came in and put up the teapot. “You two are nesty.”
“Maizie’s party dress,” Hansford said with no further explanation.
Cora nodded at her younger daughter. She had heard three sides of the story already: Louise’s, Maizie’s, and now Juts’s. Maizie had been invited to a dance and had found the perfect dress, green velvet with white fur trim, at the Bon-Ton. Juts had watched her try it on and told her it looked beautiful. But the dress was thirty-one dollars and Louise had refused even to discuss it.
Celeste, wearing a silk kimono in a deep, rich navy blue, pushed open the swinging door.
“I need something hot.”
“On the stove.”
“Mmm.” She inspected the pot.
“A watched pot never boils,” Cora told her.
“I know.” She smiled. “Naturally, you all will remain silent about my wearing a Japanese article of clothing.”
“Better than lederhosen,” Juts cracked.
“My legs would get cold.” Celeste joined them at the table and rooted through her tack. “It’s always something, isn’t it? I’ve broken two martingales—actually, I didn’t break them, Rambunctious did—and, oh thank you.”
Cora put the teacup in front of Celeste and then served Hansford, Juts, and finally herself before sitting next to Celeste. “Maizie’s fit to be tied.”
“She can’t go to the party naked.” Celeste laughed.
“Louise will pitch a hissy.” Hansford shook his head.
“According to Louise she is the only mother in the world. None of the rest of us know anything. She even crosses you, Momma,” Juts said.
Cora smiled. “Louise gets the big head.” She added, “Even if you all buy Maizie that party dress, Louise will take it back. You know it for a fact.”
“Yeah. Hateful, mean, and bossy—those are the facts.”
“Spoken like a true little sister,” Celeste noted. “I was one myself.”
Hansford took another drag from his cigar. He was watching Juts closely. “She’s like your mother,” he observed to Cora, chuckling.
“Well—Momma sure had a sense of humor.”
“Bepe was nutty as a fruitcake.” Hansford called Harriet Buckingham by her nickname.
“I’m not crazy. Louise is crazy. I’m perfectly sane.”
“Isn’t memory convenient?” Celeste said.
“Just a minute here, Hansford, Bepe was not tetched at all.” Cora rattled her teacup, her hands delicate even though she’d put on weight over the years.
“She dropped a net over your father at Pauline Basehart’s and drug him right out in the street. Sure caught those girls off guard. I tell you, it was a spectacle.”
“Never mind. That was long ago.”
“Who was Pauline Basehart?” Juts asked.
“The local madam,” Celeste informed Juts.
“Mom!” Juts exclaimed.
“My father had a weakness for women.”
“Weakness—it killed him. There he was in the middle of Hanover Street, naked as a jaybird, with Bepe beating his ass until his nose bled. He couldn’t get out of the net and Pauline wasn’t going to free him. She sent a girl to fetch Ardant Trumbull—that’s Pearlie’s great-uncle—who was sheriff then.”
“I didn’t know that,” Juts exclaimed.
Hansford laughed. “Girl, there was a whole heap of living in Runnymede before you made an appearance.”
“My father—” Cora shrugged. She didn’t know what to say.
“He was no better nor worse than many, but Bepe fixed his wagon.” Hansford shook his head.
“You think I’m like Bepe?” Juts asked.
“All over again.” Hansford clapped his hands. “To the teeth.”
“Old men live in the past,” Cora rebuked him.
“At least I remember it. Harold Mundis’s grandpa couldn’t even remember his children when he was my age.”
“The things I’m learning.” Juts got up and poured everyone more tea. “Celeste, I’m dying of starvation. May I have one of your scones?”
“Put them on the table. We’ll all enjoy them.”
Juts admired the hand-painted china as she placed the scones in the middle of the table.
“We still haven’t solved the Maizie problem.”
Ramelle opened and shut the front door. They heard her stamping the snow off her feet.
“Anyone home?”
“We’re in the kitchen,” Celeste answered.
Ramelle walked in rubbing her hands. “It’s getting
frigid out there. Scones! Cora, you’ve outdone yourself.”
Ramelle squeezed in next to Celeste and heard the entire dolorous tale of Maizie and the emerald dress she coveted at the Bon-Ton. Cora began making more tea.
“Why can’t she wear one of Spotts’s dresses? Maizie’s about her size now, don’t you think?”
“Grand idea,” Celeste declared.
They marched upstairs to the huge cedar closet. The effort of climbing the stairs exhausted Hansford. Breathing hard, he sat on a Regency chair. Many of the dresses were out-of-date, but one lovely chiffon, almost a flame-red, was perfect.
“Maizie will look like Christmas itself,” Ramelle said.
“What if Louise says this is charity?” Juts felt the sheer fabric.
“I’ll take care of that,” Celeste volunteered.
As they walked downstairs, Julia said to Ramelle, “Louise is forever harping on how being a mother is different. She’s always saying I can’t understand. You’re a mother. You don’t seem any different to me than before you had Spottiswood.”
“On the outside, no; on the inside, yes. I had to put someone else first.”
“Oh,” came Juts’s weak reply.
Cora held on to the finial at the bottom of the dark mahogany steps, waiting for Juts. “Don’t fret so about it. You’ll never have a baby if you think about it all the time. Gets your innards worked up.”
“She’s right about that.” Celeste put her arm around Juts’s shoulders.
“I put Chessy first. How much different can it be?”
“Chessy’s not helpless,” Ramelle offered.
“Wanna bet?” Juts replied.
“All women think all men are helpless without them,” Celeste said. “Truth is they do fine without us. They might not have as much fun, but they’ll live.”
Cora disagreed. “A woman can live without a man; a man can’t live without a woman.”
“What do you think, Hansford? Speak for your entire sex.”
“Well, a man might be able to live without a woman, but life wouldn’t be worth living. I’ve seen men die of loneliness in those mines, yes, I have.” He changed the subject back to Juts’s dilemma. “Girl, if you want a baby, then you should have one.”
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