“Where’s my peas?”
“On the floor, just where you left them.” Fortunately, the food had landed with the tray underneath it, so that the upset dishes had spilled onto its surface. Minimum cleanup, probably for me.
She looked astonished, but I knew it was all fake. “Me? I never did! It was that bimbo that threw the dish at me!”
We locked eyes, with mine, I hoped, looking shrewd. Finally, her own glance slid away. It pleased me very much, being able to outstare Aurora Paradise. Looking out of the window, she started humming to give me the impression she wasn’t even aware of my presence. I finished cutting the chicken into bite-sized pieces as she switched from humming to actually singing. It was “Alice Blue Gown” and her voice was awful, raspy and nasal and off-key. But she seemed to think it was wonderful, for she clasped her hand to her chest and raised her chin and fairly bellowed
“When I first waaan-dered down into tow-en . . .”
“Your dinner’s getting cold!” I had to raise my own voice over this caterwauling.
As if she’d never started singing in the first place, she stopped all of a sudden and jabbed her fork into the mashed potatoes. “Lots of butter. Good.”
“It’s drawn butter.” I stood there—never having been invited yet to sit down—scratching my elbows and letting her eat for a moment. Then I said, “I was wondering about Rose. Tell me more about her.”
“Rose who?” she asked, mouth thick with potatoes.
I sighed heavily. “You know who. You’re the one who mentioned her in the first place. Rose Devereau.”
Daintily, she plucked up a chicken bite between thumb and forefinger and popped it in her mouth and chewed and ignored me.
I persisted. “You said she played the piano.” I was holding Ben Queen in reserve, like one of the aces in the Bicycle deck.
She went on popping chicken in her mouth, after which she pulled the napkin from her collar and wiped and wiped her fingers for no reason at all except to irritate me and keep me waiting.
Elaborately, I pulled the front page of the paper from my pocket and unfolded it. “Well, I guess you don’t want to hear about the dead woman they found over by White’s Bridge. In Mirror Pond,” I added. As she looked at me bug-eyed, I refolded the paper and went over to pick up the tray of spilled food, as if I meant to leave.
“What dead woman? Who?”
“Some lady the police say could have killed herself. With a gun.”
She leaned forward, eager for details. “Suicide?”
“Probably it wasn’t. Probably, it was murder.” I started for the door.
One thing about Aurora Paradise was, nobody had to spell out “blackmail,” she being an old hand at it herself. “Come on back here!” She pursed her lips, as if thinking hard. “Well, now. Rose . . . Oh, yes, that Rose Fern Devereau. Played the piano and Isabel sang. Could hear it all the way across the lake.”
“You told me.” I wondered how she knew it was Rose Fern (which I thought a very pretty name) playing the piano. Aurora left a lot of stuff out; either that or she made it up.
“Well, Isabel thought she was a big-time opera star, when I was always the one with the voice.” She broke again into “Alice Blue Gown,” and I let her sing a few bars. After all, she was at least on the general subject. She stopped and said, “But Isabel sang at the Chautauqua, so she thought she was something—ha!”
“Chautauqua” had always been a special word for me. I paused in my search for information to let my mind play over it. The word had about it the suggestion of magic, as if an enormous circus had set up its tents to dazzle Spirit Lake. It was no tent, though, but a permanent amphitheater put up somewhere around the turn of the century and most of it still standing, but disused, across the highway up the high bank in an acre or two of cleared space across from the Hotel Paradise. This huge theater would be demolished eventually, for the wood was termite-ridden and rotted and part of it had already undergone a slow collapse. Will and I had been told not to play there, it being dangerous; of course, we did (in our playing-together days), danger being the most attractive ingredient of any activity. The Chautauqua was a long-ago annual summer event, luring quite famous people, mostly singers and musicians. I have seen faded brown photos in one of my mother’s dresser drawers and in old albums of women in huge hats and flowing gowns, fancy Victorian finery, much like the dresses in Aurora’s steamer trunks.
I would really like to have seen it, that Chautauqua; and if I couldn’t see it I wished I could have it described. All I had was the album down in the Pink Elephant, which I would leaf through, careful of its coarse black pages. The snapshots we take today are so clear and sharp and full of color. But it is the past that I want to see the colors of. Why does the past have to be such a blur, so muted and fuzzy around the edges? I don’t need the color to be in a picture taken yesterday. I don’t need to see, in snapshots, the blue of Ree-Jane’s silk dress, not when I can see Ree-Jane in person (unfortunately). But what were the colors of those dresses at the Chautauqua? I would really like to know. I paint them in my mind sometimes as I study the album: pale yellow, smoky blue, and even jet black. I paint none of them bright or garish, although I guess there were as many bright greens and violent reds and purples as there are today.
And that led me to thinking: so it’s a compromise. If I don’t know what colors the gowns were, I can paint them any way I want. It would be what I wanted, but it wouldn’t be true. Or maybe it would be, but how would I know? Maybe it is this that makes the past mysterious; I wonder if that makes it dangerous.
“So Rose played the piano,” I said, in a prompting way.
“That’s right. And crazy Isabel sang.”
I wasn’t getting much further. “Someone told me Mary-Evelyn played the piano.”
“Maybe. I wouldn’t know.” She was polishing off her Cold Turkey and blowing through the straw to make gurgling noises in the bottom of the glass.
“Well, don’t you think it was a really weird life for her?”
“Who?” She kept up the noisome gurglings, even louder, just to irritate me.
“Mary-Evelyn. Living with all those grown women the way she did.”
She was smacking her lips and jiggling the glass. “I wouldn’t mind another one of these.”
I sighed. It was near-impossible to keep her on track. Already, she seemed to have totally forgotten the death/suicide/murder reported in the paper. People like her are hard to bargain with because they keep forgetting what bargain a person’s trying to make. “You’ll just have to wait.”
“No I won’t, Miss Smartypants. I’ll just get that Lola to make me one.”
“She doesn’t know the recipe. I’m the only one that does.”
That stopped her. She narrowed her eyes at me. “Well, you can bring it when you bring my dessert. I want Angel Pie.”
“Aren’t you interested anymore in this woman that was murdered?”
She made flipping motions with her hand—be off, be off. “You’re just making that up.”
“No, I’m not.” I pulled out the newspaper and thrust it toward her.
She “hmmphed” around and said, “Can’t read this without my specs.” Then she patted the pocket of her steel-gray dress and looked vaguely around the room. “Where are they? Who took them?”
Disgusted, I said, “Oh, here, I’ll read it to you,” and snatched the paper back. From her self-satisfied little smile I could tell that that was just what she was after. It was really annoying still to be trying to worm things out of her after eight o’clock, when I hadn’t even had my own dinner. Thoughts of lobster and steak drifted into my mind, betraying me, baiting me, which was pretty silly, as it would have to be my birthday before I ever saw anything like lobster or filet mignon. I started to read the article with concentrated attention. I gave it my best dramatic reading. But I hadn’t got through the first paragraph before Aurora interrupted.
“My God! Who wrote they-aat?” She sort of keened this wor
d out, as if she were wailing from a mountaintop.
“Suzy Whitelaw-Smythe. She calls herself that, with a hyphen.”
“You mean that awful Whitelaw girl? One used to go with anything in pants?”
I wondered just how old Suzy Whitelaw-Smythe was. But of course Aurora could have been talking simply about twenty years ago, not two hundred, which I often thought she probably was.
“I guess so,” I said happily, delighted that here was someone who not only had some kind of writing taste but who could cough up some gossip about Suzy Whitelaw that I could later bandy about when Ree-Jane was within earshot.
“Good God! I guess she went and dropped her knickers for that lewd old Edsel Broadwinters if he’d put that tripe in his paper.”
I didn’t know who she was talking about. “I don’t think it’s his paper anymore. The publisher’s Mr. Gumbel.” I shoved that comment about knickers dropping to the back of my mind to be thought about later. The important thing was identifying this woman, and Suzy’s reputation would have to wait. And as much as I’d like to get into a discussion about her writing style, that would have to wait too.
“Hell, you could write better’n that.”
“I know.”
“That’s enough to make me vomit. ‘Moonlit tranquillity’? Why, everybody knows Mirror Pond’s nothing but a mudhole. Go on. I hope it’s not all like that.”
I was thoughtful. Maybe appealing to Aurora’s sense of her superior knowledge of everything since kingdom come might help. “Well, you’re right. It’s really bad writing. But try to ignore the way she says it. See, the trouble is, nobody knows who this woman is. Not even the Sheriff—”
“That Sam DeGheyn, is that the one?”
I was truly surprised the name meant something to her, especially since the Sheriff hadn’t been around since Aurora was in knee-socks and, hence, wouldn’t count for anything in her life. I said, “Yes. He’s the Sheriff. Sam DeGheyn.” It always made me just a little breathless to speak his name, and I rarely did, except to Maud in the Rainbow. It seemed quite natural there. “He doesn’t know who she is,” I repeated. “It’s a real puzzle.”
Aurora’s eyes narrowed in what I took to be concentration. I hoped she could keep her mind on the story. “Hmm. Go on, read the rest.”
I did. I made sure I was clear about the description of the blond woman—her looks, her apparent age, her clothes.
Aurora sat looking out the window, though there was only blank dark out there. Then she picked up her Bicycle cards and slowly riffled them. She said nothing.
I was still standing, of course, for she never invited me to sit down. And I was getting tired. She sat there with her eyes still on nothing, shuffling cards in a sort of slow-motion way, her mind not seeming to be really on the cards but on the newspaper story, her lips moving in and out in the same way I’d seen a couple of fat-mouthed fish do in Will’s murky fishbowl. I was exhausted with hunger (not that that was unusual) and standing all this while, so I varied my position by turning my ankles in and standing on the sides of my feet in the way I’d done when I was little. I held the tray first under my arm, then moved it flat against my chest, a chest I was beginning to be anxious about, thanks to Ree-Jane’s sly comments about me “showing.” (In the Creation story, Ree-Jane would definitely be the snake in the garden, slithering through the dewy grass, standing on her tail and telling people things they were happier off not knowing.)
My feet hurt like the devil, being stood on in that way, which made going back to my earlier posture almost a relief. I was amazed that Aurora was seriously thinking all of this over, amazed to the point I wondered if she really was, or if she was instead only thinking of how to cheat at cards.
Until she said, “Who’s got a picture? There’s got to be a picture.”
I frowned. “You mean—of her? The dead person?”
“Well, I don’t mean of you, Miss Smartypants.”
There was no real nastiness in what she said; it was her habit of talk. “There’s the one in the paper, but you can’t tell anything from it. I don’t know of any others,” I told her.
“That Sheriff does. He’s probably got plenty. See, they always take a photographer to the crime scene to record the way the body is. And all that. They are very particular about that.” Slowly, she started laying out her cards in a row.
“But the Sheriff wouldn’t give me one, for heaven’s sakes! He wouldn’t give anybody one!” At least, I couldn’t imagine that he would.
“Steal one, then.” She said this quite calmly as she moved a red jack to a red queen.
“What? Steal one?” Was she crazy? Well, yes, she was, but I’d always known that.
“You want to know who she is, don’t you?” I didn’t answer, and she looked up from under her neat gray eyebrows at me. “I pretty much know, but I want to be ab-so-lute-ly sure before I say.”
I sputtered. “But—but—why can’t you say now?”
“Because you’ll blab it all over town.” She started to hum.
I felt like throwing the tray at her. “I will not!”
Humming, she skidded a black ten over to the jack. She moved her mouth in that fishy way, not answering.
I just stood there, my fingers nervous on the tray, tapping. “Well . . . but I can’t . . . what if I can’t . . . get one?” The notion of stealing something out of the Sheriff’s office appalled me. Not the stealing part. I was never all that honest. But from the Sheriff?
Then I wondered: how did the man who came into Britten’s store know to say the dead woman was “Ben Queen’s girl” unless he’d seen either the body or a photo of her? You couldn’t tell enough from the picture in the paper. Maybe I should be talking to him, only I didn’t know him from Adam and he didn’t look too child-friendly.
“You going to steal that picture?” Aurora snapped.
“No.”
“Coward.”
“You just want me to start a life of crime. You want me to get in trouble.”
“Fat lot of good you’d be at it, miss.” She slapped a jack of diamonds on the queen of hearts.
What was maddening about all this was that I didn’t know how much truth there was in what Aurora said. Was she only pretending she had a notion of who the woman was? Just to get me riled? I chewed my lip, fuming. Maybe what I should do was bring out what I’d overheard in Britten’s. That it was “Ben Queen’s girl.” I could easily have done that, but I didn’t. I don’t know why. I think it is because I never want to know the truth about things too soon. I don’t want it coming up like a sudden sun and blinding me. Better to have it trickle out over time. That was my belief. But, I thought, I could say a man in Britten’s said he knows who it is and not tell her exactly what he’d said. But she was too smart for that kind of blackmail.
“What are you standing there for?” she asked. “And don’t think you can bribe me, either, with that Cold Turkey.” She slipped a ten of spades on the red jack and shoved her glass towards me.
“I just like watching you cheat at solitaire. You can’t play red cards on red cards, everyone knows that rule.”
She pressed her lips together hard. Then she said, “Well, these are the rules my own daddy taught me.” Prissily, she went on as she pointed to the ace, king, queen, jack—a mix of hearts and diamonds overlapping in a row. “The same color goes on all the face cards. . . .” Now her eyes drifted over to the end row, where a ten of hearts lay over a jack of diamonds. “And the tens. Tens through aces, red on red or black on black. Deuce through nine, it’s red on black and vice-versa.” Her hand waved me away.
“Really?” I made my tone sarcastic. “Then what’s that ten of spades you just slapped down doing on a red jack?”
She riffled the deck and thought a moment. “Ten of spades is wild, didn’t I say that? Ten of spades is the one wild card, and it can go anyplace.”
What a liar! Fuming, I snatched up her empty glass and turned and marched out of the room.
I heard her ye
lling at me, “And don’t be too long over your dinner, either—you’re getting fat!”
At the top of the stairwell, I wheeled around and stuck out my tongue, shaking my head hard back and forth, as if such motion would send my tongue flying away, straight through the wall and right into her old back. I then stomped, as hard as I could, downstairs. All three flights, stomping.
I saw Lola Davidow was gone from the back office, and even before I had my dinner, just to get it over with, made the Cold Turkey pretty carelessly, tossing in stuff from four bottles, fishing a few floating ice cubes from the restocked bucket (must have been a party in here after dinner), and poured in an extra-big measure of bourbon. I did not want to go back up to the fourth floor, that was sure. I opened the door to the dumbwaiter and looked it over. It seemed to be all right. It wouldn’t have surprised me if it had never been stuck, and Mrs. Davidow, after her eleventh martini, only thought something was wrong with it. I plunked the glass on it, yanked the rope, and sent it rumbling and creaking up to the fourth floor. As it rattled on up, I pounded on the wall. That was the signal, and I pounded to hell-and-gone.
• • •
That night I lay in bed in the blue darkness of my third-floor room, hearing the distant strains of a radio or a phonograph. Music, somewhere.
I lay there comfortably filled with chicken legs and mashed potatoes with pools of butter. My mother never makes gravy wells in mashed potatoes, the sort you see cooks do in diners and low-class restaurants. She considers that to be awfully “common.” Now, beef gravy could be poured over the mashed potatoes accompanying a hot roast beef sandwich, since that dish was all “one.” But my mother never serves hot roast beef sandwiches, considering them to be “common.”
Not-being-common could take the place of any of the Ten Commandments in my mother’s Bible. “Thou shalt not be common” is as important as the commandment about lying or stealing (the ones Aurora never read) or cheating or killing. Every one except, maybe, honoring thy father and thy mother. My mother’s definition of “common” was very complicated. Basically, it has to do with how much education you have or how well-bred you are. My mother does not have much education, but she is bred to the bone. Not-being-common (“common” doesn’t have an opposite word, certainly not “uncommon”) means—usually—you are well-bred or well-educated or both. Walter is an excellent example (to my mother’s way of thinking) of “common,” for he is neither of these, in addition to being a little retarded. Walter is so “common” he’s barely worth considering as an example. All of the kitchen help would be, naturally, “common.” Even (I sometimes suspected) Vera, although my mother would never outright say this. Vera probably hovers on the verge, walking the razor-edge of commonness. But, on the other hand, there are people who simply didn’t fit into the general definition. Marge Byrd, for instance, who you would think would be “commonized” pretty much by bringing half-pints of whisky into the office in brown paper bags. But no. Marge reads too much to be common, and since my mother reads a lot, they’re always comparing notes. And there were many fine points, too, to this idea of “commonness.”
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