Yes, he was. He had just described the Girl.
I think I had known he would. From Rose to Fern to the Girl. She had to be Fern’s daughter. Sure of the answer now, I asked: “What about Fern Queen’s own kids? Where are they?”
He shrugged. “Fern never had no kids.” Then, giving a smile and a little wave, he turned and walked back through the door.
I stood there, staring after him, rooted. Fern never had no kids. Probably I’d be standing there still, I was so surprised, except I had to get to that train.
• • •
Since I wasn’t dawdling, twenty-five minutes was time enough, but not to stop and make a survey of the white house with the yellow shutters. I noticed the seedlings were gone from the porch. I also noticed that no one appeared to be behind the curtains.
When I finally reached the railroad station I had five minutes to spare and sat down on the same bench. I went back to gazing off across the empty land where nothing moved and nothing changed. Time had stuck in my throat like one of those popcorn kernels that drive you crazy when you’re watching a movie. You can’t reach it with your fingers; you can’t swallow it. It just sticks and then you forget about it and then it disappears.
I was so sure I had made the connection and had been able to trace the Girl back to a beginning. Now to find I hadn’t was a bitter disappointment.
Or was it?
What had kept me from asking someone—the Sheriff, at least—about her? What had kept me from describing her to someone like Dr. McComb after I’d seen her across the lake? And what had kept me from asking Jude Stemple if he knew such a person?
Even when I heard the train coming from a long way away, I still sat there, staring off at the horizon, where the late afternoon light fretted the blue line of woods. Cold Flat Junction seemed to me not so much a place as the memory of a place. This upset me no end. For now she seemed like the memory of a Girl.
The train rounded the bend way down the track, sounding at that distance as mournful as the whippoorwill in Flyback Hollow. I got up, creaky as an old lady, and crossed over the wooden planks to the other side, where there was another bench.
Louder and closer, the train seemed to be picking up speed, but was actually slowing down, still some distance away.
I looked across the tracks now to the bench where I’d been sitting just a moment ago. In my mind’s eye I saw myself sitting there; it was very strange, like an afterimage left on your eyeballs when you glance away from a blinding light.
I sat there until the train roared in and cut me in two.
THIRTY-TWO
I was back again among the salads. I could hardly remember the train ride, or getting on and getting off, or my walk along the boardwalk back to the hotel. I remember stopping a minute or so to sit on one of the covered benches in cold shadow where the boardwalk crosses over the rocky stream. I think it might have been built there so that people could take shelter from the rain.
I sat on the boardwalk for so long that it was nearly six when I appeared in the kitchen, where there was a lot of noise and activity, the sort that always went with a dinner party. I could never understand why a dinner party of perhaps ten or twelve people caused more excitement and anxiety than having fifty guests all sitting apart and at separate tables. The salad bowls were filled with chunks of iceberg lettuce and the plates of onion and pepper rings and tomato wedges were sitting on plates ready for arrangement. These had already been sliced by Anna Paugh, who, I sometimes feel, thinks it very unfair that I always get stuck with the salads. Anna Paugh is truly nice and nothing like Vera, although she’s probably just as good a waitress. Anna is small and wispy, where Vera is tall and (I think the word is) “imperious.” Special salad plates had been set aside for the Helene Baum party. These were deep green glass and each now held a Bibb lettuce. Lola Davidow was handling the French dressing ladle and talking about the Bibb lettuces as she always did, as if they were emeralds, or had been rooted out of the ground by a pig’s snout, as my mother said truffles were. I’ve never seen a truffle in my life and wish I’d never see another Bibb lettuce. It was all right with me, though, for nothing had to be done to the precious little things, nothing added except for French dressing from the crock. And this task was not to be entrusted to me, but was, as I said, given over to Mrs. Davidow herself, as if she were the only one with the talent. The real reason she undertook this was because she had to feel she was necessary to the success of a dinner party, which, of course, she wasn’t. My mother was all geared up for the dinner party, smoking more cigarettes than usual, and calling orders out, and lecturing us to remember: if the food didn’t get in there hot, it would be the cook (meaning her) who got the blame, not the waitresses (a lot she knew). On these occasions, part-time help was called in. Mrs. Ikleberger acted as “undercook”—why, I couldn’t imagine. All Mrs. Ikleberger does is churn around and get in my mother’s way, so that my mother is always shoving her out of it. Mrs. Ikleberger opens her lunchroom beside Greg’s tavern in dead winter and serves lunches to school kids. Will and I would eat there on those rare occasions that we stayed here through the winter and went to the Spirit Lake grammar school. She was a cheery woman to have around on those cold, cold winter days when the snow was so deep it sucked our feet down into deep pockets and the frigid air seemed to turn all we saw in the distance to a smoky blue.
Right now Mrs. Ikleberger was making her usual noise with clattering pots and pans and shouting to Walter to bring over washed ones, which of course he did, though it seemed to take him an hour to remove himself and the pot or pan from the roving shadows and cross the dozen feet between dishwasher and stove. Dinner parties meant too that even Walter had temporary help. This was Paul’s mother. It was interesting listening to Walter and her talk; I would hang around the dishwasher sometimes, just for that. No words ever seemed to get beyond her tonsils; it was as if they didn’t travel up to her teeth and tongue. Walter, because his words came molasses-slow, sounded a little like her. They were a perfect match and got along well together in spite of their troubled talk, or maybe because of it.
Sometimes she brings Paul with her, much to my mother’s dismay. He calls my mother “missus” and every ten minutes is standing with his chin just reaching the serving counter, plunking a big plate down and asking, “Missus, can I have dinner?” Every once in a while his mother yanks him away and boxes his ears and threatens him with awful punishments, but Paul doesn’t appear to mind. He doesn’t pay any attention, either. So a lot of his time is spent tied to a wooden chair out on the back porch, where he likes to pick the threads out of his brown shoes until the shoes fall apart.
This evening I stood there in a spell of noises, seeming to be hypnotized by the salad makings. Actually, I barely saw them, for my mind was back in Cold Flat Junction, moving between the station and the Windy Run Diner and Flyback Hollow. In one way, I felt I had found out an awful lot; in another way, not much. For I still couldn’t be sure that the dead woman was this Fern Queen (although it sounded extremely likely). No one at the hotel had as much as mentioned the woman, so I assumed that her identity was still unknown around La Porte. It amazed me that this dead woman hadn’t yet been identified in a place as small as La Porte and a place even smaller like Cold Flat Junction. People must not have the sense they were born with. Here was a woman who left Cold Flat not to be seen again for four or five days, and here was a woman turned up dead outside of La Porte nearly four days ago. They both answer to the same description. My Lord, how smart do you have to be to put two and two together?
The only answer to that was that the Sheriff (who is certainly smart enough) simply didn’t know anyone was missing and that the Queens had never reported it. Maybe they thought Fern had just gone off on her own. Maybe the Queens did not read newspapers. I told myself that I wouldn’t be breaking my promise if all I did was to tell the Sheriff I’d heard that a lady over in Cold Flat Junction was missing and not tell him how I’d heard it. And then I realized that I re
ally had heard it in Britten’s that day when I’d first seen Jude Stemple.
I felt relieved, thinking about this. I started slapping onion rings on the iceberg lettuce for the “ordinary” salads and felt just as glad that my role tonight would be merely as Vera’s “helper.” And Miss Bertha, who I had to wait on as usual, for she demanded it. You’d almost think she liked me, but I knew that wasn’t the case; she just didn’t want to have to get used to yelling at somebody else. Anna Paugh would be serving all of the other guests; there were four other reservations, which would mean about ten or fifteen people.
Naturally, I had already looked over the preparations to work out the menu—meaning what I would get to eat at the end of it all. Roast lamb, oven-browned potatoes, and green peas. To put it that way, though, is something like saying a sunset is red, blue, and yellow. It does nothing by way of describing exactly how the three things appear individually (the crusty edge of the browned potatoes, for instance), and certainly not how the colors mingle and melt into one another. To my mother, a meal must be “composed.” Broccoli never is to be eaten with lamb or roast beef. Nor browned potatoes with chicken. Tomatoes must never appear with pimiento. Things like that. It is, as I’ve said, an ART. That was the evening’s menu, and the only choice I would have to make (as would the diners) would be between brown gravy and mint sauce. That sounds easy, but then so did that Solomon-and-the-baby business, until the details were revealed. The brown gravy was as smooth and glowing as the newel post at the bottom of the lobby steps; the mint was fresh and picked from a huge wild acre of it out behind the icehouse. (Since Mrs. Davidow came to the Hotel Paradise, there is considerably less of it around. She is extremely fond of mint juleps in the summertime.) My mother told me once that all she does to make her mint sauce is to crush a handful of mint and add water, vinegar, and sugar. Anyone can do it, she says. Oh, wrong, wrong, wrong. For some reason, if my mother fills up a cup with water and pours the cup into a glass or a jug, something happens to the water. It is like a woman passing through a room in a long gown of silk and chiffon wearing some ethereal perfume. Even after she passes, a bit of the silk train can be glimpsed on the doorsill, and the scent floats back.
She is like a sorcerer. Unfortunately, I am not the sorcerer’s apprentice.
While I thought about Cold Flat Junction and mint sauce, the salads somehow got composed and removed to the dining room. One couple had turned up and Anna Paugh was moving back and forth serving them. Where Miss Bertha was, I didn’t know. Maybe she’d had a stroke. I tried to banish this hope. And the dinner party was late. My mother fumed; Vera regally smoked a cigarette and adjusted her high starched cuffs. To my mother, a dinner party being late was some kind of heresy. Food, she said, dried out. I never saw any evidence of this, but to her immaculate eye I’m sure it was the case.
Miss Bertha, who most of the time was completely unconscious of what went on around her, always seemed to know when she was least wanted and would be the most trouble for people and came into the dining room right before the Baum party. They were so close on her heels she might have been the Baum flag bearer.
“That old fool!” exclaimed my mother, banging a pan of hot rolls down on the counter. Then she said, “Find out what she wants, quick! And then just slap it down in front of her!”
I sighed. “Quick” and “Miss Bertha” never did go together, but I could understand my mother’s desperation. Now I would be drawn away from the Baum dinner and helping out Vera. Vera (of course) announced that she “could manage,” as if it made absolutely no difference whether I was around or not. Then Anna Paugh bustled through the swing door and said that she would wait on Miss Bertha, whether Miss Bertha liked it or not, because I was absolutely necessary to the smooth running of the Baum party. She didn’t use those words, but she certainly conveyed that idea. Well, I thought that was wonderful, and Vera could have killed Anna Paugh.
Vera shouldered her way into the dining room through the swing door with her tray of consommé bowls held high on one palm. I followed with the Bibb lettuce salads. Helene Baum was trying to rearrange her guests and no one was paying any attention to her. They were all drunk, naturally, and none drunker than Lola Davidow, who had seen to it that the rest of them followed her jovial lead. Mrs. Davidow was right there, grabbing another dinner service for herself off a nearby table, and starting to squeeze herself in between the mayor’s wife and Ken King, the pharmacist, who was laughing and yelling at the top of his lungs down the table to the doctor. It amazes me how Lola Davidow can get away with inviting herself to people’s dinner parties, but she’s done it more than once. No one seems to care. It’s true that Mrs. Davidow can actually be good company, and I suppose that people like to appear to be open-minded and cheery and up for an adventure.
All of the other reservations had descended on the dining room at exactly the same time as the Baum party and Miss Bertha. As good a waitress as Anna Paugh was, she could not be at all the tables at once, so that eventually the diners were sending out little silent signals to me (since I appeared not to be doing much but standing at attention over the Baum table), either trying to beckon me over with little waves or mouthing silent requests—“water, water,” “rolls, rolls”—as if they were perishing in the desert. Miss Bertha, however, was not silent. She trumpeted down half the length of the room. I ignored them all.
It was halfway through this dinner that I realized several of the Baum guests were exchanging comments and theories about the dead body found in Mirror Pond. I picked up the water pitcher and edged closer to the table, presumably to refill water glasses but really to listen. All that was clear was that the Sheriff and his men still hadn’t been able to identify the woman, and wasn’t it the most incredible mystery?
Unfortunately Helene Baum chose this interesting moment to take her life in her hands and complain that her lamb was overdone. The talk about White’s Bridge and the dead woman was deadened by the quarrel that broke out between Helene Baum and Mrs. Davidow over the lamb. Instead of quietly and quickly sending the lamb back for whatever reason, Mrs. Davidow told Helene that the lamb was perfectly cooked, that Jen always roasted it for exactly the same period of time. Naturally, Helene kept on complaining. It wasn’t pink, she said; it wasn’t rare. When she had it in Paris, it was rare. She started showing it around and holding it aloft as if for the judgment of God and the president of France. If Vera had been there at that moment, instead of in the kitchen, she would have made mewling, apologetic noises and offered to get a lamb-replacement. I’ll say this for Lola Davidow: no one was going to criticize my mother’s cooking when she was around. So since no one was going to do anything but fight about it, I snatched the plate from Helene Baum’s presenting hand and hurried off to the kitchen.
There was nothing overcooked about the lamb at all; it wasn’t supposed to be served rare. Even I knew that. My mother said it could give you the same disease you could get from underdone pork. Helene Baum always claimed something was wrong every time she came to the hotel, for she was jealous of my mother and her cooking. I set the plate on the surface of the black iron stove to heat up. Vera and my mother were hovering over the dessert table, apparently doing something complicated with the pies.
Just then Mrs. Davidow stormed into the kitchen, red-faced and fit to be tied, as Helene Baum was still going on about Paris and spring lamb. She told my mother about the complaint.
“Rare? The damned fool wants rare lamb?” My mother reached around to a shelf that held empty canning jars and banged one down on the pastry table. “Here, take her a jar of trichinosis.”
Lola and Vera laughed and so did my mother. It was a good lesson in not wasting anger on damned fools. But there was still Mrs. Baum’s dinner to be dealt with. What I did with the plate was to add a fresh half of roast potato and neaten up the pile of peas. I intended simply to make the plate look like a whole new dinner.
I did this mechanically, as my mind was really on the dead woman and Fern Queen. I was the on
ly person, besides Jude Stemple, who suspected they were one and the same. As I spooned fresh hot gravy over the same old lamb slices, I wondered about my promise to Jude Stemple. Had I really, officially “promised”? I didn’t think so. I hadn’t actually said “I promise.” But it was no use; I couldn’t convince myself. Granted, I was often pretty careless with the truth, but it was one thing to make up convenient little stories and another thing to break promises. As I plucked a sprig of parsley from the parsley bowl and dropped it on the gravy, I was feeling noble.
Back at the Baum table, Mrs. Davidow was still smarting over the “undercooked lamb” accusation, and when she saw me place the fresh plate before Helene, she raised her eyebrows. For all that we didn’t get along most of the time, Mrs. Davidow and I often operated on the same wavelength. I wiggled my eyebrows at her, in answer to her own eyebrow movement, and as Helene Baum pronounced this lamb properly cooked, I rolled my eyes and Mrs. Davidow answered with some eye rolling of her own.
So the dinner proceeded through dessert, with Vera whisking around the table placing a piece of Key lime chiffon pie, elegantly decorated with whipped cream, before each guest. Poor Anna Paugh was charging about between her five tables, and Miss Bertha was still yelling at me. I continued to pay no attention.
• • •
When the dinner party was over (or over enough for me to leave, as they were still carousing with brandy snifters), I had my own dinner (mint sauce like liquid emeralds), and at nearly ten p.m. I was sitting in the Pink Elephant with my notebook open before me and my chin in my hands, staring at my most recent rented painting. It was a restful, watery-colored garden scene by one of those French painters whose names all begin with M, and who the part-time librarian said was her very favorite painter. She told me all about him, but five minutes later I forgot. I wondered what that meant for my future education. There was another French painter who lived and worked at the same time and whose name (which I also forgot) was almost exactly the same as this one’s except for one letter. And the second one also painted in those watery colors, with tiny little strokes and dots. Now, I wondered how anyone in his right mind could be expected to keep those two M-painters separate—or even why I should keep them separate. I wondered if it might not be a hoax, and it was all one painter.
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