“You mean that Bertha is still coming here? Crazy as a bed-bug, that old lady. Okay, then bring it after, but don’t make me wait too long. These pictures might just waltz away if you don’t come back soon.”
And here, Aurora began to waltz around, reminding me of the dance last night. Maybe I should have invited her.
Miss Bertha wanted pecan waffles with orange syrup and I said I was sorry (which I was, but not for her sake), we didn’t have any, that we did have grits and hot biscuits (one of Mrs. Fulbright’s favorites), and eggs, of course. “Any way you want them,” I generously added, knowing how she’d get them.
After much grumbling and tomfoolery and moving things around on the table—her silver, the water pitcher, the vase of wildflowers—and stabbing her butter patty with her butter knife, she said, “I’ll have eggs over easy, since you can’t boil an egg. Mind you get the grease off.”
I put my pencil behind my ear and minded I wouldn’t and returned to the kitchen.
Walter was standing at the stove stirring the grits in the top of a double boiler. That’s what my mother always used to keep things hot. The biscuits were in the oven heating up. He was wearing one of my mother’s aprons. He turned to me and said, “What’s the old fool want?”
I laughed because he sounded just like my mother and almost looked like her too, as he stood with arms splayed and hands resting on the long counter.
“Eggs over easy, no grits. Can you do it without breaking the yokes?”
“Sure can, I watched Miss Jen do it.”
“Well, don’t. At least break one.”
“Got it,” he said, just as my mother would have.
“I’ve got to make Aurora Paradise an Appledew.”
“Ain’t no more apple juice, but there’s pineapple. You could make a pineapple dew.” Walter broke two eggs into a small bowl. They both ran. Calmly, he picked up another egg and broke that and the yoke stayed whole. He heated up the frying pan.
I considered a Pineappledew, leaning on the counter as Walter had done and as my mother did. It was her thinking position. Vera would march in and rattle off four totally different orders and my mother would stand arms akimbo, her head bowed a little, eyes shut, nodding. When Vera was finally done, she’d say, “Got it.”
A feeling wrenched me, almost as if someone had literally grabbed me around my waist. It was a terrible feeling, no doubt caused by her absence, that there would come a time when my mother would not stand so, arms splayed and eyes tight shut. Vera would come no more to bark out her food orders nor would Mrs. Davidow come to sit on the center table, to smoke a cigarette and gossip. It was the same feeling that had washed over me in the upstairs storeroom where cobwebs floated in the thin light that slanted through the grimy windows, the same feeling as I had got when I remembered the Waitresses. In this lingering absence, it was as if something knocked loose within me to roll across a green baize table, like the one in the poolroom next to the Conservative offices —to roll away and out of control. I could not find words for it, or maybe I did not want to find words for it, for they might give it a shape (as William Faulkner says) and I did not want to see the shape. Then I wondered if not wanting to see it was just my cowardly way. I hung my head and wondered if anything could set all of this to rights.
“Is this broke enough?”
Walter’s voice snatched me back from this hard place and I’d half forgotten what we were doing. I looked at Miss Bertha’s fried eggs. “Yes.” One yolk had spread flat and hard and the white was tough and stringy. Just the egg my mother would never have allowed into the dining room, not if they tortured her for a spy.
“Sorry,” I said to Miss Bertha, when I’d set the breakfasts before them. “We used the last egg on that.” But somehow I didn’t feel as gleeful as I usually did nor think the joke as jokey.
43
An album
Whatever had knocked loose from me had rolled out of sight by the time I’d finished making a Bombay Breakfast for Aurora. What inspired this new drink was the bottle of gin in the back office safe called Bombay. The finished drink, I thought, surpassed the Appledew. Besides the rum, the Jack Daniel’s, and the Curaçao (which I discovered had an orange flavor), I put in orange juice, pineapple juice, and half a mashed banana, which I whisked together with one of the broken eggs Walter had saved. (This also felt thrifty.) The whole thing struck me as a very healthful drink. The egg especially gave it an honorary breakfast standing.
“This ain’t an Appledew,” said Aurora Paradise, complaining right off.
Still, she looked at the tall glass with an air of expectation. For had I ever let her down? I had also found among Mrs. Davidow’s souvenir swizzle sticks one with a camel sitting atop it. It made, I thought, a nice Bombay-ish touch.
She sipped and smacked her lips. “This is a good drink, Missy.” She took another, longer swallow and said it again.
“I’m glad you like it, but don’t expect it every morning. It takes a lot of trouble.”
She flicked her fingers at me. Today her crocheted mittens were pale olive green with tiny darker green leaves done in satin. I wondered if she had made all of these mittens herself. I couldn’t imagine her having the patience. “Oh, you’re just so all-fired lazy.”
“No, I’m not. Listen: I can’t be making you drinks every time you get a mind for one, remember. Mrs. Davidow will be back soon and I can’t be getting stuff out of her safe all the time.”
“Well, I’ll give you some money and you can go to the liquor store.”
I rolled my eyes at this crazy suggestion. “I’m twelve, remember?”
“Then send that man.”
“Look, we had a bargain you’d show me that photo album, there.” It sat on the side table at her elbow.
She slid a glance that way, then gave me a sly look. “How about doing the pea-trick first?”
“No! It’s not even a trick because you hide the walnut shells right from the start.”
She sighed. “Oh, all right, if you’re going to be contrary.” She set aside the drink and picked up the album. It was covered in an olive-green silk the color of her mittens. It was water stained and a little threadbare. She turned a few pages quickly as if she knew exactly which one she wanted, and said, “There!” Her finger tapped one of the snapshots.
A young pale-haired woman sat on the top rung of a wooden fence; the dark-haired young man leaned against it. They were both smiling happily.
I gasped. They were Rose Devereau and Ben Queen.
“Couldn’t’ve been more’n twenty when that was took.”
Questions tumbled in my mind. I picked one. “Where are they?”
“Spirit Lake, looks like.”
“There’s no sign of the lake.”
Aurora looked again. “Could be Paradise Valley or Cold Flat Junction.” She shrugged. “Could be anywhere, I guess.”
Most places seemed to be so hard to pin down they did seem “anywhere.” It was important to anchor the two to a particular place. While I was studying the snapshot for clues, she whipped the album out of my hands.
“That ain’t all!” Now she flipped to another page and turned the album so I could see it. Here was another couple, and this snapshot was older than the one of Rose and Ben. They were posing, she awkwardly, he easily, as if used to the camera’s attention. He was dressed in a dark blazer and light trousers and was very good-looking. She was wearing an embroidered white dress. His smile was brilliant. He was the young man in the old photograph Dwayne had shown me.
“That there is Isabel Devereau.”
I couldn’t help it; I snatched the album from her. Isabel Devereau! Younger than in the snapshot my mother had of the sisters, and almost pretty—at least, not as grim. Her expression was softer. “Who’s he?”
“Jamie Makepiece is what I believe his name is. I thought she had a beau. That’s him right there. I remembered when I found this album. I thought it was lost and I found it over there where Jen Graham keeps her stu
ff. Someone had removed it from amongst my possessions.”
“Well, don’t look at me.” She sounded so self-righteous, but I didn’t want to get her off on another subject.
“When I saw this picture, it all came back. Isabel Devereau and Jamie Makepiece. Why, that was fifty years ago. When I myself was eighteen—” She slid me a glance to see if I bought this point, which I didn’t, but again I didn’t want to argue.
“There was talk of marrying. But then they didn’t. He was from New York and you can see by how he dresses he’s a city boy. A sharpie and a ladies’ man. This was taken”—here she tapped the snapshot again—“when he come to visit one summer, visited some relation in Spirit Lake, I don’t know who. “Actu’ly”—she primped her hair with her bony, mittened hand—“he was sweet on me, I could tell.”
I kept from pointing out that Jamie was a good twenty years younger than she was, like Ben Queen (who, she’d said, also had a crush on her).
“But that ain’t the reason he left before any marrying could take place. No sirree!”
I waited. She was silent. “Well, why did he?” I shifted my small tray from under one arm to the other. I must admit I was on pins and needles for I was sure there was more to come. But her thin mouth had swung shut like a letter box. I should have known.
She snatched up her empty glass and moved it back and forth. “I’ll just have another Bombay Brunch before I continue my story.”
“‘Breakfast,’” I corrected her. “It’s too early even for brunch. How could you drink another when it’s hardly nine A.M.”
“I’ll push myself.” She raised the glass.
This was so maddening. I went through some pretantrum motions of whining and stomping my foot, knowing it would do no good but not being able to help myself. It might be surprising to hear that when I was little I had a leaning toward temper tantrums, though not anymore of course. It got to be all I wanted to do was throw my physical self around, even while knowing this wouldn’t get the outcome I desired. But here I was so irritated the tale of Jamie and Isabel was being interrupted I could hardly keep myself from doing something physical. My feet seemed to have a mind of their own, like Frankenstein feet. They stomped several times. Aurora just sat with her album clamped to her chest, her lips sealed.
“Oh, all right!” I grabbed the glass and left with my tray and stomped downstairs until I was out of earshot. Then I ran.
Walter had gone up to Britten’s store, so I was alone in the kitchen watching the liquor, a banana, and a fresh egg I’d broken sweep around in the blender. I decided to pour in everything and let the blender whirl it all together.
Jamie Makepiece. Another character added to the story, an even older story; another player to add to the Mr. Ree game. Jamie Makepiece and Isabel Devereau. It was hard imagining one of the Devereau sisters having a romance, especially with a good-looking New York society ladies’ man. If Aurora remembered all of this right. Back then she would have been in her thirties, I figured, and fifty years ago—why, Rose Devereau would have been only ten years old. Younger than I was now. And the same went for Ben Queen. And my mother would have been just a girl. It was so hard to imagine these people as children. It was hard to imagine one of the dour Devereau sisters in a party dress, to tell the truth.
I was pouring the frothy drink into Aurora’s glass and nearly dropped the pitcher. I saw the awkward Isabel in her white dress, embroidered with dark little flowers whose color didn’t show in the picture but which I’d bet several years’ worth of tips was blue.
The same material as Mary-Evelyn’s dress, the same blue silk flowers, only a different design. I remember how Miss Flagler, who owns the gift shop, had talked about one of the Devereau sisters as being an accomplished seamstress, and how a Devereau dress was to be coveted then much more than anything Heather Gay Struther could come up with now. Miss Flagler had said whenever she saw Mary-Evelyn, the child was beautifully dressed. And I’d seen those dresses, for they were still hanging in the closet of Mary-Evelyn’s room. Still in mint condition forty years later. I had tried them on, so I knew.
Floating in the thick water growth of lily pads and grass, Mary-Evelyn had been wearing her white ruffled dress, made from the same material Isabel Devereau must have kept for ten years. But it was not this which had caught my attention—the two dresses made of like material. No, what kept me standing and staring out of the window by the icebox was what I’d been trying to remember when I woke up. It was the doll Maud had been holding in that bedroom of the house on White’s Bridge Road, dressed in white organdy with little blue flowers sewn onto it. What was that doll doing in Brokedown House?
It was in a kind of stupor that I walked the Bombay Breakfast up to the fourth floor. I think I might have walked it all the way to Bombay and hardly noticed. It kept going through my mind: the doll, the photograph—what were they doing in the Calhoun house? For I have no doubt the doll was Mary-Evelyn’s. Miss Flyte hadn’t said the Devereau sister made doll clothes to sell. And the Calhouns were a whole different society from the Devereaus. They wouldn’t have mingled. It appalled me to think I would have to go back even further in time and consider things done then, fifty years ago, but I recollected the story of Agamemnon and his family and realized fifty years of revenge was just an eye blink for the Greeks.
“You in a coma?”
I had got to Aurora’s room and handed her the drink (at least I guess I had, since she was drinking it) and must not have been wearing my usual know-it-all expression. I wondered how much the album had shaken loose in her memory. If nothing else, there was still more of the Jamie Makepiece story. “You agreed to tell me why Jamie left,” I said testily, to let her know I was out of my coma.
Slowly she sipped her drink, then set it aside and made a few small movements, such as resting her hands in her lap, as if gathering herself together. She looked pleased to death with herself, as she usually does when she has information I want. “There was talk.”
“About Jamie and Isabel?”
“About Jamie and Iris.” She delivered up this name with a little hiss as if the name were dangerous.
Wide-eyed, I jumped back. “Iris? But you said Isabel before. Isabel was Jamie’s girl.”
She nodded. “Um-hmm.”
It was almost as bad sometimes as talking to Ree-Jane, the way she held on to information I wanted, but was quick to give me information I didn’t want, like what was on my X-rays, if I’d had any taken. “Are you saying he was both of theirs?”
“That was the talk, that Iris got him away from Isabel. Now, I can’t say if he broke off with Isabel and picked up with Iris, or if he started seeing Iris on the sly behind Isabel’s back. But then he left real quick, that’s what was said. Talk was, all the girls were after him. Well, as you can see, he’s right handsome. I didn’t have time for him; I had other fish to fry.”
“How long was he here?”
“All that summer, if memory serves.”
Memory wasn’t serving very well if she couldn’t recall this when I first asked about the Devereaus several weeks ago.
“That was one fine summer, indeed. We went swimming almost daily in Lake Noir”—surprisingly, she was one of the few people around who could say it right—“and had weenie roasts nearly every night beside the lake. That water was cold as ice and clear as glass. And we’d take boats out on Spirit Lake, too. At night when the moon was up, we’d just drift and drift around.”
It sounded more like some movie about high school kids than something that really happened. Why would she be attending weenie roasts at her age? That was the trouble with her stories; you never knew what part to believe in. But something told me it was true about Isabel, Iris, and Jamie Makepiece.
“Then Elizabeth stepped in; Elizabeth took over like always.”
This detail surprised me. “What did she do?”
“Why, she sent him packing’s what I heard. Elizabeth was pretty much boss, being the oldest. I guess he went back to New Yo
rk and his New York ways. Elizabeth sent Iris off to relatives. That was her punishment. I can believe it.” Here she slewed a look around at me as a relative, then picked up her drink and sipped it.
I stood looking at her intently, as if my look were a kind of hypodermic syringe that could siphon more of the Iris and Jamie story out of her. Imagine Iris going back finally to the Devereau house and that grim fate.
“Did anyone ever see him again?” I was getting concerned for Jamie for some reason. Isabel, of course, would blame Iris and hardly attach any blame at all to Jamie, as she would want to think it was her, Isabel, he truly loved and had just slipped for a moment. At least that’s the way I’d do it if it were me.
Aurora held up a mittened hand, palm out, as if to push my questions back. “That is all I recall.”
I was frowning in simple frustration at not getting more details. “Why didn’t you tell me this when I first asked about the Devereaus.”
Complacent, she was shuffling her tattered deck of cards. “When you get old you start remembering things that happened long, long ago.”
“You’re hardly three weeks older than you were when I asked.”
She didn’t reply, just started laying out the cards. I couldn’t stop here forever hoping for more of the story, and I had no desire to watch her cheat at solitaire, so I left.
My mind ran down names of people who were old enough to have been here and heard this “talk.” There weren’t many. Miss Flyte and Miss Flagler, in their sixties and seventies, respectively, would have been young, back then. Miss Flagler owns a gift shop in La Porte, and Miss Flyte has a candle store next to it. The two of them would sometimes invite me to their morning coffee breaks. It was more often cocoa for me and coffee for them. I knew Miss Flagler recalled something of the Devereau sisters, certainly of the one who was the seamstress, for she gave me a description of an ice-green organdy and silk dress sewn by one. So she seemed to remember that time pretty clearly.
Miss Flyte, though, was the one with the greater imagination, so even if she’d only been in her teens, things might have impressed her more. I’m only twelve, and things impress me, though I tend to be more literal and go by evidence more (somewhat in the way of the Sheriff). Miss Flyte (for instance) could probably take a trip on the Tamiami Trail and to the Rony Plaza without even having to tape up pictures or make a palm tree, or bring in a fan or play records on a phonograph. Her imagination is such that she doesn’t need props.
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