Six of One

by Rita Mae Brown

  Fannie concentrated. "Hmm?"

  "What I'm saying is don't count on individuals or nations behaving reasonably. Given the horror of the last war, people will have to outdo themselves in this one, once it gets started. This will then be portrayed to us as progress." Celeste's cool voice echoed.

  "Well, I hope we stay out of it." Fannie eyed Celeste's discard.

  Cora arranged the sandwiches and quietly told them, "It's the fools who defeat you, not the clever ones."

  "Afraid you're right." Fannie poured herself more tea from the large silver pot on the tray.

  A descendant of Madame de R6camier padded into the room, a cloud of blue-gray fur. Cora scratched her ears.

  "Did you know cats used to rule the earth until they taught people to do it for them?" Celeste smiled.

  "Say, why didn't you go to the Daughters of Confederacy benefit last night?" Fannie drew a card from the pile.

  "My eyes need a rest from the glare of sequins."

  'You should've seen the crowd, Celeste—husbands, sons, us. The Sisters of Gettysburg will have to top this one."

  "It must have looked like a convention of your ex-lovers." Celeste laughed.

  "Don't be a twit," Fannie remarked.

  "Is that the present tense of twat?"

  "You are wicked, as Fairy used to say." Fannie loved Celeste when she was in this mood.

  "Really? I've always thought of myself as boldly nonchalant." Celeste paused, then smiled triumphantly. "Gin."

  "You shit." Fannie got up to fix herself a drink. "Cora fell sound asleep on the sofa."

  "All that wrangling with Louise over Mary and Extra Billy Bitters exhausted her." Celeste gazed at Cora. Now how would she win?

  Fannie returned to the card table, glass brimming with spirits. "You know, of course, that Diddy Van Dusen is taking over Immaculata Academy since her mother's death?"

  "As to children, Carlotta had a single unsavory specimen. I hope never to see or hear from Diddy Van Dusen again."

  "Don't be too hard on her, Celeste. She's still recuperating from her childhood." Fannie eagerly grabbed her cards as Celeste dealt a new hand.

  "At thirty-seven?"

  Fannie arranged her cards according to suit and number. This could take her a few minutes. "Louise must be on one rampage about this Extra Billy business. Listerine ought to get him to do a magazine advertisement in front of North Runnymede firehouse."

  "That's good, Fannie. Why don't you send it in to the Trumpet or the Clarion under a false name?"

  "Yeah." Fannie's eyes gleamed with devilment. "Sending Mary to the academy hasn't affected the child much, although Maizie is trying to be Mother Cabrini."

  "If Louise would shut up, Mary'd forget about that barbarian in time. This way it's a point of honor to stand up to Wheezie."

  "Someone ought to warn Mary that before you meet the handsome prince you kiss a lot of toads." Fannie cast off a two of hearts.

  "You ought to know."

  "Damn you, Celeste."

  "Now that Carlotta's dead and gone, we can look forward to Louise glowing periodically with a pentecostal flame." Celeste's elegant voice skipped over the words, making them crisp and perhaps funnier than the content.

  "If only you'd sent Louise to Fox Run School for Young Ladies. The woman hungers for conventionality. At least then she'd be crackers about horses instead of Jesus."

  "Mea culpa." Celeste struck her breast. "I say, Fannie, that was a shifty discard." Without her code, Celeste straggled. Fannie could win as easily as she could now.

  "It's my hand, Chalfonte. I can do as I please. God, that Bill Bitters is about as attractive as a steaming goat pellet."

  "True enough. But you and I weren't daughters raised by domineering mothers. I'm afraid Mary will take the path of least resistance for her rebellion." Celeste sighed.

  "What's that?"

  "Her body. Whenever a young thing wants to be free minus serious thought, she gets pregnant and then gets married. Voila!."

  "You aren't going out, are you?" Fannie clutched for a moment.

  "Voila! is not gin." Celeste shifted in her seat. "Pour me a cup of tea, will you, dearest?"

  "Ramelle due back -on time?"

  "End of March. I hear Spotty's face is on the cover of all those dreadful movie magazines."

  "Yes."

  "Gin!" Fannie smashed her cards down.

  "Piss." Celeste junked her cards on the middle of the wood-inlaid table.

  "My deal." Fannie scooped them up, delighted. She didn't often win with Celeste. She knew Celeste must be cheating, but her system had never dawned on Fannie. Mrs. Creighton wasn't that subtle, so she couldn't begin to imagine it.

  "Grace sent me Sigourny Romaine's latest book, Arise Artemis. Did she send you one?" Fannie gleefully asked Celeste. This subject never failed to rile the great beauty. It had burned her at Vassar and it burned her to this day.

  "She did, of course. Imagine Sigourny wallowing in the tea leaves of literary triumph? The toast of Paris. Ugh. She's illiterate in two languages, ours and theirs."

  "Tsk, tsk." Fannie shook her head.

  "The absolute worst line in the book was 'Her wings beat against my breast like an avenging angel.' Romantic tripe." Celeste slammed a card on the table.

  In a voice ringing with girlish innocence, Fannie asked, "Didn't Grace beat against your breast at Vassar with the wings of an avenging angel?"

  "Fannie, that is beneath you." Celeste's voice hit her toes.

  "No, dear, you were beneath her, or was it the other way around?"

  "I was very young."

  "You weren't so very young when you had a wild fling with Clare in that very same Paris." Fannie bore in.

  "A mere babe; I was just out of college. You sucked miles of cock on that European tour, as I recall."

  Fannie's mouth flew open. "Hie!" She castigated her by their childhood name. "You are too beautiful for words but not for arguments."

  "Even the gods are fools in love."

  "The test of a love affair is what the participants say afterwards." Fannie grumbled, picking up a card from the deck.

  "I've had many affairs. I felt it was my duty to my biographers." Celeste snatched Fannie's discard.

  "Ha! I knew you kept a pot on the stove in France." Fannie rejoiced at this evidence of frailty on Celeste's part.

  "I'm too old to care now. It's true. Ramelle's love for Curtis shook me initially. I believed it was right for her and it didn't hurt me, but I needed to know I was beautiful to someone."

  "Ramelle worships you, then, now and forever." Fannie sipped her drink.

  "Good taste, Ramelle." Celeste's lips curved upward. "But we'd been together years at that time. I needed a new jolt. I found one. It was all airy, light and sunny."

  "No regrets?" Fannie questioned.

  "No regrets," Celeste confirmed. "And you?"

  "None whatsoever. I wish I could come back a baby and start all over again."

  "If reincarnation is true you will."

  "Do you believe that?"

  "No, but I don't disbelieve it, either. I'd like to come back as a rhinoceros. They have such thick skins."

  "Grace never would go to bed with you once she met Sigourny, would she?"

  "No, the fool." Celeste studied her hand and then sweetly called out, "Gin."

  "Damn it to hell."

  Shuffling the cards, Celeste looked at Fannie. "When it comes to sex, women don't have the sense God gave a goose."

  "We make out all right."

  "We are the exceptions that prove the rule." Celeste dealt another hand.

  "Well, I never was one of those creatures who' thought the road to higher truth lay through my vagina," Fannie Jump drawled.

  "Hear, hear."

  "Do you know what has always irritated me most about Sigourny?"

  "What?" Celeste asked.

  "She's always crowing about being a self-made woman."

  "It's big of her to take the blame. Sigourn
y Romaine is an aesthetic prophylactic."

  Fannie picked up her glass and toasted Celeste. "Here's to people like us."

  "I was thinking of throwing a party to defend Western values." Celeste introduced this new topic to lull Fannie.

  "How's that?"

  "Gin!" Celeste trounced her.

  "Bad luck! Ill get you next time." Fannie's voice rose and woke Cora, who heard the phrase "Bad luck."

  A touch groggy, Cora told them, "Good luck and bad luck are like your right and left hand. You gotta use them both."

  Celeste, sparkling from her small victory, grinned. "Cora, you are outrageously sane."

  September 11, 1940

  Cora rocked on her front porch, shucking fat white ears of corn. Julia trudged up the hill, a bit late from work.

  "Hi, honey."

  "Hi, Mom." Juts collapsed in the old wicker chair next to the rocker.

  "Look at this corn. Juicy." Cora blinked as a well-fed corn spider jumped out at her from all the silk.

  "Ha!" Julia picked up an ear, twisting the tassel off.

  "Got hungry for chicken corn soup. How about you?"

  "Want me to go get some eggs and parsley?"

  "Rest. You look tired."

  "It was one of those days. A dye lot fouled up. How'd you like a few tons of splotched orange ribbon?"

  "Never know when you can use it." Cora smiled.

  "Louise's such a priss. Boy, did they have a row last night"

  "I heard."

  "Extra Billy hit Pearlie so hard they had to peel him off the wall," Julia said.

  "Terrible. They're not going to stop that girl, so they might as well let her be." Cora rocked.

  "Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas." Juts borrowed the paring knife from her mother.

  "That may be so, Julia, but Mary's set on him."

  "Since they're carrying on over in Europe, maybe we'll get into it and that's one way to be rid of Extra Billy."

  "Don't say such a thing. There's good in everybody." Small frown lines dotted her forehead.

  "Oh, Mother," Julia said in a resigned voice. What Cora believed she believed totally. "This ugly duckling will stay an ugly duckling. I'm with Louise. Bill Bitters is no damn good."

  "If you'd keep your nose to the grindstone you wouldn't have time to stick it in your sister's business." Cora watched a hen and her biddies scurry past the porch. They looked like puffs of dandelions with legs.

  "I miss Idabelle's music, don't you?"

  "She was a sweet soul. But we all got to go sometime." Cora stood up and shook out her apron.

  "Saw Orrie Tadia Mojo today. She wore high waters."

  "What?" Cora asked.

  "Pants too short for her legs." Julia's eyes betrayed her solemn face.

  "Hand me those ears, will you?"

  Julia gave her mother the corn. Cora disappeared inside and came out again in five minutes.

  "Gee, that was quick."

  "Had it all laid out. Just needed the corn. Here, honey, I brought you some lemonade."

  "Thanks." Julia reached up for the tall glass. "Now that Louise is having all this trouble with Mary she'll lean on Maizie full force. She'll get that girl in a nunnery yet."

  "If Maizie goes it's her own doing."

  "It's hard to go against your mother." Julia sighed.

  "Why, Julia Ellen Hunsenmeir, I never though I'd hear you say that!" Cora rocked vigorously.

  "Now that Louise can't get into the Daughters of the American Revolution she'll go whole hog on the Catholic Daughters of America." Julia had ignored her mother's comment, preferring to imagine herself the perfect daughter.

  "Poor Louise." Cora squinted up at the sun, putting her hand over her eyes. "All that work tracing our family."

  "Only to find out we're leftover Hessians!" Juts let out a war whoop.

  "It is kind of funny." Cora rubbed her elbow. "I feel like I been out in the rain and rusted."

  "Got aches and pains?" Julia teased her.

  "You just wait. You'll remember your old momma when you're old." Cora reached over and touched Julia's arm.

  "A light heart lives long. You'll live forever." Julia held her mother's hand.

  "Wouldn't that be grand?" Cora noticed the old round wooden tub exploding with black-eyed Susans. She could enjoy such sights into eternity. "I tell you, I'm ready to go when the time comes. Hate to leave the sun and the flowers and you, but a new crop will come up after me."

  "Mother, don't talk like that."

  "Honey, everyone's got to face their own death sometime. Better to be prepared in your soul than go out uneasy."

  Tm not prepared for your leaving or for mine. We ought to make it to one hundred, at least." Julia spoke just a little too loud. Maybe to scare off Death in case he was hanging around.

  "Listen to your old mother. Prepare your soul. If you're at peace with yourself the world is so beautiful. Now ain't that odd? If you're ready to go, to give it all up, why, everything is . . . sunshine." Cora's arms curved outward in an expansive gesture.

  "It would be easier to go if I left something behind. I've got no children." Julia's voice quieted down.

  "You're young yet," Cora reassured her.

  "Momma, I'll be thirty-six next March."

  "There's time."

  "I went to the doctor today after work. About having babies." Julia fiddled with her hem. "He said there was nothing wrong with me. I can have babies."

  "I know that."

  "But that means there's something wrong with Chessy."

  Cora held her peace.

  "It does. After all this time, we'd have a baby," Julia continued.

  "Send him off to the doc," Cora advised.

  "I'm afraid to ask him."

  "Lordie, he's your husband. If you can't talk to your husband, what's the use in being married?"

  "He'll go. I can talk to him. I'm afraid to find out and I'm afraid not to." Julia bit her lower lip.

  "You talk to Chessy. He's no lace-panty job. He'll do the right thing."

  "You're right."

  "Suppose it comes out true? Suppose he can't have children?" Cora thought she'd test the water.

  "There's nothing I can do about it. Can't blame the thermometer for the temperature," Julia replied.

  "The world's full of children that need somebody to love and care for them."

  "Adopt?" Julia was surprised.

  "Why not? It ain't birthing that makes a mother. It's the raising up of the child," Cora firmly told her.

  "What about Chessy? I thought men had to have their own. I don't think they're like women. I mean, women love children. Men have to have it be their own."

  "Fiddlesticks. Do you think for one minute Chester Smith is that selfish?"

  "No."

  "Where do you get such ideas?"

  "Louise told me that. After all, she is a mother."

  "And so's our house cat. All these years I raised you and you're worried about a thing like that? People aren't like grapes, girl, you don't weigh them in a bunch. You got to take every person one by one. You talk to Chessy and get this thing ironed out."

  "O.K. But if it is him, I'm not walking down to Runnymede Square and taking the first baby I see," Julia said defiantly.

  "I hope not."

  "I'll know when it's right."

  "Like anything else. You get a feeling." Cora rose from her chair and placed both hands on the small of her back. "Think I'll go check the soup."

  "O.K."

  Before she opened the screen door Cora asked, "Where is Chessy anyway?"

  "I stopped by the store and he said he'd be home in twenty minutes, but you know Chessy. If he says he'll be home in twenty minutes it covers anything from twenty minutes to ten days."

  December 7, 1941

  Louise, frazzled with wedding preparations, finally collapsed in her pew next to Pearlie. Julia, Chessy and Cora sat immediately behind them. Although Mary wouldn't be sixteen until January, things had progressed to such
a state that Louise had no choice but to let the girl get married; otherwise the progression would protrude and all could see. This fall from grace on Mary's part strengthened Louise's resolve to never, ever, let Maizie get out of hand. During the simple but lovely ceremony, Louise, still furious, forgot decorum and whispered in her husband's ear, "She won't amount to a hill of beans and he won't amount to a pint of piss." Pearlie squeezed her hand since he couldn't very well put it over her mouth.