“Nickel, I know Brutus Rife killed your grandmother’s lover but that was long before you were born. Anyway, justice was done, wasn’t it? Brutus was shot between the eyes in the middle of a thunder-snow. Damnedest weather I ever saw. I was still in high school at the time. Anyway, the vendetta between Rifes and Hunsenmeirs has no reason to continue. Besides, Diz’s always been friendly to you.”
I wanted to say a little too friendly but I bit my lip. “You’re the one to talk about vendettas. You don’t like the Pennsylvania Falkenroths.”
“Ah, that’s family. Anyway, Mid-Atlantic Holding Shares may not buy the Clarion. The Thurston Group is paying careful suit.”
I pushed my teacup around. Coffee made me jumpy so I preferred tea. The only time I could force coffee down my throat was before a migraine and I felt as if I was going to get a whopper right now. “Verna, can I have a cup of coffee, black?”
Charles winced. He knew what that order meant. “I don’t want to upset you but I have no children. This is the end of the line for the Clarion and the Falkenroth family. Times change.”
“But we don’t have to change with them. And whoever said progress was a positive thing has never been to Florida or California.”
“We’re not talking about ecology.”
I loved Charles. I wasn’t making it any easier for him, so now I felt like a shit. “I know.”
Verna put the coffee down with three aspirins on the saucer. “Right now.” She pointed to her lips.
I smiled up at her and gulped down the three aspirins, which were about as effective against a migraine as charging a machinegun nest with a rubber knife. But people need to feel useful even when there’s nothing they can do. “Thanks, Verna. You’re a good egg to take care of me.”
“Best customer!” She patted me on the back, stroked Lolly, lingered hoping for a syllable of our news, and then wandered back to the counter where Arnold Dow, the Clarion’s head printer, was singing “Cherry Pie.” She gave him a gigantic piece of cherry pie.
“Charles, how do you know I can’t be removed by the new management if I take over as editor in chief?”
“That’s part of the sales contract. If they do remove you, they’ll have to pay you four boxcars full of money.”
“You mean, that stuff they print in Washington?”
“Your salary will increase too. Not that you’re making much now.”
I made $24,000 a year, and given federal and state taxes, I lived close to the bone. Still, I considered myself a lucky woman because I was doing what I love. “Nobody makes money in Runnymede. You either inherit it or make it somewhere else and retire here.”
“Amen.”
Verna, unbidden, came over and poured another cup of blazing coffee for me and I gulped it down. Tears welled in my eyes and I quickly swallowed my glass of water.
“Jesus!” Lolly turned her head up to inquire as to my well-being. Lolly never liked it when I raised my voice. “I guess I am afraid about my job. A title without power means nothing. I’ve seen what’s happened to local papers when the chains get them. You have too. All they do is run AP wire stories. Hell, they don’t even use local people to review books and movies. They run the demand AP wire reviews. A newspaper is a community resource. It’s not only a method to generate cash. All those people care about is the bottom line. They’ll slash our staff. They’ll talk like accountants. Makes me sick. I want a Runnymede person to review the movies. We don’t think like someone in New York City or wherever the person is who writes the damned AP review. There’s news and then there’s the people’s response to that news through their paper. It’s not a one-way street. Don’t laugh but there really is such a thing as journalistic integrity and I don’t want some jackleg asshole in a three-piece suit telling me how to run this show!”
As I rarely popped off, Charles stared at me in fascination. Everyone else in Mojo’s was staring at me too. I took a deep breath. “Well, I’m sorry I disturbed everybody’s lunch but now you all know how I think.”
Verna laughed. Arnold, a furrow on his brow, went back to his pie, and people smiled and resumed their conversations.
“So much for secrets.” Charles sighed.
“If you wanted to keep this a secret why tell me in Mojo’s? This is Gossip Central.” And it was. After the death of Noe Mojo, a Japanese gentleman, Verna and Thacker Bonneville bought the place and put up a huge blackboard by the front door with lots of colored chalk. You could write down anything you wanted, and you could draw too. Whenever I needed a source I came to Mojo’s first.
“You’re right. I should have had you meet me over at Brown, Moon and Frost but Jack’s got a tight schedule this morning.”
“Jack knows, I take it?”
“He’s the paper’s lawyer.”
Wait until I get my hands on Jackson Frost. I sat there for a moment. “Hey, Verna, fry me up a hamburger for Pewter.”
“Where is she today?”
“Office. She didn’t want to get her feet wet.” I turned back to Charles. “How much you want for the Clarion?”
“Two million plus a small percentage of the stock which will revert back to the owner upon Ann’s death, since I’m certain she’ll outlive me.”
“May I give you my answer tomorrow morning? I want to think this through.”
“I can wait an extra day. Your migraines last twelve to twenty-four hours.”
“Pain doesn’t stop me from thinking. It’s not fair to keep you waiting.”
“Okay, tomorrow morning then.”
Charles was due in Hanover, Pennsylvania, so I headed back to the office without him. The sidewalk was glazed and the tiny darts of ice rained down like crystal BBs. I knew I was walking on ice, but it felt like eggshells.
After work, Lolly, Pewter, and I slipped and slid over to Mom’s. Even with the Jeep in four-wheel drive the road was nasty and I dreaded the two-mile drive up Bumblebee Hill to my house. Pewter spit at Goodyear, who kept wagging his tail. After about ten minutes of feline drama, the animals settled down and I told Mother everything. Before she replied she picked up the telephone. That was Mom for you, commander of the phone call, admiral of touch dialing. She didn’t reach out and touch; she reached out and grabbed you by the throat.
“Mother, don’t call Aunt Wheezie just yet.”
“Why not? The last time she had a good idea was in 1934. Let’s give her an opportunity to come up with another one.”
“Come on, Mom. This isn’t funny and I’ve got a wicked migraine.”
She put the phone down. “Say yes. You need the money.”
“That thought occurred to me. I sure don’t want to leave the paper. Gotta have a Hunsenmeir on the paper. It’s in the blood.”
“Christ, now you sound like Wheezie.” She mimicked Louise: “Blood tells.” Her voice returned to normal. “What do you care? You got your own blood.”
For three decades I had heard variations on that theme. It still felt like a wasp sting on tender flesh. I don’t know why I never fought back. Why did Mother and Aunt Louise have to tell me repeatedly that I was not related by blood, that I was adopted? I’m a bright person. Tell me once and I’ll remember. I guess I never fought back because I didn’t know how. What can you say when your mother, or the only mother you’ve ever known, tells you you aren’t hers?
“That’s not the point.”
“Well, what is?”
Louise’s party lingered in Mother’s mind like a hangover. She was out of sorts and would stay that way until she found a way to wrest the spotlight back from her older sister. “The point is I want to buy the Clarion.”
“You?” Her pupils dilated.
“Me.”
“You haven’t got a pot to piss in.”
“I’ve got the farm. I’ve got eighteen years of experience. More, if you count my work on the college and high school papers. I understand advertising. I know I can make the Clarion even better than it is now.”
Mother got up from her rocker w
ith the carved swan heads for armrests. She paced. Age had robbed none of her natural gracefulness. “You’d mortgage the farm?”
“If I have to. Can’t be worth more than one hundred seventy-five thousand even with the fifty acres, which is good land.”
“How much does Charles want?”
“Two million.”
“Drop in the bucket.” She laughed.
“My assets are a drop in the bucket but I’m hoping the bank will make me a business loan based on my experience and Charles’s recommendation. Of course, we could drum up money by putting a mattress on your back and standing you on the Square. I’d make you a nice sign: CURB SERVICE.”
“I was brought up not to make fun of my elders.”
“There can’t be many of them left.”
“You’re a fresh kid. Sometimes I wonder if I brought you up right.”
“Well, I’m not exactly the girl next door.”
The corner of her mouth twitched upward. “If you want to be like the girl next door, go next door.”
“You’ll help me?”
“I haven’t got any money.” She enjoyed being pursued.
“You know everybody. And you’ve known them forty years longer than I have. You might come up with something.”
“Might.”
As I opened the door to go home I heard her pick up the phone. She now had some information she could dangle in front of Louise like a fat grub in front of a grouper. Tomorrow night was bingo and the signs were ripe that those two would cut a shine.
3
A NEW MAN IN TOWN
FRIDAY … 27 MARCH
A thick cloud of smoke, much like the one that enveloped Pompeii when Vesuvius lost its temper, hung over the bingo parlor at Saint Rose of Lima. The large railroad clock on the wall hadn’t struck eight o’clock but the consumption of cigarettes, cigars, and the occasional pipe was far ahead of schedule. Nerves were razor-sharp because Mutzi Elliott, the caller and greengrocer, was instituting new games.
Mutzi had just returned from bingo school. Up until tonight we’d played bingo the way everyone plays bingo. You get a diagonal line filled up or a straight line and you yell “Bingo.” We were graduating into advanced bingo. Even Mom and Louise shut up to concentrate.
One hundred people plus Lolly, Goodyear, and Pewter, as well as Arnie Dow’s cat, Louisa May Alcatt, filled the hall. Everyone knew about Goodyear’s trick because Mother had shown them one by one. It was the biggest inside joke in Runnymede, and what was curious was that Louise didn’t notice people calling her Wheeze, Wheezie, or even Sis. Of course, everyone had grown up with her nickname and possibly she thought it normal but I had the creeping sensation that sooner or later Goodyear would go into his fit and there’d be hell to pay. Just so he didn’t do it tonight, because tension was fierce.
The Ping-Pong balls with numbers flew up in the air in a glass cage. Mutzi kept the top down because Pewter had crawled into the cage once. The balls popped out one by one and he’d grab them if Pewter didn’t grab them first. Usually Pewter’s antics were good for a laugh but tonight not one head turned up toward Mutzi.
INSIDE PICTURE FRAME
REGULAR X
CHAMPAGNE GLASS
Straight up or reverse
RAILROAD TRACKS
Any two parallel columns
ANY VERTICAL OR HORIZONTAL
BLOCK OF 9
Can be anywhere on the board, but there must be nine touching squares in the block
“Railroad tracks. Next game is railroad tracks. You remember now, you’ve got to get two parallel columns. Ready.” He paused for effect. “Steady. Go.” A ball popped up. “Number two.” Mutzi sang. “Tea for two and two for tea.”
Mother appeared nonchalant. She carried a little notebook with her on which she had drawn the new kinds of bingo games. Louise kept cribbing from Julia’s notes.
“Keep your nose over your own card, Wheezie, or you’ll get a blister on it.”
“Who died and made you God?” Louise shot back.
“Darlings, we are in a house of worship.” Mr. Pierre was sitting across from the Hunsenmeirs.
Louise would have come back with something but Mutzi called out, “Forty. Number forty and I tell you I didn’t have sense to come in from the rain until I was forty.”
A ripple of laughter rolled over the crowd. The gang was predominantly female with the men sitting along the side of the room at a bar. Truthfully, liquor should not have been sold in the church but Saint Rose’s needed money. Millard Huffstetler, the church’s business manager, did whatever was necessary to raise revenue. We didn’t know if he informed Father Christopolous. Generating cash for the church was one’s Christian duty. Louise took this to heart. She sewed raffia baskets every summer for Saint Anthony’s bazaar. Louise had converted to Catholicism at age eight. Mother remained Lutheran and this proved a fruitful source of contention.
The numbers rolled on until Ricky Bonneville, one of the “BonBons,” screeched “Bingo.” Kirk “Peepbean” Huffstetler, Millard’s nephew, wearing a bib like an old-time paperboy, sauntered over and checked the card. “Got ’em. Railroad tracks straight as the C and O.” He was a sign painter and still wore his spattered overalls.
“Fifteen dollars to Ricky B.” Mutzi smiled. He rang a cowbell, his idea of celebrating winners.
“Verna, you have an unfair advantage,” Mother shouted over. “Ten kids. You’re bound to win.”
“I have to pay admission for everyone. Two bucks a head, Julia. Think of that.” Verna was reaching into her cavernous bag for chocolate-covered doughnuts with which to feed her brood. Even the smallest BonBon, Decca, now a first-grader, manned a card. No wonder these kids won every math award from elementary school right up through South Runnymede High.
“Julia doesn’t know anything about children. You have to be a natural mother to know. Comes with the blood.” Louise, maliciously content in her wounding, cooed.
“Bullshit.”
Mutzi observed the tone between the sisters. He pulled out his .38 and brandished it. “Hunsenmeir girls, take heed. I keep this gun because I never know when you all will renew hostilities.” He also kept the gun because the cash was beside the Ping-Pong ball machine.
“I’m not renewing hostilities,” Mother called back. “I am replying to my senile sister. She just had her eighty-sixth birthday, you know.”
“Eightieth!” Louise was now on the verge of a towering rage.
“You’ll never see eighty-six again. Now why don’t you act your age and eat oatmeal!” Mother tossed her dab-a-dot in the air and caught it. Dab-a-dots are like Magic Markers except you press them down and they leave a perfect round colored dot over your number on the bingo card. Beans went out with the Edsel. Mother always used red and Louise blue.
“You know why your husband died, Julia? To get away from you!”
Mother smashed her dab-a-dot on Louise’s forehead. Goodyear growled and Lolly stood up in front of me. Pewter stopped stealing from Verna BonBon’s sandwich to watch.
The sisters attacked each other until both were covered with dots.
Mutzi blasted into the microphone: “Stop it! Girls, you stop it right this minute or I’ll throw you out. I mean it.”
“The hell you will,” Mother bellowed. “She started it. Throw her out.”
“You’re lying. You know how I can tell you’re lying? Because your mouth is moving.”
There was another flurry of attack by dab-a-dot.
Despairingly, Mutzi called to me: “Can you control your mother?”
“She’s not my mother. I’m adopted, remember?” I laughed but I couldn’t resist this small revenge for Mother’s crack yesterday. It was a mistake, because now Mother turned on me with her damned dab-a-dot. Lolly, who wouldn’t stand for anyone messing with me, bit Mother on the leg.
“Rabies! Rabies!”
Louise doubled over with laughter. “Ha, Lolly will catch rabies from you.”
Mr. Pierre, findin
g his courage at last, put his arm around Louise. “Darling, you need a drink.”
“I don’t need a drink. I need a new sister.”
“Blood! Blood! I need a transfusion,” Mother yelled. She rubbed her leg. There wasn’t a drop of blood on it. Lolly growled. Goodyear was too confused to do anything but lick Mother’s face. “You have that goddamned dog because you haven’t the guts to bite me yourself,” she snarled at me.
Peepbean Huffstetler helped Mother back to her seat. He brushed by me as though I were a sea slug. Peepbean had it in for me since the second grade because one time we were at the Capitol Theater watching The Kentuckian with Burt Lancaster and I gave him a fireball and told him it was a jawbreaker. That he could nurse a grudge that long said something about the excitement level of his life.
Louise was making her stately advance to the bar for a medicinal shot of liquor, wailing as she went. “She ruined my cards and I bought three cards.”
“It’s not cancer research. It’s just bingo,” Mr. Pierre soothed.
“You don’t know anything about cancer research, Pierre,” Louise chided him.
I was cleaning up the few dab-a-dots on my face. Mother wouldn’t help me and I wouldn’t help her and she looked like a pointillist painting. Mutzi was nervously announcing that the next game was going to be “champagne glass” and it was really hard, but this tornado of chat came to an abrupt silence as Thacker Bonneville walked in the door accompanied by a man handsome enough to be Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Every female head in the room snapped around to look. Mother fished her compact out of her purse and aimed a blow at her cheek with the blusher. Didn’t help the spots.
Verna, savoring the moment, waved to her husband. “Thackie, sugar, Ricky won the fifteen-dollar pot.”
“Another one of those, Rick, and the old man retires.” He cheerily waved to his boy.
“Who is that?” Mother demanded.
Airily, Verna tossed off her answer. “My mother’s brother, Edgar Tutweiler Walters. From Birmingham. We call him Ed.”
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