Mummers' Curse

by Gillian Roberts

  But it had happened. The Shooter had been shot.

  My mother had been right. He’d caught his death.

  Two

  KAREN AND I MADE OUR WAY THROUGH A SILENT CITY TO THE LOFT. I yearned for a public hue and cry, a real reaction. Something dreadful had happened, and only the air currents—both atmospheric and electronic—seemed agitated.

  I turned on the TV for a quick look. “Murder at the Mummers’ Parade,” a voice said on the hour. “Details on tonight’s Headline News.” And on another channel, “The Mummers’ Curse? That’s what some wags are calling today’s tragedy, the second in two weeks involving a Philadelphia Mummer.”

  The second tragedy. But Ted Serfi had disappeared, and he hadn’t been mumming at the time. Besides, there were those rumors, suspicions that he was “connected.” That was nothing like being shot dead in full view of watching crowds.

  I turned off the TV. I didn’t think Karen needed her day’s horrible images reinforced. We could talk or play games, while I waited to find out if my co-worker was still alive. I was sure they knew by now—his fellow Mummers would have ID’d him in an instant. But there was the notification of next of kin. That sort of thing.

  “The parade!” Karen said as I turned the TV off. “You said we could watch it.”

  “But that was before…don’t you think…how about a change of scene? We could read, or play a board game, or—”

  “The parade! You said.” She pushed out her bottom lip in a clear, if unendearing, she-who-is-peeved pose.

  It didn’t strike me as wise to remind her that the parade had turned sour, terrifying, or that she was upset. I turned on the television again.

  From then on, we snuggled on the sofa and watched while sipping from steaming mugs of chicken noodle soup. Outside the loft’s high windows, loose pages of newspapers and decimated bits of city trees whipped by, reminding me of the cyclone in The Wizard of Oz, except that Mummers didn’t get shot in Kansas.

  It was a good time to be behind doors, inside walls. It would have been a better time if all three of us were there, but Mackenzie considered finding himself at the scene of a fatal shooting a divine—or a least a legal and professional—sign that he was required to remain. He was correct, but that didn’t make me love the fact.

  At the time Karen and I left it, the parade had well and truly stalled. Nobody knew what to do beyond clearing the crowd sufficiently to allow the body to be taken from its awkward cage and moved to a cross street where an ambulance waited.

  The Mummers, vulnerable and stricken on their merriest of days, had milled uncertainly, except for the men in the frame suits who did their damnedest to stay upright and didn’t dare any fancy milling.

  I wasn’t ready to leave when Mackenzie suggested it. I was still scanning for Vincent, fearing, when I didn’t find him, that he was the caged-in corpse.

  But Mackenzie had been right to say we should leave, if not for my peace of mind, then surely for Karen’s. From there on in for a goodly time, the Mummers, from what I could glean, went into limbo, unsure of what was the right, legal, or smart thing to do. They decided to stop out of respect. But before word could travel through all the ranks, somebody realized that the Comic Clubs and one Fancy had already passed City Hall and performed their four-minute routines for the judges. Prizes had probably been decided for the Comics. Stopping penalized this and the two remaining Fancy Clubs, all the String Bands, and the Fancy Brigades. A year’s labor, a year’s passion, gone. Whoever had murdered the Mummer had thereby simultaneously murdered the entire parade.

  Or maybe the equation went something like: twenty thousand living marchers, one dead. Besides, even to the corpse of a Mummer, being responsible for canceling the parade would be ignominious, a fate truly worse than death.

  So by the time Karen and I arrived back at the loft, the parade was in motion again, and now, the lords of Broad Street, the String Bands, were in full swing. Karen watched TV, her mind obviously only partly with Macavity and me. She kept one hand on the cat’s back, as if securing herself to something yielding, safe, and soft.

  I checked my answering machine, hoping Mackenzie had called while we were en route.

  He hadn’t. My mother had. I listened to New Year’s wishes and muted distress, commenting that since I wasn’t home to take the call, I had decided once again not to listen to her, and she hoped I was at least enjoying the parade. “Something sad around here,” she said. “Remember I told you about Dr. Landau’s cat?”

  I shook my head at the machine. I didn’t remember any of this, nor did I feel guilty about this failure on my part. And in any case, I knew my mother would review the data she felt important. Again and again. Precisely the way Mackenzie said I did about the Mummers. I didn’t want to think about that. “She went away,” my mother’s voice said. “Dr. Landau, not the cat—to visit her married children for Christmas, and hired her regular cat-sitter, Violet.”

  If I sped it up or simply walked away, would I be teaching my niece to ignore her elders? I stayed and listened.

  “Violet called me all upset. Sid—Sid’s the cat—is sick. Terminally. I’m down as the emergency number. There’s no way to reach Allen—”

  Who was Allen? Another kitty? Another kitty-sitter?

  “—because they went to somebody’s ski place, can you imagine? Snow!—and the vet thinks Sid needs to be put to sleep, the dear thing. Sid, I mean. Not the vet. Isn’t that awful? In a way, I’m glad she doesn’t know, she loves him so much, and my goodness, she’s a doctor, dedicated to preserving life, she’d be—”

  I gave up on who the she was, along with the idea of being a role model for my niece, and I fast-forwarded to the remaining message, hoping again that it might be Mackenzie. Again, it wasn’t. It was my least favorite student, Renata Field.

  I upset myself when I actively dislike a student. It feels unethical, as deserving as the antipathy might be. Luckily, it doesn’t happen often. But it had surely happened with Renata, and the feeling was set in reinforced concrete.

  “Happy New Year, Miss Pepper.” Her chilly voice made it abundantly clear that she in no way meant her words. “I hope you’ve been thinking about me. I was thinking about you because it is a new year, and a new start, and my last year in high school, and I’m hoping it will be a happy year for me, too. See you soon.” And that was that.

  If Renata would put the energy into classwork that she put into trying to avoid the consequences of doing nothing except cheat, she might have an academic chance. But instead of doing her homework, Renata had repeatedly claimed I’d lost it, then handed in one take-home essay after she’d copied it, verbatim, from an A student.

  I split the A between the two of them, which gave each a 50, which in turn translated into F’s. That was before winter break, and Renata had called me every other day since. The calls did not make me fonder of her.

  I left the answering machine and sat down next to Karen, who still stared straight ahead. We both oohed and ahhed, although her oohs and ahs seemed a bit forced, at the sea of glittering instruments backed by equally ornate musicians.

  Mackenzie had been right. This was the way to watch the parade—and if we’d done it his way all along, he’d be with us now. I tried not to think about that.

  Four or more generations danced before us, from a child barely out of toddlerhood all the way up to a man who moved with the careful deliberation of old age. Their theme was “The Peaceable Kingdom,” and fantastic lions with feathery “manes” drilled beside silver and white lambs. The band members wore capes the colors of the U.N. flag, and their headpieces had platinum doves stitched on the satin.

  I love String Bands. Their one-of-a-kind music is the sound of the parade and to me, its heart.

  I’m not sure, however, why they’re called String Bands, because in addition to guitars, mandolins, banjos, bass viols, and violins, there were stringless clarinets, saxophones, flutes, and keyboards, both the metal ones of glockenspiels and the faux-ivory of a
ccordions, plus drums—bass and snare. Stringed or not, those haphazardly collected and oddly combined instruments gave the bands their unique, upbeat sound.

  The String Bands’ anthem, the one song every band includes in its repertoire, is “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers,” which contains the essence of their sound—exuberant, irrepressible, overflowing happiness. Not a music designed for tragedy or anything less than high-stepping.

  “Time for your initiation,” I told my niece. “Now that you’re at least partly a girl of this city, it’s time for you to do a strut.” I leaned close to her. “The people in New Orleans do not have this at all,” I added, and then I stood up and demonstrated, doing my own variation, which boiled down to whatever felt good and moved in time to the music, and wishing I, too, wore blue and white mirrored sequins and didn’t feel so plain and unadorned.

  And after a brief interval, Karen stood up and grinned as she took one step forward and half a step back, lifting an imaginary cape, bending forward and simply moving to the music.

  We both giggled, and I didn’t explain—not a syllable—that the strut was probably an imitation of the African-American Cakewalk of long ago. This bizarre and wonderful celebration is one of the few places the stuff tossed in the pot had actually melted. But I kept it to myself.

  And when we had made our way around the entire loft and collapsed back onto the sofa, Karen exhaled in a massive, shoulder-lifting, ultimate sigh and looked at me. “That was very bad, what happened,” she said with great solemnity.

  I agreed.

  “I was scared. The people screaming scared me.” I nodded.

  “Even though I got to be on C.K.’s shoulders.”

  “That part was good.” We held hands.

  “He said there wouldn’t be any shooting this year. That all the shooting was a long time ago.” Karen’s tone was solemn. A great deal was at stake.

  “He thought that’s how it would be. That’s what everybody thought, because this was not how it is, or was. This never happened before. This will never happen again.” Please, oh, please, don’t make me a liar on that last count, I silently begged. I needed to know that almost as much as Karen did.

  “I wish I didn’t know that Mummer was dead.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I wish he wasn’t dead.”

  The phone rang. I bolted. This had to be Mackenzie.

  But the voice had no southern softness, no bass undertones. “Mandy!” my sister said. “You’re home. Karen’s there, too, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, we’re—”

  “Thank goodness you didn’t go to the parade. I’m so relieved!”

  “Actually, we—”

  “Did you hear what happened? Somebody shot a Mummer!”

  “Yes, I—”

  “Killed him! He’s dead!”

  “I know. I—”

  “That city! How can you live there?” She sounded more like our mother every day, a fact that would curdle her blood if she were aware of it.

  Certainly, the city isn’t often mistaken for Utopia, but my sister’s method of disengaging, standing back, and pointing didn’t help. Besides, I was tired of blaming everything on geography. Cities don’t kill people, guns do. I hoped the murderer turned out to be one of Beth’s suburban soulmates.

  “Karen’s fine,” I said. “But we were there.”

  “There? Where? Not at the—”

  “Yes. At the.”

  “Nowhere near what happened, I hope.”

  “Right there. When he fell into his suit. She seems okay and we’re talking about it, but you should know, in case she has bad dreams or anything.”

  “Mandy!” Her inflection suggested that I’d purposefully exposed my niece to urban slaughter.

  “It wasn’t like we could see anything gross.” A weak defense, but the best I could manage. “And we’re comfy up here now, and talking it through, so don’t worry.”

  “I don’t feel good about her in an old warehouse in that city. No offense intended.”

  “I’m taking some, anyway. This is historic Old City. Where I live once was a warehouse, but now it’s a loft. This is chic, Beth. This is Philadelphia’s SoHo.”

  “I don’t go to New York’s SoHo,” she snapped. “And I certainly don’t take my babies there.”

  This was a bad way to start the year, and the basis of it, the problem of the increasingly fearful suburbanite, of walls real and imagined, deserved a bigger chunk of time and thought than I was willing to donate at the moment.

  “I’m sorry you were so worried,” I said as sweetly as I could, given that she hadn’t even asked whether I was all right. Let alone Mackenzie. “Would you feel better if I brought Karen home right away? We’re settled in with hot soup and the TV, but…”

  She was too well bred, or at least too cowed by what my mother had said was the code of female politeness—never inconvenience anyone but yourself, a code my mother did not necessarily follow, by the way—to say what she meant, which was “bring my baby home now and I don’t care what you want.”

  Beth sighed. I waited, counting on her excellent, if antiquated, standards. I wanted to stay put until I found out more about the Mummer. “No, no,” she murmured. “I didn’t mean… Thanks for offering, but I guess I’m being… I know you didn’t put her there on purpose. I tend to be over-protective at times…”

  And thus do the city sister and the country sister once again stave off a value clash; plus, the trip to the hinterlands was suitably delayed.

  However, two hours later, I’d had my fill of sequins, struts, and strings, but I hadn’t gotten a call from Mackenzie. His unpredictability and unaccountability were speed bumps on our path through life together. I was working at adjusting, not only understanding the demands of his profession, but honoring them. I took deep breaths and made a heartfelt New Year’s resolution to stop resenting Mackenzie’s job.

  I instantly resented the need to make such a vow.

  “Had enough parade for a while?” I asked Karen, who looked groggy. “Ready for the glories of Gladwyne?”

  She regarded me blankly. We’d finished our soup and bread and topped it with ice cream and Oreos. Perhaps too many, her glazed expression suggested.

  “Home. Yours. How ’bout it?”

  She nodded. She was a big girl, not a baby like her brother, she was fond of reminding us. But she’d been on the town for twenty-four hours, slept in a strange bed in a former warehouse, seen a parade and a murder, and she was tired and homesick, although, like her mother, too polite to say so outright.

  *

  Even now, at the frozen nadir of winter, Beth’s suburb maintained a green lushness, although I don’t know how. Trees lose their leaves even on the Main Line, and climbing vines freeze. The residual greenness must be further proof of how money colors everything. I sighed and rang her bell.

  Beth had a visitor, a slender woman with hair the color of pink grapefruit juice and features sharp enough to slice paper. As we unwrapped Karen, who had been packed off to my place wearing enough to survive a month of snow camping, we were introduced.

  “This is my friend, Quentin Reed,” Beth said.

  I’d already met women friends of Beth’s named Sidney, Michael, and Claude. Perhaps she collected the ambiguously named, but what to make of a day spent watching men dressed in sequins, feathers, lace, and satin, and an evening with a woman named Quentin? Perhaps we were headed for androgyny at long last, but was it a good thing?

  “My parents really, really wanted a boy,” Quentin-the-girl said with an engaging grin.

  True equality will be had when I meet a man named Rosabelle or Tiffany who says, “My parents really, really wanted a girl.”

  “Quentin’s a therapist,” Beth said in an overly calm voice, after Karen had run upstairs followed by the household’s galumph of a dog, Horse. “You’ve probably heard her.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course. That’s why you sounded familiar.”

  “Good day,” she’d say
on the radio. “This is Dr. Reed On the Air.” I had come to think of Dr. as her first name and Air her last. But as I’d drive wherever, listening to her ripe, fruity voice giving urgent advice and telling her “true stories”—nasty-funny case studies of neurotics she’d known—I’d imagined her fuller, older, much more subdued looking.

  “The radio doctor.”

  She smiled. “Among other things, yes.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” I was, even though I’m leery of the sound-bite solution, of keeping therapy zippy enough to maintain ratings.

  “I felt it would be good to have someone at the ready if Karen needs to ventilate,” Beth said.

  Ventilation seemed the concern of steamfitters. Besides, was it wise to hire a shrink before there was any sign of emotional problems, like purifying drinking water just in case? Or did it instead insure that there would be problems?

  “I agreed,” Quentin Reed off-the-air said, not surprisingly. “Given the dimensions of the child’s trauma. To be an eyewitness to such a dreadful event. The death, in essence, of a beloved icon, a clown.” She looked devastated herself.

  “Not a clown,” I began. But that was irrelevant and arguable. “More to the point, we weren’t precisely eyewitnesses to the crime, only its results. I suspect that nobody actually saw it happen. After all, there were thousands of people watching, and not a peep until he collapsed, so it couldn’t have been too obvious when he was shot. Mostly, this is going to be a gigantic headache for the police.” And create more nights alone for me.

  “Forgive me, but I find that a purposefully dispassionate—no, let us say dissociated—appraisal of a human tragedy,” she said in her mother-knows-best voice.

  I felt properly rebuked, improperly perverse. “I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. I meant, the good news for Karen is going to be what makes it a problem for the police because there was precious little to see. No blood, no fearsome dying. All you could see was a painted face, and then it slipped down inside his costume. His headpiece stayed on top and the costume still stood up. It almost all looked unchanged. Much less violent than TV cartoons, to tell the truth.”