Mummers' Curse

by Gillian Roberts

  I was afraid that having danced around the heart of the matter, everybody was now content. I didn’t want to push, to interrupt, but I surely wanted to know why it had been suggested that Jimmy Pat might not have become Dolores’s husband even had he lived. I wanted to hear that Vincent Devaney was not the answer. I could still see Barbs’s fearfully suspicious eyes.

  Andrée broke the tense silence. “Now that Jimmy Pat’s gone, nobody but Dolores will ever know for certain what was going on in their hearts.”

  “If she even knows. Knew,” Stella said. “I mean, really knew.”

  If Dolores knew? Wasn’t she the problem?

  “I heard it from Molly, you know her?” Stel asked.

  Andrée shrugged irritably. “Who doesn’t know Molly? She has a big mouth, and I’d tell her that to her face.”

  “She’s good friends with Dolores’s mother. She was upset.”

  “She didn’t tell you what was going on?” Andrée asked me.

  “Dolores? We’d just met, you see. I’m writing this article about—”

  “It’s the Semow girl’s fault,” Stel said.

  “What Semow girl?” Marty, the black-haired operator, asked. “How come I didn’t know?”

  “Because this is not a place of gossip,” Andrée said with not a trace of shame or self-awareness. “Besides which, we’re all grown-ups and we know it takes two to tango. Can’t go blaming only one of them.”

  “Okay, but who Semow shouldn’t I blame?” Marty asked.

  “With the card shop on Christian, between Two and Third,” Stel said. “Kind of a dump, that store. I don’t know how they stay alive, maybe just by being open all the time. Anyway, she’s always been wild for Mummers, living near so many clubs, but particularly for one of them, Jimmy Pat. I guess this was like her last chance for him.”

  “He shouldn’t have had a thing to do with her,” Andrée said. “He shouldn’t have played that game.”

  “Bachelors sow wild oats. It’s the girl’s responsibility.”

  Goodness me. Not only pin curls but the double standard was alive and well. And what did this mean? Another woman was involved. How embarrassing would it be for Vincent to realize that his other woman’s man had another woman? Infuriating enough to off the other man?

  Cherchez la femme was the old rule of detection. How would that work here? Would Jimmy Pat’s other woman cause Dolores distress and make Vincent’s rescue and love fantasies all the more vivid and urgent? Make Barbs the more furiously jealous? Make Dolores shoot her fiancé? Or make Dolores’s rival shoot her seducer? Or make Barbs shoot the fiancé? Or make Vincent…

  And in any case, how, with everyone in Philadelphia as eyewitnesses and none seeing?

  “And what’s she going to do now?” Stel asked Andrée.

  “Emily Semow? Who cares? She made her bed, now let her sleep in it.”

  “But I hear…what if it’s not just her,” Stel said. “What if there was going to be a…what if she’s having a…” She finished the sentence with a roll of her eyes and a knowing grimace.

  Emily Semow was pregnant. This was not good for anybody.

  “That’d be Emily’s business and her problem,” Andrée said. “And,” she added, facing me, “not a word to anybody. We don’t even think Dolores knew.”

  Fat chance that every single person for miles around didn’t know, but I played along. “Of course not.”

  “It’s a mess, with Dolores in mourning and all. I say let Jimmy Pat rest in peace and let bygones be bygones. Let her get on with her life. Otherwise, what’s the point?” Andrée poked and prodded Stel’s hair. All the women in the shop nodded and sighed in agreement. All except the one under the dryer, who had no way of knowing what was going on.

  But there was a point. Jimmy Pat hadn’t expired of shame or overactive glands. Somebody shot him, and there seemed to be a growing number of people who might have wanted to do it, from Vincent to Dolores to Emily Semow.

  “What’s she going to do with the gown?” the blonde client asked. Dolores’s secrets might as well have been broadcast on CNN. “Can you return wedding gowns? Who’d buy such a bad-luck thing?”

  Andrée shook her head sadly. “Who ever heard of such a thing.” Then she shook her entire self, the way a wet dog might shudder moisture off, and looked at me. “So you can tell why we think she needs a little cheering. You’ll come with us.”

  I’d learned everything I needed to know, and I wasn’t even sure Dolores would remember me, so I again demurred. “You know, I only met her because I was working on an article about the Mummers, and she was—”

  Andrée’s thin eyebrows raised. “You’re a writer?”

  “Well…”

  “This is some story, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not writing about Dolores or any particular—”

  “A major motion picture, if you ask me,” Stel said.

  I shook my head. “I’m not a—”

  “Going to let somebody else grab it? Think about it. Movie of the Week. It’s got everything. All the more reason you should come along, get more background, think about settings.”

  “No, really, I don’t think it’s appropriate.” Mostly, I didn’t think Dolores would feel it was appropriate.

  “We made food. This way, they could go to church, not worry about what to eat after. Potluck, way too much. Marty made her four-cheese casserole, and Rae”—the waif-woman nodded and smiled shyly—“makes a devil’s food cake you wouldn’t believe.” Given Rae’s sharp angles and prominent skeleton, I wondered whether she’d ever tasted her own baking, even sampled the icing with her fingertips. Ever eaten anything, in fact. “And Jo—”

  Joe. Ray. Marty. Andrée. It sounded as if they would be more likely to run a car repair shop than a salon, sexist as I knew that thought to be. How had Dolores with her non-ambiguous name gotten a job here?

  “Jo did her killer guacamole dip,” Andrée continued. “Hot but delicious. I’m doing garlic focaccia bread.”

  A meal for the cholesterol-challenged. My stomach, already burdened with Barbs’s Pepper Pot soup, asked if I wanted to begin the year by dying. Much wiser to go home, think about the meaning of these convoluted connections, and resume that sleep I’d intended as the main activity of the day. “Thanks a lot, but I’ve already eaten,” I said. “New Year, new diet. You know how that goes.”

  “So don’t eat, although I don’t know why you should diet. Come anyway. You’ll be a nice surprise, a special treat. Feels good to be thought about, and heaven knows, she could use a little feeling good these days. Make her remember there’s life beyond Jimmy Pat. That’s why we’re going. To remind her that men come and go, but there’s always hair.”

  Then Andrée looked at me, and I saw a glimmer of why she so wanted me, a stranger, along on an awkward, stilted mission. I’d be a buffer, a distraction, a point of focus. They were all understandably uncomfortable about going to pay a confused condolence call—should they be happy or sad the no-good fiancé is dead? or worried about who did him in?—to a woman they liked, but didn’t really know except as an expert hairdresser and co-worker.

  I waffled about what to do. Billy Obenhauser was due to question me, but since I wasn’t supposed to know that, why should I stay home and await him?

  I mentally explained myself to Mackenzie, as if he were inside my ear, reminding me that enough was enough. I had already exceeded my unofficial mandate—to see Vincent—with pitiable little to show for it, and I should thank these women and leave.

  Oh, but, Dolores was the pivot, the center, and this chance to see her had fallen into my lap. How could I refuse?

  Besides, going along with these women had to do with human kindness—to Andrée, if not Dolores. This had nothing to do with snooping.

  Somewhere in my imagination, Mackenzie raised one eyebrow and crossed his arms in a pose of disbelief, so I clicked off my mental TV screen, picked up my coat and bag, and followed Andrée.

  Six

 
I SURFED ALONG WITH THE WAVE OF DETERMINED HAIR STYLISTS, even though, no matter what I had mentally told Mackenzie, I felt hypocritical joining them.

  Actually, what really swept us along was a gigantic wind-shove at our backs. I was relieved that Dolores lived leeward of the salon. As it was, nobody talked because you had to think hard before opening your mouth and freezing your fillings.

  Buoyed along, I worried double-time. Would Dolores want to see me? I had actually met her twice. Once at the diner, and once when I’d gone with Vincent and Barbs to a fund-raiser for his Fancy Club. Even to winners, the city’s cash prizes on New Year’s Day didn’t begin to cover their expenses, so there were events all year long devoted to closing the deficit. In spite of all this, members have mortgaged their homes or borrowed from banks against their businesses in order for their club to march on New Year’s Day.

  The event I’d attended was a dance, cake sale, and raffle for prizes donated by local merchants, and Dolores, whose father, brothers, and fiancé were in the club, had been there.

  But both times, she’d been part of a group, not my new best friend. We had exchanged a few perfunctory words, and those only because I knew Vincent, the man she now might suspect had killed her fiancé. Those credentials didn’t warrant a welcome mat.

  On the other hand, from what I’d heard in the salon, her fiancé didn’t seem much of a loss, although I didn’t know why I was even factoring that in. What did the worth of a man ever have to do with how much he was valued by his true love?

  “Another two blocks,” the redhead said.

  Dolores lived close by, at least in geographical terms. Economically, we’d moved into a different galaxy, an enclave of large, semidetached homes set back behind front yards on tree-lined streets.

  Girard Estates, somebody at the salon had said. Named for Stephen Girard, the first American multimillionaire, a French rags-to-riches immigrant who almost single-handedly bailed out the U.S. after the War of 1812. There’s a Girard bank, bridge, street, school, but here, indeed, according to a sign, was Stephen’s Estate. Or one of them.

  Set in the midst of a large park was an impressive sprawl of a Revolutionary-style house that belonged in Architectural Digest, not blue-collar, closely packed South Philly.

  This, plus lots more of the surrounding land, had been his farm, the sign said. I tried to imagine South Philly as open corn or pumpkin fields leading to the ports on the Delaware. My imagination couldn’t handle that much of a stretch.

  We walked another short while and entered the left half of a solid-looking Dutch Colonial two-family home.

  The front lawn looked as if it bloomed with roses and forsythia in warmer times.

  The Grassis had twined greenery and lights around the porch’s heavy wooden railings, and a wreath lush with marzipan-like fruit was on their front door.

  Inside, the house had a well-preserved sense of the early days of the century. We walked into a small entryway that ended in a frosted-glass door designed to catch the wind and protect the house from the cold.

  The inner door was opened by a dried apple doll dressed in black, with eyes half-hidden by weathered crinkles of skin, and a dumpling body below. “Oh, yes, oh, yes,” she said. “Dolores told me you were coming. It’s so nice of you.” Her voice was pleasantly crackly, the way I’d imagine an apple doll’s would be.

  Behind her, I could see the living room and behind that, a huge dining room with walnut wainscoting that matched the living room’s high baseboards. A fire flickered in a green tile fireplace in the corner opposite the front door, but it appeared the shallow variety originally designed for coal, and the flames looked heatless, the log really an ignited gas line. The ceiling trim was festooned with still more boughs of greenery, and a string of blinking green-and-red lights encircled the arch into the dining room. A Christmas tree, surrounded by a nativity scene, dominated the non-fireplace corner.

  “Mrs. G.,” Andrée said by way of greeting. “So sorry to come for such a sad occasion. You remember Marty, Rae, and Jo from the shop, don’t you? And this here is Amanda, a writer friend of Dolores’s who came looking for her. We made you a little something, too, hope Dolores told you we were going to and hope you aren’t insulted, you’re such a famous cook.”

  “Come in! Come in!” Mrs. Grassi waved her arms toward herself and her home, but as we surged into the living room, she reversed the motions of her hands. “Leave your things there, in the vestibule.” We did, dropping and hanging hats, mufflers, coats, boots, and bags in the closet and on a bench there for that purpose, while Mrs. Grassi talked nonstop. Her words felt like a hot shower on this freezing day. “Dolores is on the phone upstairs,” she said, “you can imagine the calls, but in a minute she’ll be down. So nice of you! You’ll make my Dolores a little happier, too.” She wiped at her eyes with the sort of lacy handkerchief I thought extinct. “Those dishes must be heavy!” she exclaimed.

  “No, no—plastic containers,” Andrée said.

  “You carried them all the way over! Angels, that’s what you are. Let me—or here, into the kitchen. We’ll heat them up. They need heating up? I have a microwave. Here, you’ll get a hernia!”

  “I could set the—” Nobody heard me. The group, led by the indomitable Mrs. Grassi, headed for the kitchen, which was commodious and breathed the very essence of hearth. This, I was sure, was where the family lived.

  “Such an awful thing!” the lady of the house said. “I can’t believe it. Just last week, Jimmy Pat was right here. In my house where you’re standing… This smells delicious, what is it? Your mother’s recipe? How is she? The arthritis still bad? And in this weather, too—can you believe how cold it still is? I went outside this morning and thought I’d…”

  The shower of words had become a tsunami. I tried to tune her out. She was the spirit of generosity with words and affection, but probably not a good source of hard information. Besides, I had need of a rest stop.

  Mrs. Grassi noticed my questioning expression. “Upstairs,” she said. “First door on the left. But you know what? Dolores is up there, and the boys, so use the one in the rec room. Down these stairs.”

  This time, I entered what felt like a night club. A plush and mirrored, carpeted retreat, with a curved chrome bar, fully stocked. The room was lush, overdone maybe, but not stuffy, with magazines left tossed open onto tables and sofa pillows, a black-and-white check sweater dangling off the corner of a chair, a pair of running shoes with a shimmery throw of fabric tossed on top. Not like Barbs’s precise and anxiety-ridden household.

  On the mirrored coffee table stood a small porcelain sculpture of a comic Dude, with his trademark golden slippers, glitter-trimmed tuxedo, and pink-and-green three-tiered umbrella.

  And on the walls, a baroquely framed Mummer rendered in oil paint and what looked like gold leaf, and more plainly framed photographs of men in full regalia, arms around each other’s shoulders, toasting the camera. And a plaque honoring Edward Grassi, Sr., for his donations and service to the Philadelphia New Year’s Shooters & Mummers’ Association.

  Dolores’s father, I’d been told, was involved with launderettes, but obviously, he seemed equally involved with Mummering.

  Even the powder-room mirror had been made to look like a backpiece, butterfly shaped and trimmed with carved feathers.

  Once I was upstairs, the women of the kitchen shooed me out. “You’re a guest,” Mrs. Grassi insisted. So were the other visitors, but they were different—from the neighborhood, familiars. “Sit in the living room. Be comfortable. Dolores will be down in a minute.”

  The overcrowded room was a contrast to the rec room one story down. The chairs looked too stiff and delicate for a house in which four sons had been raised. The end tables were completely covered by a lamp with a fringed shade and sculpted silver-framed photographs of babies and brides, the coffee table had a collection of glass kittens, and the fabric on the sofa was a scratchy cream brocade that practically begged you to stain it. You weren’t going t
o curl up with a magazine or leave your shoes behind here. This room was a show of possessions, a formal statement.

  I heard the comfortable laughter of women working together and the clunk of dishes and pots and pans from the kitchen, and I considered braving Mrs. Grassi and reentering that warm and much friendlier space. Instead, I surveyed the snapshots on the end tables. Spotting Dolores at four or five stages of her evolution was like watching a stop-action nature special, but I was more taken with a photo of Jimmy Pat in jeans and a T-shirt, leaping into the air, both arms extended. I picked it up and examined it. The camera had caught that hyper-alive, appealing electricity I remembered. The man had had a rakish charm, maybe too much for his own good.

  “Yeah,” a growly female voice said from mid-staircase. “Lookin’ at Jimmy Pat, aren’t you? That was at the races—he won that day, that’s what the jump was about. There you have him. He always said that’s who he was and who he’d be till he died. And he was right.” By the end of that practiced-sounding speech, Dolores had reached the bottom of the staircase. She blew her nose, blinked tearily, and looked ready to greet me.

  Then she did a double take. “You?” she asked. “You? In my own house?”

  This was worse than any of my imagined scenarios. “Hello,” I said, “I went to the beauty parlor to extend my condolences, and Andrée insisted that I come over here with them, and—”

  Just then, what sounded like a herd thundered down the staircase. When they’d reached bottom, and the dust cleared, they turned out to be only two men, both probably in their twenties.

  “Yo,” one of them said to me. “Yo,” the other agreed with a laconic hand wave.

  They were fine-boned and good-looking. I recognized one and could assume who the other was even before Dolores grudgingly introduced us. “My brothers,” she said. “Two of my brothers. This is Stephen—” the younger-looking of the two, the one I’d had coffee with, although he didn’t seem to remember me with any enthusiasm “—and George. This here is Amanda Pepper. She works at Vincent’s school, only she teaches English.”