“Oh, Jeez. An English teacher,” George said. Having heard that one line, I felt as if I could write his biography. Class clown all through school. “I’d better watch my p’s and q’s, whatever the hell that means,” he said.
There were several theories of the meaning of the expression. One simply had to do with the confusion young printers’ apprentices had setting the similarly shaped letters. A more interesting theory held that bar accounts were tallied with a p for a pint and a q for a quart, and that in figuring how much you owed, you had to mind which was which. However, I squelched my impulse to pass on the wisdom. “I’m on winter break,” I said instead. “Have no fear.” I’ll bet he talked straight through every English class he’d ever had. But having beaten the system and graduated, he now became tongue-tied in the presence of the breed that had failed to quiet him down years back. You get wary in the presence of those you’ve successfully bamboozled.
“Yeah, but all the same,” George said. “Grammar. Parts of speech. Ooh-ee! Man, I’m still in trouble about them. Like with propositions?”
I almost corrected him, but realized in time that this was the start of an oft-told part of George’s repertoire.
“‘A proposition relates its object to something else in the sentence,’” he said. “That was one of the only things Sister Prudence said that made sense to me. So when she asked for examples, I said, ‘Madam, should I be behind you? Above you? Under you? Between you and your sister, Sister?’ And Sister Prudence suspended me.”
I’d heard equally pathetic variations on that theme, and I was coming to feel a lot like Sister Prudence about it.
Stephen, the younger brother, ignored the banter and seemed less than delighted by my presence. In fact, he looked as if storm warnings should have been posted beneath his face. That was pretty much as I remembered him from the evening at the diner.
“Amanda is also a journalist,” Dolores said. She sounded as if that were akin to having a social disease. “She’s writing about us.”
“Not really,” I said.
“Not really what?” Stephen demanded.
“I’m not a writer yet, only trying to see if I could do it, could sell an article.”
“You’re trying out the idea by writing about us?” Stephen asked.
“Don’t you remember anything?” his sister demanded. “You were there at the diner when she asked all those questions and things?”
Stephen gave a so-what shrug. Another young male I’d failed to impress. “I’m not writing about specific people,” I said. “I’m writing about Mummers.”
“Shooters,” Stephen said. “You should know at least that much.”
I nodded. “Sorry,” I said.
“That sure as hell is us,” George said. “Every one of us. Ask my mom—she’s a Mummer widow, all right. Never sees Dad, he’s so busy with his committees at the club.”
“I’m the Mummer widow,” Dolores growled.
There was an awkward moment, which I tried to end by dragging us back to the topic. “I’m interested in Mummers as a group, as a cultural phenomenon, a tradition. Outside of Philadelphia, not all that many people know about—”
“About who?” Stephen again. “Don’t you people get permission before you barge in on somebody? We aren’t guinea pigs, you know.”
“About what Mummers—Shooters—are,” I insisted. “How the parade evolved, who’s involved in it, what it means to your lives, how hard you work all year. You know.”
Dolores’s mouth tightened. “About Jimmy Pat,” she said. “No. Not at all.”
“And not about my sister, right?” Stephen asked. “Not about Jimmy Pat that way, either, am I right?”
“Of course.” These people were incredible egotists, unable to see beyond their own little fiefdom. “I was never interested in—”
“George…” Stephen changed concerns abruptly. “George, we’re late. Supposed to be there already.”
“Sorry.” George zipped his leather jacket. It was impressive, burgundy with a fur lining and grassi’s launderettes embroidered in lemon yellow on the back.
Stephen pulled an identical jacket out of the vestibule closet.
“That you, boys?” Mrs. Grassi, wiping her hands on a dish towel, called out from the dining room.
“Yeah, Ma,” they said, almost in unison. “Bye, Ma. Back soon. Nice meeting you, Amanda.” That last was from George. I had a sense that once again, Stephen didn’t think it was nice to have met me. In either case, first the inner, then the outer doors slammed behind them.
“Boys,” Mrs. Grassi said. “All noise. I was downstairs, lookin’ for a picture to show the girls. Dolores, you all right? You’re pale. I’ll get you something hot.”
“Ma—” Dolores began, but Mrs. Grassi was gone again, and the widowed bride turned on me with viper speed. “You should be ashamed of yourself, coming here,” she spat out in a rush. “If you were decent, you’d leave now, right away.”
“Why?” But I knew I was an interloper. She was honest about it and I wasn’t.
“We treated you right, told you what you wanted to know, had a few laughs together, so what kind of person are you? Why’d you do a thing like this? You don’t like us? Don’t like me? Want to make everything worse for me?”
Dolores was petite, a feminine version of the fine features and delicate bones that made her brothers so attractive. She wore an understated black tunic and leggings and no visible makeup. You saw her and thought of vulnerability, fragility. Today, even her hair seemed subdued, its parameters narrower, as if it, too, were in mourning. But as soon as she opened her mouth, now and the earlier evenings I’d spent in her company, an oversized, gruff, and intimidating bad-girl spoke out. If you didn’t look at her, only listened, you’d envision someone huge, merciless, and murderous, or at least, a seasoned moll.
“I know you think I understand what you’re talking about,” I said softly, “but honestly, I don’t.”
“It’s not like I don’t know. I just got off the phone.”
“With whom?”
“Whom, schmoom. I’m not of the fancy talkers. I’m not an English teacher. This is my house, I can talk like I want. You have no right to snoop.”
What had I done? I hadn’t inspected a thing except those out and on show, so where was the harm or the offense?
“Hot chocolate.” Mrs. Grassi’s voice preceded her around the corner from the kitchen. “Drink.” She stood in the dining room, at the table, which was covered with a crocheted cloth. “I brought one for you, too,” she told me. “Do you good on a freezing day.”
I thought it impolite to point out that we were all in an overheated house. Iced tea might be more like it.
“Sit, sit,” Mrs. Grassi said. “We’re almost finished in there.”
“Couldn’t I help you?”
“Visit with my baby girl,” Mrs. Grassi said. “My little princess. That’s the help you can give.” Dolores snorted cynically at the idea of consolation from me. Apparently, Mrs. Grassi didn’t hear. “Besides,” she continued, “you’re a guest in my house. Sit, sit!” We sat.
Dolores waited till her mother was back in the noisy kitchen. “You’re a nosy bitch,” she snapped.
Everybody in the shop had described her as sweet. Vincent was her once and possibly future admirer. I wondered why. I tried again. “You said you were on the phone with someone. Who was it?”
“I thought it was whom was it,” she snarled.
I waited.
“Vincent,” she finally said.
“He called you?”
“Like you don’t know. You were there today.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” My mind made loopy figure eights. Was there, then, something real between Dolores and Vincent? Were Barbs’s suspicions on target? Why would Vincent, the prime suspect, call Dolores unless his story was altogether true? But what about Barbs? And why would Dolores seem sympathetic to the man? Loop, loop, getting nowhere but back to “go.
”
“Stop seeing him,” she said flatly.
“Wait a minute! Me? Stop seeing him? Meaning what? Why?”
She leaned closer, across the crocheted cloth. I smelled her cologne, an aroma that would be blue violet if it had a color. It didn’t suit her personality. “You want me to spell it out? Okay, teach, here goes. Because he’s married, because you’re messin’ with his head. Because you’ll ruin his life if you keep this up.”
I became wistful for my figure eights, because now my brains were shapeless, a sort of lava lamp of the mind.
“Barbs might not be a mental giant, but she isn’t stupid.”
Barbs was jealous of Dolores, not of me. Or what kind of game was Vincent playing? “Vincent and I—we teach together. We aren’t—it isn’t that kind of a—” I stopped myself. I needed to think more about what this meant, and how much I should say.
“The least you could do is cover for him. Or do you want him to spend the rest of his life in jail?”
“If he killed Jimmy Pat, then I don’t know what I want,” I said slowly. “I would think you’d feel that way, too.”
She glared.
“You don’t think he did it?” I asked.
“What does it matter what I think? The police think he did, and he wasn’t where he should have been because he was with you.”
“But he said…he told me…”
“You’re a user, know what I mean? You used Vincent and Jimmy Pat and me and everybody else to get your precious story. And you’re still using us. Great. You’ll make money and get famous, and he’ll go to jail.”
This was about my story? That was the snooping she resented? “I’m not writing the article,” I said. That appeared to be true, even if unintentional.
“Like I believe that. Anyway, the damage is done, you asking all those questions and playing up to Vinny for information, and then there he is, trying to help you out during the parade and you won’t even admit it and maybe save his life.”
“Wait,” I protested. “Now I’m even more confused.” He’d told me that she’d made an appointment with him. She was his missing alibi, not me. Except she seemed oblivious of that. Was this pretense? A cover-up? An attempt to avoid whatever shame Vincent said such a date would engender? To whom had Vincent lied?
Since Vincent hadn’t seen Dolores when he said he was supposed to, that meant she had no alibi for the time of the murder, either, and I believed that in the hell-hath-no-fury department, Dolores would be Chairwoman. I looked at her with new interest.
“Like I care about your being confused,” she said.
“Are you under the impression that Vincent Devaney was with me when Jimmy Pat was shot?” Surely she was bluffing, creating a smoke screen for herself. She had probably suggested this scenario to Vincent. Unless, of course, he was playing a game I truly couldn’t follow.
Dolores was an Olympic-level glarer.
“In the first place,” I said, “nobody yet knows when Jimmy was shot. In the second place, I wasn’t with Vincent at any time during the parade. And in the most important third place, I was with somebody, with my…my boyfriend. Who is a cop. A cop who knows Vincent was not with us. How could I lie about that?” I hated how my voice rose toward the stratosphere, as if it were trying to find a place to hide.
She just plain didn’t care about logic or reason and, in fact, brushed it away with a sideways motion. “We aren’t real to you, just bugs to study, freaks of nature.”
“Not at all, that isn’t…” But I had wanted to look at this culture within a culture, at a closed society centered around something unusual and exotic, like mumming, and looking at it meant backing off, being apart from. Maybe she had a point.
“Stop, already,” she said. “Haven’t we suffered enough? I was supposed to have a wedding in two weeks and instead, there’ll be a funeral.”
“I didn’t kill Jimmy,” I said, even as I wondered if she had. “Don’t you want to find out who did?”
Her eyes flashed. “How’m I supposed to manage that?”
She actually waited for an answer, but I shook my head.
“Everybody liked him,” she said. “You had to like him.”
I nodded. I, too, had been aware he was something special, that he wore a likableness that was almost tangible.
“I’m not saying he was a saint,” Dolores said. “He was a good-time boy, never worried about tomorrow. That can make problems, but not so bad that somebody’d…” She seemed unsure of her own words, then shook her head again. “Nah.”
“What kind of problems?” Was this an oblique reference to the scarlet Emily Semow?
“Vincent must have said. Everybody knew. Jimmy lived fast. Loved risks and chances. On anything. The horses, Atlantic City. Hell, if he’d lived through the parade, he’d have had a wager on how much snow would be outside this time of day today. Sometimes, a man like that, he loses the bet. He wouldn’t take money from me to pay his debts. Said it wasn’t right, we weren’t married.”
“He used loan sharks?” I envisioned hatchet-faced men, knee-breakers, one loan too many.
She shook her head. “But what with getting married and everything, what I’m afraid of was that sometimes, if Jimmy wanted something real bad, like having people forget he owed them money, he could believe that they wished it just as much as he did. Like I said, he wasn’t a saint, but you had to like him all the same.”
“Do you know who loaned him money?”
Her answering shrug suggested everyone, anyone.
Charming Jimmy’s postmortem portrait grew darker by the moment. A compulsive gambler, he cheated his friends over money and cheated on his fiancée with another woman, but might be marrying her because she could pay his gambling debts. What a prize. I wondered if Dolores, knowing all that, wasn’t a little relieved to be freed from this marriage. “Are you saying a friend killed him? Do you know who?”
Dolores sniffled. “Talk about jumping to conclusions! Who said anything except that nobody would have wanted to hurt him that way? I loved him,” she said mournfully. “He was supposed to be the father of my children.”
That seemed an ill-advised description, given that he was reported to be the father of Emily Semow’s expected child. “Doesn’t that make you even more eager to know who did such a—”
“Yeah, well I’ll read it in the papers. I’m not saying another word. You’re pretending to care. You’re interested in your story. In the money you can make out of us.”
“I’m interested in the truth. If Vincent left the parade the way he says, it was because he was trying to find you, not me.”
“Says who?”
“Vincent.”
“Get outta here!” She’d told me to leave as soon as she’d seen me, but this time the words expressed incredulity. I thought.
“I gather you used to date and maybe something was starting up again?”
“Get outta here!” she said again. “Jimmy Pat and me, we were getting married in two weeks.”
An oven timer dinged. The food troops would march in any second now. I stood up.
“You’re saying Vincent’s still carrying a torch for me?” Dolores’s voice was foggy, bemused. She waved her hand dismissively. “Ahhh…that’s crazy.” But she sounded lighter, and definitely interested. Fickle, Vincent had called her. He seemed right on the mark. “Nah,” she said, continuing her internal debate. “That’s too crazy. Get outta here.”
This “get out of here” was the charm. With a few apologies, and fewer regrets, I got out of there.
Seven
TWO P.M. IN SOUTH PHILLY. I’D TAKEN A BUS TO THIRD and was waiting to transfer to the connecting bus home, but even though I could state my locale, where, really, was I?
“Hey, lady, you nowhere.”
I wheeled around to see who had read my mind and answered it. An unshaven man in a raveling knit cap and layers of jackets and shirts, none of which looked warm enough to protect him, grimaced. “Nowhere?” he repeated,
this time as a question.
“Excuse me?”
“The recycling center, like I said. Know where it is, lady? Do. You. Know. Where?” He punched the side of one of his plastic bags and I heard a metallic clinking.
I smiled my relief. Know where. Unfortunately, I had no idea where the recycling center might be. In fact, I still wasn’t one hundred percent sure either metaphorically or literally where I was. I looked toward the corner. Christian Street. Now I knew my geography, but that didn’t help the man. He must have known how useless I’d be because he shuffled off.
I watched the retreating figure. Welcome to the Nineties, to a modern refinement of Santa-as-homeless with trash bags full of recyclables. Then I turned back toward the bus stand. But the corner signs for Third and Christian Streets hung in the gray-blue air as if outlined. Something about that location, something I’d stored away besides the fact that a north-running bus was available. But what? I looked around, trying to see if memory or recognition would be on the tape this time.
The know-where man had not given up his quest. As I watched, he stopped two men. They listened as he asked his question and shook his bag of soda cans, shook their heads, waved him aside dismissively—although one of them handed him money first. The backs of their leather jackets had writing embroidered on them.
The Grassi brothers. Why were they here, twenty-thirty blocks from home? Were they following me? Or did it have something to do with why I was supposed to remember this area?
I was losing it. They could be here for a million reasons. This was their greater neighborhood and they’d had some kind of appointment. The real question was—why was I here?
Because…Christian Street. Between Second and Third. This time, I heard Stel’s voice at the beauty parlor saying that Emily Semow’s card store was nearby and always open. I glanced at my watch and confirmed that the odds of Mackenzie’s being back in the loft were slim. A case of serendipity, so a small detour wouldn’t make any difference, except, perhaps, to yield something tangible. Like whether or not Jimmy Pat really had another woman plus a Jimmy Pat, Junior, on the way, although I wasn’t sure how I could broach a subject of such delicacy.
Mummers' Curse Page 9