Mummers' Curse

by Gillian Roberts

  I walked across the street to where Semow Stationery settled grayly and unimpressively between a dog groomer and a beauty supply shop. The Grassi brothers had stopped a few paces down and were watching me.

  Nothing odd about any of this, I reminded myself. Maybe they’d needed thank you for your kind sentiments at our time of loss cards.

  “Déjà vu all over again,” George Grassi said. “You were just at my house, and now you’re…”

  “Shopping.”

  “For what?” Stephen asked. “Us? More facts for your article? That really burns me. Leave us alone, would you?”

  “I had no idea you’d be here,” I said. “I’m looking for school supplies.”

  “Why here? You’re not from the neighborhood, why here?”

  “I heard this store was open a lot, like today.” He nodded and scowled, then leaned closer. “It’s not going to do you any good.”

  “What isn’t?”

  George tugged at his sleeve and, with one last frown, Stephen turned and walked away with his brother, but he kept swiveling to watch me.

  When I opened the door, an old-fashioned bell rang in the back of the shop. However, no summons had been necessary. A tall, blue-eyed, black-haired young woman stood arranging a display of half-priced Christmas cards. She turned and appraised me. She had striking features that were probably odd and teaseable in school, but stunning now. “Help you?” she asked as I stood aimlessly near the register. She wore a black skinny-ribbed T-shirt, a black leather skirt, black tights, and clunky high-heeled black sneakers. Her hair was cut in shaggy points, so that her head looked not unlike a dark-rimmed ornament.

  The ensemble could have been a form of mourning attire, or simply standard-issue black clothing worn to show you were a unique and sophisticated individual.

  I remembered that I should look like a customer. “Um,” I said, biding time while I waited to hear what I was going to say. “I’m looking for…three-by-five cards.”

  She sighed.

  I had failed to say the secret word. Three-by-fives weren’t it, weren’t enough to brighten her day. She listlessly nodded toward a counter. This was one sad cookie. “White, yellow, green, pink, blue, lined, unlined, three-by-five, five-by-eight, whatever you want,” she recited with no animation, for which I couldn’t blame her. “Also, over with the recipe boxes we have some that say ‘From the kitchen of.’”

  I smiled and shook my head. “No thanks.”

  “Or bon appétit. Those, too.”

  I hated disappointing her.

  “Not using them for recipes?” she asked.

  “Sorry.”

  “What then? Writing a term paper?” She laughed, then stifled it. “Didn’t mean to sound like I thought it was funny if you were still in school, or anything. People should do what they want to.”

  I shoved my mittens into my purse and selected a packet of assorted colors. It was one of the brightest objects in the store, which seemed shrouded by a veil. Maybe it was only the dark day, inadequate lighting. “I’m researching an article.” I loved saying that much more than I loved doing the work.

  “You’re a writer?”

  “Freelancer.” It wasn’t a lie. I was an inept, inadequate, and completely unsuccessful freelancer, but she hadn’t asked for my résumé or profile. “It’s all an excuse to let me go crazy in stationery stores,” I added. That part was probably true.

  “So go crazy,” she said. “I could use the business.”

  I paused in front of the discounted Christmas cards. It would be smart and economical to stock up now, as the hand-printed sign advised. I would love to be a person who buys at the post-Christmas sales and has a closet filled with wrapped and carefully selected gifts and cards months in advance. But I am always broke in January. Besides, I’d worry that the catchy item I bought would be further discounted or recalled by December. Or that since it was so perfect and such a good buy, the giftee would have already gotten it for himself. Still, I paused at the half-priced card rack.

  Upholding a great local retail tradition, the store’s heat register was set on equatorial. No concessions to what customers would be wearing when they entered. In summer, the systems are equally irrational, air-conditioning set on arctic. Temperate, indeed.

  I unbuttoned my coat, loosened my muffler, pulled off my knit hat. Winter in a nutshell: taking off and putting on insulation.

  “Here,” the girl said. “Toss it on that chair. I tell my dad all the time it’s too hot in here, but he never listens.”

  So she was Emily or at least, a Semow. Who else’s father would be in control of the thermostat? I put my things down—everything—nearly was tempted to pull off my lined boots and pad around in my socks.

  I skimmed through sparkle-sprinkled Christmas kitties, cunning vignettes on the daily lives of grinning elves in curly-toed shoes, a handful of talking reindeer, and glimpses into the private life of Mr. and Mrs. Claus. I had never suspected how frisky Santa became once his annual workday was over.

  “You’re not from the neighborhood,” she said.

  I shook my head. Neighborhood seemed a quaint, old-fashioned, but important construct in these parts. Other parts of the city—like mine—were areas. This was a neighborhood.

  “Didn’t think you looked familiar.”

  I controlled another urge to apologize.

  She hummed tunelessly while she did whatever it was with the price stickers, then she spoke again. “So who do you write for? Like magazines?”

  “Like magazines,” I agreed, relocating to the always-alluring pen display and trying out one, then another, on the little pad of paper provided. With the fifth try, I thought that I had found the perfect writing implement. It wrote so smoothly, felt so right in my hand, that surely ideas would transfer themselves directly from my brain to the page, and I would finish my article and write countless more and be rich and happy forever. Scribble, scribble. Amanda Pepper. A.P. Associated Press and Me. Ms. Mandy. Smooth and easy.

  “Emily!” a voice from the back grumbled loudly. “I’m hungry, damn it!”

  “In a minute!” she shouted.

  So she was, indeed, Emily Semow.

  “Do they pay a lot?” she asked me.

  “Magazines? It varies.” I spoke from the depths of ignorance while I doodled loops and experimented with signatures. “Some magazines and tabloids, very well. Others…you know how it is.” I hoped she didn’t, because if she did, she could ask me specific questions and find out that I knew nothing. “Nice pen,” I said. Of that much I was positive.

  “Damn it, Em, I don’t like to wait!”

  ‘Then get it yourself! It’s in the refrigerator.” She looked toward the back of the store, her mouth set and her eyes bleak. “He could reach it with one hand,” she said to me. “Customer!” she shouted. “Leave me alone!”

  I tried to seem unaware of the rising tension level and focused instead on whether I wanted to stay with traditional black or make a breakthrough with blue-black or even, heretically, turquoise ink. Was the new year time for a new image? Would green composition corrections seem more benign and acceptable than those made with the traditional red?

  “People like you, they ever buy people’s stories?” she asked while she sorted through keychains.

  “I’m not a publisher.”

  “I mean, buy what happened to somebody.”

  “You mean to write it up?” Of course that’s what she meant, but I didn’t know. Tabloid TV and newspapers bought stories, but did freelancers? “It depends who they’re writing for,” I answered, hedging the issue.

  “Supposing somebody had a story to sell you, for who you write for, would you be interested?”

  “Me?” She didn’t have very high standards if she would talk to someone as tongue-tied and verbally limited as I was being.

  “A good story. Stuff nobody in the world but me knows. What would something like that be worth?”

  What to do? How to possibly keep up the pretense? />
  Bus tickets, three-by-fives, and the pen would wipe out my post-holiday discretionary funds. I couldn’t buy her story. Ever. “I’d have to…do research, get a better sense of what you mean,” I finally said. “Of whether a wide readership would be interested. Can you give me a hint?”

  “Murder. That enough of a hint?”

  “You didn’t commit one, did you?”

  “Like I’d tell you, right?”

  “Then you know about a murder.” I was practically whispering. “An unsolved murder? A wrongly solved one? An old one? A recent one?”

  “All I said was I had a story. And this—even that—is off the record, right?”

  If only I had a record to keep it off. I nodded. What did a real journalist do in this situation? “Is this like a… Jack the Ripper sort of thing? I’m…thinking of possible markets.”

  She shook her head.

  “An open case? I mean, should the police be told this information?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “The police don’t pay a cent.”

  “But legally, if you have information…”

  “So what you’re saying is you don’t do what they call investigative reporting. Too bad. What do you write about?”

  I could have said gardening or fly-fishing or anything, except the only thing which came to my limited, somewhat frozen mind was the truth. “I’m doing a piece on the Mummers.”

  “The Mum—” She squinted so hard a crease appeared between her eyebrows. “Wait a minute—you’re that writer!”

  I had achieved literary fame without writing, let alone publishing, a word. Amazing.

  “You work with Vinny Devaney, don’t you?”

  I didn’t say a word or move a muscle.

  “You’re her, aren’t you? I can’t believe it.”

  “Why? How did you hear about me?”

  “I was told you’re snooping around about Jimmy Pat’s murder for an article that’s going to be bad for us—”

  “Us?”

  She shrugged. “Shooters. Us.”

  “You’re a Mummer?”

  “Not officially. But I practically live on Two Street, and I love it, the fun, the guys, the people. It’s sure better than this.” She opened her arms to indicate the store.

  A Mummer groupie, as I live and breathe. And completely understandable, given her gray daily surroundings.

  “These are good people, my people,” she said, “and they like their privacy, keep it within friends, and nobody wants you airing our dirty laundry.”

  “I’m not. I’m probably not even going to write the article, and it never had anything to do with dirty laundry, whatever you’re referring to. It wasn’t going to be bad for the Mummers, it was going to be good publicity. That kind of thing.”

  “Like Mummers need publicity,” she said. “The whole world knows about them.” She smiled for the first time, and seemed to reappraise me. Then she lifted a shoulder and tilted her head. “But why should I listen to what a Grassi tells me?”

  “They—” I waved at the now-empty storefront. “That’s what they came here for? To tell you about me?”

  She shook her head. “We had things to say. They added a warning about you for free. A bonus. But hell, why should I listen? That family hates me because…they do. They’re jealous of me, is all. Even now. I’ll say what I want to who I want.”

  Her grammar wasn’t perfect, but the blue of her eyes was, and she had a spark that ignited her features and made her more interesting than Dolores, and I could understand Jimmy Pat’s defection. If indeed such had happened. I also could understand why the Grassis would fear her.

  What I couldn’t understand was why they’d go out of their way to warn her against me. Or if, as she’d said, it had been chitchat, something dropped in passing…then, what was it they’d had to talk to this girl about?

  “I could tell you something for your article,” Emily said.

  “The story you mentioned?”

  She shook her head. “That one’s for sale. This is for the Mummers article. About Jimmy Pat. Free of charge.”

  “My article isn’t about him, it’s—”

  “He wasn’t going to marry her. That’s what Stephen Grassi didn’t want me to tell you. They wouldn’t want you to know that, being as they’re big on their reputation. Appearances. They get what they want, you know? The Grassis act like they own us all, living up there in the Estates, having money and respect, but nobody owns me.”

  “Hold on,” I said quietly. “Jimmy Pat was supposed to marry Dolores in two weeks.”

  She shrugged. “Supposed to doesn’t mean going to. And she knew it. He told me he told her. So she didn’t say? She’s still pretending like she’s getting ready for a wedding?”

  “Well, given that Jimmy Pat’s dead, she’s not—”

  “She’s not telling the truth, is she? That it was off.”

  “Not that I know of. What’s it…what happened?”

  Emily looked at me with her dark-lashed pale eyes. “He was in love with me.” She shrugged. “What can I say? He finally realized what a mistake he was making. A man can be dazzled by an important family like the Grassis. And those brothers probably strong-armed him.”

  “It was really off?”

  She nodded vigorously. “She knew, too, but she didn’t tell anybody. Not even her mother, who kept on with the preparations. All Dolores cares about is saving face. She knew a week ago. He was going to marry me once a decent amount of time passed and the gifts were returned and all. Didn’t want to be rude and marry me the weekend he was supposed to marry her. Maybe in spring, we thought. I always wanted to be a June bride. I wanted the serenade, too.”

  The serenade was a warm-weather Mummer tradition, a private concert outside the house of the bride-to-be. I had notes about it at home. I thought about the warm weather, a season away.

  Emily’s face crumpled. “Now, of course…” She shook her head and wiped at her nose.

  “So sad,” I said. And so unlike what the gossips had suggested. A man doesn’t delay his wedding six months to someone he has to marry. And Emily, despite her dreams of romantic serenades wouldn’t wait that long, either. “What a shame for you,” I said. “Would you mind telling me what made Jimmy Pat suddenly realize it was you he wanted to marry?”

  Her peachy skin iced over and her eyes became glacial.

  “It’s so romantic,” I said. “And sad. Tragic, even, like those old myths. Tristan and Isolde…”

  “Who the hell are they?’

  “Like Romeo and Juliet, you know?”

  Her expression softened. “Except we weren’t kids, and we always loved each other and our families didn’t have problems with each other. See, I remember what I was taught. Jimmy and me, we dated after we were out of school, then I don’t know what happened. We were immature. Dolores got Jimmy Pat on the rebound, that’s all it was. Her family knew him from the Fancy Club, so they were happy about it, and they planned that wedding from day one. I don’t blame them. Dolores has a bad attitude, a bad rep. Always dumping men, changing her mind. She’s a spoiled brat and always was. Her family calls her Princess and they mean it. Baby Princess gets whatever she wants from Mommy and Daddy and her four big brothers. But people who aren’t Grassis get tired of it, you know? It gets old real fast. A man’d be crazy to plan a life with her, and rich as she is, Jimmy Pat was her one chance—if they moved fast, while he was still blinded by the fancy Grassis.”

  I wondered how she knew so much about the Grassis, who seemed to live in a different world and at a different social level than Emily did. Perhaps the link was the Mummers. “This is irrelevant, but is your family also involved with a club?”

  “Your article, huh? Always doing the research, aren’t you?” She shook her head. “I’m it for family, except my dad. He was in a String Band. Played the glockenspiel, but he’s been crippled a long time. His old club’d let him ride in the banner car, or the repair car, but he says if he can’t march on his own two fee
t, he isn’t going anywhere. Cuts off his nose to spite his face, I say.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So, about Jimmy Pat, I ran into him maybe two weeks ago, and that pretty much was it. It can be like that, you know. You suddenly realize, and then, your fate is set.”

  Two weeks ago. And he supposedly told Dolores their wedding was off a week later. It necessitated rewriting the laws of biology to begin a pregnancy, get it verified, and rupture a prior engagement within seven days. Either Emily was fabricating a story, or the gossip was dead wrong about a shotgun wedding.

  “Quite a story,” I said. “You were right.”

  “Wait a minute—are you talking about this, or the other story?”

  “I thought, since you said your story had to do with a murder, and Jimmy Pat was murdered, I thought maybe this turned out to be the story.”

  “This was a story. But what happened to Jimmy…if I knew that…” She squeezed her lips together so tightly that no color showed in them. “I’d get the son of a bitch who did it, and I’d cut out his heart.”

  I believed her. “I…have to think about the other story, then,” I said.

  “You’re not interested? Do you know, maybe, if a person can call up one of those TV shows, like Unsolved Mysteries? Do they pay? Do you need to know somebody?”

  “I could try to find out.”

  “Never mind.” I could almost see her vivid coloring fade into the overall gray of the store.

  “If you give me a clue as to what murder this is about, maybe I could—”

  “Rip me off. No thanks. It’s what I have, and I’m not giving it away. So…look around. That’s why you’re here, right?”

  There wasn’t much to see. The supplies looked old and tired. “This is it,” I said. I bought the unnecessary three-by-fives and the pen with green ink.

  She looked at me intently as I opened the door. I paused, thinking she was on the verge of changing her mind, of unburdening herself of the too-big story that weighed heavily on her.

  Then her father’s voice boomed out of the dark back room, and looking as if all possibilities had just been erased, she turned around and answered his summons.