Mummers' Curse

by Gillian Roberts

  “My mother says if you lose your honor, you lose—”

  “I’m sure she means well, and she’s raising an honorable daughter, but you both have to lighten up a little. Honor is…honor is, well…” Honor was getting tedious, to tell the truth. Honor was everywhere, pulled on as everybody’s favorite cloak, excuse, disguise. I’d heard too much about it.

  “Honor is who you are,” Sally said. “My moth—well, that’s what I think, too. Honor is what you can’t give up without losing a part of yourself. That’s why I wrote that in the essay.”

  Her words bounced off the nearby marble steps, the high ceilings, the long corridor, and boomeranged into my center, where they echoed for quite a while.

  I looked at the girl. She was smug, she was brainwashed, she was anachronistic, she was going to grow up to be the hope of the planet or somebody’s insufferable next-door neighbor. Maybe both.

  But she was right.

  “Where’s Renata?” I asked.

  “She said she’d taken care of it. I thought it was all settled.”

  “It isn’t smart to trust her opinions. And too bad, then,” I said. “A C is better than an F. And by the way, I like your definition of honor. Tell your mother.” I marched down the stairs, bearing my corn chowder tub like a beacon as I pushed open the door to the office.

  Helga looked startled.

  No wonder. I was smiling. I was elated. I was right.

  Thanks to the barely sufferable Sally and her intolerably rigid mother, I had my honor back. “Helga? Please get a message through to Mr. and Mrs. Field and Renata. And a copy to Dr. Havermeyer, too.”

  She pursed her lips and took out a pad.

  “It’s simple,” I said. “Short. Three words. And they are: ‘So sue me.’”

  And with that, I swiveled around, propelled by the forces of might and right, and I made my exit.

  I would miss this place. But it wasn’t a vital organ being amputated. It was something I could survive losing. Unlike my honor. Ask Sally Bianco.

  Seventeen

  “SINCE WHEN DO WE CELEBRATE IMPENDING UNEMPLOYMENT?” I nonetheless clicked my champagne glass against his.

  “That isn’t it at all.”

  Mackenzie and I were burning up whatever resources we had left in an old-fashioned, unchic restaurant near South Street. Its food was solid and without theme, its room starkly decorated, but soundproofed. Plus, a jazz combo played standards in the background as we toasted each other. “This is Sid’s memorial service,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Your mother’s neighbor’s cat.”

  “Ah, yes. Allyn Beth Landau, M.D. I owe her a sympathy card.”

  “Your mother called.”

  “About the card?”

  He shook his head.

  “But there weren’t any messages. I checked.”

  “We spoke in real time, on the phone, and she updated me on the saga.”

  “Okay, when last I tuned in, the poor cat was cremated, his ashes coveted by the cat-sitter, and his brokenhearted owner flying home to recover them. Did she succeed?”

  Mackenzie shook his head and chewed on a salad green. “It appears that Violet, still afraid she’d be forced to divvy his ashes, took them and flew the coop. When Dr. Allyn got home, Violet and Sid’s remains were at large, address unknown.”

  “Sad.”

  “It grows sadder still. Allyn Beth opened the paper the next day and saw a news story. Seems young Violet got off a train in North Carolina carrying her precious box of Sid, and she was robbed. Her suitcase, her pocketbook, and worst of all, the poor cat’s remains. She begged the thieves to leave that, but they thought Sid was cocaine.” He lifted his champagne glass. “Sid is truly free at last. May he rest in peace, wherever that is.”

  I hoped he wasn’t up a robber’s nasal passages. Then Mackenzie raised his glass again. “And to Amanda, as well, because she’s intact and we know where she is and we’re celebrating her return from limbo.”

  I’d drink to that, for sure. “I survived Renata-fever. That waffling and uncertainty was like losing a chunk of myself, the way Sally said.”

  “Out of the mouths of babes.”

  “How do you know she’s a babe?”

  He ignored that. “Now if I could get closure, too, we’d go for vintage champagne.”

  The gun Emily put into my pocketbook had, indeed, turned out to have once been Uncle Lou Patricciano’s, passed on to his favorite nephew. Circumstantial, but Jimmy Patricciano was assumed to have killed Ted Serfi, and that case was considered closed.

  That didn’t answer the looming question of who had then killed Jimmy Pat, and it annoyed the hell out of Mackenzie, who was positive the murders were related, and therefore both should be tidily cleared up by now.

  I didn’t see the connection. Jimmy Pat was involved in both, true, as was wrongly placed money. But given that Jimmy was the killer on one, the corpse on the other, that the money was owed on the one hand and stolen on the other, the linkage dribbled down to nothing. Apples and oranges.

  It also annoyed Mackenzie that his pet suspects had fallen by the wayside, one by one. He constantly double-checked his A-list’s eligibility. It was becoming a litany. “Arthur King,” he said now.

  “Wanted to clear his name,” I finished for him. “His sausages’ name.”

  “Emily—”

  “Had every reason to keep Jimmy alive.”

  “Dolores—”

  “Little Dolores, the darling of the Grassis?” I was pleased that her poor-me appearance hadn’t bamboozled him.

  “She’d been dumped, shamed, duped, disgraced.”

  “So you think she knew.”

  “Full well.”

  “That was probably what Vincent saw—he claimed she was crying a few days or a week before the parade, that her brother said she was going through a bad time.”

  “Therefore, why not do the cad in? She’d have more status in the community as his grieving fiancée than as his stranded-at-the-altar, egg-in-her-face dumpee. Only one flaw—how could she do it, get into the middle of the parade? Jimmy was in that massive suit—he never left the route the way Devaney did. Besides, she was blocks away at City Hall, on the bleachers at the judges’ stand, waiting to see her brothers and Jimmy Pat. Her mother was beside her, neighbors behind her.”

  “You still think it was Vincent, don’t you?” I said softly.

  He shrugged. “There’s the Dolores connection. The lifelong competition.”

  “Fabian,” I said. “Fabian, Fabian.” And I returned to this morning’s scare. “He’s a hotheaded crook. He had opportunity and motive, and he’s got the ugly personality to do it. Why keep looking for a Ted Serfi connection? Out of real fear of exposure and disgrace, loss of everything he holds dear, including his place in his club, if not prison, Fabian did Jimmy in. Don’t you see?”

  I could discuss Fabian logically, but inside, my autonomic nervous system ranted. I could pump myself up and think of the encounter as my kung fu debut, but my intestines and heart knew that my escape was based more on Fabian’s early-morning stupidity than on my cleverness or agility. If he’d been quicker or had more smarts and less smugness, he could have done whatever he wanted to and with me.

  I poked at my Caesar salad, trying to think of ways in which I could better protect myself in the future. Mackenzie worried out loud about how safe my school’s parking area was.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’ll be booted out of there soon enough.” I wondered whether I should bother marking the tenth graders’ compositions. Trying to improve student writing often equated trying to tune up their thinking, a task that Sisyphus would have quit. What a waste of effort to go at it again if I were about to be kicked out,

  “He hasn’t put back the money, am I right?”

  “Who?” My mind was still on the tenth graders who were the cognitive equivalent of illiterate. They could write, but not make sense. Given that handicap, they had few career options
and were probably doomed to become lawyers.

  “Fabian. What else were we talking about?”

  Wasn’t worth describing my mental meanderings. “He said he was going to pay it back, not that he had.”

  “Did he say how? Didn’t you tell me two guys took out mortgages to pay for the costumes?”

  “Suits. Don’t call them costumes.”

  “Doesn’t he owe them?”

  “Indirectly. They don’t know where the money went. Not yet. If they can get additional funds together, they’re going to hire an accountant to do an audit. But Vincent said—”

  “You know what I hope he said? That he did it and that the case is now closed. It would make it so tidy.”

  “Too bad.” The waiter silently put down my grilled salmon and Mackenzie’s pork chops. He didn’t tell us his name, he didn’t hover, and I thought I might adopt him. “What Vincent said was that they’re taking apart their suits tonight. See, the Fancies are allowed to reuse them, or parts of them. String Bands have to be all new from the undergarments out…”

  My beleaguered buddy had long since O.D.’d on Mummer lore. His eyes were glazed, his attention elsewhere. If I didn’t stop, he’d remind me of my phantom article, the reason I had for collecting that data.

  For the rest of the meal, I was mum about Mummers and death. Amazing, but when you gave it a real try, there were one or two other topics available.

  *

  The weather had lightened up. It was still cold, but dry and windless, and the sky was filled with stars. We walked around the corner to South Street and ordered frozen yogurt for dessert, then negated whatever healthy points we gained through that by topping it with fudge. “Hot fudge—food for a cold winter’s night,” Mackenzie explained.

  We sat in the shop, its windows steamy and comforting, and I was almost able to believe that the entire evening was going to be like this, lazy, fluid, and open-ended with Mackenzie truly off duty and all mine.

  Until he said, “Here’s the thing.”

  When spoken by that man, the thing seldom signals lazy times or laissez-faire. I spooned up the last of my hot fudge sauce and waited.

  “I’d like to visit, given that he’ll be there.”

  He. There. Visit. Fill in the blanks.

  “I don’t like anybody roughing you up, and I want to know more about the money connection.”

  Fabian.

  “Do you realize he’s the only one with the temperament, the opportunity, and a solid motive?”

  Could it be I realized that because I’d expressed it an hour ago? Maybe we’d been together too long if we no longer could differentiate between who thought or said what. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t supposed to matter under whose name each idea was registered.

  “If you’re finished with your yogurt, I’ll drop you off,” Mackenzie said.

  Now there was an idea I hadn’t originated. It was an idea that stunk. “Why?” I asked. “Are you expecting mayhem?”

  “Doubt it.”

  “Then let me come along.”

  He shook his head. “That’s unprofessional, hokey, like I’m bringing proof of what I’m saying. I’ll drop you off at home.”

  “Home is the wrong direction.”

  He shrugged.

  “We’re in the neighborhood already.” Another so-what shrug. “You think you’ll be long?”

  “Don’t intend to be. Doin’ it now because it seems less intrusive than going to his job or home. After all, one of their own was killed. It’s not odd that I’d want to look around again, ask more questions about how they run the place, things like that. See where it takes me.”

  “Then how about if I keep you company? I won’t get in your way.” I hated the idea of being counted out, dumped off for another solo evening by the hearth.

  “You’re not going to have an attack of heroics?”

  “Puh-lease! Don’t act as if I have a compulsion to play cops and robbers. Maybe I’m about to be fired, but meantime, I’m a teacher. I don’t ever want to see Fabian again, let alone have anything to do with him. It’s the end of a hard week and I want to be with you, that’s all. I am with you and my number-one wish would be that you would put off detecting for another day. But if not, then if you take me along, you might be more apt to wind it up quickly and get back to me.”

  “How can I resist? Flattery will get you everywhere, even South Philly.”

  *

  The club was housed on Two Street, behind and above a vacant former dress shop. Basically, the quarters were one large all-purpose room with storage in back, a bar along one side, and a dazzling photographic display of what was worn in parades past on the walls. Once Vincent had recovered from his surprise at seeing Mackenzie and me, and once he had realized that despite a penchant for privacy, a club with a murdered member would be wise to let in a homicide detective, he’d explained that the room was used for dances and other fund-raisers and when not in such use, for sewing and planning and general hanging out. They stored their larger creations in rented garages nearby and, as long as the dress shop was vacant, downstairs as well.

  Unlike the String Bands, whose uniforms were most often sewn and designed by professionals, these men—with help from wives—stitched their suits and built their frames and headpieces. Tonight was a careful first salvaging of this year’s garb. A suit could have a hundred and fifty pattern pieces, Vincent explained. Feathers were expensive, as were the fabrics. You saved and recycled what you could.

  Only a small portion of the members, about twelve men, sat at tables, carefully ripping stitches from strips that shimmered, glittered, and gleamed while they joked and idly talked. Tuesday night was their regular meeting. This was optional, Vincent said.

  Among the dozen, I recognized Fabian, who glared at me, and Stephen Grassi, who always looked like the tragedy mask of drama, along with a freckled redhead to whom I’d once been introduced but whose name I couldn’t remember. He remembered me, however. “Look who’s here,” he said. “The writer lady. The one’s gonna make our club famous.”

  I was too tired of repeating my protests, too tired to correct anyone on that same point.

  I could almost hear the click of eyeballs as the men glanced from me to Mackenzie and back as he made conversation. I decided I should become less conspicuous and go where testosterone was not at flood level. I murmured that I’d wait in the car. Mackenzie seemed relieved.

  I went downstairs, but momentarily detoured into the erstwhile dress shop, now eerie with robes and gigantic headpieces of parades past hanging from hooks on the wall. Some looked cannibalized, half-gone, or conspicuously lacking trim, but what was left glowed.

  Outside, the street was almost monochromatic, subtle shades of brick and flickering TV lights through windows providing the palette. But inside, even in the dim light reflected from the street, the finery twinkled and gleamed emerald and amethyst, silver and coral. In one corner sat a black-and-silver helmet surrounded by spikes of feather-backed sequins. Next to it, a yellow-gold and mirrored-petal daisy that must have been six feet high. I tried to lift it, to try it on, but it was too heavy and I was afraid of hurting it, or myself.

  But in touching it, I again sensed the wonder of becoming something splendid, eye-and mind-boggling one day a year. One day, won by fifty-two weeks of labor. It seemed like the short-lived and finite reward given in a fairy tale. One day to become your own fantasy, grotesque beauty, anything. One day to provoke open-mouthed admiration, be a hero, the symbol of pride.

  And then, back to the pumpkin coach. To working-man’s uniforms and time clocks, blue collars, dark wools, and work boots. But that one day of golden slippers was so resplendent, it was well worth it.

  Which made Fabian’s embezzlement, which put everyone in jeopardy, even worse.

  I left the storage room and made my exit to the street, my hand searching for car keys. Pocketbook Braille is a female secondary sex trait, but tonight I was unable to read the bag’s contents. Twice I pulle
d out mouth spray in lieu of keys, once a string of paper clips.

  I gave up and looked the amateur’s way, with my eyes. Still no keys. I opened the bag all the way and tried excavation instead, clearing the rubble by putting items on the car’s hood. I moved quickly and kept my wallet inside the bag, even though this was not a dangerous street and no one was around.

  I removed flotsam. My emergency stuck-in-a-line book of short stories; a folding hairbrush; a plastic container of mints; the small can of hair spray I lugged all over and had used only to immobilize a yellow jacket trying to carpool with me; five lipsticks; countless pens; two matchbooks. I hadn’t smoked in well over a year, but matchbooks were how I remembered good restaurants. At home, I tossed them into a large bowl. Rooting through it was like having a dining-out Rolodex.

  I removed the ubiquitous packet of fraying three-by-fives, neatly wrapped in a rubber band. A rupturing audiocassette. A container of floss and a still-wrapped toothbrush from my last visit to the dentist. My roll book.

  No keys. Even with the bag half-empty, I could neither see, nor hear, nor touch their comforting metal. Mackenzie must have used mine and automatically put them in his pocket when we parked.

  Keyless, generic urban discomfort took over. I felt exposed, a city turtle soft and vulnerable without a shell of dwelling or car to protect me from the night.

  Be brave, I counseled myself. I had already faced down the Fields and The System, and Mackenzie was taking care of Fabian.

  That should have made me calmer than it did. There was something wrong there, something incomplete I wished I could identify.

  It was stupid to stay out here. I’d have to go back in and be the intrusion I had promised not to be. I put the paperback and my roll book back in the bag—it didn’t make sense to call it a pocketbook, since the only pocket it would fit was a marsupial’s. Whatever its label, it now seemed a catalogue of the pieces of my life. I wasn’t yet a bag lady, but I definitely was the lady of the bag. The reader, the teacher, the female vain enough to tote five lipsticks. And the three-by-fives. What part of me were they? The eternal wanna-be? The goof-off? She who teaches because she can’t do? What would I tell my journalism class?