Indian Summer

by Ed Ifkovic

  Carlotta took yet another sip of wine, spilled a little on her wrist. “It will be the only time I actually vote.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “I’m serious,” she went on. “How do I go about registering, Henry? Do I have to register?”

  Martha spoke up. “We actually had a great uncle who was governor of the state right after the Civil War, but he was Democrat. A brother, I think, of our great-grandfather Butler. The distaff side of the family. The whole family voted Democrat.”

  “Not our side of the family,” Henry said. “Not the Fenwicks or the Smalls. You know, when Abe Lincoln spoke in New Haven, one of our ancestors introduced him. I’m proud of that.”

  Carlotta sighed. “See, I’m not the first Small to crave the spotlight.”

  Peter raised his glass. “Here’s to big things from Small people.”

  Everyone groaned. Delia, however, smiled at Peter as though he were Shakespeare.

  I sipped my forbidden wine begrudgingly. It tasted homemade, slightly acidic, bitter, a Prohibition runner’s backroom stock, fermented swill. Carlotta’s hand moved smoothly, her arm twitching, through at least a half bottle. Halfway through the meal, she was slurring her words. Everyone pretended not to notice. Classic imbibing, I told myself. So the rumors were most likely true: she’d been compelled to leave Broadway—twice, in fact—because of her out-of-control drinking. At my dinner parties, to be sure, what with the presence of famous stalwarts of theater and literature and journalism, no liquor was served. I broke no laws at home. Foolish though the Volstead Act certainly was, and doomed, my dinner guests would never be tempted. Of course, alone, I savored a glass or two. Most recently, in fact, a bottle of chilled white wine, a Christmas present from Edna St. Vincent Millay, of all people.

  The conversation drifted to national politics, the frightful economic quagmire America found itself mired in, and I ventured the opinion that the world would never be the same, that the dreadful errors of the Great War were just preamble to an even more deadly turmoil as the world reeled from one awful plight to another. Look at Germany, I announced, imperious. “Daily reports talk of rioting, of starvation, of cartoon politicians with caterpillar moustaches standing on soap boxes and exhorting the citizens to proclaim themselves powerful.”

  “No,” interrupted Governor-to-Be Fenwick, “there are safeguards.” His glance at me suggested I stick to fiction. “There will be peace in this century.”

  “Hah,” I exclaimed.

  Then the conversation drifted to the recent construction of a small Roman Catholic Church, a few roads over, near the center of town. Saint Monica’s Chapel, presided over by an immigrant priest whose name was Father Bronislaw Kowalski, a church built with the pennies and dimes of struggling Polish truck farmers, who owned the old homes in the south end of Rawley’s Depot.

  “On Sundays the back road is clogged with Model T’s and battered trucks and a few farm wagons with sickly horses, and the Polacks in their finery kneel to the Virgin Mary,” said Peggy Fenwick, in a speech that suggested her husband would not be seeking the endorsement of the Polish Benevolent Society nor the Sons of St. Kasimir.

  “Well, it’s a changing Connecticut,” Peter concluded.

  “I have no problem with Polacks,” Martha added.

  Carlotta, quiet for a while now, head drooping over heaving chest, looked up, smiled thinly. “No one has asked me about my memoirs.”

  “Sooner or later you bring it up yourself,” Martha snarled.

  “I’ve chosen a perfect title. The Farmer’s Daughter.” She waited. Expectant. No one responded. “Isn’t that perfect? The very title of my first stage success. And appropriate: me, the daughter of old Connecticut soil.”

  Martha clicked her tongue. “But father wasn’t a farmer. He didn’t do much of anything, except hunt deer and pheasant.”

  “But the Inn and its acres.” She pouted, “I don’t care. It’s wonderful. Right?”

  Delia declared it inspired, and Peter shot her a look.

  “What do you think, Edna? You’re the writer here?” Carlotta asked.

  “That’s between you and your editor. How close are you to completion?”

  Carlotta shrugged. “It’s hard to say. I keep recalling different, more exciting, Broadway anecdotes. Jason is helping me.” She shot a look at him, though he seemed to be ignoring her. “He’s my agent. After all, he remembers more of life in New York than I do.” She actually belched, looked surprised, then giggled. “I expect it will be a best seller. Not like Show Boat”—she nodded toward me—“but a New York sensation. After all, I have a racy story to tell. Titillation is, after all, a four-letter word.”

  Henry Fenwick shook his head. “Lord, Carlotta, isn’t it all out there already? The gossip sheets have covered every scandalous moment of your life.”

  “But now it’s my turn to tell all.”

  Peggy frowned. “I should think, at this point in your life, you’d like to cultivate . . . decency.”

  Carlotta looked confused, then angry. “I am a decent woman. You all know me. I’ve never . . .”

  But the moment was lost because, at that very instant, as Julia wandered in to clear dishes, Carlotta Small, attempting to point her finger in indignant exclamation, suddenly drooped, slumped, and unceremoniously passed out, her head resting in the half-eaten plate of food before her. Everyone jumped up, and Peter, the dutiful if chagrined son, led his mother out of the room, her chin still grotesquely decorated with bits and pieces of a wonderful dinner.

  Late that night, lying in my bed, tucked under an ancient coverlet that smelled of general-store remnants and ancient bodies, I could not sleep. Outside night animals hissed in the oak trees that lined the yard, nestled in the bushes that brushed the house, and in the fields that stretched, endless, across the river and town road, up into the black hemlock-covered mountains.

  At one point it the night I thought I heard weeping from across the hall. Martha, in her lonely bed? Herself shielded by old coverlets and the grotesque specter of a dying, sad family? Then silence, save for the creaking of old wood. Near dawn I slept.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The following morning Carlotta decided that I should meet Millicent Wright, the old woman who owned the regal brick house next door. “She’s dying to meet you,” Carlotta told me. “Then we’ll head into town for lunch and then I’ll take you to the library.”

  I looked forward to visiting the massive brick home, tucked behind towering hemlocks and junipers. A weathered Federal-style Colonial with those garish pumpkin-orange shutters, it struck me as a shabby sibling to the rambling Inn and Lupinski’s ornate Victorian. The yard looked overgrown, uncared for, with ragweed and thistle bent from a recent storm. The flagstone walkway leading to the front door was broken and uneven, lined with overgrown leafy shrubs, untrimmed, wild. Low-hanging tree branches slapped the side of the house, and the ground beneath was strewn with rotten limbs that had fallen from the trees, nearly covered now by autumn leaves. But the house itself was magnificent: a boxlike structure with high-pitched slate roof, three chimneys of crumbling stone, and giant stone boulders ringing the foundation. Its huge shuttered windows, darkened now by curtains, made the place look closed up, sealed off. On the faded brick, near the front entrance, a peeling sign: Moses Rawley, c.1780.

  “Let’s walk around the back,” Carlotta said. “I never use the front door.”

  A deferential knock, a shaky voice bidding us enter into a country kitchen that looked hard-polished but out of use for years. Gleaming surfaces, spotless copper pans and pots suspended from the ceiling, an old shellacked oak table surrounded by four rickety-looking straightback Windsor chairs. Again, the voice, this time louder, coming from a parlor off the kitchen.

  “You’ll love Millicent,” Carlotta whispered.

  Inside the parlor, sitting erect in a soft plush armchair, was an old woman, dressed in a dark but faded velvet dress, Edwardian length, with rings of yellowing lace around her wrinkled nec
k. An old woman, easily in her nineties, a fragile twig of a woman, frail as old paper, yet with the most riveting blue-green eyes, almost too large for the miniature head, intelligent eyes, deliberate, watching, demanding. A mop of thinning white hair, yellow-sheened, was haphazardly tucked under a white lace cap. A friendly face on a small delicate head,

  “Come closer,” the voice demanded. “Let me get a good look at you, dear.” I did, and the creased, withered old face broke into a broad smile. A thin gnarled hand reached out, and I took it. “Miss Ferber,” the voice said, warm and cozy now. “A singular pleasure.”

  Carlotta stood next to her. “Edna, this is one of my dearest friends, Millicent Wright. I wanted you to meet her.”

  Millicent glanced from Carlotta to me, impatient. “I’ve just finished Show Boat,” she said. “Took my breath away, that book. I must tell you, Miss Ferber—may I call you Edna? Of course, I can, the prerogative of old age, and you call me Millicent—that passage of the flooding of the Mississippi. So mesmerizing I paused and looked out the window, expected floodtide on my front lawn.” She laughed then, a robust but scratchy chuckle that seemed to belong to a heartier looking person. She waved her bony hand in the air, punching the air, accenting her words. She looked as though she’d dissolve into pieces of dust when you first saw her, but when she spoke, her body became animated, thrilled. I liked the woman immediately. Here was a tough woman, a no-nonsense dowager who suffered no fools.

  No fools—except, I realized, perhaps the young man sitting in the room with her, uncomfortable on a hard-backed chair in the corner, a simpleton’s gaze on his face. A nervous man, jittery, drumming his feet on the floor. Millicent saw me looking at him.

  “My nephew, Johnny Marks.” She nodded at him. “My great nephew, to be sure. Son of my brother’s daughter, long dead, all of them, and good riddance. All of them. Say hello, Johnny.”

  Johnny nodded. He said nothing, nor did he stand up, as I expected him to do. Good manners be damned!

  “As I was saying, Auntie,” the young man started, but Millicent held up her hand.

  “Johnny, we’ll continue this another time.”

  “But I . . .”

  The look on Millicent’s face suggested no room for compromise, but Johnny, pursing his lips, seemed inclined to continue.

  “Later,” Millicent stressed. “You and I already have had a lifetime discussing your plans.”

  “If you only let me . . .”

  Millicent, fiercely, “Johnny Marks, I have guests.” She pointed to Carlotta and me.

  “I was here . . .” he began, then stopped. My God, I thought—he was going to say: I was here first. The pouting schoolboy, a middle-aged Peck’s Bad Boy.

  “Johnny is the local constable,” Carlotta commented—and seemed not to believe it herself.

  A law enforcer? I stared into the weak face. Well, I thought, there must be a dearth of crime in this little hamlet. Boondocks behavior, most likely. Halloween pranks, smashed pumpkins, cornfields vandalized by mischievous lads on bicycles. Farm boys dumping manure on back roads.

  “We can’t stay,” Carlotta told her. She looked at Johnny. “We’re headed into town.”

  Millicent frowned. “But I demand a visit from you, Edna.” A creaky smile, warm, inviting. “Come for luncheon. Please. Or tea. Or to watch me reading one of your books.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “I’ll be back around five or six,” Carlotta told her, nudging me.

  “Thank you, dear,” the old woman answered.

  “You look tired, Millicent. Perhaps we should all leave you to a nap.” Carlotta glared at Johnny, who hadn’t moved. She picked up a blanket draped over a chair and placed it over the woman.

  Stepping out into the backyard, weaving our way through the thick bushes that lined a narrow path, Carlotta told me that she brought Millicent a small supper every day around five or six in the evening. Like clock work. Julia, who prepared the evening meal before leaving for the day, always packed a basket for Millicent. Carlotta usually didn’t stay, she told me, just chatted for a few minutes or not at all, and then left. It was a casual ritual that had evolved over the past few years, which she herself valued. “Millicent is special.” Then she added, “There are times when only Millicent understands me. Then we talk for hours.” But when she was in the city or traveling or ill, Carlotta confided, Martha did the delivery, though begrudgingly. “Millicent isn’t too fond of Martha.”

  That surprised me. “Why?”

  Carlotta shrugged her shoulders and didn’t answer. “She and Martha are merely civil to each other. Old World politeness, I suppose. No nasty words or anything dramatic like that. But Martha annoys her. That’s why I try to visit her once a day.” She sighed. “Just the way things are.” She turned away. “No matter.”

  “Her home is magnificent.” I glanced back at the house.

  Carlotta smiled. “I knew you’d love it. The Inn is like—like a peasant. Servile, useful, practical, down to earth. I love it, of course. It’s my home. But Millicent’s home is regal, a show place, a dowager in tiara and diamonds. Though,” she added, “the jewels are a tad tarnished nowadays.”

  “I do want to explore that house more.”

  Carlotta grinned widely. “Millicent will insist upon it. She values that house more than anything, though she lacks the money and energy to bring back its glory. I know she wants you to explore it. Her only sadness is that Johnny Marks will someday turn it into a bed and breakfast with tin-plated Coca Cola signs nailed to the front porch.”

  Carlotta drove into the center of town, with me feeling conspicuous in the gaudy Pierce-Arrow, not so much because of its rich plum color but because Carlotta drove like a maddened demon, some movie daredevil strutting on the wings of a flip-flopping carnival airplane. She accelerated, jammed on the brakes, waved her hand in the air with a lighted cigarette. She turned corners so insanely, dust flying and farm geese squawking into the brush, that I held my breath. Parking seemed an afterthought. One minute she was screeching alongside the town green, the next moment we were up against a curb, dead still, smoke wafting from the hood.

  Everyone in town greeted her, the local celebrity. People nodded, smiled—some even waved—and she basked in it all. “I’m the hometown girl who made good,” she whispered to me, after a dapper young man in a wrinkled seersucker suit bowed to her.

  “Look.” Carlotta’s polished index finger with the glittery crimson paint swept across an expanse of late-autumn green, took in a white Congregational Church on one end, a clapboard town hall on the other. In between was a large granite monument as high as a horse, covered with American flags, a roll call of the town’s dead in war, from the Revolution through the Civil War, and even, I supposed, the Spanish-American and, lamentably, the late Great War more than a decade past now. “This is old New England,” Carlotta said. “Quaint, isn’t it?”

  Quite, I thought, if a little redundant. New England town greens echoed each other with bronze-plated monuments to the dead, with steepled and austere Congregational churches, with peeling park benches on which old men in ill-fitting clothing sat and reminisced about days (and wars) past. Children kicked balls at one another. Young mothers admonished children at their games. Images taken from a soft-focus stereopticon.

  “Let’s walk.” Carlotta grasped my elbow. “Breathe in Connecticut air.”

  At that moment Connecticut air was dreadfully toxic, as a lumbering Buick putted past us, emitting a cloud of acrid smoke.

  Carlotta walked briskly, as was my wont, and I was glad I’d worn sensible shoes, broken in on rugged Manhattan sidewalks.

  “We’ll have a late lunch,” she told me. “At a tavern I love. Then I’ll plant you in the town library.” We strolled the one sidewalk in town, which fronted perhaps seven or eight stores and shops. “Then we’ll have supper in Westport.”

  That suited me. I’d planned an afternoon of intense and directed research. State and local histories; privately printed me
moirs, pioneer stories, rag-to-riches parables by small-town boys who made good, sociological studies of the Immigrant in Rural Connecticut. That sort of thing.

  In front of a small storefront with a sign that read Connecticut Valley Gazette Carlotta paused, stared through a grimy window. “Our local weekly newspaper,” she muttered, not happy. “A scandal rag obsessed with potluck dinners, American Legion meetings, Fife and Drum Corps intrigue, the Farmer’s Almanac, crop forecasts, and conservative economics. A pesky advocate of, well, Life on the Grange, if you will. Hostile to city folk and lovers of New York, as myself.”

  At that moment the front door swung open, and a plump, rosy-cheeked man emerged, his arms folded over a stack of slipping newsprint. He seemed startled to see the two of us standing there, Carlotta glowering, and me, the wide-eyed novelist, looking rattled. He nearly collided with us. He was dressed in baggy, billowing trousers, belted too high on a gloriously rotund waist, a white shirt blotchy with news ink over an unbuttoned vest, torn at the seams. Ben Franklin spectacles rested on a strangely narrow, flattened nose that was at odds with the mass of shifting flesh beneath it, a shock of almost platinum white hair, uncombed and drifting in every direction. The man impressed me as a vaudeville buffoon, or a cartoon character, one of the Katzenjammer kids, perhaps, now grown up and playing at being an adult. I guessed his age at maybe forty, maybe more, but that babyish face and the round marble eyes masked his age.

  Carlotta, clearly unhappy, made the introductions. “Edna, this is Roger Emerson, editor of our weekly newspaper. Roger, this is Edna Ferber . . .”

  Brusquely, the pale blue eyes darkening, “I know who she is. Frankly, the whole town knows who your houseguest is, Carlotta. You’ve trumpeted that news item in every encounter you’ve had.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I mumbled, not meaning a word of it. The man had not taken his eyes off me.