We Five

by Mark Dunn

  “And the look on your face, Miss Osborne—it tells me the reason for their leaving is the thing that’s upsetting you.”

  “Of course, I shouldn’t be upset by it. It’s really quite silly. Mrs. Froda doesn’t think it’s silly, obviously, but I do. And Mr. Froda takes his wife seriously—seriously enough, in fact, to go along with her wishes.”

  “You’ve now got me quite curious, Miss Osborne. You’ll have to tell me.”

  “I intend to. There’s the tamale man, and I’m suddenly famished. It’s about dreams, Mr. Harrison. Terrible, frightening dreams. She’s been having them nearly every night for quite some time.”

  “The same dreams or different ones?”

  “The same. Always the same. About—about the end of the world. Well, at least the end of San Francisco.”

  “Earthquake? Fire? Some comet shooting down from the sky?”

  Molly shrugged. “She doesn’t know the agent. She only knows the outcome. And it makes her wake up each night in a cold sweat. Two tamales, if you please. I’m very hungry.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Zenith, Winnemac, July 1923

  Bella’s birthday bash was in full swing, but for the present, Molly Osborne and Pat Harrison had chosen to limit their own swinging to the gentle and decidedly more intimate sway of the Prowse porch swing.

  “And how is it you can just stand there and and lissem to all that ma—larkey?”

  “I can’t pull myself away. She’s right there on that street corner every day—ruh—right in front of Sister Lydia’s new tabernacle. If you squa—squint and stand back far enough she—” Molly cupped her hand to convey a confidence in the manner of a back-fence gossip out of the funny pages. “—she looks just like Sister Lydia herself.” Molly giggled. She removed her hand. “Funny to think, that’s exactly how the good sister started her ministry: evan-guh-lizing on the street corners. Although this woman—she isn’t evan-guh-loozing. She’s—she’s—she’s what?”

  “She’s doom-glooming.”

  Molly nodded exaggeratedly. “That’s it! Doom-glooming.”

  “Say, did anyone ever tell you your eyelashes are the cats? Like they belong to some kind of—hiccough—storybook princess?”

  Pat handed the silver flask to Molly. He utilized the hand that wasn’t fixed proprietarily to Molly’s shoulder. She snuggled up closer to this young man whom she’d met only two hours before—the young man who, within moments of their meeting, had begun to ply her with hootch from his private stock, even though there was an ample supply of unadulterated smuggled Canadian import inside. She noticed through the fuzzy, alcohol-sotted gauze of her semi-consciousness that the similarly cleft-chinned, blue-eyed, blond-haired (albeit of the dirty variety) young boy-man presently clutching her where no man or boy had ever clutched her before seemed halfway interested in her story, and so she resumed: “She stands on the street corner and talks about the end of the world, to be brought about by Sister Lydia—the false—the false prophet—the puh—puh—personal handmaiden, she says, of Satan himself.”

  “She don’t very much like Sister Lydia, now do she?” Hiccough.

  “No, she don’t.” Molly curled the ends of her lips down into a clown’s frown to embroider her point. “Which isn’t fair. Not fair at all. Sister Lydia, as evanjaleens go—why, she’s the snake’s hips! (No, no, let’s leave snakes out of this.) She’s the real deal!”

  Molly took a gulp from the flask and handed it back.

  “No, you keep it,” said Pat, waving it away in a wozzle-limbed flail of the hands. “There’s more where that came from.”

  Molly’s head was tilted back. She was studying the cloudless night sky. Suddenly, she squealed, “Ooh! Is that a shooting star?”

  Pat didn’t turn to either confirm or deny the observation. His gaze was fixed on the face next to his. He moved closer and whispered, “Must be your lucky night, Molly Olly. Wish on that star and as your fateful servant, I’ll make it all come true.”

  Breathlessly: “Are you my genie in a bottle?”

  “I am your genie, and if you want we should have a bottle, I’ll get us a bottle. Scotch whisky or Canadian rye?”

  Molly sniggered. She had never been lit before. She didn’t understand why she felt so good and why everything—everything she’d said to the good-looking Aggie named Pat had been so well received. “You may please me most, sir,” she drawled, “by not nibbling my earlobe like that. It tickles. Here. Nibble my neck instead.” Molly lowered the scoop-neck collar of her purple crepe de Chine with two hooked fingers to give Pat even more of her neck to explore.

  Pat moved his osculatory attention to Molly’s soft, supple neck as she tried valiantly to keep the conversation aloft.

  “Still, I wah—wonder—what if there’s some truth to what this strange woman on the street corner is saying? What if—giggle, giggle—she has the gift of—oh you’re tickling me there too, you bad boy! What if something terrible really is about to happen?”

  “Horse hooey! You think too much. Say, lessskidoo. Come for a walk with me.”

  “Can I walk? My legs feel like Jell-O.”

  “You’lldofine. Come on. This porchtoocrowded.” The equally inebriated Pat Harrison squinted at the porch’s other occupants, all coupled up, clinging to one another like human barnacles. “Lesstroll. I’ll carry you if I have to.”

  “You’ll carry me where?”

  “To my car.” Correcting himself: “To my friend Jerry’s car. He won’t mind. And I know he ain’t using it ’cuz I can see him standing right there at the door. Upsy-daisy.”

  Molly allowed Pat to raise her up onto her wobbly legs and then to walk her off the porch.

  They did this under the nervous, watchful gaze of Carrie and Ruth, who stood at the front picture window.

  “Where’s he taking her?” asked Ruth, her voice registering alarm.

  Carrie grimaced. “Right down the sidewalk and right past that awful Mrs. Littlejohn’s house, and you better believe our neighborhood busybody is going to have volumes to say about this to my mother in the morning.”

  Ruth exchanged a worried look with Carrie. “Molly’s drunk,” she said. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing. Carrie, somebody needs to stop that boy before he gets her into his car. You know what happens when boys get girls into cars at parties like these. Now it was your idea we come here tonight, so you’re responsible.”

  “I merely suggested it, Ruth. It was Jane who put it all together.”

  “Well, I don’t know where Jane is right now, so it’s up to you, since it was your neighbor Bella who invited that baby sheik and his fellow frat-house muckers to this party.”

  Carrie’s eyes grew large. “You’re asking me to wrest her away from him?”

  “To preserve her virtue and her good reputation while there’s still time, yes, indeed. Don’t worry. I’ll be right there next to you, lending moral support.”

  Carrie stared at Ruth. “You sound as potted as Molly. It looks to me like we’re all doing a good job of making total nits out of ourselves tonight.”

  Ruth ignored this. She gave her friend a tug, though Carrie’s feet were set in place by something akin to abject fear. Confrontation was not one of Carrie Hale’s strong suits.

  Cain Pardlow, having successfully threaded his way through a room filled with slightly-squiffed to sloppily-stinko one-steppers, each attempting to foxtrot to Ted Lewis’s effervescent rendition of “Runnin’ Wild,” reached his intended: Misses Thrasher and Hale, the two highballs held protectively above his head relatively intact.

  “Why the worried pusses, ladies?”

  Carrie replied: “It looks like our circle-sister Molly is being dragged right off to the lion’s den.”

  “Wolf’s den would be a better description,” put in Ruth, peering into the semi-darkness beyond the Prowses’ front lawn. “Or from all appearances, the wolf’s Ford Roadster. That is the car he came in, isn’t it?”

  Cain nodded. He pushed the two hi
ghball glasses at the two women, some of the gin sloshing out. “Can’t have that. No sirree.” And then with a second, more deferential nod: “If you’ll excuse me—”

  Cain did a quick about-face and left the way he came, crossing once more the crowded, tangle-legged parlor floor and stepping on one of Bella Prowse’s slippered feet in the process (though the tipsy-topsy flapper didn’t even seem to register the injury). Reaching the front vestibule, Cain was about to make his hurried exit to introduce chivalry and male gallantry into the demonstrably unchivalrous and ungallant 1920s, when his arm was roughly seized by Jerry Castle, who had been poking his head out the front door in search of the currently elusive Maggie Barton.

  “Where are you going, pardner?”

  “To your car. To rescue a damsel in distress.”

  Jerry lowered his voice, though it wasn’t entirely necessary with the sound of music and the clamor of human merriment dinning all ears. “You can’t change the rules in midstream, Pardlow, even if Master Paddy does appear to be putting himself several furlongs ahead.”

  Cain tried to shake Jerry off, without success. “Pat isn’t going to make any kind of conquest tonight, Castle—and especially not with those two looking on in horror.” He nodded in the direction of Carrie and Ruth, who remained at the window, effecting a tableau of “nail-nibbling apprehension” that even Cecil B. DeMille would have approvingly put to celluloid.

  Jerry tightened his vise grip on Cain’s arm. “To my knowledge we’ve placed no restrictions on the means and manner of conquest, Pardlow, so back the hell off and let nature take its course. I, for one, think the young lady will come quickly to her senses and put a stop to things before he gets too far. At least that’s what I hope. I’d hate to think bootleg booze and dumb luck are going to win the whole shebang for our little Baby Skeezix.”

  Jerry and Cain discovered in that next moment they weren’t alone. Will Holborne had dropped in to make his own observation. “Gentlemen, you forget that the winner isn’t the one who rounds all the bases first. It’s he who slides into home with all the pennants flying. And I, for one, see little brilliance or panache in Patty Cake’s playing five-and-dime Casanova in the dusty backseat of a broken-down 1917 Lizzie. Been done far too many times before.”

  “Then how about I go and tell him he’s wasting his time?” sought Cain.

  Jerry grinned. “Say, maybe Paddy isn’t even thinking about the game. Maybe he actually does like her. There’s that possibility too, you know.”

  “How about I go talk to him and find out?” Cain persisted, finally freeing himself from Jerry Castle’s meat hooks.

  “Suit yourself,” said Jerry, “but if Pat isn’t jake, you mind your business and keep right on walking.” Holborne concurred with a nod.

  “Since when do you give a rat’s rump about Pat Harrison?” Cain tossed to Jerry on his way out the door.

  “Since you turned Paddy into the little brother you never had,” responded Jerry with a half sneer/half grin.

  “Among other things,” added Will, pregnantly.

  Lover-boy was preoccupied. “Castle—he always leaves his keys in the car for a quick getaway, but damned if I can find where he’s gone and stashed ’em.”

  Molly made a baby face. “We can’t cuddle and coo right here in the moonlight?”

  Pat shook his head. “Nothing doing. I got a much better spot in mind—nice little hidey-hole sort of joint on the other side of town where the darkies go. They got hot jazz and all the liquor you can hold and there’s dark little booths in the back where nobody’ll come poking their heads into your business.”

  As if to prove his point, Pat nudged Molly’s attention in the direction of the man now standing just outside the car on Molly’s side. Molly turned and started.

  “What the hell are you doing poking your head in my business, Pardlow?” barked Pat (the bark being more pinnipedian than canine).

  “I just came to tell Miss Osborne that her friends are asking for her.”

  Molly smiled. “They are? Oh, they worry too much. Tell them I’m perfectly fine. Mr. Harrison and me are going for a nye-slettle-drive.” Then, her hand cupped as if to deliver a secret—this particular secret broadcast with enough volume to cause at least one neighborhood dog to start sentry-yapping: “He’s taking me to a speakeasy—my veerfirst.”

  Cain responded by shaking his head and opening the passenger door. He had to seize Molly to keep her from tumbling out onto the grass between the curb and the sidewalk. “First, Miss Osborne, I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that Mr. Harrison doesn’t actually know of any speakeasies—or at least where they are, although I don’t doubt he’s heard the rest of us talking about them. Second, Mr. Harrison is in no condition to drive. Third, this isn’t even his car, and the gentleman whose car this is isn’t going to take too kindly to the two of you joyriding around in it, sideswiping mailboxes and mowing down fire hydrants, all in a fruitless quest for some blind pig that—even if you should get so lucky as to find it—probably won’t admit you because you both happen to look twelve.”

  Molly laughed noisily and gustily. “You’re a funny one, Mr. Parloom. Pat, your friend Mr. Pardrew is a very funny man. I like him.”

  Pat stared straight ahead, chewing his lower lip with unmitigated anger.

  “And fourth—”

  “There’s a fourth?” Pat snarled.

  Reason Number Four was delivered in a whisper for Molly’s consumption only.

  “Have you given any thought, Miss Osborne, to what Sister Lydia will say—let alone do—were she to find out how one of her choir girls spent the latter part of this evening?”

  A look of terror suddenly overspread Molly’s face. “Oh no!” she exclaimed. “She wouldn’t be very pleased at all, would she?” Tears sprang to Molly’s rheumy eyes. “Oh, what will she say to what I’ve done already? I’ve danced like a wicked wild woman and said things I shouldn’t have said and I’ve drunk things I’ve had no business drinking and, and—”

  Words suddenly failed Molly, to be replaced by an aberrant bodily function, which carried an equivalent amount of information. Cain assisted her as best he could by holding her head while removing his patent leathers from the vicinity of deposit, as Pat huffed and snorted and flung daggers of hatred at his friend for the crime of his intrusion.

  “It’s for your own good, Pat,” Cain calmly explained, his look lovingly placatory. “In terms of our game, this stunt wouldn’t have even won you the consolation prize.”

  “I had plans for something much more adventurish than simple vee—vehicular petting!” delivered the petulant baby sheik through partially gritted teeth.

  “The word is adventurous, Paddy, and if your idea of adventurous seduction is to drive this poor girl to a speakeasy and drink until the two of you pass out under the table, then you have no business playing the game. You’ll know where to find me tomorrow when you want to thank me.”

  Cain took out his handkerchief, wiped some of the sick from Molly’s lips, set her aright in her seat and started off. A moment later he stopped, wheeled himself around and returned to the car, this time putting himself on the driver’s side. “This performance of yours, Pat, makes your Puck in our little Shakespeare festival look like Hamlet by comparison. You’re far better than this.” Cain held his gaze for a moment longer than he could have gotten away with if Pat had been sober. With tender fingers he brushed back a lock of tumbled hair from Pat’s forehead, then left.

  The music was louder now, the partiers singing along with the record, “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” except that William Holborne was putting it a bit differently. “I’m Just Wild About Carrie” was what he warbled right into the ear of its most appropriate recipient, in the process spraying one side of Carrie’s face with atomized droplets of gin-scented saliva.

  “You, sir, are absolutely disgusting!” she cried, locking arms with Ruth, who was still looking out the window, still waiting for the denouement to the little drama bei
ng played out a half block away. “And it’s time for us to go. Let’s gather up the girls, Ruth, before Deloria Littlejohn or my mother or someone on this block who values their sleep ’phones the police.”

  “Yet the evening is young and you are—I do not exaggerate, madam—the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met!” Will said all this without slurring a single word. He was soon joined by Jerry Castle and Tom Catts.

  “They’re leaving,” announced Will with a display of exaggerated dejection. “The evening has hardly gotten started and these choir babies are ‘much skidoo about nothing’—nothing at all.”

  “Well, we can’t have that!” boomed Jerry thickly. “Not to mention that, practically speaking, we seem to have lost all trace of Miss Barton.”

  Carrie and Ruth looked about the room in hopes of proving Jerry wrong.

  Jerry cheerfully elaborated: “We were having ourselves a nice cozy gas in the kitchen while I was helping the little lady prowl around for something ice-cold and zero-proof, and in marches this flannel-tongued hunkie or—or wop or some such species of Ellis Island gorilla, who starts to muscle in on my territory, and while I’m fending him off, I got a couple of thirsty professorial Yid butt-inskies stealing in behind me from the back porch, and now they’re buzz-buzzing around the flame of luscious Lady M, and before I can get her hustled away to safety, two la-di-dah lizzie boys with The-da Bara eye-paint flounce in and give me the puke-belly from the stinking reality of their very existence, and while I’m contemplating which of these disturbers of my very own peace is going to get the knuckle sandwich, I see my Lady Fair duck out and disappear into the night, and now I feel cheated and wholly maligned by cruel circumstance.”

  Will grinned. “You could have spared us the silly-quee, Jerry. She just walked in. See her over there by the clodhopper in the glee-club boater? Go tell her goodnight.”

  Jerry stiff-armed his way across the crowded dance floor to reintroduce himself to Maggie, as if such a thing were necessary. At the same time, Maggie was swimming in a different direction, over to Bella Prowse, who lay sprawled upon the carpet next to the Victrola, surrounded by a cluttered imbrication of phonograph records from the Prowses’ prodigious music collection. Reaching Bella, Maggie went down on her knees to put herself at eye level with her hostess.