Grab Bag (16 page)

I don’t think he realized how loud the crash would sound. But Aunt Julia sounded a heck of a lot louder. She leaned out the bedroom window in her nightgown, ringing that dinner bell for all she was worth. “Help! Police!” she was screeching.

Pop was so startled, I guess, that he just stood there looking up at her. She spied him, grabbed the pitcher off her washstand, and sloshed a whole gallon of water smack down on his head.

Then Jimmy Hogan’s dog Spot came whooping over. Spot’s got some bloodhound in him and I knew if he ever got hold of Pop’s pantleg it would be all over. I made a flying leap and got him by the rump. Then I put my hands around his jaws and held his mouth shut so he couldn’t do anything but whimper.

“Run, Pop,” I whispered as loud as I dared.

He heard me and took off like a rabbit. By then, people were hollering out their windows. A couple of men were running down the street with clubs in their hands. I dragged Spot back to his doghouse and stayed there petting him to keep him quiet till they’d searched the neighborhood and gone back to bed. Then I streaked for home. When I shinnied up the porch pillar, Pop was waiting to haul me in the window.

“Davy, are you all right?”

“Sure, Pop. Are you?”

I sort of expected a bawling out for following him, but he gave me a bear hug instead. “You saved my neck, old scout. What did you do with the dog?”

“Took him back to Hogan’s and kept him quiet till the men went away.”

“Good work, son. Do me another big favor, will you? Don’t ever breathe a word about this to your mother.”

“About what, John Turnbull?” There was Ma with her hair hanging down in braids over her pink kimono. “What are you two doing awake at this hour? John, you’re soaked to the skin!”

“Now Alice, don’t go getting all haired up.”

Pop might as well have saved his breath. Ma didn’t let up on him till she’d wormed out the whole story. Then she gave us both a tongue-lashing that would take the skin off a brass monkey. Then she busted out laughing.

“Thank the Lord Davy has sense even if his father hasn’t.” Then she dragged Pop off by the ear as if he’d been a little kid to get out of his wet burglar suit.

It was all over town about the burglar next morning, which was Saturday. Jimmy was over to tell me before breakfast, even. He said the burglar must have doped Spot because Spot sure would have caught him if he hadn’t. I said yeah, he sure must have. I was sort of glad when Ma called me in to breakfast.

After we ate, she put on her hat. “I’m going over to see how Aunt Julia survived the night,” she said. “You’re coming with me, Davy.”

“Aw Ma,” I said, “do I have to?”

“You certainly do. If you think I’m going to trust you out of my sight after what happened last night, you’re just as loony as your father.” Ma began to laugh again. “Honestly, you two!”

So we walked up Maple Street, but just before we got to Aunt Julia’s, we met the delivery boy from the ice cream parlor bringing the weekly box of melachrino creams. All of a sudden Ma got the same funny grin on her face Pop did when he started telling Aunt Julia about the burglar. She stopped the delivery boy.

“I expect those are for my aunt,” she said. “We’ll take them in for you.”

The boy thanked her, handed her the package, and whizzed off on his two-wheeler. I was watching him go, wishing I had a bicycle, when Ma nudged me in the ribs.

“Davy, take this candy, quick, and get it out of sight.”

I grabbed the box and stuffed it down my blouse. We boys all wear middy blouses with drawstrings that tie around our waists. They make handy sacks for swiping apples and stuff. I worked the melachrino creams around to the small of my back so they wouldn’t stick out too much.

“What am I supposed to do with it, Ma?”

“Skin over to Miss Hatherton’s and leave it on her doorstep, then ring the bell and run. Try not to let anybody see you.”

“But Ma, they’re for Aunt Julia.”

“Don’t argue, Davy. You were quick enough to help your father.”

She giggled a little, then made her face all stiff and solemn and went on to the house. I slid over to Miss Hatherton’s and left the box like Ma told me to, then I hurried back to Aunt Julia’s. If there was going to be another rumpus, I wanted to be in on it, even if I didn’t see anything funny about giving away two pounds of perfectly good chocolates to a sappy schoolteacher like Miss Hatherton.

I met Ma and Aunt Julia just coming out the door. “We’re going to take a little walk,” Ma told me. “Aunt Julia needs some fresh air and exercise to calm her nerves.”

“My nerves are perfectly calm, Alice.” Aunt Julia was fiddling with the catch of her parasol. “After living with your Uncle Hiram all those years, it would take more than a burglar to upset me. Anyway, I guess I taught him a thing or two. I only hope John remembers to bring over the glass and fix that broken windowpane.”

Poor Pop! All he’d got for his trouble was another odd job. Ma and Aunt Julia started down the street. I tagged along behind. After they’d gone a little way, Ma said, “Do you mind if we stop in at Millie Hatherton’s for a minute? I want to borrow one of her crochet patterns.”

“I thought you hated to crochet,” said Aunt Julia.

“Well, I’m trying to learn to enjoy it,” Ma mumbled.

Anyway, they went up and rang Miss Hatherton’s doorbell. The box wasn’t on the doormat any more, I noticed. I hoped she’d have the decency to pass it around, at least.

I needn’t have worried. We’d hardly got inside the door before Miss Hatherton was waving that fancy two-pound box of melachrino creams under our noses. She made sure Aunt Julia saw the card saying, “With Miles Peabody’s compliments,” too.

All of a sudden Aunt Julia was looking pretty sick. “No thank you, Millie,” she said when Miss Hatherton offered her the box of candy.

“But Aunt Julia,” I piped up, “I thought you were crazy over melachrino creams.”

“I don’t care for any, thank you,” she said in a voice cold enough to freeze the whiskers off a polar bear. “Alice, I believe I’d better go home. My nerves are a trifle on edge this morning.”

She was halfway home before she spoke another word. Then she let go. “That whey-faced Millie Hatherton!”

“Most people think Millie’s rather an attractive young woman,” said Ma.

“Young, indeed! She’s thirty-five if she’s a day. And how anybody could abide that sweet-sweet voice and those silly curls dangling over her forehead—Aunt Julia flounced into the house and practically slammed the door in our faces.

“What’s got into her?” I said. “She claimed she wasn’t nervous before.”

“Women’s nerves are funny things.” Ma was smiling again, don’t ask me why. “Run on ahead and set the table, like a good boy. Your father will have to eat his lunch in a hurry if he’s going to fix that window.” She was laughing out loud by the time she finished talking.

“I don’t see what’s so funny,” I said.

“You will, some day. Now if Miles Peabody only has sense enough to keep quiet.”

“About what, Ma?”

“Honestly, men are so dense.”

I didn’t know whether she meant Mr. Peabody or Pop or all three of us, so I just went and set the table. Pop came home, gobbled down his grub, and tore off to set that pane of glass for Aunt Julia. He was pretty sore about it when he left, but he came back grinning like a catfish.

“Guess what, Alice? Miles Peabody stopped by to see how your aunt was doing after her scare, and she fell all over him. Asked him in for a bite, waited on him like a king, fed him two pieces of pie. Last I saw, she was sitting on the arm of his chair, tucking a pillow behind his head and lighting his cigar.”

He grabbed Ma and gave her a big hug. “Guess your old man’s not so dumb after all, eh?”

Ma stuck her head up over Pop’s shoulder and winked at me. “You’re wonderful, John.” The queer thing was, she sounded as if she meant it.

So that’s how Mr. Peabody got to be Uncle Miles. Pop told him the real story about the burglar quite a long time after the wedding. Uncle Miles almost laughed himself sick. So then I told him about Miss Hatherton and the melachrino creams and that’s when he gave me the genuine timber wolf’s tooth. He said I’d earned it. I still don’t quite see how.

TWICE IN MY LIFE
I have had the interesting experience of dreaming an entire story from start to finish, writing it down the next morning, and later selling it. This was the first, and is the only story of its kind I’ve written so far. It was published in
Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine,
July 1965, as “Quietly, by Night.”

I had been sleeping badly ever since my husband died. My first night in the new apartment was not likely to be a good one. I put off going to bed as long as I could, but at last it became pointless to sit up any longer.

It is a disagreeable business, taking off your warm clothes long after the heat has gone out of the pipes in a house that is not your own. Your nightgown is cold, the bathroom is cold, the sheets are coldest of all when there is no long-familiar though perhaps not greatly loved body sharing them with you. I had a hot water bottle, but it seemed a ridiculously small thing in the midst of so much emptiness. So I lay and shivered.

At least the place was quiet. Below me lived two deaf old sisters. Above was only the dressmaker’s flat, empty now that the woman had died. I’d happened to notice the obituary notice in the paper because it was near my husband’s. Suddenly while at work, it had said. There was still a dirty card reading
SERAPHINE LABERES, DRESSMAKING AND ALTERATIONS
stuck over the mailbox. If she’d gone a week earlier, I could have had my choice of the two apartments. Perhaps the top floor would be lighter and airier. But the middle was always the warmest, my brother-in-law told me.

It certainly was quiet. “Next door to a convent,” my brother-in-law kept reminding me, as though this was an advantage. In fact neither one of us know the first thing about convents, and very little about the Protestant church with which we fancied ourselves to be affiliated. My brother-in-law is one of those fat, red-faced men who like to point out the obvious in loud, hearty voices with a view to cheering one up. I was sick of him and his everlasting good intentions.

Gradually, as my body warmed the bed, I began to experience something like a sense of comfort. All that was behind me now: Henry’s illness, the hospital visits, the funeral, the awkward condolences and the forced replies, the exhausting and harrowing toil of breaking up my long-established household, the disagreeable business of the insurance. My brother-in-law really had been helpful over that. He enjoyed making the company disgorge money just because somebody had died, even though neither the loss nor the gain was his. “Nicely provided for,” he’d kept repeating, pleased as though he’d been the farsighted one himself.

There was plenty for me to live on. Nevertheless, I should find something to do. I was not used to being idle. It might be pleasant to hold a job again, if one could be found in our gone-to-seed mill town. I could leave this quiet three-room flat every morning and not come back until suppertime. In between, there would be things to do and people to talk to. Not that I was much of a talker myself, but others would chat and I should hear the cheerful noise of voices. And on the weekends when my brother-in-law’s wife telephoned to invite me to Sunday dinner, I could say, “Thank you, Martha, but I’ve been working all week and I have to stay home and clean my rooms.”

Grateful to have a plan, I dropped off to sleep.

As I mentioned, I had not been sleeping well and it took very little to wake me up. A flicker of lights on the ceiling did it this time. I lay for some while on my back, looking up at them, wondering what they could be. They were too small and feeble to be car lights; they moved in a confused, vaguely circular pattern. Finally I reached for my robe, stuck my feet into my slippers, and padded over to the window.

Two thoughts passed through my mind at the same time: “What on earth are they doing?” and “My brother-in-law was wrong.”

Next door to a convent was not such a quiet place after all, it appeared. The nuns were conducting some sort of candlelight ceremony in the narrow, iron-railed garden below my window. I could barely make them out, ungainly shapes in their old-style long black robes, each with a lighted taper casting occasional yellowish gleams on her gray-white cowl. The flames looked so weak I wondered how they could possibly shine into my room, yet when I looked behind me, there were those tiny spots of light still reflected on the ceiling.

I tried to make out what they were doing, but there seemed no pattern or sense to their milling about. With some difficulty, I counted them. Fourteen. The number carried no significance that I knew of. After a while I got bored watching them and went back to bed. At once, as though I’d flipped a switch, the lights were gone. Out of curiosity I got up and went over to the window again. The garden was empty. I lay down once more, wondering if they did this every night and whether I’d get used to it.

The following day turned out far different and far busier than I had anticipated. To begin with, I still had a good deal of unpacking and settling to do. In the midst of this, the telephone man came. No sooner had he got the instrument installed than I impulsively picked it up and called the town library, where I’d worked before my marriage. Miss Harcourt was still there, quite old by now, of course, but she remembered me.

“Anna Harris. No, it’s Anna Goodbody now, isn’t it? … Indeed we’d rejoice to have you back. It’s so hard to get anyone suitable nowadays, with all the halfway intelligent girls moving away where they can get higher pay.” And so on, for quite a while. She asked if I could fill in at the North Branch that very evening, as it was the regular woman’s daughter’s birthday and she’d been hoping to get off.

Happy to be of use again, I said yes I thought I could manage all right and no I didn’t mind a bit, though I couldn’t make out whether I was not supposed to mind the short notice or the low wages. After a very complicated series of phone calls, it was arranged for me to be on duty at seven o’clock. This meant a quick pressing out of a suitable dress, a scratch supper, and a fast walk to the North Branch.