Monet Talks (2 page)

M
ama patted her pearls. They are a gift from Daddy, the last thing he gave her before he died in a freak accident that involved a seagull with a brain tumor the size of a walnut. That was going on twenty years ago. My minimadre has worn these mollusk secretions around the clock since then. That they still have nacre is a tribute to the high standards of Mikimoto. At any rate, Mama pats the pearls when she's agitated. She twirls them when she reaches her breaking point. If you see her necklace spin, you best hightail it out of there.

“Abby, it's about the St. Necrophilia Society.”

“Excuse me?” Mama only sometimes shocks me, but she never ceases to surprise me.

“You know, that exclusive club to which only blue bloods can belong. I think your family has to have lived in Charleston three hundred years in order to join. Of course we aren't eligible since we moved here only three years ago—”

“Mama, that's the St.
Ophelia
Society!”

“Are you sure?”

“Just a minute.” I tiptoed over to the door and pounded on it with my fist. I heard a muffled “ow” and the scraping of feet. “Yes, I'm sure. Look, I already know where you're going with this. Why do you want to join a club that doesn't want you as a member?”

“But they don't know me. If they did, I'm sure they would invite me.”

“Mama, they aren't going to change their rules just because you want them to.”

“I know that, dear. I may be old, but I'm not stupid.”

I made her wait until the count of ten. “You're not old.”

The telltale gems began a slow rotation. “Abby, you know how you're always saying that your only wish is for my happiness.”

“You say that, Mama, not me.”

“Let's not quibble over facts, dear. The point is, you want me to be happy here in Charleston, don't you?”

My husband Greg and I moved down to the coast when he retired as a detective on the Charlotte police force. Greg started a new life here as a shrimp boat captain. We invited Mama, who lived up in Rock Hill, South Carolina, to join us, which she did in a heartbeat. Greg and I were both amazed at how quickly she adapted to her new surroundings. She immediately joined Grace Episcopal Church—al
though she was not allowed to join the choir—and took advantage of their myriad activities. She also belongs to an eccentric circle of friends who call themselves the Heavenly Hustlers. To my knowledge, she was as happy as a body had a right to be.

“Mama, I don't have all day. Can you cut to the chase? What is it you want from me?”

“Why I never, Abby! In my day—”

“It's still your day. Last time I checked you were very much alive.”

“Well!” The pearls gained speed.

“Theatrics aren't going to help, Mama. If we're through here, I'm going back out to work.” I started for the door.

“I'm going to crash their ball.”

I whirled as the pearls twirled. “The St. Ophelia Ball?”

“Maybe ‘crash' was the wrong word. You see, dear, Betty Lou Crustopper has two tickets again this year, and she's not planning to go. In fact, she never goes. She hasn't gone since her husband, Cotton Crustopper, died in 1947.”

“How do you know Mrs. Crustopper, and what do her tickets have to do with you?”

“Abby, if you went to church, you'd know her, too. Every Sunday they wheel her into the sanctuary and park her up next to the organ. She likes to watch Scott Bennett tickle those keys. She used to teach piano. Didn't retire until she was eighty.”

“How old is she now?”

Mama's sigh was meant as a comment on my poor church attendance. “She turned a hundred and two in June. The entire parish was there—well, except for you and Greg. You should have seen Betty Lou try to blow out her candles. Some of the children tried to help—”

“The tickets, Mama!”

“I was getting there. Honestly, Abby, I don't know where you get your impatience from.” She sighed again. “Anyway, as I was about to say, Betty Lou gave me tickets to the ball, and I plan to use them. There is no point in letting perfectly good tickets go to waste, is there, dear?”

“She
gave
you her tickets?”

“Essentially.” As Mama backpedaled, her pearls slowed to a crawl and then reversed directions.

“Define ‘essentially.'”

“I might have traded them for a basket of muffins. But they were homemade muffins, and I chopped the dates myself. And it was a very nice basket, Abby, and I tied a pretty pink bow on the handle. Everyone in the nursing home was ogling it.”

It was my turn to sigh. “Let me get this straight. You talked a centenarian into trading two tickets to the St. Ophelia Ball for a batch of baked goods?”

“Let's not quibble over details, dear. The only
reason I'm here is to ask you if you're coming with me, or not.”

“So that's where I come in! Mama, from what I've heard, they have guards posted at the door, checking everyone's identification.”

“They check only the tickets, dear.”

“Even so, we could never pass for Mr. and Mrs. Cotton Crustopper. Mr. Crustopper has been pushing up daisies for over half a century.”

“But that's the good part. No one has to pretend to be Mr. Crustopper. The tickets read ‘Mrs. Cotton Crustopper and
guest
.' I'll dress up as Betty Lou—of course we'll have to rent a wheelchair—and you can be my guest. The only restriction is that the guest has to be male. They still don't allow same-sex couples. They don't allow divorcées, either, for that matter. They check on that. Divorced men, yes, but not divorced women. At any rate, we'll hit one of the costume shops and get you a fake mustache and a little boy's tux—no offense, dear.”

I must admit that for a millisecond I was tempted to participate in Mama's shenanigan. The St. Ophelia Ball is
the
event of the season. That's all folks talk about for two months prior and two months post. The talk is, of course, all speculation. No one really knows what happens at that ball except for the attendees, and their thin patrician lips are sealed. But it was absurd to think we could pull it off, and even if we did, would we dare tell anyone? I, for one,
would bust a gut trying to keep all that juicy gossip to myself.

“Mama, my answer is no.”

“Then I'll ask C.J. She'll do anything.”

Boy, wasn't that the truth. If my assistant accompanied my mother to the ball, Charleston society would never recover. And since Charleston is undisputedly the manners capital of the country, its decline would signal the end of Western civilization. Therefore, I had no choice but to accompany Mama and save the world as we know it.

“Okay, Mama, I'll be your date. But you've got to promise me you won't do anything that Mrs. Crustopper wouldn't do.”

“But she's confined to a wheelchair, and I want to dance.”

“Mama!”

“All right, dear. I promise.”

Just for the record, I didn't expect her to keep her word; Mama's promises are meant to be broken. But at least I'd be along to handle damage control. The South might teeter as a result of our charade, but it wouldn't topple.

 

To be absolutely honest, by the time I got home that evening I was brimming with anticipation. The St. Ophelia Ball is held in the Daughters of Fine Lineage building. If you reside in Charleston and don't know where that building is, chances are your lineage does not
meet their standards. The Daughters of Fine Lineage are every bit as secret as the St. Ophelia Society, and it was only by accident that I stumbled onto this building on lower Meeting Street. I mean that literally. I'd gotten a pebble in my pump and was hopping about on one foot, and lost my balance. The next thing I knew, I was sitting on some steps, and when I looked up I saw a row of tiny brass letters above a door.
THIS IS IT
, they spelled. Then several weeks later I was eavesdropping on some customers, Linen Ladies all, and I heard the word IT bandied about. I put two and two together and got three hundred—three hundred years of blood so blue, members of this exclusive group are forbidden to donate their periwinkle plasma, lest it cause the nurses to panic.

At any rate, both Mama and I had to work very hard to keep from spilling the beans over dinner. Just because Greg is no longer employed as a detective doesn't mean he's stopped detecting.

“I smell a rat,” he said as he passed the roast.

“I don't smell anything,” Mama said, and wiggled her nose like Samantha on
Bewitched
. The woman prides herself on her olfactory powers.

Greg turned to me. “Abby, what kind of nefarious plot are you two hatching?”

“Nothing, darling. Would you like the gravy?”

“What I'd like is to know how much trouble I have to prepare for. Will I need to bail you out?”

“Gracious no,” Mama said. “This isn't one of C.J.'s schemes.”

“Mama!”

“Aha,” Greg said, trying to mask a smile, “so you
are
up to something.”

“But it isn't illegal, darling. At least I don't think it is.”

“It's definitely not,” Mama said. “Unless we resist when they try to throw us out.”

Greg pressed his hands to his ears. “Okay, that's enough. I don't want to know the rest. Just remember that if I'm out shrimping, it may take a couple of hours for me to get back. Can you two stand to share a toilet in the holding cell with a dozen other women?”

“No problem,” Mama said, without skipping a beat. She carries paper liners in her purse wherever she goes.

I cut an extra large piece of pecan pie for my dearly beloved that evening. And behind closed doors he was the recipient of even more sugar.

 

Tuesday is C.J.'s turn to open the shop. Because the big gal is so competent, I am used to sleeping in late, with nary a care in the world—that is, if my grown children, Susan and Charlie, are not going through some crisis, and Mama is behaving, and my cat, Dmitri, is not out to con
vince me that I should have gotten a dog instead.

Dmitri can't get enough of Greg's fishy smell, so he spends the night curled up on my husband's back. Greg leaves to go to work before five in the morning; thereafter the pussy with the passion for
poisson
usually seeks out the next best thing:
moi.
The trouble is, I am a back sleeper, and Dmitri weighs ten pounds and counting. Some mornings I wake up unable to breathe.

That morning, however, Dmitri had resumed sleeping on Greg's side, so I was running about la-la land with a naked Tom Cruise and a fully clothed Jack Nicholson when the bedside phone rang. At first I refused to answer, but when Tom threatened to put his clothes on—and Jack threatened to remove his—unless I picked up, I struggled back to the land of the sentient.

My eyes were too bleary to read the caller ID. “Hello?”

“Abby, I didn't take him. I swear.”

“C.J.?”

“Please don't be mad, Abby. I've looked everywhere. Even in the armoires and the highboy drawers. Not that he could have gotten in those by himself, mind you, but he could have had accomplices.”

“C.J., please—”

“Granny Ledbetter had a goat back in Shelby,
North Carolina, that was an escape artist. Yes, I know, goats are famous for being able to escape from just about anything, but this one—we called him Homer—not only got out of his pen on a regular basis, but the next morning we'd find him locked up in Cousin Arvin's closet. It happened about a billion times. Granny Ledbetter said it was trolls who did that, but Abby, I don't think we have trolls in downtown Charleston. Although some of the tourists dress like that.”

I shook my head to clear it of cobwebs. It was an exercise in futility.

“
What
is missing, C.J.? Your granny's goat?”

“Don't be silly, Abby. It's Monet.”

The cobwebs disappeared. “The mynah?”

“Abby, are you hard of hearing?”

I hung up, threw on yesterday's clothes, and broke a few traffic laws getting to the store. Imagine the mixture of relief and irritation I felt upon discovering that verbose bird sitting safe and sound on one of his perches.

“C.J.! That wasn't the least bit funny. I could have killed someone driving over here.”

“Frankly, Abby, your bad driving habits aren't my fault. And this isn't what you think. That's not Monet in there. That's a common starling—
Sturnus vulgaris
. They were imported from England, you know. In 1890 about a hundred of them were released in Central Park by a group that wanted to have every bird men
tioned in Shakespeare flying loose on this continent. Well, they got their wish, because there's about two hundred million starlings in this country now.”

“What?”

“It's one thing to be hard of hearing, Abby, but not to listen is just plain rude.”

“I'm listening, I'm listening.” I was also giving the so-called missing mynah a closer look. “Well, I'll be! That
is
a regular old starling. How did that happen? I mean, a fancy starling like a mynah couldn't have turned into a regular one, could it?” I knew that was stupid of me, but seeing is supposed to be believing, and I was trying my darnedest to believe.

To her credit, the big gal chuckled only briefly. “That's a stuffed bird, Abby. Like the kind taxidermists make.”

“I'm calling the police.”

“I already did that. They should be here any minute.”

“Good. I know I'm going to regret saying this, but I was getting used to Monet. It's going to seem very quiet around here until we get him back.”

“Shouldn't that be
if
we get him back? Somebody obviously went to a lot of trouble to do this. This wouldn't have happened, Abby, if you'd given him to me.”