Mummers' Curse (28 page)

And from a girl I went to junior high with who thought I would have been married and have changed my name by now, or was I staying with the maiden name for feminist reasons, but anyway, she was collecting for a violent-crime victim’s charity and thought I might want to donate memorabilia.

“I really
wish
,” Helga began.

I nodded. “I’ll just bet you do.” I walked out of the office, still flipping through pink slips. The one that caught my attention said only, “Grassi wants to talk.”

I called Dolores at lunchtime. “Yeah?” she asked. “What?”

“I don’t know. You called me.”

“Me? Oh, that. I was blue, so Stephen called for me. I nearly forgot.”

That family was an odd organism, treating Dolores like an eggshell-thin piece of porcelain when she seemed anything but. When last seen, she hadn’t seemed too debilitated to lift a phone. In fact, she’d been swaggering and royally pissed with me and Emily Semow both. And the time before that, she’d seemed pretty much perked up by the idea that Vincent Devaney still carried a torch for her.

I envisioned that torch as real, not metaphorical, and pictured Vincent as an Olympic runner with the flaming object in his hand, racing for Dolores, trying to pass the torch on New Year’s Day. I had to think more about that.

“About the message,” I prompted. “You wanted to say…?” I waited. Nothing. “Do you want to come here, to the school, and talk to me?”

“Your school?” I heard a shudder. “I really don’t feel up to travel.”

As if I were phoning from Kuala Lumpur, instead of two handfuls of city streets away. She was playing Baby Grassi. “Well, then?” I asked. “You want to talk now?”

“I, ah…” I thought I heard her say “that teacher” to someone, but her hand was over the mouthpiece of the phone and her words were muffled. “Okay,” she said when she returned. “I wanted to tell you that I hope you’re not saying anything in your article that would be…embarrassing. No,
wrong
. My family has suffered enough with the talk going around.”

“That is certainly not my intent,” I said.

“Then, you aren’t going to say anything about my engagement?”

“Why would I? I’ve said it a hundred—I’m not writing about you or any specific Mummers.”

The awful thing is, the more I had to protest this very point, the more interesting Jimmy Pat’s life and death became. He’d lived and died a Mummer. Born into the tradition, a neighborhood boy, gambled with and borrowed from other Mummers. Fought with Fabian over Mummer embezzlement. His friendship with Vincent was twined around the Mummers, and Vincent’s alibi was locked into parade behavior. He’d make a great symbol to hang the article on. I felt excited about the possibilities of the article for the very first time, and I could see a shape to it.

“Because it isn’t true,” Dolores said. I had trouble remembering to what she referred. “You’ve been with Emily so much maybe you think…but it just plain isn’t true. Jimmy Pat and me, we’d have been married next week.”

I could still hear male rumbling in the background. “Jimmy Pat never would’ve shamed me and my family that way. To call off a wedding after everybody’s invited, everything is done? Because there’s suddenly somebody else? That’s impossible. Worse even than leaving a girl at the altar. He wouldn’t do it.” Her voice lowered. “He wouldn’t
dare
to do it.”

My mind spun with the possibilities of a feature about him, but that didn’t mean I’d have to touch on Dolores’s tender pride. Maybe.

“Because if you printed anything like that, it would be…” I could almost feel her hand cover the mouthpiece for a moment. Then she returned, “…slander. Libel. One of those. I would sue.”

Goodie. I could have dueling lawsuits and wind up not only unemployed in my real profession, but also in one that was completely imaginary.

“Don’t drag my name in the dirt,” Dolores said. “I know journalists get weird about sources and things like that. I watch TV, I know about the ethics thing. Just don’t. It wouldn’t be good for me. Or for you.”

“What do you mean?” I said softly.

“What does it sound like I mean?” And she hung up.

Had I just been threatened, or had she simply meant it would defame her supposed honor and do me no good to be sued for libel?

I mused over this, one eye on the frosty door pane, deciding whether to brave the outside for quality sustenance or to simply rehydrate one of the instant-soup tubs stashed in my desk drawer. And while I peered outside and pondered, Vincent Devaney came down the stairs.

For obvious reasons, our relationship had grown strained, and we both sighed at the same moment. And then there was nothing to do but attempt a smile. Assuming his innocence, and I so wanted to, time would cure the impasse if we kept our balance during it.

“Sorry about that business with Fabian this morning,” he said. “He’s a little on the edge.” He nodded in the direction of the lunchroom.

Fabian wasn’t on the edge. He was in free fall without a net. Vincent was much too forgiving of his clubmate’s behavior, and that made me still more leery of my coworker. I also hadn’t retrieved the soup, but I walked with him because I wanted to talk about this morning. About lots of things, in fact.

“He’s crazy,” I said. “And dangerous. He admits taking money, and he’s terrified somebody’s going to tell the cops, and Jimmy Pat knew about it.”

“You think Fabian?” Vincent said.

I didn’t commit, but I tilted my head a bit so as to suggest that I surely wasn’t ruling that out.

“You’re not going to do something dumb now, are you?” Vincent asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t want anything to do with a murderer, if that’s what you mean.”

“Ah, he wouldn’t…Fabian’s loud, but…”

“You guys really stick together, don’t you? Everybody’s angry with one another—but protecting one another, too.”

“Like family, I guess,” he said. “You fight, you make up, you say things, but in the end, you’re one thing, and you stick together. Take care of each other.”

“Well, somebody took care of Jimmy Pat, all right.”

We walked in silence. “I’m going to the club tonight,” he said. “There’s stuff to take apart, store, you know. Fabian’ll be there, most likely. Maybe he’ll say something, I’ll know more.”

“And then what’ll you do?”

Again he said nothing. Didn’t matter. I knew the answer. You didn’t turn on family. Unless, of course, it was your neck or theirs.

“Any, ah, news?” Vincent finally asked.

I shook my head. “And that business in the paper about my article? It’s rank nonsense. I haven’t started writing yet.”

Vincent looked overly grateful.

“And if—when—I do, I won’t put anything in about you, what you told me. The Dolores stuff. You know that, don’t you?”

“I think that, but you never know what’s going to turn up in the press.”

I thought of what the reporter yesterday had written and nodded. “But there is something I’d love to know,” I said. “For my own curiosity, not the article.”

“So this’d be off the record?”

“Sure.” Where was that record? When had I become Brenda Starr, and what did this say about how we judge people? Was it that easy to create a persona? I say I’m something and
voila
I am? “Off the record,” I said in a saucy journalistic tone. “Look—no tape recorder, no notebook.” No reporter, if he had any common sense left.

His turn to nod, giving me permission to ask away.

“How did you find out that Dolores wanted to see you the day of the parade?”

First he looked surprised, then he frowned in concentration, shaking his head. “I don’t remember.”

“Did she phone?”

He frowned some more. “No,” he finally said with an air of discovery. “She wrote.”

“To your house?”

“To the club, around a week before the parade.”

“A letter with a stamp?”

“Why? What kind of question is that? I don’t…yeah. Sure. It must have. It was a Christmas card, actually, a Season’s Greetings.”

“You said she wrote.”

He nodded. “On the card, not separate.”

“You remember what it said?”

We were near the lunchroom, but we paused at its door for more privacy. “‘Two o’clock, January first, my corner.’ That’s what it said.”

“My corner?”

“Hers. I knew what she meant. And then it said, ‘Please. Important.’ And then,
D
, with a heart around it.” He sighed. “I knew she was going through something bad. This was after I saw her crying that day, you know? I mean… I was her…old friend.” He apparently no longer saw himself as her Romeo, and it seemed to diminish him. The possibilities in his life had narrowed since last we’d talked about Dolores and her summons.

“I assume this message was in her handwriting.” We went into the faculty lunchroom and spoke in low tones as I turned the heat on under the kettle.

He shrugged. “Sure. Been awhile since I’d seen it. A little more grown-up now, I thought. Besides, you could tell she was upset. It was a little wiggly, like she was nervous, know what I mean? Green ink.”

“But her writing, correct?”

“What are you getting at? I think so. But it’s not like we used to write letters. In high school, if she sent me a card, it always had a heart around a
D
. So that was her signature, sure.” He retrieved a paper bag from the refrigerator and unwrapped a sandwich. “Why?”

“Just wondering.” The kettle shrieked, and I had to run upstairs for the soup stuff.

I found the cardboard containers and chose corn chowder, closed the drawer on the remaining tub, and once again left the room. Not a memorable lunch, but it would get me through the day.

My path was blocked by Sally Bianco. “Did you read it yet?” she asked. “My essay?”

I hadn’t. “I, ah, skimmed it. I’m looking forward to a closer read tonight.”

“I’m so nervous you won’t like it. My mother, she said my ideas about honor, like you asked for, were tarnished.”

Her mother sounded like the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse. “Oh, please. You have honor aplenty. You’ve atoned enough, been punished sufficiently for your sins. Let go of it. I have.” This was a blatant lie. I was being sued, pressured, possibly endangered by the aftereffects, of her fall from grace.

“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.”