Mummers' Curse (4 page)

I upset myself when I actively dislike a student. It feels unethical, as deserving as the antipathy might be. Luckily, it doesn’t happen often. But it had surely happened with Renata, and the feeling was set in reinforced concrete.

“Happy New Year, Miss Pepper.” Her chilly voice made it abundantly clear that she in no way meant her words. “I hope you’ve been thinking about me. I was thinking about you because it is a new year, and a new start, and my last year in high school, and I’m hoping it will be a happy year for me, too. See you soon.” And that was that.

If Renata would put the energy into classwork that she put into trying to avoid the consequences of doing nothing except cheat, she might have an academic chance. But instead of doing her homework, Renata had repeatedly claimed I’d lost it, then handed in one take-home essay after she’d copied it, verbatim, from an A student.

I split the A between the two of them, which gave each a 50, which in turn translated into F’s. That was before winter break, and Renata had called me every other day since. The calls did not make me fonder of her.

I left the answering machine and sat down next to Karen, who still stared straight ahead. We both oohed and ahhed, although her oohs and ahs seemed a bit forced, at the sea of glittering instruments backed by equally ornate musicians.

Mackenzie had been right. This was the way to watch the parade—and if we’d done it his way all along, he’d be with us now. I tried not to think about that.

Four or more generations danced before us, from a child barely out of toddlerhood all the way up to a man who moved with the careful deliberation of old age. Their theme was “The Peaceable Kingdom,” and fantastic lions with feathery “manes” drilled beside silver and white lambs. The band members wore capes the colors of the U.N. flag, and their headpieces had platinum doves stitched on the satin.

I love String Bands. Their one-of-a-kind music is the sound of the parade and to me, its heart.

I’m not sure, however, why they’re called String Bands, because in addition to guitars, mandolins, banjos, bass viols, and violins, there were stringless clarinets, saxophones, flutes, and keyboards, both the metal ones of glockenspiels and the faux-ivory of accordions, plus drums—bass and snare. Stringed or not, those haphazardly collected and oddly combined instruments gave the bands their unique, upbeat sound.

The String Bands’ anthem, the one song every band includes in its repertoire, is “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers,” which contains the essence of their sound—exuberant, irrepressible, overflowing happiness. Not a music designed for tragedy or anything less than high-stepping.

“Time for your initiation,” I told my niece. “Now that you’re at least partly a girl of this city, it’s time for you to do a strut.” I leaned close to her. “The people in New Orleans do not have this at all,” I added, and then I stood up and demonstrated, doing my own variation, which boiled down to whatever felt good and moved in time to the music, and wishing I, too, wore blue and white mirrored sequins and didn’t feel so plain and unadorned.

And after a brief interval, Karen stood up and grinned as she took one step forward and half a step back, lifting an imaginary cape, bending forward and simply moving to the music.

We both giggled, and I didn’t explain—not a syllable—that the strut was probably an imitation of the African-American Cakewalk of long ago. This bizarre and wonderful celebration is one of the few places the stuff tossed in the pot had actually melted. But I kept it to myself.

And when we had made our way around the entire loft and collapsed back onto the sofa, Karen exhaled in a massive, shoulder-lifting, ultimate sigh and looked at me. “That was very bad, what happened,” she said with great solemnity.

I agreed.

“I was scared. The people screaming scared me.” I nodded.

“Even though I got to be on C.K.’s shoulders.”

“That part was good.” We held hands.

“He said there wouldn’t be any shooting this year. That all the shooting was a long time ago.” Karen’s tone was solemn. A great deal was at stake.

“He thought that’s how it would be. That’s what everybody thought, because this was
not
how it is, or was. This never happened before. This will never happen again.” Please, oh, please, don’t make me a liar on that last count, I silently begged. I needed to know that almost as much as Karen did.

“I wish I didn’t know that Mummer was dead.”

“Me, too.”

“I wish he wasn’t dead.”

The phone rang. I bolted. This had to be Mackenzie.

But the voice had no southern softness, no bass undertones. “Mandy!” my sister said. “You’re home. Karen’s there, too, isn’t she?”

“Yes, we’re—”

“Thank goodness you didn’t go to the parade. I’m so relieved!”

“Actually, we—”

“Did you hear what happened? Somebody shot a Mummer!”

“Yes, I—”

“Killed him! He’s
dead
!”

“I know. I—”

“That city! How can you
live
there?” She sounded more like our mother every day, a fact that would curdle her blood if she were aware of it.

Certainly, the city isn’t often mistaken for Utopia, but my sister’s method of disengaging, standing back, and pointing didn’t help. Besides, I was tired of blaming everything on geography. Cities don’t kill people, guns do. I hoped the murderer turned out to be one of Beth’s suburban soulmates.

“Karen’s fine,” I said. “But we were there.”

“There? Where? Not at the—”

“Yes. At the.”

“Nowhere near what happened, I hope.”

“Right there. When he fell into his suit. She seems okay and we’re talking about it, but you should know, in case she has bad dreams or anything.”

“Mandy!” Her inflection suggested that I’d purposefully exposed my niece to urban slaughter.

“It wasn’t like we could see anything gross.” A weak defense, but the best I could manage. “And we’re comfy up here now, and talking it through, so don’t worry.”

“I don’t feel good about her in an old warehouse in that city. No offense intended.”

“I’m taking some, anyway. This is historic Old City. Where I live once was a warehouse, but now it’s a loft. This is
chic
, Beth. This is Philadelphia’s SoHo.”

“I don’t go to New York’s SoHo,” she snapped. “And I certainly don’t take my babies there.”

This was a bad way to start the year, and the basis of it, the problem of the increasingly fearful suburbanite, of walls real and imagined, deserved a bigger chunk of time and thought than I was willing to donate at the moment.

“I’m sorry you were so worried,” I said as sweetly as I could, given that she hadn’t even
asked
whether I was all right. Let alone Mackenzie. “Would you feel better if I brought Karen home right away? We’re settled in with hot soup and the TV, but…”

She was too well bred, or at least too cowed by what my mother had said was the code of female politeness—never inconvenience anyone but yourself, a code my mother did not necessarily follow, by the way—to say what she meant, which was “bring my baby home
now
and I don’t care what you want.”

Beth sighed. I waited, counting on her excellent, if antiquated, standards. I wanted to stay put until I found out more about the Mummer. “No, no,” she murmured. “I didn’t mean… Thanks for offering, but I guess I’m being… I know you didn’t put her there on purpose. I tend to be over-protective at times…”

And thus do the city sister and the country sister once again stave off a value clash; plus, the trip to the hinterlands was suitably delayed.

However, two hours later, I’d had my fill of sequins, struts, and strings, but I hadn’t gotten a call from Mackenzie. His unpredictability and unaccountability were speed bumps on our path through life together. I was working at adjusting, not only understanding the demands of his profession, but honoring them. I took deep breaths and made a heartfelt New Year’s resolution to stop resenting Mackenzie’s job.

I instantly resented the need to make such a vow.

“Had enough parade for a while?” I asked Karen, who looked groggy. “Ready for the glories of Gladwyne?”

She regarded me blankly. We’d finished our soup and bread and topped it with ice cream and Oreos. Perhaps too many, her glazed expression suggested.

“Home. Yours. How ’bout it?”

She nodded. She was a big girl, not a baby like her brother, she was fond of reminding us. But she’d been on the town for twenty-four hours, slept in a strange bed in a former warehouse, seen a parade and a murder, and she was tired and homesick, although, like her mother, too polite to say so outright.

*

Even now, at the frozen nadir of winter, Beth’s suburb maintained a green lushness, although I don’t know how. Trees lose their leaves even on the Main Line, and climbing vines freeze. The residual greenness must be further proof of how money colors everything. I sighed and rang her bell.

Beth had a visitor, a slender woman with hair the color of pink grapefruit juice and features sharp enough to slice paper. As we unwrapped Karen, who had been packed off to my place wearing enough to survive a month of snow camping, we were introduced.

“This is my friend, Quentin Reed,” Beth said.

I’d already met women friends of Beth’s named Sidney, Michael, and Claude. Perhaps she collected the ambiguously named, but what to make of a day spent watching men dressed in sequins, feathers, lace, and satin, and an evening with a woman named Quentin? Perhaps we were headed for androgyny at long last, but was it a good thing?

“My parents really, really wanted a boy,” Quentin-the-girl said with an engaging grin.

True equality will be had when I meet a man named Rosabelle or Tiffany who says, “My parents really, really wanted a girl.”

“Quentin’s a therapist,” Beth said in an overly calm voice, after Karen had run upstairs followed by the household’s galumph of a dog, Horse. “You’ve probably heard her.”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course. That’s why you sounded familiar.”

“Good day,” she’d say on the radio. “This is Dr. Reed On the Air.” I had come to think of
Dr.
as her first name and
Air
her last. But as I’d drive wherever, listening to her ripe, fruity voice giving urgent advice and telling her “true stories”—nasty-funny case studies of neurotics she’d known—I’d imagined her fuller, older, much more subdued looking.

“The radio doctor.”

She smiled. “Among other things, yes.”

“Pleased to meet you.” I was, even though I’m leery of the sound-bite solution, of keeping therapy zippy enough to maintain ratings.

“I felt it would be good to have someone at the ready if Karen needs to ventilate,” Beth said.

Ventilation seemed the concern of steamfitters. Besides, was it wise to hire a shrink before there was any sign of emotional problems, like purifying drinking water just in case? Or did it instead insure that there would be problems?

“I agreed,” Quentin Reed off-the-air said, not surprisingly. “Given the dimensions of the child’s trauma. To be an eyewitness to such a dreadful event. The death, in essence, of a beloved icon, a clown.” She looked devastated herself.

“Not a clown,” I began. But that was irrelevant and arguable. “More to the point, we weren’t precisely eyewitnesses to the crime, only its results. I suspect that nobody actually saw it happen. After all, there were thousands of people watching, and not a peep until he collapsed, so it couldn’t have been too obvious when he was shot. Mostly, this is going to be a gigantic headache for the police.” And create more nights alone for me.

“Forgive me, but I find that a purposefully dispassionate—no, let us say dissociated—appraisal of a human tragedy,” she said in her mother-knows-best voice.

I felt properly rebuked, improperly perverse. “I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. I meant, the good news for Karen is going to be what makes it a problem for the police because there was precious little to see. No blood, no fearsome dying. All you could see was a painted face, and then it slipped down inside his costume. His headpiece stayed on top and the costume still stood up. It almost all looked unchanged. Much less violent than TV cartoons, to tell the truth.”

Quentin Reed’s mouth curled into a beneficent I-have-compassion-and-pity-for-your-unbelievable-ignorance smile. “I’m sure you’ll agree that a six-year-old is a much more vulnerable spectator than you would be. And death is so final, so absolute.”

Not a whole lot of room for debate there. What could I retort? That now and then there were temporary deaths? She’d have me shrink-wrapped in a white jacket within seconds. So I smiled, nervously, agreeing with who knew quite what. However, even if she’d said something grossly incorrect, how can you convince a serenely self-assured, certified mentally healthy professional that you are fine if she doesn’t think so? The more intense the protests, the more smugly superior the pro becomes. Nonetheless, probably because I am demented, I pushed on. “We didn’t see the shooting. We didn’t see his wound. The actual crime probably didn’t take place anywhere near where we were. The wind and momentum and maybe tradition kept him moving, possibly for blocks. We only saw him slide—”

“Yes, yes,” she said. “You’ve made that clear. I must say that I’m not only worried about Karen, but about you. Perhaps more so. You are in serious denial. You’ve been on what was intended to be a happy, bonding outing and instead, you’ve witnessed a hideous murder.”

“I’ve been trying to say that we didn’t witness the—”

“And you have the maturity to comprehend its full significance,” she barreled on. “Not only was the man murdered, but so were your dreams and hopes for the day.”

Were the two things equal? One dead man versus my soured plans?

“It isn’t healthy to stuff feelings,” Quentin Reed said. “Makes you sick.”

Was she actually Beth’s friend? Did they talk this way to each other all the time? And weren’t shrinks supposed to
listen
? “Doctor,” I began, then I had a thought. She was going to be peering into Karen’s psyche. “Your specialty—your branch of medicine…that’s an M.D.?”