Reinhart's Women (39 page)

Reinhart had been thinking. He picked up the ladle again and gestured with it. “Marge, you don’t know me at all, and if you did, you might not trust me anyway. But do you suppose you could hold off on this sale for just a little while? I’ll tell you why:
maybe
I can come up with a better offer. A week from Monday I’m going on TV regularly, with a spot on the early-morning
Eye Opener Show.
I’ve been in touch with the Epicon Company, where as I told you I’m a consultant, about the idea to market the chili. If I have any kind of success on television, there’s no limit to what might be possible. What occurs to me is something along this line: what if I became involved in the Center Café? Maybe buy into it in some fashion? Become your partner, under an arrangement whereby either one could buy out the other if it didn’t work?”

For the third time Marge colored slightly. It occurred to Reinhart that she might have a kind of crush on him, she who was so rough-and-ready with her customers. She was probably not used to this sort of attention. She claimed the ladle from him and began to fill more chicken buckets with chili.

“My gosh,” she said. “I just don’t know what to say.”

“If you could just hold off on making a deal with anybody else for a few days.” Reinhart gestured. “Some interesting ideas have begun to occur to me. You said your main business was early in the morning. I’ll bet you serve really great traditional Midwestern breakfasts: country sausage, farm-fresh eggs, flapjacks, hashbrown potatoes, ham steak...”

Marge was nodding shyly. “I serve a nice oatmeal in wintertime, with cream and brown sugar, and usually I get a chance to make my own doughnuts and coffee cake.”

Reinhart sighed. “Generally nowadays the last place you can find real food is in the country!” He accepted a filled bucket from her. “What I have in mind is that you would continue to handle the breakfast for the working guys on the early shift, but maybe on Sundays from say about this time of day until three we might do a brunch together. All your great classic dishes, to which might be added an English mixed grill with kidneys, lamb chops, broiled tomato, and so on, and maybe chicken crepes and some form of seafood, say shrimp quiche or individual soufflés. We might attract people up from the city, especially in the oncoming warm months.” He took the bucket to a counter and fitted on the cardboard disc that was its top.

“Maybe we could start like that, and if it went over, we might think of doing something ambitious with dinners—again on the weekends, at least at first. We could have an interesting menu. What I’m thinking of is a simple one, with only a few main dishes. Say two really good down-home American classics, country ham and red-eye gravy and deep-dish chicken potpie, and then maybe I could try my hand at a dish or two, maybe veal Orloff or poached fish in season. No doubt one must always offer steak in addition, but that would make only five or six dishes, with a few appropriate opening courses and a dessert or two.”

Marge put down the container she had just filled and leaned against a counter. “Whew,” said she. “I’m getting a little dizzy. Things had been getting more and more quiet for years, and then all of a sudden this now.”

It looked as if between them sufficient food had been tubbed. Reinhart now fitted the rest of the tops on the buckets.

“This is all speculation as yet,” he told her. “But I’m not talking completely through my hat. A big executive in the food business is practically a member of my family, and I really am going to start appearing on television. If you could just hold off for a while on the selling of this wonderful place to some guy for a warehouse, maybe I’ll be in a position to talk turkey about an arrangement that would work out for us both.”

“It’s true,” said Marge, “that a lot of trade would come to a restaurant operated by a TV chef.” She was grinning as if to herself: he could see that he had successfully corrupted her, whether for good or ill. He wondered whether he was himself corrupt in supposing he might get Grace to back him in this venture.

He and Marge proceeded to quarrel about the bill for the chili, he of course wanting to pay and she refusing to accept his money. Bob the dishwasher suddenly stopped his work and slipped through the door to the outside.

“There,” said Marge, mock-reproachfully, “you’ve got Bob all worried. He’ll have to take a drink to calm down.”

“But for all my talk,” said Reinhart, “it might well be that nothing will come of any of these ideas, and until something positive actually happens I want to pay as I go.” He gave her the money and then shook her hard, sinewy hand. “I hope we’ll be able to call each other partner one of these days.”

Marge gave him a crinkly smile. “I’d like that.” She steered him to the door through which Bob had slunk, as if it were more convenient to go out past the garbage cans and along the narrow passage between the buildings to reach his car parked at the curb out front. He suspected that for her own reasons she did not want to attract her husband’s attention.

“Where does Bob go for a drink on Sunday?” He had half expected to see the dishwasher lurking, with brown-bagged bottle, in the alleyway.

“Over to the cellar of the delicatessen,” said Marge. “It’s his sister and brother-in-law run the business.”

“Everybody’s related to one another in a village like this,” Reinhart noted admiringly.

When they got to the car, he unlocked the trunk and put the buckets therein, arranged in a snug fashion so that they would not be likely to overturn.

“Well,” said Marge, “I guess there’s certainly enough there for anybody to decide whether it’s good.”

He realized that she assumed he was taking the chili to be tested by the people at Epicon, and he saw no point in disabusing her: explaining would have taken too long.

“On the other matter,” said Reinhart. “If you could just—”

“It’s my old man who’s so all-fired anxious to sell,” Marge said. “You know how it is when you’re married—I don’t see a ring on your finger, but you must have been married once to have a great big fine-looking daughter like the one you brought the other day.” She waited for his response.

Reinhart was sure he had given the last name when introducing Edie, but such was the power of the expected.

“Which one was your husband, out there in the booth? I didn’t think either one of those fellows was wearing a uniform.”

“The fatter one,” said Marge. “He won’t wear the chief’s uniform on Sunday. He’s got a lot of niceties like that.” It wasn’t clear whether she was being ironic.

“I’ll be in touch,” said Reinhart.

He drove the twenty miles cross-country to Paradise Farm and parked near the barn, as before. From the trunk he took as many buckets as he could carry in one big embrace and walked around to the rear of the house. Distracted by a need not to spill the chili, he did not digest the fact that no other cars were visible on the property, but as he stood on the little step and shouted helplessly at the closed back doors, screen and wooden, he began to wonder whether anybody was there.

Suddenly a known face appeared behind the glass panel and peered disagreeably out at him: it belonged to Brother Valentine, AKA Raymond Mainwaring. After an instant the hostile expression changed to neutrality, and Raymond turned the key in the lock, opened the inner door, then unfastened the latch on the screen door, and pushed it open.

Reinhart by now was in some worry as to the buckets of food, which had begun to feel uncertain in his grasp. He remembered that they had probably not been made waterproof to hold fried chicken He rushed to the kitchen table.

“This is lunch,” he said, freeing himself of the load. “There are a couple more buckets in the car. I’ll go get them.”

But Raymond lifted a beige palm and spoke wearily. “Too late.”

Again Reinhart had been slow to notice a lack. This time it was people who were missing. Aside from Raymond and himself there was no one in the kitchen.

“Do you mean—?”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” said Raymond. He pulled a chair away from the table and sat down upon it in slow motion. “Paradise Farm is now a community of one.”

Reinhart took a chair for himself. His first thought was selfish: all this chili and rice & beans. But then he asked Raymond what had happened.

“I was on television.” Raymond wore an expression that probably was a cruel grin, but he didn’t have the right face for it; he merely looked puzzled. “I was investigative-reported.” His look turned certifiably peevish. “The world has too many people in it whose profession is to interfere with the plans of others.”

“That’s probably true. ... What happened, were you accused of something?”

Raymond tightened the flesh around his eyes. “No,
I’m
clean! But to be investigated is to be guilty in the eyes of some people.” He pushed out a bitter chin. “They left, all of them. Either on their own or some relative came and hauled them off. All of a sudden Paradise Farm became a potential Guyana and I was working up to be a Reverend Jim Jones.”

“I’m really sorry to hear that,” Reinhart said. “The farm sounded like a good project to me as you sketched it out.” He looked at all the buckets of food. “Well, you and I can have lunch anyway. How about some chili con carne, beans and rice?”

Raymond winced suspiciously at him. “That wouldn’t be your idea of darky food?”

“Come on, Raymond, don’t be rude. The other day you told me you didn’t have anything to eat here. Now I’ve brought something, and nobody’s here to eat it.” Reinhart got up from the table and poked into the wall-hung cabinets and counter drawers until he found two plates and two forks. He opened a couple of the buckets and served them each a hearty portion of beans and rice covered with the chunks of beef in their thick sauce.

“Try this.” He put a plate in front of Raymond.

The younger man took a morsel of chili on the end of his fork. He made a face after chewing it briefly, but he did not spit it out. “Where’d you get this? It’s certainly not very good.”

Reinhart ignored the complaint. “Did the young people too leave because of just the TV thing?” he asked, beginning to eat from his own plate. But the chili wasn’t as good today; of course it was tepid.

“There actually weren’t any young people as yet,” said Raymond. “I misrepresented that situation. I was anticipating. I intended to make an appeal to youth, and I assumed that they would answer it. But the fact is that in the short time we had been under way, I could get only older people, retired persons, and widows. That was one of the things that caused a certain suspicion about my motives, I suppose. It was obvious that the older people couldn’t do the heavy work of running a farm, especially since most of them were urban types.”

“You know what I forgot to bring?” asked Reinhart. “The beer! Though it
is
Sunday. But I’ve got connections with a little deli and could have bought some under the counter, I bet.”

Raymond looked along his dark nose. “I don’t use intoxicants,” he said disapprovingly.

“Well, for me water just doesn’t do the job with something of this persistent a flavor.” Nevertheless he got up and searched the cupboards, without any help from his host, until he found a glass. But when he turned the Cold faucet and then, unrealistically, the Hot, nothing came from either.

Raymond at last said dolefully: “There’s a well here, with an electric pump. But in fact the power has been turned off owing to failure to pay the last bill.”

“Then,” Reinhart said, “it’s just as well I didn’t try to heat this food. Isn’t there anything to drink around here?”

Raymond got up. “There’s another well outside, with an old hand pump.” He rose and led Reinhart out the door, the latter bringing along the glass.

The warm light and gentle breeze were of the kind that could make failure even worse, Reinhart well knew from personal experience: sometimes good weather was a mockery and rain a balm.

Raymond walked straight and rigid in his denim work-clothes. He was as tall as Reinhart, though more slender; taller than his late father. Behind the barn was an ancient rusty horse trough, with a pump at one end. Raymond seized the long iron lever and began to move it up and down.

Reinhart held his glass at the pump’s mouth. “Has this thing been used lately?”

“Once for washing a car.”

Reinhart decided that further questioning would be offensive, and therefore, when after much squeaking the water suddenly gushed forth in a rust-colored flow that immediately overwhelmed the waiting tumbler and wet his sleeve to the elbow, he turned as if in a certain disorder owing to the flood, and with his back to Raymond, got rid of the glassful without tasting a drop.

“Thanks,” said he, coming around after this sequence was at an end. “What’s next for you now, Raymond?”

The young man looked expressionlessly at the dripping pump. “That’s the obvious question.”

“Do you mind my asking, how did you come to be at this farm? Do you own it or what? Granted, it’s none of my business.”

Raymond answered in a neutral, noncritical fashion: “You’re curious about only the financial arrangements? You have no interest in my beliefs?”

“That’s not tr—” Reinhart began, but caught himself. “Yes, I suppose it
is
true. It’s too important a subject on which to tell diplomatic lies.” He was still holding the water glass and was therefore preoccupied physically with it: funny how you can’t find a decent way to get rid of certain things at special times. “My idea of such matters is that they are private. I generally feel a certain disdain, perhaps unfairly, when I hear on TV that some celebrity has been ‘born again.’ But I think what I dislike is not his faith, which is none of my business, but that he is telling the public about it. But that’s a Christian obligation, I suppose.” He suddenly appealed to Raymond: “Would you mind if I put your glass down here?” He pointed to the base of the pump. “I’ll take it back to the kitchen in a moment.”

“The fact is,” said Raymond, himself preoccupied, “I always believe in what I stand for. I don’t repudiate my basic beliefs of a decade ago, which are not really incompatible with what I believe now. But I seem to have a gift for falling in with persons whose motives will not bear scrutiny. For example, certain of my supposed political comrades were common thugs and are today still serving time for criminal acts for which their ideology was a hypocritical mask.” He kicked some dirt and stared into the horse trough. “Leave it to me to walk right into what was really another version of the same thing.”