Читать книгу Mischief and Malice - Berthe Amoss - Страница 8

Two

“Where are you going?” Sandra Lee asked suspiciously. She had come down the hall so quietly I hadn’t heard her. She was staring at my curly hair.

“Out,” I said, putting the final touches on my face.

“It’s a school night,” said Sandra Lee.

“So what?” I asked.

“And your lipstick is purple.”

“My lipstick is Ripe Plum and Louis says I look like my mother too. So there!”

“Louis?! Since when do you call Tom’s father by his first name?”

“Since yesterday when he invited me to go out with him.”

“Out with him?! He’s a married man!”

“He is not! He may not be exactly divorced, but he’s been gone too long to be married. I heard Uncle Henry say so.”

“Emily Post says…”

“I don’t care what Emily Post says! I’m going to meet Tom.” I picked up my purse, did the trick with my lids and eyebrows and flounced out. At least, I tried to flounce, but Sandra Lee is an expert on the last word, and just before I slammed the front door, I heard her scream, “If you think you look like your mother, you’re wrong! You look like Medusa with those dumb curls snaking around your face!”

That is what I mean about Sandra Lee. She hits the nail right on the head when it comes to what to say for every occasion. I already knew the results of an hour’s work with the curling iron were disappointing. In the first place, my hair is almost black instead of pale, pale yellow, and in the second place, no matter how my hair looks, my nose is straight instead of turned up. Still, I hadn’t felt so bad about my looks until Sandra Lee compared me to the goddess with snakes for hair.

It was already eight-thirty and I didn’t have time to work on myself any more. Besides, I couldn’t go back inside and let Sandra Lee know I cared what she said. I went to the water faucet at the side of the house, turned it on full, and stuck my head under. The cool water felt delicious after the tortures of the curling iron. I let it run and rubbed my head hard. I suppose I got carried away by the sound of the running water; anyway, I was singing “Roll, Jordan” when I heard a man laughing.

I gasped, choked, and banged my head on the faucet straightening up. There was Louis.

“Oh, Addie,” he said between fits of laughter, “you’re marvelous! I haven’t enjoyed anyone so much in a long time. I …” more laughter. His laugh was contagious and I forgot to be embarrassed and laughed with him.

“I was washing out the curls because I look like Medusa,” I said.

“You’re absolutely right. Curls are wrong for your kind of beauty.” He touched my wet head and said, “They should have named you something very Spanish, like Dolores—yes, that’s it—you look like Dolores Del Rio.”

Right then and there, I fell in love. I’m not talking about puppy love. Nothing like Leonard. And absolutely as far as possible away from my platonic relationship with Tom. I mean really head over heels into real love, for the very first time in my whole life. Standing in the warm, honeysuckle night, a full moon shining down on me, with a mature man, I knew this was different.

How old was he? Could he really be forty already? If he was about twenty-four when Tom was born, he was about forty now. Maybe he was still only thirty-nine and a half. Thirty-nine and a half, and fifteen next year. That wasn’t too bad. It must have happened before, and he’d only be forty-four when I was twenty.

“Come on, Addie, don’t just stand there dripping. We’re late,” he said, handing me his handkerchief. “Dry your hair a little.” I hadn’t even noticed my hair was sopping wet. “Not that it makes any difference how your hair looks, because I’m sure Tom will think you’re lovely just as you are now.”

I yearned to tell him it didn’t matter to me what Tom thought as long as I looked like my favorite movie star to him.

“This car belongs to the Army,” said Louis as we walked to a battered old Ford. His hand was on my elbow guiding me. I had never been helped into a car except when Aunt Eveline died and the undertaker shoved me into the long black limousine they made us ride in. “They lent me a car to come home to New Orleans,” Louis added, going around to the driver’s seat. “The Army is very understanding.”

I loved the way Louis talked to me as though I were his age. “Yes, a gentleman needs a car,” I replied.

“I’m glad you consider me a gentleman, Addie. That’s more than some people do. I meant to say, though, that the Army understands I need to get my house in order, so to speak, before I can do my best work for them.”

Louis looked at me as though I should say something else, but I couldn’t think of anything. He put his foot on the accelerator, which gave a yelp like Pumpkin barking, and the car lunged forward.

“I’m not much of a driver,” said Louis.

“Oh, you’re a wonderful driver! It’s the car’s fault, I’m sure,” I answered.

“You’re very kind, Addie, and it’s a good thing for me that you are. I need your help with Tom.” Louis said this in such a sincere way, I was positive he had forgotten to use his silver tongue.

“I’ll do anything I can, Louis,” I answered.

As we drove past Three Twenty Audubon Street, we both looked at it. In the dark, and behind the sycamore trees that lined the street, it looked like it had before it was modernized; it looked like home to me.

“You miss Three Twenty?” Louis asked.

“Yes,” I said.

I could never think of Aunt Toosie’s as home. It was newer and much cozier, a grey-blue cottage, trimmed in what we call gingerbread, wood cut out in a lacy pattern and painted snow-white. Aunt Toosie had trained a Confederate Jasmine vine up a trellis and it made the whole front porch smell sweet. Inside, everything was “Early American,” Aunt Toosie said, although the furniture was only about ten years old. But it wasn’t home to me, even though it looked like something in a book.

Three Twenty Audubon Street had also looked like something in a book—by Edgar Allen Poe. Everything had been old-fashioned, just the way my grandparents had fixed it up. “Victorian”, they called it, for the Queen who sat on the English throne in the nineteenth century. The heavy furniture had been covered in dark upholstery. Thick curtains designed to keep out light and hold old musty smells opened up only to reveal more curtains made of lace and forever in need of mending or cleaning. There were little doilies and china figures everywhere. Dust catchers, Aunt Toosie called them. Not that Aunt Eveline and Nini, who worked for us, hadn’t kept every bit of the house spic and span.

“It’s funny,” Louis was saying, “but when I was away I used to think of Three Twenty more than my own home. I spent a lot of time there, many happy afternoons and evenings with your Uncle Ben, who was my friend. Did you know that?”

“No,” I said.

So many people had lived at Three Twenty Audubon Street besides me and Aunt Eveline. I could hardly remember her brother, my Uncle Ben. “This place is the repository of bygone years,” Aunt Eveline used to say happily, groping her way around the living room.

“I can almost see your Papa,” Nini would add, pausing in her dusting to gaze into the darkest corner of the room where my grandfather’s huge mahogany-and-mohair chair stood like a throne. “I sees him sitting there, reading his paper, nodding, ’cause he’s getting sleepy, jumping awake when he hears you come in the room. ‘Eveline! Fetch my cane! I’m going for a stroll on the levee!’”

Nini and Aunt Eveline would go on like that all morning as they traveled with the cleaning equipment through every room of the house, stirring up dust and calling up ghosts that had once lived at Three Twenty.

“An old couple moved out last week and a new family just moved in,” I said to Louis. “A man and his wife and a girl my age.”

“Is she a friend of yours?”

“Not really. I don’t know her yet. I think she may be a little older than I am. The postman told me about her.” Norma Jean was the girl’s name. I knew that much. “I think she has my old room,” I added trying to keep the envy out of my voice.

When Aunt Eveline died and I moved to Aunt Toosie’s, Nini had helped Aunt Toosie bring a few of my things to her house, but Aunt Toosie didn’t have room or even want the heavy old furniture and dark oil paintings. “Give it all to the Salvation Army,” Uncle Henry had said. Four truckloads of stuff, everything I have grown up with, were carted away. I had watched the men stagger down the front steps with the grandfather clock. Its bong had once scared me to death, but that day, it seemed to be calling for help, chiming sadly as it was jogged along. After the clock came my mother’s trunk, and even though Aunt Toosie had tenderly unpacked it and brought the contents to her house, it still was unbearable to see the trunk tossed in a truck. The only thing left in the house was the giant-size armoire too big to fit down the narrow attic stairs. Aunt Eveline had used it for storage and Aunt Toosie was supposed to go through it and take what she wanted, but it was full of junk and Aunt Toosie had never gotten around to it. The Three Twenty I knew was gone. Aunt Eveline was dead and Nini was semi-retired and only working now and then when she was needed. She lived in the country, waiting for the day her niece and my friend, Holly, would visit from her unhappy home in Chicago.

“Addie,” Louis interrupted my reverie. “I really meant it when I said I needed your help. Will you help me?”

“Oh, yes, Louis, I’ll do anything I can but—”

“But what?”

“But how could I help you?”

“Well, for one thing, you could get Tom to—well, I can’t expect too much. I mean I can’t expect him to love me, but if he could bring himself to forgive me for what I did, leaving him and his mother. Then maybe after a time—well, I guess that would be all I could hope for! Forgiveness.”

“Oh, Louis, I’m sure he’ll love you—after a while—the minute he knows how nice you really are. Anybody would!” I realized that I’d practically told him I loved him, and I could feel myself blushing in the dark. If I couldn’t say the right thing, why couldn’t I at least learn to keep my mouth shut?

“Tom has every right to refuse to even see me,” Louis continued. “I can understand that. That’s where you come in, Addie. If you let him know I’m human, not some monster, and that I deeply regret my mistake—if you think I’m all right, then maybe he’ll give me a chance. Do you see what I am?”

“Oh yes! Of course!” I said.

But what I saw was Tom thinking I was siding with his father against him and his mother, and suddenly, I was not nearly so sure that meeting Tom with Louis was such a great idea.

I was even less sure when the train pulled into the station with a lot of clanging and puffing steam. The conductor hanging on the steps signaled the engineer to stop and I panicked. What was I doing standing here with Louis, meeting Tom’s train? It wasn’t my business. It was all I could do not to run for all I was worth. Oh, Aunt Eveline, how do I get into such scrapes? Aunt Eveline declined to answer.

If I live to be a hundred, I will never forget the expression on Tom’s face when he got off the train. In the first place, I’d forgotten how grown up he was, or maybe he’d grown more since I saw him three months before. He looked a lot like Louis. In fact, he looked exactly like Louis, only younger.

“Tom!” I said, surprised by the resemblance.

He saw me and started to smile; he was getting out of the train and had one foot on the step when he saw Louis. He must have felt he was seeing himself as he would look in twenty-five years. Tom’s expression froze, and he tripped and fell. Louis rushed forward to help him up, but Tom was on his feet and gave him a shove with his shoulder, a look of pure hate on his face. Louis drew back as though he’d been slapped, and good old Addie, ready with the wrong word, cried, “Oh Tom, he’s your father!”

Tom took a deep breath and said quietly, “Hello, Addie.” Then he turned to Louis and said, “Hello.”

Tom’s face was white. He looked like Pumpkin when he’s been slapped. He didn’t seem able to tear his eyes away from his father, and Louis was staring at him, both waiting to see what the other would do. I couldn’t stand it.

“Oh, please don’t fight!” I said.

It was stupid because they were both too grown up to solve their problems that way, but it broke the ice. Tom turned to pick up the suitcase he’d dropped when he fell.

“Come on,” Louis said without looking at either of us. “I have a car.”

We had to walk single file out of the train station because it was so crowded with another train pulling out and people rushing around.

“All aboard!” the conductor shouted, and I wished with all my heart I could jump on that train and go somewhere—anywhere away from Tom and Louis and the awful tension between them.

By the time we reached the car, Louis had turned cheerful again. “Tom,” he said, “can you squeeze in front with Addie so you won’t be alone in the back?”

“Yes, sir,” said Tom coldly.

“Don’t call me ‘sir,’” Louis said in the same cheerful tone, “I’m your father!”

It was a mistake. Much too soon. I could have told him that. If he wanted Tom to love him, he’d have to do something. Nothing he said, no matter how silvery his tongue, would make a bit of difference with Tom. Why didn’t I think to tell Louis that when he asked for help? He didn’t know Tom the way I did and he kept making the same stupid mistakes, talking as though he were a normal father who came home every night. It didn’t work, and one look at the thin line of Tom’s mouth told me he was making Tom hate him all the more.

I tried to think of something to say to change the subject. If only I’d had Sandra Lee’s etiquette book. Dearest was a little too intimate for the occasion but I could have found the right phrase in Emily Post. Better yet, if only I’d had the sense to mind my business and stay home, I wouldn’t have a problem. I sat there tongue-tied while poor Louis hung himself.

Finally in desperation I said, “Tom, I read in the newspaper where Roosevelt made a speech and said all that matters is who fires the last shot.” I hadn’t exactly read it but Uncle Henry had and then announced it to everyone at the breakfast table.

“Yes,” said Tom, forgetting he was supposed to be mad, “and Hitler answered him and said ‘the last battalion in the field will be German.’ If I were the president, I’d send troops over there right now and put an end to that maniac!”

“He can’t do that, Tom,” said Louis patiently. “The president needs congressional—”

“I know what the president needs,” Tom interrupted rudely. “He needs congressional permission to go to war. If I were president, I’d figure a way around that, but since I’m just a kid in school, I don’t even have a say in who invades my own house.”

I gasped and stole a glance at Louis. He didn’t say a word, but he looked startled, then very angry. No one said another thing until we got home. Then Louis said sternly, “Tom, walk Addie to her door. Then go see your mother. She’s waiting for you in her room.”

“I know what to do,” Tom said rudely. “You park and I’ll walk home.”

With that he turned his back on his father, and we walked to my door, Tom striding ahead of me. I had never seen him so angry.

“Tom?” I tried.

“Goodnight, Addie,” he said.

There went my one and only friend. I slunk into the house. Sandra Lee was listening to the radio in the living room and I got up the stairs without her hearing me. The evening had been a gigantic flop. Some stupid to think I could get anywhere with a forty-five-year-old man when I couldn’t even make a dumb football player say more than “Hello” to me! And now, the only friend I had, hated me as much as he hated his father. I was a traitor and he knew it.

I looked in the mirror and saw that half the curls had survived the Jordan. Dolores?! I looked like Albert Einstein. Tears came to my eyes and I thought, oh, Aunt Eveline, why did you have to die before I grew up all the way? Please don’t send me any more penance, because I’ve done enough to cover dozens of sins I haven’t even gotten around to committing yet.

I turned off the light and went to the window. I could see my very own old room at Three Twenty only about fifteen feet away. Oh, how I wished I were there still, snug in my bed, too young to have a love life, with Aunt Eveline about to tuck me in and tell me what a great artist I would be some day. I’d been crying a long time in the dark, staring over at my window, when suddenly I could see in. The door to the lighted hall opened, and there in the window, silhouetted through ruffled organdy curtains, the kind I’d always wanted and never had, I saw a girl. I only saw her for a moment and heard a woman’s voice carry across: “Don’t forget your medicine, Norma Jean. Goodnight.” And the door shut out the light.