Читать книгу Me and Fat Glenda - Lila Perl - Страница 8

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That very same afternoon Drew and Inez and I drove to downtown Havenhurst to look up Mr. Calvin Creasey and see about renting the house. Of course, before that we had to drive back to “the box,” as Inez called the apartment, and pick her up and take her to see the house.

At first she couldn’t believe it. But after we got there and I crawled in the living-room window again and unlocked the front door, Mom was really excited. She rushed all over the place from the basement to the third-floor attic.

“You know,” she said in a confidential whisper to Pop and me, after she calmed down a little, “it’s spooky, absolutely spooky, to find a place as perfect as this.”

Of course, anybody else’s mother would have screamed at how awful the kitchen was and would have had a fit about the rusty plumbing and the cracked tile in the bathroom. There were plenty of rooms, though. About ten or eleven, I guess, if you counted all the little funny-shaped ones, including the round one that was shaped like a sharpened pencil point and stuck up at the top of the house.

After Mom finished looking around, Pop took her outside and showed her the yard and outlined some of his plans for where he would reassemble the two most important junk sculptures he had transported from California, and where he would pile his “raw materials.”

They seemed to have everything figured out, and I only hoped they wouldn’t be disappointed when they went to see about renting the house. Drew must have been a little worried, too, because he kept warning Inez not to appear “too anxious” when they saw Mr. Creasey; that might make Mr. C. up the rent.

The thing that kept bothering me the most was that, even though it was a nice sunny afternoon and there were houses all up and down the street, not a single person came in sight the whole time we were there. Anybody would have known we were looking at the house for the second time that day because of the garbage truck parked out in front. Yet nobody showed up, not even Glenda.

All the way to Mr. Creasey’s office, Inez kept humming and eating raw mushrooms from the bagful she’d gathered that morning on her bicycle trip to the woods. Every other mushroom out of the bag, she popped into Drew’s mouth while he drove. Luckily, I had just had a chance to slap an L-burger together when we went home to get Inez and I was eating that now, cold. I know I said I couldn’t go on with the alphabet-burgers after sharing K-burgers with Toby at our last meal together, but I guess the prospect of having a friend again had cheered me up, and anyhow the L was sitting around handy at the moment.

Finding Mr. Creasey took a little while. We got to the old business section in Havenhurst all right and found 108 Broadway. It was an upstairs office over a hardware store that still had advertisements for barnyard feed in the window and rolls of chicken-coop wire for sale out front.

The stairway up to Mr. Creasey’s office was so dusty that our shoes left prints on the steps. At the top, the sign lettered on the door said that Mr. Creasey was a lawyer, realtor, county clerk, insurance agent, tax consultant, private detective, and notary public.

Drew turned the knob, which squeaked as though it was hurting. The door opened with a groan and we all walked in. Mr. Creasey was nowhere in sight, nor was anybody else. There was a big desk with papers and ledgers on it, all covered with dust, and some old chairs with cracked leather seats and oatmeal-colored stuffing peeking out. In the corner there was a long row of dark green metal filing cabinets, standing about six feet high.

While Drew talked in an unnaturally loud voice to try to attract someone’s attention, Inez stalked around the office looking for cobwebs. Not that Inez was finicky about things like that or ever did “white glove” tests in other people’s houses—not Inez. No, it was just that Mom really loved cobwebs and she knew right away that this was a good place to hunt for some. Back in California, she had never let anybody brush away cobwebs or even kill spiders for that matter.

“Because cobwebs are nature’s original designs and can give you the most wonderful ideas,” she had once explained. “Like snowflakes, no two are ever alike.” When she found a cobweb, she would draw its patterns on a piece of paper and put it away for her designs in hand-blocking or batik-making or weaving or whatever she was excited about at the moment.

Now Mom was crouching down, her eyes level with the top of Mr. Creasey’s desk (she had spotted a terrific cobweb that looped across from one of the big ledgers to the top of an inkwell) when there was a sharp, crunching noise from behind the file cabinets.

Drew stiffened and said, “Mr. Creasey?” in an extremely loud voice. It was the kind of voice a person uses when he thinks there are burglars in the house and hopes there aren’t. I just stood there with my knees turning to jelly and my fingers to ice. I didn’t know if Drew or Inez had seen it but, along the tops of the file cabinets, I distinctly saw something very peculiar and very much alive bobbing up and down, and slowly moving toward us

A second later, a man stepped out from behind the file cabinets. He was tall with sloping shoulders, a long wrinkled white face, ash-colored hair, and horn-rimmed eyeglasses. On his head he wore a dark-green eyeshade, like a baseball cap with no top.

“Sorry to have kept you waiting so long,” he said in a deep mellow voice, as though it was the most natural thing in the world to step into a room from behind a row of filing cabinets. “Won’t you all sit down. I am afraid I was occupied down below. You know what it’s like to try to get a shop assistant these days.”

I was relieved that he hadn’t been hiding behind those cabinets the whole time we were there. There must have been a staircase, directly behind the file cabinets, leading up from the hardware store to the office.

Pop and Mr. Creasey (it was Mr. Creasey) introduced themselves to each other, and Mr. Creasey sat down at his desk, reached under it for a moment, and came up with a dusty gray rag with which he began to flick at the papers and ledgers on top.

Inez leaped forward. “Oh don’t do that.”

Mr. Creasey looked up startled. The lenses of his glasses caught whatever light there was in the room, and you could see how thick they were.

“You’ve got some lovely cobwebs there. I was just about to sketch one of them.”

Mr. Creasey cleared his throat, nodded, and put the dust rag away. “Yes, of course,” he said, as though that, too, was one of the most natural things in the world.

“Now,” he said, clasping his hands on the edge of his desk so as not to disturb any of the dust or spider webs, “how may I be of service to you?”

Drew came right to the point. “We want to lease that house you have up ‘for sale or rent’ here in Havenhurst.”

Mr. Creasey cleared his throat again. “Ah, which house would that be?”

I suddenly realized we didn’t even know the name of the street it was on and I couldn’t remember seeing a number on the front door at all.

“Why, the gray clapboard one with the turret,” Inez said, as though Mr. Creasey should have known that all along and not be asking silly questions.

“Ah,” Mr. Creasey said, and leaned back in his chair.

Everybody sat silently waiting for somebody else to speak. Even Inez sat back and stopped sketching the cobweb. I really couldn’t stand it anymore. I kept thinking of Glenda and of school starting in less than a week, and somehow I kept seeing Glenda’s house with the picture window and the carefully tipped Venetian blinds. I just had to get settled.

“Could you tell us what the rent would be?” I heard myself saying. Mr. Creasey dipped his head sharply in my direction as though he was surprised to learn I had a voice at all.

There was another long silence. Then, turning his lens on me so that once again they caught the light and gave him that blind but all-seeing look, he said, “My dear young lady, you don’t really want that house.”

Mom and Pop leaned forward and opened their mouths to speak. “But we do,” I said quickly. “We do. I know it’s pretty dilapidated, but it’s the perfect house for us, because you see. . .”

Pop interrupted and I realized I was doing what he had warned Mom not to do. I was being too anxious.

“Is the house for rent or is it not?” Drew wanted to know.

Some more throat-clearing and Mr. Creasey said in his mellowest tones yet, “It is, of course. Yes, it is. But only for certain purposes. For ordinary domestic use, you understand. We can’t have any more of that spiritualist activity there. No, oh dear, no. No séances, no table-rapping, no crystal-gazing, or fortune-telling.”

“Séances!” Inez exclaimed. “Spiritualism? Whatever gave you that idea? What in the world could you be thinking of?”

Mr. Creasey pulled off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Why, excuse me if I am wrong. But aren’t you?”

“Aren’t we what?”

“Why, spiritualists, mediums, communicators with the spirits of the dead, fortune-casters. Or astrologers, perhaps.”

“No,” Drew said. “I don’t think you understand at all. I’m a professor of social anthropology and I’m also an archaeologist. I’ve got a year’s teaching contract at the State University College at Mill River. As I explained before, this is my wife and this is my daughter, Sara. Our son—he’s sixteen—is living, for the time, with friends back in California. My wife here is just, uh . . . just an . . . ordinary housewife . . . with a few, uh, interesting hobbies. None of them have anything at all to do with the spirits of the dead . . .”

“I’m awfully curious,” Inez said, leaning forward. “What made you think we were spiritualists, Mr. Creasey?”

Mr. Creasey put his glasses back on and ran his fingers across the brim of his green eyeshade. “Well, ah, to be frank, your appearance. It is a trifle unconventional. Oh, not for the college over at Mill River, I admit. But that’s a good fifteen miles from here. Havenhurst is a very, ah, conservative community, as you have no doubt observed. They like things to stay just so over here.”

Inez kept her eyes fastened on Mr. Creasey as he spoke. I wondered if she’d noticed Glenda’s house or any of the others as we drove through Havenhurst. Some of them were big like Glenda’s, but nearly all of them were what Inez would call “boxes.”

“And then there’s another point,” Mr. Creasey went on. “They’re all very house-proud people here in Havenhurst. Now, I’m willing to lease this house to you at a very nominal sum, but I’m not prepared to make any improvements in the property. It rents as is and I must tell you honestiy that it requires a good deal of work....”

“Oh, that’s quite all right,” Inez said with a faint smile. “We have plans for it.”

“Ah, do you? Well, that’s good. That’s very good. I’m relieved to hear it.”

Since I knew Inez’ and Drew’s plans better than Mr. Creasey did, I interrupted again. “What other houses have you got for rent around here, Mr. Creasey?”