Runny03 - Loose Lips (13 page)

L
ong golden shadows rolled over Runnymede Square. On the south side of the square, the flickering light on the faces of the statue of the three Confederate soldiers gave them expression. One fired his rifle, one carried the standard, and the third was falling to his knees, wounded. The standard-bearer reached down, his hand under the stricken man’s armpit, trying to keep him on his feet. Behind them the cannon loomed, its barrel pointing at the Bon-Ton department store on the corner of Hanover Street, the Yankee side of the square.

The extra sunlight on the summer side of the spring equinox stretched the days, adding a languor punctuated by laughter as more people stayed outside. The dogwood, mint-green buds soon to open in a rash of white or pink, speckled the beautiful square, laid out and planted before the American Revolution.

The Corinthian columns of Runnymede Bank and Trust, situated on the southwest corner of the square, loomed an imposing, glossy blue-white. Houses of money, redolent with dignity and the old Latin word
gravitas
, rivaled churches in holiness.

As Chessy walked across the square accompanied by a jaunty Buster, the people he had known nearly all his life were closing up their shops, winding up colorful awnings, locking doors. The greengrocer always left aging oranges, apples, and pears outside on
the stands for the poor each Tuesday night. A fresh shipment would arrive Wednesday morning.

A steady stream of people filed into Cadwalder’s for a hamburger or a soda. Some would linger for the first showing of the movie just down the street. Young men, a blush of peach fuzz on their cheeks, would ask to carry home girls’ books.

He had lived in this area his entire life, nearly thirty-six years. The web of interconnecting lives and generations glistened golden in the sunset. The more he had lived, the more he felt those connecting strands between people.

Chester Rupert Smith thought much and said little. This was a habit acquired early in a house where Josephine Smith pontificated hourly. His middle brother, Joseph, looked and acted like their mother, domineering and talkative. The youngest brother, Sanford, had some ambition but was easygoing.

All his life, Chessy had bent under the weight of the accusation that he lacked ambition and that he should have put his intelligence to better use. Getting and grabbing held no appeal for him. He felt his life was in a constant state of richness. He wasn’t unwilling to share that richness, but he didn’t believe anyone else wanted to hear about it.

Not a day dawned that he didn’t have some new idea or insight. The fact that not one of them was commercial seemed no great sin to him. He’d grown accustomed to disappointing his mother and his wife; Juts possessed enough drive for both of them. But he didn’t disappoint himself. He was content to let life unfold in all its squalor and grandeur.

Junior McGrail, resembling a sloth in good shoes, stood at the base of George Gordon Meade’s statue with her friend Caesura Frothingham.

“Good evening, ladies.” Chessy tipped his hat.

“Good evening, Chester,” they replied.

“George looks much improved, don’t you think?” He smiled.

“We saw you, Harmon, Extra Billy, and those riffraff friends
of his over here last night pulling General Meade upright. What really did happen to our glorious hero?” Caesura thought anything in a Union uniform glorious. This created problems.

“Perhaps he drank too much.”

Caesura pinched her lips. “Not General Meade.”

“Ah, well, too late for the old boy now.”

“You know what happened,” Junior said, her tiny Yorkshire terrier tugging on her pink leash toward Buster, who wagged his docked tail.

“As soon as this corner of the base is repaired, all will be well, so it doesn’t matter what happened.”

“You ought to talk to the Trumbulls, Chester. No good will come of Extra Billy keeping company with Mary.”

“Now, Junior, that’s none of my business.” He put his hands in his pockets, jingling the change. “Ladies, you all enjoy this soft evening. I’ve an appointment.” He again tipped his hat.

As he walked away, Caesura whispered, “What do you expect of Mary Trumbull? She lives in a house with painted statuary of an explicit anatomical nature!”

Junior concurred. “Mmm. Something’s not right there. Why, it’s akin to living in a den of vice. Pearlie’s artistry calls attention to women’s bosoms in such a disquieting manner.”

The twosome shrieked with laughter.

Chessy threaded through the shop clerks pouring out of the Bon-Ton. Small as the town was, the Bon-Ton enjoyed good business because Baltimore was an hour away to the southeast on bumpy roads, Hagerstown was an hour to the west, and York was forty-five minutes to the northeast. Gettysburg, only twenty minutes away, was all battlefield—no shopping there except for a brisk market in used ammunition.

Four doors down from the Bon-Ton, on the west side of Hanover Street, was the Rogers Building, erected in 1872. The second floor housed the new dance studio, and a top hat and cane were painted on one of the windows facing the street. He opened
the door and climbed the maroon-painted stairs, Buster bounding ahead of him.

Trudy Archer stood at the top of the stairs. “Mr. Smith, I’m glad to see you. Come on in. Who’s this?”

“Buster.”

“Well, I’ll give Buster a free lesson too.”

When Chessy stepped through the open door, the first thing he noticed was the beautiful maple floor. “I had no idea this was up here.”

“Me neither, until I got all the paint off. I assumed it would be oak.” She dropped the phonograph needle on the shiny black record. A Cole Porter song floated across the room. “Ready?”

He swallowed. “Sure.”

Buster sat, his head cocked, watching his master attempt the box step.

“One two three, one two three.” She smiled up at him. “You’ve done this before?”

“Never.”

The record finished, she put another one on the player, then picked up Buster’s front paws and danced a few steps with the terrier, who hopped along. “Very good, Buster.”

Chessy laughed.

Trudy worked with Chessy for one hour and he even mastered a glide step. Although stiff and unsure of himself, he wasn’t as clumsy as he thought.

At the end of the hour she patted Buster on the head and thanked Chester for dropping by.

She smiled. “If you listen to the music it will tell you whatever you need to know.”

“You’re a good teacher.” He had his good Borsolino hat in his hand. “You know, I would like to learn. I’d love to surprise Juts. Is it expensive?”

“Five dollars a month for a one-hour private lesson once a
week. There are group lessons for less, of course, but then I’m afraid word would get back to your wife and spoil the surprise.”

“How about if I try for one month? We’ll play it by ear.”

She smiled at his pun. “Deal.”

He reached in his pocket and gave her five dollars in ones. That was good money but he felt excited. He could dance.

As he strolled back out on the street he thought how wonderful it was to move to music and how Trudy Archer seemed clean and new, lustrous.

J
uts dumped out the contents of a can of mixed nuts on the kitchen counter. She fished out the almonds, filberts, and cashews, leaving the lowly peanuts.

She wore her genuine Orioles baseball cap, which she had secured when she drove down to Baltimore to bargain for slightly used beauty-salon equipment. Never one to miss a baseball game, even at the high-school level, Juts hovered over the Orioles dugout in the splashing sunshine, begging one of the boys to part with a baseball hat. As Juts wasn’t hard to look at and had more charge than 220 volts, the catcher gave her his cap.

The morning paper, folded over to reveal the Curl ‘n’ Twirl grand-opening ad, proved handy for Yoyo, who never could resist the crinkle of paper.

Louise had insisted they also take out an ad in the evening paper, the
Trumpet.
That paper hadn’t arrived yet so she whiled away her time reading the classifieds in case she had missed something earlier.

The shop was as ready as it would be. Chessy had built the cabinets and the little back room. Pearlie and his crew had added the gloss of fresh paint. There wasn’t anything to do but worry now, and since Louise had worried enough for a woman of one hundred years, Juts saw no reason to duplicate her sister’s efforts.

The Hunsenmeirs hired away Toots Ryan, Rillma’s mother, from Junior McGrail. They offered Toots seven more dollars a week and she grabbed at it. Fair business practice, but Junior howled “Foul play.”

Chessy turned ashen when Julia boldly announced her coup. In order to pay back $398 the sisters were sinking deeper and deeper into the red. She told him to stop grexing and groaning. “It takes money to make money,” she quoted him.

The thump of the paper hitting the door sent Buster scrambling. She let him out. He picked it up, proudly bringing it back to her.

“Good boy.”

Before she opened the paper she returned to the kitchen to carefully scrape the peanuts into the can. She covered the top, setting it back on the heavy wax-paper-covered shelf. Then she flipped open the paper. In cursive script like a formal announcement was the ad for their grand opening. She stepped back to admire it.

Then she turned the page, where she was assaulted by a half-page ad for Junior McGrail’s Runnymede Beauty Salon for Discriminating Ladies. A bold banner declared, “Ladies, don’t be fooled by cheap imitations.”

“I’ll snatch her bald.” Juts dashed for the phone. She dialed Louise.

“Hello.”

“Mary, get your mother on the phone.”

“Hi, Aunt Juts, what’s up?”

“Look at page four of the
Trumpet
, that’s what’s up.”

Mary called out, “Hey, Maizie, go and get the paper.”

“Get it yourself.”

“I’m on the phone with Aunt Juts. You better do as I say.”

Julia heard the trudge of feet, a door slam, a door slam again. “Mary—Mary—”

“I’ve got the paper now.”

“You could thank me.” Maizie pouted.

“Thank you, Maizie,” Mary said.

“Where’s your mother?” Juts demanded.

“Out in the garden with Doodlebug.”

“Go show her the ad on page four. Right now, Mary, and don’t hang up the phone.”

“All right.”

Julia heard the receiver rock on the table and then in the far distance, “What!” The sound of a hurried footfall followed.

“Julia, I can’t believe she would stoop so low!”

“I can.”

“I was gardening to soothe my nerves before tomorrow and this—well, I don’t understand how Junior McGrail can consider herself a Catholic.”

“I don’t understand how anyone can consider themselves a Catholic,” Juts snidely said.

“Julia—” Louise’s voice warned. “We have to respond to this, this attack.”

“And give her free advertising? Not a chance.”

“Well—there is that.” Louise sat down on the phone stool. “Guess she’s still hotsy about Toots.”

“If she’d treated her better, Toots wouldn’t have left.” Juts spoke the plain truth. “Too bad her daughter’s in Washington.
Whenever Rillma is around, the boys are around. I’d like a crowd.”

“We’ll get a big crowd. What else is there to do on a Thursday?”

“Yeah, the Strand doesn’t change the movie until Friday. Anyway, competition is the life of trade. I think we’re doing Junior a favor. After all, we’re focusing people’s attention on their hair and nails. She’ll benefit from our advertising if she’s smart. Or she’ll get better, right?”

“I don’t know about that.”

“How much longer can she keep showing Marie Antoinette’s radio cabinet?” Julia giggled.

Junior crammed her salon with fake French antiques. She was big on gilt. Her huge radio cabinet, a frightful sight, had been hand made, she said, in Paris, France—as opposed to Paris, Kentucky—and fashioned from valuable debris of Marie Antoinette’s. She also claimed to receive visitations from the murdered queen, checking on her radio, no doubt. Junior gave tarot readings in the back, even though Father O’Reilly declared it pagan superstition. Those tarot readings were Junior’s main draw, because her hairstyling consisted of a spit curl on the forehead and two for sideburns. She might branch out and give someone a finger wave, but you were just as likely to end up with hair that looked like frayed fuse boxes.

“Are you nervous?” Louise lowered her voice.

“No.”

“I am. If we flop I think my husband is going to put me on an allowance and God knows what else.”

“We aren’t going to flop,” Juts reassured her. “I have my lucky baseball cap, remember?”

“You just got that thing.”

“Doesn’t mean it isn’t lucky. Now relax. What’s the worst that can happen?”

“We go broke. Our husbands leave us. My children are shamed by a bankrupt mother. I suffer from angina and palpitations—”

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Drink a hot toddy and go to bed early.”

“Alcohol never touches my lips, you know that.”

“For medicinal purposes, Louise. Like tobacco, it’s soothing. So if you will make yourself a hot toddy, you’ll sleep like a baby and be ready for tomorrow. We’re going to be on our feet all day, you know.”