Hotel Paradise (11 page)

I sighed. She was making it up, I suspected. “Do you remember Mary-Evelyn?”

She frowned. “Who’s she?”

How could anyone forget, who’d been around then? “She drowned. She was the youngest of the Devereaus.”

She shut her eyes, apparently thinking. “Oh,
her.
That child they pulled from the lake. Sad business.” She paused and then was back on the subject of Ben Queen. “Probably he’s dead. People like Ben Queen don’t live long. They burn out. Cold Flat Junction people, the Queens.”

Cold Flat Junction! My mouth dropped. And I had been there only a few days before, my one and only trip to Cold Flat. So here I was with
three
bits of fresh information: Rose Souder Devereau, Ben Queen, and a connection with Cold Flat Junction. I decided I shouldn’t push my luck with Aurora, and picked up the glass and said, sweetly, “Would you care for another?”

“Well, don’t mind if I do, now you mention it.”

I ran down the stairs, glass and tray in hand, praying it wasn’t yet time for my mother and the others to be filing into the kitchen for lunch preparation.

My luck held; I couldn’t believe it. The kitchen was as empty as a tomb and I quickly dragged out the Jack Daniel’s and juice and Southern Comfort and tossed everything into the blender with a cube of ice, and, while it whirred, thought about my new information.

Carefully, I checked out the dining room to make sure no one was around, and then walked through with the glass on the tray, the drink looking even prettier than the first one. It was certainly more potent. I had a heavy hand.

Through the dining room and next through the music room, where I stopped and looked at our upright piano.

Rose Devereau and Ben Queen.

Into that splintered picture of that fatal summer, I could fit two more puzzle pieces. I pressed the piece that was Rose into place in the
Devereau music room, sitting at a piano. My inner ear composed some sort of watery music line, trembling up and down the keyboard.

Ben Queen, a wild card apparently in every sense of the word, I pressed into the dark and smoking wood that surrounded Spirit Lake.

Between Spirit Lake and La Porte runs a dusty country highway, a two-lane road that’s used mostly by local people now, since another highway was built that bypasses Spirit Lake. The land on both sides is flat and windy, with breezes stirred up by passing cars. In the distance you can see bands of dark evergreen trees where the woods begin. Sunlight sifts through these burnt-looking acres of faded grasses and Queen Anne’s lace, which I had always spoken of as a flower until Ree-Jane told me it was “weeds, just weeds,” quick to de-beautify anything I love. And I wonder: why is it that a growing thing that springs up of its own accord and in surprising places must be “just a weed”?

I pass this sea of Queen Anne’s lace and those fragile, starry-looking weeds called puffballs, whose white filaments I can make vanish with one breath. The puffballs make me think about God, something that my mind doesn’t dwell on much; I wonder if our souls are like the white threads of the puffballs and if God is the breath blowing them around, making them vanish. Would these almost invisible filaments finally curl and die like daisy petals pulled away from their source of life? I frowned over my comparison and thought it probably didn’t hold up. Finally, I stopped breathing at the puffballs, for I thought I was taking unfair advantage; they are too much at my mercy, and it seems childish and mean to pick wildflowers at all, much less pick them apart. So I let the puffballs alone and merely admire them and the Queen Anne’s lace, especially on my circuits of Spirit Lake where Queen Anne’s lace grows in profusion and puffballs line the rutted and overgrown road.

Ree-Jane sometimes walks the two miles with me to La Porte, but only at those times when she can’t finagle the money out of her mother for the taxi fare. As it’s a somewhat lonely two miles I am glad of the company, even hers, even though she turns her cold eye on anything that I like.

But this particular day, after supplying Great-Aunt Paradise with her second Cold Comfort and then doing my waitress work, I had the road pretty much to myself. During the two-mile hike to town I was passed only by a couple of rusted-up pickups, Billy Clutterback’s snout-nosed Studebaker, and Axel’s taxicab, going the other way, empty except for Axel. My stomach was pleasantly full of my lunch—
dreamily
full, I should say, for lunch had been my mother’s ham roll slathered in cheese sauce, one of my favorites, but a dish that my mother thought little of, saying it was tossed together from leftovers. This ham roll consists of ground-up and seasoned ham spread onto pastry and then rolled and sliced into big pinwheels. Across this she pours a rich sauce the color of marigolds from the cheddar cheese and the mustard. My mother doesn’t give a second thought to such lunch dishes, even though the pastry melts on your tongue and the sauce is satin-smooth. To her way of thinking, this ham roll is such an old peasant dish she hasn’t even bothered making up a name for it. Not like her Angel Pie or her Chocolate Feather Cake. Oh, that ham roll! That cheese sauce! I actually patted my stomach as I walked along, for it was the home for this wonderful mix of textures and flavors.

Despite this lunch, I was still making straight for Souder’s Drug Store as I came to the edge of town and continued along First Street. I bypassed Candlewick, the Oak Tree Gift Shoppe, and the Rainbow, and even the county courthouse, in my relentless pursuit of the chocolate soda.

There were three drug stores in La Porte; Souder’s and Frazee’s had more marble and mahogany than Sparks’s Walgreen. In Sparks’s, you ate at a Formica countertop in a double-horseshoe loop; it leaned more towards sandwich lunches and waffle breakfasts than towards ice cream sodas and sundaes. Souder’s was hemmed in between Prime Cut (Shirl’s favorite beauty salon on the one side, a narrow alley on the other, and then Betty’s dress shop). The salon and the dress shop always seemed to be bathed in a milky light, while Souder’s stayed dark and almost cold inside. Also, it now had the distinction of a tie to Mary-Evelyn because of the Souder connection.

Here there was another little bell just like Miss Flagler’s, jangling over the door, and as I took my seat at the counter, I wondered if Mrs. Souder could give me any information about Rose Souder Devereau. The trouble was, there were so many Souders around that it hardly seemed worth the trouble of trying to get old Mrs. Souder to remember whether there was a Rose in her arm of the family. And Mrs. Souder was pretty deaf, too, which would have made it really hard even to get the question across to her.

The wooden-bead curtain back in the shadows clicked and clattered as old Mrs. Souder came through it, twitching like always. I never have known what’s wrong with her; whatever it is affects her head, which jerks to the side as if someone is pulling a string fastened to her chin. Mrs. Souder doesn’t seem to like young people (like me); probably we make her even more nervous.

But if anyone should be nervous, it should be her husband’s customers. He’s the pharmacist, and his hands suffer from the same nervous disease as her neck. When Mr. Souder measures out liquids in slender vials, the beaker stutters against the glass. I always think the colors of these medicines are amazing: the globelike bottles standing along the wooden shelf in front of him range from springwater-clear to purple, aquamarine, and chartreuse. When the old B & O train charges through town, it sets the shimmery liquids jittering, just like the Coca-Cola glasses and ice cream dishes shiver on the tier of glass shelves.

I always have a chocolate soda with chocolate ice cream. I try to make myself order something else, but never do. The chocolate ice cream tub, just about everybody’s favorite, is usually half-empty, bits of cream crystallizing around its sides. On this day, I inspected the various tubs, heaving my chest across the marble counter to do this, thinking I would choose something else—maple perhaps, its surface undisturbed, so that my scoop would make the first creamy dent—but no, I was a slave to that chocolate.

I ordered chocolate-on-chocolate as Mrs. Souder stood there with the ice cream scoop already raised and ready to fall. She was surprisingly generous with her scoops, putting two into the ribbed glass rather than the one you got at Frazee’s. I watched the composition of my soda with the concentration of an addict.

A tiny, long-handled ladle deposited a ribbon of chocolate into the bottom of the tall glass, and this Mrs. Souder topped off with a dollop of milk. This was followed with the first scoop of ice cream, then a
brief fizz of water, a lot more chocolate sauce, more water frothing up, and then the second scoop of ice cream, followed by another brief fizz of water that bubbled across the surface. Then Mrs. Souder drew artful circles with the whipped cream spoon, forming a small iceberg of topping. A maraschino cherry was the last ingredient, and Mrs. Souder let it drop down into the whipped cream. The cherry juice bled into the white cloud, the same way Mrs. Souder’s bright lipstick bled over the edges of her thin mouth.

I always thought this lipstick rather brave of her, for she was quite old, with tissue-papery skin, delicate and very white, but that was probably from lathering on the Pond’s powder that they sold in the store.

Mrs. Souder is a silent and unfriendly old woman, but I think she is rather proud of her ice cream artistry. She looks as if she enjoys holding the chocolate-sauce ladle high over the glass so that the sauce forms swirls and dribbles ribbons; she enjoys making those high white peaks with the whipped cream and then displacing the peak by the drop of a cherry. As she comes to the end of these maneuvers, her grumpy silence gives way to the hint of a painstaking smile, the barest raising of the corners of the mouth. In her tea-colored eyes is an expression almost of delight, quickly extinguished if she sees me watching her. And it makes me wonder if Mrs. Souder, who seems as far removed from people my age as anyone can be, and who is sharp with us when she isn’t silent—if during the ice-cream-soda composition, she is remembering her own childhood, maybe spent right here in Souder’s Drug Store, maybe even sitting on one of these very same stools, for I believe she has lived in La Porte all of her life. This makes me feel some sort of kinship with Mrs. Souder, and feel I should be able to picture myself as old as she is, but I can’t. It’s too difficult to see that far into the future. Beyond my own imagined wedding day to various people (the bridegroom changes a lot, depending on my mood), my future is a blur.

So I drank my soda slowly while I turned on the wooden stool, looking over the familiar interior, and the gray backs of the items in the window—a cardboard cutout of Vitalis hair cream, another of Pond’s cold cream, two deep blue bottles of Evening in Paris toilet water, a sunburst of various styles of hairbrush. As if it were an artwork hung for years in some museum, the window never changed, and I could see the thin coating of dust on the blue bottles and the dust
mouse caught behind the Vitalis cutout. The only sound in the silence was the ticking of the regulator clock on the wall. The interior of the pharmacy was dark and cool in the way that only marble and mahogany are dark and cool.

The quiet was shattered by the talky entrance of Helene Baum, the doctor’s wife, followed up by two other women, the mayor’s wife and Mrs. Dodge Haines. They’re some of Helene Baum’s followers, for she always seems to be trailing women in her wake, talking back to them over her shoulder. She has deep-dyed red hair and always wears yellow, that day’s yellow being a sweater over a tweed skirt. She also wears harlequin-framed eyeglasses with a dusting of rhinestones across the top that are really awful. The three women went chattily to one of the little ice cream tables, Helene Baum pausing long enough for me to acknowledge her. She never says hello first. With her raspy, nasal voice, I always feel she’s going to file me down like a fingernail. I think she’s a mean-minded person, going around town cutting people apart so that Dr. Baum can sew them up again. And she thinks that being the wife of La Porte’s chief doctor gives her social standing.

To have a social standing in La Porte isn’t easy, since no one’s really rich or well connected or a member of some swank family like the Rockefellers. When it comes to sheer staying power, probably the Paradises have been around longer than anyone else. Even the Grahams (of which I’m one) have been around a lot longer than Helene Baum. I know it just kills her she never gets asked up on the balcony on those days when Aurora is feeling sociable. And it must be especially maddening to her that Mrs. Davidow gets invited, since Lola is, in Mrs. Baum’s mind, a Johnny-come-lately.

As I was scraping the last of the chocolate from my glass (and trying to ignore the nasal ordering-around of Mrs. Souder by Helene Baum), I wondered how long Dr. Baum had practiced in La Porte, for he must be in his fifties or even sixties. Could he have been a doctor here at the time of Mary-Evelyn’s death? No. That was forty years ago, and he’d hardly have been out of school, even if he was in his sixties now. Then I suddenly remembered Dr. McComb, who was quite elderly and who
had
been around La Porte for fifty or even sixty years.

I let the long-handled spoon clatter into my glass and wondered why I hadn’t considered this before: that some doctor or other had to sign a death certificate, or something like that. I had heard my mother
talk about Dr. McComb; he collected things—flowers, or butterflies, things like that. I frowned. “Horticulturist.” That was the word. He had written articles for magazines on the flowers and wildlife around this area. He probably knew a lot about weeds, too.

I took another couple of turns on the wooden stool, pushing myself with the toe of my shoe. And while I did this, I considered what I knew of flowers and butterflies. Not much. What I was turning over in my mind was how I might come by a butterfly (or a flower) that Dr. McComb would like to add to his collection. That would get him to talk to me. If I could talk to Dr. McComb, I might be able to ask him about Mary-Evelyn. Why had I never thought of this before in my search for information? Probably because Dr. McComb is no longer seen much around town, for he gave over his practice to a younger doctor, the one Helene Baum was always warning people against.