Even though Sally bought her own car, events surrounding Jill and Tony stopped the planned trips to Lincoln.
Chapter Four
First Thursday in January
Sheriff Woods was glad to let Tim drive the police car from Wayne to Geneva’s countywide police station. The visit to Tony Montgomery parents’ home flooded him with memories of Sally, Mrs. John Nelson now, and the fate of his friend, Tony. When he was only twenty years old, Art wanted Tony to see the light, stop being such a stud and develop a few feelings. But Tony jumped off an emotional cliff. After Jill dumped him, his friend wouldn’t attend classes at Lincoln College, wouldn’t eat, couldn’t seem to sleep.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
October 1958
“There are other girls,” Art said to Tony, once.
Tony met his eyes, let him see the agony. “You should take me out somewhere, behind a deserted barn and put me out of my misery, the way you would a dying dog. I’m not good for anything now.”
Art started staying with Tony, offering him water, soup, to call his folks, anything. Two weeks after homecoming, Tony‘s father came down south to Lincoln College to pick up his failing son. “He’s high-strung like his mother.” Mr. Montgomery had said, before he took Tony’s last suitcase out to the car. “Hard work will snap him right out of this.”
Art wasn’t sure of a cure for Tony’s fixation with Jill. He’d had no experience with people suffering to the degree Tony allowed.
Alone now in the dorm room he had shared with Tony, Art reached for Robinson Crusoe. The page he opened read. “When I came down the hill to the shore, I was perfectly confounded and amazed; nor is it possible for me to express the horror of my mind, at seeing the shore spread with skulls, hands, feet, and other bones, where the savage wretches had sat down to their inhumane feastings upon the bodies of their fellow creatures.”
Art summoned up a vision of the strutting braggart Tony was the last time he drove him home from high school. Jill had spit Tony out like a prune pit. Now, Tony was shriveled up in the back seat of his father’s car.
Art went back to Crusoe. “Recovering myself, I looked up with the utmost affection of my soul, and with a flood of tears in my eyes, gave God thanks that had cast my first lot in a part of the world where I was distinguished from such dreadful creatures.”
Surely, Sally would never have thrown him away for someone with more money, as easily as Jill discarded Tony.
Sheriff Woods tried to remember why he broke up with Sally. They’d separated after Jill’s wedding, after Tony suicide. He couldn’t remember the cause. He doubted he’d ever allow himself to love again. Love became a dangerous word, an emotion to be avoided. He often told Gabby he cared for her because she loved him.
His contentment was real, but not the passionate love Tony claimed for Jill. Sheriff Woods kept himself sane by staying free of deep emotional entanglements. He didn’t want to experience the fearful degree of rejection Tony suffered. It was sadly simple, he wanted to survive, so he limited his emotional range.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
First Thursday in January
Recovering from her memories of Tony and her teenage crush on Art, Sally surveyed the masculine front room of her new husband’s house, their home. The black leather couch was huge and comfortable. The ceiling-high stone fireplace dominated the room. Jarring modern art canvases on the opposite wall provided the only color. She should think about making some changes if she wanted to feel at home here. “Coffee,” she begged and John responded in a short time with a full cup.
“Did you microwave it?” Sally asked.
“No, I set up the coffee maker earlier. You seem to inhale coffee. I just needed to plug it in.”
“Thank you. Microwave coffee lacks the aroma of newly brewed coffee.”
John got cozy on the couch with her again. “So tell me again about Sheriff Woods and the Montgomerys.”
Sally groaned. “I rather talk to you about redecorating.”
“Another touchy subject.” John described where he bought the modern art, who the painters were, how much the artwork cost, into an entire soliloquy of his love of art. Poor Sally could not concentrate. Her mind roved teenage recesses, dragging out old memories of Jill and Tony and the promise to buy a car to visit Art.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
November 1958
Sally thought her peach linen suit ought to do the trick. Taking a deep breath, she straightened the shoulder strap of her purse. After standing in line to make deposits each week, she knew where to find the loan desk. Mr. Westland, the loan officer, was acquainted with her father and Jack Stone, her boss at DuKane. “Good morning, Sally. What can we do for you?”
“I don’t want you to call my father to co-sign for a car loan.” Sally eased into the arm-less chair next to his desk, one foot behind the other for balance, back straight. “Mr. Stone’s private secretary should be able to afford car payments on a used car. How long will it take before the bank will approve my loan?” She had practiced the speech in front of her mirror at home five times.
Without letting his good-natured smile falter, Mr. Westland tapped his pen on a small note pad. “Have you picked out the car?”
“The Naylor’s Chevy is two years old.” She couldn’t remember the price of the car.
“Sally, you’ve done your homework.” Mr. Westland said. “Before you sign the papers out at Naylor’s, they’ll call me. We need the vehicle registration number. Give me your social security number for the loan.”
Trying not to seem too childishly elated, she thanked him and walked out of the bank. Loretta waited to drive her to the dealership, where an older salesman made the call to Mr. Westland. Sally had nervously smiled as he nodded at her, still talking on the phone to Westland. After a lot of paperwork and a promise to return with the bank’s check, the salesman handed Sally the keys to her first car.
Sally called Art as soon as she rushed into the house after parking the white and blue Chevy next to her father’s paint truck behind the house. “I bought a car, Art!”
“So your mother won’t worry,” he said, not sounding nearly as giddy as she felt. “Tell them you’re bringing me home from school.”
“Oh, Art!”
“Tony couldn’t survive school without Jill. I’m coming home, too.”
“How’s your dad taking it?”
“I only talked to Mother.” Sally thought she heard Art’s voice break as he hung up.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Down in Lincoln, Sally stopped her car at the same spot Jill parked two weeks earlier. A freak snowfall iced the green campus. Barren elms stood along the empty sidewalk. Art hugged Sally before she stepped into his room. Tony’s side of the room was empty, the mattress bare. “His father came for him.” Art said, before she could ask.
“He loved her, then.”
“If that’s love, I never want to fall in love.” He held Sally by the shoulders. “That wasn’t love, Sally. It was a thing without affection. It consumed his mind and body, leaving no place for his soul to rest.”
“You’re right.” Sally tried to calm his fierceness. Nevertheless, as she got into her second-hand car to drive home, she judged Tony to be a romantic because he grieved so much for his lost mate. Without thinking of her words effect on Art’s nerves, she said, “Black swans die within twenty-four hours of the other swan’s death. Their hearts stop.”
“He wants to die.”
“I never understood Jill. Once when I was talking to the boys in my study hall, she took me aside. She told me not to waste my time on them. They couldn’t afford cars.” Art didn’t respond. “And another time after Mrs. Forbes invited the Latin Club over for Christmas, Jill estimated the cost of every lamp in the place.”
“Her first love,” Art said.
“Money?”
“My dad called,” Art said, once they turned north on to Route 66 heading for St. Charles. “He’s arranged for me to work at DuKane, in Customer Relat
ions.”
“Wow.” Sally kept her eyes on the scant rural traffic.
“He’s not happy.”
Rich people seldom are, Sally’s head replayed Daddy’s saying. Then she offered Art an invitation, one guaranteed to please Mother. “Could we stop off in Bloomington and say hello to my grandmother?”
“It’s your car.”
“She’ll love you.”
Grandmother Kerner could be counted on to hug the poor guy and fill him full of soup, certainly enough cookies to raise his sugar level out of any depression. “Do you like oatmeal-raison or pecan ice-box cookies?”
“Both.” Art smiled slightly.
When they stopped for gas, Sally called her grandmother to say she was bringing a friend to taste-test cookies. “I’ve got’ta plenty in the freezer,” Grandma Kerner said. “Bring more milk if you want any.”
Grandma’s German accent struck a chord of homesickness in Sally. She wanted to be eight years old again without a care in the world to fully enjoy her share of Grandma’s hugs and cookies. For an entire summer she stayed in Bloomington, when her mother broke her pelvis in a fall from a barn’s hayloft in Algonquin, Illinois. Loretta came too, but Loretta was put to work helping with Aunt Rosie’s brood of nine. Loretta could bake bread and iron by the age of eleven. Sally only dusted the steps up to the bedrooms every day with a damp cloth for Grandma with a pat on the behind if she missed a speck. Somehow, her grandmother convinced Sally in those four summer months that she was a lovable and wanted person, not like at home.
Rejudging the brown, tar-shingled house of her grandmother, Sally tried to see the house from Art’s viewpoint. The grape arbor in the side yard stood ugly with its cap of dripping snow. The window boxes on the front porch were empty of flowers. Art Woods started up the front steps. “No, no,” Sally called. “Come this way.”
As Sally opened the side door, the familiar odors of a tomato and cabbage soup reached her. The dark stairway up to the kitchen needed guidance. She held Art’s hand until they stepped into the bright kitchen. “Hello,” she called and heard a muffled reply. She went around the refrigerator to open the door to the bedrooms’ stairwell.
“I’m on the throne,” Grandma called.
“She’ll be right down.” Before Sally found a place in the packed refrigerator for the milk, Grandma appeared...even shorter than she recalled.
Grandma peered up at Art, after the introduction. At four-foot eleven and shrinking, Sally thought her grandma would be impressed with Art’s six feet two inches. “I’ve got three grandchildren taller than you.” Grandma cut Art down to size. “Are you a good Catholic boy, hanging around our Sally?”
“No, Ma’am.” Art sat down to get eye to eye. “I’m Protestant.”
“Go to church?”
“No, Ma’am.”
“Sally, you take this boy in hand now.”
Sally intended to. “About those cookies, Grandma.” She retrieved the milk carton and placed it on the oilcloth covering of the table.
“Get that off of there.” Grandma spanked her behind. “Pour the young man a glass of milk and put the rest away.”
Sally poured three glasses as Grandma briskly went down the narrow hall between the parlor and the front room out to the giant freezer housed on the front porch. Returning with plastic containers balanced up to her chin, Grandma went to the cupboard corner next to the sink and set out an array of cookies on a green glass platter. “You drink coffee?” she asked, pouring Sally and herself each a full cup.
“Not yet,” Art said.
Grandma put her hand on Sally’s arm, a warm gesture making Sally feel a part of Grandma’s life.
Art devoured the plate of cookies with appropriate “oohs” and “ahs” of appreciation. “They’re the best.” Art turned in his chair to ask Sally, “Can you bake these?”
Grandma laughed. “She’s a third daughter. Marie, her mother, got tired of teaching by the time Sally was old enough to learn. All this child does is stick her nose in books. But we love her.”
For an hour they traded gossip about the four generations in the family. Who married, gave birth, died. Art moved around restlessly. “We better head home,” Sally finally said.
“Well, use the bathroom at the head of the steps before you leave, while I pack up a few cookies to take back with you.”
“Could I have a few for my mother?” Art asked. “She doesn’t bake.”
“He’s a sweet boy,” Grandma said as Art headed upstairs. “You make sure he takes those catechism lessons, like your daddy, before you agree to marry him.”
“He hasn’t asked.”
“He will.” Grandma gave her an extra good-bye hug. “I’ll call Marie; tell her you’re on your way. No sense worrying her beads.”
As they got on the road with Art driving, he said, “That’s the kind of mother I want my kids to have!”
Sally caught a sob in her throat. “Me too. I miss her already.”
Art didn’t notice. “My grandmother lives in Florida. Grandpa has Parkinson’s, but she’s fine. She plays tennis and bridge every day. She says I’m the cat’s pajamas.”
“Grandmothers love us best.”
“Yeah, we don’t have to prove our worth to them,” Art said, somewhat restored from his college trauma. “They’re just happy we’re alive.”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
First Thursday in January
Tuning back into her husband’s one-way conversation about the merits of the various modern art pieces hanging in their front room, Sally asked him, “What do you think caused you to fixate on me, fifty years ago?”
“You didn’t even know I existed, did you?”
“I remember you as part of a pair of identical twins. You were both on the football team. The truth is, unless one of you told me your name, I couldn’t keep you apart.”
“But you can now,” John said with a hopeful tone in his voice.
Sally laughed. “I don’t really know. I’ve not seen James without that horrid hairpiece.”
“I told him. But he won’t listen to me. Betty likes the thing, I guess.”
“Her wig is a bit odd.” Sally noted John’s surprise, so she added, “for her age.”
“Nevertheless, it is a good question. I mean about fixating on another human being when we’re teenagers.”
“Almost like a duckling out of an egg.”
John characteristically rubbed his bald head to stimulate his thinking. “Must be all those hormones let loose in a rush. I remember feeling as if I might crack.”
“Tony certainly did.”
“He didn’t believe in the power of tomorrow. Mother always said when I was down, “just wait until tomorrow.” When I looked at the problem again the next day, somehow something would be altered, not always diminished, but I could find another angle to the problem.”
“If Tony waited for the day after the wedding, he might have survived.”
“Being here, in St. Charles …” John drew Sally closer to him on the couch. “Has brought back a lot of vivid memories for you.”
“I feel overwhelmed. I’m sure Sheriff Woods suffered from being in such close contact with the Montgomerys.”
“I think Tim will be free of Matilda, at least. She doesn’t seem like a bad person.”
“I’m sure she’s not. It’s hard to let go of affection for someone, even when we know it is wrong.”
“Have you let go of Sheriff Woods?” John seemed compelled to ask.
Sally put her arms around his neck. “I’d like to bury the fifty-year-old memories somewhere.”
“Memories are not infidelities.”
Sally wasn’t sure. First loves seemed to hang on. She did not want anything to do emotionally with Sheriff Woods, but her energy seemed sapped by the constant thoughts of herself as a teenager. Probably trying to recapture your youth, she chastised herself. Attempting to return to the subject of redecorating, she asked, “Would Betty like to store this artwork for you, or b
uy them?”
“I can’t see the room without them.”
“Would they find a home in one of the bedrooms, after I redecorate it for your study?”
“Why don’t we wait until we finish this arson case, before you start on the house?”
“Good idea. I can restrain myself until we figure out why Enid Krimm died in the Masters’ home.”
John stood up and swung his arms around, addressing the art hanging on the walls of his comfortable home. “You’re safe for now, guys.”
The front room might never seem anything but a bachelor’s pad to Sally. Her home in Ann Arbor kept calling. Her books were still on the shelves in every room. The kitchen cupboards stood at the ready for any future attempt at cooking. At least, she complied with John’s dictate about cleaning out the refrigerator and leaving a forwarding address. Nevertheless without her cache of books, she suspected she was only vacationing, not living, in St. Charles.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
First Friday in January
John and James were working at the Hotel Baker, going over the books, ordering supplies, and doing whatever hotel owners do, when Sally planned to visit the police station in Geneva. For the five years she lived in St. Charles, neither Sally nor her family members provoked any circumstances requiring law enforcement officials.
Daddy said anyone carrying a gun was crazy. He was never a hunter and the slaughter of farm animals wasn’t carried out on the farms he managed, except for the chickens Mother axed. He included police officers in the people he considered dangerous because they carried guns, cautioning her to always follow their orders. She wished she questioned him further. Had he ever come up against the law? With his temper, he must have set limits for himself. Arguing with government officials was out of bounds.
Sally wrinkled her nose at her reflection in the mirror above the telephone table in John’s front hall as she dialed Sheriff Woods. Curiosity demanded she proceed. “How is the extradition order coming?”
“Well,” Sheriff Woods drawled, “I talked to Geraldine and convinced her to come home. She should be at the Montgomerys later tonight.” Sally heard him sigh. “I’m getting depressed already.”
Rohn Federbush - Sally Bianco 02 - The Appropriate Way Page 7
