[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

  There was a girl in Clare’s Latin class, Lavinia Gulden, whose hair was the same color as Aldine’s, though she was not as pretty. She had a long serious face and matronly clothes and fingers that were unusually long and white, like Aldine’s had been. In class each day, after writing down the daily quotation and the verbs to be conjugated, Clare looked at the back of Lavinia’s head and tried not to think of Aldine. Once, Lavinia turned around, saw Clare looking at her, and smiled. Clare smiled in what he hoped was a disinterested way and studied his Latin notebook.

  Usually the best way not to think of Aldine was to do some algebra or chemistry. You couldn’t do those subjects and think of anything else, not if you wanted to wind up with the right answers, and Clare found that he did. He liked doing better than the other kids, the ones who had all the friends and the fun.

  “You know what you might think about?” Mr. Petring, his chemistry teacher, said to him one day. “Pharmacy school.” It was a fine profession, Mr. Petring said. His own uncle had been a druggist and wound up with a grand house on an eight-acre walnut grove. Clare had nodded. It was preposterous of course, a Kansas farm boy going to pharmacy school, but he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He left school each day just after noon so he could bus and wait tables at the café, but when things thinned out, he worked all the harder on his studies. A pharmacist. What would Aldine think of him if that’s what he were to become?

  70

  Mr. McNamara had been right. Fallbrook did need a home-style restaurant. And Ellie had been right, too, in thinking that customers would like the white aprons, genial politeness, and brisk efficiency that she’d learned in the Harvey House. She’d started with one waitress and had already added another, each of them working from 5:30 when they opened until 4:30 p.m., an hour after closing.

  Mr. McNamara had contacts everywhere, and had set her up with suppliers of beef and poultry, and with Mr. Ames, who went every morning to the farmers’ market in Los Angeles, and with Mr. Balize, who supplied secondhand china and cutlery that was good as new. She liked ordering supplies and cooking the food and hearing the hum of customers and, at the end of the day, she liked opening the cash register and balancing accounts. Some days they were ahead ten or twelve dollars; other days, the good days, as much as twenty or even thirty.

  One day Mr. McNamara drove her and Charlotte and Neva and Clare out to the highway, but he made sure Charlotte and Ellie were sitting up front. After turning north off of Mission Road, he drove a half mile or so and told them all to cover their eyes, which they did. Then he reversed direction on the highway, pulled off to the side, and came to a stop.

  “Okay,” Mr. McNamara said. “Now.”

  Ellie’s eyes rose to the billboard in front of her.

  Sleeping Indian Café, it said in huge red letters within a feathered arrow pointing toward town. Steaks, Chops & Home-Made Pie. Breakfast & Lunch. Closed Sunday.

  “It’s wonderful,” Charlotte said. Her voice was soft and full of affection. “Really, Mister. It’s wonderful.”

  “I can’t see!” Neva said from the backseat, almost beside herself. “I can’t see!”

  Mr. McNamara stepped from the Packard and opened her door. Clare stepped out, too, and was standing there nodding and smiling. They all were.

  “Just look!” Neva screamed, pointing up at it. “It’s us! Right up there! It’s us!”

  It was a dream. That’s what it seemed to Ellie. A dream from which she hoped never to awaken.

  71

  Neva didn’t like her new school. She didn’t like the way the grades were all separated, and she didn’t like the way there was no stove in the room, and she didn’t like the way her teacher, Mrs. Hartshorn, called everybody Miss So-and-so or Master Such-and-such. When Neva raised her hand, Mrs. Hartshorn never called on her, and when she didn’t raise her hand, Mrs. Hartshorn might very well pass over all the raised hands and say in her old crab apple way, “Miss Price will now recite.”

  Neva had made a plan for that. The next time she knew an answer, she cast down her eyes and acted like she was hoping like anything that she wouldn’t be called on, and then when Mrs. Hartshorn said, “Miss Price surely knows the answer,” Neva looked up with bright eyes and said, “Yes, I do. Columbus is the capital of Ohio!”

  But a knowing look had come into Mrs. Hartshorn’s face, and Neva knew that her plan wasn’t any good after all.

  It was no better on the playground, where the games were new to her. Dodgeball, tetherball, kickball, she hated them all, and instead would take her school bag and go to the far side of the building where no one else was. She would take Milly Mandy Molly out of the bottom of her bag and set her up where she could watch. Neva spent more than a week breaking twigs from a juniper bush and making a tight fence for a new fort. “It has to be tight,” she said to Milly Mandy Molly, “because right over there, under the juniper bush, the Murderous Horde is going to come, so the fort has to be strong.” She was nearly done with the fence and was arranging longer branches for the tall corner turrets when two boys found her there and looked at the fence and asked what it was.

  She didn’t look at them. She knew they didn’t like her and she knew she didn’t like them. One of them wore black shoes and the other wore brown.

  “It’s just a play fort,” she said.

  “Fort what?”

  She had named it Fort Prickly Hedge but she wasn’t going to say that because she knew they would turn it into something dirty. “I don’t know. It’s not Fort anything.”

  “Maybe it’s Fort Okie,” one boy said and the other said, “Or Fort Okefenokee.”

  Neva still didn’t look up at them. “We’re from Kansas,” she said.

  “Well wherever Okie place you were, you came here to steal jobs.”

  Neva set another branch for a corner post and said quietly, “That’s not true.”

  “Is too true so get used to it.”

  The brown shoes stepped closer.

  “Not either true,” she said so low she hardly knew whether she’d said it, but it didn’t matter whether she did or didn’t because the boy said, “Your Okie mother came in and took away another’s job and then she gets overtime, which no one else gets, even those working years and years.”

  “Who says that?”

  “Everybody says that,” the boy said.

  “What’s that?” the other boy said, and there was something so queer in his voice that Neva looked up and followed his eyes to Milly Mandy Molly leaning against the fence. “Is that monkey yours?”

  The boy with the brown shoes laughed but it wasn’t a nice laugh at all. “You bring a stuffed monkey with you to school?”

  All at once their shoes were moving toward Milly Mandy Molly and Neva sprawled out and grabbed one of the boys’ legs and tried to wrestle him down, but this just made them laugh harder and it wasn’t very long at all before they had torn off Milly Mandy Molly’s green velvet waistcoat and were shaking the straw from a hole in her stomach.

  72

  Ansel had begun coughing when he was near the top of the tapering wooden ladder, but he worked his way down to the ground and stood bent over until he was gasping for the next breath and tears ran down his face. Two of the Mexicans appeared but would not come too close. “Consunción,” one of them said, and kept staring at him.

  “No,” Ansel said when he could, waving them away. “I’m okay.”

  He made it through that day and the next.

  They were living in the hotel now. There was no denying that the girls had made it nice, and there was plenty of room. He’d taken the room farthest down the hall so he wouldn’t wake anyone with his coughing, or with his getting up to walk, either.

  After coughing in a Valencia grove one day, he spit out the phlegm and stared at it. It was hard to tell, in the soft dirt, but that night in his room he had to spit in his white handkerchief, and it was unquestionably red. From then on he’d begun washing his own handkerchiefs, and drying them on a towel under his be
d, but one day Ellie found one he hadn’t yet washed.

  “What’s this?” she asked and he replied that he’d cut his hand and used it to staunch the cut, but she had always been good at recognizing mistruths and he had always been bad at telling them.

  October was a slow month, with gusts of hot air blowing over dry hills. There was not much fruit to pick, though he did a fair amount of pruning, cutting the limbs from one whole grove of avocado trees down to their trunks, then spreading white paint over them to kill disease. The white trunks were like sculptures of unfinished men, the limbs stopped abruptly in the act of reaching out.

  On the first day of November, he stopped into the post office and Bart Crandall, watching him, said, “Got something for you.”

  Ansel thanked him and glanced at the letter and stepped out into the street without opening it because it was from Gilbert Dorado and bore the insignia of the Harvey House. His mind whirred but he kept his face expressionless on the way to the hotel and tucked the letter into his back pocket before he walked through the café door, almost deserted at this hour, though it smelled pleasantly of meat loaf and onions. Dr. Quigley was at the counter eating a slice of pie and Ellie was at work cleaning the counter. Quigley liked to come by at the end of the day for a slice of lemon meringue pie and a cup of coffee and Ellie never liked to finish her day at the café without putting a gleam to it all. Ansel nodded first at Quigley, then at Ellie and made his way to the stairs. He never sat down in a booth or at the counter when he was still wearing his picking clothes and smelling, as Neva put it, of “dirty sugar,” but it was more than that. He dreaded having a coughing attack in the restaurant with a customer present. Today this worked to his advantage—it permitted him to go directly upstairs and open the letter behind the closed bedroom door.

  It was brief—even briefer than the one he’d sent. Gil had taken pains to write legibly, though, printing in block letters:

  Estimado Anselmo,

  I send my hellos to your family and youre so beautiful wife. New job for FH sends me every which way. It’s no busy but we are still working. The Scottish girl was very good worker but Mrs. Gore fire her when she turns up family way.

  He read and reread and reread.

  “Daddy?” Neva called. She knocked on the door and he heard the knob turn.

  “Don’t come in,” he said. “I’m changing.”

  She let go of the knob.

  “Mama told me to come up and tell you to get presentable,” Neva said loudly. “She said Mr. McNamara’s coming to talk to you.”

  “When?” he asked, sitting down on the bed and reading the last line of the letter again.

  “She said hurry.”

  “Okay,” he told Neva, but he sat holding the letter.

  He read it one last time, searching for details that weren’t there, then folded it back into the envelope. Even on the second floor, the building smelled of meat loaf and onions. He looked around for a place to put the letter and couldn’t find one.

  Feet were thudding up the stairs again—too fast to be Ellie, he guessed, but he stood up to unbutton his shirt and stuffed the letter in his pocket.

  “Daddy!” Neva said again, knocking harder this time. “He’s here. And he’s all dressed up. Mama told me to get you right now!”

  As he descended the stairs, Neva and Ellie were attending McNamara, but Ellie made her excuses and shepherded Neva out with her. Dr. Quigley had left, and his dishes had been cleared away. McNamara sat at a center table with an iced lemonade, and Ellie had left a cup of hot, honeyed lemon juice for Ansel, in case he began to cough. McNamara wore a linen suit with a seersucker vest and ivory shoes.

  “Mr. McNamara,” Ansel said, extending his hand, and McNamara said to Ansel what he’d never said to Charlotte: “Please, please. Call me James.”

  So on a hot November day that was like Kansas in summer, at five o’clock in the afternoon, James McNamara asked Ansel Price for Charlotte’s hand in marriage. Ansel took this in and while sipping his hot lemon juice considered the irony of a man renting a building to a married woman without consulting her husband and then asking that same man for permission to marry his daughter. But he said merely, “And I suppose Charlotte is agreeable.”

  “Yes,” he said, and Ansel heard pride slipping into McNamara’s voice, giving it a fullness missing moments ago. “Yes, she is.”

  Charlotte was not at home, but Ansel sensed Ellie listening through the kitchen door, and probably Neva, too. He knew he was supposed to say, Well, good then, I couldn’t be more pleased and be done with it, but for a few moments he picked tenderly at one of the small linear scabs on the back of his hand, and then looking up, he said, “And you don’t think Charlotte will grow restless?”

  Unquestionably this took McNamara by surprise. “Excuse me?”

  “The age difference,” he said.

  “Ah,” McNamara said. He sipped his lemonade. He did not smell of sweat or the grit on orange peels, a distinction he seemed to relish. He looked at Ansel and said, “I’m going to tell you something that I have told no one in this town other than Charlotte.” He paused. “I married once before, and I chose badly. Her family . . . Well, she came from bad stock. They were nothing, nothing, men and women without background or bearings. Still, I was determined. I understood the meaning of ‘for better or for worse.’ My wife however did not. So that was a very different kettle of fish. Charlotte is a majestic girl. Majestic. She is her father’s daughter and she is her mother’s daughter. Your wife’s father is a very distinguished man, as I’m told your own father was sturdy and sure. Sound blood flows in Charlotte’s veins, and it shows.” He picked up his glass of lemonade, then put it back down. “Charlotte and I have discussed all this. My point, Ansel, and it’s no small one, is that I believe in Charlotte and she and I believe in the vows of marriage. For better or for worse. Like my own parents. Like you and Mrs. Price. You see what I mean, don’t you?”

  Ansel nodded as if he did.

  “Could she grow restless? Yes. Could I walk out this door and be run over in the street? Yes. But I don’t think either possibility is likely.” He smiled and said, “I look both ways when crossing a road. I believe ours will be vows that will endure.”

  Ansel heard himself say, “A father couldn’t ask for more than that,” though he wanted, somehow, to ask for more. He said, “What happened to your first wife?”

  “I don’t know. She and her fellow made for New Mexico. That’s all I know. You notice I don’t give her name. I haven’t spoken it since the day she left.” He straightened his back and pushed his glass half an inch away. He was ready to be done, but Ansel took another sip of honeyed lemon juice to coat his throat.

  “Do you remember a girl named Olive Teagarten?” he asked.

  McNamara said he did.

  “Why did she stop working for you?”

  “With child, as I recall.” His voice had changed. This was his business voice. “Unmarried and with child.”

  Ansel nodded. “But wouldn’t that be the time to give her a hand instead of turning her out?”

  “It might seem like it, yes, but then you no longer have the line that can’t be crossed.” His eyes scanned the room before returning to Ansel. “You see, Ansel, you have to think of your other employees of this type. You need them to know there are lines that can’t be crossed.”

  “Of this type?” Ansel said but before McNamara could reply, Ellie was pushing through the door carrying a pitcher and asking Mr. McNamara if he would care for more lemonade.

  “No, I don’t believe so, Ellie,” he said, scraping back his chair and standing and smiling a broad smile. “But I’m happy to inform you that your husband has granted me my fond ambition of marrying your daughter.”

  Ellie let out a small murmur of pleasure, and in the next moment Neva had poured through the door and, hearing the news, said, “When will it be and what will I wear?”

  McNamara went to one knee to speak to her eye to eye. “You’ll wear
something fetching, we’ll see to that, and, as for when it will be, I suggested tomorrow”—he winked up at Ellie—“but Charlotte said she needs time. She wants to sew her own gown.” He stood again and looked toward Ansel and Ellie. “We’d like to plan on the Friday after Thanksgiving, if that meets with your approval.”

  Ansel, in rising from his chair, heard the slightest crinkle of Gilbert’s letter in his pocket. “That seems just fine,” he said.

  “Can we invite Miss McKenna to the wedding, Daddy?” Neva asked, slipping her hand into Ansel’s.

  “No, sugar,” he said, something he hadn’t called her in years.

  “That was my teacher in Kansas,” Neva told McNamara. She extended her arm. “She gave me these bracelets made out of Bakelite.”

  “She sounds splendid,” McNamara said, and without missing a beat or stiffening in expression, Ellie told Neva not to get ahead of herself—they had plenty of time to think about the guest list. She turned then to McNamara and in the rosiness of her cheeks Ansel saw that this marriage, too, like the move to California, like the acquisition of the café, was all part of the wall she’d built to protect the life she wanted, and which didn’t require him. “Won’t you stay for dinner?” she said. “It’s meat loaf, grilled onions, and mashed potatoes.”

  But the man had gotten what he’d come for. “I’ll have to take a rain check on that, Ellie,” he said, setting his cap on his head. “Just let Charlotte know I’ll stop by around seven.” He smiled at Ansel. “We’re going to go see a movie. The new Buster Keaton is playing.”

  73

  They’d gone instead to see Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus, which was playing in Escondido. It was a thirty-minute drive, and they passed the time talking about the wedding. Charlotte liked thinking of the dresses and the decorations and the food. Mr. McNamara’s interest was in the guest list and even more especially the honeymoon, but Charlotte didn’t mind this. She’d learned that there would be a good deal of compromise in this marriage, but as far as she could see, she was getting the better end of the bargain. She turned her knees toward him on the seat and said, “I never dreamed I’d come to California and get a job and be married in two seconds flat.”