Virgin With Butterflies

by Tom Powers

Somehow she didn’t seem quite the same when she was talking to him, as she did with me.

  I thought she sounded just a little dumb sometimes, and I was worrying about it a little for fear he wouldn’t see how smart she was, so I decided maybe she didn’t feel quite comfortable with a prince. When she was just with me I didn’t know if she knew or not why she had come along. So I just went on being a water lily, and I let Aunt Mary do all the planning.

  I couldn’t help thinking how I’d make Millie’s and Moe’s eyes open when I got back and told ’em. I sat and thought how they’d both look when I walked in, and they said, “Where you been?” And I’d say, “Oh, Mexico City.”

  And the plane jolted and we had on our emergency belts and it landed and there we were in Mexico City.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WE WENT TO A HOTEL. It was lovely, and Aunt Mary and I had pretty rooms on each side of a bathroom that looked just like a Childs Restaurant. And we took turns and there was plenty of hot water, and we both felt fine.

  It was a Sunday but that doesn’t stop the Mexicans.

  Our Indian friends had some meetings and there were Mexican newspapers about the war that Aunt Mary could read which I never knew anybody that could, and she could speak it, too.

  We drove out through a great big park that was like having a masquerade, for the Mexican gentlemen liked to get themselves dressed up in velvet suits and big sombreros on Sunday. I thought they only wore stuff like that years ago, I mean in old-fashioned history, but I was wrong, they still do. And they take off their hats and dust their horses’ flanks with ’em and bow to the cars full of ladies.

  We drove away off to a place called Sochi Milko, only it’s one word, and not spelled like that, and starts off with an X like a lot of Mexican places do.

  That night we had dinner with our Indian friend and, boy, was it a dinner!

  “Don’t drink the wines,” Aunt Mary said, “there will be a lot.” And there was. I wouldn’t have anyway because, like I told you, I found out very young that not only beer but anything I drink that is intoxicating is very likely to give me sour stomach. So as I say, I didn’t and wouldn’t have anyway but the two boys sure put on a wonderful spread.

  It was held in a private room and Aunt Mary and me were both treated like we were royalty, too, just like him.

  She said we wouldn’t dress tonight, which don’t mean what it sounds like it means, but means that we wore what we had on. It was just as well because I didn’t have anything else, as Mr. Wens promised me that he would have Butch’s white satin cleaned and mended and sent back to Butch by registered mail. I didn’t want to be thought of as a thief while running off with a prince, which I hoped nobody would find out and misunderstand. And boy, they did, and didn’t they?

  The prince wore a tux, neat fitting and gentlemanly.

  Well, it seemed that Aunt Mary speaks French, too, because I asked her what she was speaking and if it was Indian—which wouldn’t have surprised me—but she said it was French. And the prince gentleman seemed to speak French better than he spoke American. So while they were doing quite a lot of speaking French I ate everthing that was put in front of me.

  After the prince and Aunt Mary finished their speaking, him and I took our little doll coffee cups and walked right out of some long windows onto a balcony and drank it standing up by the railing.

  There was an avenue down below us, full of lights and cars and people acting like it was a carnival, and there seemed to be lots of excitement.

  He said it was about the war, and that Mexico didn’t think those Japanese gentlemen ought to have been in Washington while their friends were busy blowing up Pearl Harbor, but it took him so long to say it that I changed the subject.

  I told him about Pop and me when I was younger, going downtown in Mattoon to see the Elk’s carnival and street fair, B.P.O.E., which this reminded me of. Then I asked him if he had anybody like Pop where he lived.

  Well, he used to live with his Pop, who was a pretty wonderful man, but now he didn’t because he wasn’t a boy anymore. But aside from that, his Pop wasn’t very pleased with him just now. What the reason was he didn’t say, but his Pop had given him a state to run for his own, and he had a house and he lived there.

  I asked him if he had a wife. He didn’t but his brother had two. His brother had a state where he lived, too.

  He loved his brother, I could see that, and he was sad because his Pop wasn’t very pleased with him and his brother.

  He talked a lot about England, too, and I couldn’t see why he spoke as if it was part of his country. None of the Englishmen I ever saw on the screen looked like him.

  He looked so worried, like I said. And he said some things about his brother I couldn’t follow very good.

  “We are together in everything, my brother and me. I am making this trip for him,” he says. “What he does, I must do. What I do, he must do. It is sworn so. This jewelry, I sell it for him. I must have very much money, especially now,” he says. “You do not know what the war means. How could you?” he says.

  Well I saw we weren’t getting anywhere that way, so I made him laugh, telling him about Pop and the time the hypnotizer came to Mattoon. He had tried to hypnotize Pop but Pop up and hypnotized the hypnotizer. The prince laughed and we started to have a nice time again.

  “You like flowers?” he says.

  “Yes,” I says.

  “I am glad,” he says, “I show you my orchids.”

  “Where are they?” I says.

  “In India,” he says. “You will see them, white ones for you,” and he said it as if it wasn’t far, and a kind of cold chill came over me.

  Mexico is one thing. “But India,” I thought, “is the other side of the world.” And supposing I said “No, thank you,” and these men I was traveling with didn’t agree with me about it.

  Just then Aunt Mary says out the window, “Time to go to bed,” and was I glad.

  When I got to my room somebody had sneaked in and turned the big bed down and the little lamp up, and they’d laid out my silk nightgown and my crepe wrapper. It was real nice.

  The bed was soft and I enjoyed lying there, hearing Mexican people screaming down in the street.

  “I’ll tell Pop all about it,” I thought, “I’ll go straight to Mattoon and tell him where I’ve been.” Then I turned out the little light.

  I had never thought, I guess, what shopping in Mexico City would be like. If I had thought about it I might have been a little afraid I’d have to dress up like that Spanish girl with the artificial rose in her teeth that hung on Aunt Helga’s parlor wall. She had a lace curtain kind of a shawl hanging over a high comb and a silk shawl with fringe and roses on it.

  Maybe they’ve got places in Chicago like the store we was in in Mexico but I’d never been in one. But then when I was buying something in Chicago for three ninety-eight, marked down from four, I didn’t have Aunt Mary with me.

  Honest, she spent money as absentminded as anybody you ever saw. I couldn’t figure Aunt Mary out somehow. Oh, she was top-notch, like Mr. Swift—that I still thought of as Mr. Wens—but, she was different than I expected. In the movies, a poor girl goes to visit rich relations when her mother has died and she’s got no place to go. She never knew she was so well connected until she read the letter her mother left marked “To be opened after my death.” The rich relatives always try to teach the girl to be a lady. But she gets embarrassed because she’s not like them, and she shakes hands with the butler, which rich people don’t do. When her father comes to visit they make fun of him, and she says, “He’s good enough for me.” Then she goes right back and marries her boyfriend. And then she has a baby and the old grandfather gets soft, and they all put their heads together, close to the camera, with the baby in the middle.

  But Aunt Mary wasn’t like that at all. She seemed to think I was all right, and she looked away when she picked up another fork for salad, so I could watch and find out which one to use.

  I m
ade her laugh quite a lot when there was just the two of us. Of course she wasn’t my real aunt, maybe that was it. And it was Mr. Hoover’s money, at least I thought it was then because at the time I didn’t know where it was really coming from. So I worried quite a lot over why Mr. Hoover would let her pay three hundred paysos for just a white crepe formal with silver leaves around the neck, for me.

  What she bought for me was like a hat-check girl’s dream. Underthings, real silk, and stockings and slippers and shoes and coats and hats, but everything white and mostly summer clothes.

  “Listen, Aunt Mary,” I says, “am I going to be allowed to keep all this, or are they just uniforms I got to give back when I give up this job? And if I do keep ’em,” I says, “what’ll I look like, back in a Chicago blizzard, with sandals with hardly a toehold and a little strap around up my ankles. I’ll freeze,” I says.

  “You won’t freeze this winter.” That’s all she would say, and then she went right on choosing.

  “You’ve got good taste,” she says to me in one store where I turned down a hat with too much folderol. “Where’d you learn it?”

  “From Pop,” I says, “he taught me. We was always pretending when I was little that we was podners,” I says, “and when we took on a job we use to talk over how we’d build it. If the thing’s got any shape of its own, for God’s sake don’t spoil that with gee-gaws and trimming, he’d say.”

  “Well, you’ve sure got a shape,” she says. “It’s a pleasure to buy clothes that hang so well on what you’re buying ’em to hang on,” and she went right on buying.

  I liked one suit, the color of a green apple, but “No,” she says, “I like it, too, but he likes you in white.”

  “But he’s leaving tonight,” I said.

  She didn’t say a word to that, but bought me a white wool sports coat with a hood that Hedy Lamarr would give her eyeteeth to get into just once.

  When the man in a place we’d bought a lot in said: “Twenty-six hundred paysos,” I expected her to give it all back, but Aunt Mary just opened her purse and peeled off some of that foreign money, gave him some directions and out we went.

  This took all day. We had dinner in the dining room at the hotel, me still all in black and her, too.

  “Are we going to say goodbye to ’em?” I says. “It’s getting late, and they’ll be taking off. Are we going to see ’em?”

  “At the airport,” she says, “if you want to.”

  “Of course I want to. I feel real friendly toward him. He’s a nice little gentleman,” I says.

  “He is indeed,” she says. “I keep finding myself liking him, in spite of everything. I never like to let people get to me in these cases, but he is certainly a nice youngster,” she says.

  “What cases?” I says. “Or is that no question for a water lily?”

  “What I mean is that I really hate to have to say goodbye to him,” she says.

  “Me, too,” I says.

  “Well, we’ll see,” she says, with her quiet little smile.

  I never had more fun with anybody than I did with Aunt Mary—except Pop—and she liked me, too. As we came out of the big dining room, where all the people seemed to be looking at us instead of eating their dinner, Aunt Mary put her hand on my wrist.

  “How’d you like to have your picture taken?” she says.

  Just as we got to the door and the head waiters were bowing, some men that had been sitting in chairs in the hall got up and flashed quite a lot of those bulbs at us while all the people looked. I wanted to duck, but Aunt Mary says softly, without looking at me, “Let ’em flash, what do you care? The poor boys have to to get what they’re sent out to get, or their bosses won’t give ’em a cigar at Christmas,” she says.

  So we walked slow to the elevator and they took a lot of pictures.

  Upstairs our boxes of purchases had been delivered, so I opened the white broadcloth suit she bought me and the Hedy Lamarr sport coat with the hood down the back and some stockings and white shoes that was laid there handy.

  “Why not try ’em on?” she says, and I couldn’t help feeling like a little girl that’s visiting her cousin and trying on all of her clothes.

  “I look like I was advertising something,” I says, “all in white like I am.”

  “Something pretty nice, if you ask me,” Aunt Mary says, putting my black things in a bag. “Come on, it’s time to go.” And it was, so we did.

  As we got in the car I saw the bellboy put our two little bags in the back so I knew it was goodbye to this hotel.

  And when we got to the airport, there was our plane—I mean his plane. The things on the front were spinning around, ready to go. The two boys opened the car door and the prince walked up the steps, standing in the door of the plane waiting for us. We went up and all three of us sat down in the plane and talked.

  While we were sitting there, there was a sort of a long swush and a bumping like, and a great big plane came down and eased up near us. Then all of a sudden, somebody came running up the front steps of our plane, and who was it but Mr. Wens. I can’t seem to remember Swift, so I better just call him Wens.

  Well, there he was, in a tweed suit and a bright tie and a hat turned down across the front that no matter how much a movie actor, a gangster or a politician pays for one, or how they put it on, their hats never look the least bit like Esquire and the Vanderbilts at the races—or people at poleo games—and that’s how his did. He took it off to speak to the prince, and then put it on the back of his brown head and took a roll of newspapers out from under his arm and spread ’em out. And “Hi,” he says to me, looking over my white clothes. “Ah, the Snow Queen,” he says. And he grinned his nice grin.

  So he opened the Chicago papers, and there was “War” all over ’em. Then he opened up the inside, and I opened my eyes. There we was, Aunt Mary and me, sitting in the plane, all in black, and looking like somebody that had their picture taken going to a politician’s funeral. And then I saw the headline.

  “Mystery Woman Flies with Indian Prince. Is Mystery Blonde to be Bride of Rookh? Ash-Blond Beauty Flies South with Prince,” and that kind of thing.

  Poor Pop, was I glad Jeff had said he’d go to Mattoon.

  Well, the prince gentleman kept frowning and shaking his head, and looking up at me with big, worried eyes, like brown velvet buttons, and then he talked to Aunt Mary and Mr. Wens in French.

  They all stopped and looked at me, and I stopped reading the papers. They didn’t know anything, anyway, but were just guessing who I could be. You would have thought I was Veronica Lake the way they said I looked—not that that could make anybody conceited because when the little McComber girl was dead, all the Chicago papers said she was a beautiful girl. And she wasn’t really, not like some other girls Uncle Ulrich and Willie got mixed up with.

  But every paper has got to say a girl is beautiful. So I knew not to think I was a glamour girl just because the paper said I was.

  Finally Mr. Wens took a deep breath and spoke to me.

  “Well, babe,” he says, “looks like you’ve kind of stumbled into the news.”

  “Nobody wouldn’t ever recognize me from the description,” I says.

  “Your modesty becomes you,” he says, “but unfortunately there’s the pictures those Texas boys took to prove you wrong and them right,” he says.

  “Thank you,” I says. “Do you think Mr. Pimples and his pals will believe I knew what I was trading them blues for?” I says.

  “They won’t miss, baby,” he says, “and I thought it my simple duty as a Boy Scout to fly down here and whisper to you that even the war won’t keep you from your little hour of fame, if you was to come back right now,” he says.

  “I can see that,” I says, “and even this much fame, as you call it, don’t please me none when I think of them rowdies reading about it. I sure am a little troubled, but more than that I sure hope Jeff went to Mattoon to explain to my Pop before he sees this layout.”

  “I just pu
t him on the train,” he says.

  “Jeff don’t drink,” I says.

  “Correction,” he says. “I accompanied him to the station, procured him a ticket—roundtrip—ushered him to the gate and waved until he was out of sight around the water tank.”

  “That’s better,” I says. “There’s so few taxi drivers that don’t that you hadn’t ought to sound like he did, when he don’t.”

  “I apologize,” he says.

  “Listen,” I says, “where’ll I go?”

  “Well,” he says, “the prince is just ready to take off for a town not so far from here.”

  “What town?” I says.

  “It’s called Rio,” he says, “and I gather he’d be pleased to have you and your aunt Mary tag along,” he says.

  “But he’s going right now,” I whispered, “and I’m worried what Mr. Hoover will say if we was just to run off now, even over to that other town, with only two little bags that we got in the car, and leave behind us somewhere a lot of clothes we paid a lot too much of his money for,” I says.

  “Well, it just happens,” he says, “that your aunt Mary sent ’em all to the airport here,” he says, “thinking you and she would have to start out, after the prince leaves, to look for another hotel where they won’t take a picture for the papers of every spoonful you put in your pretty little mouth. But now if you agree,” he says, “we would just load ’em all into this plane, press the starting button and do a style show for the folks in Rio,” he says.

  It all sounded too easy to me.

  I looked at Aunt Mary and she was telling directions to our Mexican chauffeur that had driven us ever since we got here, and the two boys helped him open the back of the car. Out came not only our two little bags, but all the boxes of everything we had bought with Mr. Hoover’s money.

  I looked at Aunt Mary and she looked at me very serious, and then she winked slow at me.

  So, “What can I lose?” I says, and that’s how I went to Rio, which is a big city with Jesus blessing it from a mountain top.

  I didn’t know Mexico was so big, because it took us quite a long time to get to Rio. But I guess we took some side trips maybe, because we seemed to stop a good deal.