Body Language

by Michael Craft

  “Hey, boss,” said Glee, sitting next to me in the car, “don’t miss our turn. Tyner Avenue is next.”

  Braking hard, I swerved at the quiet intersection, apologizing for the rough ride. I had never been on that particular street before, even though it was only a few blocks from my house. The new surroundings reminded me that even though my family had deep roots in Dumont, the town was still largely unfamiliar to me. It did not yet feel like home.

  Glee pointed. “The Nook is just ahead on the left. Grace Lord’s house is next door.”

  The leafy neighborhood mixed nicer, older houses with a few tidy shops, their awnings shading the sidewalk from a benign September sun. Grace Lord’s miniatures store, The Nook, already had banners hung from its eaves, announcing the exhibition of the Midwest Miniatures Society and welcoming the “king of miniatures,” Carrol Cantrell. Adjacent to the shop was a larger, vacant store, its windows soaped from within, its red-brick facade marred by rusty bolt holes where long-forgotten signage had been removed. To the opposite side of the shop, but well distanced from the street, the Lord family home sat serenely among the trees—the rolling, expansive lawn seemed the better part of an acre.

  “It’s huge,” I told Glee, slowing the car as I approached the house.

  “This area used to be the outskirts of town,” Glee explained, rummaging for something in her enormous flat carpetbag of a purse. “The Lords were always well-off, and a sizable family at that, so they needed the space. But the older generation is gone now, and the others have scattered, so Grace lives here alone.” Glee wagged a hand toward the drive—“You can pull all the way in, back by the coach house.”

  The “coach house,” which soon came into view behind the main house, was a big, old two-story garage that looked like a former barn or stable. Like the house, it had walls of white clapboard, but without the Victorian trim. The ground floor still had a sliding barn door, which was closed; the upstairs, under a traditional gambrel roof, appeared to be a nicely finished living quarters, windows adorned with lacy tieback curtains. An open wooden stairway—with treads and banister freshly painted an oily green—rose along the side of the building to a covered porch that protected the door. Potted geraniums marched up the stairs and formed a riotous red hedge beneath the porch railing.

  Glee and I got out of the car, closing its doors with a double thud that momentarily silenced birds in the canopy of trees. Glee walked around the car and headed for the back of the house, explaining, “The front door is never used.”

  I had noticed, in fact, while driving along the side of the house, that there was no walkway from the front porch to the street. Dimples in the lawn suggested that a flagstone path had once led from the porch to the driveway, now overgrown by encroaching grass and the passing of years. In contrast, the lawn behind the house was crisscrossed by well-trimmed brick walkways. One led from the driveway to the back porch. Another led from the porch to the coach-house stairs. Still another stretched across the yard to a back entrance to The Nook and continued behind the adjacent vacant building where the exhibition would be held, suggesting that both stores were part of the same property.

  As Glee and I clomped up the stairs to the back of the house, we heard a yoo-hoo from the upstairs porch of the coach house. Turning, I saw a short, older woman—presumably Grace Lord—waving to us from the edge of the porch among the geraniums and the lower branches of the trees. “Thank God,” she tittered with the birds. “I heard the car and thought it might be Carrol. Needless to say, I’m not ready!” She laughed at herself, as she wore a faded denim work shirt and something wrapped around her hair like a makeshift turban. She hefted a yellow plastic cleaning bucket loaded with rags, rubber gloves, and various spray bottles. Piled near her feet were odds and ends she’d removed from the guest quarters. She attempted to gather this all together so she could carry it downstairs in one load.

  “Wait!” both Glee and I shouted to her. Scampering over the path and climbing the stairs to meet her, I offered, “We’ll give you a hand with that,” as Glee told her, “Be careful, Grace.”

  Grace put her things down. Through an exasperated laugh, she told us, “I guess I could use some help.”

  When Glee and I reached the landing of the stairs, she paused to tell Grace, “I don’t think you’ve met my boss yet—the Register’s new publisher, Mark Manning.”

  I climbed the last few stairs and extended my hand. “It’s a pleasure, Miss Lord.” Stepping onto the porch where she waited for us, I noticed that she stood at least a head shorter than I, barely taller than five feet.

  When she realized who I was, she whisked the turban off her head and wiped imagined grime from her palms before reaching to shake my hand. “Another distinguished visitor,” she chortled, “and me looking like hell.”

  “Hardly, Miss Lord,” I assured her. And indeed, her pleasant looks matched her amiable manner. Though dressed in jeans for housework, she had seemingly spent some time primping and grooming that morning, and the tight-set curls of her steely gray hair looked fresh from the corner beauty parlor. Her homey, self-deprecating humor, her diminutive stature, and her occupation as a dollhouse shopkeeper brought to mind a one-word description of the woman: impish.

  She confirmed her neighborly nature by insisting, “Please, Mark, it’s Grace. ‘Miss Lord’ is just a tad unbecoming at my age.” And again she laughed, dismissing the bugbears of spinsterhood.

  Endeared by her disarming candor, I simply told her, “Here, let me help you.” And I gathered up what I could of the items she was removing from the coach house. There was a stack of linens, a wastebasket, a framed picture, and a box of junk that might have been cleaned out of desk drawers—scraps of paper, an old phone book, pencil stubs, tangled paper clips, a knot of dusty rubber bands.

  Glee reached up, offering to take the cleaning supplies. Juxtaposed with the oversize tiger-stripe purse carried in her other hand, the yellow plastic bucket became an absurd addition to Glee’s carefully coordinated, if over-the-edge, ensemble. I couldn’t help laughing as she led us down the stairs, her leopard-spot heels pecking at the slick green-painted planks.

  Oblivious to this, Grace yammered, “It really is a blessing that you arrived when you did. Carrol should be here any minute, and I was running behind getting his room in order.” She added, as a note of explanation for the odd assortment of things that I carried, “I just didn’t think that Carrol Cantrell, king of miniatures, would appreciate spending a week pondering the Lord family’s sentimental old bric-a-brac.”

  As she said this, I glanced at the contents of the box, then at the photo in the frame I carried. The picture caught my eye—and how!—and I fumbled to carry it at an angle that would allow me to see it more clearly. Enshrined by the fancy carved giltwork of the frame was an old photo, an enlarged, faded snapshot of a beautiful young man at play with a Frisbee and a big friendly dog, a collie, a dead ringer for Lassie. The photo sucked me into the scene it depicted, frozen sometime in the past, somewhere in a setting of trees and rolling lawn. The man was perhaps twenty—a grown boy, really—dressed for summer in cutoffs and T-shirt. Romping with the dog, he flashed a perfect smile, flexed a perfect body.

  “Most of the exhibitors have real-world jobs, so they’ll be rushing up this weekend to claim spaces and set up their booths,” Grace was telling Glee as we reached the bottom of the stairs, but I had lost all interest in their dialogue. Sensing my distraction, Grace explained, “That’s Ward and Rascal.”

  I glanced up from the photo. Assuming that the latter name applied to the collie, I asked, “Who’s Ward?”

  “My nephew,” she answered, beaming proudly. It was clear that she doted on him—who wouldn’t?—but there was also a pensive edge to her smile, as if the frolicsome photo had triggered memories of happier times. She was younger back then, I realized, and perhaps the reality of her sixty-four years hadn’t measured up to the promises of youth.

  And I wondered about Ward. How old was he now? Where w
as he? What did he do? I asked, “Ward is your… sister’s son?” I had no idea if Grace even had a sister—I was lamely fishing for any information she’d offer.

  “No, my brother’s.” Pausing, she looked out across the vast backyard. “We’ve lost a tree or two since then, but otherwise, the place hasn’t changed much.”

  Following her gaze, I realized that the photo had been snapped right there, a Frisbee toss from where we stood. I wanted more information, but feared that digging deeper might appear lecherous. What was, in fact, my interest in the kid whose picture I carried? Glee, who knew me too well, was already watching me with a smug grin, so I changed the subject, asking Grace, “Where should we put this stuff?”

  “Here in the garage,” she told us, leading the way around the corner of the building to the driveway, where she struggled to open the barn door. It inched slowly on a corroded track, and I thought I should offer to help, but my arms were full. As if reading my mind, Grace assured me, “I can get it—it just needs a little coaxing.” With a grunt, she managed to slide it open wide enough for us to enter.

  As the three of us stepped inside the garage, the warble of birds was snuffed with the daylight, and my senses adjusted to the dark interior space, the whiff of gasoline, the taste of dust. The shaft of light from the doorway, another from a gritty window, began to define the surroundings. As I set down the things I had carried from upstairs, Grace’s car took shape—something unremarkable, a late-model Taurus, white. The rest of the space was filled with clutter, the stored debris of a lifetime, the accumulated things once treasured that would one day be the bane of griping heirs, forced to pay someone to haul it all away.

  Grace flipped a switch, and several bare bulbs hanging from the rafters cast the contents of the garage into stark relief. The junk stored there, I realized, was not nearly so random a collection of miscellany as I had first presumed. No, there was a theme to this collection of remnants, a common thread to their now-defunct purpose. There were oak file cabinets, sealed cartons, and open boxes bulging with receipts and record books. Crude shelving against the wooden walls of the garage held rows of apothecary jars, both glass and ceramic varieties, their yellowed labels still whispering Latin. A marble-topped soda fountain stood upended from floor to ceiling; ice-cream tables and their wire-backed chairs were stacked for posterity in a nearby corner. A refrigerator, an old Kelvinator, still running, had a padlock affixed to its chipped chrome handle. Wedged between the refrigerator and the wall was an oblong metal sign: LORD’S REXALL. Orange streaks of rust trailed from each of its empty bolt-holes.

  Grace watched as I absorbed all this. She explained, “I keep the fridge locked so little kids won’t play in it.” Shuddering, she added, “Can’t be too safe…”

  But it wasn’t the Kelvinator that intrigued me. “That sign,” I said. “Did it once hang on the vacant store next to The Nook?”

  “Sure did.” Grace wagged her head. “For over forty years, Lord’s was Dumont’s most popular drugstore. My grandfather opened it long before I was born, and my father ran it while I was in college—I studied to be a pharmacist too. But then the Walgreens chain moved into town, and Lord’s Rexall was doomed. Dad and I shut it down the year after I graduated.”

  Although her story was succinct, told without emotion, her tone had a wistfulness that made me wonder if this broken dream of her lost career was somehow triggered by the fragment of the past captured in her nephew’s photo.

  Glee told us, “I remember Lord’s. It was our favorite hangout—nobody made a better black cow than Grace’s brother. The store closed about the time I started high school. I cried.”

  “So did I,” Grace reminded her.

  This bit of Dumont lore was interesting enough, and the sentiments of both women were touching, but I was more intrigued by Glee’s mention of Grace’s brother. Was Glee’s pet soda jerk in fact the father of Grace’s nephew Ward? Or were there other Lord brothers who might have sown the seed that produced that beautiful young man? Ward Lord—what a name—how perfectly it captured the virile energy that survived the years and still radiated from the grainy snapshot that rested near my feet in the garage that morning.

  Grace waved her arms at the drugstore paraphernalia that surrounded us, telling Glee, “I finally decided it was time to confront all this and quit my grieving. My grandpa’s pharmacy has been closed for nearly as long as it was open. What’s done is done, and there’s nothing I can do to bring it back. Except”—her eyes actually twinkled in the dim light of the garage—“this backlog of family tradition makes excellent raw material for a roombox project.”

  “Oh?” Glee’s brows arched with interest. She fished a notepad from her purse.

  Grace continued, “I’ve never really tried my hand at model-making—I’ve approached the shop all these years simply as a business—but I’ve had these unresolved feelings about the drugstore. Then, last year, I hit upon an idea that seemed both obvious and challenging. I’ve been toiling for months now on a miniature reproduction of Lord’s Rexall. I’ve still got a bit of work to do on it, but my little store should be ready to unveil when the roombox competition opens next weekend.” She planted her hands on her hips, a pose of easy self-satisfaction, signaling that she had very nearly vanquished the emotional baggage represented by a garageful of junk.

  Glee returned her smile. “Good luck in the contest, Grace.”

  I added, “Hope you take first prize.”

  She flapped her hands, dismissing the notion. “It’s probably not good enough to win—this is my first crack at a roombox, and most of the other entrants have been at this for years. Plus, as host of the show, I feel I should remove myself from the running. It wouldn’t seem right to make Carrol Cantrell feel he was under any obligation to me when he judges the entries. So I’ll enter my roombox for exhibition only.”

  “I’d love to see it,” I told Grace. Glee nodded her enthusiasm as well.

  “And I’d love to show it to you”—Grace moved toward the garage door, snapping out the lights—“but there’s no time to dally, not now. Carrol should be arriving soon, and I’ve got to get into some decent clothes.”

  We followed her out of the garage into the bright, late morning, Glee asking, “How’s Mr. Cantrell getting here?”

  Grace led the way toward the back porch of the house, explaining, “He’s flying into Green Bay. One of his colleagues arrived in Dumont yesterday, and he offered to pick Carrol up at the airport.”

  A gracious offer, I thought, as the drive to Green Bay would take an hour.

  Glee flipped through the pages of her notebook as we climbed the porch stairs. She told Grace, “I didn’t realize the onslaught had already begun. Who’s the early arrival?”

  Reaching to open the screen door, Grace turned and answered, “Bruno Hérisson.” She spoke the last name with a French accent: air-ee-soh(n).

  “Oh?” Glee seemed impressed, reading from her notes, “He’s ‘one of the world’s most renowned craftsmen of miniature period furniture.’” To me, she added, “He’s worth a separate feature of his own, Mark.”

  Lowering her voice, Grace told us in a confidential tone, “I think Bruno was a little miffed that I didn’t offer him the coach house, but I’d already promised it to Carrol. Bruno came all the way from Paris yesterday, arriving in Milwaukee. He rented a car and found his way here on his own—it’s nearly a three-hour drive. I’d have gladly picked him up, but I wasn’t expecting him so early. Good thing he’s here, though. I needed all the help I could get this morning. And I guess it worked out pretty well for Bruno too. He said he needed to discuss something in the car with Carrol.” She checked her watch. “God, they should be here by now. If you folks want to get comfortable in the kitchen, help yourselves to lemonade—there’s a fresh pitcher in the fridge—while I dash upstairs to change.”

  Grace opened the door wide for us and began stepping over the threshold, but it was too late. The whir of an engine, the crunch of tires on gravel, si
gnaled that the king of miniatures was being delivered at that very moment. “Oh, Lord…,” Grace muttered, stepping to the edge of the porch. The door closed behind her, slapped shut by its brittle spring. Reflexively, her hands fluttered to her head, trying to do something with her hair, which looked just fine. She brushed her denim work clothes with her palms while stepping down to the driveway. Glee and I followed.

  Bruno Hérisson’s rented car, a no-frills compact, hurtled up the drive, swerving perilously near the house, barely missing my own car—I cringed at the thought of the damage that, by mere chance, was avoided. The car’s windows were open, and its two occupants were yelling at each other. Their words were unintelligible, so I couldn’t tell if the passenger was merely upset with the driver’s questionable skills or if it was some ongoing argument that suddenly ended as the car lurched to a standstill within inches of where we stood.

  “Jee-sus Christ!” barked the passenger as he swung his door open and bounded to his feet, escaping the vehicle as if he feared it would explode. “Insane Frenchman—” Then, seeing us, his tone changed and he forced a laugh, a piercing, well-practiced look-at-me laugh.

  This was apparently Carrol Cantrell. In that morning’s interview in the Register, Grace had called him “a very big man in a very small world,” a description that proved to be literal as well as figurative. King Carrol stood bigger than life, at least six feet four, and I wondered how he’d endured an hour’s ride in that tiny car. Though I knew his age to be fifty, his features were skillfully frozen at thirty-nine. Everything about the man—his too white teeth, his streaked-blond hairdo, his exaggerated movements and flamboyant manner—gave the monarch of miniatures an air that was decidedly queenly.

  Then the driver’s door opened. With considerable difficulty, Bruno Hérisson, a beast of a man, extricated himself from behind the wheel with a sputtering of oaths that, to my uncertain ear, sounded more aggressively Teutonic than charmingly Gallic. Heaving himself from the car, he told the heavens, “Ah, Cantrell! I am so blessed—the honor of hauling his precious majesty to and fro. I am but your humble handmaiden, Cantrell!” and he dipped on one knee in an absurd curtsy. His accent was thick with throaty r’s and aspirate h’s spoken through a French pucker, but his command of English was otherwise solid, and his meaning was clear: he and Carrol Cantrell didn’t get along.