“You must fall in love all the time here, Samson,” she said, giving him the full Delilah while she had him at her elbow. “Hold on a minute, darling. Here’s my breast. Do you see how perfect this one is?” She winked and moved her shoulders to give him a better angle on her cleavage while she transferred the piece of chicken she was after to her plate.
At the other end of the table, Emily shifted uncomfortably and Nina rolled her eyes. Nina had taken a dislike to that particular guest after she made the mistake of telling Nina she knew Nina’s mother and then compounded it by going on at great length about a picnic they’d both attended in Newport before the war. “The War of 1812?” Nina had inquired sweetly. You had to give that lady credit. She’d laughed good-naturedly and said, “You’ll be older someday, too, if you’re lucky, miss. The hell of it is that you still feel young inside. Just you wait and see.”
After that, Nina had called her the Zeppelin, Zep when she was feeling more charitable toward her. “Buoyant, but what a gasbag,” she explained to Emily. “Watch yourself when you light a cigarette around her. She may explode if she gets too close to an open flame.” That nickname stuck with me, alas, and the lady’s real name didn’t.
Sam, whose real name was not even Samuel, much less Samson, had grown up the eighth child on a dairy farm in Butterfield, Arkansas, where he’d learned early that the more you used your mouth for talking, the less of a crack you got at the vittles. Margaret remarked more than once that she felt Sam’s being what you could call enigmatic made him seem even more like Gary Cooper than his looks did.
“Do I fall in love a lot? Well, yes, ma’am,” Sam answered. “But I try not to dig up more snakes than I can kill.”
“Our cowboys don’t get involved with our ladies,” Margaret added.
“Why not?” Zep asked.
Margaret always struggled with this explanation. The obvious one, “Because this isn’t a whorehouse,” seemed blunt. Sam asked the Zeppelin, “You ever caught a tadpole, ma’am?”
“Not lately,” Zep said, handing the serving fork back to him. “No.”
“Well, you catch a tadpole down at the pond, you take it home, run some water in the sink and slip it in. You mean to have it and hold it and so forth, but come morning when you visit it, like as not it’s floating belly up.” He carefully nestled the tines of the fork in among the pieces of chicken remaining on his serving platter. “That’s why.” He tipped the hat he wasn’t wearing at her, then pushed through the swinging double doors into the kitchen, ones the set designer had modeled on the doors of a saloon.
Sam was devoted to Margaret. We all were. “That explanation you gave was very diplomatic, Sam,” she said later, when the ladies were out of earshot. “Our guests will buy that one and feel good about it, even if it’s not the absolute truth. It isn’t a lie, either, though, which is what I like about it. We’ll have to use it again, won’t we?”
Sam nodded. “Always good to put the hay down where the goats can get at it,” he said.
Since we men cycled in and out of the dining room with the plates of food, my experience of the ladies’ chitchat came in snippets and what an affected kid from Shreveport, Louisiana, I went to college with in New Haven had called “aperçus.” He wanted to be sure I, as a fellow southerner, understood there should be a little tail dangling under the “c” so that the stuck-up easterners who fancied themselves such aristocrats wouldn’t catch me leaving it off and think the lot of us were hicks. He’d insisted on writing it out for me in the reporter’s notebook I carried in my pocket back then for jotting down stuff people said that made me laugh, and to work out the random couplets I came up with when I made my feckless stabs at writing poetry. Let me tell you something: before I went to work at the ranch I had not realized how many words rhyme with “saddle.” I toted around a boxful of those little spiral-bound reliquaries of my youth for many years. Gone the way of my copy of your photograph, I suppose. Lost, or torn out and twisted into wicks for lighting fires.
I still remember a few of my favorite exchanges, though. “You don’t marry a man because he’s perfect, you marry him because—” “—he’s rich!” “He was taller when he was sitting on his wallet” came up a fair amount, as did some variation of “A fool and his money will soon be parted from his wife and shacked up with a chorus girl.” I must have written down a fair share of the sorrowful aperçus as well, but only one stuck with me: “You know it’s time to file for divorce when all your fantasies about your husband involve him being dead.” Really, it’s a wonder anybody who works in the divorce industry has the courage to marry, ever.
Where was I? Oh, yes. Dinner, after the airport. For the evening meal the table was set with a tablecloth, place cards, and a lovely set of china plates edged with gold. Max had wanted dishes with the Flying Leap logo wrapped around the rim, but the Hollywood set designer had advised against it, explaining that such plates would disappear into our clientele’s luggage and that there were cheaper ways to advertise.
Sam got endless innocent pleasure out of setting the table with so many nice plates that matched, so that was always his job. Now and again, if dinner happened to be running late and the ladies were getting restless, to buy time Margaret sent Max into the dining room to say, “Sammy, don’t you see this spot here on this cloth? We can’t eat off this. Change it. Now.” Sam would nod, grab a double handful of tablecloth, and snatch. The tableware rattled but stayed more or less in place. The ladies cheered. There were no complaints about late service. I remember saying to Max once that there had to be a metaphor in that brilliant stall. Max pondered, then wagged a finger, chucked me on the shoulder, and said, “Keeping the magic of romance alive may require some sleight of hand.”
Yes, yes, you’re right. I did say place cards. They were exquisite, blank, and ordered in bulk from a Mrs. John L. Strong, Stationers, in New York City. Margaret had beautiful handwriting the nuns had taught her, and filled the place cards in at the same time she lettered a new guest’s name on the wooden clothespins she used to keep laundry from getting jumbled on the clothesline. And yes. One reason Margaret used the place cards was to help the staff learn the names of the ladies we served, but the more important reason was to choreograph peace.
The upside of this particular seating arrangement was that it was easy to hear the questions Zep lobbed at Nina even when the kitchen’s saloon door swung shut. Ditto Nina’s answers. I was in the kitchen gnawing on a chicken thigh over the sink when I heard, “Your being from St. Louis, Nina, explains everything, doesn’t it?”
“What does it explain?” Nina asked. I dropped the thigh bone in the sink, wiped my face and hands right quick, grabbed a water pitcher, and headed in.
“That’s why you took up flying airplanes,” the Zeppelin was saying as I swung through the door.
“I don’t follow,” Nina said.
“Charles Lindbergh,” the Zeppelin said, “is also a native of your hometown. He named his airplane after it. The Spirit of St. Louis.”
“Is that so? Thanks for telling me. I hadn’t heard that.” Nina patted the knife and fork on either side of her plate as if she were thinking of using them to slice into the delectable breast on the other end of the table. “I’m not sure I’ve heard of this Lindbergh fellow, either.”
“Really? That surprises me. I should think—”
“Yes, you should think. I’m kidding. Obviously I know who Charles Lindbergh is. I’m just sick to death of hearing about him. I’m sure Charles Lindbergh is sick of hearing about Charles Lindbergh, too, especially since being so famous made his child a target for—”
Emily looked stricken and grabbed Nina’s forearm. “Stop,” she said. “Can we please not talk about that? I can’t imagine losing a child. I don’t think I could survive that. I slept in Portia’s room for ages after that kidnapping. Archer says that’s when—well, it doesn’t matter what Archer says. Not anymore.” She looked at her lap and smoothed and resmoothed the napkin there.
Nin
a patted Emily’s hand and said. “Shhh. All right. If you must know, Z—uh, ma’am, I took up flying airplanes because I enjoy looking down on people.”
Margaret intervened with, “Who else here has been up in an airplane? Anybody?” Sounding so much like a schoolmarm that Mary Louise, in gold lamé, raised her hand to answer. “My husband and I traveled longer distances mostly by yacht, of course, or private rail car. But when I was growing up in Nebraska, I almost went up in an airplane once. With a barnstormer.”
“I understand Charles Lindbergh began his career as a—” the Zeppelin began.
Margaret laid a hand on top of hers and shook her head almost imperceptibly. “Go on, Mary Louise.”
“That barnstormer was so handsome,” Mary Louise said, “and he’d been to France. That’s where Paris is. He was a pilot in the war, like the men in that old silent movie that was playing at the cinema around then. Wings. Did you ever see that one, Nina?”
“Did I ever see that,” Nina said. “The truth is, that movie is what got me interested in flying. I loved Gary Cooper in it. He stole the picture, if you ask me.”
“That reminds me,” Margaret said, looking around and spotting me. “Ward, will you ask Sam to serve the cobbler? I think we’re all ready for something sweet.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I dawdled a little more, though, refilling water tumblers. The cobbler would keep another minute and I wanted to see how the conversation played itself out.
“They say Gary Cooper stole Clara Bow’s heart, too,” the Zeppelin said. “I understand she was engaged to another man while she was making that movie, but those two had a fling. You must have wanted to be Clara Bow, Nina.”
“Are you kidding? I wanted to be Gary Cooper. His character died doing something he loved. Right after eating half a chocolate bar. Never knew what hit him. Next stop, heaven.”
“I remember putting on my nicest dress that day,” Mary Louise continued, dreamily tracing a fingertip around the gold encircling her plate. “Parting my hair, and then redoing it, over and over, to make sure I got it perfectly straight. I imagined the pilot looking down on me, like you said, Nina, and noticing how careful I’d been with my part and thinking, ‘That’s the girl for me.’ I know it sounds silly now, but I was young and I really didn’t want to spend the rest of my life tasseling corn. Do you know, corn grows so fast that you can hear it? It moves and rustles when there isn’t any wind at all. When I was a kid I was convinced a stalk of corn would come after me in my sleep, boil me, and eat me.”
“Tell me, Mary Louise,” Emily said, putting her napkin alongside her plate and leaning forward. “Were you at all nervous about going up in that airplane?”
“I imagine Mary Louise was, if the noise corn makes growing was enough to scare her silly,” Nina said. “Although I suppose that’s not as crazy as it sounds, come to think of it. It would explain why hunting is called ‘stalking.’”
“Sure, I was nervous, Emily,” Mary Louise said, studiously ignoring Nina. “But I had to do it anyway. The barnstormer was going to be my way out of Nebraska. A ride in his airplane cost a dollar, and a ticket on the Union Pacific to anywhere good cost thirty. A dollar I could afford.”
“Fifteen minutes wouldn’t have gotten you far, not even in an airplane,” Emily said.
“Yes, but fifteen minutes was plenty long enough to get someplace with the pilot.”
Nina tapped her fingers on her lips and considered Mary Louise. “Fifteen seconds probably would have done the trick if you made sure he got a good look at you,” she said.
“Thanks,” Mary Louise said. “I thought so, too. You know who didn’t think that? The girl in line in front of me. She was telling her friend she’d kissed the pilot when he’d handed her his advertising leaflet the day before, and that he was probably in love with her already. She meant to take him home for dinner that night, to meet her parents. They’d get married, he’d give up flying and take over her father’s farm when the old man died. They were meant to spend the rest of their lives together, she just knew it. She was so full of herself. But she was the prettiest girl in town, so you know.” Mary Louise shrugged. “She was right, as it turns out.”
“He gave up flying?” Nina asked.
At the same time Emily asked, “They got married?”
“No. When they were coming in for a landing she was waving her arms around and acting a fool. He got distracted by her hoo-ha, I guess, because he snagged a wheel in this barbed wire fence and flipped the plane. Splat. Killed both of them dead.”
While we were cleaning up afterward, when we were alone in the kitchen, Margaret said to me, “I saw Nina smiling at you during dinner.”
“So?” I said.
“She calls you Cashmere. Why?”
“She thought it was funny that I knew what cashmere felt like.”
Margaret raised an eyebrow.
“The upholstery on the back seat of Emily’s car is cashmere,” I added hastily.
“What do you know about the back seat of Emily’s car?” she asked.
“One of the cats had kittens there. That’s all I know.”
“I hope that’s all you know, Ward. If there’s a woman on this earth who could make a boy like you forget yourself, it’s Nina.”
“I am not interested in Nina,” I said. “I’m not going belly-up like some poor tadpole in that woman’s sink, I promise you. As far as I can tell she doesn’t even know my name.”
Chapter Six
Reno was a skillet in the summertime, sure, but its saving grace was the Washoe zephyr, a frisky little breeze that could be counted on most days to tumble down the mountains into the basin, fanning faces and fluttering through the trees its settlers had the foresight to plant all over town.
I liked to sit on a particularly shady bench while I waited for our ladies who’d booked appointments with the lawyers in the building close to the courthouse. As I watched the leaves flip forward and back, forward and back, anonymous tidbits drifted to me on the breeze: “—last Thanksgiving, with my own sister—” “—of course I think the child is my husband’s, but it’s possible—” “—not a dime left in our bank accounts—” “Well of course I knew he was lying—” “—he hit me, so I walked—” “—he says he loves me, but I hate him—”“—I love him, but he hates me—” It was like listening to a celestial radio that only picked up the saddest soap operas, its dial twisted slowly by the universe across the whole unhappy bandwidth without settling anywhere for long. I might not have had a set opinion of the right or wrong of divorce when I got to Reno, but the things our ladies went through before they came to us won me over to the necessity of it. Better to risk frying in hell than to suffer through a living one.
After Sam and I had done our best to scrub the back seat of the Pierce-Arrow clean, a couple of days later I drove it into Reno so Nina could deliver Emily personally to the law firm she always patronized. The seat was still damp and, it seemed, indelibly stained, so the three of us rode strung across the front seat again, Emily next to me like before and trembling. “I don’t think I can go through with this,” she said.
“Sure you can,” Nina said. “Here’s the lowdown on this law firm. It’s called Stacks & Stacks. So named because of all the money they’ve made on my divorces.”
“What? Is that really why—your lawyer—huh?”
Nina laughed. “Oh, chickadee,” she said. She tapped the space between Emily’s eyes with her right knuckle. “Hello? Hello? Anybody home? Hmm. Sounds hollow. I thought you had extra brains stored in there.”
Emily knocked her hand away. “Stop that,” she said. “You’re being mean.”
“I’ll stop when you stop calling me Stilts.”
“I’ve never called you Stilts.”
“I wouldn’t mind if you did,” Nina said. “Stilts O’Malley sounds like a very dangerous customer. I like it. As for the Stacks brothers, they’re very dangerous lawyers. The best in Reno. You’re seeing Michael, the younger one. He’s
absolutely ruthless. Archer won’t have a cent when Mike is done with him.”
I pulled over in front of the law offices to drop them off, and came around to open the passenger-side door. “It’s not about the money,” Emily said as I handed Nina out of the automobile.
“Don’t kid yourself,” Nina said. “It’s always about the money when one half of the couple is loaded and the other isn’t.”
“Plenty of people have more money than I do.”
“Yes, but Archer isn’t one of them.”
Nina had on her dove-gray visiting-the-lawyer dress and Emily her black one, brushed free of cat hair. “How do I look?” Emily asked as I handed her out as well.
“Like a million bucks,” I said, “except—” I noticed one of the white tomcat’s hairs still clinging to the shoulder of her dress and tweezed it away with my thumb and forefinger. “From your boyfriend Wally,” I said, and held it up for her to see.
“Oh, I’m going to need that,” Emily said, taking it back and replacing it on her shoulder. “For luck.”
I parked the Pierce-Arrow across the street and had just taken my preferred seat in the shade when a second-floor window nearby rattled up. I heard Nina’s voice say, “How can you stand it in here, Mike, with the window closed? All that fan is doing is moving the hot air around. No, not your hot air, I didn’t say that, the hot air. Come sit over here, Emily, where you can feel the breeze.” An unseen chair scooted across wooden floorboards. “Now, don’t worry, chickadee. Nothing fazes Mike. He’s seen it all and heard the worst. I’ll wait for you in the car.”
Better Luck Next Time Page 5
