Better Luck Next Time

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  “‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,’” I said.

  “Exactly. Then I saw you wandering around, and I was afraid they would see you, and everything would be spoiled.”

  I wondered if Nina was trying to suggest she’d seen me heading to what she figured was an assignation with Emily. “Who would see me?”

  “Sam and Hugh.”

  “Sam and Hugh?”

  “It’s one of the better ideas I’ve had recently.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Sam and—”

  “—Hugh, yes. Shhhh. Here they come now. I don’t want them to think I was spying on them. Which I wasn’t.” She put a hand on my arm and gestured toward the corral with her chin. In the distance beyond it, Sam’s head and, shortly thereafter, Hugh’s crested the near end of the wash where Emily and I had whiled away a blissful half hour on that saddle blanket. The men’s bodies materialized above the lip of it top to bottom, like that children’s song, head and shoulders, knees and toes, until the all of them was in sight, and walking across the uneven earth on their way to the corral.

  Hugh collected the bicycle and rolled it inside after Sam opened the gate and propped it open. Sam took the handlebars and threw a leg across while Hugh held the bike steady and ran alongside, one hand on the handlebars and another on the seat. He released the handlebars first, then the saddle, and Sam was on his way. When Hugh stepped back, Nina took my hand and squeezed it. “Look at the two of them together,” she said. “I knew they’d like each other.”

  I couldn’t hear anything the men were saying when they leaned close to talk, but they did seem to be getting along. The only sound that made it all the way up to the house was hushed laughter when Sam slowed down too much, the bicycle wobbled, and he hit the dirt. Hugh helped him up and brushed him off. Like any cowboy worth his salt, Sam got right back in the saddle. He rode around the corral’s perimeter where the ground was the hardest while Hugh stood in the middle, rotating to monitor his progress and applauding silently now and again.

  I don’t know how long the lesson lasted. Five minutes? Fifteen? It’s hard to say. Eventually Hugh pulled out his pocket watch, consulted it, put it away again, and waved to his pupil. Sam climbed off the bike and propped it against the fence alongside the post where his hat hung. He picked the hat up, settled it on his head, then reconsidered and settled it on Hugh’s head. Hugh said something to Sam, took the hat off and put it on Sam. It went back and forth between them like that for a few more rounds, then Hugh settled it on Sam’s head one last time and hugged him. Then they kissed, briefly but vigorously enough to knock Sam’s hat off his head.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Turns out I wasn’t the only one who wished I’d been born a boy,” Nina said. “Oh, well. I’m happy for them. Really I am.”

  Hugh swung into the bicycle saddle then, skimmed out of the corral, and bumped silently down the drive. When I looked back to see what Sam was up to, he was leaning against the closed corral gate, holding his hat and staring into the well of its crown as if it were a crystal ball. Finally he put the hat on his head again and walked into the bunkhouse. After he’d been gone a good amount of time, Nina got up and went inside the house. Soon after that I went to bed myself.

  No, I never found out what kind of relationship Hugh and Sam had or didn’t have. It was none of my business, really. What I do know is that I’ve seen too much misery brought about by people trying to force themselves into molds that were not a fit for them. Like Cinderella’s stepsisters, lopping off their big toes so they could try to cram their feet into that glass slipper. I bet those women were crippled for life if they didn’t die right quick. Bled out if Cinderella didn’t think fast and snatch a hot poker from that fire they always had her tending to cauterize the stumps.

  The next morning Portia was at the breakfast table with Zep, Mary Louise, and a few of the other guests, Theresa, Liz, Martha from your photograph, more than likely. I seem to remember those three sticking together, playing endless games of pinochle to pass the time instead of spending it inventing fun new ways to stir up trouble.

  Speaking of Nina, when she slouched into the dining room, still wearing the fairy dress, and poured herself into a chair, Zep asked, “Did you sleep in that costume?”

  “It’s only a costume when I’m wearing the wings,” Nina said. She resettled the fabric underneath herself and fingered one of the seams Emily had stitched when she mended the tattered section. “The rest of the time it’s pajamas.”

  “I’m surprised to see you up,” Portia said.

  Sam brought Nina a cup of coffee as she unfolded a napkin and spread it across her lap.

  “Why’s that?” Nina asked.

  “I woke up in the night and your bed was empty,” Portia said. “I got worried you’d been kidnapped.”

  “Nothing as exciting as that,” Nina said. “There was a full moon and I didn’t want to wake you so I sat out on the porch roof, reading. It’s nice out there when the air is chilly but the roof is still a little warm from the sun the day before.”

  “That’s funny,” Portia said. “I looked out the window and I didn’t see you.”

  “I was sitting with my back against the wall, right by the window,” Nina explained, so blithely I almost believed her myself. “If you’d reached an arm out of the window, you could have tapped me on the shoulder.”

  “See any sign of Mary Louise’s prowler, miss?” Sam asked.

  “I did not,” Portia said. “What’s funny is that I could have sworn I heard voices coming from the front porch. It sounded like you, Nina, talking to Ward.”

  I pushed through the swinging doors into the kitchen and plastered myself to the wall on the other side. I intended to let Nina answer that one, then roll with whatever story she came up with.

  “You must have been dreaming,” Nina said. “What would I want to talk to Ward about in the middle of the night?”

  “I wondered that myself,” Portia said.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Let me see that photograph again. Hand me my magnifying glass if you don’t mind. Nope, I don’t recognize the handwriting. I would if it were Margaret’s. I knew Sam’s handwriting, too, almost microscopic and very tidy; and Max’s scrawl, very nearly indecipherable unless you were familiar with it, like a doctor’s. Some of our guests’ writing I can still picture, too, if I close my eyes. The look up note that Nina scribbled, Ward, block-lettered but still girlish on an envelope from Emily, and of course that bombshell from Portia that—but wait, I’m about to get ahead of my story again.

  Where did we leave off last time? Ah, yes, Portia pointing the finger at me for talking to Nina late at night.

  I was in the kitchen helping Sam with the breakfast dishes later that morning when I heard Hugh’s motorcycle thunder up the drive. Sam, just-washed dish in one hand and a dish towel in the other, eased over to the window and looked out. By the time Hugh roared off with his passengers, that dish of Sam’s was as dry as the Forty Mile Desert southeast of Reno.

  If I’d been at the window, too, counting heads when the motorcycle left, I wouldn’t have been as surprised to come upon Portia later on that day, halfway up the staircase with a kitten in her lap and her head tilted toward the library.

  I said, “I thought you went off with Hugh and N—”

  Portia held her finger to her lips and looked daggers at me. Then I heard the voices coming from the library. Emily’s, and a man’s. I nodded amiably at Portia—none of my business, nothing to see here—walked out the front door, down the porch steps, and around to the library side of the house. Luckily for me, the windows were open and I was able to position myself under one in time to hear Emily say, “You’re wasting your breath, Archer. I want you out of the house by the time I get back to San Francisco.”

  “I will not have you take my child away from me,” the voice that must have belonged to Archer said.

  “Our child,” Emily said. “Find an apartment close e
nough to the house and you can see our child every day if that’s what you want. Up to you. All I know is that you aren’t living in my house with us anymore.”

  “I won’t have it, do you hear me? Portia needs her father under the same roof, to—”

  “—to show her how she can expect to be treated by her husband? To teach her that she’s supposed to look the other way when the man who says he loves her doesn’t love her enough to keep his hands off other women?”

  “But I didn’t love any of those other women,” Archer said. “Why can’t you understand that? It isn’t fair to Portia to—”

  “Don’t pretend this is about Portia, Archer. All she is to you is a bargaining chip.”

  The thing about Emily’s voice always sounding so ragged was that it made it hard to gauge how upset she was when you couldn’t see her face. She wasn’t shouting, that’s for sure. It sounded like she had more grace under pressure than you might expect of someone no bigger than a minute, who’d once seemed afraid of so many relatively inconsequential things.

  “That’s not true,” Archer said. “You know it isn’t.”

  “Isn’t it? Well, how about this? Take her with you when you move out. Take her today, for all I care. See how much you like putting up with her moods. It’s a pretty thankless business, raising your daughter.”

  I didn’t stick around after that. All I could think of was Portia on the staircase, clutching that kitten and listening in. That’s the danger of eavesdropping, isn’t it? Sometimes you overhear things you wish you could unhear.

  The kid wasn’t on the staircase when I went back inside. The kitten was, though, mewling pitifully over the injustice of having been abandoned there. I scooped up the poor little creature and returned it to its stall down at the barn. On my way back I saw a taxi vanishing down the driveway. Then Portia came out of the house wearing the papier-mâché donkey’s head. She gave me a wide berth as she passed me on her way out to the barn.

  I found Emily alone in the library, curled up in Nina’s armchair and staring out the window.

  “Who was in the taxi?” I asked innocently.

  Emily got up, put her arms around my neck, and pulled my face down to meet hers. She kissed me full on the lips, then said, “Nobody.”

  “Careful,” I said. “We wouldn’t want anybody to catch us doing that.”

  She pulled away from me and eyed me. “So what if they do?” she asked. “You know what? I think we should get married as soon as I’m divorced from Archer. Walk across the hall and do it right away. What do you think of that idea?”

  “What about Portia?” I asked. Don’t get me wrong. It tickled me to think of becoming Mr. Emily Sommer on my way to turning myself into Dr. Howard Stovall Bennett. However. “I’m not sure she’s going to go for having a stepfather.”

  “It’s about time Portia learned the world doesn’t revolve around her. Anyway, she’ll be gone from the house soon enough. Like Nina said.”

  “Keep your voice down. She might hear you.”

  “No, she won’t. Portia’s off somewhere motorcycling with her pals.”

  “Not today,” I said. “I saw her in the hall earlier. Sitting on the stairs. I think she was looking for you.” I was turning over in my mind whether I ought to mention what the kid might have overheard, but I couldn’t think of a way to do it without confessing that I’d been listening in myself.

  Before I’d bulldogged the horns of this dilemma and got it wrassled to the ground, Emily puckered her brow and said, “Oh? I’d better go find her.”

  “Maybe so,” I said. “Last I saw her she was headed down to the barn.”

  Emily considered this for a moment. “Or. Maybe I’ll wait until Nina gets back from wherever she’s run off to. Portia is always nicer to me when Nina’s around. It’s so tiresome, always fighting with that child. There’s no pleasing her. Sometimes I wonder why I bother trying.”

  I agree I should have told Emily all I knew right then. Everything might have ended differently if I had.

  Later, while pinning laundry on the line for Margaret, I noticed that same sad, floppy-eared half-donkey, half-girl on the porch steps, waiting the way a dog will by the front door for its master to come home. Then I heard the distant rumble of the motorcycle and saw the swirl of dust as it turned off the main road and into the driveway.

  After Nina climbed out of the sidecar and Hugh thundered away, she sat by the kid on the stairs and said, “We missed you today, Portia. What did your mother say about the kitten?”

  A negative shake of the donkey’s head.

  “I don’t suppose it’s the sort of thing you could smuggle home inside your luggage,” Nina said.

  Portia dragged the ass’s head off. “I don’t want to go back to San Francisco,” she said. “Why can’t I go home with you?”

  “I don’t think your parents would be happy about that,” Nina said.

  “They wouldn’t care.”

  “I’m pretty sure they would. Besides, I don’t know where I’m going next. So I don’t think it would be a good idea for you to tag along with me.”

  “You’re as bad as they are,” Portia said. “I hate people.” She pulled on Bottom’s head again.

  Nina rested a hand between its terry cloth ears and said, “For the record, I hated people when I was your age, too. Sometimes I still do.”

  Portia knocked Nina’s hand away, got up, and stomped off in the direction of the barn.

  “Where’s Portia?” Emily asked Nina, her hands kneading the back of a chair before she pulled it out to take a seat at dinner. “I haven’t seen her all day.”

  “She’s out in the barn,” Nina said.

  “Playing with the kittens?”

  “Communing with her boyfriend Dumpling. The only being in heaven or on earth who really understands her. Says she.”

  “I could go out and fetch her for you, ma’am,” I said.

  “No, no. That’s all right. No reason to poke the bear.”

  Throughout dinner I tried to catch Emily’s eye, but she wouldn’t look at me. I tried not to read any significance into that, but I confess being so willfully ignored put me on edge.

  When the meal was over and Portia still hadn’t straggled in, Margaret made a sandwich for the kid and asked me to take it out to her. Sam put a couple of cookies on the plate and I poured a glass of lemonade.

  Portia was huddled in a corner of Dumpling’s stall, still wearing that infernal donkey’s head. Although by then the thing wasn’t looking judgmental so much as pathetic. It hadn’t been constructed to stand up to the hard use it had gotten lately.

  As for Dumpling, he had on the fairy wings. Their harness wasn’t designed to fit a horse, so the wings flopped against either side of the gelding’s neck instead of spreading as magnificently as the wings of Pegasus.

  I knocked on the closed lower half of his stall door. “May I come in?” I asked.

  “No.” Portia’s voice sounded like it was rising from the bottom of a well.

  Dumpling nickered softly. At least he was glad to see me. Or maybe he hoped I’d relieve him of those silly wings.

  “Thanks, pal,” I said. “Don’t mind if I do.” I let myself into the stall and said, “Oh, Portia, I didn’t see you there. I’m glad I found you. Margaret fixed a plate for you.”

  “I’m not hungry,” the muffled voice said. “Go away.”

  I put the plate down inside the feed trough. “Now, don’t you eat this, Dumpling,” I said. “Sugar is bad for your teeth, and anyway, it’s for Portia.”

  “What about my teeth?” Portia asked in a faraway, woeful voice.

  I decided it was better not to respond to that directly. “Portia can come in and brush her teeth after she eats that cookie, you see. Maybe I should get you a toothbrush, too, huh, pal? When I go into town to buy myself a new pair of boots, I’ll pick one up for you.”

  I rested my forehead against Dumpling’s blaze and scratched him where his jaw met his neck, the way he liked it.
“Those wings look better on you than they did on me,” I said, though I hoped that wasn’t so. There was something so sad about the flaccid way they hung there. “Okay then. I’m leaving you in charge here, old man. See you in the morning.” I patted him one last time while he lipped my shirt pocket hopefully. I didn’t have a thing in there for him. I’ve always regretted that.

  That night, Emily slipped out of the house and made it up to me and then some for missing the night before. Then she gasped, sat up and said, “Ward, I can’t marry you.”

  “What?” I said. “Why not? Because of Portia?”

  She started laughing. “Please don’t look at me like that. I was kidding. It just struck me that I don’t know your middle name. How could I think of marrying a man whose middle name I don’t know?”

  “It’s Stovall,” I said, trying not to seem as shaken as I felt. “Howard Stovall Bennett III, at your service. That’s why I go by Ward. My father was Howard.”

  “Well, come here, Howard Stovall Bennett III, and service me again.”

  Afterward, she asked, “What’ll you call your son? Quarter?”

  “Quarter?”

  “Because he’s the fourth? As in, a fourth of a dollar?”

  “I see. Ha.” I thought for a minute. I had never considered what to call any progeny of mine. “‘Stovall’ sounds pretentious, and calling the kid ‘Stove’ would set the kid up for all kinds of teasing. ‘Howard’ is too formal for a kid. Howie, maybe?”

  “How about ‘Steve’?” she asked. “My grandfather’s name was Steven and we called him Papa Steve. He was such a sweet old man.”

  I almost said, “I’ll have to run that by my mother.” Then I was overwhelmed with such sadness. My face crumpled, thinking about the descendants she’d always wanted but hadn’t lived to see.

  “Oh, no,” Emily said quickly. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Call him anything you want. ‘Sonny.’ Or ‘Hey You.’ Whatever. Archer always said Portia probably thought her name was ‘Stop That’ when she was little.”