The Sweetheart Season

by Karen Joy Fowler

  “Now, now, Mrs. Tarken,” said Irini’s father. He had come out behind Irini, dressed for work, coffee cup in his hand. He never drank liquor in the morning on a workday. It was a point of pride with him. “No one was hurt. They were all in Norma’s hands. You can’t find a safer place than that.”

  “She is off the team,” Mrs. Tarken repeated. “She can just as well find a husband right here in Magrit.” And, right on cue, here came Thomas Holcrow walking down Brief Street. He was wearing a light blue short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants. He could have been coming to the Mays or the Doyles. Irini held her breath, but sure enough, he turned in at the Tarkens’. Mrs. Tarken disappeared inside, her bare face as smooth as cream.

  “Never mind, Irini,” Irini’s father said. “He was never your type.”

  “Too gorgeous for the likes of me?” Irini asked, irritated with her father for knowing that she liked Holcrow, just the same as Walter knew. But how? The mere presence of Holcrow had heated the air so hot it singed her from a whole house away, but when had she done anything to betray this to anyone?

  “Not nearly gorgeous enough.”

  Irini went inside so that she would not appear to be waiting when Holcrow came back out. As a result she had no idea how long he stayed. She didn’t know that he went straight from the Tarkens’ to the Mays’, and she wouldn’t have ever known it if Tracy hadn’t boasted to her about his visit. It made her so upset, the thought of him calling in on every girl on Brief Street with the exception of her, that she told Tracy he had been to see Sissy first. Even though she knew she was setting the reconciliation of Upper and Lower Magrit back by decades.

  Her father went to work. She lay on her bed and finished the Agatha Christie. She hated it when the murderer turned out to be a child. Not much scared Irini, but there was something so evil in that. She was surprised that a lady, a real lady, such as Mrs. Christie, would even make up such a thing. She was alone in the house. She glanced around her bedroom, and sure enough, thanks to Mrs. Christie and her demented mind, the dolls had all assumed debauched expressions.

  She decided to go outside, but there were ghosts with knives at the falls and shadows in the woods. She walked downtown to the grocery, for a Dixie cup of ice cream. Her father said those Dixie cups were half air, but she thought that might be the half she liked best anyway. “You girls had the adventure,” Mr. Moodey told her when she brought the ice cream to the counter, and she said she knew, she’d been there while it happened. “It’s a miracle no one was killed,” he said, “but then that’s our Norma behind the wheel. We thank God for our Norma.”

  Irini browsed through the magazines. She looked at hair styles, she read snatches of the fiction. A toothpaste ad made her wonder briefly if her teeth were yellowing. Would anyone be enough of a friend to tell her so? Perhaps dandruff was her problem. Perhaps that was why Holcrow was ignoring her. She glanced at her shoulders, widened the glance to make sure Mr. Moodey was not going to come up behind her. She reached for True Life. “My Fear of His Love Almost Cost Me My Husband,” the cover said. There was a drawing of a woman with a lovely, agonized face. It was just the thing to put murderers who were children completely out of her mind.

  The woman had married at just nineteen, just Irini’s age, after a brief but sweet courtship. He’d been a pilot in the war, an officer and a perfect gentleman. He had kissed her when he asked her to marry him, kissed her deeply. But he had never tried to tempt her down any other path but purity, no matter how hard this had become for him.

  Then the first night of their honeymoon everything changed. He asked her to undress when she came to bed. He said that he liked to see her body when they made love. He said that her body was beautiful. Irini read faster and faster.

  He slid the straps of her nightgown down himself when she wouldn’t. He lowered his body over hers. She pushed him off. You’re my wife, he said. He pulled her to him, kissing her neck, sliding her nightgown away, licking her breasts, first one, then the other. Something unbearably pleasurable shot through her body in just that instant before she could refuse.

  Then she ordered him to stop. This was unnatural, she told him. What he wanted, she would never do. His blue, blue eyes went cold. He said he would never ask her again. He turned from her in the bed they shared…”

  “Are you finding what you want?” Mr. Moodey asked her. He was only an aisle away, over in sundries. Irini hastily picked up a copy of Women at Home, fumbled through the pages, groping toward a recipe, any recipe. She flipped past Maggie’s column straight to tuna casseroles. Mr. Moodey came around the canned goods.

  Maggie was calling for a nationwide strike of housewives. That couldn’t be. Irini flipped back again. She looked at the column. Stop cooking, Maggie was saying. Stop cleaning. You, quite frankly, don’t have the time. It’s just us girls talking now, so let’s be honest. As I keep telling you, any trained ape can do the dishes. Why are you the only ape in your house?

  Life is for the living and you’ve only got the one time through. Dance on the tables. Dance with the chairs. Order the lobster. If he doesn’t appreciate you, leave him on his sorry buttocks and find someone who does. Children and marriage may not have been the right thing for you. Don’t let one mistake hold you down. If it feels good, said Maggie, then it’s the thing to do.

  There it was, the word “buttocks,” right there in Women at Home. The shock of it froze Irini into whole minutes of inaction. She had never seen so many un-Maggie-like sentiments in one place at one time. Her first impulse was to hide all the copies of Women at Home behind the Good Housekeeping’s where no one would ever find them.

  She did so, keeping out one copy only, which she bought. She tore out Maggie’s column, folded it several times, and put it in her sleeve. She abandoned the rest of the magazine by poking it through the wire in the schoolyard fence. Then she walked as fast as she could to Collins House, ran the usual gauntlet of dogs, got the usual stuff on her shoes, walked past the pissing cupids, through the porch, through the kitchen, and called up the stairs.

  “It’s Irini Doyle,” she called. “Is Mrs. Ada in?”

  Walter came out of the parlor. Holcrow came out of the library. Ada came down the stairs. “Walter tells me that Sissy and the May girls spoke to each other on the trip,” Ada said. Her voice, her face were full of light. “Come and tell me all about it.”

  Irini was dreadfully conscious of the two men. A brisk walk had been just what she needed after the grocery store. That and her concern over Maggie had quite calmed her down. But now there were these men. They came to stand with her, one on either side. They stood very close; they loomed beside her, even Walter, who was hardly big enough to loom. They sandwiched her in. She couldn’t move her arms without touching one of them. Walter was breathing on her shoulder. She could feel the little puffs of hot air.

  “Maybe two words,” she told Ada with some difficulty. “And they’re already mad at each other again.” She didn’t mention that this was her fault. The men reached out and slipped the straps of her nightgown over her shoulders. “Even by the end of the trip, they already weren’t speaking.” Her voice was so uneven she had to cough. Holcrow leaned in and kissed her neck. Walter reached for her breast. “So we were right back where we started,” she finished woodenly.

  “But that’s wonderful,” said Ada. “That’s all we need. A beginning. We can build on that.”

  Ada was making far too much of things. She was imagining things that weren’t occurring. Fortunately Irini could make that stop. Irini had just the way to bring her down. “It’s happened again,” she told Ada, handing her the column. “I don’t know how. Fanny was screening everything. There’s no way this could have gotten through.”

  Ada unfolded and smoothed out the page. She read it over. She folded it up and gave it back to Irini. “The thing is,” she said sadly, “that the really good life is a life of self-sacrifice. That’s where lasting happiness lies. This will take people in the absolute wrong direction.”


  Walter reached over and took it from her. "Olé," he said, reading the page.

  Holcrow leaned in close, trying to read it, too. Holcrow smelled of bay leaves and Ivory soap and cigarette smoke. Walter passed the column to him, across Irini. His arm brushed her arm. “Oh for goodness sake,” said Irini crossly.

  Holcrow straightened away again. “What? What did I do?”

  There was no answer to that question. Irini turned back to Ada. “Will Mr. Henry see it?” she asked.

  “We’ll have to see that he doesn’t. That will be my job,” said Ada. “Your job is to figure out who is doing this.”

  “Why?” said Irini.

  “And why,” Ada agreed. “Where is Maggie going with this? Look for the pattern. Motive and opportunity. Those are the keys.”

  “I meant, why is this my job,” Irini said.

  “Not just you, Irini. You young people.” Ada shook her head. “Well, I can’t do it, can I? I have these problems between Upper and Lower Magrit to settle.”

  “Dog my cats!” Holcrow was still reading. He seemed to be a very slow reader. “I can’t see anyone being swayed by nonsense like this. Imagine a country without mothers. It’s not America. It’s not what we fought a war for. Let’s not get too upset over this garbage.”

  “Oh, people are gullible,” said Ada. “They believe everything they see in print.”

  “Did you see this part?” Holcrow asked. He pointed to the household tips column.

  “Maybe Maggie’s reached that time of life,” said Walter. He took the page back from Holcrow, looked at it again. “It sounds as if our Maggie has a lot of regrets,” he said.

  Maggie Collins writes: “Make your toilet bowl into a handsome terrarium! Maybe the problem is not that you have things growing in your toilet, but merely that you have the wrong things growing. With a little planning and a little planting, your toilet bowl can become a restful sanctuary for you and a delightful conversation piece for your guests.”

  And underneath that was a paragraph entitled “New Uses for Old Pipe Cleaners.” Irini really didn’t dare read further.

  35

  Indian Independence Day was almost upon them and Ada had yet to settle on the appropriate way to celebrate. Of course she would have to have a party at Collins House, a big party, the whole town and then some. Miss Schaap had agreed to visit again to see the flowering of the seeds she had sown that long-ago evening around the Collinses’ dining-room table. And Ada knew the party would have to be inside. This was a shame. With so many people the house would overheat unbearably, but outdoors would be hot as well, unless it were actually raining. And outside there would be mosquitoes, which people would kill right before Miss Schaap’s eyes or else do it secretly and wander around with those telltale bloody smears on their bare arms.

  So she knew the day and she knew the location. But what would she serve? They had already had curry once this summer. And what kind of entertainment would she provide? They had done the fireworks thing on the Fourth; it was too much to make Norma do it over again. Ada took the classic etiquette misstep of inviting people to a party she hadn’t yet planned and now she was suffering for it.

  She asked Claire for menu suggestions, and they spent an entire afternoon huddled over the dining-room table with cookbooks and magazines and notebooks, but neither of them came up with anything that satisfied. The day was to be strictly vegetarian, no dairy even, which quite tied Claire’s hands. And Ada wanted something different. Ada wanted something so different they couldn’t even begin to imagine it. She told Claire she felt as if it were the first party she had ever given. Every other party, she had said, everything else she had ever done in Magrit, had always been for Mr. Henry. Only this was entirely her own. She was so excited she glittered.

  The day grew nearer and nearer and she never called Claire back to finalize the food, but she did have the girls in to sweep and dust. She had her heart set on perfection. The big chandelier, cleaned only months ago, was lowered and cleaned all over again. It took the team: it took Norma on the ladder, Irini and her right arm on the rope. Henry came down the stairs to say hello to everyone and then went right back up. His ascent was painful to watch. He stumbled on the one high step. It was as if he had forgotten it was there.

  Ada had the bird-banding nets taken down. They had outlasted their original function and also their aesthetic appeal. They were torn and sagged. Weeks had passed since they had fooled a single bird.

  Meanwhile, back in the Kitchen, where Irini was supposed to be conducting her investigations, she was not Miss Marple and had never aspired to be. Fortunately Margo had quite taken over. Without any explicit instructions from Ada or anyone else, Margo began to interview the girls and write everything they said down in a spiral notebook.

  “We can handle this latest,” Fanny told her. “It was so overboard. Next issue, we announce that it was all a prank. Maybe it could even work for us. The one thing Maggie never had was a sense of humor.”

  “So, Fanny.” Margo noted the suggestion, but was not diverted by it. “You read everything that went to New York and you’re ready to swear that this was not among that lot.”

  It turned out, according to Fanny’s recollection, to have been one of those weeks when no one had written a column for Maggie. With Henry benched, there were frequently weeks in which no one wrote her column. They were depending more and more heavily on letters. But since they had just run a column entirely of letters the week before, Fanny herself had collated the results of the thickener research and written them up. She had done this prior to actually finishing the tests. This meant that she had projected the results in a most unscientific way, but she had included a chart in red and blue ink, which was both quantifying and clarifying. Like anything else with numbers, it certainly looked authoritative. You would never have read this chart and thought someone was making it up.

  The chart had taken her most of one night. It was a useful sort of chart, the kind you could tear out and keep on your refrigerator.

  And then, because there was still space, there were also a number of letters and Maggie’s answers. There was the usual spate of girls wanting to be complimented for their good judgment in refusing to have sex with their boyfriends. Maggie was always happy to oblige there.

  There was a letter from Milwaukee where a woman had found a sweet potato at her local store with poor late President Roosevelt’s profile. She enclosed a picture of the potato, a cigarette holder plunged into its side like a dagger.

  There was an interesting letter from a university professor at Brown suggesting that population growth was a bigger threat to mankind than the bomb. He also had sent a chart, and his numbers were considerably bigger than Fanny’s.

  “I mailed the pickings myself,” said Fanny. “And there was nothing in the package about buttocks. Although I myself have seen them on many a sweet potato.”

  Irini thought that Fanny was taking the whole thing a little casually. Not as if she were guilty herself, but as if she knew who was and didn’t want them exposed. If Fanny did know, it wouldn’t help Margo’s investigation at all. Nobody could keep a secret the way Fanny could.

  “Who took the package to the post?” asked Margo.

  “Who appointed you Erle Stanley Gardner?” Helen asked. “Aren’t you as much a suspect as the rest of us?” She stood with one arm around Claire.

  “I took the package,” said Claire. If Fanny was underplaying everything, Claire was overdoing it. Her face was pinched; her color high and her voice low. “I had letters of my own to mail. I offered to take it.”

  "Was it ever out of your sight?" Margo asked.

  “I met Mrs. Ada downtown. She took it and some of my personal mail to the box for me.”

  The Sweethearts were young enough, most of them, to think that a wife would never hurt her husband. We, of course, know so much better. But they thought that suspecting Ada was out of the question. So who would have picked the letters out of the box? In Magrit, where the mailman
had gone off to war and never come back, Norma Baldish handled the mail. Motive and opportunity, Ada had said. Fanny and Claire and Norma had the second. But which of them had the first?

  Norma seemed especially motiveless. What could she have against Maggie? She didn’t work in the Kitchen. She liked Mr. Henry, as they all did. She wasn’t even Upper Magrit. And tampering with the mail before it was put into the box was merely dishonest. Tampering with it afterward was a federal offense. Surely no one in Magrit could be guilty of a federal offense.

  “I’ll have to talk to Norma later,” Margo said, making a notation in her book.

  There was a long silence except for Louis Armstrong on the radio. No one was quite ready to get back to work.

  Suddenly Claire began to cry. “I did write a letter. A couple. Not for publication, some of the private ones. I only meant to be kind, but I knew all along that Maggie wouldn’t like it.”

  “Everyone knows you wouldn’t hurt anyone,” Fanny said sharply. She looked around the Kitchen. She stopped at Margo’s face. “Of course we don’t suspect Claire, do we? Do we, Margo? Why, I wrote a letter, myself. I wrote that first one about overweight women. I didn’t mean any harm, but I guess I gave someone else ideas. I didn’t write any of the others.” She continued her look around the circle of girls. “Oh come on,” she said. “You all knew I wrote that first one.”

  And it seemed as if they sort of had. They turned to Irini, waited.

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t write that one about martinis. I told you that at the time.”

  “I confessed,” said Claire, wiping her eyes.

  “I confessed,” said Fanny.

  “But I didn’t do it.”