Couldn't Inez and Ronnie have decided to mentor somewhere else?
Who needed an irritated Valkyrie in the City Hall Cafe?
Why was Veda Mae here instead of over at the Willard, anyway? Why had she been here the other day, for that matter? Was she on the outs with Lois again? About what, this time? Cora's natural curiosity perked up a bit.
The wad of little bells fastened to the front door jingled again.
The first person Clara saw when she came through the door was Jenny Maddox, whom she liked and admired. "Good morning, Jenny," she said. Then she saw Vera Hudson, to whom, as a connection of her husband's family, she should be courteous. She gave a little wave. "Isn't it gorgeous out, Mrs. Hudson. I have been walking around, up and down the hills, admiring the sun on the icicles. Up on the greenhouse, where the roof is warm and the snow water trickles down, they reach all the way from the eaves to the ground, like the stone formations in the Feengrotten. There are many snow men, someone has made a snow sphinx in his front yard. Isn't that interesting?"
Jenny stared at her. Then said, "Good morning."
No one else in the room was saying anything at all.
Clara had never heard such quiet in Cora's. She looked around for the cause just as Denise and Minnie tore themselves loose from their mentors and dashed to stand one on each side of her.
"May I have tea, please, Cora. The sassafras kind."
She reached out, putting one hand on the nearest shoulder of each of the girls. "Has she been making a fool of herself again, this malignant… pain in the donkey?"
Denise broke into giggles. "It's 'ass,' Clara, not 'donkey.' "
"Wesley told me that 'ass' is not a nice word."
"It's not, but 'donkey' sort of loses the meaning of the insult. Because one kind of an ass is a donkey but the other kind of ass is the one that has a pain in it."
"I don't know if she has been making a fool of herself right now, exactly" Minnie said quietly. "We just got here. But she has said such awful things, over and over again, about so many good people, that she should be ashamed of herself. Not just about you and Mr. Jenkins. About Chip, Gerry, Gerry's dad. Everyone."
"Why would it matter to Chip or Gerry what she says? Neither one of them cares what Grantville thinks, any more."
"Clara!" Jenny Maddox said.
"Well, it's true. Neither of them lives here; both have left this town behind. They are not likely to come back. They are both being educated, being qualificated-qualified-for responsible professional careers that will take them to far more important places than this. For them, now, this is only a small city in which they were born, far off the main trade routes. They have relatives here, but it will not be their home. Why should they care what a bitter woman says about them?"
" Klug, diejenige," the voice that had admired Jenny said into the silence.
"As for her…" Clara gestured at Veda Mae. "Do what the Mennonites do. Shun her. Do not acknowledge that she is present. Soon enough, if you do that, she will go away."
"Clara," Vera Hudson asked. "Clara, don't you mind?"
"Thirteen years," Clara said, looking around the cafe. "Thirteen years in my first marriage I was barren. I stormed heaven, I beat upon its gates with my fists. I prayed for a child as hard as Hannah prayed for Samuel. We consulted physicians, but still my husband died leaving no son to follow him. How can this old fool make me mind that in my marriage to Wesley I am blessed to be fertile right away. She cannot make me other than the luckiest and happiest woman in this town. She cannot make me other than the luckiest and happiest woman in the whole, entire, world. I will not let her make me other than that. I say only that she is being-has been-very, very, rude, from start to finish."
"That's one way to put it, I guess," Maxine Pilcher, who was still standing by the back booth waiting for Jenny to slide back in, said to Anita.
Clara grinned at her. "Don't you think that I do not know that your husband Keith has been betting when I have this baby. Like a lot of other husbands of you women here. It would be easier to make a list of who of them have not been betting when I have this baby. I will have it when God wills, like every baby is born. I am bound to have it some time, so I wish every bettor at the Thuringen Gardens a winning wager, but I dare you all. Make your husbands, whoever gets the winnings, donate them to the Red Cross once I have delivered and they know the date. That is only fair. The men have given Wesley much 'razzing' because he made me pregnant so fast and since his mother is the president of the Red Cross now, it is right that it should benefit from his suffering. So. And now I want my sassafras tea, please, Cora."
She plopped herself down into a chair between Inez and Ronnie, telling Denise and Minnie that they were both so skinny that they could share the fourth one.
"Well," Marietta Fielder said, raising an eyebrow. "What do you make of that?"
Jenny Maddox grinned at her best friend. "Clara thinks she is the direct beneficiary of a divine miracle and Wes Jenkins is God?"
Marietta managed to catch her cup before it broke, but not before she had splashed a considerable portion of the coffee onto the front of her sensible gray jacket. She was, after all, Wes' first cousin on the Newton side of the family. Before the Ring of Fire, Grantville had been a rather small town.
"What's interesting," Anita Barnes said, "is what she didn't say."
"Didn't?" Jenny asked.
"She didn't even pay any attention to the controversy over the-is 'legality' what they call it?-of whatever they did in Fulda. She blew it off. A marriage; then a baby right away. Whee."
" 'Validity,' " Marietta said. That's the word they're using. 'Validity.' "
"Clara obviously doesn't have any questions," Anita said. "As far as she's concerned, it was legal. Valid. Whatever. At most, she's annoyed because Her Nastiness Veda Mae has been harassing Wes."
"Well, about the marriage," Jenny said, "keeping the wedding here secret was really Mary Ellen's idea. She persuaded Simon and Wes. Clara was standing there in the parsonage parlor that afternoon saying, 'I still think we should have had a party.' Looking back, maybe they should have. It would have cut the gossip off right then. And she absolutely did insist on inviting Wes' mother and Chad and Debbie. Put her foot down. Sort of hard. Practically a stomp."
"Wes sure hasn't reacted so calmly," Maxine said.
Marietta shook her head. "Wes has a temper-always has had, as long as I can remember. According to Debbie, he got mad because he thought the 250 Club types were trying to insult Clara's virtue. Which they were, of course. Debbie says that he's awfully protective about Clara."
"Personally," Anita said, "I think she can take care of herself."
"Agreed," Maxine interrupted, "I hope that Wes and Clara don't ever both get mad at the same time. Whether at each other or at somebody else."
Jenny giggled. "As for the 'razzing,' though, I sort of doubt that even Wes really minds. Do you all know any man who would really get upset about being teased about being so virile that he got his wife pregnant the first time he gave her a poke? If he's going to get razzed at all, that has to be a pretty tolerable reason, the way guys think."
Anita frowned. "Arnold Bellamy would get upset."
"Arnold," Maxine said, "is an exceptional case. A person has to wonder how he and Natalie ever produced three kids."
"But if Clara thinks the thing they did in Fulda was enough, however they did it, I wonder what she thinks the marriage license and the ceremony that Simon did were all about?" Anita picked up her purse and started to dig through it for change for a tip.
"What I wonder is who managed to get into my files and dig out that license. One of these days, I'll find out and then…" Jenny's tone was threatening.
Maxine lined up her knife and fork on her plate. When Keith got back from that trip to the Upper Palatinate, he had called Doc Adams, who ordered her to come in, gave her a checkup, and told her that she had to eat more. Then Keith told Cora, who wouldn't let her get away with ordering "just coffee" any more. "Decorations on the Christmas tree? Icing on the cake?"