Later I went back to Morgue for a routine background check before I wrote her obit. I didn’t expect to find anything; her name meant nothing to me. But there was a skinny folder with Ann Hastings typed neatly in the corner. Inside were two clips — a brief story and a picture.
The story told of her graduation from college with highest honors three years ago. The picture showed an attractive brunette accepting congratulations from her parents. But it was a dark little man standing slightly to the side that caught my attention. I put an eye glass on him to make sure. It was Louis J. Oriole.
Louie was top bully for the local political machine. A real nice fellow who got his kicks clobbering old women and children.
What the hell was a guy like Louie doing at the college graduation of a girl like Ann?
I went off duty at five in the morning and spent three hours in a bar trying for the answer. It wouldn’t come. I told no one about the picture or the letter. If there was a story, I wanted it for myself.
I returned to the office just in time to catch a copy boy coming in off the early morning mail run. He tossed the first class mail on a desk and I picked out the letter in a couple of seconds — a blue envelope with red lettering.
Inside was a key to a locker at the Central Bus Terminal.
The brief case wasn’t locked. I pulled out a batch of papers. On top was a short letter signed by Ann Hastings.
It said her father was a ward leader who had borrowed money from Louie to put her through college. Louie, quite by accident, met her and his interest became more than academic. He offered her a job when she finished college. She accepted and inside a year was visiting him at home, on demand.
Three weeks ago she had learned she was pregnant. She went to Louie. He gave her a thousand bucks and told her to make tracks — for keeps.
She decided to solo into eternity. But as a lasting memento to Louie, here were a few items the newspapers might be interested in.
Sweat erupted on the back of my neck. The story was mine, exclusive. It would be spread all over page one, under my by-line. There would be a bonus, journalism awards. I would be famous.
I dashed to the street, looking for a car...
I was smiling as I slowly returned to the bus station, put the brief case back in a locker, dropped the key in an envelope, addressed it to myself and mailed it.
Then I headed for Louie’s office.
The Housemother Cometh
by Hayden Howard
They had to sneak the blonde in quietly. If Mrs. Danielson caught on, nobody knew what might happen...
The bottle-blonde’s elegant and unsteady shape was plastered between the two sophomores. They precariously buoyed her against gravity. But her terrifyingly loud giggles they could no more suppress than bubbles rising in uncapped beer.
To their frantic whispers she giggled happy responses while they maneuvered her under their housemother’s window and up the backstairs to the dorm rooms.
Fred peered down the empty hall. As he listened to Mrs. Danielson’s footsteps rapping back and forth on the floor below, he discovered he was not so heroically inebriated as he had imagined.
The mating of key with lock seemed endless in Beau’s trembling hands. Whispering angrily, the two sophomores wrestled with the key and knob. The door sprang inward with a bang.
“Oh gawd, she’ll hear,” Beau moaned.
The woman whinnied as Fred snatched her into their room. He could hear doors opening curiously up and down the hall as Beau closed theirs and clicked the light switch.
“Turn it off, you fool,” he gasped.
Stumbling in the redoubled darkness, they pulled down the shades while Fred’s bed creaked beneath the settling weight of the woman.
Under the harsh electric light, he saw her neck was laced with pink, powdered creases he had not noticed in the blue glow of the bar. She was smiling juicily at Beau; his room-mate’s baby face glistened with tiny jewels of perspiration.
“Who has a drinkee?” Her curly-lashed, mahogany and slightly pied eyes wrinkled at their corners in twin smiles as she struggled her white shoulder out of her coat.
Beau gawked as though he was watching the opening of his induction notice. Fred twisted the pint from his coat pocket, filled his toothbrush glass and handed it to her. She barely acknowledged it.
Smiling helpfully at Beau, who sat down weakly on his own bed, she burbled: “Beau, honey? That short for Beaumont? You talk like a Texas boy.”
“Yes, ma’am. Gawd, Fred, pour me more than that.”
“He’s from Fort Worth though,” Fred croaked, clutching the bottle against his blue shirt with one pale, hairy-backed hand. “He’s majoring in Econ.” His voice died uncertainly as, dimpling, she fluttered her eyelids at Beau.
“You come sit by me, honey. You’re the cutest thing I’ve seen from Texas.”
His hand left his glass standing precariously on the bed as tentatively he began to rise. But his wide blue eyes deserted her for Fred.
“We were going to flip a coin,” Fred’s voice bullfrogged, then leapt shrill as Beau fumbled a hand into his pocket. “No, you go right ahead, Beau. I’ll step out. I can be studying for my—”
But Beau reversed his rising, upsetting the glass. Jaw agape as its dampness reached his skin he rose again as her whinnying giggle brought a warning hiss from Fred.
“Keep it down. Mrs. Danielson hears every little sound.”
She giggled more gently, recrossing her knees, bemusedly watching Beau’s scrubbing motions with his handkerchief until he raised his face, red-eared.
Fred’s lips winced. Red ears fading, Beau stared at the closed door. They listened with their mouths open.
“Beau dear,” she tittered unabashed. “You and your roommate better give me the thirty little green men for my purse.”
“Thirty?” Fred squawked. “You said twenty-five for the two of us.”
“Did I now?” Her blonde head wagged on its rubber stem. Crossing her plump arms, she hitched herself inward and upward. “That was when I thought you boys had an apartment or a car. Let’s have it boys, or mama starts screaming.”
Fred glared at her face while he fingered backward for his wallet. His hand hesitated between two powerful emotions.
“You said twenty-five. Didn’t she, Beau?” But he counted fifteen one dollar bills onto the patched coverlid.
“And we thank you.” Turning her body inside her dress, she raised her eyebrows at Beau and he edged over and handed her a twenty dollar bill.
“I bet your Daddy owns an oil well, Beau,” she giggled, as she pushed the thirty-five dollars into her imitation alligator handbag. “If you say he does—” Her eyelashes fluttered in genuine welcome, even without oil wells, welcome.
Beau tittered, retreated toward his own bed, sneezed and clawed embarrassedly for his handkerchief while her voice caressed him: “You’re not catching cold are you honey?”
“If you think I might give you a cold, I—” Beau’s glance drifted uneasily toward the door.
She winked at Fred, who chuckled half-heartedly.
Her delighted shriek rang like glass against the walls.
“Quiet,” Fred gasped in agony. “Her room’s practically underneath us.”
Stretching luxuriously with a sleepy hiccough, she gurgled: “Texas, stop scratching yourself and come to mama.”
“Gawd, Fred, pour me another.” He edged around her extended nylons and sat down close to Fred. But his rosy face was beaming at her, and he wiggled away from Fred.
Fred stood up haughtily.
At that pregnant moment, the arthritic footsteps of Mrs. Danielson started clumping up the inner stairway. Fred’s glass and bottle clashed as Beau jumped up. The woman whinnied in sudden decrease of humor, and her eyes tried to focus together on the door.
The hard-heeled steps measured three doorways to theirs and stopped — audible breathing through the door.
“Who’s in there, Fred?” Mrs. Danielson’s keys jingled.
The lock clicked. Beau and Fred stared at each other in horror. Fred made a pushing motion with his hand and Beau, who was closer, caught the door with his foot and shoulder, but Mrs. Danielson was heavier than he and wheezingly determined. Through the widening door space his head disappeared and his voice mumbled something unintelligible.
Mrs. Danielson’s voice exploded like a string of firecrackers. “Beaumont Compton, you’ve been drinking!”
Inside, the blonde woman stood up, shook out her dress and in one fluid motion engulfed the square bottle within her cavernous purse.
Her voice flowed smoothly over Beau’s stammer. “Open the door, Beau dear. I don’t know where your manners have gone. I do so want to meet your housemother.”
With a moan, Beau stepped back and the door bumped after him.
Iron-grey hair strangling across her forehead, arms akimbo, the elderly woman stared. Her expression of tight-lipped distrust loosened uncertainly as the blonde woman crunched brightly on a peppermint from her purse, then stepped forward with her arms extended in feminine greeting.
“Oh, Mrs. Danielson, I’ll have to apologize for Beau and introduce myself. I’m Mrs. Compton, Beau’s mother. Beau has written me such nice things about you. I know you have made this a regular home away from home for him.”
Mrs. Danielson stroked self-conciously at her house-dress. “Yes, I do the best I can.” She smiled unevenly. “We have a nice group this semester. I wouldn’t have come up, but the boys are studying for finals and we have absolute quiet after supper so that we can all study.” Her hand made an involuntary lunge as though she had fumbled the ball, and she added glibly: “Of course I didn’t hear you, you weren’t making any noise, I just came up to see if the boys needed fresh towels. I’m so pleased to meet you, Mrs. Compton.”
The blonde woman dimpled. “Yes, and I’m so pleased to meet you. I worry about Beau. In high school he didn’t always turn in his homework on time.” She stroked at Beau’s head, but he shied away as she gushed: “I had an airline change here on my way to Banff for the national convention of my sorority, and I knew the boys would he studying hard for finals, but I was just dying for them to show me around the campus and that divine little village.”
“Yes, it is quaint.” The housemother tittered politely.
“I wonder if I could telephone a cab from here. My plane leaves at eleven o’clock. My, that’s only twenty minutes.”
“Oh yes, we have a pay phone downstairs. Could I make you a cup of tea? Those airline trips are so tiring.”
“That would be awfully nice of you, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble?”
“Oh no, no, dear, my teakettle is already on the stove.”
Past the row of unshaven undergraduate faces that protruded and retracted from doorways, the four of them trailed uncomfortably downstairs. Fred and Beau stood open-mouthed in the lower hall while the woman telephoned for a cab. Before Fred could find words, she retreated from the telephone to the kitchen.
They could hear the two women laughing politely inside.
The cabby’s knock cut short the sophomores’ frantic angry whispers. The blonde woman bustled magically down the hall, politely pursued by Mrs. Danielson.
“Goodbye dear, study hard now.” She kissed Beau deftly and patted Fred’s half-raised hand.
Stepping quickly, she cut them off from the door. “Goodbye Mrs. Danielson, I wouldn’t have missed our little chat for the world. Fm so relieved about Beau.”
The taxi door slammed before they were halfway down the steps. They could not shout or curse because Mrs. Danielson was sighing pleasantly behind them.
“Beau, I love the way your mother does her hair.”
Beau and Fred glared unreasonably at each other.
After she had clumped back to her own room, Mrs. Danielson clicked on the light above her mirror. She pushed her own grey straggle atop her head; her eyes flitted to the army of bottles and other feminine equipment on her dresser, but the sound of a yelling, thumping fight upstairs brought her charging out and up the stairs with a bobby pin bristling between her teeth.
Beau’s mother hardly gone and Fred and he were fighting!