“I don’t blame you.”
“Oh, he’s been good about it, considering. Comes over and does the lawn for me, and once a week his wife helps me clean the old place. That son of mine is why you’re here tonight, young man, because he’s the one who got me into this Hot Supper business. Said he was afraid I wasn’t eating proper. And you know something? He was right. Kind of lonely cooking for one in that big drafty kitchen.”
The thoughtful son was something of a running refrain along the old Hot Supper trail. Only in the case of the Cooper sisters, it was a thoughtful nephew.
The Cooper sisters were twins; whether they were identical twins or not, I couldn’t tell you. They were similarly built, being graceful, willowy old gals who must’ve been lookers in their day. I tend to think they were identical twins, though, as they both looked much the same. But then so do most eighty-year-old women.
They lived on the bottom floor of a two-story house; the upper floor they rented out to some college students, who played very loud rock music up there. Neither sister seemed to mind. Or hear, for that matter. The house was a pleasant old yellow clapboard, hardly a match for Mrs. Fox’s mansion on West Hill; just a sturdy, well-kept house in a neighborhood of similar houses. The neighborhood shared the valley between East and West Hills with the downtown area, a belt of churches and schools separating the business and residential districts.
The Cooper sisters had been living together for a long time-all their lives, I supposed-and probably in this same house; only in fairly recent years had they decided, for practical reasons (both monetary and physical), to rent out the upper floor, and to move all their furniture onto the lower floor. For that reason their living quarters tended to be cluttered; there were chairs enough to seat a meeting of the DAR, old photos of relatives and old paintings by relatives, tall cabinets brimming with china and bric-a-brac, and all the doilies and knickknacks in the world.
These sisters fit my stereotypical idea of old folks like round pegs in round holes; if I’d thought the intelligent and gracious Mrs. Fox was evidence of the fallacy of my downbeat thinking about the elderly, here was ample rebuttal.
Or so you might think.
Because the Cooper sisters proved me wrong. Just seeing the Cooper sisters showed me the error of my ways. Stay with me and you’ll see what I mean.
Miss Gladys Cooper opened the door, with sister Miss Viola Cooper right behind.
“Why, Mr. Mallory,” Miss Gladys Cooper said, “we haven’t seen you for years, tell me…”
“… what have you been doing since last we saw you?” Miss Viola Cooper said, picking up her sister’s train.
I might as well come out and tell you that the Cooper sisters had been living together so long that they had become a single person, in a manner of speaking. Now I mean just that-in their manner of speaking, they were a single person. They thought so much alike, and each knew her sister’s mind so well, that either could complete a sentence for the other, with neither noticing.
“Hello, Miss Cooper,” I said. “Hello, Miss Cooper.”
“Well, good evening, Mr. Mallory, and to what…”
“… do we owe this unexpected, and rather overdue, visit?”
“I’m the Hot Supper delivery boy. See?” And I displayed the lidded plates in my hands.
“What happened to the Petersens?” Miss Gladys Cooper said. “They were such a nice young couple. But of course that doesn’t mean…”
“… we aren’t delighted to see you again, after so long a time. Come in, come in.”
I came in.
Miss Viola Cooper took the dinners into the adjacent dining room (most of the brimming china cabinets were in there) and readied the long table, while her sister questioned me.
“Well,” I said, “I’m finishing up my four-year degree at the college, slowly but surely, on the GI Bill. I’ve traveled around some, and I’m trying to write freelance full-time now. I sold a mystery novel last year….”
“Yes,” Miss Gladys Cooper said, “we’ve been following your career with interest-”
“And surprise,” chimed in her sister from the dinner room. “You didn’t show any particular literary bent when we first encountered you, you know.”
“Not that you weren’t one of our favorite students just the same,” the other sister assured me.
That’s right; the Cooper sisters had been teachers of mine. My second- and third-grade teachers, to be precise, and I loved them. Then and now.
But I hadn’t seen them for a lot of years; in fact, the Cooper name on the Hot Supper list had rung no bells. Face to face, though, it was impossible not to know them.
They insisted I stay and have a glass of wine with them while they had their supper, and I stayed long enough for one glass (homemade dandelion wine, very nice) and begged off, promising them that two weeks from that night, I’d make them last on the route so I could visit all evening with them.
Which I did, and that was when they told me about their nephew David, who had enrolled them in the Hot Supper Service because he suspected that their nightly meal with occasional wine had lapsed into nightly wine with occasional meal.
My preconceptions about old people were changing fast.
That first night, when I’d been able to stay for just a few minutes, the sisters had left their meals midway to see me to the door.
“You were in my last group of students,” Miss Gladys Cooper said, somewhat wistfully, “that final year before our retirement.”
“You were in my second-to-last group of students,” Miss Viola Cooper said, equally wistfully, “the year prior.”
(I’ll give you a moment to figure out which one taught second, and which one third.)
“You young people are wonderful,” Miss Gladys Cooper said. “I don’t know why so many older folks think so poorly of you.”
“Like those lovely boys upstairs,” Miss Viola Cooper said. “So sweet and so thoughtful, and why they’re…”
“… quiet as mice,” her sister finished.
From the racket going on up there, the mice had to be wearing combat boots and into the Clash. But no matter.
“You know, Mr. Mallory,” Miss Gladys Cooper said, “a lot of people-older people, I mean-have a stereotyped view of your age group.”
Her sister nodded. “Just because some of you wear your hair a bit extreme and dress in unorthodox apparel at times, many of these elderly people think there’s something wrong with you, the silly old fools.”
“Silly old ignorant fools,” Miss Gladys Cooper added. “And if you can remember back to our class, Mr. Mallory, ‘the seeds of ignorance….”
“… bear the fruit of prejudice,’ ” I finished.
“You remembered,” Miss Viola Cooper said, smiling.
“Sort of,” I said.
4
I reserved Mrs. Jonsen for last because her place was out on East Hill, not too far from where I live. East Hill is the grab bag of Port City. Older middle-class homes dominate, sedate two-story houses of brick and/or wood, with rundown areas stuck in this corner and that, with an occasional higher-class neighborhood sitting aloof to one side. And, too, you can find certain East Hill streets that seem designed to display the multitude of American life-styles like an exhibit at a World’s Fair: a split-level home, relatively lavish, sits side by side with a cheap prefab; a handsome, well-preserved two-story gothic, dating back to when Mrs. Fox’s digs were dug, shares the same side of the street with a tumbledown shack occupied by some wino.
Mrs. Jonsen lived on the outer edge of East Hill, just outside the city limits, on the corner where Grand Street turns into one highway intersecting another. Once upon a time, Mrs. Jonsen must’ve felt relatively safe from the madhouse that is East Hill. But we’ve crept in on her, largely due to the shopping center, car dealerships, discount department stores, chain restaurants, gas stations and such, which have come to line that edge of the city like so many plastic-and-glass tombstones.