"Father smokes like a furnace," I said, in what I hoped was an insolent tone.
"That's different," said Reenie.
"Mr. Thomas," said Laura. "Mr. Alex Thomas. He is a student of divinity. Or he was until recently," she added scrupulously. "He lost his faith. His conscience would not let him continue."
Alex Thomas's conscience had evidently made a big impression on Laura, but it cut no ice with Reenie. "What's he working at now, then?" she said. "Something fishy, or I'm a Chinaman. He has a slippery look."
"What's wrong with him?" I said to Reenie. I hadn't liked him, but surely he was now being judged without a hearing.
"What's right with him, is more like it, " said Reenie. "Rolling around on the lawn in full view of everyone." She was talking more to me than to Laura. "At least you had your skirt tucked in." Reenie said a girl alone with a man should be able to hold a dime between her knees. She was always afraid that people-men-would see our legs, the part above the knee. Of women who allowed this to happen, she would say: Curtain's up, where's the show? Or, Might as well hang out a sign. Or, more balefully, She's asking for it, she'll get what's coming to her, or, in the worst cases, She's an accident waiting to happen.
"We weren't rolling," Laura said. "There was no hill."
"Rolling or not, you know what I mean," said Reenie.
"We weren't doing anything," I said. "We were talking."
"That's beside the point," said Reenie. "People could see you."
"Next time we're not doing anything we'll hide in the bushes," I said.
"Who is he anyway?" said Reenie, who usually ignored my head-on challenges, since by now there was nothing she could do about them. Who is he meant Who are his parents.
"He's an orphan," said Laura. "He was adopted, from an orphanage. A Presbyterian minister and his wife adopted him." She seemed to have winkled this information out of Alex Thomas in a very short time, but this was one of her skills, if it can be called that-she'd just keep on asking questions, of the personal kind we'd been taught were rude, until the other person, in shame or outrage, would be forced to stop answering.
"An orphan!" said Reenie. "He could be anybody!"
"What's wrong with orphans?" I said. I knew what was wrong with them in Reenie's books: they didn't know who their fathers were, and that made them unreliable, if not downright degenerate. Born in a ditch was how Reenie would put it. Born in a ditch, left on a doorstep.
"They can't be trusted," said Reenie. "They worm their way in. They don't know where to draw the line."
"Well anyway," said Laura, "I've invited him to dinner."
"Now that takes the gold-plated gingerbread," said Reenie.
Loaf givers
There's a wild plum tree at the back of the garden, on the other side of the fence. It's ancient, gnarled, the branches knuckled with black knot. Walter says it should come down, but I've pointed out that, technically speaking, it isn't mine. In any case, I have a fondness for it. It blossoms every spring, unasked, untended; in the late summer it drops plums into my garden, small blue oval ones with a bloom on them like dust. Such generosity. I picked up the last windfalls this morning-those few the squirrels and raccoons and drunken yellow-jackets had left me-and ate them greedily, the juice of their bruised flesh bloodying my chin. I didn't notice it until Myra dropped by with another of her tuna casseroles. My goodness, she said, with her breathless avian laugh. Who've you been fighting?
I remember that Labour Day dinner in every detail, because it was the only time all of us were ever in the same room together.
The revels were still going on out at the Camp Grounds, but not in any form you'd want to witness close up, as the surreptitious consumption of cheap liquor was now in full swing. Laura and I had left early, to help Reenie with the dinner preparations.
These had been going on for some days. As soon as Reenie had been informed about the party, she'd dug out her one cookbook, The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook, by Fannie Merritt Farmer. It wasn't hers really: it had belonged to Grandmother Adelia, who'd consulted it-along with her various cooks, of course-when planning her twelve-course dinners. Reenie had inherited it, although she didn't use it for her daily cooking-all of that was in her head, according to her. But this was a question of the fancy stuff.
I had read this cookbook, or looked into it at least, in the days in which I'd been romanticising my grandmother. (I'd given that up by now. I knew I would have been thwarted by her, just as I was thwarted by Reenie and my father, and would have been thwarted by my mother, if she hadn't died. It was the purpose in life of all older people to thwart me. They were devoted to nothing else.)
The cookbook had a plain cover, a no-nonsense mustard colour, and inside it there were plain doings as well. Fannie Merritt Farmer was relentlessly pragmatic-cut and dried, in a terse New England way. She assumed you knew nothing, and started from there: "A beverage is any drink. Water is the beverage provided for man by Nature. All beverages contain a large percentage of water, and therefore their uses should be considered: I. To quench thirst. II. To introduce water into the circulatory system. III. To regulate body temperature. IV. To assist in carrying off water. V. To nourish. VI. To stimulate the nervous system and various organs. VII. For medicinal purposes," and so forth.
Taste and pleasure did not form part of her lists, but at the front of the book there was a curious epigraph by John Ruskin: Cookery means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe and of Helen and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits and bairns and spices, and all that is healing and sweet in the fields and groves and savoury in meats. It means carefulness and inventiveness and willingness and readiness of appliances. It means the economy of your grandmothers and the science of the modern chemist; it means testing and no wasting; it means English thoroughness and French and Arabian hospitality; and, in fine, it means that you are to be perfectly and always ladies-loaf givers.
I found it difficult to picture Helen of Troy in an apron, with her sleeves rolled up to the elbow and her cheek dabbled with flour; and from what I knew about Circe and Medea, the only things they'd ever cooked up were magic potions, for poisoning heirs apparent or changing men into pigs. As for the Queen of Sheba, I doubt she ever made so much as a piece of toast. I wondered where Mr. Ruskin got his peculiar ideas, about ladies and cookery both. Still, it was an image that must have appealed to a great many middle-class women of my grandmother's time. They were to be sedate in bearing, unapproachable, regal even, but possessed of arcane and potentially lethal recipes, and capable of inspiring the most incendiary passions in men. And on top of that, perfectly and always ladies-loaf givers. The distributors of gracious largesse.
Had anyone ever taken this sort of thing seriously? My grandmother had. All you needed to do was to look at her portraits-at that cat-ate-the-canary smile, those droopy eyelids. Who did she think she was, the Queen of Sheba? Without a doubt.
When we got back from the picnic, Reenie was rushing around in the kitchen. She didn't look much like Helen of Troy: despite all the work she'd done in advance, she was flustered, and in a foul temper; she was sweating, and her hair was coming down. She said we would just have to take things as they came, because what else could we expect, since she could not do miracles and that included making silk purses out of sows' ears. And an extra place too, at zero hour, for this Alex person, whatever he called himself. Smart Alex, by the look of him.
"He calls himself by his name," said Laura. "The same as anyone."
"He's not the same as anyone," said Reenie. "You can tell that at a glance. He's most likely some half-breed Indian, or else a gypsy. He's certainly not from the same pea patch as the rest of us."
Laura said nothing. She was not given to compunction as a rule, but this time she did seem to feel a little contrite for having invited Alex Thomas on the spur of the moment. She couldn't uninvite him however, as she pointed out-that would have been miles beyond mere rudeness. Invited was invited, no matter who it might be.