Chapter 16
Mr. Binny drove home so slowly I swore I could feel us aging.
I was blistering with sweat, fanning my face with the paper fans Mr. Binny kept in the car.
Mrs. Tartt looked shrunken on the seat beside me, silent, staring at the back of Mr. Binny’s bald black head.
Frances wouldn’t stop chattering about her new expensive purchases, the white kid gloves, the red bouclé dress, the silk stockings, and of course some rayon too.
Mrs. Tartt had waited in the car when I’d gone back into Neilson’s.
“Please,” Mrs. Tartt had begged, “let me talk to Rory before we tell Frances.” Frances hadn’t looked thrilled when I’d told her we had to go now, but she’d told Hello I’m Nelly she reckoned she was done.
“For today.” When the man behind the desk, his tag read Will Lewis, added it up, it came to a gut-punching sixty-two dollars and fifty-five cents.
Jesus, that was double the money they had left in the bank.
But then Frances said the magic words: “Charge it, would you please, Mr. Lewis?”
“It appears there’s an overdue balance on your account of twenty-two dollars and some cents? We’d be so obliged if you’d take care of that payment with this one today, ma’am.”
He was not an unkind man, he was just trying to do his job.
How many times had I been on his side of the counter as poor farmers begged me with their eyes for more credit?
But Frances flapped her hand at him and said, “My husband said he’s taking care of all that on Friday.
Charge it, and I’ll carry the bill home to him today.
” Miss Ella nodded her approval, and Mr. Lewis boxed the items up, placing each piece inside careful as a baby in a coffin.
Now, on the drive home, all I could think was, what in God’s name was Rory gonna say?
Frances was still prattling as we made the last turn toward home.
“That red dress is close to the same color as Garnett’s but it’s not exact since I would hate for her to think I was copying her or anything.
” I didn’t know how close it was and I didn’t care.
Frances’s oblivion was grating but essential for now.
I looked over at Mrs. Tartt to make sure she was still breathing.
Her red lipstick was smeared to the left a little, like a strong wind had blown it there.
When Mr. Binny stopped in front of the house, Mrs. Tartt jerked up the chrome handle and let herself out.
She was looking real motivated to get inside first. Mr. Binny carried the boxes, up to his neck, to the door.
“Thank you, Mr. Binny, I’ll take it from here,” I said as he set the six boxes down inside the door.
Mrs. Tartt was already walking up the hall, calling, “Rory!”
“Let’s get these upstairs,” I said to Frances, but she set a hand on my arm.
“I got you something,” she whispered, smiling, glowing with a secret. “I saw you looking at that white coat.”
“Oh my God, no, Frances.” She started opening the boxes, looking through them.
“You deserve something nice, Birdie. You never do anything for yourself.”
This was the nicest thing she’d done for me in years, buying me a coat with all the imaginary money she thought she had, so what could I say but thank you? “Let’s look at it upstairs.”
“Rory, where are you?” Mrs. Tartt called, turning into his study.
Frances pulled the red wool dress out and pressed the fabric against her like a lover. She walked down the hall like this. “Rory, I want to show you something …”
“Give them a minute,” I said, going after her.
Mrs. Tartt was coming back toward us now, dazed, and then walked right past us.
“Is Rory not in his—?” Frances looped and followed her into the front sitting room, still holding the red dress, where Mrs. Tartt was staring up at the wall over a claw-footed table.
“Where’d the Negro-boys-picking-cotton picture go?” Frances asked.
“Painting, dear,” Mrs. Tartt said.
“Well, where’s it gone to?” Frances asked. The room felt dimmer, smaller than usual, and I realized it was because the huge pocket doors that connected it to the bright dining room were closed. Frances set the dress on a chair and went and pulled the doors apart.
All twelve drawers in the carved sideboard hung open, as well as the delicate curved glass doors on the china cabinets and the door to the closet.
“What in the world is going on here?” Frances went into the china closet and pulled the string light.
“The Haviland … it’s broken on the floor—and where’d the …
silver candelabras go?” Her voice dipped as she went deeper into the closet.
“And the gold finger bowls and those gold plates …” Silence, and then a yelp.
“Jesus, Mrs. Tartt, I think we done been robbed! ”
Mrs. Tartt flinched at the sound of Frances from Footely. Frances rushed out of the closet and over to the open sideboard under the window. She held up a plum-colored velvet lining. “Look at this! Somebody’s come in here and stole it all!”
Mrs. Tartt gripped the back of a tall dining room chair. “Where is Rory? Somebody look for him—”
“Rory!” Frances called, rushing into the hall. “Roree—”
“Find Picador and Polly,” Mrs. Tartt said to me. “See did they see what happened.”
I pushed open the swinging door to the kitchen.
“They’re not in here, nobody’s in here,” I called.
“Lemme go look see …” I let the door go, but Frances rushed in behind me, the door flap-flapping.
Out on the back porch, we both leaned over the rail to see the Studebaker wasn’t parked next to the barn.
“Thank God he’s not here! I was so afraid he was hurt,” Frances said and rushed back inside.
I pressed my damp palms against my hip bones and held them there a second. It helped me breathe. When I went back in the kitchen, Mrs. Tartt said, “Pic and Polly must’ve gone home, their pocketbooks aren’t here.”
Frances, stopping in her tracks by the breakfast table, said, “Mrs. Tartt, do you think your girls might’ve done this? Stole all the good silver and the painting?”
Mrs. Tartt turned around and frowned so hard her forehead looked like it could crack. “No. I do not, Frances.”
“Well, who else would do it, then?” Frances asked. She opened a drawer and banged it shut and opened another as things clanged around inside. “Rory must be at the bank, I’m calling him.”
“No, Frances,” I said. “Don’t.” I looked at Mrs. Tartt, but her eyes were fastened on a very red tomato on the windowsill, sitting in its own pink juice.
“I don’t care if he gets cross,” Frances said. “I’m fixing to use that damn telephone—”
“Wait, Frances. Mrs. Tartt,” I said, but she was still very involved with the tomato.
“I am! And then I am telephoning the sheriff and telling him we’ve been robbed!”
Staring off, touching the pearl necklace she wore with matching earrings, Mrs. Tartt said, “First—” She shuddered deeply. “We need to see has anything else gone missing.”
The notion paralyzed Frances a moment. Then— “Oh my God.” She rushed out the side door and I heard her pound up the back staircase.
“Mrs. Tartt,” I said, “we have to tell her, she needs to know.”
“Not—not yet.” Mrs. Tartt teetered up the stairs after Frances.
A minute later, overhead, I heard Frances cry out, “My whole entire jewelry box is gone!”
And then, like notes down a scale, Mrs. Tartt cried, “Noo, ooh noo, mine is gone too.”
It felt like lead was tied to my ankles as I climbed the back stairs.
“My sapphires,” Mrs. Tartt called. “All of Henry’s gold watches …”
“And my silver boudoir set is gone, and so is my fur stole …”
I went and stood in Frances’s doorway. She had all the doors open on her wardrobe.
“That fur was the only nice thing I owned,” she said and rushed past me toward Mrs. Tartt’s room. I wandered up the hall, feeling helpless. The linen closet was open with an intestinal stream of sheets flowing out.
Things were being hollered all over the house.
“The Henry Bacon painting!” and “All the guns in the gun cabinet!” Then Greek statues, fourteen-karat-gold compacts, an actual letter from Abraham Lincoln.
“My mother’s wedding band!” A sickening thought had taken root in my head and was growing at a fast rate.
The huge book of Indian drawings on a stand in the library, Henry’s crystal decanter set, more fur coats and stoles, diamond hatpins, a collection of platinum cigarette cases, a tapestry from the Battle of Something or Other, Robert E.
Lee’s favorite hat, walking canes with solid-gold heads, a set of gold teeth pulled from dead Uncle Taft, and many, many other useless, valuable things.
“Why are you just standing there, Birdie? Look for what else is missing!”
I tried, but how could you look for something that wasn’t there to look for?
A catlike screech came out of Frances. “My engagement ring!” she cried from the top of the wide stairs. Her shoulders slid down from their frantic, furious height. “I forgot, I took it off to shop so the prongs wouldn’t pull on the clothes!”
This had gone far enough; she needed to know.
“Franny, you need to come downstairs.” I went up and took her arm—it dangled like a rubber hose—and got her down the stairs and into the hall, where Mrs. Tartt was mumbling something to herself outside the parlor.
All I heard was “Oh dear, I hope my …” We followed her in.
She turned around and looked me square in the face and said, “My radio set’s gone.
” This small offense seemed to top anything else for the moment.
“Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour’s about to come on. ”
I managed to get Mrs. Tartt sitting on the pink sofa without actually pushing her down. Frances was trying to go back in the hall. “I’m calling the bank, I don’t care if I get in trouble!”
The back of my throat felt parched, sore. “Rory’s not at the bank, Franny. He was fired three weeks ago.”
Frances turned back around and squinted at me. “What?”