Chapter 24 #2
“Florsheim, may I help you?” It was a man. His voice was friendly.
“Um, hello. This is—to whom am I speaking?”
“This Jimmy Watts. What can I do you for, ma’am?”
“Hi, Jimmy. I am looking for somebody … a man by the name of Rory Tartt?”
Nothing but silence. It lasted a few seconds and then he cleared his throat. “Who’s that again?”
“Rory Tartt, from Oxford?”
He cleared his throat again. “I’m afraid I don’t know anybody by that name, ma’am.”
“I see. Um, are you the only person who works there?”
Another pause. “Yes ma’am, I own the store.” As I tried to think of what to ask next, he said, softer, “If I do happen upon him … is there a message I can give him?”
I heard something there. “He’s gone missing,” I said. “If you hear from him, could you please ask him to send a telegram home?”
“Of course. If I happen to hear from him, yes, ma’am.” And he was gone.
I handed Jack the receiver. I wasn’t sure yet what I’d heard but all I said was, “He said he hasn’t seen him.”
After he hung up, Jack bit his lip. He looked so boyish in that second I wanted to hug him. “I’ll be back the day after tomorrow. Could we talk some more about everything … we didn’t talk about yet? I could come by the house after work on Thursday.”
“No.” I didn’t want to pretend it was a date until it was. “I’ll meet you here.”
When I got home, I was still jittery with the news of Rory making those calls.
It was more information than I could keep to myself but not nearly enough to do anything about.
I stared into the kitchen cupboard at the dwindling ingredients.
We’d eaten all the tuna fish, the noodles, the grits, the imported canned meats, the lovely, decadent terrines of foie gras.
Looked like it was going to be poached eggs again, and Frances would just have to put up with it.
I’d serve them over toast tonight, dress the plate up with watermelon pickle on the side.
We’d run out of butter too. I looked over at Mrs. Tartt at the table, fiddling with an abandoned game of honeymoon bridge she’d been playing with Charlie.
“You ever churned butter, Mrs. Tartt?” I asked her.
She chuckled. “Heavens, no.” Then she said in a wary voice, “But you’re about to teach me, aren’t you?”
I sat her on a stool by the breakfast table window and laid an apron across her lap, the butter churn between her feet.
Ladling the cream off the pitcher, I showed her.
“All you do is pump the paddle, like so. It ought to sound like you’re walking through mud.
” I wondered if she’d ever done that either.
Sitting very upright with bright red lipstick on, she started working the stick between her legs, pushing it down and up.
“This isn’t too hard,” she said. “I think I’m getting the hang of it now.
” After only five minutes, she was already pink in the face and peered into the barrel and asked, “You reckon it’s about ready? ”
“No, not even close,” I said. “And don’t stop or it won’t make.” She frowned and pumped more, bits of cream splashing on the apron.
I was kneading the bread when Frances came in with a grocery sack.
It was only seventy-five degrees today, but her face was crimson.
“Mr. Wallace at University Grocery refused to do business with us. He said I could pay against what we owe him, but that’s it.
That rich people like us ought to pay their bills, so I had to walk over to Inmon’s. ”
Across the room, still pumping, Mrs. Tartt said, “I declare, is that really what people think of us now?”
“Why didn’t you just go to City in the first place? They’ll take our money,” I asked.
Frances ran herself a glass of water and sat down at the table. “Because I went all the way across town to Mrs. Chisolm’s shop to see if she was hiring. She’s not.” Well, at least Frances was trying to try.
Charlie walked in with the clothes basket, as Mrs. Tartt’s churning was slowing to a mere stroll through the mud. Then it stopped altogether. She said, “That does not look like butter.”
“You go sit, I’ll do it,” Charlie said. I saw Frances roll her eyes. Charlie started pump-pumping, pump-pumping fast and steady as a small animal’s heartbeat. Mrs. Tartt wiped her face with a handkerchief and rubbed a blister rising on her thumb.
It was time, it was past time, to make some decisions.
Standing behind the counter, I came out and said it: “Rory called the Robert E. Lee and a shoe store in Jackson from the bank a few days before they fired him.” No preamble, no side pickle, just plop it on the plate.
Mrs. Tartt’s blue eyes widened in a way that made me think of the moment the lights had come back on in the house. “This is good news—we need to telephone them and see what they know.”
I didn’t remind her the telephone had been cut off. “I did already, and neither claims to’ve seen him. Thing is, he also got calls from New Orleans that week, but we don’t know who from.”
“But it’s still something to go on, isn’t it? Don’t you think we should start looking for him? We could start in Jackson?” Mrs. Tartt said.
“Exactly what I’ve been saying all along!” Frances wailed.
If she had, I sure hadn’t heard her say it.
Still, I understood why this sounded like the answer.
If they found him—a big if—they could easily sell the car and some valuables to cover the rest of the mortgage, but: “It might very well turn into a wild goose chase, and traveling around looking for him’s gonna take time and money we don’t have much of.
Mrs. Tartt, the soundest plan is still to try and sell the house.
Then you’d have plenty of money left to go look for Rory and look properly.
You could afford to go to two, three, five cities if you had to, and you’d have something to live on when you got back, whether you found him or not. ”
Mrs. Tartt was twisting a white linen handkerchief.
Frances was scowling hard at me. “Hold on a minute,” Frances said.
“This whole thing could still take care of itself—maybe Rory’s just having …
a temporary breakdown of some kind.” She started fanning her face with this month’s Oxford Electric bill.
I couldn’t blame her—if the house sold, where was she supposed to go?
Back to Footely to live with her spinster sister?
“Rory still could come to his senses and get home in time to pay that mortgage.”
“Frances,” Mrs. Tartt said. “You can’t really believe that.” Not two days before, she would’ve glazed over, nodding like she believed it too. Instead, she set her hands firmly on the kitchen table and said, like this was a Flower Club committee, “I move we discuss Charlie’s idea.”
Charlie missed a pump on the churn. “I thought—we were waiting until tomorrow.”
“Now’s just as good a time,” Mrs. Tartt said.
Charlie took a breath. She wet her lips. “I was thinking … what if you tried taking in some boarders here at the house to earn some money.” She started pumping again.
“I don’t love the idea, but I hear folks are doing it nowadays to get by,” Mrs. Tartt said. “And it’s much better than selling my house to a stranger.”
I covered the bread with a towel so it could rise and walked around the counter. “Well, it’s not a terrible idea. You’ve certainly got the room, but …” I looked around the kitchen. “Might be hard without any furniture.”
“I’d rather not have more strangers living with us?” Frances said.
“Well, actually, Charlie’s suggested we wouldn’t have to be here,” Mrs. Tartt said. “You could go see your mama down in Footely, and I could go visit with my widow sister down in Jackson.”
And I’d go back to Footely, I thought, with no money, just problems.
“And I could ask around about Rory while I was down there,” Mrs. Tartt was saying. “I’m sure my sister would accompany me—”
“If you’re going to Jackson to look for him, then I’m coming too,” Frances said.
Mrs. Tartt smiled, slightly. “Of course you can, dear. Charlie’s offered to stay here and help with the boarders. We’d only allow ladies, and Charlie thinks she might already know of some. This way we’d have an income so we wouldn’t spend our last cent traveling …”
I was doing the math—four or five bedrooms rented at, what, a dollar a week? For the next six weeks …
“That won’t earn you anywhere near two hundred eighty-four dollars by mid-October,” I said.
“There’s … a little more to the idea, dear,” Mrs. Tartt said. “The way Charlie explained it to me was, the boarders would need an income themselves in order to pay us rent, so we’d let them work a little business here in the backyard.”
Frances pulled her lips back. It was an ugly look for her. “What kind of business?”
“It’s—” Mrs. Tartt frowned, looking uncomfortable herself. “A dancing business. It’s called … dime-a-dancing.”
“A—what?” I asked.
“It’s where you pay a dime to dance,” Charlie said, pumping. “Sometimes they call it taxi dancing. I worked in one up in Memphis.” That was where she’d met Welty. Charlie should’ve mentioned this to me before getting Mrs. Tartt’s hopes up.
“Now, I know it sounds a little seedy, I thought so too at first,” Mrs. Tartt said. “Like that picture, Ten-Cent something with Barbara Stanwyck, but Charlie says our club would be much more sophisticated than that.”
Before I could say anything, Frances, eyes squeezed shut, said, “Who? In their right mind would drive all the way out here to dance?”
Mrs. Tartt didn’t miss a beat. “The college boys would, dear. And we know the college boys have the money or they wouldn’t be going to college.”
“But they can already dance everywhere in town.” Frances directed this to Charlie, not Mrs. Tartt. “The Tea Hound, the Palace, the Mecca—they have hops all the time over at the school.”
“Go ahead and tell them what you told me, Charlie.”