All Bedlam Courses Past (part sixty-nine)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Three

An Object in Motion

(part sixty-nine) 

“But to be clear, sir, you are staying with us through tomorrow? If we have Fannie, Miss Nachfolger…” Ebrach, coming down the hallway, left off for Élucide’s pad and pencil. “And a buffet, Mrs. Koker, do you think?”

“Colors?” Élucide asked.

“Pale blue. Wheat. Not florals, but checks. The potted lemons up from the conservatory, and… I feel thuja branches, on two long platters, silver, unadorned if we have such, plus… What is a scented flower this time of year?

“Phlox. Queen Anne’s lace.”

“Perfect complements, in fact! The sweet and the herbal. Jot down asking Mr. Ratner if he has lemon-colored dahlias, large ones. And if Mrs. Koker has nothing like our blue in the cupboards, I’ll send you this afternoon to Rutherford’s for them, and a cloth.”

They turned to Mrs. Koker.

Who looked tried.

Her mouth worked, and Ebrach asked Élucide, “Who else?”

He would not be the impresario he was, if dinners, their settings, their menus, their degrees of formality, which teetering Christian of the community looked pronest to lending Spiritualism an ear, therefore whom to specially invite, were details beneath his contemplation.

He would guess, and she would have him on her side, anyway. “Everards…? I don’t know which might come.”

“Hmm, there is a notion.”

By four that afternoon, Élucide was in her father’s suite, the headache coming on. They never came that she didn’t fight them; and in a lifetime, once or twice determination had won through.

Tomorrow she needed two Richards at Ebrach’s table. Today, she might yet have paid a visit…to persuade, reason, put her foot down. She put her forehead against the window glass. On this end the hotel gave its better view, of Riverside Park, the petunia beds, the sycamores, the river’s flash of water, a corn patch on the Kentucky bank beyond a windbreak…

And this side, a clearing, humped-up earth for the railroad.

Richard’s father said their city was the floodplain of an Age-of-Mammoths Tranquility Creek, wider than the Ohio. Arcadia Summit to the left of where she stood, Cemetery Hill to the right, no other prominence she knew the name of…were eroded remains of an old plateau…

“There’ll be another ice age one day, and another great thaw, and all the works of man will vanish under the waters.”

Her answer at last had been: “We’ll have to keep an eye out.”

74

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part seventy)

(2023, Stephanie Foster)