All Bedlam Courses Past (part eighty-six)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Three

An Object in Motion

(part eighty-six)

Their old house on Ohio Avenue, grown so much smaller and narrower, was tenanted by Mrs. Heilmann, who cozily knew things. (“Now I gave your sister one time a china doll. You were too small for a thing like that, and I gave you a little pull-horse on a string. Then Fern next time I see her tells me some little missy got hold of that china doll and smashed her poor head, the dickens…”).

While they were bustling with their trunks’ unpacking, dispatching cards to acquaintances: “Letter to follow!”, they had learned Ebrach was in Europe, a relief. His house sat on a corner lot across from a cemetery. But that was all, for the eerie. Shrubberies made fat sentinels each side the porch. The door arch had only numbers, unbiblical of significance…so far as two indifferent scholars could recall.

Clotilde was at once apparent, darting into the hall, strands of hair afloat. Then in retreat, at a grumble, saying, “Honoré…?”

He spoke English, tired, insistent. “Clotilde! Mrs. Koker is meant to show the guests in. Come back and stay.”

He said the last again, in French.

Mother said: “Are you Clotilde? We are so pleased to finally meet you. Ma’am?”

This to a woman pushing skirts past the console, getting herself ahead of Ebrach’s wards, and after a certain patting-down, saying: “Mrs. Heilmann, is that you?”

“Oh, don’t mind, Mrs. Koker, I’m just along with the others. Mrs. Gremot is here to call on her cousin. And these two are the youngsters, Luce and Walt.” A giggle. “I should say Miss Gremot and Walter Junior. Fern?”

Clotilde showed beyond measure pleased with the silverplate basket, its pink glass bowl, ruffled, painted with country flowers…

(The thought had occurred.)

“Délicieux! Oh! Trop joli! Très, très charmant!”

“For cards, you know. When people stop by.”

So, for a while, the awkward talk had gone. Honoré, wan from his latest setback, frowned and chastened his wife’s speech. Walter moved in the background palming the edges of bookshelves. The room smiled in airy green and white, not a mounted head on a single wall, not a portrait (therefore none with shifty eyes), and nothing of stuffed exotica under cloches.

A narrow door in the corner was demystified by Mrs. Koker. From a cupboard she took a pair of sewing scissors, to snip at a hanging thread, or human hair, that had caught itself in the basket’s silverwork.

The performance was mesmerizing, and stopped conversation.

“Merci,” Clotilde said.

The glance Élucide exchanged with her mother said there was no merci about it, and neither of them thought so.

91

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part eighty-seven)

(2024, Stephanie Foster)