All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred ninety-five)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Eight

Things Relative

(part one hundred ninety-five)

Conniption was disqualified. He was not a nag, entered on a whim by a farmwife—billed Mrs. Ellen Miller, not known to Cookesville regulars. He was Ketchasketchcan, a horse so successful in his home state of Illinois that the betting had gone sour.

“But you see how that proves my point,” Weem said. (To race officials he had returned thirty dollars.) “It’s an Illinois story, come down to it. Mollify my editor. When I saw they’d built this place, I knew I’d get the goods.” He added, comfortable with it, “Whatever shenanigans in a town, the track crowd knows it.”

“I asked you down here to give you a story. And you’re chickening out.”

“I’m not putting your name in print.”

Being herself an editor—although Well-Being was a mild, somewhat fraudulent publication, her thought was I said, do it. “Tomorrow, come to my house for lunch. Come at eleven thirty…I don’t know if that’s early. I don’t know how fancy you get up there.”

“Ottawa Illinois, Paris of the plains.”

“By now I’ve got the county convinced I’m up to something, so a man under my roof, with Mrs. Frame there… And maybe the kids, just for lunch. Must be a letdown, if anything.”

“Kids?”

“Bertrand and Mariette. You remember, I have that cousin.”

Mariette, now twelve, was a wonderful little copy of Clotilde, twice as eager to help where she could best hamper. She played a lot of hooky. A lot, in the warm spring, in Élucide’s garden, leafing through Le Beau’s books that had picture plates, sharing lemonade with the incurious Mrs. Frame, applying young eyes to the threading of needles…

Gossiping, like a full-fledged adult, with Bee.

“I get to leave in a year,” she had told her cousin.

“Leave school? When you’re fourteen,” her cousin amended.

The child tossed her head with a strong implication of let them come after me. “How much do you need to learn, anyway?”

“Readin and writin, and rithmetic,” Mrs. Frame quoted.

Élucide was thirty. Or in August, would be—the reaching of this milestone was heartening to her, far from crushing. Thirty was less useful than fifty, where busybodies had to lump what they could not like, but you took your freedoms as they came to you.

She had a house, down Wayne Street from her father’s office, the same that had been Ranilde’s. Her parents had despaired of it, and tried a renter. Mrs. Frame’s first comment, from the threshold, looking up the stairs, had been, “Lord help me, I can’t live in so many rooms!” Her living in the small back bedroom and never venturing up “those stairs”, had let water come under the eaves, unreported. The pump for lack of use had frozen in the winter, and Mrs. Frame had not reported this either.

208

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred ninety-six)

(2025, Stephanie Foster)