All Bedlam Courses Past (part two hundred thirty-nine)

 

 

 

 

 

All Bedlam Courses Past

 

 

Chapter Nine

City Ways

 

(part two hundred thirty-nine)

 

 

 

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i.

Northbound

 

 

The gloves she wore were old kids of Mrs. Frame’s, yellowed but elegant, pearl-buttoned, summer perforations dotting the backs.

“Those ones, I got from my sister. Her husband had some money, he used to buy flour.”

“Did he? And sold to grocers?”

A silence, while Élucide packed this and that.

“I don’t know that I mean flour.”

“Well, they’re lovely. I won’t let a thing happen to them. I’m sure they’re exactly right.”

Good cotton gloves would be sooted to ruin in a railcar, had been her thought—

Libby hallooed, Roger a pace behind with a suitcase.

Élucide, after telling Libby, “The clothes on your back, a change if we do end up going out, and night things”, had sent ahead a trunk.

She was to meet Manfred at the bailey’s house, in Chicago, under circumstances Monaghan had not disclosed. Arriving the veiled lady after all, and decided on a dressy dress, a mustard silk…he would remember that about her.

“An old sympathetic friend, come calling at the lowest point of his life.”

“Yes, maudlin,” she had answered Monaghan, to his approval. “As long as you don’t believe he’ll just confess to me. At the lowest point…or the cliff’s edge, if you like the metaphor, I doubt jumping is what you do when an old friend appears.”

“A friend. Not,” she had added, when the door shut at her father’s back, “a sweetheart.”

“While to his own mind, it may be…”

All this ellipsis contained, of male-knowing-better, demanded she give over Manfred’s correspondence, for Monaghan’s train reading and Phelan’s. She had the letters in her handbag.

“Now what about Bee again?” Libby said.

“I asked her specially not to go home. To do the cooking, keep Mrs. Frame out of the kitchen, and to remind her…I think every few hours…that I’ve taken a short trip, and that I asked Bee to stay…”

“Lordy.”

“But, grace of God and all.”

“True enough,” said Roger. “Maman had mercy there. Never suffering the dotage of age, although she suffered.”

Libby seconded Mrs. Metz knowing great comforts at the end. Roger sighed for this, allowed he would poke along, all right, alone. For four days—or if the thing could be managed, for only three days—he would walk to Élucide’s house, eat his suppers with Bee and Mrs. Frame.

He would keep the shop himself. “I won’t lose us custom.” To Libby, with a squeeze. “Of course I’ve known dressmaking all my life.”

 

 

251

 

 

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Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part two hundred forty)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2025, Stephanie Foster)