Runny03 - Loose Lips (31 page)
By five-thirty in the morning the reports had been completed.
“Let me take you home, honey.” Chester reached for Julia’s hand.
She shied away from him. “I’ll walk. I need time to think.”
“I’ll carry you home,” Louise said. She glared at Chester. “We’ll meet you there.” For everyone else’s benefit she said, “We’re exhausted and I’d be a liar if I didn’t tell you we were scared.”
As the group parted for them, Juts breathed deeply and said, “I feel like the running gears of hard times.”
The story, along with pictures of the Hunsenmeir girls, went
out over the UPI wire service, AP wire service, and Reuters. The next day Juts and Louise were so besieged they locked their doors.
Popeye, whose story was picked up by a wire service, was in tabloid heaven.
T
he drama of infidelity rarely unfolds privately. Like a slow hiss in a punctured tire, the news leaks out. Mother Smith, while publicly maintaining the sanctity of marriage, managed to secrete a few comments on why men stray. Something must be amiss with the wife. Privately she gloated over Julia Ellen’s grief.
She was even snide when visiting her son one day while Juts was shopping. Walking around the backyard, noticing the garden, Rupert asked his son, “What’s she growing in there?” Josephine smugly replied, “Sour grapes.” Chester, as usual, remained silent.
Louise, stunned at her sister’s decline, sympathized. Sympathy gave way to encouragement, which devolved into hectoring. “Snap out of it.”
Juts couldn’t.
Cora paid special attention to her younger daughter and even Celeste, usually aloof from such domestic swamps, worried about Julia, saying to Cora, “Her mind is oppressed with care. She’s turning in on herself. There must be something we can do.”
“Time heals all wounds,” Cora replied.
“Time wounds all heels,” Celeste responded, then wondered if Chessy really was a heel. Since she thought monogamy a lovely pipe dream, she preferred not to dwell upon it. But Julia believed in faithfulness with all her heart and soul, a belief now painfully apparent to everyone. People usually underestimate Juts because of her rebelliousness and partying ways, but she felt things deeply, and this time she couldn’t hide it.
It was as though her intelligence was paralyzed. She got up, cooked breakfast, went to work, came home, played with Yoyo and Buster, but life moved neither forward nor back.
Hansford had a long talk with Chester, who repented of his ways. He broke off the relationship with Trudy, and he cried because he feared he’d lost Juts forever. She stayed with him but she didn’t trust him.
His mother hinted he should leave. He couldn’t. He had betrayed the person who loved him most and had stood by him since the day they collided in front of the altar.
Even though his men friends allowed as how these things happen, he couldn’t shake his pressing guilt nor his fear at the sight of his wife’s body. She was wasting away.
He took her to the movies. At one three-hanky picture she sobbed so hard he had to take her out of the theater. People pretended not to notice. By morning that story was all over Runnymede.
Trudy Archer sank a bit herself. She loved Chester, no matter how hopeless the situation. In time, she began to date Senior Epstein. The jeweler was so thrilled to have female companionship that he cared little about her fallen-woman status. Business at the dance studio sure picked up. Half the men in town came around. Perverse as it was, the women then joined their husbands out of raw fear. Marriages that had been extinct volcanoes suddenly erupted. Without knowing it, Trudy put the fire back into many a union.
Extra Billy noted Julia Ellen’s thin frame and downcast eyes
when home on leave before being shipped out to the Pacific theater. Mary, too young to comprehend why her aunt was shattered, made a point, at her mother’s urging, of spending a precious hour with her husband visiting Juts. Mary had been worrying herself nearly as thin as Julia. She was smart enough to know that Extra Billy’s posting meant he’d soon be in the thick of the shooting match.
Two years passed and Juts moved from intense grief to numbness to anger. She began to enjoy exercising her stale power over her husband. After all, she was the pure victim and he the embodiment of male sin. Chester accepted this as part of his punishment. Juts gained back a little weight. She didn’t look so cadaverous. Many attributed her renewed health to the fact that Trudy married Senior Epstein in June 1944. Jacob junior sent a telegram from the French border wishing his father well. It was the last anyone ever heard from him.
Many other young men from the border town enlisted the moment they graduated from high school. Others skedaddled to York or Baltimore, lied about their age, and enlisted while only sixteen.
Zeb Vance was hurt in a training accident stateside. Ray Parker, a tank gunner, was killed in combat near the German border. Tom West lost part of his lower jaw charging a machine gunners’ nest. The worry drew people closer together. Few were free from anxiety.
Rob McGrail wound up in the Navy band, which infuriated him. He wanted to fight, a surprise to those who knew him as a fat, lazy kid. Military life whipped him into shape, and gave him a breath of fresh air amid masculine companionship. Rob turned out to be handsome. But he chafed at tinkling on the glockenspiel for dignitaries.
Doak Garten was assigned cook duties on a submarine. Segregation existed below the sea as well as above it, but Doak, an
unusually self-possessed young man, kept bitterness at bay. He was proud to serve his country and he rode out the depth charges as well as any other man on the sub. He may not have won equality but he won respect. It was a beginning. He came home on leave once, promising his family that when this war was over he was going to amount to something. They told him he already did.
Vaughn Cadwalder, breveted to a lieutenant in combat, had been wounded twice. A bullet passed through the fleshy part of his calf. He let the doctors sew him up, leave a drain in, and he returned to his unit. The next time he was hit in the shoulder, the bullet lodging in his clavicle. The medics cut out the lead, bandaged him up, tied up his arm, and he walked out again against protests from the doctors. Vaughn discovered he was a born warrior. Even when the Germans shot both legs out from under him, crippling him, he continued to crawl toward the machine gunners’ nest. His platoon took the nest. Vaughn was awarded the Silver Star.
Joe BonBon fought in Italy. His few letters home were filled with wonder at the beauties of the country and the utter imbecility of its leaders.
Edgar Frost copiloted B-17 bombers over Germany. He made captain. He hated the war, he hated dropping death down on people he couldn’t see, but even more he hated Hitler and what he had done to a country Edgar had visited while a junior at the University of Maryland. If this was the only way to fix the mess, so be it.
It was as though Runnymede collectively held its breath for its sons and lately its daughters. Vicky BonBon joined her brothers in the Army. She, too, was posted to Europe. Spottiswood Chalfonte, sick to death of being a glamour girl in Hollywood, chucked it all to become an Army nurse, and served in the Philippines. What she saw of the war was the wounds, inside and out.
The tide had turned in 1944. The Allies, after taking beating after beating in 1941 and 1942, even in 1943, pushed back the Axis powers.
Although citizens in Runnymede and Spokane and Pueblo—as well as in Medicine Hat or Rostov-on-Don or Keswick, in Auckland or Melbourne, wherever there were Allies—knew their side was winning, each soul feared the deaths yet to come. The tide had turned but it was still a tide of blood.
And so the small casualty of a woman’s honor seemed tiny indeed, even to the woman herself. Rillma Ryan, by mid-March, had known she was pregnant without benefit of marriage. She refused to divulge the name of the father, although the name Bullette was whispered. Rillma couldn’t make up her mind what to do. She was happy, frightened, and terribly confused. Her mother, along with Celeste Chalfonte, took the train to D.C. Rillma wanted to keep the child, but Toots and Celeste advised against it. She’d have to marry fast and risk a life of unhappiness with the wrong mate or navigate the world as an unmarried woman with a child. That was a sure ticket to poverty. Or she could move west and make up a story about a father killed in combat—but sooner or later, even in the most remote part of the world, the truth comes out.
Rillma, still wanting to keep her baby, finally surrendered when Celeste reminded her, “You once told me you would do anything for me. Do you remember that?”
“Yes,” a surprisingly composed Rillma replied.
“Then I wish you to give the baby to Juts. Chester has agreed to adoption.”
Only then did Rillma give way. But she agreed to Celeste’s terms. The curiosity of it was that no one wondered why Celeste Chalfonte had taken charge of the situation. They were accustomed to Celeste in command.
And so Juts became a mother at last. Chester prayed the baby would heal their wounds. He sought counseling from Pastor Neely because he feared that his infidelity would render him unfit for the
heavy responsibilities of fatherhood. Pastor Neely only replied that if that were the case, there’d be few fathers in Runnymede.
Louise, torn about accepting an illegitimate child into the family—who would become a first cousin, after all, to Mary’s little Oderuss—also sought guidance. Father O’Reilly told her the sin belonged to the parents, not the child, and with this blessing she enthusiastically supported the idea of the nameless baby becoming a Hunsenmeir, so to speak.
Cora and Hansford merrily painted a room in Julia’s house, rooted out old baby garments, and prepared for the arrival. They painted the room a pretty pale yellow, figuring that would do nicely for a boy or a girl.
Mother Smith smoldered with contempt. Even Rupert grew disgusted with her, not that he was keen on the idea of a bastard carrying the Smith name.
The cherub arrived in a small, discreet hospital on November 28, 1944. A tiny girl. It was a rainy, cold day and a bittersweet one; the previous evening, Celeste Chalfonte, bullheaded and bored with waiting for the baby, had decided to ride and pop over fences despite the gathering twilight. She broke her neck and died instantly. She never saw the baby she had shepherded toward adoption. Despite the shock and grief, Ramelle assured Louise that she would step in as the baby’s godmother.
Juts cried twice, out of loss for Celeste and out of joy for the baby.
But November 28 was to prove a memorable day, freighted with events and meanings only the years would unravel. Rillma Ryan snuck out of the hospital in the middle of the night, running away with her still-unnamed child.
In fury and despair, Juts, Chessy, Louise, and Toots began the search for the infant. Rillma, finally coming to her senses, slunk home three weeks later and reported she had left the baby in a Catholic orphanage in Pittsburgh. Everyone pooled their gas-ration coupons and Chessy and Louise drove there to fetch
the baby. They pretended to be married; she’d caught him in an affair—that was their story—but was willing to claim his child.
By that time, Julia, through so many ups and downs, had caught pneumonia and had to stay home with Buster, Yoyo, Mary, Maizie, and Pearlie in attendance.
On the way back from Pittsburgh, a whopping blizzard struck with white fury. The infant weighed five pounds, one reason the good sisters were glad to release her. All across the great state of Pennsylvania, Chessy and Louise would pull into gas stations, farmhouses, wherever there was light, to get milk and warm it for the infant. Not one person refused them and many gave them gas coupons to make sure they would get back to Runnymede.
Once in Runnymede they immediately took the infant to Dr. Horning. Exhausted, Louise burst into racking sobs when the doctor begged them not to take the baby to Juts. Why let her love something that was sure to die?
Chester, dark circles around his eyes, hands shaking, took the baby from Dr. Horning and vowed, “This baby isn’t going to die. You tell me what I have to do.”
And so for the next six months, Chester Smith got up each night, every three hours, to feed the scrawny thing a special formula. Julia Ellen recovered in a month and she, too, fed the baby around the clock. They never complained about the lack of sleep. Sometimes they’d both get up at the same time, even though one should have seized the chance to sleep. They liked to hold the girl together. Finally, by May 8, Nicole Rae Smith, called Nickel by everyone, was so fat she looked like a sumo wrestler. She was healthy enough to be carried in her daddy’s arms to celebrate V.E. day with all of Runnymede. People cried, shouted, and drank. Surely it would be a better world now.
And Julia Ellen returned to the land of the living. Julia, her Chesterfield stapled to her lip; Julia, who shot from the hip; Julia, who tweaked authority and danced until dawn; Julia Ellen was finally a mother.
