The Baby Blue Rip-Off (3 page)

These sisters fit my stereotypical idea of old folks like round pegs in round holes; if I’d thought the intelligent and gracious Mrs. Fox was evidence of the fallacy of my downbeat thinking about the elderly, here was ample rebuttal.

Or so you might think.

Because the Cooper sisters proved me wrong. Just seeing the Cooper sisters showed me the error of my ways. Stay with me and you’ll see what I mean.

Miss Gladys Cooper opened the door, with sister Miss Viola Cooper right behind.

“Why, Mr. Mallory,” Miss Gladys Cooper said, “we haven’t seen you for years, tell me...”

“... what have you been doing since last we saw you?” Miss Viola Cooper said, picking up her sister’s train.

I might as well come out and tell you that the Cooper sisters had been living together so long that they had become a single person, in a manner of speaking. Now I mean just that—in their manner of speaking, they were a single person. They thought so much alike, and each knew her sister’s mind so well, that either could complete a sentence for the other, with neither noticing.

“Hello, Miss Cooper,” I said. “Hello, Miss Cooper.”

“Well, good evening, Mr. Mallory, and to what...”

“... do we owe this unexpected, and rather overdue, visit?”

“I’m the Hot Supper delivery boy. See?” And I displayed the lidded plates in my hands.

“What happened to the Petersens?” Miss Gladys Cooper said. “They were such a nice young couple. But of course that doesn’t mean...”

“... we aren’t delighted to see you again, after so long a time. Come in, come in.”

I came in.

Miss Viola Cooper took the dinners into the adjacent dining room (most of the brimming china cabinets were in there) and readied the long table, while her sister questioned me.

“Well,” I said, “I’m finishing up my four-year degree at the college, slowly but surely, on the GI Bill. I’ve traveled around some, and I’m trying to write freelance full-time now. I sold a mystery novel last year....”

“Yes,” Miss Gladys Cooper said, “we’ve been following your career with interest—”

“And surprise,” chimed in her sister from the dinner room. “You didn’t show any particular literary bent when we first encountered you, you know.”

“Not that you weren’t one of our favorite students just the same,” the other sister assured me.

That’s right; the Cooper sisters had been teachers of mine. My second- and third-grade teachers, to be precise, and I loved them. Then and now.

But I hadn’t seen them for a lot of years; in fact, the Cooper name on the Hot Supper list had rung no bells. Face to face, though, it was impossible not to know them.

They insisted I stay and have a glass of wine with them while they had their supper, and I stayed long enough for one glass (homemade dandelion wine, very nice) and begged off, promising them that two weeks from that night, I’d make them last on the route so I could visit all evening with them.

Which I did, and that was when they told me about their nephew David, who had enrolled them in the Hot Supper Service because he suspected that their nightly meal with occasional wine had lapsed into nightly wine with occasional meal.

My preconceptions about old people were changing fast.

That first night, when I’d been able to stay for just a few minutes, the sisters had left their meals midway to see me to the door.

“You were in my last group of students,” Miss Gladys Cooper said, somewhat wistfully, “that final year before our retirement.”

“You were in my second-to-last group of students,” Miss Viola Cooper said, equally wistfully, “the year prior.”

(I’ll give you a moment to figure out which one taught second, and which one third.)

“You young people are wonderful,” Miss Gladys Cooper said. “I don’t know why so many older folks think so poorly of you.”

“Like those lovely boys upstairs,” Miss Viola Cooper said. “So sweet and so thoughtful, and why they’re...”

“... quiet as mice,” her sister finished.

From the racket going on up there, the mice had to be wearing combat boots and into the Clash. But no matter.

“You know, Mr. Mallory,” Miss Gladys Cooper said, “a lot of people—older people, I mean—have a stereotyped view of your age group.”

Her sister nodded. “Just because some of you wear your hair a bit extreme and dress in unorthodox apparel at times, many of these elderly people think there’s something wrong with you, the silly old fools.”

“Silly old
ignorant
fools,” Miss Gladys Cooper added. “And if you can remember back to our class, Mr. Mallory, ‘the seeds of ignorance....”

“... bear the fruit of prejudice,’ ” I finished.

“You remembered,” Miss Viola Cooper said, smiling.

“Sort of,” I said.

I reserved Mrs. Jonsen for last because her place was out on East Hill, not too far from where I live. East Hill is the grab bag of Port City. Older middle-class homes dominate, sedate two-story houses of brick and/or wood, with rundown areas stuck in this corner and that, with an occasional higher-class neighborhood sitting aloof to one side. And, too, you can find certain East Hill streets that seem designed to display the multitude of American life-styles like an exhibit at a World’s Fair: a split-level home, relatively lavish, sits side by side with a cheap prefab; a handsome, well-preserved two-story gothic, dating back to when Mrs. Fox’s digs were dug, shares the same side of the street with a tumbledown shack occupied by some wino.

Mrs. Jonsen lived on the outer edge of East Hill, just outside the city limits, on the corner where Grand Street turns into one highway intersecting another. Once upon a time, Mrs. Jonsen must’ve felt relatively safe from the madhouse that is East Hill. But we’ve crept in on her, largely due to the shopping center, car dealerships, discount department stores, chain restaurants, gas stations and such, which have come to line that edge of the city like so many plastic-and-glass tombstones.

Not that Mrs. Jonsen complained about the encroaching city—at least not in my presence, anyway. She wasn’t a complainer, Mrs. Jonsen.

Matter of fact, if my negative feelings about the elderly hadn’t been dispelled by the rest of my Hot Supper charges, Mrs. Jonsen would’ve done the trick all by her lonesome. Even if the other names on the list had belonged to gnarled, senile old coots, Mrs. Jonsen alone would’ve turned me around.

Because if my image of old people as grotesque, barely living artifacts was a stereotype, then Mrs. Jonsen provided the necessary counter-stereotype. She was the universal grandmother; a kind, apple-cheeked old lady with (God help me) twinkling blue eyes and warm, winning smile.

On the other hand, she turned out to be far less spry than the other oldies-but-goodies I’d met thus far in my campaign. Like Mrs. Fox, she had arthritis, only much worse; she was pretty badly crippled, both hands and feet, and used a steel walker to get around her small house.

The house was a modest, single-story gray affair that had once been used as quarters for the hired hand and his family on the Jonsen farm. Mrs. Jonsen’s late husband had been a basically kind man (she said) but somewhat bigoted (she didn’t say that; I just gathered it). He had known that the cheapest labor he could find for his farm would be “coloreds” and therefore chose to situate the hired hand’s quarters on the far end of the farm, rather than the customary side-by-side arrangement.

This was only one of many interesting things Mrs. Jonsen told me that first night. She had been last on my list, and when she invited me to stay, I didn’t refuse.

“I have some oatmeal cookies, fresh-baked,” she said. “Would you care for a plate, young Mallory?”

Before Young Mallory could say don’t go to any bother, she was going to bother. She struggled out to the kitchen on the metal walker, and I took the plate of cookies she brought me
after her equally slow and awkward return trip. The cookies were, of course, very good. Grandmotherly good.

“You’re wondering,” she said, letting go of the walker and flopping down into a soft armchair, “why I’d bake cookies and yet have my meals delivered.”

I admitted that that had occurred to me.

“Like to keep my hand in,” she said. “Wouldn’t mind cooking for myself, but Edward—that’s my son—says cooking’s too hard for me, what with my arthritis and all. D’you know Edward?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Edward’s a good boy, but I wish he’d get married, like his sister. But he’s forty-eight now, so I doubt that he will. He’s a nice-looking boy, but a bit plump. I guess I fed him too well as a child.... Well, my word, I forgot to bring you a glass of milk. What’s wrong with this old woman.”

“That’s okay, I’m fine....”

“No, I insist.”

She started to rise, clutching onto the walker, and I got up myself, saying, “I can find it,” and went after the glass of milk.

Her kitchen was spacious—considering the size of the house—as big as her living room and remodeled fairly recently. Though the walls and ceiling were cream-colored, as were the counters and cabinets and appliances, the dominant color was blue. Two walls were completely covered with mounted blue plates, decorative plates that upon closer observation revealed Christmas scenes: sleighs, decorated trees, reindeer, candlelit churches, lots of snow—all the standard concepts dressed up somewhat differently on each plate in shades from dark to baby blue. There were eighty-some plates, and each was dated, starting back at 1895. The designs were simple but striking, and it
was an impressive display. Christmas seemed to radiate out of the wall, even if it was late June.

“Oh, the Christmas plates,” she said, when I returned milk-in-hand and mentioned them. “Our one extravagance.” She laughed. “From what you’ve heard me say about my husband Elwood, you may have guessed that he was... somewhat tight with a dollar?”

I nodded. I had indeed guessed that Elwood was tight with a dollar. He made Silas Marner look like Hugh Hefner. The only thing that might tie him to those Christmas plates was a kinship to Scrooge.

“Once a year... at Christmastime, as you might guess... Elwood would have one of his relatives in Denmark send over one of the plates, and that would be his special gift to me—special because it was not the practical sort of gift he’d usually give. Those plates aren’t cheap, you know. About twenty-two dollars apiece they’re up to now, if you send to Denmark—twice that in a store—and every year they break the mold, never make that particular plate again. Wouldn’t be surprised if that collection of mine’s valuable, as those things go. At least I know it means a lot to me, enough so’s I kept it up since Elwood’s passed on.”

“They go back a long way.”

“Elwood’s mother, for a wedding present, gave me her plates. She’d collected them from the start, in 1895. We were married in 1919, and we haven’t missed a plate since.”

The rest of the living room was antique-heavy, too, and when I mentioned that, she said, “More of Elwood’s mother’s things; that cabinet of china over there, all very nice, very old pieces; that set of crystal goblets on the mantel is, too.... She left all her things to Elwood and me.”

“She really collected some beautiful things.”

Mrs. Jonsen laughed and said, “Elwood certainly didn’t get his thrifty ways from his mother. Old Beth Jonsen spent her husband’s money and enjoyed it, which is what Elwood and I should have done, I’m afraid. When he passed on, twenty years back, I sold the farm lock, stock, and barrel, just holding onto this little house and the piece of ground it’s on. Used some of the money to fix the place up—spartan is the word for the way Elwood had it fixed up when the help lived here—and I gave a substantial portion of the rest of the funds to our boy Edward.”

There was a pregnant silence, and I said, “What did Edward do with the money?”

“Bought himself a filling station. Let me tell you a story about that. Edward always has been a determined boy, a lot like his father—all the stubbornness, if not the tightness of money... and though it’s unkind to say so about one’s own offspring, which you love very much, he just never had the horse sense his father had. How are the cookies holding out, young Mallory?”

“Fine.”

“Plenty more.”

“No, really.”

“Where was I?”

“Edward always has been a determined boy.”

“Oh yes, well, when Edward was just a youngster, he used to work at this certain filling station, pumping gas. My husband Elwood believed that a child had to earn his own way to appreciate the hardness of a dollar—and that was when a dollar was truly hard, remember—and so in addition to his farm chores, Edward went to work while he was still in junior high school, buying his own clothes and that sort of thing. Though in defense of my husband, we never made the boy pay room and board.... If you want more milk, just help yourself.”

“Thanks, ma’am.”

“Just go on out to the kitchen; this story’ll hold.”

“I don’t care for any more.”

“If you do, you know where it is. What was I saying?”

“Edward used to work at this filling station.”

“Edward worked at this filling station, where he got a lot of abuse from his boss, a fellow name of Meeker who liked to treat his help like so much dirt. You can tell a lot about a person by the way he treats his help, you know. That Meeker fellow divorced his wife, too, to give you some indication of the man’s character. As I was saying, Edward got it in his head that one day he would buy this Meeker out and own that station himself. And, well sir, determined boy that he was, he did. A lot of years went by first, of course, with Edward staying on at the farm and helping his father, but when Elwood came to his untimely early end, I gave Edward a substantial portion of the money we got for selling the farm, and he bought himself that filling station.”

She smiled.

“And?” I said. “What happened after that?”

She frowned. “The station went broke that first year,” she said. “Sure I can’t get you another plate of oatmeal cookies? Plenty more, though I must save some for Edward. They’re his favorite.”

It was a month before I got back around to Mrs. Jonsen again. Oh, I saw her every Thursday evening, dropped off her Hot Supper all right. And promised her that as soon as possible, I’d make her last on my route again so we could have another chat.