The Talk of the Town

THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Daughters of the Great Depression

Fran Baker

Chapter 1

Blue Ridge, Missouri
;
1933

Agnes Dill started it. After hoovering up a generous slice of buttermilk pie along with a brimming handful of mixed nuts, the plump widow declared in no uncertain terms that she would be double-checking her door locks from now on. In what had to be a first, everyone in the overheated parlor nodded their heads in agreement.

Everyone, that is, but Roxie Mitchell.

Roxie’s ink pen fell still and her secretary’s journal almost slid off her lap as she stared at the other women in genuine astonishment. Accord wasn’t common among the members of the Ladies Aide. Far from it, actually. Whether discussing something as important as the monthly bake sales that raised money for charities like the town library and the orphan’s home, or even something as mundane as what china piece would be handed out at the Pharaoh Theatre’s next Dish Night, the women could usually be counted on for an hour or two of debate.

Not today, however. Even Violet Lynch had agreed with Agnes. And this after last month’s meeting when Violet had insisted that Agnes didn’t have enough brains to fill a dressmaker’s thimble.

A mischievous impulse, or perhaps that streak of rebelliousness that her mother had so often complained about, compelled Roxie to dissent.

“Isn’t that a tad dramatic?” she asked in a voice tinged with amusement.

No sooner did the words leave her mouth than nine china cups clattered into their matching saucers, nine heads swiveled in her direction, and nine pairs of eyes focused sharply on her.

Ignoring the fact that she was now the center of attention, she capped her pen, closed her journal, then picked up her cup and took a sip of tea that had grown distastefully tepid in the time since it had been served. The pendulum clock on the wall of the stuffy room ticked loudly in the silence and the unseasonably cold late April wind had the tree branches tap-tap-tapping at the panes of the brocade-draped windows. In the corner stove a hearty fire snapped, crackled and popped.

Roxie heard each sound distinctly as she waited for a response to her question.

It wasn’t long in coming. Mabel Foltzcroft, wife of the town’s physician and hostess for this afternoon’s meeting, was the first to recover. Like a marionette whose strings had been yanked, she sat erect in her horsehair chair and posed a question of her own.

“Dramatic?” Mabel’s red Tangee lipstick bled into the lines around her puckered-up mouth. “What do you mean, dramatic?”

Roxie took the time to set her tea cup in its matching saucer on the small table beside her chair and to smile around the room before replying. No one smiled back. Regardless, she willed herself to finish what she had started.

“It’s just that everyone seems to be making such a big fuss about him. After all, it’s not as if he’s”—she searched for an innocuous comparison to make her point and the best she could come up with was—“some crazed debaucher turned loose on the town.”

“We all know
precisely
what he is,” Mabel said in a tone that was just this side of snide.

The other women bobbed their heads in support of that pronouncement.

“Then you also know what he isn’t.” Roxie’s vehemence surprised her as much as it apparently did the others. Her earlier amusement had completely subsided, deflated by a prick of annoyance. What was the matter with all of them, anyway? Weren’t they even going to give him a chance? “He’s not Public Enemy Number One.”

Knowing looks passed from one woman to another, arcing around the circle in a matter of seconds. It wasn’t the first time Roxie had taken up for the underdog. She’d made a habit of it her whole life, so no one could really claim to be surprised that she was doing so now. This time, though, their looks seemed to say, she’d gone too far.

“It never hurts to take precautions.” Roxie’s sister-in-law Marlene hadn’t quite recovered her figure after giving birth to her third son almost six months ago, but that hadn’t kept her from giving Agnes some stiff competition in the refreshments-gobbling department. Nor did the fact that she was married to Roxie’s oldest brother and supposedly bound by at least a semblance of family loyalty forestall a public chastising. “You’ll realize that once you have children.”

“She’d best get married first,” put in the newly-wed Rose Dirks.

Polite coughs and a subtle clearing of throats muffled the ensuing titters.

Roxie knew what prompted their reaction. It was the very same thing they gossiped about over their back fences or whispered to each other when she left a room. Roxie Mitchell was too opinionated, too educated, too much her own woman. And at twenty-five her chances of finding a suitable man to marry were growing slimmer by the day.

As the room grew quiet again, her reproving blue gaze swept the circle. She knew she should let the matter drop and end the meeting on a note of camaraderie. But the bur was under her skin now and wouldn’t let her be.

“Even if I had a dozen children, it wouldn’t change my opinion,” she said stoutly. “I think you’re all overreacting. He’s back barely one day, and you’re ready to run him out of town on a rail.”

“Well, what would you have us do?” Candise Sherman glanced up from the toe of the black sock she was darning for her corset salesman husband. “Welcome him back with a party?”

“Fete him like the Prodigal Son?” demanded the preacher’s wife, Margaret Pierce, in a voice that was rife with righteous indignation.

“That wild Bauer boy will probably have his own party,” Agnes Dill—the woman who had started it all—asserted with a decided sniff that said what kind of party she thought it would be.

“He’s not a boy anymore,” Roxie reminded her when she could get a word in edgewise.

“Which makes him more dangerous than ever,” Agnes replied on a bite.

Tongues clicked in concurrence. Roxie had to stifle hers to keep from shouting at her lifelong friends. At the same time, she wondered why she felt so strongly. What, after all, did it matter to her? She didn’t care anything about Luke Bauer. She’d hardly known him and that mostly by reputation. Yet she not only continued to defend him but she also gave them something else to chew on.

“Well, he didn’t look very dangerous to me,” she said in a deliberately provocative tone.

Once again, all eyes riveted on Roxie.

“You
saw
him?” Candise squealed.

“When?” Mabel asked.

“On my way here.”

“Where?”

“He was walking away from the train station when I dropped my car off at Hubbard’s Garage.” Roxie drove a 1923 Model T, and this was the third time in the six months since she’d bought it that the ten-year-old car had been in for service. Still, she couldn’t complain too awfully much because she’d only paid twenty-five dollars for it when Terrence and Sandra Riley sold out and moved in with their Kansas City relatives. “He didn’t look any different from anyone else, just a regular person.”

That wasn’t precisely true, she acknowledged to herself. He hadn’t looked like a regular person at all. On the contrary, from the moment he’d stepped off the arrival platform, and started down the sidewalk, he’d stood out from everyone else. Perhaps it was the unruly black hair that the wind tossed every which way. Or the ill-fitting suit he’d clearly outgrown while in prison. It might even have been the battered brown suitcase in which he appeared to carry all his worldly possessions. Regardless, he was all dark good looks and attitude—exactly the type of man a woman couldn’t take her eyes off of and other men crossed the street to avoid.

And avoid him was exactly what they’d done.

Roxie had paused after coming out of the garage and watched in appalled fascination as the women who’d seen him walking their way had goggled and blushed before stepping into the doorway of the nearest store. The men were no less obvious. Those who hadn’t blatantly crossed the street had given him wide berth on the sidewalk. She’d been ashamed of them, all of them, in that moment.

But was she any better? she chastised herself now. Did she really have any room to judge their actions? Not knowing what else to do, she had just turned on her heel and practically run the three blocks to Mabel’s house.

Now Mabel gave her freshly waved and hennaed hair a self-important pat. “Luke Bauer never looked like anybody else.”

“Didn’t act like anybody else, either,” Margaret added on a disdainful note. “Seemed to think he could live by his own rules.”

Julia Murphy, the town librarian and today’s speaker, looked up from the pillowcase she had recommenced embroidering after refreshments. “He always was a loner.”

Rose shivered. “Had a way of looking right through a body that turned my blood to ice.”

“Pride.” Candise moved her wooden darning egg to the heel of her husband’s sock and squinted at the small hole she found there. “That was his problem.”

“
One
of his problems,” Mabel qualified.

Busy sorting cotton squares for the postage stamp quilt she planned to make, Virginia Jones had remained silent throughout this uncharitable exchange. Now she looked up from the small pile of colorful squares she had stacked on her lap.

“As I recall, he was always polite as a boy, always minded his manners whenever he brought honey or fruit from his grandfather’s farm into the store to sell,” she said, speaking on Luke Bauer’s behalf. Virginia and her husband owned the Blue Ridge General Store, where most of the Ladies Aide members did their weekly shopping. And where more than half of them relied on credit to carry them through to the end of the month. “He never took a piece of candy from me or from David without saying thank you. There was good in him back then. Perhaps there still is.”

“Oh, Virginia, you’d make excuses for the devil himself, you would,” Mabel said with a dismissive wave of her hand.

Once again everyone nodded in agreement.

And once again, Roxie was the odd woman out. “But maybe Virginia’s right,” she argued with renewed vigor. “Maybe there’s good in him yet.”

Disbelief sharpened Mabel’s expression.

Roxie glanced at Virginia, who nodded encouragingly, and then said in a rush, “We should at least give him a chance to earn our respect and our trust.”

“There’s such a thing as being too trusting.” Violet’s voice held almost as much sorrow as her eyes when she lifted them from the gray silk dress she’d been hemming and met Roxie’s gaze.

An uncomfortable silence descended over the sitting room as talk of Luke Bauer ceased and they all tried vainly not to remember how Paul Lynch had deserted Violet, just up and walked out on her and their two daughters last year, leaving Violet to eke out a meager living for herself and her children from her alterations business.

“You’ll learn someday that it really doesn’t pay to trust too much.” The quavery way Violet said it added impact to her words.

Feeling her throat tighten with that familiar ache, the unbearable pain and secret shame that had driven her back home, Roxie swallowed hard. Violet was right. There
was
such a thing as being too trusting. She had learned that lesson the hard way. Arthur had taught it to her with humiliating thoroughness.

“That’s true, Violet, sadly true,” Mabel said in a patronizing tone before bouncing back to her original point. Focusing on Roxie now, she reiterated, “And you certainly can’t trust a Bauer. It’s in the blood.”

Her comment sparked others just as cutting.

“Bad blood, those Bauers.”

“I can’t ever remember seeing Everett Bauer draw a sober breath.”

“Or do a day’s honest work.”

“Wound up in a pauper’s grave, you know.”

“And what about that Nadene?”

“She came from a good family,” someone said in her defense.

“Well, a fine mother she turned out to be, running off with that traveling salesman when her boy was still in nappies,” someone else rejoined.

“Would you have stayed with Everett? He was a drunkard with a bad temper.”

“Maybe not, but I wouldn’t have left my baby behind.”

Roxie let the gossip swirl around her, wishing she’d never started this conversation. She didn’t know why she’d felt so compelled to argue on Luke Bauer’s behalf, anyway. If she’d ever said more than a couple words to him in her life, she couldn’t recall it. In fact, she really couldn’t remember much about him, period. It had all been so many years ago . . .

She stared down at her lap, not seeing the journal in which she’d scribbled her notes about the upcoming library fundraiser but instead envisioning the darkly handsome youth with the defiant look and daredevil laugh who’d never really fit in with the rest of the kids in town. Yes, he’d been proud and wild and a loner. Always the troublemaker. Always the rabble rouser looking for a good fight. Always the town’s bad boy.

But the town’s bad boy was all grown up now. He didn’t need Roxie Mitchell—or anyone else, for that matter—sticking up for him. He could fight his own battles.

And what, she wondered idly, would the man be like?