A Long Way From Chicago (14 page)

I crossed the Wabash tracks past the grain elevator on my way to Veech’s garage, eating the dust of the trucks hauling in the beans. Veech’s garage had been the blacksmith shop, and they still kept the anvil inside. Now it was a one-pump filling station with an outdoor lift. I blundered along toward it. Then the dust cleared, and I saw her.

It was love at first sight, like I’d been waiting for her all my life. She stood on the pavement in front of Veech’s, shimmering in her loveliness. And so graceful she might glide past me as if I wasn’t there, leaving me in the dust.

She was a showroom-fresh Terraplane 8 from the Hudson Motor Car Company. A four-door sedan, tan, with red stripping and another touch of red at the hubcaps. Tears sprang and my eyes stung. I couldn’t help it. My hands curled like I had her steering wheel in my grip.

No car company had an agency in Grandma’s town, not
even Ford. But Veech’s would order you a car. Ray’d said nobody had bought one in two years. He ducked out from under an ancient Locomobile up on the lift, working a greasy rag over his big hands.

Ray was seventeen and man-sized, and I’d worked hard to know him because I wanted him to teach me how to drive. He’d given me a couple of lessons last summer, but he wanted two dollars for the full course.

People around here didn’t overreact even when they hadn’t seen you for a year. Ray jerked a thumb back at the Locomobile he’d been working under. “Threw a rod.”

I nodded like I knew.

But I couldn’t take my eyes off the Terraplane. “Somebody order it?”

Ray rubbed his stubbled chin with the back of his hand in a way I admired. “Who’s got seven hundred and ninety-five dollars? This baby’s top-of-the-line. Son, it’s got a radio.”

I wanted to ask him if he’d driven it. But that was too close to asking him for a ride and a lesson. We both knew I didn’t have two dollars.

“Hudson’s sending out their new Terraplane models to drum up interest. It’s the make Dillinger drove to outrun the cops. But, hey, you’d know that,” Ray said. “You probably took a gander at the body the Chicago cops put on display. You reckon it was really Dillinger?”

I shrugged. I could see this was the summer when I missed out on everything.

That night after supper Grandma said, “I suppose you kids want to go to the picture show,” meaning she wanted
to go to the picture show. We were willing, though going to the pictures for us was the Oriental Theater in Chicago, featuring a first-run movie, a pipe organ, and a stage show with a dog act.

It was different at Grandma’s. On Wednesday nights the Lions Club sponsored the picture show in the park. They put up canvas walls, so it was like a tent without a roof. You sat on benches, and they showed the movie on a sheet hung from the branch of a tree. Everybody but Baptists came. Admission was a nickel a head or a can of food for the hungry. Grandma took a quart Mason jar of her beets, and we three got in on that.

Since nobody liked sitting behind Grandma, we settled on the back row. There was some socializing she didn’t take part in. Then the projectionist got the film threaded, and the show started. Mary Alice had been hoping for a Shirley Temple, but it was a Dracula, not too old, starring Bela Lugosi.

I have to say, it got to me. All those living dead people with black lips. When Dracula turned into a bat at the window, the night behind him merged with the night around us. It was a good audience for a horror picture. Several people screamed, and once a whole bench turned over. A night breeze sighed in the tree, making the screen waver. Mary Alice kept her eyes shut through most of it. Grandma barely blinked.

Afterward, we walked home in the dark. Mary Alice stuck close to Grandma, and I wasn’t far off myself. The town was just one shadow after another. When a big lilac bush threw leaf patterns on the walk ahead of us, Grandma shied like a horse. Then we came to an old oak tree growing
close to the road. Grandma pulled back and edged around it like Count Dracula was standing on the other side, in a cape.

Two or three years earlier we’d have thought the movie had spooked Grandma. Now we wondered if she was trying to spook us.

When we were safely inside at home, she made a business of latching the screen door. Then she looked meaningfully at the window over by the sink, like Dracula’s electric eyes might be staring in, out of his terrible fanged face. Mary Alice and I were frozen to the linoleum in spite of ourselves.

“Grandma, there aren’t such things as vampires, are there?” Mary Alice asked. Did she want to know, or was she testing Grandma? Every summer Mary Alice seemed to pick up another of Grandma’s traits.

“Vampires? No. The only bloodsuckers is the banks.” Grandma stroked her chins. “Movies is all pretend. They’re made in California, you know. But they prove a point. Make something
seem
real, and people will believe it. The public will swallow anything.”

That seemed her last word for the night. Now Mary Alice and I had to stumble up that long staircase to the darkness above. Being the man of the family, I ought to have gone first, but didn’t.

“Sweet dreams,” Grandma said behind us.

It was a long night, and hot. Mary Alice shut her window to keep vampire bats out. I know because I heard her closing hers when I was closing mine.

The next morning, after that restless night, I said to Grandma at the breakfast table, “I need two bucks bad.”

“Who don’t?” Grandma said. “What for?”

“Driving lessons, and Ray Veech wants two dollars to teach me.”

“What do you want to learn to drive for anyway?” she said. “Don’t you go around Chicago in taxicabs and trolleys?”

I couldn’t explain it to Grandma. I was getting too old to be a boy, and driving meant you were a man. Something like that. I shrugged, and she slid a belly-busting breakfast in front of me.

Mary Alice turned up, looking like the ghost of herself. She was pale-faced with bags under her eyes. Though glad to see daylight, she was worn to a frazzle.

“Anyhow,” Grandma said, “you don’t have time for driving lessons. I want you two to poke around in the attic. I can’t get up there anymore. You have to climb up through a trapdoor in the closet.”

“What are we looking for?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Any old rummage for the church sale.”

So Grandma, who didn’t take part in community activities, wanted to go to the rummage sale. She ate with the fork in one hand, the knife in the other. Then she looked up like she was having one of her sudden thoughts.

“Tell you what. Find that old stovepipe hat up there. It belonged to a preacher who knew my maw and paw. He was visiting one time, trying to convert them, and he dropped dead on the parlor rug. They kept his stovepipe hat on their hat rack ever after, to remember him by. I stuck it up there. Get it down. I saw a picture in the
paper of John D. Rockefeller in a hat like that. They may be coming back in style.”

I doubted that last part. But Mary Alice and I dragged a ladder upstairs. Grandma followed as far as the second floor to show us where the trapdoor was. We were disappearing up into the attic when below us she said, “Watch yourselves. I might have bats in my belfry.”

We weren’t familiar with attics, but this one wasn’t too crowded. Grandma used up more than she saved. There were some three-legged chairs and a dress dummy half her size and some coal-oil lamps from olden times. Mary Alice dodged cobwebs and tried not to brush against anything. “I hate it up here,” she said. But then we started going through a couple of old steamer trunks.

I pulled a big furry buffalo robe out of mine. “What about this?”

Mary Alice shrank. “Don’t touch it. It’s awful. It’s got living things in it.”

She was right. Things with wings. I put it aside. Then I came to some baby clothes, maybe Dad’s, nothing too likely even for a rummage sale.

Mary Alice’s trunk was full of paper: yellowed
Farm Journals
and buttons on cardboard and a ton of dress patterns. Then she gasped.

In her hand was an ancient valentine, a big heart surrounded by paper lace. The motto on it read:

WHEN CUPID SENDS HIS ARROW HOME,
I HOPE IT MRS. YOU.

It was signed with a question mark.

“But, Joey, who was it sent
to
?” Mary Alice wondered.

“Grandma, I guess.”

“She got
valentines?
” Mary Alice and I stared at each other.

Then she found another one, also ancient, but without the lace:

WHEN YOU’RE OLD AND THINK YOU’RE SWEET,
TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES AND SMELL YOUR FEET.

“That sounds more like it,” Mary Alice said.

A voice of doom echoed up from the trapdoor. “You find that stovepipe hat yet?”

I jumped and so did Mary Alice. The lid on her trunk dropped down on her head.

Grandma was standing right under the trapdoor, listening to us and waiting for the stovepipe hat.

“I really, really hate this attic,” Mary Alice said, whispering.

The hat was in my trunk. I handed it down to Grandma.

“It’s getting too hot up here,” Mary Alice said. “And all these dress patterns are from before the war.” But out of the bottom of her trunk she pulled up an old quilt. It was so worn, you could see through it. Its pattern was fancy, but faded.

“How about this?” she said to me. She was looking around the hem to see if the quilt maker had stitched in her initials, but the edges were all fraying away.

“What is it?” said the trapdoor.

“An old quilt,” we both yelled down.

“I forgot about that,” Grandma hollered back. “My aunt Josie Smull pieced that quilt. Drop it down.”

I did, and Grandma said, “Keep at it.” We listened to her trudge away.

Other trunks were tucked away under the eaves, so it took us all morning to go through everything. But we didn’t find anything else any sane person would want in a thousand years.

That afternoon we walked uptown and a block beyond to the United Brethren Church. We weren’t going for the lunch the Ladies’ Circle was selling. We ate at home, but Grandma said they’d be offering free lemonade. She’d taken off her apron and wore a hat. Not her fine, fair-going hat. This was the one she gardened and fished in, nibbled at the brim. She’d stuck a fresh peony at the front of the crown to dress it up. She strolled along over the occasional sidewalks with the preacher’s stovepipe hat in a grocery bag. Mary Alice wore her straw hat and a dress because we were going to church, more or less. I brought up the rear with Aunt Josie Smull’s quilt folded over my sweating arm.

“What’s a church rummage sale like anyway?” Mary Alice asked.

“Ever been in a henhouse?” Grandma said.