THE INVITATION

Fanny Smith. The name makes me grimace and the woman who wears it makes me groan. She moved in next to me twenty years ago. Her voice makes me feel as though I’m at sea: sick and hearing a foghorn. Its blaring never changes in pitch nor in volume.  By the time its over, I’m in need of at least an hour’s nap to calm my nerves.

Here she was. Standing on the walk in front of my house, calling to me in that voice. I pretended not to hear her.

“I said, Bill, there’s going to be a par-ty,” she drew the word out as though it was in a foreign language, “a par-ty next Friday.”

I coughed up a good one and looked at her.

“Oh. Didn’t see ya standin’ there, Sniff,” I said.

I’d always called her ‘Fanny Sniff’; it just came to me out of the blue, first time I met her. She hated my calling her that almost as much as she hated me. It, of course, brought me great pleasure.

She threw back her shoulders and smoothed the front of her dress. I never could bear a woman who wore a dress with flat shoes. Her shoes looked like she’d bought them at a men’s shop, except they didn’t look as feminine.

“I told her you shouldn’t be invited,” she said with that perpetual sound of authority she always had. She would’ve sounded like that even telling a joke. If she ever told one. Which she never did.

“Who, Sniff? Make it snappy – you’re wastin’ my time.”

That woman always made me impatient. Looking at her made me impatient. It made me want to swear, which I did obligatorily, just to show her.

Fanny began walking away. I chased her down the street. She turned on me so suddenly, I nearly fell over.

“Get away from me, you old coot! I’ll tell you, but only because I told her I would. Sally Cortland is having a party next Friday. Seven o’clock. Now get away from me before I lay ya flat.”

This last statement was no idle threat. The woman was, after all, a good six feet at least.

to be continued . . .

“My name’s Sally. Sally Cortland.”

I shook her hand.

“You are . . .?” she asked.

“Right. I’m Bill Bingham.”

“You must be retired?” she asked.

It struck me funny and I snorted. It was a good snort as snorts go, but she looked startled. It reminded me of someone.

Suddenly I exclaimed, “You’re that boy’s mother!”

She cocked her head and I continued, “The boy. The boy ‘twas here pulling the bark off my tree. He’s about yeah high,” I measured with my hand, “and freckly.”

“I’m sorry if he upset you, Mr. Bingham.”

I started laughing again – so hard I had to get up and spit.

“Honey, if you call anyone ‘mister’ around here, everyone will think he’s a drug dealer.”

Somehow I sensed I’d offended her. Then I figured it out.

“Oh. Right. You asked if I was retired. See, it struck me funny, ‘cuz I been on some type o’ public assistance er ‘nother since I were a pup.”

She remained silent.

“Bad back,” I explained, rubbing it.

“You said the man was a . . .,” she paused, as if searching for a phrase, “good-for-nothing scoundrel?”

I nodded knowingly.

“Don’t ferget. He was rich,” I added. After all, some things bear repeating.

She got up, shook my hand, and left.

The sun was nearing the horizon now. Its brightness colored the street in gold and orange. Sally, now at her own house, bent to deadhead some potted petunias, turned and waved at me, and slipped inside.

I sat on my sagging porch, chewed on a cookie, and let my memory have its way. It began to sprinkle. I went inside and watched out my window as the rain first pelted my newspaper and then spit into the wind; which blew it, page by page, down the street.

to be continued . . .

image: rain-all-wallpapers.net_.jpg

I quickly brushed it from my face, hoping it had been a small fly with few guts.

“Hello,” she said brightly. A smile cupped her face.

I cleared my throat in a friendly manner.

“I thought you might like some cookies.”

She climbed the steps and handed me a plate of oatmeal raisin cookies without the raisins.

“My favorite,” I said doubtfully, taking the plate and turning a cookie over to look for at least one raisin. There were none to be found.

She looked around the porch and nervously rubbed one hand with the other.

“Have a chair?” I responded.

She pulled a rusty metal rocker from a few feet away. The scraping sound pleased my old ears, like a snare drum in a rock band. She sat down, facing the street.

“We moved to the Johnston house two months ago,” she pointed to the one that had been for sale for so long. “We’ve been so busy getting settled, we haven’t had time to meet everyone.”

I lifted my head in acknowledgement.

Then, thinking how I might be neighborly, I said, “This whole area used ta belong ta a rich good-for-nothing.”

I took her silence for interest, and continued, “Oh yeah. Near scoundrel he was.  Courtney Tice. Never lifted a hand in his life. Had everything handed ta him on a silver platter. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, as they say.”

“Where, exactly was his house?” she asked.

Her eyes roamed the street in front of us.

“All over.  It was a mansion. I seen it in some hist’ry pictures some fella with glasses and a button-down sweater showed me. Long time ago now.”

The woman looked at me curiously.

“I don’t know who he were. Just walkin’ up and down Plato Street. Talkin’ ta people.”

She squinted her eyes.

“Oh.  You mean . . .?” I gave my chin a good scratching.

I reached my bony hand out and made a broad sweep.

“I’d say, if mem’ry serves, it stretched from that brick apartment over there to the corner past your house. The rest was gardens and grounds.”

The woman sat looking at the space for a time. The sun lit her hair in a way that made me wish I was young, but her hands were callused. She wore a pair of jeans and a sleeveless denim shirt. The rubber around her shoes was pulling away.

Suddenly she stuck out her hand.

to be continued . . .

I was pulling some stubborn crab grass from around my own crumbling steps when I was called away by the insistent ringing of the phone (it was my daughter from the next county wondering if I would join them for their annual 4^th of July barbecue – I answered with my usual agreeable “No”).

By the time I had returned to my task, a boy I judged to be about 10 stood, slowly, but with great delight, peeling strips of bark from a birch clump on the boulevard in front of my house.

“Hey!” I yelled, startling both the young chap and myself. My voice has always been gruff. Even as a youth it stood out like thistles next to new grass. Age had given it as low a note as time had supplied an edge.

“You can’t do that!  It’s agin’ the law!” I scolded, and was, for a minute, reminded of my old bloodhound who’d been dead 5 years last month.

The boy looked at me with fear in his eyes, but his posture remained unchanged and his brows scrunched together in a wide “V”.

Soon he replied, “Why?”

“Cuz it’s, it’s . . . agin’ the law, that’s why!” I spat back, irritated with his, by now, expression of disbelief.

He took hold of the bark again.

“No intelligent person would make a law about a tree,” he said quietly. It appeared he had decided I was belligerent and crazy, both.

I proved him wrong at once by running over and bodily shoving him into the street. He fell, and I could see one hand was skinned; tiny pricks of blood began at once to trickle to his wrist. I turned back to my house, and by the time I’d reached my steps he was gone.

“Stupid crab grass,” I muttered.

Not many days later I was sitting on my porch, reading the paper. I had read the obituaries – first, as always – and was now engrossed in the comics. It was evening, but the sun tenaciously held its place these waxing days of summer. I swatted in the air at a fly, which promptly landed on my nose. I have a respectable nose. No small speed bump this, but rather long and straight and glad-to-be-noticed. Impatiently, I let the paper fall to my lap and swatted with one grand smack. Unfortunately, I caught sight of a woman standing at the bottom of my steps just as the fly, now as flat as flypaper and sticking to its chosen landing spot, met its demise. I’ve always been a good aim. This was one of the rare times I regretted it.

to be continued . . .

THE INHERITANCE

A lone street lamp shone its dim yellow light over the pocked and crumbling pavement beneath it. The lamp, green from years of neglect, stood sturdy and dignified nevertheless; its scrollwork base and lantern top the result of the insistence of a tenacious city council member long since forgotten. Its light spread over the area like a thin blanket, not quite reaching the ends of the old street.

A socialite famous for a gluttony of grand parties, an unquenchable thirst for written works of philosophy, and a limited understanding of himself had once owned all of the land through which the street now traveled and some of the adjoining property, as well.  He was the son of a railroad baron, had observed his father’s business from bottom to top, had never been invited to take over the business and had never asked to. In all of his life, the son, Courtney Clive Tice (Clive after his grandfather on his mother’s side), had never known want. He had never had to care for himself in all of the ways mankind finds it necessary to survive, he had never had to sweat, nor to make his own money. It was all there for him from the time he was born until his last breath.

It was this last breath, this last uttered thought, that had made his land even more marketable to those who had the means to buy some of it. So it was sold in large parcels, then later resold in smaller pieces, then divided into lots that were smaller still.  The passage of time, the decline of societal standards, and general neglect had finally led to the street’s current condition. Most passersby made a wide detour around it, but those who had the nerve to pass by that now decaying part of the city still recalled its first owner’s words: “What was good could have been better.” Those were not his only words, but since they were the last sentence of his final musings, they were what the people recalled.

A sarcastic city planner had later named the street ‘Plato Street’, thinking to himself that its owner, his head full of useless philosophy, had thought in vain the property could be improved. Indeed, its current conditions proved the planner right. Ramshackle houses dotted the small, crude lawns, and those who now lived on Plato Street wished Courtney Clive Tice had told the truth. But it was obvious to all who passed by and especially to those who lived there that he had not.

One house, by now nearly bare of paint, though the chips that remained told of an original Hershey’s chocolate brown, stood on the exact spot where Courtney Clive Tice had once slept – and where he had died. The plat reached to where the edge of his smoking room had been. A hard-packed dirt path led from the boulevard in front of it to the street beyond.

A “For Sale” sign had stood in front of the house some fourteen months, taken down several weeks here and there to fool passers-by that it had been sold and really was worth something. Up it would pop again, though, in a renewed effort to bring something – anything – from property whose owner had since died in a nursing home. Then one day it was taken down for good.

It is this house – and the people in it – that taught me about the man Courtney Clive Tice could have become or maybe had become unawares to those who were closest to him.

They moved in without fanfare and I expected they were the kind that lived quietly and unobtrusively, for that is how they lived. At first.

to be continued . . .

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