“Cruikshank acts like my men and I have nothing better to do than round up those escaped patients and drive them back to that loony bin,” the sheriff complained as he carved into his chicken breast with too much vigor. “And the mayor won’t act on my complaints.” He reached for the bowl of mashed potatoes and slapped a generous scoop down onto his plate. “I know you don’t agree with me, Doc, but I’m not the only one in town who thinks it’s time for Bud Kibler to retire. Evelyn Mulrooney is running against him come September, and if she wins, she’s planning to do all she can to shut the hospital down.”
I almost choked on my string beans because that was almost verbatim what Frankie had told Viv and me on our walk home from Mass that morning—only much worse. Not only had Mulrooney scared our neighbors into believing that if it wasn’t for her diligence, they wouldn’t have known Hopper could be headed our way to murder their children, she wanted to further convince them of her mayoral worthiness by leading a charge to close Broadhurst down.
This was such life-changing news, not only for the girls and me and poor Bud Kibler, but for the patients we’d grown to care about. I was dying to hear more, but Uncle Walt was ready to move onto another one of his favorite Sunday supper topics—Aunt Jane May’s home cooking.
He leveled his bachelor blues at her and said, “Janie”—that’s what he called her—“nobody does spuds half as good as you and they’re especially fine tonight.”
Aunt Jane May had an aversion to bragging, but being from the South and all, hospitality was her Eleventh Commandment, so I expected her to politely thank him for the compliment and quickly move onto another topic. What I hadn’t anticipated was seeing a rosy blush rise up from the scooped collar of her pretty lilac dress when she told him, “I tried foldin’ in a cup of sour cream this time. Glad you like them.”
She was humble, but not the demure type, and as I watched that blush crawl toward her neck, I wondered what the heck was going on. A few weeks ago she’d turned the color of her red clutch purse at the breakfast table, and here she was almost fuchsia at the supper table. Is she allergic to cooking? Does she have scarlet fever?
But that was stupid. That didn’t make sense.
She’d been cooking her whole life without a deleterious reaction, and a nursing diploma from the University of Mississippi hung on her bedroom wall. She knew scarlet fever was contagious and wouldn’t think of spreading it around, and she didn’t appear to have any other symptoms. Her appetite was hearty, and she wasn’t listless or glassy-eyed. Other than the blush that’d charged all the way to her cheeks, Aunt Jane May looked like a million bucks. Just like Viv told her she did the morning she’d read her that pretend fortune about Mr. Tall, Dark, and Handsome and … O, Mary, sweet mother of God.
That could not be a coincidence.
Had Aunt Jane May been trotting hotly with a man who was no longer a mystery because he was sitting next to me at the dining room table? Did she forbid the girls and me to ride over the tracks because she and Uncle Walt had been secretly meeting at Earl Spooner’s Club after dark? Was that her lip-licking secret?
Of course, I was completely bowled over by that possible turn of events and reversal of roles, but I understood why she’d want to keep that from us. Frankie and I would keep our traps shut, but Viv had been acting so impetuously that she couldn’t be counted on anymore to keep a secret. And given what the girls told me that afternoon about Mulrooney setting her matrimonial sights on Uncle Walt, if Viv found out that he and Aunt Jane May were dating each other, she might tell Mulrooney for the pure satisfaction of seeing her suffer, and that wouldn’t work out so hot.
Snug in the hideout, Frankie, Viv, and I had heard the president ranting during one of the Auxiliary meetings held in our living room, “I’ve been told they’re dancing to jungle music at that club across the tracks. The Lord wants us to do something about that, ladies. We’ll be making picket signs at the next meeting. We need to close that place down.”
If any of those purported do-gooders should happen to march in front of Earl’s back door and see Aunt Jane May dancing the night away with Uncle Walt, that’d be disastrous. She’d get kicked out of the Auxiliary. Blackballed. The same way Mrs. Joan Abernathy had been when, after one too many cocktails at the church Christmas party, she’d sashayed over to Father Casey, undid the top buttons of her Peter Pan blouse, and asked him if he’d like to take a peek at Never Neverland.
The girls and I thought that was hilarious, but the religious ladies weren’t known for their sense of humor. They started one of their whisper campaigns, and by the time they got done putting Mrs. Abernathy through the wringer, she couldn’t show her face in town. She and her family had to move to Port Washington.
That’s not the fate that’d befall Aunt Jane May, of course. As powerful as Mulrooney was, she’d never get rid of the matriarch of the Buchanan family. But she would do all she could to tarnish our aunt’s sterling reputation. Nobody looked down on a man who sowed his wild oats before he tied the knot, but a single gal like Aunt Jane May was supposed to stay unplowed. Mulrooney would drag her name through the mud—in the name of Jesus Christ, of course—if she found out that my aunt and uncle were pressing against each other at Earl Spooner’s Club. She could even spread around what her daughter Brenda had told the girls and me at the park yesterday after I beat her at tetherball, “You think you’re such a big deal, Buchanan, because your relative discovered the town, but my ma thinks your aunt is doin’ unnatural acts with your uncle and she’s gonna tell everyone in town.”
I could tell by the venom in her voice and Viv’s volcanic reaction that she had insulted and threatened our loved ones, but I had no idea what she meant by “unnatural acts,” so Frankie had to keep Viv from gouging Brenda’s eyes out and explain to me at the same time, “Her mother told her that Auntie and Uncle Walt are …” she thrust her pelvis forward and backward a bunch of times.
“Hula-hooping?” I guessed, because that’s what it looked like and it’d be a pretty unnatural act for them to do.
“For the love of God!” Viv yelled as she struggled to get free of Frankie’s grip. “This little shit is sayin’ that her ma is gonna tell everyone that Auntie and Uncle Walt are doin’ what the Willis’s and the Harris’s dogs are always doin’ and—let me at her!”
Then again, I thought, as I went back to studying Aunt Jane May across the dining room table on the night of the emergency meeting, I might be making a big deal out of nothing. She’d just finished slaving away in a steamy kitchen during record-breaking heat, so her rosy cheeks could be nothing more than a prickly rash. And even if my uncle raved about her cooking, enjoyed watching the Gillette Friday Night Fights with her and, by all reports, had a ball twirling her around the dance floor at the May Mixer, that didn’t mean they were in love.
Did it?
I’d lost my mother, and my father wouldn’t dream of replacing her, so I never had the opportunity to watch a man and woman romance each other close-up. But I had observed enough couples holding hands or snuggling during a Music Under the Stars concert or smooching in the balcony at the Rivoli to know that kind of love could be a many-splendored thing.