Old Laughing Times, Section 3

“She sure was.  My dear Cynthia was the best cook there ever was.  Why, did you know that she once prepared a meal for one of the Queen of England’s relatives?  It was some sort of exotic meat, I think, a miniature horse native to some small South Pacific nation.  Though she told me the creature was so thick that at first she thought it was a baby elephant.  Then she realized that it didn’t have a trunk, but instead it had one of those long sorts of noses with white markings just like a horseshoe.  In fact, she declared that it was exactly like my lucky mark.”

Marge rubbed the back of her hands against her lap slowly.  Her companion asked, “Is that true?”

“Why, don’t you believe it?”  His gleeful challenge enlarged the doubt in Suzanne’s mind.  One could see in her hemming and hawing eyes a reflection like a see-saw going back and forth, up and down, down and up.

“Well, I don’t know, it seems so fantastic,” she finally replied.

“But it is, I guarantee, true.  How I tell you it happened is precisely what happened.  After she served the meal the Countess – that’s what she was, a countess, though I don’t seem to recall of what place, exactly – she comes up to my wife and says, she says, ‘That was a most excellent meal.’ And glides off all fancy-like.  To this day my wife doesn’t remember how she made it.  All she knows is that it was a startling discovery when she saw the mark under the matted forelock, the mark just like mine.  She says she was thinking of me during that entire preparation.”

“I hope that she didn’t think of you as being the meat.”  Grace and Suzanne laughed at Marge’s joke, which was more of an unprepared blurt than anything else.  She tried to bend her fingers straight, but once twisted, the undoing becomes more tedious than the knotting.

Their good-natured friend winked.  “And do you know that while she was preparing it, I was getting a haircut.  A few minutes past noon I shouted, ‘ouch!’, because I felt a pain running up and down my spine.  It couldn’t have been the chair, because I saw them get the delivery last week, these chairs were be-you-ti-ful: glossy mahogany, the supplest leather, not a pinching point anywhere, softer than a baby’s bottom they were.  The barber had just come out of the back room, getting ready to begin. ‘Clement,’ he says, ‘I haven’t started yet.’ ‘Joe,’ I said, though I don’t know what came over me, ‘I know that something good is going to happen today.’  And do you know that in the same day my wife cooked a magnificent feast for royalty and I got the best haircut of my life?”

“Oh, now that’s really too much.  All of this really did happen?”   Suzanne’s breathy voice could not contain its keen excitement.

“Of course it did.  Why, Cynthia swears the horseshoe brought her luck that day, her and me both.  What’s more, she won’t hear otherwise, bless her, that it’s the very reason we got married!”

“No!”  Suzanne’s mouth formed a very round “o” shape.

“Yes, it’s true, might be the very reason she said yes.”

“Mr. Averstand, could I see your watch?”  Marge cut in.

“Huh?  Oh, well, I seem to have misplaced it.  I know it’s around here somewhere.  Now where did I put it?  Cynthia must know, she probably placed it somewhere she knows I’ll look later.”

“The refrigerator?”  Marge mumbled.

Only Grace heard the indeterminate jab.  She looked on Marge with a mixture of something like fleeting tenderness and a cool set of her mouth.

“What made your wife think that?” Suzanne asked Mr. Averstand, edging forward on the wooden bench more fully into the brilliant sunlight.  The trill of some small bird came from the corner of the aviary.  “It can’t have anything to do with a game of horseshoes?  How odd it would be if it involved that.”  She let her thought trail off without care of further pursuing it.

“The first time I met her was a rainy March day.  Ah,” he filled his lungs with good, clean morning air, “I remember it like it was yesterday.  I’d just gotten discharged for my knee.  Doc Robbins said, ‘Clement, my boy, we’re sorry to see you leave, but we oughta let you go enjoy your life now.  Go marry a fine woman and come back so I can meet her.’ ‘Will do, Doc,’ I said.  The nurse gals were sad to see me go, but I made a date with one of them for that night, so it washed out nicely in the end.  I went out of the hospital, hoping to hail a cab, seeing as I wasn’t quite up to driving.

“What a surprise when I came out of doors!  I wasn’t the only one, though.  It had begun to pour unexpectedly, and people were all bustling around, wearing the harried fashion of the day – you know,” he said, as Suzanne nodded in delight, and even Marge smiled.

“Some say that the heavens opened up that day to rain down fortunes on the sons of men, good and bad.  There wasn’t a cab for a solid city block, and the ones that were there puttered along, stuffed clown cars.  And then I saw her.  The nice, warm, yellow taxi cab came rolling up right where I was standing.  Her glorious yellow hood was rounded and steamy in the most attractive way in the middle of that typhoon.  I reached for the door, when something hit me from behind.

Section 4 of 4