Good Graces

Chapter Thirty-three

After Dave and me get done watching Peter Gunn tonight, he tells me, “I’m going over to the Goldmans’ to fix the short in the stove light. Want to come along? Buy you an ice cream afterwards.”

As good as spending some time alone with Dave and seeing Henry behind the soda fountain at Fitzpatrick’s sounds, school’s going to start soon and I do not want to get rapped on the knuckles by Sister Raphael when I show up the first day with a half-written assignment. I also gotta finish so Troo has enough time to copy it. Summer is almost over. The block party is in three days.

I tell Dave, “Thanks, but I can’t. I gotta get the rest of my charitable story written,” so he goes over to Vliet Street with his toolbox alone.

Troo is in the bathroom in front of the mirror putting the finishing touches on her ventriloquist act for the Queen of the Playground contest before she goes over to Fast Susie Fazio’s for a sleepover and some cannolis. Mother is on the phone with Aunt Betty jabbering about this new man she is dating who is a real catch because it’s Mr. Stanley Talmidge. Troo thinks Mr. Talmidge looks like Quasimodo and that he’s lucky to have something else going for him. He owns the Uptown movie theatre.

So that’s why I come out to my and Daddy’s bench in the backyard to write more of my story with my flashlight. I need some peace and quiet, but that isn’t working out either.

Mr. Moriarity’s dog is barking worse than ever. I think Lizzie broke his heart and is now seeing the Johnsons’ poodle. The crickets are rubbing their legs together to beat the band. I can’t usually hear them, but tonight a strong warm breeze is bringing the sound of the kids at the playground trying to get in their last licks. Loudest of all are the cookie factory dads and their wives out on their steps, giving each other their two cents’ worth on the mystery of Father Mickey’s disappearance. “What do you think coulda happened to him? Do you think he was kidnapped? Murdered?”

Even though it’s been weeks since Troo and me buried Father, the neighborhood just won’t shut up. Even during Mass this Sunday, which Father Louie returned to say from his special dry retreat, I could hear people taking guesses in the Communion line. And it’s not only up at church or on the stoops. No matter where you go or what you do, Father Mickey’s missing is the subject of all conversations. There was even a story in both newspapers with a picture of him looking so sharp, and a quote from Mrs. Latour: “He was a saint. I don’t know how we’ll manage without him.”

Mostly, it seems like people are leaning toward foul play. The cops especially think that. Dave and Detective Riordan have been searching the rectory for clues and when they’re not doing that, they’re working hard to find Father’s body in the lagoon and Jack Hoyt Woods and garbage cans because you got to have a dead one to prove something like murder. Troo and me aren’t worried a bit. Well, Troo isn’t.

The police are also asking everybody a lotta questions about their whereabouts the night Father disappeared. They’re even questioning kids. I got the jitters over that until Troo reminded me that we can count on Artie and Mary Lane. When Artie is grilled, he will keep mum about the revenge plan no matter how high-strung he is. My sister told him if he doesn’t keep his mouth shut about us being up at the rectory that night he has to give back the coonskin cap. And Mary Lane, I’m especially not concerned about her spilling the beans. She’s been tortured by the best in the world-nuns. So detectives asking her a couple of questions wouldn’t bother her at all. (The one thing that is bothering her, though, is why the picture she took of Father up at the rectory slapping Troo that night didn’t turn out. I told her it musta been bad film, but she is leaning toward evil spirits. I expect very soon to hear one heck of a blood-dripping-gypsies-with-wieners ghost story.)

Everybody has been so caught up in thinking about Father Mickey’s vanishing that they’ve already forgotten about the other big news we’ve had. Mrs. Galecki has come out of her coma! Doc Keller told Mother at her visit this week that it is still nip and tuck, but he has high hopes that Mrs. G will recover-not fully, but at least she might be back to where she was in the first place. Dotty and drooly, but not dead.

Because it was all very under-the-covers, hardly anyone in the neighborhood knows the way I do why Mrs. Galecki got so sick in the first place. I was sure that Father Mickey had given her too much or too little of her medicines to try and murder her for her inheritance money, but it turns out that I was wrong. Mrs. Galecki had something running through her that wasn’t supposed to be there and that’s what made her go into the coma. A much happier Mr. Gary told me after a couple of whiskey sours and some hands of Old Maid, “The docs don’t know what it was in Mom’s blood, only that it was something they’d never seen before. Something foreign. It’s a real mystery.”

Not to me, it isn’t. I mighta been mistaken about how Father Mickey attempted to murder her, but I’m not mistaken that he did try to. Father was the only person from around here who had been to someplace foreign. Aunt Betty told me the afternoon Troo and me went to the Five and Dime that he was sent to a bunch of different places after he left the seminary and one of them was the Congo, which is in the dark continent of Africa. I’ve seen those little Pygmy people in Tarzan movies. They’re always sneaking around the jungle trying to poison somebody. That’s what Father Mickey musta done. Not with a blow dart, that’s stupid. I bet he mixed some poison he borrowed from the Pygmies into Mrs. Galecki’s fresh-squeezed lemonade on one of those days Ethel went out to do her errands.

Of course, my good friend was let off the hook for any wrongdoing because Ethel has never been anywhere foreign. So, hurray! She has not had to pack up her things and move down to the Core. She is right where she belongs, next door with Ray Buck sitting in the screened-in porch this very minute, which is another reason why I came out in my yard besides wanting to work on my “How I Spent My Charitable Summer” story. I wanted to listen to their low talking and clinking ice cubes and jazzy music, which is such an improvement over Mr. Gary’s Oklahoma! music, I just can’t tell you. Right before he left for the airport to go back to California, I gave him the two leather coin purses to take back to Father Jim so they would steady match, but in all the excitement, I forgot to ask him if he remembered to talk to his mother about changing back her Last Will and Testament so Ethel will inherit the money she needs to open her school for children when Mrs. Galecki really does die, which I’m not too concerned about anymore. For goodness sakes, if Pygmy poison can’t kill her, what can?

“Ya alright over there, Miss Sally?” Ethel calls over the fence.

“Now that you’re back, I am,” I holler. “I don’t think I could take much more of hearin’ about the wind sweepin’ down the plains.”

Ethel rewards me with her million-dollar laugh that I have been missing. It is so rich and there is no end to it. “Thought ya’d like to know that the doctor told me this afternoon Miss Bertha might be comin’ home next week if she gets more of her strength back. Ya still got the Nancy Drew story to read to her?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I checked it back out of the library last week, hoping she’d ask.

Ethel says, “That’s good. Real good,” and I don’t know if she’s talking to me or Ray Buck because she’s gone quiet again, so I get back to being busy, too:

How I Spent My Charitable Summer

By Sally Elizabeth O’Malley (Part 2)

We were all so surprised to hear about the disappearance of Father Mickey. Especially my sister, Troo, (known to you as Margaret) was so broken up because Father was so kind to allow her to come back to school. She also got me a souvenir bench from the old zoo that means a lot to me, so she really went all-out this summer.

I would also like to mention that Mary Lane was also charitable, just in case she screws up and forgets to write her story again this year. She won the Billy the Bookworm prize this summer at the library and took Troo and me to the Uptown to see that movie by Alfred Hitch-cock that everybody has been talking about. Just a warning to you and the other sisters. You may not want to see Psycho or you will never want to sit in a rocking chair or take a shower or teach a kid named Norman for as long as you live. (I don’t know if nuns go to motels, but if you do, that will be out of the question, too.)

My mother and Dave will no longer be living in sin after September 24th because they’re getting married. Dave took all of us to the State Fair in West Allis and we ate cream puffs. I brought two back for Ethel Jenkins, who had a pretty rough summer. She really needed some creamy filling. Troo and me rode the Tilt-a-Whirl and the roller coaster. Dave won Mother a teddy bear and also won me a couple of goldfish for my fish tank by throwing ping- pong balls that looked exactly like Granny’s eyeballs into little jars. Troo also got to go to the Freak Show to pay her