Francie Comes Home: One Last Adventure Read online

  “This is Marty. Marty Jenner, that you saw at Ruth’s. Do you remember me?” asked the voice at the other end rather breathlessly.

  “Marty? Oh yes,” said Francie. “How are you?” It was that funny kid who had been so struck by her worldly experience.

  “Fine, thanks. Listen, Francie.” The voice said her name with a sort of bravado, and Francie knew exactly what Marty was thinking that she just couldn’t call her Miss Nelson after having known her as a child, but she’d like to. “I don’t suppose you happen to be free tonight or anything? I suppose you’re always terribly busy and all that.”

  “Well …”

  Francie’s cautious hesitation doubtless called up visions of gay, abandoned evenings at the opera, because Marty sounded dejected when she continued, “I’m sure you’ve got much more interesting things to do, but my gang is going to see the new French picture at the Odeon, and just in case you hadn’t seen it—I mean, I know your Aunt Norah doesn’t go to the movies very much, and the kids are crazy to meet you. Honestly, they’d be so glad if you’d come.”

  “Why—well, as a matter of fact, I don’t see why I can’t,” said Francie. There was a rapturous exclamation from Marty; arrangements were made, and Francie went back to her room. She was conscious of a slightly shamed sensation. Marty was years younger than she was, and no doubt the gang, too, was juvenile. Would people laugh at her for going out with kids of merely seventeen or so? Never mind, she told herself: it’s something to do, and after all, why not let people laugh if they want to?

  By Thursday Francie had taken on that indefinable air that marks the person who works in a superior place. Gone was the timidity that made her voice soft and her expression appealing on her first working day. Once she had learned her way around the boxes in the back storeroom, once she knew how to read the cryptic private symbols on the price stickers, Francie began to feel at home. It was true, she realized, that she still had lots to learn. She still got mixed up sometimes in the middle of a transaction and had to call agitatedly for Mrs. Ryan. When people were rude to her—and a surprising lot of them were—she was confused and upset. Nor did she believe that she would ever be able to cope with the salesmen who dropped in at all hours, each with his own approach, each terribly persuasive in his cozening or fast-talking way: she was happy to hand them over to her employer as speedily as she could. (Watching Mrs. Ryan with the salesmen gave Francie respect for her.) Nevertheless, she began to feel her oats. Now she was a wage earner among wage earners; surely that put her on the right side of the fence! Surely that made her better than the rather silly women who didn’t even know how to spend the money their husbands earned for them! She even talked back to Cousin Biddy when that excellent lady tried to show her, one day, how to do her job.

  If she had developed as she showed signs of doing, Francie might have made a name for herself as that snippy girl Flo Ryan’s taken on. But in the natural course of events she made the acquaintance of Fredericks & Worpels, the firm next door, and her conceit was soon forgotten.

  Fredericks & Worpels was the sort of place that counted on reducing people to a pulp, that was its bread and butter; the firm was employed as consultant decorators. Until she went to work at the Birthday Box, Francie had never as much as slowed down while passing its display window. She was simply not decorator-conscious. The chaste display of one Italian Renaissance chair slightly off center had never lured her attention when she was a mere shopping customer, and though she had always cared for fabrics, she was interested only in modern patterns. Antique velvets such as those displayed by Fredericks & Worpels didn’t seem to fit into the same category, and Francie didn’t look at them. It happened, however, that the firm underwent a change shortly before Francie became a wage earner. Mr. Worpels, the old Mr. Worpels, that is, died, and the restraint of his influence was removed. The gloomy, ugly old house on one of Jefferson’s few hills, where he had lived for sixty years, was closed up, and his partner, the late Mr. Fredericks’s widowed daughter-in-law, now found herself able for the first time in her life to do with the firm just as she saw fit.

  What this would be was a topic of intense speculation among her group of contemporaries, the richer element of the town, the handful of bankers and manufacturers and their wives who paid heavily for the upkeep of the country club and went away for the winter as a ceremonial duty. Lottie Fredericks was a character, they agreed; you never knew what she might do next. Where other matrons would have concentrated on conventional pursuits, such as marrying off in a proper manner such eligible children as they had (Lottie had one child, a daughter of twenty), she might well rebel against this time-worn routine.

  “Mark my words,” said Betty Smedley, “Lottie will surprise all of you. Probably sell out and move to Rome or something.”

  Instead, Mrs. Fredericks did just the opposite, and announced her intention of bringing European culture to the Middle West. When she spoke of European culture, however, she wasn’t referring to the sort exemplified by Renaissance chairs. She had had enough of antiques—too much. She genuinely loved decorating and knew something about it; she had played with her own house, year after year, and now at last she saw the chance to expand and enjoy herself. Fredericks & Worpels, without suffering a change of name, was transformed. It sold only modern merchandise. The window next to the Birthday Box now sported a black-lacquered coffee table and a new, amusing wallpaper of blueprints.

  Dimly Francie was aware that all was not as it had been in the past, but she didn’t hear the story until one day in the middle of her second week at the Box, when a girl in a chartreuse smock, sandaled and bareheaded, ran into the shop.

  “Mrs. Ryan—” she began in a high-pitched voice. Then she saw it was Francie behind the glass-topped counter; she paused with her mouth open, and said, “Eoh.” She had an expensive accent, Francie noticed. She was a thin girl with limp pale-red hair and a cluster of pimples on her forehead. “You’re not Mrs. Ryan,” she said accusingly.

  Francie agreed. “She’s in the basement. I’ll call her,” she said, and started to carry out her suggestion.

  “Never mind,” said the girl, “I see just what I want,” and she walked over to a large black earthenware object which Francie had lately learned to call a “planter,” that is, an object in which plants can be grown. To Francie’s surprise the girl picked this up and, embracing it, went straight to the door. No mention was made of price of payment.

  “Excuse me,” said Francie. “Are—I mean, aren’t you—”

  “Give me a hand with this door, will you?” asked the girl.

  “But—who are you?” asked Francie. “Does Mrs. Ryan know about this?”

  The girl stared at her coldly over the irregular rotundities of the pot. “Fredericks and Worpels,” she snapped.

  “No doubt,” said Francie. “What I meant was … oh, here’s Mrs. Ryan.”

  She retreated to the background and waited. Evidently it was all right; Mrs. Ryan said, “Good morning, Chadbourne. Is that what you wanted?” and the girl said, “I don’t know, but we’ll let Mummy have a look.” She staggered out, and Francie asked questions and found out all about the new deal next door. Chadbourne, it seemed, was Mrs. Fredericks’s child, giving Mummy a hand with the business until she should tire of it.

  “She doesn’t seem a very pleasant girl,” said Francie tentatively. “Chadbourne! Gosh, what a name!”

  Mrs. Ryan sighed. “No, she’s not awfully attractive, but then the poor child’s never had a chance. Chadbourne was her mother’s maiden name—Lottie Chadbourne. The child’s always been delicate, and anyway Lottie’s peculiar, we might as well face it; she’s restless, that’s what she is; restless. One year it was music, and the year after that, painting. She dragged little Chadbourne out to Santa Barbara for a whole summer; sometimes she wouldn’t be parted from the child, and at others she plumped her into boarding school and then went away and forgot all about her, as far as I can make out. Lottie goes in for fads.… We have an arrangem
ent, by the way. I should have warned you. Sometimes they need some little something they haven’t got in the shop, and then they come over here and pick it up if they can find it in my jungle. And now and then, if something they’ve bought doesn’t seem to move, they ask me to put it here and sell it to my clientele if I can. It’s a different set, you see; quite often I have luck like that. Just little things. I wouldn’t undertake a piano, even an upright.”

  Her own joke pleased her; she chuckled heartily as she went back to the basement.

  Left to herself, Francie continued thinking about the bad tempered Chadbourne Fredericks. It was not strange that they had never met at dancing school or anywhere when she herself was living in Jefferson, because the other girl obviously belonged to that small group of nonresidents who used the town merely as a place to send things to or spend Christmas and Thanksgiving in; they were people who be longed to Jefferson because their parents had lived there and their business interests were local. Every town has a few of these. Francie’s own life might have approximated Chadbourne’s, she reflected, if her mother had lived and if Pop had not gone broke. She wouldn’t have been subjected to such a lot of maternal whims, of course, or swapped around from school to convent to institute, but she wouldn’t have grown up in Jefferson without interruption. As it was, for years she had done so. She’d been Aunt Norah’s little girl. And here she was, working in the Birthday Box, being snooted by red-haired Chadbourne Fredericks.…

  “What am I so depressed about?” she suddenly asked herself angrily. A thought she’d been hiding popped up—Glenn hadn’t written since he’d gone back to San Francisco. But then they never wrote much, she argued with herself. She would not be depressed: she would not start repining. As proof of this, she set to work on the window, dusting all the objects and removing a few that seemed to her more cluttery than attention-getting. Little by little by little, she hoped to reform Mrs. Ryan’s arrangements.

  It was a deep window and she soon found that she couldn’t reach the front from where she stood leaning over. She couldn’t come within six inches of that elephant-in-bed card, and she particularly wanted to put it in, out of sight. It had been there a long time, and it looked dusty and fly-specked. If Mrs. Ryan insisted on having a whimsical greeting card in her window, she might at least have a fresh one, Francie thought.

  She kicked off her heels, climbed bodily into the window, and started briskly to work. After all, it was closing time; why shouldn’t she?

  A car drove up and slowed down in front of the Birthday Box. Francie stopped dusting to look up; who was coming in at this late hour? It was a long, low, blue car of rakish cut, not the sort that usually brought customers to the Box, and a moment later Francie realized it wasn’t there because of the Box anyway. The young man who was driving it climbed out and walked past her without a glance, over toward Fredericks & Worpels.

  He was a beautiful young man. He had a profile like Marlon Brando’s, and good, careless clothes. He didn’t look a bit like Jefferson; not that Jefferson’s young men were worse than others, but they didn’t dress like that, and they didn’t grow their hair that long. Francie stared without realizing that she could be seen in the window as clearly as any of Mrs. Ryan’s objets d’art.

  However, the young man seemed unaware of the attention he was getting from this unlikely vantage point. He was looking at the shop next door, smiling at somebody behind the door there. Francie saw him enter, and then she came to herself and set to work again, squatting down on her shoeless heels.

  A moment later the beautiful young man reappeared, tenderly holding Miss Chadbourne Fredericks’s elbow as if she might slip and break if he didn’t support her. Chadbourne was transformed. She had taken off her smock and sandals; she was wearing cocktail black, calf pumps, a little hat with a touch of mink on it, and a huddly warm mink jacket. She was laughing and saying something over her shoulder to a woman at the door: Francie couldn’t see the woman, but she heard the voices dimly through her glass. Chadbourne and the man walked past her, only a few inches away, and as they passed by Chadbourne glanced up and her eyes met Francie’s.

  After all, they had met, in a fashion. Thinking about it later, Francie told herself furiously that she couldn’t well have done anything else; could she have stared coldly, as if she’d never seen the red-haired little thing before? Of course not. It had nothing to do with the fact that this dreamy man was on Chadbourne’s other side. Naturally, Francie smiled pleasantly.

  Chadbourne was different. Chadbourne could stare coldly, and did. Not a flicker of recognition lit those green-blue eyes: she just looked, and then looked away. She said something or other to the beautiful young man; he laughed; they climbed into the car and drove off.

  No, Francie didn’t like that girl. Definitely not.

  CHAPTER 6

  Snubbing is infectious, as Francie knew. When you’ve been stared at and cut dead, you are in danger of taking it out on the next person you encounter. Francie remembered the impulse from the rugged days of school in England: spite leads to spite. Therefore she tried extra hard to be polite to the next person she saw who, as it happened, was a customer—a woman who dropped into the Birthday Box a minute after Francie clambered out of the show window and put on her shoes.

  It wasn’t easy to be courteous. She was still smoldering with rage. Moreover, the Box should rightly have been closing, if not already closed with shuttered and locked doors, at that moment. The woman seemed to her just the sort of person who typified everything unsatisfactory about unsatisfactory Jefferson—provincial, Philistine, Middle West Jefferson that produced snobs like Chadbourne Fredericks. This woman was just a nice middle-aged creature who looked eager and innocent. That was enough for Francie, in her mood; she condemned the lady. Why should anyone look eager about the crummy stock in that shop, for goodness’ sake?

  Still, it doesn’t do to take things out on innocent bystanders. Grimly Francie gritted her teeth and waited while the aggravating customer walked around and idly picked up things like little gilded china shoes, turned them over to examine the price mark, and put them down without saying anything. She seemed undecided as to what disagreeable object to waste her money on. She was thoroughly ordinary to look at, dressed in plain hat and dark-gray coat, like three out of any four of the women who came into the Box. There was nothing at all to distinguish her unless it was that she seemed to be drawn unerringly to all the stuff Francie disliked particularly. From one gimcrack horror to another she wandered.…

  Suddenly she looked up from her inspection of a cast-iron dachshund planter to meet Francie’s eye. The eye must have been eloquent, for she said, “I’m sorry; I’m afraid I’m keeping you. What I really want is a basket. Have you any? A pretty shopping basket?”

  “Baskets,” said Francie reflectively. “I’m afraid we don’t stock genuine shopping ones, but would this do instead?” She brought out knitting bags appliquéd with patterned chintz flowers, and other affairs of stretched nylon, conscientiously picking out those that she considered in the worst taste, to match that of the customer. The woman, however, didn’t see anything she wanted. They were still pawing over the bags when Florence Ryan emerged from the office and greeted the stranger like an old friend.

  “Anne! My dear, this isn’t like you,” she said. Francie thought the remark mysterious, but the customer laughed a little, as if she understood.

  “No, it isn’t, is it? But I do need a basket—right now—and I thought you might, just once, have something useful.”

  “I don’t know as I ought to sell anything to you. You’re a naughty girl,” said Mrs. Ryan, continuing in a jocular, scolding vein. “I do think I might have what you want, though. Francie dear, please run down and bring up that Spanish basket for Mrs. Clark.”

  The Spanish basket was very pretty and simple—one that Francie would never have thought of as suiting a woman who admired gilded china shoes. She wondered a little as she ran down to the storeroom to get it. But she decided Mrs. Rya
n ought to know her own clientele, and as it turned out, she did; Mrs. Clark pounced on the basket and bought it immediately. The two older women chatted a considerable time before she took her leave: Francie, waiting impatiently for permission to lock up and go home, reflected, not for the first time, that her elders and betters had an infinite capacity for vapid conversation. Committee meetings. Personalities. Television. Housekeeping problems. One hardly ever heard them discuss exciting things like plays or books or concerts. Of course, one didn’t get many plays or concerts in the flash in Jefferson, but after all it wasn’t terribly far from Chicago, and there was radio and TV, though you’d never think, to hear Jefferson people talking, that TV carried any program except giveaways and “I Love Lucy.” Still, who was Francie Nelson to put on airs about the town? How was she spending her time, anyway—was she reading good books or listening to Beethoven on the Sunday radio? Not at all. She had puttered about with her paints over the weekends, but she was discovering gradually that what she wanted most was to paint for something. Stage sets, or fabrics, maybe; objects even more tangible than a painting. How could that be done in Jefferson?

  And she was going around rather too much, if the truth were told, with Marty Jenner’s set. She was dancing to juke-box music in joints, and wasting time over Cokes, accepting the kids’ admiration, even depending on it. She was in danger of becoming known, God help her, as their leader. At her age, too! And yet, she thought with quick defensiveness, what else was there to do, placed as she was? If Jefferson didn’t like her choice of company (not that anybody had hinted at criticism except maybe Cousin Biddy) they should find her more fitting companions. Everybody her age was either away, like Glenn, or settled down and dull like Ruth.

  “Someday I’ll be an institution in the town,” she thought glumly. “Pete and Marty and Jinx will go away or marry, and then there’ll be another younger gang that can take me up. I’ll be known as that woman who won’t act her age. Either that, or I’ll turn into somebody like this Mrs. Clark, drifting around in gift shops, buying iron dachshunds and trick lamps.”