The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett - 30

I n 1812, the seemingly impossible happened: The Mississippi River, one of the longest and strongest rivers in the world, began to run backward. This was the one and only story my father told at parties, how an earthquake along the river shook the ground so hard that church bells rang in Boston some 1,300 miles away, the rumbling woke up Dolley Madison in the White House, and the mighty Mississippi began running in the unfathomable direction of north . I figured if a river as hell-bent as the Mississippi could change its mind, then, evidently, so could I.

It wasn’t quite an earthquake that shook me, but it did feel like I was on some sort of wild, unreasonable ride. The argument with Charlie had left me very angry, which climbed to a state of red-hot fury before dropping into a spiral of terrifying disappointment, leaving me plain ole sick to my stomach—for my family, for Mrs. Tartt and Frances, for Charlie, for Meg. The list of lives wrecked was long.

Yesterday, before I’d run into Garnett at the post office, I came across Charlie’s ledger. Still furious, I’d thumbed through it, not able to stop myself. The numbers had practically sparkled on the page. The biggest earnings came from what she called Tricks , and while I didn’t have to wonder what those were, I saw they ranged from four dollars and fifty cents up to fifteen dollars apiece. What in the world did a woman have to do to earn that? After Tricks , there was also the income from the Upfronts ; then came Room & Board , Liquor Drinks , Admission , like it was a show of some kind, and before I could cringe over a show of what , I realized she wanted to bring in a band to play in Mrs. Tartt’s backyard. Last came Cold Drinks , Cigarettes , and finally Dime Dances , which were hardly a pittance, but when I looked at what it all added up to, I couldn’t help but be impressed. Charlie’d managed to come up with eight different ways to make money here at Mrs. Tartt’s, which by her tabulations could make us thousands of dollars. It was such a rotten, terrible, ingenious idea, I felt something close to lust. But the business was as crooked as that scuffed-up old dance platform they’d set up out in the yard, which looked even worse now in the daylight.

Who could say what might change a person’s mind about something as degenerate as this, in the time it took to get from the post office to the back porch? Garnett Pittman, that’s what. Charlie had been right all along about Garnett’s intentions—she was trying to get Meg back to the orphanage so she could ship her off to the cannery work program. From one hell straight to another.

Sunday morning, I was staring out at the crooked dance floor, stewing over how to even begin this conversation when the screen door whined open. Charlie eased it closed softly so it didn’t pop. Her eyes were flat and black like somebody’d unhooked her wires. It was unnerving to see her move so slow; she was usually such a force. To make things even worse, she had on the stained yellow dress again.

“What’re you wearing that old dress for?” I asked. She had plenty of Mrs. Tartt’s dresses, plus the weather had turned hot again, the cooler weather blown away to some other place.

Charlie turned away and said, “We’re leaving.”

Seconds later, Flossy came clomping out onto the porch. Deep lines ran down the sides of her mouth. “Bag’s all packed, Charles.” She had on a pink dress, similar to the last though somehow different. It hit just above her bluish knees like it was from a decade ago, and two of the buttons running down the front hung by a thread, not unlike herself.

“I see that look,” Flossy said, narrowing her eyes on me. “Don’t you look at me different now you know what I do for a living. I ain’t no different than the gal you was nice to when I arrived and you asked do I like my eggs fried or scrambled.”

“Where you going?” I asked.

“Where you think? Back to the Sicko. With a stop in Byhalia.”

I turned to Charlie. “Charlie, what are you planning to do?”

Charlie’s mouth was tied tight and stubborn. “I’m just going to ask Meg’s—the woman who’s raising her if I can speak to my daughter. That’s all.” She looked down at the haggard dress and said in a small voice, “I just want to make sure Meg recognizes me.”

Out front a car horn bleated twice. “Come on, Charles,” Flossy said. “Priscilla’s ain’t getting any closer.”

“Wait,” I said. It took me a second to say it, another second to believe I was saying it. “I’m willing to … discuss working the front—meaning the dance club only. But I want nothing to do with the … the upstairs business, alright?” I’d convinced my conscience that I’d just have to do what every other normal woman did and not see what I didn’t want to see. I was pretty sure I hadn’t been able to accomplish this even once in my life, but I would just have to learn .

Charlie glanced out at the backyard, considering it, and finally she said, “Fine.” As if she was the one having to settle here. She didn’t seem sufficiently surprised by my change of heart either, which irked me even more.

“Before we decide anything, I’m gonna need two promises from you, Charlie. First of all, you have to promise not to lie to me again. You got that?”

“Alright. I promise,” she said. I waited, thinking there might be a thank you or some sort of gratitude coming. There was not. The taxi honked its horn again.

“And you have to promise me you won’t go to Byhalia … not yet. I’ll find another way to get in touch with Meg’s parents.” It’d been less than a week since I’d written them, just before Frances and Mrs. Tartt left, so they hadn’t had enough time to write back.

Charlie dug her nails into her thigh, through the yellow dress. This one was harder for her to give up. I didn’t know what was the right thing to do, but Charlie showing up there and wrecking Meg’s world was not it.

“Charlie, it’ll only confuse Meg, and it’s too risky—what if they tell Garnett that Meg’s real mother came to see her?” That would put in motion a whole ’nother set of problems I couldn’t even fathom. And I did not dare tell Charlie that Garnett wanted to take Meg back, because I knew when I did, she would be in that taxicab ordering him to make tracks , and she would try to snatch Meg from the Heidelbergs and get charged with kidnapping and never set another free foot in those blood-stained heels again.

“You promise me? You’ll find a way to talk to those people?” Her voice had gone high.

“You bet I will.”

“Alright,” she whispered, clutching her scarred wrist. “But you have to promise me you’ll let me run the business my way.”

“Fine. Just tell me how it works so I know how it works, but then I don’t want to know how it’s working, alright?” Against my better bookkeeper’s judgment, I added, “I’ll take my share of the dime dances and selling legal cold drinks and cigarettes, but that is it.”

Charlie shook her head. “If you’re in this, you’re taking your whole share. It’s what we agreed.”

“We agreed we were starting a dance club.”

“I can’t trust somebody who’s not in all the way,” Charlie said. Chin up, she crossed her arms, looking just like Meg did when she had an opinion.

“You want to talk about trust—” But I squeezed my eyes shut and held my tongue and just said, “Fine.” Much as I wanted to make other demands, I left it at this for the time being.

“School starts in a week—we’ve got to start hiring now .” Charlie’s lights were fully lit again. In fifteen minutes, she’d gone from pitch-dark to electrified. I, however, was terrified and still angry about what was about to happen, and planted myself behind the sink, while she and Flossy sat six feet away at the kitchen table.

We were down to, more or less, potatoes, carrots, turnips, onions, hoop cheese, a can of anchovies, and potted ham. I started turning the noisy crank on the flour sifter to make a crust for some sort of deranged potpie. All while trying to work out the mechanics of running a front for a brothel while turning my back on one. It felt like trying to swim without getting wet.

“What if you sent a telegram to the girls at Priscilla’s,” Charlie said, “and told them it’s a good house?”

“A good house?” Flossy said, looking around her. “Please, give me the address of such a place. Look, it ain’t easy getting outta Priscilla’s. I was lucky, or I thought I was. Which brings me to mention, all I eaten since I got here is hard-boiled eggs and pickles. I want real food. I demand a hot dish.”

“I’m working on it,” I said and kept turning the crank. With the humidity this high, I had to bang the side of the flour sifter after every third turn so the flour would drop—turn, turn, turn, bang. I just wanted to learn the basic information I needed to run my side of things and not a speck else.

“This ain’t 1920 no more, ya know,” Flossy said. “You want half-decent girls, you need to have the amenities—radio, a telephone, actual furn-i-ture.” She picked a cigarette out of a box of Luckies with her pink fingernails.

“They’re hooking us up on a party line tomorrow,” I said. “And don’t smoke in here, please.”

“You make a appointment on a party line, you’ll be making your next appointment with the judge,” Flossy said.

“We’ll get a private line after we collect the upfront fees from the rest of the girls,” Charlie said. “But we can’t collect until we actually hire some.”

“Speaking of,” Flossy said, the unlit cigarette bobbing in her mouth, “lotsa girls ain’t gonna pay a five-dollar upfront. Nowadays, it’s two and a half bucks to start, two and a half after the wallets show up—” She nodded up at me. “That’s customers to you, greeny, and be sure and get us a proper premiere girl,” she told Charlie. Back to me: “That’s the real good-looking one.” She raised her palm in the air. “Thank you, I must decline, but if you can land us a fox, it’ll really drive the biz.”

“I’m not worried about a premiere girl, first we need bodies. What about Jojo’s in Memphis?”

“Busted, and mosta Jojo’s girls got a fondness for the needle.”

I sifted faster—turn, turn, turn, bang. I wasn’t exactly sure what the needle meant except probably something awful and very worthy of changing my mind about all this.

“What about Zelda’s?”

Flossy made a slice across her neck. “Kaput. I’m telling ya, there ain’t so many cribs left anymore, the Anti-Fun League’s shut most of ’em down. Girls is having to hang around street corners now. Boy, that’s a sad living. And they ain’t run by madams neither, it’s getting to be men. Call themselves pimps. Jesus, I hear Chicago’s sheer crawling with pimps.” All this was said with the unlit cigarette stuck between her lips.

It took a beat for it to register what she’d said. “When you say the Anti-Fun League, do you mean the Anti-Vice?”

“That’s the one,” Flossy said.

I looked at Charlie. She knew Garnett was running for president of the Anti-Vice League because it’d been in that newspaper article she’d shaken in my face. “Is Flossy saying they’re the ones who shut down places like—” I nearly said ours . “This?”

“That’s why we’re going to all the trouble for a good front,” Charlie said and frowned at me for bringing this up.

With Garnett’s name contaminating my head, this whole thing felt doomed. “You’re really only planning on keeping this thing open for—”

“Less than a month, I hope,” Charlie said. “Well before the mortgage is due.”

Flossy didn’t look surprised by this. They must’ve discussed it over the last few days. “Which rooms do you think you’ll be … using?” I asked.

“ Keys , rooms is called. Keys ,” Flossy said.

“All of them,” Charlie said.

“Mrs. Tartt’s room too?” I whined. “Could you try to keep hers out of it?”

“I’ll try, but I can’t promise.”

I added another cup of flour to the sifter. This was going to be a gigantic pie crust.

“What about a doctor?” Flossy asked. “You said you’re gonna get us tested, ain’tcha?”

“I did. And I will,” Charlie said.

“The house paying, or you gonna charge us a kidney for it?”

“The house,” Charlie said and sighed. “Who’d Priscilla use?”

“Kleinkamp, the old Jew doc. He’s blind as a fence post and practically mistook my ear for my twat but he’s the only one who’ll even sniff in our direction,” Flossy said. “Gotta test, though. One case a syph and fft . Doors closed.”

Syph . I shuddered, picturing one of the old posters from the World War that said, You , with Uncle Sam pointing his finger under that snaky word, syphilis . I knew I’d said I’d stay out of this, but, “What happens if you catch it?”

“Mm, occasionally nothing,” Flossy said. “Sometimes it’s just a cold. And sometimes it eats your face off.”

I looked at Charlie, asking her with my eyes, Can I catch that?

“I’ll get all the girls checked before we open and then some,” Charlie said, “but first we’ve got to hire. What about New Orleans? Who do you know?”

“Nobody’s leaving the Big Easy to work in this dinky town, Charles. Most houses put out a cat call, but it’ll take a minute.”

“We don’t have a minute.”

“With all these poor suckers outta work, too bad you can’t just print it in the situations,” Flossy said, motioning to a newspaper on the table. She slid her hand through the air like a headline. “‘Extra! Extra! Cat Call in the Fancy House District. No Furniture but All the Pickles and Eggs You Can Eat.’ ”

“Why can’t we? Only a hooker would know what it meant,” Charlie said.

“Excuse you, don’t call me a hooker. I do not hook ,” Flossy said. “I am a prostitute, thank you very muchly.”

Charlie leaned forward to Flossy. “But could we? Just put an ad in the paper?”

“No.” Flossy said what I was thinking.

Charlie took a different newspaper off the stack by the hearth and, licking her thumb, leafed through it to the page she was looking for. “One cent a word, choose newspapers in three counties, Quitman, Lafayette, Yalobusha, Tate …” She looked up. “We could put it in all of them except Lafayette County so it wouldn’t be so risky. What do you think?”

“I think you’re the worst madam I ever met,” Flossy said.

“If we got it in Monday morning,” Charlie said, “and ran it for two days, girls could make it here by Thursday to interview and we could open by Saturday night.” She opened the ledger and I watched her write in a back page: CAT CALL. 11:00 A.M. EXPERIENCE RQD. The rest I couldn’t see.

“Prostitutes ain’t really reading the situations, Charles,” Flossy said. “You’re gonna get some real strange types coming around …”

“Everyone’s reading the situations,” Charlie said. “And I’d bet money there’s a desperate woman somewhere who’ll see our ad and think, This ”—she tapped the paper—“ is just what I’ve been praying for. ”

“Well, we’re gonna need about a half dozen a those,” Flossy said.

“One of us needs to run this up to the paper tomorrow morning,” Charlie said.

“Not you,” I said, since we both knew who might see her.

Flossy caught the look between us. “You afraid a seeing somebody in town, Charles?” She looked worried.

If Flossy was gonna stay here, and do this, she needed to know the name. “Garnett Pittman. She’s running for Anti-Vice League president.” I saw a faint tic in Charlie’s jaw, and I could tell, she hadn’t wanted me bringing this up the first time and definitely not again.

“Who is this broad? What’s she want with you?”

“Nothing. She doesn’t even know I’m here,” Charlie said.

But Flossy looked at me to see if there was something Charlie wasn’t telling her. “You got something to say about this?”

How to put it? “She’s somebody who takes whatever she wants and nobody has the guts to stop her,” I said.

“Who knows, maybe we’ll be the first,” Flossy said and took the piece of paper from Charlie.

The next morning, after milking the cow and feeding the chickens, I was frowning down at the watery excuse for a cup of coffee I’d made. I was rationing it so we wouldn’t run out, when of all luxuries, a telephone showed up at the house. I watched the man from Southern Bell wire it up in the hallway and then he explained that two short rings and a long meant the call was for us, and any other ring meant it was for somebody else. “Careful what you say on a party line,” he said with a wink. What this meant was that a bored neighbor could pick it up and listen in on calls as pedestrian as a grocery store order or as noteworthy as, for example, the Tartts taking appointments for their new brothel.

Still, I tried to see it as a sign that things were looking up.

When Flossy’d gone to town to place the advertisement and Charlie was outside hanging wash on the line, I went in the hall and picked up the receiver.

“Silva, can you please connect me to a Mr. Thomas Heidelberg III in Byhalia?” The letter I’d sent a week ago had merely asked if we could start a correspondence to monitor Meg’s welfare. But after my conversation with Garnett at the post office, I needed to know what, if anything, she had said to them about Meg’s return and I didn’t want Charlie to hear.

“Welcome back to Southern Bell and Tel,” Silva said. “Lemme see here … I got two Thomas Heidelbergs listed in Byhalia … but it doesn’t list one as the third or otherwise.”

“Well. Try either,” I said. “They must be related.”

After a windstorm of static and waiting, I heard a ring and a woman answered, “Heidelberg res-a-dence.”

I cleared my throat. “Hello, this is Birdie Calhoun speaking, with the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum, and I’m calling to inquire about a little girl, Meg, who was adopted by the Heidelberg family?”

“Meg? Yes ma’am, we know li’l Meg.” Her voice was friendly; I thought I even heard affection in it. “Was you wanting to speak to Mister Tom and Miss Lucille?”

Instead of asking right away to speak to Meg’s new parents, I said, “Yes, but … I wrote the Heidelbergs last week, it was just a standard welfare inquiry. Do you happen to know if anyone else here in Oxford has contacted the Heidelbergs about Meg or anything of the sort?” It was a long shot, but according to Mrs. Tartt, the help always knows, more than the best friend, the minister, or even the husband.

She paused. “You say you calling from a orphanage in Oxford? About Meg?”

“Yes, has anyone from the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum been in touch about Meg?” I knew I must sound fishy. “We’re just a little, uh, disorganized down here,” I added with a laugh.

She was quiet and then she said, “I reckon you better speak to one a the Heidelbergs about that, ma’am, I don’t know … I better have ’em call you back.”

I was afraid I’d made her suspicious so I didn’t push. “I understand. If you could please have Mrs. Heidelberg call me, Birdie Calhoun, at my home, number 43, Oxford. There’s no telephone at the orphanage, so she should call me here at home, soon, please.”

“Yes ma’am, I give her the message.”