Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

I answered without hesitation. “An Olympic champion in the high jump and the long jump.”

“You heard of Ray Ewry?” he asked.

“Of course! The Human Frog!” Ray Ewry, my idol, had gone to college at Purdue, in West Lafayette, and I’d read all about his triumphs in the Daily Courier. Ray had won ten Olympic gold medals, in the standing high, standing long, and standing triple jumps-more than any other Olympic athlete has ever won. He might’ve won more medals if his events had not been discontinued after 1912.

“You know, Ray Ewry was a cripple when he was a boy,” Buster said. “Polio.”

Yes, I told him, I knew that. The fact that Ewry had had polio was included in every story I’d read about him.

“Doctor told him to take up jumping to strengthen his legs,” Buster said.

“And the rest is history!” I said cheerfully, though I felt anything but cheerful. I didn’t have polio. I only had a sore knee. Was Buster trying to tell me that I was a cripple too?

Buster wheeled me up a ramp onto the porch, where my mother, in her puffed-sleeve blouse with the pearl buttons, sat in a rocking chair doing needlepoint. She took my hand, and I noticed the mud still caked underneath my fingernails.

“Won’t ever get it all off,” Buster said, hanging over us. “See you when the cock crows.” He ruffled my hair, turned, and lumbered off the porch.

Mother and I smiled at each other.

“So it went well?” Mother dropped her needlepoint in her lap-a picture of three roses, but she’d done only half of one. Our house was full of her framed needlepoint pictures. I hoped she was losing interest in them. “Tell me all about it,” she said.

For some reason I didn’t describe how pleasurable it had been. I think I felt a bit guilty about how much I’d enjoyed it. I also left out the part about talking to Harry. I wanted to paint a braver picture of myself, or maybe I was wary of letting her know my changed opinion of him. She listened to me, but I could tell she wanted me to hurry up. When I finished, she picked up her needlepoint and began stitching again.

“I’ve got a scary story to tell you,” she said, staring intently at her work. “One of the ladies over there told it to me. Don’t look.”

I did look, annoyed that her story was usurping mine. All along the ivy-clad porch were groups of white-wicker chairs and tables. Three women sat at one table sipping glasses of lemonade. They were all middle-aged, fat, and dressed in starched shirtwaists and full skirts, their gray hair coiled at the napes of their necks. None of them looked as if she had an interesting bone in her body.

“I said don’t look,” Mother whispered.

I sighed and stared out at the gardens. It was midmorning, already hot in the sun, but the porch was shady and cooler, and the gladioli and zinnias looked bright and fresh. The air smelled of cut grass and soap from the laundry. The limestone fountain gurgled. A young man and woman strolled down the path toward the woods. He held a pink-and-green-striped parasol over her head. He said something in her ear and she jerked away, but then, a few steps later, she allowed him to take her hand.

“One of those ladies is from Chicago,” Mother said, still stitching. “She's here with her husband, a banker. He's taking the cure.”

“That's a story?”

“She said that this place is a gambler's paradise. Listen.” She lowered her voice. “They have card games in the back parlor, all night sometimes. For high stakes. They drink gin. Most of the people here are from Chicago. Gangsters, or friends of gangsters. That man with the cushion-Harry Jones isn’t really his name-is some big mob boss, hiding out from the law. We’re in a nest of criminals.”

“Really?” I sounded more shocked than I was. I’d been to Chicago only twice, to shop for new school clothes, and had found it a dark, claustrophobic place. That one would want to escape if one could seemed only natural. Surely not even gangsters would misbehave here, I thought. I noticed that one of the middle-aged women had a bee crawling down her back. I hoped it would sting her.

“Well?” Mother said, frowning at me. “What should we do? Now that we know?”

I didn’t even think to question the woman's claim. It might have been an out-and-out lie, or more likely an exaggeration, but both Mother and I wanted to believe it. “My knee is feeling better,” I said, bending it a few times. That was a lie. It felt the same.

Mother nodded and looked relieved. “There's our answer,” she said.

“Hello there!” Harry Jones was calling to us from across the porch. He tipped his straw hat in our direction. The woman with bobbed hair stood behind him, clutching his rubber cushion. The parrot teetered on her shoulder.

Mother and I smiled and waved back as though we hadn’t just been maligning him, as if he were one of our friends. For a second I was afraid he’d come over and tell Mother about our conversation that morning, but he merely called out, “Off to get some sun!” He and the woman walked arm in arm down the porch steps.

“I suppose,” Mother said, rocking too hard in her chair, “that you can tell who his current lady friend is by taking note of who's carrying his cushion.” She clucked. “As if he couldn’t carry it himself.” I heard a fondness in her voice, a fondness for Harry that I also felt.

I said, “He must be very sick. He's much too skinny.”

“Poor man.”

We watched him and his friend disappear down the garden path.

“A boss?” I asked Mother. “She said ‘boss’?”

“Of one of the biggest crime rings.”

I grinned.

“We can never tell your father about him,” she said, meeting my eyes and clasping both my hands in hers. “Never ever. Promise?”

I promised without a second thought.

We sat awhile in silence, watching the strolling guests, and I marveled at the dishonesty and secrecy that hung so lightly in the sweet-smelling air of Mudlavia, air that had infected not only me but my own dear mother. It was strange, I thought, how much at home we both felt, and how quickly we had come to feel that way. I was suddenly sorry for the Dotties back home, who were no doubt having a very dull summer.

My days at Mudlavia fell into a comfortable pattern. I took my mud treatment every morning, always in the cot next to Harry’s, and he and I chatted while we waited for our mud. He asked me questions about myself-my last name, where I was from, what my father did, what he was like, and so on. “Goodall,” I told him. My mother's first name, I said, was Toots. We’d come from Attica. I told him that my father had once been a gendarme in Paris, but that he’d been fired for shooting a tourist. Now he was a fat farmer who raised cows. Lying became easier as I went along.

Harry nodded as he listened, and I have no idea whether he believed me or not. I think not. He told me he was from LaPorte, Indiana, and had worked as a mailman until he was stricken with crippling arthritis. He came to Mudlavia every summer. He was widowed. “My dear Ida passed five years ago this summer,” he said. “Not a one could ever take Ida's place.” Ida? Mailman? I fixed a sad, sympathetic look on my face, admiring our ability to pretend. This was much more fun than making up plays.

“I can jump over a fence five feet high,” I told him. “World record is six feet.”

“No kidding,” he said.

“I’d show you,” I said, “but, you know.” I pointed to my knee.

One morning, as we both lay under our mud compresses, Harry said, “This place is a con game. This mud's just mud. It won’t cure me, but I don’t care. I love it, but I never let on how much. If people knew how pleasant it was, they’d all be clamoring to get in, and there’d be no room for you and me.”