Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

“We won’t tell them,” I said, and we both nodded our heads, which was as good as a handshake.

Harry always fell asleep as soon as he was covered, but I would lie awake daydreaming, not of high jumping or Olympic glories, as before, but about being all alone, buried up to my neck in the red dirt of Arizona, or the dark earth of a Canadian forest, peering around at the strange and dramatic landscape. For the first time in my life I escaped the prison of my own body, and I found the sensation soothing and exhilarating at the same time.

While I took my treatments, Mother worked on her needlepoint roses and talked to the ladies on the porch, finding out bits of gossip about the guests. Many of them were part of the same Chicago mob family, she told me with a knowledgeable air, of which Harry Jones was the boss. He was wanted for the murder of a South Side butcher. I pictured a mean-faced butcher in a bloody apron. I wondered if Harry had shot him with a pistol or a shotgun. “The butcher probably deserved it,” I told Mother, who said, “Matthew!” and then, “Probably so. Maybe they were in rival gangs.” I still hadn’t told her about my conversations with Harry. Because I’d started out keeping them secret, continuing to do so felt easiest, and so far he hadn’t given me away-he’d only waved to us from afar.

After lunch Mother and I would retire to our room. Mother was slogging through a romance novel called Go Forth and Find , which she said was tedious. I’d brought along a few Frank Merriwell adventure stories. Heroic Frank was handsome, popular, good, and, most important, athletic. Time and again he won the day in boxing, baseball, football, fencing, lacrosse, crew, shooting, bicycle racing, or, my favorite, track. I loved Frank, but now, for some reason, his feats seemed obvious and pointless and didn’t hold my interest, so I took to writing letters. Mother and I had agreed that we wouldn’t mention the criminals to anyone we wrote to. We'd write only about the beauty and peace and quiet and the fact that my knee was steadily improving, which it wasn’t.

“Should I tell Father I’ve seen the doctor?” I asked Mother one afternoon. We hadn’t seen a doctor around the place since we’d gotten there.

She put down her book. “Good idea,” she said. “So he won’t worry.”

We didn’t mention the fact that we’d yet to receive a letter from my father. My mother kept up her correspondence with her older sister, May, a spinster dressmaker who suffered from neurasthenia. Mother wrote enthusiastically to May about Mudlavia, trying, not very sincerely, to persuade her to join us, mentioning the healthful food, lithia water, and musical evenings along with the mud baths, but we both knew we were safe, because May wouldn’t set foot outside her house in Cleveland if she could help it.

I also wrote to Dottie B. and Dottie G., telling them I’d met some “interesting guests from Chicago.” Dottie G. never wrote back, but I knew I could count on Dottie B., because she liked to write. One day I received a postal with a photo of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and on it she said that she missed me “like crazy.” I repeated this to myself over and over while Mother took a nap, and I stared out our window at the sky, which seemed always to be blue, listening to wasps buzzing against the screen. Many of the guests went hiking, or swimming in the creek, but Mother stayed with me. Often we would end the afternoon by sitting in the parlor with the other guests, or if it wasn’t too hot, she would push me around the garden in my wheelchair. She seemed to be growing younger by the day. She moved in a stronger and more agile way, she laughed more, and her face glowed with sun.

One night, after Mother and I had just sat down in the dining room, Harry Jones and Sylvia Smith approached our table. Sylvia, wearing what looked like a man's suit coat and bow tie, dropped Harry's cushion in a chair and sat down beside him, a sullen expression on her face. Harry said hello to me and then turned to my mother. “Good evening, Mrs. Goodall. May we join you?” My mother gave me a look I’ve never forgotten. She was not just surprised that I’d ever even spoken to Harry but amazed, as if she’d never imagined I could be so strangely devious. An assessing glint was in her eye, as if she were rethinking everything she’d previously thought about me. But of course she couldn’t have done all that, because in just a matter of seconds, during which I held my breath, not knowing what her reaction would be, she turned to Harry. “Certainly,” she said. “Everyone calls me Toots.”

Sylvia knocked back a glass of iced tea. “Toots,” she said, to no one in particular.

Mother gave her a tepid smile.

The piano player launched into his favorite song: “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag.”

“Matthew tells me you’re from Attica,” Harry said to Mother. “You and your husband raise cows.”

“Herefords,” Mother said, nodding.

She knew nothing about cows. I couldn’t even believe she’d come up with “Herefords.” I knew she couldn’t pull it off.

Sylvia must’ve had this thought too. “Tell us about cows,” she said to my mother. “Harry here don’t know a thing about cows.”

“Surely we can find something else to discuss,” Harry said. “Toots is probably sick and tired of cows.”

“We both are,” I said. “Tired of cows.”

“Well, no, actually,” Mother said. “I never tire of cows.” While the waiter served our drinks, Mother proceeded to describe our life in Attica, our herd of cows, our team of Belgian horses, and our chickens-good layers. It was my turn to marvel. But then I realized she was simply describing her own childhood on a farm in Ohio, a place I’d never seen and she rarely talked about, because her parents had died before I was born.

Sylvia made a few snide comments and then stared across the room as if she were deep in thought. Finally, right in the middle of dinner, she got up and left the table, giving me a sneer. I was the only one who acknowledged her leaving.

The next evening Harry joined us for dinner again, this time carrying his own cushion. His lady friends sat across the room at another table, their backs to us. The parrot, perched on the shoulder of the woman with bobbed hair, turned to face us, his head cocked, as if he were spying on us. That evening I noticed a hint of repressed excitement in the flush of Mother's cheeks, her sputtering laugh, the way she leaned toward Harry when he spoke. He asked her about my fathers experience as a gendarme in Paris, and the tourist he shot.

“It was a crazy man, the tourist,” Mother said. “A butcher. An Algerian butcher waving a knife. My husband was simply doing his duty.”

A butcher! She’d said “butcher”! But Harry's expression didn’t change. He asked her about Paris, and she began to talk about Algerian restaurants and the Louvre Museum as if she’d actually seen them. Although they mostly ignored me, I was thrilled by the whole thing, thrilled by my mother's lies and my part in getting them started, thrilled that someone like Harry found us desirable.

I ate my soggy baked Alaska, looking around to see who’d noticed us sitting with Harry. Nobody paid us any attention, but that didn’t quell my excitement. My hand, with its mud-caked fingernails, reached for my water glass again and again. I had become a dirty person. Mud had invaded every crevice of my body, and I was always picking off little patches that the shower hadn’t washed away. I thought about how I could present this place to Dottie B., how much to tell-the rubber cushion, the parrot, a woman in a man's suit coat?-and how much to leave out, and how impressed she’d be.

After dinner Harry left us with a bow, disappearing into one of the back parlors.