Fannie Flagg - Standing in the Rainbow

"But I do!" Bobby protested. "Come here and look at all these big red spots all over me and I feel sick…. Come and look." He pulled up his pajama top for her to see. "Look at these spots, they're getting redder by the minute, and I feel sick and I think I have a temperature, feel my head." But Anna Lee ignored him and said as she left, "Stay in bedI don't care, I hope you do get a whipping." Bobby got up, mumbling and grumbling to himself, and put on his clothes and went to the kitchen to find his mother, who promptly handed him a banana. "Here, eat that on the way to school."

"But, Mother" he said.

"I don't want to hear it, Bobby. Now you go on before you're late."

He mumbled some more under his breath and stomped down the hall and out the door, slamming it behind him. At about 2:00 that afternoon Bobby's teacher called.

"Dorothy, I just wanted you to know that I had to take Bobby down to the sick room because he was all broken out in red spots. Ruby says he's come down with measles and needs to be quarantined."

Dorothy was alarmed. "Oh, no. Tell Ruby I'm on my way to get him right now, and thank you for calling."

Dorothy could not have felt any worse and Bobby played the part to the hilt. "I told you I was sick, Mother," he said in a thin voice and by the time Anna Lee got home from rehearsal, at 5:30, Bobby was propped up in his bed like a king, his every whim catered to. His bed was covered with loads of new comic books his father had brought home for him from the drugstore. He had already been served ice cream, two Cokes, and a 7UP, and his mother stood by ready to do his slightest bidding. When Anna Lee walked into the room, Dorothy looked at her daughter with stricken eyes. "Your brother has the measles the poor little thing really was sick." Bobby lay back and smiled weakly for her benefit and waited for Anna Lee to apologize. But instead of an apology she looked at him in horror and said, "Measles!" and ran out of the room to scrub her hands and face.

She was terrified of contracting a pimple, much less the measles. She had a performance to do. She was president of the Drama Club this year and was in the upcoming school play. It wasn't until Nurse Ruby assured Anna Lee that she could not catch the measles twice that she consented to go anywhere near him. Even then she wore gloves and a scarf over her face. She could not afford to take any chances. Not only was she in the school play, she was the lead!

Unlike her son, Doc, who was easygoing, Mother Smith was a thin feisty little woman who had been quite a beauty when she was younger. Born in Independence, Missouri, right down the street from Bess Wallace, who eventually married Harry S. Truman. He and Mother Smith had once played the "Missouri Waltz" together on the twin pianos, and she often remarked about the president, "I met him on his way to greatness."

Mother Smith had always been a free-spirited woman, long before it was fashionable; she said you could not be born and raised in a town called Independence and not have it affect you. And it must be true: she had been one of the state's early suffragettes and in 1898 she, along with a group of her college girlfriends, had marched on Washington to fight for votes for women and had been arrested for disturbing the peace.

This is a story Bobby and Anna Lee loved to hear over and over. "They sure threw us in the old hoosegow that day", she would say, then laugh and add, "Your grandmother may be a jailbird but we finally got the vote!" And although she was already in her forties at the time, she had been the first woman in town to get her hair bobbed. She had also visited a speakeasy in Kansas City, gotten a little tipsy on a teacup full of bootleg gin, and had played a jazz tune on the piano. But since she played organ for the First Methodist Church she did not spread that one around. Mother Smith had small, dainty feet and was proud of them and liked to show them off. She owned over thirty pairs of shoes. And if Bobby got his curiosity from her, then surely Anna Lee had inherited her love of shoes. Just last week Anna Lee had gone downtown on Bargain Day and had spotted a pair of black-and-white saddle oxfords in the window of Morgan Brothers department store she was dying to have. But of course of all the shoes in the window those were the only ones not on sale. She had already spent her entire allowance buying her prom dress and was broke. For the next week, she was busy racking her brain trying to figure out how she could earn the money and living in fear someone else would buy them before she could.

Every day she would go down and stare at them but she was having no luck until a few days before Doc and Dorothy were to leave for the convention in Memphis and Mother Smith suddenly had to go back to Independence to look after her sister, who had fallen and broken her hip. Even though Bobby's measles were practically over, Dorothy did not feel she should leave town with him still sick. She was still a little nervous about either of her children being ill, but to everyone's surprise Anna Lee immediately volunteered to stay home the entire weekend and baby-sit Bobby and look after Princess Mary Margaret for the price of the shoes, if she could get it in advance. Nurse Ruby said she would come over and check on him every day, and Jimmy assured her he would look after both Anna Lee and Bobby, too. So with much coaxing from everyone Dorothy decided to go after all. For the next three days Bobby knew that Anna Lee was his captive slave.

He spent them propped up in bed, listening to the radio, reading comic books, and barking orders for Cokes, root beers, ginger ale, ice cream, and anything else he could think of, while poor Princess Mary Margaret, a worrier from birth, wandered from room to room looking for Dorothy, clearly wondering where in the world she had gone and if she was ever coming back.

Doc and Dorothy had arrived at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis for the pharmaceutical convention on Friday night and the next day they were having a lovely time visiting with all their friends, unaware of the disaster in the making behind the scenes. In room 367, just down the hall, Norvel Float, the entertainment chairman for the big awards banquet, was fit to be tied. He had just been informed by telegram that the singing duo Willy and Buck, also known professionally as the How-Do-You-Do Boys, whom he had personally booked eight months ago for that night, had gotten into a fistfight over some woman in Shreveport, Louisiana. Buck had broken Willy's nose and run off to Chicago with the woman.

Needless to say, they had canceled at the last minute and Norvel Float was left holding the bag with 723 pharmacists who would have no afterdinner entertainment. He immediately got on the phone and frantically called every booking agent in the area. But they had nothing. Not a single tap dancer, singer, comic, or even accordion player was available for that night. He even tried to get Tommy Troupe, the man who did birdcalls and was terrible at it, but was informed that Tommy had died a month ago. As a last-ditch effort Float took a chance and called one of the local radio stations, WRCC, located upstairs on the eighteenth floor of the hotel. The man there was not encouraging. He said all they had to offer was a traveling gospel group that had appeared on their station that morning at 6:00 A.M. and was still in town. Norvel hired them immediately over the telephone, no questions asked, sight unseen. The man on the phone hesitated a moment and then asked, "Are you sure you want them? They're kind of raw."

"Listen, mister," said Norvel. "I'm desperate. At this point, I'll take anything I can get. Just have them here by nine-thirty." He hung up a happy man. He had no idea what or whom he had just booked; he was just relieved to have something that could carry a tune.