But for the time being, at least, he was just plain Bobby Smith. And unfortunately for Anna Lee, he was, as she always suspected, up to something.
Bobby knew of only one sure way to get even with his sister for telling his mother he had been out at Blue Springs, a betrayal that had caused him to get grounded and miss seeing Pals of the Saddle and Wild Horse Roundup the following Saturday. He and Monroe had been plotting and planning for weeks. “It” was to happen the night of the prom.
His mother and Grandmother Smith were chaperones and Doc always kept the drugstore open late on prom night so the kids could come in afterward and eat ice cream. Jimmy would be off playing Friday night poker with his buddies at the VFW. Bobby and Monroe had the house entirely to themselves, so they could put their plan in action without anyone seeing them.
After the deed was done they went back to Bobby’s room and waited. Anna Lee was the last one home and floated in on a pink cloud at around 12:29, only one minute away from her 12:30 curfew, still glowing from her romantic evening. She had danced all night under silver paper stars and blue and white crepe-paper banners that hung from the ceiling of the gymnasium with her date Billy Nobblitt, a Van Johnson look-alike, or so she thought. She dreamily undressed, still hearing the strains of “It Had to Be You” and “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” playing over and over in her head.
When she had put on her nightgown and brushed her teeth, she carefully placed her gardenia corsage in a glass of water and put it on her dresser. She crawled into bed tired and happy, a feeling of bliss that lasted about one second.
She immediately shot out of bed screaming, “Snakes, snakes,” over and over at the top of her lungs. She ran to her parents’ room, threw their door open, and screamed, “Help . . . I’ve been snakebit!” and fainted dead away in a heap.
After Doc and Dorothy had tended to Anna Lee and had gotten her revived and somewhat calmed down, and after Mother Smith, out in the hall in her hair net and clutching her robe, had announced, “If there are reptiles in the house, I’m not staying,” peace reigned briefly. Mother Smith would not go back to bed until Doc went over to Anna Lee’s room to check. But it was no nightmare. Anna Lee’s bed was crawling with about a hundred slimy, squirming red worms straight from his own worm bed in the backyard. He’d guessed correctly.
“I don’t know why she has to make such a big deal out of it. They’re just harmless little worms,” said Bobby as he was being pulled out from under the bed by his father. And to make matters worse, the minute Doc had opened the door, Monroe, his true-blue blood brother, had jumped out the window and run all the way home in his Hopalong Cassidy pajamas, leaving Bobby to face the music alone.
Anna Lee was furious at Bobby and said that as far as she was concerned, he did not exist anymore. She made it a point to ignore him. She did not speak to Bobby for quite a while, until one day she forgot she wasn’t speaking to him and asked him to bring her some milk from the kitchen.
He reacted by laughing and pointing at her, saying, “Ha, ha, I thought you weren’t speaking to me. Go get it yourself,” and ran off the porch and down the street. A disgusted Anna Lee got up and went to the kitchen and opened the icebox and asked her mother, “What I don’t understand is why you had to have another child. Why didn’t you just stop with me?” Dorothy smiled. “Well, honey, we thought we had.” Anna Lee turned and looked at her mother in surprise; this was the first she had heard of this. “What happened?”
“I guess the Good Lord just decided to send us another little angel down from heaven.”
“I may be sick,” said Anna Lee and left the room.
Mother Smith came in. “What’s the matter with her?”
Dorothy laughed. “She wanted to know why we had to have Bobby.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I blamed it all on the Good Lord.”
“Well, that’s as good an excuse as any. According to the Presbyterians, everything in life is preordained, or at least that’s what Norma’s mother says.”
“Ida? How would she know, she’s a Methodist.”
“Not anymore. As of last week she claims she’s a Presbyterian.”
“What?”
“Oh yes . . . right in the middle of the bridge tournament she announced it.”
Dorothy, amazed, cracked three eggs in a tan bowl with a blue stripe and stirred. “But there’s not a Presbyterian church within a hundred miles around here. Why would she want to be a Presbyterian all of a sudden?”
Mother Smith poured herself a glass of iced tea. “I suppose it’s all part of her plan to move up in the world.”
Dorothy was baffled. “Well . . . I just don’t know what to say. . . . There’s a lemon in the icebox. I just hope she’ll be happy.”
Mother Smith reached into the icebox. “I do, too, but I don’t think anything can make her really happy unless, of course, Norma marries a Rockafella and she can at last take her rightful place in society.”
High Society
WHAT MOTHER SMITH said was true. If there was such a thing as high society in Elmwood Springs, Norma’s mother aspired to be it. After all, Ida Jenkins’s husband, Herbert, was the town banker and as such Ida felt she had a certain position to uphold and it was her civic duty to set the standards of genteel behavior. To light the way. Set an example. She was in charge of all the refinements of life and in her relentless pursuit to bring culture and beauty to the community she nearly drove Norma and her father crazy.
Even though she was living in a small town in the middle of nowhere, she subscribed to all the latest women’s magazines to keep abreast of the times. In the late thirties she took to spelling the word modern “moderne” and referring to their house as a “bungalow,” her clothes as “frocks.” She used the word “intriguing” as much as possible, had her hair styled just like Ina Claire, the Broadway star, and she never cried when she could weep or have “wept.”
Too, Ida was a club woman from tip to top. She was the grande dame of the National Federated Women’s Club of Missouri and had spearheaded the local Garden Club, Bridge Club, the Wednesday Night Supper Club, the Book Club, and the Downtown Theatrical Club and was never seen on the street without a hat and white gloves. She never served a meal in her home without having an individual nut cup at each place setting and a clean white tablecloth. “Only heathens eat off a plain table,” she said.
On Norma’s sixteenth birthday she had given her a copy of the new and enlarged edition of Emily Post’s book on etiquette, in which she had inscribed:
If everyone would read this we would certainly be spared a lot of unpleasantness in this world.
Happy Birthday
Love,
Mother
Ida was even on a first-name basis with the author and often wondered out loud, “I wonder how Emily would handle this?” Or she would sometimes preface her remarks with, “Emily says . . .” Ida’s life goal and, she assumed, all of America’s was to bring enlightenment not only to Elmwood Springs but to the entire world until even in the farthest igloo at the North Pole and the wilds of the deepest darkest jungles in Borneo people everywhere would know that the fork belongs on the left and that fresh flowers on a table supply a delightful treat for the eye, that a clean house is a happy house, and come to embrace the fact that raising one’s voice in anger is rude and uncalled for on any occasion.
Ida always said, “Remember, Norma, in America a person of quality and class is not judged by aristocracy of birth but by his or her behavior.” Norma figured that by that standard her mother must have thought she was the duchess of Kent by now.