Miss Warshed had settled herself immovably upon the Santa Barbara landscape about twenty years ago, escorted by the two nieces from whom she derived her popular title, with the purchase of a large rambling house in the older but most respectable section of town, where they set up a ménage which in some other localities might have been deemed at least eccentric but which in the cloistered atmosphere of that corner of that city was only considered quaint and nostalgically delightful. For the two junior Misses Warshed, it was soon revealed to those who pursued the inquiry, were the daughters of a vaguely disreputable elder brother of Aunt Flo who abandoned them to the care of a wife who soon afterwards died of mortification or some such obsolete ailment, thus leaving their maiden aunt Flo to rear them, which she had done more devotedly than any natural mother. If Aunt Flo had ever had any procreative urges of her own, they seemed to have been completely sublimated by the responsibilities of this foster brood, and if some local amateur psychologists surmised that she had subtly instilled her own spinsterish diathesis into her charges, it could have been just as validly argued that they had grown up with androphobic prejudices of their very own, germinating from the embarrassment of having a father whom they could not even identify in a picture and whose name they had never heard mentioned except with the most icily significant restraint. At any rate, their lives had never been overtly complicated by romance, let alone marriage: Aunt Flo had been safely past her half-century when she hit the town, and both her protégées had been well into their late thirties, so that there had been no immediate problem of fending off slavering suitors. And seemingly content to age gracefully as they had arrived, they had remained an inviolable trio while Aunt Flo decayed gradually into her more obstreperous seventies and the waifs she had sponsored faded gracefully into their late but unlamented fifties, all of them being wistfully but intolerably charming all the time. To keep themselves healthily occupied and also pay the rent, they had opened a shop in the bypassed suburb of Montecito, inevitably named Ye Needle Nooke, where the products of their knitting and crochet implements were on sale at outrageous prices and were regularly bought by transient tourists and an indispensable core of locals who thought that the Warshed Sisters were just too sweet and should be subsidized on principle.
“And they are sweet, too,” Kathleen said. “It just breaks your heart sometimes to think how much they could’ve given some man and never had a chance to. All right, so I should go back to the bottom of grammar class. But you’ve got to meet them yourself. Come on over here.”
Before he could mount an effective delaying action she was practically dragging him through the crowd again on another tangent that led to a concession which could be instantly identified as one of the prime attractions of the affair. All it was actually selling was cheaply printed cards ruled into squares in each of which appeared some random number, but the sign over the entrance said “Bingo,” and this magic word seemed to have been sufficient to enchant an extraordinary number of devout numerologists into purchasing one or more of these mystic plaques.
“Just one thing — don’t give my real name,” was about all the Saint had time and presence of mind enough to throw into her ear, before they were being welcomed into the fold by a delightfully frail and faded blonde in pastel-flowered chiffon who said, “Why, Kathleen, honey, are you going to try your luck with us? That’s what I call doing double your duty.”
“This is Violet Warshed,” Kathleen said, and completed the introduction with, “This is Mr... er... Temple-ton. He’s been such a good customer for the champagne punch that I thought I ought to share him a bit.”
“Why, that’s what I call giving till it must hurt, honey.” Violet Warshed put out a soft hand that would have been only perfunctory if it had not had a slight tendency to cling. “I hope this is your lucky day, Mr Templeton, truly I do.”
She must have been quite a doll thirty-five years ago, Simon thought without disparagement. A Marilyn Monroe type in her generation, probably, wide open to caricature, but overflowing with everything that it took to evoke the protective instincts of the male. It was almost incredible that that appeal should have failed to agglutinate a husband when it was at its lushest, but it was still working in an entirely wistful way which Simon could see would only confirm the local assumption that the Warshed waifs had to be Taken Care Of.
He sat down with Kathleen at the end of one of the long tables which were occupied to the verge of capacity by a horde of philanthropists brooding over their charts of destiny and marking off occasional rectangles on them as the fateful numbers boomed out through a badly adjusted complex of loudspeakers. An iron-gray woman in the same indefinite fifties as Violet Warshed bustled up and down the aisles between the tables, repeating the numbers that were called and helping the more dim-sighted devotees of this intoxicating sport to mark the right squares on their cards. As she got down to the end of the next table she recognized Kathleen and said, “Oh, a trespasser.” Then she saw the Saint and linked them together, and said, “Well, it’s about time you had a good man, Kathy. Where did you find him?”
“This is Ida Warshed,” Kathleen said. With the facility of practice, she went on, “And this is Mr Templeton. He’s been such a good customer that I thought—”
“Don’t ever stop to think, dearie. If he looks like a good customer, he’s in. What was that name again?”
Even at her age Ida Warshed had a twinkle in her eye, and one got an impression that in her extreme youth she might have been quite a handful. She was as buxom and earthy as Violet was ethereal. In fact, if they had not been introduced as sisters no one would have been likely to guess that they were even remotely related. The only theory Simon could hazard was that by some freak of genetics each of them had inherited the characteristics of one parent to the almost complete exclusion of the other — Ida perhaps being predominantly the image of the scapegrace father, while Violet might have mirrored the abandoned mother who had pined away.
“Now do you have an idea what they’re like?” Kathleen asked, as Ida went on her busy way.
“Well, vaguely,” said the Saint, mechanically circling a number on his card with one of the colored crayons provided for the purpose. “But—”
“That’s Aunt Flo,” she said, “up there on the platform.”
At the focal point of the long tables where the congregation sat there was a high dais draped in bunting, not much larger than was necessary to accommodate a small table and a straight-backed chair. In the chair sat a large angular woman whose back was just as straight, even if braced by obvious tight-drawn corsets. Over the corsets she wore a black satin dress that made no attempt to be modern in length or cut, with a high boned collar of white lace and matching frills of lace at the wrists. To offset this austerity, however, her fingernails were lacquered pearl-gray, her lipstick was dark red, and her white hair had been rinsed with blue. Her face must once have been handsome rather than pretty, but age had not hardened it, indeed, the wrinkles it had acquired seemed to have engraved it with an indelible pattern of kindliness and serenity.
She twirled a wire cage filled with numbered balls, and when it came to rest she manipulated a sort of valve at the bottom which laid a single ball on the table like an egg, she read the number without glasses, and called it into her microphone in a strong firm voice. Simon drew another circle on his card.
“For a dame of her age, she seems to be in rare shape,” he remarked.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Kathleen said. “She must be at least seventy-five, but she drives the car to market and does all the shopping and most of the cooking at home. And don’t let that Whistler’s Mother look fool you — she’s never stopped being the head of the family. Violet and Ida still do what she tells them, just as if they were nearer sixteen than sixty. It’s almost funny to hear them ask her if they may go to a movie, if she doesn’t want to see it herself, and she tells them what time they have to be home.”