Talk to May Hill? What for?
“She knows about our ancestors,” he went on. “She’s the expert around here. She’s the one who’s organized the files.” I must have looked confused. “For your interview,” he explained.
Having dispensed that piece of advice he went out the door.
I looked at William, who was alert if not also shocked by the proposal. Always, always and forever, when we saw May Hill or when her name was mentioned, in the back of our minds there was the chime, the word Scram-bambow. Maybe the toolshed had not happened—no, but it had, because that word was lodged within us. Neither one of us had ever been in the upstairs of the manor house, Aunt May Hill’s domain. It was a place we would hate to have to go.
“The files?” I whispered to him.
“That’s a great idea, Mary Frances,” Gloria called, she apparently also in the know about our project, even though I hadn’t said a word about it to her. “May Hill has wonderful photographs. And letters. And receipts from the old carriage factory. The diaries of your great-grandmother. There are locks of baby hair tied up in ribbon.”
“Locks of baby hair?” William said.
“Pressed in books,” Gloria replied, as if that were an explanation. “And baptismal gowns, elaborate dresses even for the boys in the olden days.”
Stephen broke an elephant ear in half and started in on that confection. One of the strange things about Gloria was the fact that she could recount far more Lombard family lore than most of us. Because she visited May Hill in the upstairs she knew almost as much as my father about who and where and when. And she knew, for sure, our own histories, quoting our remarkable toddler sentences to us, shaking her head in wonderment. For a reason we could not put in plain words, Gloria’s mastery of our legends embarrassed us for her; and furthermore, we didn’t think Stephen liked her familiarity, either. He was the one to state the obvious. “I doubt May Hill wants to do an interview.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Gloria said. “She loves to talk about history.”
All that time my father, while he sloshed around the press in his big galoshes adjusting the wooden forms, was trying to figure out the fifth-cloth mystery. “Liveland Raspberry,” he called out. “You saved some Liveland Raspberries!” There really was an antique variety, a punky-striped early apple with that wrong-fruited name.
“Oh, Jim!” Gloria cried. “I made it too easy for you.”
“Wow, Gloria.”
Stephen was back to reading the paper, no interest, it seemed, in Gloria’s skulduggery. He said, “I hope they choose Birch Bayh to speak at the convention. Indiana! Give up your native son so we know you’ve got more in you than Dan Quayle.”
My father was maybe laughing at Stephen’s joke but he was also still smiling at Gloria’s whimsy and at the care she took to delight him. He said to his cousin, “That would put Bayh on the map, wouldn’t it?”
“This is terrific about Bill Foster,” Stephen said, moving on to the sports page, to the Baseball Hall of Fame topic.
“About time they put him in there,” my father said. The amber liquid was already running down the stack of cloths and into the broad tray at the bottom of the press. He took a paper cup from the sink and stuck it into the flow. “Oh, golly, Gloria, I’ve got it. The tartness of the Liveland. Right at the back of the tongue. This is powerful. This is just the kick I need.”
Then how pleased she was going to be through the rest of the morning, standing in her yellow waterproofs at the bottling line, filling jug after jug and screwing the caps on very tightly, her bare hands raw.
“I’m not,” I muttered to William, “interviewing May Hill.”
He was staring at the press, the way you do when even if you want to you can’t blink, you can’t turn away. In that trance he made a slow pronouncement. “I…think…you should.”
“I want Mr. Gilbert. I want to see his exotic pets. His poison dart frogs.”
The grinder started up again, the noise snapping William back to earth. “You can’t,” he said. “He’s a felon.” He said, “Frankie?”
“What.”
“You have to. You have to interview May Hill.”
When we were downstairs playing with our cousins we sometimes heard her heavy flat footfall, May Hill doing what up there? Gathering locks of hair, apparently. Pressing the hair in books.
“Maybe she’ll take you to the attic,” William said.
“I’m not going!” I wanted to remind him, in case somehow he’d forgotten: Scram-bambow.
“There’s a sea captain’s trunk up there. The first Lombard’s trunk.”
“No, there isn’t.”
“There is. Sherwood told us. Pa said so. And a cage for a circus monkey.”
“So what?”