caught himself wondering if the man would sell him a degree. After eight expulsions, the complete Ivy League circuit in four years, even Mothaw had given up. But then, he had given up trying to please her. Didn’t he tell Borden so every day? The hell with college.
“What about the Cumbersons?” he asked. “The couple upstairs.”
“Don’t ask,” Marge said ominously, beginning to stir her cup of oil again.
“Why not?”
“’Cause they been here twenty-five years and nobody’s ever seen them, that’s why.”
“That’s impossible,” he said.
“It would be if they was alive,” she said.
There was silence in the room except for the dainty tinkle of Marge’s spoon in the cup and the rippling of hundreds of tiny, ghostly rodents, dancing behind her varicolored wallpapers and up and down Elgar’s spine.
“Mr. Cumberson was already retired from the railroad when they moved here,” she said. “That was twenty-five years ago. They were both over seventy then.”
“And nobody’s seen them since?”
“Nobody.”
“Well, who pays their rent?” he wanted to know.
“Every Thursday a pension check comes for Mr. Cumberson. I never seen nobody take it out of the mailbox. But every Friday, it’s gone.”
Elgar was indignant. “You’ve been here fourteen years yourself!” he exclaimed. “You must at least have heard noises. In all those years, didn’t you ever get curious, just once, and go up there?”
“I sleep sound,” Marge said, “’cause I got nothin’ on my conscious, and I don’t look into what don’t concern me. Landlord, if you want to go up there, go ahead. All I can say to you is, I got the powers, and I don’t go. ’Cause my powers tell me, ‘Let well enough alone.’ ”
“What kind of powers?” he asked fearfully.
“Oh, nothin’ special. Nothin’ worth botherin’ about. Except, see, any time you got a little something troubling you, tell Miss Marge, and maybe she can fix it. A person robbing you, or crossing you, or spoiling your luck, or some little thing like that.”
“I’ll remember,” he promised. That was motherly kindness glowing at him from behind the rimless glasses. At least he hoped so.
“What are the first-floor tenants like?” he asked. “Copee, isn’t that their name?”
“Oh, Fanny’s a good girl. Just a little ambitious, that’s all. She’s a good mother to those two boys.”
“What about her husband?”
“I don’t believe in speaking evil, Landlord. Besides, I’m concentrating now. If you want, you can go downstairs and meet him yourself.”
She had lit a black candle, and smoke seemed to be curling upward from the cup while she mumbled unintelligible phrases. As the atmosphere was getting distinctly creepy, Elgar decided to follow her suggestion.
But felt not at all the dashing lover as he knocked at fabulous Fanny’s door. Stuffed with sausages and badly shaken. Not the most romantic of conditions.
Worse, he hardly recognized his wild non-Irish rose when she bloomed wanly in the doorway. Face scrubbed, hair skinned back severely, lashes batting more with fear, now, than coquetry. Until now he’d repressed the whole business about husband and children, little-mother role not suiting her, somehow. But from the glorious dragons rampant on scarlet fields she had changed to a mournful, motherly Muu Muu of limp, gray seersucker.
The first-floor apartment was a Dragon Lady’s lair, though: red walls, lowering reddish lamps, gaudy Chinese-type furniture crouched to spring everywhere.
Finger to her lips, Fanny let him in and said, “Shhh. Charlie’s studying his history.”
From the deepest armchair a curl of smoke rose. Pipe, not incense.
“Who goes there, wife?” came a voice from that vicinity. “Friend or foe?”
“Ofay,” she answered, giving Elgar the key to the pig Latin the Enemy was not supposed to understand.
“Then let him wait hat in hand,” came the answer. “As I have waited all day long in his employment lines and his unemployment lines.”
“Now wait a minute,” called Elgar. “I don’t know where you were today, but those weren’t my lines you were in. I don’t have any lines. As it happens, I don’t have a hat, either.”
The chair swiveled. A thick tome was lowered with awful deliberateness to reveal ruddy-brown, warpath features topped by angry, upstanding black hair.
“Who dares to contradict me in my own house? In my castle which he has invaded?”
“As it happens it’s my house,” Elgar replied. “I’m the new landlord.”
“And as it happens this sector of it is my castle. Within which I am king. You are here only on my forbearance.”
“I am here on my business,” Elgar corrected. “Which is to request your wife to remove her commercial advertising sign from my residential window.”
The king rose from his throne to menace Elgar. Unfortunately his height, about five-four, and his bandy legs did not go with the imposing attitude. Elgar judged he could easily take him in a fight if necessary. Which might prove to be the case.
“So,” Charlie intoned, “you would deny this poor woman the livelihood which she must earn to pay your unconstitutional rentals. Oh, I know you, mister. I don’t need to know your name. Whoever you are, you are the exploiter, the Enemy.”
He was beginning a kind of rain dance, hopping around slowly on one foot. Hop, turn, and point a skinny finger at Elgar’s nose.
“What is more,” he accused, “you have probably been coveting my wife and plotting to seduce her behind my back. It is not enough to be an exploiter, you have to be a seducer too. Like others of your breed. Oh, I know your kind.”
“Charlie, please,” Fanny interrupted. “He’s not so bad really.”
“They’re all bad, squaw. See to your papooses. Make sure they are asleep. Some things are about to happen which I do not intend for tender young ears.”
—My howls while he scalps me? Elgar wondered.
Fanny, leaving the room, gave him an eloquent eye-roll and a shrug which seemed to pooh-pooh his fears.
Clearing his throat for courage, Elgar said, “What were you reading when I came in, Mr. Copee?”—expressing, he hoped, the proper amount of polite interest.
The title “Mister” must have helped. Charlie growled almost civilly, “The History of the Choctaw Nation. Are you familiar with it? You should be. Three times
