A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur Read Free

Dotty, do you mean—?
    DOROTHEA: It was so magical to me, the windows curtainedwith rain, the soft look in his eyes, the warmth of his breath that’s always scented with clove, his fingers touching so gently as he—
    BODEY: Dotty, I don’t think I want to know any more about this—experience on Art Hill because, because—I got a suspicion, Dotty, that you didn’t hold the line with him.
    DOROTHEA: The line just—didn’t exist when he parked the car and turned and looked at me and I turned and looked at him. Our eyes, our eyes—
    BODEY: Your eyes?
    DOROTHEA: Burned the line out of existence, like it had never existed!
    BODEY: —I’m not gonna tell this to Buddy!
    DOROTHEA: You know, I wasn’t aware until then that the Reo was equipped with adjustable seats.
    BODEY: Seats that—?
    DOROTHEA: Adjusted to pressure, yes, reclined beneath me when he pushed a lever.
    BODEY [
distracted from the phonebook which she had begun to leaf through
]: —How far did this seat recline beneath you, Dotty?
    DOROTHEA: Horizontally, nearly. So gradually though that I didn’t know till later, later. Later, not then—the earth was whirling beneath me and the sky was spinning above.
    BODEY: Oh-ho , he got you drunk, did he, with a flask of liquor in that Flying Cloud on—
    DOROTHEA: Drunk on a single Pink Lady?
    BODEY: Pink?
    DOROTHEA: Lady. —The mildest sort of cocktail! Made with sloe gin and grenadine.
    BODEY: The gin was slow, maybe, but that man is a fast one, seducing a girl with adjustable seats and a flask of liquor in that Flying Cloud on—
    DOROTHEA: Not a flask, a cocktail, and not in the Reo but in a small private club called The Onyx, a club so exclusive he had to present an engraved card at the entrance.
    BODEY: Oh yes, I know such places!
    DOROTHEA: How would you know such places?
    BODEY: I seen one at the movies and so did you, at the West End Lyric, the last time you was all broke up from expectin’ a call from this Ellis which never came in, so we seen Roy D’Arcy take poor Janet Gaynor to one of them—private clubs to—!
    [
Bodey has not found the Blewett number in the phonebook. She dials the operator
.]
    Blewett, Blewett, get me the high school named Blewett.
    DOROTHEA: Bodey, what are you doing at the phone which I begged you not to use till Ralph has called?
    BODEY: Reporting him to Blewett!
    DOROTHEA: Bodey, that takes the cake, reporting on the principal of Blewett to Blewett that’s closed on Sundays. What a remarkable—
    BODEY [
darting about
]: Paper, pen!
    DOROTHEA: Now what?
    BODEY: A written report to the Board of Education of St. Louis. I tell you, that Board will be interested in all details of how that principal of the school system got you lying down drunk and defenseless in his Flying Cloud in a storm on Art Hill, every advantage taken with Valentino sheik tricks on a innocent teacher of civics just up from Memphis.
    DOROTHEA: YOU WILL NOT—
    BODEY: DON’T TELL ME NOT!
    DOROTHEA: LIBEL THE REPUTATION OF A MAN THAT I LOVE, GAVE MYSELF TO NOT JUST FREELY BUT WITH ABANDON, WITH JOY!
    BODEY [
aloud as she writes
]: Board of Education of St. Louis, Missouri. I think you should know that your principal at Blewett used his position to take disgusting advantage of a young teacher employed there by him for that purpose. I know, I got the facts, including the date and—
    [
Dorothea snatches up and crumples the letter
.]
    My letter, you tore up my—!
    DOROTHEA: Bodey, if you had written and mailed that letter, do you know what you’d have obliged me to do? I would be morally obliged to go personally down to the Board of Education and tell them an
opposite
story which happens to be the
true
one: that I
desired
Ralph Ellis, possibly even more than he did me!
    [
Bodey huffs and puffs wordlessly till she can speak
.]
    BODEY: —Well , God help you, Dotty. —But I give you my word I won’t repeat this to Buddy.
    DOROTHEA: How does it concern Buddy?
    BODEY: It concerns Buddy and me because Buddy’s