The Recycled Citizen Read Free

Remind me to step around to the Cowley Fathers and take up the question of beatification first thing tomorrow morning, will you, Sarah? On second thought, you’d better make it sometime during the afternoon. Ah, here comes his potential holiness now. What’s up, Adolphus?”

Chapter
 2
    W HAT WAS UP WAS nothing good’ They all knew that before Dolph opened his mouth. Mary reached up and took her husband’s hand.
    “What’s the matter; dear?”
    “Chet Arthur got mugged.”
    “Oh, Dolph! Chet’s been one of our regulars ever since we opened the center,” Mary explained to the others. “Is he hurt, dear?”
    “He’s dead.”
    “Who—”
    “I don’t know, Mary. Somebody noticed him lying in the alley between Beacon and Marlborough Streets, down near the Massachusetts Avenue end. They thought he must be drunk and called the police. The only identification he had on him was his SCRC membership card, so the police tried to call the center and got the emergency number, which is Osmond’s, because he’s nearest.”
    “And Osmond flew into a tizzy and started pestering you. What does he expect us to do about it?”
    “Well, damn it, Mary, somebody has to go over.to the morgue and identify the body.”
    “Why can’t Osmond go himself? He’s right there in town, for goodness’ sake.”
    “He says he’s not feeling well. Neither am I, but what the hell? Sorry, everybody, don’t let me break up the party.”
    Max Bittersohn was already on his feet. “Come on, Dolph, I know you hate driving in the dark. I’ll drive your car, and the rest can go in mine when they’re ready to leave.”
    “I’m going with you,” said Sarah.
    The upshot, of course, was that everybody went except Mary.
    “You won’t mind going with Max, will you, Dolph? I really ought to stay and help Genevieve clean up the kitchen. She must be tired.”
    Sarah doubted that. Genevieve had put in a good many years under Great-aunt Matilda’s iron heel; working for Mary must be her idea of heaven. The truth of the matter was that Dolph was all geared up to spare the little woman and do his duty like a soldier, and Mary was too good a wife to crab his act.
    As they sorted themselves out for the ride, Sarah couldn’t help thinking they were an unusual group to be so closely allied. Theonia, the raven-haired, sloe-eyed, almost alarmingly well-mannered offspring of a Gypsy mother and an Ivy League anthropology student who’d got more closely involved with his subject than he’d meant to, was perhaps the most exotic.
    Certainly she was the most striking to look at, and showed every intention of remaining so. Theonia still carried her height proudly, although she’d given up wearing high heels when she married Brooks. She walked every day to maintain a reasonable balance between her excellent appetite and her Rubenesque figure. During the daytime she dressed in simple black or dark red with a modest string of pearls. At night she burgeoned forth in wondrous creations of her own.
    This being a brisk September evening, Theonia had put on a sumptuous wine-colored velvet dinner gown she’d first espied as a marked-down negligee in Filene’s Basement. She’d remodeled the velvet to follow the lines of her expensive foundation garment and trimmed it with creamy lace taken from what would have been called a teddy by Sarah’s late mother-in-law, to whom the teddy had once belonged.
    Such a gown really called for a sable cloak, Sarah thought. In deference to Brooks’s views on the wanton slaughter of fur-bearing mammals for human adornment, however, Theonia had bought three yards of black woolen coating material and made herself a stole. With this draped carefully over her high-piled hair and flung around all that lace and velvet, she rather suggested a middle-aged Tosca on her way to stab Baron Scarpia.
    Brooks Kelling, standing five feet six inches tall and weighing perhaps a hundred and thirty pounds, might have been considered a laughable