JOSIE FRANKLIN HAD A BEAU. HE WAS A YOUNG DOCTOR she had met through her work and his name was John Brent. Young as the girls themselves, he was easygoing enough to be amused rather than ruffled by Josie’s rattlebrained remarks. In fact, not even a houseful of girls could ruffle Dr. Johnny. He would sit peacefully on their living-room sofa, chuckling at Josie’s non sequiturs, and ducking the scramble of six nurses with no more protest than a grin. Or if Dr. Johnny took Josie to the movies, he comfortably invited the whole Spencer Club too. Dr. John Brent was showing up at the apartment more and more frequently.
“Josie has a beau, Josie has a beau,” Gwen chanted. It was Sunday noon, and the girls were loafing over a combination breakfast-lunch. “Well, it’s about time one of us had a nice new romance.”
“It isn’t a romance and Johnny isn’t a beau.” Josie blinked behind her glasses. “He just likes me. Some. That’s all.”
“Oh,” said Vivian. “I suppose Dr. Johnny sits on our sofa because he can’t think of anything better to do? He comes around to call on the entire Spencer Club?”
“He likes our peppermints and our pretty wallpaper.” Cherry grinned. “He doesn’t like Josie, oh, no.”
Josie wrinkled her forehead and turned to quiet little Mai Lee for help.
“Is he really a beau, Mai Lee?”
Mai Lee smiled. “I think Johnny likes you better than you realize.”
Josie wonderingly set down her cup. “Well, what do you know! But honestly, I think he has fun with the whole gang of us.”
Bertha returned with a fresh pot of coffee. “I miss my John. He keeps writing that I should come back to the farm and marry him, that we’ve been waiting long enough.” Bertha’s china-blue eyes had a faraway look. It was one of the rare times that Bertha spoke of her fiancé, with whom she had grown up.
Cherry, winding one black curl around her finger, wondered about her own romance department. It was conspicuous by its absence. Wade Cooper was a highly satisfactory young man, but he was out of the Air Forces now and back home in Tucson, hard at work starting a business. And there simply was no one else at the moment.
Cherry looked around speculatively at the other girls. Gwen knew someone she liked but he was in St. Louis. Mai Lee and Vivian were as lacking in dates, here in New York, as Cherry was.
“Hey, kids. You know what?” Cherry said slowly. “I just thought about this for the first time—We’ve all been so busy with our work that I guess we haven’t done any thinking at all.”
“Thinking about what?” Cherry’s serious tone caught their attention.
“Just this. That except for Josie, we haven’t any beaux or callers or friends. That—darn it!—we’re all wrapped up in ourselves and our work. We never see anyone socially but one another.” She shook back her dark curls. “I’ve just waked up to the awful truth. We’re getting—uh—”
“Narrow,” Mai Lee supplied. “Insular.”
Vivian nodded. “Yes, we are. Here we have the apartment fixed up, and we haven’t given a single party.”
Gwen snapped her fingers. “I knew there was something I meant to do. Look up the Taylor family. They used to live in our town and last year they moved to New York. I went all through school with Ben Taylor.”
Cherry suddenly remembered a Hilton family, the Coreys, living now in New York.
“Why, we know lots of people if we’d only come out of our shells!”
Bertha Larsen, like Vivian, had no contacts in New York. But she suggested it was easy to get acquainted through the various States’ clubs, or the Ys, or the Spencer Nursing School Alumni Association.
“We could invite ’em all to come see our blue furniture!” Josie piped up. “Johnny thinks it’s quite a sight,” she added ambiguously.
“All right,” the Spencer Club voted, “we’ll look up these people and we will invite ’em.”
Cherry’s Corey family turned out to consist of an aged couple, plus a nephew aged fifty. The younger members of the Corey family, whom Cherry remembered, had gone to live in California. Cherry called on these elderly people with some disappointment, but politely asked them to come to tea. To her amazement, the old couple amiably traveled all the way down to the Village one Sunday afternoon, for the tea party. The girls invited Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins from upstairs, too, and asked Dr. Johnny to bring another young man with him. With six guests and six girls, the afternoon was a more pleasant one than Cherry had hoped for. Old Mr. and Mrs. Corey’s enjoyment was a reward in itself. And as Vivian said afterwards, “I don’t see why all our friends must be our own age. It’s comfortable to know older people!”
Gwen’s Taylor family, she announced delightedly after a long telephone conversation, was intact. Mrs. Taylor had asked Gwen to dinner, and Ben, the youngest son, would be coming down to see them some evening soon.
“I couldn’t ever think of Ben Taylor as a romance,” Gwen told the others. “Not after he dipped my pigtails in desk inkwells at school, for years and years. Yep, I wore pigtails in my youth. But Ben’s an awfully nice fellow. You’ll see.”
Ben came by one Friday evening. He was a lanky, sandy-haired, nice-looking young man, easy to talk to. He got along famously with the Spencer Club and with quiet Dr. Johnny who came in, too—Josie’s beau was “practically a fixture by now,” Cherry said. Ben was intrigued by the blue furniture and its history, devoured large amounts of refreshments, and asked if he could come back with some of his pals—to see the blue furniture. Like Johnny Brent, Ben doubted that such furniture actually existed.
“Yes, I see it with my own eyes,” he admitted, “but, of course, it’s just a mirage. It’s not bad-looking,” Ben added courteously. “Just amazing.”
They set a date and a few evenings later Ben showed up with three more young men. They all carried assorted paper boxes and bags.
“Refreshments,” Ben said gallantly. “Also, Dan, Tiny (because he isn’t), and George, in that order. George’s real name is Clarence, but we never tell anyone that.”
George indignantly denied the whole thing and grinned at Vivian in particular. Tiny was a very big, outdoor fellow who laughed heartily when he looked out on what they called their “garden.” Danny had an infectious smile and feet that kept breaking into tap steps. Like lanky, loose-jointed Ben, Danny was eager to turn on the radio and dance. Dr. Johnny just sat relaxed on the couch looking amused, as usual.
“But first we have to inspect the blue furniture,” Ben announced. They all trooped down the hall. “Gentlemen, I submit that these blue objects are distinctive, unique, the only ones of their kind in the world.”
Tiny sat down on one of the blue chairs, trying it. It creaked under his weight. Mai Lee hastily asked him if he wouldn’t help her unpack the refreshments, for which the surprised hostesses offered thanks. Tiny then made the mistake of trying to squeeze into the kitchenette, and they heard pots and pans clattering down.
“I guess we’d better dance, at that,” Cherry said and turned on the radio.
They danced for half an hour, until they were breathless. Even Dr. Johnny, who preferred to “just sit,” was pressed into service as a partner. Finally, when they could find no more dance music on the radio, they sat down around the living room to talk.
George wanted to play games. Apparently he knew dozens of them, and started off with riddles.
“How do you make slow horses fast?”
“Say giddap,” Josie solemnly guessed.
“Spurs. Sugar,” Cherry and Danny called out.
“Nope. To make slow horses fast, don’t feed ’em.” The others objected. “A pun!”
“All right, no puns,” George agreed. “Why is it useless to send a telegram to Washington today?”
They all thought. Dr. Johnny murmured, “Because Washington is dead.”
“Right! Hmm, a sharpie,” George approved. “Which is bigger, Mr. Bigger or his baby?”
“That’s silly,” sniffed Bertha Larsen.
“The baby is just a little Bigger,” said George. “Stop laughing—here’s a different kind. Will someone give me a piece of paper?”
Vivian handed him the telephone pad. George wrote down, and asked them to read:
F U N E X?
S, V F X.
F U N E M?
S, V F M.
O K,M N X.
They sputtered and puzzled, and finally it dawned on them. They declaimed triumphantly, “Have you any eggs? Yes, we have eggs. Have you any ham? Yes, we have ham. Okay, ham and eggs.” This talk made Tiny look hungry.
Dr. Johnny had a game in which “It” must not laugh or smile. Since Tiny was mumbling, far too soon, about refreshments, the embarrassed boys chose him to be “It.” The young doctor explained that the object of the game was to make “It” laugh or smile against his will, by asking foolish questions. “It” had to give ridiculous answers. “Everyone but Tiny can laugh all he wants. All right, go!”
Tiny stood up and faced the crowd, his expression deadpan.
Ben asked dramatically, “Why do you pour glue in your pockets all the time?”
“So I’ll stick at things.” They chuckled. Tiny assumed a scowl.
“How recently have you telephoned an elephant?” Gwen threw at him.
“Last week, but Jumbo’s trunk line was out of order.” Tiny very nearly smiled at his own joke. They were laughing by now.
Mai Lee inquired, “Have you ever dug for clams in a mining camp?”
That was too ridiculous for Tiny. He broke down and guffawed. “Hasta la Coca-Cola” Tiny gave up. “Who’s ‘It’ next?”
This nonsense went on and on until it suddenly was ten o’clock. Tiny said in so many words that he was starved.
The girls again told their guests how extra nice they were to bring refreshments and excitedly opened the packages. They found man-sized sandwiches and cakes, to which they added glasses of milk and a big bowl of apples.
Having supper quieted them down. The talk turned to New York, since the city was new to the girls, and then to their districts. Mai Lee described Chinatown and Vivian enthused about Long Island. In the midst of this rather perfunctory conversation, Cherry dropped a bombshell.
“Did I ever tell you about the mysterious recluse in my district? The woman no one has seen for eighteen years?”
“Your mysterious wha-a-at?”
“Eighteen years! Why did she do it?”
Immediately everybody’s mood changed. Cherry herself, sitting on one of the blue chairs, looked sober.
“No one seems to know why she did it. But it looks as if she intends to stay locked in that mysterious old house until the day she dies.”
The young men asked practical questions: how did she manage to live? Cherry explained about the arrangements with the grocer, the furnace man, the well-dressed man who apparently was a banker or lawyer and who came once a year. Even Dr. Johnny was affected by the story. The girls wanted to know what Mary Gregory was like.
“Nobody really knows what she is like,” Cherry replied. “The grocer saw her only once, eighteen years ago, and he gives a good report on her. But the rest of the neighborhood believes—Well, there is a disturbing legend about her.”
Cherry broke off, debating whether to repeat what struck her as fantastic. But the others insisted that she go on.
“Well, just this afternoon,” Cherry began hesitantly, “I was walking past that old Victorian mansion, but on the other side of the street. I started to cross the street when two children called out to me, ‘Don’t go over there! Stay away from the witch’s house!’” She smiled. “A little boy of eight, and a cute little girl about five. They were protecting me, you understand. They told me the same tale I’d heard from a soda fountain boy—a boy who grew up in that neighborhood—”
Cherry repeated Joe Baxter’s tale of the strange shadows at Mary Gregory’s windows at night. She described the thing that Joe said looked like hangman’s gallows and the eerie figure flitting around it.
“Whew! That is odd,” Ben Taylor admitted.
“Are you sure,” Mai Lee asked, “that it isn’t something the children have merely imagined they saw, or made up out of whole cloth?”
Cherry shook her head. “Some of the grownups have seen the same scary performance with their own eyes.”
There was a hush.
“Maybe she was performing some curious rites of her own,” Dr. Johnny mused.
Cherry sighed. “If there is something strange in that house, as the legend says, Mary Gregory keeps it well hidden.”
“Why only at night?” two of the guys asked curiously.
“Because witches appear only at night,” Josie said in all seriousness.
They smiled at that. Yet the testimony of a whole neighborhood was not to be ignored. Dr. Johnny asked if anyone ever saw the woman.
Again Cherry hesitated. It sounded so incredible, dreamlike, to say it aloud.
“One of my patients, a Mrs. Persson, used to see Mary Gregory summer nights, late, on an upstairs balcony. Just a glimpse of a white dress, and a white, ghostly figure. Sometimes, she says, you could hear piano music coming from that house long past midnight.”
“Why doesn’t someone just go up to the front door and ring the bell?” Josie inquired.
“Neighborhood people have tried that,” Cherry said. “Mary Gregory never answers. But I talked to—”
Cherry shook her head, troubled, wondering why she was telling all this. It had frozen their cheerful little party into a kind of horror. Perhaps she was talking about it because it was weighing on her mind.
“You talked to whom?” the others prodded.
Cherry lifted her dark eyes. “To the furnace man and the postman. The postman didn’t reveal much. He did tell me she sends and receives mail, but it—wait, you’re guessing wrong! The mail is mostly to department stores and a coal company and a bank and so forth, to enable her to order things she needs, without stirring out of her house. You see? Beyond that, I suspect the postman is as mystified as I am.”
“And the furnace man?”
“Just notes to and from her, about coal and repairs. The furnace man never once has seen her. Doesn’t even hear her moving around. He says it’s uncanny and that something unearthly is going on in that old house.”
It was strange, very strange, they all muttered. What they could not understand, above all, was the gallows and the grimly dancing figure silhouetted on the blinds at night. Cherry was forced to believe that although the “witch” legend was superstition, Mary Gregory really did do something peculiar behind drawn blinds at night.