Jimmy Meets His Match by Patrick Sean Lee (best book reader .txt) 📕

except for the park-like expanse of golf course lawn, and the English gardens meandering through the acreage spanning the distance to the mansion that would have made Mom explode with envy. Bordering the broad parkway, towering elms stood, perfectly aligned and spaced. They were trimmed as if a small army of tree barbers spent innumerable hours each day manicuring them, until even the squirrels and birds donned tuxedos before entering the branches.

The three of us exited the truck in a state of awe—Jimmy and I, anyway—and hiked up the meandering flagstone walkway to an entry as imposing as that of Monticello. I glanced nervously at my ragged sneakers as Pop pushed the doorbell button.

We waited.

The door was opened halfway by a predatory-faced woman dressed in the attire of a maid instead of what in my mind should have been spots, or stripes. She smelled strongly of lemon oil mixed with mothballs, and she showed us into a foyer the size of our entire house, where we were politely instructed to wait. She then padded silently across the black and white checked marble floor into an adjoining gallery lined with ten foot-tall paintings and milk-white statuary. Standing in the foyer peering in, it seemed to me none of it had any practical use beyond its grandiose statement of sinful wealth and extreme snobbery. Undoubtedly, Mom would have agreed. And, the statues were naked.

But such was not the case with the occupants themselves.

A middle-aged gentleman dressed in a Lord and Taylor-looking black suit strode across the floor several minutes later as I stood gawking at the smooth, sculpted, firm breasts on one of those statues. He was followed by a much younger woman, fashionably attired, who at first I mistook for Sophia Loren. Miss Marilou Jenkins, sporting a blonde, pixie cut hairdo, followed her beautiful black-haired mother. My eyes fixed on the young woman immediately, trying to imagine if she could have looked any more angelic with locks like waterfalls of silk drifting all the way to her shoulders, and snow white wings that had not been savaged by the fire. I shuddered and drew in a breath as inconspicuously as my instantly smitten condition would allow. I glanced again quickly at the undressed statue directly over her shoulder—and then as quickly made an abbreviated act of contrition.

Miss Marilou Jenkins surveyed the three visitors from the Westside; Pop and Jimmy, impassively, briefly, and then she let her gaze fall on me where it rested as she followed her parents into the foyer where we stood waiting. Whether she was counting the droplets of sweat that had begun to form on my forehead after seeing this creature Jimmy had lit on fire, mentally sneering at the apparent rags I’d thrown on not two hours ago in ignorance of the impending audience, or simply wondering what alien universe I’d escaped from, I could not tell.

“Mr. Morley. Thank you for coming across town with the boys.” Mr. Jenkins spoke in a clear, mellifluous voice as he walked toward my father, his hand extended in greeting.

Pop seemed very comfortable, or at least not particularly ill-at-ease. He shook the gentleman’s hand.

“I’m very sorry, Dr. Jenkins, that this visit became necessary. This is my son, Daniel, and his friend Jimmy.” He motioned with a nod of his head for me to say something. But what was I to say in that ambassadorial place, standing before these people who likely had just removed wreaths of laurel from their heads before entering the cavernous room?

It’s so lovely to meet you, sir. May I kiss your daughter?

And so I merely said, “Hello, sir.” To my undying horror, my voice cracked mid-sentence. The velvety mid-range C of ‘hello’ suddenly kicked up three octaves at the next short word, ‘sir’. I cursed my vocal cords and would have bolted for the door right then except that Miss Marilou Jenkins’ aquamarine eyes had brightened like twin novas, and she smiled across the room at me. I cleared my throat. My cheeks and forehead bled heat.

“Please,” Dr. Jenkins gestured to us, “Come into the library. Right this way.” He waited until Pop drew alongside him, and then walked with him, trading small asides, grinning at my father’s pithy replies.

The amiable doctor’s wife lingered a step behind the two of them. She smiled at Jimmy and me and then inquired. “Your mother could not make it, Daniel?”

“No, ma’am. Saturday is laundry day.”

“I see. That is a shame. And your mother, James?” she said turning to Jimmy, who turned up his nose at the appellation.

“Umm…she’s emptyin’ bottles.”

I cringed, certain that...

“I see. Baby bottles? You have a younger brother or sister?”

Jimmy nodded, as if he had rehearsed his answer. “Yeah, one of each.”

“Ah. How lovely.” We crossed the expanse of the gallery of naked statues, Miss Marilou Jenkins gliding between her mother and myself as though one of those marble images had come to life and stepped down from its pedestal. I thought I caught the faint scent of lilacs drifting from her. “The younger ones must keep her very busy, indeed.”

“You can’t imagine,” Jimmy laughed. “Bottles everywhere. And crappy diapers.”

Mrs. Jenkins’ pencil-thin, dark eyebrows soared upward at the remark, and she shot a mildly disdainful look at my best friend. Miss Marilou Jenkins put a hand to her mouth, stifling a giggle. We moved on, me wishing I had at least worn my old suit.

At the end of the gallery of statues and paintings, an ornate archway of stone led into a wide hallway lined with several imposing carved wood doors, their polished brass handlesets set midway up on one edge in the European style. Dr. Jenkins stopped at the second room on the right, opened the door inward, and indicated with a gracious wave of his hand for us to enter. Again, and not for the last time that day, my jaw dropped. This was the library.

Four wingback chairs—that Pop took only casual notice of, but probably would be able to describe down to the last luxurious thread later—were set in a semi-circle in front of a kingly desk of mirror-polished wood. Floor to ceiling bookcases stood, packed with volume after volume, and except for the doorway in, and a single, tall window behind the desk, the books dominated; a dense wallcovering of thousands of lofty, written thoughts.

We took a seat; Pop, Jimmy, me, and to my right, Miss Marilou Jenkins with her faint scent of summer flowers. Dr. Jenkins sat imperiously in his leather chair opposite us behind the desk. A gray-mist shaft of light shined through the window making him appear otherworldly. He leaned back and surveyed the two arsonists, the fingertips of his right hand tapping his chin, and then he let his gaze fall on his daughter.

“That was a very serious and foolish thing you boys did in that theater. You understand that, don’t you,” he said, as though the statement was being directed at her.

“Yes sir,” I concurred holding onto my vocal chords with all that I possessed.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Jimmy followed.

I did not wait for anything further to erupt out of Jimmy’s mouth. I turned to Miss Marilou Jenkins and melted into an apology worthy of my finest moment inside a confessional.

Please accept my sincerest forgiveness, miss. If I had it all to do over again I wouldn’t of…well, that is…I would have…”

Miss Marilou Jenkins’ smile broadened in amusement at my comments. She turned full-face to me and said, “I accept your ‘forgiveness’. I was planning to have it cut anyway.”

I heard Jimmy exhale in relief. If we were to be chastised and made to kneel in sackcloth outside their door for one or two weeks; made to survive on moldy black bread, and water from the gutter, it appeared it would not be at the hands of the girl sitting beside me. We both looked imploringly over at Dr. Jenkins, as if to say, “See, sir. No harm done. None at all.”

“What were ya’ doin’ at a theater clear across town?” Jimmy asked Miss Marilou Jenkins in the momentary lull in the conversation. Pop looked over at Jimmy in astonishment. I dropped my gaze and squinted with pain. Still, it was a good question, but I would never have had the courage to ask it. I waited for her answer.

“Our daughter wished to visit her cousins who live near a park on your side of town,” Dr. Jenkins emphasized the phrase, ‘near a park’. Barnum, I guessed, as there was nothing as grand as City Park where we lived; just the small, hilly half mile square home of smaller trees, smaller trails, a smaller playground, and the smaller lake. “Her mother and I were going out of town. Perhaps we should have taken her with us?” he asked in a serious tone, but with a glint in his eye.

Probably so.

In the moments ahead we learned these things:

Dr. Jenkins had been in Minneapolis with his lovely wife that weekend attending a convention of Proctologists. The eminent rectal repair specialist did not tell us exactly what one hears at such a convention—perhaps long hissing sounds punctuated by laughter and the pinching of noses?—but he lectured us, punctuated, definitely, with extremely long words neither of us had ever heard before. We sat before him nervously, and I’m certain shook our heads yes once or twice, when in fact we should have shaken them no.

The inferno in Miss Marilou Jenkin’s hair turned out to be not an inferno at all. In fact it was only a minor brush fire of really little consequence. The cousin sitting at her side had had the foresight and prize fighter reactions to smother it long before it did more than eliminate most of the split ends caused by teasing and hairspray.

“Young gentlemen such as yourselves from good Christian families,” Dr. Jenkins turned his head slightly toward Pop and nodded. Pop nodded obligingly back at him. “…consider their actions very soberly, weighing the consequences…” And we listened to it all again.

An hour later as we left his mansion I couldn’t help but overhear Pop inquiring of Dr. Jenkins whether he knew the little known fact that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart suffered from Tenesmus, brought on by an unwillingness, or forgetfulness, to run to the chamber pot due to his complete immersion in composing. Of course, Pop continued, the physicians of the day diagnosed the discomfort as nothing more than gas.

“Not precisely true,” corrected Dr. Jenkins (who certainly would have known). “Herr Mozart consumed entirely too much beef, and drank cheaper wines far in excess of what would even then have been considered moderate to heavy alcoholic consumption. While he imagined his bowels…”

At the end of which Pop quipped that never in his life had beef, or beer, at least, “…caused any discernible deviation from other than a normal bowel movement in my life. At any rate,