MRS. DUKE AND THE FRUITCAKE

 

 

Perhaps it was the Black Dress which set the tone of foreboding.

 

Mr. and Mrs. Duke lived two-houses-down, in one of the big old mill houses, and immediately upon their moving in, had had their two sons from Memphis to come down with ladders and buckets to cover the house’s grim khaki siding with a lively appley green.

 

I think she did most of the rooms herself, over time, for you’d knock, and enter a deep purple space, where the Fullers had had the dimmish white living room.   Or step through the dining-room arch into a rusty-brown cave, with great wrought-iron sconces whose red glass shades cast an inferno-glow onto the dinnerplates and lent the rich lush air of midnight dining in a Spanish castillo.  

 

The kitchen was schoolbus yellow, with the old green linoleum the only dismal note, and the lighter yellow formica table and plump-vinyled chairs sat in the middle of the floor, with counters ranged all round the edges. 

 

 A strange combination of plaster plaques were scattered on all the walls---a whole village of little Asian people at various tasks, and enough bright half-fruit to fill Carmen Miranda’s hatbox. 

 

 

 

  

 

Mrs. Duke seemed to live in a maelstrom of Primary Colors, with interchangeable tablecloths and wardrobe featuring garish fruit or umbrellas or palm trees.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

The tiers of café curtains featured dancing pots and pans, and her aprons were always wild rick-rack dreams from the Crayola Box of Eight.

 

 

 

 

 

She WAS a good cook, at least to my notion, for she made Spaghetti and MEAT BALLS, with some exotic whiff of unknown, pleasant herb, and set out little green shakers of Parmeesyun cheese.    Hers was quite a contrast to our plain ground beef, crumbled and browned with bell pepper and onion, and anointed with a can of Campbell’s tomato soup and a tiny can of Contadina.  Ours was mixed into the biggest spaghetti Ronco had to offer, cooked way past fork-twirling stage.

 

Aluminum  Wearever percolator on the white Amana range, Golden Wheat cups and saucers on the table---never mugs, for those endless cups of Maxwell House with whoever-dropped-in, and at least five ashtrays distributed around the kitchen, any three of which could be guaranteed to have a Pall Mall or Kool smouldering away, sending up eye-searing little signals of “Don’t forget MEEEE!”

She was a bright little twinkle of a woman, with sparkly jewelry and a bouncing page-boy.  The Dukes belonged to the Civic Club and the Garden Club, and she was always scurrying off to Wednesday AND Thursday Bridge, with a colorful purse on her arm and the smiling snap of Doublemint as she went.

 

So one Christmas when she came into the house preceded by Arpege,  perhaps it was the unaccustomed black dress that startled us to begin with---setting a tone of foreboding in its severity, like the one poor Miss Doris Day wore in MIDNIGHT LACE.   Her smart little black suede sandal-strap heels clicked across the floor as usual, as she set a cellophane-wrapped present down on our kitchen table.

“Y’all, I have a confession,” she said, in the tones of about-to-admit-adultery.  We looked at her, shocked into silence, as she went on.   “Y’all KNOW I make a whole lot of fruitcakes every year, and I ALWAYS bring Y’all one.   Well, this year, I just worked so hard, and bought up all that candied fruit all Fall, and went clear over to Greenville to pick up pecans at Sister’s house.   And it took me several days to pick ‘em out, and then chop the fruit and mix up all those cakes---well, I just hate to tell Y’all, but when I got through all that mixin’ and stirrin’ and gettin’ into the pans and the first batch in the oven---I looked down and saw I had a FINGERNAIL missin’ and I just like to DIED!”

 

All eyes swiveled to her hands, and sure enough, the finger-with-her-rings on her left hand had a little ole stumpy nub-nail where her usual bright red manicure flourished, like a shorter plank in a picket fence.   I think we all probably swallowed hard, and I don’t remember what-all was said or done before she left.  

 

But when she was gone, my Mother picked up the cake and said,  “Anybody feel like eating this cake now?   Why did she have to tell everybody she gave one to?  Only one of us would have been surprised.”

 

It was kinda like the old joke about the raffle where the prize was a mule, and it turned out the mule was dead.   But only the winner complained, and they gave him his dollar back.