Miss Prissy

Miss Prissy

     He was dressed in his finest suit as he lay in his casket under the rotunda. Pat’s Aunt Mercy lay in her bed in a room off the big room. Her name was Pat and her duty was to sneak bourbon and whiskey to get Auntie drunk enough not to cry. She kept Pat on her feet as she went to the kitchen to get Auntie booze. Aunt Mercy ushered in her widowhood with gin and tonic with lime on the rocks. At twenty-one Pat was still girlish but old enough to learn how to mix drinks during a wake. Her bridegroom, Bob, was huddled with the men but quiet as a church mouse while letting her male cousins talk about football and women both of which he knew little of as she could attest to. So she found the company of her embalmed uncle between bartending trips for Aunt Mercy more to her liking than the gossiping woman whose chit-chat bored her more than a soap opera.
     Uncle Laffere looked like the southern gent he was in life. He wore a dress shirt with buttons that sparkled in the lamplight. Pat could almost see a wry smile on his face as though he were saying, “I beat the devil. I lived longer than anyone would have imagined. And I died drunk. Not every man can have such luck. If I’d been in the hospital they would not have let me near the sauce. But I was back at the house and no one could stop me in my own house.”
     So she was little Patty. Her quiet trips to Aunt Mercy’s liquor closet were fun. That may sound strange at a wake. But Pat’s girlish blues were soothed by this play. She didn’t want to have to stand around doing nothing and watching old folks weep. Her job gave her a challenge. Aunt Mercy didn’t want the others to see her soused. So Pat had to be as sly as a fox.
     Pat dipped up to the coffin to get a close-up view of Uncle Laffere. He was such a fine-looking man. She wished they could have stuffed him and kept him in the old house. He seemed to belong there like he was part of the furniture.
     His mustache and beard made him look distinctive even in the arms of death. Men like him should live long lives she thought. He hardly worked but he was a gentleman to the end. He respected women which went a long way in Pat’s book to make him honorable. She remembered him telling his sisters and aunts, “Don’t punish yourselves. Sit in the shade.”
     But Pat paid her final respects to him. She kissed him on his forehead. She almost saw a wink in his eye. A lady in a black Italian mourning veil startled Pat by putting her hand on her shoulder. “I know you miss him, dear. What a handsome devil he was.”
     “Oh, he sure could put on the Ritz, Ma’am. When he blew that sax I just swooned. Don’t you think he belongs here on permanent display like Lenin is in Red Square?” Pat said with a smile.
     Cousin Rose replied, “I know the liquor is tempting at times like these but all things in moderation as Socrates said, my dear.”
     Her soon-to-be husband, Bob, finally broke away from the guys and joined her at the casket. “Pat, I am headed to Boston for a few days to help my Mom with her taxes.”
     “But honey, I’m taking my final exams next week. Can’t she hire someone to do that for her?”
     “I’ve always done them. You know how she hates to spend money.”
     “Her pathological obsession with saving things is too much. The last time we visited her house she had her husband’s dress clothes hanging at the foot of the bed like he was getting ready to go to work. He’s been dead for five years!”
      “She is eccentric.”
     “That word hardly does justice to her need for collecting things. She suggested I use her cough syrup for my sore throat. That syrup expired in the thirties.”
     “Well, we all have our strange habits. This gathering is odd to the nth degree.”
     “You think my family is peculiar? Just because my Aunt Mercy is in the guest room drunk as a skunk with her husband dead no more than three days? You know something you are right,” Pat tells him with a giggle.
    “Your family is like a menagerie from a Tennessee Williams play.”
     “I’ll take that as a compliment because I always identified with Blanche.”
      “You aren’t as desperate as her.”
     “Oh, you should have seen me with my friend Doris in Biloxi the night she introduced to me the
idea of you as my date.”
     “I hope you were pleased with me as your dance partner.”
     “You had all the right moves. That made up for your shyness. You swept me off my feet without saying a word.”    
      “I really can get used to iced tea and grits.”
     “I’m glad you agreed to move down south to New Orleans because there is no way I could have stood digging the car out of snow, those beautiful fall colors notwithstanding.”
     “You are lovelier than a maple tree in full blaze.”
     “You are more handsome than Elvis singing ‘Blue Suede Shoes’. That is the Gospel truth. Come upstairs and let me show you the Old South.”
    They crept up the stairs to an attic room. On the way there they gazed at pictures of Confederate soldiers and antique sewing machines from the nineteenth century. The room had bells to summon serving people. It was a time capsule of a forgotten age. They locked the door behind them and Bob began the flirtation that was uncharacteristic for his timid soul.
     “Pat, your beauty is beyond this world. How could I ever overlook the glitter of your eyes or the glow of your face?”
     “Oh Bob you’re making me blush. Stop it.”
     “I shall try to stay my tongue. Yet your inner light cannot be resisted.”
     “Bob when you talk like that I feel like a precious gem. Yet I long to be ordinary.”
     “Pat, you are a rare jewel whose aura enchants mere mortals.”
     “Bob, I see an anthology of Coleridge sitting on the shelf that is just waiting to be opened by us. Read to me his Kubla Khan and we’ll pretend we are cavorting in an opium den.”
     Bob pulls out the book and begins reading to Pat by the lamplight but hesitates like an explorer gazing upon a new land. “Look at you. You are mesmerized by this poem. What about it has you so fascinated?” Bob asked Pat.  
     “Such a peculiar feeling came over me. I felt beside myself with joy and fear.”
     “What were you afraid of?”
     “It felt strange. I was bathing in the words until my heart was all aflutter. I was afraid I might need more than poetry tonight and am not sure I am ready. It felt like a part of me died. It was kind of like when the horn broke off Laura’s unicorn in the play ‘The Glass Menagerie.’ I was about to seal my membership in the adult world. The magic of my childhood self was gone forever. I wasn’t protected anymore. My emotions were laid bare.”
     “Pat you have blossomed into womanhood. But I promise to take things one at a time. There is still so much fragile about you.”
     “I think I led you up here for proof that you are the man I will marry. If we weren’t at a wake I’d sleep with you right now.”
     “Pat, what did I do to earn such affection from my very own fiancée?”
     “You make me feel normal.” Pat kissed Bob on the cheek. Then she heard her mother calling her. She turned out the light and gathered her skirts to take her prissy self down the stairs.