Secrets and Lies

Lemonade and Larceny

It was one of those hot August afternoons when the humidity was so high that even the broad green leaves of the sugar maples on either side of Effie Birmingham’s front porch hung heavily from the branches as though having given up hope that a breeze would ever stir them again. But the trees didn’t complain, their broad branches employed in the Herculean task of providing some small measure of respite from the heat for the dozen women listening in rapt attention to Effie’s latest pronouncements.

It was Thursday, and Effie always held court on Thursday.

Any other day of the week, you might think that Effie was just like the rest of us – a middle-aged West Virginia housewife, who packed her husband off each morning and then spent her day tending to the myriad tasks that were part and parcel of suburban life.

But on Thursdays, after Mr. Birmingham loaded the two Birmingham children into their shiny-new, light blue 1952 Chevrolet sedan and drove away, dutifully taking their offspring to spend the day with their grandmother while he was at work, Effie would mix up a pitcher of a seasonally-appropriate beverage and prepare trays of small sandwiches and cookies or other appetizers whose recipes she’d found in the pages of Ladies’ Home Journal or Good Housekeeping magazine.

In good weather, she would arrange the drinks and treats on a small buffet table which she’d set up on the deeply shadowed front porch that stretched halfway across the front of the tall, red-brick house. Then she would untie the apron from around her slim waist, smooth out her full skirt, and swirl an embroidered silk shawl around her shoulders.

If she was feeling particularly carefree, she would also wind a strand of brightly colored beads into her short, brown coiffure before taking her seat in the old cane rocker and waiting for us to arrive.

On this particular day, Effie was serving ice-cold lemonade touched with a bit of spiced rum, which we all thought was wickedly exotic. We sipped at our drinks and nibbled at chicken salad sandwiches, cut into small triangles with the crusts carefully trimmed away, and delicate shortbread leaves flavored with just a hint of almond.

And as we sat there, our own full skirts spread out across a patchwork of blankets laid picnic-style across Effie’s small front lawn while we ate and drank and twirled our fingers in our pearl necklaces and waved hand-fans in an effort to create some small breeze, we listened to Effie plan our next – and possibly biggest – caper.

Because, you see, Effie had a gift. A sixth-sense, as it were.

She could tell you where you’d lost your grandmother’s brooch, just what to say to the grocer to persuade him to lower the price on a roast by a few pennies per pound, or how to keep your man’s attention before he ever realized he was starting to stray. We all consulted her regularly, gladly parting with a dollar here or there for her insight.

And then some uppity-up politician’s wife over in Charleston had a bad experience with a phony fortune-teller at a country fair and the next thing we all knew, any professional practitioner of phrenology, palmistry, fortune-telling or clairvoyance, as the law phrased it, was suddenly guilty of a Class II misdemeanor. Well, we certainly didn’t want Effie to risk fines or jail time on our account, so for a while we all stayed away from her and bit our tongues on our questions.

But old habits die hard, and we’d relied on Effie for too many years to be stopped by trifles. Soon, one by one, we found ourselves casually bumping into Effie at the supermarket. We’d ask our questions, she would graciously give her counsel in an off-hand, we’re just having a casual conversation as we shop manner. We would chat our way to the register only to find that, oh, my, will you look at that, you must have put that sack of flour in my cart by mistake, Effie, because I certainly didn’t mean to buy it for myself; but no matter, here you go, I’ve already paid for it, and you can just pay me back later.

Well that worked well enough for a while, but it was tedious always having to try to catch up to Effie at the supermarket or the hardware store or the Woolworth’s whenever we needed to talk to her.

It was Mary Beth Harper who first came up with the idea of the Saturday Socials, though I suspect Effie herself was instrumental in formulating the plan, as she was behind most of our best schemes.

Regardless of who actually thought of it, throughout that first winter we gathered weekly, rotating from one of our homes to another, for a luncheon or midafternoon tea. During these socials, we would each take turns pulling Effie aside into a parlor or a bedroom or a kitchen for a few minutes of private consultation without anyone thinking anything of it – or reporting it to the authorities.

Of course, our husbands frowned on how our weekly hen-fests, as they liked to call them, interrupted their own weekend plans, so we soon switched to a weekday gathering. It’s not like the men have any idea what we do while they’re away at work anyway; as long as there’s a hot meal and a cold drink waiting for them when they get home, we can spend our days as we like, and often do.

It was that first Thursday luncheon that Effie hosted, in the spring of 1952, one year after the law had been passed, when everything changed.

Oh, she was all grace and charm, the perfect hostess that our mothers and grandmothers had taught us all to be, but there was something different in her manner. She’d set up a simple outdoor buffet and spread a patchwork of quilts on the grass like a small carpet, then took up her own seat – none of which would have seemed the least bit unusual, but for her doing all of this at the front of her house rather than in the privacy of her back yard.

Well, we were all a little bit shocked, to say the least. We’d gone to great lengths to keep Effie and her prognostications from being noticed by anyone who might cause us grief, and here was Effie herself all but proclaiming to the world that she was a professional fortune-teller.

She had to know it was a dangerous thing to do. She was clairvoyant, after all.

It’s a silly law, and I am morally obliged to break it, she said when we questioned her, her soft drawl lightened by a merry laugh. Besides, if anyone should ask, we’re simply having a garden party, a picnic. They haven’t passed laws against those, now have they?

And then she poured us tall glasses of Long Island Iced Tea – another bit of wickedness, as our Saturday Socials had all been scrupulously non-alcoholic, so not to further antagonize our husbands by any of us coming home with liquor on our breath – and none of us questioned her further on the matter.

Effie’s devil-may-care attitude was contagious. So when she suggested that it would be perfectly understandable if a tin of chocolates accidentally fell into Barbara Kirkland’s large purse the next time she was at the grocery store, Barbara nodded, her dimpled cheeks turning rosy and blonde curls bouncing merrily at the thought, and proceeded to do that very thing.

And when Effie told Margaret Forsythe that she could both retrieve her favorite pair of garden gloves, which had gone missing the previous fall, and help herself to a new pair of shears from Betty Hellman’s shed at the same time without the annoying gossip ever noticing, the prim librarian took note. Margaret later confessed to us, with some pride, that she’d marched straight over to her nosy next-door-neighbor’s shed that very afternoon and relieved her of not only the gloves and the shears, but a small bucketful of gladiolus bulbs as well, which she then planted in her own neat garden.

One by one, Effie suggested that we commit a series of little larcenies and minor misdemeanors – and whether it was because we actually wanted to, or because we’d fallen in with her sense of cheerful irresponsibility as an antidote to the predictability of our everyday lives, we all went along with her suggestions.

We talked of fashions and films and practiced pick-pocketing and lock-picking. We