Hit Me

Forty-Seven

Pirate Jenny,” he said. “Maybe that’s what you’ll be next Halloween. We’ll get you an eye patch, and your mother can make you a cutlass out of cardboard.”

“Daddy home,” said the future pirate, bouncing happily on his lap. “Daddy home!”

“Daddy’s home,” he agreed. “And in fifteen years or so, he’ll be the one stuck at home while you toddle off to college.”

“And it’s all paid for,” Julia said. “You really think she’ll go through with it? Set up our little bundle of joy with a six-figure trust fund?”

“Well, you never know,” he said. “It was her idea, and I couldn’t talk her out of it. She could change her mind, but I don’t think she will.”

“And where will the pirate go to college, do you suppose? She could follow in her mommy’s footsteps and go to Sophie Newcomb, but they went and merged my old school into Tulane. I’m not sure it would be the same. With all that money she could go someplace fancy. All New England preppy. Where would you want her to go?”

“Nowhere, for the time being. Fifteen years from now? I don’t know. Some school where there aren’t any boys, how’s that?”

“Aren’t you the dreamer. How about Sweet Briar, in Virginia? I knew a girl who went there, and don’t you know she got to keep her own horse there.”

“Right in the dormitory?”

“In the stable, you idiot. Jenny, you’ll be a pirate on horseback. How does that sound?”

“Daddy home,” Jenny said.

“Well, you know what’s important, don’t you? Yes, Daddy’s home. Aren’t we lucky?”

After they’d put Jenny to bed and then gone to bed themselves, after the lovemaking and the easy shared silence that followed the lovemaking, she said she didn’t think she’d ever known anyone named Gardenia.

“I gather no one ever calls her that,” he said. “I believe she said she’d had it changed legally.”

“Better than changing it illegally. Jeb, Jenny, Denia—all of y’all have got names that are short for something, except they’re not.”

“That’s true, isn’t it?”

“I guess. Is she pretty?”

“Denia Soderling? She’s an attractive woman.”

“Why didn’t you sleep with her? Or did you? No, you didn’t. What stopped you?”

“Huh?” He doubled up his pillow, propped himself up with it. “Where did this come from? Why would that even be a possibility?”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “A beautiful lonely widow? A handsome mysterious stranger? ‘Stay in my guest room, it’ll be so much more comfortable than that nasty old motel.’ She didn’t offer you the guest room in the hope that you’d stay in it.”

“I guess she may have been interested.”

“And you weren’t?”

He considered the question. “The last night,” he said, “when she wanted to set up a fund for Jenny’s education, we talked about her name, and how it was just plain Jenny, and not short for anything.”

“So they’d get it right on the paperwork.”

“I suppose. I told her how Jenny was a breech presentation.”

“And she got it right away? Or did you have to explain?”

What he could have told Denia Soderling:

“See, there’s a very famous U.S. airmail stamp of 1918, Scott C3a. There were actually three stamps with the same design—a six-cent orange, a sixteen-cent green, and a twenty-four-cent carmine rose and blue. They all pictured a Curtiss biplane, called the Jenny because it was part of the company’s JN series of aircraft.

“The high value, the twenty-four-cent stamp, was a bicolor, and that meant each pane of stamps had to make two passes through the printing process, once for each color. Only one sheet went through upside down, and as a result the stamps had what’s called an inverted center.

“Now, this was an occasional consequence of bicolor printing. In some countries, where quality control wasn’t a priority, or where enterprising employees had learned to make profitable mistakes, inverted centers turned up with some frequency. In 1901 the U.S. issued a stamp series to mark the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, the one where President McKinley was assassinated, and three of the six stamps could be found with their centers inverted. They all illustrated modes of transportation, so depending on the denomination, you’d have a steamship or a locomotive or an electric automobile, and it’d be upside down.

“Those three stamps were legitimate rarities, and nowadays bring substantial five-figure prices. But they didn’t catch the imagination of the public the way that upside-down plane did. These were the first airmail stamps, and aviation was very new and very exciting, and here’s this plane putting on an exhibition of philatelic stunt flying. You can buy a decent copy of the regular stamp, Scott C3, for around a hundred dollars. If you want the error, with the plane upside down, you’ll probably have to spend over a million.

“Our Jenny was turned around in the birth canal, and they were going to do a caesarean because she was leading with her behind, and that makes for a difficult delivery. But the obstetrician managed to get her turned around some, so that she emerged feet first.

“We’d already decided that we both liked the name Jenny. It was high on our list. And then, when she flew into our lives upside down, well, that cinched it.”

“She might have liked it,” Julia said. “Don’t you think? Her husband was a collector, and she had a million new reasons to like the whole idea of stamps.”

“I figured it would take a long time to explain. It was nothing she needed to know, and I didn’t feel like going through it.”

“So you didn’t sleep with her, and you didn’t tell her how your daughter got her name. You’re some houseguest. Glad to be home?”

“Very.”

“And you’re exhausted, aren’t you? You can tell me the rest tomorrow. And I guess you’ve got stamps to put in.”

“Magic beans,” he said.

“I won’t even ask what that means,” she said. “Good night, my sweet.”

But she asked him the following afternoon. He’d caught up with the mail by then, and driven to Slidell to pick up the envelope that was waiting for him at a Mail Boxes Etc. office. Cash, his share of the money Joanne Hudepohl had wired to Dot in Flagstaff.

Back home, he stashed the money, then went to work on his stamps. His office was not nearly so grand as Jeb Soderling’s beautifully appointed stamp room, but it suited him just fine. His chair was comfortable, his desk the right size and height, and the light fell on his books and stamps without getting in his eyes.

Jenny took her usual perch on the chair beside his, and he kept up a running commentary while she watched every move he made. He was still hard at it when nap time came around, and Julia led Jenny away and came back to take her place at the stamp table.

“Stamps are educational,” she said, “even when it’s your father who collects them. I’ll bet there’s not a kid in her whole day care center who knows a damn thing about the Turco-Italian War and the Treaty of Roseanne.”

“Lausanne.”

“I was close. Lausanne’s in Switzerland, isn’t it? Or am I thinking of Lucerne?”

“They’re both in Switzerland.”

“Both of them? That’s confusing, isn’t it? Which one is full of magic beans? You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you? Well, that makes us even. Those were the last two words you said last night, right before you dropped off to sleep. Or maybe you were already asleep. Are you going to tell me about the magic beans?”

It took him a minute. Then he remembered and recounted his dreamy conversation with his dead mother.

“Magic beans,” Julia said. “Well, your mother might not agree, but I think taking your commission in stamps makes perfect sense. What do you figure they’re worth?”

“The Scott value’s a little over a hundred thousand. On this sort of material, figure retail at somewhere between sixty and seventy-five percent of catalog. I couldn’t get that for them, but that’s what I’d have had to pay.”

“But you didn’t have to pay anything. That’s nice.”

“Very. You know, I don’t think it cost her anything, either. I can’t believe anybody’s bid would have been higher if the stamps I took were still in their albums.”

“So everybody wins?”

“Denia wins,” he said, “and so do I. Would Talleyrand Stamp and Coin net a few dollars more if these stamps were included in what they bought? I suppose so, but they’ll make out fine as it is.”

“And they’ll never miss what they never knew was there. And you’re better off getting paid in stamps, because you’d have spent the money on stamps anyway. So you did fine with the magic beans, and that was only part of your compensation. The next time you talk with your mother you can let her know you picked up some cash while you were at it.”

“That’ll be a load off her mind.”

“Do you want to tell me about that part of it? Jenny’s good for another half hour minimum, if you feel like talking about what you did in Denver.”