My ham came out perfectly that Friday evening, the best I’d ever made. It had been almost like a dream come true, cooking with my sister- and mother-in-law. We even laughed a bit. We put my ham, Lucy’s meat loaf, and Ruth’s fried chicken in the refrigerator to chill for Saturday’s box supper. Lucy had scraped together enough sugar to bake her red velvet cake, and Hattie had shown her how to create its vibrant color using beets instead of food coloring.
“We can take the leftovers to Adora and Honor and the kids,” Lucy said to her mother as we straightened the kitchen after our cooking project. “Adora’s birthday is Sunday, remember?”
“Oh yes,” Ruth said. “Taking them the leftovers is an excellent idea.”
All three of us turned at the sound of Henry’s car in the driveway.
“Maybe Henry can drive us to Adora’s on the way to church Sunday morning so we don’t have to take one of those blasted stinky old cabs,” Lucy said.
“Watch your language,” Ruth scolded as she took off her apron.
Henry walked in the back door and I knew right away he was in a sour mood. It emanated from him like something tangible. I stood awkwardly by the table, never knowing how to greet him when we were in front of his family. Certainly there would be no welcome-home kiss. We didn’t even kiss in private.
“What’s the matter with you?” Lucy asked.
He took off his coat and tossed it over the back of one of the kitchen chairs, then stood in front of us, hands crammed into his pants pockets. “Gaston’s trial ended,” he said. “He lost.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I still hadn’t met Gaston Joyner, although I’d seen a picture of him and his wife, Loretta, in the paper that morning. They stood side by side outside the courtroom and I felt a stab of sympathy for them. The wife, Loretta, had a hand to her cheek as though wiping a tear away, and Gaston was speaking to someone outside the photograph, exhaustion in his face. I knew Henry had been hoping—unrealistically so—that the state would recognize their interracial marriage as valid and his friend could stay out of prison.
“Well, of course he lost.” Ruth set her dirty apron on the table near the back door where Hattie would be sure to see it. “He was a fool to think he could come back here with a colored so-called wife and get away with it. It’s the law, pure and simple.”
“A backward law,” Henry muttered. He sounded like an angry little boy who hadn’t gotten his way.
“Oh, you’re just being obstinate,” Ruth said.
“It may be backward, Hank,” Lucy said, “but it’s the reality. Even if the law went away, Gaston and Loretta couldn’t live here in peace. People are already up in arms about them. You know that. It’s just the way it is.”
“Frankly, it makes me sick to think of them married.” Ruth shuddered. “Just horrible. And Gaston was such a nice young man.”
“He’s still a nice young man,” Henry countered his mother. “Only now he’ll be a nice young man in prison unless they can get out of Hickory right quick. The judge will suspend the sentence if they leave the state.” He turned toward the door that led to the hallway. “I’m going up to my room,” he said.
“Don’t you want to see what we cooked for the box supper?” I asked, knowing even as I spoke that my timing was poor, and I wasn’t surprised when he walked right past me as if he hadn’t heard.
* * *
The following evening, still in a foul mood, Henry drove us to the Presbyterian church. I spotted Violet the instant I entered the huge, smoky hall that had been set up for the event. She and Henry exchanged a look, and I thought there was an unmistakable message in that exchange, one I couldn’t read. Then she glanced at me with an amused sort of smile, and I turned away quickly, shaken. You’re being paranoid, I told myself.
Ruth, Lucy, and I delivered our boxes to a long table at the front of the room where a few dozen other gaily decorated boxes were already on display. On the wall above them, someone had hung several war bond posters of soldiers and their weapons caught in the act of fighting an unseen enemy. AIM TO WIN!, one of the posters proclaimed. ATTACK! ATTACK! ATTACK! read another.
As he often did in public, Henry took my elbow and guided me to a table where I sat with him and Ruth and Lucy and a few of Ruth’s friends whom I didn’t recognize. Henry lit his pipe and I wished I could have a cigarette, but I never smoked in front of Ruth. I didn’t want to give her one more thing to criticize about me.
Violet sat on the other side of the room with a few of her friends. She was dressed in royal-blue taffeta, and the light from the overhead fixtures pooled in her pale blond hair. People gathered around her table and she seemed to be in control of them all, laughing one moment at something one of them said, giving instructions to someone else the next. She was the magnet in the room. The white-hot center. I spotted her father, Byron Dare, and his wife at a separate table. They were hard to miss because people kept clapping Mr. Dare on the back, loudly congratulating him on winning the Joyner case.
Mayor Finley, whom I remembered meeting the first time I attended the Baptist church, stood at a podium at the front of the room, gavel in hand, and I guessed he would be presiding over the bidding. He slammed the gavel on the podium a few times to stop the chatter in the room and sent a warm smile into the crowd. I recalled liking both him and his wife in our brief meeting at the church.
“As with last year,” he said, once he had everyone’s attention, “we’ll dispense with the usual rules that govern the traditional box supper, given that so many of our young men are fighting for our freedom rather than being here to bid on these beautiful boxes and consume their contents with the ladies who made them. In other words, high bidders, both men and women, will simply enjoy the meals inside the boxes they win as they purchase war bonds and stamps, knowing their bids will support our boys and our country.”
He spoke a while longer and then the bidding began. The first box was auctioned off for twenty-three dollars after some brisk bidding, and I suddenly realized that the name of the woman who cooked the meal and decorated the box would be announced. Of course. What had I expected? Given my unpopularity in town, I feared no one would bid on my box and I would be humiliated. Worse, I worried about humiliating my husband.
Lucy’s box went to Teddy Wright for fourteen dollars. As he walked up to the front of the room to collect his box and war bond and stamps, it took me a moment to recognize him as the policeman I’d thought was following me the day I walked to the post office. Out of his uniform, he looked very young, no more than twenty, and he had a simple sort of handsomeness about him with his sandy hair and blue eyes. When he turned around to walk back to his seat, he winked at Lucy with a grin. And then—I was sure of it—he glanced in my direction, and the smile left his face.
“And here we have this lovely box created by Hank Kraft’s new bride, Tess Kraft,” Mayor Finley announced, holding my lace-and-bead box in the air. “Who will start the bidding?”
I didn’t have time to feel nervous before Byron Dare leaped to his feet. “You know, Arthur,” he said to the mayor in his syrupy drawl, “I’m an old-fashioned kind of fella. I like a box supper where we get to dine with the gal who did the cookin’. So I’m goin’ to just preempt any other bid and pledge one hundred dollars for that box … as long as I also get the honor of dining with the young lady who made it.”
A hush fell over the room except for one small word uttered by Violet.
“Daddy?” She nearly whispered it, and her father pretended not to hear her. I kept my gaze on Mayor Finley, but I could have sworn that every head in the room turned to look at me. I plastered a false smile on my face. Next to me, I felt Henry stiffen.
“Well, good for you, Byron,” Mayor Finley said. “One hundred dollars going once. Going twice.” He slammed down the gavel. “Looks like the district attorney will be dining with Mrs. Henry Kraft tonight.”
Mr. Dare looked toward us with a victorious smile. I thought his gaze was on Henry rather than me. There was a war going on between these two and I was not going to be a pawn in it.
When the bidding for boxes was over, Byron walked toward our table, my decorated box nestled in the crook of his elbow and a glass of some sort of liquor in his hand. He held out his free arm to me.
“Mrs. Kraft?” he said. “Let’s find ourselves a nice quiet little spot to enjoy your fine cookin’.”
Henry leaned close to whisper in my ear. “You don’t have to do this,” he said.
“I’m all right,” I whispered back and got to my feet. I took Mr. Dare’s arm and he led me to a nearly deserted corner of the room. I sat down across from him at a table already set with paper plates and silverware and studied his head of bushy white hair as he lifted the top of the box.
“Let’s see what we have here,” he said, removing one of the thick slices of ham and unwrapping it on a paper plate. “Well, ain’t this pretty,” he said, studying the ham. “What do you call it?”
“Stuffed ham,” I said. “It’s a specialty in Baltimore where I come from.” Maybe I could win him over. He was a very different man tonight than the one who’d completely ignored me at church the day he went on and on to Henry about how he’d hurt his daughter. This evening, he was ingratiating, his eyes on mine, his smile unrelenting. Maybe I stood a chance with him. I’d spent my whole life being liked. I’d even been thought of as popular in high school and nursing school. Why did I allow myself to be so intimidated here? “It’s fun to make,” I added.
He spooned a couple of the small potatoes onto my plate. “Hank got himself a real looker, didn’t he?” he said. “You look like you could be on stage or in the movies,” he added. “Do you know who Dante Rossetti is?”
I shook my head. “No idea.” I poured myself a glass of lemonade from the pitcher on the table.
“He’s an English artist famous for his sensual paintings of beautiful women with exceptionally thick, long hair,” he said, cutting a corner from his ham and lifting it to his mouth. “I’d wager that’s how your hair looks when you let it down.”
I squirmed ever so slightly in my seat, forgetting my idea about winning him over. He was too slick. “Shall we eat our supper?” I asked. I looked across the room to see Henry dining with the mayor and his wife. I’d completely lost track of Ruth and Lucy.
“Have I made you uncomfortable, Mrs. Kraft?”
“Not at all.” I smiled.
“Please accept my apology if I have.” He bowed his head slightly. “That wasn’t my intention. In Baltimore, maybe gentlemen aren’t as free with their compliments.”
“I’ve never been compared to a painting before,” I said awkwardly.
“Dante Rossetti,” he repeated. “You must give him a gander sometime.” He chewed a bite of ham, his gaze riveted on my face, and I feigned cutting my potato with great interest. “A booming town, Baltimore,” he said. “Hickory must seem like a sleepy little backwater to you.”
“Not at all,” I said. “It’s lovely.”
He sipped his drink. “Tell me about your people,” he said.
“My … family?”
“Yes. Your kin. Are they all in Baltimore?”
“I’m afraid I lost both my parents,” I said. “And I was an only child.” I wouldn’t let myself think about the rest of my “kin”—Mimi and Pop and Vincent.
“Oh, now that breaks my heart to hear,” he said. “The thought of my little girl growing up without a daddy or mama…” He shook his head. “I’m sorry you had to come up that way.”
“Thank you,” I said. “My father passed away when I was very young, but I lost my mother just recently. So I actually grew up with a lot of love and support.” I didn’t want him to see me as some pathetic little orphan.
“Good, that’s good.” He nodded, popping another bite of ham in his mouth. “Now how exactly did you meet our lucky Hank?” he asked, once he’d swallowed. “Where was it that you swept him off his feet?”
Oh, I didn’t like this man! I had to find a way to take control of the conversation, sooner rather than later. He was fishing for something and I had no idea what.
“Washington, D.C.,” I said.
“And when was that?”
I nibbled a piece of ham. “Quite a while ago,” I said evasively.
“Well, well.” He sat back from the table and observed me with a one-sided smile. “Who would have guessed that Hank Kraft had a little something like you on the side all this time.”
Stunned, I set down my fork, bristling. “I think you have a mistaken idea of my relationship with my husband,” I said. “We’ve been friends for a long time, and sometimes friendship can turn into something deeper. I believe that’s all you need to know.”
He looked surprised that I’d actually defended myself. I was finished playing his game. I was tempted to get up and march away from the table, but that was the coward’s way out. Instead, I smiled prettily at him. “So,” I said, “I think you’ve gotten in your hundred dollars’ worth of insults,” I said. “Now why don’t you tell me a little about your work?” I asked. “It must be fascinating.”
Slowly, I saw a look of respect replace the surprise on his face. “Very well,” he said. “Where shall I begin?”