Rodeos cropped up each year. The rodeo stars swept into town and we got off school on a Thursday and Friday. But every rodeo differed and the next rodeo, after the windy one, occurred on a dreadful rainy day, which led us into the sunken living room of an old family friend.
"Rodeo Day! Well, no school for you, but my old friend from Fort Wayne, Indiana, Mrs. Jones, wants to see the three of you. She has a young boy visiting from New York. Was that a groan I heard in the back seat? I don't want to hear any of that! I want all of you to notice the quality of the things that are in Mrs. Jones' home," said Mother on the way to her old benefactor's, the lady from Fort Wayne who'd sponsored my mother when she left the Women Marines and traveled by train to Arizona to use her G.I. bill rights for college. She planned to leave us at Mrs. Jones' mansion for some very important dress shopping. Dress shopping was one of our least favorite activities, so we were relieved to discover we were being excluded. She went on to say that "Alma Jones is a very wealthy woman from near to my home and a friend of my family, her father was a Methodist minister with a gift for giving stirring sermons, and her husband was such an important banker from Fort Wayne, and they came out to Arizona for his health, his asthma, leaving the bank in good hands and producing income galore. They live off the income of the income! Well, and the best things in their home are more than you will see in many museums, let me tell you kids. So get an eyeful while you're there. By cracky, she has lovely things. I hope you respect her fine things and don't touch any of them. I will be very angry if you touch any of her things and ruin them."
Mrs. Jones herself loomed over us at the door of her white mansion. "Juney, well, here they are! Your children are growing!"
"I hope they behave," said Mother in a warning.
"Oh, they will," said Mrs. Jones. She was a large matronly woman, of obviously superior breeding and education, with watery blue-gray eyes that bulged, a large pale face and a pocket full of peppermint candies. Her mousy hair perpetually swept from her face into a huge bun at the back of her head. I think her shoulders were rounded, and she appealed to me more than she should have due to her social superiority, because of her Indiana accent, which was so like my mother's.
Her home, sure enough, overflowed with objet d'art from around the world, like some crazy nightmare, a cramped world of expensive possessions with no purpose, crowding against each other, clamoring for attention. A visitor stumbled into thick Persian rugs, Navajo rugs, Chesterfields, silk pillows, massive mahogany sideboards covered with Indian baskets (the large, dark, expensive ones), old pottery, oil paintings and cloisonn?. The giant TV case displayed a large droopy donkey-tail succulent in a pink bowl. This plant lived on a doily island. And that year there was also a terrible little boy on the sofa in front of the massive black and white TV.
In front of the boy hot chocolate cooled.
This strange boy who had been deposited at her house for days, not just a rainy afternoon, had his hair shaped in a bowl cut and Mrs. Jones informed us that he was from Back East, from New York, New York, the location we despised most in America, the apex of the evil which was controlling us. New York City was about as Eastern, and as evil, as we thought you could get.
The boy himself barely spoke to us or made eye contact. He felt miserable and wouldn't get off the sofa to play a board game or look at the rain, which meant nothing to him, but everything to us. He stared at the gray picture of the rainy parade, the miserable riders, ponies, bands members, the splashing water and slowly rolling stagecoaches.
"What a downpour," said Mrs. Jones, "I hope the ponies can swim. Aren't we better off in our home?"
"Sure," said Meredith amiably enough.
The boy smirked.
Water poured off of a cowboy hat and he laughed, once, wryly, in abject superiority. "Ha! Some cowboy! Rough rider!"
Mrs. Jones led the three of us on an excursion out to her covered ramada, to try to play hopscotch, something she thought she remembered, but the wind was blowing so hard that rain came through the rose bushes and left us miserably cold. When we were at the ramada, the boy from New York came out once briefly to look at a snail crawl on her lawn. "I've seen that before," he said across the lawn, smugly creeping back inside to the sofa.
He didn't know what a palm tree was or a cactus, but he told Mrs. Jones that he didn't want to know. He didn't want to know anything about Arizona.
"This place is a freak show," he told us when Mrs. Jones left us alone for a few minutes.
"This box might interest you," said Mrs. Jones, when she realized that we were completely bored by the parade and its miserable, wet participants.
There seemed no chance of the boy from New York liking anything.
"But inside of it," she gushed, "inside is something special indeed, so special to me. I thought that it might interest you. You see there is a most fascinating carved bean which has come all the way to Arizona from the continent of Asia and the country of India."
She held it toward us in her palm. The white bean was tiny, that beautiful bean shape, a sort of echo of the human body in its curves. But the bean was carved into a teeny elephant. The horns, the tusks, the shape of ear of the Indian elephant.
"It has also had an interesting journey along the way. I showed it to a businessman on the jet airplane and do you know what he did with it? He took it into the palm of his hands just like this," she cradled it, "and stared at it for a long time and then..." her eyes got big, "a tear came right out of the corner of his eye, it welled right up and dripped out and he began to cry onto the seat beside me. I lent him my handkerchief."
We all sat there hearing her mahogany grandfather clock tick and none of us spoke.
"Do you believe he cried?" asked Mrs. Jones finally.
"No," said Meredith with some thought, "don't be angry, but we all supposed you're lying about that."
Mrs. Jones laughed a crazy laugh that echoed weirdly in the room.
"Oh," she said suddenly, "I hear your second hot chocolate boiling!"
When she left us alone we really studied that poor kid from New York City. He got a thorough going over and it wasn't kindness we had in our hearts toward him. If we could have taken him outside in the rain and thrown him in an arroyo we would have done it gleefully.
We gave him the dumb little bean as a compensation for our obvious hatred of him.
He sat there with the dumb box and the dumb little bean elephant on his lap not doing a thing and not complaining either.
Then his eyes got real big, as though he had thought of something brilliant.
He picked up the bean and slowly, carefully, and with a great deal of ceremony, he jammed it up his nose. Pretty far up, too.
We stared at him in awe.
"Why did you do that?" asked Meredith.
Mrs. Jones brought in the tray of hot chocolate and didn't she start telling us all about where the tray came from too.
"This tray was craved of rosewood of the finest origin in Germany. Don't you think the little fairies and tiny roses are realistic?"
We refused to respond, but our eyes, which should have been on the tray she described, kept rolling toward the boy with a bean up his nose.
"Are you boys and girls enjoying yourselves?" she asked, with real terror.
How were we going to tell her that her guest had put the bean up his nose?
"Let's really watch the rodeo parade," she suggested. "We can all drink our hot chocolate and watch the ponies marching."
The boy acted eager, but nervous. He had a secret smile.
"Where is my little bean?" asked Mrs. Jones suddenly in terror.
None of us said anything.
That boy just went on smiling.
"Did one of you take my little bean?"
We said nothing.
"I don't want to make you empty out your pockets. I really don't. But that bean was a sentimental favorite."
"He put it up his nose," said Meredith finally in a fit of honesty.
"Put it up his nose!" ex
claimed Mrs. Jones in anguish. I wondered if her distress was at the fate of the bean or the boy. "What do you mean?"
"He shoved it up his nose. We all watched him do it."
She got up quickly and pushed the boy's head back to look.
"Did you?" she asked. She shook him. "Answer me! Did you put it up your nose?"
Finally, he nodded, though nodding seemed to pain him.
"Can you blow it out?"
He shook his head sullenly.
"Try!"
He blew into a tissue forcefully, then shook his head.
"I'll phone a doctor," said Mrs. Jones.
In those days of house calls the doctor still hadn't arrived when our mother took us away. We dearly wanted to see the bean yanked out of his nose.