Unfortunately I own nothing of the original "Peter Gunn" TV series and make no monetary profit. Peter Gunn and Edie Hart are the creation of the brilliant Blake Edwards. I'm merely borrowing them for my own enjoyment.
Oh, No! Not My Parents
Chapter Two
A fleeting, off-kilter question skittered through Edie's mind as she stared at the middle-aged couple standing in her doorway – How did her parents always manage to make an appearance at the least expected and most inopportune moment? It was a curse that had followed her from early childhood through her teenage years. Apparently the ten years that had passed since she'd left home hadn't made a dent in Mama and Papa's ability to catch one unaware. Especially Mama. Did she try? Or was she lucky enough to always be in the right spot at the wrong time?
Edie was engulfed by her father's firm embrace, all rancorous thoughts momentarily fleeing. A comforting sensation of safety and peace enveloped her as it always did inside his hug, as it had since she was a little girl sitting on his knee. His dark brown gabardine jacket held a blended aroma of Blackstone cigars, Old Spice aftershave and Kiwi shoe polish, prompting an overwhelming ache of unexpected tears as she buried her face in the soft fabric. She felt his arms momentarily tighten around her and he dropped a quick kiss against her temple before he released her. He stepped back to hold her at arm's length, his blue eyes smiling into hers.
"I'm sorry we didn't let you know we were coming." Joe Hart eyed his daughter's blue cotton robe and embroidered velvet slippers of almost the same color. "Did we get you out of bed, Pumpkin?"
"Papa–"
"I know, I know. Grown women don't like to be called such silly names by their fathers." He removed his fuzzy gray fedora with the ear-flaps, a hat Edie knew he'd had for more years than he'd admit, and offered up an affectionate smile. "But give an old man a break now and again, eh?"
Before she could answer, Mama was talking.
"Your father took the week off to go ice fishing with your Uncle Tom." Mary Grace Hart removed her scarf and took off her thick red woolen gloves. She wiggled her fingers and blew on them in an attempt to warm them. "Irene has been after us to visit so we decided to kill two birds with one stone." Her curious gaze swept Edie's small living room.
"In the time it took us to drive to Clearfield – you know it only takes about three hours – old Tom tripped over his tackle box and broke his wrist." Joe Hart chuckled and ran his hand over his sandy flat-top. "His fishing wrist. I know it's not funny and I shouldn't be laughing. I think his pride's been hurting him more than his wrist though, along with the fact his own vacation is a loss. He said we should still go and he could sit and watch–" He shrugged and grinned as he unzipped his jacket. "But it wouldn't have been the same. We always make a game of it, make bets on who'll catch the most and the biggest."
"We stayed Saturday and Sunday and then on Monday called down to Lancaster to see if Virginia and Jim would be at home for a visit. We spent a very enjoyable few days with them and then when we left this morning, well, the car was pointed in this direction and, well..." Mary Grace darted a furtive glance at her husband. "It was a spur of the moment decision." The tone of her voice dared him to disagree.
Joe didn't say anything, merely gave a resigned sigh and cast Edie a look that she wasn't quite able to interpret. He had always been good at that, her Papa, saying something with a mere expression. She must have inherited the ability from him, Edie mused, Pete once telling her she could carry on an entire conversation without so much as saying a word. Mama, on the other hand, usually managed to get a word in edgewise, lengthwise, sideways and otherwise, whether her listeners wanted to hear it or not.
Edie absently tightened the belt of her robe, slender fingers playing with the loose knot. She supposed she should ask about the well-being of Papa's sister Irene and her husband Tom Clark, or Mama's sister Virginia and her husband Jim Day, but she didn't. Instead, she found her eyes following her mother's inquisitive gaze to the dark gray suit jacket that hung neatly over the back of an armchair and the pair of black leather shoes sitting beside it. She sighed inwardly, finally deciphering her father's facial demeanor as one of apology and knowing instantly what her mother was thinking before the older woman even put those thoughts into words.
"Is that a man's jacket, Edith?" Mary Grace's face crinkled into a schoolmarmish frown. She stepped further into the apartment and draped her beige tweed coat over the arm of the sofa. "Please don't tell me you're entertaining a man dressed like you are. And at this hour of the day! It's already well past most normal people's lunch time."
Edie's lips parted to voice a response but she quickly bit her tongue. She wondered who those normal people were that her mother seemed to know about. And what did it matter if there was a man's jacket in her apartment where someone – some unexpected someone – might see it?
"And do I smell fresh coffee and banana muffins?" Mama Hart had a nose for baking. A nose that she began following toward the kitchen.
"Um, no, yes..." Edie took her father's jacket from him and tossed it to the sofa after her mother's coat. "Mama, where are you going?"
"It really does smell wonderful, Edith, and we didn't stop anywhere for lunch..." Mama disappeared around the corner.
Edie expelled a frustrated sigh. A glance at her father informed her he was avoiding the evolving situation at all costs. His hands dug deep into the pockets of his faded brown corduroys and he inspected the items they brought out with frowning intensity, his gaze riveted on common everyday keys, loose change and a book of matches as though they had fallen to earth from some alien spacecraft. If thirty-four years of marriage, come June 14, had taught Joe Hart one thing, it was that the women in his life were obstinate creatures and that one wrong word from him could create a bad situation from a benign beginning. He was no coward, he simply picked his own time and place to fight his battles.
Edie rolled her eyes and followed close on her mother's heels, fervently hoping Pete's earlier good humor hadn't deserted him.
Mary Grace Hart had fully expected to find Peter Gunn in her daughter's apartment. No other man could belong to that expensive-looking jacket and thirty dollar shoes. She just hadn't banked on stumbling upon him in the kitchen, making breakfast, wearing nothing but a pair of dark blue boxers. The man hadn't blinked an eye, at least as far as she could tell. She'd been too busy staring at his chest to meet his eyes. His very manly, very bare chest. It wasn't because she'd never seen a man's chest before. She'd simply been caught off guard, something that rarely happened to her. Mary Grace prided herself in being prepared for any situation.
Walking into the living room, Edie dropped a set of bed sheets and two pillows onto the nearest armchair. The cotton bedding, pale pink with a pattern of dark pink rosebuds, fit the pull-out sofa better than the several other sets kept in the bathroom linen closet. She removed the cushions from the sofa and set them in the corner by the fireplace and then she and her mother got the bed unfolded.
"Your- ... Mr. Gunn must spend a lot of time here."
Though Mary Grace had been at a strange loss for words earlier that afternoon, her eyes had followed the man – she couldn't help but think of him in any other terms than that – upon his return from wherever it was he'd disappeared to when she'd briefly turned her back to him in the kitchen. He'd seemed comfortably familiar with the apartment as he and Edie delivered a lunch of muffins, eggs, toast, bacon, condiments and coffee to the table.
Edie unfolded the bottom sheet and tucked in one corner of the thin mattress as best she could, giving her mother a curious look in the process.
"I noticed a man's black leather toiletry bag on the bathroom counter," Mary Grace Hart continued as she gathered up a few personal belongings from the long side pocket inside her suitcase. "I also noticed an extra toothbrush in the holder and an almost empty bottle of Aqua Velva on the vanity and I'm almost certain there was an electric razor." She set aside a small gold-colored cosmetic bag and a blue-patterned cotton flannel nightgown. "Exactly how often does he stay the night?"
"Mama–" The fitted bottom sheet in place, Edie spread the flat sheet, its edges hanging over the sides of the mattress by about a foot all around. She gathered the feather pillows and the pillow cases and tossed one of each in her mother's direction.
"Is he the only one?"
"What?" The blonde's eyes widened. Did she really hear her Mama ask that? She wanted to say something but any reply she might have made seemed lodged in her throat, so she simply watched as her mother closed the suitcase with a sharp snap.
Mary Grace could have bitten her tongue the moment she said the words. She was well aware there was no one else. The girl's letters and phone calls were replete with Pete this and Pete that, no other man had been mentioned in so long she had a problem cudgeling up a name. She knew she would eventually end up apologizing but there were times she just couldn't understand her daughter.
"This–" The older woman appeared stymied for a moment before sinking down on the almost-made bed, pillow case clutched in her hands, and forging ahead. "This lifestyle you lead – that nightclub and all those musicians and the hangers-on, working until all hours of the morning... It's not at all what your father and I envisioned for you."
"Mama, it's my life. I love what I do and I enjoy the people I work with." She heaved a long-suffering sigh. "You've never even been to Mother's so you're not allowed to pass judgment on it or on whatever lifestyle you think I'm living. And for your information those musicians are all friends of mine and of Pete and there are no hangers-on as you put it. I don't know where you come up with these things!"
Neither woman said anything further as they covered the pillows. Edie disappeared into her bedroom and returned with a well-worn quilt. She opened it halfway and covered the bottom portion of the bed, leaving it available to be pulled up if her parents got too cold during the night. Mary Grace reached to run her fingers along the delicate hand-stitching of the soft patchwork design, reflecting briefly on how many years ago it had been made and the many long hours it must have taken Edie's Granny Hart to piece together the many multicolored bits of cloth.
"It was kind of Mr. Gunn to take us all out to dinner," Mary Grace eventually murmured, jumping unpredictably to another subject as she was wont to do. "And it was gracious of your boss to allow you the night off at such short notice. I hope it wasn't too much of an inconvenience."
"Pete, Mama," Edie corrected, not for the first time. "He's a kind man. And Mother is–" Gracious? Yes, Mother was gracious, but she'd scoff and offer up a disgusted look if you told her that to her face. "Well, Mother is Mother. She didn't mind."
"It was a nice restaurant – what was the name? Constantine's? That's a strange name for a restaurant, it makes it sound like it should be a Greek or Italian place. But the food was quite good. And your father and I enjoyed the walk afterwards."
Constantine's was a popular restaurant located on West Jefferson Street in the old part of town, a quaint family-owned eatery nestled snugly among various businesses, apartment buildings and places of innocuous entertainment. The original brick street had been laid to run parallel to the river, which made one of its big slow turns about a mile away, with the cross streets running west to east. Separated from the river only by the aptly named River Street, along West Jefferson were scattered many of the most familiar and longest established businesses in town.
Tropea's Shoe Repair, Isaac & Sons Pianos, Samson Brothers Photography Studio and Thomasson Clocks & Watch Repair lined the street along the same side of the block as Constantine's. Johnson's Rexall Drugs inhabited one corner across the street, Klinkman & Goss Office Supplies stood at the other corner, with the ballet studio owned by Pete's artsy friend Stashek Konopka and the ubiquitous S&H Green Stamps Redemption Store sequestered between the two. If It Has Tails Pet Shop sat in the very center of the next block across the street to the south, surrounded by antique stores, with Schaub's Deli on one corner, and lining the curb opposite were Dewey's Bar-N-Grill and the Orpheum Theatre. The main branch of the public library was located several blocks to the north, there was a post office a block over to the west and a small maritime museum took up about half a block around the corner on Fourth Street. Apartment buildings, including the Holly Arms, took up parts of blocks and the YMCA was nearby.
Most of the businesses, among them some that appeared to especially intrigue Joe Hart, had already turned off their lights and shuttered their doors by the time the two couples set out on an impromptu after-dinner constitutional, prompting Edie to promise a more leisurely inspection of the area for the following day. It appeared that Mama and Papa planned to stay through the weekend and then take off early Monday morning for the three hundred mile drive home. Or so Mama implied.
"I'm positive Pete would have appreciated knowing that. It's one of his favorite places to eat and he loves the original town site."
As much as Pete did enjoy Constantine's, they'd visited the restaurant but once since the end of January, Edie having been reluctant to return to the scene of a shooting which had put the private investigator in the hospital for a couple of days. Though the incident had occurred more than a block away from the restaurant, she'd had a recurring nightmare of Pete pulling again into the same parking space in front of Schaub's Deli and the events happening all over again. And again.
"I'm sure your father said something to him."
With decisive snaps, Mary Grace closed the hasps of her blue Monarch suitcase and set it on the floor near the sofa cushions, then turned to face her daughter.
"You're having sex with this man for... for fun." She released a disapproving sigh as she abruptly changed the subject once again. "It's called sleeping around. And that's one of the more refined terms for it."
Edie's eyes widened at the words that came unexpectedly and unceremoniously from her mother's mouth.
"I wasn't born yesterday, Edith–" the older woman sighed querulously in response to the expression on her daughter's face, as only Mama could. "Despite what you might think. I read books and watch the news on television and I've even been known to take a look at the newspaper on occasion to keep up with current events. I've heard of such goings-on. I just never in my wildest dreams thought I'd see the day when my own daughter would demean herself in such a manner."
"Slee– Do you even understand what you're talking about?"
"I know that having a man stay the night in her apartment isn't something a well brought up young lady would ever do." Mary Grace raised a hand, palm outward, to forestall any response. "And don't give me any glib excuses or tell me that nothing went on. I saw the evidence with my own two eyes as I passed through your bedroom to the bathroom."
The bed had been unmade, the top sheet pulled halfway up on one side with the quilt a layered tangle at the foot of the bed. One yellow linen-encased pillow had lain squashed against the headboard and the other lay beside it, the case wrinkled but the indentations of two heads visible. Further evidence of the couple's activities had been apparent but she thought better than to utter the words aloud, no verbal description would have done it justice. She blushed inside just thinking about it!
"I don't need to make up excuses–"
"It's perfectly obvious what's been going on around here, even to old fashioned stick-in-the-mud fuddy-duddies like your parents."
"You're not–" How many times had Edie, while growing up, heard her mother use those same words to describe herself and Papa?
"There's a name for girls who do that sort of thing and its not very nice."
"Oh? And what would that be, Mama?" Edie asked with an exasperated huff.
"You know full well what I'm talking about, Edith June, so don't you pretend otherwise." Mary Grace parted with an aggrieved sigh this time around. "What on earth would your Granny Hart and Grandma Kelly think if they found out you were living in sin with this– this man?" And how many times had Mama brought the grandmothers into a discussion, trying to elicit a sense of guilt while pretending it would be the old ladies who'd be hurt by any unladylike behavior on the part of their granddaughter?
"I'm not living with him."
"Well then what would they say if they found out you were a kept woman?"
"I have no idea but I'm sure you'll let me know once you fill them in on all the details."
Edie's answer to the question was accompanied by a tolerant smile. If only her mother realized what a riot she could be about things and how easy it sometimes was to pull her chain. She was just glad her Papa wasn't around to be witness to the conversation. After returning to the apartment following supper he'd decided the oil needed changing in his old Ford Tudor and he'd driven it up to the Esso station three blocks down on Willow. Or maybe he'd recognized what was coming and decided to make a quick escape.
"Don't get snippy with me."
Snippy? Only Mama would describe a pleasant answer accompanied by a smiling face as snippy.
"Mama, I love Pete very much," the younger woman sighed. "And I don't have sex with him for fun–" She caught herself and rolled her eyes. "Well, it is fun," she admitted.
Mary Grace Hart closed her eyes and said a silent prayer.
Peter Gunn stared into the large bathroom mirror as he slowly removed his necktie and unbuttoned his shirt and cuffs. His own sardonic blue gaze stared right back. He found Edie's mother a tough nut to crack. If he could put his finger on any one takeaway from earlier that afternoon it would be that Mrs. Hart hadn't seemed overly surprised to find him at her daughter's apartment, decidedly less than half-dressed, with Edie in her robe and nightgown. Instead, her eyes had seemed to bear a sense of resignation when her gaze briefly touched upon his, and possibly a quick flash of embarrassment. He'd been much less certain about Edie's father. Though Joe Hart's expression had given nothing away, Pete had the distinct impression the older man's discomfort had rivaled his own.
Their lunch, extremely late brunch, whatever one wanted to call it – after he'd escaped the kitchen to hurriedly dress, leaving Edie to add scrambled eggs, toast and bacon to the mix – had been a strange affair. The parents appeared ill at ease due to their unexpected and impromptu arrival, Mrs. Hart not saying much at all – a digression from her normal loquaciousness, according to Edie – and Papa trying to make up for his wife's silence by supplying lengthy answers to polite questions or offering meandering comments about nothing in particular. Later, at Constantine's, Pete felt the impact of Mr. Hart's shrewd gaze on a number of occasions but any nuance of what lay beneath it had escaped him.
Dinner had passed at a reasonable pace, the conversation mostly mundane and this time around surprisingly not too awkward. Based on Pete's recommendation Joe Hart decided on the home-made ravioli. Pete had followed suit, not wanting the other man to think he had steered him into a bad choice. If the juicy, mildly spicy, meaty dish didn't live up to it's normal standard he figured they could share in their disappointment. Mary Grace had chosen deep dish chicken pot pie, the restaurant's advertised Classic of the Day, and Edie had opted for the baked cod. Dessert was a slice of one of Constantine's trademark pies, blueberry for the women and cherry for the men, each tempting piece topped with a big scoop of vanilla ice cream.
Afterwards Edie's father had deemed a stroll was in order so he could exercise away the five pounds he claimed he'd gained packing in the pasta and dessert. The women led the way along the sidewalk, Pete and Mr. Hart pausing occasionally in front of various shop windows and chatting between themselves about irrelevant topics as they followed a few yards behind. Mostly irrelevant. Being the astute investigator that he was, Pete managed to read between the lines of several comments and questions. His responses had seemed to satisfy, if Mr. Hart's expression was anything to go by. And still, the entire time they'd shared conversation, the man's intelligent blue eyes held that same unfathomable look as at dinner. Time and again it seemed a sense of dry amusement crept into his gaze, the PI imagining he must be mistaken. But it had appeared Edie's father was tolerating him, while Mrs. Hart carried around an uncertain – or was it disapproving? – frown much of the time.
Pete pulled his undershirt over his head and tossed it into the nearby laundry hamper. Slipping unbidden through his mind came the thought that Joe Hart wasn't going to be the thorn in his side when it came to his relationship with Edie. That pleasure would fall to Edie's mother.