The Life and Times of Eudora Bascombe: The Yummy-Tummy Crazy Cat Lady

By J. F. Sinkovits

What happens when a wealthy, elderly, headstrong widow from L.A. returns to her sleepy little Illinois hometown with the best of intentions? Absolute chaos and lunacy, that's what! Eudora Bascombe Waldrop inadvertently turns the lives of everyone in Laurel Glen upside down when she returns home with a top-secret plan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Mar 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645368328

J. F. Sinkovits

J. F. Sinkovits is of Austrian heritage and resides in the Chicago area, although he has also lived in California. Blessed with a vivid imagination, he enjoys, among other things, writing fiction, oil painting, all things automotive and aeronautical, as well as travel.

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Twenty-Four

About the Author

J. F. Sinkovits is of Austrian heritage and is currently a resident of the Chicago area, but has also lived in California. Blessed with a vivid imagination, he enjoys writing fiction, oil painting, all things automotive and aeronautical, as well as traveling.

Dedication

To my mother, Theresia, and my brother, Fred, for their patience and encouragement over the years. And to my friend, Leslie, who inspired me to share Eudora’s story.

Copyright Information ©

J. F. Sinkovits (2020)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Ordering Information:

Quantity sales: special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Sinkovits, J. F.

The Life and Times of Eudora Bascombe

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

ISBN 9781643786049 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781643786056 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781645368328 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019918128

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published (2020)

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street, 28th Floor

New York, NY 10005

USA

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Part One: May 1941

Chapter One

Twenty-six-year-old Nola Bascombe, discomfited by the unusual May heat, sat languidly on the porch of her Victorian home in rural Laurel Glen, Illinois. It had been an extremely cold winter, and now it seemed as though the summer weather had arrived earlier than usual. It seemed, Nola reflected, that in this part of the world one was either freezing or roasting, and she did not tolerate either extreme very well.

Now and again, as she sat on her porch, enduring the unusual heat and humidity, Nola would rock idly as her young daughter, Eudora Anne, sat at her feet, amused by the antics of a half-dozen recently born kittens. The wide porch roof sheltered them all from the unforgiving rays of the fierce mid-afternoon sun but did nothing to lessen the discomfort caused by the rainforest-like humidity. The air was heavy and without the slightest hint of movement. The leaves on the trees drooped, limp and motionless, as if they too had been overcome by the weather. The much-needed rain and a strong cool front had been promised now for days but had not yet materialized.

Nola felt her energy oozing out of her pores with every bead of perspiration. Her mother had always told her that real ladies do not perspire, and they most certainly never sweat: they glisten.

As she sat limply in the rocker, glistening, with her linen day dress stuck to her thighs, it occurred to Nola that perhaps it wasn’t the weather that she found so discomfiting after all: perhaps it was fear of the unknown, the terrible possibility that—

The thought was so frightening to her that she couldn’t even permit herself to finish it. She took two small ice chunks from the glass of lemonade at her side and touched them delicately to the hollow of her throat as she had often seen her mother do, but relief was all too short-lived as the ice too fell victim to the steadily rising mercury.

Nola’s glance swept slowly around her surroundings as she idly fanned herself with the latest issue of Silver Screen Idols, which, aside from the Holy Scriptures, was her favorite reading material. Her gaze took in the large, well-manicured front lawn, with its trellises and the rose beds she herself tended so lovingly. It settled on the big maple tree from which hung the swing that her father-in-law had made two summers ago, especially for Eudora Anne. It took in the sight of Gertrude Krannick, who was short of stature and what was euphemistically called pleasingly plump. Gertie, with her battered, wide-brimmed straw hat perched securely on her salt-and-pepper head, was crouching on her hands and knees in her front yard on the other side of the street, determinedly ripping weeds out from among the nasturtiums she’d planted in the shade of a massive old oak.

Nola sighed deeply as she watched Mrs. Krannick’s pile of weeds grow incrementally larger. If only it were that simple! If only one could pull out the Weeds of Life and toss them into a big heap where they would shrivel and die! Unfortunately, life just wasn’t that uncomplicated. It had been Nola’s unhappy experience that just when things settled down to a cozy, manageable routine, something just had to happen to turn one’s world upside down, as had happened to her on more than one occasion.

Gertrude Krannick got stiffly to her feet, stretched, fanned herself with her straw hat, and then waved wearily when she caught sight of Nola, who waved languidly in return. As the other woman dragged herself laboriously back into her house, Nola noticed that despite Gertie’s considerable bulk, even her shadow had grown tiny and had all but disappeared as if it too were searching for respite.

Nola’s gaze swept up one side of the tree-lined street and down the other and revealed that she and Eudora were now quite alone. There was no one else about. Not a soul. Even the birdsong had been stilled by the heat. Only the faint buzz of some industrious bees in the Technicolor riot of the impatiens that bordered the porch broke the oppressive silence. For one fleeting, uncomfortable moment, Nola felt as if she and her daughter were all alone in the world, as if everyone else had somehow fled the planet in anticipation of a soon-to-occur cataclysm. She had experienced that same sensation several times before in her life, and she hated and feared it.

Suddenly little Eudora laughed out loud, snatching her mother out of her dark reverie. Nola startled and turned her attention back onto her child as she giggled again. The sight of the five-year-old so enraptured with the tiny mewling bundles of fur around her was nearly, but not quite, enough to quell the nagging anxiety that seemed to have taken up permanent residency in her sensitive digestive tract.

Objectively, overall, Nola’s life was good—indeed, very good. She’d been married to her high-school sweetheart, Frank, for nearly seven years now, and with the birth of Eudora, their first and (so far) only child, Nola had found herself happier than she had ever dared hope to be, or than she thought she could ever allow herself to be. But then this latest crisis had loomed its dark shadow over her small family.

For much of the country, the Great Depression that had followed the Crash of ’29 was by now only a bitter, unpleasant memory. Chicago, the great Midwestern metropolis of which little Laurel Glen seemed but a tiny satellite, lay forty-five miles or so roughly to the east. Like a sleeping fairytale giant, it had slowly awakened from its economic slumbers, shaken off the doldrums, and was now once again humming along robustly, its businesses, factories, and various amusements awash in prosperity and black ink.

Things were not quite as promising for many smaller towns, especially quasi-rural communities such as Laurel Glen, which had seen their populations steadily eroded in the ’30s as their residents had fallen victim to the Depression, their workplaces and livelihoods floundering and disappearing into the quagmire of economic disaster spawned by the Crash.

Nola Martin Bascombe had been born and raised in Laurel Glen and had been devastated as, one by one, her friends and neighbors had fled the town in search of economically greener pastures elsewhere, some even before the Depression had fully stretched its destructive tentacles and had strangled the already-fragile Laurel Glen economy. In the space of four months, the introverted teenager had lost her three best girlfriends: Betsy Collins and her large Catholic family had moved to St. Louis, where her father had swallowed his pride and had taken a job offered to him by a brother-in-law who couldn’t stand the sight of him; Genevieve Lewis and her family had relocated to Philadelphia to live with her paternal grandparents, and where Velma Johnson had ended up, no one knew; her entire family of nine having just disappeared quietly one stifling August night, leaving Laurel Glen—and their mountain of debts—behind in the sultry darkness. Nola had never heard from Velma again and still often wistfully wondered what had become of her.

The exodus of her confidants had been difficult for the shy, teenaged girl, but not nearly as traumatic as the loss of her parents would later prove to be. Nola had been especially close to her mother, Eudora Mae, whom she remembered as an exquisitely beautiful, slight, wraithlike creature, who had always been enveloped in the faint scent of lavender and who never had seemed to merely walk: she had floated gracefully like an iridescent soap bubble wafted about on the air currents from one part of a room to another, alighting first here and then there, as her whims and caprices had dictated.

A native of Roanoke, Virginia, the seventeen-year-old Eudora Mae Phelps had fallen hopelessly in love with Edward Clark Martin, a dashing, handsome twenty-year-old soldier stationed at the nearby army base. After their marriage and his subsequent discharge from the service, Corporal Martin had brought his exquisite bride back home to Illinois, where the young couple set about putting down roots. Eudora Mae had brought her southern traditions and customs with her, and she had enchanted and captivated the locals with her grace, beauty, and Dixie hospitality.

The young Nola had idolized her mother, whom she thought of even now as a strong, capable woman despite her seeming fragility. A genuinely pious woman, Eudora Mae had taught her daughter by example more than by word that true joy and serenity in life could only be achieved by serving the Almighty and His creation. First among these, of course, were her husband and child. Above all others, it was this lesson that Nola would carry with her into her adolescence and womanhood and which she hoped to impart, in due time, to her own children, howsoever many the good Lord might choose to grant her.

Shortly before the thirteenth Christmas of Nola’s life, Eudora Mae had been taken ill by influenza and had passed from this world into the next. The shattered girl had barely had time to mourn her mother’s death when she lost her father too, not to any physical illness, but to an emotional one. She had returned home from school one unseasonably chilly mid-April afternoon and had discovered her father’s lifeless body hanging from the rafters of the disused carriage house behind the family’s modest bungalow. She had screamed for an hour. Even now, years later, the gruesome scene occasionally invaded her slumber, causing Nola, dripping with perspiration, to awaken with a strangled cry to seek solace and comfort in the arms of her compassionate, stalwart husband.

Orphaned by Edward Martin’s fatal escape from his chronic depression, Nola had been taken in by her Aunt Euphemia, Edward’s only sibling. Euphemia had opened her door more out of a sense of guilt and embarrassment spawned by her much-younger brother’s selfish act of desperation than out of any real affection for his only child. Nola always recalled the delicate Euphemia as having been gracious but rather distant, more an amiable landlady than a loving aunt. Tall, gaunt, and nearly thirteen years her deceased brother’s senior, the reserved Euphemia had seemed ill-at-ease in the company of her young niece, as if uncertain how to relate to her, and her discomfiture had been palpably and constantly felt by the young girl. Feeling herself adrift and alone, Nola, with her aspirations of becoming a great actress, would gladly have left Laurel Glen to take her chances out west in this fantastic place called Hollywood had it not been for one thing: Frank Bascombe.

Tall, handsome, and the quarterback of the high-school football team, Franklin Douglas Bascombe had been living with his family in the large, well-maintained Victorian across the street from Aunt Euphemia’s far more modest Cape Cod.

It had been widely believed (and correctly so) that the Bascombe family had been wealthier than any other three well-to-do families in Laurel Glen combined. Although, like those of so many others, the Bascombe fortunes had been eroded during the chaos and uncertainty of the ’30s, Charles Bascombe, the family patriarch, had managed to retain a sizeable portion of his wealth and had eventually even managed to increase it.

As a young man in the late 1890s, Charles had made a good solid living from his family’s well-regarded carriage works, a trade he had learned at his father’s knee. It was a well-known fact that the Bascombe Carriage Works under the guidance of Charles’s grandfather, Zebulon, had even supplied the personal carriages of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln during their years in residency at the state capital in Springfield before Lincoln’s rise to the presidency. It was said that Zebulon and Annabeth Bascombe had even hosted the auspicious couple at dinner on several occasions.

Years later, Charles had been shrewd enough to recognize the great promise of the horseless carriage when it had entered into the equation. Others might have scoffed at the noisy, smelly contraptions, dismissing them as a public menace and a passing fad; Charles, ever one to fly in the face of conventional wisdom, instead had invested in several automobile-manufacturing concerns, some of which seemed to vanish with his investment almost as soon as they had accepted it.

One of the concerns in which he had placed his financial faith had been a conglomeration of companies that the shrewd and ruthless William Durant, a casual acquaintance of his, had assembled. Durant had named his new upstart General Motors. Impressed by Durant’s business acumen and exuberance, if not by his morals, Charles had invested heavily in the risky venture. Happily, he had found his investment expanding exponentially even after Durant’s well-publicized ouster by his board of directors. The General had rewarded Charles’s faith so handsomely that only a few years later, the shrewd investor had been able to open the doors to Bascombe Motors, the only Chevrolet-Buick dealership within nearly thirty miles. Not long afterward, he had commissioned the design and construction of the fine Victorian home on a prime hilltop parcel, the rear of which extended down to the bank of the Fox River, at the corner of Maple Street and Oleander Avenue. Upon its completion, he had moved his wife, Sylvestrina, their son, Frank, and their daughters, Virginia and Emily, into the imposing house which had become the wonder of three counties.

As a happy result of her having been taken in by her Aunt Euphemia after her father’s passing, Nola had lived practically across the street from the young paragon, whom she had adored since she had been in the first grade and he had been in the third. From Euphemia’s parlor window, she had often watched him, enraptured, as he had played football on the Victorian’s broad front lawn or had shoveled snow from the driveway and sidewalks in the winter. Whenever he had noticed Nola struggling with the snow on her aunt’s sidewalk, he’d crossed the street and finished the job for her, after which Nola had always rewarded his gallantry with hot cocoa and cookies or a piece of pie.

One bone-chilling January afternoon, Frank had taken Nola’s breath away over their cocoa and blueberry pie by asking her to the picture show. Little did the love-struck teenager know that it had taken her stalwart paragon nearly three weeks to develop the intestinal fortitude to extend the invitation. Neither was she aware that as he had done so, his knees had shaken uncontrollably under the table because he’d been petrified that the young goddess, whom he adored, would find his infatuation with her ridiculous. They had been wed one week after Frank’s graduation from college, and it was with both gratitude and relief that Nola had moved out of Euphemia’s Cape Cod and into a small apartment to begin her new life with the young man of her dreams. Ironically, Euphemia had passed away unexpectedly a mere seven months later.

Their marriage was a good one: Nola idolized Frank, and he in turn worshiped her. When, to the young couple’s great joy, Nola had discovered that she was pregnant, the elder Bascombes, now living quite alone since Frank’s sisters, Emily and Virginia, had begun lives of their own, had astonished the expectant couple by making them a gift of their large, elegant Victorian at the corner of Maple and Oleander.

In February of 1936, Nola had given birth to the beautiful baby girl whom she and Frank had named Eudora Anne, partly in honor of Nola’s beloved late mother. For the new parents, life was just about perfect despite the aftershocks of the Depression that were still occasionally shuddering through pastoral Laurel Glen.

Situated on the banks of the Fox River, the quaint little town had been founded in the 1880s primarily as a summer retreat for Chicago’s wealthiest families. Andrew Bascombe, Frank’s grandfather, had followed what he had termed The Money Trail, and had relocated his family and the carriage works founded by his father, Zebulon, to the new community to which the well-heeled had come in droves to escape in the tranquil, picturesque countryside the heat, noise, and dirt of the big city. Now, decades later, many had lost substantial portions of their wealth in the Crash and had left their summer residences vacant and untended to fall into decay. And more than one desperate soul had ended its misery by leaping into the turbulent Fox River from the bridge on the Beecher Road. Now, in 1941, though the mass exodus by the moneyed Chicagoans had long since ended, Laurel Glen was still only a mere shadow of its former self, perhaps destined to never again experience its former glory.

Having already been presented with the family home, Frank Bascombe had then inherited the automobile dealership upon Charles’s unexpected passing in 1939. Armed with above-average common sense, a degree in Accounting, and a good head for business, Frank had quickly discovered that the Crash and the resulting Depression had soundly eroded the fortunes of Bascombe Motors, the business entity which, years earlier, had superseded the Bascombe Carriage Works. Without the wealthy Chicagoans and their Buicks as a solid customer base, the dealership struggled to stay afloat, drowning in an ever-rising sea of red ink. Frank never knew how his father had managed to hide the business’s dire straits from him, but he always suspected that they had somehow contributed to Charles’s declining health and untimely demise.

Although she tried hard to ignore them, Nola was painfully aware of the rumors now circulating through the little town that General Motors would soon pull both the Chevrolet and Buick franchises from Bascombe Motors if Frank didn’t manage to quickly turn the tide. She admittedly did not have a head for business affairs, but Nola knew enough to realize that this would be a catastrophe, so she did her best to not think about it.

In a valiant effort to save the dealership, Frank had engaged in seemingly endless strategy meetings with the G. M. brass. Although his charm, quiet strength, and winning personality (and possibly Nola’s fervent prayers) had somehow managed to impress and mollify the General’s management, Raymond Thorne, the president of the local bank which held the mortgage on the dealership, proved not to be as easily swayed.

And so it was that Nola sat on her porch on this hot, humid late May afternoon with the dark shadow of an uncertain future hanging over her lovely