A Patchwork Planet Page 12

“Oh, I never cared much for cigarettes,” I’d told her. “I preferred to smoke the harder stuff.”

  Just to see her expression of thrilled horror.

  Now she said, “Betty’s merely a roommate. I got her name off a bulletin board. What do I care what she thinks?”

  “Actually,” I said, “it’s not true that I have no prospects—I mean, if I wanted prospects. I could always get a job at Dad’s foundation. Does Betty know about the Foundation?”

  “I believe I did happen to mention it,” Sophia said.

  “Also, I’ve held the same one job for almost eleven years,” I said. “That’s more than you can say for a lot of other guys.”

  Sophia reached across the table and laid a hand over mine. “Barnaby,” she said. “It’s fine. Whatever you do. Really.”

  I squeezed her fingers.

  Granted, Sophia wasn’t the type I’d fallen for in the past. She was luxuriously padded, and she carried herself from the hips in a settled and matronly manner. She probably weighed more than I did, in fact, but I found this sexy. It made me conscious of my own wiriness, and the springy, electric energy in the muscles of my legs. Sitting on that vinyl chair, I had all I could do not to leap up and fling myself across the table. But I stayed where I was and just smiled at her, and then I speared a cube of beef.

  After supper, we moved to the living room. We settled on her sofa, surrounded by dried flower arrangements and frilled glass candy dishes, and started kissing. Once we drew apart when we heard footsteps crossing the upstairs hall, but it was a false alarm and we resumed where we’d left off. I stroked her creamy skin and I cupped her lush, heavy breasts in the circle-stitched cotton bra that I could feel through the silk of her blouse. When Betty’s footsteps crossed the hall again, we had to separate in a hurry and straighten our clothes.

  I told Sophia she should come to my place. She turned pink; she knew what I was asking. She said, “Well, maybe soon. Give me a little more time.” I didn’t push it. I almost preferred it this way for now. I left her house whistling. I imagined she’d be slipping into a quilted bathrobe exactly like her roommate’s, and scrubbing her face, and brushing her teeth, and settling down for the night in her four-poster bed.

  It always seemed to happen that we lost a lot of our older folks at the tail end of winter. Just when the worst of the weather was behind us, when you’d think a person would be gathering strength and looking forward to spring, why, we’d get a sudden call from a relative, or we’d find a week’s worth of newspapers littering a client’s lawn. During the first half of March, Mrs. Gordoni went into the hospital and didn’t come out again; Mr. Quentin succumbed to whatever illness he’d been battling for the past six years (he’d never named it, and we weren’t supposed to ask); and Mr. Cartwright died of a heart attack. Now I took Mrs. Cartwright shopping all on her own, and she was very different—wavery and bewildered. Funny: I had thought he was the dependent one in that couple. But you never know. I took her to the grocery store and she walked the aisles with this testing sort of posture, placing the balls of her feet just so, as if she were wading a creek. “Isn’t it ridiculous,” she told me, “how even in the face of death it still matters that the price of oranges has gone up, and an impolite produce boy can still hurt your feelings.” I didn’t know what to say to that. I steered her toward the dairy case.

  I thought about one time when I’d driven the Cartwrights to a pharmacy and Mr. Cartwright had paused in the doorway to announce, “This used to be a pharmacy!” in his loud, impervious, hard-of-hearing voice, and the other shoppers had all raised their heads and looked around them for a second, plainly wondering what it was now, for heaven’s sake. I don’t know why he said that. Maybe he was objecting to the heaps of extraneous merchandise, the beach chairs and electric blenders pharmacies seemed to stock these days. Maybe he was just confused. At any rate, remembering the slight jolt that had rippled through the store made me smile, and Mrs. Cartwright glanced up at me just then and happened to notice. I worried she’d be offended, but instead she smiled too. “You’re a good boy, Barnaby,” she said.

  None of my customers had the least inkling of my true nature.

  Then Mrs. Beeton died—that nice black lady whose children always fussed so. First I knew of it, I telephoned to see if I should pick up any groceries on my way to her house, and her daughter was the one who answered. Said, “Hello, Barnaby!” and chatted awhile, cheery as you please. Not a clue about her mother. Finally I said, “Could I talk to Mrs. Beeton a minute?” A silence. Then she said, “Let me give you to my husband, okay?” And her husband got on the line—a man I’d never met. “My mother-in-law has passed as of yesterday morning,” he told me. I guess her daughter just couldn’t say the words.

  I’d always admired Mrs. Beeton. She had such a sweet, chuckly face, and this attractive darker outline to her upper lip. Dirt was her personal enemy. Let her catch sight of a cobweb and she would not rest until she’d killed it dead.

  And then Maud May broke her hip and had to go to a nursing home. Maud May! My Tallulah client, with her movie-star cigarette holder and her pitchers of martinis and her drawling, leathery voice. I visited her to get instructions—which plants needed watering and so forth—because she swore this was not a permanent state of affairs. “No Vegetable Villa for me,” she said; that was what she called nursing homes. “I’m getting out of here if I have to crawl on my hands and knees.” Then she dropped to a whisper and asked me to bring her a carton of Marlboros. “Sure thing, Ms. May,” I told her. (We’re the muscles, not the brains.) But I sounded cockier than I felt. She’d given me a start, lying there so helpless. Why, Maud May was my foreign correspondent, you might call it, from the country of old age. She had this way of reporting on it in a distant, amused tone. “I used to think old age would make me more patient,” she’d told me once, “but instead I find, oh, Gawd, it’s turned me into a grouch.” And another time: “Everybody claims to venerate older women, but when I ask what for, they all mention things like herbal medicine, and I can’t tell an herb from a mule’s ass.”

  Now she said, “Know what this feels like, Barnaby? Feels like I’m living someone else’s life. This is not the real me, I want to say.”

  “Well, of course it’s not,” I told her.

  But I must have spoken too quickly, or too easily or something, because she jerked her head on her pillow and said, “Don’t be so goddamn patronizing!”

  “Ms. May,” I said, “I promise you’ll be out of here before you know it. What this other client was telling me just a few days ago: the older you get, the faster the time goes. By now it’s all a blur, she says.”

  “Wrong,” Maud May said firmly.

  “Wrong?”

  “Time has stopped dead still,” she said.

  Then she gave a snort and said, “No pun intended.”

  I took Sophia down to Canton to visit my grandparents one evening, because they’d been complaining they never saw me anymore. We sat in their tiny living room (twelve feet wide, the width of the house) and watched TV while Gram shot sideways glances at Sophia. I hadn’t warned them I’d be bringing her. I didn’t want to answer any questions. So Gram was having to work things out for herself, calculating Sophia’s age, gauging how close together we sat. Sweetheart? Friend? Mere acquaintance? Sophia faced the TV, pretending not to notice.

  We were watching a game show on what had to have been the world’s largest residential television set. The only place it could fit was against the long side wall of the living room. This meant we had to line the couch on the other side wall, with our noses practically touching the screen. Pop-Pop sat at one end, so he had someplace to put his beer can. I sat next to him, Sophia next to me, and Gram on the other end. The rest of the room was filled with plaster statues of the Virgin Mary, and ceramic planters shaped like wheelbarrows and donkeys, and praying hands molded from some kind of resin, and dolls dressed like Scarlett O’Hara. Oh, and I should mention that Pop-Pop wore a V-necked undershirt th
at showed his scrawny white-haired chest; and Gram was in a tight tank top and baggy army-green shorts. (The thermostat was set at about eighty-five degrees, although outdoors it was winter again.) I was interested in Sophia’s reaction to all this, but I couldn’t tell from her profile, which was edged with blue light from the game show.

  Gram said, “Sophia. Would that be an Italian name?”

  “It came from a great-aunt,” Sophia told her, turning briefly in her direction.

  “Was your great-aunt Italian?”

  “No, Scottish.”

  “Oh.”

  I knew what Gram was aiming at here. She wanted to find out whether Sophia was Catholic. She poked her headful of pink curlers forward for a moment and looked at me.

  “Presbyterian,” I told her.

  “Oh.”

  She sat back again. She sighed. Oh, well, you could see her thinking, her own daughter had married Episcopal and the sky hadn’t fallen in. “It’s a pretty name, anyhow,” she told Sophia.

  “Thank you.”

  “I like names that end with an a, don’t you? Or other vowels. Well, what other vowels? Most often it seems to be a. But wait: Margo’s name ends with an 0, for mercy’s sake! Barnaby’s mother. Or it used to be 0. Then she met Barnaby’s father and added a t.”

  Sophia looked at me. I told her, “Mom thought Margot with at was higher-class.”

  “First time I saw it written that way was on the wedding invitations,” Gram said. “She brought them home from the printer’s and I said, ‘Who’s this?’ She said, ‘That’s me.’ Well, I did try to accommodate. Her daddy said it was stuff and nonsense, but I told Jeffrey the next time he came to call, ‘Mar-gott will be down in a minute.’ He laughed because he thought I was joking, but I was serious. I honestly assumed people pronounced the t”

  “Watch this next contestant,” Pop-Pop told me. “She knows every fact there is to know about Elvis.”

  “She always was a go-getter,” Gram said. “Very energetic. Very brainy. She won so many prizes when she was in school! I can’t imagine where that came from.”

  “Margot, we’re talking about,” I explained to Sophia. She was looking puzzled.

  “Folks would ask, ‘Is she a changeling?’ Because Frank didn’t even graduate high school, and the only reason I did was to fill in the time till we married. But there must be a smarty gene somewhere in our family. Look at Barnaby! He’s practically an Einstein. Learned to read so young, he used to check in the child development books to see how he ought to be acting.”

  “I had a very promising past,” I told Sophia.

  She smiled and turned her eyes back to Gram. On the TV, somebody flubbed a question. The audience gave a groan, and Pop-Pop said, “Why, I could’ve answered that one!”

  Gram heaved herself from the couch to fetch us a snack, and Sophia rose and followed, asking, “Can I help?” She was doing everything right. Gram ought to love her.

  Now it was just me and Pop-Pop, two skinny, puny males taking up the much smaller half of the sofa. We got started on one of those man-to-man talks that are all numerals—which cable channels he was subscribing to these days, how many quarts of oil my car was burning—while in the kitchen, above the clatter of dishes, I heard Gram doing her best to figure out who Sophia was, exactly. If I cocked an ear in their direction, I could keep tabs on them while listening to Pop-Pop reel off last week’s bowling scores. No, she came from Philadelphia. And yes, she had a job; she worked at Chesapeake Bank. And she rented a place on Calvert Street; shared it with a roommate. (Gram would find the fact of the roommate reassuring—less chance we were living in sin.) And it probably did seem odd that a girl like her hadn’t been snapped up yet by some man, but she wanted to be sure she didn’t make any mistakes, because marriage was for life, she’d always felt; and in fact, she had once been engaged and another time almost engaged, but it hadn’t panned out, which now she realized must have been all for the best.

  Then she said, “I met Barnaby on the train to Philly a few months back”—volunteering it, without any prodding from Gram. Evidently it told Gram what she wanted to know, because when they emerged with the food, she was treating us like a couple. It was “you two” this and “you two” that, and, “Next time, the two of you will have to come for a meal.”

  The snack she’d fixed was a recipe she’d read about in a magazine—Bill Clinton’s favorite, corn chips with a dip made of bottled salsa and Velveeta cheese melted in the microwave. She served it on a tray that showed a head-and-shoulders portrait of John F. Kennedy. “I see we’re going with a presidential theme tonight,” I said, and Gram jabbed an elbow into Sophia’s ribs and asked, “Isn’t he a cutup?”—rolling her eyes and giggling as if they shared a secret.

  In the car as we were driving home, Sophia said she had liked my grandparents very much. “They liked you too,” I said. I was partly proud and partly taken aback. I hadn’t expected Sophia to get so into it, somehow. After a moment, I said, “You never told me you had been engaged.”

  She shrugged and said, “It didn’t last long.”

  “Who was the guy?” I asked her.

  “Oh, someone at the bank.”

  “And another time almost engaged? What happened?”

  “It just didn’t work out,” she told me. “I’m probably too set in my ways. Too, you know. Definite. Too definite for men to feel comfortable with.”

  She was wearing the dressy black coat that made her hair look blonder, and the carriage of her head struck me as queenly. I said, “Well, I think definite women are great.” She looked over at me and smiled. “If there’s anything I’m crazy about, it’s definiteness,” I said.

  She laughed. I got a little carried away; I said, “In fact, I’ve always dreamed of a having a military wife.”

  “Oh?” she said. “You mean a soldier?”

  “No, someone whose husband’s a soldier,” I said. “I’ve seen them in the movies. They know how to do everything that needs doing. They could probably build their own houses, if they had to, and deliver their own babies. If that’s not definite!”

  “So … would this mean that you’re planning to enlist?” she asked.

  “Enlist! God forbid,” I told her.

  “Then how …?”

  “I only meant …,” I said. “Shoot, I’m just talking out loud.” Which was an expression Mrs. Beeton used to use: Don’t mind me; I’m just talking out loud.

  Dummy.

  News of all the deaths spread magically among our other clients. I’ve never figured out how that happens. It’s not as if our people know each other, for the most part. But I could sense the agitation in just about every house I went to. Mrs. Rodney got the notion to update her will; so did Miss Simmons. Mr. Shank called on us even more often than he normally did, on even more trumped-up excuses, and one time insisted that I drive him to the emergency room, when as far as I could see there was not one thing the matter with him. I said, “What is it? Are you short of breath? Chest pains? Weak? Dizzy?” All he would say was, he felt “unusual.” For the sake of his unusualness I spent three and a half hours in the Sinai Hospital waiting room, watching homemaking shows on TV. “What I like to do,” this lady on one program said, “I like to place a lead crystal bowl on the credenza in my entrance hall. I fill it with tinted water and I float scented votive candles on the surface, to lend a sense of graciousness when I’m entertaining.” A roomful of sick people—bleak-faced, bleary-eyed, most in threadbare clothes—stared up at her in astonishment. Mr. Shank turned out to be suffering from stress and was sent home with a prescription for some pills.

  Then Mrs. Alford started sorting her belongings. That’s always a worrisome sign. For a solid week she had three of us come in daily—me, Ray Oakley, and Martine. (“Two men for the real lifting,” was how she put it, “and a girl so as to encourage the hiring of women.”) She wanted her basement sorted, then her garage, then her attic. This was in mid-April—a busy time for us anyhow, plus it was near Easter an
d lots of grown children were expected home and our clients were overexcited and crabby and demanding. But Mrs. Alford couldn’t wait, couldn’t put it off. Each morning she met us on her front porch, or even halfway down the walk. “There you are! What kept you?” Martine didn’t have the truck that week; so I had to pick her up, which once or twice made us late, and Ray Oakley was late by nature. But we’re only talking minutes here. Still, Mrs. Alford would be fretting and pacing. Half the time she called Martine “Celeste,” which was the name of our other female employee, and I was “Terry.”

  “It’s Barnaby, Mrs. Alford,” I said as gently as possible.

  “Oh! I’m sorry! I thought your name was Terry and you played in that musical group.”

  Martine snickered—picturing me, I guess, at the harpsichord or something. “No, ma’am,” I told Mrs. Alford. “Must be somebody else.”

  In my early days at Rent-a-Back, I’d have feared she was losing her marbles. But I knew, by now, that it was just anxiety. I’ve had an anxious client mistake me for her firstborn son; then next day, she’d be bright as a tack. I didn’t let it faze me.

  Sorting the basement was easy, because that was mostly stuff to be thrown out. Paint tins that no longer sloshed; mildewed rolls of leftover wallpaper; galvanized buckets so old they’d been patched with metal disks by some long-dead tin-kef. We crammed them all into garbage cans and hoped the city would collect them. It took us less than a day. I had time to drop Martine off and check my messages before I headed to Mrs. Glynn’s.

  The garage was where it got harder. Mrs. Alford’s husband had left a fully stocked workbench there—the lovingly tended kind, with each tool hung on the backboard within its own painted silhouette. Mrs. Alford must have dreaded to face it, because when we showed up the next morning, she managed to get our names one hundred percent wrong. “Hello, Celeste. Hello, Roy. Hello, Terry.” None of us corrected her. On her way up the back steps to the garage, she asked me, “How’s the music?” and I said, “Oh, fine,” because it seemed easier.