A Patchwork Planet Read online

  But then she wouldn’t let go of it. She said, “Now, what is it you play, again?”

  “The … tuba,” I decided.

  “Tuba!” She paused at the top of the steps and looked at me. One hand pitty-patting the speckled flesh at the base of her throat. “Funny,” she said. “I had thought it was something stringed.”

  “No, it’s the tuba, all right,” I said, wishing I’d never begun this.

  “Fancy that! A tuba in a chamber group! I hadn’t heard of such a thing.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Ah. Chamber. You hadn’t?”

  “But what do I know?” she asked me. “I’m such a babe in the woods when it comes to music.”

  “Well, that’s all right, Mrs. Alford.”

  We walked through her backyard, where daffodils were blooming in clumps. “I haven’t been to the garage in years,” Mrs. Alford said. “I never go! I don’t like to go.” She stopped at the door, inserted a key in the lock, and turned the knob. Nothing happened. “Oh, well. I guess we can’t get in, after all,” she said.

  “Allow me,” Ray Oakley told her. He set his shoulder to the door—he was a big guy, with a giant beer belly—and gave it a shove and fell into the garage.

  “Why, thank you, Roy,” Mrs. Alford said, sounding not the least bit grateful.

  Mr. Alford’s workbench was one of those objects that seem to go on living after their owner dies. And clearly he had been a hoarder. The rows of baby-food jars on the shelves were filled with various sizes of screws in generally poor condition—some bent, some dulled, some rusted. You just knew he’d saved them for decades, even though his wife had probably begged him to get rid of them. I said, “Tell you what, Mrs. A. You go on back to the house and we’ll see to this without you.”

  “But how will you know what to do with it all?” Mrs. Alford asked. A reasonable question. She wandered the length of the workbench, reaching up to touch a coping saw here, a claw hammer there. “My nephew, Ernie: he’s very good with his hands,” she told us. “I should probably give these to him.”

  “And the screws and things?”

  “Well …,” she said.

  “Chuck them?”

  She went over to the baby-food jars. She picked one up and looked at it.

  “We’ll settle that,” I told her. “You go on back to the house.”

  This time she didn’t argue.

  So the garage took us slightly longer, what with locating empty cartons and packing them with tools and writing Ernie across the top, and stuffing all the discards into trash bags. “How do people end up with so many things?” I asked Martine. “Look here: a bamboo rake with three prongs left to it, total.”

  “A rotary telephone,” Martine said, “labeled Does Not Work” She held it up.

  “I hope she’s not fixing to die on us,” I said.

  “Why would you think that?”

  “I’ve seen it before. It’s something like when pregnant cats start hunting drawer space: old people start sorting their possessions.”

  “Oh, don’t say that! Mrs. Alford’s one of my favorites.”

  I had never given Mrs. Alford much thought one way or another. She didn’t have the zing that, say, Maud May had. But I wouldn’t want to see her die.

  “Sounds to me,” Ray Oakley said, “like you two are in the wrong business.”

  “Listen to him: Mr. Tough Guy,” I told Martine.

  Then on Wednesday, Ray called in sick, and we had to start the attic on our own. What Mrs. Alford wanted was, we would carry everything down to the glassed-in porch off her bedroom, where she sat in a skirted armchair, waiting to tell us what pile to put it in: Ernie’s, or her daughter’s, or Goodwill. “How about the Twinform?” I asked her right off.

  “Pardon?”

  “That mannequin-type thing,” I said, because I’d already made up my mind to offer money for it if she put it in the Goodwill pile.

  But she said, “Oh, I’ll keep that. It reminds me of my mother.”

  She kept a lot. A humidor that used to be her father’s, a pipe rack of her husband’s, a cradle that dozens of Alfords had slept in when they were small. Each object we hauled down, she’d make us stand there holding while she told us the story that went with it. And it seemed that the more she remembered of the past, the more she forgot of the present. “Should you be lifting that, Celeste?” she asked Martine, and she mentioned twice again that Ernie was good with his hands. But when I wondered aloud how a big rolltop desk had managed to go up the attic steps in one piece, she was able to recall that it hadn’t gone up in one piece. Her husband had dismantled it first. “The top half’s attached to the bottom half with four brass screws under the corners,” she said, and she went on to recollect that her husband and her brother-in-law had carried the two parts up in the summer of ‘59. “You’ll find a screwdriver on my husband’s workbench,” she said. Then she said, “Oh, no! His tools are gone now!” and her eyes glazed over with tears.

  I said, “Never mind, Mrs. A. I can dig that screwdriver out in half a second. I know just which box I put it in.”

  She rearranged her face into an appreciative, bright expression. “Why, thank you, Terry,” she said. “Aren’t you clever!” And she kept her eyes very wide so that the tears wouldn’t spill over.

  When we were back in the attic, Martine said, “Ray had better not be sick tomorrow, I tell you.” We were struggling at the time with the top half of the desk—Martine’s hair sticking out in spikes around her face—but I knew it wasn’t the lifting that concerned her. We needed someone more hardhearted here, was what.

  Thursday, Ray returned, greenish under the eyes and still not good for much, and we stationed him downstairs with Mrs. Alford. While he shoved items from pile to pile and listened to her stories, we did the hauling. Even then, we got waylaid a time or two. We brought down a piano bench, and Mrs. Alford wanted it placed in front of her so that she could sort the sheet music stored inside. When she lifted the lid, the smell of mice floated out. “ Tm Always Chasing Rainbows,’ ” she said. She spoke so wistfully, so regretfully, that it took me a second to realize she was only quoting a song title. “ ‘Don’t Bring Lulu.’ ‘You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.’ ” Once, the house key Martine wore around her wrist clinked against a metal foot-locker we were carrying, and the sound must have touched off a memory in Mrs. Alford’s head. Out of the blue, she said, “I used to have a wind chime made of copper circles, but then my neighbor came and told me, ‘Please take down your wind chime; please. A wind chime was tinkling the whole entire time I tended my daughter’s last illness, and now I can’t bear to hear it.’”

  We set the footlocker on the floor. “Well, of course I took it down,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ray said. “Ernie’s pile, or your daughter’s?”

  Martine and I scooted back upstairs.

  Friday, we found Mrs. Alford’s brother eating breakfast with her—a tufty-haired, plump old man in a business suit. He’d arrived the night before for the Easter weekend. And Mrs. Alford was her merry self again, graciously introducing us all, ticking off our names perfectly. The three of us went up to the attic and finished clearing it out in no time, after which Mrs. Alford came to the glassed-in porch and said, “This goes to Ernie, this to Valerie, this to Goodwill,” zip-zip-zip. She didn’t even bother sitting in her armchair. We were done by midafternoon.

  I gave Martine a lift home, because she still didn’t have the truck. Neither one of us talked much. I was calculating the time, wondering if I could fit some other assignment in before I went to Mrs. Glynn’s. Martine was hanging her head out the window and humming to herself. Then all at once she pulled in her head and said, “Know what happened the other day? I was playing catch with my nephews in their backyard. And they were having this discussion—about my brother, I thought it was. ‘He says this, he says that.’ So I ask, ‘What time’s he due home tonight?’ and they get quiet and sort of embarrassed and they look at each other and I’m thinking, What?
What’d I say? And one of them tells me, ‘Uh …’ And the other says, ‘Uh, actually, we were talking about our baseball coach.’ I said, ‘Oh. Sorry. I thought you meant your dad.’ But it gave me this sudden picture of what it must feel like to be old. I mean, so old that people imagine you’ve gone dotty. I wanted to say, ‘Wait! I just heard you wrong, is all. It was a natural, normal mistake to make, okay?’”

  Then she hung her head out the window again, and we went back to our separate lines of thought.

  Sophia and I drove up to Philadelphia on the last Saturday in April. This was my second trip to Philly since we’d started dating, but she hadn’t come with me before because her mother had spent the past six weeks at a cousin’s condominium in Miami. So here we were, taking our first long car ride together on a sunny blue-and-yellow morning with a little bit of a breeze, and I felt like a million dollars. Sophia did too; I could tell. She said, “I should always go by car! You get to see so much more countryside than you do when you take the train.”

  I hadn’t told Sophia about watching her on the train that day. I guess I thought it would make me look sort of, I don’t know, sly, the way I’d engineered our meeting afterward. And besides, I was curious to see if she would bring it up on her own. In her place, I’d have bragged about it straight off. (“Want to hear how a total stranger singled me out and approached me and entrusted me with a mission?”) But she never did. Either she considered it not worth mentioning or she’d forgotten it altogether. Probably things like that happened to her all the time. She must have just taken them for granted.

  A lot of our trip was spent discussing her mother, who didn’t sound very likable. “Every weekend of my life,” Sophia said, “she expects me to stay with her, unless of course she has plans, in which case she lets me know at the very last minute: ‘Oh, by the way, don’t bother coming this week,’ when I’ve practically bought my ticket already….”

  She was listing her mother’s physical ailments when we entered the city limits. Don’t I know that kind of old lady! I drove up Broad Street and turned onto Walnut, while Sophia cataloged aches and pains and palpitations, doctor appointments, midnight phone calls … She interrupted herself to point out her mother’s apartment building, which had a green-striped awning. I double-parked in front of it. “Oh!” she said. “There’s Mother now!”

  Sure enough, a big-boned, white-haired woman in a sweater set and matching skirt stood twisting her hands together on the curb. “Come and say hello,” Sophia told me.

  I have never been the meet-the-parents type. I said, “Oh, I’d better not. I’m blocking traffic.”

  But Sophia was calling, “Yoo-hoo! Mother!” as she slid out of the passenger seat, leaving her door wide open behind her.

  Mrs. Maynard turned, blank-faced. Then she said, “Sophia? What on earth! You came by auto? You’re so late!”

  While they were pressing their cheeks together, I made a lunge across the seat and tried to shut Sophia’s door without being seen. But no: “I’d like to introduce you to someone,” Sophia told her mother.

  So I was forced to show myself. I left my engine running, though. I stepped out and rounded the front of the car and said, “How do you do. Sorry, but I’m double-parked; I really have to be going.”

  “This is Barnaby Gaitlin,” Sophia told her mother. “My mother, Thelma Maynard.”

  “I said to myself,” Mrs. Maynard told her, “ ‘Well, that’s it. Sophia’s met with some accident, I don’t know what accident, and the police will have no idea that I’m her next of kin. I’ll be sitting in my apartment Saturday, Sunday, Monday, without anyone to shop for me or fetch my prescriptions. I’ll run out of food, run out of pills; just get weaker and weaker, and they’ll find me who-can-say-how-long after, shriveled up like a prune and lying on my—’ ”

  “Barnaby and I have been seeing quite a lot of each other,” Sophia said.

  Mrs. Maynard stopped speaking and looked over at me. She had one of those rectangular faces, pulled downward at the corners by two strong cords in her neck.

  “How do you do,” I said again. I would have shaken hands, except that she didn’t hold hers out.

  See why I hate meeting parents? I don’t make a good first impression.

  Mrs. Maynard turned back to Sophia and said, “You might at least have telephoned and warned me you’d be late. You know perfectly well what tension does to my blood pressure!”

  We hadn’t been that late. Maybe half an hour or so. But Sophia didn’t bother arguing. She said, in this forthright manner, “Barnaby has become a very important part of my life.”

  I froze. So did her mother. She gave me another look. “Oh?” she said. Then she said, “Mr….?”

  “Gaitlin,” I said.

  Someone honked in the street behind me, no doubt wanting me to move my car, but I didn’t turn around.

  Sophia’s mother asked, “Just what is your line of business, Mr. Gaitlin?”

  “I’m, ah, employed by a service organization,” I told her.

  It came out sounding sort of smarmy, for some reason. Sophia must have thought so too, because she raised her eyebrows at me. Then she gave a sharp hitch to the shoulder strap of her bag. She said, “He works for a place called Rent-a-Back, Mother, lifting heavy objects.”

  “Lifting?” Mrs. Maynard asked.

  I said, “Well, there’s more to it than—”

  “What kind of heavy objects?”

  “Oh …,” I said. “In fact! I’ve been helping Mrs. Glynn some. Sophia’s aunt. I don’t know if you and she are in touch or—”

  “I met him on the train a couple of months ago,” Sophia broke in. “I guess you could call it a pickup.”

  “Pickup?” Mrs. Maynard asked faintly, at the same time that I said, “Pickup!” I stared at Sophia.

  Sophia kept her gaze fixed levelly on her mother. She said, “He sat in the seat next to me, and before I knew it I had agreed to go out with him.”

  “Really,” Mrs. Maynard said.

  I wanted to explain that it hadn’t been that way at all; that things had happened a good deal more inch by inch than that. But I could see what Sophia was up to here. I recognized that triumphant tilt of her chin. And I couldn’t much blame her, either. With a mother like Mrs. Maynard, I’d have done the same.

  Besides, the situation did work to my advantage. Because when Sophia said goodbye to me—walking me to my side of the car, ignoring the honking traffic—she kissed me on the lips and whispered, “When I get back to Baltimore, I want to come to your place.”

  Then she gave me a deliberate, slow smile that turned my knees weak, and she went to rejoin her mother.

  BY THE END of April I’d saved eight hundred and sixteen dollars. I had hoped to be farther along, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to meet my goal of a hundred extra per week. Well, at least it was a start. I got myself a savings account and a little cardboard booklet to record all further deposits.

  For most of May I had this very lucrative short-term client—a young guy who’d broken his leg in four places while mountain biking. He lived alone in a two-story house, and I had to be there first thing every morning to help him down the stairs and drive him to his law office. Then I’d pick him up at quitting time, come back again at bedtime … Not to mention the groceries he needed bought, the shirts he needed taken to the cleaner’s, and so on. When his cast was shortened to shin length and he could get around on his own, he gave me a goodbye gift of a hundred dollars. Rent-a-Back employees are not supposed to accept tips ever, under any conditions, and I told him that, but he said I had no choice. He said, “It’s take it now or have it come to you in the mail, which would cost me the price of a stamp.” So I took it. I confess. It would let me hit eighty-seven hundred that much sooner.

  Sophia knew I was in debt. She even knew the amount, but not the reason. (Why get into the particulars? The Chinese carving and all that.) She was very understanding about it. She never expected me to buy her presents or ta
ke her anywhere fancy. Instead she ferried her Crock-Pot meals to my place after work. (We’d given up on her place, now that we needed more privacy.) First we’d go to bed and then we’d have our supper, tangled in a welter of sheets, leaning against the propped pillows that bridged the gap between my mattress and the back of the couch. I’d be in my jeans again, but she would stay naked, like that painting I have never understood where the men are picnicking fully dressed but the woman doesn’t have a stitch on. Me, I tend to feel kind of undefended without my clothes, but Sophia seemed astoundingly at ease. She’d drape a napkin across her stomach and nibble on a stewed pork chop, then wipe her fingers on the napkin and toss back the loose coils of hair streaming over one shoulder. And meanwhile, I would be asking her questions. There was so much I needed to know about her. No piece of information was too small: her favorite color, favorite crab house, favorite television show … I guess really I was asking, What does it feel like, being you?

  And maybe she was asking the same. She was interested in my parents. She was curious about my brother. She wondered if he and I were anything alike. (“Not a whit,” I told her.) And especially, she wanted to know about my marriage. Where had it gone wrong? Why had Natalie and I split up?

  “Why’d we get together in the first place, is more to the point,” I said. “A weirder combination you can’t imagine. Natalie with her good-girl forehead and me fresh out of reform school.”

  “Oh, now,” Sophia chided me. “It wasn’t a reform school.” But she was wearing her thrilled look, as if she hoped to be contradicted.

  “Well, it was a rich-guy variation on the theme, at least,” I said. “Certainly my neighbors thought as much. They pretended not to know me that whole summer after I graduated—everyone but Natalie. Natalie’s family had moved in across the street while I was gone, and one afternoon I’m mowing the lawn and Natalie comes over with a pitcher and two glasses set just so on a tray. Says, ‘Could I interest you in some lemonade?’ Could I interest you: such a quaint way to put it. ‘Why not,’ I tell her, and I swig down a glass, and that might have been the end of it, except then my mother pokes her head out the door and invites us in for iced tea. As if Natalie weren’t already operating her own refreshment service in the middle of our yard! Well, poor Mom; I guess the sight of a respectable girl was a little too much excitement for her. I tell Natalie, ‘Cripes, let’s get out of here,’ and I leave the mower where it is and we walk off, just like that. So everything that happened after was my mother’s fault, you might say.”