I rolled down my window a quarter of an inch, thinking it might help defog the windshield. I said, “But you still haven’t gotten your money out of the flour bin.”
“No.”
The whistling sound from my window helped to fill the silence.
“Why not?” I asked her finally.
“Hmm?” she said. She leaned forward to swab the windshield with her palm—a mistake, but I didn’t point that out.
“Why haven’t you gotten your money?”
“Oh, it’s … never been the right time,” she said.
“Now would be a good time,” I told her. “While your aunt’s in Philadelphia.”
“Barnaby! I can’t just sneak in like a thief!”
She kept her eyes on the road while she said that. It made her indignation sound fake. All at once I found her irritating beyond endurance. I noticed how the streetlights lit the fuzz along her jawline—fur, it almost was—and how large and square and bossy her hands looked on the steering wheel. Managerial: that was the word. Wasn’t that why her other romances had ended, if you read between the lines? “I’m probably too … definite,” I seemed to remember her saying. “Too definite for men to feel comfortable with.” Darn right she was too definite!
And then that lingering, doting voice she used when she spoke of herself as a child—“When I was a little girl …”—as if she had been more special than other little girls. And her eternal Crock-Pot dinners; oh, Lord. If I had to eat one more stewy-tasting, mixed-and-mingled, gray-colored one-dish meal, I’d croak!
And her predictability: her Sunday-night shampoos and panty-hose washing, her total lack of adventurousness. (Wasn’t it a flaw, rather than a virtue, that she’d been so incurious when the passport man gave her that envelope?) Her even temper, her boring steadfastness, her self-congratulatory loyalty when she assumed I had stolen from her aunt. Here I’d been hoping she would bring me up to her level, infuse me with her goodness! Instead she had fallen all over herself rushing to protect my badness.
I said, “Sophia. Let’s go get that money.”
“Absolutely not,” she said, and she was so prompt about it, she practically overlapped my words.
“Why not? If it belongs to you, why can’t you?”
She said, “Don’t badger me, please. It’s really none of your concern what I do with my own private funds.”
“In fact, it is, though,” I said. “In fact, every time I turn around, you’re telling me how hard your life is now that you’ve lost your money. You’re going on and on about all the things you can’t afford because your money’s in the flour bin, and you know what I think, Sophia? I think you like to have it in the flour bin. I think you feel that as long as it’s in the flour bin, I owe you something. I’m starting to suspect you have no intention of getting it back. You prefer it that I’m beholden to you for your sacrifice.”
“Well, that’s just simply not true,” Sophia told me.
You would think she’d have raised her voice, at least, but she didn’t. Her tone was low and reasonable, and she went on staring straight ahead, and she remembered to signal before she pulled into my driveway. Even that I found irritating. She was just as angry as I was; I knew it for a fact, but she’d already lost two boyfriends, and she’d promised herself she would hang on to this one no matter what a … ne’er-do-well he might turn out to be. Oh, I could read her like a book!
I remembered what I’d told Mrs. Alford when I was describing Great-Grandpa’s visit from his angel. Angels leave a better impression, I’d said, if they don’t hang around too long. Or something to that effect. If they don’t hang around making chitchat and letting you get to know them.
Here is how my Pop-Pop happened to give me the Sting Ray:
I was just about to graduate from the Renascence School, and I’d been accepted at Towson State, and Dad had promised to find a summer job for me. So far he hadn’t succeeded, but that’s a whole other story. The point is, I was doing okay for once. My life was looking up. There was a lot of talk about clean slates and new beginnings, et cetera, et cetera.
Then, at Easter, I came home for the long weekend and got into a little trouble. Well, I’ll just go ahead and say it: I locked my parents out of the house and set fire to the dining room.
I can’t explain exactly how it started. How do these things ever start? It was your average Saturday-night supper; nothing special. My brother had brought a girlfriend. He was living on his own by then, in an apartment down on Chase Street, and he wanted us to meet this Joanna, or Joanne, or whatever her name was. But that was not the problem. The girl was innocuous enough. And my parents were putting on their happycouple act, telling how they themselves had met and so on—my father describing Mom as lively and vivacious and “spunky” (his favorite word for her); my mother turning her eyes up to him in this adoring, First Lady manner. No problem there, either. I’d seen them do that plenty of times. Oh, I’ve never claimed my parents were to blame for my mistakes. My mother might lay it on a little thick—working so hard at her Guilford Matron act, wearing her carefully casual outfits and frantically dragging the furniture around before all major parties—but I realize there are far worse crimes. So, I don’t know. I was just in a mood, I guess. All through supper I kept fighting off my old fear that I might burst out with some scandalous remark. It was more pronounced than usual, even. (Do you think I might have Tourette’s syndrome—a mild, borderline version? I’ve often wondered.) But I made it through the evening. Bade Jeff and What’s-her-name a civil goodbye in the front hall, watched Mom and Dad walk them to the street.
Then I locked every single door behind them and stood inside with my arms folded, listening to my parents knock and ring and shout. (“Barnaby? Barn? You’ve had your little joke now. Let us in now, please.”) I didn’t say a word. When my father stepped off the front stoop, finally, and picked his way through the azaleas to peer in the dining-room window, I snatched up the silver box of matches my mother lit her candles with and I struck a match without a thought and set fire to the curtains. They were some kind of gauzy material, and they burned lickety-split. My father said, “Call the fire department!” (He was speaking to me, I had to surmise, since who else was near a phone?) But my mother said, “No! Think of the neighbors!” and that’s when I picked up a dining-room chair and sent it through the window. It felt spectacular. I can still remember the satisfaction. It made such a clean, explosive crash. Although it also provided Dad with an entryway into the house.
I didn’t try to stop him. I just sort of wandered off to my room, noticing the whole while that I seemed to be behaving like a crazy man. I climbed the stairs with my hands hanging loose at my sides and my expression spacey and vacant, and I watched myself doing it or even overdoing it, the same way years ago I’d overdone my limp when I sprained my ankle once, putting everything I had into the role of a cripple.
Well, you can imagine the brouhaha. Long-distance calls to Renascence, reaming them out for sending home a dangerous individual. Telephone consultations with the headmaster and my adviser. But not my psychologist, oddly enough. I did have one, of a fair-to-middling sort; but the focus here seemed to be my criminal intent rather than my mental state. There was talk, even, of bringing in the police, although that was probably just for effect. My father went so far as to mention jail. “I saved you from jail once before, but I’m not doing it again,” he said. I just kept my same vacant expression. I felt mildly interested, as if it didn’t involve me. I remember reflecting on the bizarreness of jail as a punishment—like sending someone to his room, really. Just put him away! What a concept. But did it ever occur to people that getting put away could come as a relief, on occasion?
Anyhow: the next day was Easter. So we all assembled for Easter dinner—me and my folks; Jeff minus the girlfriend (I believe she’d been hastily disinvited, due to recent developments); my Grandmother Gaitlin, who was still alive at the time; and Gram and Pop-Pop Kazmerow. Of course The Event had been thoroughly dis
cussed behind my back, and I could tell it was the only thing on anyone’s mind. Much shaking of heads, much whispering in the front hall. Sidelong glances at the cardboard-covered window and the charred and blistered frame. Surreptitious sniffs of the tarry-smelling air.
Except for Pop-Pop.
He just walked straight up to me. I was standing alone in front of the unlit fireplace in the living room, feeling like a Martian, and Pop-Pop walked straight up and said, “Happy Easter, Barnaby.”
“Well. Same,” I said.
“It’s wonderful to see you.”
“It’s good to see you too, Pop-Pop.”
Then he reached out and put something in my hand. The Chevrolet key ring.
I said, “What’s this for?”
He said, “You know about my eyesight. I shouldn’t have kept on driving even as long as I have.”
“But what’s—?”
“I want you to have my car,” he said. “She’s still got a lot of miles left in her! And she’s quite a machine, Barnaby. Only Corvette ever made with a split rear window.”
“You’re giving me the Corvette?” I asked him.
He nodded.
“You’re giving it, as in giving it?”
“I can’t think of anyone better, son,” he said.
I have no idea what Jeff’s face looked like at that moment. Did he, in fact, envy me? I never even glanced at him. I was staring down at the checkered flags and blinking back the tears.
THIS YEAR, Mrs. Alford was planning ahead for Christmas, she told us; not waiting till the last minute to get that tree of hers trimmed. So Martine dropped me off one morning in mid-December—a cold day, but sunny enough to start melting the film of snow that had fallen overnight. I climbed the front steps and pressed the buzzer before I wiped my feet, since Mrs. Alford always took some time answering. But it was her brother who opened the door. I recognized the two clouds of white hair puffing above his ears. Had I ever known his name? I’d only met him the once.
He knew mine, though. “Why,” he said. “It’s Barnaby. Oh, Barnaby. How very, very kind of you to call.” And he held out his hand.
I hadn’t been prepared to shake hands, but I did, and then I scraped my feet on the mat a few more times to show that I was ready to head on in and get to work. But it seemed he wanted the two of us to stand talking a while longer. “I can’t tell you how much this means,” he said. “My sister would have been extremely touched that you stopped by.”
Would have been?
Oh-oh.
“But come in! Come in! What am I thinking? Please,” he said. “May I take your jacket?”
“Well … ah, no, thanks. I’ll keep it,” I said.
But I did come in. I couldn’t see any way out of it, really.
“Valerie will want to meet you,” the brother said, leading me through the foyer. I guessed Valerie was Mrs. Alford’s daughter. We passed the dining room, where a bearded man in a bathrobe sat reading a newspaper. Next to him, a baby was pounding her high-chair tray, but the bearded man paid no attention, and when he caught sight of me he just nodded and turned a page. “Richard,” the brother told me. “Valerie’s husband. They left the older kids at home for now; it was such short notice. And school is still in session, of course.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. We were climbing the stairs to the second floor. I hoped Valerie wasn’t in her bathrobe. I said, “It’s kind of early yet. Maybe I should—”
“Nonsense. We’ve been up for hours,” the brother said. “None of us slept very well, as you might imagine.” We reached the upstairs hall, and he called, “Valerie? Val! Look who’s here.”
In Mrs. Alford’s bedroom, a woman in baggy slacks was kneeling beside a cedar chest. She didn’t resemble Mrs. Alford. She was big-boned and gawky, with tortoiseshell glasses and lank brown hair, and you could see she had been crying. She stared at me blankly, which was understandable since we had never met.
“It’s Barnaby,” the brother told her.
“Barnaby!” she said, and she got to her feet and came over to hug me. She smelled of cedar. “Oh, Barnaby,” she said, “what’ll we do without her?” When she drew away, she swiped at her nose with the back of her hand. She seemed more like an overgrown girl than a wife and mother.
“I’m sorry about your loss,” I said. “Mrs. Alford was a super-nice lady.”
“She thought the world of you, Barnaby. Nearly every time I phoned her, she would mention something you’d done for her or some conversation you’d had.”
“I didn’t even know she was sick,” I said.
“Well, she wasn’t, so far as anyone could tell. It was a heart attack. But I think she had some inkling, maybe. I worried all this fall, because why else did she suddenly send me those things from the attic? And her quilt: just look. She seems to have finished her quilt in a rush, after months and months of claiming she would never get it finished.”
The quilt was draped over the edge of the chest. Valerie bent to pick it up and unfold it—a dark-blue cotton rectangle with a gaudy, multicolored circle appliquéd to the center. “Planet Earth,” she said, and the brother made a clucking sound.
I’d heard about that planet quilt often, but I’d never seen it. What I had pictured was a kind of fabric map—a plaid Canada, a gingham U.S. Instead the circle was made up of mismatched squares of cloth no bigger than postage stamps, joined by the uneven black stitches of a woman whose eyesight was failing. Planet Earth, in Mrs. Alford’s version, was makeshift and haphazard, clumsily cobbled together, overlapping and crowded and likely to fall into pieces at any moment.
“Pretty,” I said. Because it was sort of pretty, in an offbeat, unexpected way.
Valerie folded it up again and smoothed it gently before she laid it in the chest.
“We’re having a very small service,” she said. “I’m not sure exactly when. Then afterwards, I suppose we’ll need your help getting the house in shape to sell it.”
“I’ll be glad to help,” I told her. “Just call Rent-a-Back anytime you’re ready for me.”
When I left, Valerie hugged me again, and the brother shook hands again at the door. “Thank you for coming,” he said.
I said, “Well, I’ll miss her.”
It was nothing but the truth.
Of course, I had no way to get home, since Martine had driven off to mail Ditty Nolan’s Christmas parcels. So I sat on the curb out front and waited for her, hugging my knees and digging my chin into my folded arms. The curb was still damp from the melted snow, and I could feel a thin line of cold seeping through the seat of my jeans.
“Oh, my! All done?” Mrs. Alford used to say when I’d finished with a job. “Doesn’t that look lovely!” Her chirpy, cheery, determined voice. “Weren’t you quick about it!”
And then other clients’ voices—some cheery and some not, some sad, some downright cranky.
“Pasta? What’s this pasta business? In my day we called it spaghetti.”
“You’ll find out soon enough, young man, it is not especially unselfish to wish on your birthday candles that your children will be happy.”
“Back in Baltimore’s golden age, when the streetcars were still running and downtown was still the place to go and we had four top-notch department stores all on the same one block: Hutzler’s, Hochschild’s, Stewart’s, and Hecht’s …”
“… and at noon or so the phone rings, and my niece says, ‘I’m waiting for Dad but he hasn’t come and he said he’d be here at ten.’ I say, ‘Oh, now, you know how he is.’ About one o’clock, she calls again; two, she calls again. ‘Where can he be?’ she asks me. I say, ‘He’ll show up; don’t you worry.’ Though I’m fairly worried myself, to tell the truth. Along about three-thirty, I think, Oh! I think, Oh, my stars above! Because all at once it comes to me—I can’t say what brought it to mind—it comes to me that her dad had phoned me at eight o’clock that morning. ‘Sis,’ he’d said, ‘I’ve been trying to reach Sue but her line is busy and I want to hit the road s
o you call her later on, will you, please? And tell her I’ve decided not to stop at her place,’ he said.”
Martine tapped the truck horn. I almost jumped out of my skin.
“Don’t do that, okay?” I said, as I opened the passenger door. “A simple ‘Hey, you’ will suffice.”
“What’s up?” she asked me. She had already cut the engine. “I thought we were trimming a tree.”
“Mrs. Alford died,” I said.
“No!”
I hadn’t meant to be so blunt about it. I settled in my seat and shut my door. “She had a heart attack,” I said.
“Well, damn,” Martine said. Then she started the engine again. But she drove very slowly, as if in respect. “She was one of my favorite clients,” she said when we reached Falls Road.
Mine too, I realized. I wouldn’t have felt that way once upon a time. It used to be that Maud May was my favorite. Maud May was so let-it-all-hang-out. But I don’t know; you start to appreciate the other type of person, by and by—those ultracivilized types who keep their good humor and gracious manners even though their joints are aching nonstop and they can’t climb out of their baths without help and they’re not always sure what day it is. I’d be terrible at that myself.
• • •
“What are you giving Sophia for Christmas?” my mother asked on the phone.
“Oh …,”I said, hedging.
“Because I don’t want to interfere, but if you’d ever care for a piece of your grandmother Gaitlin’s jewelry—such as, say, for example, maybe perhaps a ring, perhaps, or something of that sort—you have only to ask.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but we’ve agreed not to bother with presents this year.”
“Why, for goodness’ sake?”
Why was a question of money, but I didn’t want to say so for fear Mom would segue into the eighty-seven hundred. Instead I told her, “Just lacking in Christmas spirit, I guess.”
Mom sighed. “But you do plan to bring her to dinner,” she said.