Nobody's Fool

  “If you say so, dear,” said Mrs. Gruber, who deferred to Miss Beryl, albeit reluctantly, in most worldly matters. “What’s that tasty highball I always like?”

  “An old-fashioned,” Miss Beryl reminded her.

  Mrs. Gruber ordered an old-fashioned.

  The menu was a special Thanksgiving issue scripted onto an onionskin page with scalloped edges, and Mrs. Gruber studied this as if it were the Rosetta Stone. They had a choice among roast turkey, glazed ham, and Yankee pot roast. Mrs. Gruber’s lips moved as she read each description and broadened into a smile as she arrived at her decision, which Miss Beryl could have predicted at the outset. “I’m going to eat Old Tom,” Mrs. Gruber announced, much too loudly. Several people nearby looked up, startled. “Old Tom Turkey will be just the thing,” Mrs. Gruber said. She was reading the menu a second time, just to make sure. “Succulent, it says.”

  What Mrs. Gruber liked about the food at the Northwoods Motor Inn was precisely what Miss Beryl disliked about it—everything came overcooked. Vegetables were recognizable only by their color, or a bleached version of it, the original shapes and textures lost to the puree process. Meats too were always on the verge of losing their natural composition, so broken down by heat and steam that Mrs. Gruber was always prompted to remark that you could cut it with a fork.

  “Succulent is the wrong word to describe turkey,” Miss Beryl said.

  Mrs. Gruber put down her menu. “What?” she said.

  Miss Beryl repeated her observation.

  “You always get angry about words when you’re in a bad mood,” Mrs. Gruber said, apparently having decided to acknowledge her friend’s offishness. “There’s nothing wrong with the word ‘succulent.’ It’s a perfectly lovely word. You can see it, almost.”

  Miss Beryl conceded that you could almost see the word ‘succulent,’ but she doubted that what she almost saw was what Mrs. Gruber almost saw. It was entirely true, however, that she found fault with words when it was really something else that troubled her. Perhaps she was even guilty of being in a bad mood. Clive Jr.’s call and her suspicions concerning Mrs. Gruber were only part of it. She’d been feeling vaguely annoyed with everything since the morning when she’d conversed with Sully on the back porch and Sully had unexpectedly admitted to having misspent his life. Miss Beryl had always admired in Sully his fierce loyalty to the myriad mistakes that constituted his odd, lonely existence. She’d expected his usual defiance, and his sad, uncharacteristic admission had made him seem even more ghostlike than usual. The whole town of Bath, it sometimes seemed to Miss Beryl, was becoming ghostlike, especially Upper Main Street with its elms, the tangle of their black branches overhead, the old houses, most of which were haunted by a single surviving member of a once-flourishing family, and that member conversing more regularly with the dead than the living. Maybe she would be better off living next to a golf course. Maybe it was better to act as a magnet for slicing Titleists than sit beneath limbs that were bound eventually to fall. That morning after Sully had left and before Clive Jr. called, Miss Beryl had a long and not terribly satisfying discussion with Clive Sr., whom she always missed most urgently on holidays. She’d tuned in the Macy’s parade, but her attention was drawn to the photograph of her husband, whose round face hovered above the Snoopy balloon. Was there something in his expression this morning suggestive of mild disapproval? “If you don’t like the way I’m handling things, you can just butt out,” Miss Beryl told him. “You too,” she told Driver Ed, who looked like he was about to whisper more subversive Zamble advice from his perch on the wall.

  Until recently, Miss Beryl had lived a more or less contented existence on Upper Main, and she didn’t understand why she shouldn’t be contented now, since the circumstances of her existence had changed so little. True, death was nearer, but she didn’t fear death, or didn’t fear it any more than she had twenty-five years ago. What she suffered from now, it seemed, was an indefinite sense of misgiving, as if she’d forgotten something important she’d meant to do. Seeing that wretched little girl and her mother yesterday had focused and intensified the feeling, though Miss Beryl was at a loss to account for why this child, however pitiful, should heighten her own personal regret. Regret, when you thought about it, was an absurd emotion for an eighty-year-old woman to indulge on a snowy Thanksgiving, when she had, Miss Beryl was compelled to admit, a great deal to be thankful for. All of this staring up into trees and waiting for God to lower the cosmic boom was nonsense, evidence no doubt that her mind was becoming as arthritic as her toes and fingers. It would have to stop. All of it. Sully wasn’t a ghost, he was a man. And Clive Jr. was her son, her own flesh and blood, and there was no reason to believe that his protestations of concern for her well-being were other than genuine. Her suspicions were paranoia, pure and simple. Clive Jr. had nothing conceivable to gain by scheming against her independence, and if he had no reason to do it, then he wasn’t doing it. And if he wasn’t scheming against her, then Mrs. Gruber couldn’t be his accomplice.

  There, Miss Beryl said to herself, glad to have reasoned this through so she could enjoy her dinner and be thankful. She once again studied Mrs. Gruber, who’d gone back to her menu and was examining that document as if it contained a plot. Probably, Miss Beryl conceded, she owed Mrs. Gruber an apology. And she was about to offer one, when she heard herself say something entirely unexpected. “Tell the truth,” she said, as if she meant it. “Does my son call you to check up on me?”

  Mrs. Gruber started to put her menu down, then did not. “Whatever do you mean?”

  “I mean, does he call you and check up on me?”

  “Of course not, dear,” Mrs. Gruber said to her menu. “Why ever would he call me?”

  Miss Beryl smiled, her spirits lifted by her friend’s feeble lie and her own ability to detect it. “I didn’t tell him we were coming here for dinner today,” Miss Beryl said, suddenly certain that this was true. “But this morning when I talked to him, he knew.”

  “You must have told him before,” Mrs. Gruber told her menu. “You just forgot.”

  “Look at me, Alice,” Miss Beryl said.

  Mrs. Gruber lowered her menu fearfully.

  “Clive Jr. isn’t really my son,” she told her friend. “The bassinets were exchanged in the hospital.”

  Mrs. Gruber’s stricken look was testimony to the fact that she believed this for a full five seconds. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”

  “It was a joke,” Miss Beryl said, though it hadn’t been. It was a wish, was what it was.

  When Miss Beryl finished her Manhattan, she noted that the line at the salad bar had begun to dwindle. “Well,” she said, rising. “Let’s establish a beachhead at that buffet.”

  Mrs. Gruber, still looking guilty, received this suggestion gratefully. “Beachhead,” she repeated, pushing back her chair. “You and your words.”

  At the salad bar Mrs. Gruber filled two plates, which she allowed one of the Tyrolean waitresses to deliver to their table.

  “I like words,” Miss Beryl said when they were seated again and Mrs. Gruber had begun eating, with great solemnity, her cottage cheese. “I like choosing the right ones.”

  An hour later, on their way back to Bath, Mrs. Gruber got the hiccups. Miss Beryl remembered one of her mother’s favorite quips, which she now shared with her companion. “Well,” she told Mrs. Gruber. “Either you told a lie or you ‘et’ something.”

  Mrs. Gruber looked guilty and hiccuped again. When they arrived back at Upper Main, Clive Jr.’s car was parked at the curb.

  Sully’s ex-wife, Vera, stood at the sink in the kitchen of her house on Silver Street, feeling, for the umpteenth time today, liquid emotion climb in her throat like illness. From the kitchen window in the gathering dusk she was able to make out a ramshackle pickup truck idling at the curb, its blue exhaust creating a cloud that threatened to take over the entire block. Apparently whoever owned it had gone into the house across the street, leaving the truck running, its
viral pollution not so much dissipating as enshrouding. Vera imagined the cloud of noxious fumes growing until it covered not only the block but the entire town of her childhood, her life, leaving a greasy film on everything.

  For nearly sixty years she’d lived on Silver Street in the town of North Bath, for the last thirty in this modest, well-tended house with Ralph Mott, the man she’d married soon after divorcing Sully. For the first twenty years of her life she’d lived down the block in a house that, until a decade ago when her father took up residence in the veterans’ home, had been as pretty and well-tended as any on the street. Since then the whole neighborhood had slipped into unmistakable decline. Her father’s house, the house of her happy girlhood, was now rented to its third grubby, loutish welfare family. The current owner was a man Vera had known and disliked when they were in the same high school class. At the time he bought her father’s house everyone had assumed he’d move in, but instead he rented it, along with the one his parents had lived in around the corner, and he himself moved to Schuyler Springs. He’d bought her father’s house for a song when Robert Halsey, who was in slowly declining health, sensed that it would not be long before he would be in need of constant care. He’d sold the house well below market, without consulting his daughter or anyone else, perhaps without suspecting what the house was worth, perhaps fearing that if he waited too long, the house could conceivably be lost to illness. He’d sold it in the summer, when Vera and Ralph and Peter were away for their week’s vacation, and had moved into the veterans’ home in Schuyler Springs before she returned. He knew that she would try to dissuade him, and perhaps succeed in doing so, knew that it was her intention to tend to his needs for as long as he allowed her. He was unsentimental where his daughter was concerned, knew all too well the preternatural strength of her devotion to him, knew that she would put his needs, his well-being, before her own, and maybe even before her family’s. When she’d been a younger woman, away at her first year at the state teachers’ college at Oneonta and he’d taken ill, she’d simply dropped all her classes and come home to tend to him. When he got well again, at least for a time, she never went back, instead allowing herself to slip into a doomed marriage with Sully (so she could be close by, he suspected) and then, after the divorce, into a more satisfactory but—her father suspected—equally unhappy marriage to Ralph Mott.

  Robert Halsey had been concerned, though not terribly surprised, when his daughter talked her second husband into buying a house down the street. He understood that the proximity made Vera feel safe and good, and he was never able to find a way to tell her that it was time for her to give him up, just as he was never able to tell her when she exercised bad judgment in other respects, despite the numerous opportunities she provided. Her love for him was the most terrible thing he’d ever witnessed, and he could think of no way to combat it, no way to prevent her from injuring herself further. By selling the house and giving her and Ralph the money, by moving to Schuyler Springs and into the VA home, he had fled her devotion and helped his daughter and her second husband get out from under the burden of debt brought on by her earlier lapses in judgment.

  Though he had never found a way to tell her, Vera knew that she was a disappointment to her father. He had worked hard and sacrificed much on his small-town teacher’s salary to provide her with an opportunity to attend college. Instead of going to the university as he’d urged her, she’d insisted on the state teachers’ college because it was closer, and then had walked away from even that. She’d known that returning home to tend him would not please her father, that doing it was some sort of deep-down lie. She had not liked the college or her life there, had not made friends, had not been able to focus on her studies. Her father’s illness had been an excuse to return home and share his life. She loved him that much and found it impossible to question her unflagging devotion to him, even though she understood, at least in moments of brutal clarity, that it was this devotion, as much as Sully’s myriad shortcomings, that was responsible for the failure of her first marriage, just as it was responsible for the continued unhappiness of her second. The simple fact was that no man measured up to Robert Halsey, her father, a man of noble bearing, directly descended from Jedediah Halsey, the man who first envisioned, then made a reality of, the Sans Souci.

  The only person who came close to measuring up was her son, Peter, in whom Vera had a great deal invested. In Peter she saw a boy destined to redeem her father’s faith and sacrifice. He was bright, a far better student than she had ever been, and he did very well in school despite the fact that his teachers seemed not to like him. His achievements always seemed to fall just short of brilliance, a fact for which his mother was never able to account. He was an exceedingly nervous child, but she did not suspect that he studied out of fear, propelled forward only as far as fear could push him, which was a goodly distance. When she finally began to recognize her son’s terrors for what they were, it did not take her long to isolate their source, which could only be Sully, the man who both was and was not his father, who was lurking in the back of her son’s consciousness.

  Vera was able to identify this fear because she shared it. She had always carried with her the knowledge that Sully possessed the power to destroy them all, possibly through carelessness, perhaps even through misguided good intentions. Her most nagging fear when Peter was growing up was that Sully might one day wake up and take an interest in their son. This turned out to be an unwarranted concern, but Vera spent many a sleepless night developing strategies for coping with Sully in the unlikely event that he should become an issue, and each time he turned up at her door, usually at her foolish husband Ralph’s instigation, with plans to take Peter somewhere, Vera was terrified that he would suddenly love the boy. What would she do then? What could she do?

  It was this irrational concern that had so often led Vera’s judgment to falter. Recalling how homesick she’d been in college at Oneonta, how out of place she had felt, how hard it had been to focus on her studies, she decided to spare Peter North Bath’s suspect high school by sending him to an all-boy prep school in New Hampshire. The decision had been an agonizing one because she’d known that even as the strategy protected Peter from his father, it also separated the boy from herself. In the end she decided the risk was worth it, telling herself that the better educated and more refined he became, the less appealing he would be to his father, the less likely Sully would be to come to his senses and love his own son.

  Some would call it justice, she supposed, the way things had turned out—file under “Be careful what you wish for.” As she had hoped, Sully showed even less interest in their son after he went away to prep school. It occurred to Vera too late that this would have happened in any case. The responsibility and burden of affection had always weighed heavily on her ex-husband. Given half a chance, he gravitated naturally to the easy camaraderie of the lunchroom, the barroom, the company of men, of another man’s wife. By sending her son away, Vera had prevented something that did not need preventing, and at a cost to herself. Her attempts to protect Peter, her devotion to him, had once again, just as it had with her father, set into motion the law of unintended consequences, along with the cruel laws of irony and paradox. For Peter, in becoming a son to be proud of—an educator like her father, a college professor at home in the very environment that had intimidated Vera—had learned to lose his interest in and affection for her, coolly dismissing the books she recommended to him, smiling his ironic smile at her political views as if to suggest that she was incapable of any opinion or observation that wasn’t entirely typical or predictable. There was so much she would have liked to tell him, now that they were both adults, and he wasn’t interested in any of it. He seemed more pleased to spend time with Ralph, her husband, who had no views at all, than with herself. That her son remained capable of affection but could spare so little for herself was the crudest twist of all.

  Today, at their Thanksgiving dinner together, Vera had seen more clearly than ever b
efore what a terrible thing love was, or at least the kind of love that had rooted most deeply in her own anxious heart. Knowing how difficult it would be, she had planned the day carefully. Yesterday she’d baked the pies and then had risen early this morning to stuff the turkey and prepare her father’s favorite squash. Then, midmorning, she’d driven to Schuyler Springs with Ralph to gather Robert Halsey from the dreadful veterans’ home, not an easy task because they had to transport not only the fragile man but also his breathing apparatus—the portable oxygen tank and mask—which they could not just put in the trunk, since her father might need it on the drive back to Bath.

  For a while it had seemed the day would work. Back on Silver Street they’d been able to get her father, who was having one of his better days breathing and required the oxygen only sporadically, installed in the living room. Peter, who had always been fond of his grandfather, had drawn up a chair, and the two had swapped teaching stories, Peter suppressing for once his cynicism, along with, at Vera’s insistence, the fact that he’d been denied tenure at the university. Ralph had turned the football game low, and horsey Charlotte had managed to keep the horrid little Wacker, a truly monstrous child, from tormenting his brother and everyone else. Vera had stayed in the warm kitchen, humming over the final dinner preparations and allowing herself to become intoxicated by the smells and sounds of food and family and terrible, terrible love and longing. If she felt a fear, it was the distant one that Sully might show up and spoil everything, since Peter had informed her that he’d issued the invitation, surely to vex her. But she told herself that God would not be so cruel to her as to allow this, at least not today.