Nobody's Fool

  Nor did her rage diminish. As the shadows of her customers continued to move past the old woman relentlessly, the door opening and closing just beyond her reach, Hattie had hurled first warnings, then obscenities. Her customers didn’t mind so much being called fart blossoms, but the sight of an old woman so possessed was unnerving, and those who’d escaped were glad to be safely out in the street. When it became clear to Hattie that neither warnings nor insults stemmed the tide of her customers out the front door, she picked up and chucked a full salt shaker, hitting Otis Wilson behind the right ear, spinning him around on his seat at the lunch counter.

  “Christmas,” Cass said to Sully now, her voice low and threatening. Sully didn’t usually notice such things, but he observed that Cass looked exhausted this morning, herself yet another old woman.

  “She’s all right,” he said, hoping to strike a note of comfort and, of course, hitting something else entirely. “She’ll quiet down.”

  They both studied the old woman then. Hattie’s jaw was set in such a way that it was difficult for either of them to imagine that she’d changed her mind about anything recently. Or conceded anything.

  “After Christmas is when she’ll be all right,” Cass said.

  This morning Sully had noticed on the way in that there was a sign taped to the front door announcing that Hattie’s would be closed the week between Christmas and New Year’s, which, if true, would be a first. The diner was often shut on major holidays, but a whole week between Christmas and New Year’s had never been done before, so far as Sully recollected. The hasty lettering on the sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that Cass had said nothing to Sully about the closing before, suggested to him that she’d arrived at the decision during the night. The deep lines etched beneath her eyes suggested early morning. “She’s not going to go for that,” Sully said, nodding at the sign and noticing as he did so that Rub was there on the other side of the door, shifting his weight from one foot to the other in the gray half light of early morning, his hands thrust deep into his coat pockets, clearly hoping to attract someone’s attention inside, where it was light and warm. He was just tall enough to see over the top of the sign, and Sully could tell he was pleased to have attracted notice, though his face clouded over when nothing came of it. He consulted his wrist then, as if to check how long it would be before the diner officially opened. Since Rub never wore a watch, there was nothing on his wrist that was of the slightest use in this regard. Sully wondered where he could have possibly picked up such a gesture.

  “She hasn’t got any say in the matter,” said Cass, who hadn’t noticed Rub. The tone of this observation suggested a challenge. Sully could dispute the statement if he dared.

  “Okay,” said Sully, who didn’t dare. “I just meant she wasn’t going to like the idea, that’s all.”

  “No,” Cass said. “You meant more than that. You meant that I’d never make it stick and that I shouldn’t even try. You meant that it would be simpler to let her have her way like always, since she’s going to get it in the end anyway. That’s what you meant by ‘she won’t go for it.’ ”

  Well, it was true. That was pretty much what he’d meant. “I didn’t mean that at all,” he objected.

  “Yesterday was the last straw,” she told him, pointing a handful of knives, fresh from their rack on the drainboard, at him. “Yesterday tore it. She’s going into professional care. She can abuse people who are paid to take it.” She slung the knives into the plastic trough beneath the counter.

  “Okay,” Sully agreed. “Fine.”

  Somehow, by appearing to question her judgment or perhaps her will, he’d managed to get Cass angry at him. There were times when he wondered if this were a special skill he possessed, this ability to redirect almost any woman’s anger to himself. They all seemed perfectly prepared to surrender their original object of scorn. Whenever Ruth was angry at Zack, Vera at Ralph, Toby Roebuck (and all the other women in Carl’s life) at Carl—these women were all apparently satisfied to vent their fury on Sully if he happened to be handy, as if he embodied in concentrated form some male principle they considered to be the cause of their dissatisfaction with their own men. Which made him wonder if there might be a way to distract Cass before she got up a good head of steam. “You want to let Rub in?” he suggested.

  Rub was dancing faster now in the entryway.

  “He gets here earlier every morning,” Cass said. “If I let him in, it’ll look like we’re open.”

  “He’ll make you feel better,” Sully predicted.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know,” Sully confessed. “He always does, though.”

  “You just like tormenting him.”

  “Wave to him,” Sully suggested.

  They waved. Rub scowled, did not wave back.

  “All right, I can’t stand it,” Cass said, trying to suppress a smile. “Go let him in.”

  “See?” Sully said, moving past her.

  “Before you do,” she caught him.

  “What?”

  “I’m going to need some help next week. I don’t know who else to ask.”

  “Okay,” Sully said.

  “Don’t say you will unless you mean it.”

  “I’ll make time.”

  “One morning should do it. There’s two places I want to look at. One in Schuyler, one in Albany.”

  “Okay.”

  “Quit saying okay.”

  “Okay.”

  “Go let him in.”

  Sully did.

  “You two were talking about me,” Rub said as Sully closed the door behind him and relocked it. “I could tell.”

  “Make him pay,” old Hattie said audibly at Rub’s elbow.

  Rub, who was frightened of all old women, stepped quickly aside to look at Hattie and determine, if possible, if she’d been addressing him. She never had, even once, during all the years he’d been coming there, though it appeared she was doing so now, and, even worse, demanding money he didn’t have. Without taking his eyes off the old woman, he whispered, “Could I borrow a dollar?”

  When Peter, sleepy-eyed but dressed for work, emerged from the room he and Will were sharing at his mother’s, he caught Ralph poised and listening outside his wife’s bedroom door. In times of trouble, their bedroom became her bedroom, and Ralph knew he was not allowed in without permission. Together the two men stood in the narrow hallway between bedrooms, listening for sounds on the other side of the door. But the only sounds in the whole house emanated from downstairs in the kitchen, Will’s spoon scraping his cereal bowl. When Peter turned and headed down, Ralph followed him.

  “You ready, sport?” Peter said.

  Will was ready. He’d finished his cereal and was engaged in a scientific experiment with the few remaining Cheerios in his bowl. In the beginning, they floated. You could hold a Cheerio under the surface of milk for a long time, but as soon as you removed the spoon, it floated right to the top. You could break it in half, and then the two halves floated. Break the two halves in half and all four floated. But when you broke them into smaller pieces, they bloated up, lost their buoyancy, turned to brown muck in the bottom of the bowl. Without arriving at any conclusions as to what this phenomenon might mean, Will nevertheless found it interesting. It was nice to be able to think such thoughts in peace. Until recently, he’d get about halfway through such a complex thought and Wacker, who could sense other people thinking, would do one of his sneak attacks. Will rubbed the tender flesh along the inside of his right arm between the elbow and the armpit. The soreness was going away. He was beginning to heal. He smiled at his father and grandfather.

  “How about putting that over on the sink,” his father suggested. “Help Grandma out, okay?”

  Will did as he was told. “Is Grandma sick?” he said. He knew something had his grandmother all upset, and he hoped that soon somebody would explain why. It had something to do with the telephone and somebody who kept calling his father and talking to Grandma Vera
instead. And it had something to do with the fact that they weren’t living with Mommy and Wacker and Andy anymore. And it had something to do with Daddy telling Grandma Vera last night that maybe he wouldn’t go back to his teaching after Christmas. Maybe they’d stay and he’d work with Grandpa Sully. Grandma Vera had gotten maddest at that. She was still mad. Mad at Daddy and at Grandpa Sully and Grandpa Ralph for not being on her side. She was mad at Mommy for leaving. About the only person she wasn’t mad at was Will himself, for which he was grateful, except she kept asking Daddy, “What’s going to happen to this child? What’s going to happen to your family?” Which made Will wonder if she could see some danger coming that he was unaware of.

  When Will took his cereal bowl and placed it on the drainboard, Peter said to his stepfather, “Why don’t you come along and grab a cup of coffee at the diner?”

  “I better not,” Ralph said.

  Peter shook his head. “I’d sure get out of here for a while,” he said. “You’re going to bear the brunt of this if you’re handy.”

  Ralph shrugged, followed them out to the back porch, where Peter and the boy donned their heavy coats and gloves. “I’m used to it,” he said, his voice prudently low. Actually, it was more than prudence that caused Ralph not to say it too loudly. There was also guilt. Saying “I’m used to it” felt like an admission, as if to suggest that they both saw Vera in the same unflattering light, which wasn’t true. Ralph wouldn’t have gone so far as to say that his wife was wrong to be upset. He’d have been upset himself if it had been any of his business, which it wasn’t, none of it. People would get themselves into fixes, was the way Ralph looked at it. Peter had gotten himself into one, and that was all there was to it. And since it was the kind of fix Ralph had no real experience with, he considered it morally imperative not to suggest a resolution. Probably he’d suggest exactly the wrong thing. Vera, on the other hand, seemed to know what Peter should do, which was typical. His wife’s strong suit was providing other people a sense of direction, and this was what Ralph was really acknowledging when he said he was used to it. What he was used to was his wife knowing what to do next and making sure it got done.

  “Your mother just wants what’s best for you, is all,” he said.

  “I know,” Peter said, zipping Will’s jacket. The little boy, who had apparently had his throat zipped into his zipper at some point, always put his mittened hand beneath his chin to prevent it from happening again. Sully was right, of course, Peter reflected, the boy was scared of just about everything. “And that would be fine if she didn’t always assume she knew what was best for me. Me and everybody else,” he added, to indicate he understood that Ralph too suffered her certainty.

  “Heck,” Ralph shrugged. “It’s only love, is all it is.”

  Peter shook his head. “No, Pop, you’re wrong. It’s love, all right, but it’s not only love.”

  Ralph wasn’t sure he followed Peter’s distinction, but never mind. “Anyhow,” he said. “Don’t pay no attention to what she said. You know you’re welcome to stay here as long as you need to. This house is part mine too, and as long as it is, you and yours …”

  Ralph discovered he was unable to continue, his voice having suddenly constricted with complex and powerful affection for all concerned. Constricted with love. With only love.

  Peter studied his stepfather. “How do you do it, Pop?” he wondered. “How do you put up with it?”

  Ralph was grateful for the appreciation but had no idea how to respond to Peter’s question without seeming to grant another admission. “I’ll handle things here,” he said. “She never stays like this long. By tonight …” He let the statement trail off when he remembered who he was talking to. He might have been able to convince a stranger that things would be better by evening. But Peter knew his mother, and therefore he knew better. In truth, Ralph himself had never seen Vera more down than she was now. “I just hope we don’t get no more phone calls.”

  Peter looked down at the garage floor. “I have no idea how she got the number.” Actually, this was not true. It had occurred to him late last night that he’d called Deirdre collect over Thanksgiving. The number had probably appeared on her phone bill. Concerned as he was by the phone calls, they weren’t his worst fear, which was that Didi herself might show up, which she had in fact threatened to do.

  “How’d you ever go and meet somebody like her?” Ralph asked. This was the question that had been puzzling him since the previous afternoon when he had taken the last of the calls and wished he hadn’t. Ralph had no firsthand experience with academic people, but he imagined them to be like the people he saw on the Albany educational channel on the cable. Vera liked watching that channel and was always contemptuous of Ralph when he had to confess after watching one of those drama shows for a full hour that he wasn’t too sure he understood what was going on. The way he figured it, everybody at Peter’s university probably talked the way they did on educational TV, and so he was not prepared when the young woman on the telephone who kept calling and demanding to talk to Peter and who apparently refused to believe that he wasn’t there said to Ralph, “Okay, but just ask when he gets home, okay? Just ask him. Do I, or do I not, give the best head on the East Coast.”

  “I met her at a poetry reading,” Peter told him in answer to his question.

  Ralph nodded soberly, feigning comprehension. “The women who go to those things all like her?”

  Peter couldn’t help but grin. “A surprising number.”

  Ralph shook his head. He’d never been to a poetry reading. The reason he’d never gone to one—that people would be reading poetry there—had always seemed sufficient, but now he had another reason if he ever needed one. Vera’d never asked him to attend a poetry reading, but it was the sort of thing she might do someday if she got annoyed at him and was searching for a punishment and was tired of the educational channel. The good news was that there weren’t any poetry readings in Bath, but Schuyler Springs wasn’t very far away and they probably had them there. Maybe Albany, for all he knew. It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry readings and not know it.

  Ralph had been too embarrassed to pass along to Peter the young woman’s question about whether she did or did not give the best head on the East Coast. Ralph would no more have repeated what the young woman said to him than he would have confessed to having, when he was a young man, once been the recipient of a blow job. It had happened in South Carolina, where it had been against the law, and not just the fact that they’d paid for it, either. Like most horrible experiences, Ralph had not been able to forget it. What had he been thinking of, to go along? Now, at fifty-eight, he asked himself the same question he’d asked himself as an eighteen-year-old. And answered it the same way. That he hadn’t known what it would be like until it was too late to back out. Ralph had imagined, for one thing, that they would each have a girl. And a room. A different girl and separate rooms. That was the way he’d thought it would go. Not the same girl for all of them and all of them crowded into a hot, dark little room. It was a private act he’d imagined, not a public performance. And pleasure, not some vague distant rumbling, like a churning stomach. He’d imagined two naked people, not a fully dressed girl servicing six men who dropped their trousers down around their ankles when it was their turn and pulled them up again as soon as they were finished. He had not imagined performing to a gallery, accepting advice, criticism and finally applause. How had he allowed himself to take part in something so sordid?

  Well, he hadn’t meant to, was about all he could say in his own defense. He honestly hadn’t meant to. He hadn’t known what he was getting into, and he felt certain that the same thing must be true of Peter, whom Ralph refused to think badly of. If Ralph blamed anyone, as the two men and the boy stood awkwardly at the back door, limited in what could be said by the presence of the boy, he blamed himself for not knowing what to advise. He hadn’t even advised Peter about the existence of such women as this one he’d fal
len in with, the kind who could make a man feel like something not quite a man and accomplish it in a way no other man, however jeering and contemptuous, could do. “You ain’t quite up for this, are you, Mr. Limp?” the sneering girl they’d hired in South Carolina had said after she’d been working on young Ralph awhile, to little effect, and a couple of his friends had howled appreciatively at this insult. But a boy who hadn’t had his turn yet and probably feared a similar difficulty had come to Ralph’s defense and told the girl not to talk with her mouth full, and this act of friendship had allowed Ralph to relax and concentrate until the vague rumbling finally came and went, like a train into and then out of the station of the next town over. No, Ralph refused to think badly of his stepson. He would have liked to say something witty and comforting like the boy had done in South Carolina, something like Sully always came up with, but about the best he could do was tell Peter he and the boy were welcome to stay with them as long as they needed to. Hiding, Ralph suspected, was what Peter was doing, and Ralph didn’t blame him a bit. Even forty years later, if that girl from South Carolina ever turned up in Bath, Ralph would have bolted, maybe up into the Adirondacks someplace into the deep woods, until he was sure she was gone again and it was safe to return. And Ralph didn’t consider himself a coward either. A man had a right to be scared of such women. A moral duty to, probably.