We were through breakfast by seven forty-five. By eight Ruth was in the kitchen with her glasses on and her cookbooks open, and I was out in the rain, doing my best not to blow away on every gust, trying to clean up the worst of the soggy leaves and trash that had eddied into the entrance. The plum blossoms of the night before were only a memory. This was no warm Hawaiian wind. This storm that had overtaken the first was straight down from the Aleutians.
Streaming water off my slicker, my beret soaked, I brought in wood and laid a fire. With chicken breasts amandine for the main course, I decided to evoke Césare’s appreciation with a good Green Hungarian, and put two bottles in to chill. To give a running start to Minnie, who was due at nine, I emptied all the wastebaskets and the garbage pail. When she didn’t show up by nine, I went in and made the bed. Then I cleared some coat space in the front hall closet, and when my householder’s eye was of. fended by the clutter of canes, umbrellas, and walking shoes stacked in there, I cleaned out the closet
Nine-thirty, and no Minnie. Ruth, browning something in butter, compressed her lips and worked her black eyebrows at me significantly. “I thought maybe she could help with the cooking and serving,” she said. “If she doesn’t show up pretty soon the won’t even have the house tidied up.”
I started washing up her pots and pans, which she redirtied as fast as I washed them. By ten I had caught up with her, and the kitchen was filling with succulent smells, but still no Minnie. “She may not get here at all,” I said. “There may be mud slides, washouts, down trees, all sorts of things. Maybe I’d better do the vacuuming. Then you can put her to work right away if she comes.”
“Oh, if you would,” Ruth said gratefully. Reaching to move something off the burner, she burned her wrist. Grinning with pain, she held still while I smeared the inch-long burn with ointment which I, suburban preparedness freak, had stowed in a drawer only days before.
The more any situation looks to Ruth like darkest tragedy, the more I am inclined to believe it can be dealt with. My contrariness, I suppose. At that point I was hearty and cheerful, and though I had been preparing just as anxiously as she had, I wished, from my superior calm, to reassure her.
“Take it easy,” I told her. “Césare’s never been known for his promptness. If he gets here at all, and he might not, he’s sure to be late. There’s plenty of time. just do your cooking, and relax, and I’ll go ahead and straighten up the house, and if worst comes to worst and we have no guests, well sit down together, just me and my Jo-John, and eat the chicken breasts amandine and drink a cold bottle of Green Hungarian together.”
“I don’t know,” she said, and looked at me (or herself) and laughed. “If he doesn’t come now, after getting us started on this, he’ll never be welcome in my house again.”
She had the lights on all over the house, to make things more cheerful that dark morning. I got out the vacuum cleaner and plugged it in and made one, pass across the rug, and pop, the cleaner’s howl died and all the lights went out.
“Oh, I knew it!” came Ruth’s cri de coeur from the kitchen.
“Peace,” I said, unruffled. “It’s probably just the circuit breaker.”
Leaving the vacuum where it stood, I went and inspected the panel on the kitchen wall. While I was craning up at it, looking for a breaker that was kinked, the lights flashed on, and the vacuum began to howl and flounder. I arrived just too late to keep it from bumping into the piano leg. As I shut it off and straightened it up Ruth came running, looking like Medea, and popped her finger in her mouth and rubbed it over the dented scar. The lights dimmed to a red pulse, flared up, and went out once more.
Unlighted, the room was gray and cold. The wind went past the plate glass absolutely flat, and rain like tracer bullets swept the tops of the live oaks below the terrace. I could barely see the valley or the country road; the hills opposite were only sodden, running outlines.
“What’ll we do?” Ruth said.
“Haven’t you got candles?”
“Oh, candles! How’m I going to cook? How’ll we keep the house warm? What’ll we do for water? We can’t even flush the john.”
True. There are handicaps to country living in an all-electric house whose water is pumped from a well, in a country where the winter ground is like soup, so that trees lie down across the power lines when the wind blows. Once last winter the power was off nearly all day, so long that Ruth and I paid three different calls, to people we didn’t especially want to see, just to get to use a bathroom.
On the other hand, I was still feeling cheerful and competent. These little emergencies stir the blood. I cope, therefore I am.
“I’ll light the fireplace,” I said. “That’ll both warm and cheer us. Johns—I don’t know. What if I bring in some pails and kettles from the tank so we don’t have to run down the pressure? Keep one flush in each john for the visitors. As for cooking, what is Sterno for?”
“Did you ever try to bake corn fingers with Sterno?” Ruth said. “Did you make an apricot soufflé with Sterno?”
“Maybe they’ll just have to do without corn fingers and apricot soufflé.”
“That would be quite a lunch. Chicken and salad.”
“And wine. He’s eaten a damned sight worse. At least let’s see if we can keep the chicken warm.”
I found two cans of Sterno, another fruit of my preparedness campaign, but no sign of the little tin stove to use them in. Ingenuity suggested tipping up a burner on the electric stove, setting a can of Sterno in the well under it, and tipping the burner back flat. Presto. I was congratulating myself and trying to cheer my determinedly gloomy wife when the door blew open and Minnie stamped in, wet-footed, wet-coated, hoo-hooing like a steamboat, with a wet cigarette pasted to her lower lip.
“Heyyyyy! Ain’t this some’m!”
Every Tuesday morning she arrives at our door bursting with some dramatic tidings. Like any boiler or pressure tank, she must be eased of her burden gradually. She can’t be hurried, she has to bubble and hiss herself quiet Even on such a day as this we know better than to interrupt her show. As when on some hot mountain road a traveler hears the rumblings under the hood, and watches the temperature needle climb past the red and out of sight, and stops and opens the hood, and with handkerchief around hand makes darting stabs at the radiator cap to open it a little, but not too much, so the Allstons gave greetings to their cleaning lady, and waited for the jets of steam.
She kicked off her muddy shoes, she stripped off her raincoat and revealed the white nurse’s nylon that gives her status as a professional and imparts a touch of class to the establishments she is willing to assist. Rumbling with phlegmy laughter, squinting against imaginary smoke from the cigarette that had been quenched in her run from car to door, she slid in stocking feet to the kitchen wastebasket and with a wet thumb and finger dropped the disintegrating cigarette in among the garbage.
“You know what I see on my way over? Ha-hal Them creeps! Lessee if their zoning laws’ll take care of that onel”
Them creeps are the junior executives and computer programmers who occupy the new subdivisions. It is Minnie’s contention, with which in the main I agree, that they have ruined the hills by imposing their one-acre, one-house rigidities on land that used to be lived on comfortably by people who respected it. This morning, after waiting an hour while her husband Art dried out her wet distributor, she came over the hill past one of the new tracts just in time to see one of the bulldozed shelves let go its hold and slide smoothly down into the creek, leaving the aghast residents staring from the rain-swept edge of what had once been their front yard.
“Fence, trees, part of the lawn, the whole business,” Minnie said. “I thought of callin’ Art, and then I thought, What the hell, let ’em apply to Town Hall. You know, Mister Allston, if it was you, or the Pattersons, or somebody decent, Art’d be over in a minute to help. Jeez, it use to be a lot different around here. Everybody helped everybody else, everybody went to the same Christmas and New Year p
arties, there wasn’t any difference except some people had a bigger house and maybe a couple horses in the pasture. And you knew people, you’d see things goin’ on. Now everybody’s behind a chain-link fence, you never see anybody even mowin’ his lawn. But you’ll see this guy for a while, you can look right in his parlor window. I wisht it would happen to the rest of them. Them creeps with their subdivisions and their tax hikes and their zoning! My God, you can’t even build a henhouse without a permit—can’t even keep hens, for hell’s sake. Got to tie up your dog, can’t do this, can’t do that, can’t keep horses because the neighbors object to all them flies. Then that same woman and her phony husband that have sunk all they got, and a lot more, in this place they’ve made too expensive for anybody to afford it, they go on down to Town Hall twice a month and pass some more laws so their fancy address won’t get hurt by dogs and chickens and cluster housing and black people and Chicanos and students and hippies and federallyfinancedlowerincomehousing, all one word. That’s their real scare. Honest to God, they cross themselves when they say it.”
Ruth, with her unburned wrist holding up her bangs and her mouth in a rictus, said, “Yes. Well.”
Minnie stowed her shoes and raincoat in the broom closet and stood up, grunting. “Might as well work in stocking feet, so’s I won’t mess up your floors. God, them people. You know what one of ‘em said to me the other day—Mrs. Barnes, you know her? One of them white tennis dress ones with her legs naked clear to her behind? Runs into me on the road and stops me to ask about Mr. Patterson. Knows I work there. ‘Mister Patterson don’t look well,’ she says. ‘Looks so pale and thin,’ she says. ‘Well,’ I says, ‘he’s just gettin’ over an operation.’ ‘Is he gettin’ over it?’ she wants to know. ‘I heard it’s terminal,’ she says. ‘I don’t know where you heard that,’ I says. ‘Far as I know, he’s gettin’ along fine.’ ‘Well, I’m so glad to hear it,’ she says, and then she says, like it hasn’t been on her mind all the time, ‘Oh, Minnie,’ she says—who the hell ever give her the right to call me by my first name?—‘Minnie,’ she says, ‘if anything should happen to Mister Patterson and they don’t need you no more, I hope you’ll keep me in mind. It’s so hard to find reliable help,’ she says, ‘up here in the hills.’ Sittin’ there waitin’ for him to die. Jesus.”
“That’s callous,” Ruth said. “I can’t imagine people being so callous. Minnie, I wonder...”
“ ‘Why don’t you try East Palo Alto?’ I ask her, and she says, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t dare! Bring a black into the hills?’ she says. ‘It would make me nervous, just knowin’ they knew where we live.’ ‘Well, Mountain View or Sunnyvale then,’ I says. ‘There’s plenty people need work.’ But she don’t like that any better. ‘Chicanos?’ she says. ‘Right when La Raza is suin’ this town, right this very minute, tryin’ to push a lowcosthousingproject on us and break down our zoning? I’d be just every bit as nervous hirin’ a Chicano as I would a black.’ ‘Well, that’s too bad,’ I says to her, ‘because you know what my last name is? Garcia.’ That kind of scrambled her. ‘Oh, but you’re different,’ she tries to say. ‘I mean, you’re married to Mister Garcia but you’re not ... And you live in the hills, you’re a neighbor.’ ‘So was a lot of other Chicanos till you crowded them out,’ I says. Oh boy, that’s some kind of people. Nixon could of got his whole White House staff out of just one subdivision around here. I wish you could of seen them up there on the edge of that bank lookin’ down to where their front yard had slid.”
“I wish we had,” Ruth said firmly. “I wish we had time to hear all about it. But we just haven’t got time, I’m afraid. We’re in a jam, Minnie. We’ve got people coming for lunch, and the power’s off. You know how that is. You can’t do anything. But we’ve got to, just the same. First thing, I guess you or Joe will have to bring in some buckets of water from the tank.”
“Why sure,” Minnie said. “Whyn’t you say? You just tell me what you need done. Oh... hey.” Her eyes were on me.
“What?” I said.
“I. forgot to tell you. But if you got company comin’, your culvert’s plugged up and there’s water runnin’ all down your road. I just barely made it up.”
The light came on, dimmed to a glow, fluttered, and went out —some forlorn last kiss of broken wires off in the wet hills. Ruth said in her crisis voice, “I suppose you’ve got to see what you can do. Minnie’ll get me the water. But first bring me in two leaves for the table. Oh, damn, why didn’t we say we’d take them out somewhere?”
“Maybe we couldn’t get out,” I said. “Maybe he can’t get in. Relax. We’ll make it.”
“Oh, relax!” Ruth said. When she gets into one of those states she resents any attempt to soothe her. Only last-ditch desperation is permissible.
That was about eleven. Three quarters of an hour later I was still digging, blind with rain, my slicker threatening to lift me up like a hang glider, at the mound of leaves and gravel the flood-water had piled over the entrance to the culvert. Water pouring down against the pile was being deflected out into the road, to go sheeting down the asphalt toward the bottom, where a lake had covered the area between the eucalyptus trees. That culvert was obviously clogged too.
My feet were wet, my pants were soaked to the thighs. As usual, my hands had gone into their Raynaud’s syndrome spasm in the cold and were white to the second joints of the fingers. For all that, the adobe mixed with leaves was so impossible to shovel that I finally had to get down and dig at the mass with my hands. Eventually I moved something that counted. The bottom fell out, the stream of water dove downward with a slurp, and across the road I heard the plug of mud and leaves shoot out into the gully. So. Emergency dealt with. I cope, therefore I am. I washed my numb hands in muddy ice water and stood up to shove them between the buttons of my slicker and into my armpits for warming. Then I heard a car at the foot of the hill.
It had already eased through the lake down there. Now, shifted down, it started fast up the road on which water was still sheeting, not yet cleared by my clearing of the culvert. It threw a bow wave like a power boat—a BMW, I saw, two people in it, blonde hair on the right, black behind the wheel, two faces staring out through the sweeping wiper blades. Césare and company, a half hour early. Ruth would be so pleased.
Leaning on my shovel, I stood aside, my face fixed for humorous comment, intending to wave them on when they slowed, with shouted assurances that I would be with them in a few minutes. But at the last moment something in the set of Césare’s head and neck told me that he was not pausing in any downpour on any flooded hill for any workman in a muddy slicker leaning on a muddy shovel. I just had time to swing around as they passed. The splash drenched the back of my slicker and the unprotected back of my neck.
Almost contemplatively, assuring myself that I still had a half hour before my guests were due, I went on down to the bottom and cleared the culvert there to ease and drain the lake. Leaving the shovel in case further emergencies developed, I came back up the road littered with leaves, broken branches, and rocks loosened from above. To maintain feelings appropriate to a host, I did not allow myself to dwell on the State Department’s exchange-of-persons program, nor yet on the volatile and romantic Italian temperament. Instead, I counted the steps it took me from the bottom culvert to the middle one—one hundred twelve—and from the middle one to the top—one hundred seventy-one. Two hundred eighty-three altogether.
Unseen, I got past the entrance and around to the bedroom door. But when I had peeled off my soaked and muddied clothes and stepped into the bathroom, my finger on the switch produced no light, and in the shower my turning of the knob gave rise to no more than a weak little old man’s jet followed by a dribble. While I tried to get clean under that, I elaborated a fantasy in which I called Dr. Ben Alexander and had him come to examine the prostate of my plumbing system.
Finally I got half clean, though my hands continued numb, and at twelve-forty, only ten minutes after they had been invited for, but forty after the
ir arrival, I went in to my guests. Things had obviously been a little strained in there. Ruth, who has a lot of doomed-queen, avenger-queen expressions, sometimes Medea, sometimes Clytemnestra, sometimes Lady Macbeth, gave me one that was more like Cassandra or Mary Queen of Scots. She was just handing a drink, probably the second or third, to Césare, who was peering out at the drowned hills and being reminded, not for the first time if my intuition was right, of Umbria.
Césare rushed to embrace me, crying to his gods that he had not recognized me on the hill. “How could I know? I saw you there, I thought, ‘Poor devil, what some people must do to live.’ But I could not stop, you understand, the road was a torrente. Or should I pretend that Ms. McElvenny was driving?”
I shook Ms. McElvenny’s hand: she was a pussycat with half-inch eyelashes. “I knew who was driving,” I said. “Remember the last time I saw you? You drove me down that corkscrew road from the American Academy to Trastevere. I didn’t draw a breath all the way down. Once I looked back, just as we passed that little temple, the one with the fountains, and the gravel was still hanging in the air above the Villa Aurelia’s gate. Then I looked down, and here came a Volkswagen bus that was going to meet us just at a curve where a fellow was washing his car in the road. And from farther down the roofs of the Regina Coeli were floating up toward us the way Fifth Avenue would float up at you if you did a half gainer off the Empire State. Nobody’s going to be in any doubt who’s driving, if you’re at the wheel.”
Césare was delighted. Said Ms. McElvenny the pussycat, “Can you picture what it’s like to have him drive you down Jones Street?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I can. Exactly.”
The Spectator Bird Page 6