Beginner's Luck

by Laura Pedersen

  I'm not sure about ecstasy, but I am sure that the red tights are starting to itch something awful and that if I don't go upstairs and change in another few minutes I'm going to be in serious agony.

  Chapter 50

  On the Outside ♠

  By the second day of May there's been no sign of morning frost silvering the brown grass for two consecutive weeks and Mr. Bernard declares it officially safe to begin planting the outdoor gardens. We buy flats of flowers from the nursery, carefully bury the roots of the tiny seedlings in the freshly turned earth, and transfer the small but sturdy plants we'd been nurturing in the summerhouse. The porch pots are taken from the sunroom and placed at various points along the meandering garden path.

  And by the second week of May, my back is aching, my fingernails are permanently stained brown, and I practically fall into a coma the moment I lay my head down on the pillow at night. There are nightmares about giant pachysandra trying to smother me and bury my worn-out body in the damp soil to be used as fertilizer for their offshoots.

  One night I'm so exhausted that I go to my room directly after dinner. I can't even wait for the apple strudel to finish baking in spite of the fact that it smells delicious. Mr. Bernard kindly offers to save me a piece for breakfast.

  Propped up between the lamp and clock radio on my night table I find an information package from the Cleveland Institute of Art. A bright purple Post-it marks a summer program where you put together a portfolio that can be used to apply to the regular four-year program. Anyone can sign up. I read about this for a few minutes and then pass out from exhaustion, thereby quickly clearing the way for the sinister pachysandra of my horticultural dreamscapes.

  A gentle tapping on my door awakens me. At first I think it's morning or else the pachysandra have taken to clumping around the house in the middle of the night, foraging for boxes of Miracle-Gro.

  "Hallie, are you awake?" It's Ms. Olivia.

  I open the door wearing the red practice football jersey Craig gave me before his raging hormones totaled us. It has his number, 22, in peeling black iron-on fabric across the front and back. Ms. Olivia is wearing a bright orange tracksuit and carrying a flashlight.

  "Hurry up and put some pants on," she urges me. "It's a moonless night, perfect for Conrad."

  One thing about Ms. Olivia is that she isn't affected by daylight savings, normal working hours, alarm clocks, or anything else that has to do with time.

  "Okay," I agree. "I'll be downstairs in a minute."

  The thing I should be most worried about, however, is not that we are going to trudge into the middle of the woods, just the two of us, and read from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, but that I actually knew what Ms. Olivia's cryptic statement meant when she summoned me in the first place.

  Together we tramp through the backyard with the beam from the flashlight bouncing along ahead of us like an unsecured moon. I enjoy the great outdoors as much as the next person, but must admit that even I feel spooked reading Conrad in the forest at midnight. Especially the part about coming across a remote outpost with a row of human heads mounted on poles.

  And it only makes the reading scarier knowing that on this very same ground, in these very same woods, Indians were once slaughtered by Europeans. Eric had found an actual Indian arrowhead back here when we were in elementary school.

  I read aloud the dying words of Kurtz, The horror! The horror!

  Ms. Olivia stubs out her cigarette and shreds the butt into the grass. Then she explains that "The horror!" represents despair over the encounter with human depravity, and that's what the heart of darkness is supposed to mean. And also that powerful people shouldn't go around trying to civilize others. Then she tells me about the author. And when she talks about Joseph Conrad, quite frankly, it's easy to understand how he became preoccupied with despair and depravity. According to Ms. Olivia, his father was a poet and Polish patriot arrested for his politics and sent into exile in northern Russia. And it was there that both Conrad's parents died of tuberculosis. Ms. Olivia especially admires Conrad for refusing an offer of knighthood from the British government.

  During the trek back home Ms. Olivia smokes another cigarette. She says that she hopes I'll never start since it's a terrible habit and will probably give her lung cancer. "There's nothing worse than a dead Unitarian," she jokes, "all dressed up with no place to go."

  By the time we arrive back at the house it's only one o'clock, but after reading all that macabre Conrad it feels as if it should be much later. Mr. Bernard is sitting downstairs in his bathrobe paging through a coffee-table book about Biedermeier furniture.

  "Have Thelma and Louise returned from their adventures? I'm so jealous that you girls never invite me to your Wiccan rituals and coven meetings. Did you have a séance or just talk about boys and do each other's nails?"

  "I told you not to wait up," Ms. Olivia dismisses Mr. Bernard's teasing.

  "I was listening for the beating of the drums. And also, you had a customer." We all understand this to mean that someone stopped by for one of Ms. Olivia's morning-after pills.

  "Good night," says Ms. Olivia as she begins to climb the stairs.

  "Oh, Moth-er," Mr. Bernard calls after her with exaggerated sweetness.

  "Yes, dear?"

  "The pet store next to my shop has a going-out-of-business sale sign in the window."

  "Oh, Bertie, I'm just not ready for another dog right now."

  "That's not what I meant." Mr. Bernard pauses. "You haven't been down there freeing the birds again, have you?"

  "Of course not!" Ms. Olivia replies indignantly. "Don't be ridiculous."

  "Ridiculous? What about—"

  "Those were toads, Bernard. Common garden-variety toads, and they never should have been incarcerated in the first place."

  "All right, all right. I just wanted to make sure."

  "And I bought the toads before I returned them to the earth."

  "Yes, of course. Please accept my apologies."

  "I have a receipt for the toads," Ms. Olivia calls out from the top of the stairwell.

  After we hear the door to Ms. Olivia's room close, Mr. Bernard asks, "So were you scared?"

  "A little bit," I admit.

  "Once when I was about ten years old we had a power failure," Mr. Bernard recalls. "Father was out of town and Mother had me make popcorn and then took me down to the basement and lit a few dozen candles and read 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue.' Mutilated corpses, scalped women, an escaped orangutan, the whole kit and caboodle. It made Psycho look like a romantic comedy."

  Sometimes I can't help but wonder if Ms. Olivia knows more about witchcraft than she lets on. There's a boxful of odd-looking charms and trinkets on her bureau, and a whole shelf of books on mystical writing in her library. She claims it's all research for her poetry.

  "Uh, Mr. Bernard ..." I whisper.

  But he's lost in his book. "Uhmmm."

  "Your mother ... I, uh .. . she's not a witch, is she?" But I don't want this to sound like an insult, because I really do love Ms. Olivia. So I quickly add, "I mean, not that it would matter."

  Only Mr. Bernard doesn't even look up from the page. "No, no," he replies offhandedly, as if this is the most natural question in the world and doesn't even require his full attention to properly answer it. "Mother abhors dark clothing. She favors a bold palette—lots of vermilion, marigold, and magenta. Furthermore, I'm quite positive she has no idea as to where I keep the brooms."

  Chapter 51

  Cleaning Up ♦

  One evening at dinner Ms. Olivia casually announces that the mysterious Ottavio Vespignani will be paying us a visit beginning May 25, in just one week's time. Although she hasn't mentioned him since the Judge died, I know that they send E-mails to each other and occasionally speak on the phone. Ms. Olivia talks on the phone wherever she happens to be and doesn't seem to care if the conversation is overheard.

  The only way I can tell that Mr. Bernard is anxious about the visit is b
y the cooking and housekeeping frenzy that ensues. Using the excuse of "spring cleaning," he hires every possible local service—chimney sweep, window washer, a driveway-sealing company, and eight German-speaking cleaning women who scrub, wax, and shine the place from top to bottom in a single hour. Mr. Bernard dubs them the Luftwaffe and makes us all evacuate the premises while they scour and carpet-bomb. Another van pulls up and two burly men march into the house and take down all the drapes and remove the bedspreads and whisk them off to be sanitized and deodorized.

  Ms. Olivia appears unfazed by Mr. Bernard's purification rituals and sloughs off his occasional outbursts about the general squalid state of the household the way a Labrador retriever shakes off its bathwater. Though when he attempts to line all of our drawers with oilcloth she says that angst has finally overcome his innate sense of decor.

  Two days before Ottavio's arrival, Mr. Gil and Mr. Bernard sort through all the Judge's clothes and take them to the Salvation Army bin behind the Star-Mart. Then Mr. Bernard, Mr. Gil, and I sit around the dining room polishing the silverware while Ms. Olivia alternately works a crossword puzzle and reads to us from Robert Herrick.

  That age is best which is the first,

  When youth and blood are warmer;

  But being spent, the worse and worst,

  Times still succeed the former.

  "How does a person write a great poem or novel?" I ask.

  "Oftentimes they're inspired by earlier works or a heroic figure," explains Ms. Olivia. "Remember the Italian renaissance poet Francesco Petrarca? He inspired Chaucer."

  "Like Elton John wrote about Princess Diana?" I ask.

  "Quite right," says Mr. Gil.

  Of course, the real question on our minds at that moment is not poetry but where Mr. Ottavio Vespignani will sleep. There has been no move by Ms. Olivia to move Rocky off the pullout couch in the Florida Room, and I haven't been asked to donate my bedroom. And even though Mr. Bernard and I scrubbed the summerhouse from the skylight right down to the natural wood flooring, we haven't been asked to prepare a bed out there either.

  Anyway, nobody dares to ask Ms. Olivia, though Mr. Bernard has poked around a few times by pretending to mull over the purchase of new linens at one of the white sales at the mall.

  "Does Ottavio enjoy seafood, Mother?" Mr. Bernard inquires the morning of the big arrival. "I was thinking of making madrilene with red caviar and Dover sole in a shiitake mushroom sauce."

  "I'm sure that will be fine," Ms. Olivia replies. "Ottavio appreciates any and all good cooking."

  "Does he have any food allergies?" Mr. Bernard asks.

  "Not that I'm aware of," she says.

  "I know!" Mr. Bernard appears to have solved the problem. "Crabmeat Monterey! Where can I find Grandma's recipe?"

  "I haven't seen that recipe box in a month of Sundays."

  "Of course you haven't seen Grandma's recipe box. I hid it because you were always taking out the index cards and scribbling quatrains on the back of her recipes and then misplacing them or using them as bookmarks. However, the one for Crabmeat Monterey was jotted down on a piece of notebook paper and I thought for sure it was tucked inside one of her old cookbooks. Gelatin, tomato soup, green olives ... eggs, I can't remember if there were any eggs in it."

  "Bernard, it's ridiculous to go to all this trouble."

  "Mother, I'm not going to have him think we live like a bunch of hillbillies. I thought I'd reserve tickets for Swan Lake. There's a performance at the Cleveland Playhouse on Friday night. And now that Craig has been welcomed back into the fold, perhaps Hallie can invite her beau and the six of us can all go together."

  Ms. Olivia's advice has alleviated the sexual Cold War between Craig and me, in that I've promised Craig to deliver her sex cure shortly, as soon as exams are over.

  Mr. Bernard looks to me for approval of this ballet trial balloon. "Ever been on a triple date?"

  "No. I've never even been to a ballet. I don't think Craig has, either. But sure, we were only going to play miniature golf on Friday."

  Fortunately Craig doesn't seem to mind the Stocktons and all of their idiosyncrasies. In fact, he actually enjoys coming here, because they encourage him to practice doctoring the trees and to try different fertilizers of his own concoction. Mr. Bernard even pays him to restore birdhouses. Craig is extremely patient with detail work. Whereas if I can't fix a thing within five minutes I want to smash it with a spade.

  "And we'll need new slipcovers in the solarium." Mr. Bernard abandons Crabmeat Monterey for the moment and returns to his catalogue of preparations.

  "Oh, it's the solarium now, is it?" Mr. Gil says with great exaggeration. "And I imagine it overlooks the arboretum," he teases.

  Mr. Bernard ignores him and leans over his shopping list for Ottavio's arrival dinner, only by this time he has more items crossed out than left on since he keeps on overhauling the entire menu. He's poking his lip with the back of his pen and muttering, "Lemons, acorn squash, baby onions, pineapples for sorbet..."

  Ms. Olivia asks if I'm ready to begin our tutoring session. I'd assumed that with Ottavio arriving soon she would have wanted the evening to herself. But she says it's slightly overcast and therefore we should go to the cemetery on the edge of town to study World War I. Ms. Olivia says that you should always discuss war on foreign soil in a cemetery under leaden skies right before sunset so you don't regard human life as expendable.

  Before I can answer Ms. Olivia the telephone rings. Mr. Bernard motions to me with his right hand like the Pope waving to his subjects from the balcony, only without looking up since he's still concentrating on his list of ingredients.

  "Would you mind answering that, Hallie? It's probably a long-distance salesperson offering to come over here and do our laundry if we'll switch to AT&T." I go to the kitchen, pick up the phone, and find that the person on the other end isn't a telemarketer at all, not by a long shot.

  Chapter 52

  The Only Game in Town ♣

  “Hey, Hellcat?" the voice of my old track pal Cappy croons through the receiver. "What's the skinny? You on the dodge from some Yoo-Hoo bootleggers or the bicycle repo man?" He laughs heartily at his own jokes. "I scrounged this number from your kid brother, what's his name, Freddy? Cost me twenty bucks—I hadda buy him a baseball cap."

  "Teddy. Sounds like him. Naw, Cappy, I don't owe nobody any spondulicks."

  "Well how come I haven't seen you wagering on the glue pots? What? Didja hit it big on the Preakness?"

  "I didn't follow any of the Triple Crown this year. I had stuff to straighten out."

  "Listen, kiddo, I got a gig for you. Totally legit. Two words for you, my bookmaking brainchild. College basketball."

  "So, what about it?"

  "So, remember that day you showed me how to enter all the past histories for the ponies and track conditions into the computer and to generate probabilities?"

  "Yeah."

  "Well, I've been working on that for roundball."

  "It's illegal to take bets on basketball in Ohio, you know that," I remind him.

  "Who said anything about taking action? You'd just be crunching some numbers, kiddo. C'mon, Hallie. What do ya say? Two grand a week in cash during the season and then we'll do soccer and a little rugby in the summer and winter. Rugby's gettin' real big in the minimum-security slammers—all the rich guys have ESPN nowadays."

  Wow, two grand a week! That's over a hundred thousand dollars a year.

  "I'll let you know, Cappy. Finals are in a few weeks. I'll call you when they're over."

  "Finals? I thought you bagged that school shtick. Lemme know soon. It took me a coupla weeks to track you down. Jumpin' Jehoshaphat, where are you, some sort of mental institute?"

  "It's complicated," I say.

  As I'm talking to Cappy, Mr. Bernard enters the kitchen as if on a mission from the cooking gods. He climbs up on the stepstool and from the top shelves pulls out a tangle of wire cooling racks, several of which go jangling to the flo
or.

  "Incoming!" he shouts as one of the thin metal racks bounces off my shoulder and a few more clatter into the stainless-steel sink. "Excusez-moi."

  He leaps down and spreads the contents of a folder on top of the range, the only available surface space, and after hastily paging through yellowed newspaper clippings and index cards inked in flowery blue script he gleefully shouts, "Here it is!" Mr. Bernard proceeds to remove a square piece of cardboard that's labeled Crabmeat Monterey.

  "Uh, I've got to go," I say into the receiver and then disconnect.

  "Everything copacetic?" Mr. Bernard asks me.

  "Sure," I say, still holding the receiver in my hand. "Why do you ask?"

  "Because you look as if you've just heard bad news." Mr. Bernard gathers the cooling racks from off the floor.

  "It was just... it was just an old friend from ... from the track."

  Mr. Bernard stops what he's doing, stands up, and very seriously says, "Hallie, do you have gambling debts? If you need a loan, it's not a problem."

  "No I don't, dammit!" I say angrily.

  "Did I say something wrong?" Mr. Bernard appears stunned by my outburst.

  "Why does everyone always think the worst of me? I haven't laid any action in months—I mean, not that there's anything wrong with betting. But I haven't so much as played penny-ante Hi-Lo. And I have more than two thousand dollars in the bank ..."

  Mr. Bernard walks over, and I don't know why but I start to cry.

  "No one thinks anything bad about you," he says. "It's just the opposite. We care so much. Everybody ... your parents, Gil, Mother, Craig, me, your teachers at the high school. Even your brothers and sisters. Look how Eric and Louise invited you to the Bulldogs' playoff game in Cincinnati."

  At that moment Ms. Olivia waltzes into the kitchen wearing her red pea-coat and carrying the American history review book. However when she catches sight of me wiping my eyes she turns right around and says, "Whoops, I thought the car keys were in here," and quickly exits.