“Counting the bricks, of course,” Beatrice said. “Will you keep an eye on them, then? When I’m gone?”
Estella wondered if her mother was confusing bricks with four generations of Diamonds, and she was actually counting heads.
“Of course, Mom,” she said. “I’m good with bricks.”
Then her mother looked right at her, seemingly not confused at all, and she said, “Promise me you’ll take care of your father when I’m gone. He’s an old man, you know, and I don’t want strangers in my house.”
“I know, Mom,” Estella said. “I promise. I’d swear on a Bible if I had one.”
As it turned out, her mother had one in a drawer beside her bed. She made Estella hold the Bible and swear.
Beatrice didn’t last long after that.
ESTELLA WAS IN the reception hall at the church after the funeral, looking at her parents’ wedding portrait, which had been placed on an easel. She was feeling neither sociable nor hungry for the lunch the church ladies were busy setting out. She had gripped so many hands in the receiving line that her fingers were numb, and she couldn’t count how many times she’d heard, “Your father is so lucky to have you.” She was wondering how long it would be before they could all go home, when she heard a voice speaking—almost in her ear—and when she turned to see who it was, she recognized a man from the receiving line. She couldn’t remember his name. He was saying something about Beatrice and Oliver being a handsome couple. So many wedding pictures from that time, he said, had the new couple looking so stern that one could hardly imagine the marriage lasting a week, let alone a lifetime. Although they did believe in long marriages in those days, did they not? Divorce was not as much an option as it was now, people tended to stick it out.
“Are you suggesting,” Estella asked, “that my parents would have divorced if they’d had the chance?”
“Sorry, no, I didn’t mean . . . That’s a happy couple in the portrait, no doubt.”
“I don’t follow you, then,” she said.
“It was the photographs,” he explained. “They had to hold the pose for so long that they didn’t smile. That’s all I meant. My apologies.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yes, I see now. Like the Mona Lisa. Well, that’s one theory.”
“I don’t expect you remember my name,” the man said then, holding out his hand. “Clarence Angell. My father and yours were business colleagues of some sort. My father would have been here himself but he’s not well. He asked me to come in his stead. Which I was happy to do, of course.”
“Clarence Angell,” she said, taking his hand. “Well, how do you do? Thank your father for thinking of us.” He was handsome, a dapper dresser, although she didn’t trust a man who spent too much time thinking about what he was wearing. She herself spent very little time thinking about it. Beatrice had told her on more than one occasion that she ought to attend just a little more to her appearance: try a different hairstyle, get a perm, perhaps wear a bit more colour.
Clarence shook her hand firmly and she wanted to pull away, although not for any particular reason having to do with him, she was just tired of people’s hands. She was aware that she was speaking with a strange man whom she had just met at a funeral.
Then Clarence Angell cut to the chase. “Let’s say we get out of here for a bit,” he said. “Go for a drive. Get away from the smell of egg salad. Not that I have anything against egg salad, but some fresh air might do you good.”
She turned toward the door without looking back. Clarence followed her, and when they were on the sidewalk in front of the church he took her arm and led her to his car, an Oldsmobile like her father’s, but sportier, a pale-yellow two-door sedan, with leather upholstery. He had parked the car on an angle so that it took up two spaces in the crowded parking lot, and although she thought this smacked of pride, she admired the vehicle.
Clarence opened the door for her and rolled the window down against the heat inside. Estella had a scarf in her purse and she considered tying it on her head to protect her hair from the wind, but then she decided she didn’t care. She was too old to care about such things. What did it matter if her hair blew around her face?
They drove the length of Albert Street, both directions, and then through the park and around the lake, and when he asked her where she wanted to go next, she said, “Anywhere. Just keep driving.” And so he did. Albert Street again. Victoria Avenue to the edge of town and back.
“I brought you out here to cheer you up,” Clarence Angell said, because she wasn’t talking. “Apparently it’s not working.”
“I can think of something that would cheer me up,” she said, cutting to her own chase. “Let’s go to a hotel.”
He laughed. “Wow,” he said. “You go from zero to sixty in a hurry. You’re kidding, though, right? A real card.”
“I’m not a card at all,” she said. “I’m dead serious.”
“All right then,” Clarence said, and he drove them to the Plains Hotel on Albert Street. On its roof was a new sign that had everyone talking. The neon tubes were on a narrow tower you could see for blocks and their colour told you what kind of day it was. Today was blue, fair weather. Which was true. It was early spring, but there were tulips blooming all over the city.
Clarence parked his car in the hotel lot, and once again he walked around and opened the door for Estella. A real gentleman, she thought, one who was about to lead her to a rented room on the day of her mother’s funeral. He walked with the swagger of a man who figured he deserved his unexpected bit of luck. He booked them a room and paid cash—Mr. and Mrs. Jones, bags to be delivered later—and the desk clerk pointed out the elevator.
This was the first time Estella had been with a man since the train porter. Like the time on the beach, she didn’t know what had got into her. She shed her funeral dress and got into bed with Clarence Angell, and she wondered how she could be doing this when she should be back at the reception with the rest of the Diamonds. What kind of woman was she? She knew what kind of man Clarence was because he hadn’t tried to talk her out of it, but she had no intention of seeing him again anyway, even though they had met at a funeral.
He used a condom. He had one in his wallet. She was quite a bit more impressed than she had been the first time, and she had no regrets. Afterwards, she got dressed and fixed her hair in the bathroom and then told Clarence he’d better drive her back to the church. She hoped the guests would still be there and she could slip in without being noticed. Clarence was sitting up in bed smoking a cigarette.
“Sure thing,” he said. He seemed to be studying her, which was not surprising.
On the way to the church, she asked Clarence what his father did that he had known Oliver, and Clarence said, “Commerce. But he didn’t have your father’s business sense. He did all right, but he was never rich.”
Rich.
It was an uncomfortable word. It was a word Oliver had not liked when it was applied to him. Estella was the same. She thought it was a vulgar word.
“And what do you do?” she asked.
“Sales,” he said.
When they arrived back at the church, the funeral home’s silver cars were gone but the Diamond cars were still parked out front. Clarence found a parking spot, and then he walked around and opened Estella’s door.
“No need to come in,” she said.
“Nonsense,” Clarence said, and he walked her inside and into the hall, where a group of mostly family remained seated at the tables. They all looked when Estella came in with Clarence, and she wished that they had not been seen together.
“Would you consider going to a movie with me sometime?” he asked while they were still out of earshot of the others.
“Probably not,” she said.
She immediately chose a lone empty chair between Fay and one of her nieces, and she proceeded to ignore Clarence Angell, even though he came and stood right behind her chair as though he had some proprietary claim on her, and once again she thought hi
s behaviour was crude, or at least insensitive since he wouldn’t take the hint. Finally he went to where Oliver was seated, shook his hand, and then left.
“Who was that?” Fay wanted to know, and Estella said that he was the son of a colleague of Oliver’s, and that she was just being nice to him because he hadn’t known anyone at the funeral.
“I’m not sure you could have made your lack of interest any clearer,” Fay said.
Estella was afraid her niece would start chanting Auntie’s got a boyfriend, but she didn’t. She supposed that it was too out of the ordinary for Estella to walk through the door with a man that could, in fact, be a boyfriend. She wondered why Fay’s comment had sounded a bit on the critical side. Did Fay think she should be glad of the attention of any man? And what would she think if she knew that Estella and Clarence Angell had gone to a hotel room?
“He was clinging,” Estella said to Fay. “I hate that.”
When the family realized that all the guests were gone and they were the only ones left in the hall, Theo suggested that it was time to thank the ladies who were now doing dishes in the kitchen, and take their leave of the place. But they lingered, as though they didn’t really want to go home.
Finally Oliver stood, and they all followed his lead. It was distressing to see him walking alone to Theo’s car. During her mother’s illness, Estella had thought she might apply for a job at an international school when she was free again, or perhaps go to university in another city and finish her stalled degree in mathematics, but she didn’t suppose she’d be making much of a change in her life for a while. She couldn’t see leaving her father now, promise or no promise to her mother. He’d never lived in the house alone. Clarence Angell could maybe have provided a diversion, but she’d pretty much made sure he wouldn’t be calling.
When they got home, Oliver went straight to bed. Estella sat at the dining room table and stared at the white teapot that was still in the same place it had always been. She wondered who had kept it dusted since Beatrice had been unable to do the housework. Not her. That left just her father. She pictured him with a feather duster in his hand, taking care of the teapot.
She thought about going to bed, but she knew she would not be able to sleep. She decided to read the letters again. She had read them many times over the years, but had not done so recently. She reached for the teapot, and when she was lifting it from its place on the corner shelf she dropped it. She waited for the sound of catastrophe, the pot smashing, the lid flying off, but the teapot didn’t break. It landed solidly, right side up, between her feet. She stared down at it, her heart pounding, as though she had dropped a sacred object, an urn containing the ashes of a loved one.
She bent down and lifted the lid off the pot and was surprised to see that the letters were gone. The beads were there, inside the jeweller’s bag, but that was all. She put the lid back on and picked up the teapot and checked for damage, but there was none. Then she looked up and saw her father standing in the doorway in his grey and red striped bathrobe, just as he had been all those years ago when she had first discovered the letters. She had not heard him on the stairs.
“They’re gone,” she said. “The letters.”
“They’ve been gone for some time,” he said. “I suppose Beatrice finally got tired of them and threw them out. Throw the darn teapot out, too, if you want. It’s just a teapot, and not a particularly good one. The spout drips.”
“I don’t know, Dad,” she said. “It’s always been here.”
“You can have the beads,” he said. “I should have given them to you years ago.”
Estella removed the velvet bag, and said, “I think we should keep the teapot.” She placed it back on the shelf.
“That’s what your mother said. I did ask her.”
Oliver got himself a glass of water from the kitchen and went back upstairs. Estella took the beads out of the jeweller’s bag and unwrapped them, and was glad to see they had survived the fall without chipping. She remembered the story of how Salina had acquired them, by slipping them into her pocket. She tried to think back to the last time she had seen the letters, but she couldn’t remember. She was sorry they were gone. She felt as though she had lost two women, both of her father’s wives, on one day.
Instead of going to bed, she put on her coat and went outside to the garden. The air had cooled, she was sure it was below freezing. The tulips along the fence never should have bloomed so early, they would all be dead by morning. She sat in her mother’s wicker chair and wondered how Beatrice had disposed of the letters. The fireplace was her best guess. Who knew why she had let the beads remain, but perhaps she believed they were valuable.
In the morning, Estella could see the tulips from the kitchen window, still blooming, as she made her father’s breakfast.
A month later, she went back to her teaching job, just as she had after Jack mended. When an application for international school positions came in the mail she didn’t bother filling it out. She continued to do the cooking and cleaning because she didn’t see the need to bring a new person into the house, at least not yet. She felt as though she were biding her time, waiting for an opportunity to present itself, one that would extricate her from the indifference she was feeling to her own life.
IT WAS TWO years before Clarence Angell came calling. They ran into each other at the dry cleaner’s and he reintroduced himself.
“We met at your mother’s funeral and we went for a drive in the park,” he said.
“Right,” she said, “I remember,” although she wanted to say, It was a little more than a drive in the park, as I recall.
When Clarence was on his way out the dry cleaner’s door with his suits draped in plastic, she said, “Would you like to come to the house for dinner on Sunday?”
Gladys and Theo were there when Clarence arrived, and it was obvious that they couldn’t believe Estella had invited a man to dinner. They did not remember Clarence from the funeral. Estella could just see Gladys planning the teacup shower as she looked him up and down and tried to figure out how this could have happened without her knowing. Estella supposed that Gladys now saw her as one of those middle-aged women who had given up on having a home and family of her own. In fact, Estella was not especially taken with Clarence Angell, but when she’d seen him at the dry cleaner’s she had decided not to ignore the family history of auspicious meetings at funerals. And she was bored, even with herself.
They had a pleasant enough dinner. When Oliver asked Clarence what he did, he said he worked in advertising for the daily newspaper. Estella thought he had told her “sales,” but she supposed advertising was sales.
After dinner, he left at a respectable time and did not hang around waiting for something more. Once he was gone, Oliver said, “I can’t expect to have you here forever, can I.”
Estella said, “Dad, it’s nothing like that.”
The next weekend, Clarence took Estella to a nice restaurant, and after dinner they went for a drive through the park, and she wondered what she would do if he decided to pull over in a secluded spot and make a dive for her. She felt nothing like she had the day of the funeral: madcap and reckless, and tired of being the family spinster. But Clarence made a completely innocent loop through the park, and then he drove her home and walked her to the door, and he did not even try to kiss her or invite himself inside.
“Do you like boxing?” he asked before he left. He said he was a boxing fan and there was a club on Railway Avenue that had Saturday night bouts. Strictly amateur, but it was something to do if you had an interest in that sort of thing.
Estella said she had no idea whether she liked boxing or not. The only thing she knew about boxing was what Peter Boone had told her years ago at Lake Claire when he was just a boy and he’d talked about his training program, the one she’d assumed he’d ordered from the back of a comic book.
The next weekend Clarence took her to her first boxing match at the club on Railway Avenue. It was hard to imagine Pe
ter Boone, who had not grown into anything close to stocky, committing himself to such a brutal sport. She hoped he had given it up.
She wasn’t entirely sure how it happened, but Saturday evenings with Clarence became a regular thing. They went to dinner, or to a movie downtown, sometimes to the same dance hall she’d gone to during the war, although it was no longer filled with servicemen. Sometimes Clarence took her to a boxing match. He was a serious fan, and often carried a magazine called The Ring around with him. She was not especially interested, but she was happy enough to go along.
They began to end their dates, by mutual agreement, in a hotel room. Clarence gave her an excuse to start spending a bit of her teacher’s salary on better clothes. She’d always been a frumpy dresser and had never cared about what was in style, or what colours might look good on her. She discovered a ladies’ boutique in a strip mall not far from her school and the owner helped her choose a few attractive dresses and pantsuits. Olive green, she was told, looked especially good with her complexion. She even bought a black dress and a Chanel suit that was far too expensive. Clarence never failed to notice when she wore a new outfit. They were, without a doubt, an odd couple. Estella knew she was not in love with Clarence, and she was pretty sure he felt the same, in spite of their trysts at the Best Western or the Travelodge.
Her nieces began to ask if she and Clarence were going steady, always with an amused tone, as though it were an impossible turn of events. Her sisters-in-law wondered when she thought this Clarence fellow was going to get around to popping the question. That’s how they phrased it, popping, like popcorn, as though it were a lighthearted thing, a man asking Estella to marry him.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” she would always say, trying to hide her resentment that everyone seemed to think it so entertaining that she finally had a man in her life. She didn’t even try to explain that she had no intention of marrying Clarence.
After they’d been Saturday night regulars for almost three years—long enough that even Estella wondered why Clarence had never raised the topic of marriage—she did something she had a hard time explaining. They were out for dinner and she’d had more wine than she was used to—they were into a second bottle—and she was watching a pair of lovebirds at another table in the restaurant. They were younger than her and Clarence, and couldn’t take their eyes or their hands off each other. After watching them for some time and wondering what it felt like to be so besotted, Estella impulsively leaned across the small dining table they were seated at, and she kissed Clarence full on the lips. Then she sat back on her own side of the table.
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