Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Williams, Joy

  “Your mother isn’t very forthcoming with the details, is she?” Deke said.

  “I would wake up weeping,” Angela said. “Tears would be streaming down my face.”

  “You quit, and now they don’t anymore?” Deke asked suspiciously.

  Angela stared at him.

  “Doesn’t seem much to give up the drink for, a few tears. How long’s it been since you’ve cried now?”

  “Oh, years,” Angela said.

  “And now her heart’s a little ice-filled crack. Isn’t it, Mummy?” Darleen said.

  “Why don’t you leave your mother alone for a while,” Deke said. “Look at you. You’re a vicious little being, like one of those thylacines.”

  “The Tasmanian wolf is extinct,” Darleen said. “Don’t show off so goddamn much.”

  “Their prey was sheeps,” Deke said. “But the sheeps won out in the end. They always do.”

  “Sheeps,” Darleen snickered.

  “A vicious little being you are,” Deke repeated mildly. He regarded the painting once more. “I got a friend knew a guy who lived with a beaver in the Adirondacks. Every time my friend would go visit him, that beaver would be there with its own big beaver house made of sticks and such right in this guy’s cabin. He’d rescued this beaver and they had a really good relationship. You broke bread with my friend’s friend and you’d break bread with that beaver.”

  “Mummy, when do you plan on serving supper?” Darleen said. “She never has food in this house,” she said to Deke.

  “She’s got a number of vegetables ready to go. Vegetables are good for you,” he said without much conviction.

  At dinner, Angela felt impelled to ask him how he and Darleen had met and what, exactly, it was that he did.

  “This is what I got to say to that remark. I don’t know if you read much, but there’s a story by Anton Chekhov called ‘Gooseberries.’ And in this story one of the characters says in conversation that there should be a man with a hammer reminding every happy, contented individual that they’re not going to be happy forever. This man with a hammer should be banging on the door of the happy individual’s house or something to that effect.”

  “You think you’re the man with the hammer?”

  Deke smiled at her modestly.

  “If I recall that story correctly,” Angela said, “the point being made about the man with the hammer is that there is no such person.” Angela had attended boarding school herself. She remembered almost everything she had been alerted to then and very little afterwards.

  “You’re so negative, Mummy. You dispute anything anyone has to say,” Darleen crouched over the table with her fist wrapped around a fork, not eating.

  “The man with the hammer that I recall is in another story, not by Chekhov at all. In A Mother’s Tale the circumstances couldn’t be more …”

  “Don’t be tiresome, Mummy,” Darleen said.

  “Why don’t you leave your mother alone, the poor woman,” Deke said. “This is an ordinary woman here. Where’s the challenge? Why do you hate her so much? Your hate’s misplaced, I’d say.”

  “Why do I hate Mummy?”

  “Not at all clear. Whoa, though, whoa, I got a question for Angela. You ever confess under questioning from this child that you had considered, if only for an instant when she was but the size of a thumb inside you, not having this particular one at all, maybe a later one?”

  “No,” Angela said.

  Deke nodded. “That’s nice,” he said. He picked at his potato. “This is a little overcooked,” he said.

  “I just want to check on something,” Darleen said. She disappeared into what had been her bedroom. There was the ugly wallpaper in a dense tweedy pattern which would make anyone feel as though they were trapped under a basket. Darleen had selected it at the age of eight. Angela didn’t use the room for storage. Technically, it was still Darleen’s bedroom.

  “Dinner was OK, actually OK,” Deke said pleasantly. “Glad you didn’t go the fowl route. You ever had goose? There’s this wealthy woman in town and she’s got this perturberance about nuisance geese. They’re Canada geese but they’re not from Canada, she says, and she’s got the town to agree to capture and slaughter them and feed them to the poor. If you have any influence, would you tell that old girl we don’t like those geese? The flavor is off. They’re golf course geese and full of insecticides and effluent and such.”

  “Betty Bishop!” Angela exclaimed. “Why, I just broke her wrist!”

  “Good for …” Deke began, then stopped.

  “It was an accident, but what a coincidence!”

  “I guess you wouldn’t have the influence I seek then,” Deke said, sniffing. “You ever get the air ducts in this place cleaned? Should be cleaned annually. Dust, fungi, bacteria—you’re cohabiting with continually recirculating pollutants here.”

  Darleen returned. “Where’s my little fish,” she demanded.

  “Well, it, oh goodness, it’s been years,” Angela said.

  “Is that my fish’s bowl in the kitchen filled with pennies and shit?”

  “I saw that,” Deke said. “Clearly a fishbowl, now much reduced in circumstances.”

  “I had a little fish throughout my childhood,” Darleen explained to him. “I said ‘Good morning’ to it in the morning and ‘Good night’ to it at night.”

  Deke stretched out his long, black-wrapped legs.

  “For years and years I had this little fish,” Darleen said. “But it wasn’t the same fish! I’d pretend I hadn’t noticed there was something awfully wrong with fishie sometimes before I went to school, and she would pretend she hadn’t slipped the deceased down the drain and run out and bought another one before my return.”

  “Oh, I knew you knew,” Angela said.

  “If it had been the same fish, you two would have lacked the means to communicate with each other at all,” Deke suggested.

  “Mummy, I want to be serious now. Do you know why I’m here? I’m here because Daddy Bruce requested that I come. That’s why I’m here.”

  For an instant, Angela had no idea who Daddy Bruce was. Then her heart pitched about quite wildly. Darleen had neglected to put her eyes in full deployment and she gazed at her mother with alarming sincerity.

  “I was studying one night. I’d been up for hours and hours. It was very late and he just appeared, in my mind, not corporeally, and he said, ‘Honey, this is Daddy Bruce. I don’t want you cutting yourself off from your mom and me anymore. Your mom’s a painful thing to apprehend but you’ve got to try. She’s living her life like a clock does, just counting the hours. You can take a clock from room to room, from place to place, but all it does is count the hours.’”

  “He never talked that way!” Angela exclaimed. “He was just a boy!”

  “Well, that’s what happens pretty quick,” Deke said. “They all get to sounding the same. It’s characteristic of death’s drear uniformity. Most difficult to be pluralistic when you’re dead.”

  “He said he never loved you and he’s sorry about that now.”

  Angela’s heart was pounding hard and insistently, distracting her a little, making a great obtrusive show of itself. Be aware of me, it was pounding, be aware.

  “He said if he had to do it all over, he still wouldn’t love you but you wouldn’t know it.”

  “It don’t seem as if this Bruce is giving Angela much of a second chance here,” Deke said.

  “Daddy Bruce wanted to assure you that—”

  “Tell him not to worry about it,” Angela said. There were worse things, she supposed, than being told you had never been loved by a dead man.

  Deke giggled. “What else he have to say? Did he suggest you were studying too hard?”

  “He would hardly have bothered to come all the way from the other world to tell me that,” Darleen said.

  “I suspect there’s only one thing to know about that other world,” Deke opined. “You don’t go to it when you’re dead. That other world exists
only when you’re in this one.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Angela said. She took a deep uncertain breath.

  “That might be correct,” Darleen said, gnawing on her hands again. “The dead are part of our community, just like those in prison.”

  “Ever visit the prison gift shop?” Deke said. “Can’t be more than ten miles from here. They sell cutting boards, boot scrapers, consoles for entertainment centers. The ladies knit those toilet-seat covers, toaster covers. Nice things. Reasonable. They won’t let the ones on death row contribute anything, though. They want to sell products, not freak collector items. It’s like that tree used to be outside the First Congregational Church. That big old copper beech they cut down because they said it was a suicide magnet? Wouldn’t use the wood for nothing either, and that was good wood. Threw it in the landfill. Tree was implicated in only four deaths. Drew in two unhappy couples was all. Wouldn’t think they’d rip out a three-hundred-year-old tree for that, but down it went. And now they’ve got a little sapling there no bigger around than a baseball bat.”

  Angela dismayed herself by laughing.

  “That’s right,” Deke giggled. “If a young person gets it in his mind now passing that spot, he’s got to wait.”

  “I should have suspected you two would get along,” Darleen said sourly.

  “You sick?” Deke asked Angela. “Is that why you don’t care so much? Some undiagnosed cancer?”

  “She’s never been sick a day in her life,” Darleen said. “She has the constitution of a horse.”

  “Horses are actually quite delicate,” Deke said. “Lots can go wrong with a horse, naturally, and then you can make additional things go wrong, should you wish, if it’s in your interests.”

  “Deke worked a few summers in Saratoga,” Darleen said. She suddenly looked weary.

  “A sick horse is a dead horse, pretty much,” Deke said. “I’m going to uncork that other bottle now.” From the kitchen, Angela heard him excoriating the rust on the gas jets, the lime buildup around the sink fixtures, the poorly applied adhesive plastic covering meant to suggest crazed Italian tiles. Goblet once again brimming, he did not resume his place at the table but walked over to the painting. “I can see why you felt you had to have this,” he said. “At first it appears to be realistically coherent and pleasantly decorative, but the viewer shortly becomes aware of a sense of melancholy, of disturbing presentiment.”

  Angela wondered if it was possible to desire a drink any more than she did at this moment. It couldn’t be.

  “You clearly got an affinity with unknowing, unprepared creatures,” Deke went on.

  “Deke used to be an art critic,” Darleen said.

  He waved one hand dismissively. “Just for the prison newsletter.”

  “Yeah, Deke attended prison for two years,” Darleen said.

  “I began my thesis there,” Deke said. “‘Others: Do They Exist?’ But I never completed it. I was a couple of hundred pages into it when I had to admit to myself that it wasn’t genuine breakthrough thinking.”

  Angela rose to her feet suddenly and tried to embrace Darleen. The girl was all stubborn bone. Her clothes smelled musty, and a stinging chemical odor rose from her spiky hair. She pulled away easily from Angela’s grasp.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa there,” Deke said.

  Darleen laughed. “Daddy Bruce better get here quick. Wake you up.”

  “I have to … I have to …”

  They looked at her.

  “It’s late and I have to go to work tomorrow,” she said, ashamed.

  “You said you’d take the day off!” Darleen cried.

  “Take the day off, it don’t fit when you put it on again,” Deke said. “Attention here, I’m taking the fishbowl and going out for more wine. Liquor store has one of those change machines. Those things are fun, you ever seen one work?”

  “Don’t leave!” Angela and Darleen exclaimed together.

  “At a dangerously low level,” he said, raising the bottle.

  No one could argue that it was otherwise.

  “Just stay a little while longer,” Darleen pleaded.

  Deke pursed his lips and pressed his hands to his leather shirt. “I might commence to pace,” he said. He grimly poured out the last of the wine.

  “There was a strange thing that happened last night,” Angela began. “I was on a boat, the boat that goes to the islands. I wasn’t actually there, but the most remarkable coincidence—”

  “A coincidence is something that’s going to happen and does,” Deke said. “You got a fondness for the word, I notice.”

  “Oh, Mummy is so seldom precise,” Darleen said. “When I was small, she would tell me I had my father’s eyes. Then one day I finally said, ‘I do not have his eyes. He was not an organ donor to my knowledge. A little frigging precision in language would be welcome,’ I said.”

  Deke looked at her impatiently, then stood as though yanked up by a rope. “You girls hold off on the Daddy Bruce business until I get back. That’s dangerous business. You don’t want to go too far with that without an impartial yet expert observer present.”

  He left without further farewell bearing the fishbowl, the door shutting softly behind him.

  Angela laughed. “I think we disappointed him.”

  The room felt stifling. She opened a window, beyond which was a storm window, a so-called combination window, adaptable to the seasons. She fumbled with the aluminum catches and pushed it up. The cold clutched her, then darted past. She turned and looked at her daughter. “I love you,” she said.

  “Mummy, Mummy,” Darleen sighed. Then, tolerantly, “The new headmaster has a white umbrella cockatoo that likes to be rocked like a baby.”

  “Do tell me about it, please,” Angela said.

  “Stupid bird,” Darleen said cheerfully.

  Six years later, Angela was dying in the town’s hospital, in a room where many before her had passed. She had known none of them, but this room they had in common, and the old business engaged in there. Darleen had been summoned but would not arrive in time. Angela was fifty years old. She had not gotten out as early as she might have certainly, but now by chance she had firmly grasped death’s tether.

  Passed that little sapling tree on the way here, Deke said. Still being permitted to grow in the churchyard. Too new yet to cast a shadow, but it had better mind its manners, no?

  Angela wanted to laugh, even now. What a night that had been!

  Most enjoyable evening, Deke agreed.

  The first nurse said, “It sounded like, ‘Did you bring the hammer?’”

  The other nurse said, “Sometimes their voices can be remarkably clear. You can really understand them. I had one say, ‘I don’t want to go back there.’ Just as clear as could be.”

  The first nurse did not like this one. She was new and ambitious, quite often imprudent. “Are you sure?” she demanded.

  FORTUNE

  IT WAS THE PARENTS! When would the parents stop coming? They’d been coming for months, since Christmas, since before Christmas, since the burning of the Devil festivities on the seventh. June’s mother and her second husband had arrived, missing Howard’s parents by only a few days, for they had come down specifically for his twenty-second birthday. Caroline’s father had come down for Valentine’s Day with his new wife and their fairly new infant to show her to Caroline, as though she cared. Abby’s parents were still in town, having arrived for Semana Santa—Holy Week, which was now just past—and James’s parents would be showing up any day now from Roatón, off Honduras, where they had been diving. And each set of parents had a new child with them. There was Emily and Morgan and Parker and Bailey and Henry, not one of them over the age of six. It was a phenomenon.

  The parents were generous when they visited. June’s mother’s new husband chartered a plane and flew them all to Tikal. They climbed Pyramid IV and watched the sunrise, even baby Morgan in her tiny safari ensemble. And even though June’s mother’s new husband had rent
ed rooms for them at the Jungle Lodge, one night they’d slept out among the ruins in hammocks. Everyone knew this was the desired, anecdotal thing to do, sleeping out among the ruins beneath the bats during a full moon, which it happened to be that night. Then they flew back to Antigua for the parade of the heads, for this is what they had really come for, to see the huge papier-mâché heads, the gigantes and cabezudos, running and weaving down the streets beneath the fireworks and whistling rockets. June’s mother and her new husband had expensive cameras and they took pictures of everything, they were delighted with everything.

  When Howard’s parents came, the father, a prominent throat specialist, rented horses for everyone and they had ridden to one of the lakes for a picnic. Even baby Bailey made the trip, wrapped in his mother’s arms with one tiny hand clinging to the pommel. The whole group of them, eight in all, trotting like a cavalry through the poor little towns on these big-assed horses, leaving behind piles of green-flecked dung. Where had they gotten such healthy horses? It was embarrassing. Buenos días! Howard’s parents said to anything that moved. It was amazing they hadn’t been stoned.

  Caroline’s father appeared with darling Emily, a redhead, and his lively new redheaded wife, who wore a ring in her navel and was only two years older than Caroline. There had actually been something of an incident when everyone had been invited for lunch in the garden of the Hotel Antigua. There were some hummingbirds in the hibiscus bush near them, green and purple ones, the size of mice. One veered toward Emily in her high chair, no doubt encouraged by the feathery brilliance of her hair, and her attentive mother smacked it sharply with a guidebook she was holding. The bird spun to the ground in a buzzing heap.