“Lawsuits all over the place,” Mrs. Cohen says, with her usual enthusiasm. “Big time. All the way back to the beauty parlor fire.”
Everyone wants to tell me about the beauty parlor fire. “Seven months ago,” Mrs. La Salle says, “and in retrospect, yes, it was the first of the series of unusual events. But when something’s the first of a series, you don’t know that then, do you? What about it, Louise?”
Mrs. Dexter just grunts.
The other ladies apparently haven’t noticed that Mrs. Dexter falls silent during these accident discussions.
“I do think it was a mad old lady,” Mrs. La Salle says. “So easy to lose your bearings around here. You’ve noticed that, Carla.”
Our next moment of quiet is broken by Mrs. Cohen, who suddenly points at my father’s easel and cries out, “Why, my goodness. Why, look. Edward, your painting, that is amazing , it’s so real, so imaginative. Look, everybody, come see what he’s done!” She’s half out of her chair, her gray-black hair ruffled by the breeze, and pointing at Daddy’s now-filled page, a scramble of bright chalk colors, all the right yellows and blues for this vivid day. It’s a recognizable picture of our landscape; here’s the meadow with its clumps of wildflower and grass. But there’s more than our landscape in his picture; by a miracle of extended perspective he’s made his view stretch over the bluff edge, which is unfenced in his picture, and down to a beach below, bounded by three conical rocks. Of course there isn’t any beach below and also no rocks like that, as I’ve just determined by squinting at the view during our meditation session, but in Daddy’s picture there is a beach and conical rocks, and on it is laid, arms wrapped against its sides, a mummylike figure, trussed and crisscrossed with yellow stripes. My father has used a bright yellow crayon for the stripes. I know right away who the figure is; I recognize her. It’s his woman in the net.
I think, Oh, Jesus Christ.
In the corner, where the artist’s signature might be, Daddy has drawn the Eye of Horus, wide-open, staring, and with marks below that look like running feet.
I didn’t, I tell myself, want him to do something like that.
He sees it so clearly that he draws a picture of it. The bluff, here in his picture, was another bluff, and a different prospect below, but he still sees it bright and true; doesn’t that mean it really happened? I don’t think your imagination works like that, to supply all those physical details . . . Especially if you’re an old gentleman with Alzheimer’s . . .
The Manor ladies are standing up now, exclaiming. My father is a favorite; they want to give him praise. “My goodness.” “So interesting.” “So odd.” “It suggests something. Edward, do you want to explain?”
Daddy says, “I’ve painted a lot, you know.” He says, “I saw her.” He seems a little troubled by the praise.
Ms. Chaundy is coming over to see; she picks her way regally between the grass clumps; she stops, she looks down at Daddy’s picture, she says, “My word.”
There’s a pause while she pulls on the trailing end of her scarf, then she remarks, “Quite surprising.”
“It’s good, isn’t it?” Mrs. Cohen asks. “I mean, really, really good.”
“Yes,” agrees Ms. Chaundy. And after a minute she elaborates, “Absolutely. A work of . . . of the imagination? Tell me, Dr. Day, of the inner spirit?”
“I’ve painted a good deal,” my father says. “I like these crayons,” he adds in a confidential tone. “They’re good for difficult subjects.”
Ms. Chaundy starts to say, “A welling up of the . . .” and then stops. She asks, “Your inner powers sent you this scene?”
Daddy shakes his head. “The yellow’s not exactly right.”
“Such an original scene,” she says. She levels her shoulders and adjusts the scarf; she moves away to examine Mrs. Cohen’s shakily indicated bluff and wildflowers; she says they show “the beginning of the life force.”
“But not,” Mrs. Cohen intervenes, “as good as Edward’s. Nowhere near. That picture is remarkable.”
I’ve been fighting a revelation in my chest that’s like one of our upsurges of ocean waves. This idea lodges behind my lungs and is cramping my breathing; I’m thinking thoughts at Daddy that all have behind them the idea danger, and all start with the word please. Please be careful. Please forget about your net-woman. Please stop, stop. This is going to turn out dangerous. Please, darling, no more pictures, no more talk about a woman in a net; try to give it up now, oh, will you?
“Listen,” I say to Mrs. Cohen, “There’s something I need to talk about. I think it’s important to share . . .”
Good California word: share. And I recount for her the story of Mrs. Dexter’s piece of glass and how, yes, it was glass, and it was sharp, and I think it had to be in that oyster on purpose. Mrs. Cohen is enthusiastic; she loves to be in on new knowledge, she loves to talk. She has the kind of bubbly breathlessness in the face of gossip that makes it clear she’ll go right home to her Manor apartment and call people on the telephone; it will seem almost a duty to get the word out. She’ll be a fine resource. “Guess what? Do you know what I learned?” she’ll ask, “Well, no, it’s not a secret . . .” She’ll have this story all over the Manor by dinner-time.
“Oh,” she says now, and, “Oh, I thought so.” She is so thrilled by my inside info that she stops short in the middle of the path. “But I couldn’t get Louise to say a single solitary thing. Oh, just wait until I tell Daphne—Mrs. La Salle. Both of us thought, of course, but . . . Now why on earth would Louise want to keep quiet about it?” She waits, hunched over the drawing pad under her arm. “Well, maybe I have an idea. Things are endlessly complicated, Carla, don’t you find?”
I tell Mrs. Cohen please don’t let on how you know this; please just pretend the information dropped out of the sky. And she continues walking and burbling, and I follow, still subliminally projecting at Daddy, Honey, have some sense, will you now.
Chapter 7
It’s evening on my corridor, and I am doing my rounds.
“I’ll get you a flashlight,” I tell Mr. Rice. He has just stopped saying, “Who is it?” and has begun talking like a normal human being; he’s worried. “The hall,” he says, “has a dark corner. I am upset. I have been consulting my lawyer. I’m concerned.” Mr. Rice is worried about the accidents. He explains: “I was concerned before . . . previously . . . when that woman went out the window. But now . . . an oyster with glass in it. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
Mr. Taylor, his buddy next door, has also started talking to me; he is worried, he says, not just about the accidents, but also about locks. “Are there enough locks on the doors? Are they the right kind? I like the double-bolting one that makes a big click after you turn the key.” Also, he would like some Ovaltine.
Mrs. La Salle, who lives down the hall, has been lying in wait while the men harangue; now she pulls me into her apartment. Her problem is not so much that she’s worried as that she wants company. “English Breakfast with or without ?” she asks, meaning with or without caffeine. Then she gives a little lecture on her collection of block prints, which are very handsome and strange; they’re modern Japanese and show architectural shapes, dark green and ink blue, cliffs and crags and monuments that assertively hold their own against the Manor’s high-ceilinged rooms.
“Hiroyuki Tajima,” she says, naming the artist, and I tell her that I like the prints.
Have I ever really described Mrs. La Salle? Maybe I’ve said she looks like a member of a European royal family, but that’s misleading because she’s not one of the fat dumpy royalty with a baffled expression and a square pocketbook suspended from her wrist, but the other kind—the skinny sophisticated duchess you imagined for your Cannes and Sundance movie; alert, tanned, handsome, and with earrings. Or today just one earring, a lumpy, uncut aquamarine. She wears a dark green dress and a twisted leather belt with a double silver arrow buckle. She has the look of not-caring that goes with the royal title.
; “Carla,” she says, tapping Hiroyuki Tajima’s black enamel frame with a red fingernail, “I need to speak about your father; I am worried about him. You know, I have seen how upset he can get. And such a specific fantasy, that one about the beach. So clear. I’ve never known an Alzheimer’s fantasy to be that definite. How long has he had it?”
We talk in a general way about Daddy, with me trying not to react too much. His pastel picture has really advertised his obsession; what did I expect? And Mrs. La Salle is a friend. “You are doing so well with him,” she says. “I admire you so much.”
I look around her apartment—extra subtle and expensive-looking in the right way, not just fake-opulent, like the Manor’s Victorian halls and pink pictures. Mrs. La S. goes in for spare modern furniture and small African statues. And I can really appreciate all this—I’ve been missing Art (capital A). One good thing about having both parents in archaeology was the immersion in Art; all that stuff about proportion and scale and balance, they served it up with meals. Art was almost the only thing my mother and I ever connected on. “I suppose this is quite fine,” Constancia would inform me, in a matter-of-fact voice, holding out a perfect ovoid bronze bowl. I told her it was gorgeous, and she half-closed her eyes and said, “I suppose so.” She didn’t go for superlatives.
Mrs. La Salle is talking. “My dear, there may be episodes for him later on. My brother had episodes.”
We discuss Daddy’s woman-in-the-net with me not saying much; I’ve decided to be—circumspect is the word—from now on.
“He has moments when he makes perfectly good sense,” I say, and she agrees, “Certainly.”
“And you’re so professional,” she adds.
I smile and shake my head and count out the pills for her evening Vicodin and calcium. Mrs. La Salle is the handsomest lady in the Manor and maybe the best conversationalist, but I’m not ready to make her into a confidante yet.
“I do hope you’re coming tomorrow,” she goes on, “to our party in the beauty parlor.” She laughs dismissively. She’s sophisticated enough to know that a beauty-parlor party is ridiculous and might happen more often in Welch, West Virginia, than here. But she still likes the idea; after all there’s not much social life at the Manor. The party is to celebrate the beauty parlor being refurbished after the fire. “You know, I hate to brag,” she says. “I’ve done a lot of things in my life: I was a manager at Gumps and on the board of the Ballet, and then I had a column for City magazine, the restaurant gossip one. And now I’m here. Well, times change. Come to this thing.”
I tell her yes, we’ll be there.
But first I have to talk with Mrs. Sisal.
I’ve been summoned to the Sisal office. “Hey,” Belle says, delivering this message, wiggling her crunched forehead (maybe you remember the worried forehead of the woman with the rake and the church-barn behind her), “What have you done? The superpower is cross; trouble in River City.”
Cross indeed. Mrs. Sisal is positioned with her back to me. Her secretary, Rebecca, hides in the peon computer alcove out of her way and shoots me a stricken look as I go by.
“Well,” Sisal says, addressing a spot on the window.
Turns out, Belle and Mona aren’t the only ones who think I’m an Observer. Mrs. Sisal thinks so, too. Or thinks I ought to be. “You didn’t tell me,” she accuses. “You knew, and you didn’t say. And now it’s all over the Manor.” She’s talking about the glass in the oyster, the fact that it really was glass. “You kept it a secret. Why didn’t you say?”
She gives me a half a minute, which is enough. I’m pretty good with the impromptu lie.
I fix her window reflection in a stare of the utmost sincerity. “I was worried about the Manor.”
She’s stopped by that, as I guess she should be. “The Manor?”
“I was afraid Mrs. Dexter would want to sue.”
Mrs. Sisal is not a dummy; in fact, she’s quite smart. She’s disbelieving. Her window reflection tucks in its mouth corners. “And you were protecting the Manor?”
“Mrs. Sisal,” I shift my body forward, moving my voice into its extremely real mode, “my father is a lifetime resident here. He has invested all his assets in the Manor. It’s the place where he lives. If the Manor goes down, he goes down. He would lose all his money. I was protecting my father.”
People will believe what they want to in a crisis, maybe this is especially true of strong-minded people. Mrs. Sisal says, “Ohhh,” a long, drawn-out, thoughtful exhalation. She takes off her glasses and examines them. Finally, she turns around to face me; she appears assuaged. “And you thought of all that in those few minutes?”
I tell her modestly, “Yes.”
“And now you’ve learned that Mrs. Dexter does not plan to sue?”
I haven’t learned anything of the sort. But I say, “Mrs. Dexter is a very private person.” Which is true. And if, in the future, Mrs. Dexter decides that a suit will comfort her privacy, I can always exclaim about how fickle old ladies are.
“That is sensible,” Mrs. Sisal says. “That will be better for . . . everyone.”
She’s probably residually cross at me for making her look foolish with her aluminum-card theory, but she’s letting go of this for two reasons. First, she could never really believe she looked foolish. And second, she’s feeling relieved. No suit from Mrs. Dexter. No Miss Day testifying.
Mrs. Sisal thinks Miss Day is being smart about this. Or at least very sensible. Miss Day is the kind of sensible person the Manor needs. “It was intelligent of you not to gossip about this. I gather that you didn’t gossip?”
I sit back, pleased that the record of who said what to whom is apparently even more confused than I’d expected.
“Well,” Mrs. Sisal says finally, resignedly, “I believe you behaved sensibly.” Her voice caresses this nice word sensibly. She positions both feet on the edge of her file drawer, apparently a sign of well-being for her. “We are pleased with your adjustment.” Briefly, she makes a sort of smile, which appears to hurt. “Now, let’s have a look at your schedule, shall we?”
For a moment, I get the insane idea that Mrs. S. is about to reduce my hours or maybe raise my pay, but, of course, no such luck, we simply begin to go through a list of my clients.
When we reach the end of the client list, she clicks the computer good-bye and rearranges her swivel chair. “Miss Day, you are perceptive and intelligent; in working with these clients have you ever noticed anything untoward?”
“Untoward?” I ask, while thinking, Oh, so that’s how it’s pronounced; I’ve always said un-two-ward. “No,” I remark firmly.
“Miss Day, I think some clients are worried about recent events—the kind of event you’ve witnessed—do you think that is possible?”
I resist saying, “Are you kidding,” and agree, “Yes.”
“How do you handle these client worries?”
I answer part truthfully, part untruthfully; I’m beginning to be good at this, “I don’t encourage it. I listen. I let them get it off their chest.”
“Ah.” She runs a Gucci heel against the file drawer rim. “That is a constructive attitude. Just the right attitude. And of course you don’t gossip afterward.”
“No.”
“Fine. Miss Day, we’re pleased with your mature approach. But if a situation appears dangerous, I hope you will then come to me. I need to know if a situation is explosive.”
I don’t say, “I thought that was what you wanted.” I just repeat, “If a situation is explosive.” I don’t actually tell her I’ll come to her about the explosive problem.
But she’s happy with my answer. “Not many of our aides,” she tells me, “have your degree of education.”
She half-rises, to signal that we’ve talked enough. “We are pleased with your work here, Miss Day. And it is agreeable with us that you continue some of the special things you’ve been doing. You may keep on going to your father’s classes. Also, you may accompany him to the dining room.”
She nods to let me know that Yes, we knew all along you were overstepping the boundaries, but now we’re saying it’s okay because this is a bribe. Spy for me, girl, and your dad can stay and play.
Mrs. Sisal looks good today in her long-waisted suit and short straight hair partly pasted to her cheek. I wish I could get my hair to do that.
“I will see you at the party tonight,” she suggests, favoring me with a pinched Dragon Lady smile.
Chapter 8
Daddy has said, “A party, darling! How very, very nice!” He’s not exactly sure what a beauty parlor is. “A place of beauty, dear? Many places are beautiful.” When I say it’s where you have your hair washed and set, he looks completely lost. I don’t think Constancia ever did anything to her hair except to lather it up under the shower. After which it emerged looking great.
“My good suit,” my father says, sliding his closet door open, “the one we got for me in—where was it?”
“Alexandria.”
He agrees, “Yes, of course, just as I thought. And what will you wear?”
I get into the spirit of things. “My purple shirt.”
The purple shirt is one Susie gave me for her Beltane festival. Susie thought Beltane was a rebirth celebration; she didn’t listen to the rumors about blood and sacrifice. The shirt has sequins across the front in a moon-and-stars pattern.
Daddy is pleased by it. “Mythic,” and holds my hand as we walk across the courtyard to a door with a banner proclaiming: CELEBRATE! DRAWING FOR A FREE SHAMPOO!
The beauty parlor, like the hospital, is mostly pink formica, but someone has been sufficiently knowing to add bits of Victorian nonsense; there is a fluted white molding and some scalloping, and every so often an occasional angel or winged being pasted in bas relief against the pink wall. Sandwiches, soft drinks, and white wine are lined up on a long sterilely wrapped table in front of the dryers.
Mrs. La Salle is present, sheathed in gray satin so crisp it could stand up by itself; she’s stationed near a sandwich platter. “Olive and pimento,” she says. “I truly hate those angels. Tell me honestly. Did you ever go to a party in a beauty parlor?”
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