The Western Coast

by Paula Fox

  The furnishings! A studio bed, a folding chair with a missing slat in the seat, an unpainted table of the cheapest sort.

  “You mean it’s thirty-five dollars?” she asked the old woman.

  “No. Like I said. You give me twenty-five, him five.”

  Billy grabbed up his jacket and felt in the pockets. “Here, I got a key made in case someone took the place. You understand, I’m coming back from the reservation in six weeks?” She nodded and took the key from him. The old woman was suddenly seized by a spasm of dry coughing. This furious and rising crescendo of open-mouthed ragged shouts was curiously like a temper tantrum. Billy’s attention was caught and held. With a last long rasp, the woman fell silent, tears running down her cheeks. “Boy!” cried Billy.

  Annie left thirty dollars on the table—let them divide it up—and retreated quickly down the long hallway, out to the street. What was worrying her now was a coat. The weather had changed abruptly this morning, the damp chilling rainy air had hardened into bitter cold shot through with small bursts of icy wind like the cold springs in a mountain lake. She was wearing two sweaters and the raincoat. It was a narrow edge she was traveling if a coat could throw the whole plan into question. But she would certainly need one in England, wouldn’t she? Perhaps there was something in the old house toward which she was now driving. There had been trunks in the attic she had not touched. An old coat of her mother’s?

  On this third day of her visit to the house, she felt its spirit had died. Perhaps there were mice in the cellar, squirrels in the attic, but the air smelled of rotted cloth and rotting wood, nothing living any more. In Uncle Greg’s bedroom, the sheets lay strewn as the ambulance attendants had left them; the pots on the floor were nearly all full, the smaller ones sitting in pools of damp where the water had overflowed and sunk into the floorboards. Annie looked at the sleigh bed. It was hers.

  Yesterday she had found a will, witnessed by an indecipherable name. The house was left to the Hudson Valley Historical Association, its offices in Cornwall. The furnishings, with the exception of the bed, were left to Dr. and Mrs. Vernon Fletcher of Providence, Rhode Island. The small hoard of money in a Nyack savings account would just about cover the costs of a simple funeral, Helen Sears had said. “Very simple,” she had warned her. With the words still in her ears, she had gone yesterday to stand by Uncle Greg’s bed, watching the lift and fall of his narrow chest beneath the blanket. A geranium bloomed on the window sill of the little room. She remembered, horribly, her childhood nightmare of being buried alive, of waking to find herself in a wooden box, deep in the ground.

  Today, she would have to telephone Mrs. Vernon Fletcher, Uncle Greg’s only living relative that she knew of, besides herself. But first she went to the attic, clinging hopefully to the idea that a coat would be in one of those trunks. In one, among yellowed laces and boxes of buttons and packets of letters, she discovered a velvet cape, caught at the throat by an elaborate gilded frog. She shook it out, smelling an odor of lavender and dust. Then she placed it around her shoulders and stood for a while in the middle of the attic, looking out a small window at the cemetery, the woods, the smoke of a chimney somewhere down near the river. There were two other trunks, their leather straps rotten, and she walked toward them, the train of the cape whispering across the floor behind her. On one, she saw a faded legend: “The Cadogan, Sloan Square, London.” Inside it was a doll with a china face lying on a dark-green shawl. She picked up the doll. One of the eyes opened; the lashes were nearly all gone, the painted blue eye gazed blankly up at her. She dropped it back to its bed, tore off the cape and ran down the stairs to the telephone.

  Mrs. Vernon Fletcher answered the phone on the second ring. Annie identified herself quickly; the woman’s breath was noisy in her ear.

  “Well, he was getting on,” Mrs. Fletcher said. “Of course, we haven’t seen him for years, not being close, don’t you know? Only second cousins really. I remember you when you were a little thing, saw you once.”

  “He’s going to die,” Annie repeated.

  “I expect so. But Vernon can’t get away easily, you see. We hardly ever go anyplace. We’ve got eight sick dogs and two sick cats right now and a woman went off to Oregon, just leaving us a yellow mongrel, and he hasn’t been able to find a halfway responsible helper for months. These colored people just come and go. You know how afraid they are of dogs? Funny, that. But we’ll come to the funeral all right. I suppose you’re seeing to all that, being the closest relative and all and him being so good to you when your daddy abandoned you the way he did?”

  “He’s not dead yet.”

  “We all die.”

  “He’s left the furnishings of the house to you, except for his bed.”

  There was a little gasp at the other end. “Imagine that!” said Mrs. Fletcher. “Why, the dear old fellow! Well, that’ll certainly give Vernon a lift. A vetenerian’s life is a dog’s life.” She emitted a little cackle. Annie smiled grimly.

  “There’re a lot of books,” she said.

  “Books? Isn’t there a piano? It seems to me I recall a piano? And a desk with lots of drawers, and a round dining table? Oh yes, I do remember. After all, that’s a big old house, isn’t it? Well, bless him!”

  “Then, perhaps you might manage to come and see him—while he’s still alive?” She heard the sardonic note in her own voice and was instantly ashamed. Was she so worried at the thought of Uncle Greg’s dying alone without the remnants of his family around him? Or was it more simply her own vile nature, her fear that Uncle Greg’s illness would interfere with her plans? Plans! Getaway! Her thoughts squirmed away—she must think about what she was doing, but England flashed in her mind like an electric sign on a marquee, and she could not see or think beyond the word itself.

  She went into her old room. The leafless branches of the maple tree struck the windowpane lightly, again and again. There was a bookcase next to the bed. She picked up the first volume of The Jungle Books, then A Child’s Garden of Verses. Uncle Greg must have bought her those, she thought, and opened the Stevenson poems to the flyleaf. “For Ann, on her sixth birthday, with love from Tony,” she read, and dropped the book on the old pink blanket that still covered her bed.

  In the closet, Uncle Greg’s “good” robe hung from a wooden hanger. The lapels were purple moire. She was confounded by the opulence of the rich fabric, the elaborate tailoring. Whatever had he had in mind? The cloth smelled old, yet she could not remember ever having seen it before. Secrets. She thought of Uncle Greg’s hands, so rough, so formed by the work he had done for so many years, emerging from those silken cuffs.

  “He’s rallied a bit,” Miss Sears reported. “I think it’s the care. A little nourishment, a warm room. It may not seem so to you. But we’ve got him filled with morphine. The pain is bad. I can’t think how he stood it for so long!”

  “Does he know what he has?”

  “Oh—he pretends not to. They often do. He told me this morning that he’s worried sick”—she broke off to laugh a little wildly —“because Mrs. Belknap may call about spring planting. Mrs. Belknap! Another one of the old harpies. They’re all dying off, you know…The people I grew up with, rich and poor, all dying out. I once thought they’d go on forever. We all do when we’re little.”

  “I have to have a smallpox inoculation. Would you know a doctor?”

  “Would I know a doctor!” Helen Sears cried. “My God! That’s all I know! Doctors! You can have it done here. I can’t get over your going to Europe.”

  “There’s something else,” Annie added with sudden anger. She was sick of Helen’s hoots and catcalls, her outbursts, her mindless ironies. “Listen to me, please!”

  The nurse took a pack of cigarettes out of her skirt pocket. She looked humble all at once, lighting her cigarette and looking at Annie submissively. Was that all it took? A touch of anger?

  “That sleigh bed…I don’t know what to do with it. I know it’s very old. I don’t want Mrs. Fletcher to h
ave it. But there’s no place for me to keep it.”

  “Put it in storage.”

  “I haven’t got money for that.”

  “Well—there’s a junk shop downtown. The old man who runs it calls it an antique store, but it’s junk. Maybe he’d buy it and take it off your hands. But wait!” She held up one hand. “You can’t do anything yet. Maybe get it appraised. It doesn’t belong to you yet. Oh, I hate it! The way everybody goes out of life, leaving a trail of muck behind them. Once a year, I throw out everything I own. They’re not going to catch me with a lot of useless stuff for people to maul and paw over. Not me!”

  Annie went to stand beside Uncle Greg’s bed. He was dozing. She held the robe across her arm. A few petals from the geranium had fallen on the window sill. The sky was smudged with snow clouds. He was going to die. Walking out the door of the old house an hour earlier, she had thought, I’ll never come here again. The gaunt face on the pillow before her, the sunken eyes and the blanched lips, had come to mask the features of the unalterable adult of her childhood. He had always been there when she returned from school. He had always been in the kitchen so early in the morning on freezing winter days, pouring her a glass of milk in which white shards of ice still floated. Adults were there before you on every occasion. And now he was altered; now he would be absent for the rest of her life. She touched his hand where it lay on the coverlet. She did not even know she was weeping until his eyes flickered, then opened. She held the robe up for his dazed eyes, and to cover her own face. She had, she thought, only been weeping for herself.

  “That’s the one,” he whispered.

  There were days during which she did nothing, going out from Billy’s dreadful little room to buy a newspaper and some eggs and milk in the morning, and spending the rest of the day reading every item in the New York Times or the Herald Tribune, falling asleep from the sheer exasperation of her boredom. But there were other days when she had the sensation of running through a thick, nearly impenetrable substance that was the hours of the day, not long enough for all she had to do.

  The smallpox inoculation turned red, swelled and “took.”

  She went to the offices of the shipping company and booked passage on a ship called the Constellation, sailing on March fourth, in three weeks’ time, for Southampton. “It won’t be the Ritz,” the man had said. “You’ll be in barracks for all practical purposes, oh, with women I assure you.”

  She stopped by the antique shop in Nyack on her way to the nursing home. The owner scoffed when she described the bed. “Oh, yes, there’s a positive run on such items,” he had nearly shrieked. And asked her what kind of mahogany. Well, she didn’t know. Then how did she know it was mahogany at all? But he agreed to go to the house and look at it and give her a price. But mind you, don’t expect much! When she saw him again a few days later, he remarked there were a few other items he’d be interested in too. He must have flown through the house like a vulture. But she was surprised by his offer, a hundred and fifty dollars. It would buy her a coat and gloves and leave some over. Then he told her the will would have to be probated and that would take time, “not to mention the actual demise of your uncle,” he added. Probably take a year. She looked her chagrin. He scowled. “Well, for mercy’s sake, wait till the body gets cold, will you?” She protested. He grinned unpleasantly. “All right, all right. I’ll draw up a little paper, you assign the bed to me. Then I’ll pay you. But if he doesn’t die, my girl, I’ll see to it I get my money back.”

  Uncle Greg’s face grew thinner by the day, even as his body thickened, as his feet grew too swollen to fit into his old slippers. He was barely eating now, and the morphine didn’t always work. Some days, when she went to see him, he didn’t recognize her at all. “You might as well stop coming,” Helen Sears said. “He is moving into that stage where they don’t know anybody.”

  “I’ll come,” Annie said without further comment.

  She had written to Theda, and Theda had written back at once. She read the letter over and over, as she had once read Max’s letters, touching the words, the signature. It had been a long time since she had heard from Max. After she had written him that she intended to leave the country, she hadn’t heard a word. Theda’s letter breathed of her presence. She wrote as she spoke. It dawned on Annie, by the third reading, that Theda missed her. She felt suddenly quiet, sitting on Billy’s studio couch, holding the blue sheets of paper in her hands. It was as though she had forgotten what it was to be quiet, to be still, to hear her own even breathing, to feel the eased softness of her limbs. Theda missed her. Even her first excitement at Theda’s news that Max was being demobilized soon and was only across the river in Fort Dix, New Jersey, and that Theda had sent him Annie’s address on Morton Street, was tempered by the extraordinary sensation induced by the affection and sweetness of the letter. She almost fell asleep there, sitting up, her bare feet on the cold floor.

  She had called Jersey Lighter to tell him about the room and Elmira had answered, gurgling at her in some peculiar adult baby talk about their little girl. Annie had the impression that Elmira hadn’t the least idea who she was. Presumably as a result of that call, Walter Vogel appeared at her door one evening a day or so later. Standing behind him was a plump dark-haired young girl with a pouting mouth like a gulping fish. They entered the room. The girl stared unblinkingly at Annie; what on earth had Walter told her about her?

  He had hardly changed at all, even his clothes looked the same, dungarees, a pea jacket, a watchcap. “This is Lou,” he’d said, the little smile on his lips, gesturing toward the girl with his thumb. Lou looked at the floor. He had come for the divorce decree; he and Lou were getting married. Just before he left, he whispered to Annie, “She doesn’t know anything. I had to teach her what shit meant!”

  Lou had not spoken a word the half hour they were there. Only watched Annie. And Annie, possessed by monstrous embarrassment, had behaved like someone she’d never heard of or imagined, talking animatedly to Walter about her “plan,” shouting at him when he questioned her as to any details, laughing hectically at the slightest suggestion of criticism. He, too, had ended up looking at her fixedly, wonderingly. What had come over her? Mortified, she crawled beneath the blanket, cursing herself and imagining scenes in which she simply handed Walter the decree and shut the door in his face, or warned that idiot of a girl what she was getting into. So Lou didn’t know the word shit, did she? Oh, God! Oh, God! And how he’d looked at Lou once! He’d never looked at her like that. Had he? Why could she not name the quality of that look? Yet at the same time she knew what it meant.

  Then quite clearly, as though it had materialized out of the floor, she heard her father’s laughter. She turned on the light, dressed and went out to the street. On Seventh Avenue, she found an all-night drugstore with a phone booth in the back. She had to step over cardboard boxes to get into it. As she dialed the long-distance operator, she saw by the clock over the soda fountain that it was just past midnight. In Massachusetts, the phone rang on and on. And then, as she was about to put away her quarters and dimes and go back to the room, a woman’s voice entered her ear intimately, sleepily.

  “Yes?”

  “Is Mr. Gianfala there?”

  “Who is this?”

  “His daughter.”

  Silence.

  “He’s drunk,” said the voice. “I’m sorry. Too drunk to talk, I think.”

  “Could he—I’m leaving for England soon. I’m in New York. I only wanted to say good-by.”

  “I’m Margo. It’s very late, you know. We go to bed early here.”

  “But if he’s up—”

  “Barely. Well, I’ll try. Wait…”

  She heard a distant roaring, a noisy worldless protest, then so loud she held the phone away—“Annie!”

  “Tony. I called up to say good-by.”

  “Ah…good-by. That’s all we ever say, we two. Where is it this time? Oh, where are you going? Where?”

  “Abroad. Tony,
Uncle Greg is dying.”

  “Dying…poor old Sugared-Tomato…poor old devil. I’m dying too. We are all dying. Except for Margo, of course. Margo intends to outlive us all.”

  She wanted to hear him laugh, not listen to the falling and rising tides of alcohol in his voice, his tone so boorish, so truculent, yet straining fatuously for poetic effect. But she could think of nothing that would elicit his laughter, and thought, I will go back to the room, and perhaps I can remember it from there.

  The operator said that three minutes were up, would she deposit another quarter please? She hesitated, her hand over the coin. Why not hang up? He wouldn’t even remember she had called. But she dropped the quarter in the slot, holding the phone tightly in her hand as though the force of her grip might reach through his intoxication to reclaim his recognition of her.

  “I found a book you’d given me,” she said. “It was in the house, A Child’s Garden of Verses…”

  He coughed violently, then—“‘I had a little shadow—’”

  “Yes, yes,” she said eagerly.

  “All I remember. Annie, can you come here? Come see us before you go? See your fat little brother?”

  “No, I can’t. I have to be at the nursing home most of the time. The other relatives won’t do much. And my ship is sailing in a week.”

  “Poor little shadow,” he said lugubriously.

  “I’m not a poor little shadow,” she protested, at once warmed and cheered by her indignation. “I’ll write from over there.”

  “Annie? Annie?”

  The phone clunked. Through the operator’s request, she said, “Good-by.”

  She swept down Seventh Avenue, past Morton, on and on, hurried forward by a wind of surpassing coldness. All at once, the street was entirely empty. She had passed the places where people lived, and was in an area of warehouses and office buildings and lofts, dark, forbidding, a night cemetery. Miles north, her father would be stumbling about rooms she had not seen, harassing a woman she had never met. In that house where they were enacting some habitual drama, her unknown brother might be wakened by their voices. She retraced her footsteps up to Morton Street. Her only obligation was to Uncle Greg.