Old Ladies

by Nancy Huddleston Packer

  “What on earth were you doing on a horse at your age?”

  He shrugged. “Pretending I wasn’t my age, of course. The problem is, as I can’t remember who said, you get old but you never get older.”

  “Back to the vital statistics. Doctor? Lawyer? Merchant chief?”

  He laughed. “Not even tinker, tailor, soldier, or sailor. Michele had a boutique in Paris—didn’t I write you that? And I was the attraction for all the rich American widows passing through. Actually my second, Dolly, was one of them. And so there was New York and lots of fun and after that Ruth hauled me off to New Mexico. Now your turn, please. I want to know everything.”

  She told him about law school at Berkeley and meeting Andrew, the law firm the two of them had founded in Palo Alto, raising two daughters, widowhood, five adorable grandchildren seen fairly frequently since they lived minutes away, wonderful kids but rather dreading their teen years.

  “My life must seem terribly dull and conventional,” she said. “Yours was much more exciting.”

  He shrugged. “I suppose, but once you hit old age, the party’s over and everyone’s gone home and you have nothing left but confetti on the floor.”

  “No compensations?”

  He laughed. “Of course. Though Ruth hauled me off to New Mexico more or less against my will, I love it. Great skies and beautiful mountains. No pressure to be something one isn’t—not that I ever knew the difference.” He paused but when she made no response, he went on. “And people when you want them and not when you don’t. And of course the horses. They did add great joy to the last years before they turned on me.” He leaned forward. “And you, has your ‘conventional’ life been good?”

  “Wonderful.” Again she gestured toward the photograph on the end table. “Andrew and I were very happy. We had a great marriage.”

  “Ah,” he said, smiling. “Don’t I get some credit for that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who was it who said if a second marriage is a success, then the first cannot be thought a total failure? Fitzgerald?”

  “You and I were not married,” she said in a low voice.

  “Close to it. Just not the entanglement.”

  She looked at him but did not speak. After a silence, he said, “I didn’t mean for it to come out quite like that. Of course there was entanglement, much more than.” He frowned and shook his head. “How many times have I thought of that awful trip to Tijuana, and that filthy man. You were so brave.”

  She stood up. “My goodness, where have my manners gone. What will you drink?”

  “What?” he said, his voice startled. “I was saying that you were…”

  “I think I have all the usual,” she said, “Sherry? Wine? Martini?”

  He leaned back in his chair, a puzzled look on his face. “Well, okay, but water, please, plain or fizzy.” When she questioned that with a lifted eyebrow, he shrugged and said. “I was so far gone that even the old doctor in my little New Mexico town told me I had to quit.” He shook his head, his expression playfully mournful. “So I spend my last years cold sober. Rather harsh punishment for petty sins, don’t you think?”

  “It does sound quite petty,” she said as she disappeared into the kitchen.

  He frowned for a moment, then shrugged. The light from the lamp was shining on the photograph on the end table. He picked it up and studied it for a long moment. When he shifted the frame his own reflection appeared on the glass. He combed his hair with his fingers and reset his necktie and lifted his lips in a smile and replaced the photograph.

  In the kitchen, the woman put ice cubes in two glasses and poured in bottled water. After a pause she emptied one of the glasses into the sink. Then she pulled down a bottle of scotch from a high shelf. As she poured the scotch into the glass, a smile played around her lips. She put both glasses on a tray and added bowls of cashews and olives and carried the tray into the living room.

  “The sun is over the yardarm, as we used to say,” she said, setting the glass of water and a tiny cloth napkin on the coffee table in front of him. “Are you quite sure you don’t want to join me?”

  “Want, yes,” he said. “But quite sure.”

  She lifted her glass in a toast. “Well, then, to a long life.”

  “To a long life.” After he had toasted her, he placed the glass on the little napkin. “It’s already been a long life, for both of us.”

  “Too long?”

  “Oh, no—never too long, never long enough. I’m far from ready to die.”

  “The distinguished thing, didn’t Henry James call it?”

  “Your wonderful memory is still intact,” he said with a nod. “Remember how we used to lie in bed and talk about death? You were so determined to face everything head on. Whereas I thought dying was like sex: if you didn’t think about it it would go away.”

  “Andrew always said if there’s no solution, there’s no problem, so why think about it at all.”

  “Exactly. So I never do.” He paused. “Except those little flickerings of panic in the middle of the night.”

  They laughed at that, and then she leaned toward him. “Now tell me why you called me.”

  He shrugged. “I was in San Francisco, and I wanted to see you.”

  “You haven’t been in San Francisco in fifty years?”

  He looked away for a moment. “Well, yes, of course I have. And I’ve kept track of your whereabouts by the changes in the telephone book.” He shook his head. “But I kept not calling you.”

  “So why now?”

  He drew a silver box from his coat pocket and took out a tiny yellow pill. “I think my ticker needs a little reinforcement before we venture onto that terrain.” He put the pill on his tongue and swallowed it down with water. “How about you, how’s your health?”

  “Nothing serious. An ache and a pain here and there. I take enough vitamins and supplements every morning so that I hardly need breakfast before I go down to the gym for my thirty minutes of torture.”

  He laughed. “You actually do all those gyrations and gruntings? Just like you. Such discipline. It used to shame me.”

  “Now that we’ve concluded our medical reports,” she said, “let me ask again: why now?”

  He sighed and glanced around the room before answering. “I know it’s rather a mawkish thing to say, but you’re my major piece of unfinished business and with a bad heart, I thought I should. We never really came to closure.”

  “Oh, but I did,” she quickly said. “Long ago. Once I met Andrew, none of all that mattered, so you needn’t have worried.”

  “It’s always plagued me,” he said, closing his eyes and shaking his head as though in pain. “I’ve always felt such shame.”

  After a pause, she said, “Oh, well, if it’s absolution you want, why don’t we stipulate that you have it.”

  “That makes it sound awfully trivial.”

  “Aren’t all such things trivial after so much time has passed?”

  He looked at her steadily for a long moment. “What I can stipulate is that I was a terrible coward. I simply could not face you. When I left, believe me, I meant to come back. Everything just happened so fast.” He shook his head, and pressed his lips tight.

  “Oh, I’m so glad you didn’t,” she said, with a relieved sigh.

  He stared at her. “Glad?”

  “If you had come back, who knows, I might not have met Andrew.” She waved her hand in the air. “But we don’t need to rehash the distant past.”

  He threw himself back in his chair. “So I’ve been carrying this burden all these years and that’s all it meant to you?”

  “I’m sorry if it really continued to bother you,” she said, shaking her hand in the air as though batting away a mosquito. “But if you came here to be somehow exonerated, surely you’re happy now.”

  “Yes, of course.” He frowned and after a moment said, “But to be honest I’m sad that you forgot me so easily while I’ve constantly thought of
you.”

  “Constantly?”

  He laughed. “Whenever always with pain while you forgot me.”

  “I didn’t forget you,” she said in an impatient voice. “After all that happened, how could I? I’m not yet in my dotage. Of course I was hurt when I got that little note from was it Gstaad? the ski resort? But I was young and those things don’t last.”

  “Well, it has lasted with me all these years,” he said, “and finally I found the courage, however late, to come to apologize for my bad behavior.”

  “Is that what it was? Bad behavior? Like a boy who sasses his teacher?”

  “It was much more serious than that, of course, or I wouldn’t be here,” he said, frowning. “And frankly I expected that it would have meant more to you.”

  “You expected me to be still suffering?” Her face tightened, and she leaned toward him. “Was that why you came? To get a booster shot for your flagging ego?”

  “What?” he said, raring back. “That’s outrageous.”

  “Why else really would you have come?”

  “You keep challenging me. I don’t remember that trait in you.”

  “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn from no other,” she said with a dry laugh.

  “You may doubt if you will, but the honest truth is that I have never stopped suffering for what I did.”

  “And so you want sympathy because you hurt me?” She cocked her head and stared at him. “Now that is a great definition of chutzpah.”

  “Well, I was never lacking in that.” He leaned back and sighed. “Perhaps guilt has a longer shelf life than hurt.”

  “Could that be because there’s more pleasure in it?” She smiled. “A few drops of guilt might be like the bitters in a Manhattan, adding just a touch of zest.”

  “That is so unfair.” He closed his eyes and shook his head.

  “You came seeking fairness? Do I owe you fairness?”

  His eyes shot wider. “I came seeking penance,” he said in a loud voice, straightening his shoulders so that his chin rose.

  “Penance?” she repeated. “Penance shouldn’t be easy, should it?”

  “Easy?” He puffed out a laugh and rolled his eyes. “I feel as though I’ve been flayed alive.”

  “In that case, we’re getting closer to even.” She abruptly stood up. “I’m afraid I’m being derelict in my hostess-y duties. Would you like an olive? A cashew?”

  “What I’d desperately like is a scotch and soda,” he said, “but fortunately alcohol is like sex and death. Or have I already said that?” He laughed ruefully. “In any case, I must go. My driver will be waiting.” He put one hand on the arm of the chair and one on the head of his cane and thrust himself upright.

  “Well, if you must.” She made a reluctant face, and then smiled. “You were kind to remember an old friend.”

  “And you to let me visit.”

  She led the way to the apartment’s front door. “Stay off those horses,” she said, wagging her finger at him.

  He wagged his cane at her. “Take care of those grandchildren.”

  A Woman and His Dog

  On the way to the hospital that last night, Martin had said, “Take care of Ozzie,” and Lydia had promised she would. A few days later somebody—perhaps their granddaughter who had flown in for the funeral—had taken Ozzie to the boarding kennel. But in her grief, Lydia had not thought of the dog until five weeks later one of the veterinarians called to ask how long he would be boarding there. Lydia was ashamed of forgetting her pledge to Martin and sorry to remember it.

  Ozzie was a little castrated gray mongrel with black spots and a black muzzle. He had appeared on their front steps late one evening, half-starved and filthy. A tag on his collar had said “Ozzie.” Martin had fed him a bowl of milk and some leftover roast lamb and spread an old beach towel on the kitchen floor. Next day Lydia had tacked notices about the dog on nearby telephone poles and the bulletin board at the local grocery store, but no one claimed him. “Some kid just deserted him once the college was out,” Martin said. “I guess he’s ours.”

  “Yours,” Lydia said. Though they had had dogs when their children were young, she had never liked them—they smelled and shed and barked and ate unmentionable things. But she did not veto Ozzie, for after the first few days Martin had seemed to come out of his depression. In the year and a half since retiring from his engineering firm, he had grown lethargic and morose, slumped in front of the TV, seldom leaving the house, hardly speaking at mealtime, not very fastidious with his shirts and underwear. Ozzie turned out to be better medicine than anything the doctor had prescribed.

  Martin bought a new collar and leash and began to take Ozzie for a long walk every morning. He combed the burrs from Ozzie’s coat, fed him morsels from the table, and in the evenings tussled with him over an old shoe. After a week or so, Martin bought a dog bed and set it down in their bedroom so Ozzie wouldn’t be lonesome at night. Though Lydia had protested, of course she gave in. Martin had become his cheerful, engaged self again, teasing her about what he called her phylogenic prejudices and grooming Ozzie daily. And so it had gone for the two years she had feared she might not have Martin.

  ***

  When she brought Ozzie home from the kennel, he leaped out of the car and rushed up the back steps, wagging his rump, grinning and slathering, as though he had been anticipating this moment for the whole five weeks. Lydia opened the door, and Ozzie scurried past her to the bedroom, the living room, the kitchen, finally landing at the front door with his chin on his paws.

  “No sense waiting,” Lydia said. “Martin won’t ever come home again.” The words seemed to explode in her skull, and she slumped to the floor, the tears coursing down her face. Ozzie came up to her wagging his tail, and she shoved him away.

  That evening she brought the dog bed from the garage and put it on the kitchen floor. She let Ozzie out into the backyard for a few minutes and then closed him into the kitchen. And then as she had every night since Martin’s death, she lay in bed for hours, gazing at the shadows the streetlights cast on the ceiling, spinning, spinning. Was there anything she could have done? Had he suffered terribly? Why hadn’t she gone first? Why was she alive without him?

  At early light she woke to an odd noise, an intermittent harsh sound, like a file over metal. She followed the sound down the hallway and opened the kitchen door. Ozzie flew past her. When she turned on the light, she saw splinters of paint along the bottom of the door and scattered across the kitchen linoleum. Ozzie had scratched gashes deep into raw wood.

  When Ozzie trotted back down the hall and into the kitchen, Lydia said, “Damn you,” and leaning against the doorjamb to steady herself, she whacked him on the jaw with the back of her hand and sent him sprawling. Once he had righted himself, he stared at her in bewilderment.

  Martin’s dog. She had struck Martin’s dog. Never since childhood had she struck a living creature, yet she had struck Martin’s dog despite her promise to take care of him. Martin would be ashamed of her, and she was ashamed of herself. She picked up the dog bed and carried it to the corner of the bedroom, just where Martin had placed it.

  After breakfast, Lydia hooked Ozzie to the leash and picked up the newspaper in its blue plastic wrapper, and they set out for the pocketsize neighborhood park where Martin had usually taken Ozzie for an early morning outing, where they always had the place to themselves. The park was edged with trees and thick shrubbery and had a zigzag of paths that marked off a swing set, parallel bars, and a splintery wooden bench. Martin had proudly trained Ozzie to stay in the park, and so Lydia unhooked the leash, and Ozzie began his explorations, sniffing and snorting at every leaf and plunging his black muzzle deep in the grass to get a better purchase on the odors.

  “Hurry up,” she said to him as she sat down on the bench. “I haven’t got all day.”

  But that was exactly wrong, for: she did have all day. She had nothing to look forward to but a long expanse of empty time. The vis
its of friends and neighbors had slowly ended, and the telephone calls from her children had become weekly. Oh, yes, she could fiddle in the garden or sweep and dust the house or try to read a book, but there was not one thing in the world she wanted to do. In her teens, she had often thought she was marking time until her real life began. Now she was marking time until it ended.

  ***

  She walked Ozzie to the park every morning, sat for a few minutes while he roamed, cleaned up after him with the blue newspaper wrapper, and then went home. For a week or so that was their routine. But when an early autumn storm struck and the rain seemed like solid sheets of glass, she said, “I’m not taking you for a walk in that,” and shoved Ozzie into the back yard. A few minutes later, she heard him crying at the door and she let him back in. He stood in the middle of the room, jerking spasmodically, a shower of water flying around the kitchen, landing on the floor, the chair legs, Lydia’s shoes.

  Lydia knew it was her own fault. When it had rained, Martin had put on his Burberry raincoat and snap-brim hat and he and Ozzie walked to the corner or around the block. When they came back, Martin always let Ozzie shake off the rain on the front porch and then had rubbed him with an old towel. That evening Lydia donned Martin’s raincoat and hat and walked Ozzie to the corner and back and then dried him as best she could.

  ***

  The rains cleared and by Sunday the air was warm and dry. As Lydia and Ozzie walked the two blocks to the park, there was not a sound except that of a far-off train. She unleashed Ozzie and sat down to read the newspaper. Seventeen bodies had been found in a grave in the back yard of a North Dakota recluse. Forty-three people had been killed in a suicide bombing in Pakistan. A front-page photograph showed a small boy in Darfur, his belly button like a tennis ball being squeezed from his swollen belly. What a miserable world.

  As she refolded the paper, ready to go home, she saw Ozzie disappearing into a cave of shrubs and pine trees in the corner of the park, and thinking to keep him from some awfulness, she went in after him.

  This time he had not found anything edible even by his standards but a man lying curled on his side. The man’s face was marked with dirt and shiny streaks of dried saliva and red welts where he had pressed against the gravel. It was Gene Clabaugh, whose house was on the street behind Lydia’s. He taught at the high school—physics or chemistry—and once he had been a member of the town council.