The Possible World

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  I remember when Winfield was an outpost, a hinterland. Now it’s treated as a suburb of Providence, along with Cranston and Warwick and a dozen other towns, as though the capital city has flung its skirts out and annexed every bit of civilization it could.

  “For more than a hundred years, the oldest resident of each town in the state is presented with a Barclay Cup.” Wallace Barclay addresses Gloria alone, as though she has been elected our representative.

  “I’ve never heard of this,” says Gloria. “And I worked for the ProJo for thirty years. Both Features and News.”

  “Oh, it’s not in the cities,” says Mr. Barclay. “Only the towns.” He warms to his topic: “At one point, more than twenty towns participated in the tradition. Now it’s just six.”

  “What happened to the others?” Gloria asks. She cocks her head interrogatively, the picture of a Lady Reporter; she lacks only a little pad of paper and a pencil.

  “Theft or damage or simple carelessness. Winfield’s Cup, I’m happy to say, is one of the last remaining originals.”

  “Who would steal a cup?” Gloria asks. “Is it made of gold?”

  He looks pained.

  “It’s made of sterling silver with ebony inlays. But the historic value far outweighs . . .” And he’s off on a lecture.

  As he speaks, Gloria’s eyes behind her glasses move to me. The thick lenses make her eyes look enormous, cartoonish. After a good long minute, they move back to Mr. Barclay.

  “So yada yada yada, you still have your cup, good for you,” she says, cutting across his disquisition. “And someone died, and now it’s time to find the next victim.”

  “It’s a local honor,” says Mr. Barclay after a startled pause. “Winfield’s Barclay Cup tradition has been bestowed in an unbroken chain of succession for more than a century.”

  “Unbroken,” Gloria repeats, and there is a challenge in it. “Unbroken?”

  Mr. Barclay looks vexed. “Almost unbroken,” he concedes. “There was a brief time during the 1980s when the cup was put into a storage unit by the family of the former honoree.” How had Gloria guessed? She’s pounced on the one weakness in his narrative. “It was returned to us in 1992, and we’ve had close control of it ever since.”

  “So where is this thing?”

  While Gloria spars with Mr. Barclay, attention in the room is drifting. The knitters are starting to knit again; the card players are peeking at their hands. And of those who are still watching, it isn’t clear how many are following anything of the discussion or just happen to have their heads turned this way.

  “Well, I don’t have it with me.” Amusement at the thought. “We’re hoping to present it at the sestercentennial of Winfield, next summer.”

  “How exciting,” the aide says. “There’ll be a place in the shade, won’t there? For the sester—for that event. There needs to be a place in the shade. And easy access to a bathroom.”

  The Barclay index finger goes up again.

  “There’s a, there’s a wrinkle.”

  Mention of the bathroom is having its typical effect on this group—around the room, walkers and canes are being deployed and their owners getting up.

  “For the first time in the history of the Cup, we have two contenders,” says Mr. Barclay. “Both nearly one hundred. And neither one has a birth certificate.” He puts his finger down. “Not unusual, for, ah, for persons of such vintage. That’s not the issue.” He turns to face me for the first time. I drop my eyelids again, deliberately relax my mouth muscles, and let my jaw drop a little. Old lady camouflage. “The issue is that there isn’t any kind of record of her. Not in Winfield, not in Providence. Not anywhere.” I peek up at him, his smudgy spectacles and downy head. “And we’ve looked.”

  “We all know Clare. She’s been here for twenty years,” says the aide (Andrea? Annette?), putting a hand on my shoulder.

  “She had to come from somewhere,” says Gloria. “She didn’t spring from Zeus’s head.” I almost laugh at this reference; does she notice? I look down again.

  “We haven’t been able to find out where,” says Mr. Barclay.

  My father used to say, Look people in the eyes, let them know you’re someone. But of course, his battle was different, against the strong anti-French prejudice of that time; he didn’t live long enough to become invisible.

  A chime flutes through the air; the lights go on and off three times. Immediately there is a great clatter of walkers and canes, and a welter of grumbling rises around the room. The aide excuses herself, crosses the room to help Mr. Simonetti up from his chair.

  “What’s happening?” says Mr. Barclay, but he can barely be heard.

  Where’s my scarf?; we need to get there before they run out of banana pudding; will you carry my water, dear?; they never have banana pudding; I’ll know if you changed the cards, I’ve got a system; that’s ’cause they run out; no they’ve never ever had banana pudding; that’s why we have to get there early.

  “Dinner bell,” Gloria tells Mr. Barclay. “They’re like Pavlov’s dogs.”

  After a good five minutes of noisy exodus, they are all gone, leaving only Gloria, Mr. Barclay, and me.

  “You were saying,” says Gloria.

  “Oh—yes,” says Mr. Barclay, as if startled from a reverie. “It’s rare that a person is completely undocumented. There’s always something. A tax record, a mention in the obituary of a loved one, a lease, a census, a hospital bill. Church records are the mainstay, of course. We have more churches per capita than any other state in the Union.” As if that is something to be proud of. “But this time we’ve been through all available records, and there’s nothing.”

  “She’s off the grid,” Gloria says. “Very forward-thinking.”

  “Now, people do change their names,” Mr. Barclay continues. “Through marriage, adoption formal or informal, out of personal preference, to cover up a crime—”

  “That’s an idea,” Gloria interrupts. She turns to me. “Are you an escaped criminal?”

  Finally someone addressing me, but not sincerely. She doesn’t expect an answer. It is a bit of comedy, as if she’s talking to a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  “I didn’t mean to suggest—” Mr. Barclay barely suppresses his annoyance. “I just meant that a person will take on a new persona for any one of a number of reasons. It was easy to do, back in the day. Before centralized records a person could take a new name and just live his life out, no questions asked.”

  Brief silence now, from both of them. Should I speak up and rupture the illusion of being lost in a fog of senility?

  Gloria speaks before I can decide. “From what you’ve told us,” she tells Mr. Barclay, “it doesn’t matter what her name is. It only matters what her age is. She knows her age, or at least she did at one point. So unless you’re saying she’s a liar . . .”

  “I’m not suggesting any such thing,” he says. “But documentation is important. My great-great-great-grandfather started this tradition. He commissioned the Cup, he designed the engraving. Each generation of my family has appointed a member to oversee the Cup. In my lifetime, my grandfather had the duty, then my uncle, and now me. I won’t entrust the Cup to just anyone.”

  “Aha,” says Gloria. “You’re the one who lost the Cup in the eighties.”

  He closes his eyes, as if willing her to disappear.

  “I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “I didn’t lose it,” he snaps. “The honoree’s family misplaced it. I’m the one who found it.” He slips a hand into the patch pocket of his cardigan and takes out something, holds it up in front of himself.

  Seeing it, my heart starts up, a clapper in a bell. I hold out my hands.

  They both look startled, as though a tree has reached out toward them. Mr. Barclay recovers first, and hands the item to me. I accept it from his soft, uncallused fingertips.

  It is a reprinted photograph from a newspaper article, mounted on a bit of cardboard, marked at the top with a black pen: 11/1/1936.
A slim girl in a long dress, a spray of flowers in her hair.

  “From the archives of the Providence Journal,” he says.

  “Fan-cy,” says Gloria, who’s rolled her chair up beside me to look.

  I remember the feel of that dress, gray in the picture but sky blue in real life, of a heavy cool satin that slipped against my skin as I moved. My Best Dress.

  “Is that you?” he asks.

  You can see the jacketed elbow of my companion at the edge of the frame, the rest of him lost forever; I can almost smell the candles burning, hear the breathy truncated moans of the orchestra tuning up.

  His voice, a coaxing whisper now: “Is that you?”

  I tear my eyes away from the image to find him unsettlingly close.

  “No.” My heartbeat shakes extra syllables into the word: no-o-o.

  “Are you sure?”

  Is it the rattlesnake that mesmerizes its victims? I stare back at him, breathing in his smell: clean laundry with a hint of liniment.

  I open my hands, let the photograph slip to the floor. He pounces and recovers it, holds it up in front of me again.

  “Asked and answered, young man,” says Gloria, chrrring back from her place at my side and then forward again, toward him. “Asked and answered.”

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” he tells her, not looking away from me. “This is a private matter.”

  But the spell is broken now: I see him again as he is, soft-handed and ineffectual. No doubt he’s had someone else making his dinners his whole life, doing his laundry. Left alone in the world, he would surely starve. He is no match for me.

  “Wasn’t private a minute ago,” Gloria says. “You know, we don’t even know that you are who you say you are. We haven’t seen any identification.”

  She brings her wheelchair right up to him, bumping the footrest against the sides of his legs. He sidles away a few steps, still holding the picture, fumbling in a pocket with the other hand and pulling out a silver card case, a foppish item to come from under that ratty cardigan. Gloria lifts the grabber stick, and with a surprising delicacy closes its pincers over the business card he draws out. “Let me see that.” She brings it very close to her face and tilts her head back to peer through the bottom of the trifocals at it. “Wallace Barclay, Barclay Foundation, President.” She drops it into her lap with a dismissive air. “You could have gotten that made anywhere.”

  “What?” he says.

  “Is this identity theft, is that what this is?” She is clearly enjoying herself. “Are you one of those Nigerian scammers?”

  “I assure you—it’s not—it’s a well-established honor.” Fluster is bringing out his accent. Nawt. Awnuh.

  “Do you watch the obituaries? Hightail it to the bedside to be there when the death rattle comes, Johnny-on-the-spot to snatch your Cup back?”

  “People are usually thrilled.”

  “You’re like a vulture.” She pokes at him with the grabber stick. “This woman is almost one hundred years old.” Poke poke poke while she advances her chair.

  “That’s the point,” he protests as he backs away from her.

  As she passes me, I can see that her bun is made of a very long braid coiled up and pinned. That won’t last; she’ll soon have the easy-care, sexless bob of white fluff around her ears that we all have here.

  “Angela,” cries Gloria. That was the name, Angela.

  And the aide is there, stepping between the two of them.

  “You won’t get much from old Miss Clare, I’m afraid,” she tells Mr. Barclay. “She’s in and out.”

  “Any kind of documentation would be helpful,” he tells Angela, putting the photograph back into his knitted pocket, allowing her to draw him away. “A marriage license. A family Bible.”

  “Miss Clare’s never been married.” The ooze of pity in her words. “She’s a charity case, doesn’t own a thing except what’s in her room. She’s never had a visitor.” As they cross the room I can still hear them. “Might as well give the Cup to the other lady.”

  Mr. Barclay turns his head back toward me one last time, spectacles flashing, before he goes through the doorway. And then he is gone, and my heart is settling down again and the muffled soundtrack of Oak Haven is closing quickly over his visit, the coughs and murmurs and the clicking of cutlery from the dining room swelling and the photograph receding already, the whole thing nearly forgotten.

  Not by everyone, though.

  “I must say I didn’t expect such intrigue in a retirement home,” Gloria says. There is a bloom across her cheeks, and her eyes behind the lenses are huge and bright. “I think Mr. Hawkins may be running numbers out of his room, and now you, a potential outlaw. Is that it, are you on the lam?”

  “Young lady,” I say, calling up the spirit of every nun who’d ever held me in her steel gaze. My voice feels rusty with disuse, and I clear my throat. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  The cartoon eyes go even rounder with surprise.

  “You are mocking me,” I say. “Mocking all of us.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “You said, ‘We’re like Pavlov’s dogs.’ ”

  “It was just—”

  “Dogs.”

  We might be equivalent in the eyes of the world—two old, unimportant ladies—but she is thirty years my junior. By the time she was born I’d already lost my whole world, not once but two times.

  “It’s not your job to pry into people’s lives anymore,” I tell her. “You used to be a reporter. Your life before is gone.” The mirth drains from her expression. “And you’re not just visiting. You’ll see.” I fumble in my lap blanket for the call button. “For one thing, that ridiculous hairstyle. You won’t find anyone to take care of it here.” A hand goes up to touch her hair. “Where do you think you are?” I find the button and give it a vigorous squeeze. “This isn’t a cruise ship. This isn’t a spa.” Squeezing again, as hard as I can. “This is the place you’ve come to die.” I can feel the air go still before my next word. “Alone.”

  For that is really the only reason she would be in Oak Haven at her age: sickness advanced enough to require care, and no one loving her enough to be willing to provide it.

  We sit a moment in the echo of my cruelty before an aide appears in answer to my bell.

  “Nellie, there you are,” I say.

  “What’s wrong, Miss Clare, what’s all the ringing, did you have an accident?”

  She isn’t Nellie, of course, Nellie was a dozen girls ago.

  “No, no, just help me up. I want to go to my room. I want some peace and quiet.”

  “What a shame,” she says as she helps me up from the chair and puts my cane into my hand. “And here I thought you’d gone and made a friend.”

  * * *

  THERE IS NO knock on my door at bedtime, for I don’t require a sleeping medicine. Sleep is my reward for each day; it’s where my memories live. I slip into it effortlessly, an otter sliding into a warm current. I long for it so greedily that I have set myself strict rules: two naps a day totaling no more than three hours, and bedtime no earlier than nine o’clock. The soft steps in the hall of the aides coming around to the others tells me it’s time. I put a bookmark into my book and slide my feet down below the covers, switch off the bedside lamp, and close my eyes.

  * * *

  AND IT’S SUMMER, the blazing green and hand-over-your-mouth heat of August, the air so dense that not even the flies are buzzing. In my sleep, I am smiling: this is a good day, a good memory.

  I’m in the cemetery, which means that it is afternoon. In summer, I did the harder garden work in the morning, starting early and keeping ahead of the sun as long as I could. Summer days split themselves like that: mornings in the garden weeding and watering, replacing the coffee cans full of drowned slugs and retying the tomatoes that were forever shifting their weight as they grew and threatening to touch the ground. After noon I went into the cemetery—one day to mow and the next to edge the fringes left behind
after the mower, and daily care for the rose bushes that grew up against the stone wall on all four sides of the green. Two or three mornings a week were devoted to canning, the little stone house a fog of steam as the glass jars pop-pop-pop sealed up one by one, a bounty against the winter. Winter was always at the heart of everything then, even the hottest day.

  Those long summer days were hard, but at the end of each as the sun finally began to slant toward setting, what more satisfying sight than Roscommon. I would sit on the front step of the house with a glass of cool well water and look down over it all, admiring the white markers parceling the cemetery into neat green rows, the gray stone perimeter clotted with blooms of yellow and red and white and lilac. And on the near side of the stone wall the garden, with its fenced-in glory of harvest: the netted tomatoes fat on the vine, the beans tied primly to their poles, the flat bitter furbelows of beet greens spaced against the soil, the pale curling fists of lettuce like a row of French knots. I loved that quiet hour looking out over my piece of the world when the sun was sinking. Everywhere I looked was evidence of my labor, of my mark upon the earth. I did not own Roscommon legally, but it was mine all the same.

  In my dream, I’m edging a plot near the middle of the cemetery, and when I hear the rustling beyond the stone wall, I don’t pay any attention at first.

  * * *

  I’M JOLTED AWAKE by sounds from next door, Gloria’s growling alto and the higher, younger voices of the aides.

  “Of course I was assigned the woman’s angle.” That is Gloria. “How was the widow coping, how were the children doing without their dad? They never gave me anything meaty.”

  “Men are jerks,” says one of the aides. “Okay, next one is big, plenty of water.”

  A pause—Gloria is swallowing a pill—then she continues.

  “No one expected the story I brought back.” The next bit is drowned out by the rumbling of the motor as the bed is being adjusted. “No lie,” cries Gloria. “She showed me the murder weapon.” For nearly a minute her alto wheezing mingles with the Are you serious! and She did not! and light pealing laughter from the aides. “They had to print it in the News section.” Triumphant: “And that was my foot in the door.”