“Tuttie!” I shouted with relief when she answered my knock. “Tuttie!” It was all I could say. I threw my arms around her and hugged her till she protested.
“Susan, Susan, get a grip on yourself,” she said, and I felt her hands on my chest, pushing me away. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Tuttie, I was sure you were dead!” I was smiling while I said it, which must have looked a little incongruous to her.
“So I guess you’re glad I’m not?” she asked cautiously, closing the door behind me and padding into her living room in her terrycloth scuffs. She did not look like she had been home all day, ill. In fact, she looked like she had just gotten home from somewhere. She had on the blouse and skirt she often wore on Saturday, for dress, and her face was still made up. She had slipped her scuffs on over her nylons.
“Sorry I couldn’t reach you today,” she said, offering me a cup of coffee. “I left too early in the morning and just got back.”
“From where?” I asked, now a little perturbed that I had worried all day for nothing.
“Long Island,” she said, flopping onto the worn sofa and kicking off her slippers. “You don’t have to pay me if you don’t want to, but it was business.”
I sat down next to her and drank my coffee. “Do you want to explain a little more?” I asked in a clipped voice.
“I got to thinking about how valuable you kept saying I was, but how I don’t feel that way at all. I putt here, I putt there. I forget what I sold yesterday.” She looked very sad. “I don’t feel like I make a contribution. So I got to thinking, what can I do? Then I got an idea. Last night I called my second cousin Mildred in Westbury, she’s hoarded a lot of stuff in her basement over the years, and I heard she’s moving to Florida. I figured she’d want to lighten her load a little. I said, ‘Millie, have I got a deal for you,’ and I went out there and bought a lot of stuff for the store. Good things. Quality things. Some came from Germany with Uncle Sol. And I didn’t cheat her, I think I paid a fair price. Wait’ll you see the stuff, lambchop. It’s quality.”
I smiled weakly, still annoyed that she hadn’t called, but my anger was fading fast. “Where is it?”
“Still at Millie’s,” she answered. “We just have to get it out. We have a few weeks. It’s not too big, mostly china and linens and things like that. A few lamps. Some prints. A walnut desk.”
“A desk!” I laughed. “Sounds pretty big to me. What else? A sideboard? A breakfront? An organ?” I couldn’t think of anything bigger than that.
She didn’t laugh, as I’d expected. In fact, her head fell forward a little and she looked about ready to cry. “Go ahead, make fun of me. It wasn’t an easy trip. I did it for you.”
I could have kicked myself and would have, if my foot would have reached back there. Instead, I put my hand gently on her shoulder. “You did good, Tuttie. It sounds like great stuff. I’m sorry I laughed.”
“Apology accepted,” she said, more quickly than I imagined. “So, lambchop, I should apologize, too. I could have called. I just didn’t. I was still a little confused about our talk. Thought it wouldn’t hurt for you to worry.”
“Well, I did,” I said, smiling. “Don’t do it again.”
“You can fire me if you want to,” a sly grin forming at one end of her mouth. “But without me, you’ll never get Millie’s stuff.”
“Well, then,” I played along, “I guess you’ve got mc, haven’t you? It looks like maybe I should give you a raise, to keep you around.” I called Catherine to say I would be late, then took Tuttie out for a falafel sandwich.
• • •
That was how Tuttie became the manager of Out of Time. It didn’t occur to me that day, but the seed of the idea got planted then. It took me several more weeks to decide that what I really needed to do, for my own sanity, was to go into semi-retirement and write my book about Lucy. Or Lucy’s book about herself, whatever the project turned into.
The day I went to Long Island, to Tuttie’s cousin Millie to pick up what Tuttie had purchased, was the day that really clinched it for me. Tuttie had picked up some wonderful antiques for a fair price, and Millie’s friends with bulging basements were now calling Tuttie every few days. I realized that Tuttie’s taste in antiques was better than my own, better than Margielove’s. Tuttie actually read up on things. With her direction, the store was destined to become a classier operation than I could have made it, and a far cry from the run-down junk shop Margielove had run. In a way, it made me sad. The junky aspect was what had brought me to the store in the first place. Without it, I would have walked by, maybe becoming a clerk in the Key Food up the block. I would be poor, out of school, probably out of my apartment, maybe out of a girlfriend. And I would have never made all those trips north to unravel Lucy’s secrets. I like to think about what might have been. It makes me feel so lucky.
Now it was time for the shop to move on, out of the past and into the future that Tuttie was going to stake out for it. Tuttie would run the store, with the help of a part-time clerk; I would still keep the books, but I wouldn’t be around on a daily basis. She might enlist my help and my station wagon to go on buying trips. But essentially, I was a free woman, for as long as I needed to be.
My last day of work was still one more ending. Now I wouldn’t be living in Tuttie’s neighborhood or seeing her daily, though we’d talk on the phone a lot. This time, though, Tuttie seemed less sad. She was embarking on something new, like a new relationship, when every day brings some thrilling new discovery. Ever since she’d disappeared to Long Island, Tuttie acted more confident of her knowledge and abilities. She even seemed to remember things better, but she said that was probably just my imagination. Maybe it was; maybe seeing her write in those little spiral notebooks became so second nature to me that I hardly noticed her doing it anymore. Whatever, I left the store that last day feeling confident about Tuttie and scared about what was facing me. When the next morning came, and I realized I had a whole day to myself, and endless more just like it, I panicked.
I woke up late and ate a big, long breakfast, which was unusual because I rarely ate before noon. I puttered around my desk, pushed it from one side of the room to the other, went out to buy a typewriter ribbon. Fleck wasn’t home when I knocked on her door, so I proceeded crosstown to Catherine’s school, where I waited in the admissions office for her class to end. Sitting on a stiff chair by the door, I got curious looks from teachers and students alike. I was too old to be a student, too young to be anyone’s mother. I had forgotten to bring a book, so I read a pamphlet on drug and alcohol abuse and another on preparing for the SAT’s.
Catherine walked right past me, did a double-take, then stood over me, as if I were a truant. “What are you doing here?” she asked in a hushed voice that made it clear this surprise had been a mistake.
“I thought we could have lunch. To celebrate my first day.” I could tell from her raised eyebrows that she could see right through me. “I’m trying to be more spontaneous.”
She looked over her shoulder to see who was listening and a lot of people were. The secretary behind the counter was watching us as she sorted through slips of paper of various sizes, probably parental excuses. Catherine hated public scenes. Her voice fell to a level I could barely make out.
“It’s hard to be spontaneous in a high school,” she said. Or that, at least, is what I heard. “You’re using me to avoid your work. I won’t be a part of that.”
She turned around, walked to the counter, asked for her messages. There weren’t any.
“I have to monitor a study hall now, then advise the History Club. I think you should go home and sit down at your desk. We can discuss this later.”
I didn’t like Catherine’s teacher persona, and I wasn’t about to make a scene that she’d hold against me for months. I don’t think I said goodbye. On the street, I realized I was crying; but it was less because of Catherine’s abruptness than because I knew I had to go home.
32
I made one more stop before heading back to Grove Street. The day was nothing like the one when I’d first wandered into Bea Best’s antique shop, unaware that I was about to become a thief. The place looked different on a cold sunny day in March. It also looked as if Bea had shifted things around quite a bit. Sold them, probably, even though this shop didn’t feel like a place where actual sales transactions occurred. It was more of a museum, a slice of time, with Bea thrown in to create a certain atmosphere. I noticed as I walked in that there was no longer a bell on the door.
Bea was dusting the bookshelves with a bright turquoise feather duster. It was the most colorful thing in the room. The bell had been replaced by an annoying squeaky hinge that signaled my entrance.
“Hello, Bea,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Hello.”
She didn’t stop dusting, and for a moment I wondered if she remembered me. After all, we had only seen each other two times in the last year, and she probably saw a lot of brown-haired, thirtyish women of average height. But considering what I’d been through, how could she forget? I was starting to feel miffed, when she spoke from the bookshelves, her back toward me.
“I understand you’ve had a change of venue,” she commented, flatly. I was surprised that she knew.
“Yes, it’s quite nice,” I replied. “How did you know?”
“I sent something to you, and it came back,” she explained, but didn’t offer to give it to me now.
“You won’t believe this,” I said, “but I’m living in Elinor Devere’s house. She was one of your aunt’s circle of friends.”
She looked startled. “That’s odd,” she said, thoughtfully. “If you were going to do something like that, I would have expected you to pick Aunt Lucy’s old apartment instead.”
“I looked into that building, but there was nothing available then, and I was too poor anyway,” I said. “I’ve had a change of fortune, too, you see.”
“Yes, well, that would make a difference.” She sounded incredibly bored, as she always had when she talked to me. I wondered if it was just I who bored her, or everyone. I realized I had never really seen her interact with anyone else. “And what is it you’d like from me today?”
Her bluntness was always disconcerting, and I stammered a bit, putting my thoughts together.
“N-nothing, really,” I said, then knew that wasn’t exactly true. “Well, honestly, I just wanted to tell you what I’ve been thinking about.”
That came out all wrong, and she cocked an eyebrow, as if to say, why should I care what you’re thinking about?
“What I mean is,” I continued quickly, “I wanted to run an idea past you.”
I was still standing at the door, but she had moved across the room and placed her duster on the jewelry counter. I wanted to suggest moving to the back room but couldn’t get the words out.
“Would you like some lunch?” she asked, without changing her flat tone and without waiting for an answer. I followed her behind the curtain to her office.
Refreshments had been set out for two, like the last time I had arrived without notice.
“Were you expecting someone?” I asked, feeling disoriented as I always did here.
“It’s lunch time,” she commented, as if she were always expecting someone.
We sat on the humpback sofa in front of a tray of bite-sized cucumber sandwiches and glasses of lemonade. I ate three or four very quickly before I realized I had eaten anything at all.
“And now,” she said, biting a sandwich very gingerly, almost as if she didn’t like cucumber, “your idea.”
“I think that Lucy Weir wants me to finish writing something for her.”
Bea didn’t look at me but continued concentrating on the taste of her sandwich. She finally put it down, unfinished, as one might in a restaurant and not at home. I thought for a moment she might try to send it back to the kitchen.
“I think she wants me to finish the novel she started writing about Harriet and her,” I continued. “I think that she believes no one understood them and someone has to set things straight.”
“More lemonade?” she asked, noticing I had finished mine.
“No,” I said, somewhat rudely, and Bea looked at me in surprise. It came out much stronger than I intended, but I realized I wanted her attention.
“And you’d publish this under your name,” she said, after a considerable pause.
“No,” I replied, firmly, even though I hadn’t thought about it. I backed down. “Not necessarily.”
“Are you asking if I’d sue you if you published under my aunt’s name?” she asked, as casually as she might have asked for the time.
“No,” I said again, “that hadn’t occurred to me.”
“It should have,” she said. “Even if I didn’t, my sister Letty might, if she found out.”
It was a more complicated issue than I’d imagined. All I wanted to do was please Lucy.
“That’s a good point,” I said, sadly. Letty hadn’t actually threatened me but just didn’t want anyone to be able to trace Lucy to her. “Though I don’t know how she’d find out. Unless you told her.”
“Yes, well,” she said, finishing her lemonade and standing up. “I must go back to work, and I assume you do, too.”
“I’ve taken some time off,” I explained, finishing a fifth sandwich wedge quickly. “To work on this book.”
I followed her back to the store, where she picked up her feather duster and resumed her work.
“One more question,” I persisted. “Sophia Cervenak. Do you know who that is? What connection she might have to your aunt?”
She looked at me blankly, and I could tell she was honestly in the dark, not just concealing something. “I’ve never heard of her,” she replied, turning away.
“Yes, well,” I found myself saying. I headed for the door, unsure what to say or what had been said.
“You’ll want that package on the counter,” she said, without turning around. I hadn’t noticed the package before, but there it was, wrapped up as neatly as all the others she’d given me, as neatly as Lucy wrapped her own manuscript. It was the package that had been returned in the mail. It felt like another scrapbook.
“Should I open it here?” I asked.
“If you like,” she answered, flatly.
I ripped at the paper eagerly, revealing what I expected, a leather scrapbook. The pages were filled with postcards from around the world. Beneath them, in a childish scrawl, were the names of the places they had been sent from.
“To complete your collection,” she said. “In case anything happens to me.”
They were all from Lucy to young Beatrice during the 1930s. I was surprised, because Lucy’s journals never mentioned travel. Yet she had apparently traveled around the world and back several times between 1930 and 1940.
“She traveled to forget,” Bea said.
“And she couldn’t?” I offered. Ten years of travel seemed to suggest that.
“I don’t know,” Bea replied. “She never came back. She disappeared. The postcards stopped, and she never came back.” Her voice cracked in the first true show of emotion I had heard from her.
“Are you sure you want to give them up?” I asked, suddenly saddened.
“They belong with the rest,” she said, still facing the bookshelves.
I’d never felt anything for Bea before, no sympathy, no kindness. Yet, in that moment, I realized what a sad woman she was, how much she had loved and needed her aunt. I walked up behind her and put a hand gently on her shoulder, feeling it tremble slightly.
“Thank you, Bea,” I said, and the magic of the store seemed to melt away in that one minute of contact. She was, after all, just a person. She glanced back at me, lifted a hand to mine on her shoulder, and patted it.
“You know, I never married, just like Aunt Lucy,” she said softly, and somehow it didn’t surprise me. It was the most touching coming out I had ever witnessed.
“Y
es, I know that,” I replied, and we stood there like that for a moment before a customer entered the store. We both cleared our throats awkwardly.
“Could we have lunch next week?” I asked, and she said simply, “Yes, well, that would be nice.”
We began to have lunch then once a week after that.
33
The postcard collection added a new dimension to the whole project. This would be a novel about love and loss and remembrance. Lucy would head off into the sunset after Harriet’s death and never return. Lesbians would eat it up. I’m not the only one, after all, with fantasies about true and perfect love.
I knocked on Fleck’s door when I got home, ostensibly to show her the scrapbook, but more just to kill the rest of the afternoon. It was too late in the day to write, and wasn’t it tea time at Fleck’s? I still felt hungry from all the running around I had done and the light lunch Bea had offered. Fleck, I knew, always had some nice cookies and cakes.
But she still wasn’t around. I found out later she had started consulting to Elinor’s foundation, when she found out she didn’t have to wear a suit to do it.
I mounted the steps to my apartment slowly, last thoughts of other stalling techniques shooting through my head. Go to the supermarket? Make dinner? Spend a few hours learning to prepare a chocolate mousse? Find other housewifely things to do?
Instead I sat down in the living room and leafed through the postcards. London. Copenhagen. Paris. Istanbul. Where had she gotten the money? The cards were spaced months, sometimes years apart. Maybe she worked her way around the world. It was hard to imagine how else she could have managed it on a teacher’s salary.
The messages seemed to confirm that guess. From Paris: “I start a new tutoring position on Monday. A rich American businessman’s son, who seems to speak no French. If these people are to be found in Paris, it seems as if I will find them.”
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