The Last Laugh
Page 17
“They’ve taken Dania,” I said.
“Who? Where?”
“Two policemen. We don’t know where.”
“Want me to phone O’Donohue?”
“Yes! Now!”
“Now? I’ll do it tomorrow. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
But Gladdy pushed her cart into his path. “Mr. Finn,” she said, “you phone your friend now.”
“Ma,” said Agnes, “what’s going on?”
“Forget it,” said Finn. “It’s Sunday. He won’t answer.”
There was no point in arguing with him, that much I knew. And maybe, after all, Dania would talk her way out of a night in the police station. “Amn’t I great?” she’d say. “They just took me under their wings.”
Yael ran up, breathless. “Sorry I’m late!” she said. “Traffic! Where’s my mother?”
* * *
Gripp Redux #2
There are advantages in returning from the dead, Gripp thought. For one thing, no one expects you back. Still, he took the precaution of buying a straw hat and a pair of large sunglasses at a tourist shop. He also grew a neat Greek mustache.
And then, coming out of one of the Byzantine alleys at the port, he almost ran into O’Donohue. The man was red-eyed, unkempt, unshaven. He’s had a hard time of it, Gripp thought, searching those cliffs for my body.
He watched him shuffle past. Then he spun around and came up behind him, pressing the nose of the revolver into the small of his back. “Keep moving, O’Donohue,” he said. “Hands away from your pockets.”
A man like O’Donohue, thought Gripp, knows when his life is over.
EPILOGUE
HESTER MADE A THIRD MARRIAGE, this time to a childless widower much older than herself. She found him online, and hopes, I think, to inherit a comfortable life from him. They live—not very happily, says Lily—in Florida. I see her once or twice a year.
Lily, on the other hand, I see all the time. She is a doctor now. As soon as she finished her internship, she joined Doctors Without Borders, went off to Africa, and barely survived a severe case of cerebral meningitis. She lives with Sevan, an Armenian pediatrician, who is her lover. (Finn objects to the word “lover,” of course, but that is what Sevan is, and I like him despite his unregenerate love of puns.) Lily herself has become the delight and comfort of my old age. Almost everything about her surprises me with happiness, including the informal competition she’s now running among pediatricians for titles of children’s books that will never be published. So far, she’s awarded third prize to “You Were an Accident,” second to “Daddy Drinks Because You Cry,” and first to “You Are Different and That’s Not Okay.” She is still devoted to horses, and her kitchen is plastered with the ribbons she’s won.
A year after we returned, Dania moved to Wisconsin because Yael had joined a practice there. And Noam soon followed with his family. Wisconsin, she reports, is the most wonderful place in the world, apart from Israel, and why don’t I consider coming there myself? She herself never seems to consider that I have people in my own life—Lily, Finn, others—or that I might like being where I am.
As it happened, she did manage to talk herself out of a night in the police station our first day back. And despite the fact that she could not be forced by law to hand over her professional notes on Wendy, she did so voluntarily. In light of these, the recording Wendy made of their phone conversation was deemed inadmissible, and Wendy’s death an accident. We were all called to give evidence, including Gladdy, and to this day I have Wendy on my conscience. The only punishment Dania received was a reprimand from the psychotherapy board for accepting gifts from a patient. She never returned to live in California, although she does visit every summer. “Ruthi,” she says, “amn’t I great? I have the best of all worlds!”
And, of course, I agree.
I never wrote another column for So Long, claiming Gripp as an excuse. But I did suggest Bess for the purpose, never thinking she’d agree. As it turned out, I was quite wrong. And then, after one or two “à Go Go’s,” she was offered an agony column by the local paper. And now “Ask Bess” is syndicated throughout the country. Clearly she has found what she wants, whether or not she has the word for it. Her specialty is fat women. And it’s been getting raving reviews, as Dania would say, ever since.
Despite objections from the wellness industry, Bess now flies all over the country, rallying fat women everywhere. She’s even started her own line of overpriced tents. “Not overpriced at all!” she says. “Have you seen the fabric? The cut? The seams?”
So I’ve stopped teasing her. In fact, I’ve come to adore her. We see each other several times a week when she’s in town, and even when Finn joins us it’s as if he’s never been more to her than what he is now—an old darling who made the grand gesture of traveling halfway around the world to surprise me with his presence.
As for Wilfred, Bess sent him back his debit card—which, she reports, he didn’t like at all. Bullies never like losing their hold over you, she says, especially if you’re their mother. The fact is, she’s now making her own little fortune, what with the column, the talks, the tents, and the book she’s written. It’s been sitting comfortably on the bestseller list for twenty-six weeks, much longer than my Gripp Redux, and shows no signs of dropping off. It’s the title that’s selling it, she says: How to Make a Good Man a Better Lover; or, Unlocking the Secrets of the Universe for Fun & Profit.
Meanwhile, she’s spending as freely as ever. But not on Rex. He lasted about three months with Irina before taking off for the Bahamas again. No doubt, says Bess, he’s hoping to find himself a widow there, or on one of the cruise ships that hire him to dance with their widows. That’s where she found him again, on a ship she was taking through the Panama Canal with a group of her fat ladies. They had about ten days together, and that was quite enough, she said. Sayonara, Rex.
Gladdy still lives with her, of course. Quite soon she found a new church and a new set of friends. But when they started asking her to give a talk about herself—the world she’d left behind and why she’d left it—she turned them down flat. “Troublemakers,” she said. “They want to stir things up.”
When Bess suggested a catering business for Gladdy and bought a little bakery around the corner, that was the start of Gladdy’s new life. After some months, when the bakery began to catch on, Gladdy took on a helper, and then another. And every day now there are lines of people outside Gladness Bakery. Most popular is my grandmother’s honey loaf, and also her Victoria sponge cupcakes with vanilla icing. Recently the morning paper ran a two-page spread on Gladdy during Black History month. “But they make a big mistake!” Gladdy complained. “I am not American. And those others they are not African. That is the difference between us.”
“She’s damn right there,” says Finn, slapping his thigh. He’s come to love Gladdy almost as much as she’s allowed herself to be fond of him. Often I hear her high-pitched trill of laughter when he’s with her. But if I ask him what brought it on, he just says, “That’s between Gladdy and me.”
One day she said, “I am hope, Miss Ruthi, that you marry Mr. Finn.”
And in the end that is exactly what I did. It hasn’t made much difference. For what is such a marriage if not a gesture in itself? A sort of flourish in the face of the gods between two people who, despite themselves, have found each other again before their lives have had a chance to run their natural course?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOR THE GIFT OF TIME, peace, and a beautiful place in which to write, I thank the Bogliasco Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Spíti tis Logotexnias in Greece. Sarah Crichton’s enthusiasm, humor, and brilliant counsel have kept me going. And to a lunch with Jennifer Rudolph Walsh—whirlwind of intelligence and energy—I owe this book. Thank you!
ALSO BY LYNN FREED
Friends of the Family
Home Ground
The Bungalow
The Mirror
&n
bsp; House of Women
The Curse of the Appropriate Man
Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home: Life on the Page
The Servants’ Quarters
The Romance of Elsewhere
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lynn Freed is the author of seven novels, a collection of short stories, and two collections of essays. Her honors include the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award in Fiction from the Academy of Arts and Letters, two PEN/O. Henry awards, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. Born in South Africa, she now lives in Northern California. You can sign up for email updates here.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Dramatis Personae
The Last Laugh
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Also by Lynn Freed
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Sarah Crichton Books
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2017 by Lynn Freed
All rights reserved
First edition, 2017
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Freed, Lynn, author.
Title: The last laugh: a novel / Lynn Freed.
Description: First edition. | New York: Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016052196 | ISBN 9780374286651 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780374713676 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Female friendship—Fiction. | Older women—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Family Life.
Classification: LCC PR9369.3.F68 L37 2017 | DDC 823/.914—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016052196
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