chapter sixty-six
NELL GLANCED AT THE CLOCK on the bedside table—7:30—turned over, and pulled the blanket around her shoulders. Time to get ready for Mass. She still went, and wondered why.
But she was tired this morning. And she had a right to stay home. You didn’t turn eighty-five every day. Perhaps the two scotches last night were one too many . . . all your fault, John Flynn, for introducing me to scotch.
Around 11:00, she flicked back the soft sheet, freeing her feet. She’d come to appreciate old sheets, their caress tender to ancient, papery skin. She eased her legs, thin and crosshatched with fine lines, over the side of the bed and stood, gathering herself. You did that when you were old—gathered yourself.
Poking her feet into woolly slippers, she padded to the kitchen and set a pot of coffee to percolating. The apartment held a faint, elusive scent of ripe apricots.
She passed up lunch. There was a bit of cold roast beef, but she wasn’t hungry. Instead, she shuffled back to bed. How luxurious it was to lie abed when you were exhausted. Not to go to Mass. Not to clean house or cook a meal. Only lie abed and read Mr. Wodehouse and, off and on, drift to sleep. This was the reward for being eighty-five.
At eighty-five, she’d outlived her secrets, as Elvira had outlived her sins. Age freed one of much baggage.
Though Nell slept and woke and slept again, she was still drowsy when evening drew down, so she brushed her teeth and washed her face. Glancing in the mirror, she marveled. When she was young, she had looked into a mirror wondering what she could do to improve what she saw. Now she didn’t notice her face, even when she was staring straight at it. There wasn’t much you could do with an eighty-five-year-old face but own it.
Larry would be phoning soon. For the past couple of months he’d been calling each evening to check on her, though he said it was to gossip.
Later, she plumped the pillows, climbed into bed, and reached once more for Jeeves in the Offing. She would finish it tonight. For the umpteenth time. That was another thing about age. You could read the same book again and again with the same relish as the first time, because your slip-slidey mind so quickly forgot plots. No, that wasn’t quite true. You could read with ever-greater relish because you knew with certainty that the pages were lined with treasure—even if you couldn’t quite recall the nature of that treasure.
She withdrew her bookmark, its lettering nearly indecipherable from years of use: “Zephyr Playing Cards, Box 738, Hortense, Indiana. Wishing you luck in cards and in love.” Touching it to her lips before laying it on the bedside table, she began reading: “Lady Malvern was a hearty, happy, healthy, overpowering sort of dashed female, not so very tall but making up for it by measuring about six feet from the O.P. to the Prompt Side. She fitted into my biggest armchair as if it had been built round her by some one who knew they were wearing armchairs tight about the hips that season. . . .”
Nell giggled, read, dozed, and thought about her long affair with Mr. Wodehouse. She recalled the day in the Water and Power Company when she had discovered Love Among the Chickens.
“Wasn’t that fortuitous, Eudora?” As so often these days, she addressed her old friend. “What if I’d grabbed Mrs. Gaskell instead?”
Jeeves in the Offing lying across her breast, she fell into a deep sleep.
Around 3:00 a.m. John appeared beside the bed. Her darling man—he who had seen to it that she never ran out of Wodehouse. Now, he lay down next to her, closed the book, and slipped it onto the bed at her side. And now, he covered her body with his. And slowly, in the most irresistible way, the breath went out of her as she felt his weight, as so often before, rousing her and carrying her away.
epilogue
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 14, 1961
Leaning against the counter in Larry Lundeen’s kitchen, Lark said, “She never knew we’d planned a party.” Topping up her glass of white wine, she followed him into the living room, carrying the bottle.
Long legs draped over the arm of a club chair, Sally lit a cigarette from the lighter on the coffee table. “Who in hell could know?”
“Well, this was her party, as it turned out,” Beverly said. “This reception, Larry.”
“Everybody was here.”
“Except Neddy.” Larry pulled up a side chair. “Too bad he had a case in court.”
Sally scraped a bit of tobacco from her tongue. “Weird about the burial.”
Beverly sat next to Lark on the sofa. “Well, she wanted to be buried near Hilly. And he was in the Protestant cemetery. Whad’ya gonna do?”
“So . . . a Catholic funeral and a Protestant burial. I sorta like it,” Lark said. “Ecumenical. Isn’t that what we call it?”
“I take it there was enough money to bury her.” Sally glanced at the others. “Or did you take care of it?” she asked Larry.
“It wasn’t a problem.”
“Look, if you paid for it, we want to pitch in,” Sally said, “and I know Neddy will, too.” She flicked ashes into a heavy ashtray.
Setting his glass on the table and crossing his legs, Larry surveyed the three women. “I’m Nell’s executor.”
“And?”
“She left a tidy little estate.”
“Hey, Lar, we remember those vanilla wafers. We drank that weak tea. We know better,” Beverly told him.
“You couldn’t dunk the vanilla wafers,” Sally said. “They disintegrated, and you had a spoonful of glop in the bottom of your cup.”
“Even so,” Lark said.
“Yeah, even so,” Beverly echoed.
“Thrift was a habit she got into because of Hilly,” Larry told them. “She worried about what would happen when she was gone.”
“But where the hell would she get any money?” Sally asked, sitting up. “A retired third-grade teacher who didn’t even qualify for Social Security?”
Larry reached for a Sobranie from a silver box and lit it. “I’m talking out of turn here,” he said.
“So talk,” Lark told him. “We’re all a little pie eyed and probably won’t remember.”
“You’ll remember.” He uncrossed his legs, resting elbows on his knees. “She had an inheritance from John Flynn. Money and some stocks.”
“John Flynn.”
Beverly asked, “Wasn’t he governor?”
“Congress. Before your time. They were lovers, Nell and John.”
Breaking the stunned silence, Sally said, “I’ll be damned.”
“God, I’m glad to hear that,” Lark said.
The women demanded details, and Larry retailed as many as he possessed.
At length he said, “Apollo Shane handled all this.”
“I’ll be damned,” Sally repeated.
“Nell almost never touched the money,” Larry went on. “And the stocks meant nothing to her.”
“How unworldly can you get?” Sally snuffed out her cigarette and lit another.
“So where’s this all leading?” Beverly asked.
“Her will divides the estate between the three of you.”
“What the hell?” Sally coughed smoke.
“Who else would she leave it to?”
Lark was weeping. “Sweet Jesus.”
Beverly threw her head against the back of the sofa. “This is a damned dime novel.”
Larry laughed. “It is, isn’t it?” He rose. “I think I’ll have another Old Fashioned.” Returning, he told them, “There’s more.”
“I’m not sure I can take much more.” Lark topped off the wine glasses.
But Larry crossed to a bookcase, slipping four volumes from a shelf. “These.” He set three books on the coffee table, holding one back for himself. “Signed first editions.”
“I knew she was a Wodehouse nut,” Beverly said, “but signed first editions?”
“John Flynn tracked down three of them.”
Each of the women reached for a book. “And the fourth?” Lark asked.
Larry read them Nell’s letter from Wodehouse. Beverly let out
a low whistle. “Think of it. I wonder what she said in her letter to him.”
“This one she left to me,” he told them, passing around the book Wodehouse had signed to Nell.
Sally read, “‘To Nell, jewel among women, in whose debt shall always be found yours truly, P. G. (Plum to you) Wodehouse.’ Plum?”
“His nickname.”
Lark opened her Psmith in the City to the last page and read silently.
“What have you got?” Sally asked.
“Mike’s mind roamed into the future. . . .” Lark read. “The Problem of Life seemed to him to be solved. He looked on down the years, and he could see no troubles there of any kind whatsoever. Reason suggested that there were probably one or two knocking about somewhere, but this was no time to think of them.”
Beverly nodded. “Amen, Mike.”
Setting his drink down, Larry pulled a folded piece of paper and reading glasses from his breast pocket. “And finally.”
Using his tie, he wiped smudges from the glasses, then read,
To my girls: When Hilly left us, you three filled my life with joy and worry—oh yes, worry. I expect you had no idea how much sleep I lost over you or how grateful I was to lose it. My token is small payment. Let it buy a smile.
And, darling girls, talk to me sometimes, from across this permeable boundary, as I have talked to Hilly and John and my friends Eudora and Juliet. I’m here. I’ll listen.
Love,
Nell.
afterword
BEGINNING WITH The Cape Ann, I wrote a series of Harvester novels: The Empress of One, What a Woman Must Do, and Gardenias. In all but What a Woman Must Do, Mrs. Stillman, the protagonist of Goodnight, Mr. Wodehouse, played a crucial role in the lives of those around her, and yet I think she would describe herself as quite ordinary.
If there is indeed such a figure as Everyman, then Mrs. Stillman is Everywoman: Wife, Mother, Widow, Friend, Lover, Mystic, Teacher, Reader. I wish to emphasize Reader because, throughout her adult life, Nell Stillman falls back upon literature in order to survive the losses, humiliations, and mysteries to which we are all heir.
Since I have been for forty years an ardent fan of P. G. Wodehouse, and since I saw in his artful and noble nonsense an anodyne to pain, I thought it appropriate to combine the needs of Nell Stillman with the gifts of Wodehouse. In doing so, I hope to honor both.
It is rare that a writer of fiction finds the opportunity to celebrate an author much loved in her own life. It has been my privilege to do so—and at the same time to celebrate the power of literature to comfort, enlighten, entertain, transform, and, doggone it, make us a lot more fun to be around.
acknowledgments
THANK YOU, Daniel Slager, for your brilliant editing. Because of your suggestions, the manuscript gained new depth, focus, and meaning. Thank you Joey Jacqueline McGarvey, dear heart, for finding and correcting my ten thousand errors in spelling, punctuation, and fact. Thank you, Doug Stewart, for being a hand-holder extraordinaire as well as the best agent ever. And thank you, Madeleine Clark, who always comes up to the mark.
Thank you, Women Who Wine—Sandy Benitez, Judy Guest, Kate DiCamillo, Pat Francisco, Lorna Landvik, Alison McGhee, Wang Ping, Mary Rockcastle, and Julie Schumacher. Please note: I have listed you alphabetically, not by age. I know when I’m well off.
Thank you, Loft Book Group and We Old Ladies Who’ve Been Together Forever Book Group. You keep me reading the sorts of things that inspire me to be a better writer.
As always, thank you, Daniel Sullivan, my dearest advisor, best friend, and life partner. Thank you as well to Maggie, Ben, and Kate, the Sullivan children, genius writers all.
FAITH SULLIVAN was born and raised in southern Minnesota. Married to drama critic Dan Sullivan, she lived twenty-some years in New York and Los Angeles, returning to Minnesota often to keep her roots planted in the prairie. She is the author of seven previous novels, including The Cape Ann (Crown, 1988). Her most recent publications with Milkweed are What a Woman Must Do (2002) and Gardenias (2005). A “demon gardener, flea marketer, and feeder of birds,” Sullivan lives in Minneapolis with her husband. They have three grown children.
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