Plum & Jaggers (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Susan Richards Shreve

  The obituary in the Monday-morning Grand Rapids Express had the lead:

  NICOLE LUCAS, GRANDMOTHER TO PLUM & JAGGERS DIES AT 87

  On Tuesday afternoon, the church pews were full, people crowded in the back, standing on the lawn in the damp, gray March weather, the collars of their coats up.

  “People know us,” Julia whispered to her grandfather. “As if we’ve existed in Grand Rapids all along.”

  “Of course people know us,” William said. “This is our home.”

  Few of the people who came had actually known William and Noli. Their friends were very old or dead. Friends of Lucy’s came and cousins several times removed, or friends of friends, but the majority of the crowd inside the church were young, the McWilliamses’ age, people who had known them in grammar school or known them before they moved to Washington. This crowd had come to Noli’s funeral because the McWilliamses were on television.

  “Plum & Jaggers brought them here, don’t you think?” Charlotte asked Sam.

  “And my criminal record in Grand Rapids,” Sam said.

  After the service, the McWilliamses stood with their grandfather at the entrance to First Methodist, greeting people who formed a long line to speak to them. In the corner across from the door where they were standing, Sam noticed a young man with a boyish face, pale, thinning yellow hair, a look of illness about him, blowing the smoke from his cigarette out the side door of the church. He didn’t come over to the line of people shaking hands with the McWilliamses and their grandfather, but neither did he show any interest in leaving.

  “Who’s that?” Julia asked. “He keeps watching Sam.”

  “I don’t know,” Oliver said. “He’s a stranger to me.”

  Sam watched the man for a moment. There was something out of the ordinary about the way he carried himself, the way he held his head at an exaggerated angle, the way he looked at Sam, unembarrassed to be staring.

  “My guess is Matthew Gray,” Sam said.

  “That’s a familiar name,” Charlotte said.

  “Do you remember him?” Sam asked Oliver, breaking out of the receiving line.

  “I don’t,” Oliver said.

  “He’s the reason we left Grand Rapids.”

  Sam crossed the room and put out his hand.

  “I’m Sam McWilliams,” he said.

  “Oh yes, yes, yes,” the young man said. “I’m Matthew Gray. Matthew Laster Gray.”

  “I thought that’s who you were,” Sam said.

  “I shouldn’t be here,” Matthew stumbled. “I didn’t even know your grandmother.”

  “We’re glad you’ve come,” Sam said.

  “I see you on television.” Matthew had watery blue eyes more in the shape of a rectangle than an oval, absent of expression. He seemed not to know what to do with his hands, and so they hung at his sides, and he shook them as if they’d gone to sleep.

  “Do you know who I really am?” Matthew asked.

  “I do know who you are,” Sam said gently.

  “Yes, yes. Well, some people said you left town because of me,” Matthew said. “I don’t think so, but that’s what my mother said.”

  “Your mother is right,” Sam said. “That is why we left Grand Rapids.”

  “Too bad, too bad,” Matthew said.

  “It is too bad, because I wasn’t the one who hurt you,” Sam said, surprised at the control in his voice when he felt on the edge of internal catastrophe. “It was a Tuesday and I was at recess playing with some friends—I don’t remember who—but I do know that everyone had recess at the same time and you were in my brother Oliver’s class.”

  “Yes, Oliver. He threw up on the art table. We were doing our pumpkins.”

  “Oliver never mentioned that, or else I’ve forgotten,” Sam said. “But on the day that you were hurt, I was on the blacktop, where I usually played. I never went behind the athletic field, where the shed is, because I was afraid to be too far from the building where my brother and sisters were.”

  “I was afraid, too,” Matthew said. “I was afraid of Ranier Moore.” He lit another cigarette. “Ranier Moore hurt me behind the shed.”

  “No one told me who hurt you,” Sam said. “I only know that I didn’t.”

  “It was Ranier. Ranier Charles Moore. He hated you. Hated you,” Matthew said. “That’s what my mother told me after my brain got better and I suddenly remembered it was Ranier, not you. Or I think I remembered,” he said, offering Sam a drag of his cigarette, which Sam took, although he didn’t like to smoke. “I got hit in the head, you see.”

  Sam noticed that people were stopping in the church hall with their cups of strawberry punch and sugar cookies, pretending to have a conversation but actually watching Sam and Matthew Gray.

  “Has Ranier come to the funeral?” Sam asked.

  “Ranier isn’t here. He’s someplace else, but very smart. Brilliant, my mother says. He went to college and had a good job and then went crazy and had to go to a hospital for a long time. My mother says he’s a sex maniac.” Matthew shook his head. “She says he’s the only sex maniac that has ever lived in Grand Rapids.”

  Sam took Matthew by the arm and stepped just outside the church door, aware that the young man was warming to him, pleased with Sam’s attention.

  “Do people in Grand Rapids know that it was Ranier, or do they still think it was me?”

  “My mother knows. She said not to tell anybody. Ranier would kill me dead as a doornail.”

  Sam waited while Matthew finished his cigarette.

  “After you moved, people in Grand Rapids forgot all about you, and then you got on television sitting at the dining-room table on the TV screen and people remembered how your parents were dead and that’s why you beat me up.” Matthew laughed, putting up his hand to cover his mouth as if he were coughing instead. “Only you didn’t do it, after all.” He put out his cigarette, came back into the building, and shut the door. “But people don’t know that, so when your grandmother died, everybody wanted to come to the funeral to look at you, in the flesh. That’s what my mother said. In the flesh.”

  “So it seems,” Sam said.

  “I go to funerals in Grand Rapids all the time,” Matthew said. “Everybody’s funeral, and this is the biggest one I’ve seen, the very biggest of all.”

  The crowd was thinning, and Sam moved back to where his family was standing, taking a place next to his grandfather.

  “At least two hundred people are here,” William said to Sam. “Isn’t it remarkable how kind people can be.”

  “It certainly is,” Sam said.

  “I wonder why we ever left Grand Rapids,” Williams said. “We were very happy here.”

  “We were,” Sam said kindly, taking his grandfather’s hand, leading him out of the church.

  Later, after dinner, Sam walked the streets of his old neighborhood alone. The evening was damp and cold and empty, with a wet snow beginning to fall. Occasionally Sam saw a person walking his dog or hurrying home late from work, but mostly he had the sparsely lit streets to himself.

  East Grand Rapids was an older section of town, with some enormous houses where the furniture barons had lived, and less pretentious brick or clapboard houses for the workers, with aluminum siding, built close together, with small yards, in walking distance from the business district and schools. The house where Lucy Lucas grew up, to which the McWilliams children moved when their parents were killed, was a brick colonial painted yellow, with a front porch and a swing and a small front yard, where Noli had had a cutting garden.

  Sam laced through the streets where he had once walked or ridden his bike. Gradually, as the night darkened, the stars concealed in the heavens, snow accumulating, the neighborhood came back to him as a place he knew in his bones, the smell of winter, the rising streets over the Grand River, the way the houses were built in
close proximity. He circled back to the Lucas house again and again in order to get his bearings, a swing set in the yard now, the front door bright blue under the porch light, young children, three or four of them flying past the windows in pajamas. As he walked, he began to remember specifics. Matthew Gray’s house, two blocks south from his on Wicket Street, where he had gone with his grandfather to apologize for something he had not done. The house where Tommy Meeuwsen had lived was dark except for a light in the back. Sam had gone there for a birthday party just after his parents had died, and the Meeuwsens had had a pony in the backyard who bit his fingers when he gave it sugar, and he had called for Noli to pick him up before the birthday cake. Next door was the piano teacher’s house, where he used to sit in the hall while Charlotte had her lesson, looking through what was then a very small collection of terrorist bombings, which he kept in a folder in his bookbag.

  Several times he tried to find Ranier Moore’s house, starting at the Lucases’ old house. He had gone to Ranier’s for a sleepover and for dinner once when Mrs. Moore made sweetbreads, soft and white as brains. “It’s the Clean Plate Club in the Moores’ house,” she had said. He and Ranier hadn’t been friends. Nevertheless, Ranier had pursued him, asking him to cookouts and sleepovers and birthday parties, which he refused to accept in spite of Noli’s insistence that he be polite.

  “I don’t want to go to Ranier’s,” Sam would say to Noli.

  “But you should,” Noli would reply. “Ranier likes you so much.”

  “I don’t think he does like me,” Sam said, sensing even before the incident with Matthew Gray that Ranier’s interest in him wasn’t based on friendship.

  He came upon the Moores’ house by surprise. He knew it was the Moores’ because of the six-foot chain-link fence around the small backyard where they had kept their dog, Bloomfield Hills. It was the only house with a wire fence, and the neighbors complained about the dog and the unattractive fence and the fact that when the Moores cooked out on the grill, they had to do it in the front yard and eat on the front porch because Bloomfield Hills was behind the fence in the back and wasn’t fond of people.

  This evening the Moores’ house was brightly lit, crowded with furniture, and in the dining room Sam could see a young, blond, frizzy-haired girl working at a table. On the wall behind her, quite visible from the street because of the size of it and the light over it, was a cloudy reproduction of The Last Supper.

  The drugstore was closed, but Sam could see Matthew Gray at the back unpacking boxes in the hair-products aisle. He knocked on the glass, and Matthew looked up, smiling when he saw who it was.

  “Sam McWilliams,” he said happily, unlocking the door. “We’re closed, you know. Closed to the public.”

  “I know,” Sam said. “I came by hoping to catch you.”

  Matthew smiled broadly. “So here I am, right here in my place of employment, where I work,” he said.

  “I don’t want to keep you,” Sam said.

  “No problem.” Matthew took a Coke out of the cooler and handed it to Sam. “On me,” he said. “The Coke is on me. A gift.”

  “I’ve been walking around my old neighborhood.”

  “I live on Wicket Street,” Matthew said.

  “I remember. I saw your house.”

  “In the same room where I have always been, only my mother got me a plaid comforter and matching curtains for my birthday. Red and green.”

  “Well, I just walked by Ranier’s house,” Sam began.

  “Bloomfield Hills was killed by a Good Humor truck in front of the house. I was on my bike and saw it happen.” Matthew shook his head. “I wasn’t sorry. A dog is like his master, is what my mother says.”

  “I remember Bloomfield Hills and I know what you mean,” Sam said. “Do the Moores still live there? When I walked by just now, a blond girl was in the dining room.”

  “That’s Veronica, who lives with them. She’s their niece.”

  “And you don’t know where Ranier lives now?”

  “Someplace,” Matthew said, suddenly brightening. “I remember now. Ranier came home for Christmas, and he was at church and I asked him had he seen Plum & Jaggers, and he said yes, and I said wasn’t that something, you on television after beating me up.”

  “So he isn’t crazy any longer?” Sam asked.

  “Oh yes, yes, very crazy, but he smokes cigarettes even in church,” Matthew said, excited by the conversation, slapping his hands together, a giggle bubbling in his throat.

  “I wonder if I’d recognize him,” Sam said.

  “No, no, no.” Matthew shook his head. “He’s very old.”

  “He’s my age.” Sam smiled. “He has always been my age.”

  “He’s older than you now,” Matthew said solemnly.

  Sam left Wednesday afternoon to get back to work and resettle his family in their old apartment on West Eleventh Street. William was confused, forgetting for the moment why Sam would be going to New York, even forgetting his house on Morrison Street in Washington and what had happened to bring his grandchildren to Grand Rapids.

  He wasn’t returning to Washington. He didn’t want to leave Noli in Grand Rapids by herself. That’s not the way he said it, but they knew it was what he meant.

  “This is home” was what he said.

  All he wanted from the house on Morrison Street was the great oak bed in which he used to sit regarding himself in the mirror over the dresser while Noli leaned against the pillow next to him.

  So the others stayed behind in Grand Rapids to settle their grandfather in an apartment.

  “I’ll call you every morning as always,” Sam said, kissing William on the top of the head. But hearing his own voice, he thought his remark came across as casual, even patronizing. Later on the plane he wondered about himself. Why this absence of sadness at Noli’s death? What he did feel, had felt since Oliver’s birthday, when his grandfather called to say that Noli had died during her afternoon nap, was more like the memory of sadness, a short story he had read, an aftertaste, but not sadness itself. The wires of the synapses clipped, a cold emotion, not death, but the absence of life. He felt nothing at all.

  On the plane, in the middle seat of three in coach, Sam suddenly saw himself behind the screen of his own life—the creation of Sam McWilliams on Plum & Jaggers—an actual representation, a cardboard replica, an empty vessel that the inventor of Sam McWilliams had made substantial for a television audience.

  The McWilliamses stayed five days, securing a first-floor apartment in a house on Wicket Street near Matthew Gray, two blocks from the house where they had lived. William was pleased. The house on Wicket Street was familiar to him, he said, wondering had he lived there when he was young or after he and Noli were married?

  “He loves the apartment,” Charlotte said to Sam on the telephone. “It has a garden out back.”

  “He never liked gardens,” Sam said.

  “Well, he likes them now. It’s what he wanted more than anything. He says he likes cutting gardens,” Charlotte said.

  “He’s changed, then, hasn’t he?” Sam asked.

  “Especially with us,” Charlotte said, motioning to Julia to ask her if she wanted to talk to Sam.

  Julia shook her head.

  “It’s odd not to have Sam here, isn’t it,” Julia said, looking out the window of her grandfather’s new apartment, at the bare trees accumulating light snow in a late-winter storm as they were packing to leave Grand Rapids. “Sort of like death.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  SOMEONE WAS following Julia. Not all the time, not even every day, but persistently. She’d walk out of the apartment and feel that someone was watching. The street could be empty. She’d look up and down the block, checking the windows of apartments, and hurry to the subway, to the market, to get a coffee on Sixth Avenue. She never saw anyone specific, not close enough to identify. Bu
t a person in a crowd would catch her attention, on a subway or across Fifth Avenue on her way to work or coming out of a crowded elevator. An attitude about him that struck her as personal. Every man with graying curly hair was immediately familiar. It was spring, too late for wool scarfs, but often she thought she saw the man from the bookstore who had touched her hair, and then he’d disappear.

  Once, in an elevator with Charlotte on her way to the dentist’s, she turned around to see a man about forty, with a beard, leaning against the back of the elevator, staring at her, and he didn’t turn away.

  “He probably recognized you,” Charlotte said, once they were in the dentist’s office.

  “I don’t think he was the sort to be watching comedy at 1 a.m. on Saturday nights,” she said.

  “You’re turning into an agoraphobe like Noli.”

  “Who wouldn’t?” Julia said. “I’m asking Sam if we can get a bodyguard.”

  Sam agreed. At the Actors’ Studio they found a large all-state wrestler from Massachusetts who had flunked out of college and come to New York City in the hope of developing a career as a character actor. His name was Baldridge, and he was a member of the thin-blooded residue of failed aristocracy, too little challenged to rise to occasions. They called him Heartbreak, and he loved the name, believing it reflected their affection for him.

  His job was Julia, although he often found himself responsible for all four of them, waiting in a coffee shop next door to 142 West Eleventh Street in the village, the brownstone to which they had returned the first week of April.

  “You can count on me absolutely,” Heartbreak said.

  But occasionally something attracted his attention, and like a hound dog he’d simply vanish on a new scent.

  One afternoon shortly after he’d been hired, Julia was trying on clothes for Marigold at a thrift shop when a friend of Heartbreak’s from college walked by the shop. Heartbreak forgot entirely what he was supposed to be doing outside the thrift shop door and went with the friend for a beer. When Julia came out with her bag of clothes, he was gone, catching up with her just as she was hailing a cab on Sixth Avenue.