“I guess I’m just stuffing and wind,” he said, and waited for her to deny it.
“All of us are some of that.”
His eyes struggled to get into hers. “You love, me, don’t you?”
“Yes, Daisy, I do.”
The smell of lilac swelled around him and held him in place. “When they put me under the sod you’ll miss me, won’t you?”
“I already miss you,” she said.
• • •
Barney Cole took Louise Baker’s call in his office, and they met at a roadside restaurant on the outskirts. She arrived in her shiny Porsche and stood by it with her black hair blown back, her chino skirt stretched tight across her hips. He pulled up in his repaired Cutlass, which was giving him trouble again, this time the electrical system. He climbed out of the car slowly as if not to disturb its delicate condition. He had on a dark suit, one of his better ones. She looked at his tailored legs and said, “You take good care of yourself, don’t you, Barney?
They kissed.
“Not as well as you do,” he said. “You’re more beautiful than I remember.”
“You’re sweet to say that.”
“It happens to be the truth.”
In the lounge of the restaurant they sat at a small table with a bowl of nuts between them, an exotic mix that put salt on their fingers. A dozen or more customers sat at the circular bar, a few more at other tables. The decor was dark oak, with mammoth beams running across the ceiling. “Nice place,” Louise said, her eyes roving. “New?”
“Relatively.”
“Scampy would’ve had a piece of it.”
Scampy, whom she had lived with for many years, had been a local loanshark, speculator, and string-puller, his influence having penetrated the police department, the district attorney’s office, and city hall. Louise had been his straw in business ventures and his eyes and ears when he took sick. When he died his wealth went to her, including the money he had out on the street and in cash boxes stashed in his cellar, a considerable return well worth her years with him.
Over brandy she said, “Some people thought I put him in the grave. Did you?”
“No.”
“You don’t like me talking about him, do you?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Funny thing, Barney, I loved him, but I took his death in stride, buried him without a tear. I guess that’s why people talked. My father I never loved, but his death has hit me hard. How the hell do you explain that?”
“Parents are the thread to your childhood. Nobody wants it broken.”
“I think you’re wrong, Barney. I hated my childhood.” Her face seemed as much like ice as flesh could get, a small smile preserved in the permafrost. “You and I came from the same neighborhood, but your father could pay the rent. It’s all right to be poor, but not willfully.”
“You’re still grieving for him.”
“No, I don’t think so. Maybe what I feel the most is a sense of waste. Not for him, for my mother. He never once went out of his way to make her happy.”
Cole twisted the stem of his brandy glass. “How’s your mother taking it?”
“My mother keeps everything inside. It’s my sister who’s carrying on. That’s why I had to get away for a while.” She touched his hand and then squeezed it as if to extract strength. “Thanks for coming.”
From the bar two men in business suits were shooting glances at her. He said, “You still draw attention.”
“I see only you,” she said, her dark eyes suddenly intent upon him.
“What are you doing?”
“Counting the lines in your face. Not too many. You’ve still got your college-boy look. You’re a constant, Barney, thank God.”
The bartender blew his nose, the noise like the note sounded by a hunting horn. The lighting inside the bar was a spray of tinsel. Cole said, “I was hoping to meet your husband.”
“Ben has a health problem. I didn’t want him making the trip.”
“Yes, you mentioned once he has a delicate constitution.”
“Blue bloods usually do.”
“You’re not ashamed of us, are you, Lou?”
“Not of you, Barney. You’ve always had class.”
“You never did tell me how you met him.”
“Didn’t I? You sure?” She sighed. “It was a couple of winters after Scampy died. I booked a flight to Florida. I had Miami in mind but at the last moment chose West Palm Beach. I wanted elegance. Ben was down there with his housekeeper, who was acting as his nurse.” Her voice, slurring, became sweet and mellow, sugar steeped in brandy. “He needed someone like me, and I wanted someone like him. The rest is history.”
Cole smiled, feeling the wind of her words. “No regrets?” he asked.
“None,” she answered. “I love him in a way totally reserved for a husband. What I mean is I’d never want to hurt him. I’d go to extremes to prevent it.”
“Sounds serious.”
“It is. I have exactly what I want in Mallard Junction and intend to keep it. You’ve never been there, have you, Barney? Beautiful place. And I have the oldest name in it. Ben’s people founded the town, I forget the date. His name’s on the library. Baker Memorial. It’s on the town hall. It’s in the park. You read the names on the old war memorials, you see a bunch of Bakers.”
“You sound smug.”
“I have the right. People with pedigrees kiss my ass because of his name and my money. You need both out there, and I’ve got ‘em.”
A man wearing a silver jacket and a glossy hairpiece that deceived nobody seated himself at the piano in the corner and began rippling out a vintage tune. Cole said, “But you get lonely.”
“All of us have loneliness, doesn’t matter where we are. It’s a cold spot deep inside us. That’s how my mother used to put it.” Her face drew closer to the bone, and her voice acquired a husk. “Remember when your wife died? You couldn’t stop shivering. You needed a warm arm. Remember when Scampy kicked off? I called you in the middle of the night. I needed a warm arm.”
A shadow tumbled over the table.
“It’s what you do in the face of death,” she went on. “You reaffirm life by making love. That’s what we did.”
The waitress, her face glowing from an extravagance of makeup, whispered, “That’s beautiful.”
“I even wanted to get pregnant,” Louise said, her hand again slipping over his. “But it didn’t happen.”
“A gentleman at the bar would like to buy you both a drink,” the waitress said.
“Tell him to go screw himself,” Louise replied without lifting her eyes.
The waitress smiled faintly. “I’ll put it to him in a slightly different way if that’s OK.”
“Long as he gets the message.”
The piano player was doing his best with another old tune, missing a note now and then. Cole said, “What have you got in mind, Lou?”
She looked at her watch, the face circled by diamonds, an old gift from Scampy. “Nothing, no time. I have to get back to my mother.” Her eyes charged into his. “Anybody looking?”
“Somebody, I’m sure,” he said as she leaned into his voice.
“Barney, kiss me the way you would in bed.”
• • •
Emma Goss sat in an upholstered chair in the den with her eyes closed. Another night and much of a new day had passed. She heard Henry Witlo bumping about in the kitchen, but her mind refused to provide credence to his presence. Nothing about him tallied with reality, and she was not the woman sitting here in a robe but an unclean stranger she did not wish to know. The real Emma Goss, she was quite certain, was ensconced somewhere else, somewhere perfectly safe.
A few minutes later the doorbell rang.
His voice boomed in on her. “You sit right there, Mrs. Goss. I’ll get it.”
“I shall wake soon,” she said to herself. “I shall be back from wherever I am.”
Some vibration alerted her, and her eyelids flickered open
. He was in the room, looming large but remaining unreal. He was yellow hair, blue eyes, an obtruding voice — nothing else.
“That was the paperboy,” he said. “Collecting. I paid him out of my own pocket. Gave him a fifty-cent tip. Hope that won’t spoil him.” The blue eyes dwelt upon her. “I told him I was your nephew. We don’t want the neighborhood thinking nothing dirty, telling jokes about lonely widows. You know how people talk.”
Her face burned. She tasted sickness on her tongue and swallowed in an effort to eject it.
“If I’m your nephew, I should call you Auntie. Auntie. I like that, Mrs. Goss. How about you?”
“No.” She answered the voice, not the man, who was now only a flash of hands.
“It’s up to you,” he said agreeably. He dipped down on one knee and placed his smile at her eye level. “But it’s something you should think about.”
Her robe was loose, but it did not matter. She felt she was safely elsewhere and functioning quite normally in a context of everyday banalities, the tutelary spirit of her husband watching over her.
“The thing is I worry about you,” he said. “I’ve been doing all the cooking, which I don’t mind, but you don’t eat anything. That’s not good for you.”
Her stomach had tolerated a little toast, later some overly sweet coffee, that was all.
“You hear me, Mrs. Goss?”
Her mind stretched back to when her life was as fresh as roses, when a toy tea set and a cuddlesome doll were her prized possessions, when the shameless boy up the street made water behind a tree and her mother forbade her from ever talking to him again. Unlike other parents deprived of authority when their offspring reached adolescence, hers had retained their stature well beyond, and seldom, she recollected with pride, had she given them cause for displeasure.
“At least look at me, Mrs. Goss. That’s only polite.”
She gazed wistfully, not at him, but at the boy she had forever after shunned, whose obituary she had clipped from the paper only a few weeks ago, a life shriveled into a few dry paragraphs.
“That’s better,” he said in a pleased voice, and her head reared back as though a strong light had been thrust in her face. His hand swooped down where the broad line of her body broke through the robe. “Learn to relax, Mrs. Goss. People that don’t, they get ulcers. Other things too. Their hair won’t comb right. Their skin gets bad.”
She palpitated. Her eyes blinked like those of a baby who had not yet learned to use them. Then his hand moved from here to there.
“You’re lucky, a woman your age, you got nice skin.”
Her face flamed. She felt hot down to her toes and wondered why her knee was not scalding his hand.
“And you got nice legs — just a little heavy.”
She placed her hands on her head as if it had been hastily set on her shoulders and needed to be moved a little to the left or perhaps to the right. She seemed uncertain.
“That’s kind of nasty,” he observed, his fingers breezing over a small blueberry patch of burst capillaries. “But who’s going to see it, huh?”
Her hands shot forward. Suddenly she needed help and tried to ask for it, but her tongue thickened over the words. Then it was too late. Her stomach turned and convulsed.
“Jesus!” he said, leaping to his feet.
Her eyes reeled in shame.
“It’s all right,” he said from his height. “I’ll clean it up.”
• • •
In the cloying floral smell of the funeral parlor, Louise Leone Baker stared down at her father’s lifeless face, all the stress of the years rubbed out of it by the undertaker’s ameliorating art, the inert mouth sealed forever. The hair on his head, darker than it had been in life, looked like stray bristles from a brush. The suit was from Kap’s, her purchase, a pin from the Sons of Italy attached to a lapel. She whispered, “It’s too hard to hate you, Dad, so I’m not going to try.” Then she stepped back into a chorale of somber voices, a maze of distant family members whom earlier she had not immediately recognized.
A woman’s voice said, “They did a wonderful job on him.”
“Yes, they did,” she answered automatically.
“Your mother’s taking it well.”
“My mother has always taken it well.”
Another voice said, “People are starting to come.”
The crowd grew into one of the largest at the funeral home in years, an endless line of arrivals bottling up in the foyer. Louise, tall and emotionless, stood beyond the overly ornate casket with her stiff-faced mother and sobbing sister and received a constant bobbing of faces. She was the draw, not the deceased. Lawyers redolent of after-shave offered condolences, and known liars and cheats from city hall took turns squeezing her hand too vigorously. “So nice of you to come,” she said to each, pain creeping into her wrist. Old friends of Scampy’s, short Italian men in alligator shoes, rose on their toes and planted arid kisses on her cheek. Cronies of her father’s, men without neckties, gathered in front of her with filled eyes.
“Wonderful wake,” said one. “Does honor to him.”
“He’s at peace,” said another.
“Is that what you call it?” she said mostly to herself, tossing a concerned look at her mother, but her mother was doing fine and her sister was reveling through tears in the presence of so many mourners.
“Hello, Louise.”
The avuncular voice warming her heart belonged to Arnold Ackerman, whom Scampy had called the only gentleman bookie in Lawrence, also the shrewdest, always knew when to lay off a bet. He viewed her with a concentrated eye.
“You’re so beautiful.”
“I know I’m beautiful,” she said. “I’ve been beautiful all my life. I’m the Sophia Loren of Lawrence.”
“You’re more than that,” he whispered out of his rubbery face. “You’re bigger than Scampy ever was. He’d be jealous.”
“No, Arnold. He’d be proud.”
A downtown businessman she had once bailed out of trouble ventured a hand onto her shoulder and lingered too long until gently and subtly she prodded him on, a maneuver she repeated with a county commissioner whose debts to Scampy he had paid off with favors. A grizzled priest she had presumed long dead frowned at her with undeflectable Sicilian eyes and said in a gravel voice, “I understand you’ve strayed.”
“I’m Episcopalian now, Father.”
“I see. Are you also English, no more Italian?”
“Touché,” she said, taking his arm and drawing close to his ear. “I remember the times you patted me on the bottom.”
“I’m only flesh and blood.”
“Yes, Father. So am I.”
He started to pull away and then abruptly returned close to her. “Your father was not a bad man, you know, just a little one. Not everybody can be big.”
“But we can try, Father.”
“You’ve bought your position in life.”
“It’s what money can do,” she said. “Bless me, Father, for I have prospered.”
When the Sheas came upon her, she inwardly flinched at the sight of Daisy’s florid face and neck of loose-fitting skin. Embracing him, she felt the breath come out of him. She smelled no liquor, only the wintery scent of a hard peppermint clicking against his teeth. He tried to say something but had no words, and she had none either. Then she hugged Edith and felt bones. Edith said, “I hope you’ll be staying long enough for us to get together.”
“I’ll try,” she said noncommittally.
“Have you seen Barney yet?”
“Yes.”
Edith smiled with schoolgirlish insinuation. “I figured.”
“You figured wrong, but that’s OK.”
Daisy found a voice. “I’m dying, Lou.”
Edith said, “Let her handle this one first, all right, Daisy?”
“Is he?” Louise asked in a whisper.
“I don’t think about it.”
“As long as you care.”
“I care.”
/>
Several elderly women from the old neighborhood converged upon her. They all looked like the embodiment of hymns. They were followed by members of the Sons of Italy. Voices boxed her in, and in time faces began to look alike. Then she saw one that did not. She saw first Chick Ryan’s charging head of hair clumped with gray and then his full uniform of brass and braid. When he smiled at her, the lines in his face cut deep. His teeth became bigger.
“You haven’t changed,” he said as if he had expected deterioration and was mildly disappointed.
“I see you’re a captain now,” she said. “Congratulations.”
He had a way of throwing his eyes out like darts. They shot into her. “This time I got the promotion by myself.”
“That’s why I’m congratulating you.”
“But I don’t forget,” he said. “Anytime you want to call in the marker, I’m ready.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it, Chick.”
“I’m not. I’m just telling you. Sorry about your father.”
She glanced over at her mother’s face but could not read it, everything held in tight. She looked at her sister, who, though younger, looked older because of extra weight from a sweet tooth. Her eyes raked the crowd for Barney Cole’s face and finally glimpsed it near the entrance. He was a late arrival. Then the priest who in her mind had risen from the dead placed his hand on her elbow, which she started to shake off as if the fingers were ghostly.
“Your mother’s asked me to say the rosary. That won’t offend you, will it?”
“I’d be pleased,” she said.
The priest took a place near the casket, and the room went quiet. His voice was a narcotic drone and evoked memories of her childhood and then a clear image of her father in an undershirt, his scrawny elbows on the table, pasta on his plate and sauce on his chin. It was no longer a provocative image, merely a durable one. Her sister tilted sideways and whispered, “I didn’t know Dad had so many friends.” Some minutes later, the ritual of the rosary over, she stepped to her mother’s side and murmured that she would be right back.
“Don’t be long,” her mother said.
She needled through the shifting crowd, accepting quick condolences and compliments, and hooked on to Barney Cole with a firmness that surprised him. “I need to breathe,” she said, and bumped against him so that he would cut a path through the foyer, where more flowers had been placed, an overflow. An employee of the funeral home, his eyes the sort that swelled when he spoke, murmured a pleasantry and opened the front door for them. The evening air, touched with the smell of the city, rolled in on them. Outside on the small colonnaded porch, she said, “I had to get away from that casket. My sister picked it out with my money. Such elaborate packaging for a corpse.”
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