Love Among the Walnuts

by Jean Ferris

  "Are the patients getting any kind of treatment?" Sunnie asked.

  "Oh, no," Dr. Waldemar replied. "There's really not much we can do for them. Either they haven't responded to treatment, like Eddy and Boom-Boom, or they're too uncooperative to treat, like L. Barlow Van Dyke and Whitney Hamilton Atherton Moreland III, or they're perfectly satisfied the way they are, like Virgil and Lyle and Everett."

  "What about Graham?" Sunnie asked.

  "He won't even try. He just mopes and eats. So what we do is keep them comfortable and entertained. To tell you the truth, if any of them were to get better, they wouldn't have any place to go. Their families really don't want them back."

  Dr. Waldemar showed Sunnie and Sandy around the rest of Walnut Manor, and everywhere they looked, they saw Opal at work. As they walked through the grounds, she was up in a tree sawing off a broken limb. Then she applied mortar to some bricks that had fallen out of the wall separating Walnut Manor from Eclipse.

  Later, in the kitchen, they saw her chopping vegetables and tossing them into a large kettle on the stove. When she finished chopping, she stirred the soup with one hand and spread peanut butter on slices of bread with the other.

  Upstairs, she skated down the hall, dust mops on her feet and a paintbrush in her hand, touching up chips in the wall as she went.

  "How big is your staff here?" Sunnie asked Dr. Waldemar.

  "Now there's just Opal and me. It's hard to get the kind of help we need, way out here in the country. When it got so we couldn't attract any nurses, Opal took a nursing degree through correspondence school. You never knew when she'd come flying at you to practice her tourniquets or try to change your bed with you still in it."

  "How can you get a nursing degree through correspondence school?" Sunnie wondered.

  "It ain't easy," Opal replied, skating by on her dust mops.

  "We both live on the premises," Dr. Waldemar said as they started down the stairs. "So the patients are never left unattended. Opal grows a vegetable garden in the summer and cans the produce for winter. We're almost self-sustaining. We've got a few chickens for eggs and a cow for milk and butter."

  "Thank you for the tour, Dr. Waldemar," Sunnie said. "We'll talk it over and let you know."

  "Ah, exactly what is it that three members of your family have?" asked Dr. Waldemar as he walked them to the door.

  "Comas," Sunnie said, opening the door. "Bye."

  Dr. Waldemar's mouth gaped as if to say something, but Sunnie took Sandy's hand and pulled him down the stairs to their bicycles. Dr. Waldemar watched, his mouth still ajar, as they rode away.

  As soon as Dr. Waldemar and Walnut Manor were out of sight, Sunnie began to giggle.

  "What's so funny?" Sandy asked.

  "Oh, Sandy, did you see the look on Dr. Waldemar's face? Do you think for one minute he believed we have three comatose relatives?, Nobody has three comatose relatives. Oh, is he going to be surprised when we move them in there."

  "You think we should put them in Walnut Manor?"

  "Yes, I do. Maybe something funny's going on there, but it's plain to see Dr. Waldemar and Opal like the patients and treat them well. That's worth a lot more than a heated swimming pool and gourmet meals. Besides, the location can't be beat."

  "What do you mean something funny's going on there?" Sandy asked as they pedaled down the road toward Eclipse. "It didn't look like a funny place to me."

  "Not that kind of funny. I mean, a place that charges the kind of fees that place does shouldn't have to turn off the heat in the swimming pool and serve peanut butter sandwiches for lunch and keep a cow and chickens. And they should have more staff. And those patients should be getting some kind of treatment, not just sitting around playing cards and watching TV. Oh, what a challenge that place could be. How I'd love an assignment like that. It would be heaven!"

  "Sunnie, if we're going to put Horatio and Mousey and Flossie and Attila in Walnut Manor, I want you to go with them. Opal's too busy to give them the care they need. I won't feel right about sending them there unless you say you'll go, too."

  Sunnie looked at him. Tears gleamed in her eyes and her bicycle wobbled precariously. "Oh, Sandy, what a lovely thing to say. There's nothing I'd like better. I could hardly bear the idea of leaving Eclipse and ... and my dear patients. If your lawyers say it's OK, then I'd love to stay. You know, I'm a little like the people at Walnut Manor; if I left here, I don't know where I'd go. I don't have any parents, and now that I'm finished with nursing school, I don't even have a dormitory to live in. And I'd have hated to leave here without knowing how the story ended. The story of your parents, I mean. I want to be around when they wake up. I'll stay right here with them until they're all right, even if it takes years."

  "In a way, I hope it does," Sandy murmured, gazing at Sunnie with gratitude, and also with something else—something more complicated and harder to understand.

  "You know," Sunnie said, pedaling straight again, "I like to think of life as a story. Somehow that helps it make sense. When something bad is happening, like when my, mother died, I think, If I were making this into a story, what would I have happen next? And I think up something that helps me get through the bad part. I admit I never would have thought of having my father die at the same time as my mother and leave me money for nursing school, but that turned out to be better than anything I did think up. Do you ever do that?"

  "No," admitted Sandy. "But this is the first time anything bad has happened to me."

  "Well, how would you like it to end?"

  "Of course I want my parents and Flossie and Attila to be all right—"

  "Don't worry," she interrupted. "They will be."

  "And I want Bart and Bernie to get what they deserve. They were bad enough when all they were was lazy and greedy. But now, since they tried to kill us and then blame me for what happened, they're worse than anything I could have thought up for a story."

  "Absolutely right," she said. "What else?"

  "You're not going to like this part. I'd like to spend more time in the city. I know you think Eclipse is perfect, but you've known another life. There is so much energy and excitement in the city, something I've never felt, living in Eclipse. I like it."

  She thought for a moment, a frown between her perfect eyebrows. "Maybe you need a place like Eclipse to make you appreciate the city. And vice versa. Well, if that's what you want, then that's the way I want your story to go, too."

  They parked their bicycles in the front drive of Eclipse and went inside to tell Bentley about Walnut Manor.

  CHAPTER 10

  The day of the move, a parade of ambulances delivered Mousey, Horatio, Flossie, and Attila to Walnut Manor while all the residents except Eddy stood on the broad porch watching. Dr. Waldemar had opened a section of the closed wing for the new patients, and furnished an adjoining bedroom for Sunnie. Sunnie carried Attila, in the dishpan, through the front door. This was the first Dr. Waldemar and the others knew that a chicken was to be one of the patients.

  As she passed Graham, Sunnie pointed to him and said, "You're a big strong boy. How about taking my suitcase up to my room?"

  Graham shambled forward and grabbed the handle of the suitcase. He pulled it toward him but it didn't budge. He pulled again, harder, and this time it moved a couple of inches. "What have you got in here?" he asked, astonished.

  "Books," she said, coming back onto the porch, the dishpan in her arms. "I don't have time right now to explain my theories of education to you, but I can tell you that I believe in continuing to learn, and after a bit of experimenting, I settled on a method of picking a subject and reading in depth on it. I've just finished an extensive study of whales—nothing personal," she said, eyeing Graham's girth. "I figure if I give three months to each subject, that's four a year. In ten years I'll know a lot about forty different things. How many people do you know who know a lot about forty different things? I can see already that some subjects will be more interesting to me than others. Whales weren
't too bad, and they did get more interesting as I went along, though I wasn't sure they would at first. I even read a book from the whales' point of view. It was all about what they thought and how they felt and how they communicated with each other. The book said they had ESP. But it seems so far-fetched to me. Like imagining Louie sitting around composing poetry in his head. I know he doesn't do that. At least I don't think he does. Oh dear, now I'm all confused. Well, come on, let's get this stuff un-loaded so we can get settled in. Some day soon you and I have to have a nice chat." She turned and carried Attila into Walnut Manor.

  Graham looked after her, a dazed expression on his round face. "Who's Louie?" he asked. No one on the porch knew, so he wrestled with the suitcase again, finally dragging it up the steps and through the door.

  There was a great deal of commotion as people went back and forth, up and down the stairs, carrying things, depositing things, dropping things. Finally the sleepers were settled in their room, Sunnie's suitcase was unpacked, and Sandy and Bentley were sadly contemplating returning to Eclipse alone.

  "Oh, you might as well stay for supper," Opal said, looking at their crestfallen expressions. "It's nothing special."

  Sunnie decided to eat her dinner on a tray in her patients' room so she could make sure the travel hadn't harmed them, but the others gathered around a single long table in the dining room.

  Opal had made a great pot of spaghetti and a big green salad, and as she dished up the plates, she announced that dessert would be canned peaches from Walnut Manor's own trees and anybody who didn't like that could just lump it.

  Sandy thought Opal's spaghetti sauce was the best he'd ever tasted, but he didn't say so for fear of hurting Bentley's feelings. Bentley was quite proud of his own spaghetti sauce.

  Mr. Moreland leaned across the table toward Sandy and said, "That's a good-looking nurse you've brought along. I seem to remember her from somewhere. What's her name? Stormy? Windy? I can't remember anything anymore."

  "Her name's Sunnie." Sandy loved to say her name. "And you saw her a few days ago when we came to take a tour of Walnut Manor."

  "Is that so?" Mr. Moreland asked.

  Everett nudged Sandy with his elbow. "'She had curves in places other women don't even have places.' Cybill Shepherd said that about Marilyn Monroe."

  "She may be right," Sandy said. "I don't know much about women."

  "I must be forgetting what I knew about them," Mr. Moreland said. "Today I pinched Opal. She almost broke my arm after I did it."

  "'Happiness? That's nothing more than health and a poor memory.' Albert Schweitzer," Everett said.

  "What a bunch of balderdash," Mr. Moreland retorted grumpily. "I've got them both and they don't add up to happiness. I used to be able to hold a full day's quotes from the Big Board in my head, and now I can hardly remember the difference between stocks and bonds. There was a time L. Barlow Van Dyke and I were making money so fast we didn't have time to count it. We were young, stubborn, ambitious, competitive. I beat him by one week to making my first million, but he made his second before I did. After that, we quit counting. Now look at us. I can hardly remember my own name, and he sits around looking like a thundercloud. Who'd ever have thought we'd end up like this? Last time I saw him out in the world he was making a speech at some big function, and now he's not only mute, he's a cat molester."

  "A cat molester?" Bentley asked, alarmed, raising his voice slightly to be heard over the sound of Graham's chewing. Graham was already on thirds, while everyone else was still on firsts. "You mean he teases cats? Manhandles them? Torments, harasses, badgers, and annoys them?" Bentley had spent many hours reading the thesaurus.

  "I suppose. That's the last thing he said the day he checked in here. Opal asked him what we should call him, and he said, 'Cat molester,' and he's never said another word. I guess he's ashamed of how far he's fallen."

  There was a little commotion at the other end of the table where Boom-Boom sat. He had spilled his milk and now was scolding himself while his other half cried. Opal got up for a sponge and cleaned up the milk before she went back to taking one bite for herself and then giving one bite to Eddy who lay on his padded, wheeled platform next to her chair.

  After dinner, which Sandy had enjoyed immensely, he and Bentley went upstairs to say good night to Sunnie and the sleepers.

  As Sandy and Bentley drove back to Eclipse in the dark, Sandy sighed and said, "It doesn't feel right, just the two of us going home. Two's not enough. I want Horatio and Mousey and Flossie and Attila back." He was afraid to say he wanted Sunnie back—afraid Bentley would hear the longing in his voice. "I wish there was something we could do."

  "I've been reading up, and I'm going to try something," Bentley said. "Remember our chemistry experiments in the kitchen?"

  "Sure. You discovered that formula to make plastic from potato peels."

  "Right. Well, I'm going back to experimenting. To see if I can find a cure."

  "But Bentley, you don't know anything about medicine. This could be dangerous."

  "I know a lot more about medicine now than I did a couple of months ago. I'll test my experiments on Attila."

  "What if they don't work?"

  "I'll just keep trying until I find something that does."

  "I mean, what if..."

  "I know what you mean. I'll have to be careful."

  Bentley pulled the Daimler into the garage.

  "Please be very careful," Sandy said.

  The next morning, after breakfast, Bentley drove. Sandy to Walnut Manor. After he visited Flossie, Bentley went home to begin his experiments, leaving Sandy at Walnut Manor until supper time.

  "Now, Sandy," Sunnie told him after they'd finished the morning chores for their patients, "my new field of study is finance, and it's as much for your benefit as for mine. If you ever want to get control of your father's money and secure it against Bart and Bernie, you've got to educate yourself. You've got to learn about buying on margin, and tax shelters, and depreciation, and things like that."

  "What?" She might have been speaking a foreign language to him.

  "That's all part of a sound financial education, Sandy, and you have to start now."

  "Oh, all right. If you say so. But it sounds so difficult and dull."

  "Well, it sounds difficult to me, too. After all, I don't know much more than you. But I do know about checking accounts and income tax. I still have trouble reconciling my bank statement, but at least I know how it's supposed to be done. Somebody told me not to bother because the bank is never wrong and I should just trust the amount on the statement, but I discovered once that the computer had stuttered or something. Instead of subtracting a check for $8.79, it subtracted $888.79, so it does pay to be alert. And if that kind of mistake could happen in a little checking account like mine, why, just think of what could go wrong with a financial empire like your father's."

  "I'm sure my father has accountants or something to handle things like that. They'd spot it."

  "They could be embezzlers. Now sit down and let me read this book to you. It's called Earning, Spending, Saving, Investing, Borrowing, and Losing."

  Before Sandy could get to a chair, Opal appeared in the doorway and said, "I need another pair of hands. You aren't doing anything that shows to the naked eye. Come on." She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him out of the room.

  Sunnie watched him go, then shrugged and opened her book.

  "It's cold in the library," Opal said, dragging Sandy down the stairs, "and I can't light another fire until all the old ashes have been cleaned out of the fireplace. Dr. Waldemar's taking a nap, and I've got to get lunch going. You're elected." She towed him into the library and left him staring forlornly into the cold fireplace, which brimmed with ashes.

  Behind him Mr. Moreland, L. Barlow Van Dyke, Boom-Boom, and Everett sat at the card table, in coats and gloves, playing their usual game. Virgil and Lyle sat on the couch, a blanket wrapped around them, watching television. They had a schedule
they abided by, watching the same programs every day. The only conflict they had was at 11:00 A.M., when Virgil wanted to watch Bowling for Dollars and Lyle wanted to watch I Love Lucy reruns. They compromised, alternating days for those programs.

  "Hurry up and get that fireplace ready," Mr. Moreland said. "I'm freezing."

  "And it's harder to cheat when you're dealing the cards with gloves on," Boom-Boom said in his little kid's voice. "Boom-Boom," he said in his grown-up voice, "that isn't very nice. Now apologize to Mr. Moreland." "No," he answered, sticking his thumb in his mouth.

  Sandy tentatively took a shovelful of ashes from the fireplace and deposited it in a brown paper grocery sack. A fine gray cloud rose from it and floated over the hearth, settling slowly onto the carpet and making Sandy cough.

  Graham turned from the windows, where he was looking out onto a barren winter landscape. "Why don't you wet the ashes down before you shovel them? Then they won't fly around like that."

  "That's a great idea," Sandy said with admiration. Graham flushed and turned back to the window as Sandy went off to the kitchen to get a pitcher of water.

  Working at the messy job, he listened to the sounds of the TV and the four men playing cards, and he was glad they'd decided to put Mousey and Horatio and Flossie and Attila here.

  "Well, LBVD," Mr. Moreland said, slapping his cards on the table, "that makes two million, three hundred and fifty-seven thousand, nineteen dollars and twenty-four cents you owe me." He scraped together the cards from the other players and shuffled them. L. Barlow Van Dyke scowled more darkly than usual and stuck his gloved hands in his pockets.

  "'That money talks/I'll not deny,/I heard it once:/ It said, "Goodbye."' Richard Armour," Everett said.