Honeydew: Stories (9 page)

Ophelia sighed. “What a loss.”

“Actually, a profit.”

“I mean to me. I’ll miss him. I hope his new home is—”

Rennie took a ferocious breath and broke cardinal rule one. “The man is from Colorado. He’s staying at Devlin’s Hotel. He’s tall. He’s in his seventies. He has the soul of a gentleman.”

“Oh. Oh? Oh!” Ophelia now put
her
elbows on the glass case. They stood face to face, the check lying between them.

“Eyes like sapphires?” Ophelia inquired.

“Well, blue.”

“Hair like wheat?”

“Snow.”

“Politics is perhaps no longer so important,” Ophelia speculated.

Rennie said nothing.

“Lew has been gone for less than a year,” she whispered.

Rennie said nothing.

“But I am not in my first youth.”

Nothing.

Ophelia touched the check with two gentle fingers, rotated it until the signature faced her. “‘John Ipp…’ I can’t read this, Rennie.”

“Ippolito. He showed me his driver’s license.”

“My heart’s delight—his name was Horace Cannon.” She gave the check a quarter rotation so they could both look at the name. “Can we transform John Ippolito into Horace Cannon?”

“…I don’t think so.”

Ophelia retreated from the check, and from Rennie, who had broken cardinal rule one to no purpose. She sat down on the love seat. “Horace,” she mused. “How my heart leaps at the thought of him, him and Puck. I was ready to run to Devlin’s Hotel…burst into his room…fling myself onto his chest. ‘It is I, Ophelia!’”

“Mr. Ippolito would have been charmed,” Rennie said.

Ophelia, in a voice almost accusing, said: “You have kindled a desire in me—”

“I’m a terrible chatterbox.”

“—that will not be easily quieted.”

Rennie’s second cardinal rule leaped to the floor and smashed itself to bits. “Hunt him down,” she snapped. “Try the Internet. Call his college alumni office.” Advice spurted out of her mouth.

Some of Ophelia’s hair had come loose from its confining pins. Her earrings swung. Her blouse had worked its way out of her waistband. To Rennie’s acute eye Ophelia became in succession everything she was and had ever been, in reverse order: a colorful grandmother, a woman who had known a long and happy marriage, a girl in love for the first time.

“Hire a detective,” Rennie wound up. And she turned her back on Ophelia and climbed the little stool and put in Puck’s place a blue glass epergne she had bought yesterday—an ugly and misbegotten item; but it would probably be snapped up before closing time.

T
his Yefgin—what a rogue! Leather battle jacket, cascading
R
s, and a circlet of gray hair lying loose on his head just as if it were a wig, though whenever he bent his two-timing face to examine a piece of jewelry, Rennie saw that it was real hair springing from his pink scalp. Double deception! And then, that peculiar profession—in a brown third-floor office Yefgin cured people of addictions like tobacco and scratch tickets, using a combination of hypnosis and harangue. “Special concoction,” he said, with a wink. Many of his clients did quit their habits, though they often switched to new ones. When Yefgin addressed a woman he kissed her hand first, then twisted his face into a grin that suggested he’d just conceived a helpless passion for her even though they’d met only minutes ago, such things happened all the time in Turgenev. His discolored teeth inspired sympathy rather than revulsion. He was forever in debt. Rennie let his IOUs accumulate to a thousand dollars—then, until he paid up, she refused to sell him any of the dramatic prewar brooches and bracelets he bought for his mistress, and she wouldn’t sell him any delicate Victorian rings either, the ones he gave to his wife, Vera. Oh, the scamp.

From time to time Yefgin brought Vera into Forget Me Not to try on one of those rings. She was a large woman with dyed hair whose garnet eyes were settled comfortably in her fleshy face. Rings meant for the fourth finger had trouble wriggling past the knuckle of her pinkie. They had to be resized. Yefgin doted on his fat spouse. He doted on his mistress too, buying her an enamel cockatoo and a bracelet of gold panels connected by diamonds—and, today, right now, a bouquet of amethysts for her lapel.

“Don’t tell Vera,” Yefgin said, scribbling his IOU.

He needn’t have troubled to say anything: Rennie made it a point of honor to keep her customers’ business to herself. Yefgin kissed her hand and scooted away.

She liked the rascal. But then, she liked most people who came to her shop here in Godolphin, Massachusetts. She liked the people who fancied tiny Edwardian desks. Breathlessly they bounded up the three stairs at the rear of the store, and through the wide arch, and into the sunlit back room where the furniture stood waiting—they might have been meeting a lover. Rennie liked office girls who called themselves administrative assistants. They spent lunch hours trying on necklaces they couldn’t afford. Then, desperate to treat themselves to something, they bought stickpins they’d never wear. And the gossips who didn’t buy anything at all—they sat on the striped love seat opposite the waist-high jewelry case, chattering at Rennie, who stood behind it. And the braggart dealers who tried to unload mistakes. She even liked the helpless acquisitors, people who lived only to buy, who filled their lives with one expensive thing after another. But their addiction made her uneasy. Maybe she should run a side business in cures, like Yefgin, browbeating people out of their lust.
Really, you don’t need these pewter candlesticks,
she’d say with urgent sympathy.
You’ve got those brass ones I sold you last month.
But why defeat her own purposes. Enabling was her vocation.

Muffy and Stu Willis slid into the store at least twice a week. Like many long-married people they looked like siblings—both short, both with fine thin hair the color of Vaseline, both with a wardrobe of ancient tweeds and sand-colored cashmere sweaters. An inch of pale shirt showed at the neck of Stu’s sweater. Pearls adorned Muffy’s. The rims of their glasses were so thin that the spectacles seemed penciled onto their old and yet unwrinkled faces. Together they weighed less than two hundred pounds.

A quarter of a century ago, Stu’s public relations firm had done well enough. But it was an inheritance from Muffy’s father that allowed them to indulge her attachment to furnishings, rugs, jewelry, and dreary but costly clothing. Stu was quiet, Muffy quieter. Stu occasionally put in a word about the weather, but mostly he stood with his hands in his pockets, his eyeglasses watching while Rennie spread jewelry on the counter at Muffy’s soft request. And Muffy’s voice—there was nothing to it. It was as if she had once been almost smothered and then allowed to live only if she limited her vocabulary and breathed hardly at all.

When Rennie had spotted the diamond bracelet at an estate sale, she thought right away of Muffy. The bracelet was a four-strand cuff, each square-cut jewel exactly like the one beside it and behind it and in front of it, like a team of expensive mules. Rennie called Muffy the next morning, and within half an hour the couple was standing before her. How meager they were growing. The diamond cuff hung heavily on Muffy’s mournful wrist. “Oh,” she sighed.

Stu’s palm held the bracelet Muffy had taken off—similar to the new offering, but emerald. He tossed it up and down. “Stu,” Muffy murmured.
Stu
was one of her words. “Look, Stu.”

He gave the diamonds something between an inspection and a glance. “Nice.”

“Can I wear it for a while, Rennie?”

“Of course.”

“What’s a while?” Stu inquired of his wife.

“Go have a nice lunch.”

And so, pocketing the emeralds, he strolled out—emaciated and out-of-fashion. Yet there was something of the dandy’s spring to his step.

Muffy settled herself on the striped love seat and Rennie prepared for skimpy strings of conversation. From time to time Muffy would wonder aloud if the thing really suited her. And of course it didn’t suit her any more than it would have suited a vegetable brush. The Lord alone knew what would suit her. What might improve her would be a transfusion, a perm, a toddler (her one child, an unmarried daughter, lived in California and paid two brief visits a year); an interest in something, anything—gardens, bridge, crime novels, crime itself…“Perhaps this design is monotonous,” she said in her nearly inaudible voice.

“Perhaps it is,” Rennie said.

Customers—regulars, occasionals, strangers—came in and went out. Some left with purchases. Rennie sold a good ring, a poor Limoges box, a set of demitasse spoons. Muffy’s eyes wandered from one person to another, her braceleted wrist unmoving on her thigh. Between customers, she produced a few murmurs. She’d heard about a movie that wasn’t worth seeing. Someone had mentioned a program that wasn’t worth watching. They’d dined at a restaurant out in Worcester that wasn’t worth the drive. The Willises tried a new place every Saturday, alone, together. On the other six nights, alone, together, they dined at the Tavern on Jefferson Avenue, walking from the town house Muffy had grown up in. They ordered the special, whatever it was, and Stu drank a glass or two of wine, and Muffy drank water. The Tavern had once been a church and boasted a stained-glass window. Its patrons included academics and young doctors from nearby Boston hospitals, still wearing their scrubs, and pairs of single women—young, no longer young, frankly old. Rennie often dined here with her friend Dr. Elissa Albright, collector of art deco jewelry. Yefgin and Vera liked it. And here, Saturdays excepted, in this thickly colored noisy place, sat the wordless couple.

“The bracelet may be too wide,” Muffy said now.

“It may be,” Rennie said.

“I will use the last of Papa’s legacy if I buy it.”

Rennie said nothing.

After a while: “Diamonds are like currency,” Muffy said.

More silence.

“Perhaps it’s too heavy.”

“Perhaps it is.”

Stu came back from lunch at last. He lifted Muffy’s wrist from her lap. “Mmm,” he said.

They bought the bracelet.

But not only the bracelet. It was as if this end-of-the-legacy purchase included a stake in the business too. Many mornings, on his way to his office—recently reduced from two rooms to one—Stu dropped off his wife like a day-care child. Rennie feigned enthusiasm. Muffy spent the morning inspecting the jewelry, and the Staffordshire, and the Tiffany lamps. She searched for secret compartments in the Pennsylvania desks. Often she stayed the entire day. “No, Rennie, I never eat lunch,” she said to Rennie’s offer. After hours of musing, she turned to the silver as if it were a sweet saved for last. Vases and platters and tea sets stood on shelves behind glass; shallow drawers were full of tableware. “Nice you’ve finally got an assistant,” said Mr. Gadsby one afternoon. He’d stopped in to look at a barometer. When Rennie lifted her eyebrows he turned to the little figure on its knees, in front of a low drawer, holding a spoon, apparently memorizing its arabesques.

In a way Mr. Gadsby was right. Many days Muffy brought in soft cloths and silver polish. She rubbed trivets and serving forks, and then bathed them in a dappled enamel basin she’d set up on newspapers in a corner, and then carried the basin up the three stairs to the skylit back room and rinsed the silver in the lavatory whose door was hidden by a Chinese screen. When she brought it back down the stuff glowed nicely.

One night at the Tavern, Dr. Elissa treated Rennie to a description of decline. “You see, old girl, elderly people can often tolerate what their cells do to them. They can even tolerate what their physicians do. But that first slip, that first turn of the ankle—ah, that’s the beginning of the end. What seems like convalescence is really weakening. Bed rest is preparation for the coffin. There’ll be another incident, and another. The aging body cannot repair its skeleton. It begins to yearn toward ruin, and then it accomplishes it. Even—”

“Elissa, for God’s sake…”

Elissa took a swig of beer. Seven bar pins gleamed on her broad chest. “None of this applies to you, Rennie. You’ll live forever. We all need you.”

Muffy fell at Forget Me Not. The skylit back room was rather bare that day. Mrs. Fortescue, who rarely bought anything, had, in the space of twenty-four hours, purchased and removed a dining table and six chairs. It was a present to her son on the occasion of his third marriage. “Fine furniture can anchor a relationship,” the hopeful lady confided to Rennie. And so there was space for Mr. Gadsby’s grandsons to stage a make-believe sword fight with cardboard tubes. They stood aside politely when Muffy padded by carrying a rinsed silver coffeepot. But they may have addled her. At any rate she missed the top stair, and, leaning backward, she slid down the other two. She entered the main room of the store lizard shoes first. She held on to the pot. She made so little noise that the Gadsby boys didn’t notice her unusual descent, nor did their grandfather and Rennie, heads bent over a signet ring. Stu, coming into the store, saw Muffy flat in front of the stairs, legs spread as if awaiting him. Behind and above her the duel had resumed, the boys appearing and reappearing under the arch, parrying, thrusting. “Muffy,” said Stu, in a tone of reproach.

Mr. Gadsby raised his glance from the ring and bounded to the silent form. Rennie too. Stu was third.

“Don’t move her,” Rennie said.

“Is there pain, dear?” Mr. Gadsby said.

“My wife,” Stu mentioned, and took the coffeepot and put it on the floor beside her feet.

The boys had paused. “I didn’t do it,” one said.

Nobody had done it, thought Rennie as she telephoned 911; that had been Elissa’s point, hadn’t it. Muffy fluttered her fingers until Stu took her hand in his.

She stayed a week in the hospital—she was found to have broken a small bone in her foot, and to be emaciated and anemic as well. She was brought home in an ambulance. Two deft strongmen carried the stretcher up the narrow stairs, watched by Stu in the front hall, and by Rennie too—he had begged her to be there. “You are Muffy’s best friend,” he’d explained; and she turned away to spare him her surprise and horror.

She had visited their house exactly twice before: once to advise on the placement of a French landscape, all cows and mud; once to deliver a repaired clock. Both times she had been struck with the gloom of the downstairs, deprived of light by spruce trees in front and by the houses stitched to theirs on either side. All the fine appointments stood in shadows. But today, following Stu following the stretcher upstairs, she found a light and airy master bedroom. Its high windows, above the spruce, were open to the May softness. The marital four-poster faced a Chippendale chest, so important, so highly polished, that Rennie was reminded of the mirrors young couples hang on their ceilings.

The big men left, passing Stu in a deliberately slow manner. Rennie ran after them with a pair of tens. Back in the room, Muffy, whiter than her pillows, asked for a pain tablet. Stu crushed it between two exquisite teaspoons brought by the Jamaican housekeeper. Muffy took a sip of water from a faceted glass. “Stu. Have a nice lunch somewhere.”

“But you…but Rennie…”

“Agnes will make a sandwich when I ring,” she said. A porcelain bell sat on the night table. And so housekeeper and husband left the room.

“Rennie, I must…make an inventory of my things. It’s been on my mind. In the hospital…all I thought of.” This was a prolonged utterance, and she lengthened it further, asking Rennie to open the walk-in closet and announce its occupants. Rennie obeyed. Two pairs of black alligator pumps. Two pairs of brown alligator pumps. Two pairs of brown oxfords. Mr. and Mrs. Penny Loafer—that couple, or its ancestors, must have been all the rage fifty years ago. And dozens of skirts, each of a slightly different tweed; and dozens of sweaters, ranging in shade from vanilla to rancid mocha. And stalwart broad-shouldered fur coats in plastic capes of their own. “Now the chest, the Stephen Badlam chest of drawers, start from the bottom,” said Muffy’s weak voice. There were two drawers of silken underpants, piled squarely like memo pads. Tidy slips, camisoles, beige silk scarves. The three next drawers held gloves, and stockings, and little white blouses. Rennie intoned descriptions. The drawer second from the top held only pearls, strand after strand, each separated from the next by pearly candles, how clever. And finally the single top drawer, high and narrow. Rennie stood on a mahogany stool inlaid with mother-of-pearl. She pulled the drawer out. What could be here? The good stuff must be in a safe somewhere.