Nobody's Fool (27 page)

One ball even made it into the enclosed patio where they sat and rattled around the perimeter angrily.

"We seem to be under siege here, son," Miss Beryl observed when Clive Jr.

bent to pick up the smiling Titleist that finally came to rest at his feet.

Hisexpression at that moment was like the one so often captured in photographs of Clive Jr. as a boy showing off a Christmas or birthday present. The idea of these photos was always to capture the boy in a moment of happiness, but Clive Jr. " more often than not, wore an expression that suggested he'd already discovered what was wrong with the gift 143 and why it couldn't possibly perform the feats illustrated on the package it came in. When the light turned. Miss Beryl pulled through the intersection and considered what Clive Jr. was up to now, whether it had anything to do with her leaving her home. She was still contemplating this possibility when she heard Mrs. Gruber ask, "Wasn't that it, dear?" and noticed that her friend's bony finger was indeed pointed at the one building in Albany that she recognized, the Northwoods Motor Inn, their destination, already overshot.

"Oh dear," said Mrs. Gruber sadly, watching the Northwoods Motor Inn recede behind them, as if her friend's mistake might well be too severe to admit correction.

"Can we turn around, do you suppose?" In fact, they could not, at least for a quarter mile. The street they were on was divided by an island, the existence of which escaped Mrs. Gruber's notice. When the Northwoods Motor Inn disappeared from sight in the rear window, Mrs. Gruber let out a loud sigh.

Several blocks farther on, when they stopped at a traffic light, Mrs.

Gruber spied an alternative.

"That might be nice," she offered.

"It certainly looks nice."

"That's a bank," Miss Beryl said, though she had to admit that except for the huge sign identifying it as a bank, it did look more like a restaurant.

Mrs. Gruber sighed again. Miss Beryl turned, looped through the bank's empty lot, and headed back the way they had come, a maneuver that befuddled Mrs. Gruber, who expressed both surprise and excitement when the Northwoods Motor Inn came into view a second time, now on the other side of the street.

"There!" Mrs. Gruber pointed. She also directed Miss Beryl to a parking space.

"There!" she pointed again after her friend had slowed, signaled and begun to turn into the space. Things were going to work out after all.

Things had a way of working out, even when they looked the darkest, Mrs. Gruber mused. It was a lesson in life that she'd learned again and again, and she made a mental note right there in the front seat of Miss Beryl's Ford to quit being an old Gloomy Gus. The Northwoods Motor Inn catered, especially on Sundays and holidays, to old people.

The dining room was large and all on one level, and there was plenty of room between the white-clothed tables for wheelchairs. The young waitresses, attired in friendly Tyrolean costume, were all strapping girls, sturdy enough to support an elderly diner on each arm when it came time to sidle down the soup-and-salad buffet. These girls knew from experience that their clientele were enthusiastically committed to the buffet concept in direct proportion to their physical inability to negotiate it.

The more compromised by arthritis, ruptured discs, poor eyesight, dubious equilibrium and tiny appetite, the more the Northwoods' diners were enamored of the long buffet tables with their sweeping vistas of carrot and celery sticks, cottage cheese, applesauce and cheese cubes speared with fancy cellophaned toothpicks, as well as the exotica, pea and three-bean and macaroni-vinaigrette salads, many of which required explanation. The buffet tables had a way of backing up as these explanations were made and choices narrowed, until the line snaked halfway around the room.

This was the state of affairs when Miss Beryl and Mrs. Gruber were seated at a table far too large for the two of them in the very center of the room.

Miss Beryl was still unnerved at having driven right past the restaurant, and she was far too peeved at her companion to think seriously of food. Mrs. Gruber was all for joining the buffet line immediately, before it got any longer. Miss Beryl refused, ordering a Manhattan.

"It's not going to get longer," she explained.

"Except for us, everyone in the room is already in it."

"If you say so, dear," said Mrs. Gruber, who deferred to Miss Beryl, albeit reluctantly, in most worldly matters.

"What's that tasty highball I always like?"

"An old-fashioned," Miss Beryl reminded her. Mrs. Gruber ordered an old-fashioned. The menu was a special Thanksgiving issue scripted onto an onionskin page with scalloped edges, and Mrs. Gruber studied this as if it were the Rosetta Stone. They had a choice among roast turkey, glazed ham, and Yankee pot roast. Mrs. Gruber's lips moved as she read each description and broadened into a smile as she arrived at her decision, which Miss Beryl could have predicted at the outset.

"I'm going to eat Old Tom," Mrs. Gruber announced, much too loudly.

Several people nearby looked up, startled.

"Old Tom Turkey will be just the thing," Mrs. Gruber said. She was reading the menu a second time, just to make sure.

"Succulent, it says." What Mrs. Gruber liked about the food at the Northwoods Motor Inn was precisely what Miss Beryl disliked about it--everything came overcooked. Vegetables were recognizable only by their color, or a bleached version of it, the original shapes and textures lost to the puree process. Meats too were always on the verge of losing their natural compo143 sit ion, so broken down by heat and steam that Mrs. Gruber was always prompted to remark that you could cut it with a fork.

"Succulent is the wrong word to describe turkey," Miss Beryl said.

Mrs. Gruber put down her menu.

"What?" she said. Miss Beryl repeated her observation.

"You always get angry about words when you're in a bad mood," Mrs. Gruber said, apparently having decided to acknowledge her friend's offishness.

"There's nothing wrong with the word 'succulent."

It's a perfectly lovely word. You can see it, almost. " Miss Beryl conceded that you could almost see the word 'succulent," but she doubted that what she almost saw was what Mrs. Gruber almost saw. It was entirely true, however, that she found fault with words when it was really something else that troubled her. Perhaps she was even guilty of being in a bad mood. Clive Jr.

"s call and her suspicions concerning Mrs. Gruber were only part of it.

She'd been feeling vaguely annoyed with everything since the morning when she'd conversed with Sully on the back porch and Sully had unexpectedly admitted to having misspent his life. Miss Beryl had always admired in Sully his fierce loyalty to the myriad mistakes that constituted his odd, lonely existence. She'd expected his usual defiance, and his sad, uncharacteristic admission had made him seem even more ghostlike than usual. The whole town of Bath, it sometimes seemed to Miss Beryl, was becoming ghostlike, especially Upper Main Street with its elms, the tangle of their black branches overhead, the old houses, most of which were haunted by a single surviving member of a once-flourishing family, and that member conversing more regularly with the dead than the living. Maybe she would be better off living next to a golf course.

Maybe it was better to act as a magnet for slicing Titleists than sit beneath limbs that were bound eventually to fall. That morning after Sully had left and before Clive Jr. called. Miss Beryl had a long and not terribly satisfying discussion with Clive Sr. " whom she always missed most urgently on holidays. She'd tuned in the Macy's parade, but her attention was drawn to the photograph of her husband, whose round face hovered above the Snoopy balloon. Was there something in his expression this morning suggestive of mild disapproval? " If you don't like the way I'm handling things, you can just butt out," Miss Beryl told him. " You too," she told Driver Ed, who looked like he was about to whisper more subversive Zamble advice from his perch on the wall. Until recently, Miss Beryl had lived a more or less contented existence on Upper Main, and she didn't understand why she shouldn't be co tented now, since the circumstances of her existence had changed so little. True, death was nearer, but she didn't fear death, or didn't fear it any more than she had twenty-five years ago.

What she suffered from now, it seemed, was an indefinite sense of misgiving, as if she'd forgotten something important she'd meant to do.

Seeing that wretched little girl and her mother yesterday had focused and intensified the feeling, though Miss Beryl was at a loss to account for why this child, however pitiful, should heighten her own personal regret. Regret, when you thought about it, was an absurd emotion for an eighty-year-old woman to indulge on a snowy Thanksgiving, when she had. Miss Beryl was compelled to admit, a great deal to be thankful for. All of this staring up into trees and waiting for God to lower the cosmic boom was nonsense, evidence no doubt that her mind was becoming as arthritic as her toes and fingers. It would have to stop.

All of it. Sully wasn't a ghost, he was a man. And Clive Jr.

was her son, her own flesh and blood, and there was no reason to believe that his protestations of concern for her well-being were other than genuine.

Her suspicions were paranoia, pure and simple. Clive Jr. had nothing conceivable to gain by scheming against her independence, and if he had no reason to do it, then he wasn't doing it. And if he wasn't scheming against her, then Mrs. Gruber couldn't be his accomplice. There, Miss Beryl said to herself, glad to have reasoned this through so she could enjoy her dinner and be thankful. She once again studied Mrs. Gruber, who'd gone back to her menu and was examining that document as if it contained a plot.

Probably, Miss Beryl conceded, she owed Mrs. Gruber an apology. And she was about to offer one, when she heard herself say something entirely unexpected.

"Tell the truth," she said, as if she meant it.

"Does my son call you to check up on me?" Mrs. Gruber started to put her menu down, then did not.

"Whatever do you mean?"

"I mean, does he call you and check up on me?"

"Of course not, dear," Mrs. Gruber said to her menu.

"Why ever would he call me?" Miss Beryl smiled, her spirits lifted by her friend's feeble lie and her own ability to detect it.

"I didn't tell him we were coming here for dinner today," Miss Beryl said, suddenly certain that this was true.

"But this morning when I talked to him, he knew."

"You must have told him before," Mrs. Gruber told her menu.

"You just forgot."

"Look at me, Alice," Miss Beryl said.

147 Mrs. Gruber lowered her menu fearfully.

"Clive Jr. isn't really my son," she told her friend.

"The bassinets were exchanged in the hospital."

Mrs. Gruber's stricken look was testimony to the fact that she believed this for a full five seconds.

"That's a terrible thing to say."

"It was a joke," Miss Beryl said, though it hadn't been. It was a wish, was what it was. When Miss Beryl finished her Manhattan, she noted that the line at the salad bar had begun to dwindle.

"Well," she said, rising.

"Let's establish a beachhead at that buffet." Mrs. Gruber, still looking guilty, received this suggestion gratefully.

"Beachhead," she repeated, pushing back her chair.

"You and your words." At the salad bar Mrs. Gruber filled two plates, which she allowed one of the Tyrolean waitresses to deliver to their table.

"I

like words," Miss Beryl said when they were seated again and Mrs.

Gruber had begun eating, with great solemnity, her cottage cheese.

"I

like choosing the right ones." An hour later, on their way back to Bath, Mrs. Gruber got the hiccups. Miss Beryl remembered one other mother's favorite quips, which she now shared with her companion.

"Well," she told Mrs. Gruber.

"Either you told a lie or you 'et' something."

Mrs. Gruber looked guilty and hiccuped again. When they arrived back at Upper Main, Clive Jr. "s car was parked at the curb.

Sully'sex-wife, Vera, stood at the sink in the kitchen other house on Silver Street, feeling, for the umpteenth time today, liquid emotion climb in her throat like illness. From the kitchen window in the gathering dusk she was able to make out a ramshackle pickup truck idling at the curb, its blue exhaust creating a cloud that threatened to take over the entire block.

Apparently whoever owned it had gone into the house across the street, leaving the truck running, its viral pollution not so much dissipating as enshrouding. Vera imagined the cloud of noxious fumes growing until it covered not only the block but the entire town of her childhood, her life, leaving a greasy film on everything. For nearly sixty years she'd lived on Silver Street in the town of North Bath, for the last thirty in this modest, well-tended house with Ralph Mott, the man she'd married soon after divorcing Sully. For the first twenty years of her life she'd lived down the block in a house that, until a decade ago when her father took up residence in the veterans' home, had been as pretty and well-tended as any on the street. Since then the whole neighborhood had slipped into unmistakable decline. Her father's house, the house other happy girlhood, was now rented to its third grubby, loutish welfare family.