Nobody's Fool (3 page)

He would tell her what to do and why, and she would listen politely for as long as it took before declining to follow his advice. In her opinion Clive Jr. was full of cockamamie schemes, and he treated each as if its origin were the burning bush and not his own fevered brain.

"Ma," he often said, on those occasions when she emphatically declined to follow his advice, "it's almost as if you didn't trust me."

"I don't trust you," Miss Beryl said aloud, addressing her son's photo on the television, then adding, to her husband, "I'm sorry, but I can't help it. I don't trust him. Ed understands, don't you, Ed." Clive Sr. just smiled back, a tad ruefully, it seemed to her.

Since his death he'd increasingly taken their son's side in matters of conflict.

"Trust him. Beryl," he whispered to her now, his voice confidential, as if he feared that Driver Ed might overhear.

"He's our son. He's the star of your firmament now."

"I'm working on it," Miss Beryl assured her husband, and in fact, she was.

She'd loaned Clive Jr.

money twice during the last five years and not even asked him what he intended to do with it. Five thousand dollars the first time. Ten thousand the second. Amounts she would not be pleased to lose but which, truth be told, she could afford to lose. But both times Clive Jr. had paid her back when he said he would, and Miss Beryl, on the lookout for a reason not to trust her son, discovered that she was mildly disappointed to have the money back in her own possession. In fact, she was unable to fend off a particularly shameful suspicion--that Clive Jr. had not needed the money at all, that he'd borrowed it to demonstrate to her that he was trustworthy.

She even began to suspect that what he must be after was not part of what would be his soon enough, but rather control of the whole. But to what end?

Miss Beryl had to admit that the logic of her suspicions was flawed.

After all, her money, the house on Upper Main IS and its considerable contents, everything would belong to Clive Jr. eventually, when, as he put it, "the time came."

One of the things that drove her son to distraction, Miss Beryl suspected, was not knowing how much "everything" amounted to. There was the house, of course, and the ten thousand dollars he knew his mother had because she'd loaned it to him. But how much more? It was this information about her finances that Miss Beryl did not trust her son with. She had an accountant in Schuyler Springs do her taxes each year, and she instructed him to surrender no information about her affairs to Clive Jr. For legal advice, she dealt with a local attorney named Abraham Wirfly, whom her son continued to warn her against as an incompetent and a drunkard. Miss Beryl was not unaware of Mr.

Wirfly's shortcomings, but she steadfastly maintained that he was not so much incompetent as unambitious, a character trait almost impossible to find in a lawyer. More important, she considered the man to be absolutely loyal, and when he promised to divulge nothing of her financial and legal affairs to Clive Jr. " she believed him. Without ever saying so, Abraham Wirfly seemed also to entertain reservations about Clive Jr." and so Miss Beryl continued to trust him. Clive Jr."

s growing exasperation was testimony to her excellent judgment.

"Ma," he pleaded pitifully, pacing up and down the length of her front room, "how can I help you protect your assets if you won't let me? What's going to happen if you get sick? Do you want the hospital to take everything?

Is that your plan? To have a stroke and let some hospital take their thousand a day until it's all gone and you're destitute? " The logic other son's concern was inescapable, his argument consistent, yet despite this.

Miss Beryl could not shed the feeling that Clive Jr. had a hidden agenda.

She knew no more about his personal finances than he knew about hers, but she suspected that he was well on his way to becoming a wealthy man. She knew too that despite his realtor's eye, he had no interest in the house, that if he were to inherit it tomorrow, he'd sell it the day after. He'd recently purchased a luxury town home at the new Schuyler Springs Country Club between North Bath and Schuyler Springs.

The house on Upper Main might bring a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, maybe more, and this was nothing to sneeze at, even if Clive Jr. didn't " need" the money. Yet she was unable to accept at face value that this was her son's design. There was something about the way his eye roved uncomfortably from corner to corner of each room, as if in search of spirit trails, that convinced Miss Beryl he was seeing something she couldn't see, and until she discovered what it was, she had no intention of trusting him folly. Outside Miss Beryl's front window a thick clump of snow fell noiselessly from an unseen branch.

There was a lot of it, but the snow wouldn't stay. Despite appearances, this wasn't real winter. Not yet. Still, Miss Beryl went out into the back hall and located the snow shovel where she had stored it beneath the stairs last April and leaned it up against the door where even Sully couldn't fail to see it when he left. Back inside, she became aware of a distant buzzing which meant that her tenant's alarm had gone off.

Since injuring his knee. Sully slept even less than Miss Beryl, who got by on five hours a night, along with the three or four fifteen-minute naps she adamantly refused to admit taking throughout the day. Sully woke up several times each night. Miss Beryl heard him pad across his bedroom floor above her own and into the bathroom, where he would patiently wait to urinate. Old houses surrendered a great many auditory secrets, and Miss Beryl knew, for instance, that Sully had recently taken to sitting on the commode, which creaked beneath him, to await his water. Sometimes, to judge from the time it took him to return to bed, he fell asleep there. Either that or he was having prostate problems. Miss Beryl made a mental note to share with Sully one of the ditties of her childhood: Old Mrs. Jones had diabetes Not a drop she couldn't pee She took two bottles QfLydia Pinkham's And they piped her to the sea. Miss Beryl wondered if Sully would be amused.

That probably depended on whether he knew what Lydia Pinkham's was.

One of the problems of being eighty was that you built up a pretty impressive store of allusions. Other people didn't follow them, and they made it clear that this was your fault. Somewhere along the line, about the time America was being colonized, Miss Beryl suspected, the knowledge of old people had gotten discounted until now it was worth what the little boy shot at. Had Miss Beryl been a younger woman, it might have made an interesting project to trace the evolution of conventional wisdom on this point. Somehow old people, once the revered repositories of the culture's history and values, had become dusty museums of arcane and worthless information. No matter.

She'd share the jingle with Sully anyway. He could stand a little poetry in his life.

Upstairs, the alarm clock continued to buzz. According to Sully, the only deep sleep he got any more was during the hour or so before his alarm went off. He'd recently purchased a new alarm clock because he kept sleeping through the old one. Also the new one. The first time Mrs. Beryl had heard that strange, faraway buzzing, she'd mistakenly concluded that the end was near. She'd read somewhere that the human brain was little more than a maze of electrical impulses, firing dutifully inside the skull, and the buzzing, she concluded, must be some sort of malfunction. The fact that the buzzing occurred at the same time every morning did not immediately tip her off, as it should have, that it was external to herself. She'd assumed that the time Clive Jr. was always alluding to had indeed come. It was the abrupt cessation of the buzzing, always followed immediately by the thud of Sully's heavy feet hitting the bedroom floor, that finally allowed Miss Beryl to solve the mystery, for which she was grateful, because, having solved it, she could stop worrying and shaking her head in search of the electrical short and giving herself headaches. Perhaps because of her original misdiagnosis, the distant buzzing of Sully's alarm was still mildly disconcerting, so she did this morning what she did most mornings. She went first to the kitchen for the broom, then to her bedroom, where she gave the ceiling a good sharp thump or two with the broom handle, stopping when she heard her tenant grunt awake, snorting loudly and confused. She doubted Sully was aware of what really woke him so many mornings, that it was not the new alarm.

Perhaps, Miss Beryl conceded, her son was right about giving Sully the boot.

He was a careless man, there was no denying it. He was careless with cigarettes, careless, without ever meaning to be, about people and circumstances. And therefore dangerous. Maybe, it occurred to Miss Beryl as she returned to her front window and stared up into the network of black limbs, Sully was the metaphorical branch that would fall on her from above.

Part of getting old, she knew, was becoming unsure. For longer than any other widowed neighbors. Miss Beryl had staved off the ravages of uncertainty by remaining intellectually challenged and alert. So far she'd been able to keep faith in her own judgment, in part by rigorously questioning the judgment of others.

Having Clive Jr. around helped in this regard, and Miss Beryl had always told herself that when her son's advice started making sense to her, then she'd know she was slipping. Perhaps her fearing Clive Jr.

"s wisdom on the subject of Sully was the beginning. But she'd not concede quite yet, she decided. In several important respects Sully was an important ally, just as he had been a month ago when she'd taken a tumble and sprained her wrist painfully. Fearing it might be It broken, she'd had Sully drive her to the hospital in Schuylcr Springs, where the wrist had been X-rayed and taped. The whole episode had taken no more than two hours, and she'd been sent home with a prescription for Tylenol 3 painkillers.

She'd taken only two of the pills because they made her drowsy and she didn't mind the pain once she knew what it was. As soon as she'd learned the wrist wasn't fractured, she felt better, and the next day she made a gift of the remaining Tyienols to Sully, who since his injury was always in the market for pain pills. Sully could be trusted, she knew, to keep her secret. She wished the same could be said for Mrs. Gruber, whom Clive Jr. used. Miss Beryl suspected, to check up on her. Mrs. Gruber denied this, of course, but then she would, having been forbidden by her friend to communicate any information of a personal nature to Clive Jr. But Miss Beryl was pretty sure Mrs. Gruber was a snitch just the same. Clive Jr. could be ingratiating, and one of Mrs. Gruber's chief enjoyments in life was discussing other people's illnesses and accidents. Miss Beryl doubted that her friend could resist an insidious sweet-talker like Clive Jr.

Still at the front window.

Miss Beryl peered for a long time through the blinds and up the street in the direction of Mrs. Gruber's house. Quarter to seven. The street was still silent, the new blanket of snow spoiled by just the one set of dark tire tracks. Miss Beryl sighed and stared up into the web of tree limbs, starkly black against the white morning sky. " Fall," she said, pleased and heartened as she always was by the sound other own decisive voice. " Sec if I care. "

" You probably wouldn't care if I fell," said a voice behind her.

" I bet you'd laugh, in fact. " Miss Beryl had been so preoccupied with her thoughts, she had not heard her living room door open or her tenant enter.

It seemed only a few seconds before that she'd heard him snort awake in the upstairs bedroom, surety not enough time to rise, dress, do all the early morning things a civilized person had to do. But of course men were strange creatures and not, strictly speaking, civilized at all, most of them. The one she saw standing before her in his stocking feet, work boots dangling from their leather laces, had no doubt simply rolled out of bed and into his clothes. She doubted he wore pajamas, probably slept in his shorts the way Clive Sr. had, then grabbed the first pair of trousers he saw, the ones draped across a chair or over the bottom of the bed. Knowing Sully, he probably slept in his socks to save time.

NOBODY'S FOOL 19

Not that her tenant was much worse than most men. He had the laborer's habit of bathing after his day's work was done instead of in the morning, which meant that when he awoke he had only two immediate needs--to relieve himself and to locate a cup of coffee. In Sully's case the coffee was two blocks away at Hattie's Lunch, and he often arrived there before he was completely awake. He left his work boots downstairs in the hall by the back door. For some reason he liked to put them on in Miss Beryl's downstairs flat rather than his own. The boots always left a dirty trail, in winter a muddy print on the hardwood floor, in summer a dry cluster of tiny pebbles which Miss Beryl would sweep into a dustpan when he'd left. Men in general. Miss Beryl had observed, seldom took note of what they trailed behind them, but Sully was particularly oblivious, his wake particularly messy.

Still, Miss Beryl wouldn't have given a nickel for a fastidious man, and she didn't mind cleaning up after Sully each morning. He provided her a small task, and her days had few enough of these.

"Lordy," Miss Beryl said.

"Sneak up on an old woman."

"I thought you were talking to me, Mrs. Peoples," Sully told her. He was the only person she knew who called her "missus," and the gesture reserved for him a special place in Miss Beryl's heart.

"I just thought I'd stop in to make sure you didn't die in your sleep."

"Not yet," she told him.