The Best Thing for You (35 page)

To leave, I mean.

The smile, the society manner, were gone. She had not – how could she have? – rehearsed this moment. Raw dignity this was. Dignity itself a scab on raw need. The thought pleased Anna, though not the expression of it. She tried to translate it into French, to see if it would sound more at home there.
La dignité est une croûte
–

Unfortunately, Mrs. Pass, the doctor said, taking charge when Anna didn’t respond. Mrs. Pass, there’s been an accident.

For a moment Anna saw Buddy clearly in his mother’s innocent, perplexed face. The man looked out of the woman. Then the ghost vanished as Cora realized what was coming and resumed, quite desperately, her smile.

Her father it was who had arranged the funeral, who met with the lawyers and pulled Cora’s house off the market until the police investigation was concluded, who went through Buddy’s
bills and files and papers, seated grandly at the dead man’s desk and frowning at various shoeboxes she brought down from the bedroom cupboard, filled with receipts and notes and possibly important papers.

I suppose you knew about this, he said, extracting a portfolio of papers from one particular manila envelope.

What’s that?

Insurance.

That’s to do with the house, she said. I think.

He frowned at what he must have supposed was her ignorance, but said nothing. It was as though, in her widowhood, she had become an infant again, helpless and in need of protection, unworthy of even the gentlest reprimand. When the police came to the house to ask more questions, as they did more often now that she was past the first debilitating shock of her husband’s death, he treated them with suspicion and minimal courtesy. He was affronted that they would not leave her alone. This, she saw, was both a rare manifestation of his love for her and a concern for his own name and honour now that she was, again, in his possession. When one young officer, fed up with his bullying, said he would prefer to interview Anna alone, her father threatened to call a lawyer.

Certainly, the officer said.

Still, she could not bring herself to worry. Stephen was the one they needed, and Stephen she felt sure of, though she could not have said exactly why. Her certainty came down to a few remembered images: his hands, trembling on the table in the café; the poem he had felt compelled to read to her, ears pinking predictably, from his school textbook. Also he had learned so much from the movies about chivalry in a fallen world. Once, after they made love, he had wept. What were the police, what was a parent, after that? He was her Alan Ladd, her John Garfield,
her cynic with a cigarette, and underneath her Knight of the Rose.

We shall have to pay a visit to this insurer, her father was saying, as he turned the pages of the policy with a deliberately licked finger. I suppose you will have to accompany me, as the beneficiary.

She watched as he worked his way through Buddy’s papers, touching finger to tongue to page, again and again, as though compelled to leave his own faint spoor on all that had been kept from him, until now.

Her strongest urge to confess came in the elevator on the way up to the insurance agency as her father pulled the wroughtiron cage door closed. The cage was a pattern of spear-like fleurs-de-lys. She wanted to tell him about the repairman, about the image of the stalled elevator car and what she had seen in it, the gilt and the abyss.

Mr. Pass, the tall secretary said before she had a chance to introduce him. Mrs. Pass. She nodded to them both, though her glance returned to Anna. A flickering of interest, appraisal. I’ll just let Mr. Foster know you’re here.

A boy who had been sitting in one corner of the waiting room reading a magazine glanced up at the name. Something about him snagged at her memory. Dark-eyed, pale, with a fine skin and legs like shoots. A private school boy, tie and briefcase and all. Did private school boys need insurance? They had many needs, obviously. He might have been fourteen but already his shoes, for instance, were enormous. Their eyes met briefly, but Anna turned away to fold back the veil pinned to her hat. She still wore her mother’s good black wool suit.

Mrs. Pass? the secretary said, at the same moment as her father’s impatient, Anna.

Ben Foster, the agent said, shaking hands with her father. Turning to her: My condolences for your loss, Mrs. Pass.

She recognized the boy then, in the desk photograph that was so clearly this good, dull man’s cynosure and pride.

There were forms to fill out, a few questions. Her father answered everything. Anna was aware of a formality, a guardedness even, between the two men that had not been there the time she came alone, but her father pulled greyness from the gayest of men, she had seen it often enough. Still, while her father was engaged with the forms – reading every word, in his mulish way, before he would touch the proffered pen – the agent caught her eye and shook his head and said, I know it must be very hard.

Her eyes filled with tears and she permitted herself a single low, aching sound from the back of the throat in assent. Her father glanced up sharply, then returned to his papers.

Wordlessly, the agent pulled a clean handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suit and offered it to her across the desk. When she touched it to her cheeks and nose, it smelled faintly of laundering. In that moment she would have liked for him to understand.

I don’t care about the money, she said.

Quiet, Anna, her father said. We know what’s best for you.

She watched the agent’s dislike for her father give way before the urge to live up to the unexpected thrill of that
we.
She saw he couldn’t help it. He was an animal just like her father, with young of his own.

Usually no payments can be made prior to the conclusion of the police investigation, the agent said. But in this case – with Mrs. Pass being so young – well, I’m going to see what I can do.

Thank you, her father said.

The agent walked out into the waiting room with them. My son, John, he said to Anna.

You see, she thought. The boy shook hands like a proper puppet.

It’s time for a new photograph, she said, eliciting the same frail, sweet smile from both father and son. The boy looked at his enormous feet.

He won’t let me, the agent said.

What are you working on? she asked, for she saw he had swapped the magazine for a notebook, hastily slapped shut when they appeared.

Outrageous question, apparently! The boy flushed.

It’s an opera, isn’t it, John? the agent said encouragingly.

Anna.

Her father stood by the elevator, frowning. There were references in this conversation he didn’t understand. Clearly, Anna knew, he believed his position was being undermined by some prior familiarity with the agent that she had not seen fit to reveal to him.

I’m sorry, the agent said softly, frowning. She thought perhaps he was embarrassed to be standing before her at such a time, a man with a child, when she had neither.

It’s very nice to have met you, she told the boy.

It
is
an opera, he said urgently.

Stephen, that was who he reminded her of. Well, sure. She supposed any boy would do for that. This one was younger by a year or two, but the intensity was there. Perhaps they were all like that, perhaps it was all just puberty ripping through. As she readjusted her veil in the elevator, as the mechanism of winches and pulleys engaged, as they sank past the second floor and came to rest on the ground, she decided she had better check on Stephen just in case.

Twenty-nine!

A pinch-faced woman stepped up to the counter, pinched out a smile, and pointed to a particular piece of fish. Like to like. The butcher held it out on a piece of brown paper, cropped tail limply dangling, for her inspection. She nodded.

Thirty!

A woman Anna’s age – a sapped, milky blonde far gone with child – wanted sausage rolls.

A dozen, did you say?

Two dozen, she whispered, obviously mortified by her own appetites.

Two dozen, the butcher repeated loudly, busying himself. The woman’s maternity dress looked home-sewn, a jersey sack with a poorly finished neck facing, complete with unintentional pleat where the machine had nipped a little extra fabric and she had not known what to do, Anna thought, and so had made the bunny-bright decision to ignore it, to believe it wouldn’t show. She would be the kind who could make a decision about a belief. Obviously the whole wide world was new to this girl and she was coping as best she could.

Two dozen, the butcher said, placing the package on the counter. Thirty-one!

He was brusque but he at least did not slap the food around the way his son did. Usually when there were this many people waiting the son would appear but today the butcher simply worked a little faster. Though of course he was a delivery boy now, no longer his father’s boy.

Thirty-two!

But then she could phone for a delivery, not to her mother’s house of course, but to her own. She went there days now to clean, as she had once cleaned Cora’s house, though nights she still spent in her parents’ house, and would for the foreseeable future, into
the fall at least. There was no way around that. The twenty-first of June it was, only. The butcher severed a portion of ground beef with a paddle and scooped it into the scale. The silver finger on the scale’s clock face swung round and stopped, trembling, then snapped back as the butcher removed the meat and swung an increasingly lazy pendulum arc back and forth across the zero.

Thirty-three!

Thirty-three, Anna said, placing her ticket on the counter.

The eyes and voice, those were the easy conduits. You might have said, indeed, that the son stood clothed in the father, costumed in the older man’s heavier flesh, peering out through his eyes, the particular tenor of his voice warped only slightly deeper by the thicker configuration of mouth, tongue, and throat. He was recognizably there.

As she watched him count and clip off her sausage links she said, You’re busy today.

No rest for the wicked, he replied, not bothering to look up from his work. Thirty-four!

At the bungalow she placed her mesh bag in the icebox without unpacking it and immediately called the grocery store. While she waited she dusted. After about forty minutes came the knock at the front door.

Delivery, Stephen said.

Won’t you come in? Just while I find my purse.

Seven twenty-nine.

He closed the door behind him and stood with a bag in each arm. Baking goods, she had ordered – flour, yeast, vanilla essence. It would all keep. So much for the neighbours.

In the kitchen he began unloading the bags on the table, checking each item off against his list. When she said his name he repeated, Seven twenty-nine. Or I could put it to your account. You’d have to sign here. Do you have an account with us?

Stephen.

You’d have to sign here.

Slowly understanding, she took the pen and signed where he pointed.

We have special delivery rates on Wednesdays, he said. Wednesday is always a good day to shop at Farrell’s Fine Foods.