The Evening Star (59 page)

“You still don’t really know he done it,” Rosie said. “All this suffering could be for nothing.”

“If he hasn’t done it, then where is he?” Aurora wanted to know. “What’s to stop him from driving over here to affirm his innocence?”

“Aurora, he don’t even know he’s being accused,” Rosie said, wondering why she was bothering to argue so hard for Jerry Bruckner, a man she scarcely knew. For all she knew, he was guilty as hell—one indicator pointing in that direction was that Patsy no longer came into the house for a chat when she came to pick Rosie up for exercise class. She now showed up at the last possible moment, got Rosie at the curb, drove like a bat to Bellaire, and said little—all signs of guilt, in Rosie’s view. Once or twice she had been tempted to ask Patsy about it point-blank, but so far she hadn’t.

“He knows he’s accused of
something
” Aurora pointed out. “I was seeing him every morning and now I’m not. A moron would know that suggests that all is not well.”

“I don’t know why I’m carrying on about this,” Rosie said. “Whether he did or whether he didn’t ain’t gonna bring Willie back.”

“Rosie, Willie’s only been gone a few hours,” Aurora said. “He may have just gone on a bender.”

“Naw, he don’t drink, except wine coolers,” Rosie said. “If it’s a bender it’s a dope bender.”

“Do you really want him back, or are you just annoyed that
he managed to wrench himself from your embraces?” Aurora asked.

“What embraces?” Rosie said.

“Well, I suppose I just assumed there were embraces,” Aurora said.

Rosie looked very downcast. “Once, since he got back from Alabama,” she said. “I don’t call that a sex life. I don’t call it nothing.”

“No wonder you don’t want him back,” Aurora said.

“I don’t, particularly,” Rosie admitted. “But I’d still like to know if he’s alive or dead.”

“This news about Melly is very good news,” Aurora said. “If we weren’t such selfish old hags we’d be happy as larks just knowing she’s had this success.”

“I’m happy as a lark for her,” Rosie said. “I just ain’t happy as a lark for me.”

“It’s an upswing, though,” Aurora said. “I can remember whole years when there was not the slightest hint of an upswing. Now if Teddy could stop shaking, and if Tommy could get paroled, we’d be almost out of the woods.

“Also, it would help if we could both find beautiful, distinguished, desirable men to fall in love with,” she added. “It would sure be a big improvement on what we’ve had.”

“I like Theo but I wouldn’t call him beautiful,” Rosie allowed. “What’s the mean brother look like?”

“Identical,” Aurora said. “Identical to Theo, that is. While I was in the process of getting drunk I thought they might be twins.”

The phone began to ring, and it rang several times. Aurora’s hand was a foot from the receiver, but she made no move to pick it up.

“Pick it up, maybe you won a cruise to Turkey,” Rosie begged. It maddened her when Aurora became reluctant to answer the phone. She herself had never ignored a ringing telephone in her life. How could anyone just sit there and pass up a chance on a cruise to Turkey?

“Pick it up!” she pleaded. “It could be Willie!”

“If it’s Willie, then it’s for you, and you should pick it up,” Aurora said. “My own strong suspicion is that it’s Pascal.”

Rosie dashed over and got the phone on the seventh ring.

“Hello, Greenway residence,” she said.

“I’m not coming,” Pascal said. “I don’t want to see Greeks. I lived in Greece, I know what they’re like. Tell her not to use the silver, they’ll put the spoons in their pockets.”

“You tell her,” Rosie said, trying to hand the phone to Aurora, who resolutely refused to take it. When Rosie thrust it at her she batted it away.

“I can hear him, I’m not speaking to him,” Aurora said. “He’s just maligned my guests.”

“She won’t take the phone. If you’re not coming you’re not coming,” Rosie said. “Is your decision final?”

“Final today, final tomorrow, final forever!” Pascal said, so annoyed by Aurora’s refusal to take the phone herself that he immediately hung up. Just as he did, Aurora changed her mind and reached out her hand for the receiver.

“He hung up and I give up,” Rosie said. The tensions of the morning made her feel like crying. Lately, it seemed, tension had become virtually the sole ingredient of her life: tension with Willie, tension with Aurora, tension within herself over her wishy-washy policies in regard to Willie. On the rare occasions when one of her children called, it was always to announce a calamity: a smashed car, a wounded grandchild, a huge hospital bill, a dead pet. None of her daughters ever called unless they were in tears; none of her sons unless they were at a point of despair—any way you colored it, what it added up to was more tension.

Though she knew she was bored with Willie, it hurt a lot that he had just crawled out of bed, put his clothes on, and run off. And now Aurora wouldn’t even talk to Pascal, a nice enough man who was just a little too prone to flying off the handle.

Overwhelmed, engulfed, beleaguered, broken, Rosie thrust the dead receiver in Aurora’s general direction and burst into tears. She ran out of the room, sobbing heavily, and crashed into the vacuum cleaner, which she had foolishly left at the head of the stairs. The vacuum cleaner began to topple down the stairs. Rosie made a grab for the hose but stepped on a little attachment she only used to dust the insides
of lampshades, and fell after the vacuum cleaner head first. She somehow overtook the vacuum and passed it on her fall, so that when she came to rest at the bottom of the stairs, the cleaner caught up with her a second later and walloped her on the back of her head. Then, as she attempted to turn over and get the vacuum off her, the hose caught up with the parent machine and the long, heavy attachment that was on it at the moment whipped around and whacked Rosie hard in the eye, shocking her so that she sat helplessly while the world around her went blank, and she sank into a faint.

Aurora, in the process of calling Pascal back to give him a sound chewing out, heard a horrible crash on the stairs. The sound of crashing went on for some time. She hastily got up and ran to the stairs, only to see Rosie, apparently lifeless, lying at their foot, the vacuum cleaner on top of her.

“Rosie, wake up, are you alive?” Aurora asked tentatively. “However rude I may have been, I still hope you’re alive.”

Rosie neither moved nor spoke. She was out. Aurora managed to recall that only the day before she had knocked
herself out,
and had turned out not to be dead. Perhaps they had both simply slipped into the habit of knocking themselves out. On the other hand, Hector, whom she missed deeply and never more so than at this moment, had passed out quietly in the Pig Stand and had, in fact, been dead. Since that moment when she had looked over to discover Hector dead against her shoulder, not a single thing had been right: Jerry had betrayed her, and she had invited two Greeks to dinner although she didn’t know them and there was a good chance that they would look ridiculous and out of place and not at all appealing to her—
if
Rosie wasn’t dead and the dinner party happened and the Greeks actually showed up.

“Rosie, Rosie!” she said sharply, in her most military voice, before inching carefully downstairs, taking care not to trip on what seemed like miles of vacuum-cleaner cord curled threateningly down the whole length of the stairs.

Rosie didn’t respond—she failed to so much as twitch. Aurora removed the vacuum cleaner, knelt by her maid, and
tried to detect vital signs. She felt Rosie’s forehead—it felt alarmingly cold—then tried to feel her pulse, but couldn’t remember which arm the pulse was supposed to be in. At any rate she located nothing to indicate that Rosie was alive.

Panicked, she ran to the kitchen, thinking first Hector, now Rosie, what if I’ve lost them both? She grabbed the kitchen phone and immediately dialed Jerry: there was a time for pride and a time to put aside pride, and this was the latter. But the phone rang again and again and no one answered. Finally his message machine clicked on—she remembered that he had set it at ten rings so as to discourage all but the most desperate patients. She hung up—what good would it do to leave a message? Fortunately she had taped the name and number of the Petrakis brothers’ bar on her refrigerator door for easy reference. Aurora dialed it rapidly while in her panic, missed a few digits or transposed them, got a wrong number, and woke up a woman who said, “I’ll kill you if this is you!” Aurora hung up, redialed more carefully, and could almost have fainted with relief at hearing Theo’s voice.

“Theo, it’s urgent, Rosie may have killed herself, would you and Vassily mind coming to dinner a few hours early?” she asked.

“Why, you having the funeral tonight?” Theo asked. He had been thinking about the dinner party so much that he had become nervous, and when he was nervous he was apt to become a little sarcastic.

“Of course not—I need you to help me determine if she’s alive,” Aurora said.

“Her maid may be dead,” Theo said to his brother. “You want to go over with me now?”

“Why?” Vassily asked.

“To see the body, I guess,” Theo said, covering the receiver with his palm.

“I don’t work for no ambulance company,” Vassily reminded him. “Tell her to call an ambulance company if she want someone to examine the body. Does this mean the dinner’s off?” he asked, annoyed. Though Vassily didn’t much like Aurora, he did like free meals. He had had it in mind
that Aurora might make veal franchise, one of his favorite dishes. Now it sounded to him like the dinner was off just as he had been looking forward to some mouth-watering veal française.

“Not necessarily,” Theo said. “I don’t know what happened yet.”

“So why are you asking me? I don’t know what happened neither,” Vassily told him.

“What was the cause of her demise, if she demised?” Theo asked Aurora.

“Falling downstairs—I would appreciate it if you’d hurry on over,” Aurora said.

“Uh-oh,” Theo said. “That’s what killed old Grandpa Paki. He fell down almost a hundred steps and died that night.”

“Goodness, you must have had a large house if it had a hundred steps available for someone to fall down,” Aurora said, just as Rosie came walking into the kitchen. Though upright, and clearly alive, she was rather unsteady on her pins.

“It wasn’t a house, it was an island,” Theo said. “There was a hundred steps going down to the water and Grandpa Paki fell all the way down them.”

“Oh, false alarm, here’s Rosie, she’s apparently not dead,” Aurora said, losing all interest in the fate of Grandpa Paki.

“She ain’t dead, the dinner’s on,” Theo said to Vassily.

“Boy, am I gonna have a shiner,” Rosie said, trying to tug an ice tray out of the refrigerator. “I ain’t been hit in the eye that hard since Royce clobbered me that time I tried to stab him.”

Despite her efforts, the ice tray wouldn’t come out—it was frozen to its place.

“Sit down, sit down, I’ll get you some ice,” Aurora said. “I don’t think you should move around too much—you may be injured internally.”

“I am injured internally—Willie injured me internally by running off,” Rosie said. Instead of obeying her boss’s order not to move around, she demonstrated why she was the star
of her exercise class by doing a back bend over the sink and letting a stream of cold water pour straight down on her injured eye.

“She’s amazing—moments ago she was so injured I took her for dead, and now she’s doing gymnastics of the sort no sane person would attempt,” Aurora told Theo.

“I guess the crisis is over, but if you need help with the veal française, Vassily and I could come a little early,” Theo said. He felt rather proud of the tactful way he had let Aurora know what his brother expected to be fed.

“We’re not having veal française, we’ve having agneau à la grecque,” Aurora corrected. “What makes you think I would serve two lively men a boring dish such as veal française?”

“Nothing makes me think it, it’s just something Vassily had his heart set on,” Theo said, winking at his brother.

“Well, let him reset his heart, and you can reset your clock, if it isn’t set correctly,” Aurora said. “Rosie and I are having a taxing day and we expect you promptly at eight.

“Almost nothing annoys me more than a man who presumes to tell me what to cook,” Aurora said to Rosie, after hanging up. “If you start letting them tell you what to cook, the next thing you know they’ll be telling you
how
to cook,” she went on. “They’ll be telling you to leave out the onions just when you should be putting in the onions. I find it very vexing.”

“I don’t think it’s no worse than falling downstairs and knocking yourself out with your own vacuum cleaner,” Rosie said. The faucet was still pouring water on her eye. Some of it splashed in her mouth as she was speaking, causing her to splutter. She kept her eye directly under the faucet, though—if she didn’t cool down her eye, she knew she could expect to look horrible for a week.

“I said I’d get you some ice,” Aurora said.

“Yeah, but where is it?” Rosie asked.

Aurora got up, and with a mighty yank managed to break the frozen tray loose from its moorings.

“It’s here, and I wouldn’t mind hitting a Greek with it,” she said.

Across town in the salty breeze wafting off the Ship Channel, Theo looked at Vassily and shook his head.

“No veal française,” he said. “We’re having Greek food.”

“Greek food?” Vassily said. “What does she know about Greek food?”

“I guess we’ll find out,” Theo said.

“I don’t see why you like her, she’s fat and bossy,” Vassily said.

“What do you think your wife is—Angela?” Theo asked.

Vassily ignored the comment about his wife, who was undeniably fat and bossy, as well as being in the process of divorcing him. His mind was on the food issue. It was annoying that Theo’s new River Oaks girlfriend had decided to feed them exactly the kind of food they could eat at home.

“It’s an insult,” he commented. “She must think we’re too dumb to eat anything but feta cheese and little lambs.”