Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498) (19 page)

BOOK: Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498)
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“Ho!” my father exploded, and we all burst out laughing.

We laughed until Ben lay across the table, heaving, and my father held his head in his hands. I doubled up on my chair, my knees pressed into my chest as my laughter became painful.

Then, all at once, though the pain didn't stop, I wasn't laughing anymore. I was crying. “But Fred
isn't
going to die, is he?” I sobbed.

“No,” my father consoled me, not laughing anymore either. “Not for many years, I hope—if he spends them quietly at Miss Hooks's.”

There seemed no reason to cry, and nothing we could say. Though we were trying, none of us could imagine life without Fred.

CHAPTER EIGHT:
PASSAGE

The maid from the big house came in to clean ours and cook our meals during what felt like weeks that Fred was in the hospital. Her food was too neat and skimpy compared to his. We felt that our eating inflicted a willful injustice on the woman.

Fred was released—thinner, paler, resigned to the future the doctor decreed for him.

My father announced plans in a charged, determined manner. He could no longer take his time with individual clients. He wanted to be available to as many of them as possible at the same time. New York was the capital of the art objects world—he knew many people there—he didn't know why we hadn't gone there to live years before. On the telephone, he bought a house overlooking the Hudson River, forty miles north of the city.

He and Ben, and he and Fred had nagging arguments about the car. Ben wanted to take Fred's place at the wheel for the trip. Fred wanted to take his own place. And my father said he'd sooner learn to drive himself in the next few days than trust either one of them to get us and his velvet-lined satchel to New York.

Fred gave in, Ben fumed, and my father donated the old Buick to his friends in the big house—to use, sell, or junk—and he bought train tickets. The funny thing was, we all really wanted to fly, but we knew we'd have more time together on the train.

Once again, everything in the house was packed. But there was a difference this time that disturbed my usual detached equanimity about the proceedings: all Fred's belongings, including his old leather briefcase and its contents, were going with him on the train, and from it to a ship, to cross the Atlantic. And he wouldn't be with us at the new house to oversee the unpacking of everything else.

On the way to the railroad station, packed into a taxi, we passed Arthur Frith's house. His two elderly supervisors must have come home, for he was sweeping the flagstone path in front, the one that had served as my escape route the night of Fred's, and my, attacks. Arthur glanced up and, involuntarily, I waved to him. He did not wave back.

My glance shifted to Fred, in front with the driver, and I burst into tears. “I don't know why…don't know how…it'll be…” I whispered helplessly to my father.

“No one knows how life will be,” he said. And, as Ben turned around inquisitively from the jump seat, “There's no rehearsal for living—or leaving.”

CHAPTER NINE:
WINDING HILL

When anyone asks me where I'm from, to save time, and because we lived there the longest, I say Winding Hill. Only once has anyone asked me what it was like there—a dreamy taxi driver in Milan when I was in my late twenties. To save time, again, since I was in a hurry to get to whatever was next—in that instance, the airport—I quipped that it was just a really old river town. “Ah,” he said, “like Firenze.”

Winding Hill was nothing like Firenze. There were differences—differences between Winding Hill and all the other places we'd lived. In ways, Winding Hill was the queerest, among civic anomalies. It was a carefully preserved residential oasis sprawling across the hills between two small, heavily industrial towns to its north and south. From almost any acre of it, you could see the river; the richer the householder, the higher on a hill was his house, and the more of the river he could see.

It was a worried community. The citizens worried about real estate developers attempting to buy large tracts from the estates of deceased Winding Hillers and putting up twenty-of-a-kind contemporary structures among the half-century-old houses. They worried about getting to the train to Manhattan in the mornings; morose husbands were sped to the station by tense-faced wives in a matinal ritual that made narrow, treacherous Winding Hill Road look like a speedway from its top to its bottom where it merged into the station platform at the river's edge.

They worried about what they called the “new people”—residents of fewer than ten years, some of whom had built houses with inch-thick fieldstone facades meant to resemble the older fortress-like houses, and others who bought old places through the executors of former occupants' estates. Those houses were still referred to by the names of the original owners.

We had the “Welch” house, which we rechristened the “noisy” house. Our name was a triumph of accuracy. Fifteen minutes after we arrived, we understood why, though it had been on the market for several years, no prospective buyer who had seen it had purchased it until my father told a realtor on the telephone that he'd take it, sight unseen—and, as it happened, unheard—provided we could move in immediately.

It was a stark, square, white stone building with twenty rooms—ten huge and ten tiny—set on a plateau halfway up Winding Hill Road, like an enormous headstone. Happily, its neighbors were all more than three acres removed. For there wasn't a faucet one could turn on without an ear-shattering response from the innards. A quarter- turn brought a harsh, low growl accompanied by a shrill wheeze that went up and up until its hissing decibels mercifully escaped the human ear. A full revolution provoked a violent crescendoing choking, clanging, and beating coughing spell, suggestive of a pair of armies clashing in medieval warfare. The flush of a toilet produced an even fiercer riot; it made one imagine that the implacable granite exterior walls were about to collapse. All the doors scraped or wheezed or whistled or squeaked; the kitchen's outside screen door was an odd one—it howled and squealed pathetically on the out-swing, but closed without so much as a whisper.

Rarely was there a quiet moment once we moved in, and the series of cleaning women and part-time cooks who passed in and out within the space of two weeks was dizzying. These people were distinctly
individual souls with only one characteristic in common: they were all, for different reasons, unqualified to fill Fred's shoes. My father began to appreciate Fred's abilities more than he ever had before.

One woman, Tenny, had a mental block against laundry. She disappeared after my father found all of his shirts, abandoned in a heap, tied together by one shirt's sleeves and apparently hurled down the steps to the dank, dark cellar. Agnes was a stickler for routine; for her three-day tenure, she put dinner on the table at seven o'clock sharp whether my father was ready to eat or not. Mrs. Saalig was a brooding type who insisted upon being called Mrs. Saalig, which would have been quite all right except that she also insisted upon calling my father Walter and making the living room her salon in which she entertained him during her two days of service while the dinners burned. Mrs. Bellamy, who came and left just as swiftly, enjoyed an austere prejudice against food in general. Fresh fruit and vegetables were “contaminated,” fowl and desserts were too fattening. Acceptable (to us) portions of anything acceptable (to her) were bad for the stomach juices.

At this same time, my father and I took turns answering Aunt Catherine's sudden and uncustomary flurry of correspondence. Ben disqualified himself from this duty by insisting he might say the wrong thing to her. Before we left Chicago, my father had informed her of Fred's attack and departure, and her first letter was waiting for us when we arrived in Winding Hill. In increasingly hysterical handwriting, she explained that she only wished she were “free to come keep house for you all, now that you don't have somebody to keep things going right the way they should be for growing youngsters anymore.” This was followed the next week by a second letter, apparently mailed the day after the first, nearly screaming her remorse at our dire situation. Since my father had responded to the first letter, at my turn, I filled three pages, in larger than my normal handwriting,
by telling her not to worry, I
loved
Winding Hill, (I didn't dislike it as I had our Chicago suburb, so that didn't seem too sizable an exaggeration), that I had made new friends again, (not really an
“L-I-E”
because school was to start in a few weeks, and I would have the opportunity to do so), and Tenny and Agnes and Mrs. Saalig and Mrs. Bellamy took up a page and a half. I was just being informative, but it seems my descriptions fanned Aunt Catherine's fears even more, and her third response was a long telegram announcing that if there was one thing about her that was a true fact, it was that she knew where her duty lay, she had always been the more responsible of Jen and herself, and that she would arrive the following Thursday to help set our new house in order.

I hadn't realized the change that had come over my father until he greeted this news with, “Good. Catherine has better sense than I do about some things.”

“Aunt
Catherine
?” Ben said.

“Yes, and don't you forget it.”

In the following days, I began to watch him, pay closer attention to the things he was doing, as if he were a puzzle I'd thought I'd known how to solve but suddenly found was still perplexing.

Most of the time, he wore the same sullen look as the men being hurtled to the eight twenty-six each morning. He spent whole mornings cleaning his desk. In a curt, thoroughly executive manner, he called an employment agency and commanded they supply yet another household worker—a man this time, who could oversee all his affairs, one who preferably didn't talk too much, and who could hire capable people for the various chores who didn't talk too much either. He didn't care what he'd have to pay him.

Hubert Peterman, former manager of a country club dining room, having struck out and failed in his own catering service, arrived. There was never a less aggressive, more inaudible, man who wasn't
dead. Hubert was a widower of fifteen years, who was content to act out the stereotype fixed in his mind of what sort of person a widower should be. He came equipped with an old photograph album which he told me was his diversion in the evenings, when he was used to “sitting and reminiscing.” By his second day, he had hired a maid away from the club who, in a silent trance of consideration for his widowerhood, did our cleaning and laundry. He did the ordering by telephone, softly, and cooked, if uninspiredly, to my father's order of “use lots of butter, and there's hardly anything we don't like.”

Except for the paintings and tapestries that hung on most of the walls, most of the odds and ends of my father's collection began to disappear from sight. My father thought Hubert ideal for us, and quickly began to disappear into long silences very like his. He didn't seem to look forward to anything except Aunt Catherine's visit.

Once, Ben asked him for the third time if he could try out his new interpretation of Hamlet on him, and my father answered listlessly, “All right. But if it's as tumultuous as I think it's going to be, don't practice it when Catherine comes. You know Shakespeare isn't her greatest interest.”

Ben paused. “When are you going to look up all the people you know here?” Usually by this time, three-and-a-half weeks after moving into a new residence, he was disappearing daily for meetings with people we never met.

“When we're settled.”

“He's getting creepy,” Ben said to me privately.

“Oh, I don't know.” I didn't like having to agree with him.

“Then why is he so glad Aunt Catherine is coming? And this guy Hubert is like a ghost. I'll be glad when school starts.”

“Me, too. Ben, I wish Fred was here.”

“Don't say that to
him
.”

The next morning, my father went out to the airport to meet Aunt
Catherine and escort her back. “Remember, I want you to do everything you can to please her,” he warned us on his way out. “You don't see your aunt very often.”

After he left, Ben gave orders. No one was to turn on a faucet or flush a toilet for the first half hour she was here.

“What happens if she has to go to the bathroom?” I said.

“You leave the room with her and break the news to her gently beforehand.”

We didn't know why we were doing it, but following my father's lead, from the moment of her arrival early that afternoon, we paid court to Aunt Catherine. In response, she blossomed with good cheer and hearty conversation, told us seemingly endless anecdotes of doings in the retail drugstore business and the inside information about the rummage sale her church's Ladies' Guild held recently. She said she'd never seen a house of ours look neater and gave effusive credit to my father's good judgment in engaging Hubert. She said “that it
was
a shame about Alfred.”

“Alfred?” we all said at once.

“Dear me! Fred, of course! It's just that every time I think the name Fred, I think of our Alfred Judd at home. He's always called Fred too, but
I've
always called him by his real name, Alfred.”

My father nodded understandingly. I couldn't understand why her mistake didn't pierce his heart as it did mine. Fred was Fred, and how could anyone refer to him as Alfred? Who knows where he even was now, out in the middle of an ocean on a slow ship to a place I'd only read about in books! How dare she call him Alfred? But my father didn't seem the least wounded, not even pricked.

“Catherine, how long can you stay?” he said. “We have many things to talk about.”

She said she could stay five days, and during those days, my father didn't deviate from the “things” he wanted to discuss. There was
actually only one—the eventuality of his own death. His remarks and questions, and certainly their answers, demanded that Ben and I interrupt at times, but he wouldn't permit it. We listened to my father and Aunt Catherine's incessant conversations, staggered by the change in his attitude.

BOOK: Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498)
5.56Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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