Werewolves in Their Youth (14 page)

She stared at him, mouth open, eyes looking huge and crooked behind her half-inch lenses. She had on her blue summer housecoat and slippers. Her makeup, normally thickly applied, and her hair, normally arranged into a nice, round old-lady ’do, were uneven and haphazard. Neither Oriole nor he was looking too sharp, then, on this hot summer day. She surveyed him carefully, from his high forehead to his worn-heeled shoes, finally settling, it seemed, on the trim calfskin briefcase in his hand as the key to the mystery of his identity.

“I’m sorry, young man,” she said, her voice pleasant but cool and slightly wheezy, as though it were being produced by a ripped concertina. “I mustn’t talk to salesmen. My husband doesn’t approve of it one bit.”

“Gam, it’s
Eddie.
” Eddie set down the briefcase. He swallowed. “
Dolores’s
Eddie.”

“Oh, my.” Oriole looked worried. She knew that she ought to recognize him. She stroked the soft white down on her chin and gave it another try. “Did you call me?” she said.

“No, I’m sorry, Gam, I didn’t. I’m just passing through Portland and I thought I’d stop by.”

“Yes,” she said, nodding her heavy head, her eyebrows knit, her watery blue eyes studying his face. “Well, isn’t this a nice surprise!” She closed the door to undo the chain, then opened it wide to him. “Won’t you come in?” He could see she still had no idea who he was. “And to think that I was just thinking of you, too! How do you like that?”

“Hi, Gam,” said Eddie, putting his arms around the old woman and kissing her cheek. Raised by her German parents on a farm outside Davenport at the beginning of the century, Oriole was a big, broad-backed woman, ample and plain and quadrangular as the state of Iowa itself. Hugging her, Eddie felt comforted, as by the charitable gaze of a cow. He picked up the briefcase and followed her into the apartment, a suite of four rooms with two baths, a tiny kitchen, and a view from two sides of roofs and bridges, the dull, shining band of the river, and, on this hot, clear summer afternoon, the distant white ghost of Mt. Hood. Oriole passed most of her time in the small, bright room just off the entryway, sitting in a green chintz chair, with her feet propped up on a green chintz hassock, reading large-print editions of the novels of Barbara Cartland, whom she somewhat resembled, solving word-search puzzles, and spying on the next-door neighbors through a pair of Zeiss binoculars nearly as old as she was—Eddie thought she must be ninety—brought back from the Great War by Dolores’s grandfather, Horace. The Farnham was built on the plan of a Greek cross, and Oriole, whose apartment was in the eastern arm, had only to gaze along an angle reaching some twenty feet to the northwest to see into the windows of 9-F. There was never much to see—the occupants were a Persian cat and a couple of maiden sisters named Stark who kept their blinds drawn most of the time and whose chief occupations seemed to be drinking tea and reading religious magazines—but Oriole never stopped hoping, and once she had been fortunate enough to witness a brief foray by the housebound cat out onto the narrow window ledge, and the sisterly panic that ensued. It was a momentous event that Oriole rarely neglected to renarrate to visitors.

“Why don’t you put your darling little suitcase in the guest room?” she said to Eddie now, patting at the wispy cloud of her hair, tugging at the collar of her housecoat. “I’m just going to get dressed.” She chuckled. “You must think I’m awfully lazy! I guess I just lost track of the time this morning. What time is it?”

Eddie blushed for her sake and pretended to look at his watch. “It’s still early,” he said. “But, Gam, I’m afraid I’m not staying. I only—”

“I’ll bring you some clean towels,” said Oriole, steering herself into her bedroom. “I know we’ll have
such
a nice time.”

Eddie shrugged, set down his burden, and sank onto a cheap vinyl-and-chrome kitchen chair, beside a scarred old walnut table whose matching chairs and sideboard had long since disappeared. Besides the well-worn armchair and hassock, the only other furniture in this room, which served as Oriole’s parlor, study, and dining room, was an overlarge piece of Empire cabinetry that held her romance novels, Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses, and a heartbreakingly beautiful photograph of a homely sixteen-year-old debutante Dolores, with a snaggled smile, being devoured by a vast pink chiffon ball gown. There was a formal living room, in which a few other relics of Oriole’s life—a scrollworked Victorian chesterfield, a gilt mirror, some chairs with feet carved into lions’ heads—had been set on display, but she rarely used it, preferring to entertain guests from the lumbar comfort of her green chintz armchair. All the rest of her furniture—and, according to the dentally sound but no less heartbreaking woman who’d emerged from the clutches of that vast pink dress, there had been rooms and rooms of it—had been sold, along with the big house on Alameda Street which Eddie had never seen, or dispersed among Oriole’s eventual heirs, or, as Oriole always claimed, stolen, by the gang of crooked servants, nurses, and kleptomaniacal beings by whom the old lady imagined herself to be plagued. “There!” said Oriole, emerging from her bedroom in a loose sleeveless dress, belted at the waist and patterned with pink daisies, purple irises, red carnations, and gold fleurs-de-lis against a background of green lattice. Eddie wondered if such dresses were, for old ladies, the fashion equivalent of large-print books and shouted conversations. “That’s much better. It’s awfully warm today.”

“It is hot,” said Eddie. It was stuffy, as well, and there was a faint sweet tang from the kitchen trash. Despite the heat of the afternoon, none of the windows were open, and the apartment felt even more close and airless than the elevator. “You look very nice.”

“Thank you.” She made her way over to her green chair and lowered herself slowly and with an air of deep satisfaction into it. She and Eddie looked at each other, smiling across the gap of years and nonblood relationship and a fundamental lack of acquaintance. It occurred to Eddie, for the first time, that he and Mrs. Box were nothing to each other. Eddie mopped his forehead. Oriole tapped her knobby fingers on the arm of her chair and studied him, eyes screwed, head cocked to one side.

“Do I know you from Davenport?” she said at last.

“No, Gam,” said Eddie. “I’ve never been to Davenport. You know me from here in Portland. From your granddaughter. Dolores?”

“Of course,” said Oriole. She nodded. “I like her.”

“So do I,” said Eddie.

“Did you know my husband?”

“No, I didn’t, Gam. But I know what a nice man he was.” In point of fact, old Horace Box, an executive with the Great Northern Railroad who died when Dolores was a little girl, had always been described to Eddie as a formidable person—a strikebuster, a perfectionist. His photograph looked out from the wall above Oriole’s head—square jaw, rimless spectacles, brilliantined hair, an expression of unsurprised disappointment.

“Oh, he was a wonderful man,” said Oriole. “I miss him to this day.”

“I know you do.”

“You know,” she said, lowering her voice as though about to impart a confidence. She fingered a gold chain that hung amid the satiny pleats of her throat—an ornate, inch-thick, and not particularly attractive piece of jewelry, a sort of gnarled golden tree branch across which crawled beetle-size diamonds surrounded by swarms of emerald-chip aphids. “This beautiful necklace he gave me never leaves my body.”

“Wow,” said Eddie. Oriole had revealed the secret of her necklace to him many times in the past, in exactly these terms, following the script of the tour she conducted for visitors through a fragmentary scale model of her vanished life. But this time, as he watched her run her swollen fingers along the twisted branch that Horace Box had presented her with on the occasion of their fiftieth anniversary, Eddie was moved, and somehow disturbed, by the enduring habit of her grief. For twenty-two years the necklace had not left her withered throat except on two calamitous and oft-narrated occasions, when the clasp had given way—once on the beach at Gearhart, and once as she bent to draw a bath.

“I sleep with it on, you know,” she said. “Though at times it lies quite heavy on my windpipe.”

“Seventy-two years,” said Eddie, enviously, too softly for Oriole to hear. He and Dolores had been married thirty-one months before parting. There had been an extramarital kiss, entrepreneurial disaster, a miscarried baby, sexual malaise, and then very soon they had been forced to confront the failure of an expedition for which they had set out remarkably ill-equipped, like a couple of trans-Arctic travelers who through lack of preparation find themselves stranded and are forced to eat their dogs. Eddie had known for a long time—since his wedding day—that it was not a strong marriage, but now, for the first time, it occurred to him that this was because he and Dolores were not strong people; they had not been able to bear the weight of married love upon their windpipes.

The principal reason for his divorce, Eddie believed, was that throughout their marriage he had foolishly devoted most of his time to the development of an ill-starred device called the Stylevision. This was to be a combination of video camera, liquid-crystal screen, keyboard, hard-wired image-manipulating software, and a six-thousand-entry fashion-eyewear database that would enable the optical consumer to “try on” six thousand different pairs of eyeglasses without moving a muscle. “A face processor,” Dolores had half derisively called it. He had sunk tens of thousands of dollars, not primarily his own, into the device, only to see his plans founder on the unfortunate tendency of the Stylevision’s screen to display, in addition to the face and prospective spectacles of the horrified client, the shadows of his nasal cavity and eye sockets, the naked grin of his teeth, all the delicate architecture of his skull. The device emitted neither radiation nor sonographic waves; the X-ray trick was simply an intermittent and unpredictable side effect—Geoff Eisner, Eddie’s wirehead partner, had called it “an artifact”—of the program which enabled it to manipulate images of the human face, so that every fifteenth or sixteenth trial, the machine produced not a fashionably bespectacled client in a range of attractive and affordable frames but a grinning death’s-head. Eddie’s investors withdrew their support and sued him for a return on their investment, while Dolores also viewed the failure of the Stylevision, after so many months of marital neglect, as a kind of broken agreement, and a perplexed Geoff Eisner—that bastard—who had done most of the soldering and software development and who had been the all-too-willing recipient of that extramarital kiss, vanished back into the cannabinaceous wastes of Oregon. In the end Eddie lost his patents and his wife through the inexorable efforts of attorneys, and found himself the prey and plaything of collection agencies and subpoena artists.

“I believe it’s quite valuable,” Oriole was saying. “Though I’ve never had it—oh, thingamajiggy.” Sadly she shook her head. “I don’t know what’s becoming of my memory! What do you call it when they take a look at your jewelry and—you know—”

“An appraisal,” said Eddie.

She snapped her fingers. “That’s it. I’ve never had it appraised. But I believe it’s quite valuable.”

“I believe,” said Eddie, as a thrilling and unwelcome idea entered his brain, “that you’re probably right.”

It was a kind of fantasy, at first—another foolhardy Eddie Zwang scheme. Stiff-necked old Mr. Box had been burdened by a romantic soul and over the years had given his wife all manner of baubles and gems, and although none of them alone was worth as much as the necklace, one ought, Eddie imagined, to be able to pawn her things for enough to install himself in Mexico in the miserable style to which he planned to grow accustomed. If they dined at Muller’s, say, where it was always Oriole’s habit to drink two cocktails, a thief would be able to lift her earrings and bracelets and watches while she slept, without fear of waking her. The kindness Oriole had always shown him, the affection that had drawn him from the freeway this afternoon into this misbegotten visit to the Farnham, the outrage and meanness of his contemplated crime—all of these he dismissed as the qualms of a man who had the luxury of having faith in himself. Nothing he did surprised him anymore. He would leave her the ugly gold necklace that lay so heavy on her windpipe. He told himself it was the only thing she really had.

“That certainly isn’t a very big suitcase,” said Oriole, pointing to the calfskin satchel at his feet.

“Well, I can’t stay very long,” said Eddie. The muscles of his face clenched into a hard knot, and as he smiled at Oriole his heart was filled with low enthusiasm. “But I think I will stay the night.”

They took a taxicab to Muller’s. The fare was $2.75, which Oriole insisted on paying, tipping the driver with the change from three one-dollar bills. Eddie was embarrassed. (He and Dolores had once tried to determine at what point her grandmother’s mind had ceased to notice increases in the cost of living, presidential-election results, the disappearance of unkind racial and ethnic generalizations from polite conversation. They’d figured the date of her last glance down at the instrument panel of life to be sometime in the early 1970s; that was when her husband had died, struck down in the middle of Tenth Avenue by a truck full of crawfish on ice, bound for Jake’s Famous.) The taxi driver made no effort to conceal his disgust at the proffered gratuity, and Oriole no effort to remark it. Eddie searched his pockets for change but found only a ten-dollar bill and the 1943 zinc penny that he carried for luck. He held on to his last ten dollars and his luckless lucky charm and slunk into the darkness of Muller’s cocktail lounge, which Oriole for some reason favored over the dining room. It was a morose and shadowy lounge—red Naugahyde, soft Muzak, favored by a certain type of quiet, middle-aged alcoholic—but Oriole seemed oblivious of its unsavory air and had a table she liked in the corner, under a chiefly orange but somewhat brown painting of a lighthouse. They ordered from the large, cholesterol-rich menu. They each drank a pair of vodka tonics, and the old woman told him, for what Eddie reckoned to be the fifteenth or sixteenth time and with steadily increasing divagation, about her mother’s summer kitchen in the backyard of the house in Davenport, about her trip West as a newlywed in 1920 on her husband’s railroad and her disappointment at not seeing any wild Red Indians along the way, and about her sisters—Robin and Linnet—both of them now passed on. They ate their tan-and-beige meals of gravy and crust. While Oriole’s attention was focused on her dessert, Eddie contrived to order a third drink for each of them. Then Oriole paid the bill, stiffing the waitress, and they made their hazy way back to the Farnham.