“I believe Effie has left us,” Max Biedelman told Sam when it seemed that Effie’s departure this time would be a lasting one. “She’s turned into a foolish old woman, and she would have hated that, had she known. She means no offense, Mr. Brown, though of course her behavior is inexcusable.”
Sam brushed this aside. “Miss Effie doesn’t know any better. Where she’s gone seems like a happy place, and that’s something to be thankful for. I hope I keep my spirit half as good when I’m her age.”
To his astonishment, Max Biedelman turned from him with welling eyes. “You are a good man, Mr. Brown,” she said, clapping a hard hand on his forearm and then going to stand at the front room window to regain her composure. At last she said, “Do you know, I’ve been in many frightening situations over the years, even times when I was in mortal danger, but I have never felt so powerless as I do now. It’s humiliating to grow old, Mr. Brown. One loses one’s dignity.”
“That isn’t true, sir. You’re the most dignified lady I’ve ever met outside of my grandmother on my daddy’s side. You stand right up and say what’s on your mind. You’re a shining example.”
Max Biedelman turned. “I’d like to hear about your grandmother on your father’s side. Please sit, Mr. Brown. I’ve forgotten my manners.” She gestured to a fine, tapestry-covered chair across from her.
Sam sat down carefully. “My grandmother, now, that’s a story,” he said. “The woman was as tough as an old boot, brought eleven children into this world and kept eight of them alive to over the age of fifteen, which was a rare trick in those days, at least where my folks were from originally, down in Arkansas. Corinna, her folks were real poor except for the land they farmed, but that land was theirs, homesteaded fair and square. My daddy’s folks were townspeople, which was completely different. They didn’t have so much as an extra ‘Howdy.’ My daddy’s daddy worked the railroad, laying track eighty miles east of Jesus. The man was gone for months at a time. My grandma would get his pay, but it wasn’t enough to feed all those children, so she worked as a washerwoman, did clothes for anyone who had a penny or two to spare. She did fine needlework, too, and taught all the girls in the family to do fancy work right along with her—nickel a hanky, dime for lace to trim a dress or a petticoat. Rumor was, she also hired herself out to keep a man company, but the family never believed that part, mainly because she was too tired most of the time to have anything left to hire out, if you know what I mean. Her name was Leeza, at least that’s what everyone called her. Probably short for Elizabeth, now that I think about it. She had a proud head, always kept her nose up like she was smelling something sweet, didn’t take guff off anybody. My daddy tells a story about her chasing a little bitty white man around the town with a hatchet for cheating her out of twenty-five cents he owed her for some washing. Dangerous thing for a black woman to do, but Leeza wasn’t about to give up on that twenty-five cents. To hear my daddy tell it, half the town turned out for the showdown, which was her pulling him down into the mud on Main Street and sitting on his chest spouting scripture. Man not only paid her what he owed her, he promised to go to church the following Sunday.” Sam chuckled softly. “The woman wasn’t afraid of danger, no sir. No black person in their right mind stood up to white people back then, not even about money to feed their children. Old Leeza, though, she told the family she was too damned tired to put up with it anymore, fingers full of calluses and half-blind from the fancy work. I guess something just snapped. Funny thing was, she and her girls got plenty of work after that. People respected her. Feared her, too. Figured any black woman crazy enough to do what she did had to be someone to reckon with. The family was sure proud of her. By the time I knew her, she was just a scrawny little thing, old hen too tough to eat and too ornery to kill.”
Max Biedelman smiled. “A splendid story, Mr. Brown, and a remarkable woman.”
“Tell you the truth,” Sam said, shaking his head, “the family steered pretty clear of old Leeza those last few years. You never knew when she might take offense at something and come after you with that crooked finger of hers jabbing at you like a steel spike. Woman might have been righteous in the eyes of the Lord, but she sure was touchy.”
Sam stood up, and Max Biedelman struggled to her feet, too. “Do you know, Mr. Brown, I believe you made that story up just to cheer me. And you have.”
“No, sir,” Sam protested. “Every word of it’s true.”
“Well then,” said Max Biedelman, a little bit of hell finally coming back into her eyes, “I shall have to search my family archives for one that will top it.”
“That would be a tough thing to do,” Sam smiled. “But I do love a good story, me and Hannah both. You just say the word, and we’ll be here.”
Max Biedelman pressed his arm as she saw him to the door. “I count on that, Mr. Brown,” she said.
Harriet fussed over her finches, wondering if they knew how beautiful they were. They were no more substantial than a dandelion blown into the wind; their songs were heavier than their bones. So ponderous in motion herself, she had always wondered what it would be like to take wing, to no more than wish yourself airborne to be airborne. She’d built a large aviary in her home, devoting two whole rooms to her birds, so they could fly. In the last several weeks she had sat inside the aviary often, feeling the breath of their flight on her face as they passed. Now, late on a dark Thursday evening, she confronted squarely the fact that Truman Levy had abandoned her.
For months he had shared her deep devotion to the zoo. They had talked at length, familiarly; sometimes he even put his feet up on her second visitor’s chair, crossing one neat ankle over the other, his brown leather loafers as spruce as he was. He often came in on weekends to take care of some detail or two, and he always stopped to chat with her before going home. Several times she had invited him out to lunch, and he had always accepted. He was only five or six years younger than she was; she had once or twice caught herself wondering if a more intimate relationship might be possible.
But that had all changed when Neva Wilson came to the zoo. Harriet was no fool—she could sense immediately that Truman was different toward her. He was a courtly man, but his slight distaste for Harriet bled through his exquisite manners. It was true that she’d been featured in a number of newspaper articles as well as the new advertising campaign, but it was all for the good of the zoo, not for Harriet’s personal aggrandizement. She had expected his enthusiastic support and congratulations, but instead she detected a certain impatience, even a degree of discomfort. Whatever the exact reason, their shared commitment to the zoo—which was to say, to each other—was clearly eroding.
Harriet was never sure at what age she had recognized that she would probably never marry. She had been young; younger than thirty-five, certainly. Younger than thirty? Impossibly young, if she’d been younger than thirty, and yet her final descent into the hell of the department store makeover had been the end of a journey, not the beginning. It marked the death of her last fading hope that she might yet rise above her plain heritage, conquer her big bones and overstated features, her mannish hands and dull hair. By the time she was in her late twenties, the list of social opportunities that she had never experienced was already long: make-out parties, high school proms, homecoming dances, festival courts, double dates, drive-in movies, sorority pledges, fraternity weekends. Instead there had been an endless string of weddings, weekend after weekend during which she was politely added to the guest lists of cousins, colleagues, neighbors. She had worn permanent creases in her one good suit from all of them; had spent money she didn’t have on silver plate and cheap crystal for the gifts. And she was greeted the same way at each one: Why, Harriet! How good to see you! How long has it been—yes? Well, really. That long? As though it was her fault, as though she had been deliberately withholding herself from their loving if absent-minded arms, rather than left to fend for herself for yet another Christmas, another Easter or Thanksgiving. Harriet, dear! How grown-up you look! t
hey’d say, when what they meant was matronly, dowdy, plain.
She was not deluded. Nor, however, did she believe in self-pity. She was a woman of strength who believed that productivity was, if not a substitute for beauty, at least a damned good second. For every lover she’d failed to attract, she’d achieved a new promotion, a new title, a raise. She began to decline the endless string of baby showers that had replaced the wedding invitations, using the saved gift money to buy finches instead, and then to build an aviary in the first small house she had bought for herself on her thirtieth birthday.
In all those years, there’d never even been a serious boyfriend. Not that she was a virgin; there had been men from time to time, more or less interchangeably. As marriage prospects, however, they had lacked luster and freshness. At first they phoned several times a week, proposing movie dates or dinner at inexpensive ethnic restaurants. Credit cards being too ambiguous for the cheapskate, cash was often laid on the table so Harriet could see for herself that she was expected to come up with the balance of the bill. Then the calls would come less and less frequently until finally they failed to come at all. Harriet rarely noticed until weeks had gone by.
But she’d thought that Truman was different. He had the smooth cheeks and clear, light eyes of a younger man, coupled with hands so beautiful they might have belonged to Michelangelo, hands capable of pulling a soul out of stone. But clearly she’d been wrong. As her birds muttered and trilled peacefully all around her in the aviary’s artificial sunlight, she picked up the telephone and called the zoo to listen one more time to Truman’s recorded voice regret that he was not available.
Across town in her apartment, Neva was in a less philosophical frame of mind. Another gale had blown in off Puget Sound, the third in a week, with wind and rain keeping inside anyone who had a choice—including Hannah. Neva and Sam had treated her to a long indoor bath with warm water, and later Neva taught her to blow bubbles using a child’s bubble hoop and Dawn dishwashing liquid. But despite their best efforts they were losing ground. From what Sam had said about the weather, it would rain more or less continuously until spring, making it nearly impossible to keep Hannah’s feet dry. Even now, and in spite of the apple cider vinegar footbaths, the abscess under her toenail was worse, and so was Sam, judging by his rapidly diminishing energy and noticeable limp. Time was becoming an increasingly pressing issue all over.
Now Neva sat in her Goodwill armchair in her one-room apartment, scratching Chip’s ears as he dozed in her lap. Someone must be missing him tonight. He was a gentlemanly soul, sturdy and calm, an ankle-winder, a lap-sitter, a champion sleeper with a deep, resonant purr and excellent Manchu whiskers. He usually appeared in the tunnel from Johnson Johnson’s house as soon as he heard Neva open her front door.
The windows rattled as sudden hail clattered against the glass like BBs. Sam had told her he and Corinna spent evenings like these in the barn because storms made Hannah anxious, and there were a lot of storms in this part of the Northwest. Neva sometimes found their devotion unnerving, as though Hannah’s Hannah-ness were more important to Sam than her elephant-ness—as could certainly be the case, given that Sam had never worked with or visited another elephant, or even another zoo. He and Corinna were also childless; if she remembered right, there had been something about a baby many years ago, some tragedy. She resettled Chip on her lap and contemplated the nature of loss. Six months ago, she had been sitting in the waiting room of a dental office in Yonkers, New York, when across the room a boy reading a book went off in her mind like a bomb. He had a long, slender face and hair that blazed like autumn, the exact shade of red that children hated the most because it was all people saw. He might have been her, twenty-five years earlier.
Or he might have been her son.
She’d left the office with a pounding heart. In putting her baby up for adoption she had agreed that she would never try to find the child, or assign or retain anyone else to do so. But she had asked if the dental office could slip her appointment back by an hour, went to a nearby Barnes & Noble, and bought a book about dragons that the clerk assured her would suit an eleven-year-old boy. Then she returned to the dental office.
“I just noticed this book in my backpack,” she said, lying to the receptionist. “I must have picked it up by accident—it belongs to the boy who was here this morning, and I’d like to return it to him. Can you tell me his name, or maybe an address where I can drop it off?”
“You can just leave it with me and I can call for you,” the girl had said brightly, tapping her teeth with blood-red fingernails. “His mom was in for a cleaning. Valerie Nightingale. Pretty name.”
Neva had slid the book into an envelope, put a card inside that simply said, “I’ve heard this is a great book,” and sealed it up. No signature, no phone number. No harm. The boy was as good as dead, for her; she might as well have seen a ghost in that waiting room.
Truman sat at the kitchen table with his father. Matthew Levy had the build of a boy and the large, agile brain of a man perfectly suited to receiving and processing information. He had just explained to Truman that he’d unearthed no unexpected bounty for the Biedelman Zoo in either the city’s or the law firm’s archives.
“I hope you weren’t counting on my finding a pot of gold,” he told Truman. “It’s very rare to find a windfall, you know, except in the movies.”
“No, it was just a wild hope,” Truman said. “Did you by any chance review the provisions of Hannah’s trust while you were there?”
“The trust?” Matthew hesitated, as though he was trying to remember. Truman recognized this as a trick of humility he’d learned years before as a prosecutor. Undisguised, his prodigious memory had given him a certain machine-like quality in the courtroom. “Yes, I did,” he said now. “Its provisions were very straightforward. Max established it to provide for Hannah’s food, upkeep, and veterinary care. Unfortunately, it doesn’t generate a great deal of money anymore.”
“That’s an understatement. It probably seemed like a fortune when she set it up, though.”
“Yes, well, money isn’t what it used to be,” Matthew smiled dryly. “But then, it never was.”
Truman cleared his throat. “Dad, if Hannah ever left the zoo, would the trust go with her?”
“Is she leaving?”
“No, but one of the keepers asked me that question, and I didn’t have an answer.”
“I’d have to read the provisions again to be sure, but I don’t recall anything stipulating that Hannah has to live in Bladenham as a condition of the trust. An error of omission, no doubt. I’m sure Max never even considered the possibility of Hannah’s leaving—though, oddly, she didn’t leave the trust with the Zoo in perpetuity. When Hannah dies, the money is to be disbursed by the trustee to an individual elephant or an elephant welfare organization of his choice. I’m sure your new director will fight that, when it happens.” A small glint appeared in the old man’s eye. He had met Harriet Saul.
“Then who’s the trustee?” Truman asked. “I always assumed it was the zoo director.”
Matthew consulted a slim, leather-bound folder. “No, no. I wrote down the name because I wasn’t familiar with it. Here: Samson Brown. Is that someone you know?”
Truman leaned forward. “He’s her keeper. He’s been with her since Max Biedelman was alive.”
“Yes, well, she named him as sole trustee, with no provisions for how his replacement should be selected if he predeceases the elephant. That struck me as odd—she was exceptionally thorough in arranging all the other details of her estate. Perhaps she and this man had some understanding between them. In any case, he’ll be responsible for choosing the trust beneficiary after Hannah’s death. If he doesn’t predecease her, of course.”
“And if he does?”
Matthew frowned. “Well, it would certainly be best if he names a successor beforehand. If he doesn’t, the position would most naturally fall to someone at the zoo—Ms. Saul, in all likelihood, based on h
er position as chief administrator.”
Truman thought for a minute. “So does this mean that Sam is Hannah’s owner?”
“No, no. Technically the zoo—the institution—is her owner, since she’s part of the property Max left to the city. But Samson Brown is, essentially, her appointed guardian. All decisions concerning her care and well-being must be made or approved by him.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I take it this is a surprise.”
“To me, anyway.”
Matthew looked at Truman mildly. “By the way, after her death Hannah’s remains are to be interred on the Havenside grounds, beside Max’s own grave. The city apparently granted her that variance.”
“She arranged for Hannah’s burial?”
“As I said, she was thorough,” Matthew said. “I suppose it’s also possible she wasn’t entirely in command of her faculties when she had the papers drawn up. Or maybe her attorney wasn’t in command of his faculties, which strikes me as more likely.”
“What are you saying?” Truman said. “Wasn’t Tim Roscoe her attorney? He was with your firm.”
“And old as the dickens by then, too. I had no idea you were so interested in all this—I don’t believe you’ve mentioned it before. I’ll look into it a little more thoroughly if you’d like me to.”
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