“It would be information that might come in handy,” Truman said. Matthew raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
Winslow shuffled into the kitchen in his baggy socks. “Why are you guys talking about Hannah? Is she okay?”
“She’s fine,” Truman said. “I was just asking your grandfather some hypothetical questions.”
Hearing a change in the tenor of the conversation, Miles rose from his bed beneath the piano in the den and thrust a slobbery rubber dog bone through the baby gate. When none of them responded he maneuvered a shred of towel onto his head. Matthew considered him doubtfully. “Does he know what we’re saying? He certainly seems to be very…involved.”
“He doesn’t sleep,” Winslow said. “Ever.”
“Of course he sleeps, Winnie,” Truman said. “Just not at night.”
“Ever,” Winslow insisted.
“He’s exaggerating,” Truman told Matthew.
Matthew finally turned in his chair to regard the pig head-on. Miles, encouraged, put on his most ingratiating pig-smile and perked up his ears. “You know,” Matthew said, “you might have just gotten a dog.”
After Matthew left, Truman stayed at the kitchen table listening to Winslow do warm-up scales on the piano and pondering the fact that by siding with Neva he was participating in a deception, not to mention one involving Harriet. He was uncomfortable with that, and he’d said as much to Neva when he’d called her last night with his decision.
“Look, I’m not comfortable with it, either,” she’d told him. “I don’t do things behind people’s backs and I never have. If I thought there was any other way to get Hannah out, I’d jump at it. But I don’t think there is. Do you? I’d love to hear another plan.”
Truman didn’t have one.
“Then let’s move on to something else. How’s Miles?” she’d said.
In fact, the pig was being particularly solicitous these days, snuffling underfoot as Truman made dinner or packed lunch for Winslow. He had taken to bringing Truman love tokens—a stub of carrot, a savory kibble, a Wiffle ball; once, one of Truman’s own slippers, slick with slobber. These the pig presented with a strangely Old World flourish, shifting from foot to foot until Truman looked down and feigned delight at such a gift.
“He hasn’t rooted up the kitchen floor,” Truman had told Neva, “or eaten anything that isn’t generally acknowledged as food, so I’m cautiously optimistic. On the other hand, I worry about his happiness. Maybe he longs for other pigs. Do pigs need other pigs, to be fulfilled?”
He’d heard Neva laugh softly on the other end of the line. “Truman, Truman.”
“What?”
“He’s not us, you know. He’s not human. Don’t make things more complicated than they are.”
Truman wished he could ask her what she was wearing. He also wished he could ask her why there were fewer freckles on her hands than her forearms, when it should have been the other way around. Did she wear gloves a lot? If so, why? He also wished he could kiss her. A nice, slow, easy kiss, the kind that happened between two people who were completely at ease. He wished he could be at ease. Wanting the other person to be at ease made him uneasy. Intimacy was a complicated business.
In any event, Neva had gone someplace else. “Look,” she’d said. “Would it help you to know that Hannah is the most tractable elephant I’ve ever worked with? I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I also believe she’s capable of deep feeling. I don’t normally believe in attributing human emotions to animals, but I’ve seen her hover around Sam all afternoon when he isn’t feeling well. If he goes into the barn and she can’t follow, she’ll wait by the door, sometimes for hours, until he comes back. Her behavior on his days off is totally different than it is when he’s working. She’s less sharp, less observant. She’ll stay all day in one part of her yard, rocking or sucking her trunk. It takes a lot to engage her, and when you do, it doesn’t last. Is this making sense to you? On Sam’s days off, he and Corinna always come in after-hours to watch a movie or two with her, and Hannah knows that, so she’ll start perking up, finally, at closing time.” Neva had sighed. “It’s hard to know what’s right, but she can’t stay here if she’s going to have any quality of life after Sam’s gone. I’ve gone over it and over it, and I still keep coming up with the same answer. Let’s just start quietly and see where it takes us. Raising the money is going to be the hardest thing to do, never mind being discrete about it. You wouldn’t happen to have half a million dollars lying around that you’ve just been waiting for the right moment to tell me about, would you?”
“If I did, I’d hand it over to you right now.”
Harriet had been sitting in her aviary for several hours with a bottle of wine, and now she poured out the last glass. Somewhere around the middle of the bottle she had gone to her bedroom briefly to change into her Maxine Biedelman clothes. She couldn’t say why; no one was going to see her tonight. But she felt better in them, much better. Maxine Biedelman would never call up Truman Levy or anyone else just to hear his voicemail message. Maxine Biedelman went her own way, shining the dual beams of her strength and independence far ahead into the darkness. No one would have dared to call her Bucket. Maxine was a force to be reckoned with.
Harriet took a yellow legal tablet from a little Indonesian teak table she’d bought recently and fished a pen out of her breast pocket. She had had reading lenses made for a pince-nez she’d found among Maxine’s things in the attic, and now she clipped these on her nose as she consulted her notes.
She was developing a budget for renovating Havenside. The house had once been a place of glory, well-documented in the sheaves of photographs Harriet had winnowed from the files upstairs several nights before. In the styles of the great houses in Newport, Rhode Island, there had been painted skies on the ceilings, with birds and scudding clouds; ornate moldings and gothic arched windows and claw-foot bathtubs with taps in the shape of griffon heads. Though Maxine herself had been largely indifferent to these charms, she had evidently maintained the house’s original architectural integrity for her father’s sake.
According to the notes on Harriet’s legal pad, it would cost between seven hundred and fifty thousand and one million dollars to return the house to its original splendor. She had already found a tent and awning vendor who would recreate Maxine’s original campaign tent from photographs for twenty-three thousand. Restoring and maintaining Havenside’s paths and gardens would cost another twelve thousand dollars.
One million thirty-five thousand dollars. It wasn’t that much. Harriet estimated that she could raise the money through an aggressive capital campaign in less than two years. She would have Martin Choi run periodic articles keeping the citizens of Bladenham informed, fueling their civic pride. She would have the ad agency convince Seattle and Tacoma newspapers to write features, too, and see that the stories were picked up by the Associated Press, Reuters, and the other wire services, maybe even USA Today and CNN.
As Maxine, Harriet was also ripe for television coverage, including regional and even national morning programs and evening news magazines like 60 Minutes. National Public Radio was another must-have, not so much for the audience it reached as for its prestige among the country’s intelligentsia.
Harriet made a note to investigate the cost of commissioning original theme music—a signature piece, something robust and memorable that could be used in future zoo ads, but which, in the meantime, TV and radio producers could pick up and include in their coverage. Maybe the ad agency had green talent who would write the music for free in exchange for exposure.
And then, while sipping the last of the wine and paging idly through a stack of old photographs she had brought home from the zoo, Harriet Saul experienced an epiphany. Skipping over animal images, she studied for a long time a picture of Maxine Biedelman at the turn of the century on the Serengeti Plain in Africa. No girl now, but a woman standing tanned and clear-eyed, Maxine regarded the camera with a straight back and a faint smile, s
olidly grounded in her heavy brown boots. An energy beat from the paper like a drum, not civilized but primal, elemental, a throbbing in the gut, in the belly like an oath. I am, I am, I am.
For the first time in her life, Harriet understood what her spirit had known for some time: she was in love.
chapter 15
Sam sat on a hassock in his living room, gently rubbing Corinna’s poor flat feet and swollen ankles. “You’re getting too old to stand up all day, Mama,” he said.
Corinna dismissed his remark with a wave of the hand. “That apple cider vinegar footbath helping the baby at all?”
“Not much.”
“A little?”
“I’m hoping,” Sam said.
“Yeah.”
Sam gently massaged Corinna’s toes, lovingly running over each one the fingers of a healer who knows his limitations.
“You think it’s really going to happen?” Corinna asked.
“What?”
“Moving the baby.”
“Don’t know, Mama, but Neva’s a tough little thing—determined, too. She doesn’t like that Harriet Saul, either, so we’ve got a little bit of spite on our side, that and knowing it’s the right thing to do, taking shug to that place.”
“I never thought of her living just with elephants.”
“You mean I’ve been dreaming it all these years and you never saw it?”
“No,” Corinna said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know, exactly. The baby’s people. I never thought of other elephants as people, not like shug.”
“They are, though,” Sam said, frowning. “At least, they’re her people. It doesn’t matter if they’re not ours, as long as they watch out for her.”
“Think she’ll know what to say to them?” Corinna asked.
“If she doesn’t, she’ll learn. She must have known how to do it over there in Burma.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“I know that, Mama,” Sam said quietly. “But she’s going to be all right. I can feel it, like I felt she’d be all right as long as she was with us, all these years.”
“Yeah,” Corinna said, unconvinced. “Do we have to get our money ready soon?”
Sam worked her flat arches with his thumbs. “Not yet. Neva says Truman Levy’s working on something.”
“Does she know we mean it when I said we’d give the money if it’s going to make the difference in getting the baby to that place?”
“She knows, Mama.”
Sam stopped rubbing, holding Corinna’s feet quietly in the palms of his hands.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“Don’t know who I’ll be, without the girl.”
“I’ve thought that, too,” Corinna said softly.
“I guess we’ll find out, when the time comes,” Sam said. He lowered Corinna’s feet into her slippers, arranged her skirt over her ample lap, and kissed her hand.
“You think they’ll let us visit her at that sanctuary?” Corinna asked.
“Neva promised, Mama. She gave her word.”
“Well.” Corinna heaved herself out of her chair and patted his cheek. “I think I’d better see about supper.”
“Something I can do?”
“Nah, you just put your legs up.”
Sam stood until she was gone, then lowered himself into his own chair with gratitude. His legs were on fire from the knees down, and the ulcer was moving down onto the sole of his foot. He didn’t know how much longer he could hold on, though he’d never tell that to Corinna. She worried too much as it was.
He parked his eyes on the far wall and found himself thinking about the baby they’d lost. At first Corinna had gone so far away in her mind, Sam had thought he might lose her, too. He didn’t think he could bear that, thought that if it happened, he’d stop being himself altogether and change into a mean and bitter man who didn’t give a single goddamn. But Corinna hadn’t died, not outside or in, and except for her everlasting feud with God, she’d healed. Maybe not completely, maybe not perfectly, but mostly you couldn’t see the scar, not even when you knew where to look.
But since Neva Wilson had started talking about moving Hannah to the sanctuary, Corinna had been suffering; Sam, too. They were too set in their ways to move to California, and neither of them had much experience with travel. They’d pretend they were planning to visit that place, but they’d never do it. They’d grieve. Hannah would go and they would not, and that was just the way it had to be.
Miss Effie died quietly at Havenside on Thanksgiving Day, 1957, attended only by Max Biedelman. In the weeks before her death, a series of strokes had reduced her to an angelic presence no longer capable of speech but lit from within by a gentle light.
Even in her grief Max Biedelman preferred privacy, handling all the arrangements herself. In any case there were very few to make. Neither she nor Effie had living family anymore, and the women had been too isolated in their last years even for friendships. When Effie’s ashes had been returned from the crematorium, Max Biedelman had reached Sam at the elephant barn and asked him to accompany her on a walk.
He and Hannah went up to the house as quickly as they could and found the old woman on the porch waiting for them, dressed in black trousers and an exquisitely cut black coat. “They used to call them widow’s weeds, Mr. Brown,” she said with a certain irony. “I had my tailor prepare them some months ago.” She had a canvas satchel over her shoulder, heavy enough for her to bow slightly beneath its weight.
“You want me to carry that for you, sir?”
“I’m fine, Mr. Brown. Thank you.”
They proceeded in silence, Max Biedelman leading them with quick steps. Sam wondered if the doctor had given her some kind of pain-killing medicine to ease her grief, but even if he had, Sam doubted she’d have taken it. No, he guessed her vigor was shock, like people who walked ten miles out of the wilderness on broken feet. Sam and Hannah fell in behind her, not slowing down until they had reached the little clearing where she and Miss Effie had liked to come with books and a picnic lunch. As soon as they stopped, Hannah lifted the old woman’s arm gently in her trunk and tucked it between her own leg and the wall of her chest.
Max gave her a firm pat with her free hand. “I’m all right, Hannah,” she said, offering her a peppermint she pulled from her pocket. “That’s very nice of you, but I’m perfectly all right. Go along, now.”
Hannah stood for a minute, considering, and then freed Max Biedelman’s arm.
Sam said, “You go ahead, sugar. We’ll call you if we need you.” Hannah padded off, but only as far as the edge of the clearing, where she stood with her back to the woods she loved, keeping Sam and Max Biedelman in her line of sight.
The old woman lowered her satchel to the ground in the watery sunshine and took out a fancy enamel urn Sam had never seen before. “The ashes,” she explained. “I would be honored, Mr. Brown, if you would help me scatter them.”
They took turns releasing ashes around the clearing, into the breeze. They didn’t speak, and when they were done the old woman simply unfolded her shooting stick and sat on the little stool with her back to Sam. He hunched on a stump nearby, bits of dry leaves falling through his fingers like tears. He and Corinna hadn’t cremated the baby, but dressed her in a white lace christening gown Corinna had made when she’d still been on good terms with the Lord, and buried her in a small pink casket with a white satin lining like God’s angels must wear.
Finally Max Biedelman turned back to him, pulling her composure around her like a tattered coat. “Well, Sam,” she said.
“You want me to take you home now, sir?” he said softly.
“Not yet. But you may stay with me a little longer. I would like that.”
“I’m right here.”
Max Biedelman sat quietly, her hands in her lap. Then she raised her worn eyes and said, “I didn’t intend to grow old, Mr. Brown, but apparently it’s happened anyway.”
“Yes
, sir.”
“I shall miss her terribly.”
“You’re mighty strong, sir. You’re going to get through this all right.”
Max Biedelman regarded her hands holding each other in her lap. “I don’t know that I want to get through it. I don’t know what the point of getting through it might be.”
“You’ve got your animals. You’ve got this place.”
“Yes.” The old woman rose wearily, calling to Hannah. “You’ve reminded me that there are things to do.”
Sam stood, too. It had taken his grandmother seven years to die. He could see that Miss Biedelman meant to get it done quicker.
Johnson Johnson paced in his kitchen, waiting. He knew that Neva had gotten home because all three cats had disappeared down the tunnel. Finally there was a knock on his door.
“What surprise?” Neva said, holding the note he’d taped to her front door. He breathed in the smell of animal dung and musk and fruit and hay that wafted around her like a fine perfume. He smelled her sometimes at night, when he ran through his favorite memories at the end of the day.
“I made something,” he said. “Come on.” He was out of the room and headed upstairs before Neva had even closed the outside door. He could feel her following warily. She’d be pleased, though, once she saw what he’d done.
“Here,” he said. Three steel drums sat on the wide landing outside his bathroom, where he’d been working on them under his yellow light bulb. He used the yellow light when he needed to hear as well as see something he was making. He didn’t know why it worked that way, just that he’d always been able to hear better when it was turned on.
Neva inhaled sharply, running her hands over the drums. Johnson Johnson had cut them at different heights, and hammered their tops into different shapes. Around the outsides he’d painted friezes of elephants. From a rivet on the side of each drum he’d hung a rubber mallet with foam tape wrapped around the wooden handle as a grip.
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