The Story of Arthur Truluv

by Elizabeth Berg

  Maddy shrugs. “Well, she is a good cook.”

  “She’ll be blabbing on and on about her exploits at the beauty parlor and the grocery store, sharing all the gossip she gets. Bringing people over here for classes, invading our privacy! And you know, she wants to have little kids in here! Beginning Baking, she said, she’s going to teach them how to make lollipops! You ever hear a group of children laughing? They’ll blow the roof off this place!”

  Maddy says nothing.

  But then Arthur says, “But you know what? Here’s the thing. You know what else I thought about after I said yes—I admit, without even really thinking about it?”

  “What.” She is looking out the window, but she’s listening.

  “I thought about how she might have lived a long time being afraid in the night—she always leaves so many lights on. She believes that her last chance for love just died, and her last chance was her first love, and there is something about that that is awfully hard to bear. Think about it. To know you’re at the end of hoping for love and to realize that something else will have to do, if you’re going to have any reason to go on.

  “I guess what I decided is that Lucille is like a pink tank. You know? She’s a tank, but she’s pink. And I think if she gets on our nerves too much we can just tell her. She can take it. What’s the worst that can happen? She’ll throw a cupcake at us?”

  Silence, until Gordon comes into the room and meows.

  “Okay if he’s here?” Arthur asks.

  Maddy doesn’t answer, but she pats the bed beside her and the cat jumps up.

  “His vote is that you please stay here. His vote is that you don’t go any more than five feet from him. Ever.”

  “I know,” Maddy says, stroking the giant head.

  “Sounds like an outboard motor when he purrs, doesn’t he?”

  She smiles.

  Arthur stands. “Well, I’m going over to give Lucille the bad news.”

  Maddy looks up. “What do you mean?”

  “I can see you’re not comfortable with her living with us. That’s all right, I’m glad you told me. And so I’m going over to tell her she can’t move in after all. I’ll tell her I made a mistake. And I did make a mistake. I should have talked about it with you first. I apologize. I’ll go tell her and then maybe we can have some lunch, just the two of us.”

  He gets up to go to the door.

  “Truluv,” she says.

  He turns around.

  “You think I don’t know what you’re doing?” Gordon is in her lap now, upside down, his eyes closed.

  “I will tell her not to move in, Maddy. If her moving in means your moving out.”

  Maddy waves her hand. “Oh, let her come.” Her knee is jiggling a mile a minute.

  Arthur waits until she looks up at him.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.” She laughs. “Yeah, let her come. I’ll stay.”

  “Want me to help you unpack?”

  “No, I got it. I didn’t get too far. It’s mostly just a couple of books and some shirts in there.”

  “Can I tell you something, Maddy?”

  “Sure.”

  “We used to have some real good friends, Nola and I, named Tom and Joanie Guthrie. Married the same month and year as we were, and we always thought we’d have kids at the same time and they could play together; Tom and I talked all the time about building swing sets and sandboxes.

  “Well, Nola and I couldn’t have kids, as you know, so we kind of made our friends’ children our own. They had the one, little Bobby, and then four years later Joanie had another son, named him Clyde. Bobby couldn’t seem to say Clyde and called him Kite, and we all loved that; fact, it became his nickname. But anyway, what I want to tell you is that when Joanie had that second baby, she seemed awfully blue. And she finally told Nola that she was so worried about whether she could love two children, about whether she could make room in her heart for as much love as she felt for Bobby. Wasn’t it betraying Bobby, to love another child? And Nola told her what her sister Patricia had said, after having her second. Patricia said she felt like she’d grown a second heart.”

  “Okay, Truluv,” Maddy says.

  “Okay?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  He starts to leave the room and she says, “Truluv? Hold on a second, I have something to tell you.”

  “Oh?”

  She goes into her closet and emerges holding Mr. and Mrs. Hamburger.

  “There they are!” Arthur says, and the joy makes his voice crack. “Where’d you find them?”

  “I took them,” Maddy says, her head down. “I took them off Nola’s grave.” She looks up, serious-faced and a little pale, too, he thinks. He’ll talk to Lucille about that, later. More spinach in her diet? Liver?

  “I’m very sorry,” Maddy continues. “I’ll put them back today. I just…I really like them, and I thought I might not see you again and so I just took them. I’m really sorry.”

  “You like them, huh?” Arthur says.

  She nods. “They’re so retro!”

  “Well, you want to know something funny? I was going to give them to you for your birthday. So, Happy Birthday.”

  “Really?”

  You’d think he was giving her the Eiffel Tower.

  “Really.”

  She goes over to her desk and places the Hamburgers on the corner. She steps back to regard them, then makes a minor adjustment. “There!”

  Next she goes to her duffel bag and takes out a small photograph that she puts next to the Hamburgers. Arthur goes over to inspect it. “You?” he asks.

  “No, that’s my mom.”

  “Oh!” Arthur says, and takes another, long look. “Died when you were only two weeks old. That’s a shame.”

  Maddy’s voice changes, goes deeper. “How do you know that?”

  Uh-oh. He turns around to face her. “Well, I met your dad, actually. I meant to tell you. He got my address from that time you wrote it down, and after you ran away, he left me a note asking me to call him. I did, and we met. He was afraid for you. And he wanted to get a message to you.”

  “What message was that?”

  Tell her I want to help if she needs more money. “He wanted you to come home. He loves you and he really wanted you to come back.”

  She looks levelly at him. “He said that?”

  “Well, of course he did. More or less, I mean, I don’t recall the exact words. But of course he did. I think he’s very sorry about how…I think he’s sorry.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not going back there. All done with that. I can’t go back. It’s not healthy for me, okay?”

  “Okay. But he knows you’re here, right?”

  “He knows I’m here.”

  Arthur peers more closely at the photograph. “Beautiful woman.”

  “Yes.”

  “It must have been hard for your dad, that you look so much like her.”

  “Or he could have been glad that he still had some part of her, through me,” Maddy says. “That’s what my counselor says, and that’s what I think, too.”

  She’s quiet for a moment, and then she says, “Can I tell you something?”

  “Of course!”

  “I want to tell you, because I think you’ll understand.”

  “Okay. I’m all ears. Plus, I’m all ears.” He points to his oversize ears. He sits back down at the desk, and Maddy goes back to the bed.

  “So, this is kind of a weird story. When I was about four years old, I told my dad I wanted to die.”

  Arthur inhales sharply, and Maddy says quickly, “It wasn’t…It wasn’t because I was sad or anything like that. It was that I’d been taught about heaven and hell in Sunday school, and I thought heaven seemed like such a wonderful place. And my dad had told me my mother was there. I’d been told about sin, too, about how sins stained your soul. I thought of it like flypaper, all this black stuck onto white. It seemed to me that as I got older, my sins would get bigger, so th
e best thing might be to die young, and then I’d be pretty much guaranteed admission into heaven.

  “So I told my dad about it one day, he was reading the paper at the kitchen table and I came up and stood very close to him, he didn’t like for you to talk to him when he was reading the paper. But eventually he pulled me onto his lap, which he hardly ever did, but he did that day, and he said, ‘What’s up?’ And I said, ‘I want to die,’ said it very happily, I think, I mean, I was just so happy about the idea. And he…he just went nuts! He pushed me off his lap and started yelling. He said, ‘Nobody asks to be born! Nobody! You get here and you just have to deal with what you get!’

  “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t understand why he was so angry. I thought he’d be glad. I’d be with my mother and I’d be out of his hair. I always felt like a burden to him. I always felt he’d be glad not to have me around, reminding him every day of the wife he no longer had. I think he loved my mother an awful lot. I think that was a good love. But he lost her. Because of me. And when he lost her, something spoiled in him. And then he lost himself.”

  Arthur starts to speak, and Maddy holds up her hand. “I know. I know it wasn’t my fault. But boy, it sure felt that way. Every day, it sure felt that way.”

  Arthur nods. His hands are clasped in his lap, and he runs one thumb over the other. He says, “I don’t know what to say about that, Maddy, except to say that I think your father said the wrong thing. I think he should have held you tight and told you what a marvelous little philosopher you were, and that heaven would be waiting for you a long, long time from then. It must have been awfully hurtful and confusing to such a little girl to hear him say those things to you, to push you off his lap the way that he did. But the longer I live, the more I come to see that love is not so easy for everyone. It can get awfully complicated. It can make us do good things but it can also make us do bad things. One thing I know, though, is that your dad must have done some things right. Because look at you. Look how you turned out. And I would bet my last nickel that your dad loves you very much, Maddy.”

  Her eyes fill, and he wants to say more, but the doorbell rings and they hear Lucille sing out, “Yoo-hoo!”

  Arthur and Maddy look at each other.

  Then, “I got it,” Maddy says grimly, and heads downstairs. Arthur moves to the open closet door and peers in. One pair of shoes, or rather a kind of boot. A pair of jeans and a pair of sweatpants. Three tops. A jacket, one of those Army fatigue jackets that the kids seem to like so much. That’s it. And— What the? “Get out of there, Gordon!” The cat flicks his tail and stays crouched firmly in place. “Suit yourself,” Arthur says.

  “I’ll take that,” he hears Maddy say.

  “Okay,” Lucille says. “Now, be careful, that’s all my extracts, they cost a fortune.” Then, “No, no, I can handle my suitcase. It’s light. The movers will be here tomorrow. Do you know what room is mine?”

  “I’ll show you,” Arthur says from the staircase. And his old heart jumps in his chest.

  He’ll put her in Nola’s sewing room. Small, but light-filled. Flowered wallpaper that Arthur himself put up years ago. He cut his finger that day. Nola made hamburger soup and yeast rolls for dinner. So funny the odd details you remember.

  On the shelf of the closet is Nola’s sewing machine. He’d like to keep it there. Lucille won’t mind, he doesn’t think. She can use it, if she wants. Though if he hears that machine running it might kill him dead because it will bring back the memory of him and Nola buying that machine to make baby clothes, then Nola using it for everything but. Still, Lucille can use it if she wants.

  Arthur ushers her into the room, and she looks around. “Wallpaper’s peeling,” she says. “Would you mind if I fix that?”

  “Okay with me,” Arthur says. “I don’t think they make that pattern anymore, though.”

  “Well…maybe I could paint it?”

  “I guess that would be all right.”

  “Oh, good! I know exactly the color I want. I saw it in Dooley’s Hardware not long ago, and I thought to myself, Oh, do I wish I had a need for that! It’s called Bakery Box Pink, isn’t that just perfect? You’ll feel like you’re in a bakery every time you come to my room!”

  There goes the neighborhood, Arthur thinks. Going in her room will probably feel like being trapped in a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, but never mind, it’s her room now. Let all these personalities reveal themselves. When Nola was alive, he lived by her decorating rules, anything she wanted was fine with him. But now he’s on his own. And you know what? From the time he was a little boy, he has wanted a saddle in his room. A Western saddle on a fence. He could have a little fence built in the corner of his room and go and buy a saddle to toss over it. If the baby’s a boy, why, he’ll love it. He can sit up there and pretend to be riding the range. For that matter, if the fence is built low and sturdy enough, and the saddle is glued firmly into place, Arthur could try it himself. Don’t think he wouldn’t.

  —

  At the end of August, Maddy is in Walmart to buy some maternity pants. She has almost reached the area of the store she wants when she sees Anderson walking by. She turns around, holds still. It’s unlikely he saw her, it was just a flash of him that she saw. But no, he did see her. She hears him behind her. “Maddy.”

  She turns to face him. He lifts his chin in that casual and dismissive way, his greeting. She says nothing.

  “Well, look who’s here,” he says.

  “I thought it was your day off.”

  “It is. I came in for some dude that had to go to a funeral. Guess that gets you pretty excited, huh? What with your love affair with cemeteries.”

  “I have a lot to do, Anderson, so…”

  He leans against the shelf, blocking her way. He’s trying to be sexy, crossing his arms to display his muscles, but she doesn’t care anymore.

  “Come on now,” he says. “You’ve got time for a Coke, right? I’ll buy you some French fries, too.”

  “Actually, no, I don’t have time.”

  “I went over to your house the other day,” he says. “I sat outside for the longest time. I figured you’d see me and come out. I waited a long time, for nothing.”

  Before, she would have apologized to him. Now she does not.

  He looks around, then leans in. “I wanted to see you bad, you know what I mean?”

  She snorts.

  “I did, I swear! Look, I know I said some things.”

  “Yes. Like you want nothing to do with me and I’m crazy.”

  “Okay, I was a jerk. But you know, it was a big surprise, what you told me. I was, like, in shock, okay?” He scans her body. “So are you still?”

  “Am I still what?”

  He shrugs. “You know, pregnant?” It’s as if the word is a cut in his mouth that he has to speak around.

  It occurs to her to say None of your business, which, so far as she is concerned, is true. But what she really wants is to get rid of him, and so she says, “Yes, I am still pregnant. The baby is due on Christmas Day.”

  His face softens. “Awwwwww.”

  Now she’s confused, and a little frightened. “I have to go,” she says, and starts to walk away.

  He takes her arm. “I’ll come and see you tonight,” he says. “About eight o’clock.”

  Great. Then her dad will tell him where she is. Unless she warns her dad not to. In which case, her dad will get all upset, and anything can happen.

  “I don’t live there anymore.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “None of your business.”

  He smiles. “What, do you live with that old dude that goes to visit his wife every day? That fucking lecher you told me about?”

  She moves closer to him.

  “Let me tell you something, Anderson. You could live to be a thousand years old and never begin to measure up to the kind of man Arthur Moses is. You can’t see the broad side of a barn for your ego. I wish I’d never met you.”

 
; “Yeah, well, you’re having my baby, so…”

  “It’s not yours!” She bores her eyes into his.

  “Are you fucking kidding me? You said it was mine!”

  “I guess we both said things that aren’t true, didn’t we?”

  She walks away, hopeful that he won’t follow her, and he doesn’t.

  —

  It’s later than Maddy thought it would be when she gets home. She went to Goodwill for clothes and had the good luck to find not only a great pair of maternity jeans but a top that wasn’t hideous. And she found a child’s book on trees that she bought for the baby. It’s hard to think that what’s growing inside her will someday be a fully formed little kid who can listen to books, then read them himself, but it’s true. It’s also hard to remember that the baby is half Anderson. But the way she looks at it most times is that mostly the baby is itself, a blank slate, and she will do everything she can to make sure her child does not have the isolating experience growing up that she did. All the while she lived with her father, she felt like a rope unraveling.

  “Arthur?” she calls, coming in the front door. No answer. “Hello?”

  They must have gone out somewhere, but not for long: she smells dinner in the oven. She takes a peek and sees a chicken roasting, potatoes baking. On the counter, a perfect-looking pie, cherry crumb-topped, she guesses, judging by the dark red juice that has bubbled out of the crust.

  She goes upstairs and puts away her clothes, then puts the little book on her bookshelf. She’ll show it to Arthur and ask him what he thinks. He’s the nature expert.

  On her desk are the Hamburgers and the photo of her mother, but now she sees something different, too. A pretty silver picture frame, maybe eight by ten, and in it is another picture of her mother. Or no, it’s the same picture, but it has been restored. The image is much clearer. Maddy picks up the frame and stares into her mother’s face, that smiling, confident, happy face, sure of a future she never got to have.

  Where did this photo come from?

  Well, it can only have come from Arthur or Lucille. The cat didn’t do it. Or…her father? No. It was Arthur.

  She sits in the desk chair holding the photo, a bit overwhelmed. In many respects, sorrow and disappointment are easier for her to handle than this outpouring of attention and affection that she has been offered by these two old people. It’s odd, it’s just so odd, all that has happened to her. Trying to separate the events in order to determine what led to what is like trying to distinguish the beginning and end of one strand of spaghetti on a platter piled high with the pasta. If she hadn’t had the home life she did, would she have had a better time at school? If she had had a better time at school, would she have ever met Arthur? Would she be going to art school without the intervention of Mr. Lyons? If she hadn’t lived here, would she ever have come to such an appreciation of what old people offer?