Last Will

by Bryn Greenwood

  As a courtesy, the corporate office sent out a girl named Celeste to be my assistant. She had a new blue suit and a blond bob, and every time I glanced at her she smiled brightly, either intending to become a VP of something or Mrs. Bernham Raleigh. Within half an hour she had created a calendar for me, and was returning phone calls, taking memos and typing up checks for household bills.

  “I ordered checks for the household account with your name, but until then it’s perfectly okay to use the ones with the late Mr. Raleigh’s name,” Celeste said when she passed me the checks to sign. Against my will I was influenced by the bold print that said ‘Robison P. Raleigh, Sr.’ in the upper left corner. For as long as I had been capable of expressing a preference I called myself Bernie, but I signed the checks ‘Bernham S. Raleigh.’ It was a case of medium writing, a spirit directing my hand.

  By noon I felt hemmed in on all sides. In the study, Celeste was unflaggingly cheerful. Upstairs, Mrs. Trentam vacuumed in and out of the bedrooms. Mrs. Bryant put in her final days, inventorying the linen closets and china cupboards. Meda was a roving emissary of dusting; she was everywhere at once. I passed her in the hall and she said, “Mr. Raleigh.”

  “Bernie,” I responded on autopilot. She acknowledged the correction with an uneasy closed-mouth smile, kept walking, and started up the stairs. Even her ankles were nice to look at.

  Shamed back into my duty, I returned to the study and made phone calls to my lawyers and accountants about the money that was going to descend on me in the near future. My grandfather’s money was reproducing itself while I was asleep. There was no way to keep up with it. While I lay in bed in the mornings, masturbating mindlessly, there were accountants, stockbrokers, and working stiffs putting in ten-hour days to make more money for the Raleigh family.

  The first of many meetings that Celeste scheduled for me was with the executor of my grandfather’s will. I might have thought it was my grandfather’s way of apologizing to me, but it seemed more like a domino rally. I was the only one left standing. Most of the will was unchanged from when it had been written, except that after my father died, Uncle Alan’s name replaced my father’s. Over the years my grandfather had added some minor codicils to provide for my mother and Aunt Ginny, as well as a few employees, including Mrs. Bryant. Then, when Uncle Alan had his heart attack, someone applied the legal equivalent of Wite-Out® to the will and wrote in my name. At Uncle Alan’s funeral, my grandfather must have already known what he was going to do.

  “How’s the book business?” he’d said to me in parting.

  “Good. It’s quiet,” I said.

  “Well, take care of yourself, son.”

  “You do the same, sir.”

  I shook his hand and then got in my rental car and drove to the airport. At the time, I assumed Pen had made other arrangements for the business that didn’t involve me. I’d never given a thought to the money.

  The will stipulated nothing for charities or schools. My grandfather believed in people “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps,” and didn’t think much of college degrees. His modest tithing had been a disappointment to the Church during his life, and in dying he chose not to continue it.

  I got the impression that my grandfather’s executor had wasted a lot of his own breath trying to convince Pen to leave some of it to someone or something more worthy than me. The Raleigh Industries company stock tipped the scale at over two billion. The rest of his stock portfolio and cash assets totaled another three billion. Then there was the house, plus an alarming array of real estate, the jet, seven cars, and the furnishings of the various properties: antiques, artwork, china, crystal and silver plate service for an army of 100. Lastly, I inherited my grandmother’s jewelry, modestly appraised and insured at just under thirty-one million. That woman could wear diamonds.

  When they showed me the numbers, I think I displayed stoic gravity in the face of the vacuum of emotion I experienced. I felt no elation or gratitude, which seemed to be what the lawyers expected. I realize I could as easily be dead. I realize there are much worse things than what happened to me, but the money didn’t make it any better. It made it worse.

  I left the meeting with my head full of insidious plans. I played with the idea of getting on a plane and going back to Kansas City for a few days, or forever. A visit, I speculated, would bolster the feeling that there were important things there for me to go back to, to reaffirm that I would be going back. In my heart, I knew it would have the opposite effect.

  A feeling somewhere between panic and fatalism kept me driving around for hours after the meeting. It was my primordial feeling of a black hole sucking things inexorably into itself. The sensation would be bad enough if I felt trapped in the gravitation of it, but I never do. It’s everything else slowly spinning inward, the whole of the world caught in the centripetal draw, while I watch from a distance. I taught myself it was better to stand aside and witness the destruction of the universe, but I wondered if I hadn’t learned to fear the wrong thing.

  A mile or so before the turn I should have taken to go to my grandfather’s house—my house—there were two small white crosses planted by the side of the road. The names on them were Robison Raleigh, Jr. and Robison Raleigh III. I never understood the urge to create memorials of places where tragedies occurred. Misery landmarks itself, even when you want to forget. I resolved to have the crosses removed, even if I had to come out and take them down myself. I drifted briefly, the steering wheel becoming less real in my hands. I didn’t turn toward the house and a little further on I drove by a familiar figure walking along the shoulder of the road. It bothered me that I knew Meda Amos so completely from a single glance, because I had no business filing away the shape of her back and her way of walking in my brain. It was perverse and useless.

  I Couldn’t Possibly

  Meda

  It was better than my other choices—at least I knew who he was—so I got in the car with Mr. Raleigh. My teeth were chattering so much I couldn’t say anything. I waited for him to start driving, but he didn’t.

  “Your seatbelt,” he said, and after I fastened it, he pulled back on the road.

  He laid his arm across the back of the seat and his arm was so long his hand was almost right behind my head. It made me nervous, even though I knew there wasn’t any reason to be. He reached over and turned the heater up a little higher, but didn’t say anything else. After ten miles of that, the silence got to me.

  “The car runs fine for a while and then it goes dead. It’s an old car. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.” He didn’t answer, so I kept babbling until we got into the city limits. I told him where to turn. Right at the Presbyterian Church, then straight through to the T at the old train depot, and then a left.

  “It’s the third one on the left,” I said, pointing because I couldn’t think of how to describe which house he was supposed to stop at. My family called it the Blue Mushroom, and it was the ugliest house I’d ever seen.

  “Is this your house?” he asked, surprised into saying something finally.

  “No, it’s my grandmother’s house. Thanks for the ride.” I started to get out of the car, but I still had the seatbelt on.

  “Would you like to go to dinner?”

  I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen that one coming, so I tried to say what Aunt M. would have said to end the conversation: “I couldn’t possibly. I need to get dinner for my grandmother and my daughter.”

  “They’re invited, too. We can all go out to dinner,” he said. “Please. I’d really enjoy some company.” I felt silly for automatically thinking he meant something else. I didn’t want to go, but I felt sorry for him.

  “Well, okay, sure. It’ll take us a minute to get ready. You want to come in?” He didn’t pick up on the fact that I was just trying to be polite. Or he was that lonely.

  Another Miss Amos

  I knew I was taking advantage of Meda’s compassion, but the seed of dread I was carrying around outweighed other considera
tions. Aunt Ginny was at her bridge group. I couldn’t go home. Under the surface of Meda’s kindness was a vein of anger; she scowled when I turned off the car. At first I thought her annoyance was because of the house, the fact that the house was more or less a shack. I’d have called it a lean-to, except that it wasn’t leaning to anything. It was ancient, low to the ground and covered with faded blue corrugated siding that curled away from the house at the foundation. I thought maybe she was embarrassed for me to see the cracked plaster and sagging ceiling, or the wretched green, flocked-velvet lamp shade, or the coffee table with the warped veneer top or the sofa with its matted upholstery and cigarette burns. Possibly she didn’t want me to see her grandmother sitting on that sofa with her feet—gone the way of all waitresses’ and hairdressers’ feet: corns and bunions and broken veins—propped on that coffee table.

  Also, no one had mentioned Meda’s daughter before, which invited questions about the fact that she was single again or still. Meda picked up the little girl, who looked about two, and escaped to some hinter region of the house, leaving me to introduce myself to her grandmother, who, like Meda, was also a Miss Amos. Not long after that introduction was effected, I discovered why Meda was uneasy about my presence. Miss Amos the Elder didn’t waste time on small talk.

  “You’re the one who was abducted, aren’t you?” she said.

  I was momentarily stunned, because people don’t usually ask about it. When I didn’t answer she asked a second time, so I said, “Yes.” She leaned closer to me, pointed at herself.

  “I was abducted, too. Standing out in my garden one night—I can show you where it was—and they took me.” At first I didn’t suspect what was amiss with her story, only fearing that she would return to mine. “It was a real bright light, and then I woke up on this table and they were standing all around me. Is that how it was for you?”

  “Don’t tell him that. He doesn’t want to hear your crazy story,” Meda said from the hallway. There was a patch on the shoulder of her coat. It was large enough that most people would have thrown the coat away, but she had patched it with a similar piece of fabric. Everything about Meda Amos made me want to help her, even her anger. I wanted to help her, but the complicated side of the equation was that I wanted her to need my help.

  Once we were at dinner, Miss Amos returned to her story. “They looked like those mummies you see in National Geographic. Like they were all head and those big black eyes.”

  “Gramma! Mr. Raleigh doesn’t want to hear this stuff.” Meda muttered to me, “It’s my mother and all those stupid newspapers she reads. Gramma can’t remember what’s real and what’s not. She thinks half that stuff she reads happened to her. And Mom just encourages her. She’s a UFO person. Believes in UFOs.”

  Meda and her grandmother bristled at each other.

  “What’s your little girl’s name?” I asked.

  “Annadore.” I gave her what I hoped was a look of benign curiosity, but when she saw the look she said, “It’s a long story,” but didn’t elaborate.

  Meda was solidly real beside me, and I was half relieved, half disappointed that she seemed almost matronly with her practical shoes and her jacket on. As she leaned over to help Annadore with her food, she propped her bosom on the table. Terrifying, but in the lovely, rollicking way that a snake is terrifying. Fast, poisonous, slithering in the grass, but brilliantly designed. All sharp fangs, plated scales, and sinuous coiled muscle. Even if you’re afraid of snakes, once you see their practical beauty, all the things you think you know fall away.

  I caught myself looking at her, continuing my internal debate about why she was so riveting. It was not merely the juxtaposition of the scars to her beauty or the suggestion of perfection corrupted. I couldn’t find a single feature in her face to improve upon, and that included addressing the issue of her scars. The problem was that the scars served as focusing mechanisms. They kept you looking when you wanted to be able to look away, and forced you to look at her face from new angles. In another woman you might have overlooked the subtle curvature of her upper lip that hinted at a smile, even when she wasn’t smiling. You definitely would have missed the ethereal glow of the apple of her cheek. Since the Old Masters died, no one cares about that sort of thing.

  Whatever it was about her, I didn’t want to be parted from the sight. Meda didn’t make the offer, but I accepted her grandmother’s invitation to come in when I returned them home after the meal. Meda left the room briefly and her grandmother leaned close to me.

  “I’m not crazy,” Miss Amos said in a melancholy whisper. “She’ll tell you I’m all loose in the head because of my stroke, but it happened. It happened and I didn’t remember it at all until my stroke. Broke something open inside me so I could remember it. They were cruel little things, with the coldest eyes. No heart to them at all. You know. They say that it happened to you, too, when you were just a little boy. Someday you come when you like, when she isn’t here to bother us. You and me, we’ll talk. We’ll talk. We’ll talk.” She said it like a mantra, drifting toward a trance or toward sleep, making me uneasy.

  When Meda came back, she leaned over her grandmother and said, “Gramma, why don’t you go to bed? It’s late.”

  After the old woman shuffled down the hallway, Meda lifted Annadore out of her playpen and sat down in the chair across from me. After a few moments of quietly rocking her daughter, she said, “She hasn’t been the same since her stroke. I think she realized she was going to die and that did something to her.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  SMILING DOG

  Meda

  “Death must be different for the elderly, though,” Mr. Raleigh said. “As people get older, I imagine they start bracing themselves for it.” He was waiting for me to answer, to disagree. He had some weird ideas about conversation. I couldn’t help thinking about how he had died and been brought back. It made my skin crawl and he must have noticed. “What?”

  “I was thinking about people who die young, about how they don’t get any chance to get themselves ready.” He was dead quiet and he sat back into the chair, staring off into space. I said, “Are you okay?”

  “Oh…yeah. What were you saying?”

  “I was going to say that people don’t keep track of where they are in their lives, that’s why they’re not ready to die. It’s not like you’re looking out the window of a house, thinking, oh, it’s spring, it’s summer. We look out the window and think, looks like it’s going to rain, I better take an umbrella. We’re not thinking, I’m going to need my coat in three months when it gets cold.” I said it in a big rush, wanting to get away from that other thing. I didn’t want to think about it or see him thinking about it.

  “Maybe we’re not aware of the seasons of our lives at the moment that they’re occurring, but we can look back and see them. One morning you wake up and the season has changed. I wonder if my grandfather got up that morning and there were leaves falling from the trees.”

  “I think it’s like being in a boat, sailing along, going some place, not realizing how close we’re getting to the rocks until one day—we find out that’s the only place we’re going.”

  “Have you ever been sailing?”

  “No,” I said. Mr. Raleigh put his chin in his hand and we sat there not saying anything until he looked up at me and smiled. He reminded me of a dog my brother once had. The dog would smile if you petted him, but even when he smiled, he looked sad.

  Subservience of the Flesh

  I liked the sinister flash in Meda’s eyes, when she talked about little sailboats colliding with sharp rocks. I was moved by her understanding of it, and pleased to find myself not thinking prurient thoughts about her. I don’t discount the possibility that what I felt was due to the little girl she had balanced across her thighs. She spoke without a single gesture, both her hands trapped in the task of holding her daughter. That, I imagined, was the burden of motherhood: the actual subservience of the flesh. I was relieved when Meda stood up and carried
her daughter down the dark hallway. A few minutes later she came back and said, “Well, goodnight, I guess. And thanks for dinner.”

  I was not completely unafraid, but was less afraid of going back to the house. I went upstairs and discovered that someone—Mrs. Trentam or Meda—had aired out my room, changed the sheets, opened the curtains, straightened everything, and taken away my laundry to be washed. The place was changed—the boiling lobster feeling dissipated.

  The image of Meda resting her breasts on the table stayed with me, kept me awake thinking about the mystery of breasts. They have a very practical purpose in procreation: nurturing offspring. That practicality aside, however, breasts are an attractant, examples of the incredible marketing genius of biology. Imagine a toothbrush so alluring it made you want to brush your teeth. You couldn’t stop thinking about brushing your teeth. It ate up whole hours of idle thought. That would be quite a toothbrush.

  From what I had seen through her clothes, Meda’s breasts were like that. They figured a great deal in my leisure thoughts, but it was her mouth I couldn’t stop thinking about. Her mouth was such a form of torment to me that I forced myself to think about her ankles, or her hair or any other part of her, in order to avoid thinking about her mouth. The whole situation annoyed me; it was disgusting and vulgar to catalogue her physical charms for later perusal. Without a doubt, men regularly subjected her to that sort of mental delectation, but I tried to hold myself to a higher standard.

  As much as I chastised myself, several mornings later I was in fact using her to animate my sexual diversions when she walked into my room. I had stayed up too late watching TV, then slept in without bothering to shut the bedroom door the night before. Maybe I was starting to feel at home. I struggled to whip the bed sheets up over me into some semblance of order, but it was futile. There was no point in hoping Meda didn’t realize what she’d walked in on. Her face went pink, and she apologized softly: “I didn’t realize you were in here. The door was open. I was just going to put clean sheets on the bed.”