by Anne Tyler
Not till we were settled around the table did Sophia manage to get a word in. Then she did a wonderful job. She made a little story of our trip to Camden Yards, and everyone came out well in it. (Opal had caught on to baseball so quickly; I’d been so patient in explaining the rules.) I kept saying, “Oh, it was nothing,” and, “Just a routine game, all in all”—rolling my eyes at the other men and looking sheepish. Jeff asked me how Ripken had done. Dad asked if I had noticed any slacking off in attendance after the strike. I felt like some kind of impostor.
When I was a teenager, I would be eating dinner and all at once I’d imagine grabbing hold of the soup tureen and turning it upside down over my parents’ heads. Noodles would snake down Dad’s temples, and carrot disks would stud Mom’s French twist. The image always set me to laughing, and then I couldn’t stop. I’d be laughing so hard I was choking, spewing bits of chewed food, while the two of them sat staring at me grimly.
I don’t know why that memory came back to me just at that moment.
Pop-Pop told Sophia I used to go to ball games with him as a little kid. “Him and Jeff; they’d take turns,” he said. “Barnaby loved that bugle call! Loved it. Always used to say to me, ‘Pop-Pop,’ he used to say, ‘aren’t you glad we don’t have organ music, like those poor other ball teams have?’ ”
It seemed everybody assumed that Sophia would be riveted by the most inconsequential mention of my name. And she did look entertained. She was smiling and nodding, forgetting to eat her canned pineapple ring.
“Just how did you two meet?” Mom asked, and my grandma, showing off again, burst in with, “They met on a train.”
“On a train!”
The phrase gave me a vision of Sophia riding that train: her golden bun, her feather coat, her calm, pale hands accepting the stapled packet. My personal angel at last, I had fancied, but now that seemed an outdated concept. It was like when you’re introduced to someone who reminds you of, say, an old classmate, but then later, when you know him well, you forget about the classmate altogether. Sophia was just Sophia, by this time—so familiar to me, so much a part of my life, that I couldn’t imagine how she appeared to the people sitting around this table.
Except it was obvious they must like her. She was telling them in some detail now about our train ride. “He spilled coffee all over me,” she told them, and they laughed and tossed me appreciative glances, as if I’d done something witty. She said, “First I was annoyed, but when I saw how nice he was, and how well-mannered—”
“Barnaby, well-mannered?” my mother said.
“Oh, he apologized endlessly and helped me clean myself up. And so then we got to talking, and he told me about his work—”
A few resigned expressions here and there, but I don’t think she noticed.
“—and he described his clients so considerately, you know … And the clincher was that in Philly, I got a glimpse of Opal.”
This was exceptionally kind of her. Just by mentioning Opal’s name, sending her a wink across the table, she reminded the others that tonight was really Opal’s night. I watched them all remember that. Gram, who was sitting on Opal’s left, patted her hand and told her, “So you met Sophia before any of the rest of us, you smart little old thing!”
Opal smiled down at her plate.
“And then Barnaby asked for your phone number …,” Wicky suggested to Sophia.
“No, no. It was all left to me. I was the one who phoned, asking for him to come work for my aunt.”
They laughed again, and Pop-Pop slapped his knee.
“Well, yes,” Sophia said, laughing too. “I admit it was sort of trumped up. But Aunt Grace did need assistance, and so I didn’t feel guilty about it.”
“Of course not!” Gram said soothingly.
“He’s been an enormous help to her—put her whole house in order again. You must be very proud to have raised such a caretaking person.”
“Why, thank you, Sophia,” my mother told her. “That’s sweet of you to say.” She glanced down the table to Dad. “It’s not as if he hasn’t caused us some worry, in times past.”
“Oh, I know all about that,” Sophia said. “But look at how he turned out!”
Everybody looked. I gave them a little wave that was something like a windshield wiper stopping in mid-arc.
In those photo albums I used to rifle, people were so consistent. They tended to assume the same poses for every shot, the same expressions. You’d see a guy on page one, some young father at the beach, standing next to his wife and baby with his arms folded across his chest and his head at a slight angle; and then on the last page, twenty years later, there he still was with his arms still folded, hair a bit thinner but head still cocked, wife still on his left, although the baby had grown taller than the father and was settled into some favorite stance of his own by now. Even the beach was the same, often. I would turn page after page, ignoring my friends. (“Gaitlin! What’s keeping you, man? Look what we found upstairs!”) I would set my sights on, say, one little boy and follow him through infancy, kindergarten, college. I’d see him slicing his wedding cake, and darned if he wasn’t still wearing the same knotted-up scowl, or shamefaced smirk, or joyful smile.
What I’d wanted to know was, couldn’t people change? Did they have to settle for just being who they were forever, from cradle to grave?
Seated at that table, the night of Opal’s dinner, I felt I had changed. I waved a hand at my family as if I’d left them far in the distance—as if I’d become a whole other person, now that I loved Sophia.
THEN SOPHIA’S aunt accused me of theft.
She said I stole the cash she had been keeping in her flour bin.
“That flour bin’s famous!” I said. “Everyone and his brother knows she keeps her money there. Why is she picking on me?”
It was Mrs. Dibble I was talking to, because did Mrs. Glynn have the decency to accuse me to my face? Oh, no. No, she went behind my back. She telephoned the office on a Sunday night in mid-August, using the after-hours number that rang in Mrs. Dibble’s home. Announced right off that I had taken her money; no ifs or ands or buts. Not a question in her mind as to whether I was the culprit.
Mrs. Dibble asked her how she could be so sure. “There could be any number of explanations,” Mrs. Dibble told her—or at least she claimed she’d told her, when she reported the conversation to me. I wondered what she had really said. Maybe she’d said, “Yes, that particular worker does have a history of criminal behavior.”
Well, no, I decided; probably not. (It would reflect very poorly on Rent-a-Back, for one thing.)
Funny: when Mrs. Dibble broke the news to me, I felt this sudden thud of guilt, as if I might in fact have done it. I had to tell myself, Wait. Hold on. Why, from the first day I was hired, I had bent over backward not to meddle in our clients’ private belongings. It was almost an obsession. I would go out of my way; I would ostentatiously shut a desk drawer as I passed it, and had once, while delivering a lady’s diary to her hospital room, stuffed it into a grocery bag so I wouldn’t be tempted to peek.
Mrs. Dibble broke the news by phone, but that wasn’t her choice. First she asked if I would come see her in person. I said, “Why? What’s up?”
She said, “Oh, just this and that.”
“Spill it,” I said.
She sighed. She said, “Now, Barnaby, I don’t want you overreacting to what I’m about to tell you,” and then she said Mrs. Glynn believed I’d stolen her money.
I said, “I’ll go have a talk with her this minute.”
“You can’t. You have to promise you won’t. It would only complicate matters. I just thought I should warn you first, before the police get in touch.”
“The police!”
Something like a cold liquid trickled down the back of my neck.
“Do you think they’re going to arrest me?” I asked.
“No, no,” Mrs. Dibble said, giving a false laugh. “Arresting a person is not as easy as that! They’ll
probably want to question you, though, to get your side of the story.”
“I hate that woman,” I said.
“Now, Barnaby.”
“What have I ever done to her? Why would she just up and decide it was me?”
Then I thought I knew why. I thought of how Sophia had presented me to her mother. “I guess you could call it a pickup,” she’d said, with that triumphant look on her face.
She was as proud of my sins as I was of her virtues.
Mrs. Dibble was calculating aloud how I could make up for those lost hours at Mrs. Glynn’s. An hour a week at Mrs. Alphonse’s, she said; an hour with a man in a wheelchair over in Govans … She knew how hard I’d been working to save more money, she told me. But I was only half listening. I had to get hold of Sophia.
First of all, her line was busy. I tried once, tried twice, and then slammed down the receiver. Drove to her house in record time and pounded on the front door. It was after eleven o’clock by now, on a Sunday night. Normally she’d have been in bed. But all the lights were on, even the one in her room, and the footsteps I heard approaching were hard-soled and wide awake, and when she opened the door she was wearing what she’d worn that afternoon.
“Barnaby,” she said.
Not surprised in the least; so I knew it must have been her aunt she was talking to on the phone.
“I didn’t take that money,” I said.
She pressed her cheek against the edge of the door and studied my face. She said, “Even if you did, it wouldn’t change how I feel about you.”
“I didn’t take it, Sophia. Do you really think I’d do such a thing?”
“Of course not,” she said.
Then she stepped forward and kissed me, and turned to lead me into the living room.
But after we had settled on the couch, she said, “I know you’ve been under some pressure, trying to pay off your debt.”
“So you figured I just waltzed into a little old lady’s kitchen and helped myself to eighty-seven hundred dollars.”
“Twenty-nine sixty,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Two thousand, nine hundred and sixty was what she told me she had in her flour bin.”
At the rear of the house, I heard the refrigerator door latch shut with a muffled, furtive sound, and then something made of glass or china clinked but was instantly hushed. Betty, trying to be discreet. No doubt they’d been discussing me before I came. (“I said all along he seemed fishy, Sophia. Didn’t I have a bad feeling, way back at the beginning?”)
“Level with me,” I told Sophia. “Did you ever happen to mention to your aunt that I’d been in trouble with the law?”
She flushed and said nothing. She met my eyes very steadily.
“Did you?” I asked.
She said, “I might have, at some point. Maybe I did say, I don’t know, you’d had some problems in the past. But I didn’t mean any harm! I just wanted to show that you were an interesting person! I also said you came from a very good background. I said it was just your age or whatever, your age and circumstances, and you’d changed your ways completely and I had total faith in you.”
“Well, thanks,” I said.
She studied me, maybe wondering how I meant that. In fact, I wasn’t sure myself. I groaned. I tipped my head back against the sofa cushions and closed my eyes.
“Barnaby,” she said. She was using a tactful, delicate tone that put me instantly on guard. I opened my eyes and rolled my head in her direction. “Is it some kind of loan shark?” she asked me.
“Huh?”
“The person you owe money to.”
I laughed.
“Because I know about these things, Barnaby. I see it in my business all the time: people in such deep debt they think they can’t ever get out from under. Exorbitant interest rates, fees on top of fees … I want to help you, Barnaby. I don’t have eighty-seven hundred, but I do have, let’s see … In my savings account—”
“It’s my parents,” I said.
“Your parents?”
“They’re the ones I owe it to.”
“Well, for heaven’s sake,” Sophia said. “You owe eighty-seven hundred to your parents? And they’re making you pay it back?”
“Nothing odd about that,” I pointed out. “A debt’s a debt.”
“Yes, but your parents are so … affluent!”
This made me smile. It always tickles me, how people avoid the word “rich.”
“I just think that’s shocking,” Sophia said. She was sitting very straight on the edge of the couch, practically swaybacked. “When their own son has to work weekends, even, and live in somebody’s basement! That snoopy Mimi Hardesty always peeking out the window the minute I drive up, and calling down to ask if she can run a load of laundry as soon as you and I start getting intimate!”
I smiled again, but she didn’t notice.
“And your clothes are practically rags,” she said, “and your car is on its last legs…. What can your parents be thinking of?”
I could have calmed her down, I guess, if I’d told her about the Chinese statue and such. That would have made my parents look more reasonable. But it would have made me look shoddier. And besides, I enjoyed hearing somebody rail against my parents. I have to say, I took pleasure in it.
No, I was not at my best that night. I was spiteful and contrary, mean-spirited, malicious. When Sophia went out to the kitchen to get us a glass of wine, I pocketed a little porcelain bowl in the shape of a slipper that sat on her coffee table. And I didn’t even like that bowl! And certainly had no use for it.
Monday, I overslept. I was supposed to run errands for Mrs. Figg, because she couldn’t show her face again in half the stores in town. But I stood her up and wouldn’t answer the telephone when it rang. “Barnaby, are you there?” Mrs. Dibble asked my machine. “Mrs. Figg is fit to be tied!” I just turned over and went back to sleep.
What woke me, finally, was Mimi Hardesty calling from the top of the stairs. “Barnaby?” Her voice was oddly high and childish. “There’s a gentleman here to see you.”
You don’t often hear the word “gentleman” in everyday conversation. Especially not Mimi Hardesty’s conversation. I sat up. I said, “Who is it?”
“Um, an officer. Can he come down?”
“Why, sure,” I said.
Meanwhile scrambling out of bed, grabbing my jeans from the floor, and hopping into them one-legged. Heavy footsteps thudded toward me. I raked desperately at my blankets. It mattered a lot, for some reason, that I should get my bed folded back into a sofa. But I had left it opened out for so long that I’d forgotten how the thing worked, and anyway, it was too late. The cop arrived at the bottom of the stairs—an older man, gray-haired, surprisingly lean considering the weight of his tread. He already had his card out to show me. Does anyone really read those cards? Not me, I can tell you. I didn’t even hear his name, although he announced it in a loud, friendly voice. I looked past him to Mimi Hardesty, who was bending forward to peer at me from several steps above him. One small hand was clapped to her mouth, and her eyes were huge and perfectly round.
“Just like to ask you a couple of questions,” the cop said, pocketing his card. Without glancing in Mimi’s direction, he said, “Okay, ma’am.”
Mimi said, “Oh! Okay,” and turned to scamper upstairs. She was wearing shorts, and although the fronts of her legs were hazed with freckles, the backs were a pure, flawless white.
You notice the most ridiculous trivia during moments of stress.
But I was saying, “Have a seat,” as if I weren’t concerned in the least. “I can guess what you want to ask,” I said. (I figured I’d be better off bringing it up before he did.) I scooped an armload of dirty laundry from the chair. “I know that one of our clients believes I stole from her.”
The cop sat down and opened a spiral notebook. “So did you?” he asked mildly.
I said, “No.”
He gazed at me a moment, his expression n
oncommittal. I wondered if that might possibly be the end of it. “Did you?” and “No,” and he’d leave. But nothing’s ever that easy. He had to follow protocol: take note of my name, my age, my years of employment at Rent-a-Back. Eventually I gave up and sat down on the edge of my bed. My feet were bare, which somehow put me at a disadvantage, but I worried he might think I was going for a gun if I stood up to fetch my sneakers.
I did tell him that I’d known where Mrs. Glynn kept her money. “Everybody knew,” I said.
He asked, “Did you ever see the money?”
“No,” I said. Then I said, “Hey! Do you think she could be delusional?”
But the cop just gave me a look, at that, and closed his notebook in this weary, disgusted way that made me feel about two inches tall.
When the alarm went off at the Amberlys’ place, the night I was arrested, the police sent one of their helicopters putt-putting overhead. I was a little bit high. We were all a little bit high—me and Len and the Muller boys. I told the others, “Let me deal with this,” and I dialed the Northern District police on the Amberlys’ bedroom phone. “I wish to register a complaint,” I said. “There’s an extremely noisy helicopter disturbing the peace here.”
The man asked what address I was at, and then he went off for a while. When he came back, he said, “Yes, sir. The helicopter is ours; we sent it out on a call.”
“Well, in that case,” I told him smartly, “you should know how to call it back in.”
And I hung up, all dignified and haughty. Then the four of us collapsed into giggles. Then a car pulled up out front, and a flashing light revolved across the ceiling.
It was the very last moment that the world in general thought well of me.
In midafternoon, Sophia phoned. I was back in bed but not asleep. Still, I let the machine answer for me. “Barnaby, it’s me,” she said. “I’ll try you again later. Just wanted to say hi.”
“Hi,” she wanted to say. “Pulled off any more grand thefts lately?”
I got up and went to pee. Ran water over my toothbrush but replaced it in the rack without brushing, as if I were still a kid trying to hoodwink my mother.
