Last Things

by Ralph McInerny

  The apartment was small, simply furnished, books everywhere, and a computer very much in evidence, almost in the center of the room. Photographs of the Bernardo family stood on every available surface. Eleanor was touched to see herself well represented.

  “What a lovely place.”

  “I like it.”

  “The bachelor girl.”

  On the mantel of the little fireplace, occupying pride of place, was a Lladr6 porcelain of the Blessed Virgin. Eleanor went to it and moved an ungloved finger over the smooth surface.

  “Your mother said you looked through your father’s things.” She kept her back to Jessica as she spoke. There was no answer. She turned.

  Jessica, coat off, shoes kicked free, said, “I am going to have a beer. Would you like one?”

  “No, thank you. Yes, I will.”

  Jessica pattered off to the kitchen and returned with the beer, handing one to Eleanor, no glass. She tipped her own and drank thirstily.

  “Ah.”

  “Is it true?”

  Jessica did not pretend she had forgotten her remark. She collapsed into a chair, leather with matching leather footstool to which she lifted her stockinged feet.

  “I wondered why you were so eager to see Dad’s papers.”

  “And you found out why.”

  “Your letters? Yes.”

  “What have you done with them?” There was a desk against the wall served by the same chair on which Jessica must sit when she used her computer, and just revolved from one to the other. The desk was littered with papers.

  “They were quite a revelation.”

  “Jessica, you must know about your father. There were other letters.”

  “I couldn’t figure out who they were from.”

  “I suppose one could guess, with a little thought and hard remembering.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “Exactly. I was going to suggest that they all be removed and destroyed. To spare your mother.”

  “And the women?”

  “Jessica, this is extremely embarrassing for me. I was a fool. It was all a long time ago.”

  “Not all the letters are dated.”

  “Are they here?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want them.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Not yet? Jessica, you can’t mean to use those letters in the novel you’re writing.”

  “If I did, only you and I would know the basis.”

  “You are going to use them?” Eleanor tried to imitate the way Jessica drank out of the bottle and beer dribbled down her chin. She wiped it off with the back of her hand.

  “I haven’t decided.”

  “You’re toying with me.”

  And she was. Jessica pretended to resent the advice Eleanor had given when she had prattled about entering the convent. Was she taking her revenge?

  “I suppose you want to destroy them.”

  “Of course. It was awful of your father to keep them, but so like him.”

  “Didn’t you ever ask for them back?”

  “Your father wouldn’t even tell me if he had kept them.”

  “So you wanted to search.”

  “Not soon enough, obviously.”

  “They are technically his property, of course.”

  “Oh, Jessica, stop! Give me those letters. If you have read them I suppose I can’t stop you from somehow using them in your story, but I won’t rest until I know they’ve been destroyed.”

  Jessica took another thirsty drink, then looked thoughtfully at Eleanor. “I have been trying to remember the times when that was going on, between you and Dad.”

  “You were only a girl.”

  “Was it going on when you advised me against the convent?”

  “You were never serious about that.”

  “You seemed to think so at the time.”

  “Jessica, are you trying to get back at me or something?”

  Jessica finished her beer and set the bottle on the floor beside her chair. “No.”

  “Are you going to put me in your novel?”

  Jessica laughed. “Real people can’t be put into novels, Eleanor.”

  “Just their letters?”

  Eleanor would have given anything to be able to rummage through the papers on Jessica’s desk, as she had gone through Fulvio’s. It was insufferable to have to sit here bargaining about those letters. She imagined breaking in, while Jessica was at work. Oh, dear God, what a fool she had been.

  When at last she left, mission unaccomplished, Eleanor did not start her car at once. She laid her forehead against the steering wheel and wept, thinking of Jessica reading what she had written to Fulvio. Eventually, she drove away, headed home, heartsick.

  31

  “You can’t seriously mean to use them.”

  Would she in the end portray the character based on her father as a womanizer, unfaithful with her aunt and others? It was not her father’s actions that shocked her. Had her mother ever suspected? The letters made Eleanor intelligible now in a way she had never been before. All that fussing concerned-aunt manner made clear that Eleanor could not imagine herself except as a Bernardo, an honorary Bernardo or Bernardo emerita; it was her identity. Of course Uncle Joe would have been second best to Fulvio, so she had to worm her way into the affections of the paterfamilias too. Half-forgotten memories from years ago came to Jessica. The lake, the little sailboat, her mother wondering where her father had gone. “I can’t see the boat. Can you see the boat?”

  “Were you ever discovered?”

  “I want those letters.”

  “I could have copies made for you.”

  Her aunt’s open hand swept through the air and clapped against the side of her head, causing her ear to ring, her cheek to burn. Almost immediately she was sorry for what she had done but turned away. She would never have the satisfaction of getting even copies of those letters now.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what? Writing those letters? Seducing my father?”

  “Seducing!”

  If there is laughter in hell it would sound like her aunt’s.

  It had been Eleanor’s pushy insistence that had prompted Jessica to go to her father’s study and snoop around. When she found the file of letters written to her father by his abject conquests, she was bemused, saddened, fascinated. And then she had come on those signed “Eleanor.” Dear God. She took all of them from the folder and put them in her briefcase. She told herself that she would destroy them, but she hadn’t. They suggested an interesting twist in her novel.

  The bearded man on a bicycle had been waiting for her in the parking lot some days before when she came out of the lab.

  “Jessica Bernardo? I am a colleague of your brother’s.”

  “Raymond?”

  “Not likely. Andrew. I want to talk to you.”

  “That’s what you’re doing.” There was menace in his manner, his stance awkward, the eyes narrowed but with strange feline flecks in them.

  “Right here? All right.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Cassirer. Horst Cassirer. Your brother has launched a campaign to prevent my receiving tenure at the college and I want you to stop him.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “I am deadly serious. Perhaps I seem young to you, but my scholarly achievements are well known. Throughout the land. Apparently your brother feels threatened by the comparison beween my career and his own.”

  “Threatened? Andrew has tenure. What could you do to him?”

  “I am here to discuss what he is doing to me. I do not intend to take this lying down. I will mount an attack of my own. But first I am trying indirection.”

  “Coming to me?”

  “Are you aware that your brother shares an apartment with Gloria Monday?”

  “What on earth has that to do with you?”

  “His lifestyle is in violation of the faculty manual. If known, it would be cause for dismissal, tenure o
r not.”

  “You want to blackmail him?”

  “I want him to understand the consequences of his effort to thwart my career. If he wants to destroy me, I will destroy him.”

  “Aren’t tenure decisions made by a committee? How could Andrew’s vote threaten you?”

  “His vote could save me, that is the point. Will you talk to him?”

  “You mean will I warn him?”

  “If you like.”

  “What was your name again?”

  “Cassirer.” He spelled it for her. “Horst. I am deadly serious,” he repeated.

  He turned and went away among the parked cars to the street. Jessica watched him go, the angel of destruction. Of course she knew about Gloria, and of course Andrew knew that she knew. A sign of this was that they never referred to it. Jessica had put two and two together, or rather one and one, and seen how it was. Why did the realization make her despise Gloria, whom she scarcely knew, and think of Andrew as being snared in her web?

  Her father, Raymond, Andrew, all of them succumbing to the temptations of the flesh. Of course they were men, and men are different.

  “He came to you!” Andrew half-lifted from his chair in the cafeteria.

  “And threatened to reveal that you are living in sin with Gloria.”

  The old phrase altered his manner. He smiled. “That makes it sound quaint.”

  “No, just dumb. Did you ever think of marrying her?”

  “And making an honest woman of her?”

  “Well, a wife anyway.”

  Andrew moved his coffee mug as if it were a chess piece, then moved it back again. On his face was written the truth that he would not want to commit himself for life to Gloria. Perhaps the reverse was also true. Meanwhile they had an apartment at halfrent apiece, companionship, and she supposed endless sex. No, familiarity breeds temperance. Regular fornication would pall. How did she know this? I’m a novelist. And Andrew wasn’t. That creep Cassirer was right that Andrew’s career was not stellar. His suffered by comparison with Gloria’s, forget about Cassirer. How did he see his life?

  “Even if I moved out he could still make the accusation.”

  “Sins of your past life.”

  “What’s all this about sin?”

  “It’s what what you’re doing is called. Remember?”

  “Who are you, Mom?”

  “I wish.”

  “Are you a virgin?”

  “Would you think less of me if I were?”

  She would be damned if she would talk about herself when he was the problem. She had little doubt that Cassirer meant what he said. Perhaps even if Andrew crumbled and voted for him he would play the morality card.

  Andrew said, “I doubt the administration would care to make a fuss about how I live.”

  But the media would. A permissive age was prurient about the behavior it ostensibly approved. Vice and virtue were simply instruments of accusation. Jessica was certain that Cassirer himself did not condemn the way Andrew lived. As she did.

  “Well, I’ve delivered his message.”

  “I could kill him for going to you.”

  “If ’twere done ’twere well ’twere done quickly.”

  All the way home she wondered if she had gotten the quotation right.

  There was a message on her phone. She half-hoped it was Walter. But it was Raymond.

  “Jessica, I’ll just say it. Dad died at five ten this afternoon. Could you go home and be with Mom?”

  She was so stunned that she could not even cry. She turned and went back out to her car and drove off to be with her mother.

  32

  Eleanor had taken Margaret to the hospital and went with her into Fulvio’s room. He now had a plastic mask over his face and was being given oxygen. Margaret gave a little cry at the sight of him. Well, he did look awful, complexion gray, his chest rising and falling in the effort to breathe. His eyes went back and forth between Margaret and Eleanor. He lifted the bottom of the plastic mask and said, “Boo.”

  Margaret put the mask back in place and leaned over him. She wanted desperately to do something, but there was nothing to do.

  Eleanor whispered to Margaret, “I’ll check with the nurses.”

  Margaret said nothing. Eleanor went out to the nurses’ station, where she stood at the counter and was ignored. Doctors scribbled their notes, nurses came and went, busy, busy. There was no one she could ask how Fulvio was. What answer did she expect? After a time she went back to the room.

  “My turn, Margaret. Go the waiting room. Did you sleep at all last night?”

  On the drive down Margaret had lamented missing Mass that morning. Apparently she had tossed and turned until dawn and then fallen into a deep sleep. Eleanor found her in early afternoon, a bewildered woman sitting on a couch, unable to drive herself to the hospital.

  “Of course I’ll come with you,” Margaret said when Eleanor suggested she stay home and rest. But she responded to the suggestion that she sit in the waiting room. “I’ll say a rosary.”

  Eleanor went to the restroom, and when she passed the waiting room, Margaret was already asleep in her chair. She went on to Fulvio’s room. His eyes were closed. He continued to breathe in a way that involved his whole upper body. Had she ever really thought she loved this man? What Eleanor saw was the man who had made a fool of her, driven a wedge between Alfred and herself, and kept her silly letters where they could be found by Jessica. What a hateful man he was, sick or not.

  The oxygen mask was connected to an outlet in the wall by a clear plastic tube like that which led from the needle in Fulvio’s wrist to the wrinkled plastic bag from which, drop by drop, fluid was released. Just below the bag, there was a little handle, like a faucet. Eleanor imagined her hand going to it, her fingers gripping it, slowly turning it. The flow to his arm would stop. There was a silver handle over the oxygen on the wall. Eleanor imagined turning that off too. But her hands were gripping the frame of the bed. She stood there and looked down at the man who had ruined her life. How else could she describe it? Her two marriages had been farces, because of him. And Alfred …

  “Is there something between you and Fulvio?” he had asked out of the blue.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Yes or no!”

  “No.”

  But her half-hysterical tone negated the word. Alfred stared at her and seemed to age as she looked at him.

  Perhaps if she had been honest, he would have forgiven her. As it was, he decided to confront Fulvio, accusing him of …

  “He didn’t know how to put it.” Fulvio grinned as he told Eleanor.

  “Oh my God.”

  “He wants to take his money out of Bernardo’s.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  Another grin. “Maybe later.”

  But there wasn’t to be much later. If Alfred had aged visibly in the minutes after he put the dreaded question, he went rapidly downhill in the weeks that followed. The first time that, waking in the wee hours, she went downstairs and found him in the study, a glass in his hand, his eyes red with drink and tears, she drove pity from herself with anger.

  “Alfred! What are you doing?”

  “I always wondered what it was like to get drunk. Now I know.”

  How long had that gone on? Like a fool, she told Fulvio, and one night he showed up unannounced to have a talk with Alfred. He wanted Eleanor to leave them alone but she refused. Alfred offered Fulvio a drink.

  “I only drink wine.”

  “Eleanor, is there wine in the house?”

  “I don’t want any wine. I’ve come to talk to you about your money.”

  “To hell with the money.” And then a drunken inspiration. “You can keep the goddamn money. Keep the money but leave Eleanor alone.”

  Fulvio snickered. “Don’t you realize what that would make her?”

  Alfred rose from his chair and charged at Fulvio, but he was unsteady on his feet and when Fulvio pushed him he stumbled backward a
nd fell. From the floor, he stared ignominiously at Fulvio. He spoke in a low and broken voice. “Keep the money. What do I care?”

  After Fulvio left, Eleanor got him to his feet and tried to get him to come upstairs.

  “I suppose I should, now that you’re bought and paid for.”

  She slapped him. Hard. “You drunken ass.”

  She lay in her bed sleepless for hours, hearing him banging around downstairs. It was nearly three when he came upstairs, laboriously, talking to himself. Then he stood in the door of the room. Eleanor lay still, pretending sleep. When she felt his hand on her breast, she screamed, threw back the covers, and leapt from the bed. Her fury cowed him. She pushed him out of the room, sending him reeling into the hallway and slammed the door. A moment later she heard a crashing sound. She came outside and looked over the bannister at the crumpled body of her husband.

  In his hospital bed, Fulvio’s chest continued to rise and fall. He seemed to be sleeping. Digital displays on the console over his bed blinked in ways she could not understand, like moving figures in a broker’s office. Suddenly they seemed to be blinking out of control. Eleanor stepped back, wondering if she should do something. Surely if there were danger, the nurses would come on the run. That was the point of intensive care. But she thought of the overworked crew, distracted, scampering about. It was ten minutes before the nurse ran into the room.

  The nurse pushed her aside and busied herself with her patient. She leaned across the bed and shook the plastic bag. Fulvio awoke, wild-eyed. He began to gasp. The nurse pressed the oxygen mask more tightly to his face. He began to struggle, as if she were trying to harm him. His arm jerked up and the needle in his wrist came loose under the bandages that held it in place. Blood began to ooze from the edges of the bandages. The nurse sounded the alarm.

  Fulvio was surrounded by nurses and doctors when the fatal stroke came. Eleanor had moved to a corner of the room, ignored as she had been earlier at the nurses’ station. They were thumping on Fulvio’s chest, trying to revive him. A machine was hurried into the room and great jolts shook Fulvio’s body. Finally, they gave up. It was over. A nurse turned and glared angrily at Eleanor.