by Gloria Dank
Gertie kept minute descriptions of her finds. The goshawk feather, a long gray fluffy one, was her proudest possession in recent months.
She pulled her bulk painfully upstairs and stood panting on the landing. All she could hear was the sound of her blood pounding and knocking in her ears, like the sound of the surf on a vacation she had taken once, in her long-forgotten youth. Even she had been young once, she thought now, without rancor. Even she had been young. She had taken that trip to the seaside with a young man that her parents had disapproved of. It had all been deliciously illicit and forbidden. They had stayed in a little hotel that had been converted from a lighthouse, in a tiny round room at the very top. In the morning, you could wake up and look out the window and see miles in every direction, out over the rolling expanse of sea. The gulls would come and circle, begging for bread—little beggars! she had thought at the time, amused—in their raucous voices. The young man and she had spent a great deal of time alone in that room, suspended in air and space, suspended in time, alone at the top of the lighthouse, with no company except for the sound of the sea and their own voices. How furious her father had been when she got back. She remembered how he had lectured her, over and over. But it hadn’t made any difference. Gertie had always done what she wanted. She had been thinner in those days—not thin, of course, never truly thin, but she thought the present-day anorexic look was ridiculous and unbecoming. She had been plump and buxom and hearty, a young girl with a long braid of thick chestnut hair and bright blue eyes that grew luminous (although she did not know this) in the sea air, in the blue twilight at the top of the lighthouse turned motel. She had always done what she wanted. She was the one who had left the young man, who had told her he wanted to marry her. She no longer remembered why she left him. There must have been a good reason. She had left him, and gone her own way, which she had been following ever since. Thinking about it now, old and fat and monstrous, clinging like a wart to the top of the bannister, her blood thundering solemnly in her ears, Gertie felt no regret. She could not even remember his name. No matter. She had never really loved anyone except Hugo.
Hugo … and this house. The house that Hugo had built, how she loved it, even more than she had loved that airy, ethereal spire of a lighthouse. Everything in it was so much Hugo. She planned to have it to herself one day, although of course there was no hurry. No hurry at all.
Gradually her blood settled down to a muffled roar in the back of her head. She straightened up, wheezing, and went down the hall to her room, where her catalogs waited. She could hear them calling to her as she went … Gertie … Gertie … it’s been too long, Gertie … what about that goshawk feather, Gertie?… come to us, Gertie …
Invigorated by the call of the wild, Gertie strode briskly down the hall to her room.
8
“Gertie knows something,” Snooky announced to Bernard that afternoon when he returned to the cabin.
Bernard looked interested. He pulled a page out of the typewriter. “What?”
“I don’t know, but I know she knows something.”
“How do you know?”
Snooky related the conversation in the kitchen of Hugo’s Folly.
“I see,” said Bernard. He thrummed absently on the typewriter keys. “Interesting.”
“Of course, it could be nothing. Just Gertie showing off.”
“But you don’t think it is.”
“No.”
“What was Sarah’s reaction?”
“She told me afterward that Gertie doesn’t know anything, but I thought she looked a little upset.”
“Hmmm. Interesting.”
“Yes.”
“Any way we could find out more?”
“Well, I don’t think there’s much chance of Gertie opening up her heart to you, Bernard. Or me either, for that matter. She’s pretty close-mouthed about things.”
“But you’re sure she knows something?”
“Uh-huh.”
Bernard pondered this for a moment.
“I Ching,” volunteered Snooky.
“Excuse me?”
“I Ching. It’s a kind of Chinese oracle. You use it with sticks or with pennies. Maybe we should consult it.”
Bernard turned away.
“You’re so close-minded, Bernard. I had a girlfriend once who consulted the I Ching every day. She swore by it. She used to say that thought was meaningless; intuition was all.”
“May I say that I am not in the least interested in the sayings of one of your feather-brained girlfriends?”
“You may,” said Snooky, “but if you do, you’ll hurt my feelings.”
Over dinner that night, Bernard appeared abstracted. He grunted to himself and ate his food mechanically. Misty, at his knee, lifted up one paw to beg for food, but for once he ignored her.
Finally Maya leaned forward and touched his elbow lightly. “What is it, darling?”
“What is what?”
“What’s the matter?”
“Oh, nothing. Nothing. Just a few ideas rattling around in my head.”
“About your book?”
“No. Not exactly.”
Maya turned to her brother, who was staring down at the blue-and-white checked tablecloth. “What about you, Snooks?”
“Huh? Oh, I’m all right. I’m okay. I just have a few things on my mind, that’s all.”
“Things on your mind?”
“Yes.”
“A heavy burden for so light a vehicle,” remarked Bernard, reaching for the pepper.
Snooky looked embittered. “I’m thinking about what Gertie said today. I’m worried about her. She didn’t look well at all. She said she had come home to do her cataloging, but I don’t think that was true. Her face was all red.”
“High blood pressure,” said Bernard.
“And a heart condition, like Irma. Amazing, with all the activity she gets.”
“She could probably go on like that for years.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“I nearly always am.”
“Just like Mrs. Woolly,” said Snooky pointedly. “One of her more annoying traits.”
It was Bernard’s turn to look annoyed. “Don’t start in on Mrs. Woolly.”
“Why not?”
“She happens to be my livelihood.”
“That’s not my fault. I never wanted you to write about sheep. I don’t find sheep particularly appealing.”
“What would you rather I wrote about?”
“Well, I’ve always liked marsupials. Kangaroos, you know. Wallabies. Or how about wombats? Nothing nicer than a wombat. They look like little bears. Or how about an opposum?”
“No.”
“Bernard likes sheep,” said Maya. “And rats. He likes writing about them.”
“But Bernard, they’re so boring.”
“I don’t think so.”
“How about lizards?”
“No.”
“Spiders?”
“No.”
“Birds?”
“No.”
“Extinct reptiles?”
Bernard gazed at him with a faint frown. “What?”
“Dinosaurs. Pterodactyls. Triceratops. You know what I mean.”
“Oh. No.”
“Well, don’t say I didn’t try to help out.”
“I like Mrs. Woolly,” said Bernard stiffly.
“Nothing wrong with Mrs. Woolly.”
“Apparently you think so.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You haven’t said much of anything, as far as I can tell.”
“I like Snooky’s idea about lizards,” Maya said mildly. “You remember that snake you had when you were a little boy, darling? Why not try a book about snakes? You’ve always liked them.”
“I have not. And that snake hated me. It escaped as soon as it could.”
“Escaped?” said Snooky. “Where did it go?”
“Down the drain in the sink in my parents’ bathroom.
When my mother turned on the water to brush her teeth, it reared up out of the drain into her face.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not.”
“What happened to her?”
“My father claimed she was never quite the same afterward.” Bernard sullenly stabbed at his meat with a fork.
“All of Bernard’s pets met some kind of gruesome death,” said Maya affectionately. “Every single one of them. It’s tragic, really.”
“Every single one of them? What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh, come on, Bernard.”
“I refuse to parade my personal tragedies for the sake of satisfying your idle curiosity,” Bernard snapped. He stabbed with increasing fervor at his steak.
“My curiosity isn’t idle, Bernard. It’s active—extremely active. Now, what happened?”
“A series of hideous and tragic accidents in which you could not possibly be interested.”
“But I am interested. I am very interested. I couldn’t be more interested.”
“Tell him about Piggy,” said Maya.
“Piggy?”
“Bernard’s dog when he was young. Go ahead, darling, tell him about Piggy.”
“Piggy died,” Bernard said grudgingly.
“How?”
“A friend of my mother’s ran him over in our driveway. He liked to sleep in the driveway in the sun. My parents and most of their friends would check for him before they drove in or out. But one day my mother had an acquaintance over for lunch, and when she was leaving she ran over Piggy.”
“How sad, Bernard.”
“Thank you.”
“The saddest part of it is, she didn’t run over him just once,” said Maya. “She ran over him five or six times.”
“Five or six times?”
“The idiot lost her head,” said Bernard. “She ran back and forth over him, and then jumped out of the car and ran into the house screaming and crying.” He brooded on this. “Once would have been enough. Piggy was not a very large dog.”
“I’m sorry, Bernard. Sorrier than I can say. Did you get another dog?”
“Yes, but it wasn’t the same. My other dog wasn’t as smart as Piggy. Piggy was special.” Bernard put a large lump of butter in his potatoes and mashed it down dispiritedly with his fork.
“What about your other pets?”
“Well, there was an aquarium of tropical fish.”
“What happened to them?”
“They bred for a few months, then they all died.”
Snooky was thoughtful. “Kind of a metaphor for all life, wouldn’t you say, Bernard? First we breed, and then we die.”
Bernard forked some of the mashed potatoes into his mouth.
“That’s why Bernard is so solicitous about Misty,” said Maya, smiling at him. “He’s worried she’ll go the way of the rest.”
“Not Misty,” said Snooky. He lifted her up and held her with her little paws dangling in midair. “Not this little old Misty. Nothing’s going to happen to her. She’s smarter than Piggy was. By the way, Bernard, if Piggy was so very intelligent, why did he go to sleep in the driveway?”
Bernard did not reply. Misty woke up, smiled, and yawned hugely into Snooky’s face.
The next morning Bernard roused himself bright and early, crept out of bed without waking Maya, put on a heavy sweater and jeans and thick gray socks and went into the kitchen. He made himself a pot of coffee, poured himself a large mug, added thick cream and four sugars and wandered contentedly into the living room. The sun slanted across the floor, and the fire was still smoldering from the night before. He put on another log and stirred the fire a bit, hoping it would catch, which it didn’t. He sat down, shivering, at his typewriter. He took a sip of the coffee, which went down warm and sweet and boiling hot. By the time the others got up he was halfway through his second cup of coffee and typing away madly.
Snooky wandered into the kitchen, yawning, his tattered blue robe trailing after him, and Maya went into the bathroom to take a shower. Bernard paused for a moment to look over what he had done. On the floor by his side, the telephone began to ring.
It rang once, twice, three times. Bernard glanced through what he had written, grunted cheerfully to himself and put it back in the typewriter.
The phone shrilled four times, five times. Bernard began to type.
On the ninth ring, Snooky came out into the living room and stood looking at the stolid figure of his brother-in-law.
“Forgive me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that the phone?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the phone ringing?”
“Yes.”
“That phone there on the floor by your side?”
“Yes.”
Snooky sighed. “I see.” He picked up the telephone. “Hello?… Oh, hello, Sarah … I … what? What’s wrong? Calm down. I … what?”
He listened intently for a moment.
“I’ll be right over,” he said, and put down the phone. His face had gone gray.
“What is it?”
“It’s Irma. She’s in bad shape. She’s at the hospital.”
“The hospital?”
“An overdose of her heart medication.”
Their eyes met.
“A suicide attempt,” said Snooky.
Bernard was frowning. He looked severe, like a judge. “Or somebody,” he said slowly, “doesn’t want to have to wait for their money.”
When Snooky arrived at the hospital, Detective Bentley was there, interviewing the family.
“Who found her?” he was saying, pen poised above a notepad. Sarah, Gertie, Dwayne and Roger were huddled in a small, miserable group in the waiting room.
“I did,” said Sarah. “Snooky, thank God you’re here.” Snooky sat down next to her and took her hands in his.
“What time was it?” asked Bentley.
“I don’t know. Around seven o’clock this morning, maybe. I came into her room, and she was having trouble breathing. I called an ambulance right away.”
“The doctors told me she’s suffering from an overdose of digoxin, her heart medication,” said Bentley. “An overdose. Who usually gives her her medicine?”
“I do,” said Sarah.
“How often do you administer it?”
“Once a day, in the morning. I gave her her dose yesterday around nine o’clock, just as usual. And I only gave her one of the pills, just the way I always do. Not the whole bottle.”
“How many pills were left?”
“I don’t know. Maybe half the bottle.”
“The bottle was kept—where?”
“On the table next to her bed.”
“What kind of a mood has she been in recently?” asked Bentley, scribbling furiously. “Has she been depressed?”
“Yes … no. Up and down, ever since Bobby’s death. Yesterday was one of her bad days.”
“She wasn’t feeling well?”
“No. She stayed in bed most of the day.”
“Did she see anybody?”
“Just Gertie and me. I brought her her meals.”
“Any visitors?”
“No.”
“Let me ask you something, Miss Tucker,” said the detective. “Who else besides yourself would your aunt take her medication from?”
“Well, I always gave it to her personally. I don’t know who else she’d trust. Gertie, I guess. Any of the family.”
“Thank you.” Bentley strode away, his short legs working like pistons, to have a conference with one of the doctors. Sarah turned and buried her face in Snooky’s shirt. “He thinks I did it,” she said, her voice muffled.
Snooky said nothing. There seemed to be nothing to say.
“I’m going to her,” said Gertie.
Sarah looked up, startled. “Gertie, you can’t. They’re still working on her.”
“Fools,” said Gertie. “Doctors, I mean. Fools, the whole lot of them.” But she sat back down, her shapel
ess mass a large toadstool on the bright blue hospital chair.
Roger had his head in his hands. He was slumped forward at an awkward angle. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.”
Dwayne was staring across the waiting room with a strangely blank expression on his face. He seemed to Snooky to be calculating something inside his head—the look you get when you’re adding numbers, or trying to multiply in your head, and you carry the four, but you’ve already forgotten what the first number was, six or eight or twelve? He seemed withdrawn to a small, central, inner point, where calculations were being made rapidly and smoothly. At Snooky’s side, Sarah buried her face in his shoulder and began to sob.
After that first day, spent mostly in the hospital waiting room, time seemed to slow down for Irma’s family. The little white digoxin pills had caused a heart attack. Slow and clocklike, like automatons, dulled by the frightening nearness of death, her relatives went back and forth, back and forth between their houses and the hospital. Their lives were ruled by the clock now: visiting hours from ten to twelve, and again from four till six; home again for dinner; back to the hospital the next day, carrying flowers, candy, cards from neighbors. Only Gertie refused to be ruled by the hospital clock. She would sit for hours, ignoring the rules about visitors, holding her sister-in-law’s hand and scrutinizing her intently.
“I never knew they were so devoted,” Snooky said to Sarah at one point. “Gertie was there all last night, the nurses told me.”
Sarah was exhausted. There were pulsing blue veins in the hollows under her eyes. “Thank God for Gertie,” was all she said. “Whenever Irma wakes up, there’s somebody there.”
Gertie’s motives were, even for her, a little obscure. Part of it, she felt, sitting by the bed and clasping Irma’s frail hand in her own big comforting one, was the fact that Irma was in many ways her last link to her brother Hugo. Irma had been his wife and the three of them had lived together in that house for many happy years. Also, much as she hated to admit it to herself, the proximity of death fascinated her. She sat and watched the life force ebb slowly from her sister-in-law’s body. The process fascinated and amazed her. Just so had she watched a sparrow die, crippled by a fall, its rapid breathing slowing gently to a stop. Once she had tried to feed a baby mole that had been abandoned by its parents, left for lost in the middle of the lawn, and halfway through the feeding of warm milk (Gertie didn’t know whether moles liked warm milk, but she thought most babies did, and figured it was worth a try), it had given an odd little hiccup and died right there in her hands. She had never forgotten the experience: the sorrow and the sense of loss. She sat for hours, looking at Irma. This was the last person who had truly known Hugo, and here she was fading before her eyes.
