“I’m William now,” he announced, as he’d been doing all day.
“Really? As of when?”
“As of this morning.”
She held out her hands welcomingly, and he caught hold of them and stood on his tiptoes to kiss her cheek as she pecked at his. She smiled. “I think you’re a little taller every time I see you… William. But you shouldn’t be in such a hurry to be a grown-up. It’s overrated.”
She seemed genuinely happy to see him, which wasn’t always the case. As often as not when he came to visit, Madge would be off in another world, and nothing he said would register. She would ask him about school and then nod and go Mm-hm, Uh-huh, Isn’t that interesting.
Today it was William who was in another world. During the entire drive to St. Paul, all the while he was telling her about how his friends and teachers at St. Tom’s had reacted to the declaration of his new identity, and then while she was telling him the story of how she’d vacillated all through nursing school and for years afterward between being prim Margaret and brazen Madge, he kept glancing at her and wondering, uneasily, why she seemed… different. It wasn’t a difference he could put into words. It wasn’t, for instance, that she was so much fatter now than when they’d been living together. That change had taken place gradually, and William could no longer clearly picture Madge the way she used to be (which even back then hadn’t been what you could call thin). It wasn’t that she no longer wore the same basic black outfit every day as soon as she changed out of her hospital uniform. Now that she was working at a nursing home, she dressed like an ordinary person. Her hair was done up in the same loose bun as ever, and her face was made up with the usual bare minimum of makeup. The general impression was that she didn’t care how she looked so long as she basically passed muster—but had she even been otherwise?
Probably it wasn’t Madge who’d changed, but himself. He’d got used to his mother’s more stylish, more expensive clothes. Without knowing it he’d become the kind of snob that Judith accused Ben and Sondra of being. The kind who feels superior to anyone who’s wearing the wrong clothes, wrong meaning cheap.
Or just as probably the “difference” was nothing but a side effect of the marijuana he’d been smoking. Because, in fact, everything seemed skewed from the way it usually registered: the traffic was too speedy, the trucks too loud, the sun too bright through the rifts of cloud. He examined his ragged fingernails and began to feel choked up with pity because his pink hands looked like two animals that had been skinned alive.
The Obstschmecker house, when they finally got there, was the strangest sight of all. It only needed a sign over the door saying “Beware of Ghost” to look like an official haunted house. The paint all flaky, the lawn already rank with weeds this early in the spring, a fallen branch from the elm in the backyard clinging to the ridge of the east dormer window, and the lower half of that window sealed up with a weathered sheet of plywood. To the right and left and across the street as well were new pink-brick condos with fake mansard roofs. The big FOR SALE billboard at the corner said that Calumet Manors had been built by the Golden Gopher Development Corp., a subsidiary of N.N.E. Each unit of the development had its own sunken garage and plot of not yet sodded lawn, and each lawn its own seedling maple. Even if it had been fixed up, the Obstschmecker house would have looked out of place amid these latter-day structures, having been built on so much larger a scale.
“They’re awful, aren’t they?” Madge said, parking the Honda outside the garage. “And would you believe each one of them costs more than they were offering Mother for the house five years ago? The ceilings are only eight feet high. And the plumbing’s already shot in half the houses. Those developers are crooks, all of them.”
This instant diatribe seemed to cheer her up appreciably, or else she was simply glad to be home. William followed her around to the back of the house (Madge explained that the front door was kept locked all the time, “just to be on the safe side”) and then in through the back door. The wooden railing had broken off the back stairs and lay rotting in the leaf pile that had been a flower bed.
“Mother!” Madge called out from the kitchen. “We’re home.”
The kitchen reeked of air freshener. No forest, no lumber yard, had ever smelled so piny. Yet both windows were open and a breeze was turning the pages of a cookbook that lay on the table amid a clutter of newly dirtied bowls and pans.
Madge checked the stove to see that the burners and the oven hadn’t been left on, and then called out again: “Mother! William is here.”
In reply a door slammed shut.
Madge sighed. “I hope she’s not going to be in one of her moods. Well, she can suit herself. Come in to the dining room, that’s where your stuff is. I was going to have your friend set it up in your old room so you could test it out right off the bat, but he explained what that would entail in terms of wiring the whole thing together, and it sounded like more trouble than it was worth.”
By the time this preamble was over William stood in view of his birthday present. It was, as he’d been hoping (but hoping to get from his stepfather, not from Madge), an Apple. Not just an Apple, however, but an Apple garnished with all good things—a double disc-drive, a Soft-Card co-processor, a DOS 3.3 disc controller, and for the icing on this electronic birthday cake, a Silentype thermal printer, the first such (according to the note Jason had provided for the unveiling) that the dealer, the User-Friendly Computer Store in Robbinsdale mall, had sold to anyone in the Twin Cities.
“It’s wonderful, Madge,” William said, after he’d checked off all the items on Jason’s inventory, “truly. But I can’t possibly accept this. I don’t know exactly what it all cost you, but something on the order of three thousand dollars. At least. You could get a new car for what you spent on this. And I know if I bring it home, my mother wouldn’t let me keep it.”
“That’s sweet of you, Billy—William, excuse me—but in fact I didn’t spend a penny of my own money for it. It all came out of your own trust fund. Naturally, if you don’t want it, I can take it back to the store. But both your sister and the nice Jewish boy she put me in touch with, both of them thought this would be exactly what you wanted. And that you’d probably learn to use it well enough to get your money’s worth out of it.”
“This is the first I’ve heard about my having a trust fund.”
“Because you weren’t told. Right after the accident I had a hard enough time just dealing with things like the funeral, and in any case there didn’t seem to be any immediate need for you to know about it, not till you had to start thinking about college. Maybe I was wrong, maybe I should have told you before this. Or maybe I should have waited a year or two longer. But your mother tells me you might be heading to college ahead of the usual schedule. So you should know what’s possible, financially. Basically, you’ve got enough money to draw on that you can go to just about anywhere you want to, including medical school, if that’s what you’re still aiming for.”
“But Dad didn’t have any money saved. How…?”
“How!” replied Madge, lifting her right hand, Indian-style.
It was like a belly dive into the pool of memory. Madge and his father had played the same simple trick on him a hundred times, and the humor of the sudden derailment it created whenever it appeared had always cracked him up. And so it did again.
Madge smiled and, when he’d stopped laughing, said, “We did have some fun times together, didn’t we?”
He nodded.
The telephone rang and Madge went into the kitchen to answer it. As soon as she was out of the room, the reality of the once familiar but so much changed scene bore down on William—the mustiness, the mess, the neglect. The floorboards in the alcove where the hanging plants were hung had warped from the water leaking, drop by drop, from the overwatered pots. Beside the rocker an ashtray of cigarette butts had been spilled on the carpet and never picked up. The place looked as though bums had been squatting there.
; Madge came back into the dining room and said, “That was St. Malachy’s, and I’m so pissed off. I’ve had this arranged for weeks in advance. You’d think that when I ask for one afternoon, but no, no, it’s impossible to get anyone else. Lucy isn’t answering her phone, and there’s only the two aides on duty, and this is something that requires an R.N. Which means me. Sorry.”
William gave an obliging shrug. “That’s okay. I’m planning on getting into the same business, remember. So I better get used to this sort of thing. But I would like to know about this mysterious trust fund before you head off. Dad was not exactly a millionaire when he died.”
“There’s no mystery. He had insurance. It was our wedding present from my father, a fully paid-up life policy for $100,000. Henry was furious at the time. I remember him saying he’d rather have had a set of Tupperware than the damned insurance, and you could see his point. He was never going to enjoy any of it. The policy was drawn up in such a way that he couldn’t even use it as collateral for a loan—if you know how that sort of thing works?”
William nodded. He didn’t, but he wasn’t interested either. “Does my mother know about the trust fund?” he asked.
Madge smiled. “She knows it exists, but not the amount. Right after the accident, your mother was a little… I guess the word is hostile. She seemed to think I was going to put up a custody battle for you. I mean, I do love you, and it broke my heart to have you move away so soon after Henry was gone. But she’s your mother, I’m not. Anyhow, when we discussed your situation, I told her that there was a trust fund and that I was the executor but that I didn’t want to tell you about it till you were nearer to college, and she agreed to that. But I never told her how much it was, and she never asked. She probably thought, knowing our situation, that the insurance was for a couple thousand at most, and didn’t want to embarrass me by asking. While I was thinking that your long-term interests might be better served if Dr. Winckelmeyer wasn’t aware that you stood to come into a lump of money like that. Sometimes, you know, a stepfather will want to take money from a trust fund to pay for things like high school tuition, even clothes. And Ben Winckelmeyer never struck me as an especially generous man. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’d advise you to keep this under your hat. Let him think the computer came from me.”
William smiled agreement. He was always happy to join a conspiracy. And such a present coming from Madge would make his stepfather feel like a cheapskate.
“I gotta go now,” Madge said. “And since I won’t be able to drive you and this big gray Apple home to Willowville, let me give you money for a cab.”
“No, no, I’ll call Mom. She’s always saying how I never visit you often enough, so she won’t mind coming to pick me up. She’s happy for any excuse that’ll get her out of the house. But there’s still one thing…” He hesitated, with an instinctively lawyerly prudence, not wanting to come right out and ask how much the trust fund amounted to.
Madge misunderstood his reticence. “Oh, I got my share, if that’s what you’re getting at. The pot was divided fifty-fifty. I put my half in a similar trust fund for Ned, so that if I go before he does, he won’t have to be in the kind of ward I used to work in at the state hospital. That’s always been my worst anxiety, and the insurance has more or less put an end to it. Whatever happens, I know Ned will be taken care of decently.”
A bell began to ring. It wasn’t the doorbell, or the telephone, but a real hand-rung bell that produced a thin, silvery, irregular tinkling like the bell that an altar boy rings at Mass when the Host is lifted. It seemed to come from upstairs, which gave William an uneasy feeling, since he’d been assuming that Grandma O. had gone to her own room, and so the only person who could have been responsible for ringing the bell upstairs was Ned, and that, of course, was impossible.
“Damn,” said Madge, reaching the only logical explanation, “Mother must have gone upstairs. That’s the bell she rings when she wants me to bring Ned up his dinner, or for whatever other reason. And if those bowls out in the kitchen are any clue, she’s put together some kind of birthday party. If I go up there now, I won’t be able to get away for another fifteen minutes. Mother doesn’t do that much cooking anymore, but when she does…”
“Hey, that’s okay,” William said. “I’ll go up and say you’ve already left. If you want me to.”
“Would you? I’d appreciate it.”
“She doesn’t let up with that bell, does she?”
“It’s funny, I’ve got so used to it I don’t even notice anymore. Mother has the idea that Ned likes the sound. She’ll sit there sometimes five, ten minutes just holding the bell up in front of him and ringing it. Like now. At first it got on my nerves. Now, it’s like… I don’t know, hearing the water run for a bath. It seems natural. You’re sure you don’t want cab fare?”
“Don’t waste your money. Mom’ll come for me. After all, it’s my birthday, I’m entitled to limousine service. Which reminds me, I can’t thank you enough for the Apple and the printer. It’s the best birthday present I ever had.”
“Thank your father. The trust fund came from him.” She took up her purse, and they smiled at each other but didn’t try to kiss again. They were neither of them much for hugging or kissing. But when she’d gone and the back door had banged shut behind her, William felt a pang of sorrow go through his chest, a sorrow not simply over the fact that his feelings for Madge went deeper than his feelings for his own mother, but a further sorrow that came from knowing that deep as those feelings might be, they weren’t finally deep enough. It was as though, inside, he was just like his brother Ned, but while in Ned’s case it was his body that was immobilized and impotent, with William it was his feelings, or his soul.
And still that damned bell kept up its endless jingling, as though it was the sound of the sadness he was feeling, the silvery, incessant shrilling of his own emptiness. Little as he wanted to go upstairs and have a “birthday party” with Grandma O. and Ned, even that seemed preferable to staying down here and listening to that bell. How could she stand to hear it herself? Maybe her own hearing wasn’t that good.
“I’m coming!” he called up the stairs. “Stop ringing the bell, I’m coming!”
The moment he’d mounted the first step, the ringing stopped. He felt embarrassed, since he hadn’t thought Grandma O. would have been able to hear what he’d said.
—Well, said a voice that was not Grandma O.’s, but a man’s voice, deep but seeming also somehow far away, like the bell. I’m waiting, Billy. Come.
“Billy?”
It was the voice, the real voice of Grandma Obstschmecker. The other voice, the man’s, could not have been real. He must have imagined it, the way earlier he’d imagined the words on the blackboard in Room 202.
“Billy!” Her voice was louder, with an exasperated ring to it. “Billy, I know you’re up there, I’m not deaf. And your knapsack’s right here on the table as plain as day. Billy!”
Reprieved for the time being from having to go up to Ned’s room, he hurried back to the dining room. Grandma O. regarded him doubtfully, as though making up her mind whether or not to be angry.
“Hi, Grandma,” he said, with a perfunctory smile. “I thought you were upstairs.”
“Why did Madge leave?” the old woman demanded brusquely. “I heard the bell ringing, so naturally I supposed it was Madge. She has the idea that Ned likes the sound it makes. But then I heard the car drive off, and the bell went on ringing, so I knew she must have left you here.” She grimaced at him, and touched her wig to be sure it was positioned properly. “Happy Birthday,” she added. Somehow she made even that seem like a complaint. “How old are you this time?”
“Thirteen.”
“I’ll be seventy-three on my next birthday.”
He didn’t know what to do with this information except collate it: “That’s sixty years’ difference between us.”
She nodded gravely, as having reached the same rueful conclusion independently. “I baked your f
avorite dessert.”
“Lardy-slice?”
She nodded.
“Hey, I haven’t had any lardy-slice for a long time.”
“It’s in the pantry, under a bowl to keep the flies off. I’m afraid it’s a little burnt.”
“Well, we won’t have to eat the burnt parts.”
The lardy-slice, however, had been half incinerated. Its blackened, pie-crustlike dough could not be pried from the tin baking pan even with the most heavy-duty metal spatula. They ate it by digging shreds and chunks from the soft middle with their forks. William was surprised at how much he enjoyed it. Even the dark brown parts tasted good. They ate without talking. Grandma O. was old enough not to have to pretend an interest in matters that didn’t concern her, such as how William was doing in school, or the nature of the equipment in the boxes in the dining room.
“Now,” she said, when the last edible morsels of the lardy-slice had been carved from cinders stuck to the pie tin, “if you like, I’ll phone for your mother to come get you, and you can go back upstairs and see Ned a while longer. Maybe Madge is right, maybe he does enjoy company when they come calling. Maybe for him hearing that bell is like listening to a song on the radio. That’s what Madge thinks. We’ll probably never know, will we? You wouldn’t mind ringing it for him a little while longer, would you?”
“But I wasn’t ringing the bell. I was just starting to go upstairs when you called me.”
“In some ways, Billy Michaels, you haven’t changed a bit since you were six years old. Stubborn? I’ve never known a child to be so stubborn. Well, there’s no point in arguing with stubborn people. It only raises your blood pressure. Though mine’s not as bad now as it used to be. I guess I must be eating more healthily. Though I don’t make any effort to. I eat whatever I like. The lardy-slice was good, wasn’t it?”
William concurred in this with a sincere nod of his head. “Thanks for making it, Grandma.”
“It was Mr. Obstschmecker’s favorite dessert, too,” she confided. “He could put away an entire pan at one sitting. So I always made two, one for him, one for the family. It has a different name in German, but I can’t remember what. I don’t remember any German now, except Gesundheit!”
THE M.D. A Horror Story Page 18
