“Very funny, card,” she smiled.
“What did you want to see me for anyway?” having drifted to the side. The water was like honey under the tinted dome, and it ran from both corners of his mouth.
Hannah thought, Interiors—she’d come to the right place.
The person on the other end had sounded marvelously relieved when to his question “Is this Hannah Burden?” she’d said, “Yes.” It was her uncle’s attorney, whose voice croaked like rubber stubbed against warm asphalt, “I was beginning to think I’d never find you.”
She hadn’t had the chance to ask him how he had in fact found her, not that it mattered, since she had lived in the same apartment since she got to town, for when he told her that the redoubtable, detested uncle LeRoy was dead she could hardly catch her breath.
(Wrynn listened quietly as water slapped the raft’s edge while Hannah’s memory of the conversation evolved.)
“In what event, what?” Hannah had asked the lawyer. “You’re going to have to slow down.”
(This was when? Wrynn interrupted—Just before I called you, she answered, and went on.)
“In, the, event,” but now it appeared the lawyer was going to read too slowly. “In the event the beneficiary named herein shall, directly or indirectly, you with me Hannah Burden?”
“Directly or indirectly.”
“Under any pretense or for any cause or reason whatever, oppose the probate of my last will, or institute.”
“Excuse me?”
“Yes,” exacerbatedly.
“Probate means oppose the validity of the will?”
“Probate’s the process of establishing, officially, that the will is valid, yes. That’s, yes, now if I may, can I go on? Institute, abet, take or share, directly or indirectly, in any action or proceeding against my estate to impeach, impair”—
Hannah thinking: peaches, pears …
—“set aside or invalidate any of the provisions of my last will, I do hereby revoke any and all devices, bequests, trusts, or other provisions to or for the benefit of my niece Hannah Burden, is that much understood, then?” and the lawyer excused himself to fetch a glass of water. As desk, papers, telephone were left behind the beneficiary imagined this country lawyer’s office; humming ceiling fan, its birch blades paddling; bookcases glass-fronted to jurisprudential sets all brown, black, red-rowed behind; the filing cabinets, photographs of his family.
I, LeRoy Mann, of the city of Babylon, county of Webster, state of Nebraska, being of sound and disposing mind and memory, not acting under duress, menace, fraud, or undue influence of any person whatever, do make, publish, and declare this my last will and testament, revoking all previous wills and codicils. Whereas I am a widower and formerly married to Berenice Davis Mann who died on 8th July 1954, and whereas I have no children living or dead, I hereby give and bequeath all of my possessions, properties, stocks, monies and holdings to my beloved niece Hannah Burden, of New York, New York, provided she survives me, moreover provided she satisfies the conditions set forth herebelow.
“Hello? sorry. Better, now where were we?”
“The conditions,” said Hannah.
“Yes, well, we were getting there, perhaps we’ll simply move on ahead to that portion of the will, since it’s that upon which all this seems to hinge in any case, right? Hereby authorized to execute in such manner, no wait a bit, let’s see, yes here we go: Furthermore, it is understood that the conditions precedent to my loving niece’s taking possession and becoming sole owner and proprietor of the generous gift of my entire estate are as follows, that (one) she shall neither sell nor give away any of my personal chattels, nor purchase any other such chattels, and that she live just as I have lived, with precisely these objects I have passed my own life comfortably enough surrounded by, and that thereby she might come to understand, appreciate, cherish … skipping ahead here, uh …”
“I don’t understand.”
The lawyer excused himself, took another call; a bluejay scolded from the maple outside his window, and Hannah listened to it dazed. A click and the lawyer was back on the line.
“The significance of these conditions we might traverse briefly, then, at this time since I’ll be sending you a copy of the full document, and since it was found, was deemed appropriate that all these conditions be met with the purest fidelity and that in their, their intricacy be fully understood by you before you begin to benefit in any way from these considerable resources.”
“Spell out what you mean by appropriate, fidelity, considerable and—” embarrassed, in a way, to interrupt, yet it was as if the tardy, deliberate cadences of the lawyer acted as a vise, compressive as her father Nicky’s summer migraines must have been (she remembered them, the packs of ice mama Opal applied to his temples, how the man ground his teeth and shouted, the front of his shirt soaking with melted ice).
“Goddamn it all if your uncle didn’t have some reason behind these here precautions he took with you,” veering, as Hannah understood, from the script. “If you would listen, stop gloating and just—”
“I resent that,” she said.
“To be brief.”
“Please, fine.”
“The farm, the land, stocks; monies, all holdings are given to you under the requirement that, in order for you in your own lifetime come through labor and fitting circumstances to understand first and eventually to appreciate the man your uncle was, you take as your own responsibility the maintenance of the farm. Your beloved uncle kept half a dozen head of Guernseys, two dozen poultry, kept his own silage and provender for them, in essence ran his farm by himself and in his last years without any assistance whatever, certainly without the help any number of people might naturally expect of their only surviving kin, the last of his kin left on earth who, rather than following the most common of familial strictures, to respect and keep, chose instead to abandon this poor man to his own devices—”
“Wealthiest son of a bitch, I mean the wealthiest in that whole county … poor man, sick bastard, he wrote all that crap, didn’t he.”
“Hannah Burden?”
“He could’ve hired the whole town of Babylon, Blue Hill and Red Cloud thrown in, to come out every damn day and feed his poor hens one grain of scratch at a time, by hand.”
“Hannah Burden, I’d like to finish. You certainly have available to you the option of refusing to abide by the conditions, as I read to you before. You would thus forfeit any benefit under the provisions of the will, the estate will be liquidated and all the proceeds thereof will immediately be transferred into a trust for a certain charity Mr. Mann has named, and it would further be provided that you receive the sum of one dollar a day for as long as you live, one dollar issued, under the direction of this codicil, where is it, yes, right here this codicil, one dollar each day as long as she shall live to be issued from these offices by check, and posted to your current place of residence. But this is skipping ahead, just to finish the conditionary items.”
“Go on.” A deadweighted sinking sensation.
“That you must, further to come to a closer appreciation of your beloved uncle, eat your food from his plates, using only his utensils, sleep in his bed, in those selfsame linens he slept in, sit only in his chairs, cook all your meals on his stove, tell the time by his several clocks—this itemized chapter of the will continues for, let me see, well, roughly sixty-five, seventy pages, which I will be posting you, as I said, so there is no reason to read it all here, it would take several hours, maybe more, long-distance … but I believe you have a sense of what the what? the spirit of the will is, at least in these directives?”
After a few moments Hannah’s voice crackled: “But he was clearly, absolutely insane. There’s no question. I mean, you can see that, surely?”
“It’s not my place to agree with you on that.”
“‘Being of sound mind,’ it’s a joke, any judge in the country, I’ll move to have it overturned.”
“That would be very difficult t
o do, very difficult. I’ve seen this kind of thing before. Frankly, it’s more common than you’d think. I had a client years ago left his house, two cars, a sizable life insurance policy, left it all to his pet bulldog. As disgusting an animal as I ever saw. Beautiful new wall-to-wall carpet in this house and saliva trails everywhere. Ruined, just ruined. The family of the deceased spent two years litigating. Ran it all the way up to the state supreme court, but nothing doing. As trustee I had to assign a curator to the dog, somebody who would watch out for ground glass in the dog chow.”
“This is ridiculous.”
“Courts and judges these days have adopted a very liberal approach in assessing competency or capacity. Until proven otherwise, a testator is presumed competent to make a will. Originally, he, your uncle, had made out a holographic will, just written it out himself and signed it, brought it in for me to file, but when I told him it wasn’t worth the paper—that is, holographic wills are authorized for mariners at sea, for members of the armed forces serving in combat, that sort of thing, he called me out, said he wanted to do the thing up right, in accordance with all the formalities prescribed by law. I can agree with you there are … elements to it—”
“Venomous—”
“It’s none of my business, that is, whatever problems there were between, but to get back to your notion about turning it over it’s my opinion, if you’ll pardon my French, this here thing’s solid as a brick shithouse.”
“That is exactly what it is,” said Hannah.
“That determination you can come to at a later date, after you have read it through carefully and discussed it with your own attorney.”
“I don’t have an attorney.”
“I advise you to get one.”
After she hung up she had called Franz, with whom she hadn’t talked for years, and asked him whether she could see him immediately. Pulling the door behind her, its heavy mass closing temporarily in the frame, she prowled through the hot streets for a time feeling at once victimized by the past and the future. She hailed a cab, and gave the address of Franz’s new penthouse on the Upper East Side.
He paddled with short strokes to the side of the pool, careful not to get his face wet, and rolled with studied delicacy onto the Mexican tiles which lined its perimeter. He walked past her, fastening the tie on a fresh terry-cloth skirt, without betraying his thoughts about what he had just heard. Hannah followed him through several rooms, each of which faced out over the park covered in heavy leafage and reservoir which lay like a blinding mirror within its banks, until they had come to his study. Here was the ballerina figurine and there the piggy bank, arranged to face one another on the low glass table. As she took in the room she recognized it was laid out in the same manner, with the same furniture, curtains, rugs, as had been the apartment where she first met him. He opened a low walnut door, concealed in the paneling along the wall, and ducked into the dark for a moment. When he emerged he had a bottle in one hand and two crystal glasses in the other.
“What’s this?” she said.
“To celebrate.”
“But you didn’t understand. I’m not going back there. I have to turn the thing down.”
Franz shook his head, grinned, drew the cork from the gold foil. “You know how you told me about that Vache, what was it, you had once and how I mentioned it was better for an animal to die of disease than be force-fed cement for three weeks before it was shipped off to slaughter? well, it so happened I checked with the stud ranch I have a little bit of interest in over in northwest Jersey and found out I owned a small herd of cattle, can you believe? So I told them, honey forget the chemicals, forget the cement, leave the girls in the pasture with salt lick and straw, or whatever the hell it is they eat, let them die of old age, and all that gets me to thinking about your problem with this will, and I start wondering, now what are chattels? Aren’t they things that can be moved, i.e., like through a loophole? For instance, can cattle be chattels?”
Hannah smiled.
“You with me?”
“I am.”
He lifted his glass. “To the whore with a heart, Our Lady Francis of the sacred cattle.”
And she came over and embraced him.
4.
WHEN MADELEINE WORK and her husband, Henry, first arrived in New York they came with bundles as tatty and tied-together as those seen in so many photographs of immigrants at Ellis Island who stood there in the great hall filled with a billowing echo of languages, enmeshed, one woven through the fabric of the next. And they may be said to have felt as alien and disquieted. Each had been here before, though rather than ease their passage, earlier exposure to the vertical city produced in them more dread than hope. The man named Ingram—and neither was certain this was his surname or given—met them so briefly at the train station, was all an endless ravishment of talk as he helped them gather their baggage on the ramp. Madeleine, who was always the one instantly to form an opinion, later told Henry there was something queer about that Ingram, something slippery. But of course Henry, while he was predisposed to trusting his wife’s intuition, as it was more often than not proved right, argued against bad thoughts, for it was Ingram who had made all the arrangements so they could finally escape the South, the camp, the shack.
“I’ve got a letter here from your brother, by the way,” said Krieger as he lifted a bundle of what was presumably clothes, tied into a quilt and bound with scarves and rope, into the back of a cab. It went through Krieger’s mind, what kind of motherfugger could Owen Berkeley be to allow his daughter to continue this way? the man Henry Work he sized up as decent, one who would feud with nobody—he’d claim he was constitutionally incapable of arguing with a woman (a matter of body, the disposition of its fluids and spices, no doubt)—as his eye lit on the big brass safety pins that gathered the straps of his overalls. This guy was a string saver, collector of buttons, magazines, marbles, and he could fix radios, appliances, car engines with eyes closed. Brittle old pipe tobacco could be made damp and aromatic as fresh-mixed by sealing it inside a pouch together with a wedge of green apple. A cardinal struck by a car found dying on the shoulder of the road in some high grass, etcetera, out there by some wild sumac, say, he would know to anesthetize it by a bead of gin touched to its beak at the tip of his little finger then drown it in a puddle of rainwater and bury it in a bank of dirt, even leave a stone to mark its place. Call him Abraham just see what kind of rise there is to be gotten.
“Abr’ham? your old lady hard of hearing?”
“Maddie, did you hear what Mr. Ingram here says?”
“I heard.”
“Well, take the letter.”
Krieger handed her the blue envelope. “I just saw him last week down in Guatemala, he’s doing some fine work there, fine work, you all must be very proud of Jonathan, right Abr’ham.”
“My husband’s name is Henry.”
“He pretty near stopped a polio epidemic or something all on his own in one of the northern departments down there, it’s made him into kind of a local folk hero.”
“Maddie, aren’t you going to open it?” Henry went on, having loaded the last of their baggage into the front seat of the cab.
“Actually, as I think it may pertain to some work I’m currently involved with and I don’t have much time, etcetera, I really would appreciate it if you have a look at it, let me know if Jonathan wants me to do anything for him before I go back down, hey—who’s your favorite boxer like, Clay? Joe? Rock?”
Madeleine opened the letter and read it, trying to imagine what Jonathan looked like now, thinking of him the last time she saw him in that barber shop when he was thirteen, up at Berkeley house on the Hudson.
Dearest Maddie, how does a person start a letter like this after so many years apart? First off, I love you, sister, and of course I miss you, and also it’s important to let you know right away that (how silly this will come off sounding) I stand with you, I support what you’ve done and Look—look at how you were right from the very be
ginning, Look at how long it’s lasted (that doesn’t sound flippant or prejudiced I hope). Well, it’s my hope that someday soon you’ll let me see you and Henry again. I don’t blame you for taking the decision to make the cut a total one. But whenever you decide to start making exceptions—remember I’m still the same devoted boy you left that afternoon at Schiavellos, right?
By the way, Mr. Ingram, whose idea it was to get you two set up in this new place—he hasn’t fully described it to me but it sounds great—is a good man, someone to trust. He’s doing this partly as a favor to me and partly, I guess, as a favor to an old friend of his. Be nice to him, for my sake? If he needs any help or anything, well there it is.
I think you would be proud of me and the work I am doing down here with these poor people. I know it sounds bleeding Liberal, but what else is there to do but try to put back in some of the endless, vast masses of things we have taken out of here—food right out of these people’s mouths, timber off their forests so they can make grazing land for fast-food hamburger-chain cattle, all the rest of it, it’s all genocide of the first order. If only you could see what we have done. I’m ashamed to be American.
Maddie, when do we all meet? Ingram swears he will not say how he found you and where exactly you’re going, and I respect that in him. I gather, for his work he needs to be in touch with Owen. And, as you, I’ll have nothing to do with that if I can help it, though he claims it is all in a good cause.
But I’ve run out of paper and this lamp’s fluttering, must be low on kerosene oil. I send you hugs and kisses and regards to Henry, and still hope that one of these days maybe soon you’ll relent so we can all be together again?
Love,
Jonathan.
“Anything in there for me?” Krieger asked, pleasantly, if a bit oversure of his forger’s skill.
Madeleine was distracted by something she could not quite place her finger on; the handwriting seemed so different, its rounded letters almost like a child’s. But then, she thought, Jonathan was always the baby in the family. “No, not really,” she answered.
Come Sunday Page 18
