Fool (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Frederick Dillen

  Barnaby got out and looked, and it was one of the baseball hats with wings that the go-go president of the Old Ladies Bank had worn. It was in good shape. It still even had its squeeze bulb and the wire to the wings. As he tested for flappability, he felt he was holding the archeology of his own life, and that his life was ancient.

  Then he felt a surge of tenderness for the fact that Peterpotter carried the hat around on his tractor. Did he wear it when he was out of sight of everyone? And why? No, Barnaby didn’t want to know why. He would find Peterpotter and give the thing back to him. It was too painful to contemplate.

  In the meantime, he put it on. Maroon with white wings. Good colors for Barnaby.

  And then when he stood beside Ada’s door in the silent, airless hall of the Picadilly Manor at four-thirty, regardless of his hat and his knowledge and his nap and his sneakers, regardless of the balm he felt from his cathartic run-ins with Peterpotter and the beautiful girl, regardless of the fact that all was well and soon he would have pilgrimed his goodly way home to the perfumes of low tide and money, Barnaby did not want to knock.

  He thought of his father shrinking down inside his flannel suits and sitting stoically upright until he managed to die when no one was near except the asshole from the mortuary who put him in a bag and cremated him before anyone else on earth had any idea there’d been a death. It was a death Barnaby said he admired at the time, but now he thought it was a hateful death and not just because he’d been left with the fluffmeister line for last words.

  Before that, he had gone too late on purpose to see his mother in the hospital for what he knew would be the last time. He had hurried unseen past the nurses’ station and knocked and knocked and knocked. The door had been open only enough to see the end of the bed, and yet the end of the bed was more than just empty; it was made up for its next patient and there was no evidence of his mother ever having been there, no sign even of the most recent flowers that he’d sent, because he meant to be late. He’d meant to leave her alone, and then when it was too late, he had knocked and knocked, waiting for her to call from where she was hidden, tucked up at the head of the bed, call, “Barnaby? Is that my pumpkin?”

  He knocked. On Ada’s door, to which Happiness had taped a half-page, full-color turkey cut from the newspaper on the day after Thanksgiving.

  He knocked loudly.

  He knocked with a sudden enthusiasm that transcended any knocking he’d ever done before. It was Friday night, and it was an auspicious Friday night. Yesterday he’d been given a new birthday and whatever new soul came with that. Today he’d been given, one right after another, Peterpotter and beauty. It was a Friday night to make things happen, a night when he knew that he had to gallop blindly ahead and bring the pilgrimage to fruition no matter what.

  On the other side of that fowl, which had survived Thanksgiving but was doomed for Christmas, at the instant of Barnaby’s knock, Ada bleated her courting surprise.

  “Oh!”

  Barnaby didn’t wait for Happiness who locked with the same rigor she decorated.

  He threw open the door, and he burst into the apartment in a hat with wings instead of a cape.

  “Ada!” he hailed, and he was so loud and large that he did surprise her.

  And she made an “Oh” for real. She straightened up in her chair at the hall desk where she always kept herself in expectation whenever Barnaby was expected, and to her credit she looked as pleased as any actress should who has imagined a scene and brought it to life.

  “Did I surprise you?” Barnaby called, louder still.

  “You surprised me,” she said with pride. Then she saw his hat and called, “Happiness, go get one of my hats down from the top of my closet, the one that ties under my chin.” Happiness passed by on a course for the bedroom, and Ada said to Barnaby, “I always looked well in hats.”

  Barnaby pointed at her desk and shouted, “Checking out the mail?”

  He shouted it loudly enough to be heard in the parking lot where the day maids were loading the afternoon silver stolen from other widows into large, battered Oldsmobiles.

  “Yes,” Ada said, loud herself, more delighted by the moment at the drama of Barnaby’s enthusiasm, holding up the handful of bills and new circulars that the mailman delivered every day in place of the royalty statements that once had been common.

  “Did we make any money?”

  “No. I was expecting a lot of oil checks, but not a thing. Are you going to leave me?”

  “I’m going to have to leave you, Ada. I need a rich woman.”

  “I knew it,” she said, and she laughed with her head back like a debutante in a convertible as he took the grips of her chair and turned her for the living room. She waved one hand behind her head just like the pretty girl at the Y stretching an elbow to the ceiling. God but she had been pretty, the Y girl.

  Ada’s stretching tightened the folds of her sweat suit (pink, Happiness had her in this evening), and that stretching and tightening flushed air out of the sweat suit so that Barnaby was bathed by condensation in which was distilled the smell of death that described the apartment.

  Fine. And instead of withdrawing from the long fingers so slackly covered by parchment slick that once was skin, he let Ada’s knuckles strum his belt buckle. Then he took that hand in one of his own hands and steered the couple of yards to the coffee table with his free hand and with nudges of his hip. Ada’s fingertips pried a hold into his wrist while she tried to think of something to string out their banter.

  At the coffee table she let go and brought her head upright as Happiness arrived with a soft, tan, turbany hat that reached down as though with ear flaps into ties that went under the chin. It was an expensive hat once, with a mannered elegance that suited Ada, and Barnaby nodded powerful appreciation.

  “Oh. I know what I was upset about,” Ada said, and her tone went to enthusiastic seriousness, and Barnaby sat down into expansive readiness on the sofa. Really, Barnaby was at the top of his game, pilgriming like a house afire. “Happiness?” Ada called over her shoulder. “What was it this afternoon? The Declaration of Independence? That your television minister was talking about.”

  Happiness made the ties into a bow among Ada’s dewlaps and then stepped around on the good gray carpeting of the living room to face Ada over the issue of the Declaration of Independence and over the coffee table. She wore her white, synthetic pants and her pink synthetic shirt with its brave, unwrinkleable ruffles. She also wore the pale, doughy, infuriatingly kind face of intelligence never received and never missed, the face of every soul who knows they will fail and tries hard just the same and never thinks to hold it against the people who do well without trying at all. For just a second Barnaby wondered whether Happiness might not be a role model for some new reality when his suspension ran out. Because her sorts of people did always seem to enjoy themselves. And Barnaby was already pale; he was ordinarily kind; it would be fun to become doughy again.

  “The Declaration of Independence?” Happiness said. “Or the Constitution? I think that he was saying the Constitution.”

  “Really?” Ada said, in a rejoinder of absolute and earnest collaboration. “Perhaps it was. Yes, I think so. The Constitution. It’s the same man every afternoon, and this afternoon he was right.”

  No, Barnaby thought to himself when he heard this.

  He had more than one responsibility on this pilgrimage. He had World Books back at the cloister, and he could not let Happiness and Ada wander into wrongheaded discourse on the Founding Fathers. He held up his hand to stop them in their tracks, to prevent civilization from sinking another notch.

  “Did I tell you,” he said, to bring things at least back into the relevant sphere of Happiness’s afternoon television evangelist, to avoid himself, Barnaby, having to lecture sternly on profound American documents, “did I tell you that I looked up Nebuchadnezzar? In fact the whole Fertile Crescent has become a hobby for me.”

  The Fertile Crescent?

 
; Nebuchadnezzar certainly was one of the names invoked by the evangelist to puzzle Ada and Happiness, and Barnaby did not completely lie; it was very much on his biblical mind to pull out the N volume and to look up Nineveh as well. He’d also promised to do the Assyrians and Babylon. The thought of research always appealed to him. The research itself, alas, drove him away, a weakness of his in the securities business too, though not a crippling one.

  But the Fertile Crescent.

  This was a good, resonant phrase that had not come from the television preacher. Had it come out of his daughters’ homework? Out of his very own classwork in fourth grade at the Hoyt School? Barnaby remembered right this minute that the Fertile Crescent was the place where things began. Was it possible that the grid of essential understanding really was in place inside of Barnaby despite everything, that the truths of Western civilization were only waiting to be dusted off now that he needed them to finish out his pilgrimage and get himself home? A scholar of the fucking Holy Land. In a month’s time, who knew; if the investment business did not beckon after all, he might be ready to teach.

  “You should come over and watch with us,” Happiness said.

  “I beg your pardon?” Barnaby said.

  “Our afternoon program,” Happiness said, joyously alert to a weakened victim (as she supposed) whom she might snag and reel into that world of hers where she had God to share. As if Barnaby didn’t have a piece of that world himself. Though Ada was certainly in Happiness’s corner of it now. Did the fact of Ada joining up only after the big stroke say something about a ruthless side to Happiness? Dim, relentless Happiness? Given a workforce of a dozen Happinesses, Barnaby might make his fortune back with a boiler room telephone sales operation. What would he sell? Penny stocks? Religious aphorisms? There might be a little seed money from Ada who would love the sleazy risk of jail. But no, Ada didn’t have anything to spare. And even in the abstract, Barnaby didn’t feel the smallest spark of ambition to make any kind of fortune. Really? Gad. That was a discouraging thing to think, also quite false.

  “Yes,” Ada said about something else, and Barnaby snapped himself back into the focus that pilgrims had to maintain if they hoped to reach, tonight, by God, the end of the trail.

  Happiness continued to nod to the notion of him coming every afternoon and watching the Bible channel with them.

  But Barnaby shook his head at Happiness and mouthed a soundless “Gym.” Then he flared his shins to bend his knees, because invoking the gym on a good evening made him feel like an athlete.

  “Yes,” Ada said again. “And what the preacher said was that this country was founded on religion. The Constitution demands religion. But now the enlightened liberals, the humanists, the seculars, have gotten around that and forbidden it. You can’t even say a prayer in school. Where else would you learn? The Founding Fathers knew. And now it’s everywhere on television, and you only have to look at the newspapers to see here in Oklahoma City. All those vans kidnapping shoppers from the parking lots of the malls. I never would have believed Oklahoma City could get worse, but it has. And the Constitution forbids it.”

  “No,” Barnaby said. “Demands religion? That’s not true.”

  He couldn’t be sure quite how it was not true, because what came to him in the way of academic ammunition for the moment were Tigris and Euphrates. What were they? Rivers in the Fertile Crescent. Suddenly he knew that, and he felt a flush of pride and reassurance like discovering a bearer bond for a million bucks in the back of the closet; the grid was there. Barnaby Griswold had his wings and he was flying. He would have to find Peterpotter and thank him.

  And of course it was in the ways of Peterpotter’s world (once his own world, and soon to be his world again) that Barnaby saw through Ada’s television huckster. Here was a guy who preached about Nebuchadnezzar and Nineveh, accurately as far as anyone would know, and then started using a fraudulent Constitution as his sharp stick at people’s pockets. Barnaby had been around long enough to recognize used cars and desert land schemes behind that. It was not a technique Barnaby had tried very often, but there had been occasions.

  Ada, meanwhile, was adamant. “It is true. He said so this afternoon. Happiness heard him. And it’s written in the Constitution: there must be religion. Tell him, Happiness.”

  It was a real conversation about vital issues, and Barnaby was racking up goodnesses. How many conversations like this had there been? Not many. Just as Barnaby was almost back, Ada was back, recovered in mind if not body, available to real and continuing pleasures. Barnaby had done what he’d come to do, and here was the brow of the very last hill. Redemption and expiation were at hand.

  Happiness nodded happily, and Barnaby shook his head, waiting confidently for the grid to provide him with something of a more appropriate tenor than desert land and the Tigris and Euphrates.

  The Federalist Papers? Did they have anything to do with religion and the Constitution?

  “Oh, God,” Ada said, and gripped the sides of her wheelchair in a way that demanded Barnaby and Happiness look at her with a different order of attention.

  “What time is it?” Ada said more loudly, and Barnaby and Happiness looked to one another for a moment as though caught unprepared in their class on quantum mechanics.

  “The restaurant opens at five,” Ada groaned to herself, and Happiness rushed to bend over her, thrusting a forearm and its wrist-watch into Ada’s lap, a Bugs Bunny watch.

  Could you trust emergency blood pressure to such a second hand?

  But Ada was in a fury past watches.

  “Late,” she cried, very loud again, and now she gripped and shook the sides of her wheelchair so hard that her fingers looked like steel, only white, pure bone, and Happiness and her Bugs Bunny watch were frightened back, and the elegant hat slid to one side like a loose saddle.

  Barnaby squeezed his own hat into flight, hoping to contain things.

  But, “Don’t anybody come near me,” Ada shouted, and then, still gripping the armrests of her chair, she leaned at Barnaby and put her voice into a hiss. “Are you still going to have dinner with me? You don’t want to. I know that.” Then she threw herself back and shouted, “Happiness, am I dressed? God damn it all to hell. Listen to that. Foul. But, we have to go. She has to be fed. She has to be everything’d. So get it over with. Wheel me out. I hate myself. Late. I hate myself.”

  The First Amendment; that was where religion and the Constitution met.

  But for the moment, he had other things to manage.

  He pulled open the door of Picadilly Manor, turned to grip the handles of the wheelchair, set a foot to hold the door, swiveled the chair and pushed its front wheels out over the threshold, caught the closing door again with his hip on that side, and then drove the rest of the way out and felt the door whoosh shut behind them.

  Ada went “Oh” in a faint voice of fear and helplessness as Death in the large and heavy shape of the manor door tried to take her.

  The diagramming on Barnaby’s exit move was simple but not simplistic, and Barnaby managed it both gracefully and dramatically. He admired the practiced illusion of being an athlete, and if torturing Ada was a spin-off, so be it.

  Because he had not been a bit intimidated by Ada inside just now. Ada was a power of the first water and had an arsenal of difficult gifts, but the judges, no matter who they were and how they chose to manipulate their card, knew that Barnaby was still pilgriming on, paying everything off and winning his way home. The judges and Barnaby both knew that he was soaring.

  Also, of course, Ada wasn’t really afraid of the manor door. She made her death-peep to warm up for her Buick which Barnaby had parked in its ready position against the curb with the front passenger door open.

  Now he parked the wheelchair alongside the Buick and locked the wheels.

  “Oh,” Ada said more loudly.

  Barnaby stepped around in front of her and said, “Are you ready?”

  “Take me back.”

  He squatted to
move her white, geriatric, nurses shoes off of the footrests.

  “No,” she said. “Please.”

  He stood over her and pulled her hands up around his neck. She held them there but only barely as he reached to grab under the armpits of the extra pink sweat jacket Happiness had put over her. When he had a good grip on her weight, he said, “One. Two. Three.”

  Ada said, “Oh, oh, oh,” and balanced up almost to standing as Barnaby pulled.

  “Help out,” Barnaby said serenely.

  “One two three,” she said. “One two three,” and humid air from all the seams and surfaces of her body flushed up out of her clothes.

  Barnaby hugged her against him as he turned to the open door of the Buick.

  She farted and said over Barnaby’s shoulder, “More gas than in Russell County,” and let her legs go slack entirely.

  Ada was not small, and when she let her legs go slack she handled like a great, loose bag of sand. Barnaby held that bag like her life depended on it (as it did) and backed her against the opening to the Buick.

  “I can’t,” she said with volume, as he tipped her blindly into the doorway toward the seat.

  “I can’t see where I’m going,” she said in nearly a shout, and now her wrists bit into his neck as everything else of her continued to sag limp and his hat tipped forward over one of his eyes. Fitness. Always be fit for the big effort at the end of things. Ask your Friar Tucks and your St. Georges. Ask your Sebastian.