“Duck your head,” he said.
“Oh.” This was a shriek, and she shrieked it again so that it vibrated over Barnaby’s shoulder and off the high, pilastered, fake-door facade of Picadilly Manor. “Oh?”
He fed her weight down and in, and then, just before she’d quite reached her seat, he had to let go. The weight was too much to support when he was bending over, and besides, he needed to get a hand up and be sure her head, even protected by its turban tonight, did get under the Buick’s roof.
It was with only inches between her and the seat that he let her go, but as she released into free fall, Ada’s eyes went wide and she made, very faintly again, much more delicately than before, one last, “Oh,” a sound so childlike and so surprisedly polite that she might truly have been looking at Death instead of Barnaby.
Then she was on the seat and it was done, and he straightened his bill and squatted down to collect her sweatpanted pencils of legs and lift those with their nurse’s shoes into the car.
As he hugged her again where the weight sat in the middle of her body, to align her in her seat and to get the seat belt around her, she said, “I don’t know how you did it. You’re a wonderful man, Barnaby Griswold. I’m going to kiss your cheek. There. My only and favorite ex-son-in-law. Take me to dinner. I’ll take you to dinner.”
Barnaby stood out of her embrace, out of her seat and out of her breath, which was a wallow of unhealthy mold beneath the antiseptic shine of toothpaste Happiness had rubbed in her mouth. He closed her door and took the pad from the seat of the wheelchair and folded the wheelchair and hoisted and slid the chair into the trunk. He reminded himself not to count his chickens as they mounted beyond counting, but there was no need to remind. He was so good at this, so smooth, that it was just plain fun. He was enjoying Ada as he never had done before. He’d passed a threshold, and he was enjoying his pilgrimage. Heavenly.
It was no more than several hundred yards from the walled parking lot of the manor up past the shops around the Center Market and the pharmacy and then across Sussex Avenue to the other half of Driscoll Hills’ little merchant village. Near the Center Market and the pharmacy there were usually cars, but not since the boom had anyone had to watch for traffic in the meandering enclosure of expensive strip mall and parking lot that made up the village. Even at five o’clock rush hour and less than a month before Christmas, there were hardly a dozen cars to steer past during a drive to the Dinner Box.
The collapse of her weight in the plush double seat, however, no matter how Barnaby tried to balance up her head, left Ada in a wad, a hatted wad tonight, beneath the level at which she could see effectively what was going on outside the car. So she stared at the glove compartment as if that had become the accident of her death hurtling toward her. She made gasping intakes of air to be ready, and she strangled the seat belt with both hands beneath the bow at her chin.
Barnaby kept the First Amendment in mind, but the drive was no more an occasion to broach serious discussion than leaving the manor had been.
Nor was getting out of the car a moment for talk. Ada did relax her death watch when they stopped, but Barnaby had the physical mechanics to manage, and he wanted to manage those mechanics with the style they deserved.
He parked up the little pitch from the Dinner Box, and Ada said with the fire of someone ready suddenly to begin her night on the town, “Here we are.”
Barnaby set up the wheelchair and revolved Ada’s bulk and pulled her feet out the door of the Buick, and now when he reached under her arms, she took a practical hold on his neck, careful of the body of his hat as well as its wings and wire, and when he lifted, she engaged what muscles she had and actually stood.
As he hugged her and swiveled her to the chair, she hugged him back and made an effort at shuffling her feet.
When he dropped her down into the chair and said, “Feet,” she said, “Feet,” and shuffled her feet again in a gesture of helping to arrange the footrests.
Then she said, “Let’s go.”
They were a team.
Barnaby stood behind the chair, unlocked the wheels, pulled into the clear, checked the nonexistent traffic and aimed downhill.
He held both handles, locked his elbows, leaned over the sparse, gray perm of Ada’s head, way over, so that his shirt brushed the brittle curls supported by the perm, and so that also when she put her head back finally in terror at the speed, her skull would press right into his belly.
And he let go.
He gave his weight onto the handles, and with Ada’s weight in the front of the chair, they could roll.
They did roll, with Barnaby’s big sneakers spread like fins and dragging behind for steering and for a brake on the speed.
But not much of a brake.
“Go,” Ada said.
It was an electric ten or twelve yards.
Then, “Stop, stop, stop,” and her bony skull was against his stomach.
“I can’t,” Barnaby said, and went an extra yard past the restaurant to get an extra howl from Ada before he dragged down hard on the left sneaker for a rudder and put out his other foot and stood and paced the wheelchair, in easy and perfect stride, to the door of the Dinner Box. Perfect stride. He was an athlete, and it gave him pleasure. And as they reached the door, the disappointed young woman who worked as waitress was just opening the restaurant for the night, so she could hold the door for them and they could push right in.
“Good evening,” Ada said to the waitress firmly. “I see we have it to ourselves. Good. We’d like a corner table. There by the window. That’s the best. It’s just Mr. Griswold and myself.”
Then she leaned her head gaily back to speak up at Barnaby as they navigated the few feet to the table. “We weren’t late after all. I made a fuss for nothing, as usual. Oh, well. Can you forgive me? Should I sit at the table in a regular chair tonight?”
“You’ll sit in the chair you came in, and like it.”
She laughed, and waited while he put on her brakes to see if he had anything else interesting to say.
Which he did. You didn’t spend your afternoons in the cloister library for nothing. “The First Amendment,” he said when he’d sat down himself, and she heard the authority in his voice and leaned forward over the gingham tablecloth.
She was too low in her chair to get her elbows up on the table, and her fists hooked over the table edge might have been vestigial limbs raised in a scrabbling gesture of cartoon supplication, but her attention was there. Barnaby could see in her eyes that this was not just one of her good hours. This was better than any hour she’d yet had. The adrenaline from rolling down the hill was not a drink exactly, but it did always get both of them going. And tonight they both were going faster and better than ever before since the stroke. The hats were a help too; certainly Ada looked fine beneath her turban. But Barnaby knew this was more than hats and rolling. Ada was back, and Barnaby had brought her back. He had answered his call.
“The First Amendment of the Constitution?” she said.
“Yes, the Constitution,” he said with the ebullient anger of a triumph which was both righteous and American. “It specifies in so many words the separation of church and state. Your television preacher forgot about that this afternoon when he said the Constitution demands religion.”
“Barnaby, you’re absolutely right,” Ada said, and now she leaned an elbow on one of the arms of her wheelchair, giving herself a pose of considered intelligence but also catching the lace curtain beside her in the sleeve of her sweatshirt.
Gingham cloths, white lace curtains, pastel pink walls, and portraits by the reigning society photographer of precious children posing insipidly beside dogwoods in spring. Christ Almighty, what a restaurant. What would Michel say? What would the tigers?
Barnaby reached to free the curtain and said, “I am right. Thank you for saying so.” He felt generous beyond bounds. He was glad to have brought elevated discourse into such a dining room. He was glad also that Ada’s having
asked about freedom of the press several weeks ago had caught his attention and driven him to actually open the World Books. Who would have known that freedom of the press and separation of church and state needed to be in the same amendment? Had the preacher, Barnaby wondered, been deceitful on freedom of the press questions also? He was a very busy fraud, the preacher.
“Frankly,” Ada said, “I’m not surprised he forgot. In fact, I’d be surprised if he ever read the Constitution at all. The man is a fool. But Happiness loves him and I can’t very well tell her not to watch.” As she spoke, Ada herself realized she was having much more than just a good hour, and her voice took on a tone not unlike Barnaby’s, satisfied indeed to be talking capably of something as meaningful as an Amendment.
Any audience would by now have forgotten his pilgrimage to simply marvel at the happy dance of souls which Barnaby had wrought. But this really was the fulfillment of the pilgrimage; Ada was as nearly Ada as she was going to be, and along with that, because of that, the old Barnaby Griswold, the real Barnaby, was back as well. Who but Barnaby would have known a pilgrimage could come to its spiritual reward in the Dinner Box? And in a month, maybe two if he was going to be frugal at the start of things, he would be back in La Cote for his other rewards.
He nodded soberly about amendments for Ada, and watched three elderly couples, an audience of sorts, all in pastels and country faces, come in the room and sit at two tables, the men exhausted and the women already making it clear that they would put food they didn’t want on the men’s plates. As he nodded and watched, Barnaby also turned over in his mind Ada’s calling the preacher a fool. She was right of course: preaching was a distinct possibility as a line of work for Barnaby, should he ever need work; he filed it away.
“Good for you, Barnaby, for knowing your Constitution.”
“Well,” Barnaby said. “After all.”
“There was,” Ada said loudly for the benefit of three more new members of the audience passing by, two old women and an older, addled gent, “there was a time when everyone knew their Constitution.”
And with that, they were off discussing earlier, better times, discussing with feeling, stirred by their own attention to it, the very beginning of the country. Barnaby tried once more to place The Federalist Papers and then let it go to concur in Ada’s outrage at any American president who could compare squads of hired Nicaraguan murderers with Washington and Jefferson and Adams and Madison. Scandalous.
Then, as Barnaby reached his knife and fork to cut Ada’s scabrous fillet of sole for her, there seemed to be reason to talk of the arts. Which brought Ada, and Barnaby too, into heydays of personal history. Barnaby could nod well enough at the names of painters and operas he’d once or twice (or more often) been dragged past. He could easily invoke the names of fine restaurants near New York galleries that Ada had admired.
Both he and Ada remained aware of rapt attention from the audience as those folks raked their way through their own soles and corn breads. It was not a dining room in which there could often have been conversation of any caliber. Barnaby recalled briefly and happily his friends the tigers and then made the mistake of perceiving once again the lace and pastel and, most dispiriting, the large, cloying photographs of hideous children.
And it was just then that Ada’s hour was up. He looked across the table to see her strike her pecan pie an irritated slap with the bottom of her fork because she could not pry a bite loose.
Barnaby beat his wings once to get her attention and said largely and blithely, “Enough? Shall we move on to the rest of the evening?”
“Yes. Let’s go. Let’s go home and talk some more.”
And he shouted, “Check,” like an asshole in the old days, and as they made their exit, Ada recovered herself just long enough to remember the good Sloans at Mrs. Krashauer’s gallery, and so they could negotiate around the cheap audience tables in a parade of refined and cosmopolitan momentum. It was dark outside, and the heartbroken young waitress held the door again so that they could disappear into the night with heads and hats flung back but still rightly attached. He got Ada up the hill and into the Buick, and she turned to mush.
She moaned in a whisper, “I’m so tired, I’m so tired, I’m so tired,” for all the very few minutes they drove.
She shrieked horribly once as he hauled the limp sack of her out from the Buick and into her wheelchair again.
“Happiness,” she moaned as they came in the condominium, and she began picking with both hands at the bow under her chin, but the bow did not come untied, and the hat slid slowly down around the side of her head.
“Here I am,” Happiness said. “Right here. Did you have fun? I bet you did have fun. And the Lord brought you safely home.”
“Take me,” Ada said. “In there. I have to. And then put me in bed. Put me to sleep. That’s what I need. Put me to sleep like a dog.”
“You’re tired. Praise the Lord and pass the pajamas.” Happiness took the wheelchair from Barnaby, but instead of heading away with it, she turned it around to face Barnaby. “But first, did you say good night to Mr. Griswold?”
Ada looked up at Barnaby with her hat now all the way down under her chin like a feed bag, with the bow intact on top of her head, and she said in a firm and matter-of-fact voice, “We’re dying. This is what it’s like.”
Barnaby beat his wings.
“Don’t be silly,” he said.
“Get me pills, Barnaby. I don’t want to live. If you love me, get me lots of pills, so I can go when I want. Tomorrow. It’s time for me to go, and I want to go like a human being.”
Her eyes lost their attention once more, and Happiness turned her around and started off for the bedrooms. “Here we go,” Happiness said. “A wonderful time. Good night, good night.”
And without looking back, in a slurred whisper but loud enough for Barnaby to hear, Ada called as she disappeared, “I don’t want to go alone, Barnaby. You go with me. You’re dying anyway.”
Barnaby drove the station wagon home to Friday night Wimbledon but did not get out. It was dark and he was all by himself and he could not go in that desolate little house again.
Could absolutely not.
Why?
Because Ada was right. He was dying. Peterpotter and the girl at the gym told him so clearly enough. Ada told him as clearly as possible. There was nothing more; he would never make it beyond his suspension no matter when it ended. He would never make it back to his life. And he knew it. He should have known for years. He had known.
He opened the door of the station wagon and thought of crawling down onto his tiny driveway and curling up in a fat ball in his broken hat and crying like a baby. He was a crybaby and always had been, and he was aware that unless he curled under the car, he would extend off the driveway and onto the loveless tentacles of Bermuda grass which made a tacky, threadbare, wall-to-wall carpet across his supposed lawn. And nobody cared. Was this what it had been like for the go-go president on the way to prison? Had he worn his hat through the prison gates? Barnaby could feel the strength in his legs evaporating just like Ada’s.
He stuck a foot out to the asphalt to test whether or not he could stand and walk to his front door if he chose.
Absolutely fucking not. He brought his foot back and shut the car door. Before he spent another night alone in that cot, he’d drink himself to death like his own mother. As quickly as he could. Why wait around? If today weren’t the first of December, it would be light for hours more. Would it be better if it were light? No. He wanted it to be dark. He didn’t want anybody to see him sobbing on his lawn. He was dying, for Christ sake, with Ada in Oklahoma. Of course he was. He would get pills for both of them, and they could curl away under her covers together.
That was the thought that brought him decisively to his course.
He really would get drunk. His own mother’s poison. He had let her drink herself to death and never cared to stop her; for years when he was a boozer himself he had never even dropped b
y to keep her company. He’d been busy with deals, and there were no more deals. He turned the key in the ignition and frightened himself with the grating howl the engine made because it was already running. The station wagon would die here too. His only friend. Maybe he’d wreck it tonight. He put it in reverse and backed out onto Wimbledon without looking, knowing that it was too early and the wrong street for a real wreck, but hoping nonetheless.
He drove across Driscoll Hills and through the village again to a place his radar had picked up, a restaurant that would have a bar. He’d seen too many cars in the parking lot at happy hour for there not to be a good bar. Expensive cars and not so expensive cars. Barnaby could still recognize a serviceable place to get drunk. Called Doug’s, but who the fuck was Barnaby to quibble about the name of the next place he’d throw up in? Would he have to throw up? He’d often thrown up when he went off the wagon halfway through Lent, and now he had been years on the wagon. What had he been thinking, not to drink for years?
He parked and said good-bye to the station wagon and went in.
Perfect. Well-to-do-ish young families eating expensive, fake spaghetti on cheap steel tables in back. Swinging, highbrow secretaries doing motor-skill dip nibbling with bread and olive oil in the dimness near the bar. And along the bar itself were all the honest happy hourers doing the right duty and ordering full-price drinks now that happy hour was past. Good souls. A safe and congenial place to drink unnoticed until he threw up, there, in a large pot of greenery that Doug kept out of the way just for the purpose. It felt like a recognizable challenge. It felt like the old days when he had something sensible that needed doing. He would drink himself to death without even a good club to do it in. True, he had had a twinge when he’d let all his memberships go, but the days of a club carrying you until your liver killed you, those days had ceased with improvements in medicine; the fabled reprobate corner in the common room and the dingy sots’ bedrooms all the way upstairs, those were long since history. And just as well, Barnaby thought. Democracy. The Federalist Papers.
Fool (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 13
