Fool (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Frederick Dillen

  And now Marian pulled with determination on his sleeve and aimed toward their car. “When you get on the monster thing,” she said, “it’s time to go.”

  “I’m not really a monster,” Barnaby said.

  “No, you’re not. You’re a fool. I’m a monster. Marian will probably become a monster. But…”

  Marian said, “Come on, Daddy. You’re tired,” and pulled harder on the sleeve.

  Winott let her inch him backward, and said to Barnaby, “What’s-his-name Childs is a horse’s ass. Was there really anything more than that going on in there?”

  Was this a quiz? Barnaby tried to think, and all he could think was that Marian liked him. He tried not to look at her as she dragged her father toward their ten-year-old Mercedes with battered fenders.

  “Don’t think, Barnaby. Christ. Nobody’d ever pay you to think.”

  “Fiduciary,” Barnaby said in the large voice of a pitch from the old days. “Fiduciary,” he said again, trying to conjure whatever it was he was about to say. “Fiduciary is going to sell the farm before the end of the year.”

  And actually, it was true. He said it, and he believed it. Could he feel the motion of a wave beneath him? No.

  The market was going to dive. That he knew.

  If he knew that, there had to be a wave somewhere.

  “Did you know the market was down sharply this afternoon?”

  Barnaby shook his head.

  “So you think right now that the Fiduciary traders are ready to dump in Japan?”

  Barnaby nodded. Somewhere a wave was going on past him. A job. How would he ever know who he was if he had a job? Yet he should be glad. He had to be glad. He was glad.

  “Just for fun, I’m going to go home and call around. Talk to me after the holidays, about the work. Come on Marian. Maybe Barnaby Griswold’s made us all a lot of money.”

  She said, “Offer Barnaby a ride. He’s wearing gigolo shoes and his feet are freezing.”

  “Get in, Barnaby,” Winott said. “Where are you going?”

  But if he got in with them, they’d never get him out. He had to catch the train back to Boston and then get himself to the airport; he was planning to spend the night in New York and then on to Ada tomorrow. He would blow all that if he got in the car. He’d try to buy them dinner and he’d forget where he’d checked his suitcase at the airport. Besides, he had his taxi coming, and he would hate to pass that cabbie in a Mercedes, even an old one, not when he’d become a cop and a fireman for a few minutes.

  A job. God only knew he needed a job.

  He needed Marian, and she knew that. Why didn’t that horrify her as much as a job horrified him?

  He said, “I better walk. I’m going to meet my taxi on the way. My feet are fine.”

  Marian smiled.

  Could he have kissed her?

  In front of Choate Winott? Get a grip, Barnaby.

  Winott said, “They’ll offer shitty pay, but if it worked out, I bet they’d find money for you to hedge with some percentages at profit breaks. And Tulsa. That might be where they’ll offer the best deal. It ain’t the big time, but it would be work. You don’t have a constitutional aversion to a job, do you, Barnaby?”

  Marian rolled her eyes and got in and closed her door.

  And as the Mercedes started away, Barnaby yelled, “Marian. Are you coming home?” and she looked back over the seat and held out a fist with her thumb up, just like the cabbie, although Marian had all of her fingers.

  He had never made the calls because he had not wanted everyone else to know; he had not wanted to know for sure himself. Though he had himself known even before he apologized for his life to Peterpotter and a room full of strangers. He had known as surely as his father had expected him to. When he’d first lost it all, he had been ashamed of the loss, and then somehow he’d managed to become ashamed of ever having had it; there was the secret, and he had been afraid if he called anyone they would hear that shame in his voice. Because a fluffmeister cared about the money, the money most of all, and Barnaby Griswold had forever before cared about money with a glee that had transported him and everyone around him. Shame had no place in that party. Shame was opening the oven door; shame was a cold wind on fluff. So he’d hoped that a championship would stand in for glee, would reinstall the ruthless innocence which had always been his happy trademark. Then he had hoped for the goodness of a pilgrimage to turn the reflections of the world back into reflections of himself the way they’d always used to be. Had he been ashamed even before it all went away? Had he made too much too fast on the Old Ladies Bank deal? Barnaby Griswold, for whom too much had never been nearly enough; one way or another he had made more than he could digest, and the fun had leaked out, and how could a man like Barnaby call colleagues and victims without fun in his heart?

  When it was gone, he’d wanted it back, but so what? Money was drawn to a fool by foolishness, by larks and play periods involving other money, by hats with wings. Money had come to Barnaby in the past for the fun of it, but never again would there be the same sort of fun. It would be earnest fun now, when it happened. He would laugh at the jokes of kind people, people who helped one another and maybe even helped him. God knew he was going to need help. He would laugh at the jokes maybe of people who went to church on days other than Christmas and Easter. He hoped he would know when to laugh, because he wanted to get it right. He had changed, and he had a lot to learn, and he would learn. He had changed, and he was as grateful as any man could be. He was forty-six and he had lost everything, including the nature that had always been his greatest resource, and yet somebody had just given him a job. Winott wouldn’t have said it if he weren’t going to produce. Barnaby Griswold had a job, and thank Christ. He had been swinging into the true abyss, and now he had his own tiny, precious corner of safety in Tulsa. God Almighty but he was grateful.

  He sat in the back of his Portuguese friend’s taxicab as they inched along the Point Road which was freezing up, and he said, moving his lips but not making any sounds that would lose him his new friend’s confidence, he said, “Thank you, God, for bailing me out this one last time.”

  There wouldn’t be another bailout, he knew that. But he would never need another.

  In the back of his cab, leaving a place he’d loved, leaving a place he’d thought was everything to who he was, Barnaby Griswold was more grateful than he’d ever been in his life.

  In Tulsa, the assignment would be to recognize and recruit fools and their foolishness, and he could do that. He could make banter from the old days when he had to. But that was hardly the same as living it. Once you’d put foolishness in your job description (and Barnaby meant to learn what a job description was), you could never pretend to being the real thing. Good.

  His father had won. Which was to say, his father had stuck with him and pulled him through, gotten Choate Winott to give him a job. Of course his father had loved him. Winott had seen it.

  And there was even Marian, though he hardly dared let himself think of that. There was Marian too. Good-bye and good riddance to money. Hello (he hoped) to love.

  Barnaby sat in the back of his taxicab, exhausted with relief and numb with joy. He could have wept (Christ what a weeper he’d become, though this was more in the old style) for all he had been given and for the loss finally, finally, of his own foolish nature. Even as he sank low in his seat and felt ecstatic tears of welcome and farewell pump up through his diaphragm, the spirit of foolishness separated itself from him and lifted away out of the taxi into the early winter night on Winott Point.

  Barnaby chose to think that spirit would stay near the old Griswold house and watch over what had been his family.

  As it happened, the taxicab was just then passing the house, and Barnaby looked over the hedge at the dark clapboard bulk and realized with a start that it wasn’t dark at all. The lights were on.

  Barnaby sat up and told the cabbie to stop.

  The girls had come for Christmas. It had never occur
red to him they wouldn’t stay in the city. He wondered if they had a tree.

  Should he go in? What would they say if they opened the door and found their father?

  He thought about Marian and Choate Winott and he wondered if it were possible at this late date to become a better father. He had always said that one day he would, and perhaps this was the day to begin. Everything else was beginning, the good and important things. Perhaps he already was a better father.

  He handed another twenty over the cabbie’s seat back and asked him to wait. Then he got out and walked up the driveway and across to the front door that nobody ever used. He kicked his numbed feet into the snow up the steps and could feel individual bricks teetering. It hadn’t been cold enough yet to freeze the bricks in place. He pressed the rusted door bell, and heard (no sure thing) the bell ring inside.

  He was going to say Merry Christmas to his own children whether they liked it or not.

  He was going to spread his arms and bellow it. “Merry Christmas, girls.”

  He wished he had come with large boxes from Bergdorf’s under his arms. That was how he had handled things in the old days, especially if the deal had come in. Or, for that matter, if the deal had gone away—all the more reason to drop a bundle on presents. Oh, Barnaby had often been a great Christmas soul. He’d taken the girls to the Nutcracker two years in a row for midweek matinees, though the second year, after a particularly persuasive lunch at La Cote, the shift to ballet had been less than perfect; the whole afternoon had been less than perfect, which was the kind of thing that always baffled Barnaby, because if the afternoon had been spent on business, the lunch would have led with perfect seamlessness into the business of dinner. Anyhow, that had been a year when the presents (from Bendel’s, if he remembered rightly) had been even more splendid than usual.

  He dug his soaked shoes, slippers now for all intents and purposes, into the snow on the front porch so that he wouldn’t lose his balance when he threw his arms wide and bellowed and strode forward to hug his girls.

  Though maybe something other than the bellow would make more sense.

  “Hello, girls,” he could say quietly, with his arms at his sides. “Merry Christmas. Remember your father?” And then if they had the tree lit, if they had some Christmas feeling inside them, as he knew they did, they might come out onto the snowy, night porch themselves, and hug him, their father for Christmas.

  He wished it were not already after Christmas Day, especially since they wouldn’t recall that Christmas went on for twelve days. No, the girls were certainly not the theologians Barnaby was, and so even though it was only the day after Christmas, he wondered if it might not be better to say Happy New Year. That didn’t have the same wistful ring of love and family and forgiveness as Merry Christmas, but if he wanted forgiveness, no matter how much he had changed, no matter how much better a father he’d become, he would have to be patient. He wished he had sent them something, but Ada had insisted on no presents and no tree in Oklahoma and it had been all Barnaby could do to get a Christmas check to Happiness. Which had made things seem other than seasonal inside the tiny world at Picadilly Manor. And of course there was no Bergdorf’s in Oklahoma City. What could he have gotten them that they would have wanted? That he could have afforded?

  Was it too late to run into town in the cab for something? He’d rung the bell already for Christ sake.

  He rang it again.

  He was their new father, and they could damn well learn how to say Merry Christmas when they didn’t have any boxes from him under the tree. There were enough boxes that first Christmas after the Old Ladies Bank deal to make a lifetime of presents for an army of anybody else’s children. So what if he hadn’t arrived with them?

  Relax. That was nothing like the note he wanted to strike.

  Besides, they were hardly children now.

  Had it been ten years since the Nutcracker fiasco? He hated to think. Twelve years? Which would have been long enough for them to forget the Nutcracker if there hadn’t been all the other fiascoes. Long enough certainly to become young women. Ladies. Merry Christmas, ladies. How did that sound? Would he recognize them? There had been an awkward afternoon some years ago when he had passed them on the street and not even noticed them, but those had been the years when their appearance changed by the hour. He would have known them then if he hadn’t been distracted. He would know them now; they would be who opened the door. Who else would be in the house?

  But would they recognize a father who no longer occupied all of a suit, who was no longer even a fool?

  Maybe they were distracted themselves.

  Christ, it was cold. The bricks in the steps would freeze up tonight. He turned to be sure his cabbie was holding steady.

  He rang the bell again.

  He pulled his keys out and unlocked the door and opened it.

  He raised one bold arm into the house and prepared to bellow (without question it was best to bellow for this sort of invasion) Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

  But between raising his hand and taking a breath for the bellow, he realized that the house was empty. They were up from the city for Christmas all right, but they were out. They’d turned on every light in the house except for the tree and gone out. Well, who was he to gripe about that kind of thing?

  He waved a don’t leave me here to the cabbie and went on through the front hall and into the living room. At least they hadn’t left the lights burning on the tree, but there the tree was, where Barnaby had always put it, or where he’d had Win have the guy from the tree place put it, since it was rare that he’d ever gotten up before Christmas Eve. He stood and looked. There were packages still open. The ornaments on the tree were ornaments that he recognized. Some of them were ornaments from when he was a kid. He felt as if he hadn’t seen a tree there since then, but as a kid they’d never come out here for Christmases. It was Barnaby who’d wanted to, and now that he looked at that tree he was proud of having wanted to. A successful domestic instinct if ever there was one. Barnaby was not without virtues of the home. It was just that the tree had not been in its place for the last several years; that was why it seemed a tree from long ago. Despite all the panoply of presents he’d had his secretary assemble, he’d missed Christmas Day altogether the year the Old Ladies Bank deal came in, and Win had packed the girls and everything else up and come back to the city the day after. He had not forgotten the date, but he had celebrated with other people and he had thought that the celebration could just continue. Twelve days of Christmas. And then the next year, it had all been unraveling, and it was not clear to him just at the moment how one year went at all, and then Win and the girls were off on their own with another family, for God sake, twice. The seasons after Barnaby became a full-time resident of the house on the Point, those years had seemed without need of a tree, though Barnaby did not think of himself as a Christmas hater like Ada. He loved Christmas, but Christmas had not been a part of all that. He was surprised the girls had found the ornaments. He might not have found them himself.

  He had always closed off some of the house when he was running the furnace, but that wasn’t his bill anymore, and he was glad of the warmth for his feet.

  He could smell the Point damp baking out of the walls like a swampy saddle. Through the windows behind the tree, if it hadn’t been dark, he would have seen over the brackish pond toward the cove and the ocean.

  He thought about looking to see what the girls had gotten, but he didn’t want to get caught bending under the tree with his paws in their stuff.

  Had Ada sent something? She always had in the past. Checks, recently. But Barnaby would have seen the checks. How had he not arranged that? How had he not sent anything himself? He had sent checks from here on the Point before Oklahoma. And gotten no thank-you notes, which had hardly seemed fair when those checks were expensive for him to write. Had their mother sent something from wherever on the face of the earth she floated? It looked as if she must have. It was all he coul
d do not to go root around under the crusty, gold-gone-black ornaments of his childhood for precious wrappings from Tobruk. Was it this house, and at Christmas, that had let Win keep thinking Barnaby would change? Barnaby thought that it was, and now of course, too late, he had changed after all.

  But that was history; it was all history now, and he preferred to keep up the sense that he was moving forward with his just-recent beginning. So he backed away from the interrogation of a lifetime of Christmas trees.

  He backed right out of the living room and ran up two steps at a time to the phone in the upstairs hall.

  He glanced only for one fearful instant into the glaringly lighted girls’ bathroom at the head of the stairs. The thick spread of cosmetics and underwear was so molten it could have been alive. No one spoke about women anymore as “the other,” but by Christ they were.

  He sat at the phone and looked out the window over the front porch. His cabbie’s headlights held firm at the end of the driveway. Good. Barnaby was not stranded, and the girls would have a warning when they arrived. He wondered what they were driving. He dialed, and Happiness picked up on the second ring, and he said, loudly and gaily, “It’s me.”

  Happiness said, “Hello?”

  “It’s Barnaby. I’m calling from Winott Point to say that everything went fine at the meeting and I’m coming back. Don’t bother to put Ada on. I’m just checking in. So you’ll know.”

  “Do you want to talk to Ada?” Happiness said.

  “No, no. I’m running. But tell her I called.”

  “I’ll tell her you called.”

  “There’s snow outside. Beautiful. Have you ever been in real snow?”

  “I come from eastern Montana, Barnaby, and the Lord brings more snow to Montana some years than people want.”

  Montana. How the fuck had he never known that?

  “Happiness?”

  “Yes?”

  “I want to tell you something. Marian is actually here, was here. I saw her. She likes me after all, and she’s coming home. How about that? And you know what else? Somebody, her father actually, who is a big-shot banker, is going to help me get a job. In Oklahoma. Which means I’ll still be back before New Year’s Eve. The day after tomorrow, actually, just like I promised. We don’t want Ada to worry about that. I’ll be back. And I’ll tell her about everything else myself. But isn’t it exciting? Things are turning around for me. Aren’t you glad, Happiness?”