by Alison Lurie
“Oh, my God.”
“See, that’s why I’m here.” Barbie goes on talking, but only a phrase here and there gets through to Vinnie. “So the next day . . . couldn’t get a seat on the plane till . . . Mom decided.”
“I’m so sorry,” she finally manages to say.
“Thanks. I’m sorry to have to tell you.” Barbie’s voice has become even more wavery; Vinnie can hear her clearing her throat at the other end of the line. “Anyhow, why I was calling,” she says finally. “There’s this old antique picture Dad had, and Professor Gilson says he wanted you to have it if anything happened to him—I mean Dad did. He was planning to give it to you anyhow, because you helped him so much with the research on his family, Professor Gilson says. So the thing is, I’ll be in London day after tomorrow, on my way home. I thought maybe I could bring you the picture then. If it was convenient.”
“Yes. Of course,” Vinnie hears herself reply.
“When should I come?”
“I don’t know.” She feels incapable of making any plans, almost of speech. “When would you like to come?”
“I d’know. Anytime. I’m free all day.”
“All right.” With what feels like a major effort Vinnie gathers her wits. “Why don’t you come about four. Come to tea.” From a distance, she hears her own voice, sounding horribly normal, giving Barbie Mumpson her address and directions.
Vinnie hangs up, but she is unable to let go of the phone. As she stands in the bedroom holding it and staring out through the gray gauze curtains into a blurred street full of rain, a frightful image comes to her: the image of a smashed rented car on a muddy country road, of the death that Chuck had also imagined for himself, and even courted.
He’d said he wanted her to have some picture if anything happened to him. Because he knew something was going to happen? Because he was planning it? Or was it some awful premonition? But his daughter hadn’t said it was an accident. She’d said nothing about what happened, only that he’d “passed on.” Would she have said that if it were an accident? Because if it was an accident, or rather, not a real accident—Vinnie’s head has begun to ache horribly—it would mean Chuck didn’t want to live, that he wanted to pass on. Stupid euphemism, what you’d say of someone who’d stopped for a moment on the street to speak to you, and then—
A choking, sinking feeling comes over Vinnie, as if the rain outside were pouring into her flat and rising up the walls of her bedroom. But all the euphemisms are stupid. Passed on, passed away, kicked the bucket, gone over to the Other Side—as if Chuck had committed a foul or switched teams in some awful children’s game.
What he has done is died; he’s dead. He’s been dead—what did Barbie say—since last Friday. All these days she’s been calling him, all the days he hasn’t been calling her . . .
That’s why he didn’t call, Vinnie thinks. It wasn’t that he was tired of me. Joy and relief flash across her mind, followed by a greater pain than before, like the beam of a lighthouse that on a dark night first pierces the gloom, and then illuminates a frightful shipwreck. Chuck wasn’t tired of her; he was dead, is dead. There is nothing left of him but his awful family, one member of which is coming to tea the day after tomorrow. And until she gets here, Vinnie will know nothing.
When Barbie Mumpson arrives it is raining again, though less heavily. She stands dripping in Vinnie’s hall, struggling with a wet raincoat, a vulgarly flowered umbrella, and a damp cardboard portfolio tied with tapes.
“Oh gee, thanks,” she says as Vinnie relieves her of these burdens. “I’m so dumb about these things.”
“Let me.” Vinnie half closes the umbrella and sets it to dry in a corner.
“I never had an umbrella before, really. I just bought this one last week, and for days I couldn’t get it open. Now I mostly can’t get it shut. I’ll figure it out some day, hopefully.”
Barbie is large and fair and healthy looking; she has a deep tan and wears an ill-fitting wrinkled pink polo shirt with a crocodile crawling across the left breast above the heart. She is also somewhat overweight, and older than her high, childish voice had suggested on the phone—perhaps in her mid-twenties.
“Please,” Vinnie says. “Come in and sit down.”
Out of some private sense of congruity, she has provided for Barbie the lavish country-house tea she had only the day before yesterday—weeks ago, it seems now—imagined the mythical De Mompessons serving to Chuck. His daughter’s appetite, like his, is good; her manners less so. She shovels in the raspberries and cream almost greedily, pronouncing them “really yummy.”
“And what do you think of England?” asks Vinnie, who feels it would be both awkward and impolitic to move at once to her real concern.
“Aw, I don’t know.” Barbie wipes cream from a square, slightly cleft chin—a disturbing feminine version of Chuck’s. “It’s not much of a country, is it?”
Repressing her reaction, Vinnie merely shrugs.
“Kinda poky and backward, you know?”
“Some people think that.” Vinnie realizes that Barbie not only has Chuck’s large, blunt, regular features and squared-off jaw (more attractive on a man than on a young woman), but his habit of blinking slowly at the end of a question.
“I mean, everything’s so small and kinda worn-out looking.”
“I suppose it might seem so, compared to Tulsa.” Vinnie allows Barbie to run on, to run down her beloved adopted country in the usual stupid tourist way. You are rightly named, she thinks, silently christening her guest The Barbarian.
“And it’s so awful wet.”
“Mm.” Vinnie doesn’t want to start an argument; she is pacing herself, waiting for the moment when she can politely ask the question that has been repeating itself in her mind and interfering with her sleep for forty-eight hours.
“How did it happen?” she bursts out finally.
“Pardon?” The Barbarian lowers a fistful of cake, shedding crumbs. “Oh, Dad. It was his heart. He was in this town hall, see, over in the next county. He went there to look at some old records, you know.”
“Yes, he mentioned he might do that.”
“Well, it was a real hot day, and the office was on the top floor. There wasn’t any elevator; you had to walk up three long flights to get to it. Anyhow, even before the librarian could bring Dad the book he wanted, while he was just standing there by the desk waiting, he just kinda collapsed.” Barbie chews and swallows audibly, rubs one fist into her left eye, then reaches for another watercress sandwich. Crocodile tears, Vinnie thinks. “Anyhow, by the time the ambulance came and they got him to the hospital he had passed.”
“I see.” Vinnie lets out a long sigh. “It was a heart attack.”
“Yeh. That’s what the doctor said.”
What they call natural causes, Vinnie thinks. Not a deliberate or half-deliberate act, not his fault—not her fault. Maybe. But if it weren’t for her, Chuck wouldn’t have died in a provincial English records office; he wouldn’t have been there in the first place. (“If it hadn’t been for you”—she hears his voice again—“I never woulda thought of looking for my ancestor.”) But what does it matter whether he died because of her, or in spite of her? Either way he is dead. He will never enter this room again, never sit where his stupid daughter is sitting now, smiling stupidly at her.
With great difficulty, Vinnie remembers her manners and focuses again on Barbie. “That’s awful,” she says. “An awful shock for you.” She frowns, recognizing that her remark is as much of a cliché as The Barbarian’s.
“Uh, well.” Barbie chews and swallows. “I mean, naturally it was, but in a way we were sorta prepared for it. Dad had been alerted, after all.”
“Alerted?”
“Oh, yeh. He’d had a couple of what d’you call them, episodes, already. The doctor in Tulsa told him he oughta take it real easy: he was s’posed to give up alcohol and cigarettes and avoid exertion as much as possible. Even then there was always some risk. I mean, he could’ve
gone anytime. Maybe he didn’t mention that to you, I guess.” She blinks slowly.
“No, he didn’t mention it,” Vinnie says. Images of Chuck drinking and smoking appear in her mind, followed by one of him engaged in a particular kind of exertion.
“He shouldn’t have climbed all those stairs in that dumb old town hall,” Barbie says. “But that was how Dad was, y’know. When he got some project in his head, he had to finish it.
“Like I remember once when we were kids, I said I wished we had a treehouse,” she goes on. “And Dad got interested, and started drawing plans, and the next Saturday he was up in our big catalpa tree all day building it. Gary and me were helping him, and he made Consuelo—she was our cook then—bring out sandwiches for all of us so we wouldn’t have to stop working for lunch. By the time we got done it was nearly dark, and we had a picnic up there, we had . . . pink . . . lemonade . . . Excuse me.” She snuffles back tears.
“That’s all right.” Vinnie passes Barbie another napkin, since she seems to have lost her own.
“Thanks . . . It’s just . . .” She blows her nose loudly on the hand-hemmed linen. “I’m okay now. I haven’t been crying much. Just at first when Mom got the cable, and on the plane. And then with the cremains.”
“Cremains?” Vinnie repeats, baffled.
“Yeh. Ashes, I guess you could call them. See, Mom decided to have Dad cremated over here. Well, like she said, there wasn’t anything else to do, really. Professor Gilson arranged it: he was wonderful. He didn’t know Dad had passed till Mom phoned him, but then he got in touch with the hospital, and him and his students took care of everything. They found me a place to stay and met me at the train; they were just great, honestly. They really thought a lot of Dad. I’m so stupid, I didn’t know what to do about anything, but they helped me, like, finalize everything: pay the bills, and sort out Dad’s stuff, decide what to send home, and what to give away.”
“That’s good,” Vinnie says, trying to prevent herself from imagining the process.
“They took care of everything, really. Except for the cremains. That was kinda weird and awful, y’know. Professor Gilson had them saved for me. I thought they’d be in a big heavy silver urn or something, but it wasn’t anything like that.” Barbie snuffles, stops.
“Nothing like that,” Vinnie prompts.
“Naw. They were in a, I don’t know, a kinda waxed cardboard carton like you get with store-packed ice cream, about that size. Inside it was a plastic bag full of this kinda pale gritty gray stuff. I couldn’t believe that was all that was left of Dad, just a coupla pounds of what looked like health-food soy mix.” Barbie snuffles again, swallows.
“Then I didn’t know what to do with it,” she continues. “I didn’t know if it was legal to take cremains on a plane. I mean, suppose there was a customs inspection? I couldn’t see putting that carton in the suitcase with my clothes anyhow, y’know?” She begins to tear up again. “Sorry. I’m so stupid.”
Barbie’s continual assertion of her lack of intelligence has begun to annoy Vinnie. Stop telling me how stupid you are, she wants to say. You graduated from the University of Oklahoma, you can’t be all that stupid.
“That’s all right,” she says instead. “I think you’ve done very well, considering everything.” Almost against her will, she reclassifies The Barbarian as an innocent peasant—the victim rather than the accomplice of that Visigoth realtor her mother, who is no doubt responsible for Barbie’s low opinion of her own intelligence.
“Anyhow, when I phoned home next, Mom said not to bother,” Barbie resumes presently. “She said what I should do was scatter the cremains somewhere. So Professor Gilson drove me out in the country to a place he said Dad had liked. It was nothing special. Just this little field, on the side of a hill, that one of Dad’s ancestors owned once. It wasn’t a bad place really: kinda quiet. And Professor Gilson said hopefully it’ll never be built over; it’s too out-of-the way, and the land is too steep.
“So I climbed over the fence by these wooden steps they have here, what did he call them?”
“A stile?” Vinnie suggests.
“Yeh. That’s right. Anyhow, I got over it. And I walked up the field a ways, and sorta dumped the cremains out into the long grass and flowers. I guess I shoulda scattered them around more, but I was crying too much, and I couldn’t put my hand into the bag. It seemed kinda rude, y’know?”
“Yes, I see what you mean.”
“Poor old Dad.” His daughter sighs and reaches for the last watercress sandwich. “Mom was right. It was pathetic really, his chasing around the country looking for ancestors.”
“1 don’t see that,” Vinnie says a little snappishly. “Why shouldn’t your father have been interested in his genealogy? A great many people are.”
“Sure, I know. But they’ve mostly got someone worthwhile in their family tree. Like Mom: her side of the family is real distinguished. She’s a D.A.R., and she’s descended from a whole lot of judges and generals. Hiram Fudd, the senator, y’know, he was her great-uncle.”
“Really,” Vinnie remarks. In her mind a catalpa tree appears, with monkeys dressed as judges and generals and senators sitting in the treehouse and on the nearby branches.
“I guess Dad thought if he went back far enough he might find somebody he could be proud of too. Professor Gilson told me he was looking for months, all over the country; but all he ever came up with was a lot of farm workers and a blacksmith and this old hermit . . . At least I guess that’s what he was doing down there, besides helping Professor Gilson out sometimes. Mom wondered if maybe he’d got involved with . . . uh, you know, a woman.” Barbie blinks at Vinnie, but inquiringly rather than suspiciously. It is clear that in her mind Professor Miner is not “a woman” and probably never has been one. “I mean, do you think there coulda been anything like that?”
“I have no idea,” Vinnie says frostily, thanking heaven for the existence of British Telecom. Because of it, there will be no incriminating and distressing letters from her for Barbie or her mother to find later among Chuck’s effects. And she too has nothing of Chuck’s, not even a note—only a few of his winter clothes.
“I sorta don’t believe it. Dad wasn’t like that. He was a very loyal person, y’know.” Barbie blinks.
“Mm.” Vinnie glances involuntarily in the direction of the hall closet, where she seems to see Chuck’s sheepskin-lined winter coat glowing with a guilty fluorescence. “More tea?” She holds up the pot, aware that tea is all she can offer now: Barbie, in spite or perhaps because of her grief, has eaten all the watercress sandwiches and walnut cake.
Chuck’s daughter shakes her head, causing her long sun-bleached hair to flop about. “No, thanks very much. I guess I oughta be going.” She gets up clumsily.
“Well, thanks for everything, Professor Miner,” she says, moving into the hall. “It was real nice to meet you. Oh, hey. I almost forgot to give you Dad’s picture. Boy, am I stupid. Here.”
“Thank you.” Vinnie places the portfolio on the hall table and unties the worn black cotton tapes.
“Oh,” she gasps, drawing her breath in as she lifts a creased sheet of tissue to reveal a large hand-colored eighteenth-century engraving of a forest scene with a grotto and a waterfall. A figure dressed in rags and bits of fur and leather stands before the grotto, leaning on a staff. “Your father told me about this picture. It’s his ancestor, The Hermit of South Leigh; ‘Old Mumpson’ they called him.”
“Yeh; that’s what Professor Gilson said.”
“You don’t want it yourself,” Vinnie says rather than asks, hoping for the answer No.
“I d’know.” Barbie looks larger and more helpless than before. “I guess not.”
“Or perhaps your brother might like it,” says Vinnie, realizing at the same time that Old Mumpson, in spite of his honorary title, looks no older than Chuck and a good deal like him (if Chuck had grown an untidy beard), and also that she wants the picture so badly it frightens her.
&n
bsp; “Aw, no.” Barbie almost recoils. “Greg? You gotta be kidding. That guy looks like some kinda hippie weirdo; Greg wouldn’t have him in the house. Anyways, Dad said if anything happened to him, Professor Gilson was s’posed to give the picture to you.” She smiles awkwardly. “You could throw it out, I guess, if you want to.”
“Of course not,” Vinnie says, taking hold of the portfolio as if it might be snatched from her. “1 like it very much.” She looks from the engraving to Barbie, who is standing there dumbly.
“You must have had rather a hard time of it these last few days,” Vinnie says, suddenly realizing this. “It’s too bad your mother or your brother wasn’t able to come to England with you.” Or instead of you, she adds silently to herself. Because surely either one of them would have been able to manage things better, and not had to lay it all on Professor Gilson. But perhaps that was the point: Barbie had been sent because she was helpless.
“Uh, well. Mom woulda come, only she was closing an important sale, a big condo deal she’s been putting together for months. And Greg’s always awful busy. Besides, his wife’s expecting a baby next month.”
“So they sent you.” Vinnie manages to keep most of her disaproval out of her voice.
“Yeh, well. Somebody had to come, y’know.” Barbie blinks. “I don’t have a family, or much of a job, so I was kinda disposable.”
“I see.” Vinnie has an image of those shelves in her Camden Town supermarket that hold “disposables”—paper plates and napkins, plastic cups and spoons, aluminum-foil pie tins and the like: made to be used on unimportant occasions and then discarded. A strong dislike for Barbie’s living relatives comes over her. “Well, you’ll be able to go home now.”
“Yeh. Well, un, no. I’ve got to stay another couple days in London. Mom decided we’d better plan on ten days. Anyhow it costs a lot less that way, on the charter. I have a free hotel and everything.”
