Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  In any case, the town of North Bath, now, in the late autumn of 1984, was still waiting for its luck to change. There were encouraging signs. A restored Sans Souci, what was left of it, was scheduled to reopen in the summer, and a new spring had been successfully drilled on the hotel’s extensive grounds. And luck, so the conventional wisdom went, ran in cycles.

  The morning of the day before Thanksgiving, five winters after that first elm turned on the residents of Upper Main, cleaving old Mrs. Merriweather’s roof and reducing Mrs. Gruber’s birdbath to rubble, Miss Beryl, always an early riser, awoke even earlier than usual, with a vague sense of unease. As she sat at the edge of her bed trying to trace its source, she had a nosebleed, a real gusher. It came upon her quickly and was just as quickly finished. She caught most of the blood with a swatch of tissue from the box she kept on her bedstand, and as soon as her nose stopped bleeding she flushed the tissue emphatically down the toilet. Was it the quick disappearance of the evidence or the nosebleed itself that left her feeling refreshed? She wasn’t sure, but she felt even better after she’d bathed and dressed, and when she went into her front room to drink her tea, she was surprised and delighted to discover that it had snowed during the night. Nobody had predicted snow, but there it was anyway, the kind of heavy wet snow that sits up tall on railings and tree branches, the whole street white. In the gray predawn, everything outside looked otherworldly, and she watched the dark street and sipped her tea until a car slalomed silently by, leaving its track in the fresh snow, and the vague sense of unease she’d felt upon waking returned, though not as urgently. Who will it be this winter? she wondered, parting the blinds so she could see up into the trees.

  Though Miss Beryl was far too close an observer of reality to credit the idea of divine justice in this world, there were times when she could almost see God’s design hovering just out of sight. So far, she’d been lucky. God had permitted tree limbs to fall on her neighbors, not herself. But she doubted He would continue to ignore her in this business of falling limbs. This winter He’d probably lower the boom.

  “This’ll be my year,” she said out loud, addressing her husband, Clive Sr., who sat on the television, smiling at her wisely. Dead now for twenty years, Clive Sr. could boast an even temperament. From his vantage point behind glass, nothing much got to him, and if he worried that this might be his wife’s winter, he didn’t show it. “You hear me, star of my firmament?” Miss Beryl prodded. When Clive Sr. had nothing to offer on this score, Miss Beryl frowned at him. “I might as well talk to Ed,” she told her husband. “Go ahead, then,” Clive Sr. seemed to say, safe behind his glass.

  “What do you think, Ed?” Miss Beryl asked. “Is this my year?”

  Driver Ed, Miss Beryl’s Zamble mask, stared down at her from his perch on the wall. Ed had a dour human face modified by antelope horns and a toothed beak, all of which added up, to Miss Beryl’s way of thinking, to a mortified expression. He looked, Miss Beryl had insisted when she purchased Ed over twenty years ago, like Clive Sr. had looked when he discovered he was going to be required to teach driver education at the high school. Clive Sr. had been the football coach, and his later years had not gone the way he’d planned. First, when the football team had begun to lose, he’d been required to teach civics, and when it continued to lose, he’d been required to teach driver education. Eventually, football had been dropped, a victim of declining postwar enrollments, demographic shifts, and continued humiliation at the hands of archrival Schuyler Springs, leaving Miss Beryl’s husband bewildered and adrift. Driver ed turned out to be the death of him when a girl named Audrey Peach, without warning or reason, braked Clive Sr. through the front windshield of a brand-new driver ed car early one morning before he was entirely awake. Clive Sr. never wore a seat belt. He made sure his student drivers and passengers wore them, but he himself disliked the sensation of restraint. The way Clive Sr. looked at it, once he got wedged into a compact car, there was no place for him to go. A big man, he required a big car, and he suspected that the little piece of shit driver ed car the school board had purchased was a punishment for the losing seasons he was now suffering in basketball, a sport he didn’t even like. Once inside the compact car, he felt so claustrophobic it was hard to concentrate on his teaching. The low roof required him to hunch forward to see where young Audrey Peach was pointed. When she hit the new brakes, the little car stopped impressively, but Clive Sr. kept going, his bullet-shaped skull punching right through the windshield, where he lodged, briefly, like a sinner in the stocks, until the car rocked and flung him back into his seat, neck broken, a bloody object lesson and the only driver ed teacher in upstate New York ever to be killed in the line of duty.

  “See?” Miss Beryl addressed her husband’s photograph. “Ed thinks so too.”

  At least, she comforted herself, when the divine boom got lowered she’d be in better financial condition to receive it than many of her neighbors. She could congratulate herself that she was not only well insured but reasonably secure. Miss Beryl, like so many of the owners of the houses along Upper Main, was a widow, technically not “Miss” Beryl at all, and her husband had left her in possession of both his VA pension and retirement, which, together with her own retirement and Social Security, added up, and she knew herself to be far better off than Mrs. Gruber and the others. Life, which in Miss Beryl’s considered opinion tilted in the direction of cruelty, had at least spared her financial hardship, and she was grateful.

  In other respects life had been less kind. Her being known in North Bath as “Miss” Beryl derived from the fact that the militantly unteachable eighth-grade schoolchildren she’d instructed for forty years considered her far too odd looking and misshapen to have a husband. They refused to believe it, in fact, even when confronted with irrefutable evidence. They instinctively called her Miss Peoples or Miss Beryl on the first day of class and paid no attention when she corrected them. Clive Sr. was of the opinion that kids just naturally thought of their teachers as spinsters, and he had found the whole thing amusing, often referring to her as “Miss Beryl” himself. Clive Sr. had not been a profoundly stupid man, but he missed his fair share of what Miss Beryl referred to as life’s nuances, and one of the nuances he missed was the hurt he thoughtlessly inflicted on his wife when he called her by that name, a name that suggested he saw her the same way other people did. Clive Sr. was the only man who’d ever treated Miss Beryl as desirable, and it seemed to her almost unforgivable that he should, without thinking, take back the gift of his love for her in this one small way, take it back repeatedly, always with a big grin.

  But he had loved her. This she knew, and the knowledge was another of the ways she was better off than most of her neighbors, whose husbands, when they died, left their widows alone and largely unprepared for another decade or two of solitary existence. Mrs. Gruber, for instance, had never worked outside the home and had little notion how the world operated beyond the obvious fact that it was getting more expensive. Indeed, Miss Beryl was the only professional woman among these frightened Upper Main Street widows. Alive, their husbands had protected them from life’s falling limbs, but now their veteran’s benefits and meager Social Security did not stretch very far, and so they rented their second-floor flats out of necessity, though the rents they received often did little more than cover the repairs necessitated by the disintegration of hundred-year-old pipes, the overloading of antiquated electrical circuits, the falling of tree limbs. To make matters worse, taxes were skyrocketing, pressured upward by downstate speculators in real estate, many of whom seemed convinced that Bath and every other small town in the corridor between New York City and Montreal would appreciate dramatically during the eighties and nineties. It might not look it, but Bath had much to recommend it. Not only was the old Sans Souci, grandly restored, scheduled to reopen next summer, but a huge tract of boggy land between the village and the interstate was being considered for development of a theme park called The Ultimate Escape. Miss Beryl’s son, Clive Jr.,
for the last decade the president of the North Bath Savings and Loan, was leading a group of local investors to ensure that the theme park became a reality, and he subscribed enthusiastically to the view that because land was limited, the future was limitless. “In twenty years,” he was fond of saying, “there’s going to be no such thing as a bad location.”

  Miss Beryl did not argue, but neither did she share her son’s optimism. To her way of thinking there would always be bad locations, and unless she was gravely mistaken Clive Jr. would discover this by investing in them. Clive Jr. was a cynical optimist. He believed that people went broke for two reasons: stupidity and small thinking. Stupidity in others was a good thing, according to Clive Jr., because there was money to be made by it. Other people’s financial failures were opportunities, not cause for alarm. He liked to analyze failure after the fact, discover its source in small thinking, limited ambition, penny antes. He prided himself on having rescued the North Bath Savings and Loan from just such unhealthy notions. For years that institution had been edging by slender centimeters toward insolvency, the result of Clive Jr.’s predecessor, a deeply suspicious and pessimistic man from Maine who hated to loan people money. The fact that people came to him asking for money and often truly needing it suggested to him the likelihood of their not being able to repay it. He could see the need in their eyes, and he couldn’t imagine such need going away. He thought the institution’s money was safer in the vault than in their pockets. The man had actually died in the bank, on a Sunday, seated in his leather chair, his office door closed, as it always was, as if he suspected he might be petitioned even on a weekend night with the doors to the bank locked. He was discovered on Monday morning in a state of advanced rigor mortis not unlike, it was later remarked, the condition of the institution he oversaw.

  When Clive Jr. took over, things loosened up right away. The first thing he did was put down a new carpet in the lobby, the old one having evolved several stages beyond threadbare except in the passageway that led to the CEO’s office, where there’d been little traffic. His goal for the decade was to increase tenfold the savings and loan’s assets, and he made known his intention to invest what money was left aggressively and even, when the situation seemed to call for it, to loan money out. After so many years of pessimism, Clive Jr. maintained, it was time for a little optimism. Furthermore, that was the mood of the nation.

  The only policy Clive Jr. shared with his late predecessor was his deep distrust of the residents of North Bath, whom both men considered shiftless. That’s the way his high school classmates had been, and they’d grown up shiftless, in Clive Jr.’s view. He preferred to deal with investors and borrowers from downstate, indeed from out of state, indeed from as far away as Texas, convinced that these were the future of Bath, just as they had been the salvation of Clifton Park and the other recently affluent Albany suburbs. “Downstate money is creeping up the Northway,” Clive Jr. told his mother, a remark that always caused her to peer at him over the rims of her reading glasses. To Miss Beryl, the idea of money creeping up the interstate was sinister. “Ma,” he insisted, “take it from me. When the time comes to sell the house, you’re going to make a bundle.”

  It was phrases like “when the time comes” that worried Miss Beryl. They had a menacing resonance when Clive Jr. delivered them. She wondered what he had in mind. Would she be the judge of “when the time came,” or would he? When he visited her, he looked the house over with a realtor’s eye, found excuses to go down into the basement and up into the attic, as if he wanted to make sure that “when the time came” for him to inherit his mother’s property it would be in good condition. He objected to her renting the upstairs flat to Donald Sullivan, against whom Clive Jr. harbored some ancient animosity, and no visit from Clive Jr., no matter how brief, passed without a renewed plea for her to throw Sully out before he fell asleep in bed with a lighted cigarette. Something about the way Clive Jr. voiced this concern convinced Miss Beryl that her son’s anxiety had less to do with the possibility that his elderly mother might go up in flames than that the house would.

  Miss Beryl was not proud of entertaining such unkind thoughts about her only child, and at times she even tried to reason herself out of them and into more natural maternal affection. The only difficulty was that natural maternal affection did not come naturally where Clive Jr. was concerned. The Clive Jr. who sat on the television opposite his father seemed pleasant enough, and the face the camera caught did not seem to be that of an unhappy, insecure, middle-aged banker. In fact, Clive Jr.’s face, still boyish in some ways, seemed full of possibility at an age where the countenances of most men were etched indelibly by the certainties of their existences. Clive Jr., at least the Clive Jr. who sat on the television, still struck Miss Beryl as unresolved, even though he would be fifty-six on his next birthday. Clive Jr. in real life was a different story. Whenever he appeared for one of his visits and gave Miss Beryl a dry, unpleasant peck on the forehead before scanning the living room ceiling for water damage, his character, if character was the right word, seemed as fixed and settled as a fifth-term conservative politician’s. She endured his visits, his endless financial advice, with as much good cheer as she could muster. He would tell her what to do and why, and she would listen politely for as long as it took before declining to follow his advice. In her opinion Clive Jr. was full of cockamamie schemes, and he treated each as if its origin were the burning bush and not his own fevered brain. “Ma,” he often said, on those occasions when she emphatically declined to follow his advice, “it’s almost as if you didn’t trust me.”

  “I don’t trust you,” Miss Beryl said aloud, addressing her son’s photo on the television, then adding, to her husband, “I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. I don’t trust him. Ed understands, don’t you, Ed.”

  Clive Sr. just smiled back, a tad ruefully, it seemed to her. Since his death he’d increasingly taken their son’s side in matters of conflict. “Trust him, Beryl,” he whispered to her now, his voice confidential, as if he feared that Driver Ed might overhear. “He’s our son. He’s the star of your firmament now.”

  “I’m working on it,” Miss Beryl assured her husband, and in fact, she was. She’d loaned Clive Jr. money twice during the last five years and not even asked him what he intended to do with it. Five thousand dollars the first time. Ten thousand the second. Amounts she would not be pleased to lose but which, truth be told, she could afford to lose. But both times Clive Jr. had paid her back when he said he would, and Miss Beryl, on the lookout for a reason not to trust her son, discovered that she was mildly disappointed to have the money back in her own possession. In fact, she was unable to fend off a particularly shameful suspicion—that Clive Jr. had not needed the money at all, that he’d borrowed it to demonstrate to her that he was trustworthy. She even began to suspect that what he must be after was not part of what would be his soon enough, but rather control of the whole. But to what end? Miss Beryl had to admit that the logic of her suspicions was flawed. After all, her money, the house on Upper Main and its considerable contents, everything would belong to Clive Jr. eventually, when, as he put it, “the time came.”

  One of the things that drove her son to distraction, Miss Beryl suspected, was not knowing how much “everything” amounted to. There was the house, of course, and the ten thousand dollars he knew his mother had because she’d loaned it to him. But how much more? It was this information about her finances that Miss Beryl did not trust her son with. She had an accountant in Schuyler Springs do her taxes each year, and she instructed him to surrender no information about her affairs to Clive Jr. For legal advice, she dealt with a local attorney named Abraham Wirfly, whom her son continued to warn her against as an incompetent and a drunkard. Miss Beryl was not unaware of Mr. Wirfly’s shortcomings, but she steadfastly maintained that he was not so much incompetent as unambitious, a character trait almost impossible to find in a lawyer. More important, she considered the man to be absolutely loyal, and when he promis
ed to divulge nothing of her financial and legal affairs to Clive Jr., she believed him. Without ever saying so, Abraham Wirfly seemed also to entertain reservations about Clive Jr., and so Miss Beryl continued to trust him. Clive Jr.’s growing exasperation was testimony to her excellent judgment. “Ma,” he pleaded pitifully, pacing up and down the length of her front room, “how can I help you protect your assets if you won’t let me? What’s going to happen if you get sick? Do you want the hospital to take everything? Is that your plan? To have a stroke and let some hospital take their thousand a day until it’s all gone and you’re destitute?”

  The logic of her son’s concern was inescapable, his argument consistent, yet despite this, Miss Beryl could not shed the feeling that Clive Jr. had a hidden agenda. She knew no more about his personal finances than he knew about hers, but she suspected that he was well on his way to becoming a wealthy man. She knew too that despite his realtor’s eye, he had no interest in the house, that if he were to inherit it tomorrow, he’d sell it the day after. He’d recently purchased a luxury town home at the new Schuyler Springs Country Club between North Bath and Schuyler Springs. The house on Upper Main might bring a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, maybe more, and this was nothing to sneeze at, even if Clive Jr. didn’t “need” the money. Yet she was unable to accept at face value that this was her son’s design. There was something about the way his eye roved uncomfortably from corner to corner of each room, as if in search of spirit trails, that convinced Miss Beryl he was seeing something she couldn’t see, and until she discovered what it was, she had no intention of trusting him fully.