Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  “The plan is to convert it into a B-and-B,” Miles Anderson confided.

  “Okay, I’ll bite,” Sully said. “What’s a B-and-B, besides brandy?”

  “Bed-and-breakfast,” Anderson explained. “Surely you’ve heard of bed-and-breakfasts?”

  “Never.”

  “They’re the rage.”

  “Okay,” Sully said agreeably.

  A good pause. “Anyway, the place is in, shall we say, imperfect condition. In fact, the whole place needs sprucing up.”

  “Sprucing?” Sully said.

  “A little of everything, I fear. Painting. Lots of painting. Plumbing. Electrical. Insulation. Also yard work. Two tree stumps that need digging up and carting off. There’s time, though. I won’t actually need to take possession until spring. Mid-May, in all likelihood. The plan is to open in August for the racing season.”

  “I don’t do electrical work,” Sully said. “I can recommend someone though.”

  “Yes … well … that might work, mightn’t it?”

  “It might,” Sully said. In fact, he was calculating in his head just how well. A winter’s worth of work, done at his own pace, when his knee permitted. Good timing, too. After the ground froze, Carl Roebuck would have little for him until late April.

  “I understand you own a truck?” Miles Anderson said.

  “Most days.”

  “You own it most days?”

  “I own it every day. It runs most days.”

  “I see. Yes. Well, what else can I tell you? It’s going to be strenuous work, I fear.”

  Since Miles Anderson made that sound like a question, Sully answered it. “I’m used to strenuous work.”

  “Hmmm. Yes. Well. All right then. Listen, I hope you don’t mind my asking how old you are?”

  “I’m sixty,” Sully told him. “How old are you?”

  “Touché. I wonder. Would you be willing to drop by sometime tomorrow morning and see the place? Give me an estimate? I have to be back to the city in the afternoon.”

  “Which city?”

  “New York City. I wonder. Did your hourly rate just go up?”

  “No,” Sully said. His hourly rate had gone up when Miles Anderson had used the phrase “mightn’t it.”

  They agreed that Sully would meet him at the house at eleven. Sully took down the address. “I live about two blocks from there,” he said.

  “Indeed,” Miles Anderson said, his voice rich with indifference.

  “Who recommended me, by the way?” Sully thought to ask before hanging up.

  “Several people,” Miles Anderson said. “You have an excellent local reputation.”

  Sully hung up. He’d considered asking Miles Anderson if he had any objection to paying him under the table, but decided that part of the negotiation could wait. Miles Anderson didn’t sound like a man who’d be hung up on an ethical matter.

  Wirf was nearly finished with Sully’s dinner when he returned. “I just talked to a man who said I had an excellent reputation,” he told Wirf.

  Wirf wiped a patch of glistening gravy from his chin with a cocktail napkin. “Out-of-towner, huh?”

  “New York,” Sully said.

  “Big job?”

  “All winter, sounds like.”

  “He’ll pay you under the table?”

  “I didn’t mention it yet, but I will.”

  “Good, no records. They catch you working, we’re kaput.” Wirf said, then added, “Hey, I got a hell of an idea. Let’s you and me sit right here and drink beer all night.”

  “Okay,” Sully agreed, deciding not to mention the man in the dark sedan or the fact that he might already have been caught. In fact, he half hoped he had been caught. Then the die would be cast. Right this minute, he felt good. His knee was murmuring but not singing. Could it be things were looking up? Had he yanked himself out of his stupid streak in record time? It was a possibility worth contemplating. “Maybe if we stay right here long enough that deadbeat bartender will buy a round.”

  FRIDAY

  Clive Jr. sat across the breakfast table from his mother, trying to match the splinters of the demolished Queen Anne chair, which sat in an impressive pile at his feet. His mother was fully dressed and so utterly alert that Clive Jr. understood her to be furious. Still furious. Her lips were drawn into the same thin white scar that had frightened him as a boy and, truth be told, frightened him still. The irony of his being frightened of his mother was not lost on Clive Jr., who weighed, the last time he checked, just over two hundred and twenty pounds—too much, he admitted, for a man five-ten, but easily dismissable as genetic. These last ten years, he had come to bear an uncanny resemblance to his father, Clive Sr. Miss Beryl, all four foot ten of her, Clive Jr. estimated to weigh in at about ninety pounds fully dressed, as she was now, at six-thirty in the morning the day after Thanksgiving, the morning after he’d made what Clive Jr. now understood to have been a tactical error of sizable dimension. “Ma,” he said, setting down the two splintered pieces of wood that didn’t want to match. He kept his voice low, so as not to awaken his fiancée. “I’m sorry.”

  Miss Beryl glanced up from the teabag she was dunking angrily in her cup of steaming water. “Why?” she said, purposely misunderstanding, he was certain. “You’re not the one who broke it.”

  “I’m not talking about the chair,” he said, though he again picked up and examined the larger of the two pieces of fractured wood. “I thought you’d be thrilled,” he explained, though this was not true. “I guess I shouldn’t have surprised you.”

  Miss Beryl studied her son and relented a little, he looked so miserable. He was sleepy-eyed and unshaven and he’d rushed over first thing in the morning, displaying more courage than she was accustomed to expect. He’d even brought with him a copy of The Torch, his high school yearbook, which contained a picture of the Joyce woman, as if to prove that she was who he said she was. “I used to enjoy surprises more, back when nothing surprised me,” she admitted.

  Indeed, Miss Beryl had spent the majority of her sleepless night trying to decide whom she was most furious with—Clive, Jr. (the obvious choice) or the dreadful Joyce woman now asleep in the guest bedroom, or herself. In retrospect, Miss Beryl was deeply ashamed of yesterday’s disorientation, of the way she’d allowed a simple situation to throw her. Her son had explained twice who the woman squirming uncomfortably in Miss Beryl’s Queen Anne chair was, but Miss Beryl’s confusion had been a black hole, dense and resistant to illumination.

  A little over a year ago she’d reluctantly agreed to let him have a key to the back door. “If there was ever an emergency …,” he’d explained, allowing his voice to trail off meaningfully. And so, when his car had been parked at the curb yesterday afternoon, she’d been prepared to find Clive Jr. himself pacing in her living room, going over everything in the house with his appraiser’s eye, something he could do openly only when she was gone. Either that or snooping around Sully’s flat upstairs, assessing the damages.

  But who was this too carefully dressed, bosomy woman, her hands nervously aflutter as she sat, her thick knees and anklebones touching, as she waited to be introduced? Miss Beryl immediately pegged her as some kind of social worker, or perhaps the proprietress of a nursing home. Clive Jr. had more than once alluded to the eventual necessity of her moving into “a nice safe environment when the time came,” and even offered to “screen some of the literature” for her, an offer Miss Beryl had emphatically declined. She’d been indulging a great many suspicions about Clive Jr. of late, and so, when she saw that Clive Jr. was accompanied by a nervous, rather prim-looking woman of advanced middle age, she concluded that, in her son’s view at least, the time had come.

  This erroneous conclusion, having gotten lodged in Miss Beryl’s brain, she’d been unable to dislodge, despite her son’s careful, labored introduction. Much to her eventual embarrassment, Miss Beryl had continued to glare menacingly at the increasingly agitated woman. “My fiancée, Ma,” Clive Jr. kept repea
ting, but the word refused to compute. Why would Clive Jr. be engaged to a social worker? Miss Beryl had given up on her son marrying years ago, and now she was being asked to believe this absurd coincidence—that he was going to marry some nursing-home proprietress. Only later was she able to sort it out, that this woman’s connection to social work and nursing homes had existed only in her own imagination.

  And so, this morning, Miss Beryl was still furious with Clive Jr., and with the dreadful Joyce woman, but during the long sleepless night she’d also begun to entertain again the terrible possibility that the time had come, that she no longer had any business living alone. She was no longer safe on the interstate. She got confused going places she’d been to a hundred times before. She was becoming suspicious and paranoid. Miss Beryl had always believed that she herself would know “when the time came” for her to give up her independence. But what if she didn’t? What if everybody else knew already? Miss Beryl, who had always suffered the cruelty of her eighth-graders’ jokes, had no desire to become a legitimate figure of fun for these same children, now age forty.

  And so, just before dawn she’d made up her mind to apologize to both her son and his fiancée, a resolution she began to entertain second thoughts about at first light. These seconds thoughts had evolved into reluctance by the time the sky outside her bedroom window had become white. Clive Jr.’s appearance, before she’d even made her tea, put the resolution to rout. Now, watching him ineffectually trying to match the splintered pieces of the Queen Anne had the effect of causing her to wonder what had possessed her to even consider yielding territory to her son.

  “Joyce feels terrible about the chair, Ma,” Clive Jr. said, as if he suspected her decision to tough things out.

  Actually, Miss Beryl had mixed feelings about the Queen Anne. The chair’s destruction afforded her the opportunity to continue her instinctive dislike for Clive’s fiancée, who was mouthy and full of silly opinions about subjects of which she was wholly ignorant, the length and breadth of which had been discussed during the course of what had been for Miss Beryl one of the longest evenings of her life. Among the dreadful Joyce woman’s devotions was the president, newly elected to a second term. Having lived in California, the Joyce woman said, of course she knew Mr. Reagan far better than non-Californians. She had campaigned for him there and, of course, again here in New York when he ran for president. Fixing Miss Beryl rather unpleasantly with her doughy eyes, the Joyce woman had stated, without apparent irony, that the only thing that concerned her was the president’s age, a man that old, doing a job which aged you so. “He seems so tired” the Joyce woman said seriously, as if she had a personal relationship with the president, feared not just for the office, but for the man, “but I truly think he’s sharp as ever.”

  “So do I.” Miss Beryl had fixed her savagely and excused herself from the room under the pretext of scrounging up a plate of cookies and some coffee.

  “Decaf?” the Joyce woman had pealed. “Oh, I’d love some decaf.”

  Clive Jr., who’d lapsed into comatose silence during the Joyce woman’s soliloquy, followed Miss Beryl into the kitchen. “I wish you’d quit glaring as if you meant to murder her,” he complained.

  “I can’t help it,” she told him. “I have what’s called an open face.”

  Handing her son the plate of cookies, Miss Beryl shooed him out of the kitchen, then searched out the instant coffee in a remote cupboard. It took her a few minutes to boil the water, arrange the coffee cups on a tray, compose herself and return to the living room, where the Joyce woman was brushing cookie crumbs from her ample bosom. The plate was empty.

  “Mmmm,” the woman cooed when she sipped her coffee. “I’m sorry to be such trouble, but honestly, if I have caffeinated after five, I’m up all night long!”

  And then she was off again, explaining how she had always adored coffee, had always drunk twenty cups a day and never had problems until recently. But now, lord, it was simply tragic what coffee did to her. There was no other word for it besides tragic, but wasn’t that the way with all the good things, the things you really loved. Everything good was either immoral or fattening, she added, apropos of nothing, and then cackled as if the cleverness of this observation were attributable to herself.

  While the woman talked, Miss Beryl sank comfortably into her seat and tried not to glare, taking what solace there was in the fact that the coffee she’d given her guest was not decaf. Slender consolation, since the fool woman was probably as wrong about caffeine as she was about everything else. Thinking she’d drunk decaf, she’d sleep like the dead, like the president she admired, all three of their shared ideas rattling around in their otherwise empty heads, unassailed by doubt or caffeine.

  In this, it turned out, Miss Beryl had been wrong. She’d heard the dreadful Joyce woman get up to use the bathroom at midnight, then again at two, and finally at four-thirty. Each time, Miss Beryl had muttered “Good!” in the dark.

  One of the other things she’d been slow on the uptake about was that Clive Jr. had planned for the Joyce woman to spend the night in the spare bedroom rather than return to Lake George, where she lived. Even after she caught her son’s drift, she wasn’t sure what his intention meant, or was supposed to mean. Was it simply Clive Jr.’s plan for the two women to get to know each other? Or were Clive Jr. and his fiancée trying to reassure her that they were not sleeping together? Was this propriety for show or for real? Poor Clive Jr., either way, Miss Beryl thought.

  When the Queen Anne buckled, the two brittle back legs had splintered lengthwise and it was a matter of great good fortune, Miss Beryl supposed, that the Joyce woman had not been impaled. As it was, she’d hit the floor hard enough to shake the walls. Driver Ed had come crashing down from his wall, denting his chin, which made him look even more dour and disapproving. Also a little like Kirk Douglas. The look that had come over the Joyce woman’s face, more of mortification than pain, had been horrible. She’d looked at Clive Jr. as if he’d played a practical joke on her by seating her, or allowing her to be seated, on a trick chair. Her bottom lip had begun to quiver and then her whole face came apart in the kind of grief that Miss Beryl associated with the sudden, violent loss of a loved one, not a momentary loss of dignity. Clive Jr. had ushered her, choking and sobbing, into the bathroom, where she stayed for nearly half an hour. In the living room, Clive Jr. and Miss Beryl had spoken in whispers, each pretending to ignore the ebb and flow of sorrow on the other side of the bathroom door.

  “Joyce’s emotions are very near the surface,” Clive Jr. had explained as he gathered up the pieces of the Queen Anne. “Menopause devastated her.”

  Miss Beryl had narrowed her eyes at this observation, so clearly out of character for Clive Jr., whom she’d never known to see anything from a woman’s point of view. No doubt he was repeating the Joyce woman’s own explanation for her emotional instability. Miss Beryl herself was not particularly sympathetic to the “devastations” supposedly wrought by menopause, a condition she herself had weathered with good grace. She’d observed that women who were “devastated by menopause” were often vain creatures to begin with. They’d spent their young lives trading on their looks, knowing, in fact, no other currency.

  This Joyce woman had been attractive all right, at least to judge from her yearbook photo. It had occurred to Miss Beryl this morning when she’d studied the pretty girl in The Torch, that in a way the Joyce woman who had whimpered for half an hour in the bathroom was grieving the loss of a loved one—the self she had been when she was flush with the currency of youth. And Miss Beryl was unable to decide whether it was appropriate to sympathize with such a person. She was inclined not to. It had been within her power to comfort the Joyce woman by telling her, once she returned from the bathroom, that the chair’s destruction was not so much her fault as Sully’s, whose squirming into his work boots every morning had no doubt readied the chair for its final collapse. But every time Miss Beryl had been about to make this gesture, the Joyce
woman had said something disagreeable, and finally Miss Beryl had decided to let her suffer.

  When she’d finally returned to their company in the living room, the Joyce woman’s mood had swung dramatically. She’d become heroically yakky, as if only a steady stream of pointless, breathless, one-sided conversation could ensure that Clive Jr. and Miss Beryl would be prevented from inquiring after her health, physical and emotional. Miss Beryl wondered if she’d popped a pill. The Joyce woman made no mention of the broken chair, refused, in fact, to glance in its direction.

  “She’s really a wonderful girl, Ma,” Clive Jr. now insisted with uncharacteristic sincerity. “She wasn’t herself yesterday.”

  “Who was she?” Miss Beryl said, an unkind question perhaps, though not as unkind as the other that occurred to her: “What girl?” The woman had to be in her late fifties.

  Clive Jr. looked at his hands. “You’re always hard on people, Ma.”

  Miss Beryl had to concede that this was probably true. Clive Sr. had pointed it out to her more than once, and Mrs. Gruber was of the same opinion. So had been her legion of eighth-graders, whose mediocre efforts she’d rewarded with mediocre grades. “I wasn’t aware of being mean to her,” she told Clive Jr., “but if I was, I’m sorry. It’s not my opinion of her that matters anyway. I’m not the one who’s going to marry her. You’re the one that’s got to like her.”

  “Well, I do,” Clive Jr. insisted, that same stubborn quality to his voice that he’d had as a child. “I love her,” he added. He’d set the splintered sticks he’d been trying to match on the floor with the remains of the crippled chair and taken back from her the yearbook, the ribbed surface of which he massaged affectionately with his pink thumb, a gesture so pathetic that Miss Beryl felt herself soften toward him.

  Getting up from the table, she gathered her teacup and saucer. “I’m glad for you,” she said. “There are worse things than love. Give me a minute and I’ll think of one.”