Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  “Do you think she’s all right?” he asked Miss Beryl the last time he called. “I can’t believe she’s still asleep.”

  “You would if you could hear the way she’s snoring,” Miss Beryl had told him.

  Normally, getting this dreadful Joyce woman out of her house would have improved Miss Beryl’s spirits enormously, but all morning she had remained haunted by the sight of old Hattie in grim flight, her flimsy housecoat trailing behind her like a cape in the wind. Miss Beryl had never much cared for the old woman, whom she’d always considered grasping and crude, but the indignity of her flight and capture had brought Miss Beryl to the edge of tears. Worse, she’d seen herself in the old woman and recognized that it was this very eventuality that her son was attempting to guard against. The day would come when they’d need a net for her too. Clive Jr. just wanted to make sure that “when the time came” at least her financial affairs would be in order. Maybe that’s all he wanted. She would just have to face reality and do as Clive Jr. asked. Sell him the house as a hedge against the boom getting lowered. Do it now rather than later. Come to terms instead of stubbornly putting it off until it was too late.

  Having reached this sensible conclusion, her spirits plummeted precipitously the rest of the morning. Midmorning, she’d had a nosebleed, then, just when she thought they couldn’t get any lower, the North Bath Weekly Journal arrived, as it always did on Friday, midmorning. Today, as usual, two of its eight pages were devoted exclusively to local opinion. Those voiced in the “Sound Off!” section collectively represented the rhetorical sophistication of a Bronx cheer played through a bullhorn. Since the authors were allowed to use aliases, there were no discernible rules. One letter was a character assassination of the high school marching band leader, another a fundamentalist Christian credo of sorts, the point of which, if one existed, was lost to faulty grammar and syntax, while yet another letter was an inflammatory attack on homosexuals in particular and perverts in general, a letter which stopped just short of advocating their summary extermination. The reason for the author’s reticence on this last ethical point was that extermination was thankfully not needed now that God had sent His very own virus to do the job. Yet another writer urged every resident of Bath to turn out for the long-awaited Big Game this Saturday, thus proclaiming to the whole world that their community was second to none when it came to school spirit. This last was the sort of letter that would have warmed the cockles of Clive Sr.’s heart. School spirit had been one of his most deeply held tenets until his school did away with football and gave him driver education by way of compensation.

  Miss Beryl read each of these letters in its entirety, searching among them for some even accidental lapse into good sense, true feeling, even rudimentary decency or goodwill and wishing that the thoughts therein expressed by her neighbors could be explained as simple discombobulation. The best she was able to do was to reflect that people invariably exhibited the very worst side of their flawed natures when invited to put their thoughts into writing, especially when the invitation was sanctioned hit-and-run posing as democracy in action.

  Here was the rub, Miss Beryl knew. If she was going to surrender her affairs and thus her freedom, one had better trust the wisdom of so doing. Admittedly, Clive Jr. was not one of the letter writers in the Bath Weekly, and turning over her affairs, her leverage, to him was not the same as signing over her assets to eighth-graders, past or present. Still, Miss Beryl could not help suspecting that even if she was slipping, even if she was not the woman she had been a decade ago, her health, like her equilibrium, more precarious, even if she was more given to momentary confusions and disorientations, she was still sharper than most of the people she knew, including the people who wrote letters to the Bath Weekly, including her friend Mrs. Gruber, who wanted today to be Monday, perhaps even including her son, who looked out her front window and saw the Gold Coast. Miss Beryl was not old Hattie and never had been. More to the point, there was a good chance she never would be.

  “This is your fault,” she’d been telling Clive Sr. when Mrs. Gruber called to explain her present discombobulation. The last time Miss Beryl had willingly surrendered her future to another human being had been when she’d allowed Clive Sr. to talk her into marrying him and living out their lives in Bath. How had he ever managed that? she wondered. Love, dern it, was how. He had loved her, and in return for this great gift she had allowed him to bring her to Bath, where he had then promptly abandoned her to a life of fighting with eighth-graders. Then he’d gone and let himself be killed and left her to live out the rest of her many years with “Finally Fed Up” and “A True Christian” for company. Now here she was contemplating mortgaging her independence to this same man’s son, a man who’d grown to resemble his father so minutely that he might have been Clive Sr.’s clone.

  “I’m sorry if I sound grumpy,” Miss Beryl told Mrs. Gruber. “I was just sitting here wishing I had somebody to fight with when you called.”

  Mrs. Gruber ignored this explanation. “I saw Clive Jr. drive by,” she said. “Was that a woman with him in the car?” Mrs. Gruber knew perfectly well it was.

  “Clive Jr., star of my firmament, is to wed,” Miss Beryl said. “I only just learned of it myself.”

  “And that’s made you grumpy.”

  “Hardly,” Miss Beryl objected. “I’m perfectly happy to turn Clive Jr. over to any woman who will have him, and this one apparently will.”

  “Well, I’m eating like a bird today,” said Mrs. Gruber, who had little use for transitions. “Prune juice. Later a little dry toast and tea.”

  Dry toast, tea and prune juice was Mrs. Gruber’s way of warding off the constipation that tormented her after a heavy meal at the Northwoods Inn. Yesterday she had eaten a green salad, ambrosia salad, carrot-raisin salad, pea-cheese salad and macaroni salad from the buffet. Then Old Tom, stuffing, cranberries and a candied yam. Then pumpkin pie and whipped cream. There wasn’t room for all of this on Mrs. Gruber’s ninety-five-pound frame, and today it all weighed on her rather heavily.

  The other thing that weighed her down was guilt. For more than a year, as Miss Beryl suspected, she had been secretly feeding information concerning her friend to Clive Jr., who called her at least once a week to make sure that his mother was okay. She wasn’t spying for Clive Jr. exactly, just passing along information. For Miss Beryl’s own good, as Clive Jr. himself insisted. His mother was too stubborn for her own safety. Hadn’t she tried to keep a secret of her fall last summer, along with the badly sprained wrist that resulted? Mrs. Gruber understood Clive Jr.’s concern for his mother, and so she told him little things. In return, he told her things, too. She already knew, for instance, that Clive Jr. was getting married, and she now made a mental note to pretend she hadn’t known.

  The only misgiving that Mrs. Gruber had about her arrangement with her best friend’s son was that sometimes she ended up telling Clive Jr. things she never intended to. This morning, for instance, when Clive Jr. called from the bank to inquire whether they’d had a pleasant Thanksgiving dinner at the Northwoods Motor Inn, Mrs. Gruber hadn’t the slightest intention of telling him how Miss Beryl had gotten lost in Albany and how they’d nearly not found the restaurant at all.

  “Tell me about her,” Mrs. Gruber said.

  “About whom?”

  “Clive Jr.’s young woman.”

  “She’s not young,” Miss Beryl said. “She’s late fifties, if she’s the girl in the yearbook.”

  “Is she nice?”

  “She talks a lot,” Miss Beryl said. “She’s a fan of the president’s.”

  “She sounds nice,” said Mrs. Gruber, who also liked the president and didn’t mind talk nearly so much as the silence of her big house. “When will the wedding be?” she asked, anxious to find out how much Clive Jr. had told his mother. Early spring was what he’d told Mrs. Gruber. Around Easter.

  “I neglected to ask,” Miss Beryl admitted. “I don’t believe there’s any hurry. I’m sure the bride�
��s not pregnant.”

  “Will Joyce work at the bank?” This was actually a question she’d been meaning and kept forgetting to ask Clive Jr., who had mentioned that his wife-to-be was an accountant.

  Miss Beryl was about to confess that she didn’t know the answer to this question either when something occurred to her. “How did you know her name was Joyce?”

  Mrs. Gruber froze. Despite her intention to be careful, she’d spilled the beans. “I have to go,” she said. “My telephone’s ringing.”

  “You’re on the telephone,” Miss Beryl pointed out. “It can’t be ringing.”

  “The doorbell, I meant,” Mrs. Gruber said. And hung up.

  Miss Beryl hung up too but let her hand rest on the phone while she thought. At least now she was sure who the snitch was. Lately she’d begun to fear it might be Sully. Her advisers had been divided on this issue, just as they were on all issues. Clive Sr. subscribed to his son’s view that Sully had had her snookered for years, while Driver Ed assured her that Sully was loyal and even whispered suspicions about Clive Jr., suspicions Miss Beryl felt guilty about listening to. Now that she was sure, Miss Beryl couldn’t help smiling. “How do you like them apples?” she asked Clive Sr. Clive Sr. looked sheepish behind glass.

  Miss Beryl’s hand was still on the phone in its cradle when it rang again.

  “There wasn’t a soul at the door,” Mrs. Gruber said, as if this were a great mystery. “I can’t understand it. I heard the bell.”

  “You know what you are?” Miss Beryl said ominously, winking at Driver Ed across the room.

  Mrs. Gruber gulped. “What?” she asked a little fearfully.

  “You’re all discombobulated.”

  Ruth was in a good mood and at a loss to explain why. Just yesterday, Thanksgiving, of all days, she’d hit some sort of new low. Things had been so rotten she’d telephoned Sully, hoping he’d cheer her up. Talk about desperation. After so many years the one thing she should have known about Sully was that he was better at prolonging the good mood you happened already to be in than getting you out of the doldrums. He was far too honest to cause anybody to feel better than they were inclined to feel on their own.

  And so, not surprisingly, Sully, who had failed dismally to cheer Ruth up yesterday, had been just the thing she needed today, when her own inclination was toward high spirits. Today Ruth felt fine, despite the tawdriness of the motel room, the grunginess of its shower and the fact that Sully had fallen dead asleep no more than a minute after they’d finished making love for the first time in many months. When she emerged from the shower, wrapped in a motel towel, he was snoring peacefully, his eyes half open but showing nothing but the whites. Though it was late November, he still hadn’t entirely lost his summer coloration, which always made Ruth smile, the way his face and neck and forearms were brown, almost gray, from exposure to sun and wind while the rest of him remained pale, almost translucent. Always a strangely shy man, he’d taken the trouble of pulling the sheet up to his waist before falling asleep. His head lay tilted up against the bed’s headboard, his hands locked behind his neck, a posture designed, in all probability, to ward off the sleep that had overtaken him anyway. That he should try to stay awake when he was so tired struck Ruth as sweet, the sort of small gesture Sully was capable of at times. She knew he needed the sleep a lot more than he had needed to make love.

  Ruth, on the other hand, had needed to make love. She no longer granted her husband conjugal privileges, a fact he seemed barely to have noticed. It was possible he had another woman, but Ruth doubted this. As far as she could tell, Zack was just one of those men who gravitated naturally toward abstinence, as if celibacy were an old La-Z-Boy recliner, comfortable and molded and requiring more effort to get out of than into. She doubted he cared much about her affair with Sully. He was capable of jealousy when properly instigated, but she understood that what really bothered him was being made a fool of. And Ruth suspected that what Zack really would have liked was for people to quit telling him about her and Sully so he could pretend ignorance. He pretended ignorance as convincingly as laziness, and his pretense of laziness was indistinguishable from the real thing.

  Nearly two and a half months of “being good” had left Ruth needy, and making love with Sully this afternoon had made her happy without, unfortunately, diminishing her need. What she hoped was that the pendulum of their affair was swinging back again, that their being good for a while would have the salutary effect of rekindling both their passions. She felt such tenderness for Sully as he lay before her now, asleep, that she indulged for a moment the idea of accepting his proposal of marriage, contemplating what their life together would be like. That, however, was an excellent way to spoil a good mood, something Ruth adamantly refused to do. Instead she let the towel fall to the floor, carefully drew back the sheet and began to stroke Sully, whose eyelids fluttered by way of response, though for a few seconds he continued to snore. When he finally opened the eyes that never entirely closed, even in sleep, he grinned at her. “Oh,” he said. “It’s you.”

  “Yes, it’s me,” Ruth said. “And watch yourself. You see what I’ve got here, don’t you?”

  Sully closed his eyes again, inhaling deeply. “I just hope you don’t have any further plans for it. I’m sixty, remember. And in no shape for double-headers.”

  “Too bad,” Ruth said. “And here I was actually considering your proposal.”

  “Which?”

  “Yesterday’s. You asked me to marry you.”

  Sully thought about it. “No, I didn’t,” he said finally. “I asked you why we didn’t get married. I knew there was a good reason. I’d just forgotten what it was.”

  Ruth continued stroking. “That’s not how I remember the conversation.”

  “I guess if you insisted,” Sully said, wide awake now. “I would marry you. You’re one of the better-looking older women in Bath. Ow!”

  “Take that back.”

  “You’re not one of the better-looking older women in Bath? Ow again.”

  “You know what?” Ruth said. “I think you like pain.”

  “Just don’t lean on my bad knee,” he warned. “I’ve enjoyed about as much of that pain as I can stand.”

  “I didn’t hurt before, did I?” she said, recalling their lovemaking.

  “No,” Sully assured her, feeling a little guilty about his own greatly reduced abilities as a lover. “It couldn’t have been much good for you.”

  “It was grand,” she told him dreamily. “I like being on top.”

  Sully grinned at her. “You and every other woman.”

  Ruth ignored this. “I like being on the bottom, too.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re flexible,” he told her. “But I think you’re going to be on top from now on.”

  She was tracing a line down the inside of his thigh with her fingernail, stopping just short of the swelling, as if she knew precisely where the pain began. “It’s gotten worse, hasn’t it?” she said. The sight of his knee had surprised her when he slipped out of his pants. He’d done this with his back to her so she couldn’t get a good look, but she’d seen enough.

  “It’s just fluids, probably,” Sully told her. “I’ll go in to the VA one of these weeks and let the bastards drain it. I’ve got even bigger headaches right now, if you can believe it. You wouldn’t happen to have a spare two grand on you?”

  Ruth propped herself up on one elbow. “On me?”

  “I didn’t think so.” He explained to her about the truck, about the one Harold wanted him to buy, about the snowplow blade.

  “Sounds perfect,” Ruth said. “Therefore, you won’t do it, right?”

  “I don’t see how I can,” Sully said. “Even if I could find somebody dumb enough to lend me that kind of money. I’m getting too old to owe people more than I can make in a month or two.”

  “Will you get mad if I remind you that you own property?”

  Sully shook his head. “Not if you don’t object to me re
minding you that I don’t. At least not really.”

  “Then who does, Sully?” Ruth wanted to know. “If you don’t own your father’s property, who does?”

  “I have no idea,” Sully told her. “The town of Bath, probably. My father hadn’t paid his taxes in years, and I sure haven’t paid any. They keep telling me they’re going to sell it at auction. They may have already, for all I know.”

  “They’d notify you first, Sully.”

  “They may have. I throw all that shit out unopened along with the sweepstakes entries.”

  “Would you like me to find out for you?”

  “No. I don’t want anything of his, Ruth,” he told her for the umpteenth time. “You know I don’t.”

  “It’s not a question of want anymore, Sully. It’s need. You need transportation. Sell the place and use the money for what you need. Forget your father.”

  “That would be the sensible thing,” he admitted, hoping that this would end the discussion. Sometimes admitting that Ruth was right satisfied her.

  “Which is your way of saying you won’t, right?”

  Sully sat up, found his cigarettes, lit one and shared it with Ruth. “I drove by there today, oddly enough,” Sully admitted. Even this much, acknowledging the existence of the house and his possible interest in it, was hard. So hard he’d been guilty of a half truth by suggesting that all he’d done was drive by, that he hadn’t stopped, hadn’t looked the house over from outside the gate, thought about what the land it was sitting on might bring. “Back taxes would probably be more than it’s worth. Not that it matters, since I don’t have the back taxes.”

  “Suppose you sell the property and it only brings ten thousand, which is nothing. And suppose there’s seven thousand in back taxes. That’d be a lot. That’s still three grand left. But you don’t need three grand, is that what you’re telling me?”