Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  Ask the right question, get an answer. Miss Beryl had no sooner asked it than she recognized the woman as one of the checkers at the IGA. “Now we’re cooking with gas,” she told her advisers, though all was still not clear. Why a checker from the IGA would be on her doorstep, for instance, was not evident. She wasn’t holding a can, which meant she wasn’t collecting for the heart fund. Miss Beryl supposed that in order to clear this mystery up, she’d have to answer the door and ask. She was about to let the curtain fall back into place when she noticed that behind the tall woman, almost out of view, stood the little girl with the wandering eye, which made the tall woman the child’s grandmother and, according to local gossip, Sully’s longtime paramour. Was it the little girl’s bad eye or the good that fixed Miss Beryl before she could let go of the curtain?

  The bell rang a second time as Miss Beryl opened the door. “Oh,” the tall woman said, appearing startled. Her voice was as gruff and mannish as her clothes. “I was about to give up.… I mean, I thought you weren’t home.”

  “No, I just check people out through the window before opening the door,” Miss Beryl admitted. As she spoke, Miss Beryl was trying to peer around the tall woman at the little girl, but the child had gone into hiding behind the woman’s legs. “I just let Mormons stand there. They do, too. Stand right there, like they’re waiting for the Second Coming. Them and insurance salesmen.”

  “I’m Ruth. You remember this one?” the woman said.

  “I sure do,” Miss Beryl said. “You gave me the slip, didn’t you? I looked up and you were gone.”

  It had been one of the worst moments of Miss Beryl’s life. Such a simple task, so profoundly botched. She had failed to protect a child. After hitting the little girl’s mother with his rifle, the father had simply collected his daughter, put her into the truck and driven away. The stupid policeman had stood right there and let him.

  “She can move when she wants to, all right,” Ruth said, her tone suggesting that the child didn’t want to very often.

  Miss Beryl remembered her manners. “Come in out of the cold,” she said. “Little One wouldn’t eat my cookies last time, but she might now that we’re old friends.”

  The child was still in hiding behind Ruth, refusing, so far, to acknowledge Miss Beryl.

  “We can only stay a minute,” Ruth said. “We just dropped by to say thanks.”

  “What for?” Miss Beryl asked, genuinely curious.

  “For calling the police. Who knows what would have happened if you hadn’t? We’re sorry for all the trouble, aren’t we, Two Shoes? We would have stopped sooner except we’ve been spending most of our time at the hospital.”

  To Miss Beryl’s surprise, the little girl spoke from her hiding place. “Tomorrow,” she said.

  Ruth turned and picked the child up. “That’s right, darlin’. Tomorrow’s the big day, isn’t it. Mom gets out of the hospital tomorrow and Grandma gets to go back to work. At least for a while.”

  Miss Beryl took their coats and hung them up while Ruth and the child went into the living room. “Mommy was right,” Miss Beryl heard Ruth say. “This is some place. Look at all the Christmas decorations!”

  Miss Beryl couldn’t help smiling, since she had not, thanks to her blue funk, felt up to the task of decorating for the holiday. All of her Christmas things were still in storage. Probably Ruth’s eye had caught the small table that served as a stand for her nutcrackers. Maybe at first glance the rest of her exotica resembled Christmas to Ruth, who didn’t look like a traveler. “And look. Mrs. Peoples is doing a puzzle. There isn’t much we like more than puzzles, huh.”

  The child glanced at the puzzle and then back at Miss Beryl, causing the old woman to wonder if the little girl’s grandmother might be expressing a wish—that the child would be interested in something. When Ruth took a seat on the sofa, the child turned her back to the puzzle, climbed onto the sofa next to her grandmother and, all the while never taking her eyes off Miss Beryl, found Ruth’s earlobe with her thumb and forefinger. An expression like serenity came over the child’s face then.

  Ruth got off the sofa then and sat on the floor beneath the child. “There. Now you can reach it, huh,” she said.

  “Are you quitting the IGA?” Miss Beryl wondered in response to Ruth’s remark “at least for a while.”

  “It’s quitting us. They haven’t said so in public, but they’re going to close the store.” Ruth explained that the new supermarket at the interstate had put the financially troubled little IGA out of its final misery, just as the IGA had killed the corner groceries two decades earlier.

  “Will you go to work out there?” Miss Beryl wondered.

  Ruth shook her head. “I don’t think they’ve hired anybody over twenty-five. No, Grandma will have to find something else, right, Two Shoes?”

  The little girl continued to stare at Miss Beryl.

  “We don’t know quite what yet, but some damn thing,” Ruth continued. “You can’t stand still in this life or you get run over. We’ll have to figure out something when the time comes. If all else fails, maybe we could find Grandpa Zack a job. That’d be a kick, wouldn’t it? Watch Grandpa Zack work for a change?”

  Miss Beryl listened to the woman, fascinated by her vocal resemblance to her daughter. It was as if the younger woman had suddenly awakened thirty years older and wiser, the sharp edge of her anger and tongue having eroded while leaving the same bedrock personality.

  “Maybe something will present itself,” Miss Beryl said, trying to sound encouraging. “Clive Jr., star of my firmament, claims this is going to be the Gold Coast before long.”

  Ruth looked vaguely puzzled by this, though Miss Beryl couldn’t be sure whether the source of her puzzlement was that she didn’t know who Clive Jr. was, or whether she didn’t know what a firmament was, or whether she shared Miss Beryl’s own doubts about the existence of a Gold Coast anywhere near Bath. In any event, she didn’t seem interested in contesting the point. “We could stand a little gold, couldn’t we, Two Shoes? We’d know just what to do with it.”

  “How about that cookie?” Miss Beryl said, remembering her promise.

  “We might eat one,” Ruth answered for the child. “You never can tell.”

  Miss Beryl went into the kitchen to fetch cookies. When she returned, to her surprise the little girl had left her grandmother and was standing at the table where Miss Beryl had set up the jigsaw puzzle, her arms hanging straight down at her sides. Miss Beryl set the plate of cookies down on the coffee table and joined the little girl. “Find me that piece right there,” she suggested, pointing at the small space in the upper right-hand corner. “I’ve been looking for that piece for three days, and I don’t think it’s here. It’d be just like the people who make these dern things to leave one piece out, just to torment old ladies.”

  “Check the floor,” Ruth suggested. “That’s where the pieces I need always are.”

  “I’ve checked everywhere,” Miss Beryl said, returning to her seat opposite Ruth, who had taken and was chewing a cookie thoughtfully as she studied her granddaughter.

  Miss Beryl was delighted to see that Ruth had been right, after all. The little girl did appear interested in the puzzle, which meant that the child’s grandmother had a better understanding of her than the mother, who, Miss Beryl suspected, would have interrupted her daughter and tried to get her to eat a cookie. Indeed, Miss Beryl could almost hear the young woman. (“Come eat a cookie, Birdbrain. This old lady was nice enough to get it for you. The goddamn least you can do is eat one.”)

  “Did you say her mother gets out of the hospital tomorrow?”

  “They’re unwiring her jaw right now,” Ruth explained. “Tomorrow she’ll be ready to come home. We’ve been having a lot of trouble understanding why Mommy doesn’t talk to us. Normally we can’t get her to shut up, and now she won’t talk. But the main thing is that she’ll be home … and that other person won’t be.”

  “What’s wrong with him, anyway?” Mi
ss Beryl wondered out loud. There’d been something strange and military about the way the man had methodically and without visible emotion shot out the windows of the house next door, as if he were acting on orders that were being transmitted that moment through headphones.

  “He’s a moron,” Ruth said. A simple explanation that fit the facts. “Comes from a long line of them. With him out of the way it’ll be a second chance for my daughter. Who knows? She might even be smart enough to realize it.”

  “Maybe you and your mom can come visit me sometime,” Miss Beryl said to the child, who continued staring at the puzzle without exhibiting any inclination to touch it. “I’m an old lady, and I don’t get very many visitors, except that lady down the street I told you about.”

  Was it a smile that began to form on the child’s lips? A smile, Miss Beryl realized, became an ambiguous thing when the eyes were not in harmony. “Snail,” the little girl whispered.

  “Right,” Miss Beryl said, cheered by this response. “The one who ate the snail.”

  Ruth smiled. “So that’s where the snail came from. Snails are all we’ve heard about for two weeks.”

  “Well, if you come back and visit me, we’ll call up the lady who ate the snail and ask her to come over so you can meet her. She even looks like somebody who’d eat a snail,” Miss Beryl said, then glanced at Ruth. “Grandma’d be welcome too if she felt like coming.”

  “Grandma will be back to work by then,” Ruth said, leaning forward, running the backs of her fingers along her granddaughter’s calf. “Besides. If I started coming over here regular, people would think I was visiting someone else.”

  At this reference to Sully, Miss Beryl felt guilt rise in her throat like illness. “Donald will be moving the first of the year,” she said. “He didn’t tell you?”

  “We’re on the outs at the moment,” Ruth admitted. “I’d heard a rumor, though.”

  “I’m going to miss him. Clive Jr., star of my firmament, is convinced he’s a dangerous man, but he’s wrong. Donald is careless, but he’s always been his own worst enemy.”

  “I know what you mean,” Ruth said. “I’ve finally given up, though. I’m going to be fifty on my next birthday. Which means some damn thing, I’m not sure what. That I’m too old for all this foolishness, I guess. And I’ve got a feeling I’m going to inherit a responsibility soon”—she nodded almost imperceptibly at the little girl—“and responsibility is not our mutual friend’s long suit.”

  “He might fool you,” Miss Beryl said, regretting this observation immediately. In truth, Miss Beryl, who was simply inclined to think well of Sully, had long been waiting for him to redeem himself somehow, but it was beginning to look like his stubbornness was going to outlast her faith. It had always been her belief that people changed when life made them change, a belief Sully’s dogged daily struggles—what he himself called “shoveling shit against the tide”—seemed designed to challenge.

  “He might.” Ruth smiled sadly. It was a wonderful open smile that transformed her appearance completely, softening it, making her almost beautiful, and Miss Beryl thought she saw what must have kept Sully interested all these years, because otherwise she was a very plain-looking woman. The mystery of affection, in particular Clive Sr.’s affection for her, was one of life’s great mysteries. What, she had often wondered, had made her the center of his life? Miss Beryl had always been realistic about her odd physical appearance, and even as a young woman she’d concluded that Clive Sr. must have possessed the special gift of being able to see past that appearance. She remembered her mother’s slender consolation to her unpopular child: “Don’t you worry. You have what’s called inner beauty, and the right man will see it.” Ruth’s remarkable smile offered a subtle variation on her mother’s clichéd wisdom.

  “It’d be just like him to surprise me, now that it’s too late to make much difference,” Ruth said.

  “We wear the chains we forge in life,” Miss Beryl said. “Donald said that to me one day not long ago. I almost dropped my teeth.”

  Ruth smiled, then frowned deeply. “He’s going to end up alone, isn’t he,” she said, her eyes filling up.

  “We all do,” Miss Beryl almost said. Beneath the dark branches of its ancient elms, Upper Main was full of lonely widows, solitary watchers and waiters. Miss Beryl didn’t worry about them. Didn’t worry about herself, not really. Why then worry about Sully? What if he did appear a little more ghostlike every time she saw him, as if he were fading out of himself, as if, when people finally lost faith in him and quietly drifted away as she and Ruth were now doing, they were taking part of him with them? His life seemed governed by some cruel law of subtraction, and his sum total was already in single digits. When he left the upstairs flat for new lodgings, would there be enough left of him to require a place? Why worry about someone ending up alone when that someone did everything he could to ensure it? “With Donald,” she explained, “I’ve always just left the door open.”

  Ruth smiled her sad smile again. “That’s always been my strategy too,” she admitted, looking up at the second story of Miss Beryl’s house, as if she imagined Sully might be up there. “My problem is, I can’t stop watching the doorway and being disappointed,” she explained, then looked over at her granddaughter again.

  Miss Beryl studied the child too, thinking, as she often had when she surveyed her eighth-grade classes, that maybe people did wear chains of their own forging, but often those chains were half complete before they’d added their own first heavy link. Maybe completing other people’s work was the business of life.

  “Let’s go, squirt,” Ruth said to the child, who did not respond until she was touched, and then she slid back onto the sofa and began to grope for Ruth’s ear.

  Ruth gently removed the little girl’s hand. “We’re going to see Mommy, and you can play with her ear all afternoon, okay? Give Grandma’s ear a rest.”

  The child was staring at Miss Beryl again, almost smiling, it seemed.

  “We know every bend in the road between here and the hospital, don’t we, Tina?” Ruth said, taking the child’s small hand. “We go back and forth to Schuyler once a day at least.”

  “I thought about paying a visit,” Miss Beryl said, “but my driving isn’t what it used to be. The last time I went there I got lost.”

  Miss Beryl walked grandmother and granddaughter to the door and watched them retreat down the steps and get into Ruth’s old car, which started up noisily and got even noisier when she shifted into reverse, put her foot on the gas and backed slowly, with an apologetic shrug for the noise, into Main Street. Feeling distant from her extremities, her toes and fingertips tingling vaguely, Miss Beryl went into the bathroom and blew her nose hard, inspecting the tissue for blood. When there was none, she returned to her front room, where the telephone was ringing.

  “Why don’t I make us a big steaming pot of chicken noodle soup?” Mrs. Gruber said in lieu of hello. It would take her another minute or two of inconsequential small talk before she’d get around to mentioning that she’d noticed a strange car in her friend’s driveway. Instead of dropping her voice, she’d let the sentence hang, to signify her desire for a thorough, detailed explanation. It would be amusing, Miss Beryl thought to herself, to withhold that explanation awhile, to watch her nosy friend suffer.

  “Because I’m feeling better,” she told Mrs. Gruber, which was true. For when she picked up the phone, Miss Beryl noticed the corner of the jigsaw puzzle and saw that the piece she’d been looking for was no longer missing. The child had found it, slipped it quietly into place, never said anything. “Let’s go someplace for lunch.”

  “Goody,” said Mrs. Gruber.

  “This is vintage Sully,” Carl Roebuck said.

  The two men were standing on the back porch of the Bowdon Street house. Will, forgotten, stood off to one side. The weathered porch sloped furiously, the remnants of two-week-old snow having gathered in one corner where the sun didn’t reach. Will looked past his grand
father at the gray, crooked house. He did not want to go inside. He was hoping his grandfather would not be able to get the door open. The house was all crooked and haunted-looking, and he knew that his mother, had she been there, would not have wanted him to go inside. Grandma Vera wouldn’t have wanted it either, and when he thought of her he recalled a conversation he had overheard between her and Grandpa Ralph. In Grandma Vera’s opinion it was dangerous for Will to accompany Grandpa Sully on his morning rounds. She didn’t say why Grandpa Sully was dangerous, but Will, though his affection for the stranger of his two Bath grandfathers was growing daily, thought he understood why his grandmother was worried. Grandpa Sully took him up dark, smelly stairways in the back of buildings, and to places where there were wild dogs, and now to a house about to fall down. Some of Grandpa Sully’s friends smelled bad, too. In his grandfather’s company, Will found that he was often torn between opposing fears. He understood that getting too close to his grandfather was dangerous, especially if Grandpa Sully was wielding a hammer or, like now, a crowbar, or the long, sharp spatula he used in the restaurant to flip eggs. Even his father had warned him not to get too close to Grandpa Sully when he had any sort of tool in his hand, which was why Will had not even ventured up onto the porch when his grandfather started after the back door with his crowbar.