Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  This was the oath Sully had faithfully kept, and when he parked the El Camino at the curb and limped up the walk toward what could be only, in this too quiet night, an ambush, he felt the oath strengthen under the influence of beer and pain and painkillers and fear, and though he understood it was probably unwise to be so faithful to any oath, yet as always he was unwilling to indulge regret. According to Ruth, it was wrong of him not to forgive, but in truth the only time he’d even been tempted was at his brother’s funeral. There, in church, his parents had both surprised him. His mother, dry-eyed and dressed in somber black, had borne a look closer to triumph than to grief. This is his doing, she seemed to be saying of the big man who stood, hunched over the wooden pew, sobbing next to her.

  Big Jim had worn an ill-fitting suit of mismatched plaid so outrageously inappropriate for a funeral that Sully, himself dressed in his brother’s old sport coat, a dark color at least, had noticed and felt terrible shame on top of his sorrow. Still, his father’s wracking sobs in the front pew of the church seemed so genuine that Sully had wavered in his oath until he remembered the way his father had behaved at the funeral home, the way he’d greeted each visitor to his son’s casket in a voice clear and rich with whiskey, “Come look what they’ve done to my boy,” as if he himself were the victim of this accident, as if Patrick were just a prop, a visible proof of Big Jim’s loss. It was the same way he’d behaved the day he impaled the boy on the fence. Before the boy even could be taken down, Big Jim had convinced the crowd to feel sorry for himself. And self, in the end, was the source of Big Jim’s sorrow at the loss of his eldest son, Sully realized. For months, maybe years, Sully had watched his brother’s transformation, watched Patrick become more and more like his father—more cruel, more careless, more angry, more of a bully. Though only seventeen, he was often drunk, and he’d been drunk when he hit the other driver head on. Big Jim was, in a sense, mourning his own death, and Sully decided not to, not then when Patrick died, not many years later when Big Jim himself finally died peacefully in his untroubled sleep.

  Halfway up the walk, Sully paused, stared at the house of his childhood, listening in the stillness to what sounded like freeway traffic, though it could not be. The interstate was miles away, and Sully couldn’t remember ever hearing the sound of it, even on the stillest nights. For the umpteenth time today Sully felt disoriented, as if the geography of his life were suddenly subject to new rules, as if his young philosophy professor had gone right on disproving things during the long weeks since Sully dropped out of school and as if now, as things disappeared, the spaces between them were shrinking. Somebody had apparently disproved The Ultimate Escape, and maybe the huge tract of marshland the park was to sit on had disappeared along with Carl Roebuck’s housing development. Perhaps the disappearance of all these things had drawn the once distant interstate closer, everything shrinking to fill up the void occasioned by rampant philosophy. That would explain the traffic sounds, which grew louder as Sully halted on the top step, listening to them.

  To Ruth’s way of thinking, Sully’s unwillingness to forgive was the source of his own stubborn failures, and in the past she’d been capable of being very persuasive on this subject, would in fact have persuaded just about anyone but Sully. Her failure to convince him was probably the best single explanation for why things never worked out between them. She made it clear that he could not have them both—herself and his stubborn, fixed determination. For a while he’d allowed her to undermine it in subtle ways. Once they’d even visited Big Jim in his nursing home. But Sully could only surrender so much, and he understood that if he and Ruth married, she’d eventually have him visiting Big Jim’s grave with fresh flowers. She’d go with him and make sure he left them. And where was the justice in that? It would mean that in the end Big Jim had fooled them all and beat the rap, walked out of court on some flimsy Christian loophole called forgiveness. No. Fuck him. Eternally.

  “Fuck you,” Sully said out loud at the front door to the house on Bowdon Street, pushing it open angrily as the second of Jocko’s screaming yellow zonkers finally ripped wide open the portal to the past, setting his brain, his heart, his soul churning. “Fuck you, old man,” the words he’d wanted to say as a boy, words that sounded fine, even now, in the empty house.

  Big Jim Sullivan, at the base of the stairs and about to head up with fists clenched, turned drunkenly to face Sully in the doorway, nothing but darkness between them. His face was bloody and unnatural, its skin pulled tightly in conflicting directions by the clumsy stitches of old wounds. His nose, broken half a dozen times in brawls, was no longer plumb, his respiration audible. He grinned at his son across what separated them, the same grin Sully remembered from the day he missed the next rung of the ladder and fell off. That day, a tall chain-link fence had separated them. Now, nothing.

  “It’s about time you decided to stand up and testify,” Big Jim said.

  “I’m right here, old man,” Sully assured him, feeling solid for the first time in days. If this was destiny, so be it. “Let’s go a few rounds, you and me. We’ll see who quits first.”

  His father’s grin broadened. “Come take your medicine,” he said.

  Still sensing ambush, Sully let the door swing shut behind him so there could be no retreat. Unless his father had made friends in Hell, it was just the two of them.

  At two o’clock Miss Beryl was awakened by what sounded like someone dragging a heavy chain across some distant floor. “We wear the chains we forge in life,” she thought, half expecting Clive Jr., gotten up as a ghost in Dickensian garb, to appear at her bedroom door. She wondered if what all this meant was that she was about to have another gusher. She sat up in bed and swung her feet over the side in search of her slippers. Before standing up, she wiggled her toes and flexed her fingers questioningly. In the past her spells had been preceded by a tingling at the extremities, though she felt no such sensation now. Nor, when she stood, did she feel woozy or distant.

  Maybe it was just that the long day—so lacking in pity—was still not finished with her. She found her robe and made her way into the kitchen, where she turned on the bright overhead, confident that if there was a chain-rattling ghost on the premises, it wouldn’t possess the temerity to pursue her into this cheerful, bright, hundred-watt realm. Tea, at this hour, was probably not a good idea, but she put the kettle on anyway and stood watching it, half expecting the phone in the next room to ring.

  It had been ringing when she returned from Schuyler Springs, and she took several calls before unplugging the phone. There’d been two more from reporters, who were now referring to Clive Jr.’s unavailability for comment as his disappearance. There had also been another call from the woman at the savings and loan, who sounded suspicious when Miss Beryl insisted that, no, Clive Jr. had not contacted her, had not left her any instructions, no hint of a destination or intentions.

  In her mailbox when she returned from Schuyler Springs there’d been the manila envelope she’d given to Abraham Wirfly the day before. Its contents, for which she should have been relieved and grateful, had done little to cheer her up. Inside, she found a handwritten note: “Unable to reach you, I’ve taken the rather large liberty of rescuing the enclosed from the county clerk’s office, where it had not been fully processed. We can, of course, refile any time you wish, but given recent events I must strongly advise you against transferring any property to your son at this time. The second matter we discussed has been dealt with as per your instructions.”

  This, then, was what had come of her poor compromise, her attempt to do right, to separate the conflicting dictates of head and heart, to assuage conscience, which was, as Mark Twain had shrewdly observed, “no better than an old yeller dog.” For fairness and loyalty, however important to the head, were issues that could seldom be squared in the human heart, at the deepest depths of which lay the mystery of affection, of love, which you either felt or you didn’t, pure as instinct, which seized you, not the other way around, maki
ng a mockery of words like “should” and “ought.” The human heart, where compromise could not be struck, not ever. Where transgressions exacted a terrible price. Where tangled black limbs fell. Where the boom got lowered.

  When Miss Beryl again heard the sound of a distant chain being dragged across a floor, she went to investigate, turning on lights as she moved from one room to the next. She traced the sound to the hallway she shared with Sully, and she contemplated the wisdom of opening her door to see what manner of thing was on the other side. Still, God hates a coward, she thought, and opened the door a crack.

  The hall light was on, and there, just outside her door by the stairway that led up to Sully’s flat, stood a Doberman with a lopsided grin. One end of the chain she’d been hearing was attached to the dog’s rhinestone collar. The other end was attached to nothing at all. As far as she could tell, the dog was the only occupant of the hallway, though she was unwilling to open the door any wider to be sure. “Who are you?” she asked the Doberman, which started at the sound of her voice, suffered some kind of spasm and slumped against the banister as if shot. Before Miss Beryl could process this, the outside door opened and Sully materialized, screwdriver in hand.

  “I tightened that railing back down for you,” he told Miss Beryl when she opened the door to survey the strange scene in full. Sully seemed not to be surprised by the fact that there was a Doberman slumped against the stairs, which might or might not have meant that the dog was with him. Neither did Sully seem surprised that his landlady was awake at two in the morning.

  In fact, her tenant looked to Miss Beryl like a man for whom there were no more surprises. He was paler and thinner and more ghostlike than ever, though not exactly Dickensian. “You mind if I come in and take my boots off, Mrs. Peoples?”

  “Of course not, Donald,” she said, stepping back from the door.

  At this the dog let out a huge sigh and slumped all the way to the floor. Both Sully and Miss Beryl studied the animal. Sully shook his head. “What’s your policy on pets?”

  “Does he bark?” Miss Beryl wondered.

  “He did a few minutes ago,” Sully told her, his voice, for some reason, shaky. “Just in time, too. I was about to step into thin air.”

  Miss Beryl waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. So pale and thin, Sully looked like air might well be his natural element.

  “I can only stay a minute,” he told her, collapsing into the newly repaired Queen Anne, which protested audibly but held together. Mr. Blue had been right. It was fixed.

  “I’m making tea,” she said. “Can I interest you in a cup?”

  “No, you can’t,” he said, grinning at her now. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

  “Other people change their minds occasionally,” she told him. “I keep thinking you might.”

  Sully lit a cigarette and seemed to consider this. “You do?”

  His question seemed less mocking than wistful, as if he was grateful for her refusal to accept his bullheadedness at face value. Outside in the hall the dog’s chain rattled.

  Sully glanced around her flat as if for the first time, taking things in: “I guess it’s just you and me, old girl,” Sully said, no doubt in reference to Clive Jr.

  At this, Miss Beryl herself sat down. “I’ve been discussing Clive Jr. with his father all afternoon,” she admitted. “We failed him, I guess. It pains me to admit, but somehow we managed to raise a son with no …” She let her sentence die, unable to locate a word for what her son lacked, at least a word that would not represent a further betrayal.

  “Well,” Sully said. “At least you raised him. You did your best.”

  “He was never the star of my firmament, somehow,” Miss Beryl confessed, sharing this sad truth for the first time with another living human. It was what Clive Sr. had accused her of one afternoon not long before Audrey Peach had sent him through the windshield. By then Sully had gone off to join the war, and Miss Beryl had already resigned herself to the certainty that he’d be killed. She was so sure he would be that she’d already begun to apportion blame. Most of it, of course, rested squarely on the shoulders of the brutal, stupid man who was the boy’s father and part of what was left on Sully’s mother, who’d found such grateful solace in her own victimization. But there was some blame left over, and Miss Beryl had located what remained in her own home. She wasn’t supposed to know that her husband and son had gone over to Bowdon Street to put an end to Sully’s tenure at their dinner table, to expel him from their family, but she did know it. She also knew that her husband and son had done this out of jealousy and fear.

  What a terrible thing it had been for her to realize—that part of her husband’s devotion to her was predicated on the understanding that no one else shared this devotion, that his love was a gift contingent upon her receiving no other gifts. This was what Miss Beryl had still been trying to forgive him for when Audrey Peach stole from her the opportunity to explain why forgiveness was necessary.

  In their worst argument—the one Miss Beryl, during the long years of her widowhood, refused to remember and yet could not forget—Clive Sr. had accused her of being unnatural, of inviting “strangeness” into their home. This was apparently as close as Clive Sr. could get to articulating what was troubling him. He’d stood in the middle of their living room and offered the room itself as evidence. African masks and Etruscan spirit boats and two-headed Foo dogs everywhere. “It’s like living in a jungle,” he complained so seriously that Miss Beryl did not smile, as was her habit when her husband became serious. What it all meant, she realized, was that he was unhappy with her, that he regretted his choice, that he blamed her for the son who could neither dribble a ball nor defend himself, and that in addition to all this he also blamed her for not loving this boy more, for instead being so fond of another boy who could have no legitimate claim to their affections, for welcoming the world’s strangeness into their home to subvert them all. She could still see the look on his face, and Miss Beryl realized that it was this expression—this stubborn, injured disapproval that she’d witnessed in her husband only on this single occasion—that Clive Jr. had grown into, that made it so difficult for her to feel for him what she knew she ought to feel for a son. It was as if Clive Jr. had been sent to remind her of the terrible moment of his father’s unspoken regret at having loved her. “I don’t think you know what love means,” Clive Sr. had told her petulantly, as if to suggest that his affection for her was unrequited. Which, until that moment, it had not been.

  But part of what he had said was true—she didn’t understand love. This was what Miss Beryl had been coming back to, all day, all her life probably, to the mystery of affection, of the heart inclining in one direction and not another, of its unexpected, unwished-for pirouettes, its ability to make a fool, a villain, of its owner, if indeed any human can be said to own his heart. “I know this,” she’d told Clive Sr. that long-ago afternoon. “Love is a stupid thing.”

  It was, then and now, her final wisdom on the subject. No doubt, in his own way Clive Sr. already knew this to be true, had realized it when he found himself to be in love with her, a thing nobody would ever be able to understand.

  If Sully was horrified by her admission that Clive Jr. was not the star of Miss Beryl’s firmament, he gave no sign. With one hand he was holding his cigarette vertically now, its ash having lengthened dangerously, while he leaned forward to untie the laces of his work boots with the other. This effort seemed to sap his last ounce of strength.

  Miss Beryl’s tea kettle began to sing in the kitchen. When she stood, Sully said, “I heard a rumor you did a good deed.”

  Miss Beryl understood that this must be a reference to the house on Bowdon, understood too that it was the subject that would not wait until morning. He was looking at her now with an expression she’d never witnessed in him before, the expression of a man much harder and more dangerous than she had believed Sully to be.

  “You stuck your nose where it didn’t b
elong,” he said.

  “I know it,” Miss Beryl conceded. “I’m an old woman, though. I’m entitled.”

  He didn’t reply for a long moment, the hardness remaining in his black eyes until his more familiar sheepish grin released it. “Anyhow,” he said. “I forgive you.”

  “Thank you, Donald,” she told him, and then neither of them spoke for some time, the urgent whistle of the tea kettle the only sound in the flat. “You’re certain you wouldn’t like a cup of tea?”

  Again he didn’t answer, though she couldn’t tell whether it was because she already had her answer or because he’d been overtaken finally by exhaustion or because it had occurred to him that he had no idea what he wanted.

  When she returned with her own cup of tea, he was asleep, his head back, mouth open, snoring. It was a thunderous sound, the first time she’d heard it so close, without the ceiling between them. He’d fallen asleep in the act of removing one boot with the toe of the other.

  Miss Beryl located the ashtray she kept for Sully in the end table and put it under his cigarette just as the tall ash toppled. When she removed the cigarette itself from between his stained thumb and forefinger, she noticed that Sully slept with his eyes open, the knowledge of which caused her to smile. Old houses surrendered a great many secrets, and in the twenty-some years she’d listened to Sully living above her, she’d concluded that she knew just about everything there was to know about her tenant. But here was a new thing.

  Outside in the cold hall, the dog’s chain rattled again, and when Miss Beryl opened the door, the Doberman scrambled with great, spastic effort to its feet, circling itself in the process several times, stepping on its own chain, until it finally located its fragile equilibrium. Then it stood looking at her expectantly, as if to suggest the hope that it hadn’t gone to so much trouble for nothing.