“I don’t know,” D.T. admitted. “What would you like to do?”
“Can we go see Barbara?”
He thought of Barbara and of Bernie. Tasting wine; perhaps tasting each other. “Not today, honey.”
“Why not?”
“Barbara’s busy.”
“Doing what?”
“Retaliating.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means she’s out of town. How about a movie?”
“Which one?”
They talked it over. Heather opted for a special effects monstrosity she had seen six times previously, each with a different adult. Out of things to ask, afraid of what might be asked of him, D.T. abandoned two and a half hours of his judicially allotted parental opportunity to the creators of a glorified cartoon with less story line than a single panel of Family Circus. By the time the closing credits wound across the frame of his vision he was frantically planning their next activity.
Outside the movie house, the sun squeezed his eyes like oranges and their juice threatened to spill down his cheeks. He grasped his daughter’s hand and led her to the car. “You want to ride around a while?” he asked. “Go out in the country and look at some cows or something?”
“Can we go by the lake?”
“Sure.”
They drove for miles, gazing upon the bucolic edges of the city in what D.T. hoped was a rapt silence rather than an enervating boredom. They saw crops growing and animals feeding and solitary people working at what they worked at every day of their lives. D.T. began to think of seeking out a place to buy. An acreage. Trees, grass, maybe a creek or a pond. He would grow sunflowers, grapes, berries; make his own wine. Heather would spend all summer with him; they would have time to really get to know each other. He could get a goose for protection, a goat for milk, chickens for eggs. Maybe even a black-faced sheep, just for fun, and a dog for Heather. Excited, he glanced at his watch and reluctantly headed back to town, his wake strewn with future plans.
“Daddy?” Heather asked as he approached the house.
“What, honey?”
“What do you do, exactly?”
“You mean my business?”
“Uh huh.”
“I’m a lawyer. You know that.”
“Michele says you help people get divorces.”
“That’s true.”
“That doesn’t seem like a very nice thing to do, Daddy. Why don’t you get a different job? Why don’t you start doing something nice?”
“Like what?”
“Like, ah, making ice cream, maybe? Timmy Fredericks’ daddy makes ice cream.”
“Ice cream causes cavities.”
SEVEN
I like it when we go places, Daddy,” Heather had said after he’d returned her. “Even that funny museum.”
“I do, too,” he’d responded. And smiled. And hugged her. But their day had ended in a stillness cured only by Mirabelle’s heavy voice and embracing flesh, a stillness that failed to mask D.T.’s relief at being able to deposit the responsibility for Heather’s future on the lovely portico of a lovely mansion in a lovely neighborhood in which he did not reside. With a kiss, a pat, and a predictable pang of guilt, D.T. had left his only child to grow another week without him.
Now he searched out house numbers in the fading light of evening, numbers pasted to facing rows of bungalows that ranged from crumbling slums to elaborate objects of residential art. It was what the realtors would call a “transition” neighborhood, in which storybook colors and precisely planted flowers vied with shattered windows and rotting shingles to see which would claim the block. D.T. had grown up in a similar neighborhood, amid a similar struggle, in a house that fell somewhere between the extremes of care he was driving through.
His parents had been neither idlers nor artists but workers—his father a grocer with his own store and thus his own prison, his mother a seamstress whose stitches had gathered the pleats and tucks of every formal gown in a town that rarely had a call for formality beyond the New Year’s ball at a club that refused membership to coloreds and to Jews, a club to which his parents did not belong. Both of them had spent far more time trying to raise up those beneath them than to climb to those above. Now his father was dead from a stopped heart and his mother lay bedridden with a broken hip, dependent upon people other than her only child for everything but breath. Some day soon he would have to visit her again. Some day before she died he and she would have to share, for one last time, a room and a past and the prospect of a future that would surely disappoint them. Perhaps that was the precise definition of middle-age: when you were as worried about your parents as you were about your offspring.
He stopped at a sign, calculating that Esther Preston lived in the next block. The visit with her would be a painful waste, and she would end up believing that he had somehow cheated her by not being what she needed. It had happened to him before, with clients to whom he was useless but strained to be otherwise.
He hesitated longer than necessary at the stop sign, then spurted rapidly ahead and parked in front of the appointed number. By the time he got out of the car he was feeling better. Perhaps his visit would not be hopeless after all—perhaps in Heather’s lexicon it would be defined as something nice.
The Preston house had a blue composition roof and red siding that had begun to blister. It was so small it seemed suitable for a prize in a board game. An ornamental olive tree grew into ten feet of space beside the front walk. Along the foundation were marigolds and zinnias and, at the corner, a box elder bush. The lush lawn seemed extravagantly tended, given the purported handicap of the occupant.
D.T. pressed the bell and waited; pressed it once again and waited longer, and began to hope he had acquired an excuse to leave. Then the door opened noiselessly and he lowered his eyes.
She was sitting in a wicker wheelchair whose yellowed woven back arced above her like a halo. Hands folded, eyes raised, lips smiling, she seemed without affliction but for the narrow band of cloth that passed above her eyes and lashed her head to the high back of the chair. She was younger than he’d pictured, thin and frail. Gray streaks marbled her brown hair. Her flesh bore the etch of age, but her kinetic lips and eyes diverted him from the sags and wrinkles that advanced on them.
“Mr. Jones?” she asked through the smile.
D.T. nodded. “Mrs. Preston, I presume.”
“Of course. Won’t you come in? And it’s Esther. Please.” Her voice was firm but slightly slurred, as though she were fatigued or flirting. Her dress was candy-striped and festive. She unclasped her fingers and seemingly without effort rolled herself back out of his way. The tires of the ancient chair were as black as licorice and were crumbling like cake.
He entered her house. The air was viscous with the scents of starches. D.T. was reminded of his father’s store, his mother’s kitchen. “Please follow me,” Mrs. Preston said, and pushed herself easily into the living room. She seemed to sail before him, as though she were only an idea.
The living room was only slightly larger than the foyer. The ceiling was low and gray, the walls an eggshell white. Here and there little wooden niches gleamed of varnished pine and sheltered knick-knacks. The bulb in the center of the ceiling sparkled starlike through cut glass. The floor was polished hardwood. Strips of rubber runners crossed it like canals of black water.
There was a single place for him to sit, a speckled horsehair divan with doilies pinned to its arms. Across from the divan were an iron floor lamp that had once burned oil and a round marble-topped table with a book and a box of tissues on it. Between the table and the lamp was space to park her chair.
D.T. sat obediently on the divan and saw Mrs. Preston watch him with what looked very much like amusement. “May I get you something, Mr. Jones?” she asked. “I have coffee and lemonade and some cookies I baked this morning.”
He began an automatic refusal, based on his dislike of eating in the presence of strangers, particularly from his erratic
lap. Then he looked into her hazel eyes and changed his mind. “Lemonade would be fine,” he said. “And maybe a cookie.”
“How about two?”
“What kind are they?”
“Oatmeal.”
“How about three?”
“That’s better,” she said with a quick laugh, then rolled out of the room like a charioted princess.
D.T. looked around, intrigued as always by being left alone in another person’s house. Mrs. Preston had ringed herself with a pocket universe, edited to suit her tastes. There were dried flowers in vases and live violets in pots and a hollowed stone which served as an ashtray. The drawings and photographs on the walls offered birds, animals, stars, sunsets, snow-capped mountains, white-sand beaches, whales. The recessed niches were hives of sculptured miniatures—a brass bee, a porcelain rabbit, an iron frog, a pewter stag, a walnut stallion, and a plaster figurine of someone who looked a lot like Mozart. In the bookcase closest to him were a tiny leatherbound edition of Shakespeare’s plays and prosaic odds and ends that ranged from Pride and Prejudice to Fear of Flying. Most prominent of all was a framed color photograph of the cathedral at Chartres, so precisely focused it seemed something beyond even the ken of God. Next to the cathedral, perhaps as evidence of Mrs. Preston’s unbound psyche, was a small reproduction of Lautrec’s gay and naughty Moulin Rouge, a line of girls with ruffles flying. D.T. smiled and began to relax. It seemed a place where he could do no wrong.
Gradually he noticed the adaptations. A device on the front door permitted opening and closing with an arm instead of fingers. Chrome rails were attached at various places to the walls, above the paths of rubber pads. The sturdy frame of an aluminum walker hid in the corner behind the bookcase. Long looped cords hung like nooses from the lamps. D.T. changed position and looked at his watch. He’d been in the precise and utile little house only five minutes.
When her wheels brought her back to him they made no noise, and he was caught thumbing through the heavy scrapbook that lay on the coffee table in front of the divan. All the clippings were photographs from magazines and newspapers, some glossily vibrant, others faded and yellowed with age. Each was of a ballerina, leaping and twirling or bowing and posing, all elegant and lithe and mesmerizing.
“My scrapbook,” Mrs. Preston said with twitching lips. “I began it when I was thirteen and my life was dance. I saw no reason to discontinue it just because my life became far less glorious than my dreams.”
“You mean your disease?”
She laughed and shook her head. “I gave up dance long before sclerosis came along. I’m afraid I lacked the courage to test myself against the art.”
D.T. put the heavy book back on the table. When he looked at her again she was inspecting him carefully. His eyes quickly strayed from hers.
“Please don’t be embarrassed, Mr. Jones,” she said quietly. “I’m really not as ill as you probably suspect. I have very little pain, in spite of how I look. Other than the irritants of slurred speech and some occasional edema and diplopia, my problem is simply strength. I have none much of the time. But even though my body no longer functions well, it does function. One just has to anticipate its eccentricities.” She laughed in two syllables. “At one time I thought MS had been visited on me because I had wanted to dance too desperately. That it was punishment for my lust to be not as other beings.”
“And now?”
“Now I see it simply as a fact to be accounted for.” Her slippery voice was suddenly hollow. “There are so many facts to be accounted for in life, aren’t there, Mr. Jones? I’m sure you encounter many of them in your practice. Perhaps even in your private life.”
She raised her brows and he nodded uneasily, thinking once again of Heather and feeling the way he always felt in the presence of the handicapped—unworthy of his health.
When she saw his look she immediately constructed a soothing aspect, like so many of the afflicted her function not to be cheered but to cheer. “Here you are,” she said, and rolled toward the coffee table. “Please take the tray.”
He lifted the tray from her lap and placed it in front of him, noticing in the process the suction cups on its underside. On it were a tall glass full of ice and pulpy pinkness and a small china plate, hand painted with roses, supporting three cookies of the diameter of hockey pucks. D.T. thanked her and took a bite.
“A bit too much vanilla, I’m afraid.”
“Couldn’t prove it by me,” D.T. said, and moved to cookie number two.
“You really needn’t rush, Mr. Jones. Unless you have another appointment.”
Mouth full, D.T. shook his head. “I’m not rushing, I’m just eating,” he mumbled. “You’re not the first to confuse the two.”
She nodded happily. “Of course, there really is no need for you to be here. Other than the rather extortionate demands of Miss Holloway, that is.”
“Well, my social life for the week has already come to pass. And this is the best cookie I’ve had since 1954. Where is Miss Holloway, anyway?”
“She’s seeing a patient. She said she’ll be back to check on me at eight. She said she would only believe you’d been here if you left a card behind.”
D.T. took out his wallet and removed a business card and flipped it to the coffee table. “So much for my presence,” he said. “If she still has doubts you can show her the crumbs I seem to be spilling all over your floor.”
“Don’t worry about it. Please.”
“Okay, I won’t,” D.T. said. “Do you look after the place yourself?”
“The interior, yes. Outside, I have a wonderful neighbor who keeps things looking marvelous. I don’t know what I’d do without him. Of course his efforts to please me seem to have backfired.”
“How’s that?”
“He’s made the place so attractive the landlord has increased the rent substantially.”
“They tend to do that,” D.T. said; then swallowed the dregs of the second cookie. “Which bring us to why I’m here, I believe.”
“Yes,” Esther Preston acknowledged. “It’s quite simple, though, I’m afraid. My ex-husband is well and entirely rid of me, Mr. Jones. He performed all of his obligations under our property settlement agreement if not our marriage contract, and he has gone on to what appears to be, from the things I read in the papers, a dazzling life. I have no claim on him nor do I wish to pursue one.” Little lines sprouted above the set of her thin lips, bloomless stems of purpose.
“Do you have a copy of the settlement agreement?” D.T. asked her.
“Yes. Somewhere.”
“Could I see it?”
“I suppose so. It’s in the bedroom, I think. I’ll get it for you.”
“Can I help?”
“No. Everything is within reach, Mr. Jones. One learns to do that quite quickly.”
She rolled away again, and D.T. took advantage of her absence to finish off the lemonade and the final cookie. When she came back she handed him several sheets of legal-sized paper, stapled at the top and signed on May 21, 1965, by Mrs. Preston and her former husband. There was no indication what lawyer if any had prepared the document.
D.T. flipped quickly through the pages. “Did you have an attorney?” he asked.
“No. It didn’t seem necessary. Nat and I discussed it and I felt I was being treated fairly.”
“Who prepared this agreement, then?”
“My husband’s lawyer. The firm is Bronwin, Kilt and Loftis, I believe. A large one downtown. The particular attorney was a man named Grusen. He was a friend of Nat’s. He died some time ago, I believe.”
D.T. remembered his chat with Jerome Fitzgerald of the day before. Jerome the litigator, partner in the same firm. D.T. examined the agreement a bit more closely.
The form was basic and familiar. After reciting the facts of the marriage—nine years, no children—and the prior division of personal property to mutual satisfaction and the remaining marital estate of the parties—a home of an approximate equity of six t
housand dollars plus unnamed assets of a total value of twenty thousand dollars—the agreement provided Doctor Preston would assume existing debts and Mrs. Preston would receive quit-claim title to the house plus a single lump-sum payment of six thousand dollars plus alimony in the amount of two hundred dollars per month for a period of two years in final settlement of all claims by Mrs. Preston against her husband. Not generous, but not quite unconscionable, particularly for the year in question. About what he’d expected, which meant virtually hopeless. He looked up at her and thought he saw uncertainty in her eyes.
“May I ask you some personal questions?” D.T. asked, determined to do something, unsure of what.
“Of course.” The guileless eyes shone brightly.
“How much money do you have right now?”
“Savings?”
“Yes.”
“A bit over nine hundred dollars. Plus the interest that will be paid at the end of next month.”
“Any other assets?”
“Nothing other than the things you see around you. All of them valueless except to me.”
“Do you have any family?”
“No.”
“Any investments at all?”
“No, other than the savings account.”
“How much did you get when you sold the house you lived in with your husband?”
“Eight thousand net to me. All of it and then some went for medical bills.”
“Is that why you sold it? To pay medical obligations?”
“Yes.”
“Have you worked since the divorce?”
“For a short time. I had a job in a bank during my marriage and after. In fact that’s the way I first discovered that my illness was something other than a lingering cold. I could no longer operate a calculator accurately.”
“And since you got MS you haven’t worked?”
“No. I made one effort some years ago but it was far too embarrassing for all concerned. My employer was a friend, and he was willing to keep me on, but only out of sympathy. I was entirely useless to him as an employee, as I would be to anyone.”
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