“Fresh chicken,” she says. “For soup.”
“It’s too fucking hot for soup,” he growls. “Where’d you get the money?”
“Barter,” she says, smiling. “No money.”
“What did you barter then, cherie?” His eyes are hateful and black. Money is his biggest worry since things went bad in Nice. They had come with such hopes, with money in their pockets. All gone now. Between the wine business and the writing, they haven’t seen any money for a month. But he finds wine to drink. His fingers are stained with it.
“Old clothes,” she says, smoothing her cotton skirt. He would never know if she had sold clothes or not. He hates all her clothes.
He takes a long drag on his cigarette. “What clothes?”
“Some old ones I do not wear.” In Nice he bought her the satin dress, fancy shoes, the lovely soft jacket. She sold them months ago.
He looks her over with his hard eyes, not lingering, as she hoped he wouldn’t, on the faded blue scarf she wears on her head. Planning this day she wore the scarf for a week, hiding her long, black hair until this morning when she sold it for sixteen francs to a woman from Bordeaux who makes wigs for whores.
He frowns at the kettle, now bubbling. “I’m going out.” In the garden he washes himself in the American way, she supposes, of splashing a few handfuls of water on one’s neck, and slams the gate behind him.
Sitting on the stool in front of the hot fire, she thinks she will write to her aunt. Ask her why she gave up this house, if there is some curse on it. Maybe there is a way to find happiness here that she is too blind to see. With the curse lifted, Weston will be happy and they will have a baby.
She chops leeks and tears flow from her eyes. As she throws the vegetables into the kettle she prays once more for a child. Then they will both be so happy they will love each other forever.
Chapter 4
It was late morning by the time they arrived in the financial district. Fifteen days since Harry died, a Wednesday. Merle was missing a staff meeting at ten-thirty, a lunch meeting in Queens, and six afternoon appointments with clients, one of whom was an old black man named Elmer she’d been helping for years.
She sighed and tried not to think about Elmer and his problems. She was a walking appointment book, her mind fixated on the calendar the way others memorized football scores and bird lists. It was a curse to be so obsessed with days, hours, appointments. Calendar Girl, Harry used to call her, teasing her as he asked on what day of the week the Fourth of July fell three years from now, as if she were a parlor game. And she knew, she always knew.
Tristan sulked in the train. Merle forced herself to look at the scenery and feel joy — or something, anything — whenever she saw a redbud or crabapple in bloom.
Why was she so obsessed with time? Now the future looked fuzzy, and it scared her. She had no idea what was going to happen, and felt herself clinging to her old life, unwilling to let it go even though the reality was that it was gone already. And shame, that was a big one. Her failure to love her husband hovered at the edges of everything. She was deficient. That was obvious. She hadn’t admitted it to her sisters yet but she would. She couldn’t keep something so big, so emotional, from Annie especially.
She watched Tristan, his black eye and sad face full of boredom and pain. She loved her son deeply, but that was organic, wasn’t it? She reached out for his hand on the train. He allowed the touch for exactly ten seconds. She didn’t have to consult her watch.
Don’t think: of pain or regret, love or hate, past or future. Just be in the world. She breathed out, slowly. Relax, this is your life. Why is that so hard? Her mind spun, torturing her. The past was a minefield. The future refused to show itself, as murky as the puddles in the streets.
Hanford Welsh was on the ill-fated seventh floor of the building, not far from the Stock Exchange. They took the elevator.
“Whoa, buddy,” said one of the traders in the lobby, Mike, or Ike, or Mickey. “I hope the other guy looks worse.”
Tristan put up his fists. “You want some?! Come on!” The trader laughed and edged away.
Dragging the boy into Harry’s corner office Merle shut the door. “This is hard enough without you acting like a child.” He stalked to the corner windows. Everyone had stared at him on the train. She could kick that trader except she’d said the same dumb thing.
Harry’s secretary poked her head in. “Hi, Merle. Do you need anything?”
Merle tried to smile. People were scared enough around the Widow. “Thanks, June. A box maybe?”
She returned with two paper boxes with lids. June was a tiny, young thing, just Harry’s type, with wispy light brown hair and big gray eyes. “I’m working for Mr. Marshall now. He said to help you, if you need me.”
“I want to look at Harry’s computer files before I leave. I need his password.”
June frowned. “I’ll check.”
Merle looked over Harry’s desk, the death site. There was no sign of his last breath, of the ambulance workers who pushed him to the carpet and pounded on his chest, shocked him with paddles, gave him mouth-to-mouth. Everything was tidy, as if he’d be back tomorrow. There was his nameplate, which she dropped in the box. On a spindle a stack of pink “While You Were Out” messages sat skewered.
“You want all these pens and stuff?” Tristan was staring at the open pencil drawer.
“Why not.” He grabbed two handfuls. “Do you see any passwords?” The boy pushed the mess of papers around and said no. “Keep an eye peeled.”
The message slips were old, from people who must have given up weeks ago. Should she call them? She owed Harry a little dignity. She dropped them into the box. His gray overcoat still hung behind the door. She folded it and set it in the second box.
There was a solid wall of file cabinets across one wall. Last night when she couldn’t sleep she’d spent a couple hours poking aimlessly around in Harry’s den. She didn’t have passwords at home either. What was she looking for? His life, in a thousand manila folders. It was depressing.
She was fingering files when Steve Hanford burst in and enveloped her in designer cologne. If there was a fine grooming class at business school, Harry’s manager had aced it. Steve oozed success, from his tassled Italian loafers to his dyed brown coif that swirled elaborately over his forehead.
“How are you? You look great, Merle. But you shouldn’t have to do this. I'm so sorry. It can’t be fun.”
Tristan was making a face behind Steve’s back. Merle said, “Life goes on.”
“That’s what they say.” He put an arm around her shoulders, easing her away from the file cabinets. “What can we do to make things easier?”
“There’s a steep learning curve here. I let Harry do all the financial stuff — ” Steve winced dramatically. She felt a jolt: What-what?! “What — is it?”
“Dee Dee was just saying that. She wanted me to explain everything to her. And it’s taken me years to get things balanced — Oh, listen to me. Please, go on.”
“I need to see Harry’s personal accounts. I have to know everything that went on here with our money.”
He flinched again and stepped back, hands deep in fine gabardine. “Of course, Merle. That’s your privilege. Let’s — can you follow me out here?”
In the hallway he stopped, lowering his voice. “Merle, did Harry tell you about his trading account? What he did?”
“I assume he traded stocks.”
Steve rubbed his forehead. “Right before — you know — he ran some options, you know, futures? Trying to predict if prices of stocks and commodities will go up or down. He was selling short because he thought prices were going to fall. He would have cashed them the next day, probably, because prices did go down a little. But he didn’t, because, well.” Because he was face down on his desk. “Nobody looked at them until the end of the week. By then it was too late. The options were called.”
Merle felt bile rise in her throat. Called options meant you had lost
your bet. You had gambled and lost. And you had to pay up.
“His clients’ money?”
Steve shook his head.
She felt her breath catch. “How much?”
“He never did anything halfway, you know that. He loved rolling the dice. ”
“How much did he lose, Steve?”
“Six-hundred.” She squinted at him. “Thousand. And change.”After a microwaved casserole that night Merle spread the day’s booty across the kitchen counter to commence a stare-down. Almost immediately her parents called. They were “in the neighborhood.” They lived about an hour away and had only returned from Florida a few days before Harry died.
Although moved by their concern, what she really needed was some quiet time. After Steve Hanford’s little revelation that her husband had lost over half a million dollars and she could be sued for even more lost dollars from his chancy option trading, she had gone to the bank. When she tried to clean out the joint account, she found out Harry had taken almost thirty-thousand dollars out of their checking account the day before he died. While she was fuming about that she emptied out the contents of his safe deposit box into a McDonald’s sack still warm with grease from Tristan’s lunch.
Then, after the bank, back to the lawyers.
“Anything I can do to help,” the younger partner boomed. They must love him in court. Troy Lester was the Brooks Brothers version of Steve Hanford, but bald and smelling of spearmint chewing gum.
“At Harry’s office,” she said slowly, trying to breathe. “He was trading options when he died, and they were called. He lost whatever he was trading, our money, and a lot more. I won’t be liable for that, will I?”
“Normally, no.”
She stared at him, willing him to speak. “Normally?”
“The house is safe, since he put the mortgage insurance in your name. And the French property is too complicated to touch. That leaves the life insurance policy — ” He paused, frowning, as if life insurance was nauseating.
“Do you mean — can they garnish that?”
“I think we can avoid that. But there’s a problem Mr. McGuinness wasn’t aware of.”
The other shoe hovered, preparing to drop. She felt it deep in her guts, the looseness, the hollow sense of doom. You thought that was bad, eh? Well, let me tell ya.
She swallowed hard and looked him in the eye. “Tell me.”
“Creditors would have to sue the estate, which if the debts were large enough — and from what you’re telling me maybe they are — they definitely would. Even I would sue.”
“And litigation isn’t your bag. What are you saying?”
He grimaced. “Lawsuits are potential problems, if there are creditors. But the immediate problem is that he borrowed against the life insurance.”
She stared at Troy’s oversized forehead. She had already decided how much she would set aside from the insurance for Tristan’s prep school, then college, and the funeral expenses. But this was what Harry had used to play the options market. This was how much he cared about the security of his family. Damn him. It was gone, all of it. Harry had borrowed against it and lost it all.
She may have swatted Troy Lester with her purse. Lawyers! Who could trust them?
In the kitchen Merle stared again at the meager list of sums on her notepad. Her parents would want to help if they thought she was in trouble. She swept up the checks and statements into her address book and put them on the shelf over the kitchen desk. The last thing she wanted was their pity. They had their own problems, everybody did. One thing she’d learned already since Harry’s death — there was only so much sympathy in the world, then people turned back to their own woes. And who could blame them? The world was a hard, unfair place. She would lie and tell her parents Harry left them secure and well-off.
They stood under her father’s big golf umbrella then shook themselves in the front hall. Her mother was still an elegant woman, not as straight and tall as she used to be but always finely coiffed, her gray hair pinned up in a twist. Tonight she wore a simple black dress and pearls. They were at the age when funerals were unfortunately common. Maybe they’d come from one. Merle glanced down at her sweatpants and Harry’s old Penn t-shirt. Making an effort was, well, such an effort.
“Someone here?” her father said, fixing his blue eyes on her as if she was hiding a boyfriend upstairs. Jack Bennett never lost that protective feeling toward his five daughters. He looked tired though, the bags under his eyes tinged with blue. He was dressed in a dark suit from his attorney days, a blue shirt with no tie. He missed the law, he told her at Christmas, missed the action, hated being old and put out to pasture. She would tell him about old McGuinness the Turd one day, whose retirement plan was to keel over at the water fountain.
“Tristan’s home. He was having trouble studying. Maybe he went back too soon.”
Bernie — her mother Bernadette — insisted on going upstairs, exclaiming over his black eye, and swearing to keep it secret from Grandpa Jack. She loved having secrets with her grandchildren and could be trusted for six or seven minutes. In the hallway outside Tristan’s room, she took Merle’s hand.
“Everything is all right then,” she said in her firm schoolmarm tone. “You’re strong and young. It seems hard now but you’ll be all right, both of you. Tristan’s had some trouble but he should go back next week. ”
“He’s supposed to see a counselor.”
“Oh, rubbish. I knew a thousand boys like Tristan.” Bernie taught junior high school algebra for twenty-five years but always sent the bad boys home to their parents. “Good boys who are picked on by bullies. It’s been going on for centuries. You just have to put on a face and go back.”
Bernie’s advice for most everything was to ‘put on a face.’ If they didn’t think you cared they couldn’t hurt you, and the piddling little concern, whatever it was, went away. It worked wonders in the courtroom and the schoolroom. But in your family it let you hurt in silence and fester in privacy. Merle was an excellent pupil; she’d been putting on a face to Harry — and maybe to herself — for years.
“And what about you?” her mother said. “You’re thinner, not that it doesn’t look good on you. But you have dark circles under your eyes like when you were in law school.”
“Sleeping's not so good.”
“Do you have pills? Dr. Farouk gives everyone pills.”
They left a half hour later, after two cups of milky coffee and a full rundown on their Florida neighbors who had cooked a giant octopus on a charcoal grill and made such a stink they got cited for a public nuisance. Her parents came from the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps era, when everything bad could be pushed down and hidden, when to get by you pretended you didn’t care. You carried on, until carrying on — and not caring — became your life, robotic shell of existence that it was.
Merle poured herself a large glass of red wine and set Dr. Farouk’s pills next it, spreading out the financials again. They meant well, her parents. They tried to distract her with coffee and octopus. She’d just have to figure out how to help herself. Maybe that actually was the old bootstrap approach. Maybe it would work if she applied herself. On a new sheet of paper she made lists: Connecticut. France. IRA statement, bank statement, Legal Aid salary. Potential lawsuits. Lists would keep her sane. Well, as sane as she ever was.
She drank wine, poured more. The financials didn’t change. They didn’t grow zeros. The lists grew longer but not in the plus column. There was no money for college. No money for prep school. Her salary would barely pay the utilities and train fares. Property taxes were out of the question. The sleeping pills stared at her until she dumped them in the toilet. The swirling black capsules stayed in her mind as she poured more wine. Don’t need no stinkin’ pills. She felt stronger then, like she might find an answer to the rest of her life, somewhere, somehow.
Tristan bounded down the stairs, waving his English book. He read her a poem by Dylan Thomas; he was trying to write a short pa
per on it. He stood in the middle of the kitchen, one eye swollen shut, and read it theatrically, arms waving, one toe pointed just so. He was so adorable, hair uncombed and shirttail out, she had trouble focusing on the words, let alone their meanings. When he finished he reread certain passages.
“'A weather in the flesh and bone/ Is damp and dry.’ What do you think that means? How can something be both damp and dry?”
“Well,” she began. She had struggled in English, at least the interpretation of metaphor that was the heart of poetry. She was too literal. “Um. Let’s see. Flesh and bone. So the flesh is damp and the other is, like, bone dry?”
“Yeah, but.” He frowned at her. She apparently wasn’t helpful. “What about this line: ‘the quick and dead move like two ghosts before the eye.’”
She knew this! “Quick means alive, so dead and alive.”
He squinted at her and slammed the book. “Dylan Thomas liked to think about death. Mr. James thinks he was obsessed.”
Merle bit her lip. Was this Tristan’s way of telling her she was thinking about death too much, that she was obsessed? If anything she thought too little about Harry. She didn’t miss him, not really. Was this Tris’s point? Did he know she didn’t love Harry? She glanced up at her son. He was getting out the popcorn popper and looking for oil. Life went on. It was just poetry. Strange, pretty words that she couldn’t figure out, just like when she was in school.
She put on a smile. “Oh, those poets.”
Tristan made a huge bowlful of white kernels. Before he took it upstairs she enlisted him in breaking-and-entering on Harry’s home computer, a job that had more appeal than Dylan Thomas. Then the Widow, numbed with wine and poetry and parental advice on culinary octopi, slept in her sweatpants, disturbed only once, “in the darkest hours when the mansion lay still in the icy moonlight and the silent hand of the future held all in its clammy fist,” [String of Pearls] by a victorious squeal from the young prince down the hall.
Blackbird Fly Page 3
