The Wrong Kind of Money

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “Come in, George,” she said.

  “I don’t really need this,” he said, holding up the cane. “I carry it as insurance. The sidewalks outside are icy in places.”

  She led him into the drawing room of the apartment, the most formal of her rooms, a room always reserved for special occasions.

  “You have a beautiful apartment, Hannah.”

  “Thank you. It—suffices.”

  And now, sitting opposite him in one of a pair of Louis XIV chairs, the mirror of memory has cleared. The years have dropped away, and his face has resumed its familiar contours, the same slightly off-center smile. It is as though he hasn’t changed or aged at all, and she wonders if the same miracle of transformation has taken place in his mind as well as he looks at her.

  As though echoing her thoughts, he says, “You haven’t changed a bit, Hannah.”

  “Oh, Lord love you for a liar,” she says with a laugh. “Of course I’ve changed. And so have you. Though not all that much, in fact. No, you haven’t changed a bit, either.”

  They sit in silence for a moment or two. “Would you like a drink?” she asks at last. “Some tea perhaps?”

  “No, thanks. Nothing,” he says, and there is another silence.

  “Well!” she says finally. “Here we are.”

  “This is going to be difficult for us, isn’t it?” he says. “So much time’s gone by. There’s so much to talk about, and yet—”

  “And yet so little.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you marry, George?”

  “Yes. Twice, in fact. I’ve buried two wives. That’s not an expression I like much, but that’s what they say. I’ve buried two wives.”

  “Children?”

  “No, never any children. Sometimes I’ve regretted that, now that I live alone. You?”

  “Three. No, four, actually.”

  “Ah.”

  “One of them was yours.”

  He smiles faintly. “I often wondered about that. That thought often crossed my mind, particularly when your letters stopped coming. But I was so far away, and there was nothing I could do.”

  “Of course there wasn’t. She was a beautiful baby girl.”

  “And I’m sure you were a wonderful mother, Hannah.”

  “No, as a matter of fact, I wasn’t. I wasn’t at all. My mother took me to Germany to have the baby. She was raised as my baby sister. Nobody ever knew, not even my father. Especially not him.”

  “I see,” he says.

  “Do you? You see, it was such a different era, George. That German-Jewish crowd I grew up in. So proud. My father’s family—all those distinguished rabbis and scholars in his family tree. And the women in those days. So strict and prim and proper. They wore long, high-collared dresses, and pearls—pearls, even for canoe trips and picnics in the Adirondacks! Everything had to be just so. It would have destroyed my father if he’d known what happened to me. I would have disgraced the whole family. I’d have been an outcast. The whole family would’ve been outcasts. I’d have disgraced the family name.”

  “I understand,” he says.

  “It’s all so different today. Today nobody would bat an eyelash at what you and I did, or what happened to me. Today it would just be ho-hum. My granddaughter, Anne, who’s eighteen—she says she’s never going to get married. She says she’s just going to have a long string of lovers! Of course, I think she says things like that just to tease me, but she says them just the same.”

  “It just wasn’t in the stars for you and me, was it, Hannah?”

  “No, it wasn’t. But your daughter grew up to be a very beautiful woman, George. Very beautiful, and very bright, and very talented. She worked for my husband’s company for a number of years. She even got to be rather famous. Advertising Age, which is a trade paper, once voted her Advertising Woman of the Year! You and I can be very proud of that, George. She—” She breaks off suddenly. “Would you like to meet her, George? I could arrange that.”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “What do you think?”

  “It’s up to you, George. I could—”

  “But then you’d have to explain to her who I am, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes, I suppose so, but—”

  “Which could be difficult.”

  “Yes. Perhaps.”

  “So I think—no. It’s a little late for me to start becoming a father at my age, Hannah.”

  “Let me at least show you some pictures of her.” She rises and fetches a leather-bound photo album from a small table, and hands it to him.

  He sits with the album unopened on his lap.

  “Open it. It’s full of—”

  “No, I think I’d rather keep the picture I have of her in my mind’s eye,” he says. “But let me show you something.” He reaches into his inside breast pocket and withdraws a small book. “I’ve always kept a journal,” he says. “This one is from the year you and I met.” He opens it to a page and shows her a small, dried, brown, and papery flower that has been pressed between the pages.

  “My gardenia,” she says, and suddenly she is tremendously touched and moved, and tears well in her eyes. “It was for my father, but you stopped and picked it up.”

  “It’s been around the world many times, that little flower.”

  “You picked it up, and put it between your teeth like a gypsy, and danced a little jig.”

  “If you look closely, I think you’ll find the teeth marks are still there. But I think I might have a little trouble now, dancing the jig.”

  “And then you left your cap.”

  “And you kept it for me.”

  “And you kept my flower.” She stares down at it, and all at once the dried petals become white and fresh again, and, yes, she can see fresh teeth marks on the stem. She closes the little book carefully and hands it back to him, and he replaces it in his inside breast pocket. “George—do you remember—do you remember the sound you said the snoring sailors made from the bunks below you on your ship?”

  He smiles at her. “Manush, manush. A lot of time’s gone by, Hannie, and a lot has happened to both of us. But I have wonderful memories, my dear, wonderful pictures in my mind’s eye.” He reaches for his cane and rises, a little stiffly, from his chair to go.

  She also rises. “George—will you come back again? Will you come back often? So we can talk some more, and remember more things?”

  “Of course,” he says, and smiles at her again, but something in the way he says this tells her that he will not come back again. They stand there, in her formal French drawing room, full of Louis XIV, a lifetime of collecting, and they are both suddenly a little hesitant and awkward. It is as though they have taken separate paths and met at the end of a peninsula, and all the ground behind them has washed away. He lowers his head and kisses her lightly on the forehead. “Good-bye, dear heart,” he says.

  The introductory applause dies down as Noah approaches the podium, and as he turns to face his audience of Ingraham people, the house lights dim, though a small spot remains on Noah’s face. Behind him the big screen lights up. “For me,” he begins, “it all began in the tiny Scottish village of Ballachulish.” He presses a small button on the podium, and, click, the first image fills the screen. “Population three hundred and sixteen, not far from the entrance to the Firth of Lome. It was in the early spring of 1992, and the air was crisp and fresh and new. What was I doing in this little town, so small and remote that it doesn’t appear on most maps, a town that reminded me a little bit—”

  Softly, at first, the overture from Brigadoon comes up from the pair of speakers on the stage. The song is “The Heather on the Hill.” Look at your audience, he hears her say. Catch their eyes.

  Noah looks out across the sea of upturned and politely expectant faces that fills the darkened ballroom—faces he wishes he would one day learn to attach to names without the help of name tags—and, beyond the faces, to the pair of glass doors that leads into the lobby, and sees a young girl with long d
ark hair sitting in a club chair. A small blue suitcase sits beside her on the floor. Her knees are pressed tightly together, and her eyes are closed. Her lips are moving, and he realizes that she has memorized the script, too, and is following it with him. Suddenly he thinks he should forget the script and rush out to her, telling her not to go without him, telling her they’ll work something out. Come with me, go with me, I don’t care where. Surely we are not the only man and woman in the world to whom this sort of thing has happened. There are many more of us out there. We are not alone. But of course he does not do this.

  “—of Brigadoon.”

  As he speaks, the music rises briefly, then fades, then disappears.

  “Your mother’s in the east sitting room, Mrs. Liebling,” Sister Margaret Mary says. “And she’s alone, so you might want to have your visit with her there? You can close the doors, if you like, for privacy.”

  “Thank you, Sister.” She starts down the long, wide corridor toward the sitting room.

  The rooms of Greenspring Hills have been decorated in the exuberant style of the late Dorothy Draper when she was in her cabbage-rose period. The colors used are all warm and vibrant, yellows, hot pinks, oranges and lime greens, citrus colors that, supposedly, are designed to convey an atmosphere that is cheery and upbeat. Cabbage roses appear in persimmon on the wallpaper, and in lemony yellow on the polished chintz used to cover chairs and to create balloon-type window hangings. All the floral prints are oversize, and all the rooms are deeply carpeted in soft pastels, and all this use of fabrics gives Greenspring Hills a hushed quality, in which all sounds of distress are muted, if not silenced altogether. Here a scream would not carry far. Actually, these echoes of Dorothy Draper are not entirely accidental. Greenspring Hills was decorated by Carleton Varney, who was Mrs. Draper’s handpicked successor.

  Carol finds her mother seated in one corner of a plump pink and green chintz-covered sofa, her rosary beads in her hands. She is dressed, as usual, very simply, in brown slacks and a beige blouse, though Carol notices that the blouse is food-stained in the front. She reminds herself to speak to Sister about that before she leaves. She likes her mother to look tidy. Her mother was always a small woman, but today, sitting in that big sofa, alone in that big happy-colored room, she looks even smaller, her gray hair hanging to her shoulders straight, uncurled. Her mother does not look up when she enters the room, but continues fingering her beads.

  “Hello, Mother,” she says, sitting down beside her on the sofa.

  “I’m making a very special novena,” she says. “And I’m making it for you.”

  “Oh, that’s nice, Mother,” Carol says.

  “The Blessed Virgin is weeping for you today, and also for me.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Mother.”

  “There have been sins committed, and for these there must be atonement. There must be redemption.”

  “Of course. Are you happy here, Mother?”

  “Happy? Oh, I’m as happy here as I’ll be anywhere, until I’m gathered into the arms of Our Lord Jesus.”

  “Sister Margaret Mary said there was a little problem in the dining room this morning.”

  “Sister Margaret Mary is a liar!”

  “Oh? I thought you liked Sister Margaret Mary, Mother.”

  “She’s a liar! And don’t call me Mother! There is only one Mother, the Holy Mother of the Universe! She’s with us now.”

  Carol reaches out and gently touches her mother’s hand. “Mama, then. When I was little, I called you Mama.”

  “Don’t interrupt me. Let me finish my beads.”

  And so they sit in silence while her mother mutters the words under her breath. “Hail, Mary, full of grace.… Our Father …”

  At last she finishes, and her hands fall to her lap, though she still holds the beads. “Let us pray,” she says. “Get down on your knees, Carol, and we will pray for forgiveness.”

  “I don’t want to pray just yet,” she says. “First, I want to talk about what happened in the dining room this morning.”

  “The angels spoke to me this morning.”

  “Yes—that’s what I meant. What did the angels say to you, Mama? Sister Margaret Mary said—”

  “Don’t believe what she says! She’s not the messenger of the Lord. I am!”

  “Of course, Mama. So tell me what the angels said to you.”

  “That a sin has been committed. A mortal sin.”

  “Tell me what that was, Mama.”

  “The angels came into the dining room to tell me.”

  “And what did they say?”

  “That there has been lechery, and there has been sin, and that you and I are to be punished for it.”

  “I see,” Carol says, feeling helpless. Like so many of her conversations with her mother, this one is just spinning in circles, going nowhere. “Well,” she says, “you mustn’t let these messages upset you. Because when you get upset, it upsets everybody else who lives here. Isn’t there a little pill you’re supposed to take when you feel upset? A little yellow pill?”

  “Pills are worldly things. This was Divine Word.”

  “But you see what I’m saying, Mama, is that when you inflict your upset on other people—well, that’s not very Christian, is it? Remember, ‘Do unto others—’”

  “Don’t talk to me about what’s Christian! You married the Christ-killer. You’re the apostate.”

  “Now, Mama, you know I don’t like it when you talk this way.”

  “It’s true! You know what Father Timmons said when you married a man of the people who crucified and killed Our Lord, the only begotten son of God and our Holy Mother. He said no good would come of it, and no good has. And now you’re being punished for it—punished by your Christ-killer’s lechery and unfaithfulness, by his treachery and betrayal. But I—I sat back and let you do it. I let you be delivered into the hands of Satan. You have your punishment now. But the Blessed Virgin hasn’t decided yet what my punishment will be. That’s why I’m making this novena.”

  Carol sighs. “Sister Margaret Mary said you received a fax this morning. Who was that from, Mama?”

  “Fax? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “One of those letters that comes over the telephone lines.”

  “There was a letter, yes.”

  “Who was it from, Mama?”

  “The Blessed Virgin.”

  “I know the Blessed Virgin often speaks to you, Mama. But I didn’t know she wrote you letters.”

  “Nonsense. She writes to me all the time.”

  “And I didn’t know she had a fax machine.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “What did the letter say, Mama?”

  “It is Holy Writ. It was signed B, for Blessed Virgin.”

  “But what did the letter say?”

  “The truth. The truth about you and the Christ-killer you married. And his young whore.”

  “Do you still have the letter, Mama?”

  “Yes. I should probably burn it, since it’s Holy Writ. I should burn it, and let the smoke rise up to heaven and join our Holy Mother and her heavenly angels who sent it to me.”

  “May I see the letter, Mama?”

  “No! It is Holy Writ. It was not meant for the eyes of an apostate.”

  “But if it concerns me, I’m sure the Blessed Virgin intended you to share the letter with me.”

  Her mother eyes her narrowly. “You think so?” she says.

  “Oh, I’m quite sure of it, Mama,” Carol says. “That would be the Christian thing, wouldn’t it—to share?”

  “To convince you of your sin, and your apostasy? Do you think that’s what she wants?”

  “Of course that’s what she wants, Mama. It’s quite obvious that’s what she wants. How else would she convince me of my sin?”

  “But she doesn’t exactly say that in her letter.”

  “But remember Saint Augustine, Mama. He said, ‘God always writes straig
ht, but sometimes in crooked lines.’”

  “That’s true. At least you remember some of the things Father Timmons taught you.”

  “I remember everything he taught me. Is the letter upstairs in your room, Mama?”

  “No, I have it here.” Slowly she reaches inside her soiled blouse and withdraws the letter, and hands it to Carol.

  “… and now let’s go next door and try some Ballachulish,” he says. “I think you’re going to like it.”

  The lights in the room come up again, and the applause begins.

  “Maybe you’d better hold your applause until after you’ve tasted Mr. Kelso’s brew,” he says, and there is laughter. “And now, before I leave the microphone, I have just one favor to ask of all of you before we all start partying in earnest. I’d like to conduct a blind taste test. As you enter the party room next door, each of you will be given two ballots. On the table on your left, in numbered plastic glasses, will be samples of Angus Kelso’s whiskey along with samples of fourteen other premium single malts. I’d like you to taste each of these, and rank each on a scale of one to ten—based on the usual three criteria: taste, nose, and color. On the table on your right will be samples of the water from Mr. Kelso’s caves, along with nine other premium bottled non-carbonated waters. I’d like you to do the same with these. When the results are tallied, then maybe we’ll have something to celebrate.”

  There is more applause, and people begin rising from their seats.

  Noah looks out across his audience to the double glass doors that lead to the lobby. The girl and her suitcase are gone.

  And now the wrap-up cocktail party is in full swing. The results of the taste test were even better than Noah had dared hope for, with Angus Kelso’s scotch coming out the easy winner, and with eighty percent of the voters voting it their favorite. The test of the bottled waters was almost as encouraging; sixty-five percent chose Kelso’s as their favorite. Now Noah moves around the room, shaking hands, accepting backslaps and congratulations, using his old trick of looking a man straight in the eye and at his name tag at the same time.

  “Hey, Phil … Yo, Paul … How’re you doing, Harry? … Hey, Dave—your wife have the baby yet?”