Goldilocks

by Andrew Coburn

  Henry put on a brave face, but his smile was lopsided. “What if I don’t want to go?”

  “Then you should take another look at John. Normal circumstances, he wouldn’t hurt a fly. You cross him, you could say he’s a rough mother.”

  “Some people say that about me.”

  “No, Henry. Nobody says that about you. You got my word.”

  They watched him put on his shoes and knot the leather laces and move agilely with buttocks in gear, as if he had strains of marching music in his head. He came out of the bathroom with toilet articles stuffed into a pouch and his hair slicked back. Clothes, mostly underwear and socks, he packed into a canvas gripsack that looked as if it had never been new. He hiked the collar of his denim jacket and rolled the cuffs just above his wrists.

  Sal, looking at keys, coins, and a few crumpled dollar bills on the bedside table, said, “This is the extent of your wealth? Not exactly a winner, are you?” He suddenly tossed an envelope on the bed. “A few hundred bucks in there from Mrs. Baker. Don’t blow it all at once.”

  “That a kiss-off?”

  “You got it, Henry.”

  The sky was starlit, and the moon, a sizable chunk of silver, had taken on the aspect of a weapon. Henry stashed his grip in the back of the Charger. They watched him while leaning against their car, which was long and sleek, the next thing to a limo. Sal smiled, the craters in his face brimming with shadow.

  “What kinda car you got there, Henry?”

  “It’s a Dodge.”

  “Looks like a shitbox to me. What’s it look like to you, John?”

  “Don’t matter,” John said, “long as it gets him where he’s going.”

  “You get there,” Sal said, “stay out of trouble. You go to the joint, guys’ll make use of you. Tell him, John.”

  “You’ll come out with your asshole bigger than Callahan Tunnel.”

  Henry climbed into his car. He shut the door hard and locked it and peered out the half-open window. “You guys don’t scare me.”

  “That’s right, Henry. You keep thinking that all the way to Lawrence.”

  TWO

  BARNEY COLE sat in his closed inner office with Edith Shea, who was of deadly thinness, seemingly made of hot wires, too restless to stay in the worn red leather chair he had drawn for her. She sprang up and breezed by his cluttered desk to a window, where she spilled ash on the sill. “I should’ve divorced him long ago,” she said, expelling smoke. “I shouldn’t have listened to you. I blame you, Barney.”

  “I tried to do what was right for both of you.”

  “And failed miserably.” The window faced a pack of scruffy pigeons on a ledge and overlooked the emptiness of an alley four stories below. The office was in the Bay State Building in the heart of Lawrence, a pint-sized tenement city oppressed by mammoth mill buildings no longer serving their original purpose, a shifting immigrant community evenly divided north and south by the abused Merrimack River and populated by too many priests and politicians and by far too many lawyers, most of whom, like Cole, lived in the surrounding suburbs.

  “And what was right for the children,” he added.

  “That’s a laugh.” She stood like a streak of chalk in a white uniform pantsuit, and Cole could not remember whether she was working now as a waitress, hairdresser, or nurse’s aide, all of which, between babies, she had been. She, not Daisy, was the sinew of the family, which had leveled off with the birth of her seventh child, a girl. The oldest, a boy, was a day student at nearby Merrimack College, a good portion of the tuition diminished by a scholarship that Cole, through a friend, had helped arrange.

  “It’s not too late, if that’s what you want,” he said, lowering his eyes as she lurched from the window.

  “Of course it’s too late. He’s dying, for God’s sake.” She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another. “But he’s taking his time. He farts around about everything.”

  Cole looked up from his desk and watched her fight off a small shivering fit.

  “I didn’t mean that, Barney. Well, I meant it, but not the way it sounded.”

  “I know,” he said gently, wishing there was more he could say to show that he truly did understand. He had a bottle of Teacher’s in the drawer of a file cabinet, but he did not want to offer her any, too early in the day for that. She ran a bony hand through her hair, which was dark and curly and shot with gray.

  “There’s no insurance. He cashed everything in. He’s going to leave me nothing but debts. God knows how much he owes Arnold.”

  “Arnold won’t dun you.”

  “I know that, but there are others. He owes everybody, Barney. How much does he owe you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s because you’re being sweet, one of your endearing qualities. I wish I were in the mood to appreciate it.” She lurched to another window, this one overlooking downtown’s midmorning traffic, unwieldy and unsteady, as if drunks were leading the way. “I know he’s meeting you for lunch, Barney. Talk to him. Find out who else he owes. I wake up in a sweat at night thinking about it.” The nervous quickness of a smile gave an odd twist to her mouth. “He’ll tell you things he won’t tell me. He might even be honest about himself.”

  Cole’s secretary flashed him. He picked up the phone and murmured, “Later, Marge.”

  She pulled hard on her cigarette and continued to stare through the window, her face a wedge of bone. “No one in his family has lived a long life. That’s the way it goes.”

  “Arnold would call it the luck of the draw,” Cole said quietly, and she threw him a grudging look.

  “We all came out of the same tenements. What did you do, stack the deck and draw aces?”

  He arose from his desk, long and thin-bellied in a ten-year-old tailored suit, more muscular than most men of forty-four and fitter than many younger, his features unobtrusively handsome. He raised a hand to touch her, but she avoided it.

  “What’s in your eyes, Barney? Sympathy or pity?”

  “Understanding, I hope.”

  “Is it free, or will you send me a bill?”

  “Slow down, Edith. I’m not a shrink, I’m your lawyer.”

  “And my friend.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re so fucking stuck-up.” Her eyes, larger than most, glittered coldly. “Do you know you’ve never once, all these years, made a pass at me? I’ve always resented that.”

  “I’m sure I did, one time or another, but you never picked up on it.”

  “Always the diplomat, aren’t you?” She straightened her back, steadied herself, and prepared to leave. “Don’t tell Daisy I was here. OK?”

  “OK.”

  “I mean that.”

  “I know you do.”

  A heavy moment passed, and then suddenly she stepped into him. All at once, against his chest, he felt the hardness of her brow, the narrow length of her nose, and the sharp cut of her chin. “Hug me, damn it,” she demanded and threw her rib cage and thin contraption of hips against him, producing almost a clinking sound, as if she could be easily taken apart and reassembled at a more appropriate time and perhaps to better advantage. The heat of her mouth and a rush of tears poured through his striped shirt. Her voice drilled into his skin. “Barney, I don’t want to lose him.”

  • • •

  Daisy Shea cut into his salad with a weighty knife and fork, broke a lettuce heart, and sliced a tomato wedge in half. Feigning an appetite, chewing deliberately, he got Russian dressing on a corner of his mouth and swiftly wiped it away with the napkin from his lap. He had the ruined face of a drinker, the cavalier eye of a sport, and the reckless air of a gambler reduced to bluff, all hopes pegged to serendipity. He was, like Cole, a lawyer, but with a negligible practice and an office above a used-furniture store, his rent in arrears, a horseplayer with a history of bum tips and a cardplayer whose big moments had passed, along with the red of his hair, which had wasted to white. He was Cole’s age, almost to the day, but looked a generation
older. He ate as much of his salad as he could stomach and pushed away the bowl.

  Cole said, “How are you feeling?”

  “I got a foot in the grave. How am I supposed to feel?”

  They were in Bishop’s, the most popular restaurant in the city, just beyond the post office and in sight of St. Mary’s Church. The food was a mix of Arabic and American, and the lunch crowd, teeming with familiar downtown faces, was political, professional, mercantile. Here and there, in the semiprivacy of booths, developers discussed deals over skewered lamb, and at tables near the aisles bookmakers dressed like bankers exhibited their young second wives.

  Playing with the menu, which never changed, Daisy appeared to take comfort in the babble around him. “A rough guess,” he said, “off the top of your head, how many meals you figure I’ve eaten here?”

  “I couldn’t begin to imagine,” Cole said. “What do you figure?”

  “More here than at home.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Who says I got to have one? A guy in my shape can say what he wants.” He glanced about, craning his neck, which had begun to resemble drippings from a candle. In nearly every direction he glimpsed people he knew in one way or another, some since childhood. “In the old days everybody stopped by my table to talk to me. Now nobody does. They don’t want to ask how I am. Scared I’ll tell ‘em.”

  “Maybe it’s simpler than that.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Maybe they’re afraid you’ll put the touch on them, or maybe you already owe them so much they don’t want to embarrass you.”

  “That’s a low blow, Barney.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You should be.”

  The waiter, one of several who had been with the restaurant for years, removed their salad bowls and set down dishes, lamb on the stick for each, and a platter of French fries to share. The fries were a favorite of Daisy’s, but now he merely picked at them. According to the strict diet laid out by his doctor, he should not have been eating them at all. When his napkin fluttered to the floor, he reached down and came up wheezing. He stretched his neck again, caught the waiter’s busy eye, and ordered a Cutty on the rocks.

  Cole said, “I thought you quit.”

  “I cheat.”

  They ate in silence, Daisy nibbling. When his drink arrived, he immediately reached for it with a tremulous hand that went steady as soon as the heat of the scotch touched his stomach, a part of which had been cut out a year ago. Color dribbled into his face, and he began eating with more energy, though with the same small bites, as if his teeth were tender.

  “I heard from Louise,” Cole said, and Daisy’s head bobbed.

  “What did she want?”

  “A favor.”

  “You owe her one.”

  “She reminded me.”

  “Who loved her the most, Barney, you or me?”

  “I think you had the edge.”

  His head dipped again, this time as if the rise of voices in the restaurant were too loud, megaphonic, skull-hurting. Abruptly he drew up his chest and raised his chin. “She ask about me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I said you were doing fine.”

  “Good. I wouldn’t want the bitch feeling sorry for me.” He rattled the ice in his drink and let the subject slide, as if at will he could excise certain essentials of reality from persons in his past. He quit picking at the French fries, which had gone cold, but he finished his lamb and the green beans that had come with it. Then, sucking on chips of ice, he glanced around again, at people leaving and some just arriving. “You haven’t asked about Edith. Usually you ask right away.”

  “How is she?”

  “Terrific. I go, she oughta have the wake here. Noon hour would be best. What d’you think?”

  “You’d have a crowd, if that’s what you want.”

  “No box. Why waste money, just lay me out on a table, nice cloth on it, kind they use here at Christmas to put people in the spirit. Later, if you’re a real buddy, you could sling me over your shoulder and lug me up the street to St. Mary’s for the mass. Priest — who is it now, Father Flaherty? — could prop me in a pew. I’d like that.”

  “What if someone comes in late and sits beside you, doesn’t know you’re dead?”

  “I won’t tell him. You want to, you can whisper to him I’ve risen. Jesus Junior.”

  Cole signaled for coffee.

  “What’s the matter, Barney, don’t you go for that?”

  “I wonder if we might be serious for a moment.”

  “About what?”

  “Your debts.”

  “You putting the arm on me?”

  “No.”

  “Then I don’t want to talk about them. Not when I’m in such a good mood.”

  The coffee came. Daisy oversugared his and took a deep swallow, burning his throat. There was a time, high school, when he could bury flaming matches in his mouth and inhale Pall Mall cigarettes from the lit ends. The class cutup. The memory flashed bright in Cole’s mind, succeeded by another image of Daisy, a second-stringer in the backfield, indestructible in helmet and pads, a sea of enemy jerseys parting as if by a miracle as he galloped fifty-five yards to score the winning touchdown over Lowell. Or was it Haverhill? At any rate, the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune published a page-one picture of him with a careless arm around the unlikeliest cheerleader, Edith Pratt, while his eyes sought the prettiest, Louise Leone, Cole’s girl at the time.

  “You gonna drink your water?”

  Cole slid the tumbler toward him and with a faint twinge of nostalgia remembered the two of them commuting to Suffolk Law School in Boston, Daisy scrounging for tuition and struggling with his grades, graduating at the bottom of the class but passing the bar on the first try. With borrowed money and scavenged furniture, they rented and equipped dinky office space together in the Bay State Building, from which, for purposes of publicity, Daisy rang up restaurants during the busy hours and had himself paged: Urgent telephone call for Attorney Francis J. Shea.

  Daisy’s teeth lay apart in an odd smile.

  “What’s the matter?” Cole asked.

  “I’m starting not to feel so good. God’s punishing me in the stomach, what’s left of it.” He inched his chair back and rose carefully, which for a moment seemed a desperate undertaking. His first step, sideways, was shaky, but his next one straightened.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Men’s room,” he replied with a wink. “Don’t want to embarrass you.”

  Alone, Cole sipped his coffee. Ten minutes later the waiter asked whether he wanted a refill, and he shook his head, somewhat disquieted over the time Daisy was taking. He paid the check with a Bishop’s credit card and marked in a generous tip. On his way out of the dining room he paused to exchange pleasantries with two fellow lawyers, one of whom, despite dubious qualifications, was in line for a judgeship. He entered the lobby and descended switchback stairs to the lower level, where a woman with a small tidy face and beauty-parlor hair emerged from the ladies’ room tugging at herself. A few years ago, quite successfully, he had represented her in a divorce libel, and he recalled everything about her except her name.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “You can’t expect to remember all of us.” She spoke of herself, her remarriage, her daughter’s graduation from Merrimack College, and then, with a long glance to her left, well past the cigarette machine, she whispered in a disturbed tone, “Isn’t that your friend?”

  “Yes,” Cole said. “Please excuse me.”

  Daisy sat on a padded bench with his head tipped back against the hard wall, his eyes shut tight, and his hands limp in his lap. His legs were doubled in as if they had buckled, and the cuffs of his trousers had ridden up over his black anklet socks, exposing the chalk of his calves. Cole leaned forward.

  “Excuse me, Daisy, but are you alive or dead?”

  The eyelids fluttered open. “A little of eac
h,” he said and flashed a truculent little smile. “I’m gonna outlive all of ‘em, Barney, even you. Wanna bet on it?”

  Cole said, “What will you put up — an IOU?”

  • • •

  “I put him in the conference room,” Marge said.

  “Why did you put him there?” Cole asked with mild surprise, for the chairs in the narrow waiting area beyond her desk were unoccupied.

  “I didn’t like the way he looked at me,” she said, and Cole did not question her judgment. She was efficient and intelligent, attractively plain in a wholesome way, with penny eyes and straight brown hair that fell just below her jawline. She had been with him for seven years, part-time for a while and then full-time when his regular secretary had left to get married, a step that did not appear imminent with Marge, who lived with and cared for her mother. Staring up over her IBM typewriter, she said, “He claims he had an appointment.”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “You should’ve told me.”

  “Yes, I should’ve.”

  “Is it personal?”

  “More or less.”

  She lifted her appointment calendar. “You have Mrs. Goss at two. She’s always prompt.”

  “I won’t keep her waiting,” he promised.

  He opened the door of the conference room with scarcely a sound and shut it behind him with a noticeable one. The room, narrow and book-lined, austerely furnished with an old oak table and heavy chairs, had a cloistral atmosphere. His heels clicked over the carpetless floor. “Henry, isn’t it?” he said, and watched the denim shape rise out of the farthest chair. A ham of a hand flew at him.

  “Yes, sir, it is. Henry Witlo.”

  The handshake was firm but clumsy. Cole was Henry’s height but was substantially outweighed. Henry’s shoulders seemed to hover, and the blue eyes looked painted in beneath the shock of yellow hair.

  “Sit down, Henry.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Cole.”

  Cole moved to the other side of the table, sat directly across from him, and for a cool moment studied him. The face, doughy enough to diminish lines, was not as young as it had first seemed, and the smile was looser than necessary. Cole said, “Mrs. Baker phoned to say you were coming to Lawrence and might be stopping by, but I didn’t expect you so soon.”