Goldilocks

by Andrew Coburn

  “Yuh, that’s what I heard,” he said, pulling on a cigarette. “I’d've looked in on him, but I don’t know him that well. Wife and I bought some dinette furniture from him years ago. Cheap stuff as I remember. Didn’t last long.”

  “Hear anything about what happened to him?”

  “Got beat up is all I know.” He brought up an arm and let his hand dangle from the wrist. “Long time ago I heard he was this way, but I don’t know that for a fact.”

  Each turned as an ambulance, roof lights flashing, swerved into the lot and headed toward the side entrance of the emergency room.

  “Business here never falls off,” Alfred said, snapping away his cigarette. “Always something doing.”

  “Take care,” Cole said, stepping away.

  “You too, Barney. I don’t forget what you did for me.”

  The woman at the reception desk told Cole that Mr. Pothier had been moved to a private room and directed him to the new wing, which he had trouble finding at first. Checking room numbers and glancing in at beds, he heard a sigh much like the deep sound his grandmother had made when liberating herself from a corset. Farther down he glimpsed beyond an ill-drawn curtain a man perched on a bedpan, head bowed in apparent prayer for results. He forgot the number he was seeking, but an extra sense seemed to pilot him to the right room.

  Buddy Pothier was sitting up, an enormous bandage taped over one eye, ugly-looking sutures in his upper lip, teeth obviously missing from a big part of his mouth. A nurse, who was pushing a pillow behind him, saw Cole out of the corner of her eye and said cheerily, “Ah, you have a visitor, Mr. Pothier.” To Cole she chirped, “You should’ve seen him a few days ago before the swelling came down. You wouldn’t have believed he could make such an improvement.”

  Cole moved self-consciously toward the foot of the bed. He had only a nodding acquaintance with Pothier and had never been a customer.

  “Anything more I can do you for, Mr. Pothier?” the nurse asked and was answered with a shake of the head. She stepped past Cole with a smile and left with a swish.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you,” Cole said, edging to the side of the bed. “I guess it’s hard for you to talk, so I won’t stay long. I’d just like to ask a couple of questions.”

  Pothier stared at him warily out of the good eye and then looked away as if from a commotion inside his head.

  Cole waited a moment and then asked, “Do you have any idea who did this to you?”

  The voice was small, the mouth barely opening. “None.”

  Cole remembered walking by Pothier’s store as a child, when the father was alive and ran the business, the merchandise gothic-looking and indestructible. He said, “It’s important to me, Mr. Pothier. Just between us, was it a big blond guy?”

  The eye swung back at him. The voice, bigger, said, “It was nobody.”

  • • •

  When Louise Baker returned home, Mrs. Mennick was waiting with an anxious air. There had been a telephone call from Lawrence. “Your sister wants you to call her right back,” Mrs. Mennick said, and Louise nodded with no show of concern. Her sister, who usually rang up the private number and left desperate messages on the answering machine, was full of crises invariably involving money. “I wrote the number down,” Mrs. Mennick said, “so you don’t have to take time to look it up.”

  “Thank you,” Louise said negligently, disappointing Mrs. Mennick, who enjoyed drama in the lives of others. Louise moved past her. “Would you get me coffee, please?”

  At the hall table she picked through her mail, discarded everything with less than first-class postage, and left the rest, mostly bills, to open later. When her coffee was ready, she carried it upstairs to her bedroom office and rang up her sister’s number. No one answered. She cradled the receiver with relief, for she had little patience with her sister and no regard for her deadbeat brother-in-law, who sold bad cars for a living, written-off wrecks doctored into some kind of usable condition for customers who could afford no better.

  She sipped her coffee on the little balcony outside the door windows and surveyed the grounds and distant hills with a rich sense of proprietorship. A document in her desk, her prideful signature opposite Ben’s biddable one, gave her clear title to the rousing beauty of the view. She placed cup and saucer on the rail and stood with her hands behind her back and her chest projected so that her breasts suggested birds about to fly away. Her head tossed back, she sniffed in the sweet air as if possessed of a wild animal’s sense of smell. The ring of the telephone was a shrill intrusion and a taint on her mood.

  She took her time stepping back into the bedroom and more time picking up the receiver. She expected her sister’s voice and was prepared for a story, but the caller was Barney Cole. She was not prepared for his story and for a moment or so only half heard his words. “Hold on,” she said. She put the receiver down and fetched her coffee from the balcony rail, though little remained in the cup. “What were you saying?”

  “Is he violent? Does he use his fists?”

  She drew in an irritable breath. “If there’s a problem, Barney, tell me.”

  “Just answer my question.”

  “You’re not in court, counselor. Spell it out better.”

  “I think he may have beaten up somebody.”

  “You think. Don’t you know?”

  “I wish I did.”

  “Easy solution, Barney. Why don’t you just ask him?”

  “He hasn’t been around.”

  “Are the cops involved?”

  “The victim’s not talking.”

  She lifted her coffee cup and drained it. “Barney, you’re wasting my time.”

  An hour later, when she was down in the sitting room reading the local weekly, her picture in it, she heard the sound of a car. The banker and his friends were dropping off Ben. A minute later she heard the front door open and lofted her voice. “In here, Ben.” He appeared, flushed and smiling, strands of his flat hair hanging over his brow. He looked like an overheated and happy child, his mustache a smudge from hard play. “What’s the grin for?” she asked.

  “They cheated,” he announced cheerily.

  “You’re not serious.”

  “I most certainly am. I won sixty-five dollars.”

  “You mean, they cheated in your favor.”

  His smile turned sheepish. “I pretended not to notice.”

  She put the paper to one side, rose from the chair, and spread her arms for the child in him to come to her. “Nothing much gets by you, does it, Ben?”

  “I don’t think so, Lou. I hope not.”

  She stood with her body to his. “Your mind is better than ever.”

  “I want to believe that,” he said.

  The air was soft and powdery when they took a stroll among the flower beds, which Mrs. Mennick’s brother tended to weekly. The pansies circling the goldfish pool fluttered their petals like a swarm of butterflies and particularly pleased Louise. They reminded her of watercolors her third-grade teacher had tacked on the wall. The assertive orange of early-blooming day lilies arched high over their foliage. The sweet William had quickly passed its prime, and the red bloom had turned dark and velvety, which pleased Ben. It reminded him of a dress his mother had worn. As they moved closer to the side of the house, toward the roses, Louise said, “Mrs. Mennick’s brother is picking her up soon to take her to the movies.”

  He nodded. “Yes, she told me this morning.”

  “That means you must take your medication yourself.’

  “I will,” he said.

  They each heard the ring of the telephone.

  “I’d better get that,” she said. “I think it’s my sister.”

  “Do you have to?” he said in mild protest, but she was already hurrying away. He waited near the roses. It was his favorite time of day, the sun firing low rays through the distant trees and creating immense patterns of light and shade. Mrs. Mennick, who had changed into a flowered dress and put on makeup, looked
out at him through a window and smiled. Her crimson mouth was so big and bright that it appeared a painter had slapped her face with a brushful of madder. She vanished, but a few minutes later she returned and scratched on the screen for his attention.

  “You’d better come in, Mr. Baker.”

  He entered through the front door. Louise was standing near the telephone in the study, her face a pale oval inside the neat fall of black hair. Her dark eyes gradually focused on him. “Come here, Ben.”

  He moved forward uneasily, as if on the edge of an experience sure to bear pain. She extended a hand.

  “Take it, Ben. Squeeze it.”

  Her hand was dry and cool, almost cold. His hand was bigger, but her squeeze was greater. He said, “What’s the matter, Lou?”

  “My father died.”

  • • •

  Henry Witlo spend the day familiarizing himself with the house. He inspected each room with an eye for detail and a thought for secrets, probing closets and dipping his hands into drawers. At the desk in the den he scanned letters, postcards, private papers, passbooks. In the attic, where he had to crouch, he pawed through a chocolate box of sepia snapshots of people in old-fashioned dress. In the basement he flipped through stacks of Life magazine dating back to the Truman years and carried one up to read on the toilet. The bathroom smelled of talcs and soaps. All the towels were pink. He showered with gusto, crushing shampoo into his hair, slapping soap into his underarms and open legs, and using a brush on his back with particular vigor. He had a choice of two toothbrushes and used the green one. He whipped his hair back with a comb much cleaner than the one carried in his back pocket and admired himself in the mirror, his face full of light as if from some radiant purpose not yet fully revealed but becoming clearer by the moment.

  He had made himself a big breakfast, had served himself an even bigger lunch, and now was thinking of supper. He walked softly through the dead silence and leaned into the haze of the bedroom, where the shades were three-quarters drawn and the bed was open and hot-looking, the pillows smashed. The fitted sheet, along with the mattress cover, had sprung loose from a top corner.

  He said, “I’m going to make something to eat. You want something?”

  No sound came from Emma Goss, who sat squeezed and immobile in a small rocker, as if time no longer moved for her. She was wrapped in a robe she had slunk into hours ago, the collar raised around her throat, the sash tied tight, every button buttoned. Her white feet seemed painted onto the floor.

  “You oughta start talking to me,” he said. “Makes it easier. And you should call me Henry. That makes it friendly.”

  Her eyes were on him, but not in a way that registered or even blinked, as if everything inside her head had clenched. Only the low catchy sound of her breathing gave a sign that she was functioning.

  “You can’t just sit there,” he said. “Legs’ll go, then everything else. You’re not a spring chicken, Mrs. Goss.”

  All at once her face strained to speak, but nothing came. Her mouth stayed a dry line. He angled closer, and she flinched.

  “Good,” he said. “Shows you’re alive. Maybe you’re worried about your kitchen. You don’t have to. I clean up after myself. I got good habits.”

  Her chalk face colored, and her lips quivered. The words puffed out. “May I use the bathroom?”

  “Sure you can. I don’t know how you held it so long.” His smile was broad. “You got a nice bathroom. Blue water in the toilet, I like that. What color’s your toothbrush?”

  “Pink,” she said in a soft burst.

  “Good. I used the other one,” he said, and watched her grip the arms of the rocker and rise with a terrible effort that seemed to expend all her strength. Clutching the front of her robe, she gazed wildly about, as if she no longer knew where the bathroom was, and then murmured something he failed to catch. “What’s that, Mrs. Goss?”

  Her color deepened. “Can I shut the door?”

  “Sure, you can even lock it. Have all the privacy you want. And while you’re in there, do something to your hair.”

  She took a tentative step and then another, and he knew she was not going to make it. He reached out to help but drew back when she flinched again. Her third step was fatal. She softened, spread, and sagged in his arms. She was ice-cold beneath the robe.

  In her ear he whispered, “You need me, Mrs. Goss. You just don’t know it yet.”

  SIX

  DAISY SHEA, feeling punk, locked up his little office and went home to an empty house in the middle of the day. In the bedroom he dropped his clothes where he stood and climbed into his unmade marriage bed, six of his seven children conceived there. The seeding of his first child had taken place on a blanket in a stretch of woods in Methuen that was now the site of a giant shopping mall. Pictures of all his children in identical frames stared at him from the walls.

  He slept restlessly and dreamed that the medical examiner pronounced him dead but later, for a consideration, changed his mind. He dreamed that hospital attendants forced him out of bed and made him stand naked as if for inspection. Nurses scowled, visitors showed shock, and children, not his, tittered.

  In another dream his wife seemed to be disseminating herself to a multitude of men, none of whom could get enough of her; so they stayed, waiting for more, arguing over rights once solely his.

  In his final dream he was not dead but undergoing endless repairs.

  He woke to the sound of voices in the kitchen. His younger children were home from school and arguing over their chores, with the youngest protesting the loudest. And his wife was home from work. He saw first the food stains on her white uniform and then her handsome bone of a face peering down at him as if from a great height. Concern tinctured her voice. “You OK?”

  “Yes,” he said, stirring under the covers. “I was a little tired, that’s all.”

  “Louise Leone’s father died,” she said. “It’s in the paper.”

  He pushed aside the covers and sat up, leaving the shape of his head stamped in sweat on the pillow. His bare upper body looked soft and gelatinous. “That means she’ll be coming to Lawrence.”

  “Does that excite you?”

  “Sure. She’s a big shot now.”

  Edith stepped back to the door and closed it against the growing noise of the children. Daisy swung his legs out of the covers and sat on the bed’s edge in his underpants. Memories tainted by the years thrashed through his mind.

  “The old man never liked me,” he said. “He had a thing against the Irish.”

  “As I remember, he didn’t like any of Lou’s friends, not even Barney.”

  He scratched an elbow. “When’s the wake?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “How old was he?”

  “In his seventies,” she said.

  “I can’t be sad. He lived his life.”

  The room was stuffy. She raised a window, admitting the fat aroma of lilac, the bloom in its final burst of fragrance. The bush was the only color on the block. She stooped down, swept up his suit jacket, and hung it in the closet.

  He said, “Do you have a boyfriend, Edith?”

  She turned her head from the smell of mothballs. “When would I have time?”

  “I wouldn’t blame you.”

  “Yes, you would,” she said, and tossed his trousers beside him on the bed as he scratched his other elbow.

  “You know, Edie, there’re things from a long time ago I never confessed. I wonder if it still matters.”

  “What things?”

  “In law school, to make a few bucks, I peddled filthy funny books. Jane jerking off Tarzan, Blondie blowing Mr. Dithers, Batman abusing Robin. A couple of professors were my best customers.”

  She dropped his shirt beside him. “No, I don’t think it matters now.” She picked up his well-worn loafers and glanced at the heels. “You should take these to the cobbler soon.”

  “I cheated on you a few times, but I confessed that to Father Flaherty.”

/>   “That makes it all right then,” she said out of an arid face, and deposited the loafers near his feet.

  “The women didn’t mean anything to me. That’s the God’s honest truth.”

  “I don’t want to hear, Daisy. I want you to spare me.”

  “You don’t care.”

  “As you said, it was a long time ago.”

  He rose with his face still squeezed from a sleep that should have been longer and more peaceful. Glimpsing himself in the dresser mirror, he raced a hand through his white hair. “Remember when it was red, Edie?” Suddenly he felt like a slug and snatched up his shirt. Then he shivered, and his eyes glazed over as if an ancestral stirring were giving him a sense of chill Irish air with the smell of peat plugged into it. Quickly he worked his arms into his shirt and fumbled with the buttons. When she gripped his arm to steady him, he smiled into her face. “I was a handsome guy back then, no wonder women went for me.”

  “You’re not going to spare me, are you?”

  “And I was a spiffy dresser. Got my suits from Manny the tailor, God rest his soul.”

  “You got one suit from him, and you never paid him.”

  “Louise always had an eye for me,” he went on with careless confidence, his shirttails dangling. “You must’ve guessed that.”

  “You’re dreaming, Daisy. She never gave you a second look.”

  “That’s how much you know,” he said with a wink. “Why do you think she went to bat for me the time I had the big trouble?”

  “Because I asked her to.”

  He kept his smile as if unable to unglue it and squinted at her as if a harsh light had been thrown into his eyes. “You don’t change, Edie. Doesn’t matter whether I’m in the pink or sick as a dog, you treat me the same.”

  “It’s the only way I know,” she said. His shirt was buttoned wrong, and with quick rough fingers she fixed it and straightened the collar around the ruined flesh of his neck. The hair inside his ears looked like cigar ash, and for a moment it seemed she might try to blow it out. Instead she brought a hand to his face as if she could make it smooth and young again.