The Beggar's Pawn

by John L'Heureux

  Reginald said nothing. He sat back and let her wash his palms and smear them with Neosporin and wrap them in gauze. She finished and sat back on her heels. “There,” she said, and Reginald sighed and shut his eyes, content, as if he might stay like this for the rest of the day.

  She remained kneeling before him, startled into silence by her growing realization that he was on some kind of drug. But it was probably just grass. It was probably just a painkiller. She stood up and waited for him to say something. He sat there with his eyes closed.

  “If you’re all right,” she said, “I could drive you home.”

  He said nothing but only opened his eyes.

  “You shouldn’t be walking after that upset.”

  He smiled as Dickens placed a paw upon his knee.

  “You’re sure you’re all right? Do you think I should take you to the emergency room?”

  “It’s so peaceful here,” Reginald said.

  She sat beside him on the couch. Dickens curled up at their feet.

  Maggie stood up finally and took the bowl of water out to the kitchen. He was all right, he had only been shaken up, but now he seemed to want to stay here and rest. She was strangely uncomfortable with this, and yet surely she owed him more than a couple of bandages. He had saved her dog’s life.

  “We’ll have a coffee,” she said, “and then I’ll drive you home.”

  They had coffee and Reginald got himself together and stood for a moment looking beyond the grand piano out into the back garden. “I didn’t know you had a pool,” he said.

  “It’s only a little thing,” she said. “Mostly decorative, but David likes to do mini-laps after he’s done his work for the day.”

  “It must be nice,” Reginald said. He continued to stand looking out. “You have everything.”

  Maggie felt guilty suddenly—she felt accused—and then, just as suddenly, she felt a rush of gratitude for his throwing himself at the UPS truck and saving Dickens. They did indeed have everything and he very likely had nothing.

  “If there is ever anything we can do to thank you,” she said, “please . . .” And, almost before she could finish the sentence, he said, “Well, there is something.” He cleared his throat and apologized and then started to speak again and almost at once he said, “No, I can’t ask, really, I shouldn’t.” But finally he got it out.

  “Could you loan me two hundred dollars?”

  It was an emergency, he explained, it was one of those things that just happens, and he could tell her the whole story if she wanted him to, but it was embarrassing, it was humiliating to have to ask for money. It was a loan only, he would pay her back within a week, maybe sooner, but he would repay it, he promised.

  “Absolutely,” Maggie said. “Absolutely,” and she got her checkbook.

  Reginald was still asking and promising and apologizing by the time Maggie finished writing the check. He folded it in half and slipped it into his breast pocket.

  He was eager to go now and Maggie drove him home.

  She decided she would not mention the loan to David, though that same evening she told him at length and with a vivid sense of drama how Reginald had thrown himself in front of the UPS truck and saved Dickens’s life. She cried as she talked about it and David was near tears himself.

  “Reginald Parker,” he said. “Who would believe it?” And the more he thought about it, the more he felt moved to thank Reginald formally, appropriately. The next day he went to Whole Foods and put together a basket of champagne and red caviar and paté, several excellent cheeses, and an assortment of tinned meats. It was a picnic hamper for an extravagant afternoon at the beach, it was slightly crazy, and he had it delivered to Reginald with a note of thanks. It cost nearly three hundred dollars—but only think if they’d lost Dickens!—and David decided he would not mention it to Maggie.

  It was 2009 and the stock market was in the pits and the less you said about money the better.

  2.

  As it happened, Reginald Parker returned the two hundred dollars in just over a week. He returned it in cash—ten twenties—which Maggie found embarrassing, but Reginald didn’t seem to notice her embarrassment; in fact, he seemed to want to linger over the transaction.

  “I’m an honest creditor,” he said, “I pay my bills,” and he counted out his ten twenty-dollar bills.

  David was in his study reading Gissing’s The Odd Women and Maggie was grateful he was not witness to this.

  * * *

  —

  MAGGIE AND DAVID HOLLISS were sixty-five years old when they first met Reginald Parker in the year 2001 and for some time David had been talking about retirement. “Nobody wants an old teacher,” he would say. “Everybody talks about wisdom and experience and all that crap, but when it comes down to it, young people want to be taught by their own kind. They want somebody they can look up to, but only a little, somebody ten years older and ten times better looking.”

  “But you love teaching,” Maggie would say.

  “You’ve got to know when to quit,” he said again. And again.

  He still hadn’t quit some five years later when he turned seventy. It was easy just to go along teaching his two courses in fall and two in winter and to spend spring and summer researching and traveling and lazing about. The students seemed interested still, and he had a couple of PhD dissertations to direct, which made him feel legal, he said, and the money was good, so why not just continue on. He could go on researching the Gissing book forever—it would see him to his grave perhaps—and so what the hell.

  Then, when he turned seventy-one, the tax laws obliged him to start withdrawing money from his retirement plan. “I’m old,” he said to Maggie, “and we’ve got plenty of money. I should do the decent thing and retire.”

  She wasn’t sure how life would be with him hanging around the house, but she said, “Whatever you want,” and when he gave her that doubtful look of his, she said, “Just don’t start invading the kitchen.” And a little later she said, “You’ve earned the right to do whatever you want.”

  It was out of old habit that she liked to emphasize his earnings because at the start of their marriage she had been rich and he had felt guilty about it. Her money had bought their house and her money had made it possible for him to take an academic job that paid only half their yearly expenses. Maggie was a Sedgwick, admittedly from the poor branch, and when her parents died they left practically nothing. A doting great-aunt, however, had left Maggie a trust fund of a little under two million from which she was paid ten thousand a year until she was twenty-five, at which time the entire capital became hers: small by Sedgwick standards but a vast fortune in an academic community. David felt guilty buying the house with Maggie’s money—fifty thousand was a huge sum back then—but he found the guilt easier to live with as each year went by.

  They were healthy and happy in Northern California. The weather, always benign, seemed to encourage people to be active, and so with tennis and swimming and long daily walks they seemed immune—even at age seventy-one—to the absurdities of old age. No shaking hand, no halting speech, no blank stare at being suddenly lost. They suffered only the usual health surprises of young old age. Maggie had had a hysterectomy at forty and a cancer scare at sixty. David, with no physical problems to speak of, had a small stroke at sixty, an attention getter, and a milder one at sixty-three, a reminder. Consequently both of them were keen on staying fit and young, or youngish. Maggie retained her thin figure by eating only half of every meal, a practice she had observed since she was a teen. David, on the other hand, had begun to put on weight around his middle, though at six feet three he was able to carry the extra pounds. He had a mass of gray hair and broad shoulders and his eyes were wide, making him seem pleasantly surprised. In short, they looked like what they were: a couple suspended between middle and old age, happy, wealthy, content. And comfortably godless.

&
nbsp; “Religion makes him nervous,” Maggie said. Like all the Sedgwicks, she had been baptized in the Church of England, but the baptism hadn’t taken and she was perfectly happy with David’s gentlemanly atheism.

  “There’s been more blood spilled in the name of religion . . .” David began and the sentence might end anywhere, “. . . than over money . . . than over land . . . than over power . . .” whatever came to mind at that moment. He had a positive fear of religion. “All religions are dangerous,” he said. Churches and church services put him off completely. He had been an atheist because he had been raised that way, shielded from superstition by a devoted mother and an uninterested father and insulated against theology of any sort by a nicely secular education, first at Harvard, then at Yale. He had an acute moral sense nevertheless; he was politically liberal and he had a rigorous understanding of right and wrong. Long ago, in his first year of teaching, he had lost patience with a particularly difficult student in freshman comp—exasperated at her resistance to basic grammar, he told her she was not only uneducated, she was uneducable as well—and he remained apologetic about it for the next ten years. He paid his taxes to the last penny. He supported all the right causes and made generous contributions to a large number of clamoring charities. He believed in justice, fidelity, and financial rectitude. He considered himself a genial atheist. Nothing militant about him. It was just religion that made him nervous. That’s how he was. Dickens, on the other hand, made him calm.

  Dickens was like one of her children, Maggie said, except without all the problems. Dickens chased squirrels, and once he got sprayed by a skunk and they’d had to wash him down with tomato juice, but he was an excellent dog, amiable and devoted, and who could help but love him? Their kids had been a different matter. All three of them had been problem children, smart and hyperactive and attractive, but a cause of worry from the start.

  Sedge, the oldest and much married son, had seemed to them in his teen years as possibly gay. He was crazy for clothes and he spent too much time on his hair, a mass of black curls, but they could live with that if only he would stop waving his hands about when he talked. They resigned themselves but continued to hope.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” they asked him when he was twelve since they figured it was about time.

  “I’m not interested in girls,” he said. “I’m interested in science.”

  “He’s gay,” David said. “Well, so long as he’s happy.”

  When he was fifteen, Sedge began hanging out with a bunch of rich-kid thugs who specialized in grass and liked to terrorize the school sissies.

  “This is altogether too much,” David said, but presumed it meant that Sedge was either going straight or had chosen to compensate by persecuting his own kind. But the boy remained interested primarily in science and he continued to wave his hands about when he talked.

  Then, in his senior year, Sedge got a girl pregnant. She was a nice girl whose parents were sensible university people, friends of the Hollisses, and so a quiet abortion was arranged. Sedge and the girl remained friends, though he said he would never forgive their parents for forcing the abortion.

  He married the girl at the end of his freshman year in college. Divorce followed rapidly and this became the pattern for his next three marriages. He had turned out handsome and sexy and—never mind the fluttering hands and the mass of black curls—people were always falling in love with him. He would marry an unsuspecting girl, buy a house—he could always depend on the parents for help in a pinch—and settle down forever with his new bride. Within the next year or two Sedge and his wife would decide it had all been a well-intentioned, glittering mistake, though of course they would remain good friends. Divorce. Division of the spoils. Alimony for a specified time. Never any children so there was no need for child support. Fortunately his job as a research scientist for a Los Angeles pharmaceutical company paid him well, with fat bonuses each year, and his parents could be depended upon to dog-sit while he sorted out his life. This is how they came to have Dickens, and when Sedge saw how they doted on the dog, he didn’t have the heart to take him back.

  Years passed and Sedge continued to spend too much time on his hair and to wave his hands about when he talked. These habits on more than one occasion gave rise to brief misunderstandings of a sexual nature, usually at cocktail parties where they could be laughed off as a by-product of drink, but Sedge found these situations amusing and, in a way, flattering since he was getting well into middle age and he still hadn’t settled down to normal life. What he wanted was his parents’ marriage, a meeting of minds and hearts that excluded everybody else, even their children. That last thought surprised him with its coldness and its accuracy. They loved him, just as they loved his younger brother, Will, and his sister, Claire, but not as they loved each other and not as they loved Dickens. For a moment he felt jealous of the dog. And of Will.

  Will, in his teens, had become the perfect son. He had started out like the rest of them, adored and indulged and frequently in trouble, and when he was thirteen he had followed Sedge into his high-on-grass period. That didn’t last, however, because Will unexpectedly developed a superego that could not reconcile such mindless self-indulgence, as he announced, with the brevity of life and his own seriousness of purpose. There was nothing morally wrong with marijuana; it was just that you lost so much time being out of it and he was convinced that it permanently damaged a person’s basic mental acuity.

  “Look around you,” he said to Sedge. “Look at your friends. They’re all losers.”

  Sedge waved his hands in protest but, failing to find the right put-down, he said, “And you, I suppose, are the Perfect Son.”

  “Capital, old fruit,” Will said, intending to sound British. Will took his new conscience with him to Berkeley, after which he did graduate work in English literature at Essex in England. He married another graduate student—an English girl named Daphne—and, in a particularly hospitable moment, the university offered him a teaching job on the Modern Literature faculty. The couple bought a house with a little help from Maggie and David and immediately produced a child, a daughter, after which they had another daughter every other year until there were three in all. Will wrote his mother and father on the major holidays and phoned them once a month and sent comic greeting cards on their birthdays and their wedding anniversary. He rarely asked them for money, though they sent him whatever they gave the others and they rejoiced that at least one of their children led a loving, well-ordered life. Will’s wife collected antique porcelain dolls, each with its own name and wardrobe, but David and Maggie overlooked the dolls since Daphne was a good wife and mother and she was devoted to Will.

  It was Claire they worried about.

  Their youngest, Claire, was born while Maggie and David were on sabbatical in Italy and, enchanted by everything Italian, they had named her Chiara. But she was never a Chiara, not for a moment. She was Claire, plain, straightforward, definite. As a baby she was a speck of a thing and, though her two brothers were tall and thin, Claire grew up short and chunky. “I’m a block,” she said at age ten. “I’m the shortest girl in my class.”

  “But you’re lovely,” Maggie said. “You have beautiful eyes.”

  “And I’m fat,” Claire said. “You can’t deny it.”

  What could you do with a child like that?

  Early on her teachers protested and then learned to fear her frankness, for which she was praised at home. “You always know what Claire is thinking,” the teachers said, “and if you don’t, she’ll tell you.” Indeed her frankness was so often commented on that she came to regard it as a virtue, and cultivated it, and confused it with honesty and integrity. “Claire’s fierce integrity” was taken for granted by Maggie and David, who did nothing to tame it.

  Thus Claire grew up and went to Columbia and emerged with her fierce integrity focused on social issues, beginning with race relations and moving on to the
inequities of immigration law and the evils of preemptive war. Unable to find a satisfying job, she took up residence in a commune in Oregon and left it after little more than a year because of what she saw as the basic selfishness of the lifestyle. While she was there, however, she found a boyfriend and had a son by him—named Gaius for his father—and almost at once broke off the relationship. She left, but kept in touch. The little boy stayed in the commune with his father. In time—and with the financial help of the Hollisses—Gaius attended Princeton, where he majored in economics.

  After her time in the commune, she herself had gone on to a life of near poverty, first with a lesbian partner who had left the commune to become a theater director in Baltimore and then, if Claire had had her way, with the Little Sisters of the Poor in Oklahoma. She made a retreat at their convent and, when the eight days were over, she asked to be admitted as a novice.

  The Mother Superior was an old hand at delayed vocations.

  “Have you felt this calling for a long time now?”

  “I don’t have a calling. I don’t think I have a calling.”

  “But you care passionately about good and evil?”

  “I have no interest in good and evil. They’re abstractions and I’m a practical woman. I’m from California. I care about justice.”

  “Justice, of course. And charity? You care about charity.”

  “Where it’s deserved.”

  “Charity is loving-kindness. Charity is a gift of the Spirit of God. It exalts the giver. Like faith, it is a free gift.”

  “Gifts should be given to those who deserve them.”

  Mother realized she was on the wrong track.

  “Were you raised Catholic or are you a convert?”

  In this way Mother Superior discovered that Claire was not a Catholic at all, though she said that if accepted by the order she would be willing to turn Catholic. Mother Superior explained, with a severe show of patience, that Claire would have to turn Catholic first and then, after a probationary period of three years, she could apply to the order and they would—in good time—decide if she was ready for the postulancy.