Hearts (20 page)

The Piners and a few other guests had come to the chapel and were gone. Linda and her Uncle William were the only ones there. He was thin and hard-looking, like those beaten farmers in photographs from the Depression. His suit didn’t fit him and Linda guessed that it had been borrowed for the occasion. “Thanks for coming, Uncle William,” she said, wondering if he had ever been called Bill, or Will, or Billy when he was a child. She had never had a nickname, either, and it occurred to her that it was a kind of deprivation.

“Alma looks real nice,” he said, cracking his knuckles in the stillness of the room.

The undertaker had done the best job possible, with makeup and something stuffed into the cheeks to disguise the distortion the strokes had left. Still, there was a stubborn pull to one side of her mother’s face, as if she had a splitting headache. It would not allow Linda to think in terms of eternal peace.

And her mother was wearing a blue dress. When the undertaker’s office had called, asking for suitable clothing for the viewing, Linda had hesitated, thinking only her mother’s uniforms were truly suitable. She pictured her in the quilted coffin that way, the black satchel against her feet, her shoes polished to a dazzling contrast
of whiteness. Then Linda had brought them the blue dress, and the dark, moderate-heeled pumps her mother would have taken off before lying down anywhere.

Uncle William asked if his sister had had a good death. Linda still wasn’t sure what that expression meant. Her mother had been in the hospital, recently returned from a coma, and was propped in bed, being given oral nourishment for the first time in weeks. The nurse spooned food in and it quickly dribbled out again. Linda looked questioningly at the nurse, who closed her eyes and shook her head, as if she were delivering a verdict. “Daughter’s come to visit, Mother,” she said. “Laura’s here.”

“Linda,” Linda said, but the nurse was noisily gathering dishes and leaving.

Linda walked around the room, touching things, looking everywhere but at that odd and anguished face. She said, “It’s still raining outside.” The doctor had assured her that her mother could hear even if she was unable to respond. And there was another listener, Linda remembered, a neighboring patient behind her drawn curtain. Mrs. Palchik, the woman’s name was. She was in and out of the hospital all the time because her lungs kept filling up with water. She often looked even worse than Linda’s mother, but when Linda asked how she was feeling, she invariably answered, “Fine, honey, just fine,” in a thin and watery voice. Her side of the room was always colorful with flowers and greeting cards, was usually busy with loud and cheerful guests insisting on life. The day before, Mrs. Palchik had offered Linda’s mother a wilting bunch of roses.

Linda stood at the drawn curtain, her hand foolishly
raised, as if she planned to knock. “Hello?” she called in through the fabric. There was no answer, so she tiptoed around and looked in. The bed was empty, stripped. And everything else—flowers, cards—was gone.

“Mrs. Palchik’s gone home again, I see,” Linda said. “Maybe you will soon, too.”

She thought her mother made a sound, some kind of reply. Linda looked up, hopeful, and noticed that the nurse had pulled back the sparse dry hair with a pink ribbon. A speck of food was still clinging to the corner of her mother’s mouth. Linda took a Kleenex from the table and rubbed gently at the place until it was clean. “Did you say something, Ma?” she asked.
Would
you say something?

The first major stroke had made it difficult to name familiar objects. Wanting a mirror, her mother had drawled, “White flash,” and then, not understood, had grown angry. “Ohhh, face box!” she cried. Linda ran around the room bringing the wrong things: comb, magazines, handkerchief, water, becoming as frantic as her mother, who was losing the names of the things in the world.

The second stroke had impaired her speech even further, and had paralyzed the entire right side of her body. Linda was relieved when she understood anything her mother said in that thick garble. She liked to imagine it was a foreign language in which her mother was fluent and Linda had only a few words.

That last day, no one kicked her out at the end of visiting hours. After the nurse lowered her mother’s bed for sleep, Linda pulled up a chair and took her mother’s hand. It was inanimate, unresponsive, and she put it back gently, hoping its new placement was not uncomfortable.
The hand looked rejected and helpless, so she picked it up once again. It was winter and by late afternoon the room had darkened. The rain was steady against the window. It was stuffy in there, a sealed place with too much heat rising from the radiator. The closeness made Linda groggy.

She woke to a definite sound, someone gargling. Mr. Botts? Her father? Was it a school day?

“Ma?” she said, coming to in instant recognition and terror.

“Yes,” Linda told her Uncle William. “I guess you could say it was a good death.”

After the funeral she accompanied him to the airport. He was going back to Florida, used to doing his drifting in a more compatible climate. Linda had paid for his air fare. On the way to the boarding gate, she bought a red carnation from an impeccably dressed teenaged Moonie, for two dollars. “Could you make it three?” he asked. “Come on, you can help us more if you want to. Can you make it two seventy-five?” He peered inside her purse. “You’ve got some loose change in there. Make it two and a quarter.” Linda edged away and tucked the carnation into her uncle’s lapel.

Is it a good death if someone else is watching? The worst thoughts always sneaked around at bedtime. Robin had been gone for ages. Linda was about to get up and see what had happened to her when she heard the bedroom door open.

“Linda?” The name was whispered, urgent.

She sat up and whispered back. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. There’s this old lady down the hall. She wants to tell my fortune.”

“What?”

“She’s a
palm
reader. She told me to come to her room when I was finished with my bath.”

“Did you go?”

“I wanted to ask you.”

“Well, she’ll probably expect to be paid for it, Robin. And you don’t believe in that kind of thing, do you?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“Just think about it for a minute. What could those lines in your hand, that you were probably born with, have to do with some drunk that comes down the street one day and runs you over?” After she said it, she knew it wasn’t the best example.

Robin was thoughtful. “Maybe it could have to do with the lines in
his
hand,” she said.

“I guess you want to try it out, don’t you?”

Robin shrugged.

“Do you want me to go with you?” Linda asked.

“Yeah.”

Linda reached for her robe. “I’ll be ready in a minute,” she said.

The woman
was
old, and as small as a child. She was perched on the edge of a wicker chair and her feet did not quite touch the floor. She welcomed them both in a high, piping voice and said that her name was Effie Borden.

Linda looked around. The room seemed ordinary, as ordinary as the name, and not like the gypsy’s den she had anticipated. No beaded curtains. No enormous poster of a sectioned palm, like the ones she used to see in downtown Newark, where the readers were always called Madame Esmeralda, or something like that. The curtains here were white and simple. A Big Ben alarm clock ticked loudly on the nightstand, next to a glass of
water and a vial of blue capsules. There was a crowd of framed photographs on the bureau top. Effie Borden was probably a permanent guest.

After the introductions were over, Linda confessed that they were really quite closely budgeted and couldn’t afford a reading for Robin, as much as they would dearly love to have one.

Effie waved her little hand. It would be a gift, she said. She didn’t get that many opportunities to practice her science on people who still believed there
was
a future. She invited Robin and Linda to sit on the edge of her bed and she moved the wicker chair around to face them. “Linda,” she said, “I said the word ‘science’ just now, and I experienced your unspoken skepticism.” Before Linda could protest, she went on. “Chiromancy and chirognomy are very ancient practices. They were not unknown to the early Chinese. Assyrians and Hebrews, the Greeks and the Romans paid them great respect.”

Linda cocked her head and nodded, hoping she looked pleasant and receptive.

Then Effie Borden asked to see Robin’s left hand. It curled in her own, hiding its ragged, close-bitten nails. Effie smoothed it open. “You’re right-handed, aren’t you?” she asked.

Robin nodded.

“This is the one you started with,” Effie said. “And this is the one you’ve developed. Just look at the difference between them.”

Linda stared into Robin’s pink palms. It was true; they weren’t identical. The lines
were
different. But what did that mean?

“So,” Effie Borden continued, “don’t let anybody
tell you that you can’t alter your own fate. You have already begun to do so.”

Robin flashed a pleased, sly look at Linda, who made an effort to smile back.

“Now regard the thumb,” Effie said. “The single digit that keeps man supreme among beasts in the universe. Notice the well-developed phalange. That indicates the presence of powerful will and determination.”

“Oh, yes,” Linda murmured.

Effie Borden went on, explaining the little padded mounts that were named for the planets. She called them out—“Jupiter! Venus! Mars!”—as if this were a planetarium and she were the guide. She traced the four great lines of Life, Head, Heart, and Fortune. She said that longevity was clearly indicated in Robin’s hand. “Look at that line!” she commanded. “You’ll live to be a hundred and twenty!”

Linda looked down at her own hand that was resting opened on her knee. The lifeline ended abruptly in the middle of the palm. Quickly, she closed her fingers over it.

“There is a predisposition for adventure,” Effie was saying. “Travel, perhaps? In the recent past, and in the near future?”

Again, Robin glanced at Linda.

Linda wondered if the Maverick with its Jersey plates was visible from Effie’s windows. It didn’t really matter, though. The old woman was telling Robin the usual harmless things, the ones people most wanted to hear, about good health and love, about long voyages. She mentioned a light-haired man and a dark one. Then she said, “There’s been a death. Yes?”

“Yes,” Robin answered, almost inaudibly.

“And long ago, a mystery, a disappearance! You are still concerned with its solution …” She hesitated. “There is a possibility of violence here. I see a shining weapon. Turmoil. Confusion. But …” And now she paused dramatically. “But it will all end well.”

Linda was reminded of the Nancy Drew books she’d read and loved when she was Robin’s age. Someone was always talking about mysterious disappearances, about impending danger. And of course it always ended well. Linda was getting sleepy at last, and had difficulty suppressing a yawn.

Robin looked more awake than ever, truly animated. She leaned forward and breathed raspily through her mouth.

“I see water in your future, vast and blue. I see mountains.”

That could be almost anywhere, except Kansas maybe, Linda thought. But she couldn’t help being moved by Robin’s intensity. She was only a little kid, really. Linda tended to lose sight of that. And thank goodness, Effie was winding up. There was the usual again: health, friendship, romance, family happiness, finis.

Effie Borden went to the nightstand. She took one of the capsules with some water and threw back her head to swallow it, like a bird.

Robin thanked her. Linda stood up and added her thanks, not without sincerity. It had certainly been a distraction, a nice little evening’s entertainment. And the tension that had been strung between Robin and herself all day was eased.

Back in their own room, Linda considered what would be an appropriate response to the whole business, a kind of summing up, to give Robin the right perspective. The girl seemed to have taken it all very seriously. It wouldn’t be fair to just smash that innocent faith. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be very responsible of Linda to encourage it. “That was fun, wasn’t it?” she said, turning off the light.

“Some of the things she said were true,” Robin answered from her bed.

“Well,” Linda said. “You know that stuff could be true about almost everybody.”

“No, it couldn’t,” Robin said.

Linda didn’t want to quarrel. She wanted to sleep, was almost there. But a sudden flow of logic came into her head and she needed to share it. “About the death, for instance,” she said. “That could be about me, too, couldn’t it? And the travel?”

Robin was silent.

“You sleeping?” Linda asked.

In response, Robin turned sharply in her bed, making it creak.

“And the dark man and the light man,” Linda said. “They always say that. I mean, what other kinds are there?” She decided to end the matter there. She had made her point and there was no sense in arguing. Besides, all this chatter was waking her up.

Robin said, “That’s dumb, and so are you. You don’t know
anything
.”

Linda sat up. “Now you’re being rude, Robin. And I wish you wouldn’t whine like that. You’ve been doing it all day.”

“I have
not
.”

“There! You just did it again.”

“I
didn’t
.”

“Robin, you did. You do quite a lot of it, and it is very nerve-racking. You are always whining and arguing.”

“It’s better than what you do,” Robin muttered.

“Pardon?”

“Pardon?” Robin mimicked.

“Did I hear correctly?” Linda said.

“Did I hear correctly?” Her tone, her inflection were remarkably like Linda’s.

“Stop that!” Linda demanded, swinging her legs over the side of the bed.

“Stop that!” Robin echoed.

“What are you doing!”

“I’m showing you how
you
sound. Always talking and talking at me, like a … like a machine!”

“Like a what?”

“Like a machine,” Robin said, but her defiance was softening.