Honeydew: Stories (8 page)

Though Bonnie’s days were packed with obligations, she nonetheless devoted an hour every Wednesday to minding her man. After work she took the underground as always from the hospital to the central metro station and then, instead of trolleying to the section of Godolphin where the Flaxbaums lived—firm wooden three-deckers, mostly firm families within—she trolleyed to Godolphin’s commercial area, Jefferson Corner. Dactyl, where Myron worked Wednesdays and Saturday afternoons, was on the historically registered block that included Forget Me Not, an antiques shop; Roberta’s Linens; Dunton’s Tobacco; and the Local, a restaurant. This stretch of stores stood behind a brick colonnade. Each store had inner doors opening to its neighbors. Historians guessed that the whole arrangement had been part of the underground railway. The door between Forget Me Not and Dactyl had a square glass window. At three o’clock, Bonnie, wearing a bowler she kept at Forget Me Not and rimless glasses with no refraction, took possession of the window after first exchanging nods with Renata, Forget Me Not’s proprietor. In her long years of storekeeping, Renata had seen far more peculiar things than a wife keeping an eye on a blameless husband.

Bonnie’s habit had begun on a July Saturday. Coming out of the bookstore across the street, her arms full, she had glimpsed Myron inside Dactyl. She swiftly crossed the street and took a spy’s position behind one of the columns and peeked out. She could see him better now. He was standing with his hands behind his back. His chin was slightly lowered as if he were looking down, but his glasses pinching the tip of his nose indicated that his eyes were raised in order to see over them. She watched for a while. And then, bending the rules of physics and physiology, she entered him. She burrowed between his ribs; she spread her substantial self within his smaller periphery. The scraps and scrolls of his knowledge occupied their now-shared frontal cortex. His lively interest employed four optic nerves. His disappointments made four shoulders slump. She knew his shame at having to sell footwear in order to increase the family’s comfort, and she knew the secondary shame that so respectable an extra job should cause that first shame. And so whenever she watched him on Wednesdays—watched only; she couldn’t occupy him after that first exalted melding—she was able to feel again what was felt by this father brother husband nephew teacher protector salesman patron of a botanical curiosity lover of Ovid…

So the practical, competent woman, every surgeon’s favorite nurse, calmness itself behind her mask and gown, ready always with the instrument needed, her pity always contained, this paragon of unflappability surrendered to her own soft interior every Wednesday and peeped at her husband from the window of Forget Me Not, saw pride and disappointment and shame and resignation, saw him kneeling like a knight—not like a servant, Myron!—in front of some woman shopping for pumps exactly the color of a certain Bordeaux, exactly the height of a certain stair rise, no, no, no, higher, lower, redder, less red, did I say I wanted a bow, a buckle, a golden chameleon climbing up my instep, amphibians give me the creeps…

“Reptiles,” corrected Flax.

The woman bought the shoes.

“Can you read their lips?” Renata inquired.

“Not exactly,” Bonnie said. “I supply.”

“That’s the how of communication, isn’t it.”

“Yes.” It was the how of family too, but she didn’t say that to the kindly spinster. All commensals supplied each other in one way or another—commensals, from
com mensa,
eating together. She loved mealtimes, preparing the dinner with help from everybody, using ingredients bought with the money she and Myron supplied. Dinner-table conversations were full of information, not always accurate, and full of earnest misquotations; the boys’ manners if not perfect were adequate, and the dining-room mirror obediently reflected them all, her own fat self and Myron’s balding self and Sean’s and Leo’s loved faces, and the back of Felix’s loved head, although in his darting way he showed one profile and then the other. “Salt, please,” he would say to his father. (Someday she must stop putting salt on the table.) Myron passed the salt; Myron, the fellow she had stumbled upon, literally, twenty years ago.

He’d been slumped in a chair in the surgical waiting room while his poor sick father died under the knife, it couldn’t be helped, and returning from the sad conclusion of the operation, she had tripped over his legs sticking out into the room. A small woman slept in the next chair—his sister, it turned out. It was three in the morning.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she’d said to his feet.

His eyes flew open. His mouth flew open. He wanted to ask her. It was not up to her to tell him. But she broke protocol with a gesture: she put her hand on his shoulder, and then fled. The woman beside him stirred.

Later he sought her out to thank her for the care she had given. “Papa had a good life,” wearily.

“And an unterrible end,” she said, breaking protocol again.

He’d called her a month later and they were married a few months after that.

And now there were five Flaxbaums, moving every night within a silvered oblong, a group portrait, including a corner of the couch in the next room. This portrait would disappear when the last of them underwent the physiological necessity of individual extinction, when the last memory of the last of them was gone. Then these two generations of Flaxbaums would fade from history, taking with them all their supplying and relying and self-denial and dissatisfaction and gratitude. Life and death? They were incidental, in her opinion, though of course she deplored suffering. But what counted was how you behaved while death let you live, and how you met death when life released you. That was the long and short of it. Her honorable spouse could instruct those overeducated Brits, all 850 of them, just by his own example.

Very late Thursday night (Friday at four in the morning, to be exact), in the kitchen, Flax wearing pajamas encountered Sean wearing underwear. This was not an unusual occurrence.

“Which exam tomorrow?” Flax inquired, though he knew.

“Evolution. The origin of life will be inquired about. I’ll respond that life was an accident, arising from the unexpected concentration of organic molecules in hydrothermal vents four million years ago. Then I’ll expand on that.”

He would get an A, Flax knew. He always got As. They sat down opposite each other, Flax sipping warmed milk, Sean ignoring a glass of some red stuff. Flax said, “Yes, life began like that. We were all there already—those molecules have drifted down through the millennia and become part of us. And the vents in fact are still in the ocean, and the giant tube worms that live near them.”

“Will you mention that in your…London speech?”

“Maybe. Do you want to become a physicist?”

“I…No. I hope to become a poet.”

“I thought so. And write epics?”

“No, sorry. I want to write compressed lyrics. ‘Walk on air against your better judgment.’”

“‘The beauty of innuendos,’” supplied Flax. “Felix will get baptized and become a priest,” he predicted.

“‘Guilt, justice, the desire to be good.’ Our Felix.”

Flax cleared his throat. “Poets eat, I’m told.”

“Physics will be my day job.” Sean grinned, softening the grandiosity.

“Medio tutissimus ibis,”
the father said.

“‘You will be safest in the middle,’” the son translated—remembered, really; all the boys knew Ovid. “Yes, I will.”

His very dark eyes were inherited from Flax’s own father, he who had arrested on the operating table and dispatched Bonnie to Flax. The boy’s irises were almost indistinguishable from the pupils. Dark, dark brown, the distilled mixture of every shade in the world. If determination had a color…

“My son, I remember when our family was only you and your mother and I, Jack was still making a living somewhere. I remember when this refrigerator was hung with your nursery drawings. I remember when you put your child’s hand so gently against Leo’s infant cheek, silk touching silk, I remember so much, I would keep you here until morning telling you, beloved boy, but now I must go to bed.” And he stretched his own hand across the table and with its hairy back stroked the cheek of his firstborn. “What on earth is that stuff you’re not drinking?”

“Mouthwash. It’s the last thing I take the night before an exam.”

“Don’t swallow, it’ll poison you.”

“I always spit.” Sean stood up, took a swig, swished, and then, holding the liquid in his mouth, walked through the dining room into the living room and, one hand on Jack, awarded Plant a pinkish stream. The creature as usual stretched its stem toward him.

On Friday evenings the Flaxbaums attended the bar and grill down the street, and idly watched its television, and talked of this and that. That Friday Flax wore his beret and Bonnie introduced her bowler. Aunt Jan Flaxbaum met them there. She was Flax’s diminutive sister, a busy dentist with crooked teeth.

“I googled King’s College on the Strand today,” Flax told his family. “I thought I’d ask for a more modest topic and more time to prepare it. On the site was a notice surrounded by a rectangle. ‘It has come to our attention that persons are sending out invitations in our name. Unless the invitation has kc.uk at the end of its address, it is fraudulent.’ There was in fact a banner of letters after the e-mail address of last Monday’s invitation, but not the ones mentioned.”

“There were some numbers too,” Leo remembered.

“There was no
u,
” Sean said.

“No
c,
” Felix said sadly. “It disappeared, maybe.” His treasured beetle was crumbling at last, would soon be invisible.

“No
k,
” Flax said.

“Fuck King’s College,” Bonnie remarked, or so her three sons thought they heard. “Please, what are you all talking about?” Jan said.

Leo told her, while Bonnie imagined Myron enduring the collapse of a fancy he had perhaps only half believed. At some point he’d probably caught the aroma of scam that the rest of the family had sniffed—erroneously, they’d hoped—from the start. She saw him standing next to the computer, his head lowered, his glasses at the end of his nose, one stubby finger on
DELETE
.

“Well, they’d have been lucky if he’d accepted,” Jan said, ignoring various irrelevancies. “Is that your coat on the first hook, Flax? What’s that enormous jet-and-velvet thing—did you get an award?”

“It’s a button from Felix’s collection. Leo sewed it on.”

“It was once Great-Aunt Hannah’s,” Jan recognized. “It decorated a mauve toque.”

“I remember!” Flax said. “She had a shelf of fancy hats.” And the conversation drifted away from Unanticipated Seminars and the Mystery of Life and Death and entered the comfortable area of family history.

That Saturday morning, shapeless in her flannel robe, Bonnie tiptoed into the living room, not bothering to close the bedroom door. She took a brown bottle from her pocket. It held the extract of the
P. vulgaris
root, a variety of primrose. This liquid was the Czech preparation
solutan
—a nostrum against bronchial asthma and bronchitis. She poured some
solutan
into Plant, practicing a version of homeopathy. “Take some of your own medicine.” Her cousin in Prague supplied the stuff to Reilly, the chemist, his shop not far from the Zizkov Tower. The Irish are as disseminated as the Jews; Flax had noted this. Concealed behind a half-closed door he had frequently watched Bonnie dose Plant. This morning he was watching from bed. “I love you,” he whispered to his wife, who couldn’t hear this unoriginal unbeatable declaration. Of necessity he whispered it also to
P. vulgaris flaxbaum,
who might be developing a rudimentary tympanum within that coiled leaf, who knew, Linnaeus and Darwin and Dawkins hadn’t figured out everything; and Plant, like the rest of the family, was entitled to its secrets. He often wondered what unanticipated being Plant was destined to become. But he wondered even more frequently what kept the organism going—cilantro, mouthwash, slain numerals, coffee, a Mitteleuropean nutraceutical, the last ashes from Uncle Jack’s cigar? A mystery, isn’t it, Blessed Harry.

T
he statue—hollow, bronze, about three feet in height and about thirty pounds in weight—wasn’t the sort of thing Rennie usually bought. And for an excellent reason: it wasn’t the sort of thing she was able to sell. In the antiques business you couldn’t just follow your whim; you’d go broke in a month. At Forget Me Not, Rennie’s shop, she dealt in French clocks, and English silver, and pottery made a century earlier in a Boston settlement house—a set of those plain plates now fetched more money than the immigrant potters had made in a year. Forget Me Not was known for its Regency teapots and Victorian jewelry and hat pins from the 1940s, bought these days by collectors or—who knew?—murderers.

Rennie herself was known for discretion and restraint. She allowed certain customers to use the telephone to get in touch with a detective or a divorce lawyer—cell phone calls can be traced, the customers nervously confided; may I…? Old ladies came in with valuable saltcellars; circumstances had forced them to part with the family silver. Men bought pendants for women not their wives. Elegant matrons wept over sons in jail. Rennie kept such facts in her head like diplomatic secrets. And this caution had led, through the years, to a general prudence: she did not tell any customer anything whatsoever about any other customer. It was one of her two cardinal rules.

The other rule also involved keeping her mouth shut: she refused to give advice. “Advice is the province of psychiatrists and hairdressers,” she said. “Me, I’m just a rag-and-bone woman.”

The statue belonged in a chamber of oddities. Rotund, almost naked, male—at least, fig leaves hinted that the figure was male—with a little jacket over his shoulders and a top hat over his curls. He carried a spear in one hand and held a mirror aloft in the other. His face was round and merry.

Ophelia Vogelsang had staggered in three months ago with this fellow in her arms. “From Uncle Henry’s apartment,” she’d crowed, as if saying “from the Vanderbilt collection.” She set the statue on the floor and sank onto the striped love seat.

Ophelia was also small and round. She wore her abundant hair—mostly beige but streaked with rust and pewter and old gold—in the confused whorl she must have adopted during her free-spirited days in New York’s Greenwich Village. She had been in her twenties then, under the guidance, such as it was, of her uncle Henry. She was seventy-five now, and for the past half century she had lived here, in Godolphin, Massachusetts, with her dear husband, Lew. Lew had died six months ago.

The day Ophelia brought in the statue she was wearing her version of widow’s weeds—black sneakers, a full black skirt, a black blouse open at the throat, and long earrings woven out of tiny beads. She bent to touch the statue’s curls. “He’s called Puck,” she said, looking up at Rennie. “He guarded Uncle Henry’s back parlor fifty years ago. Though
parlor
isn’t the right word.” And she sat up straight and shook her earrings. “The place was all carpets and cushions and fringes. Oh my! Not a chair or a respectable piece of furniture in sight. A room to frolic in.” She poked her fingers into her unfashionable, immensely flattering coiffure, dislodging several gingery strands which then floated near her lined and lovely face. “Puck watched over my love and me.” She didn’t smile in a reminiscent fashion, as a less subtle person might have done. She didn’t smile at all. Nevertheless, information was transmitted.

“The statue stood on a pedestal in the archway,” she went on. “We could see it from our pillows on the floor.”

Rennie had been running Forget Me Not for twenty-five years; very little could shock her. But even twenty-five years ago, the news that Ophelia had once conducted a love affair on the floor of Uncle Henry’s back parlor would not have brought a lift to Rennie’s eyebrows. Yet something did surprise her—a hot fizz that accompanied the little confession. The space between the two women seemed to have been sprayed with attar of sentiment.

“Are you selling the statue?” asked Rennie, high on romance.

“I am.”

“Well, I’m buying,” Rennie heard herself say.

“I’m so glad,” Ophelia said. “I wanted to honor dear Lew’s last wishes, and one of them was get rid of that goddamn Puck.”

So apparently it was not husband Lew who had made love to Ophelia on the floor of Uncle Henry’s parlor. But it was certainly Lew—a small, twinkling academic—who had made her happy for half a century. And it was Lew who had collected modern paintings—oblongs of gray overlapping other oblongs of gray. “Puck did look out of place in our living room,” Ophelia admitted. “But Uncle Henry had left him to me—what could I do? Now Lew’s wishes trump Uncle Henry’s. And I drop in here so often—I’ll get to visit the boy. Until you sell him, of course.”

Rennie figured she would die before unloading this impulsive purchase. Nevertheless, she installed Puck in the shop window. There he brandished his spear and waved his mirror for several weeks. Children passing by pointed at him and laughed. Dogs too seemed to laugh. Rennie moved him inside and put him next to an elaborate Chinese vase. It was a miserable pairing. Finally she put him on top of the safe. And so a customer entering Forget Me Not saw the usual old things: the striped love seat facing the waist-high jewelry case; within the jewelry case, brilliant adornments; behind the case, impassive Rennie; and behind Rennie, the safe, high on its table. And one new thing: cavorting on top of the safe, a plump bronze boy.

The man with the white mustache came in on a Monday. He was tall and somewhat awkward, but his suit was expensive. The tanned skin around his eyes was puckered and pleated, so that the eyes seemed on display.

“Good morning,” he said. “I’m staying at Devlin’s Hotel—they recommended your shop.”

“Good morning,” Rennie said.

His blue gaze traveled around on a preliminary excursion. It landed briefly on Puck. “That’s a nice piece.”

“Would you like a closer look?”

“No, thank you.” And then he took his mild self around the store, looking at this and that. Eventually he chose one of the millefiori paperweights—for his sister, he said. He paid cash—his wallet delightfully bulged—and dropped the glass weight into his jacket pocket. “You have wonderful taste,” he said, like everybody else. “I’m in town for the rest of the week, on business. I’ll drop in again.”

He didn’t come on Tuesday—at least, Rennie didn’t think he did. The store was particularly busy, and people often glided in and out without speaking. Cathy Lovell the artist did come in. Her sneakers, her jeans, her smock, and her hair were noticeably spattered with paint, as if she’d decorated herself before leaving her studio. As usual she tried on all the art nouveau jewelry. She bought a Lalique pin. She’d return it in a few days, again as usual. Yuri the fix-it man came in hunting for old radios; he wanted to scavenge their insides. Mr. Brown, who had a high, freckled dome, came in to buy a bracelet for a beautiful girlfriend and a similar but less expensive bracelet for a less favored one. Rennie suspected that neither of these women existed. Many of her customers were subject to harmless delusions. She wondered what Mr. Brown did with the jewelry he frequently bought—maybe sold it to a dealer at a loss. Mr. and Mrs. Yamamoto…Ophelia came in.

Ophelia had at last ended her period of mourning. She was wearing a red checked skirt, an orange dotted blouse, and her signature earrings. On Ophelia, hodgepodge looked like a style worth copying: every woman should go out and bedeck herself from the nearest dumpster. She settled on the love seat, and Rennie, helping the Yamamotos, felt her spirits rise several notches.

“Hello, Rennie,” said Ophelia when the Yamamotos had gone. She raised her eyes above Rennie’s head. “Hello, Puck.” She picked up a paperweight from the table beside the love seat…one of the paperweights that the man with the white mustache
hadn’t
bought. “He was king of the fairies, you know.”

“Uncle Henry?”

“Oh, Uncle Henry was indeed gay, gay before being gay was even mentionable in polite circles. But Henry didn’t give a damn for polite circles. He was a tender guardian. He liked Lew. He gave me away at my wedding.” A tear traveled down her cheek. “Henry liked the other one too. The man I shared the pillows with, in the parlor.”

And who was he?
But Rennie didn’t ask. She never had to ask. She just sat on her high stool behind her jewelry, her brow wide, her jaws wide, her red hair scraped into a topknot, her shoulders square in the inevitable jacket (she owned them in dozens of colors), her lapel adorned with a single splendid pin. She had none of the softness of a therapist, none of the forgivingness of a clergyperson, none of the piled-up wisdom of an old family friend. Still, calmed by her inexpressive face, people talked. She nodded, never commenting, never making suggestions, never breaking cardinal rule two. But they left comforted.

“Who was he?” said Ophelia, echoing the question Rennie hadn’t asked. “Oh, not one of your sparkling personalities. Deep, didn’t say much. Geology was his passion. He was getting an advanced degree in it. And then he was going out west…some desert in Colorado. So very far from New York. Lew, now, he came along later, he belonged to Uncle Henry’s world—funny, irreverent.” She paused. “The soul of a gentleman,” she said, and Rennie knew she was referring to the other man.

Ophelia sighed, and slumped; and for a moment she was a wretched old woman in tatters. Then she collected herself and gazed up again at the statue. “Puck was king of the fairies, as I was saying. He put love potions in people’s eyes. Brought about misalliances. A mischievous sprite. I have to go now, Rennie. Today is my grandson’s ballet recital.”

The man with the mustache came in again on Wednesday. This time he was interested in silver. His daughter-in-law collected pillboxes, he said. “In that way, she wards off illness.” He was attracted not to the most expensive item in Rennie’s collection but to the finest—Georgian, chased, with a tiny painted shepherdess enclosed in a glass oval. The pillbox had a little slide that revealed a hidden compartment. “What do you suppose that’s for?” he wondered.

“Love potions.”

“Oh, no, love potions, that’s
his
business,” said the man, raising his face to exchange a stare with Puck. “I’ll buy this mysterious pillbox.” Again he paid in cash, a wad of hundreds.

She watched him leave, as she watched everybody if she had the leisure. He wore a long brown suede trench coat. Hair as white as the mustache grazed the coat’s collar. He had an outdoorsy stride for all that he appreciated indoor things like paperweights and pillboxes. He had purchased presents for a sister and a daughter-in-law, not a wife. Of course, he might have bought his wife a mink downtown. But Rennie didn’t think so.

“A baby gift,” Ophelia said breathlessly, on Thursday. “A very special baby, my next-door neighbor’s granddaughter, four pounds and some ounces. In our day they didn’t live at that weight. Now they grow up to play third base and the trumpet. Have you got a silver mug?”

Rennie had a silver mug; it lay on the very shelf in the cabinet where the pillbox had rested. Which reminded her: “Somebody’s been admiring Puck,” she recklessly revealed. “You might consider this tiny spoon,” she said in a hurry; and together they bent their heads over an exquisite and useless utensil.

“I’ll take them both,” Ophelia said. She wrote a check, backed away with her purchases, gave Puck a little salute. “The arm holding the mirror,” she said. “I used to hang my clothes on that. He hung his clothes on the spear.” She was at the door now, but she didn’t leave. “I had a necklace made out of campaign buttons—
Madly for Adlai,
each one said. He wore an
I Like Ike
hatband. Nineteen fifty-six.”

It was a hard-fought election, the Stevenson-Eisenhower presidential race. Once at a flea market Rennie had found a cigarette case enameled with the message
Stevenson for President.
She sold it to a collector. The case now resided in a university library.

“Politics…politics drove us apart,” Ophelia said. A pair of customers came in, sidling around her.

“Well,” Rennie said.

And then Ophelia was gone, and someone wanted to examine the strange-looking Turkish lamp that had been part of an estate sale. “Does it work?”

“I’ve never tried it,” Rennie confessed.

A dreadfully dirty old woman bought a diamond and emerald ring. She paid with a money order. Mr. Rodriguez the piano tuner, installing his bulk on the love seat, complained at length about his son, who wanted to become a mechanic instead of going to Harvard. Mr. Rodriguez, taking first one point of view and then another, finally talked himself into letting the boy apprentice himself to a machine shop for a year, to see how things worked out. “Thanks for the advice,” Mr. Rodriguez said to Rennie, who hadn’t said a word. Cathy Lovell came in to return the Lalique pin.

“My business in this town is concluded,” the man with the mustache said on Friday. “I’m an engineering consultant,” he offered. “I’ll take the Puck.”

Rennie never showed surprise. “Shall I arrange to have him delivered?” she inquired.

“No, I’ll escort him myself to Devlin’s Hotel,” he said. “He can be my carry-on tomorrow—probably just fits in the overhead rack. Or else I’ll buy him a seat,” he added idly. “How much?” he thought to inquire.

She named a price higher than she expected to get—people usually liked to haggle over objets d’art. But he silently took out his checkbook. Rennie looked at the check, drawn on a Denver bank, and then climbed onto a little stool kept near the safe and fetched Puck down. He stood on the glass case between them.

“Yes,” the man said at last, and stowed the statue under his long left arm, and tipped an imaginary hat with his right hand, and was gone.

An hour later Ophelia found Rennie sitting on her stool, elbows on the counter, staring into space. A check lay on the glass. “Rennie, are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“Heavens, where’s Puck?”

“The man who admired him bought him.”