A Patchwork Planet (25 page)

Then I locked every single door behind them and stood inside with my arms folded, listening to my parents knock and ring and shout. (“Barnaby? Barn? You’ve had your little joke now. Let us in now, please.”) I didn’t say a word. When my father stepped off the front stoop, finally, and picked his way through the azaleas to peer in the dining-room window, I snatched up the silver box of matches my mother lit her candles with and I struck a match without a thought and set fire to the curtains. They were some kind of gauzy material, and they burned lickety-split. My father said, “Call the fire department!” (He was speaking to me, I had to surmise, since who else was near a phone?) But my mother said, “No! Think of the neighbors!” and that’s when I picked up a dining-room chair and sent it through the window. It felt spectacular. I can still remember the satisfaction. It made such a clean, explosive crash. Although it also provided Dad with an entryway into the house.

I didn’t try to stop him. I just sort of wandered off to my room, noticing the whole while that I seemed to be behaving like a crazy man. I climbed the stairs with my hands hanging loose at my sides and my expression spacey and vacant, and I watched myself doing it or even overdoing it, the same way years ago I’d overdone my limp when I sprained my ankle once, putting everything I had into the role of a cripple.

Well, you can imagine the brouhaha. Long-distance calls to Renascence, reaming them out for sending home a dangerous individual. Telephone consultations with the headmaster and my adviser. But not my psychologist, oddly enough. I did have one, of a fair-to-middling sort; but the focus here seemed to be my criminal intent rather than my mental state. There was talk, even, of bringing in the police, although that was probably just for effect. My father went so far as to mention jail. “I saved you from jail once before, but I’m not doing it again,” he said. I just kept my same vacant expression. I felt mildly interested, as if it didn’t involve me. I remember reflecting on the bizarreness of jail as a punishment—like sending someone to his room, really. Just put him away! What a concept. But did it ever occur to people that getting put away could come as a relief, on occasion?

Anyhow: the next day was Easter. So we all assembled for Easter dinner—me and my folks; Jeff minus the girlfriend (I believe she’d been hastily disinvited, due to recent developments); my Grandmother Gaitlin, who was still alive at the time; and Gram and Pop-Pop Kazmerow. Of course The Event had been thoroughly discussed behind my back, and I could tell it was the only thing on anyone’s mind. Much shaking of heads, much whispering in the front hall. Sidelong glances at the cardboard-covered window and the charred and blistered frame. Surreptitious sniffs of the tarry-smelling air.

Except for Pop-Pop.

He just walked straight up to me. I was standing alone in front of the unlit fireplace in the living room, feeling like a Martian, and Pop-Pop walked straight up and said, “Happy Easter, Barnaby.”

“Well. Same,” I said.

“It’s wonderful to see you.”

“It’s good to see you too, Pop-Pop.”

Then he reached out and put something in my hand. The Chevrolet key ring.

I said, “What’s this for?”

He said, “You know about my eyesight. I shouldn’t have kept on driving even as long as I have.”

“But what’s—?”

“I want you to have my car,” he said. “She’s still got a lot of miles left in her! And she’s quite a machine, Barnaby. Only Corvette ever made with a split rear window.”

“You’re giving me the Corvette?” I asked him.

He nodded.

“You’re giving it, as in
giving
it?”

“I can’t think of anyone better, son,” he said.

I have no idea what Jeff’s face looked like at that moment. Did he, in fact, envy me? I never even glanced at him. I was staring down at the checkered flags and blinking back the tears.

T
HIS YEAR
, Mrs. Alford was planning ahead for Christmas, she told us; not waiting till the last minute to get that tree of hers trimmed. So Martine dropped me off one morning in mid-December—a cold day, but sunny enough to start melting the film of snow that had fallen overnight. I climbed the front steps and pressed the buzzer before I wiped my feet, since Mrs. Alford always took some time answering. But it was her brother who opened the door. I recognized the two clouds of white hair puffing above his ears. Had I ever known his name? I’d only met him the once.

He knew mine, though. “Why,” he said. “It’s Barnaby. Oh, Barnaby. How very, very kind of you to call.” And he held out his hand.

I hadn’t been prepared to shake hands, but I did, and then I scraped my feet on the mat a few more times to show that I was ready to head on in and get to work. But it seemed he wanted the two of us to stand talking a while longer. “I can’t tell you how much this means,” he said. “My sister would have been extremely touched that you stopped by.”

Would have been?

Oh-oh.

“But come in! Come in! What am I thinking? Please,” he said. “May I take your jacket?”

“Well … ah, no, thanks. I’ll keep it,” I said.

But I did come in. I couldn’t see any way out of it, really.

“Valerie will want to meet you,” the brother said, leading me through the foyer. I guessed Valerie was Mrs. Alford’s daughter. We passed the dining room, where a bearded man in a bathrobe sat reading a newspaper. Next to him, a baby was pounding her high-chair tray, but the bearded man paid no attention, and when he caught sight of me he just nodded and turned a page. “Richard,” the brother told me. “Valerie’s husband. They left the older kids at home for now; it was such short notice. And school is still in session, of course.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. We were climbing the stairs to the second floor. I hoped Valerie wasn’t in
her
bathrobe. I said, “It’s kind of early yet. Maybe I should—”

“Nonsense. We’ve been up for hours,” the brother said. “None of us slept very well, as you might imagine.” We reached the upstairs hall, and he called, “Valerie? Val! Look who’s here.”

In Mrs. Alford’s bedroom, a woman in baggy slacks was kneeling beside a cedar chest. She didn’t resemble Mrs. Alford. She was big-boned and gawky, with tortoiseshell glasses and lank brown hair, and you could see she had been crying. She stared at me blankly, which was understandable since we had never met.

“It’s Barnaby,” the brother told her.

“Barnaby!” she said, and she got to her feet and came over to hug me. She smelled of cedar. “Oh, Barnaby,” she said, “what’ll we do without her?” When she drew away, she swiped at her nose with the back of her hand. She seemed more like an overgrown girl than a wife and mother.

“I’m sorry about your loss,” I said. “Mrs. Alford was a super-nice lady.”

“She thought the world of you, Barnaby. Nearly every time I phoned her, she would mention something you’d done for her or some conversation you’d had.”

“I didn’t even know she was sick,” I said.

“Well, she wasn’t, so far as anyone could tell. It was a heart attack. But I think she had some inkling, maybe. I worried all this fall, because why else did she suddenly send me those things from the attic? And her quilt: just look. She seems to have finished her quilt in a rush, after months and months of claiming she would
never
get it finished.”

The quilt was draped over the edge of the chest. Valerie bent to pick it up and unfold it—a dark-blue cotton rectangle with a gaudy, multicolored circle appliquéd to the center. “Planet Earth,” she said, and the brother made a clucking sound.

I’d heard about that planet quilt often, but I’d never seen it. What I had pictured was a kind of fabric map—a plaid Canada, a gingham U.S. Instead the circle was made up of mismatched squares of cloth no bigger than postage stamps, joined by the uneven black stitches of a woman whose eyesight was failing. Planet Earth, in Mrs. Alford’s version, was makeshift and haphazard, clumsily cobbled together, overlapping and crowded and likely to fall into pieces at any moment.

“Pretty,” I said. Because it
was
sort of pretty, in an offbeat, unexpected way.

Valerie folded it up again and smoothed it gently before she laid it in the chest.

“We’re having a very small service,” she said. “I’m not sure exactly when. Then afterwards, I suppose we’ll need your help getting the house in shape to sell it.”

“I’ll be glad to help,” I told her. “Just call Rent-a-Back anytime you’re ready for me.”

When I left, Valerie hugged me again, and the brother shook hands again at the door. “Thank you for coming,” he said.

I said, “Well, I’ll miss her.”

It was nothing but the truth.

Of course, I had no way to get home, since Martine had driven off to mail Ditty Nolan’s Christmas parcels. So I sat on the curb out front and waited for her, hugging my knees and digging my chin into my folded arms. The curb was still damp from the melted snow, and I could feel a thin line of cold seeping through the seat of my jeans.

“Oh, my! All done?” Mrs. Alford used to say when I’d finished with a job. “Doesn’t that look lovely!” Her chirpy, cheery, determined voice. “Weren’t you quick about it!”

And then other clients’ voices—some cheery and some not, some sad, some downright cranky.

“Pasta? What’s this
pasta
business? In my day we called it spaghetti.”

“You’ll find out soon enough, young man, it is not especially unselfish to wish on your birthday candles that your children will be happy.”

“Back in Baltimore’s golden age, when the streetcars were still running and downtown was still the place to go and we had four top-notch department stores all on the same one block: Hutzler’s, Hochschild’s, Stewart’s, and Hecht’s …”

“… and at noon or so the phone rings, and my niece says, ‘I’m waiting for Dad but he hasn’t come and he said he’d be here at ten.’ I say, ‘Oh, now, you know how he is.’ About one o’clock, she calls again; two, she calls again. ‘Where can he be?’ she asks me. I say, ‘He’ll show up; don’t you worry.’ Though I’m fairly worried myself, to tell the truth. Along about three-thirty, I think,
Oh!
I think,
Oh, my stars above!
Because all at once it comes to me—I can’t say what brought it to mind—it comes to me that her dad had phoned me at eight o’clock that morning. ‘Sis,’ he’d said, ‘I’ve been trying to reach Sue but her line is busy and I want to hit the road so you call her later on, will you, please? And tell her I’ve decided not to stop at her place,’ he said.”

Martine tapped the truck horn. I almost jumped out of my skin.

“Don’t
do
that, okay?” I said, as I opened the passenger door. “A simple ‘Hey, you’ will suffice.”

“What’s up?” she asked me. She had already cut the engine. “I thought we were trimming a tree.”

“Mrs. Alford died,” I said.

“No!”

I hadn’t meant to be so blunt about it. I settled in my seat and shut my door. “She had a heart attack,” I said.

“Well, damn,” Martine said. Then she started the engine again. But she drove very slowly, as if in respect. “She was one of my favorite clients,” she said when we reached Falls Road.

Mine too, I realized. I wouldn’t have felt that way once upon a time. It used to be that Maud May was my favorite. Maud May was so let-it-all-hang-out. But I don’t know; you start to appreciate the other type of person, by and by—those ultracivilized types who keep their good humor and gracious manners even though their joints are aching nonstop and they can’t climb out of their baths without help and they’re not always sure what day it is. I’d be terrible at that myself.

• • •

“What are you giving Sophia for Christmas?” my mother asked on the phone.

“Oh …,”I said, hedging.

“Because I don’t want to interfere, but if you’d ever care for a piece of your grandmother Gaitlin’s jewelry—such as, say, for example, maybe perhaps a ring, perhaps, or something of that sort—you have only to ask.”

“Thanks,” I said, “but we’ve agreed not to bother with presents this year.”

“Why, for goodness’ sake?”

Why
was a question of money, but I didn’t want to say so for fear Mom would segue into the eighty-seven hundred. Instead I told her, “Just lacking in Christmas spirit, I guess.”

Mom sighed. “But you do plan to bring her to dinner,” she said.

“She’s going up to Philly that weekend.”

“To Philly? Does that mean you’re going too?”

“No, I thought I’d stick around and pester you and Dad,” I said.

“Oh.”

“I can see you’re overjoyed at the prospect.”

“Well, naturally we’re delighted to have you! But I was thinking her people might like to get to know you a little better.”

“Evidently not,” I told her.

Sophia had, in fact, invited me, but I had made up this story about how I didn’t want to disappoint my parents. “For someone so down on his family,” she’d said, “you certainly seem to see an awful lot of them.” I told her I felt obligated, because Jeff and Wicky would be visiting Wicky’s folks for Christmas and Mom was all upset about it.

Which she was, no lie, but my presence at dinner was hardly going to change that. “Christmas will be so pathetic this year!” she was saying now. “Just you and Gram and Pop-Pop. I wonder if I should invite Dad’s cousin Bertha.”

“You detest Cousin Bertha,” I reminded her.

She said, “It’s such a pity Opal’s not coming.”

“We’ll have our turn next Christmas.”

“The two of you have been getting along so well together…. She should start spending her summers here, don’t you think? Or winters, even. We could enroll her in one of the private schools. Then for college, of course, she would go to Goucher. She could room with us, if she likes, although I suppose she’d prefer the dormitory. But dorms are so noisy! Studying in a dorm is such a struggle!”

“Mom. She’s barely ten years old,” I said.

She sighed again. Then she asked, “Should I invite Len Parrish?”

“I wouldn’t bother.”

“I could tell him to park the Corvette around the corner, where your Pop-Pop won’t have to look at it.”

“It’s not the Corvette,” I said.

“What, then?”

Someday I should get credit for all the things I
don’t
say. Like, “Your hero is a sleazeball, Mom.” What I told her was, “He’s got other plans, I’m sure. He’s a very popular guy.”

“Well,” she said. “All right.”

This was so untypical of her—I mean, the resigned and listless tone she used—that I caught myself feeling sorry for her. I remembered what she had said at Thanksgiving: how I was more her son than Dad’s, more related to her. It seemed that now I was taking that in for the very first time. Poor Mom! It hadn’t been much fun loving someone as thorny as me, I bet.

So when she told me she’d better hang up because she had a hair appointment, I said, “Mom. You know what I think? I really think your hair would look great if you stopped dyeing it.”

It was meant to be a kindness, but it backfired.
“You
may not like it, but all my friends say it looks lovely!” she snapped. And then she told me goodbye and slammed the receiver down.

Well, no surprise there. Just because we were related didn’t mean we were any good at understanding each other.

“In the afterlife,” Maud May told me, “God’s got a lot of explaining to do.”

“What about?” I asked. I was unpacking groceries, and she was smoking a cigarette at her kitchen table.

“Oh,” she said, “children suffering, cancer, tidal waves, tornadoes …”

“You think those need explaining? Tornadoes just happen, man. You think God sits around aiming tornadoes at people on purpose?”

“… old ladies breaking their hips and becoming a burden …”

“The most He might explain is how to
deal with
a tornado,” I said. “How to accept it or endure it or whatever; how to do things right. That’s what I’m going to ask about when I get to heaven myself: how to do things right.”

Then I said, “Anyhow. You’re not an old lady.”

“Good Gawd, Barnaby, you’ve gone and bought those goddamned generic tea bags again!”

I looked at the box I was holding. I said, “Rats. I thought they were Twinings.”

“Interesting that you imagine you’ll get
into
heaven,” Maud May said wryly. She blew a cloud of smoke in my direction.

“And also, you’re not a burden,” I added.

She inspected the end of her cigarette and then turned to stub it out. “Though who knows?” she asked the ashtray. “Nowadays, they’re probably letting all kinds of people in.”

Christmas fell on a Monday this year; so Friday the twenty-second was full of those last-minute chores our clients wanted seen to when guests were about to descend. Folding cots brought down from attics, wreaths hung from high-up places, major supplies of liquor hauled in. Most of this I had to handle alone, because Martine was helping out at her brother’s. The new baby was in the hospital with pneumonia. I hadn’t even realized new babies could
get
pneumonia. So Martine spent the first part of Friday baby-sitting her nephews, and then at three I stopped by her brother’s house to collect her for a job at Mr. Shank’s. Mr. Shank had taken it into his head he needed his entire guest-room furnishings exchanged with the furnishings in the master bedroom, and he needed it now, and next week or next month wouldn’t do.