A Patchwork Planet (4 page)

“Fine,” I told her. “After you.” And then had the satisfaction of watching her pretend it was no big deal when sixty pounds of Christmas tree hit her in the chest as she got halfway down.

Mrs. Alford was waiting for us in the living room—her cardigan thrown aside, her speckled hands twisting and pulling and itching to get started. “Oh, good,” she said. “But what about the ornaments, I wonder?”

I said, “Half a minute, Mrs. A.,” and we lowered the carton to the rug.

“You did see where they were, though,” she said. “You found the boxes.”

“We will; don’t worry,” Martine told her.

“I hope they’re not in the basement, instead.”

Martine and I looked at each other.

But no, they were in the attic. When we went back up, we spotted them on top of a disconnected radiator—two cardboard boxes marked
Xmas
in shaky crayon script. They weighed a lot less than the tree had. We could carry one apiece with no trouble.

As I was heading toward the ladder, I threw another glance at the Twinform. “Of course, it didn’t allow for Fat Days,” I told Martine, “or Short Days, or any of those other days when women take forever deciding what to wear.”

Martine said, “What?” Then she said, “
I
take about two minutes deciding.”

Which was abundantly obvious, I could have told her.

By the time we got back to the living room, Mrs. Alford had emptied the tree carton and heaped all the branches in a tangle on the rug. She said, “Over in that corner is where we always put it. We mustn’t let it block the window, though. My husband hates for the tree to block the window.”

I’d heard so much of that—the deceased coming back in present tense—I hardly noticed anymore.

Martine set up the stand, while I fanned out the branches to get them looking more lifelike. It wasn’t the first time I’d put one of these together (a lot of our clients had switched to artificial), but I’d never quite adjusted to how soft the needles were. Each time I plunged my hand in among them, I felt disappointed, almost—expecting to be prickled and then failing to have it happen.

Mrs. Alford was telling us about her grandchildren. “The oldest is sixteen,” she said, “and I’m sure she couldn’t care less whether I have a tree or not, but the little ones are at that dinky, darling, enthusiastic stage. And they’ll only be here for one night. I have to make my impression in a limited space of time, don’t you see.”

Then she laughed merrily so we wouldn’t think she was serious, but of course she didn’t fool either of us for a second. She was dead serious.

This one worker we had, Gene Rankin: he walked off the job after only three weeks. He said he couldn’t stand to get so tangled up in people’s lives. “Seems every time I turn around, I find myself munching cookies in some old lady’s parlor,” he said, “and from there it’s only a step or two to the ungrateful-daughter stories and the crying jags and the offers of a grown son’s empty bedroom.” Mrs. Dibble told him he would get used to it, but she just said that because she didn’t want to train another employee. You never get used to it.

The tree turned out to be so big that we had to pull it farther from the wall once we started hooking the lower branches on. Martine wriggled in behind it and called for what she needed. “Okay, now the red-tabbed branches. Now the yellow,” and I would hand them over. Mrs. Alford went on talking. She was seated on a footstool, hugging her knees. “When the sixteen-year-old was that age,” she said, “—that dinky, darling age, I mean—why, I set a sleigh and a whole team of reindeer up on top of our roof. I climbed out the attic window and strung them along the ridgepole. But I was quite a bit younger then.”

“Sheesh. I’ve never been
that
young,” I said.

I must have sounded gruffer than I’d meant to, because Martine told Mrs. Alford, “Pay no mind to Barnaby. He had a bad trip to Philly.”

“Oh, was this a Philadelphia week?” Mrs. Alford asked.

“Natalie says he can’t come visit anymore,” Martine told her.

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that, Barnaby.”

Martine crawled out from behind the tree and shucked her jacket off. Beneath it she wore overalls and a long-sleeved thermal undershirt that looked orphanish and skimpy, with the cuffs all stretched and showing her little wrists, as thin as pencils. “See if you can find some lights in one of those boxes,” she told me.

But Mrs. Alford had beaten me to it. She was hauling them forth hand over hand—the old-fashioned kind of lights, with the big, dull bulbs. “It’s a terrible thing, divorce,” she said. “Especially when the child is caught in the middle.”

I said, “I don’t know that she’s in the
middle
, exactly.”

“He ought to talk to his lawyer,” Martine said.

“Of course he ought!” Mrs. Alford said. “When my nephew and his wife split up—”

“Or go to Legal Aid.”

“Oh, Legal Aid is a lovely organization!”

“Hmm,” I said, making no promises.

“Or another possibility: my brother is a lawyer,” Mrs. Alford told me. She hooked a scratched blue bulb onto the lowest branch. “Retired, needless to say, but still …”

I changed the subject. I said, “Mrs. Alford, you know that Twinform you have in your attic.”

“Twinform?” she asked. She moved to the branch on her right.

“I was wondering. Did you buy it yourself? Or was it handed down through your family?”

“I’m not entirely certain what you’re talking about,” she said.

“That wooden person standing near your chimney. Kind of like a dress form.”

“Oh, that. It was my mother’s.”

“Well, guess where it was manufactured,” I told her. “My great-grandfather’s woodenworks.”

“His woodenworks, dear?”

“His shop that made wooden shoe trees and artificial limbs.”

“Mercy,” Mrs. Alford said.

I could see she was only being polite. She moved away from the tree and started unpacking ornaments, most of them homemade: construction-paper chains gone faded and brittle with age, pine cones glopped with red poster paint. “Someday I should get that attic cleared out,” she said. “When would I use a dress form? I’ve never sewn a dress in my life. The most I’ve done is quilt a bit, and now that my eyes are going, I can barely manage that much. I’ve been working on a quilt of our planet for the past three years; isn’t that ridiculous?”

“Oh, well, what’s the hurry?” I asked. (No point explaining all over again that the Twinform wasn’t meant for sewing.)

“One little measly blue planet, and it’s taking me forever!”

“But here’s the weird part,” I said, reaching for one of the chains. It made a dry, chirpy sound, like crickets. “How the Twinform came into being was, an angel showed up and suggested it.”

“An angel!” Mrs. Alford said.

“Or so my family likes to claim. They say she walked into the shop one day: big, tall woman with golden hair coiled in a braid on top of her head. Said she wanted shoe trees, but when Great-Granddad showed her a pair, she barely glanced at them. ‘What women really need,’ she said—these are her very words; Great-Granddad left a written account—‘What women really need is a
dress
tree. A replica of their entire persons. How often have I put on a frock for some special occasion,’ she said—‘frock,’ you notice—‘only to find that it doesn’t suit and must be exchanged for another at the very last moment, with another hat to match, other jewelry, other gloves and footwear?’ And then she walked out.”

Martine was staring at me, with her mouth a little open. Mrs. Alford said, “Really!” and hooked a modeling-clay cow onto a lower branch.

“It was the walking out that convinced them she was an angel, I believe,” I said. “If she’d stayed awhile—if she’d haggled over prices, say, or bought a little something—she’d have been just another customer making chitchat. But delivering her pronouncement and then leaving, she came across as this kind of, like, oracle. She stayed in Great-Granddad’s mind. Before the week was over, he’d built himself a prototype Twin-form and paid a neighbor’s artistic daughter to paint the face and hair on. See, you got your very own features custom painted, was the clincher.”

Mrs. Alford handed me a bent cardboard star covered with aluminum foil, not one point matching any of the others. I stepped onto the footstool and propped the star against the top of the tree.

“That’s the reason,” I said, “after the Twinform made him rich, Great-Granddad started his Foundation for the Indigent. And that’s why the Foundation has an angel on its letterhead.”

Martine said, “Oh, I always thought that angel was just a
general
angel!”

“Nope, it’s a very specific angel, I’ll have you know,” I said.

“I don’t understand,” Mrs. Alford said. “Are you talking about the Gaitlin Foundation?”

“Right,” I said.

“Do you mean to say you’re one of
those
Gaitlins?”

“Well, when they claim me, I am.”

“I had no idea!”

“I’m the black sheep,” I told her.

“Oh, now,” Mrs. Alford said, “you could never be a black sheep.”

“Just try telling my family that,” I said. “My family would take it kindly if I changed my name to Smith.”

“They wouldn’t!”

The tree was finished, by now—all the ornaments in place, not counting a paper snowflake that Mrs. Alford was hanging on to in an absentminded way. She looked distressed but also pleased, and alert for further tidbits. (People always imagine that our family must be loaded, although if they put two and two together, they would realize the Foundation had siphoned off most of the loot.)

“He’s exaggerating,” Martine said. Probably she was afraid I’d bring up my criminal past, which our clients, of course, had no notion of. “Barnaby’s very close to his family! Seems every time I talk to him, he’s just back from seeing his grandparents.”

“Those are my Kazmerow grandparents,” I said. “Not Gaitlins.”

“Plug in the lights, Barnaby.”

“The Gaitlins I see only on major holidays,” I told Mrs. Alford. “Thanksgiving. Christmas. Ever notice how closely Christmas follows Thanksgiving? Seems I’ve barely digested my turkey when I’m back for the Christmas goose, sitting in the same eternal chair, telling the same eternal relatives that yes, I’m still a manual laborer; still haven’t found my true calling; still haven’t heard from my angel yet; maybe next year.”

“You have an angel too?” Mrs. Alford asked.

“All the Gaitlins have angels,” I said. “They’re required. My brother Jeff saw his when he was younger than I am now.”

“What’d she tell him?” Martine wanted to know.

“She told him to get out of the stock market, just before Black Monday.”

“Isn’t that kind of … money-minded for an angel?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve always had my doubts about her. Besides which, she was a brunette. I maintain angels are blond.”

Mrs. Alford was giving me this dazed look. I said, “Don’t worry, Mrs. A.; I’m not serious,” and I took the snowflake from her and hung it. (It was pancake-sized, slightly crumpled, snipped from gift wrap so old that the Santas were smoking cigarettes.) “I don’t think my family’s serious, either, when you get right down to it,” I said. “Shoot, they don’t even go to church! My dad’s an outright atheist! The angels are just one of those, like, insider things that help them imagine they’re special. You know? I bet your family has some of those.”

“Well …,” she said dubiously.

I bent to plug in the lights, and when I straightened up, the tree was sending out this dusty, faded glow and Mrs. Alford had her hands clasped under her chin. “Oh! How pretty!” she said.

Some of the branches were drooping—the ones where the modeling-clay animals hung. Some of the paper chains’ links had sprung open. The pine cones had lost quite a few of their scales, so that they had a snaggle-toothed look. But Mrs. Alford said, “Isn’t it perfect?”

I said, “It certainly is.”

By the time we got back to the truck it was dark, and a chilly drizzle was falling. Martine had to switch her windshield wipers on. While she drove, I filled in the time sheets, one for her and one for me, and I tore the carbon copy off hers and stuck it in her overhead visor. Then I sat back and said, “Ah, me.”

The lights from the oncoming traffic kept swinging across Martine’s face, turning her skin even yellower than usual.

We passed a city bus, empty except for the driver, its windows glowing foggily like the bulbs on Mrs. Alford’s tree. We passed a little strip mall, all closed for the night and eerily fluorescent, with swags of frowsy tinsel swinging in the wind.

I said, “This weather will mess up a lot of New Year’s plans.”

“It won’t mess up mine,” Martine said.

“I thought you didn’t have any.”

“Who told you that?”

“Didn’t you say Everett was sick?”

“Yes, but I’m going to this party at my brother’s. Him and his wife are throwing a party, and I said I’d help with the kids.”

Martine had a whole slew of nephews that she was forever amusing—taking them to the zoo or the circus or letting them spend the night in her apartment. I don’t know where she got the energy. I could never be like that. I could barely recall what my own one nephew’s name was.

I said, “Ah, me,” again, and this time Martine glanced over.

I said, “In Penn Station today, this guy was going around asking people to carry something to Philadelphia for him.”

“Whoa! A mad bomber.”

“He claimed it was a passport for his daughter,” I said.

“Yeah, right.”

And then … I don’t know why I said this next thing. I’d been planning to tell the story just the way it happened, I swear. But what I said was, “So when he asked
me
, I told him yes.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did too!” I said. (For a second, I thought she was doubting my word.) “He said I had an honest face,” I said. “How could I resist?”

“For all you knew, he was planning to blow up your train.”

“Well, obviously he didn’t succeed,” I said, “since I’m here to tell the tale. No, I’m pretty sure it was a genuine passport. Of course, I didn’t actually check it out. This lady next to me, blond lady, she kept saying, ‘Oh, just take a peek, why don’t you? Just take a little peek!’ But I wouldn’t do it.”