A Patchwork Planet (6 page)

I couldn’t figure out how this related to
me.
I said, “Well. That’s very interesting.”

She must have sensed my disappointment, because she said, “You think I acted terrible, don’t you?”

“No, no. Not at all.”

“You’re shocked I would walk out on her like that.”

“I’m not a bit shocked,” I told her. “I know all about these aged parents. The kind that want everything done for them, and the kind you can’t do a thing for, and the humble, self-denying kind, and the cranky, picky, dissatisfied kind … I must have seen every existing model. They’re who my company deals with, mostly.”

“What company is that?” Sophia asked.

“Rent-a-Back, it’s called. We go around to people’s houses, perform whatever chores they aren’t quite up to.”

“Oh! What a valuable service!”

“Well, we try,” I said. (I wanted to look as good as possible.) “How about you?”

“I work in a bank. Equity loan department,” she said. And while I was adjusting to this, she gave a little laugh and said, “Nothing like as helpful as what your company does!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “A loan can be extremely helpful.”

She made a face, turning her mouth down. (She had no idea.) “And can people just telephone and you send somebody over?” she asked. “Or do they have to be on a schedule of some kind?”

“Either way. We offer both arrangements,” I told her.

“Would a client be able to get her groceries carried in? Her garbage taken out to the alley? Little humdrum things like that?”

“Oh, the humdrum is our specialty,” I told her. Then it dawned on me that she might have her mother in mind; so I added, “We operate just in Baltimore, though.”

“I was thinking about my Aunt Grace. She’s in Baltimore; and independent? You wouldn’t believe how independent. But she’s getting hard of hearing, and she’s frail as a stick, besides; has trouble with her bones. She can break a bone in midair, if she’s not careful.”

“Osteoporosis,” I said knowledgeably.

“ ‘Aunt Grace,’ I tell her, ‘you need a companion! Someone live-in, to fetch and haul!’ But
oh
, no, no. Not Aunt Grace. ‘I prefer to have my house to myself,’ she says, and of course you can’t really blame her.”

“Yes, we see that every day,” I said. Then, trying to get back to the subject, I said, “But anyhow. You believe in intuition.”

“I most assuredly do.” She nodded several times, cradling her coffee cup in both hands.

“You believe a person will just be led to the proper action.”

“Absolutely,” she told me.

I made myself keep quiet a moment. I allowed her a block of silence to fill; I put on an expression that I hoped would seem receptive. She didn’t seize her chance, though. She just took a sip of her coffee. Beyond her head, bare trees skimmed past.

“So,” she said, finally.

I sat up so straight, you’d think I’d been electrocuted.

But all she said was, “Tell me more about your company.”

“My company,” I repeated.

“How many workers does it employ? Would you call it a success?”

“Oh, yes, it’s done very well,” I said.

And then I gave up and just went with the flow—told her about our two newspaper write-ups and our letters from grateful clients and their relatives, their sons and daughters living elsewhere who could finally sleep at night, they said, now that we had taken over their parents’ heavy lifting. Sophia kept her eyes on my face, tilting her head to one side. I could see how she would make an excellent loan officer. She had this way of appearing willing to listen all day.

I described my favorite customers—the unstoppable little black grandma whose children phoned us on an emergency basis whenever she threatened to overdo (“Come quick! Mama swears she’s going to wash her upstairs windows today!”); and our “Tallulah” client, Maud May, who smoked cigarettes in a long ivory holder and drank martinis by the quart and called me “dahling.” Then the weird ones. Ditty Nolan, who was only thirty-four and able-bodied as I was but couldn’t face the outside world; so everything had to be brought to her. Or Mr. Shank, a lonesome and pathetic type, who took advantage of our no-task-too-small, no-hour-too-late policy to phone us in the middle of the night and ask for someone to come right away for some trifling, trumped-up job like securing a bedroom shutter that was flapping in the wind.

By the time we reached Wilmington, I’d progressed to Mrs. Gordoni, who couldn’t afford our fees but needed us so badly (rheumatoid arthritis) that we would doctor her time sheet—write down a mere half hour when we’d been at her house a whole morning. “For a while, none of us knew the others were doing it,” I said. “Then it all came out. Our two girl employees, Martine and Celeste: they weren’t filing any hours at all for her, which is a whole lot easier to catch than just underreporting.”

“Isn’t that nice,” Sophia said. “You don’t often see that kind of heart in the business world.”

“Well, I wasn’t trying to brag,” I said. “I mean, we generally do charge money for our labors.”

“Even so,” she said, and she gave me a long, serious stare and then nodded, as if we had shared a secret. But I didn’t know
what
secret. And before I could say any more, the conductor walked through, announcing Philadelphia.

Still, even then, I hadn’t quite lost hope for some kind of revelation. I went on weighing and considering her most casual remark, giving her every chance to redirect my course. As we stepped off the train, for instance, she said, “Notice how much faster people move, here,” and I blinked and looked around me. Faster? People? Move? What was the deeper significance of that? But all I saw was the usual crowd, churning toward the stairs in the usual hobbling manner. “It always takes me by surprise, what a different atmosphere Philadelphia has from Baltimore,” she said, and I said, “Atmosphere. Ah,” and stumbled as I started up the steps, I was so intent on analyzing the atmosphere.

In the terminal, I stopped and faced her, wondering if her goodbye, at least, might be instructive. “Well,” I said, “I enjoyed our conversation.”

“Yes! Me too!” she told me. But she continued walking, and so I was forced to follow. She said, “I thought that was so fascinating about your company. Where are you headed?”

“Where am I headed,” I repeated, sounding like a moron.

“Does your daughter live nearby?”

“Oh. Yes, she’s off Rittenhouse Square.”

“So’s my mother. Shall we share a cab?”

“Well …”

It hadn’t occurred to me that my actions would be observed at the other end of my trip. I said, “No, thanks; I—”

“Though it
is
a nice day to walk,” she said.

A nice day?

We followed a group of teenagers through the Twenty-ninth Street exit, but I was dragging my heels, pondering how to get out of this. Suppose, by some horrible coincidence, Sophia’s mother lived in Natalie’s building! What then?

The weather did seem to have improved, I found when we reached the sidewalk. The temperature had risen some, and the sun was trying to shine. I said, “It’s still kind of damp underfoot, though.” I was looking toward the line of taxicabs, hoping she would change her mind and take one. But she walked right past them, and it was true she had those boots on.

On Market Street, she asked, “Are you bringing your daughter a present?”

“No,” I said. I flipped my jacket collar up. (Tweed was not half as warm as leather.) “This was such a sudden decision,” I said. “She’s probably not even home! I should just cut my losses and grab the next train back.”

“Darn,” Sophia said, not appearing to hear me. “If I’d thought, we could have picked up something in the station. They have all those boutiques there.”

“Well, no great loss,” I told her. “I wouldn’t have had the slightest idea what to get her, anyhow.”

“You could have bought a stuffed animal. Something of that sort. All little girls like stuffed animals.”

We veered around a man pushing a grocery cart full of rags. Sophia’s pace had grown leisurely and wafting. I had a sense of being dragged backward. “When
I
was nine,” she said, “my favorite toy was a stuffed raccoon named Ariadne.”

“Ariadne!”

“Well, I was extremely fanciful. I liked the Greek myths and all that. It’s because I was an only child. I was quite the little reader, as you might imagine.”

She had the only child’s elderly way of speaking too, I noticed. But I didn’t point that out to her.

“My father kept forgetting Ariadne’s name,” she was saying. “Most often he called her Rodney. ‘Sophia! Come and get Rodney! She’s out here on the porch, and there’s supposed to be a storm!’”

She laughed.

I looked at her then and knew, for a fact, that she was not my angel. She was an ordinary, middle-class, middle-aged bank employee with no particular life of her own, and it showed what a sorry state
my
life had come to that I could have imagined otherwise even for an instant.

If I’d had the nerve, I would have turned around then and there. Already half my Saturday had gone to waste. But it would have seemed peculiar, just wheeling and racing off with no good reason. So I dug my hands in my pockets and kept going.

I really hated this city, come to think of it—these wide, pale, bleak sidewalks littered with blowing rubbish, and the bombed-out-looking buildings.

I said, “Where does your mother live, exactly?”

“On Walnut Street,” Sophia said. “How about your daughter?”

“Locust,” I said.

Thank goodness.

A truck roared past, and we walked awhile without speaking before Sophia asked, “Is your ex-wife a Philadelphian?”

“No,” I said, “but her husband is.”

“Oh, so she’s remarried.”

“Right.”

“That must be difficult for you.”

“Difficult? Why would you say that?” I asked.

“Seeing her with someone else, I mean. I suppose inevitably there’s a bit of—”

“I never give it a moment’s thought,” I said, and then I stopped short, at the corner of Twenty-second Street, and said, “Well, here’s where I’ll be—”

But Sophia turned down Twenty-second and kept walking. I had hoped she would continue east. “It must have been an amicable divorce, then,” she called over her shoulder.

I said, “Oh …,” and took a few extra steps to catch up. “It was
sort
of amicable,” I said. (No sense going into the gory details.)

“Were you very young when you married?”

“Lord, yes. I was way too young. And she was even younger. We got married on her twentieth birthday.”

Then I happened to glance down the street, and who was walking toward us? Natalie. She was wearing a red coat and holding Opal’s hand. It was unsettling, because I’d just had a flash of how she had looked on our wedding day: all dressed up for the registry office, so pale and prim and solemn in a red coat that was not this same one, I guess, but close enough; close enough.

She hadn’t seen me yet. She was speaking to Opal, turning to look down at her, and it was Opal (gazing straight ahead) who spotted me first. Opal wrenched her hand free and cried, “Barnaby!” and ran to meet me. There was enough of a breeze so she had lost that careful, prissy look. Her hair was tumbled, her cheeks were pink, and her jacket was flying behind her. She barreled into me and threw her arms around my waist, which she wouldn’t ordinarily have done. She wasn’t a very
warm
child, in my limited experience. But she said, “It’s not true you’re stopping your visits, is it?”

“Who, me?” I asked, and I looked past her to Natalie. She approached more slowly, with a hair-thin line of puzzlement running across her forehead as she noticed Sophia. (Maybe she imagined we were together.) I said, “Hey there, Nat.”

“Mom said you weren’t going to come anymore,” Opal told me. She grabbed hold of one of my thumbs and started tugging on it, bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet in an edgy, agitated manner I’d never noticed in her till now. “She said you’d talked it over and you’d be stopping your visits. But I knew you wouldn’t do that. Would you? You’d want to keep on seeing me! Wouldn’t you?”

“Well, sure I would,” I said. It hadn’t occurred to me that she would take this so personally. I felt kind of touched. In a funny way, I felt almost hurt. My throat got a hurtful, heavy feeling halfway down to my chest.

And Natalie must have felt the same, because she said, “Oh, honey. Of course he would! I didn’t realize you would mind so much.”

Then a hand arrived on my arm, so light it took a moment to register, and I turned and found Sophia smiling into my eyes. It was the most serene and radiant smile; the most
seraphic
smile. “Goodbye, Barnaby,” she said, and she dropped her hand and walked away.

I never did explain her presence to Natalie. I honestly don’t know what I would have said.

M
Y FAVORITE MOMENT
of the day comes before the sun is up, but conditions have to be right for it. I have to be awake then, for one thing. And the weather has to be clear, and the lights lit in my room, and the sky outside still dark. Then I switch the lights off. If I’m lucky, the sky will suddenly change to something else—a deep, transparent blue. There’s almost a sound to it, a quiet sound like
loom!
as the blue swings into focus. But it lasts for only a second. And it doesn’t happen that often.

It happened on my thirtieth birthday, though. I took that for a good omen. My thirtieth birthday fell on a Monday, which was garbage day for more than half our clients. I hadn’t gotten around to setting out their trash cans the night before, because I’d indulged in this private little one-man birthday bash, instead. So there I was, up before dawn in spite of myself, just opening my door, which is the only place in my apartment I can even see the sky from; and I switched my lights off, and
loom!

I decided turning thirty might not be so bad, after all. I thought maybe I could handle it. I went off to work whistling, even though I had that balsa-mouth feeling that comes from too many beers.

It was a bitter-cold day, the kind that turns your feet to stone, and after I’d dealt with the trash cans I went home and wrapped myself in a blanket and tried to get back to sleep. Only trouble was, the telephone kept ringing. I let the machine answer for me. First call, Mrs. Dibble wanted me to take the Cartwrights grocery shopping. Second call, she needed a sack of sidewalk salt run over to Ditty Nolan. Third call was my grandparents. “Barnaby, hon,” my grandma said, “it’s me and Pop-Pop, just wanting to wish you a—”

I leaned over the edge of the bed and picked up the phone. “Gram?” I said.

“Well, hey there! Happy birthday!”

“Thanks. Is Pop-Pop on too?”

“I’m here,” he said. “Hope you got plans to celebrate.”

“Oh, yeah; well, yeah,” I said in this vague sort of way, because I couldn’t tell if they knew about the dinner Mom was fixing. I never could be certain. Some years she invited them, but other years she thought up reasons not to. (My grandpa had driven a laundry truck till poor vision forced his retirement, and Gram still clerked in a liquor store. “God gave” them—their wording—only one child, my mother, and they were very proud of her, but the feeling didn’t seem to be mutual.) I said, “Probably I’ll just, you know, drop by home for dinner or something.”

“That’s my boy!” Gram said. “That’s what I like to hear! A visit’ll mean the world to them, hon.”

“Yes, Gram,” I said.

Then Pop-Pop asked, “How’s the car doing?”

“Oh, chugging along just fine,” I said. “Had to take it in and get the steering linkage tightened, but no big deal.”

“Why, you could have done that yourself!” he said. “That’s what
I
always did, when she was mine!”

“Maybe next time,” I told him.

I’d given up trying to convince him I wasn’t a born mechanic.

The way the conversation ended was, I would stop by and see them later in the week. They had a little something for me. (A book of coupons good for six take-out pizzas, I already knew. It was their standard birthday gift, and one I counted on.) Then after I hung up I called Mrs. Dibble, because my conscience had started to bother me over the Cartwrights. They tended to feel rushed when somebody else took them shopping. “So,” I said. “Cartwrights’ groceries, Ditty Nolan’s salt. What: she’s expecting snow?”

“I have no idea,” Mrs. Dibble told me. “We’re just the …”

We’re just the muscles, not the brains. I said goodbye and stood up to unwind myself from my blanket.

The Cartwrights were a good example of why Rent-a-Back was so sought after. They weren’t all that old—early sixties, which in this business was nothing—but Mr. Cartwright had permanently ruined his right ankle several years before while stepping off a curb in Towson. So he couldn’t drive anymore, and Mrs. Cartwright had never known how and did not intend to learn, she said, at this late date. Nor could they afford a chauffeur. Rent-a-Back offered just what they needed: somebody (usually me) to drive their big old Impala to the grocery store, and unfold Mr. Cartwright’s walker from the trunk when we got there, and follow behind as the two of them inched down the aisles debating each and every purchase. I could have just waited at the front of the store, but I got a kick out of listening to their discussions. Today, for instance, Mr. Cartwright expressed a desire for sauerkraut, but Mrs. Cartwright didn’t feel he should have it. “You
always
think you want sauerkraut,” she told him, “and then you’re up half the night with indigestion and it’s me who has to bring you the Turns. You know how cabbage in any form gives you indigestion.”

Mr. Cartwright said he knew no such thing, but I knew it. And I knew green peppers repeated on him too, and I knew what their shoe sizes were and their grandchildren’s video game preferences, and I had advised on the very coat that Mrs. Cartwright was wearing today. (It was this navy one or a gray, almost white, which I had pointed out would show the dirt.)

In the window bays near the registers I noticed big sacks of sidewalk salt, and I thought of picking one up for Ditty Nolan. But the Cartwrights might feel slighted, seeing me attend to another customer on their time. So what I did was drive them home (Mr. Cartwright next to me, Mrs. Cartwright perched in the rear but leaning forward between us to advise on traffic conditions) and carry in their groceries, and then I got in my own car and drove back to the store for salt. Then I went to Ditty Nolan’s.

I don’t know why Ditty Nolan was scared to go out. She hadn’t always been that way, if you could believe Ray Oakley. Ray Oakley said Ditty’s mother had fallen ill with some steadily downhill disease while Ditty was off in college, and Ditty came home to nurse her and never left. Even after the mother died, Ditty stayed on in the Roland Park house where she had grown up—must have had a little inheritance, or how else would she have managed? For sure, she didn’t go out to work. And when I rang her doorbell, she had to check through the front window first and then undo a whole fortress of locks and sliding bolts and chains before she could let me in. “Barnaby!” she said.

She was thin and pretty and unnaturally pale, with wispy tow hair that hung to her shoulders. Her dress was more a spring type of dress—flower-sprinkled and floaty—which wasn’t so unreasonable for someone who avoided all weather.

“I brought your salt,” I told her.

“Oh, good,” she said, stepping back. “Come on inside.”

I followed her in and dropped the sack to the floor. I said, “Has there been some kind of forecast I haven’t heard about?”

“Forecast?” she asked. She was wandering away to some other part of the house. Her voice came threading back to me.

“Is it supposed to snow or something?”

“Not that I know of,” she said.

She returned, holding an envelope. My name was on the front. “Happy birthday,” she said.

“Oh! Well, thanks.”

I should have guessed: the salt was just an excuse. She knew every birthday at Rent-a-Back and never let one pass without notice. I opened the envelope and looked at the card inside. “This was really nice of you,” I told her.

She waved my words away. Long, fragile hands, untouched by the sun. “What a pity you have to work today,” she said. “I hope you’re having a party later on.”

“Just supper at my folks’ house.”

“Is your little girl going to join you?”

“Well, no,” I said. “But look at what she sent.”

From my rear jeans pocket I pulled out Opal’s gift—a leather money clip, the kind you make from a kit. I hadn’t put any money in (if you thought about it, it was kind of an
ironic
gift), but I liked carrying it around. “The mailman brought this Saturday,” I said, “along with a handmade card with a drawing of me on the front that really did resemble me. You could even see the stitches on my blue jeans.”

“Oh, isn’t that sweet!” Ditty said.

“I was so tickled that I called her up long distance,” I said. “Knocked her mother for a loop, as you might imagine. But I think Opal liked it that I bothered.”

“I’m sure she loved it,” Ditty said.

I put the money clip back in my pocket. “You want me to add the salt to your account?” I asked.

“Yes, please,” she said. “And then maybe when the weather gets bad, you could come sprinkle my walks. I can’t have the UPS man falling down and suing me.”

Ray Oakley always claimed, every year when she gave him
his
birthday card, that she had a little crush on him. But I knew better than that. She didn’t have a crush on any of us. It’s just that service people were the only human beings she saw anymore.

My parents lived in Guilford, in a half-timbered, Tudor-style house with leaded-glass windows. Out front beside the gas lantern was this really jarring piece of modern sculpture: a giant Lucite triangle balanced upside down on a pole. My mother went after Culture with a vengeance.

I showed up for dinner late, hoping my brother had gotten there first; but no such luck. Mine was the only car in the driveway. So I spent some time locking my doors and double-checking the locks, studying my keys to see which pocket they should go in. Eventually I was detected, though. My father called, “Barnaby?” and I turned to find him standing on the front steps. Against the light from the hall chandelier he looked like a stretched-out question mark, with his stooped, hunched, narrow shoulders. “What’s keeping you?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m just …”

“Come on in!”

I climbed the steps, and he stood back to let me by. He was taller than me and more graceful by far—had a Fred Astaire kind of elegance that my brother and I had totally missed out on. Nor did we get his soft fair hair or his long-chinned parchment face. My mother’s genes had won every round.

“Happy birthday, son,” he told me, giving my arm a squeeze just above the elbow.

“Well, thanks.”

That about wrapped it up. We had nothing further to talk about. As we crossed the hall, Dad sent a desperate glance toward the second-floor landing. “Margot?” he called. “Barnaby’s here! Aren’t you coming down?”

“In a minute.”

The living room had an expectant look, like a stage. A fire crackled in the fireplace, and somebody’s symphony poured from the armoire where the stereo was hidden. Over the mantel hung more of my mother’s Culture: a barn door, it could have been, taken off its hinges and framed in aluminum strips.

“Well, now,” my father said.

He seized the poker and started rearranging embers.

“Which birthday is this, anyway?” he asked, finally.

“Thirtieth,” I told him.

“Good grief.”

“Right.”

Then we heard my mother’s footsteps on the stairs. “Happy birthday!” she cried, hurrying in with her arms outstretched.

“Thanks,” I said, and I gave her a peck on the cheek.

She had dressed up, but in that offhand way that Guilford women do it—A-line skirt, tailored silk shirt, navy leather flats with acorns tied to the toes. Her one mistake was her hair. She dyed her hair dead black and wore it sleeked into a tight French roll. It made her look white-faced and witchy, but would I be the one to tell her? I enjoyed it. You see a woman who’s reinvented herself, who’s shown a kind of genius at picking up the social clues, it’s a real pleasure to catch her in a blunder. I watched as she bustled about—snatching my jacket, darting off to the closet, rushing back to settle me on the couch. “We haven’t seen you in ages,” she said when she’d sat down next to me. Then she jumped up: cushion tilted off-center in the armchair opposite. “You’re skin and bones!” she said over her shoulder. “Have you lost weight?”

“No, Mom.”

“I’ll bet anything you’re not eating right.”

“I’m eating fine,” I said.

If I’d lost weight every time Mom claimed, I’d have been registering in the negative on the bathroom scale.

Now she was off to pull open a desk drawer. The woman could not sit still. Always something discontented about her, something glittery and overwrought that set my teeth on edge. “Where
is
it?” she asked, rummaging about. She came up with an envelope. “Here,” she said, and she sat back down and laid it in my hand. “Your birthday present,” she said.

“Well, thanks.”

“Maybe you can find yourself some decent clothes.”

“Maybe so,” I said, not troubling to argue. I folded the envelope in two and slid it into my jeans pocket. (I didn’t need to look to know it was a gift certificate from some menswear store or other, someplace Ivy League and expensive.) “Thanks to you too, Dad,” I said.

“You’re very welcome.”

He was propping the poker against the bricks, and the sight of his thin, sensitive fingers also set my nerves on edge, and so did the music diddling about as if it couldn’t decide where to go. I turned to my mother and said, “So. Are Gram and Pop-Pop coming?” Which was purely to annoy her, because I already knew the answer.

“No, they’re not,” she told me, brazening it out. “But your brother is, of course. And I invited Len Parrish too. He’s stopping by for birthday cake after; he couldn’t make it for dinner.”