All for a Story (10 page)

“I sometimes bring food,” she said, speaking as if he were following her, so he did. “But I did not know what to bring for you.” She stopped short in the kitchen and sniffed. “You cook?”

“Just bacon and eggs,” he said, feeling sheepish in the shadow of her subtle approval. “And as for food, the neighbors have all been so generous. I think I’m set for a month.”

“That is how long you are staying?”

He tried not to recoil at the directness of the question. “I haven’t decided, yet, exactly what I’m going to do.”

“Hmph.”

Zelda disappeared into the tiny mudroom long enough to retrieve a bucket, which she set on the floor with a clatter before opening the tap on the kitchen sink, filling it with steaming water.

“I can take care of those,” Max said, feeling self-conscious at the idea of watching this relative stranger wash his dishes. But she ignored him, and with that same strange familiarity, found the box of soap flakes in the curtained-off space below the sink and sprinkled in a generous amount.

“If you will gather your clothes, I will take them to wash. I will have them back on Thursday.”

“Mrs. Ovenoff, please.” He’d hit the necessary note to make her stop, turn, and face him. Outside of the few neighbors who had barely made it past the threshold of the front door, this was the first guest he’d entertained in this home. She might present
herself as a mere cleaning lady, but she was a cleaning lady of prior acquaintance, and one who clearly held a place in her heart for the former occupant. More than all of that, she may well be one of the many counselors promised in the proverb he’d read just minutes before her arrival on the porch.

He gestured toward the table. “Please. Sit with me. Have a cup of coffee.”

She looked suspicious. “We usually have tea after.”

“We can have both.”

She stiffened. “I don’t care for coffee.”

“Then just sit with me. Ten minutes while the dishes soak.”

This —in light of the congealing bacon grease —won his argument, and though she didn’t look particularly pleased, she brushed past him and stood while he pulled out a chair for her. By the time he’d excused himself to fetch his cup from the other room and poured himself a cup rich with the final dregs from the pot, she’d used the back of her hands to gather every errant crumb and dropped them into a scrap of rag that must have been hiding in her apron pocket.

“I didn’t know my uncle well at all,” Max said once he’d settled in across from her. “Do you think you can tell me a little more about him?”

She folded the rag into a small, tight square and worried it between her fingers. “I came to this country twenty years ago with my sister and her family. Her husband had a good job working in the steel, in Pittsburgh. Good for an immigrant, because he spoke English already, and we all lived in a little apartment. I helped with her children, and they gave me a home. That was not in this town.”

Max nodded but remained silent, curious to see how this would eventually come to answer his question.

“They had more children, and the apartment got smaller, so
small that I slept on a couch in the kitchen. I know they wanted me to get my own family, to find a husband of my own. But I liked being useful. I never was a beautiful woman, so I did not have many men interested in me. My brother-in-law was trying to save enough money to buy a little house, and I knew they did not want to take me with them. I worked as a janitress for our building, and I asked if the landlord would keep me, to let me have a single small room. He told me the owner had several properties in different cities, so I came here.”

Journalistic instinct told him there was much of the story missing, and she had yet to even mention Edward. He leaned forward. “I mean no offense, Mrs. Ovenoff, but I’ve never heard of a landlord transferring a janitress. Why didn’t you stay in Pittsburgh?”

She studied the cleaning rag in her hand. “I had to get away. It was not good, those last days. So crowded, and my sister pregnant again, hardly enough room for her husband in the bed.”

Now he understood, or he thought he did, because unmistakable shame had invaded their conversation. Why Zelda would have chosen to reveal such a story he had no idea, but he felt the urge to rescue her from the memory.

“And that’s how you met Uncle Edward?”

She brightened. “It was a little more than five years ago. He had just taken the offices for his newspaper, and they were a mess. I worked in that building, mopping and such, but not for that tenant. I saw him that first day, pacing in the hallway, so angry and scratching his head.” Zelda fell into an accurate impersonation, her face adopting his scowl. “And he is saying, ‘Oh, what will I do?’ I was walking by and he grabbed my arm —” she demonstrated —“and begins to yell at me, saying I must not do my job because this place looked so terrible, like pigs and goats had been doing their business in there.”

“What a charmer,” Max said.

“So I clean his office. One hour later, he was looking and looking for something to complain about, but I left him nothing.” She smiled, reliving the satisfaction. “He would always say, ‘Zelda, you could make porcelain out of pig —’ Well, I won’t say the word he used. But you understand. He appreciated me, and he paid me above what the owner paid. And we would talk almost every day. I would see him being nice to me, talking so sweet right after yelling and cursing at someone else.”

“You were friends.”

She nodded —short, severe nods that carried through clear up to the loose bun of hair on the top of her head.

“One day, he asks if I can come to his home and wrote the address on the envelope with my pay, and I worried that it would seem improper. But it was for me to clean, only.”

In his mind’s eye he saw her, carefully grooming for that first visit, brushing and pinning her hair, pressing her blouse. “And tea after?”

“Yes. To clean, and tea.”

She couldn’t look at him, and a sweet tinge of pink enhanced her regular rosy complexion. The silence that followed told him clearly that there had been more. Lovers, perhaps. But at the very least, companions.

He reached his hand across the table to still her fidgeting ones. “I’m glad to know he had someone who cared about him.”

“Everybody think he was such a grouchy bear, and he was. But he had a tender side, too.”

“Did he ever talk about me?”

Now it was Zelda’s turn to look upon him with something between affection and pity. “He did.”

Max was prepared to press no further, but Zelda patted his hand with motherly affection.

“He wondered, often, how he could bring you into his life, I think because he did not want you to be all alone like him. I say to him, ‘Call the boy. Or write a letter.’ But men are stubborn. One month goes by, and then a year.”

“I didn’t try any harder than he did.”

“You are young. You don’t have a road of loneliness to look back on.” She took her hand from his and stood, smoothing her apron. “That has been ten minutes, I think. And if you will please gather your laundry? Just your clothes —I get the sheets from the bed.”

Max stood too. “Certainly. And I don’t know if you can do anything about the bookcase —”

Zelda cut him off with a guffaw. “I don’t touch the books, except to dust.”

“Fair enough.” He remained standing there, hands loose in his pockets, not sure what to do with himself, when the telephone jangled in the front room. Relieved, he answered it, identifying himself to the familiar voice on the other end —Nelson Bolling, Uncle Edward’s attorney.

“Are you free tomorrow morning, Mr. Moore?”

Max looked at the precarious pile of books and the open, waiting Bible. “I am.”

“Very good. If you will meet me at Capitol Bank and Loan, let’s say nine. They are prepared to sign over the contents of your uncle’s safety-deposit box.”

“I’ll be there.”

He hung up the phone and sat back down, feeling welcomed by the chair. The Bible remained open in his lap, but the text did not call to him. Instead, he leaned his head back against the crocheted afghan and listened to the sound of the crackling fire
accompanied by the soft humming of the woman in the kitchen. In that moment, he knew for certain that, whatever the extent of their physical relationship, Uncle Edward had loved this woman, because he found himself on the brink of caring about her too.

“Mr. Moore?” she called out, interrupting her tune. “May I have the remains of your coffee?”

A curious question, given she’d declared earlier not to like coffee. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Ovenoff. I drank the last of it.”

“No, I mean this.” She stood in the kitchen doorway with a pile of coffee grounds on a piece of newspaper.

“I suppose so, but I’m afraid you won’t get a very good drink out of them.” He didn’t want to hurt her feelings or sound suspicious, but what in the world would a woman do with a pile of coffee grounds?

Zelda laughed. “Oh, it is not for drinking. I mix with an egg white, makes a nice scrub for the face.”

“Really?” Come to think of it, she did have remarkably few wrinkles for a woman of her age. “Do women know about this?”

“Some do, I suppose. Poor women, maybe, who cannot afford to buy such fancy things.”

She was back to her humming, leaving Max alone with his parable, the wisdom of Solomon, and a fresh, blank page in his journal. At the top of it he copied the verse from Proverbs that had seemed so bitterly amusing less than an hour ago. Underneath the verse, he wrote the word
Counsellors
, with a bold underscore. And beneath that, he wrote a single name:
Zelda Ovenoff
.

Now he would wait for God to bring him the multitude.

“Perhaps,” she said, leaning forward a little, “you will tell me your name. If we are to be friends —” she smiled her grave smile —“as I hope we are, we had better begin at the beginning.”

ELIZABETH VON ARNIM,
THE
ENCHANTED APRIL

MONICA WAS STILL UNDER HER COVERS, not quite asleep but not ready to face the cold, when she heard the faint knocking on her door.

“Miss? Miss? A package for you.”

The voice belonged to Mrs. Kinship, Monica’s neighbor who worked overnight as a janitress for some of the government buildings downtown. For a quarter a week she’d clean the individual apartments in this building, too, but Monica was well suited to live with two bits’ worth of dirt and clutter. The other service Mrs. Kinship offered to her fellow tenants was the delivery of the mail, as it often arrived at the door to the common parlor shortly after her return from work. Before retiring for the day, Mrs. Kinship would slip the various envelopes under the appropriate doors.
Occasionally, usually after reclaiming a letter that Mrs. Kinship had “forgotten” to deliver, the occupants of the apartments would put a dime in an envelope and slip it under
her
door —just to thank her for her troubles.

At first, Monica had refused to participate in this minor postal extortion, figuring she didn’t have a soul alive who would be writing her a letter anytime soon, and what could be the harm if her creditors’ notices piled up under Mrs. Kinship’s greed? But that was before Charlie and the almost-daily missives Monica received from him. Little notes describing his ardent desires, addresses and directions for places they could meet for discreet drinks and dancing. And occasionally, a trinket.

She threw her quilts off and ran across the stinging-cold floor, plastering on a broad smile as she opened the door to her neighbor, who hadn’t bothered to do the same.

Mrs. Kinship was one of those gray women —her hair, complexion, dress, and demeanor completely without life. Right now the only spot of color was the bright-red box tied with a silver ribbon that she held in her open claw.

“This from your gentleman?” she asked, as if she had the right to know.

“Well, I don’t know. I haven’t opened the card yet. There is a card, isn’t there?”

Mrs. Kinship sniffed. “Not my duty to inspect the packages. Just to deliver them.”

Monica wanted to correct her, saying, no, in fact, it wasn’t her duty to do even that, but unless she wanted to take it upon herself to sit at the front door in the mornings and grab the early post, it would be best to keep her smile.

“Thank you for that,” Monica said. She took the package from the older woman, who left her hand palm up and open, waiting.

“I thought I’d get some soup from Sobek’s later this afternoon. Shall I bring you some?”

Mrs. Kinship seemed to be weighing the chances that Monica would follow through. Satisfied, she worked up a bit of a smile, saying she hoped the package was something nice, obviously hinting that she’d like to stay and see just what it was.

“If you’re asleep,” Monica said, inching the door closed, “I’ll leave the soup at your door. Have a good rest.”

Once alone, she lit a fire in her stove and huddled next to it. As it turned out, there was a card, but she set it aside, eager to see the gift beneath the passionate red paper. Slowly, to savor the experience, she untied the ribbon, thinking it might be nice to embellish a hat or something later. With the ribbon gone, the paper fell away, revealing the more exotic, fiery-red —nearly orange —box, featuring the familiar image of a phoenix in flight.