Five Fortunes (42 page)

All three networks project that Laura Lopez has beaten Lloyd
Prince in the Democratic Primary!!!! She is expected downstairs to address her suporters momo soon.

Ajax had drunk an entire bottle of red wine since suppertime and been kissing Sheila Detweiler for the last hour, and the combined effect of these stimuli had been to lower his IQ down to around his earlobes.

In New York City, Jill returned to her screen to find a message from Sweet2:

That’s so cool!!!

I am psyched, completely!

We should celebrate!!

Too bad it’s three in the morning.

Do you want to go hear Woody Allen play some Monday?

Jill stopped. This was in fact something she had always wanted to do, but hadn’t had anyone to go with. She had had no intention of setting another date with Colleen, but…

Yes.
she typed.

I absolutely do.

Cool!
answered Colleen.

I
n mid-June, Rae’s sister Velma died. She’d been in Florida, in a condo in Boca Raton. Rae hadn’t seen her in almost a year, but they had been planning to leave on a cruise together in two weeks’ time, through the islands of Greece and Turkey. Instead Rae was packing for a hot-weather funeral.

Velma had left no instructions for a service or interment. The family plot in Buffalo where their parents were buried had room for her, but none of the family had been in Buffalo for thirty years.

Velma’s sons were stolid and silent at the condo where they gathered.

Velma’s daughter, Cookie, four times married and looking now so much like her mother that it gave Rae a start when she walked into the room, was bereft. She had planned a service to be conducted on the beach at sunrise.

Rae was glad of the company of Leon and Harriet and her grandchildren. In the predawn darkness her son-in-law made sure there were folding chairs brought out and placed in the sand, and Harriet, foreseeing how cold it would be at dawn, had brought her mother an extra shawl. Rae could tell that her daughter was annoyed at the cousins and worried that she would be undone by the chill and the early hour. On top of that was the shock of losing the last person on earth who remembered what she remembered about Christmas in Buffalo, when they both believed in Santa Claus.

In truth, Rae
was
cold to the bone and dazed by jet lag; in California, it was two in the morning. But it was lovely to see the sun 334

Five Fortunes / 335

come up over the horizon of the sea, and sweet, she thought, when the church soprano Cookie had hired sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

Cookie sobbed. Rae was dry-eyed and numb. They all had been given Sweetheart roses to hold during the service, and at the end, they were instructed to go to the water’s edge and, silently saying a last farewell, to throw the flowers into the dawn. The surf cast them right back up onto the sand, along with bottle caps and plastic soda can holders and a rim of sticky yellow foam scum, which might not have been exactly the image Cookie had envisioned. Rae insisted that Velma would have liked it. Harriet took her back to her hotel and put her to bed. She slept until past lunchtime.

“Will you go on your cruise by yourself, Missus?” James asked her as he brought her coffee. Rae was having lunch on a tray in the sun in the side garden a day or two after she got back from Florida.

She wasn’t reading or listening to music; she was just sitting in the sun like an old person, chewing and staring into space.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “But it’s all paid for—why don’t you and Doreen go?”

James laughed.

“No, why not? It’s a shame to waste it. I’ll be fine here, Cook will take care of me. You were going to be on vacation those weeks anyway, weren’t you?”

James thanked her, but made excuses. The truth was, he was worried about Rae. He and Doreen knew what it was like to be far away from home and family and childhood friends, cut off forever.

There had been many, many nights of tears. Doreen had been unable to visit her father’s grave in Canton; she had not even known of his death until a month after the fact. Now it had happened to Rae. She was separated not by distance but by time from a world she missed.

She wasn’t as lucky as they were; they at least had each other. She had a lot, but Doreen and James talked to each other in quiet voices in the kitchen about what she didn’t have.

“It’s too much death,” James said. “Mr. Strouse. Winston Churchill.

336 / Beth Gutcheon

Now the last sister.” Doreen nodded. For the first time, they could see at moments the effort it cost her to be gay. When no one was with her, she seemed to be visibly smaller. Her eyes didn’t shine.

She looked old.

“She may recover,” said Doreen, in a way that James knew meant that she also might not. Doreen had a doctor aunt in China. Aunt said she could always tell when a person was beginning to die. She said she didn’t even have to see the patient; she could see it in the faces of the relatives.

A week or two passed. Rae was settling into a new routine. It was quieter. Many of her friends had already begun to scatter for the summer. One had a house in southern France and left in May. A number of others moved out to Stinson Beach. Some had houses in Napa. San Francisco was gray and windy in the summer and the wind could grate on your nerves.

“I don’t like it,” Doreen said.

“You could call Walter or Harriet,” James said. “Your brother and sister.”

Doreen made a face. “I hear her talk to them on the phone. They don’t know anything’s wrong.”

“My father was ninety-three when he died, and he died happy, but that was different. He had a job,” James said. His father had been a master tailor, and he’d kept sharp and busy until the end of his life. Only arthritis in his hands had slowed him down, and it never entirely stopped him.

“That’s what
she
needs. She needs a job.” Doreen went to the stove to heat water for tea.

“Uh-huh,” said James. Doreen turned around and looked at him.

“What?”

“Right. She needs a job.”

In the solarium Rae was thinking about The Cloisters. She was thinking she would like to just move there and take the veil.

Everything would be decided for her. Every morning she would wake up and her schedule would be planned. Every week a new raft of people to meet would arrive.

Five Fortunes / 337

But then again, every week the last group would leave, going back out to sea, to be in the midst of life, while she sat on the beach in the dry sea scum, like Velma’s roses.

There were moments, increasing in number during the day, when she felt hopeless.

“Missus,” said James.

He was standing in the door of the television room. Rae was sitting there in the chair where Albie used to sit. She was wearing bedroom slippers even though it was almost lunchtime. She had not done her exercises yet today, and had not even really finished dressing. It was too early to turn on the television. To turn it on in the morning would be like drinking alone. She was sitting in there, looking at the
TV

Guide
, thinking about Albie and about what she would watch this afternoon.

James looked as if he had something weighty to say. He had his hands behind his back and the sort of expression on his face that people wear when they are about to deliver a memorized speech.

“Yes, dear?”

“I have been thinking,” he announced.

“Come in, dear. Sit down.”

James came in. After a moment, he decided he would sit down.

He perched on the edge of the love seat across from her.

“Missus, you asked me once what I wanted to do.”

“You said you wanted to be a terrorist, didn’t you?”

“Activist, yes…”

“Have you changed your mind?”

“No, but I have found something else that attracts me as well.”

“Have you!”

She looked at him with the old spark. Aha! Something interesting!

“Yes. I have.”

“Well, spit it out. I’m all ears.” She stuffed a pillow behind her back and settled into the couch.

“I would like to take you to see something, if you are free.”

“Of course I’m free. But will you tell me what it is? Do I need my hiking boots?”

338 / Beth Gutcheon

He smiled.

“It’s a housing place. Project. In Oakland.”

“A housing project. Well, this is very mysterious, James. Am I going to buy it?”

“We will talk about it.”

“This is something you turned up in your research?”

“Yes.”

“A public project?”

“No.”

There was a pause. Rae said, “This is rather fun, like playing Twenty Questions.”

“Twenty Questions?”

“It’s a game. I’ll teach it to you in the car. Should we go right now?”

“Right now would be fine with me if you are not busy.”

She looked at her watch. “I don’t think we’ll get back in time for lunch if we leave right now…”

“I thought I would take you to McDonald’s on the way home.”

“Oh, you devil,” said Rae. James had discovered that she loved driving up to the window and buying french fries and a milkshake without even getting out of the car.

On the way, over the Bay Bridge, she explained Twenty Questions to him. She went first, and it took him only nine guesses to discover that she was Patsy Cline. Then he took a turn and she was furious when she asked all twenty questions and wasn’t even close, except that she knew he was mineral. “I give up. What are you?”

“A car wash,” he said.

“I’m never playing with you again.” James was very pleased with himself.

“I surmise you have been to this place before,” she said after a while. They had passed the downtown and were heading out toward the piers.

“Yes, I’ve been here several times. Dona Reo thought we might want to know about it. It’s a friend of hers who runs it.” Rae liked to have James check back periodically with the people to whom they had

Five Fortunes / 339

given money, to see how it was used, and if it had helped. He had early morning coffee with Dona about once a month now.

After the tour, James bought Rae a Big Mac and fries and a chocolate milkshake. She waited until she had eaten, and gotten the catsup off her fingers and reapplied her lipstick before she said,

“Okay, James. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

James was busy with his Filet-O-Fish. “He has an interesting idea, yes? Village life. The very old together with the very young. Everyone responsible to the others. Clear rules, a strong leader. The social contract made visible.”

“James, you are so American I’m faint with pride. You’ve become a Utopian. Now I’m waiting to hear what it is you have in mind for me. Am I going to buy a project?”

“You could.”

She looked at him. He was keeping his eyes on the road, picking his way through the Oakland streets.

“I could, but…?”

“You could. But I have spent some little time discussing it with Ralph. His idea is working, but there are frustrations. Those buildings were not designed with his theory in mind. The nursery rooms are low and there’s not much light. The basketball court should not be in the middle, where the midnight games disturb people sleeping.

The Town Meeting and martial arts rooms should be somewhere light, instead of in basements, which are nasty…”

“You mean you want me to
build
a housing project?” She thought she was prepared, but this idea was so big it actually shocked her.

“It would be best,” he said primly, “if we are really going to prove something.”

She stared at him.

“Well, but…but, James! That’s a huge job! It would take years!

We’d have to find the right site, choose an architect, hire urban planners, I wouldn’t wonder…”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” he said. “I suppose we would have to do all those things…”

I
t was a hot night for June in Los Angeles. Aunt Sallie Spear was eating tuna salad on iceberg lettuce. She had it on a tray in her parlor where she could see the television. There had been another arson of a black church, this one in Alabama. She was watching the pictures of the pastor picking his way through the rubble, followed by a camera crew. You could see a charred triangle of wood sticking up like a stalagmite that was all that was left of the organ. The pastor was crying.

She knew what that was like.

She had taken her girdle off before she sat down to eat. Her hose were rolled down to her ankles. She was watching the President of the United States call for an end to these burnings. The President was sitting in his suit at his desk, signing something. Calling for an end to this cruel and cowardly arson. Good luck to you, she thought.

She pushed her food around on the plate with her fork, eating slowly.

Each bite was like a chapter in a story she was reading. When the plate was empty, and the news was over, there would be nothing to do with the long hot evening until it was time to climb the stairs with her girdle in her hand and finish undressing. No point in rushing.

She had an air conditioner in the kitchen. She meant to get another one for this room, but to tell the truth, you didn’t need it that often.

She thought about taking the bus to Sears and Roebuck and getting just a little one, but she always thought of it at times like this, at the end of a day, the beginning of a long hot night. She didn’t mind hot days. Hot nights she didn’t care for. Hot days you could share, but 340

Five Fortunes / 341

on a hot night, lying awake, you were alone, even if you were a little child in the same room with your brothers and sisters. If you were an old lady with your brothers and sisters all buried, even more so.

Here came the weatherman. There were wildfires burning in Idaho, some place called Ada County. That fire was started by lightning thought the weatherman; it had been dry in Ada County.

Two hundred and fifty acres were burned or burning. Churches.

Acres. She would like to see Idaho, but if she had to choose, she would rather live beside the burned-down black church in Alabama than the burned-down acres of Ada County. At her age, you had to stay close to what felt like home.