Free Food for Millionaires (45 page)

Charles spoke up finally.

“Deaconess Cho,” he said quietly.

Leah was now running the water in the sink, her arms deep in the dishes. She did not answer.

“Leah,” Charles said. Douglas was taken aback to hear someone call the deaconess by her American name.

“Leah,” Charles said again, “you don’t need to do this.”

Leah turned around.

“I should be offering you tea or something. I’m sorry about the mess.”

“No. You should be resting,” Douglas said firmly. He’d had no idea what to expect upon visiting the bachelor choir director. He himself was a widower, but his life looked very different from this man’s. Douglas was a tidy man who’d hardly tolerate such disorder. His housekeeper, Mrs. Jonas, had taken care of him and Ella proficiently for over twenty years, and when she retired, she had trained Cecilia to take over her work. “I will help Deaconess Cho clean up before we go. Why don’t you lie down?”

It was hard to resist the doctor’s suggestion. Charles felt itchy and hot all over. Last night, he’d barely slept. He trudged toward the living room to lie down on the sofa.

“Deaconess Cho,” Douglas said loudly, trying not to shout over the running faucet. “Here, let me help you.”

Leah brushed him off, smiling. “Elder Shim, you should check on the director. I’m fine right here. This I know how to do.” She air-swept her hand across the dirty things on the counter as if to display her province of expertise. “I’ll work better alone.” She nodded pertly, tipping her head toward the living room. She looked adorable to him, but Douglas stared at her soberly to see if she was okay doing this. Ignoring his discomfort, she went to the table and pulled out two cans of mandarin orange juice from one of the six-packs that the doctor had brought in and handed them to him. She couldn’t imagine finding two clean glasses and a tray nearby. Douglas went to find Charles.

Finally alone, Leah squeezed the water from the dishwashing sponge and dabbed some detergent onto it. Thankfully, there was soap for the dishes. It was better to work than to talk, she thought. What would she have said to the choir director, anyway? Typically in these visits, Elder Shim would lead the small group in prayer and ask his series of questions that he tended to ask the bedridden parishioner. Then they’d conduct a brief worship service, drink a glass of juice or eat a doughnut, then leave. In the book of James, Jesus’s brother wrote about how you had to take care of your neighbor’s practical needs as well as spiritual needs. Her father’s favorite passage in the Bible had been “Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, ‘Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.” If she could locate some teabags, she would boil water in a cooking pot—there being no kettle on the stove—to serve the men something warm to drink. She glanced about and noticed the rice cooker behind the large chrome coffee machine that she didn’t know how to use. At home, she and Joseph drank Taster’s Choice. In her mind, Leah ordered up a list of tasks she could try to accomplish in an hour.

In the living room, Douglas found Charles sleeping on the sofa, his body curled like an S, his face reddened by the pox. The doctor crept up the stairs quietly. Charles’s bedroom was the first large open chamber near the landing. The room itself was beautiful, with two enormous windows that opened like doors, shellacked hardwood floors, and a carved stone fireplace. The wide-planked floors were covered with dirty clothes and piles of newspapers. On the lone armchair, there were stacks of music scores. Douglas shook out the blanket rumpled over the bed and folded it over his arm. The bedsheets felt hardened to the touch from lack of wash. He put down the blanket to strip the beds and took the dirty sheets downstairs.

First, he went to cover Charles with the blanket. Then he snooped around the house and discovered the laundry room beside the kitchen and put the sheets into the washing machine. The stainless-steel machines were from Germany, a manufacturer Douglas had never heard of. He pressed a red button to start the load, and it was so quiet that he opened the top to see if there was water running at all. From the looks of it, the choir director didn’t possess many things, but the items he owned were costly and well chosen, and yet none of it was cared for—as if the owner wished the things themselves to fall apart from neglect or disrepair.

When he stepped out of the laundry room, he saw that Leah had swept the kitchen floor and was now on her knees mopping the tiles, the way the maids of his childhood home would clean the
maru
in smooth, concentric motions. When he was growing up, Douglas’s mother would chide the cleaning girls if she spotted one hair on the floor, and all the common-room floors of their enormous estate had to be cleaned twice daily. Leah was singing quietly, and he could not make out the words of the hymn. Douglas went to her. Leah, her knees tucked under her, a rag in her hand, looked up at him.

“I thought maybe I would ask Cecilia, my housekeeper, to come by tomorrow.” She also lived in Brooklyn, but Douglas didn’t know where exactly. He hesitated from telling the deaconess how bad the conditions of the upstairs room were. “I put his bedsheets in the wash.” He gestured to the shuttered laundry room door. Leah opened her eyes wide in surprise. It was hard to imagine the doctor doing a load of wash. “Maybe you could stop now,” he said. “The kitchen looks much better.” Leah smiled at the recognition. “Deaconess, it’s your only day of rest. Maybe we should leave after the director has woken up and we could pray for him.” He bent his head forward slightly her way. Her face shone like a happy child’s, and his heart fluttered a little, and he had to look away from her.

“I don’t mind. Maybe I can find sheets for the bedding and make up the bed while the wash is going on.” Leah tried to stand, and Douglas gave her a hand up. She took it, and when she rose, she let go of his hand quickly, never having been touched by him before.

“There’s no one at home anyway, and I feel useful doing this—” Then Leah said nothing more, because she remembered that the doctor had no one at home, too. Was that why each week he served the sick and bedridden of the church? He didn’t want to face an empty house on Sunday afternoons? That seemed like an unfair rationale for his dedicated service to the Lord. Leah had never had cause to think of it this way before. But this was the first time she herself had ever spent any time apart from her husband.

Douglas smiled at her. In her company, he felt almost dumb with pleasure. It reminded him of the way he felt in the presence of his older sister, who used to take him to school and who had died before Ella’s high school graduation. The deaconess had the same gentleness in her expression that his sister did.

Leah bent to pick up the dustpan and went to the garbage can, filled to its capacity. She began to pull at the edges of the black garbage bag. A new one would have to be put in. Douglas moved swiftly to her side to relieve her from this.

“He’s sleeping very well,” Douglas said. He grabbed the two corners of the bag and knotted them to make bunny ears. Ella had liked this when she was a child.

“It must be very uncomfortable.” Leah wiped her brow; a strand of hair had come loose from its bun. “I remember when Casey got chicken pox. I put Tina in the room with her right away so they would get it together. So it would be over faster.”

Douglas understood. Working parents had to do these kinds of things to save time. He wouldn’t have known what to do if he’d had two children.

“The choir director doesn’t have any food at home. Maybe we could go to the store to pick up some things for him to eat. There’s no fresh fruit or vegetables here.”

“Yes, of course.” Douglas tucked his hand into his trouser pocket for the car keys. His beeper vibrated. “Oh. What’s this?” He studied the beeper screen, the size of a stick of gum. “The phone?” he said, wanting to make a call, and looked around.

Leah pointed to the wall beside the refrigerator. She couldn’t help noticing the thick layer of dust above the freezer.

Douglas dialed the hospital. The resident had paged him because an elderly patient recovering from surgery had a very high fever and was having convulsions. The neurologist on call had advised the resident to contact him. Douglas got off the phone.

Leah stood waiting, not knowing what he’d say.

“We better go back now,” he said, sucking air through his teeth.

“Oh.” There was still so much left to do. “We didn’t have our worship service. And he’s sleeping.”

Douglas opened his mouth to speak but said nothing. “You’re right,” he said. “And the laundry.” He looked down. “I know.” He raised his index finger. “I’ll go to the hospital and come right back. I don’t think it will take long.”

“And I can stay here and clean up while you go.”

“Do you mind?” he asked. “No.” He shook his head as if he were disagreeing with himself. “I mean, you should come with me, and we can both come back when I’m done.” Douglas felt confused. It was hard to say how long it would take. The hospital was half an hour away without much traffic, and if the medicine worked, he’d talk to the attending physicians and return in no time. “I think we could be back in two hours at most.”

“No,” Leah found herself saying quietly, thinking it would be a better deed for her to clean the house and fix dinner for the choir director than to wait at the hospital. “I’ll keep working. I really prefer it. I was feeling bad that I’m not helping Tina. Anyway. . .” She made a long face, looking ashamed of herself. She was surprised by her own admission.

“But Cecilia could probably come tomorrow.”

“Has she had chicken pox?” Leah asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied, thinking he should have thought of that.

“I’ll stay. He’s asleep, and I’ll make up the bed and finish up. Please don’t worry.”

“Are you okay with that?”

Leah nodded reassuringly. The resemblance to his sister when she smiled like that was uncanny, and he had to shake it off. Douglas wrote down his beeper number and left her in the kitchen.

Two hours passed, but Douglas had not returned. Charles was still asleep. The kitchen was nearly clean, and Leah had drawn up a list using a small brown bag of all the things the house needed, like paper towels, laundry soap, lightbulbs, and basic food items like milk, juice, and coffee. He had a tablespoon of cooking oil left in the bottle and no white sugar or tea. From the moldy take-out containers in the refrigerator, it looked as if he had been ordering in; otherwise, he’d been eating out of cans or boxes. Perhaps he ate out all the time, but she had no way of knowing. Leah washed the inside and outside of the Japanese rice cooker with hot water and soap, and she opened the new bag of rice found in the corner of the pantry and made a fresh pot. She felt happier than she had in a long while. What she was doing really mattered. She carried up the clean pile of sheets and went to Charles’s bedroom and discovered the mess Elder Shim had already witnessed.

She made up the bed and diligently carried down load after load of wash and sorted the piles by colors. It was six in the evening, and she hadn’t heard from the elder yet. Leah didn’t know where she was exactly or where the nearest subway station was located. There were no taxis outside the window, and she didn’t know whom to call. The cooker beeped three times when the rice was done, and she opened the lid and fluffed the steamed grains. She was hungry herself. It would have been nice to have a cracker or an apple, but there wasn’t anything like that in the house. She knew because she’d already looked. There were four cans of Campbell’s Chunky soup and three tins of tuna in oil. Leah picked up the broom, dustpan, and rags and went upstairs.

After she picked up the books and scores from the floor and stacked them on the chest of drawers, she moved the scattered pairs of shoes left in his unused fireplace into his closet, then cleaned the floors as her mother had taught her to do—first sweep carefully, then wipe with a wet rag, and then last, a dry one.

“What are you doing?” Charles asked her, leaning uneasily against the doorjamb of his bedroom.

“Huh,” Leah said, startled. She touched her heart with her hand. Concentrating on her work, she’d almost forgotten about him.

“Who let you up here?” he asked, his voice quiet and dazed. He wasn’t angry, but he was annoyed at himself, because he couldn’t honestly recall how the soloist had gotten into his house. He rubbed his upper arms, feeling the chill of the bedroom.

Leah had opened the windows to air the room. She’d heard somewhere that rooms with sick people should be aired often.

Charles marveled at the cleanliness of the room. The floors gleamed with the original polish, reminding him of the way the house had looked initially when he and his father had come by with the real estate broker.

“I came with Elder Shim,” she said. Didn’t he remember? “But he got called to the hospital. And I was cleaning up. I’m sorry. I was trying to help—”

“No. I mean, okay. I. . . I—” Charles closed his eyes, feeling dizzy.

“Are you all right?”

Charles clenched his teeth, trying to focus.

“Have you eaten today?” she asked.

“Where is Elder Shim?”

“I—he was paged, and he’s coming back soon.” Hadn’t he heard what she’d said only a moment ago? she wondered. “I’ll leave as soon as he comes. I just wanted to finish the laundry.”

Charles noticed then that all the clothes on the floor were gone.

“Maybe you should lie down,” Leah said, worried that he would faint. She stood up from the floor and went to him.

Charles moved toward the bed, and on his third step, he nearly crashed into her. She stayed close to him, trying to balance herself in case she needed to break his fall. He weaved a bit, and Leah slipped her hand beneath his arm to prop him up. He smelled like cigarettes and sweat.

“It’s late. Shouldn’t you be home?” he asked as she put the covers over his legs.

“If you can call a taxi for me, I can go, but Elder Shim is coming back to—”