Grist 01 - The Four Last Things (21 page)

“So what do you want?” he said. “Wait a minute. If we’re going to do this, we might as well do it. Coffee? All I got is instant, but I could use a cup.”

“Sure,” I said. “Black.”

“How about you, miss?” he said with an unexpected sweetness that made Eleanor’s eyes widen. “Some tea? A Coke, maybe?”

“Coffee,” she said. “That’d be fine. Black, like his.”

“Okey-doke,” he said, shuffling off in his slippers.

“Gee,” Eleanor said, blinking.

“You softy.”

“You’re really
not
as nice as you used to be,” she said. “I don’t know, with everybody else, I have the feeling that the plumbing fixtures are going to stay put. How come with you I feel like they’re always pulling away from the wall? Why do I always feel like you’re poking around under the plumbing?”

“Because that’s where the bugs are.”

We spent several moments in silence. The room was cluttered and threadbare but as clean as Sally Oldfield’s front seat. A picture of a woman in a beehive hairdo turned out, on closer examination, to be Mary Claire, squinting into the California sunshine as if its dazzle obscured her future. Finally Caleb Ellspeth came in carrying an invalid’s tray. On it were three cups that were even worse-matched than the ones I used at home, a sugar bowl, and a creamer. He looked too frail to carry the tray, and Eleanor started to get up to help. I had to grab her wrist to keep her down.

“Just in case anyone changes his mind,” he said, putting the tray down in front of us. “Me, I can’t drink this stuff without a little help.” He began to spoon sugar into his cup. “Okay,” he said, “let’s get it over with.”

“I want to know about the beginning,” I said. “How you got into the Church. How Angel became the Speaker. What happened to you and Mary Claire.”

He snorted. “Me and Mary Claire,” he said.

“Anything,” I continued, “about how the Church works inside.”

He stirred his coffee. “Is this going to be in the papers?”

“Not with your name in it,” Eleanor promised.

“If you tell me,” he said to her, “I’ll believe it.”

Eleanor took out her pad. “When did you join?”

He shrugged. “Mary Claire joined first. About eight years ago. This was in New York, where Angel and Ansel were born.”

“Ansel?” Eleanor said.

“My son. Anyway, she liked the Church pretty much, gave her something to do when Ansel got her down, which was most of the time.” He put down his spoon and studied the surface of the invalid’s tray. “Ansel’s brain-damaged,” he said flatly.

“I’m sorry,” Eleanor said.

“Me too. Where was I?”

“In New York,” she prompted.

“Yeah. So she joined and she kept at me to join, and I wasn’t that hot for it but Ansel got
me
down sometimes too, more than I could tell her, so finally I went with her and wound up hooking into a Listener.”

“Did it help?” I asked.

He looked at me reflectively. “Didn’t hurt,” he said. “Nah, that’s not right. Sure, it helped. I couldn’t talk to Mary Claire because she always wanted to believe that it’d all be hunky-dory in the end and that I was the one who could make it happen. Anyway, it wasn’t as hard on me as it was on her. I was in the Navy and I was gone a lot, you know? And she was always home, always having problems with the kid.” He took a sip of coffee. “Ansel, I mean,” he added. “Ansel was pretty rough on her. It’s not easy when you’re a woman, knowing that something came out of your body that probably ought to be dead. Anyway, that was how we felt at the time. So, yeah, it helped. It gave me someone to talk to.”

“And when did you come to California?”

“Not long after that. Mary Claire wanted to come, she was crazy about little Anna, who was the Speaker then, right? And I managed to get a transfer, and we came. The four of us,” he said. He swallowed once. “You’re not drinking your coffee, miss.”

“Sorry,” Eleanor said, taking a brave pull at it. “Just listening.”

“Listening,” he said with an unamused smile. “Let’s hear it for Listening.”

“So you came to L.A.,” I said. “Then what?”

“Things were better at first. We got a Mexican dame to hang around with Ansel, and Mary Claire started spending more and more time at the Church. There was a new Speaker then. It was okay with me if it made her happy, even when the bills started to add up and I figured that the Church cost more than everything else in our lives put together. So I was working at the naval station in Long Beach and she was passing out stuff at the Church, and so what? Like I say, it made her feel better.”

He tilted his head again in the same listening attitude we’d seen at the door. I hadn’t heard anything at all. “Excuse me a minute,” he said, standing up.

“May I come with you?” Eleanor said unexpectedly.

He shifted his weight uncertainly. “Sure,” he said at last. “I mean, I guess so. You’re pretty. He might like to look at you.”

We followed him out of the living room and through the kitchen, a fussy, bleak, single man’s kitchen with an old chipped gas range. The door at the end of the kitchen was ajar.

“These were the maid’s quarters,” he said. “I guess everybody had a maid then. Got its own bedroom, bathroom, everything. All I had to do was put in heat. California people don’t think maids need heat.” He pushed the door the rest of the way open and said, “Quiet, now.” Eleanor nodded soberly and we all went through the door.

I stopped in my tracks so suddenly that Eleanor bumped into my back. “Gee,” she said.

It was like Dorothy stepping out of the house and into Oz. Here, everything was color. Two walls were painted bright yellow and a third was peach. The fourth, the one that held the door we’d come through, was covered with a kind of middle-earth fairyland, complete with mountains, castles, hobbits, and elves.

The entire ceiling was plastered with pictures. It must have taken Ellspeth days to paste them all up there. Illustrations cut from nineteenth-century children’s books were interspersed with pictures of Disney characters, rainbows, waterfalls, an autographed picture of the Roadrunner and the Coyote signed by the genius who created them, Chuck Jones. There must have been two hundred of them.

In the center of the room was a hospital bed cranked halfway up. The chemical smell was strongest here. In the middle of the bed, lying on his back and connected to a gleaming chromium respirator, was a little boy.

He had Angel’s golden hair, but his body was contorted and misshapen. His fingers clawed anxiously at the air. The respirator covered the lower half of his face. Ellspeth smiled, and years fell away from his face.

“Hello, darling,” he said. “Look, I’ve brought you some new friends. See the pretty lady?”

“Hi, Ansel,” Eleanor whispered. “What beautiful hair you have.”

Ansel’s fingers extended and two of them pointed toward Eleanor.  Some kind of a sound came out of the mask.

“Well, well,” Caleb Ellspeth said. “Well, well.” Eleanor went past him and took the crooked hand in hers.

“Aren’t you the lucky boy?” she said. “Your own room and your own window. I never had my own room when I was little.”

It was true. Eleanor had grown up in the back room of a Harlem grocery. She’d slept in a double bunk bed with her two brothers until she was twelve.

Ellspeth picked up a glass and held it in front of Ansel’s face. “Lemonade,” he said. “I’ll make you some lemonade in a few minutes and give it to you.” He looked at Eleanor, who was stroking the yellow hair. “Maybe the pretty lady will bring it if you’re good.”

Ansel’s fingers had curled around Eleanor’s palm. She looked back at me.

“Sure, I will,” Eleanor said. “In fact, why don’t I stay here? You finish talking and I’ll keep Ansel company. Would you like that, Ansel?” The boy blinked.

“I couldn’t ask you,” Ellspeth said.

“You don’t have to,” Eleanor said. “But if you don’t think Ansel would like it …”

“He’ll like it,” Ellspeth said. “Won’t you, Ansel?” Ansel held on to Eleanor’s hand.

Ellspeth backed slowly away from the bed. “Call if he’s any trouble,” he said.

“He won’t be any trouble,” Eleanor said. She was beaming. “I’ve just thought of a Chinese fairy tale that I’ll bet Ansel has never heard. I’ll bet you don’t know any Chinese fairy tales, do you, Ansel? Is there a chair I could sit on?” she asked Ellspeth.

“Sure, sure,” Ellspeth said, as if embarrassed. He pushed a fragile-looking chair over from the wall and Eleanor sat down without letting go of Ansel’s hand.

“That’s better, isn’t it, Ansel?” Eleanor said. “Now we can be closer together. Now, listen, do you know where China is? No? Well, it’s a long way away, farther even than New York, where you were born. Things in China take a long time to happen, and this is a long, long story, so if you go to sleep while I’m telling it to you, you won’t hurt my feelings. But, boy, this is a
good
story.”

Ellspeth tugged my sleeve. As I followed him into the kitchen, Eleanor said, “Do you see how black my hair is, Ansel? In China everybody’s hair is black, just like mine. But this story is about a very special little boy, a little boy with bright gold hair, exactly like yours, but not so pretty.”

Ellspeth went to a roll of paper towels hanging on the kitchen wall, tore one off, and blew his nose on it. “The kid needs a woman,” he said fiercely.

“How much does he understand?”

“The words? Not much. But he can feel her. He can tell a good person better than I can.”

“She’s a pretty good person,” I said.

“Marry her,” he said, “if you’re in a position to do it. You’re a dope if you don’t.”

“Well,” I said lamely, “we were talking about you.”

“Right.” He opened a cabinet under the sink and tossed the towel into it. “The big marriage expert. Let’s go back into the living room.”

In the living room he reseated himself and looked down into his coffee cup. “The Ballad of Caleb and Mary Claire. Like I told you, I was in the Navy,” he said after a gulp of cold coffee. “This is about four or five years after we got to L.A., and Mary Claire and I were getting along pretty good, I thought, I mean we were both in the Church and she wasn’t picking at me about Ansel anymore. She seemed better, you know? Anyway, when they wanted me to travel I said okay and relinquished my hardship deferment. They sent me to the Philippines, Subic Bay. All these randy, cute little girls, all these guys going ashore, coming back with drip, syph, God knows what. I was the only guy didn’t invest that ten bucks in cab fare, the only guy came home with a dry wick. I’d been writing her regular, getting not as many answers back as I wrote letters, but I figure, she’s got the kids to worry about all day, and the Church, and what am I doing? Lying around reading
Playboy
and keeping the machine clean, so I plan this big surprise. I get home three days early, right off the boat I buy a dozen roses, a bottle of champagne, make reservations at Perino’s, where I’ve never even been before—I mean I am ready to party Mary Claire out of her skin. Rent a limousine, get home about eight p.m., choke off the impulse to call out ‘Surprise,’ and stand in the front door listening to her moving furniture around upstairs. She was like that, you know? Ever since Ansel was born, too much nervous energy. Wake up at four a.m., start shoving the couch around. So I go up the stairs wondering where the bed’s going to be this time, and open the door, and the bed’s right where I left it, only it’s fuller. She’s on it with two guys. Two guys from the Church. I mean one of them was my Listener. I told everything to this guy, and here he is trying it all out on my wife with one of his buddies.

“Well, where I come from, Michigan, you don’t hit women. So I took it out on the guys. I threw one of them through the window without bothering to open it, we were in a two-story apartment at the time, and the second guy, the Listener, had it easier because, first, the window was already busted, and second, he had the other guy to land on. Then I turn around to her and she’s yelling, ‘Don’t hit me, don’t hit me! I just changed the sheets.’

” ‘Mary Claire,’ I say, ‘I wouldn’t hit you with somebody else’s fist.’ And I shake up the bottle of champagne and pop the cork in her direction, and she’s sitting there all wet, holding the sheet up above her tits, and I say, ‘Welcome home,’ and throw the flowers at her. ‘Yeek,’ she says, like I hit her with a baseball bat, and then I’m out of there. I don’t even stop to see Angel or Ansel, not even Ansel. It’s like I’m mad at them too, for some reason. The car’s still waiting outside, although the driver’s pretty gaga at these two naked guys who just sailed out the window and are now crawling for the shrubbery, and it’s time for Perino’s. So I go. But first I go back onto the lawn and give my Listener a good kick or two. Then I go to Perino’s and drink my dinner to the point where it takes three waiters to get me back into the car, and I tell the driver to take me back to the ship. Two days later I sail for Christ knows where, and I still haven’t talked to my kids.”

Behind him, Eleanor came into the room. “Asleep,” she said, seating herself next to me.

Ellspeth nodded to her, tilted his head back for a second in the listening position, and continued. “I
have
talked to my lawyer, though, some jerk from the Church—I didn’t know who else to ask, I’d spent all my time in L.A. with my kids and my wife and the people in the Church—and the lawyer tells me not to worry.

“So, like the world’s ultimate end-of-the-line asshole, pardon me, miss—I don’t worry. And then, I think I’m in Tokyo at the time, I learn that she’s run up my credit cards to nine thousand bucks, which is as high as they’ll go without dissolving in the hand, and she’s got the apartment and four-fifty a month for her plus another five each for Angel and Ansel, and my pay is attached because I owe on the credit cards. So the light dawns in the east that maybe she’s been porking my lawyer too.”

“Sounds like a logical assumption,” I said.

“Yeah, and so forth and so on. Except it turns out that maybe it’s wrong, because a couple of months later, who’s the Church’s new Speaker? My little girl, Angel, who’s never said anything more complicated than she wants a glass of water. I mean this was a kid who didn’t learn to read until everybody else in the class was doing square roots or something. Slow, Mary Claire used to say, the kid’s slow. She’s going to wind up scouring some clown’s pots and pans, Mary Claire used to say, like there was something wrong with that, like Angel was supposed to be a nuclear physicist or translate the Bible into Farsi. And all of a sudden she’s the Speaker, spouting stuff … Well, you’ve heard it—sounds like the Gettysburg Address in drag.”