Nothing That Meets the Eye (35 page)

Winnie knew she was probably right. He stood in the middle of the living room, too ashamed of himself to say anything.

“Do you know what I think you should do? Take a good long vacation,” Rose said. “Go up to Maine and do some fishing. Remember how you used to talk about going to Maine for some fishing?”

Winnie barely remembered. He had not dreamt of taking a vacation in years. He could not remember the last vacation he'd had. “I don't deserve it, Rose.”

“But it'd do you so much good. Just close up the store and go, Winnie. This very month!”

Winnie said he might in the latter part of July. Then in August, and then in September. And then he never did. He was worried about the loan he had to pay back to the bank. Winnie went on working from seven in the morning till ten at night, sorting stocks, making change, renewing orders in cautious quantities, and totaling up at the end of the day his intakes of $6.25, $11.19, and sometimes only $3.10.

One evening he picked up the antimacassar that lay on the back of his armchair, and it fell apart in his fingers. Rather, it dissolved in his fingers, like so much smoke. He dropped the weightless fragments into the wastebasket. They were so fine, he doubted that Rose would even notice them when she emptied the basket.

Five more years passed, and in spite of many little ups and downs, Winnie's bank account stayed around a hundred and seventy-five dollars, just about what it had been after Richard absconded with the seven hundred fifty. The only thing that changed was Rose's hair, which got grayer and grayer, and the sensations in Winnie's legs as he trudged home in the winter evenings, lifting his feet high to get through the snow. Winnie felt tireder every winter.

Then one day in April, when Winnie was sixty-one, a letter came from a lawyers' firm in New York. It said that Oliver Hazlewood, an old uncle of Winnie's, had died and left him a hundred thousand dollars in his will. It would take a year to probate the will, but after taxes and legal fees, Winthrop Hazlewood would receive eighty thousand.

Winnie and Rose took this news very calmly, because neither of them could quite realize it was true. They didn't even talk about the money for days. Finally Rose broke the silence by speaking of old Oliver Hazlewood, whom she had met only once, at her wedding. Rose said it was very nice of him to have remembered Winnie so well, since as far as she knew Winnie had never been close to him, had he? Winnie said he hadn't been at all close to him, and that he was very touched at Uncle Oliver's giving him all that.

A little later, they began to talk of what they would do when the money came. They would go to Florida for a vacation. Or perhaps to California. They might even buy a house in Florida or California.

“That'd mean selling the store,” Winnie said.

Both of them sat kind of stunned for a minute, trying to imagine a life without the store.

“We're getting on, Rose. We'd best enjoy to the full what's left of our lives,” Winnie said courageously.

Rose tried to imagine enjoying the rest of her life to the full. Lemonade in a hammock somewhere. All the new dresses she wanted. Bridge parties with tea and candy like she read about. But Rose didn't know how to play bridge. Sea voyages. . . . There were so many things she could do, Rose got dizzy as soon as she started to think about them.

They decided that when the money came next May, they would sell the store and the house, take a slow trip by train along the border of Canada, which they had always wanted to see, and then go to California. They didn't know exactly where, but they had heard of beautiful little towns along the coast south of Los Angeles. By the time next summer rolled around, they would have a better idea as to which town would most likely suit them.

Christmas found Winnie as pinched as ever, but he rented the sleigh, loaded it with presents for the orphans, and drove out to the orphanage for a Christmas Eve afternoon like all the thirty-odd others he had spent in Bingley. But this time there was a surprise for Winnie.

Above the gates of the orphanage fluttered a red streamer with gold letters, saying, merry christmas, winnie!

All the children were waiting for him on the orphanage steps, and Sister Josephine, the superintendent, was there, too. Sister Josephine came forward as soon as Winnie drew rein and handed him a little box.

“The children made up a collection to buy you this for Christmas, Winnie,” Sister Josephine said. “They asked me to give it to you, but it's their present, every bit of it.”

Winnie opened the box. Inside was a gold watch, engraved with flowery scrolls on the cover that flipped open to show the watch face. On the back, it was engraved with his interwined initials.

“Merry Christmas, Winnie!” the children yelled.

Winnie was blushing. All he could think of was that the children had donated thousands of precious pennies to buy the expensive watch, and that he was soon going to be so rich, he could easily buy himself a watch like this and not even feel it. He decided he must talk to Sister Josephine in private, tell her about the money he was going to get, and ask her to sell the watch and return the money to the children. But that could wait a few days, until after Christmas, of course.

Winnie showed the watch to Rose. Rose told him he ought to keep it, no matter what. It was the sentiment attached to it, not so much the money, she said.

“Besides, you wouldn't want everybody in town to know we're going to get all that money—yet—would you?”

Winnie certainly didn't. The eighty thousand dollars put him into an agony of shyness every time he thought about it. They would have to tell everybody eventually, of course, but Winnie wanted it to be at the last moment, and as quietly as possible.

“Sister Josephine can keep a secret, though,” Winnie said. “I ought to give the watch back soon, so they can get the same price they paid for it.”

Rose saw there was no arguing with him, either about keeping the watch or talking to Sister Josephine right away.

Winnie went to Sister Josephine on the second of January, and asked her to take the watch back. Sister Josephine wanted him to keep the watch and give its value back in money, when he got his money. But Winnie couldn't bring himself to wait till May.

“It's going to make the children very disappointed,” she told him.

“I hope not for long,” Winnie said. Then he crept out of her office, bent and small and more humble in his heart than any child who had ever crept out of Sister Josephine's office after being scolded.

May came around finally, and Winnie got a letter from Mr. Hughes of the law firm, asking him to come to New York to sign some papers and to receive the money.

“Well, I suppose it's time we told Ed we want to put the house and the store up for sale,” Winnie said. Ed Stevens was the real estate agent in Bingley.

“I suppose it is,” Rose said.

Winnie spoke to Ed that afternoon, and told him the reason: he was going to get eighty thousand dollars, and he and Rose were going to live in California. Within an hour, the news was all over town. That afternoon, Winnie's store was jammed with people coming in to congratulate him and shake his hand. Winnie thought from their smiles that they meant it, too. He had been worried that some people might be envious.

The next day, Winnie went to New York. It was only the second time in his life he had been to the big town. The first time he had been so small he couldn't remember much, so it was a brand-new experience to him, and just riding by taxi—Winnie would have walked but he was afraid of getting lost and being late for the appointment with Mr. Hughes—from Grand Central Station to East Fifty-second Street made Winnie feel like a piece of pine he had watched once being shot through a sawmill in Bennington, barked, dressed, and cut up for kitchen matches in less time than it takes to tell. Winnie felt about as insignificant as a kitchen match when he walked into Mr. Hughes's plush-carpeted office. But Mr. Hughes was awfully friendly and nice to him, and explained what all the papers were before he signed them, as if Winnie were quite familiar with such matters.

“What bank would you like the eighty thousand deposited in, Mr. Hazlewood?” the lawyer asked. “Or do you want the whole thing in trust?”

Winnie gulped, thinking of eighty thousand dollars landing in the Bingley Bank. “My wife and I are going right off to Canada,” Winnie said. “Then we're going to California to stay, so we'll be giving up our present bank. I don't suppose you could give me the money in cash, could you?”

Mr. Hughes looked surprised for a minute, then he smiled and said, “Why, yes, we could by this afternoon. But are you sure you want to risk carrying all that with you to Vermont, just in your pocket?”

Winnie had with him an old briefcase in which he had intended to carry the money away. “I never lost a dime in my life just by leaving it somewheres. Or even by getting robbed,” Winnie added with a smile.

So Winnie arranged to come back to Mr. Hughes's office at four, which would still give him time to catch the sleeper at five-thirty for Vermont. Winnie passed the time by walking slowly up Fifth Avenue, which he knew was the most famous street, looking wonderingly at the big buses, the taxis that raced by painted every color in the rainbow, and at the shop windows full of expensive articles. Winnie was attracted by a pair of binoculars priced at eighty-five dollars. He looked at them with a vague longing, and from the great distance of the unattainable, just as he had looked all his life at every costly object that he would have liked to possess. Then suddenly he realized that he could buy them by this afternoon at four. Why, eighty-five dollars was only about one thousandth of the money he would have! The idea made Winnie feel light in the head, and he walked on up the avenue, trying to get his bearings by thinking of something else. He sat for a while in Central Park. The trees looked pretty puny, but he felt better surrounded by the green things than by all the concrete buildings.

At a little after four, Mr. Hughes handed Winnie eight packets of banknotes, each one containing ten one-thousand dollar bills. The bills didn't even look like money with those little 1000 figures in the corners, but Winnie's hands were trembling as he put the packets into the briefcase. Mr. Hughes shook his hand warmly, and wished him a glorious time in Canada and California. Winnie thanked him very kindly, both for himself and for Rose.

Winnie tried not to think about the money on the train. He just put the briefcase in the net over his head in the upper berth, and fell asleep about as quickly as he usually did.

It was only the next morning, on the ferry across the Dardle to Bing­ley, that Winnie began to think about the money in the briefcase. He thought about how hard he had worked all his life, and how little he had ever made. Not even enough to buy Rose a refrigerator yet. He thought about all the mistakes he had made, and the bad luck that had followed him like a hound dog on a sure trail, ever since he had come to Bingley—his brother's going off with all that money, and the mildew in the cellar, and all the times he couldn't even count when he had bought goods that wouldn't sell, when he had given the wrong people credit, and all the times he had not bought certain goods that would have sold and made some money if he had bought them. It was just as if he had looked for failure all his life, he thought, and as if finding failure was the only thing he had ever done successfully. And now he'd been handed a fortune on a silver platter, eighty thousand dollars for doing absolutely nothing. He ­didn't deserve it. It didn't seem fated, this piece of luck that was going to change his life completely. Winnie reached for a handkerchief in his hip pocket. He was thinking about leaving Bingley, and there were tears in his eyes. Just as he brought the handkerchief up, his hand hit the briefcase, which was lying on the rail of the ferry.

Winnie grabbed for it, but he was too late. The briefcase dropped down and down and fell with a quiet plop into the water. Winnie leaned over the rail. It was gone without a trace.

“Hey!” Winnie yelled up at the bridge. “Say, stop the boat! I just lost eighty thousand dollars!”

“Lost what?” asked one of the passengers on the deck, a man Winnie didn't know.

Winnie headed for the steps that went up to the bridge. Then he stopped, shaking from head to foot. It was silly to think of stopping the boat. The way the river was rushing by—high water, too, swirly and full of mud from the spring rains—he'd never get that briefcase back in a thousand years, not even if he hired a crew of divers to go down and look for it!

“What did you say you lost?” asked the man beside him.

“Nothing,” Winnie said.

The boat was drawing near the Bingley slip. There seemed to be a lot of people down at the dock. Winnie had hoped he could get home unseen by anybody, because he knew the first person who saw him coming back from New York was going to rush up and congratulate him on having the money. Now he knew he couldn't. Just as he stepped on the gangplank, a roar went up from the crowd.

“Welcome home, Winnie!”

“How's the millionaire?”

“Where's your Rolls-Royce, Winnie?”

The firemen's band by the boathouse started playing “There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” loud enough to drown out all the yelling and cheering, and Winnie saw Rose, all dressed up in her Sunday best, with flowers pinned on her shoulder. Now everybody was yelling, “Speech! Speech!” Winnie walked down the gangplank toward Rose. He felt like a whipped dog, and he supposed he looked like one, but nobody seemed to gather anything from that fact.

Cal Whiting, president of the Bingley Bank, held up his hand for silence.

Winnie braced himself. Now was as good a time as any, Winnie told himself. They'd all know in a few hours, anyway. “Ladies and gentlemen—my old friends of Bingley,” Winnie began, and loud applause followed those words. “I am deeply ashamed to tell you all that I just dropped the money over the rail of that boat there. By accident.”