Ruffly Speaking (35 page)

With every step Rowdy and I took, the floor creaked like a rickety bridge about to drop out from under us. We made our cacophonous way through a butler’s pantry. When I pushed a swinging door, it shrieked on its hinges, and Rowdy shoved ahead of me. I flipped a switch on the wall, but the brass chandelier over the mile-long table had fake-candle-flame bulbs that gave only dim light. Propped on the mantelpiece over the fireplace at one end of the dining room were two tarnished candlesticks with no candles, a china shepherdess, a beautifully framed watercolor of a flower garden in bloom, and two plastic boxes that turned out to house little gadgets with warning lights. One gadget would indicate gas leaks; the other would warn of the presence of carbon monoxide.

“Miss Savery!” This loud, hollow bray was a stranger’s. In what felt like an effort to demonstrate my control of the alien sound, I repeated, “Miss Savery!” We reached the large entrance hall at the front of the house, where my foot caught in a braided rug. To regain my balance, I rested a hand on Rowdy’s back. I raised my chin, opened my throat, and let the strange voice boom up the wide staircase ahead. “Miss Savery!”

A momentary burst of silence hit my left ear. Rowdy jerked his head and pulled away from the stairs. “Buddy, I am so sorry,” I told him. Far above us, something moved. We headed up the stairs. On the second-floor landing, I hit every light switch and saw no one. Straight ahead, a door opened to a filthy green-tiled bathroom that looked like the stage set for a film on home safety hazards. Teetering on a little marble shelf above the ancient sink, as if deliberately positioned to tumble into the basin, was a battered electric radio plugged into the same four-way adapter that also sprouted the cords of a grungy Water-Pik and a new-looking rotating-bristle toothbrush, both of which sat on top of a toilet you don’t want to hear about. On a filthy bath mat rested a rusty electric heater heavily patched with duct tape. A three-legged stool next to the empty tub supported a little student lamp positioned like a duck ready to dive into the water. Alice Savery evidently enjoyed reading while she soaked. Her taste in books, it seemed to me, should have run toward sizzlers, but cosied up next to the lamp as if prepared to nudge it into the tub was a beautifully bound volume of
A
la recherche du temps perdu.
Proust’s
In Memory of Things Past.
Courting lost time. The old Venetian blinds that covered the window had ivory-colored slats like the thinly milled tusks of poacher-killed animals. Maybe Rowdy smelled them. I had to drag him out.

On the landing, I again shouted to Miss Savery. Then I headed up the worn wooden servant stairs to the third floor. On both sides of the treads, books were stacked so high that Rowdy and I were forced to ascend single file. I went first. On top of one stack of especially scholarly-looking tomes were two dismantled smoke detectors, their battery compartments gutted. Chunks of plaster from the hospital green walls crunched underfoot.

When we’d finally picked our way up, I was sweating from the trapped heat, and my lungs sounded like an artificial respirator in need of a tune-up. The landing offered a choice of four closed doors. A foot or so above the knob of one door was a large blotch of smudges that looked like a nonrepresentational finger painting grudgingly produced by a depressed child. Working on scent rather than sight, Rowdy headed for that door. He had raised a paw to add a bas-relief to its decoration before I tugged him back, gave him an informal version of the down signal, and murmured that I’d be back soon. I turned the doorknob, wormed past Rowdy, entered the room, and quickly pulled the door shut behind me, leaving Rowdy’s leash securely caught in it.

The room I entered had a low ceiling, but it was long and wide, and its walls were so heavily lined with books that it looked like some out-of-the-way section of the stacks of a university library. Despite three open, unscreened windows that admitted smoke-tinged air, it smelled predominantly of old paper.

Directly ahead of me was an ugly, beat-up teacher’s desk. The only light came from an old-fashioned gooseneck lamp on the desk top, which also held three or four Harvard Coop notebooks, a mug of pens and pencils, a large red fire extinguisher like the one in the kitchen, an antique Underwood manual typewriter, a black telephone wired to what looked like two answering machines, and three or four other electronic devices that I couldn’t identify. I’d found Alice Savery. I no longer needed Rita’s aid. I popped it out of my ear and dropped it into a pocket of the black dress.

She was sitting at the desk. She faced away from me. As approaching sirens finally began to wail, she rose from her seat. Before she had finished turning around, I said, “Your carriage house is on fire, but the little boy got out. Now you need to come with me.”

Her gray hair with its Roman cut made her head look like a steel helmet with the visor raised, and the khaki clothes that had seemed practical and above style when I’d first seen her in her garden now looked unmistakably military. Her eyes were fiercely narrowed, as if she suffered from some form of chronic conjunctivitis that made vision painful. Although I’d removed the aid, Alice Savery’s voice was loud and somehow impersonal. Her tone was at once authoritative and pitiful: “Alfred would never have let them get away with it,” she said firmly. The small gray-and-brown figure peered to the left, then to the right. “They
stole
my garden. I had roses, beautiful roses. And in my white garden, there were two weeping pears that they cut down. They brought in a machine to tear up their roots.”

I found myself speaking very simply. “Miss Savery, your carriage house is burning. The fire could spread. It could be dangerous here. We need to leave. Come with me.”

Her slate-gray gaze moved systematically back and forth without pausing even briefly on me. “Can you smell it in the air?” But she was voicing an observation, not asking a question.

“Of course. The smoke—”

She blew out a scornful breath. “At first, one finds it all so very easy to dismiss. It can be so dreadfully, dreadfully subtle. One learns to adopt a multifaceted approach. There are some who disagree, but I count myself among those who subscribe to the theory that aluminum does indeed play a contributory role.” The strained expression on her tight face suggested a painful struggle with some complex problem of logic. Once again entirely sure of herself, she gave a stiff smile accompanied by a mechanical jerk of the chin. “Secondary smoke is an entirely different matter.” She paused a moment. When she spoke, her voice was still loud, but her tone now suggested the expectation and fear that she might be overheard. “They have very powerful lobby groups.” Projecting her voice as aiming it at the most distant seat in a large lecture hall, she added a single word in a confiding stage whisper:
“Viruses.”

As I understood the tobacco industry and its lobby groups, the term was apt enough. Alice Savery, however, turned out to be speaking literally. Her objection to cigarette smoke was based not so much on the threat it posed to human lungs as on its capacity to infect plants with something called the tobacco mosaic virus. I wondered whether it existed at all. The rabies virus certainly existed. So did HIV. As Alice Savery saw it, those were the two principal viral weapons directed at her, and their chosen agents of contagion were, respectively, dogs and homosexual men. “This
Lamb,”
she almost shouted, “made no effort whatsoever to disguise it. One knew immediately.” She shook a bony fist. “When one works in one’s garden, insect bites are an inevitability, not to mention two potentially rabid—” She broke off. Her eyes blazed at me. “He committed suicide. He was an extremely foolish person.”

“Come with me,” I said gently. But, again, Alice Savery paid no more attention to my words than she did to the wails of the sirens or to the shouts of the firefighters that now reached me through the open windows. Desperate to communicate with her, I went striding to the big window that faced the backyard, and I pointed dramatically at the carriage house. Flames seemed to leap out to kiss the thick streams of water from the hoses.

Alice Savery followed me. At last taking in what I’d been trying to convey, she stared briefly at the scene, but then moved away from the window and back toward her desk. “They
stale
my garden.” She was enraged and grieved. “And now they’re burning down my carriage house. The children have done that, you know. They steal my flowers. Only yesterday, they came and ripped them out. They hide in my carriage house, and they think I don’t know. They sneak in there, and they smoke cigarettes. My poor—

I approached her slowly and cautiously, as if she were a strange dog that might suddenly turn on me without warning as I tried to rescue it from danger. I offered her my arm. She took it. I led her to the door. As I turned the knob, I told her, “My dog is waiting in the hall, but he’s very friendly, and I promise you that he’s had all his shots. He won’t hurt you.” Rowdy’s leash was jammed in the closed door. In opening the door, I freed him.

Only when Alice Savery caught sight of Rowdy did I finally realize that my assurances—indeed, every word I’d spoken—had been utterly wasted.

“Miss Savery, you can’t hear anything I’m saying, can you?” I asked softly.

Even if Alice Savery had heard me, her terror would probably have blotted out my voice, and even if she’d been a dog lover, Rowdy would have been a bizarre sight, a big smoke-black dog, his pink tongue hanging out as he panted from the heat, a black jersey bow on top of his massive head. Alice Savery’s steely fingers dug painfully into my arm. Then she let go and sped across the room toward her desk, presumably in search of whatever ultrasound device she’d used on Ruffly. I tried to beat her to it. We reached the desk almost simultaneously. Her hand grabbed for one of the gadgets. I snatched the gadget. “He won’t hurt you!” I bellowed. I tried to let her see my lips, but she wasn’t watching.
“He’s perfectly friendly!”

As if to prove my claim, Rowdy moved toward Alice Savery. She sidestepped, threw panicked looks left and right, and suddenly darted toward the dim end of the room that lay at the front of the house. As I bent to pick up the leash that trailed from Rowdy’s collar, I heard what sounded like the rattle of chain. When I looked up, Alice Savery was at the window that overlooked Highland Street, her back toward me. I shouted her name. Anyone who can hear finds it almost impossible to believe that someone else cannot.

Hooked over the windowsill was a wide, sturdy-looking metal bracket, and out through the open window, Alice Savery was dropping the metal chains and rungs of the emergency escape ladder the bracket was meant to support. Years of manual labor seemed to have given her the strength and agility of an athlete. When I was halfway to her, she had one leg over the sill. Her hands clutched the bracket. I dropped Rowdy’s leash and sprinted, but she’d already swung her lean body over the sill, and one of her feet must have found a rung.

“Don’t!” I hollered.
“Stop!”

She transferred her full weight to the ladder, and the bracket dug into the rotten wood of the sill. Then, as her frozen face vanished beneath the window, the bracket moved, and its hooks shifted. In seconds, the old wood gave way under Alice Savery’s weight.

34

 A month later, Rita’s freshly streaked hair was long enough to cover her ears completely and reliably. Even when she shook her head, the aids didn’t show at all.
Aid,
I should say. To leave her left ear free for the telephone and to give herself a chance to adapt to amplification without total bombardment, she’d taken to wearing only the aid that went in her right ear. Three days earlier, however, she’d stepped into the shower, soaked her head, poured on shampoo, and discovered only when she was halfway through lathering her hair that one of the unbearably uncomfortable foreign objects to which she would never adjust was still firmly lodged in her right ear canal. It was now at the audiologist’s for repair or replacement. Consequently, I was walking on Rita’s left. Rowdy was ahead of
^Us
at the end of his six-foot leather lead, sniffing bushes and, early on the warm summer evening, making sleddog-sure that we didn’t hit a patch of thin ice. Willie trotted Merrily along in what Rita considers perfect heel position, that is, anywhere that might even remotely be considered vaguely in the vicinity of her left side. His eyes crackled, his beautifully trimmed black coat gleamed, and every one of the tiny black Scotties running around his new red collar and down his leash looked exactly like him.