Trust Me (29 page)

She nodded, lowering her eyes to guide her fork while its side sliced the lettuce leaves beneath her scoop of cottage cheese.

Even as he acted, Fulham knew, his enemies, armed with his wallet, were running up giant bills—buying cars, clothes,
front-seat theatre tickets, mockingly extravagant meals. Yet the girls he talked to that Friday afternoon counselled delay; they all sounded seventeen, with placid, gum-chewing voices. As a group, they seemed to have dealt with momentarily disappearing wallets before. Houston did agree to stop payment on the check, but the bank said the computer could not possibly be programmed to stop his account before early next week. The credit-card offices had busy phones, and differing policies, and by the time Fulham hung up in exhaustion his credit lay in a tangle, a hydra with a few of the heads cut off but most still writhing. He went through the whole house again, trying to imagine his self of yesterday in every tidy room, including the small room, once a sewing room, where they watched television. To discourage excessive watching, the Fulhams had furnished it austerely; there was only the bare set, an oval rag rug, and a cushionless Windsor settee, with a plaid blanket neatly folded against one arm. The wallet’s non-existence rang out through the rooms like a pistol shot which leaves deafness in its wake; he stood stunned that an absence could be so decisive. It occurred to Fulham that the house would feel like this the day after he died.

Downstairs, the front door slammed. “Got the mail,” Diane called up. In his distraction he had forgotten to make his usual noon trip to the box at the end of the brick walk. But into his subconscious had filtered, hours ago, Rodolfo’s “Che gelida manina” from
La Bohème
, whistled off-key. The mail was dumped on the hall table, with the petals fallen from the summer’s last roses. A long sand-colored envelope from Houston lay amid the junk and bills. It held the check, dated three weeks ago. No hidden message, no mark of misdirection or extra wear on the envelope betrayed where it had been for so long a time. In this blankness he felt a kind of magnificence,
the same kind that declines to answer prayer. He found himself not consoled. Payment on the check had been stopped; it was a worthless piece of paper.

Next morning, Saturday, Fulham awoke with a soreness in his stomach, a chafing hairball of vague anxiety that clarified into the conscious thought
I am a man without a wallet
. The arrival of the check had lessened his fears of criminal conspiracy but isolated the wallet’s loss upon a higher plane, where it merged with landscapes and faces that had once belonged to his life and would never be seen again, melted into the irreversible void like the sticky, oddly plausible stuff of dreams. Shame had replaced rage as his prime emotion; he had no wish to leave the house, or go to his makeshift office, or face the grandchildren, who, downstairs in the hall, were noisily arriving. His daughter’s and his wife’s voices twined in a brief music ended by the slam of the front door and the click of high heels briskly retreating down the walk. From an upstairs window he spied on the redheaded visitor, once his baby, as she ducked into her husband’s low sports car, flashing a length of bare leg.

The children spent the morning gorging on television and at lunchtime little Tod handed Fulham his wallet. He said, “Did you want this, Grandpa? It was all folded up in the blanket.”

His fat, worn wallet. His own.

“Oh, dear,” Diane said, putting her hand to her cheek in a choreographic gesture that seemed to Fulham to parody dismay. “When
Silk Stockings
ended I tidied up and must have folded your wallet in without realizing it. Remember, we put the blanket over our laps because of the draft?”

That made sense. The nights were getting cooler. Now Fulham recovered a dim memory of being annoyed, on the
hard Windsor settee, by the lump in his back pocket. He must have removed it, while gazing at Cyd Charisse. As if in another scene from the movie, he saw himself, close up, hold the wallet in his hand, where it vanished like a snowflake.

“Grandpa has lots of wallets,” Tod’s shiny-haired little sister chimed in. “He doesn’t care.”

“Oh, now, that’s not quite true,” Fulham told her, squeezing the beloved bent book of leather between his two palms and feeling very grandpaternal, fragile and wise and ready to die.

O
FF WE GO
! Saturday morning, into our cars, children and dogs and all, driving north to Vermont in leaf season, to the Tremaynes’ house on the Columbus Day weekend. It’s become a custom, one of the things we all do, the four or five families, a process that can’t be stopped without running the risk of breaking a spell. Threading out of greater Boston on its crowded, potholed highways, then smoothly north on 93, and over on 89, across the Connecticut River, into Vermont. At once, there is a difference: things look cleaner, sparser than in New Hampshire. When we leave 89, the villages on the winding state roads, with their white churches and irregular, casually mowed greens and red-painted country stores advertising F
UDGE
F
ACTORY
or P
UMPKIN
O
UTLET
, show a sharp-edged charm, a stagy, calendar-art prettiness that wears at the eyes, after a while, as relentlessly as industrial ugliness. And the leaves, whole valleys and mountains of them—the strident pinks and scarlets of the maples, the clangorous gold of the hickories, the accompanying brasses of birch and beech,
on both sides of the road, rise after rise, a heavenly tumult tied to our dull earth only by broad bands of evergreen and outcroppings of granite. We arrive feeling battered by natural glory, by the rush of wind and of small gasoline explosions incessantly hurried one into the next. The dirt driveway—really just ruts that the old wagons and carts wore into the lawn and that modern times have given a dusting of gravel—comes in at right angles off an unmarked macadam road, which came off a numbered state route, which in turn came off a federal highway; so we feel, at last arriving, that we have removed the innermost tissue covering from an ornately wrapped present, or reduced a mathematical problem to its final remainder, or climbed a mountain, or cracked a safe.

The gravel grinds and pops beneath our tires. Marge Tremayne is standing on the porch. She looks pretty good. A little older, a shade overweight, but good.

She and Ralph bought the big wheat-yellow farmhouse with its barn and twenty acres one winter when he had made a killing in oil stocks, the year of the first gas lines, and when their three children were all excited about skiing. Ralph, too, was excited—he grew a Pancho Villa mustache in imitation of the ski instructors and, with his fat cigar in the center of his mouth and his rose-colored goggles and butter-yellow racing suit and clumpy orange step-in boots, was quite a sight on the slopes. Marge, in her tight stretch pants and silver parka and Kelly-green headband and with her hair flying behind, looked rather wonderful, too; her sense of style and her old dance training enabled her to mime the basic moves gracefully enough, and down she would slide, but she wasn’t a skier at heart. “I’m too much of a coward,” she would say. Or, in another mood, to another listener: “I’m too much of an earth mother.” She took to using the Vermont place in the summer
(when Ralph had hoped to rent it) and raised vegetables by the bushel and went into canning in a big way, and into spinning wool and mushrooming, and she even began to show a talent for dowsing, serving her apprenticeship with some old mountain man from beyond Montpelier. Ralph was still working in town, and except for Augusts would drive up to his wife on weekends, five hours each way, carting children and their friends back and forth and keeping house in Brookline by himself. So this leaf-season weekend has become a visit to Marge, our chance to see what is going on with her.

Marge and the newly arrived Neusners are standing on the side porch when the Maloneys pull up. The Maloney children bound or self-consciously uncoil, depending upon their ages, out of automotive confinement. There is pleasant confusion and loudly proclaimed exhaustion, a swirling of people back and forth; the joy of an adventure survived animates the families as they piecemeal unload their baggage and collapse into Marge’s care. She has a weary, slangy, factual voice, slightly nasal as if she has caught a cold. “It’s girls’ and boys’ dormitories again this year. Men at the head of the stairs turn right, women left. Boys thirteen and older out in the barn, younger than that upstairs with the girls. The Tylers are already here; Linda’s taken some littles for a leaf walk and Andy’s helping Ralph load up the woodboxes. Ralph says each man’s supposed to split his weight in wood. Each woman is responsible for one lunch or dinner. Breakfasts, it’s a free-for-all as usual, and don’t put syrupy knives and forks straight into the dishwasher, anybody. That means
you
, Teddy Maloney.”

The nine-year-old boy, so suddenly singled out, laughs in nervous fright; he had been preoccupied with trying to coax
the family dog, Ginger, a red-haired setter bitch, out of the car, in spite of the menacing curiosity of Wolf, the Tremaynes’ grizzled chow, and Toby Neusner, an undersized black retriever.

Bernadette Maloney, embracing Marge and kissing her cheek and thinking how broad her body feels, backs off and asks her, a touch too solemnly, “How are you doing?”

Marge gazes back as solemnly, her slate-blue eyes muddied by elements of yellow. “The summer’s been bliss,” she confides, and averts her gaze with a stoic small shrug. “I don’t know. I can’t handle people anymore.”

Her headband today is maroon. Her thick long dirty-blond hair over the years has become indistinguishably mixed with gray, this subtle dullness intensifying her odd Indian look, not that of blood Indians but of a paleface maiden captured and raised in their smoky tepees, in their casually cruel customs; her face up here has turned harder and more chiselled, her unpainted lips thinner, her eyes more opaque. She has not so much a tan as a glow, a healthy matte colorlessness rubbed deep into her skin. Her body has grown wider, but with her old sense of style she carries the new weight well, in her hip-hugging jeans and a man’s checked lumberjack shirt that hangs over her belt like a maternity blouse. Belly, gray hair, and all, she is still our beauty, and Ralph, when he appears—having evidently been hurried from his car straight into service, for his Brooks Brothers shirt is creased and dirtied by the logs he has been lugging and his city shoes are powdered with sawdust—is still a friendly ogre; he exudes fatherly fumes, he emits barks and guffaws of welcome. His eyes are reddened by cigar smoke, he stammers and spits in his greedy hurry to get his jokes out, he laughs aloud before the punch line is quite reached. He appears to have lost some weight.
“My d-daughters’ awful cooking,” he explains. “Th-they’re trying to,
ha
, poison the old guy.”

How old are we? Scarcely into our forties. Lots of life left to live. The air here is delicious, crisper and drier than air around Boston. We start to breathe it now, and to take in where we are. The sounds are fewer, and those few are different—individual noises: a single car passing on the road, a lone crow scolding above the stubbled side field, a single window sash clicking back and forth in the gentle wind we hadn’t noticed when outside unpacking the cars. The smells of the house are country smells—linoleum, ashes, split wood, plaster, a primeval cellar damp that rises through the floorboards and follows us up the steep, wear-rounded stairs to the second floor, where we see the children and their sleeping bags settled in the tangle of middle rooms. The house, like most Vermont farmhouses, has suffered many revisions over the years; they thought nothing, in the old days, of lifting out a staircase and turning it around or of walling in a fireplace to vent a Franklin stove. With our suitcases as claim markers, we stake out bunks in the two large front bedrooms that the Tremaynes, when they were most excited about skiing, had set up as single-sex dormitories.

Deborah Neusner stands by the upstairs-hall window, gazing out at the empty road, at the field across the road, at the woods beyond the field, with all their leaves. Bernadette Maloney joins her, standing so close that the two women feel each other’s body warmth as well as the heat from the radiator beneath the window. “The Englehardts are coming, but late. Little Kenneth has a football game.”

“Not so little, then,” Deborah says dryly, not turning her thoughtful profile, with its long chin and high-bridged nose. When she does face Bernadette, her brown eyes, in the sharp
Vermont light, shine on the edge of panic. The Englehardts mean different things to different people, but to all of us they—Lee so bald and earnest and droll, Ruth so skinny and frizzy and nimble and quick-tongued—make things all right, make the whole thing go. Until they arrive, there will be an uneasy question of why we are here, at the top of the map, in this chilly big wheat-yellow farmhouse surrounded by almost vulgarly gorgeous, red-and-gold nature.

The host is under the house! All afternoon, Ralph lies on the cold ground beneath the kitchen wing, wrapping yellow Fiberglas insulation around his pipes. Already there have been frosts, and last winter, when the Tremaynes were renting to skiers, the pipes froze and the people moved to a motel and later sued. He keeps the cigar in his mouth while stretched out grunting in the crawl space; Bill Maloney hopes aloud to Andy Tyler that there is no gas leak under the kitchen. Both men—Bill burly and placid, Andy skinny and slightly hyper—hang there as if to be helpful, now and then passing more insulation, or another roll of duct tape, in to their supine host. Josh Neusner is splitting his weight in wood, an unfamiliar and thus to him somewhat romantic task. The romance intensifies whenever the splitting maul bounces from an especially awkward piece of wood and digs deep into the earth inches from his feet. He is wearing thin black loafers, with tassels. Wood chips and twigs litter the barnyard around him, and white dried dung from the days when Marge tried raising chickens. The barn overhang is loosely battened; upstanding spears of light make sliding patterns as you move your head. It is like an Op Art sculpture in a gallery, but bigger, Josh thinks, and the effect has that coarse broad authority of the actual, of the unintended.
This whole milieu and the business of woodchopping is so exotic to him that his awareness flickers like a bad lightbulb. Minutes of blankness—rural idiocy, Marx had called it—are abruptly illumined by the flash of danger when the maul again sinks its murderous edge close to the tips of his city shoes; then the pebbles, the grit, the twigs are superillumined, vivid as the granules of paint in a Dubuffet, and something of this startled radiance is transferred, if he lifts his head quickly enough, to the sky, the fields, the gaudy woods.