A Gracious Plenty (20 page)

“I’m glad you could help us out, Miss Nobles. Our regular evening nurse went to be with her family due to the weather.”

“Uh, no, Father,” Leonard explains. “Finch isn’t a nurse. She’s here with me, to sit out the storm.”

Mr. Livingston looks at Leonard and looks at me, and drops my hand and steps back. Then he steps forward again and says, “I see” in a tone I can’t identify. He takes my hand again and says, “My deepest apologies, Miss Nobles.”

I look to Leonard because my mind is slow at catching on.

“If you need something done …” I offer.

“If you’re a guest here, you’ll be treated like a guest,” Mr. Livingston insists. But the way he looks at Leonard, I know that something’s amiss.

We settle down in the study, the chairs all made of leather and big enough for two to sit in. It is hard to imagine Leonard ever living in this house.

“How’s Mother?” he asks, and I try to cover the dirt I’ve tracked in with my shoe.

“Fine. She’s sleeping now. I hope she’ll sleep out the night.”

“I told Finch she could stay in a guest room,” Leonard says, but his voice isn’t gruff the way I know it to be. His voice is high and he asks it like a question, and I’m suddenly homesick, very homesick, for my little house. All I want is to be sitting on my porch, watching the wind blow. It wouldn’t matter if the house blew down with me in it—if I was at home.

Mr. Livingston motions Leonard into the hallway, says, “Excuse us, please, for just a moment,” and then I hear the angry whispering, the accusations. I hear Leonard apologizing and Mr. Livingston tapping his foot on the hardwood floor, making quite a racket and whispering loudly about Leonard’s mother and what could happen.

And I decide their house is no place for me, storm or no storm. I’d rather be at the Holiday Inn, and though I don’t know where one is, I decide I’ll find one if I have to, if the Mediator chases me out again.

But when I head for the door, Mr. Livingston suddenly appears and takes my arm. “Allow me to give you a tour, Miss Nobles?”

I look back to Leonard, and he’s flushed, his blue eyes wide, his jaw tight. “Go ahead, Finch,” he says through gritted teeth. “Father’s a real storyteller. You’ll enjoy it.”

Leonard stays behind as Mr. Livingston leads me around the first floor, giving me the history of the community and of the house as we go. But I can’t listen too good for wondering what’s going on inside Leonard, and what’s going on in the cemetery, and what I’m going to do next.

“This woodstove,” Mr. Livingston tells me, “was purchased from a man named Adam Smith by my great-grandfather back in the early 1800s.”

“Do you know who made it?” I ask him.

And he looks at me perturbed. “Who
made
it? I don’t care who made it. I care that it’s nearly two hundred years old.” And he moves us along.

“This moose was shot by my wife’s brother, Mr. Albert Dubus. He brought it all the way from Canada.…”

The head on the wall is dead, of course, but the eyes are wide open, the pelt supple, the rack impressive. And I wish I could talk to the moose. I’d rather talk to the moose than to Mr. Livingston, and after he walks ahead, I reach out and touch its neck.

Mr. Livingston leads me to the kitchen, which is large and well furnished but otherwise unexceptional. “The original kitchen was out back,” he says. “If you look out this window, you can see the building right there,” and he points and turns on an outside light. “The food was made there, where there was space for a large hearth, and then the servants brought it into the house. But now, with modern appliances”—and he winks—“we don’t need such a space.”

“What do you use the old kitchen for?”

“Right now, it’s not in use,” he answers quick. “For many years, my wife, Mrs. Livingston, used the area as a reading room. Before that, it was a play area for the boys—it kept Leonard out from underfoot.”

“I see.”

“I had another son,” he tells me, like I don’t know. “God took him from me when he was just a child. He had great promise, that boy. They say he had my eyes.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “At least you’ve got Leonard.”

But Mr. Livingston doesn’t reply to me at all.

He takes me up the front staircase and shows off the rooms, restored to their pre—Civil War decor. He shows me knick-knacks inside each room, clocks and plates and pictures and statues. He shows me gifts he received from important people and points out one particular bed shipped all the way from Switzerland, then points out the place where Leonard cut his teeth. “I had it stripped and sanded and varnished again. But it will never be as valuable,” he says.

He leads me to French doors that open onto a balcony. I can see the limbs of trees practicing karate out there.

“Children find the one most important thing you own to destroy. You don’t have children, do you?”

“No,” I say.

“No, I don’t suppose you do.”

And I don’t know what he means by that, but it stings my face.

All the doors upstairs are open except for one, and that one, he explains, is his bedroom.

“You can have your pick of rooms, Miss Nobles,” he tells me. “And in the morning, if you’ll strip the bed of your sheets, I’ll have the housekeeper wash them.”

Then he takes me down the back staircase. At the bottom, there’s a room where Mrs. Livingston is sleeping, just off the kitchen.

“The invalid’s room,” he says. “We don’t want her climbing the stairs.”

“Len?” a woman’s voice calls. “Is that you, Len?”

“Yes, doll,” he answers. “Mildred, we have company.”

“We do?” she titters, and I hear feet tapping at the floor.

Then Mr. Livingston does a strange thing. He grabs the doorknob and holds it closed even though his wife works at it from the other side.

“Leonard!” Mr. Livingston calls. “Come escort Miss Nobles back to the study. If you’ll wait here—” he says to me, and inches the door just a crack and wedges himself inside “the invalid’s room.”

I meet Leonard halfway. “I’m leaving,” I tell him. “I’m going home.”

“Wait,” he says. Then he pauses and looks at his shoes. “It was a bad idea, wasn’t it? I’m sorry, Finch. I just thought—”

“Just hush,” I tell him. I can’t hear him apologize again.

I open the front door and stand there, barely making out my pickup across the lawn. I look at Mr. Livingston’s truck and Leonard’s squad car and think of how I’m going to drive—and where I’ll go. The weather’s worse already and there’s a shutter on a window clanking, a screeching coming from somewhere else. And though the rain comes in, splashing inside, speckling the wooden floor with pinprick dots, I don’t close it. The weather’s just too bad to leave.

“You mad?” he asks.

“No,” I say.

“Why’re you mad?”

“I’m not mad,” I answer. “I’m uncomfortable.”

“Me, too,” he tells me. “I thought it’d make it better—for you to be here—but I guess not.”

“You shouldn’t be uncomfortable here. He’s your father, Leonard. Work it out.”

“It’s not that easy,” he says.

“I have easier conversations with my parents and they’re
dead,”
I tell him. “Why do you let him treat you that way? Either stand up to him or get away from him.”

“I just want him to be proud of me,” he says.

And that’s the last straw for me. “You are
too old
to be acting so childish,” I say. “You can’t spend your life living for somebody else. And besides that, your father’s not going to be proud of you. He’s proud of a
moose head
, Leonard. He’s proud of the
woodwork
. But you’re not an antique, or a limited edition, and you’re not imported from a foreign country. He’s got more pride in his liquor cabinet than he’s got in you.”

“That’s unfair,” he says.

“Hey, I got an idea. Maybe if we took you to a taxidermist and got you stuffed, then he’d be proud. Maybe he could stand you in the corner and hang coats on you, and when guests came, he could say, ‘This was my son the policeman. He spent his life trying to make me proud.’ ”

And as I fuss, the wind picks up. The wind blows so hard that I can’t even close the door when I try. It blows so hard that it knocks over the wooden coatrack and peels up the edge of an area rug.

“I wish I could send you
home
,” Leonard says, and I can tell I’ve pissed him off.

“I’m going,” I tell him. “I don’t want to be here watching you get treated like shit. You can’t even stand up for yourself. That’s pathetic,” I say.

“I know,” Leonard says, and he drops his miserable head.

“
No
, you asshole,” I tell him. And I get right in his face. “Don’t
let
me talk to you that way! You got to stand up for yourself. Can’t you see nobody else is going to?”

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Quit apologizing! You make me sick.” I head down the steps, down the walkway, and there’s hail now, bouncing on the ground, falling so hard from the sky that it pings on my scalp. And I’m mad at everybody, Leonard included. I’m mad at the Livingstons and the Mediator and Papa and Lucy and especially at the Poet, who I can occasionally glimpse shooting the balls of ice from a BB gun, shooting all around the air.

“Okay,” Leonard yells back, and he’s chasing me down, right behind me. “You want me to talk hard, I’ll talk hard. You’re a fine one to be criticizing me, when you’ve spent your whole life ashamed of your face and running from everybody. You’ve made it ten times worse for yourself because you never gave anybody a chance, always
expecting
them to mistreat you. You hold grudges like nobody I’ve ever seen, Finch. Hell, it’s taken you this long to forgive me for the first day we started school—and I ain’t convinced you’ve forgiven me now. And that’s why you got nobody. I might have a problem standing up for myself, and I might not be worthy of anybody’s pride, but I do the best I can, and at least I got some
friends.”

“I got friends,” I reply. “Plenty of friends. A
gracious
plenty,” I tell him.

“Name them,” he says, and he turns me around and starts walking me back toward the house. And I start reeling off people from the cemetery—the same damned ones I’m mad at: “Lucy and William and the Poet and Marcus”—I even say his name, Marcus—“and the Poet and the Mediator and Ma and Papa and Lucy and William and Rulene and Jed.” I could go on and on.

“They’re all
dead
,” Leonard tells me. “You can’t exactly call ’em and tell ’em to come pick you up, now can you?”

“You’d
like
to think that,” I say. “You’d like to think it’s all in my head, but it ain’t, Leonard.”

And I think we could go on fighting for hours. I think we could accuse each other and feed off the rain until we wound up nothing but blood and shreds of muscle on the steps. I think we’d enjoy it. Maybe the hail’d beat us to pulp.

But then Mrs. Livingston comes out, in a robe and slippers. Her face has fallen and her hair has grayed, but she still carries a regalness about her. It isn’t so hard to imagine her on the steps of the courthouse, baby Marcus in her arms.

“Well, hello,” she says to me, and walks right out onto the walkway to touch my cheek, the burned one, stroking her thumb against the burn. “I remember you,” she tells me. “You were a member of my childhood class.”

And it startles me so much to see her there that way, to feel her touch, that I just say, “No.”

“Mother, this is Finch Nobles. She was in school with
me
,” Leonard tells her, and he shoves us all back up the steps and inside the door. I drip onto the shiny wood floor.

“No,” Mrs. Livingston says. “I remember this face. She’s the girl who stole my poodle in New York.”

I shake my head.

“Oh yes, you did. That was in 1945, and we were living on Twenty-third Street. And I had the prettiest face in the city and yours was the crudest, of course. So you stole my prancing poodle.”

“Darling,” Mr. Livingston says, leaning against the mop he’s fetched from somewhere, “we never lived in New York. And we never had a poodle.”

“Besides that, Finch wasn’t even born then,” Leonard says.

“What did you do with that poodle?” she asks me. She twists the hem of her robe around and around in her hand while she waits for an answer, lifting it so high that I can see her thin white thighs.

“I fed it painted Easter eggs,” I play along. “When it died, I buried it in the yard and grew a poodle tree.”

“Oh,” she says, delighted, “I have missed you so much,” and she comes to hug me.

I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve had arms thrown over my shoulders or a face that I could feel so close to mine. I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve been able to smell someone so clearly, but Mrs. Livingston smells of powder and camphor, and I close my eyes and breathe it in. But she’s a short woman, her head resting against my chest, and when I look down, I see that she’s staring at me, her eyes blue like Leonard’s, a wild dog’s eyes.

We’re still huddled in the foyer, peering out the door, and Mrs. Livingston says, “This is quite a storm, isn’t it? I’ve never seen such a storm. Did it drop you off here?”

I nod.

“It’ll blow out soon and we can all go to bed,” Mr. Livingston replies. “Come on in and let’s have a beverage.”

Leonard offers his mother his arm, and she takes it. I follow behind and take a seat in a rocker.

Mr. Livingston pours clear liquid over ice cubes in thick smoked glasses. When he hands me mine, I take it but don’t sip.

“That rocker,” Mr. Livingston tells me, “once belonged to a nursemaid from Wales.”

“It did not,” Mrs. Livingston argues. “It was the rocker I used to rock Leonard and Marcus.” She throws back her drink, swallowing it all in one gulp.

“The two aren’t mutually exclusive, my dear.”

And Leonard clears his throat.

“You like Dickel?” Mr. Livingston asks me.

“Oh, yes,” I reply, though I don’t even know what I’m saying or why. I don’t know if I like Dickel or not. But the words just come out to join all the other strangeness.

He laughs at me, and I flush, and then the thunder cracks down above the house so hard, it rattles the beams in the floor. Lightning glows at every window, and the lights flicker, flicker, out.