Goldilocks (39 page)

Several times, from her side of the shrubbery, Mrs. Whipple tried to get into conversation with Emma, but each time Emma cut her short. Finally Mrs. Whipple beat a path through the boundary bushes and confronted her. “About your poor nephew, Mrs. — ”

“You know he was not my nephew,” Emma interrupted, superimposing her words on Mrs. Whipple’s. “You know that very well.”

“I was only being polite, Mrs. Goss. After all, it was not
my
fiction, was it?”

Emma heard her words quite clearly but felt her presence only obliquely and was beginning to dismiss it altogether.

“My husband treated it as a joke,” Mrs. Whipple said, “but I said more power to you. Romance isn’t just for the young. And at any age, I said to him, what’s worse than living alone?”

“Living a lie,” Emma said coldly, and turned away.

A little later she sat at the desk in the den with Harold’s gold pen. After some hesitation, she wrote a letter to Mildred Murphy in Florida and told her exactly what she thought of her, but upon reading it over she tore the deckle-edge notepaper into bits. It no longer seemed important.

Doing housework, she stopped short when she thought she glimpsed Henry in the glare of the china closet and grimaced at her foolishness when closer inspection revealed only the dishes that had been her mother’s. She did her housework in a pair of striped shorts, which she did not yet dare wear outside or in front of the two young men from Sears, Roebuck who maneuvered a new mattress into the house and took away the old. She also stuffed Harold’s clothing into cartons and placed them in the driveway, knowing the rubbish man would sort through them. In one carton were Harold’s Florsheims and loafers and Henry’s ripple-soled construction boots. That evening she took a long bath, went to bed early, and savored the crispness of the fresh sheets and the hardness of the mattress. She had her best sleep in years, not unlike that of a child exhausted by a day of play.

During the second week of July she made an appointment with the Lawrence Driving School. She had never been behind the wheel of a car in her life, and her first lesson was a disaster, though the instructor assured her that he had seen worse. Her second lesson was no better. Her hands gripping the wheel, her nose dripping sweat, she proclaimed, “I’ll get it if it kills me.”

The perfect repartee died on the instructor’s lips. Something about the intensity of her determination made him say instead, “I’m sure you will, Mrs. Goss.”

• • •

It was the first week of August. Stealthy storm clouds appeared in the midnight sky like sailing ships from another time, bringing hours of howling rain that lasted into the late morning and left the landscape smashed and drowned. Then came sudden sunlight, prismatic puddles, quaking lilac leaves. “Everything’s beautiful,” Daisy Shea said, greeting the world with a smile and failing to notice that someone had stolen the hubcaps from the Cutlass Supreme. Edith pointed it out. “It’s OK,” he said with irrepressible optimism. “I’ll file a claim.”

“You’ve got a three-hundred-dollar deductible,” she said with a long face. “How much do you think you’re going to get?” She waited poignantly for an answer and then said, “You should’ve sold it like I wanted. The only kind of car you can keep in this neighborhood is a junk.” She viewed him with a critical eye and softened her voice. “You shouldn’t wear short sleeves, Daisy. You haven’t got the arms anymore. And you’re wearing your pants too high. You look like a pear.”

“But I feel good,” he said. “That’s what’s important. How do you feel, Edith?”

“Tired. Come on, let’s go.”

She was late for work. He drove her. Within a few minutes he slid into the clatter of downtown traffic with two fingers on the wheel, which was how he had driven when courting her, impressing her then, annoying her now. When he pulled up at the coffee shop, she took a ten-dollar bill from her bag and gave it to him.

“Have a good lunch,” she said. “Not here. The food’s poison.”

He tucked the bill in his breast pocket and thrust his smiling face at her. “Give the old man a smacker,” he said, and puckered his lips. In a hurry, she placed her fingers against her own mouth and then pressed them against his.

“Don’t spend that money on booze.”

He drove to Bishop’s, got there before the full lunch crowd, and was seated at a good table in the middle of the dining room where he could see everybody coming in. Brushing aside the menu, he ordered lamb on a stick. “No fries,” he told the waitress. “And nothing to drink. I’m being a good boy.”

He knew none of the faces at the surrounding tables, mostly women from downtown offices, but he smiled jauntily whenever he caught an eye. He liked the slipshod way one woman tore her bread and the vigorous way another chewed her food as if life were to be enjoyed to the fullest, no compromises. When the waitress brought his order, the lamb as succulent-looking as anticipated, he prepared to eat in the same zestful fashion, but never took a bite.

A pain shot through his head, lasting only seconds but so excruciating he felt something had been torn from him. His whole head ballooned, which impaired his hearing. Everyone in the restaurant was carrying on as before, but now without him. It was as though he were watching a mute movie in which all looks, gestures, and movements were sudden and sharp, in many ways sinister, and in all ways exaggerated. Slowly he pushed aside his plate and cradled his head in his arms on the table. The women around him stopped eating and stared. The waitress bent over him. Without raising his head, he whispered, “I’m quite sick.” The next moment he was dead.

• • •

A federal grand jury handed down secret indictments against Louise Leone Baker,
5
Baker’s Meadow, Mallard Junction, and Rita Gardella O’Dea, Farrwood Drive, Andover. Both women, along with Mario Paolino of Palermo, Sicily, were arraigned in Boston, where they had been in deep consultation with their lawyers, the indictments not as secret as supposed. Later, outside the courthouse, they faced a welter of reporters and television cameras. Rita’s lawyer told her to say nothing, but she ignored him and positioned herself for the cameras. “They hounded my brother, now they’re hounding me,” she said in a rich voice, and paused dramatically. “I’ll tell you something, ladies and gentlemen, my brother was tough, but I’m tougher.”

Louise, averting her head, referred all questions to her lawyer. Mario, who pretended he knew no English, posed. Later he asked Rita whether it would be on Italian television. She grabbed his wrist and nearly broke it.

Ben Baker was released from the hospital on that same day. Clarence, blinding in his freshly laundered work whites, walked Ben down the flower-lined path to the pickup truck, where Mrs. Mennick and her brother, Howard, were waiting. Clarence handed over Ben’s old leather suitcase to Howard, who unceremoniously tossed it into the back of the truck. Clarence stuck out his large placid face, which looked as if a little of everything were kneaded into it. “You take care of yourself, Mr. Baker.”

But Ben had forgotten him. He was gazing wildly about. “Where’s Lou?” he whined.

Mrs. Mennick opened the passenger door of the truck. “Get in, Mr. Ben.”

When he failed to move, Howard gave him a push.

• • •

Aged aunts and forgotten cousins shed tears in the central viewing room of John Breen’s Funeral Home. The mother who had borne him was dry-eyed until she approached the casket, and then she broke down. Old drinking buddies reached in for a final touch. A flicker of light on the dead man’s face softened the features, and for an amazing moment the eyelids seemed ready to twitch open, as if the deceased were moved by all the attention and grief.

Barney Cole moved from the casket to Edith Shea, who immediately gripped his upper arms. Her eyes were liquid, like oil. She said, “His left hand should be over his right. Could you tell Mr. Breen?”

“Yes,” Cole said, “I’ll tell him.”

“Barney, I didn’t even give him a proper kiss good-bye. I had the chance, I didn’t take it.” For a moment her mouth was all muscle. “If I could have him back for one more minute, that would do it. But Mr. Breen can’t do that for me, can he?”

A while later Cole left the funeral home, stood beside his car, and immersed himself in the dark air, his eyes reaching upward. The night sky was a jewelry box thrown open. Kit Fletcher climbed out of the old Cutlass and joined him, slinging an arm inside his.

“What do you see up there?”

“Too many stars to count,” he said, and took a breath. “I don’t get it. A guy dies, the sky stays bright.”

“The world goes on, Barney, with or without us.” She pressed closer. “How are you doing?”

“Good. Fine. I’m OK.” He looked at her. “Thanks for coming with me.”

“Thanks for calling.”

“You’ve got that wrong,” he said. “I didn’t call, you did.”

Her smile was mysterious. “Are you sure of that?”

“Absolutely.”

“Could I persuade you otherwise?”

Heated smells of the city drifted through the lot. Across the way were low brick buildings for the elderly, where the only signs of life were from Sonys and Zeniths, their colors fluttering in the windows like flowers no more comforting than the bouquets girding Daisy Shea’s casket. “Why would I want to fool myself?” he asked.

“So I won’t have to beg.”

“I wouldn’t want you ever to do that.”

The night murmured. People trickled out of the funeral home, a couple of the men heaving around to look at Kit, whose arm had tightened against Cole’s. “We had something, Barney. Do we really want to say good-bye to it?”

Cole had no answer, only a sensation of heat lurking in the ashes. Loosening his arm, he opened the Cutlass door for her and then moved around to the other side and slipped in behind the wheel. She had taken the key from the ignition.

“I know what’s going on in your mind,” she said. “You’re wondering to what extent I’m dishonest. If my word’s good for anything, I can promise you I’ll never do anything again behind your back.” She smiled into his face. “Scout’s honor.”

Lights from a turning car swept over them and made them stark. Cole returned the smile but stayed within himself. The moon was radiant, like a sort of cake. At that moment he could no more believe that men had walked on the moon than he could that he and Daisy Shea had once been nineteen years old, with everything ahead of them. He was still smiling.

“What’s the joke?” she asked.

“You’re not a Girl Scout.”

“That’s right. Just an attractive and intelligent person like you.” She handed over the ignition key. “Let’s go home and have that kid. A damn waste of nature if we don’t.”

Leaning into the windshield, he took a final look at the stars and said, “Most of us can’t come anywhere near predicting the future, but the guy lying in there knew exactly what his was.”

“We can predict a little of ours,” she said with confidence as more headlights poured over them. Her voice, turning husky and playful, touched his cheek. “By the way, I’m giving up a lot for you. A trip to Italy.”

He said, “I think you’d better take it.”

This edition published by
Prologue Books
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
10151 Carver Road, Suite 200
Blue Ash, Ohio 45242
www.prologuebooks.com

Copyright © 1989 by Andrew Coburn
All rights reserved.

Cover Images ©123rf/Engin Korkmaz, Natalia Bratslavsky, Maxim Ahner

Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

eISBN 10: 1-4405-4510-3
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4510-8