Love Among the Walnuts (10 page)

"Look how much you've learned from me already about playing cards," Mr Moreland said, forgetting that Sandy had beaten him
before
his directions. "If I still had my wits, I could teach you lots of things. Why, I could teach you so much about managing money you'd be a millionaire in a year."

"I think I already am a millionaire."

"Inherited money doesn't count," Mr. Moreland sniffed. "You don't have the passion for it that you do for the stuff you make by yourself. You should have that pleasure, boy."

"It's too bad you can't teach me. Sunnie wants me to learn about finance, but the book is so thick and the print is so small, I don't even want to start."

"You have to have your hands on money to make finance interesting, boy. Dealing with it theoretically out of a book won't work. I think maybe we should play some Monopoly instead of cards. L. Barlow would like that, too. He was always a nut for making money." He sighed. "Now he's just a nut. Like the rest of us."

"Sunnie doesn't think you're nuts," Sandy said. "Just—I don't know—misunderstood? Unappreciated? Something like that."

"Oh, what does she know?" Mr. Moreland asked grumpily. "She's just a kid."

Sandy, who had thought Mr. Moreland would be pleased that someone thought he wasn't a nut, was puzzled. Was Mr. Moreland just so contrary that he automatically disagreed with everything, or was his reaction something Sandy would have understood if he'd been more worldly? A few months ago he'd thought he knew everything worth knowing, but lately he'd realized how much more complicated real life was than the safe, simple imitation of it he'd had at Eclipse.

Fortunately there was little traffic on Old Country Road. Sandy was now driving the Daimler from Eclipse to Walnut Manor every morning, while Bentley sat beside him holding his breath and pressing his right foot into the floor.

After a quick visit to see his parents, Flossie, Attila, and Louie (who stayed at Walnut Manor all the time now but wasn't allowed to leave the sickroom for fear of L. Barlow Van Dyke, the cat molester), Sandy always had a visit with Sunnie. Usually she read to him, something he could hardly listen to because he was so absorbed in watching her rosy lips forming the words. And she talked to him, telling him stories of her life, sharing bits from her readings, expressing her opinions on all manner of things. And asking him his.

Sandy was dismayed at the number of times he had to say "I don't know" when she asked him what he thought. He was beginning to wonder if, for all his educational advantages, he actually ever
had
thought.

After his engrossing, and often bewildering, time with Sunnie, he would go down to the library and play Monopoly with Mr. Moreland and L. Barlow Van Dyke. Boom-Boom and Everett, who weren't interested in finance, played gin rummy games at another table.

L. Barlow Van Dyke had initiated some changes in the Monopoly game that gave them investment options beyond the usual hotels, houses, and railroads: He had made cards allowing them to buy and sell treasury bonds, gold, art, raw land, and pork belly futures.

"Pork belly futures?" Sandy asked, laughing, sure that they were playing a joke on him.

"Don't ever laugh about money," Mr. Moreland said severely. "Pork belly futures are as good a way to increase capital as anything."

"Yes, sir," Sandy said, contrite. It seemed as if every day he discovered a new way in which he was ignorant.

Just before lunch Sunnie would come downstairs, knowing that if anything changed with her patients, she would hear the bell Bentley had rigged to each of them. She'd put Mr. Moreland's vitamin pills and a glass of water next to the Monopoly board and move on before she had to listen to any of his imaginative cussing.

Sometimes she sat with Virgil and Lyle, watching TV. She made them watch a few minutes a day of TV programs about the outside world: nature, travel, adventure programs.

"Oh, please, Sunnie," they'd beg, agitated and fearful. "Turn back to
Bowling for Dollars.
This program is so ... so..." They never could say exactly what bothered them so much, but, clearly, they suffered. Sunnie tried only once to get them to watch the news. It took them several days, huddling together in front of
Leave It to Beaver
reruns, to recover.

Sometimes she sat on a stool beside Eddy, talking to him about Louie or something she'd read or her mother the actress or her father the street juggler—the same sorts of things she talked to Sandy about each morning. Eddy never responded.

But maybe the way he watched her, rapt and silent, was a response. Sandy thought that he himself must look that way when she talked to him. How he wanted to dazzle her the way she dazzled him, but he knew it was impossible. She must regard him as a child, a simpleton, a boob, the way he was coming to regard himself as he realized more and more how little he knew. Pork belly futures were the least of it.

Sometimes Sunnie played games with Boom-Boom and praised him so lavishly that he smiled shyly around the thumb in his mouth and looked at her adoringly.

While she was engaged in these activities, Mr. Moreland would toss down the handful of vitamins she'd left him and scowl his fanciest scowl at anyone who saw him do it, muttering, "Flotsam! Shinsplints!"

Just before Opal came to call them to lunch, Sunnie sat on the arm of Sandy's chair as he bent over the Monopoly board, and he felt as if another light had been turned on in the room. Impetuously he gambled a chunk of his money on a long shot, an upstart biotechnology stock bought on margin, flaunting his new expertise like a twelve-year-old showing off on his bike.

Competition was always keen as to who would get to sit next to Sunnie at the lunch table. On this day Graham and Dr. Waldemar won.

Opal skated in from the kitchen on her dust mops, with a tureen of soup in her hands and an unlit cigarette in her mouth—she had reluctantly agreed with Sunnie that it was unsafe for her to smoke with oxygen tanks for the sleepers stored upstairs—then skated back to the kitchen for a platter of toasted cheese sandwiches. Outside the big windows, snow fell softly, covering the shuffleboard court and filling the empty pool.

"I used to hate the snow when I was a little girl," Sunnie said, "because my mother was always out in it and I worried about her." She put a sandwich on her plate and one on Graham's, then gently took his hand and shook her head when he reached for another one. "But here it's so beautiful and peaceful, I feel completely different about it. Isn't it funny how I can change my mind like that? Do you know, I've never built a snow man? Have any of you? I know just how to do it. I've read all about it." She grabbed Graham's hand again as he made another attempt at getting an extra sandwich. "I know! We'll make one this afternoon, after I've tended to my sleepers. Yes, all of us; don't you look at each other that way, Virgil and Lyle. It's not as if I'm suggesting anything that will hurt you. It'll be fun, you'll see. Doing it yourself is better than watching someone else do it on TV. Stop scowling at me, Mr. Moreland and Mr. Van Dyke. I'll bet you can make wonderful snowmen. I think you should make snow tycoons and let them light their pipes with dollar bills." She stopped Graham's hand again and gave him a handful of carrot sticks from the relish tray instead. "It's important to keep moving. It always cheers you up to get some exercise."

Suddenly the front door burst open, and Sandy, looking through the big, open dining-room doors and across the wide front hall, saw Bart and Bernie come in, beating the snow off their overcoats and leaving puddles on Opal's polished floor.

"Ah," Bart said, starting across the hall with Bernie trailing him. "Dr. Waldemar?" He held his hand out to Mr. Moreland, who just looked at it.

"I'm Dr. Waldemar," said the genuine article, standing up. "What can I do for you?"

"I'm Bartholemew Huntington and this is my brother Bernard Ackerman. Our brother and sister-in-law, Horatio and Mousey Huntington-Ackerman, are patients here, and we've come to visit them."

"No!" Sandy shouted, jumping to his feet.

Every face at the table turned to Sandy. How could he deny his father and mother visitors? The rest of the inmates would love to have a visitor.

"Don't let them anywhere near Mousey and Horatio. Flossie or Attila, either," Sandy said, coming around the table to stand almost nose to nose with Bart. His heart was pounding so hard he was almost sick—it was a way he'd never felt before in his life—but he would not let Bart and Bernie have another chance to hurt anybody he loved.

"You can't keep us from seeing our own brother," Bart snarled.

"That's what you think," Sandy snarled back, surprised that he knew how to snarl, since he'd never done it before.

Dr. Waldemar looked helplessly from one to the other of them until Opal came skating out of the kitchen with a tray of dishes filled with rice pudding. She deposited her tray on the table and inserted herself between Sandy and Bart. Her cigarette poked Bart in the chin, and he took a step backward.

"What's going on here?" Opal asked. "Who the heck are you two grizzly bears?"

"I'm Mr. Horatio Alger Huntington-Ackerman's brother, and this"—he jerked his thumb at Bernie—"is his other brother. We've come to visit."

"No visitors," Opal said.

"What are you talking about?" Bart snarled again. "He's my brother."

"No visitors. That's our policy with comatose patients," she said. "They're too delicate. Now beat it before I call the cops."

"I can get a court order to see them," Bart said. "I've done it before."

"Goody for you," Opal told him, jabbing him in the chest with her cigarette, which broke in two, half of it sticking to his damp overcoat.

Bernie had already retreated to the front door, but Bart plucked off the broken cigarette, dropped it on the floor, crushed it with his foot, and kept glaring at her. She glared back.

"We'll see about that," Bart said finally, and stalked to the door, slamming it behind him as he left.

A ring of shocked faces around the lunch table looked at Sandy. Opal asked the question they all wanted the answer to: "How come you're so dead set against your uncles seeing your parents?"

"Don't call them my uncles," Sandy said. "I don't want to be related to them in any way. They're attempted murderers."

A gasp went around the table, but not from Opal. She picked up the broken cigarette, rubbed her dust-mopped foot on the spot it left on the floor, and said, "Yeah? Who'd they attempt?"

"Mousey and Horatio and Flossie. I'm afraid I attempted Attila," Sandy said sadly, "but I didn't know the cake was poisoned when I gave it to her."

"Huh?" Opal said, and so did everyone else at the table.

So Sandy sat down and told them the whole story.

When he'd finished, Opal put another unlit cigarette in her mouth and said, "We're going to have some more trouble with them. We'd better be prepared. Hey, Dr. Waldemar, wake up. We've got a problem here."

Dr. Waldemar's chin rested on his chest and his breathing was heavy and regular.

"Shoot," Opal said. "The guy's really slipping. Sometimes I think I ought to park him in an armchair in the library and run the place myself. Which I'm practically doing anyhow." She deposited her cigarette in a cup of rice pudding. "Well, OK. I believe you, kid. We've got to protect our sleepers. Too bad the fancy security system we used to have broke and we never fixed it. Any other suggestions?"

Lyle and Virgil put their arms around each other and shivered. Graham took another rice pudding from the tray and started in on it, first making sure that Sunnie wasn't paying attention. Eddy, of course, didn't do anything, and Boom-Boom sucked furiously on his thumb. Mr. Moreland and Mr. Van Dyke looked at each other, frowning impressively in silent competition, to see who could come up with a suggestion.

"We could hide them," Mr. Moreland said.

L. Barlow Van Dyke made a strangling sound and shook his head.

"Where?" Opal asked. "And what about all their gear?"

"You've got a lot of buildings here, cottages and stables and stuff. Put them in one of those."

L. Barlow Van Dyke's face was turning purple as he shook his head over and over.

"Don't you think a court order would allow Bart and Bernie to search the outbuildings?" Sunnie asked.

L. Barlow Van Dyke paled by a couple of shades and nodded smugly.

"Oh, onion juice!" Mr. Moreland said. "I forgot about that."

"We could say they had something contagious," Sandy suggested. "Then Bart and Bernie couldn't go near them."

Sunnie threw her arms around him. "That's a wonderful idea. Bentley's so clever with his chemistry things. He could cook up something, I'm sure, to make them look sick. Or we could paint spots on them or something. That would keep Bart and Bernie away from them. But it's more important than ever that we get them to wake up. I have an idea of my own," she said, letting go of Sandy. "I think we should all spend more time up there with them. We have to bring them back into life, not keep them isolated. There's a fireplace in their room—I think we should have our after-dinner reading upstairs instead of in the library. Aren't you all tired of sitting around the library, anyway?"

"Is there a TV?" Lyle asked, still clinging to Virgil.

"No," Sunnie said. "Just real people. We'll start tonight, after we've had an afternoon out in the snow. You know, your unconscious works on a problem even when you're doing something else, so while we build our snow people we must all think about keeping our sleepers safe, and who knows what we'll come up with. Now let's go outside."

Every head except Sandy's and Boom-Boom's was shaking from side to side, reluctance as thick in the air as Opal's cigarette smoke used to be. Graham took two more rice puddings from the tray.

"No objections," Sunnie said sternly, returning Graham's puddings to the tray before he could take even one bite. "We're all going outside if I have to dress you up myself. You've got twenty minutes to get ready."

"I want to go out," Boom-Boom said around his thumb.