Nobody's Fool (104 page)

"I can only stay a minute," he told her, collapsing into the newly repaired Queen Anne, which protested audibly but held together. Mr. Blue had been right.

It was fixed.

"I'm making tea," she said.

"Can I interest you in a cup?"

"No, you can't," he said, grinning at her now.

"How many times do I have to tell you?"

"Other people change their minds occasionally," she told him.

"I keep thinking you might." Sully lit a cigarette and seemed to consider this.

"You do?" His question seemed less mocking than wistful, as if he was grateful for her refusal to accept his bullheadedness at face value.

Outside in the hall the dog's chain rattled. Sully glanced around her flat as if for the first time, taking things in.

"I guess it's just you and me, old girl," Sully said, no doubt in reference to Clive Jr.

At this. Miss Beryl herself sat down.

"I've been discussing Clive Jr.

with his father all afternoon," she admitted.

"We railed him, I guess. It pains me to admit, but somehow we managed to raise a son with no ..." She let her sentence die, unable to locate a word for what her son lacked, at least a word that would not represent a further betrayal.

"Well," Sully said.

"At least you raised him. You did your best."

"He was never the star of my firmament, somehow," Miss Beryl confessed, sharing this sad truth for the first time with another living human. It was what Clive Sr. had accused her of one afternoon not long before Audrey Peach had sent him through the windshield. By then Sully had gone off to join the war, and Miss Beryl had already resigned herself to the certainty that he'd be killed. She was so sure he would be that she'd already begun to apportion blame. Most of it, of course, rested squarely on the shoulders of the brutal, stupid man who was the boy's father and part of what was left on Sully's mother, who'd found such grateful solace in her own victimization. But there was some blame left over, and Miss Beryl had located what remained in her own home. She wasn't supposed to know that her husband and son had gone over to Bowdon Street to put an end to Sully's tenure at their dinner table, to expel him from their family, but she did know it. She also knew that her husband and son had done this out of jealousy and fear.

What a terrible thing it had been for her to realize that part of her husband's devotion to her was predicated on the understanding that no one else shared this devotion, that his love was a gift contingent upon her receiving no other gifts. This was what Miss Beryl had still been trying to forgive him for when Audrey Peach stole from her the opportunity to explain why forgiveness was necessary. In their worst argument the one Miss Beryl, during the long years of her widowhood, refused to remember and yet could not forget Clive Sr. had accused her of being unnatural, of inviting "strangeness" into their home. This was apparently as close as Clive Sr.

could get to articulating what was troubling him. He'd stood in the middle of their living room and offered the room itself as evidence.

African masks and Etruscan spirit boats and two-headed Foo dogs everywhere.

"It's like living in a jungle," he complained so seriously that Miss Beryl did not smile, as was her habit when her husband became serious. What it all meant, she realized, was that he was unhappy with her, that he regretted his choice, that he blamed her for the son who could neither dribble a ball nor defend himself, and that in addition to all this he also blamed her for not loving this boy more, for instead being so fond of another boy who could have no legitimate claim to their affections, for welcoming the world's strangeness into their home to subvert them all. She could still see the look on his face, and Miss Beryl realized that it was this expression this stubborn, injured disapproval that she'd witnessed in her husband only on this single occasion that Clive Jr. had grown into, that made it so difficult for her to feel for him what she knew she ought to feel for a son. It was as if Clive Jr. had been sent to remind her of the terrible moment of his father's unspoken regret at having loved her.

"I don't think you know what love means," Clive Sr.

had told her petulantly, as if to suggest that his affection for her was unrequited. Which, until that moment, it had not been. But part of what he had said was true she didn't understand love. This was what Miss Beryl had been coming back to, all day, all her life probably, to the mystery of affection, of the heart inclining in one direction and not another, of its unexpected, unwished-for pirouettes, its ability to make a fool, a villain, of its owner, if indeed any human can be said to own his heart.

"I know this," she'd told Clive Sr. that long-ago afternoon.

"Love is a stupid thing." It was, then and now, her final wisdom on the subject. No doubt, in his own way Clive Sr. already knew this to be true, had realized it when he found himself to be in love with her, a thing nobody would ever be able to understand. If Sully was horrified by her admission that Clive Jr. was not the star of Miss Beryl's firmament, he gave no sign. With one hand he was holding his cigarette vertically now, its ash having lengthened dangerously, while he leaned forward to untie the laces of his work boots with the other.

This effort seemed to sap his last ounce of strength. Miss Beryl's tea kettle began to sing in the kitchen. When she stood' Sully said, "I heard a rumor you did a good deed." Miss Beryl understood that this must be a reference to the house on Bowdon, understood too that it was the subject that would not wait until morning. He was looking at her now with an expression she'd never witnessed in him before, the expression of a man much harder and more dangerous than she had believed Sully to be.

"You stuck your nose where it didn't belong," he said.

"I know it," Miss Beryl conceded.

"I'm an old woman, though. I'm entitled." He didn't reply for a long moment, the hardness remaining in his black eyes until his more familiar sheepish grin released it.

"Anyhow," he said.

"I forgive you."

"Thank you, Donald," she told him, and then neither of them spoke for some time, the urgent whistle of the tea kettle the only sound in the flat.

"You're certain you wouldn't like a cup of tea?"

Again he didn't answer, though she couldn't tell whether it was because she already had her answer or because he'd been overtaken finally by exhaustion or because it had occurred to him that he had no idea what he wanted. When she returned with her own cup of tea, he was asleep, his head back, mouth open, snoring. It was a thunderous sound, the first time she'd heard it so close, without the ceiling between them.