Poorhouse Fair (8 page)

"We left our door open," he explained. "When it's got out before it's always come back. If you leave the door open."

"There's always the first time," she said, speaking, like him, to the other two, who acted as the channel of their argument, "and how do we know this isn't the time it will get caught fast, with its toenails? You know their toenails have to be trimmed. I didn't know that. If I had known half the trouble the bird would be I wouldn't have let her wish it on me. Anything my daughter doesn't want--she's on the move day and night, never in the same place more than a week it seems--she thinks, Oh Mom up at the Home will be glad for this. She has nothing to do. She's grateful for anything. She has nothing of her own."

"Joan doesn't think like that," Lucas explained.

"Well she didn't think twice about wishing the parakeet on us. She bought it for her boy and the boy tired of it after a week, as you might expect. So, ship it off to Mom, and let her spend her pitiful little money on fancy seed of all sorts and cuttlebone. Let her clean the cage once a day. Let her worry with the bird's nails. They're more than a half-circle and still growing. It gets on its perch and tries to move off and beats its wings and wonders why it can't, poor thing. I thought I could take my sewing scissors and trim its nails myself; they're fragile-looking; you can see the little thread of blood in there. But evidently you can't. They'll bleed unless you know just where to cut. My daughter sent along a magazine, on how to take care of them. They'll bleed if you don't know just where you can cut. So we have to wait until he takes it into his head to go into town with the cage to the dog doctor in Andrews. It costs money, too. It's not free. They have free medicine for humans but for any little bit of animal care you have to pay, and they call this progress. I said, you know, if you tell them you're from the poorhouse, but no, he wants to pretend he isn't."

The Lucases' companions at the table were homely Tommy Franklin, who made small baskets by filing peach-stones, and Elizabeth Heinemann, a blind lady he sometimes guided about and always escorted at meals. Tommy, fearing that the other woman's hurried talk would tire Elizabeth, and anyway feeling a need to put his voice before her, began softly, "Your talking about scissors reminds me. . . ." He was so shy of talking the Lucases fell silent, to hear him, and he had to proceed. "Last month I took the bus to Burlington, to see my brother, and I noticed when I got on this old woman talking to the driver. I didn't think about it any and always try to mind my business because you never know. . . . Though I was looking out the window darned if she didn't sit down right aside of me. I guess she figured, another old person. . . . Well, she had been a nurse, she said. And she goes into this long story about how years ago she was called in to care for an old rabbi who had pneumonia. The house was full of nice things, she said, very expensive and well-kept. The rabbi's daughter kept the house. But underneath this beard, which went down to here, according to their religion, was where this terrible mess connected with his disease was, she said. She said the first thing she did was to go to the store and buy scissors, and a razor, and shave him. The daughter, she said, howled something terrible. And when the doctor came he took one look at the old fella and his eyes popped and he said he would never have dared to do that." Somehow when the woman had told it, this sentence was more of an ending. Tommy glanced at Elizabeth; her eyes were brilliantly fixed on a spot past his shoulder. She had a long neck stretched tall by her perfect posture; at this moment her wide mouth was broadened further by a sweet smile of expectation. Confused and inadequate, he went on. "I asked her, didn't he try to stop you, and she said, he was very sick. I guess he was unconscious when she did it. So I had to sit there Listening to her tell this all the way to Burlington. Your mentioning scissors put me in mind of it." It had turned out wrong; when the woman had told the story, there had been a righteousness in her action and a kind of justice in the close. His way it sounded simply as if he were against the

Jews, when he had no feelings toward them one way or another.

"I guess she thought," Lucas said, "it being a Jew, it made no difference." He studied his food, boiled potato white on the white china on the white table-top. Potato, meatloaf and broccoli was the meal, big because this evening, if the fair were in full swing, there would be no supper. Lucas never found his appetite until dark, and after Angelo's fooling any pressure on his left gums made it ache above. Still he appreciated that Conner tried to feed them well. His thoughts predominantly were with his morning's purchase, a pint of rye, and the relations it would assume with his pain.

His wife, who during her recital had fallen behind, was eating rapidly.

Elizabeth Heinemann said, "Isn't it pretty, the rain? You never feel alone when it rains." Her clean neck elongated to bring her closer to the drumming overhead, which in the first movement of the storm was savage, though she wished it even louder, to clarify her confused inner world of tilting purple tumuli, a pre-Creational landscape fairly windowed by her eyes, the navy blue of a new baby's.

"DIDN'T I see Buddy's twin on the lawn?" an old man at another table asked.

"Buddy has no twin," Gregg said. "That's just what they say to excuse Buddy for being a moron."

"No. In a crushed-cap-like."

What the old man--Fuller--saw dawned on Gregg, and the tension of mischief smoothed the net of wrinkles on his small face. "Driving a truck?"

"I saw the truck. I didn't see him drive it." Fuller was wary of Gregg.

"How do you think he got here? Flew? You think fairies can really fly?"

"No, in a cap with his sleeves rolled up."

"Buddy's twin. He came up from Newark to see his f.ing brother. It was very touching. Gypsies had split them in the cradle. The only trouble with the twin is he got this job driving a truck and he can't drive a foot. He knocked down a big section of the wall out front."

At this point Fuller sensed that Gregg was having him on. He looked toward Hook, who he knew would speak the truth, but Hook was saying, "It was re-markable, the way the stone fence gave. You would think, now, that the few end stones would fall away and leave the rest stand. Yet a whole tri-angular section held together, the cracks in the mortar running in a straight line. Indeed it will cost Conner a pretty penny to have it repaired; the stone masons nowadays are used to setting nothing but bricks and the cinder blocks."

"Who was the young man I saw on the lawn then?" Fuller asked.

"Buddy's twin he means," Gregg said.

"Buddy's twin? Buddy's twin is in Ari-zona." Gregg's signals to play along were quite missed by Hook, who turned considerately to Fuller, known as soft in the head, and explained, "That young man drove the Pepsi-Cola truck here, and was nothing like Buddy. Buddy is educated."

"Educated how to be a pain in everybody's a.," Gregg said.

Fuller's broad downy eyebrows twisted a bit in perplexity. "Who was it who came from Newark, then, the driver or the twin?"

"The driver is the twin," Gregg said.

"The twin is in Ari-zona," Hook repeated, "in the southwest, where they are doing such wonder-ful things with irri-gation."

"And who fired the shot?" Fuller asked, his soft brain affably manufacturing a third image of Buddy, this triplet holding a rifle, for he knew that around the place the only person willing and permitted to handle a gun was Buddy.

Neither Hook, whose attention at the moment had been fixed and who was incapable of receiving side impressions, nor Gregg, then buzzing around the motor of the backing truck, knew to what Fuller referred. "The kid, the twin," Gregg answered quickly, "he had a gun in his pocket. He was a tough kid. He tried to kidnap me."

"A gunshot?" Hook asked.

"Out back," Fuller said. "It was why I came outside, now that I remember."

"That wasn't a shot," Gregg told him, "that was just your own head cracking you heard." Ashamed of having said this, he stood up and added, "I'll get dessert." As the youngest and best co-ordinated of the three, it was fitting that he should. He brought back four plastic dishes of peach halves, and ate his and the extra one while his companions were still chopping theirs with spoons.

BECAUSE he had not been naturally shaped for solitude --indeed a native gregariousness had been a factor in Conner's early dedication to a social cause rather than a more vertical and selfish career, in a science or art--he felt despairing as he proceeded down the deserted stairwell and was glad to come upon Buddy, his one friend in the place. With a bang of the outer door the boy emerged into the hall, drenched. His torso beneath the soaked adhesive shut declared its forms. The collar was recklessly open; in the V the tan hollow at the base of his throat pulsed. His face was red with exertion and his wet hair hyacinthiue. "That's done," Buddy breathed, taking Conner's presence there casually. "The soft drinks are stacked under the trees by the porch. Not that we'll have anybody to drink them, except maybe Noah."

Buddy's flip acceptance of the rain, Conner's enemy, cut slightly. He asked, "Why did you have to handle the cases?"

"Beyond and above the call of duty," Buddy sang: parody of Conner! "The driver of the truck, a lovely youth, was so abashed by his error of smashing down our wall that he would have been incapable of completing his delivery. His impulse was to hop astride his mount and flee to Newark, where he was planning, I gathered, to deflower a local bloom."

"Smash what wall?"

"The late Mr. Andrews's. Haven't you seen? It made an audible thump."

"No I haven't. Did you get the kid's name, or were you both too excited?"

"I was calm as the proverbial vegetable. He was the tot. He even imagined one of the inmates--one of the smaller men--was planning to hide in his cab and make an escape. I begged him to take several, but with a tremor of his bedewed lashes he declined. Behold, his name."

Conner took the wrinkled damp piece of paper offered him, scribbled in Buddy's somewhat studied Italic hand. "What do you think he'll tell the insurance?"

"Lies, nothing but lies. He spoke pidgin Spanish in his dangerous, composed moments."

"O.K. Thanks for everything. You better change, Bedewed. What happened to the cat?"

"Cross him off your list. Our secret is safe."

"Buried?"

"Not yet. I rushed to rescue our friend Ted."

"O.K." Conner let a frown show, pettishly, since of course there hadn't been time. Now with the rain the cat must lie uncovered. A sadness of sorts pierced him, and he asked, "About the wall. Can I see the damage from the porch?"

"Nothing easier, alas. It's no mean hole." This last was called on the fly, since the boy was running up the stairs, removing his shirt as he went.

The warm sense of shelter given by a porch whose railing is spattered with rain insufficiently offset Conner's disappointment with Buddy, his feeling that they had met at incompatible angles, and his renewed awareness that it was still the fate of his kind of man to be, save in the centers of administration, alone. The rain, falling absolutely, with an infrequent breath of wind turning a section temporarily oblique, pounded the porch rail, and a spray so fine it was more of an aroma than a mist rolled in to the wall, dampening the yellow boards, making the tops of checker tables glisten, and tinting the wicker chairs a darker vanilla. The air turned white; a fork of lightning hung above the distant orchards, shocking each spherical tree into relief. Seconds later the sound arrived. The clouds above formed a second continent, with its own horizon; a bar of old silver stretched behind the nearly tangent profiles of the farthest hills and clouds. Again lightning raced down a fault in the sky, the thunder following less tardily. On the lawn before him there was no sign of the day's celebration save the empty aligned tables and the cords of colored bulbs strung on the poles. The fumbling old men had somehow done their job.

Through veils of rain the damage was indistinct: a discolored patch of some length, and a curious pallidity, as if the wall had been stuffed with oyster shells or fragments of plaster. It did not seem to interfere with the silhouette of the wall. While it could have been worse it was bad enough. With the shortage of craftsmen weeks would pass before a mason could be got out here. In the meantime the stones that littered the lawn should be collected. On the day of the fair the poorhouse was on view; his management would be incriminated in the apparent collapse and neglect of the wall, right where everyone entering could see. All his conscientiousness was denied by that section of stone. He hated the tongues of townspeople. A sentence from the disturbing letter of the morning recurred to him: Yr duty is to help not hinder these old people on there way to there final Reward. Their final reward, this was their final reward. How much longer before people ceased to be fools? It had taken the lemur a million years to straighten his spine. Another million would it be before the brain drained its swamp? An animal skull is a hideous thing, a trough with fangs, a crude scoop. In college, he had been appalled by the conservatism zoological charts portrayed. With what time-consuming caution had the tree-shrew's snout receded and its skull ballooned! He could picture the woman who had sent him the letter, her active pink nose, her dim fearful eyes, her pointed fingers crabbedly scraping across the paper--a tree-shrew, a rat that clings to bark. When would they all die and let the human day dawn?

He wished the rain more vehemence. In the volume of space above the lawn, set like a table for a feast, the impression was not of vacancy but of fullness; the feast was attended.

WITHIN the dining-hall most had completed dessert but few left. Where had they to go? Some days they hastened to get into the open, or gather by the television, or get to their duties. But today was what weather could not change, a holiday. They remained seated at the small white tables, enjoying the corporate existence created by the common misfortune of having their fair washed away. "Now in all Mendelssohn's years," Hook stated, "I don't recall inclement weather on a fair day."