The Odd Job (27 page)

“Plenty. I don’t like the sound of his heart. He’ll probably have to be kept under observation for a day or two anyway. Come on, Bill, let’s move him out. What about bail?”

“Everything’s arranged,” Attorney Bittersohn assured the intern. “I’ll handle the paperwork while you get him settled. Sarah, you’d better go back with Ira and get some sleep.”

“Yes, Uncle Jake.” Sarah turned to the intern. “I’m the one who gave him the coffee and sandwich. It didn’t hurt him, did it?”

“Might have saved his life. It sure saved mine tonight, I never got time for supper.”

Feeling a good deal better, Sarah followed the gurney down the drafty corridor. Under observation was exactly where she’d have wanted Melanson to be. She’d been thinking of asking Lieutenant Harris about a special officer to keep watch over him, but the intensive-care unit would be even safer. She doubted whether the patient would be allowed any visitors for a day or so; she needn’t feel guilty if she didn’t get to see him right away.

“What happened to Lieutenant Harris?” she asked Ira, who happened to be next to her.

“He went home. He lives in Dorchester, he told me he hadn’t had an evening at home for the past three weeks.”

“Then I’m sorry I was snippy to him; but how was I to know?”

Sarah didn’t apologize for having taken up Ira’s evening. He and Miriam were night owls; Miriam was no doubt thinking up some tantalizing midnight snack about now. But it wasn’t midnight, or anywhere near. Sarah was surprised to see from the clock on the wall that it wasn’t even ten o’clock yet; she felt as if she’d been here for ages on the deep.

It was curious, now that she thought of it, that she’d been born and reared so close to this old building and never once until tonight got so much as a peek inside. She wondered whether any of her relatives ever had been there, and thought it unlikely. Any malefactions they or their acquaintances might have committed would have been the sort that didn’t get punished. Renting rat-infested hovels to poor people who’d have had to scrape for pennies to pay the rent collector or find themselves out on the sidewalk would have counted as business, not exploitation. Naturally it would have been the rent collector who got the curses and the complaints, and the absent landlord who ignored them and kept the money.

Kellings had been shipowners during the days of the China clippers. No doubt some of their captains had managed to circumvent the Chinese officials’ herculean efforts to keep opium from being smuggled in through their ports by this new lot of foreign devils who were, with true Yankee zeal, emulating their British counterparts who had plied the opium trade so long and so successfully. Should his lucrative sideline have been discovered, the resourceful captain would have been more apt to get an extra bonus than a reprimand.

Sarah was sure that none of her ancestors had ever gone blackbirding; she was not sure their refusal had been entirely on humanitarian grounds. The slave trade had been economically unsound. Human cattle took up too much cargo space, even when crammed together in the noisome holds as tight as they could fit. Too many of them died on the long voyages and had to be thrown overboard at considerable loss of profit. It was altogether a chancy business, and Kellings seldom left anything to chance if they could help it.

Furthermore, slavery as it was known and practiced in the South before Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation was not well-adapted to the northern way of life. Why should it have been? There were always plenty of green immigrants coming off the boats and finding themselves compelled by circumstances to labor long hours for wages hardly sufficient to keep body and soul together. Instead of being whipped for laziness or insubordination, they got docked or fired with no redress until, after long and bitter fighting between the workers and the bosses, the unions came into being.

These were topics that did not, as a rule, get discussed among the Kellings. Sarah had learned a great deal since she’d stepped out from under the family umbrella, perhaps all those conflicting ideas had contributed to her urge to rescue lame ducks and all-but-gone geese. No wonder Walter Kelling had had such a rough time trying to write the truth about his forebears without running afoul of his chauvinistic relatives. It was a lot to think about; Sarah didn’t feel up to thinking.

Ira noticed her silence. “Long day, eh?”

“Oh, today was a picnic compared to yesterday.” She was trying to be airy but a yawn got in the way. “I can’t tell you what a relief it is not having to drive myself back to the lake. It’s too bad poor old Milky’s heart’s started acting up—Milky is what the other guards at the museum call him—but he’s surely better off in the hospital than having to be pent up in that dreary little cell. And it’s all wrong, somehow.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know, Ira. I just have this uncomfortable feeling that I’m holding the wrong end of the stick. Perhaps my head will be clearer in me morning, I couldn’t be more befuddled than I am now. You know, I completely forgot to ask Melanson if he has anybody who ought to be notified. If Dolores were alive, she’d know, of course; but with her gone, there just doesn’t seem to be anyone who knows anything.”

“Well,” Ira replied sensibly, “if he has a wife or a mother or anybody, they’ll have called the museum, don’t you think?”

“It closes at five. There always used to be a night guard, but I doubt if he’ll have been told about what happened this afternoon, assuming he hasn’t been laid off. Surely the last place any connection of Melanson’s might call would be the Charles Street jail. They’d phone the hospitals, or ask the police to. So that’s a relief of sorts.”

Sarah emitted a ladylike snort. “I don’t know why I say that. The problem is that I keep thinking I ought to be doing something and I can’t think what to do.”

“You’ve done more than enough tonight, Sarah. That poor slob was about ready to cash in his chips. He’d probably be dead by now if you hadn’t intervened. You won’t try to see him tomorrow, will you?”

“I doubt very much if they’d let me, since I’m not a family member or even a close friend. I’ll call and see how he’s doing, naturally; I can do that from my own house. I thought I’d drive over to Ireson’s Landing in the morning and spend a little time with Anne. But I don’t know about taking Davy with me. I’ll have to keep up my disguise and I can’t risk involving him.”

“That’s a relief,” said Ira. “I was afraid you were planning to take him with you, and I’d promised to teach him how to call a minnow in Yiddish.”

That got a giggle out of Sarah. “How do you call a minnow in Yiddish?”

“You go ‘Fisch-e-le! Fisch-e-le!’ ”

“Oy!” Sarah was not at all surprised to feel tears running down her cheeks. Fischele, “little fish,” was one of Max’s pet names for her. If only he would call! All she had for a possible connection was the number of that bistro, or whatever they called their taverns in Argentina, and she had no idea whether it would be open at this hour. She didn’t even know what hour it might be down there now. She tried to pretend she wasn’t crying, but Ira had sensed her mood.

“Then you won’t be needing my shirt tomorrow?”

“No, you can wear it this time.” At least she could put on a decent pretense of cheerfulness. “One reason I want to go to my own house, if you really want to know, is that I need to collect some fresh underwear. Furthermore, I’m afraid I just won’t be able to stand that awful getup of Charles’s another day. I’m thinking seriously of pretending to be Aunt Bodie. Did I mention to you that the wig Charles fixed up for me is what remains of the beard in which he played Noah?”

“As in the ark?”

“The very same. Greater love hath no actor than that he sacrifice his beard to a fellow thespian. At least I’m trying to think of myself as a thespian, but it doesn’t seem to be working all that well. I did fool Anne, she thought I was Aunt Calpurnia, who lives in Virgin Gorda and sails a sloop. But then Anne’s better at flowers than she is at people. Getting back to Aunt Bodie, I might even drop in on her for a few minutes, just to let her know that she needn’t bother attending my funeral. Uncle Jem said she was quite wrought up about it when she talked with him after that stupid obituary turned up in the paper. Goodness, I’m tired.”

“I should think you might be. Put your hand down between your seat and the door. Can you feel a lever?”

“I think so. I can feel something metal sticking up.”

“Good girl. Push it forward.”

“I can’t, it seems to be stuck.”

“Then pull it back.”

“Done it!”

Sarah found herself semi-recumbent and somewhat more comfortable than she’d felt sitting up. She shut her eyes and left Ira to play with the radio. When they got to the lake, Ira had to wake her up and walk her inside the cottage.

I
T WAS A HALCYON MORNING
. Sarah had meant to sleep late, but how could she with the breeze so soft and the songbirds so loud and Davy tugging at her hand and wonderful smells coming from the part of the cottage that had been more or less partitioned off for cooking and eating purposes? Luckily she’d had enough presence of mind to tuck a nightgown and a short cotton robe into her tote bag; she wore them to breakfast. Since the cottage was in an isolated spot, she kept them on afterward and wandered barefoot to the lake, wishing again that she’d brought a swimsuit.

But what did it matter? One could always wade, if one didn’t mind the schools of minnows swishing against one’s ankles and taking tiny sharp nips at one’s toes. One didn’t mind a bit, of course, particularly when one’s small son was getting such a kick out of using his mother for bait to entice them into his minnow net. The heron was not around just now, but an American bittern was, harder to spot among the reeds because its neck was so much shorter and its drab-brownish camouflage so effective, but a sight worth seeing for all that.

The bittern was somewhere between two and three feet tall. There were touches of black on its wingtips and the end of its beak, and a V-shaped black necklace under the place where its chin would have been if birds had chins. But they didn’t, and Davy wanted to know why. The best that Sarah could suggest was to ask Uncle Brooks when he and Aunt Theonia came home, as she fervently hoped they would. She was still tired and the bruises on her leg had turned into something the Museum of Modern Art might have liked to exhibit, but the knee was less bothersome. Checking her own problems, Sarah was reminded of Melanson’s. When Ira came out to see the bittern, Sarah asked if he’d mind keeping an eye on Davy while she telephoned the intensive-care unit. She got an affirmative answer, as she’d confidently expected, and went inside to dial.

The report was nowhere near so positive as she’d hoped but less dire than she’d feared. Visits by members of the family, had there been any family, would have been discouraged. Visits by mere acquaintances were not to be thought of. So Sarah had the day off. She came back outdoors and stretched out in one of the old-style folding canvas deck chairs that the cottage provided and watched her son make sand castles. Miriam sat beside her under a beach umbrella that had seen its best days but still offered shade enough for practical purposes, and worked out a list of how many Rivkin relatives to invite in case Mike and Tracy ever got around to naming the fateful day.

“Sarah, you didn’t really mean that about visiting your aunt Bodie, did you? My God, Tracy’s mother’s going to have fits when she sees this list. Hadn’t you better lie low while you have the chance?”

“I am lying low.” Sarah was in fact waving her wounded leg around in the air, trying a few careful knee bends. “I do think I ought to drop over and see Cousin Anne. Didn’t you say Tracy’s mother was coming to lunch?”

“Yes, and she’s bringing her sister from Rehoboth, I should be so lucky. Jeanne’s a doll, but I have to say I’m glad Iphigenia or whatever she calls herself—Imogene, Iolanthe, Ish Kabibble, who cares?—lives too far away to be dropping in. Not that she would because we’re not classy enough. I was going to suggest that you might like to come down with a migraine about half past eleven, but having lunch with Anne is a much better idea. You could take some of that chicken we had last night.”

“Oh, Miriam, I meant to tell you the sandwich I took to Melanson last night may have saved his life. That’s what the intern said. He hadn’t been able to eat anything until I managed to get him soothed down a bit, then he went after it like a starving wolf. He said thank you. That’s about all he did say before he passed out. Well, if I’m going to Ireson’s Landing, I suppose I’d better stir my stumps. I’ll try to see Melanson tomorrow but I’ll have to go as myself. He’s had shocks enough already. I don’t know what’s to become of that poor soul if Turbot stays on the board and won’t give him back his job.”

“You really think Turbot could be that mean?”

“Oh yes,” Sarah assured her sister-in-law. “He’s mean enough for anything, he’s proved that already, but he’s cutting his own throat. With Melanson gone, there’s nobody on the staff who actually knows how the museum should be run. Vieuxchamp’s a cipher and the rest are all zombies.”

“You don’t suppose that’s the real reason why Turbot fired Melanson?”

“Good heavens, Miriam, I hadn’t thought of that angle. It seems bizarre that anybody could ever see Melanson as a threat, but everything’s crazy about this situation. I do wish I could take Davy home with me, but Anne’s not much interested in children and I’m feeling awfully skittish about letting anyone see him and me together, as you must be sick of hearing by now. He’s having the time of his life here with you—oh, look, quick. The bittern is flying. I must fly too.”

“I’ll make you and Anne a little lunch while you’re getting dressed. I’ve got to fix something for Jeanne and Her Highness anyway. You’re not wearing that god-awful blouse again, are you?”

“I have to stay in costume, but I do think I’ll put on a less depressing blouse and my old walking shoes instead of those holey sneakers. I might as well stick with the hat, it’s no uglier than the one Aunt Bodie’s been wearing for the past umpty-million years.”