Goldilocks (12 page)

“You’re so beautiful.”

“I know I’m beautiful,” she said. “I’ve been beautiful all my life. I’m the Sophia Loren of Lawrence.”

“You’re more than that,” he whispered out of his rubbery face. “You’re bigger than Scampy ever was. He’d be jealous.”

“No, Arnold. He’d be proud.”

A downtown businessman she had once bailed out of trouble ventured a hand onto her shoulder and lingered too long until gently and subtly she prodded him on, a maneuver she repeated with a county commissioner whose debts to Scampy he had paid off with favors. A grizzled priest she had presumed long dead frowned at her with undeflectable Sicilian eyes and said in a gravel voice, “I understand you’ve strayed.”

“I’m Episcopalian now, Father.”

“I see. Are you also English, no more Italian?”

“Touché,” she said, taking his arm and drawing close to his ear. “I remember the times you patted me on the bottom.”

“I’m only flesh and blood.”

“Yes, Father. So am I.”

He started to pull away and then abruptly returned close to her. “Your father was not a bad man, you know, just a little one. Not everybody can be big.”

“But we can try, Father.”

“You’ve bought your position in life.”

“It’s what money can do,” she said. “Bless me, Father, for I have prospered.”

When the Sheas came upon her, she inwardly flinched at the sight of Daisy’s florid face and neck of loose-fitting skin. Embracing him, she felt the breath come out of him. She smelled no liquor, only the wintery scent of a hard peppermint clicking against his teeth. He tried to say something but had no words, and she had none either. Then she hugged Edith and felt bones. Edith said, “I hope you’ll be staying long enough for us to get together.”

“I’ll try,” she said noncommittally.

“Have you seen Barney yet?”

“Yes.”

Edith smiled with schoolgirlish insinuation. “I figured.”

“You figured wrong, but that’s OK.”

Daisy found a voice. “I’m dying, Lou.”

Edith said, “Let her handle this one first, all right, Daisy?”

“Is he?” Louise asked in a whisper.

“I don’t think about it.”

“As long as you care.”

“I care.”

Several elderly women from the old neighborhood converged upon her. They all looked like the embodiment of hymns. They were followed by members of the Sons of Italy. Voices boxed her in, and in time faces began to look alike. Then she saw one that did not. She saw first Chick Ryan’s charging head of hair clumped with gray and then his full uniform of brass and braid. When he smiled at her, the lines in his face cut deep. His teeth became bigger.

“You haven’t changed,” he said as if he had expected deterioration and was mildly disappointed.

“I see you’re a captain now,” she said. “Congratulations.”

He had a way of throwing his eyes out like darts. They shot into her. “This time I got the promotion by myself.”

“That’s why I’m congratulating you.”

“But I don’t forget,” he said. “Anytime you want to call in the marker, I’m ready.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it, Chick.”

“I’m not. I’m just telling you. Sorry about your father.”

She glanced over at her mother’s face but could not read it, everything held in tight. She looked at her sister, who, though younger, looked older because of extra weight from a sweet tooth. Her eyes raked the crowd for Barney Cole’s face and finally glimpsed it near the entrance. He was a late arrival. Then the priest who in her mind had risen from the dead placed his hand on her elbow, which she started to shake off as if the fingers were ghostly.

“Your mother’s asked me to say the rosary. That won’t offend you, will it?”

“I’d be pleased,” she said.

The priest took a place near the casket, and the room went quiet. His voice was a narcotic drone and evoked memories of her childhood and then a clear image of her father in an undershirt, his scrawny elbows on the table, pasta on his plate and sauce on his chin. It was no longer a provocative image, merely a durable one. Her sister tilted sideways and whispered, “I didn’t know Dad had so many friends.” Some minutes later, the ritual of the rosary over, she stepped to her mother’s side and murmured that she would be right back.

“Don’t be long,” her mother said.

She needled through the shifting crowd, accepting quick condolences and compliments, and hooked on to Barney Cole with a firmness that surprised him. “I need to breathe,” she said, and bumped against him so that he would cut a path through the foyer, where more flowers had been placed, an overflow. An employee of the funeral home, his eyes the sort that swelled when he spoke, murmured a pleasantry and opened the front door for them. The evening air, touched with the smell of the city, rolled in on them. Outside on the small colonnaded porch, she said, “I had to get away from that casket. My sister picked it out with my money. Such elaborate packaging for a corpse.”

“You sound hard,” Cole said.

“It’s an act.”

Somebody was standing on the bottom step, a gray-haired man with a handkerchief in his grasp. He had a small trivial-looking nose, almost not worth blowing, but he blew it anyway and then hopped apologetically out of their way. They stepped down onto the sidewalk and immediately moved out of the streetlight to avoid people who were leaving. Across the street a woman squawked Spanish at a man who looked no good. Figures loomed in the large lit windows of a four-family house. A siren wailed from the direction of downtown. Once again Louise snugged her arm inside Cole’s, and they moved along, avoiding the seams in the sidewalk. Her stride was stiffer than his.

“Something feels wrong,” she said.

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“What makes you think it?”

“I don’t know that either.” A car flashed by, painting them. “Maybe it’s being back in Lawrence. I hate it, Barney. I have no good memories, except maybe of you.”

“You’re forgetting Scampy.”

“That wasn’t all roses,” she said without explanation.

They strolled to the corner, where the vast concrete Masonic temple hovered like the hulk of an abandoned ship, distress lights burning from the bridge. Across the way, buried in darkness, lay Campagnone Common, out of which ricocheted the rapid fire of youthful Spanish voices. She listened, and then turned away.

“No spics in Mallard Junction, Barney, and except for the guy that runs the Texaco station I’m the only wop.”

“Makes you a novelty.”

“Except I won’t wear off.” Abruptly she pulled herself erect and retook his arm. “I think I’d better get back, give my mother a break from my sister.”

They retraced their steps to the front of the funeral home, where reluctantly she released her hold. She could tell from his expression that he did not intend to go back inside with her.

“You don’t mind, do you?” he said. “I have somebody waiting for me.”

“Your friend?”

“Yes.”

“Lucky woman,” she said. “Or maybe you’re a lucky man. I’ll see you at the funeral tomorrow, won’t I?”

“Yes,” he promised.

“I’m not as tough as I seem.”

“I know that.”

“You more than anyone else,” she said with a blank stare, as if someone had put out the light in her eyes. “When I go back in there, maybe the old man will be sitting up enjoying himself. He always did like attention.”

“We all want that,” Cole said.

“My sister kissed him, but I didn’t want to touch him. I didn’t want to make him more dead.” She smiled over the chill of her jewelry. “Go, Barney. I’m talking foolish.” They embraced, and then she watched him edge away into the gap between two parked cars, one a limousine insolent in its size and glitter and tinted glass. He was halfway across the street when, surprising herself, she called out, “Barney — don’t leave me.”

She saw him turn around, but the scrape of the shoe she heard was not his. It was quicker and closer, either behind or beside her. She moved reflexively but vaguely as if she were not quite with her body. She glimpsed the face, a sheen of sweat, and then the pistol, which seemed to make no more noise than the double crackling of a banknote.

“I don’t believe it,” she said more in anger than in panic. Then she looked for Cole.

His arms swept around her and kept her on her feet. At the same time she exercised a strength of her own, which brought her to the threshold of an imbecilic calm. The bug-eyed man from the funeral home rushed toward him. Cole said, “Get an ambulance.”

SEVEN

H
ENRY
W
ITLO
came into the den and threw her a look of impatience. She had rid herself of the robe for a dress and had done something with her hair, but she had buried herself again in the upholstered chair and, as if to ward him off, had tilted her husband’s picture toward the doorway. “I brought in your mail,” he said, sorting pieces. “You got bills to pay. I’ll leave them here.” He dropped them on the desk near her husband’s photograph. “Who’s the person sending you a postcard from Florida? I can’t read the writing.”

“It’s none of your business,” she said with courage, and he smiled.

“That’s better, Mrs. Goss. About time you showed a little life.”

She sank deeper into the chair, the shock of her own voice pushing her there. She wanted to say something else, but her thoughts were too loose to collect. Then, quite suddenly, her eyes were drawn to his feet, and she experienced another shock. “Take them off,” she said.

“Why?” he asked amiably. “They fit fine. My first pair of Florsheims.”

“They’re not yours.”

“They’re not anybody’s. Your husband’s gone, Mrs. Goss, won’t be back, so what’s the harm? Unless you’re afraid you’ll hear me and think it’s him.”

Again, desperately, she wanted to add something vital but could generate nothing. She felt that her head was no more than the pulp of a peach adhering to its stone. Henry moved closer.

“Time you got up again, Mrs. Goss, did some walking around.” With what seemed an amazing lack of effort, he gripped her under the arms, lifted her to her feet, and tilted her toward the light as if to examine her for freshness. “We’ve got to make some rules,” he said. “From now on you eat at the table with me, no more stuff about not being hungry. And you talk more. I want real conversations.”

She imagined herself dying the death of a thousand cuts from the bite of his voice. He had steadied her and was maneuvering her out of the den, her shoulder brushing the frame of the door. Her slippered feet were clumsy on the carpet. “Easy,” he told her. The bathroom door was open. She saw her husband’s toothbrush, razor, and metal comb laid out neatly on a folded towel beside the sink. “You got to go in there?” he asked, and she shook her head fast. He guided her into the kitchen, where everything looked spick-and-span, not a dirty dish in sight, no stains on the floor, though she had heard things spill. “When I was a kid, Mrs. Goss, my mother never cleaned anything. I did it all.”

She wanted a drink of water and edged to the sink, which appeared perfectly clean until she gagged over the exhalation from a rancid sponge. “I’ve always taken care of people, Mrs. Goss. Nobody’s ever taken care of me. The army did a little, but that wasn’t personal, and then they stopped caring when I got to Nam.”

She deposited the sponge in the wastebasket under the sink and then turned on the tap and watched the water glove her hand. When the water was cold enough, she filled a tumbler.

“Only one who really did something for me was God. He gave me looks. Bet you think I dye my hair, Mrs. Goss. I don’t. It’s my natural color. Women, that’s the first thing they see, my hair. Then my eyes.”

She drank too much water, and it stung her stomach.

“We both got nice eyes,” he said. “Yours are kind of like violet.”

“Please,” she said. She did not want to be touched, but his hands were already on her, propelling her in a direction that seemed dictated by drafts of air from windows not normally open. There was something he wanted to show her, he told her, angling her into the dining room, where he had placed a mass of cut flowers in one of her larger vases.

“Got ‘em from your garden,” he announced proudly. “Figured they’d look good on the table in case we start eating in here. Kitchen’s OK, I don’t mind it, but this would be nice and fancy.”

More than ever she felt the shape of her world bending in, leaking precious air, deflating around her. Staring at the china closet, she cried her husband’s name, the cry inward.

Henry said, “While I was getting the flowers I saw your neighbor, Mrs. Whipple she said she was. I told her I was your nephew, just to keep the story straight. I said I’ve come to look after you for a while, you not being all that emotionally well since your loss.”

For a number of seconds she had no feeling in her face, none in her neck, and only a little in her arms, which she could not raise.

“Why are you staring at the china closet?” he asked. “You think I took a dish.”

She imagined herself on her hands and knees at Bellevue Cemetery, tearing at the sod, as if it were possible to yank her husband from the grave and make him see what his death had done to her.

“Those are your best dishes, Mrs. Goss. I wouldn’t use them unless we were eating fancy.”

“When?” she said. “When are you leaving?”

He moved close to her, breathed her air. “You really want to live here alone, Mrs. Goss? You’re no spring chicken. What happens if you have a stroke or something on the toilet, who’s going to pick you up, make you decent? Cops come, see you that way, they wouldn’t even bother to pull your dress down.”

Her gaze was frozen, her arms stiff, her feet planted.

“Ambulance attendants, they’re no better. Nobody looking, they grab a feel.”

Her wrists twitched. There was life in her forearms all the way to her elbows. Cautiously she lifted them.

“I’m here, you think I’d let that happen? No way, Mrs. Goss. I haven’t known you very long, but already you’re special to me. What do you think of that?”

She spread her fingers and with the nails went for his face.

• • •

Dr. Stein, who was in his early forties but had the small puckish face of an old man, looked Barney Cole up and down and said, “You look pretty fit, I’ll say that for you, but of course I don’t know how you are inside. You could be rotten.”