Misfortune (3 page)

“What about Richard Pratt?”

Arthur shrugged. “Not much news from what I hear. I guess he’s hanging in there.” He wiped off the far end of the bar with a damp towel. “Mrs. Pratt’s around, though. I saw her earlier this afternoon. Nice lady.”

George looked up at the mention of Clio Pratt’s name. “She’s not,” he said matter-of-factly. “And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

Paul was surprised. Although he didn’t know Clio Pratt well since she hardly ever took a tennis lesson and didn’t come to the ladies’ clinic, she seemed friendly when she frequented the Pro Shop. At least she didn’t order him around like some of the women did, demanding sizes and service as though he were the hired help. He wondered whether he should come to her defense but decided against it. It was too early in the season to get embroiled in disputes between members.

Arthur surveyed the bar in search of something to do.

“I could use a change of pace,” Paul remarked to fill the awkward silence.

“Couldn’t we all,” George echoed.

Arthur swept the two empty glasses off the bar and began to rinse them in the sink. “Every summer’s a little different,” he said without looking up from his task. “And the great thing about unexpected events is that you never know when to expect them.”

Frances Pratt heard three honks outside her bedroom window. She glanced in the mirror, ran her fingers through her thick brown curls, and grabbed the cabled cardigan from her bed. Pressing her face to the screen, she called down to Sam Guff, who waited in his blue Jeep Cherokee with the engine idling. “I’m coming.”

Keys, lights, money, she reminded herself of what she needed. Plus water for the dogs. As she stopped to flick the switch at the threshold, she remembered her lucky gold hoop earrings. Couldn’t leave without them. She retrieved the jewelry from a small box on her bureau.

“Bye, guys,” Frances said to Felonious and Miss Demeanor, her black mutts, as she quickly rubbed each one behind its ears. As she did, she noticed a slight graying around Felonious’s muzzle, a sign of age that she didn’t want to see. She had rescued both dogs from the Orient Point animal shelter at four weeks and bottle-fed them for the first month after their mother had been the victim of a young boy’s target practice. They had grown to look more like Labrador retrievers with broad faces and square noses than the scrawny puppies she had first brought home. She couldn’t imagine life without these dogs, her only roommates.

Frances greeted Sam as she climbed into the seat beside him.

“Feeling lucky?” he asked.

She smiled but said nothing.

Patsy Cline crooned on the radio as they drove the three miles of back roads into the main street of Orient Point. On the north fork of Long Island, a sliver of land jutting out into the sound toward Plum Island, Orient Point was best known for its ferry service to New London, Connecticut. Frances liked its relative quiet. “It’s where real people live. People with the same concerns as me. People who do their own laundry.” She remembered the speech she had given to Blair, her younger sister, as she justified her decision to settle herself just outside of town in a farmhouse surrounded by potato fields and vineyards. “Orient Point is a great place to live, lots of open space, a four-dollar movie theater, a strawberry festival, a Woolworth’s. What more do I want?” Besides, Frances liked the distance from her family. Forty-five miles from Orient Point to Southampton gave her the space she needed. She was alone, but not too far.

As Sam turned the truck into the expanse of concrete that formed the parking lot behind Our Lady of Poland Church, Frances could see that the crowd was bigger than usual. The summer was coming, and with it, Wednesday night bingo grew in popularity. Frances checked her watch: ten minutes until the first game began.

For the past seven years, the entire time she had lived in Orient Point, Frances had been coming to the Catholic church on Wednesday evenings to play bingo in the basement. It was her only foray into any house of worship, but she couldn’t resist the game. Grand compared with most of the architecture in the surrounding areas, the square brick building had white columns and a marble statue of the Madonna set inside a carved arch to mark its entrance. Since the previous week, Frances noticed that the planters had been filled to overflowing with fuchsia geraniums.

“Mary on the half-shell must like pink,” Sam observed under his breath as they approached the Madonna.

“Quiet,” Frances whispered back, anxious lest they offend any of the many people who took great pride in Our Lady of Poland. She had heard the parish included more than two hundred families.

They followed the hordes inside, waited in line to pay a five-dollar admission fee and purchase one-dollar cards, then settled themselves at one of the many folding tables laid out in rows across the basement. Frances scanned the numbers on the four cards she had bought. Too many duplicates, the cards are too similar, she thought as she glanced over to see if Sam suffered the same problem.

“I’m not trading,” he said without looking at her.

“I wasn’t asking you to.”

“But you were thinking to ask.” He smiled.

Frances had met Sam, a forty-three-year-old widower, the first night she had come to play. Sitting beside him, she couldn’t help but notice his hazel eyes, pronounced cheekbones, and thick wavy hair. Nor could she avoid staring at his left hand, the thumb, index, and little fingers with two stumps of flesh in between, as he rolled the bingo chips in circles on the table with his palm. At the brief intermission before the final blackout game, she had introduced herself and, exaggerating her reach toward his right side, extended a hand. He hadn’t hesitated to shake it.

“Sam Guff,” he said, looking her straight in the eye.

By coincidence, he turned out to be her neighbor from across the street. The following week he had offered to drive her. After that their routine was established. Frances now looked forward to their Wednesday evenings, as much for the time spent with him as for the bingo.

“Everybody ready,” the master of ceremonies shouted from the podium at the front of the room. Tonight the numbers would be drawn by Abby Flanagan, an elderly woman with thick black glasses and a mole on her cheek that was prominent even from the back of the room. She wore a printed sundress, rolled nylons, and white nurses’ shoes.

“Game one is a square. All the B row, all the O row, and the top and bottom of the card.”

Frances watched Abby’s underarm jiggle as she spun the wheel. The room was quiet.

“B nineteen!”

“N forty-three!”

Sam placed a chip on his card.

Frances felt her heartbeat quicken as the wooden, numbered balls spun in their metal wheel. Why she loved bingo, she could not say, but she justified the hours spent in this windowless basement as a harmless indulgence.

“B seven!”

Richard Pratt had introduced his daughters to bingo thirty-one years ago when he took Frances and Blair to a Sunday night game at the Fair Lawn Country Club. It was one of the many family events offered during July and August. The main room of the clubhouse was emptied of its wicker couches and chairs and replaced by round tables covered in cotton cloths with floral centerpieces. Children between the ages of five and fifteen, the young ones accompanied by parents, the older ones left to their own devices, ate fried chicken, overboiled corn, sweet-potato rolls, and coleslaw off china plates. Frances hadn’t been able to eat, her stomach queasy with excitement for the waiters to clear, then distribute bingo cards and ice cream in Dixie cups.

The first time she won, she remembered weaving her way through the tables to the front of the room, then waiting, legs trembling, as the caller checked the numbers on her card against those called. She knew that all eyes were upon her, each child in the audience hoping that she had placed a chip on the wrong number, misheard, so that the game could continue and they still would have a chance. There was no error. The prize, a gift certificate to Lily White’s, the only toy store in Southampton, was hers.

“Fanny, she just called G eighty-four.” Sam leaned toward her. “You’ve got it on both cards. One’s in the square.”

She focused her attention on the caller as the game progressed.

“
Bingo!
He’s got bingo,” a woman shouted from the back corner of the room. A black woman in a green dress with a white lace collar pushed a wheelchair with an elderly man in it. He wore what appeared to be a flannel bathrobe and carried his winning card on his lap. Although his head hung forward, shaking slightly as the woman maneuvered him around the tables and folding chairs, Frances could see his smile.

May 20. She suddenly remembered.

“Frances, it’s Clio,” the voice at the other end of the telephone had said. It had been nearly three in the morning when the ringing pierced her sound sleep.

“What happened?”

“Your father’s in the hospital. He’s had a stroke.”

She drove the two hours to New York University Medical Center in the foggy darkness, her eyes transfixed on the windshield wipers sweeping rhythmically back and forth over the glass in front of her. Clio waited in the visitors’ lounge for the intensive care unit, sitting with her feet tucked under her and a cashmere blanket draped across her lap. Her dark hair was pulled back from her pale face, and her eyes looked sunken. Frances could see her hands tremble as she held a paper cup of tea that had long since cooled.

“How is he?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice was flat, soft but steady. “They still don’t know.”

“Have you seen him?”

“Yes. Briefly.”

“Was he conscious?”

“I’m not sure he knew I was there.”

“I should let Blair know.” Frances remembered for the first time since Clio had called that her sister was on a business trip to Japan, selling art to Honda executives for their headquarters.

“I spoke to her. She’ll be on the first flight back.”

Frances could think of nothing else to ask or say. She settled herself on the opposite couch to wait, glancing periodically at a well-worn copy of
People
that someone had abandoned. The articles on movie stars, rock singers, and celebrity models blurred into a sea of triviality. Clio stared ahead blankly, moving only slightly if voices were heard in the hall. Hours passed.

“We’ve got a winner,” Mrs. Flanagan announced. The crowd clapped politely, then cleared their cards for the next game.

“Are you all right?” Sam asked.

“Yeah. Why?”

“Just wondering. You seem kind of quiet.”

“Well, this is hardly the place to chat. This is serious competition.” Frances tried to sound lighthearted.

The waiting had stretched for hours. At one point, sometime late in the afternoon, Dr. Handley had appeared. He’d removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

“Richard’s had what’s called an intracerebral hemorrhagic stroke on the left side of his brain. A blood vessel ruptured and there’s been extensive bleeding in the brain tissue. He’s still in surgery.”

Afterward Richard Pratt remained in intensive care, heavily medicated and sedated. He didn’t move or speak and opened his eyes only for a second every so often. Clio stood sentinel, rubbing his hand, wiping his face with a warm washcloth, whispering words Frances couldn’t hear, kissing him gently on the cheek. Although Frances offered to spell her, Clio left the hospital for only the briefest intervals to shower and change, returning quickly to resume her post. Frances managed to walk around the block, to stop at a nearby delicatessen for a tuna salad sandwich wrapped in waxed paper along with thick slabs of pickles, to call into the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office to check her messages.

Seated in a vinyl chair by the window, Frances watched as Clio hummed Frank Sinatra’s “Come Fly with Me,” massaged Richard’s feet, and refluffed his pillows several times each hour. Although Frances was moved by Clio’s affection, the intimacy she shared with Richard even though he was too ill to notice, her attentiveness left little room for Frances or Blair, who returned from the Far East. Only when Clio left for a brief moment to summon a nurse or make a cup of tea could Frances approach her father’s bedside. She stared down at the veins in his eyelids, the gray at his temples, the collarbone protruding from his loosely tied hospital gown. She rested her hand on his shoulder, leaned over close to his ear, and whispered that she loved him. Whatever else had passed between them, in the few moments she had alone these words seemed the only ones worth speaking. The rest didn’t matter.

After a week the three women met with Dr. Handley at his office across the street from the hospital. “There’s widespread damage to the brain tissue surrounding the site of the rupture. He has virtual total hemiplegia, or paralysis on the right side of his body, his face, his arm, his leg. His motor skills, coordination, and speech are certainly impaired and, I expect, his brain function is, too, although we haven’t completed all of our testing.”

“Is the damage permanent?” Frances asked.

“It’s too early to say what improvements he might make with proper rehabilitation.” Only time would tell.

“Fanny, Fanny, you’ve got a bingo.” Sam tapped her arm.

Frances looked down at her card where chips made an X through the free space in the center. She forced a smile.

“Pretty great given the odds. Look at the size of this crowd.” Sam’s face was animated with excitement he assumed she shared.

“Do me a favor?” Frances asked.

“What?”

“Take it up for me.”

Sam looked confused.

“Please.” Frances couldn’t explain to him that the thought of being watched by this crowd was unbearable. The rush of memories brought on by the anniversary of her father’s stroke made her feel vulnerable. At least for tonight, she wanted to hide among the other nonwinners.

“Whatever you say.” He nodded, then stood up. Before leaving his place with her card, he bent over and murmured, “Maybe this will be your lucky summer.”

Blair Devlin stretched her lean legs on the chaise longue, wiggled her toes, and flopped her head back on the blue-and-white toile pillow. “So, what is it you needed to tell me?” She yawned and twirled a strand of straw-colored hair around one finger.